Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
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pressure. For the moment all I can do is hold me together, hold me at qui vive in face of it.
Dinner with Greg … roast beef (almost rare enough to be rare), green peas (wizened), and roast potatoes (sullen) — “The Parliamentarian’s Special” quoth the menu! God — the Cdn Nemesis … A half bottle of Beaujolais scarcely masks it . . Greg laughs — “it’s just a variation on Air Canada’s performance — airborne buses. One and the same thing. You know — this train is really a set piece … it establishes the kind of citizen it wants.” I know instantly that Greg is right …. know exactly what he is saying. “You mean the people are for the car, and not the car for the people — it is the people who have to ‘live up to the car,’ grow into it — a car made, not to suit the people, but people being remade to suit the new Canadacar.”
Greg’s right. His perception mates my own — “if these are Canadians remade to suit the traincars, the Club Car we passed through getting here, that’s the car for the people who service the People.The car for the Canadians who are remaking Canadians: the New Canadian Club for the People’s Commissars … with its red carpet, black leatherette chairs, & the pictures at one end by W. H. Bartlett, circa 1830, for the permanent English-Canadian Victorian Romantic, & at the other by one of the young French-Canadian revolutionnaires, bought with his third consecutive Canada Council grant. The Club car is the Club of our New Establishment.” Greg laughs again, at my flinch — “You’ve got it — this train is a very precise political platform … it’s the travel arm of the Third Adam.”
“I don’t understand you there.”
Greg: “… the new Cdn Man — the Uprooted Cdn; we used to be part of the First Adam … the continuous civilization of the Western World. That was our role in the New World. The Americans left us that legacy when they became the Second Adam after 1776 and all that. Well, these jokers (Greg jerked his head to embrace the diner) belong to the Cdn Grit Liberal Culture … whether they know it or not. They’ve uprooted, to rule. Their implicit claim is to be the Third Adam. But they’re officially ‘modest’ — so no one says it. They just understudy the role!”
I laugh — Greg, like me is a hopeless Tory … and I know that, like me, he voted NDP last time: Tory Radical. Our Toryism is our culture as Canadians … not our politics. I look behind Greg — there is a beaut! Cdn Male: age 46?, navy blue suiting, waistcoat (no handkerchief), unobtrusive glasses, solid … with a face of precast putty.His conversation is alas all too clear — I don’t overhear it; I’m overrun by its calm assertion: “… they don’t put enough force into their speeches, not enough guts — I ghost write for the Minister of Finance — he’s uninspired … ” I can’t believe it — can’t believe this man criticizing dullness; it’s self-contradictory. For a moment my whole personality focuses again, all the legions called home by concentrate of contempt.For an instant I am whole again — alive from toe-tit to occiput. My whole being accuses these sterilettes. And then I feel the danger of exspenditure again. Pull in my horn; I’ll need it later — in emergency.“But this train IS an emergency … it is THE emergency, integral part of it….” Greg looks surprised at this outburst. “Oh I’m just talking aloud — I’ll subside in a minute.” But Greg is looking at me with a large understanding, & I blurt on, “this train is as dangerous, as lethal in its own right as any boxcar translating political deviates to Siberia.Its tactics are more subtle — but they come to the same thing: absolute elimination, corporate destruction.” Here Greg looks mystified & I stop … & am vulnerable again, to dispersal.
After dinner, back to the bar-car … alone. I don’t know why. I guess I need a drink. A brandy. Ask mischievously for a Marc de Bourgogne.There never is any, of course. I always ask just to reassure me there isn’t any …. Only one place in English Canada where I have had a good Marc. A free seat by the window — my partner in crime discovers himself readily to me … after all, we are fellow inmates, accomplices of the Rapido (there is still something furtive about the bar-car).
“My name’s Jack Emery — second year Law, Dalhousie …. live in Willowdale … I like hockey and theatre. What do you do?” I flinch … it is the “what do you do?” that hurts. Always “what are you?”Never “who?”. In all my years in Toronto no one ever asked me “who”— except “who’s what.” People are expendable in English Canada; everyone is only a person “ex officio.” & now, of course I’m no longer anything. Except a deserter … no — better than that — because I have my purpose: I’m a demissionary. God, here is this law student, already firmly entrenched in the English Canada Heresy — ex officio humanism! It’s a form of agnosticism. But what chance has he, the betrayal has been made for him, at birth, by his community. We offer each other a drink and discuss the new cabinet changes.
Student — “Canadians think too much about themselves.”
Says it with diffident self-satisfaction — like a Christian who has just confessed his Fault, & is now fresh armed with a proud Penance. &that done he unthinking opens up a little … that is, his eyes open into mine more … I nearly fall into the unexpected aperture … but even as I totter bar-car catches me & I withdraw in time. I can’t afford to fall anywhere in these surroundings, because I have no control. Draw back, vetoed again. Stammer something — “we may think too much about ourselves, but we never feel for ourselves.” That ends the exchange. The best that can be achieved now is a slowly distending propriety — a kind of improved impasse.
He returned to his own car. And waiting to get off wrote his notes with what care he could muster, testing the muted vulgarity of the Rapido. He had to acknowledge to himself that this train did set the taste-pace for its clientele. The clientele being those, like himself, in the coach — the Permanent Commoners … Improved Commoners now, he supposed. And the administrators, the taste-makers, being those in the Club Car. The new élite. The new Canadian Priesthood. Secular Order! The enemy within. The new ultramontanism — with Ottawa as Rome. He’d have to start his own English-Canadian “Quiet Revolution” — against this new Canadian Church … he, the anti-clerical Loyalist.
The man who shared his seat returned from a later dinner. Young — perhaps 30. Black suit, but with small cuffs. Hair close cropped — but not chopped … sat silently down, careful not to intrude his eyes upon anyone. Started reading: only the chapter head was visible … “how to handle a conference.” Hugh sank in consternation: “God, the army is everywhere.” He went back to his notation … scribbling furious — “the national government has become our Tastemaker — and the Taste it is setting is disastrous indication of the New Man it is concocting by default….”
By the time he had finished they were in Montreal. Everyone was filing out. Everyone, that is, except a young man three seats forward who stood up, dressed himself with confident placidity, while conscientiously allowing the others to exit. How was it possible, Hugh pondered, to be so correctly condescending as this man was? And then — as he watched the performance, mesmerized — he knew that the youth reminded him of someone. Whom? He stared … the boy must be twenty-five, hair kempt by comb (not brushed, of course), grey coat unobtrusively tweeded, suit implacably pressed. Standing with his body held carefully at arm’s length … from what? Hugh didn’t know. Not yet. The man was obviously a model, for himself — but of what? Bells rang in his ears … the youth put on his white scarf, his gloves. And then it all came to Hugh with a rush — the face from the picture on the wall of the United Church Sunday School near Collingwood, the skiing village … that was it: this youth