Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
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of details, of itemization ... all that had gone now ... he was confounded, in utter conjugation with the body of the Church — it was militant in him. He turned — and staggered out ... the Place d’Armes was outrageously alive in him ... (395–96)
Conclusion: “You Hate Them Almost as Much as You Love Them”
There are scenes of Place d’Armes where “the monster from Toronto” — as Robert Fulford called Hugh Anderson (and by extension Scott Symons) in an infamous and damaging review — comes to the surface, notably in the interactions with Rick Appleton, who functions as a scapegoat for sellout, almost an evil twin, the enemy or at least a frère ennemi. One cannot deny or downplay the anger and the spleen in the Anderson-Harrison-Symons complex. But the deep meaning of Place d’Armes is a hating through to love, another reinvention of impasse: “art is love — even an art of hate is love — the optimum of despair — creating despair in hope of hope” (361).
“‘You hate them almost as much as you love them ...’” remarks a perceptive antiques dealer as she observes Hugh Anderson devouring and demolishing the English-Canadian customers passing through her store (116). What terrifies and enrages Anderson is a deadening of sensibility, an increasingly abstract, technified relation to life, a growing corporatization of society, a diminishment of honour in relation to career, increasing greed, creeping amnesia, reduction of potency, smothering of spirituality. Yet Symons the culture critic is always secondary to Symons the joyful participant in life. The efforts of the Combat Journal pay off, in the end. They allow for the transcendence that joy affords and a true sighting of the richness of the fabric of what is given in the literal and allegorical City:
I realize that what has been restored to me these past days is my self-respect. I have gone through Hell for Heaven’s sake ... and found my human dignity. Bless Meighen’s eyes, bless the chalice, bless the Mother Bank and the Great White Elephant and the Flesh Market and the Sphinxes Large and Lesser and the Wedding Cake and the Greyway and the Front and Holyrood. (368–69)
Symons’s text is finally just that, a restoration: last words and blessing for his cherished, unknown readers, a figural return to an inner place that can never be fully grasped but which is always real, immanent in all of life’s moments.The final image of the text, an outstretched finger bursting with life and blood points there.
Place d’Armes is an act and a gift of love. It is a masterpiece in contemporary composer Pierre Boulez’s terms, “something unexpected which has become a necessity.” One that new readers will gratefully receive in this timely new edition.
Selected Biographical Sources
Gibson, Graeme. Eleven Canadian Novelists. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1973.
The Idler. Interviews with editors.“The Decade of the Last Chance,” No. 23, May/June 1989. “Deliquescence in Canada,” No. 36, July/August 1992.
Symons, Scott. “The Long Walk” in Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons. Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998.
____. “Notes Toward a CV by Scott Symons” in Dear Reader:Selected Scott Symons.
____. “Rosedale Ain’t What It Used to Be.” Toronto Life, October 1972.
____. “The Seventh Journey (A Last Letter to Charles Taylor).” Toronto Life, September 1997.
Taylor, Charles. Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1977).
Selected Critical Sources
Briggs, Peter.“Insite: Place d’Armes.” Canadian Literature, Summer 1977.
Buitenhuis, Peter. Introduction. Place d’Armes (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart paperback edition, 1977).
____. “Scott Symons and the Strange Case of Helmet of Flesh” in The West Coast Review, Vol. 21, No. 4, Spring 1987.
____. “Scott Symons” entry in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Cameron, Elspeth. “Journey to the Interior: The Journal Form in Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes.” Studies in Canadian Literature, Summer 1977.
Dickinson, Peter. Here Is Queer: Nationalism, Sexualities and the Literature of Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.
Elson, Christopher. “Mourning and Ecstasy: Scott Symons’ Canadian Apocalypse” in Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons. Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998.
Goldie, Terry. “The Man of the Land, the Land of the Man: Patrick White and Scott Symons.” Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Fall 1993.
____. Pink Snow: Homotextual Possibilities in Canadian Fiction. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2003.
Martin, Robert K. “Cheap Tricks in Montreal: Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes.” Essays on Canadian Writing, Winter 1994.
Piggford, George. “‘A National Enema’: Identity and Metafiction in Scott Symons’s Place d’Armes.” English Studies in Canada, March 1998.
Young, Ian. “A Whiff of the Monster: Encounters with Scott Symons,” Canadian Notes & Queries, No. 77, Summer/Fall 2009.
Notes
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all parenthetical page references are to this edition of Place d’Armes.
2. Tim Wilson interviewed Scott Symons in Essaouira, Morocco, in June 1997 for Vision TV. He was kind enough to provide me with the unedited footage of this interview from which I have extracted this phrase.
3. In this biographical sketch I make use of the following sources: Charles Taylor, Scott Symons chapter in Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1977, 191– 243); Scott Symons interviews in The Idler No. 23 (May/June 1989) and No. 36 (July/August 1992); “Notes Toward a CV” in Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons, edited by Christopher Elson (Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998), 309–14, and “The Long Walk,” ibid., 303–08; various interviews conducted with Christopher Elson in 1995 in Essaouira, Morocco; unpublished texts, diaries, and drafts.
4. Civic Square, the “book-in-a-box,” is the second part of what Scott Symons always referred to as his Tale of Two Cities. Picking up from the formal liberties and material inventivity of Place d’Armes, in certain respects it is the most singular of his published works. An unbound book counting in the hundreds of pages, contained within a parodic simulacrum of a blue Birks gift box, every copy was personally signed by Symons and decorated with his trademark flying phalli, an illustration of the movement of Eros. The work connects the High Tory spirit of Rosedale with the emergent hippie spirit of Yorkville and gives us a multifaceted “Torontario.” Symons left a copy in the collection plate of St Thomas’s Anglican Church in memory of his father Harry Symons. In this book there are many episodes, investigations of sites ranging from Nathan Phillips Square to Mosport Park, from the Blythe Folly Farm in Claremont to Chestnut Park Street in Rosedale to the Toronto Art Gallery’s “Op-Pop” Ball. In the 1997 documentary God’s Fool, painter David Bolduc and curator Dennis Reid speak with intense fondness of Civic Square’s ability to draw together “urban ferment” and “rural transcendence.” It contains a plethora of lyrical quasi-poems and didactic asides, mini-essays, rants, pseudo-prayers, as well as a polemical history of English literature, a celebration of dappled Country Canada, an ode to cocks (and cunts), a Canada prayer in the mode of an Our Father, intense typologies of Canadian personalities, descriptions of birdlife, the “yella-fellahs,” yellow warblers, and much else. Throughout Symons holds nothing of his linguistic playfulness back. One passage builds to an expression that the author begged the publisher to allow him as title — The Smugly Fucklings.
5. The