A Whiff of the Monster

Encounters with Scott Symons

“I certainly am ‘a legend in my own time’ in Canada… I am also a Canadian of formidable cultural background and education. And eloquent.” —Scott Symons
“He was a catalyst for changing the fabric of society. He tells the truth.” —Donald Martin
“A negative catalyst going through life on autopilot” —Dennis Lee
“A genius without talent” —John Robert Colombo
“I’ll be the organ grinder and you can be the monkeys.” —Scott Symons

“That’s a hell of a letter to send to me!”

The loud voice over the phone – angry, male, tremolo – had woken me from an afternoon nap, and whoever it was had not announced himself. As I mumbled “Who’s this?” into the receiver, I realized the caller was – had to be – Scott Symons, thirty-eight-year old enfant terrible of the Toronto literary scene circa 1971. He was shouting at me from the Bracebridge monastery to which he habitually retreated. I had written Scott a letter he didn’t like. And now there would be a price to pay because as Scott said – and this was not the only time he is reported to have said it – “no-one fucks with Scott Symons and gets away with it!”

I had met Scott Symons four years earlier when a mutual interest in Allen Ginsberg brought us both to Toronto’s Convocation Hall in 1967, the year of the nation’s Centennial and the legendary Summer of Love. Canada’s 100th year as a nation had a particularly liberating effect on the young, who experienced it as not only a watershed in the country’s history and outlook, but as a long-awaited national coming of age, the occasion marked by Expo 67, an extravagant World’s Fair in Montreal.

A cultural breakthrough begun in the early sixties with the emergence of a new crop of artists, writers and publishing houses, coincided with the rise of the hippie movement and the emergence of a national leader of a new sort – Pierre Elliot Trudeau. By 1967, Canada’s Flower Children were being uprooted, shaken loose and scattered across the nation, and the streets and cafés of Toronto’s Yorkville bohemia had become fertile ground for artists and restive youth from across the country. I was a twenty-two-year-old college student with a handful of verses published in two little magazines. One was called One; it was a discreet, rather obscure American periodical for homosexuals. The other was the once-staid Victoria College literary journal Acta Victoriana. Acta was published from a one-room cellar with an inconspicuous entrance half-hidden by a well-manicured lawn. It was a cut above the average college lit mag, being both attractive and readable. The student staff were an astonishingly talented – and handsome – lot and included three future Governor General’s Award Winners: David Gilmour, Greg Hollingshead and John Ayre, future biographer of Vic’s preeminent intellectual Northrop Frye. Next door at the theatre space, Ayre’s playwright friend Graham Jackson was causing a frisson of excitement. With his luminous eyes, luxuriant curls and a slight limp that gave him a Byronic swagger, Graham turned heads just by entering a room.

While the student writers edited Acta, Vic’s faculty included Frye himself and poets Dennis Lee, David Knight, Francis Sparshott and Frye’s disciple and rumoured paramour (there were whispers of a secret passage behind the bookshelves) the imperious Jay MacPherson. In her quarters, Dr. MacPherson presided over her own chilly poetry salon, dispensing literary formulae like castor oil.

The poems I published at Vic seem unexceptionable now but struck Canadian readers of the day as unusually daring. With titles like “The Moth Boy” and “The Skull,” they were openly gay in a way that had never been seen in CanLit. In high school I had explored books of a certain tendency, from Plato to Stephen Spender, but in the sixties, same-sex relationships were just beginning to peek out of the Canadian literary closet. An early breakthrough had come in 1964 when the British house of Secker & Warburg published The Desert of the Heart, a novel by the American-born Jane Rule. The first home-grown products came the following year. Edward Lacey’s mordant poetry chapbook The Forms of Loss became the first openly gay book published in Canada. And John Herbert’s riveting prison drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes was workshopped at Stratford. Considered far too shocking for Canadians, it failed to find a sponsor until 1967 when it opened off-Broadway and became an instant hit.

The year before the much-anticipated Centennial saw the appearance of a brilliant second novel by Leonard Cohen, anointed disciple of the messianic Irving Layton, the man who brought sex to Canada. Beautiful Losers had an important gay character, the mysterious soap-collecting separatist referred to only as F, a “hopped-up” radical who dies “in a padded cell, his brain rotted from too much dirty sex.” No role models here, but the sixties were nevertheless bringing rapid changes to Canada. By 1967, the country Frederick Philip Grove thirty years before had called “a non-conductor for any sort of intellectual current” was suddenly effecting cultural electricity. As one observer put it, “everyone’s sexuality was bouncing off the walls.” Even so, Toronto the Good was not ready for the explosive succès de scandal that followed.

Combat Journal for Place d’Armes: A Personal Narrative was released by Canada’s leading publishing house McClelland & Stewart at the beginning of 1967 as its author’s Centennial gift to the nation. It was in no way a conventional novel, in that it reclaimed the original meaning of the word novel – new. This was something new. The authentic, insistent voice of a delirious Tory renegade who can’t stop writing diaries. The “personal narrative” of Place d’Armes is an oddly complex journalistic montage. The original hardcover version was ingeniously designed by master printer Stan Bevington to resemble an old-fashioned notebook, complete with attached prints, postcards and fold-out maps – a time-travelling jacket, with big pockets.

Place d’Armes relates the story of a married, well-connected Torontonian named Hugh Anderson, whose life parallels that of his creator. Anderson, an authoritarian elitist in a love-hate relationship with his own class, country and background, rages against a Canadian culture he sees as denying both its British roots and its capacity for sensuous, and sensual, self-expression. Anderson is an avid hater whose targets range from Methodism and William Lyon Mackenzie to the new flag, Expo 67 and various passers-by on the street whose aesthetic sensibilities he longs to whip – literally – into shape.

Hugh Anderson’s escape from an emasculated culture he blames for having blocked, perhaps blighted, his power to love involves immersing himself in the life of Montreal’s historic Place d’Armes, and having sex with the young hustlers he meets there who “touch him in a way no-one has ever touched him in his own community,” presumably because he never made it down Yonge Street as far as the St. Charles Tavern. While recording this pilgrimage in his diary, Anderson is also at work on a novel about a character called Alexander, who is yet another authorial double. Or triple. Unusually for so personal a novelist, Symons writes always in the third person. His fictionalized journals involve a series of near-identical alter egos, each furiously writing about the next. One of them has a Governor General’s Award.

A brief excerpt from Combat Journal for Place d’Armes:

The gift of insite. That is my battle in La Place. The right to remain open… to see… to have insite. I must incite insite. And if it is necessary to incite homosexation to propitiate my long rejected insite, then it must be done. … If I cannot, then I am dead. But if I do I risk my sanity!…

Only this diary keeps me firmly in 3-D… when I am in flight from the disembodiment of 2-D or in pursuit of 4-D… 4-D – my unknown birthright, constrained into 3-D, and finally dissolved by 2-D (the proxy plenitude of the positivist priests… professorial, psychiatrical, professions).

It involves three different men, moralities, societies … visions. Each in irreparable conflict.

In 4-D body is imbedded… a world of love.

In 3-D body is detached… world of common-sense.

In 2-D body is dissolved… world of non-sense.

And the Canadian is exposed in a unique immediacy to all three at once. His American heritage is 2-D (the American dream); his British heritage is 3-D (Parliamentarian’s Club); his French-Catholic heritage is 4-D (Peasant Baroque!)… .

I become either Protean, or insane!

Though the “Personal Narrative” of Place d’Armes does include the tangled thread of a plot, its strength is in its spirited, all-out manhandling of the language. Rendered in five different typefaces, it is both playful and enraged (or self-indulgent, depending on your point of view), often overwrought, and sprinkled with odd barbarisms (“psychiatrical,” “parasite” as a verb), useful coinages (“homosentient”) and delicious McLuhanish puns like “the hermaphrobike,” who could well be a relative of the suicidal Danish Vibrator in Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. Its trajectory (Scott’s language, I mean, not the Danish Vibrator, who merely threw himself into the sea) occasionally soars heroically, only to turn abruptly on itself for yet another vitriolic but pointless – because endlessly repeated – confrontation with Canada, and with the reader. “Exposé 67.”

The book is full of abusive tantrums; as Mencken sagely observed, “the public likes to read abuse.” Symons harangues the reader in a fictional language suggestive of a series of experimental, sometimes discordant jazz riffs, many of which elide and mutate and instead of resolving, feverishly repeat, eventually disintegrating, or collapsing into themselves. The voice is strictly solo, but we are treated to some dazzling and spirited improvisations throughout the gig. It is Scott Symons’ – and Hugh Anderson’s – wild verbal probes that provide inspired comic relief to Place d’Armes, without which it would be intolerable, and probably unreadable.

Scott Symons and his protagonist were not the first Anglo-Saxons to slough off their past, heal their psychic wounds and warm their cockles by consorting with prostitutes in less Protestant climes. But Symons, award-winning journalist, Rosedale elitist, scion of the establishment, delivered his message from the sexual – and political – front lines in nearby French Canada. It was brave, personal, “homosentient,” and enormously angry, and English Canada was quite shaken by it. The fact that Symons was no stray dog but “the pedigreed son of a Rosedale bitch” made his barking-mad dash for freedom all the more unlikely, and unseemly. And shocking.

The dichotomy between Scott’s attitude and his background – and his ambivalence about both – were highlighted by the pair of contrasting author’s photos on the paperback edition of Place d’Armes. On the front cover Scott is dressed with casual ease in a duffle-coat and sneakers. On the back, a formal portrait by Ashley and Crippen has him brooding with hand on brow, wearing a cravat. These images were reflected by two matching, or rather unmatching, descriptive blurbs, one printed above the other. The first could only have been written by Scott, or someone channelling him: it emphasizes the Combat Journal as an all-out “assault” on its “target” – an urban environment in which nothing is what it purports to be. It concludes:

As (Hugh Anderson) discovers that these buildings are people, places, himself, multidimensioned, he loses his mind, becomes a figment of the imagination of La Place d’Armes, keeps encountering predatorial denizens, Blondebeestes, Royal Canadian Commissars, is saved only by an enactment which destroys his male maidenhead forever and relentlessly resurrected arraigns all Montreal before him – whip-bitch, federaste [Federaste or f deraste, a conflation of “f deraliste” and “p d raste,” was a coinage of Quebec separatists alluding to the alleged sexual proclivities of their federalist opponents, particularly Pierre Elliot Trudeau.], Exposé 67 – invulnerable accusation, then turns and plunges into La Place to complete his mission by giving Body and Blood.

Whew! And that was just the blurb!

This was Symons in full bandolier-bedecked combat fatigues. And there was more to come. Underneath, prominently placed but in smaller type, was set out a different set of credentials. A sober recital that could have been cribbed from Who’s Who paraded the insurgent’s august ancestors, his degrees from Cambridge and the Sorbonne, his National Newspaper Award, his prestigious curatorial positions, his visiting professorship, his consultancy at the Smithsonian. Curiously, no mention of that old standby of the respectable author: the wife. But clearly, Scott Symons wanted it known that he was not just any old rebel off the street, or la Place. He was somebody.

Specifically, he was the maternal grandson of the legendary William Perkins Bull, the wealthy Toronto eccentric known as “the Duke of Rosedale.” Bull, an oil and lumber baron, was an historian, naturalist and philanthropist, adviser to Prime Ministers Laurier and Borden, prominent Freemason, and personal attorney of department store magnate Timothy Eaton. He published an array of books said to have been written largely by his stable of researchers. His daughter, Scott’s mother, was known in Rosedale as “the Pink Lady,” not for her politics which were quite conventional, but for the powerful cocktails she served her guests.

Despite his establishment background, Symons proclaimed, “My heart is Quebecois!” Yet his novelistic view of his Montreal sexual experiences is as deeply ambiguous as the rest of his feelings. Hugh Anderson is seen as “hell-bent for heaven… sainting for sinhood…. To see La Place, to write my novel, to come alive, again, I must fall, utterly. To share my love, I must humiliate me… must grovel. Stand waist deep in the shit… and then sing.” This tormented view of sex, sin and sanctity is more Baudelaire/Genet than Whitman/Carpenter. The English poet Kenneth Hopkins quipped that Scott was “waist deep in the shit, crying Shit!”

Combat Journal for Place d’Armes records a series of encounters that often seem more martial, or more ceremonial, than amatory. The metaphor of the War of the Sexes is a common, indeed ancient one in heterosexual lore, but is surprisingly rare in gay discourse; there are almost no fights in gay bars. But Place d’Armes was precursor to a number of works published during the Gay Liberation period of the seventies. The Wild Boys, William Burroughs’ paean to post-pubescent anarchy, appeared in 1971, and John Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw in 1977. The young men in The Wild Boys are runaways and castaways who employ bizarre weapons and whom society tries, and fails, to destroy; the young men in The Sexual Outlaw are depicted as urban front-line fighters, shock troops, in a sexual guerilla war against their own society. Their bodies are their weapons. The New York gay writer George Whitmore suggested the point of engaging in extreme sex was to be seen to do it “without flinching,” i.e. sex as defiance, a courageous proof of one’s masculinity.

Whitmore’s colleague Edmund White suggested that gay men should regard their venereal diseases as badges of honour, like combat medals in a revolutionary sexual war. Place d’Armes presented the first of a rising generation not of activists necessarily, but of combative sexual outlaws. What gave rise to them? John Rechy answered with one word: “Rage.”

At any rate, it seems evident the outraged, enraged and outrageous chief combat journalist of Place d’Armes may well be suffering from acute battle fatigue, not to say shell shock. He seems a man in precarious psychological equilibrium, perhaps in imminent danger of mental collapse. How the author is doing is less certain.

Canadian reviewers recognized the novel’s crotchety uniqueness, some taking a not unsympathetic view of its challenge to frosty, thawing Upper Canadian puritanism. But one particular review was to become notorious, and to help make Scott notorious: Robert Fulford’s column in the Toronto Star was entitled (presumably by a sub-editor) “A monster from Toronto.” It was judicious, insightful, and so devastating that Scott was still smarting from it over three decades later and an ocean away.

Fulford’s piece began: “The hero of Scott Symons’ first novel, Place d’Armes may well be the most repellent single figure in the recent history of Canadian writing.” Fulford describes Hugh Anderson as “a monster of snobbishness still wedded to an aesthetic view of life that can be called – depending on the degree of your benevolence – either aristocratic or fascist.” Symons, Fulford explains, is “writing a novel about a man who is writing a novel about a man who is writing a novel,” each of the novelists being more like Symons than the last. “This is nothing if not ingenious, and it works, but halfway through the book it grows tiresome.”

The column went on to describe the book as overwritten as well as overproduced, revealing “more ambition than talent…. The author makes each of his points half a dozen times, and they do not improve through repetition.” Place d’Armes was characterized as “a kind of higher journalism,” (This was the heyday of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson). “When it departs from this, – when it tries to develop human insights, or tries to convey passion – it fails badly. The hero’s problem is that he cannot love; the author’s problem is that he can write neither with nor about love.”

Symons’ – and much of the reading public’s – reaction to the Star’s review focussed on its title. It was the fictional Hugh Anderson, of course, not his creator, who had been accused specifically of loveless monstrosity. But the title stuck. The Monster from Toronto was born. Symons was understandably upset, forgetting in his anger that 1) “All publicity is good publicity,” and 2) “If you dish it out, you should be able to take it.”

Fulford’s column was hardly the first time a Canadian author had been subjected to a journalistic savaging of his or her fictional creation. Three years previously, George Robertson had written in the pages of Canadian Literature that the central character of Margaret Laurence’s now-classic The Stone Angel, was “as unpleasant a heroine as one is likely to meet… proud, bitter, and vengeful… bloated… blind and selfish.” (George Robertson, “An Artist’s Progress,” Canadian Literature No. 21, Summer 1964.) Apparently no umbrage was taken on that occasion as Mrs. Laurence did not assume the characterization was necessarily aimed at her. Symons felt no such distance from his fictional clones. Thus Fulford’s verdict was understandably viewed as an unwarranted personal denunciation.

When I first met Scott, the furor over his debut novel was still breaking. Place d’Armes had been published in January. In February, the University College Literary & Athletic Society at the University of Toronto sponsored a controversial “psychedelic festival” called Perception ’67. This encompassed a variety of events including a series of visionary (or disorienting) “Mind Excursion Rooms” and a Saturday night “Happening” at Convocation Hall featuring the music group The Fugs and, as an opening act, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who read poems and chanted Buddhist hymns. Psychedelic guru Dr. Timothy Leary had also been invited but the federal government had barred him from entering the country, citing a conviction for “drug trafficking” (i.e. transporting marijuana across state lines). At the last minute, the University College Principal, Douglas LePan, announced a strict ban from all college properties of “users or advocates of the drug LSD.” “Recently,” Principal LePan explained, “a far from negligible number of our students had psychic breakdowns and had to withdraw and enter psychiatric wards.” Faced with such disturbing phenomena, LePan’s administrative instinct was to suppress, not encourage, discussion. LePan, an author and former diplomat, had been an aide to Lester Pearson. His war novel The Deserter scandalously won the 1964 Governor General’s Award over The Stone Angel. (LePan’s fear of bad publicity was seen in a new light when he came out of the closet in 1990 at the age of seventy-six.)

Even without Leary or an official panel on drugs, the mid-winter Happening was a success, with a number of Toronto luminaries in attendance, including Marshall McLuhan sporting a “third eye” in the form of a light-refracting disc strapped to his forehead. I didn’t see McLuhan but while engrossed in listening to Ginsberg, I became aware that the man I was staring at, sitting directly across the aisle from me, was someone I recognized as the author of a novel I had just read. I had picked up a copy of Combat Journal for Place d’Armes soon after it appeared, and admired its inventive language and unprecedented audacity. After the reading, I introduced myself, had a brief conversation with the author, and wandered off home to think about Ginsberg and Symons. Soon afterwards, Scott left the country in an exodus that was to become notorious.

Before Place d’Armes changed everything, Scott Symons was known in both English and French Canada as a prescient, award-winning journalist. His series – in French – forecasting the Quiet Revolution had won the National Newspaper Award. He was a respectably married man with close ties to the academic world, a pious Anglican who retreated from time to time to a provincial monastery to engage in fervent prayer. Those who knew him on a personal level frequently found him sharp, abrasive, and unpredictable – decidedly not a gentleman or what passed for gentleman among those Scott called (reverently, in a chat with the Queen Mother) “Your Majesty’s Royal Americans.” He was still a celebrated and eminently respectable figure when he received an invitation to speak to the students of a small private school near Bracebridge, Ontario. It was there that he met the strikingly handsome, seventeen-year-old John McConnell, the bright, alienated son of a prominent Toronto banker. This was the beginning of the odyssey frequently described since as “running away to Mexico with a teenage boy” – a notorious tandem flight that in fact never occurred. Later conversations with both Scott and John gave a more accurate, though no less extraordinary, story.

Scott was born on July 13, 1933. After graduating from Trinity College at the University of Toronto, he won a Commonwealth Fellowship to King’s College, Cambridge. From there he went to the Sorbonne. The woman he married at the age of twenty-five was, he often reminded people, the granddaughter of a leading bank president. The marriage had gotten off to a rocky start when Scott’s rudely provocative speech disrupted his own wedding, but it lasted for ten years and produced a son, born in Paris while Scott was working in the wine trade.

“So you could have been a French vintner, Scott,” I once remarked.

“Maybe I should have been. But while I was in France I met Julien Green.”

Julien Green was an American-born writer who lived in France and wrote in French. It was over dinner with Green and his younger lover (whom he later adopted) novelist Eric Jourdan, that Scott’s closet doors first became seriously unhinged. Green, as Scott put it, “introduced me to my gay factor” – not through any erotic suggestion but simply by his eyes going “right through me.” Photos of Green show him as an attractive man with a good-humoured smile. But Scott experienced Green’s gaze rather as E.M. Forster experienced a friendly pat on the bum delivered by the openly gay George Merrill at the cottage he shared with Whitman’s disciple Edward Carpenter. “It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas,” Forster recalled, “without involving any thought.” The frisson from that touch was the genesis of Forster’s classic gay novel Maurice.

Julien Green’s searching gaze apparently opened up long dormant feelings in Scott. According to Charles Taylor’s masterly essay in Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern, Scott, while a young student at Trinity College Schools in Port Hope, had contracted an affair with another boy – an affair that Scott broke off when, believing that “his body and his desires were dirty,” he “felt an overwhelming inner veto.” Later, Taylor wrote, “he would blame the school, his family and his society for compelling him to suppress his love.” Scott apparently came to see this repudiation as “decisive, and crippling.” He remained, in his own words, an “eternal thirteen; eternally the boy reaching out to touch but never being allowed to do so… except as Mommy and Authority permitted.” The penetrating look of a French novelist across a Parisian dining table had resurrected these awkward suppressed memories. Nevertheless, Scott and his young wife returned to Canada to live at her wealthy family’s Ontario farm, which they purchased with money from Symons’ family. And Scott wrote his acclaimed series of articles for La Presse on the coming political and social upheaval in Quebec.

“I was saying that Canada was going to explode,” Scott told me. “There was going to be a revolution. Trudeau and I became good friends through that. He was editing Cité Libre at the time…. We had a real symbiotic relationship that we were both aware had a sexual component. We were both aware that the other was homosentient. In those days, no-one said anything about homosexuality. Many of the guys at La Presse were gay but you certainly didn’t walk up to them and announce it. Of course I was married at the time.”

Scott’s establishment connections and a wide and discerning knowledge of Canadian antiques paved the way for him to become Curator of Canadiana at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum, one of a number of positions from which he was dismissed for causing too many problems. About the same time, he told his wife about his growing attraction to men. “She said if you want to do that, you should do it.” So he left her in Ontario and headed for Montreal.

Those trips, and his voluminous journals, were, Scott said, his way of knowing himself and expressing himself. “Because you couldn’t talk about anything in my culture in those days. You couldn’t even talk about heterosexuality. Though the French Canadians were quite a bit looser than we were. But you couldn’t announce that you were into cocksucking. It would have ended everything. But I published Place d’Armes as my gift to Canada for the Centennial. And that led to the breakup of my marriage. We had no intention of separating. We adored each other,” he insisted. “But her parents were so nosey and determined to run her life. Her mother was noted for being a cruel woman.”

I reminded him that he had been having an affair with the young John McConnell. He recalled meeting John at Muskoka Lakes College, a private school “for kids whose parents couldn’t figure out what to do with them. They were a wealthy family. His father ran (Ontario Premier) John Robarts’ ad campaigns. I was on a retreat at the monastery in Bracebridge and was invited to give a talk at the school. After the talk, there was this beautiful boy with flaming red hair, standing in the hall, waiting for me.”

Though only seventeen at the time, John was tall and well-built and looked like a lumberjack, which he later briefly became.

“What did you say to him?” I asked.

“Every instinct told me he was profound trouble. I said ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’”

Scott’s answer surprised me. I too had met a beautiful, extraordinary seventeen year old – in a Yorkville sidewalk café – and had fallen in love with him. Law or no law, it would never have occurred to me to tell Richard Phelan “I don’t want to talk to you.” Scott had evidently been conflicted in ways that were foreign to me. But teenage boys can be willful, and John was not about to be brushed off so easily.

“He had set his sights on me,” said Scott, “and he was going to get me. But his parents sent him to a gilded cage in Nassau. I went to San Miguel de Allende in Mexico where I was hanging out with a group of painters including York Wilson and Leonard Brooks. He got a message to me. And I sent him a telegram saying ‘Take up your cock and walk.’ I remember sitting in the courtyard garden and there he was.”

John later confirmed Scott’s recollection. So, all later sensational accounts to the contrary, Scott Symons never did “run away to Mexico with a seventeen year old.” Nonetheless, John’s well-connected father set the police of three countries on the pair, posting a hefty reward for their arrest. When John heard about this, he contacted his sister, asking her to warn their parents that he would kill himself if Scott was jailed. Word soon came back that the reward had been rescinded and that John could pick up his passport at the Canadian embassy. The couple then re-entered Canada and fled “to grizzly country” on the Northern B.C. coast. After various adventures and misadventures there, including a stint at lumberjacking, they resurfaced in Toronto in 1970, where I ran into Scott again.

In the previous year, my long-standing efforts to start a gay organization at the University of Toronto had finally paid off. Whereas before, no-one had dared to come out of the closet, now in the wake of the Stonewall riots in New York and the Trudeau-sponsored decriminalization at home, the situation had suddenly changed. In November of 1969, the first official meeting of the University of Toronto Homophile Association launched what would become the Canadian Gay Liberation movement. When I learned that Canada’s best-known gay author was back in town and staying at the Norman Elder Museum and Gallery in Yorkville, I lost no time in dropping by to ask him to speak to the new group.

By then, Scott’s wife, considering herself abandoned, had divorced him, forbidden him ever to see his son again, and sold his property at auction. When I commiserated with Scott about his divorce, he placed the blame squarely upon his in-laws, seeing them as representing an implacably hostile Rosedale establishment of bland, powerful eunuchs and their cruel, unavailable wives. The fact that he had left his wife to live in distant parts with a teenaged lover did not seem to Scott to be grounds for divorce. “The vile cow, doesn’t she know how much I love her?”

By my next encounter with Scott, both of us had new books making their way to the store shelves. My poems in Acta had been spotted by Dennis Lee, who was about to launch a new publishing company, House of Anansi, with the novelist Dave Godfrey. Dennis asked me for a manuscript, and Anansi published Year of the Quiet Sun late in 1969. About the same time, Scott published his second book, an extraordinary production originally called The Smugly Fucklings, but after much persuasion released under the more sober title of Civic Square.

At 848 pages, Civic Square: An Original Manuscript by Scott Symons made Combat Journal for Place d’Armes seem concise and coherent. Neither Scott nor his publisher Jack McClelland had relished the daunting task of cutting the idiosyncratic – and ever-expanding – manuscript, and it was recognized that, uncut, it would be, as editor John Robert Colombo later put it, “unmarketable.” Scott gave his publishers the same permission he gave the surgeon who circumcised his son: “Just take a little bit.” The work was eventually issued in a small edition as a gestetnered typescript of unbound sheets stacked in a large, powder-blue box that simulated the trademark “Birks boxes” of the fashionable Toronto retailers. Each copy of the book was personalized by Scott with distinctive coloured glyphs of fiery, flaming phalli. It remains a controversial work to this day, having been judged (by Patrick Watson) as “extremely skilful” and (by Dennis Lee) as “very badly written.”

When I arrived at Norm Elder’s Yorkville home and private museum, Scott was sitting on the single bed in his room. He made a gentlemanly pass at me, which I deflected. Scott concluded I must find him “intimidating;” as it happened, I just didn’t fancy him. When I moved the conversation to the subject of speaking engagements, Scott said he would be happy to speak to the UTHA and a date was set. We chatted a little about his background, his and his wife’s ancestors, and his boyhood at Trinity College Schools, which, knowing my English background, he informed me was “the Canadian Eton.”

“I went to Beal,” I said, with a certain emphasis. Scott looked at me in silence. Obviously he had never heard of Beal, which was not surprising as it was an undistinguished Ilford grammar school. He shifted his buttocks and emitted a loud and pungent fart and we sat silently, savouring the moment. Scott seemed quite at ease in Norman’s quarters, though he later confided that he “didn’t sleep comfortably” there because of the pet boa constrictors Norm kept down the hall.

Another young writer who visited Scott around that time was the Lancashire poet Michael Higgins, who was then living in Toronto. When he dropped in on Scott’s rooms, Michael was carrying a guidebook to the city of York which he showed Scott, seeing it as an alien but comparable locale to the Place d’Armes. “He snarled with contempt,” Michael recalled, “and (literally) threw the book at me, hitting my arm, and saying something along the lines of ‘I’ve been there before, one doesn’t need this!’” Michael left thinking Scott to be uncouth as well as over-rated. He never finished reading Place d’Armes.

Other meetings were more successful. Scott enjoyed brief liaisons with several UTHA members. The young gay activist Michael Pearl told Scott, after an erotic encounter, “You’re a cute old number!” Scott met more formally with our little gay organization more than once in the months that followed, sometimes accompanied by John McConnell. He spoke about their relationship, and about modern civilization’s rising competence and declining compassion. He felt Canada was an anaphrodisiac society with a crippling fear of tenderness. He found at the UTHA “a level of intimacy and honesty in discussion,” but felt that more should be said about “the nature of a good and deep and extended relationship between two guys – all the difficulties of being a homosentient person in this society.” He told the group how both he and John had come from wealthy Toronto homes and, “desperate for love and affection, had to knock down just about every barrier that exists in the Protestant society book to reach out and touch each other.” A favourite topic was “the amount of hate” existing not only in society in general but specifically in “the failure to touch” existing in the middle class marriage: what he called “the hate space.”

Scott celebrated “the guerilla warfare of the new sensibility,” comparing himself to Che Guevara, an insurgent bedecked with explosives. He found much to enjoy in the emerging gay world, but was shocked by the amount of hate he found there. What the gay world had not done successfully, he felt, was putting men “in touch with each other on a long-term basis very intimately very relaxedly.” He found – and I saw this as quite perceptive – that in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships, “you (often) turn onto somebody, and then when he or she gets close to you, cut him or her off. That was the control system.” Scott called this “the negative orgasm cycle.” He and John, he told us, were trying to overcome this unhappy situation, and it was “a long, hard trip… the big battle. And it’s a battle the whole of our society is in.”

By that point, Scott and John had spent some time living in a remote part of Newfoundland, thanks to the first of a series of cash subsidies organized by Scott’s friend and patron Charles Taylor, writer son of the millionaire horse breeder E.P. Taylor. (At one UTHA get-together Scott had proudly displayed on a tabletop a small stack of high-denomination banknotes, spread into a fan like a hand of playing cards.) The couple had been welcomed by the rural islanders and the motherly Ma Snook. Scott came to admire the locals’ “quick responses” and “eyes that look straight into you, as if probing your beauty… constantly alert and aware… fresh and clean inside themselves, like the sea on a calm sunny day.” And, he found, they were men and women “honest about their sex. There is none of the morbid division between their desires and their values… so true on the mainland…. They celebrate in their flesh, and it is beautiful.” Nevertheless, at least one woman-friend there was offended at what she presumed was Scott’s “seduction of a gracious, inexperienced young boy.” In fact, John had been sexually active with men for over a year prior to their meeting and had been earnestly looking for an older male partner.

At the UTHA, Scott and John both spoke eloquently, and Scott quickly began to attract a personal following from among the (mostly male) members. He readily agreed to be a speaker at one of the series of public lectures the Association was sponsoring on campus. So it was that on March 25, 1971, in the university’s Medical Auditorium, Scott gave a presentation advertised under the title “Canada, Orgasm and Us.”

The lecture drew a considerable crowd. Scott talked of his stay in “a falling down goat house about a hundred miles up the coast” from Vancouver, and his life in Newfoundland, “tougher in its climate… it has the wonderful addition of a people and a culture four centuries old.” He delighted the audience by declaiming the “Cocks are beautiful…. Cocks are Holy Rood” passage from the beginning of Civic Square. At one point, departing from his scripted remarks, he began to read a love letter, apparently delivered that very morning from John, who was still back in Trout River, Newfoundland. Scott then removed from the same envelope a nude photo of John which he held aloft and proceeded to circulate around the auditorium. As the lecture continued, the picture of the handsome, naked young man was passed, somewhat nervously, from hand to hand. I was sitting toward the front of the auditorium, on the aisle, and eventually the photo reached me, slightly soiled from having been dropped on the floor. The seats in front of me were empty, everyone was paying attention to Scott, and seeing no outstretched hand, I pocketed the photo to return it after the lecture. As it happened, Scott left quickly with a sizable entourage before I could reach him.

Though radical in some things, I was conservative in others. I had enjoyed hearing of Allen Ginsberg’s public disrobings (on being asked “What do you mean by naked?” he had taken his clothes off to demonstrate) but it seemed to me that nude photographs of one’s lover should be for private viewing or shared with a few close friends. Passing them through hundreds of sweaty fingers in a public stadium did not strike me as a great idea; displaying one’s own nakedness in public is one thing, displaying someone else’s, a quite different matter. I doubted it would help Scott’s reputation, and if he was going to be the mutinous messiah of the new Canadian gay movement, as was beginning to appear likely, I felt there might well be dangers ahead if he didn’t rethink this particular tactic.

As Scott had left for his monastery the morning after the lecture, I wrote him a brief letter suggesting he might want to rethink his approach. Before mailing the note, I thought I should seek a second opinion. I showed it to Paul Pearce, a level-headed member of the UTHA whose judgement I trusted. As he was equally skeptical of Scott’s public manner, the letter went in the post the next day, with John’s photo enclosed. A couple of days later, I awoke to Scott’s challenging voice from the cloister.

One of the duties and prerogatives of friendship is surely to warn of possible dangers ahead, to restrain, to urge caution and reflection. Just in case. This can cause problems, and Scott was not the first, or the last, acquaintance to excommunicate me. My letter on that occasion, if not impertinent, was certainly presumptuous, in that it was a letter that only a friend should write. I had presumed friendship where none really existed, and my little message must have sounded self-righteous, censorious, annoying. As his reaction to The Star’s review had shown, Scott was easily rattled when not taken at his own valuation.

By this point, Richard Phelan, the schoolboy I had met during the Summer of Love four years earlier was now a world-travelling student of Buddhism. He had returned to Toronto for a stretch and he and I were hanging out together, collaborating on a book to be illustrated with his drawings. Richard had met both Scott and John and though he may not have been at the “Orgasm” lecture, he certainly had heard about it. Richard was one of those people who never speak ill of anyone, and his only remark on the lecture was “There’s a difference between a ballet and a striptease!” But he could tell that Scott’s phone call had upset me more than I let on, and once Scott was back in town from his retreat, Rick arranged to visit Scott to see if he could smooth things over.

According to Rick, Scott had been in no mood for tea and tête à tête, pressing instead for a more carnal engagement, “All he wanted to do was have sex with me,” Richard said with a shrug and a smile. When he demurred, he was accused of having “forgotten how to celebrate,” which was Scott’s word for fuck. “You’ve been in the city too long!” Scott scolded, unaware of Rick’s recent wanderings in the far-flung holy places. Realizing his cause was hopeless, Richard gracefully retreated. And that was that. Scott seems never again to have talked to a gay group or associated himself with a gay cause. His brief career as a public spokesman for Gay Lib was over. The next time Scott and I spoke, well over thirty years had passed, Richard was dead, and Scott had returned from his long, self-imposed exile for the last time.

John left Scott in the summer of 1972, shortly after the publication of Heritage, Scott’s learned, idiosyncratic “furniture novel” (Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture, McClelland & Stewart, 1971). “We were in a sixteen foot trailer near Trout River Pond,” he told me years later. John, who had dropped out of Grade Twelve, had expressed his desire to get a university education. “Working in lumber camps and fisheries was fine for my youth but wouldn’t work for me as I aged. I needed to go back and complete my schooling and Scott could not abide that. He wanted me forever young and all for himself – including all of my future.” Also complicating things was John’s growing interest in homoerotic sadomasochism. John’s interests, both erotic and educational, Scott interpreted as rejection, and he responded with a series of verbal assaults.

“When I told Scott I was going to leave him,” John wrote, “he exploded into a rant and wouldn’t calm down. I told him I was going for a walk.” Scott followed John along the lakefront, tackled him, and attacked him, leaving him with a black eye. At that point, John realized he wanted to leave Scott but feared that “if I didn’t hold open the possibility of living together he would become violent again.” With talk of a trial separation, Scott left for Mexico, and the prospect of renewing his relationship with a woman both he and John had been involved with on a previous trip. “When Scott arrived in Mexico he found that the woman had already moved in with another man. That stirred him to make overtures about getting back together with me.”

Scott attributed John’s diminishing erotic interest to the pernicious influence of the “squares and smuglies,” John told me. “Nothing to do with his big belly.” John also began expressing an interest in exploring heterosexual relationships, partly as a way of blocking the possibility of Scott’s return. “I wanted to distance myself from him far enough,” he recalled, “to make impossible the resumption of our erotic relationship. Going straight served that function.” Scott, of course, saw the breakup in a different light, claiming that John had been attempting to kill him by murdering their love. He interpreted John’s interests not as the natural feelings and ambitions of an intelligent young man but instead as treachery and attempted homicide. He was persuaded to see a psychiatrist, who told him John was trying to exorcise his own demons (as it were) by projecting them onto Scott. In willing Scott’s death, he was absolving himself of the need to commit suicide; he had been exercising a kind of “psychic voodoo.” Scott’s journals of this period contain many mentions of psychic voodoo, black magic and sadomasochism. He was deeply troubled about his future – and his reputation. “I can’t stop him,” he wrote in his journal. “And a whole nation will applaud his honesty, his decency, and pay him well….”

After his split with Scott, I continued to see John from time to time until he graduated and left the country. I remember visiting him in his small, cozy apartment near High Park when he was a university student. He told me Scott had sometimes come to see him. On one occasion, after Scott had left, John noticed he had lifted a stack of photos of their time together. Recalling their final meeting, John remembered Scott had showed up “in full leather regalia, harness, boots, leather jacket and Master’s cap.” They talked briefly and were soon in bed together. Scott took his belt to John. Then, with John still naked on the bed, “Scott abruptly buckled up, suddenly exiting and leaving the apartment door wide open, screaming ‘Evil! Evil! Evil!’ as he strode down the hall.” John never saw Scott again. He started a new life in California, where he became a therapist and a prominent member of the gay leather community.

Scott now saw himself as “a murdered man.” By 1973, he had left Canada, recapitulating an earlier stay in Morocco by settling in a well-appointed compound in Essaouira, where he lived for most of the next three decades, leaving the hefty manuscript of his three-part novel Helmet of Flesh with Dennis Lee, who spent the next fourteen years shaping it into publishable form. Essaouira seems to have been a favourite spot for Canadian (and other) expatriates. Richard Phelan wrote to me from there in 1972, and in ’78, Edward Lacey was arrested for smoking hash in one of the local cafés, jailed for two months, and deported to Spain – an incident Scott regretted not knowing about until much later.

In 1977, Charles Taylor published his book Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern, a collection of sympathetic biographical sketches of Scott and five others who “followed a lonely path in search of a more sustaining vision than was offered by… Canadian society,” exploring other cultures and “traditions which modern Canada seeks to denigrate.” Taylor quotes Scott’s belief that “the Canadian Identity is evil. I am dedicated to the total destruction of the Canadian state.” What he anticipated as a replacement is not recorded.

That year, Scott published a lengthy article in a Canadian literary journal entitled “The Canadian Bestiary: Ongoing Literary Depravity” (West Coast Review, Vol. 11, No. 3). It is an extended personal reaction to Marion Engel’s 1976 novel Bear, an odd tale of an unhappy woman who, as Scott puts it, “seduces a poor, tatty bear.” Scott was evidently deeply offended by Engel’s mildly controversial novel, which confirmed and deepened his convictions about what he saw as the loathsome degeneration of English-Canadian culture. Writing the piece, he confided, his “two central feelings were scorn and outrage.”

After a page or so of nervous clowning around, “A Canadian Bestiary” developed into a slashing verbal assault on Bear and its author. Feeling the book had been praised for all the wrong reasons, Scott obviously enjoyed venting his indignation. His point was not so much that Bear was an overpraised and pretentious book, rather that its very publication and acceptance exemplified the nation’s smug, subcultural tawdriness, thus preventing the future publication of other, better books.

His swashbuckling assault having bloodied Ms. Engel and her Bear, Scott then mounted a scattershot attack on much of the rest of CanLit. By the end of his thirteen pages, he had savaged not only Ms. Engel (“common… culturally pretentious… with absolutely nothing to say”) and her Bear (“spiritual gangrene… a Faustian compact with the Devil”) but also Irving Layton (“a runt”), Robertson Davies (“Humbug!”), Mordecai Richler (“second rate”), Victor Coleman (“insidiously trivial”), Jacques Godbout (“a federaste”), literary immigrants (“born in Baghdad or Bongo Bongo”) and even the Symons-friendly Coach House Press (“ghoulish… psychedelic masochismo”), not to mention his old nemesis Robert Fulford (“Bobo Fullblown”).
In this extraordinary one-man uprising against CanLit, the only writers to emerge more or less unscathed are the two ageing doyennes Margaret Laurence and Marie-Claire Blais; Dennis Lee, then in the initial throes of sculpting Scott’s monumental Helmet of Flesh; and one or two lesser-known figures who are damned with faint praise. The essay finishes with a disdainful denunciation of “the literature of depravity and psychic deprivation,” and a ready prophecy that the next “with-it-lit” fad will be “sadomasochistic homosexuality!” which Symons characterizes, obscurely, as a “natural kick-back.”

Commissioning Scott to vent his opinions was like milking a rattlesnake; once you got his fangs in the jar, the venom just kept coming, and you were sure to have a saleable, if highly toxic, commodity. “A Canadian Bestiary” did cause a small stir. But Scott quickly returned to Essaouira, and I read nothing further by him until his Helmet of Flesh finally hit the shelves in 1986.

The first half of the novel is a mildly satirical, third-person narrative about a youngish Canadian – another Symons clone called York Mackenzie – who falls in with a dissolute group of travelling English expatriates in Morocco. In a vigorous extended passage at the centre of the novel, an ecstatic fire dance – “James sniffing the flames like wine… Flesh fused to flame in a single groaning dance” – culminates in what may or may not be a human sacrifice. A fever-ridden Mackenzie then recovers from his hallucinations in a private sanatorium. It becomes evident that York Mackenzie, like Hugh Anderson before him, is in a psychologically precarious state. Unfortunately, from then on, the story rather falls apart as the author doesn’t seem to know how to utilize the impact of his vivid central scene. One chapter, a flashback to his life with a lover called John in Newfoundland, is written mostly in Newfie dialect, which soon becomes annoying. At one point in the book, Mackenzie recalls being beaten up in a Yorkville alley on orders from John’s relatives – an event which the real John did not remember from their time together, remarking that back-alley beatings had never been his family’s style. Eventually, Mackenzie returns to Newfoundland, and to John, without much apparent enthusiasm.

Helmet of Flesh met with a varied reception. A careful blurb from Margaret Atwood described it as “significant and provocative… will be read and talked about for many years to come.” So discerning a connoisseur of humour as Dr. Northrop Frye professed to find it “funny.” Others were disappointed, judging it an unsuccessful amalgam of its editor’s jovial Boys’ Own adventure story approach and Scott’s inchoate ravings. Some Helmet readers were surprised to see Scott’s gracious acknowledgement of ongoing assistance from the Canada Council, the Toronto and Ontario Arts Councils, and an array of patrons, named and unnamed, including “businessmen and women, writers, media people, restauranteurs, civil servants and a Toronto bank” – an apparent contradiction of his frequent contention that he had been generally anathematized, blackballed, driven into exile.

Over the years, curious bits of Scott Symons lore filtered back to Canada. The would-be gay messiah was now said to disdain gays, the gay movement, and even Trudeau’s legalization of homosexuality. Symons claimed now to “hate Trudeau with a volcanic passion.” His sexual preferences, he maintained, in a conversation with David Warren of the Ottawa Citizen, had been “a mistake” and “a red herring.” What he really wanted, he said, was a “male revolution” against the “epistemological enormities” of feminism, the cruel Canadian women, with their “closed cunts.”

In 1990, a Toronto magazine, The Idler, published two of Scott’s essays. “Atwood-as-Icon” was a critique of the public reputation of Margaret Atwood. It made some telling observations, but was hampered by its author’s appearing to have read only one or two of Atwood’s works. “Mazo Was Murdered” was not so much a defence of the prolific, now underrated novelist Mazo de la Roche, as an attack on the detractors of her epic Jalna series and the Anglo-Canadian cultural tradition it represents. Both essays were included in Christopher Elson’s compendium Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons, which Gutter Press published in 1998. Shortly before the book appeared, Canadian filmmaker Nik Sheehan was putting the finishing touches on his documentary film about Scott. God’s Fool will stand with Charles Taylor’s essay as an authoritative documentation of Scott’s unique personality.

One old friend interviewed in the film remembers Scott and his wife attending an art gallery function, Scott playing the part of a snake charmer, with his wife as the snake. A former student remarks, “It was very important for him to believe that he loved women.” His protégé Donald Martin sees him as essentially a truth-teller, and an influential social force, while David Gilmour recalls the darker aspects of Scott’s self-promotion, and remembers his own incredulous youthful reaction to the massive, uncut Helmet of Flesh: “Where is the valium? Oh, this is the Valium!”

Scott himself declares that he is a spiritual African: “I love Morocco and the Moroccans love me… Je suis Zulu!” he adds with a chuckle. And he supplies an entirely fictional version of his long-ago meeting with John McConnell. The school hallway in Muskoka has now become a forest through which John rides with the wind in his hair, a romantic young Tartar on a galloping horse, confronting Scott in a scene reminiscent of Marlon Brando eyeing Robert Forster in John Huston’s 1967 homo-gothic Reflections in a Golden Eye. In Scott’s recapitulation, John teasingly calls him a big, black bear – not a tame bear like Ms. Engel’s mangy mascot, but a wild animal with impressive, horse-frightening power.

The Scott Symons that Nik Sheehan captures in his Moroccan redoubt appears to have lost much of his vitality, delivering many of his speeches while lying down. By the end of the film he seems bloated, desperate, and somehow unclean, his watchful eyes shifty and menacing as he wanders through his lonely compound ranting “How dare they!” to the walls, or making notebook entries in a deserted rooftop restaurant. One can’t help thinking of Big Daddy’s resonant line in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof: “There’s an air of mendacity in this house!” Scott’s companion of almost twenty years, Aaron Klokeid, is seen briefly, but never speaks.

Regrettably absent from the large cast of commentators in God’s Fool is Charles Taylor, whose finances kept Scott in pocket and out of trouble for almost thirty years. In fact Taylor had been very ill, and died before the film was made. It was the unexpected demise of his true friend and patron at the age of sixty-three that brought down a slow curtain on Scott’s Moroccan sojourn. Early in 2000, Nik Sheehan, now back in Canada, received two long-distance calls from Morocco. The first was from the Canadian embassy in Rabat, informing him that Scott had been instructed to leave the country within twenty-four hours. The second was from an emotionally shattered Aaron Klokeid, now apparently “abandoned to his fate.”

Within a week, Scott was back in Toronto, with a colourful story to explain his sudden reversal of fortune. The mild-mannered Aaron, he confided to Nik Sheehan and others, had become “mixed up in a Thugee ritual murder cult involving international drug smugglers.” Scott’s personal investigations into this sinister conspiracy had so rattled the Moroccan authorities that, Scott’s connections to the King notwithstanding, he had seen fit to leave, turning over his “ranch” to the local villagers as a parting gift.

The word from Morocco was somewhat different. There it was maintained that Scott had used Charles Taylor’s final subsidy to have an additional turret added to the writing room of his large house. With the loss of his sole source of income, Scott’s many substantial debts to local businesses soon came due, and the government, anxious to avoid further unpleasantness, had issued an expulsion order. Aaron Klokeid, left to his own devices, was apparently bailed out by his Vancouver family.

By the time Scott arrived back in his birthplace, many of the principal players from the old days had quit the scene. After many years abroad, Edward Lacey had succumbed to a heart attack in a Toronto rooming house in 1995. Michael Higgins had returned to England. Richard Phelan and Michael Pearl had both died in the pandemic that devastated the North American gay community in the eighties and nineties. By the onset of the millennium, so many of my old friends had been lost to AIDS that I was not surprised to hear that John McConnell too was now said to be “very sick.”

Scott had arrived in Toronto with no money and in deteriorating health. He first sought shelter at Massey College where his old chum John Fraser was now Master, but, alas, they were “full up.” After a brief stay next door at Trinity, he prevailed on a succession of friends including Nik Sheehan and crime writer James Dubro. For a while he lived unobtrusively in the basement of a fraternity house before being ejected by the authorities. From there he decamped to what Dubro described as “flea-bag rooming houses” in Kensington Market. I caught up to him in 2001 at a literary get-together memorializing Edward Lacey. He seemed much mellowed and had apparently pardoned me for my act of lèse-majesté all those years before.

Scott spent his last years living at Leisure World, a crowded care home for the indigent infirm on St. George Street near the U. of T. Campus. In 2006 he shared dinner at my home in Toronto’s east end, and gave what was to be his last interview. After several heart attacks and the onset of Parkinson’s and diabetes, he was frail, a bit forgetful, and still eager to talk. Though much of the old bombast was gone, there were some new delusions (he believed the Prime Minister was his nephew). But he seemed a different creature from the desperate wreck captured at the end of God’s Fool. Nicer, and more tranquil.

He reminisced about his old publisher Jack McClelland, who, he said, had considered Scott “the most important writer in his stable,” but “I was kind of a peripatetic scandal and he wanted to protect himself.” I asked him about his relationship with John. He had fond memories of their time in Newfoundland, and was proud that he had been asked to “give the Christmas address at the Salvation Army Church.” His split with John, like his earlier split with his wife, he blamed wholly on parental malice: “They threatened to disinherit John and jail me,” he said, and had hired a psychiatrist to convince John “there was nothing significant in our relationship.” John’s mother, he emphasized, “was a cruel woman.” John, he told me, had wanted to get back together with Scott but had contracted AIDS and “died a horrible death.” Aaron Klokeid, he said, had been in Morocco on his honeymoon when they met. At that encounter, Scott had apparently played the role of Julien Green but in this case, the impressionable young man did not turn away from the older expatriate writer and take his bride back to Canada but stayed with him for two decades. Eventually, he said, Aaron was “seduced by the governor’s mistress.”

He much enjoyed his dinner with us, was gracious to my elderly mother, and posed for a few photos in the garden. Scott seemed in his last phase to shuck off many of the psychic burdens that had made him so angry. In spite of Leisure World’s painfully crowded conditions, he was cared for reasonably well there and had no problem fitting in with the other patients, who called him “the professor” (at least those who could speak). He continued to enjoy his cigarettes, and had at least one outing a week, attending regular Sunday services at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church nearby. All in all, he seemed if not content, at least resigned. I never heard him complain. Perhaps all those stays in the monastery rubbed off on the old Monster after all.

Not everything was sweetness and light of course. A publisher friend took him out one evening to dinner and drinks at a Bloor Street restaurant. When Pierre Trudeau’s name came up in conversation, Scott grew agitated, stopping all conversation in the room and turning diners’ heads by shouting “I fucked that Trudeau up the ass!” – an historic claim that, had it been true, we would surely have heard about before.

Shortly after our interview, I ran into an old Toronto friend of John’s, Ian Turner, who told me Scott had been misinformed: John McConnell was in fact alive and well, and living in San Diego! I was able to contact him by email and a few days later, paid a visit to Leisure World to give Scott the good news of his ex-lover’s resurrection.

John phoned Scott on Christmas Eve, 2006. Scott apparently expressed no regrets. (Regrets had never been his style.) The brief call, John told me, brought back “all his hyperbole, his exaggerated self-importance and his embellishment of fact to make himself look grand.” Yet their talk reminded him “how badly I had needed that kind of dominating, patriarchal presence when I was younger, and how little I felt ‘owned’ by my own father in an emotional sense.” He remained grateful for all the affection that Scott had given him which with time outweighed the acrimony, the abuse, the stolen photographs, and the black eye.

Scott and John spoke several more times, Scott still unapologetic, still urging John to return because “we owe it to ourselves.” He remained estranged from his wife and son, and the rest of his family seldom visited, though he did have at least one dinner with his brother Tom. Scott said his brother admitted: “You were right.” He didn’t mean about everything of course, but specifically about the recognition of gay people in Canada, the public acknowledgement of our humanity, our mortality.

Scott’s Anglican funeral service at St. Thomas’s was accompanied by clouds of frankincense and every rite in the book – entirely appropriate, one parishioner remarked, as Scott was convinced he would be with the saints. At the Massey College reception afterwards, old friends and acquaintances reminisced. One woman recalled being in grade seven with Scott and going to a party with him and another child. Scott, she said, played the accordion at the time. He painted the other kids’ faces and had them jump about all evening, telling them “I’ll be the organ grinder and you can be the monkeys!” I related the old classmate’s story to John in San Diego. He replied that “it is as good a metaphor of Scott’s life as any. In both his life and his writing he portrayed others by painting a false face on them, and then had them dance to his tune, calling them monkeys, which is how they appeared to him.”

What drew me to Scott Symons in the first place? He and I were both idiosyncratic writers going our own way, both speaking and naming the Love that Dare Not, writing about what Scott called “homosentience” in the then-thawing emotional climate of the True North. More than that, both of us fell head over heels in love with spectacularly beautiful, quite unusual seventeen-year-olds who strolled, or strode, into our arms. But Scott was bound to his native Canada in ways that I, as an immigrant, could not be. Scott could never put Rosedale behind him, or the Pink Lady, or his betrayal of boyhood love. Rather, they remained the centre of a psychic world in which he was “eternally thirteen,” eternally being told his cock was dirty.

Rating writers is a futile academic exercise. We have no idea how the future will judge our contemporaries. All we know is that we would almost certainly be surprised. Many of the best-known Canadian authors are, though entirely worthy of respect, nonetheless just a tad on the boring side. Scott, on the other hand, was a literary high roller with an utterly unique voice. His name is high on the alternate list with Émile Nelligan, Emily Carr, Grey Owl, Brion Gysin, Juan Butler, bp Nichol, Albert Collignon, bill bissett, Norman Elder, Thomson Highway, Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite…. What a roster! Self-starters and visionaries all.

Canadians of course, had seen something like Scott’s bombastic mythologising before, in the robust figure of Irving Layton. But through all Layton’s boasts – including his claim to have been born circumcised, the sure sign of a messiah – we could see, or thought we could see, the twinkle in the poet’s eye. Scott was every bit as megalomaniacal as Layton, but those black, beady little eyes did not twinkle. Indeed, they seemed (until near the end) not so much searching as accusatory, inquisitorial, confrontational. As for his chequered career (or rather careers, as he had several), Jack McClelland stated it as simply as anyone: “The problem as we see it is that (Scott’s) lack of discipline is killing him both as a man and as a writer.” His towering ambition attempted the well-nigh impossible: to be the exalted ruler and the insurgent rebel, the hierophant and the heretic, at the same time – a precarious double act attempted by many, Wilde, Mayakovsky, Capote and Mapplethorpe among them. Most came to grief.

Such artists belong to a class of human beings the French call les monstres sacrés – Sacred Monsters. They are compulsively, often prolifically creative creatures, utterly self-absorbed, confident of their own charismatic genius, oblivious to the feelings of others, uncaring or unaware about the effects of their own words or actions. They can be bombastic and demanding. They are often profligate with money, sex, drugs, travel, religion: with them, it is all or nothing. At their most monstrous, they can be paranoid, bullying, “a must to avoid.”

Picasso, Hemingway, Frederick Rolfe “Baron Corvo,” Aleister Crowley and Ayn Rand are remembered as classic Sacred Monsters of their century. Scott Symons was surely of their number, which is why Robert Fulford’s mot juste drew blood. Of his fellow Monsters, it may be the dreaded Rolfe whom Scott most resembles – in his not quite definable talent, his enormous sense of entitlement, his unerring capacity for self-sabotage.

The English writer Daniel Farson had the dubious privilege of knowing more than a few such Monsters, including Francis Bacon and Brendan Behan, and in his book Sacred Monsters (Bloomsbury, 1988) he succinctly summed them all up: “They may be difficult, temperamental, occasionally treacherous, frequently drunk, usually unpredictable; this is their price for making life more interesting for the rest of us. They are worth the trouble.”

Scott Symons certainly made peoples’ lives more interesting, for better or worse. He was a unique writer. And at a signal time in the country’s history, he presented us with a reminder that there are many Canadas, not all of them yet mapped. He was the féderaste par excellence. He was no saint. But he may well be with them – in one capacity or another.

Tags: Issue 77

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