Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.
The photographs on pages 42 and 400 are by Chirstopher Elson.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions.
J. Kirk Howard, President
Printed and bound in Canada.
| Dundurn Press 3 Church Street, Suite 500 Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5E 1M2 | Gazelle Book Services Limited White Cross Mills High Town, Lancaster, England LA1 4XS | Dundurn Press 2250 Military Road Tonawanda, NY U.S.A. 14150 |
To T.W. and J.S.
without whose love
this book would not have
been possible
And to all those who have made this book necessary
TABLE OF CONTENTS
COMBAT JOURNAL FOR PLACE D’ ARMES
DAY FOUR
DAY FIVE
DAY SIX
DAY SEVEN
DAY EIGHT
DAY NINE
DAY TEN
DAY ELEVEN
DAY TWELVE
DAY THIRTEEN
DAY FOURTEEN
DAY FIFTEEN
DAY SIXTEEN
DAY SEVENTEEN
DAY EIGHTEEN
DAY NINETEEN
DAY TWENTY
DAY TWENTY-ONE
DAY TWENTY-TWO
Siting La Place
BY CHRISTOPHER ELSON
It’s all a question of seeing — of eyesight on site.
— Place d’Armes (125)1
I left several lives behind ...
— Interview with Tim Wilson2
Scott Symons, one of Canada’s most remarkable and controversial cultural figures, passed away on February 23, 2009. He was seventy-five years old. “My life is a sketch toward a life I’ll never have time to live” is a phrase he often used with his friends and in interviews. Symons’s life was indeed a remarkable one — abundant, excessive, troubling, exigent, and colourful in the extreme. The fruitful and destructive tensions between his lived experience and his artistic project lie at the very heart of his literary reflection. Combat Journal for Place d’Armes, first published in 1967, was the inaugural statement of this unique sensibility, a work worthy of republication and reappraisal.
Reaction to Symons’s passing in the media was predictably ambivalent. Although he had fallen nearly silent in recent years, the echo of decades of greater and lesser social controversy and the received critical judgment of an overweening and unrealized artistic ambition with which the name of Symons had come to be associated were the dominant notes of the necrologies and articles published in the wake of his death.
Martin Levin of the Globe and Mail referred in his blog to Symons as a “potent and scathing presence” in the Canadian literary life of the 1960s and 1970s and noted that “I never met Symons. And somewhat regret it (I think).” Film director Nik Sheehan’s appreciation of Scott in the March 12, 2009, edition of Xtra! characterized the late author as “an uncompromising artist, a difficult friend and a giant of a man.” David Warren’s column in the February 25 Ottawa Citizen engaged the same terrain, differently: “Scott was, in the best Byronic tradition, ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know.’ I was honoured as well as inconvenienced to know him well. I loved him, and wish him success in his new vocation.” Warren contributed in some further measure to the appraisal of his artistic accomplishment: “With sex out of the way, Scott’s topic was Canada: the dignity she had, and had lost. Paradoxically, he was a true son of that Rosedale heritage, very proud of its accomplishments, and painfully ashamed of its decline into trend-conscious mediocrity.” Sandra Martin’s obituary in the Globe and Mail gave a very thorough account of the complex life lived while emphasizing the view (widely held) that Scott Symons had not established the necessary distance between autobiographical exploration and literary characterization and narration: “His life was his art. Alas, it was not a masterpiece.”
Who was this writer, this man capable of eliciting such admiration, uneasiness, excitement, fascination, and condescension? And what does his work mean for us today?
Hugh Brennan Scott Symons was born on July 13, 1933, in Toronto (between Orange Day and Bastille Day, as he once delightedly said to me). He was one of seven siblings, the son of well-established members of Toronto society. His father, Major Harry Symons, had been a star quarterback, a fighter pilot in the First World War, and was a writer himself, winner of the inaugural Stephen Leacock Prize for Humour in 1947. His grandfather, William Limberry Symons, was one of the architects of Union Station in Toronto
