On his mother’s side, the Bull family legacy and its English connections were deeply influential for Symons. His grandfather, Percy Bull, was a near-legendary figure in Toronto, known by many as the Duke of Rosedale, a cantankerous “rogue male” and a member of the Mark Twain Society.3
Symons attended Trinity College School (TCS) in Port Hope, Ontario, where he met his lifelong friend, Charles Taylor (son of E.P., a Globe and Mail London and Beijing correspondent, and author of Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern and Radical Tories). In a 1997 Vision TV interview with Tim Wilson, Symons remarked on the quasi-Benedictine character of life at TCS, and trembling with emotion evoked the impact of having attended Anglican chapel twice a day for five years. The sense of life as ongoing liturgy, the conviction of its sacramental character that permeates Place d’Armes and other works, had its roots in that environment. He also recalled with scorn the anti-intellectualism of the establishment boys there. For Symons, “jock” would always be synonymous with cultural underachievement — personal and national.
After a year in the city at University of Toronto Schools following a gymnastics accident, Symons attended Trinity College, University of Toronto, and took a B.A. in modern history, studying with eminent Canadian historians of varied ideological stripe such as Frank Underhill, Donald Creighton, and Maurice Careless. Like many other university students of his generation, Symons was a summer officer cadet with the University Naval Training Division. He self-deprecatingly referred to himself as “the least pusser cadet they’d ever seen.” But he took real pride in this affiliation and had great affection for the Royal Canadian Navy, which he always cast in later years as a Dickensian universe of improbable and touching characters.
Scott took a “gentleman’s M.A.” in English literature at Cambridge University from 1955 to 1957 where he studied with F.R. Leavis and was influenced by tutors such as Dorothea Krook and Basil Willey. While admiring his tutors greatly, he claimed his real education in England was in the King’s College Chapel, at Evensong, in the Fitzwilliam Museum, and with relatives in London. In March 1958 he married Judith Morrow, granddaughter of the president of the Canadian Bank of Commerce. For the next three years he and his wife were to move between journalism jobs in Quebec and study at the Sorbonne, where Symons received a Diplôme d’Etudes supérieures and where he became close to the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel and a regular at Marcel’s salon. Symons once recounted for me the humorous but bittersweet anecdote of how he fell out with Gabriel Marcel. He and his wife put on a skit about a small accident they’d had and a police officer who had caused them problems, a sketch they thought amusingly showed French stubbornness and unwillingness to admit ignorance in the face of obvious contradiction. The renowned philosopher, dramatist, and music critic found it too clichéd and insulting, and they weren’t invited to return.
The Paris interlude was intended to bolster a deepening relation to the French language and to French Canada. Symons and his wife became collectors of French Canadiana, particularly of rooster weather vanes. He claimed to have been shot at by an angry farmer as he tried to steal one, with his wife saving the day in the getaway car. There is no doubt that they became close to the burgeoning intellectual and cultural scene. In a 1963 speech in Winnipeg, Symons stated without hyperbole or irony, “we witness in French Canada what is perhaps the most talented, the most purposeful outburst of creative energy anywhere in the Western world today. (It makes the New Frontier group of the United States look like a posthumous Edwardian garden party.)”
By then Symons’s intimate knowledge and insightful perceptions of Quebec had been recognized with the 1961 National Newspaper Award for a series written in French in La Presse and published in his own translation by the Ottawa Journal. The series described the emerging Quiet Revolution. Symons even sometimes claimed to have coined the term. He had become an honorary member of the St-Jean Baptiste Society, the first Protestant ever so honoured, and was close to the influential editor of Le Devoir, André Laurendeau, later of the Bilingualism and Biculturalism Commission. Yet Symons had to move on from journalism. Responding to a mixture of family and inner pressures, he sought and accepted a position as curatorial assistant in the Canadiana Department at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).
From 1961 to 1965, Symons worked at the ROM, becoming chief curator of the Canadian collections, and was an assistant professor of art history at the University of Toronto. He and his wife had a son, Graham. Symons was awarded a visiting curatorship at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and was also made a research associate at the Winterthur Museum, the principal American museum of the decorative arts. Charles Taylor’s Six Journeys contains an account of a public talk Symons gave at the Smithsonian about French-Canadian and New England rooster weather vanes, and the comparative properties of those “cocks.” “His audience, who listened in absolute silence, became aware that he was giving a lecture on comparative eroticism,” writes Taylor. Symons’s unique take on the life and liveliness of objects and his exhaustive connoisseurship didn’t go unnoticed in the United States, and he was offered a position at the Smithsonian. He declined, citing a “date with the Canadian Centennial.”
Indeed, somewhere between his sense of the disparity between the dominant accounts of Canadian history and what the objects were telling him (“furniture doesn’t lie”) and his shock at the adoption of a new Canadian flag designed by a committee and first flown in February 1965, Symons came to the difficult decision to leave behind his life of privilege and cultural achievement. There was also the matter of his increasing interest in the erotic beauty and sexual attractiveness of men. Somehow this erotic turn was connected to his concern with the loss of national character, purpose, and potency. This sense of personal and collective crisis had to be dealt with; the urgency became simply irresistible for Symons. In 1989 he recalled the decision to quit and head for Montreal, a move that he always called a démission, no doubt because the French word retains a sense of mission rather than simply conveying the fatality and fatigue of resignation:
I contemplated for at least five years before I did what I did that it would have to be done. I kept waiting for other people to do it. Why should I, who was happily married, had a lovely home in Toronto, a lovely farm full of Canadian art and culture, a Curator of Canadiana, a Professor at the U. of T., a Visiting Curator at the Smithsonian, have to do it? I did not leap with any glee. There was a sense of vocation and a sense of civic action. One can laugh at it, one can praise it, but it’s genuine.
Place d’Armes, published in 1967 by McClelland & Stewart and here republished by Dundurn Press, captures this precise moment in late 1965 and its break with life success, career competence, bourgeois heterosexuality, and social respectability.
It is nearly impossible and perhaps unnecessary to sum up the thirty-four years of Symons’s life following his decision to leave behind his Toronto world. It is fair to say that whatever judgment posterity may have about the decision itself and about the literary work that it permitted, the “demissionary” himself lived out the full consequences of his act in the years that followed. After trying for a time to hold his marriage together in the context of his now-overt bisexuality and need for a sexual life including men, Symons broke definitively with the marriage and lived a great passion with a young man, John McConnell, who at the time of their meeting was not yet eighteen. Flight to Mexico ensued, where the lovers were pursued by the Mexican Federal Police at the instigation of their families in Toronto.
Symons liked to joke that the Canadian Honours System saved his life when he won a prize for best first novel and returned to Toronto to collect it. He was able to finish and publish Civic Square, begun between the writing of Place d’Armes and its publication.4 This second published work was an extraordinary, unbound book-in-a-box, the Toronto counterpoint to Place d’Armes, again centred on a public square and seeking to deepen a sense of Canadian meanings through close attention to our built heritage.5 An internal exile with John McConnell followed: he spent time in British Columbia in the lumber woods and embarked on a “furniture safari” that resulted in the writing of Heritage: A Romantic Look at Canadian
