relationship with McConnell ended, and in a movement of shock and reconstruction he spent time in Mexico teaching at PEN workshops in San Miguel de Allende and eventually settled in Morocco, which he had earlier visited, almost accidentally embarking for Marrakesh rather than Mallorca on a holiday from London. From those experiences between 1970 and 1974 came the three volumes of the Helmet of Flesh trilogy. Only volume one has so far been published — in 1986.7 (All of Symons’s books appeared originally with McClelland & Stewart.)
In “Notes Toward a CV” in the 1998 Gutter Press anthology, Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons, Symons gave a tender and compact assessment of what twenty-three years in North Africa had meant to him:
[T]he role of Morocco in Scott’s life (1971 to the present) has been large. It gave him hearth & haven. Allowing him to take his stand, hang tough, and bear witness. Armed with fluent French (Morocco is part of La Francophonie!) he could live joy (much), sustain his rooted Canadian meanings intact, and … grow. What he loves in Morocco is their sense of dance, music and the pipes of Pan. And their incredible smiles ...
There were periodic returns to Canada, often connected to a writing or media project (“Canada a Loving Look” — Globe and Mail, 1979; “house writer” for The Idler in the late 1980s; et cetera) or the launch of Nik Sheehan’s film and my anthology in 1998, but Symons remained faithful to the nourishments and the contemplative possibilities of Morocco until forced to leave by urgent personal circumstances in 2000. He and his Canadian lover and partner in Moroccan life for almost twenty-five years, Aaron Klokeid, also separated at that point.
Symons spent the last years of his life in Toronto dependent upon the goodness of friends, the remainder of a last bequest from his lifelong supporter and correspondent Charles Taylor, and what little income he could earn from writing and royalties. He published a few pieces in the National Post, worked on a novella, Kali’s Dance, based upon his last experiences in Morocco, and drafted elements of a memoir, none of which were brought through to publication. His health gradually deteriorated until, finally, suffering from diabetic brownouts and for all intents and purposes homeless, his dearest friend, Mary-Kay Ross, was able to arrange for him to take up residence in Leisure World, a continuing care facility on St. George Street.
Scott had written that “I quest the right death.” I recall him saying to me in Rasoir, Morocco, looking south over the wall behind his magnificently simple home (like that of a high Roman official in retirement) to the brush and seemingly endless dry lands beyond, “When it’s my time, I’ll take my motorcycle and see just how far south I can go. I want to disappear into Africa. No one will ever know what happened to me.”
Circumstances are our masters, as Blaise Pascal said. Symons’s “sunset time” was to be spent in slow decline in Toronto rather than in an eschatological African road movie. Those of us who knew him in those last years, who visited him occasionally with sadness and trepidation in the dreadfully reduced circumstances of the euphemistic Leisure World, found him to be unfailingly gentle, engaged, unreconstructed, still himself. I will not forget his bravery on the occasion of our last lunch together.
The rest of this introductory essay was originally written before Scott Symons’s passing and focuses on the achievement of Combat Journal for Place d’Armes.
From One Place to Another
New Year’s Eve, 2007, Dakar. First day of a two-week stay in Senegal. I dare myself from the Novotel into the unknown avenues, leaning steeply (a very Scott word) toward La Place de l’Indépendance. The newness of the African night, the strangeness of the streets, the rush and flare of fireworks overhead, and the brief, bright volleys of sharp firecrackers underfoot all combine for an uncanny, elevated perception.
I’m thinking, too, of another Place, of Scott Symons’s remarkable, durable, influential achievement, Combat Journal for Place d’Armes.
From one Place to another then, which seems oddly fitting, utterly right. Place, with all of the bilingual signifying power that Symons evokes and analyzes in his “novel.” A place, a site, a space, spaciousness itself, spaciosity of inwardness in its conjunction with the real. An inner sanctum, for intérieur, inner Château, to use the language of the mystics, as Symons sometimes has. As he puts it in Day Five of Place d’Armes, La Place is “the inmost world” (146).
Back in my hotel room — after failing to reach La Place, driven here by pickpockets and shady followers. On with the TV, looks as if it will be an Al Jazeera kind of New Year’s, but then I see it: the Church of Notre Dame on Montreal’s Place d’Armes in the film The Whole Nine Yards with Bruce Willis and Matthew Perry, a movie about a Montreal dentist’s conflict with his new neighbour, resettled American hit man Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski.
There it is, the very church that grounds and founds the extraordinary ecstatic Canadian novel I have in my bag, rearing up on the small screen in this African hotel room. It can’t be relegated to a background, not to a mere beauty shot, not even in such a limited, competent exercise of light entertainment. To my utter amazement, La Place really is everywhere. I hear the roar that Symons sung. I did not expect it to come rushing in on Senegalese cable.
Laughing, I remind myself that my task remains the writing of something like an introduction for something cleverly disguised as a novel.
“I have come to sight La Place for others ...” (96)
Place d’Armes Today
Place d’Armes, originally published as a dissonant and dissident centennial gift to Canada from its author, a Toronto curator, professor, and journalist on the run from stifling respectability, is a classic of our literature and one that retains remarkable power to fascinate, to enervate, to confuse, to provoke, to arm and disarm the reader (who is always Dear Reader to Scott Symons).
Expressing a multi-faceted crisis of identity, Place d’Armes was written as it was lived in a three-week period in late 1965. It is a text born of the same sense of foreboding that gave us, at almost precisely the same moment, George Grant’s Lament for a Nation. It may be thought of as the last will and testament of the last British North American, a High North American Tory who knows that his culture is in stalemate and who is trying to invent forward metamorphoses for it. It is also a founding moment for gay literature in Canada and an open, utterly honest plea for liberty of sexual expression and largeness and generosity in conceptions of love and sensuality. It is a transgressive literary text that plays havoc with generic modes, mixing diary, fiction, thinly disguised autobiography, and cultural commentary. It is a work that even challenges our sense of the book as a predictable, easily definable object and the novel as a recognizable category. Yet there is a narration here, characters, and an effort to find good forms. But they are complex and imperfect forms submitted to the larger necessities of an existential quest.The book overflows with bold and exciting solutions to almost impossible representational challenges.
The overlaid voices and typefaces marking out the various modes (journal, novel, novel within the novel, parodic or documentary asides, and digressions, et cetera) are dizzying, perhaps a little bewildering. The reader must really read this text. And that is part of Symons’s intentions. His “narrators” do not do everything for us but rather lead us deeper and deeper into the real and virtual city, the concrete and the symbolic Place. It may be said that all culminates on Day Twenty-One in a moment when the fictional creation of Hugh Anderson, Andrew Harrison, himself turns to writing a novel, the main character of which is named ... Hugh Anderson. With this move we have a kind of internal looping, a metafictional recognition of the book’s complexities, a mise-en-abime of unity: Symons writing Anderson writing
