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and “The Long Walk,” ibid., 303–08; various interviews conducted with Christopher Elson in 1995 in Essaouira, Morocco; unpublished texts, diaries, and drafts.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 main character of Place d’Armes is in a very deep way the square itself — La Place, in Scott Symons’s intensely personal usage. The historic public square located in Old Montreal and bounded by Notre-Dame Ouest, St-Jacques Ouest, St-François Xavier, and Saint-Sulpice streets is the site of a range of architectural and monumental forms ranging from Georgian-Palladian to Neo-Gothic, from Art-Deco to High Modernist. A nineteenth-century sculpture by Louis-Philippe Hébert of Sieur de Maisonneuve, situated in the centre of the square, harkens back to the earliest moments of the settlement, Ville-Marie, and the epic character of the establishment and defence of the seventeenth-century colony.
Harold Kalman’s A History of Canadian Architecture (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994) mentions Place d’Armes in several places. It was the site of the first Bank of Montreal headquarters constructed in 1818–19, and with each addition to the bank’s properties, innovative and nationally important approaches were taken. Kalman also gives a fascinating account of how Notre Dame, “the most important landmark in the early Gothic Revival,” emerged from the competition among parishes and the desire of the Sulpicians to make a major statement by bringing in a foreign architect (James O’Donnell, a New York Irish Protestant!). Kalman’s text provides in a very condensed form some of the same factual, historical information dispersed throughout Symons’s more lyrical text and puts Place d’Armes at the centre of Canadian architectural evolution.
In her foreword to Montreal Metropolis 1880–1930, eds. Isabelle Gournay and France Vanlaethem (Montreal/Toronto: Canadian Centre for Architecture/Stoddart Publishing, 1998), Phyllis Lambert, founder and director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, underlines this “initial duality of religion and commerce” (6). She plays off the very different Place d’Armes and Dominion Square as capacious and generous sites of some of Montreal’s necessary cultural and urbanistic accommodations: “The architecture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Place d’Armes and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dominion Square is paradigmatic of Montreal, a city accustomed to change and to accommodating opposing values, able both to absorb the shock of the new and to create the variety of urban structures and infrastructures called for by the twentieth century.” (7)
A small pamphlet in the Quebec National Library, apparently self-published in 1968 by philosopher and theologian Michel Bougier, emphasizes the Catholic and French-Canadian elements of the square, including the importance of the International style Banque canadienne nationale building by architectural firm David et Boulva. But it is in considering the church that Bougier is at his most eloquent: “It is sweet and good to find oneself, on some wintry afternoon, in the grand, nearly deserted vessel. Its sombre and contemplative atmosphere encourages one to reflection, to just desires, to good will.” Symons’s apocalyptic communion must be set against this rather tamer vision of spiritual life.
Finally, perhaps the best single source of information and inspiration relative to Place d’Armes may be found in a text by Maryse Leduc, architect, which accompanies the book of cut-outs of buildings in the square prepared for Héritage Montréal by Conception-EditionsARC and available for purchase online at www.copticarchitecture.com/a.htm. Leduc bridges the competence of the architectural historian and the excitement of the urban dweller who finds herself enlivened by the “event” of this phenomenal ensemble of buildings. “At once both contemporary and classic, the square is truly an urban event, a place that enhances the buildings that enclose it. It is a pleasure for the eyes, inviting them to discover there a detail ornamenting a doorway or the grand interiors [sic] spaces that extand [sic] the square. The views and vistas that the square offers are each as impressive as the other, forming both tableaux and individual landmarks in the city.” (2) With its emphasis on the informed pleasure of seeing, on the conjugation, as Symons might have said, of interior spaces with the urban landscape, Leduc is very close to Symons’s perception of the “insite” of the sight.
Other sources for those interested in Place d’Armes include Marc Choko, Les grandes places publiques de Montréal
