Editions du Méridien, 1990); and Monique Larue with Jean-François Chessay, Promenades littéraires dans Montréal (Montreal: Québec-Amérique, 1989).
6. Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture (McClelland & Stewart, 1971; republished in the United States with the New York Graphic Society), with photographs by the still-prolific John Visser, completed the first trilogy. The book is an anatomy of furniture, a “furniture novel,” as Irving Layton is reported to have said. Leonard Cohen told Scott that he had done something very clever, producing a “hand grenade disguised as a coffee table book.” The volume’s long concluding essay, “Ave Atque Vale” (“Hail and Farewell”), is an account of the “furniture Safari” from southwestern Ontario to St. John’s, Newfoundland, taken by Symons and his lover in 1970. It evokes landscape, old, rooted Canada, the personalities and places associated with the most significant finds of Canadiana. Furniture is faith, Symons repeats again and again. The philosopher George Grant wrote the preface to “this splendid book” and noted that in it “Symons shows us consummately that the furniture of any time or place cannot be understood as a set of objects, but rather as things touched, seen, used, loved, in short, simply lived with through the myriad events which are the lives of individuals, of families, of communities, of peoples.”Who else but Scott Symons, reminiscing about a French-Canadian armchair, a chaise à la capucine, could persuasively argue, in the midst of intense connoisseurship and curatorial precision, that contact with such a chair constituted a breach of his marriage? “That was in 1959 — my core attained. My smug opacity ended.”
7. Helmet of Flesh (McClelland & Stewart, 1986; also published in New American Library in hardback and paperback editions) owes its existence to the editing of Dennis Lee, who helped bring the thousands of pages of draft into something resembling a coherent whole. Helmet I describes the arrival in Morocco of Symons’s alter ego York MacKenzie and a series of wild misadventures which ensue. There is a trip into the High Atlas with a band of misfit Englishmen that cannot end well. Constantly present in the overwhelming Moroccan setting, through flashbacks, letters, and photographs, however, are Osprey Cove, Newfoundland, and London, England. Simone Weil is a tutelary presence here with her spirituality of extreme attention, as she is in the still-unpublished installments of the second trilogy. There are remarkable set pieces in which Moroccan realities challenge and transform the sensibility of the main character, particularly through the experience and reading of carpets, the uncanny attractiveness of Moroccan music, and some crowd scenes in the Medina of a rare descriptive power. It is to be hoped that someday Waterwalker and Dracula-in-Drag may also be published.
It is important to note that Michel Gaulin has translated Helmet of Flesh into French as Marrakech (Québec-Amérique, 1997) and that his translation of Place d’Armes was published in the fall of 2009 with Montreal’s XYZ Éditeur. The French translation of Helmet of Flesh received some excellent reviews.
Excerpts from the unpublished volumes may be found in Christopher Elson, ed., Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons (Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998).
8. Eleven Canadian Novelists, interviews with Graeme Gibson (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1973), 310.
9. Literary Review of Canada, November 2005.
10. In the first group: Elspeth Cameron, “Journey to the Interior: The Journal Form in Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes” (Studies in Canadian Literature, Summer 1977); Peter Briggs,“Insite: Place d’Armes” (Canadian Literature, Summer 1977). In the second: Terry Goldie, “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); Robert K. Martin, “Cheap Tricks in Montreal: Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes (Essays on Canadian Writing, Winter 1994); George Piggford, “‘A National Enema’: Identity and Metafiction in Scott Symons’s Place d’Armes” (English Studies in Canada, March 1998); Peter Dickinson, Here Is Queer: Nationalism, Sexualities and the Literature of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
11. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
12. Interview in The Idler, No.23, May/June 1989, 29.
13. Eleven Canadian Novelists, 317.
14. Michel Deguy, Arrêts fréquents (Marseille: Métailié, 1991).
COMBAT JOURNAL FOR PLACE D’ARMES
any resemblance to persons dead, or really alive, is pure coincidence
Stranger, reconquer the source
of feeling
For an anxious people’s sake
From NIMBUS, by Douglas Le Pan
Basilique Notre-Dame in Montreal’s Place d’Armes.
“La Place d’Armes is the heart of Montreal, metropolis of Canada. No visitor to the city can afford to miss this remarkable square where the modern and the historic meet in splendour and harmony. Walk out to the centre of La Place — and stand under the great statue to Maisonneuve, founder of the city, in 1642. On the north side of La Place stands the Head Office of the Bank of Montreal … popularly known as ‘My Bank’ to over two million Canadians. On the west side is the Head Office of the Banque Canadienne nationale. The largest financial institutions of English and French Canada respectively: side by side, tower by tower. Yet facing these two ultramodern skyscrapers, on the south side of the square, sits the Presbytery and Church of Notre Dame. This Church is traditionally known simply as “The Parish,” the pride of the Sulpician Order who once held all Montreal in fief. The rough stone Presbytery dates from the days of Louis XIV, while the Church, which was completed by 1830, is the earliest example of the Gothic Revival Style in Canada. It is considered one of the finest in America. The lavish interior of the Church, copied from La Sainte Chapelle in Paris, is one of the sights of the city. It is appropriate that the Church is faced not only by the modern Bank of Montreal tower, but also by the old Bank building with its classic pediment and dome, dating from 1847. To the east the square is fitly completed by two handsome stone skyscrapers; the Providence Life Building which will remind you of New York in the Roaring Twenties, and beside it an excellent example of the famed brownstone architecture of the High Victorian Period.
In effect La Place d’Armes is a summary of the entire city. Because to the north and west of it rises the mountain with its new city of commerce and cultures. The Queen Elizabeth Hotel, the most up-to-date in Canada; La Place Ville Marie, the largest shopping and office complex in the nation; and La Place des Arts, symbol of the vibrant artistic life born of the meeting of French and English civilizations in the New World — these are only a few blocks away. While to the south and east of the square lie the great international harbour of Montreal, and the historic Old Quarter, with its unique ensemble of Georgian stone buildings. If you want to wander these curving streets, in a matter of minutes you will be in la rue St. Paul with its modern boutiques and art stores, its antique shops, with the magnificent Georgian Bonsecours Market, once the Parliament of Canada, and Notre Dame de Bonsecours Church dating from the eighteenth century. Fine restaurants
