Working the Dead Beat (29 page)

Scott Symons

Writer

July 13, 1933 – February 23, 2009

S
HORT, WITH A
dark complexion, smouldering brown eyes, and a thick helmet of black hair, Scott Symons had a chunky wrestler's body and a magnetic but quixotic personality. He could energize a gathering simply by being there; just as easily, though, his voracious narcissism could suck all the oxygen out of a room.

Born into a prosperous, well-connected Toronto family, he had all the presumed attributes for a charmed life, along with a fierce intelligence, a passionate curiosity, and the literary ambition to write the great Canadian novel. He was driven by a messianic vision, one that hearkened back to the homoerotic and whacky beliefs of Aleister Crowley, the early twentieth century oculist, mystic, alleged spy, and founder of the religious cult of Thelema.

Symons wrote three novels, including
Place d'Armes
, arguably CanLit's first openly gay novel, but he will be remembered most for his outrageous lifestyle, which began in scandal and ended in poverty and illness. After several years of declining health, he died in a publicly subsidized Toronto nursing home at seventy-five, on February 23, 2009.

In his zeal to destroy the puritanical establishment that had cradled him, Symons affronted family, alienated friends and lovers, and destroyed relationships. He wantonly inflicted pain in the most flagrant and public ways without any semblance of remorse. At thirty-four he abandoned his wife and small son to run away with a seventeen-year-old boy at a time when homosexual acts between consenting adults were a criminal offence. Vicious in print, he attacked the character and writings of a coterie of friends that included Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson, Bill Glassco, and Robertson Davies.

His closest and oldest friend, the late journalist and essayist Charles Taylor, supported him emotionally, intellectually, and financially. Back in 1977, in
Six Journeys: A Canadian Pattern
, Taylor wrote what remains the most perceptive profile of Symons, a biographical essay that is empathetic, knowing, and revealing.

Taylor was not his only champion. The late Jack McClelland, his publisher, believed Symons was “one of Canada's most important writers.” And he was — as a non-fiction writer. His political and cultural journalism in
La Presse
about post-Duplessis Quebec and the stirrings of the Quiet Revolution in the early 1960s was lucid and perceptive, while his lavishly illustrated book
Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture
was an imaginative and culturally provocative treatise with photographs by John de Visser and a preface by George Grant.

Turning his back on what he did best, Symons wrote fiction that was overblown and rambling. As literature it was forgettable; as sexual polemic it was revolutionary. His goal was to empower readers to embrace hedonistic experience and shrug off the complacent shackles of postwar Canadian society.

He could craft visually charged scenes as though he were wielding a paintbrush instead of a pen, but he had profound difficulties in stepping back from his material and establishing a distance between himself — the author — and the characters he manipulated to espouse his homoerotic views about the “lived life.” As for absorbed experience, the bedrock of all fiction, he paraded it raw. Perhaps his biggest mistake as a writer was his obsessive journal-­keeping, an addiction that began in his mid-twenties. He recorded everything in his “combat journal,” as he called his diary, which then became, seemingly without transformative editing, the sprawling stuff of his fiction. His life was his art. Alas, it was not a masterpiece.

HUGH BRENNAN SCOTT
Symons was born on July 13, 1933, in Toronto, the fifth of seven children of Major Harry and Dorothy (née Bull) Symons. (One of his older brothers, Tom Symons, was the founding president of Trent University and author of the Symons Report on Canadian studies.)

His father, a fighter pilot in the First World War, made his living in real estate and won the inaugural Stephen Leacock Award in 1947. His British-born grandfather, William Limberry Symons, designed the Old Union Station and many of the houses in the exclusive Rosedale enclave where the Symons family lived; he was also a president of the Ontario Society of Architects. On his mother's side, the Bulls were United Empire Loyalists. His maternal grandfather was William Perkins Bull, a lawyer, financier, art patron, and writer who was known as the “Duke of Rosedale.”

Symons grew up surrounded by books, traditions, and culture and “thinking highly of himself,” according to his youngest brother, Bart Symons. After attending Rosedale Elementary School, he was, according to his friend Charles Taylor's profile, “already showing signs of a moody truculence,” a rebelliousness that his parents hoped to curb by sending him to board at Trinity College School, a private boys' school in Port Hope, Ontario. That's where the two met, the shy and diffident son of industrialist E. P. Taylor and the self-assured and authoritative scion of old money. Despite their disparate personalities, they were equally dismissive about an inherited life of privilege and social status.

Although Symons hated everything about the school — except his pal Charles — he was an excellent student. At
TCS
he fell in love with another student, a love he repressed by becoming a gymnast, “a form of athletics which suited him because it was solitary and ritualistic, with a touch of grace,” Taylor wrote. He practised obsessively, and one night, alone in the gym, he fell off the high bar and broke his back. He was immobilized in a body cast for several months.

While it is tempting to speculate that being trapped in a body cast is symbolic of the way Symons felt encased by society, what we know for certain is that he moved back into the cocoon of his parents' home after the accident and spent his final year of high school at the University of Toronto Schools, an academically elite boys' school in the centre of the city. That fall he entered Trinity College at the University of Toronto, where he enlisted as a naval cadet, served in the student government, and excelled academically, earning a slew of scholarships and medals along with a bachelor's degree in modern history in 1955.

Instead of revelling in his triumph, he skipped the ceremony and spent the day working at a part-time job at Woodbine Racetrack — perhaps a sign that he wouldn't be going easily into the dark establishment night. Nevertheless, he went up to Cambridge that fall as a student of F. R. Leavis at King's College, although later he said he received his real education at evensong and in the Fitzwilliam Museum. About this time he became engaged to Judith Morrow, a childhood friend and a bank president's daughter, and returned to Toronto to take up a short-lived job on the editorial page of the
Telegram
. After being asked to write a report surveying the paper's editorial policy over the previous fifty years, he said it had deteriorated miserably, and he was soon shown the door.

He and Morrow were married on March 1, 1958. At the reception, both the groom and his best man, Charles Taylor, made well-lubricated speeches denigrating the guests and everything they represented. Two months later the newlyweds settled in Quebec City. Symons took a job with the
Chronicle-Telegraph
, improved his French, and moved so easily in Québécois intellectual circles — then dominated by André Laurendeau and Jean-Louis Gagnon — that he was invited to join the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society, becoming the first non-francophone and non-Catholic member, as he liked to boast.

By the autumn of 1959 Symons and his wife were in Paris, studying French literature and grammar at the Sorbonne, exploring the countryside, and helping to harvest grapes in a Bordeaux vineyard. They returned to Canada a year later with their newborn son, Graham, because Symons had been offered a reporting job at
La Presse
. The end of the Duplessis era — the autocratic premier had died the previous year — was a propitious time for a bilingual outsider to sniff out political and intellectual ferment, and Symons made the most of it with a National Newspaper Award–winning series of twenty-five articles in 1960–61 that presaged the coming Quiet Revolution. Indeed, he said later that he had coined the term.

Although his family and his wife's had frowned upon his career choice, Symons had considerable prowess as a journalist. But success frightened him. With his customary restlessness he “backed into what seemed more respectable,” as he later wrote. He quit
La Presse
, moved back to Toronto with his family, and took a job as an assistant curator in the Canadiana department of the Royal Ontario Museum.

Again he seemed to have found his métier. Within three years he had been appointed curator and assistant professor of fine arts at the University of Toronto and granted a sabbatical, which he spent as a visiting curator at several august institutions in the United States. He gave a memorable public lecture, complete with slides, at the Smithsonian Institution, in which he compared the “full-bodied and orotund” Quebec weathervane roosters with the flat and one-dimensional American “cocks” as his stunned audience slowly grasped that they were on the losing side in a discussion of comparative cultural eroticism.

Symons was intent on kicking against the pricks, a defiance that he tried once too often with his superior at the
ROM
, who fired him for insubordination. Unable to quit the field of battle, he turned down the offer of a permanent job at the Smithsonian so that he could pursue his self-styled vocation as “a kind of priest of the chapel of Canadiana.” Living on a fifty-acre farm east of Toronto that his wife had bought from her husband's family, he began and abandoned a book on Canadian history, wrote a play in which a symbolically unfulfilled English Canadian achieved a beatific state when sodomized by a French-Canadian chair, and, perhaps deliberately, messed up an audition for
This Hour Has Seven Days
, a provocative television show that seemed suited to his talents and tastes. The Symons universe was unravelling.

He fled the farm and holed up in a small hotel in Montreal. In an obsessive twenty-one-day outpouring, he produced his first novel,
Place d'Armes
, an autobiographical torrent about Hugh Anderson, an English Canadian, who wants nothing more than “the right to love my country, my wife, my people, my world,” a goal that he can achieve only by reclaiming his emasculated soul through sexual intercourse with male Québécois prostitutes in the square adjoining the Église de Notre-Dame. Anderson celebrates his deliverance by taking Holy Communion in the church, eating the Host in the Place d'Armes, and embracing bemused passersby.

Critical reaction was not mixed when
Place d'Armes
— Symons's centennial project — was published in 1967. Writing in the
Toronto Star
under the headline “A Monster from Toronto,” cultural critic Robert Fulford castigated Symons's gauzily veiled protagonist as “the most repellent single figure in the recent history of Canadian writing” and criticized the author for being incapable of writing with or about love. A savaged Symons licked his wounds in Yorkville, which was enjoying its sexually liberated heyday, by cavorting with all manner of libertines, including two statuesque and begowned black transvestites whom he invited to a family party hosted by his in-laws.

He was also creating his second novel,
Civic Square
, an even more unwieldy manuscript that was the English-Canadian counterpart to
Place d'Armes
. A massive collection of polemical letters addressed “Dear Reader,” it was printed as a nearly 900-page unbound manuscript and packaged in a blue box, symbolic reminder of a gift package from Birks, the tony establishment jeweller. As a final flourish, Symons drew birds, flowers, and a red phallus on each page as it came off the Gestetner machine. He then delivered a copy to St. James Cathedral, his family's church, depositing the nearly four-kilogram offering on the collection plate after Communion.

By now Symons had more serious preoccupations than rampaging book critics. The year before, at thirty-four, he had run off with John McConnell, the underage son of a prominent Canadian family. The lovers fled to Mexico with the police in hot and fruitless pursuit and then lived for a time in lumber camps in northern British Columbia. Coincidentally, Symons received a minor literary prize — the Beta Sigma Phi Best First Canadian Novel Award — while he was on the lam. He returned to Toronto to pick up his laurels and his thousand-dollar cheque and to have a formal meeting with his disaffected wife, who, not surprisingly, had begun divorce proceedings.

And so Symons began the long nomadic phase of his life. He lived variously in Trout River, a west-coast Newfoundland village, where he wrote much of the text for
Heritage
, his furniture book (which would eventually be published by M&S in 1971); in the Mexican expatriate artists' colony San Miguel de Allende, where he began writing
Helmet of Flesh
; and mainly in Morocco, where he lived and loved and wrote for more than two decades in Essaouira, a walled medieval town. That's where he seemed most in harmony with himself, his new lover, Aaron Klokeid, and his cultural and physical environment.

Periodically he returned to Canada: in 1970 on “a personal odyssey into the heart of early Canadian belief” as he researched his furniture book; in 1986 for the launch of
Helmet of Flesh
at a lavish party hosted by Charles Taylor at Windfields, his family estate (now the home of the Canadian Film Centre); and in 1998 to attend the International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront, where Nik Sheehan's documentary film about him,
God's Fool
, was being screened and Christopher Elson's anthology
Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons
was being launched by Gutter Press.

Symons always claimed that he was homosexual, not gay, by which he probably meant that he didn't embrace the gay liberation movement as a defining political and social cause. He wasn't seeking equality, he was railing against the real foe: the Blandmen — the establishment types who he felt had betrayed Canada's British and French heritage. Frequently lonely and depressed, often suicidal, perpetually broke, he was dependent on the indulgence of friends as his job prospects dwindled and his health deteriorated. He smoked, drank, and ate prodigiously at their expense and suffered over the years from diabetes and kidney problems.