ONE OF MY first jobs at M&S was printing multiple copies of Scott Symons’s Civic Square, a manuscript typed on the wax paper of a Gestetner duplicating machine. It’s hard to explain how the damned thing worked: there were inked rollers that sometimes relieved themselves of superfluous ink, making the paper copies messy and virtually unreadable, so that each sheet had to be inspected and replaced if necessary. My hands and arms all the way to the elbows were covered in ink. Scott Symons was there for part of the arduous process but kept himself away from the infernal Gestetner.
He was about my height with muscular shoulders and arms, a tanned face with intense brown eyes that he would focus, squinting to make sure I knew he was serious—very serious, even when he appeared to be kidding about some parts of his personal story. He talked about growing up in a big house in Rosedale, a Red Tory, grandson of Perkins Bull, a famous bulwark, he said, of Toronto society; as expected of him, he had married into the upper class. His wedding, he told me, had been a disaster. Since then, I have heard various versions of the event, but irrespective of who made the nastiest speech and who shouted “Shame, shame!” it was Scott who was at the centre of this story, a rebel among the respectable, loathsome Protestant gentry of his day. By the time of Civic Square, he had left his wife and son to begin his journey of self-discovery.
While he talked incessantly and with great passion about his life, we made three hundred sets of the 848-page beast, then stacked each one into a blue Birks-style box. (Birks was a very chic, expensive downtown Toronto jewellery store.) Scott personalized the top sheet of each set of pages with a red felt-tipped pen, drawing stylized testicles, penises, flowers, decorative curlicues, and signing his name. We then closed the boxes and wrapped a Birks-style white ribbon around each one. Civic Square was heavy-handedly anti-Toronto-establishment, so the packaging served to attract attention to the story inside. Scott was planning to deposit one of the blue boxes in an offering plate at St. James Cathedral, his father’s church.
Originally, Scott told me, the book was to be called The Smugly Fucklings but Jack had objected, as he objected to the overall length and repetitions in the manuscript, though he decided to publish it anyway. John Robert Colombo,I an experienced freelance editor Jack often entrusted with difficult manuscripts, had done his best with Civic Square, but it was never going to become a big seller.
Jack, Scott assured me, admired his flourishes of inimitable prose, his clear-eyed view of the milieu he had been born into, and his absolutely honest rejection of it. Scott loved Jack’s courage in publishing his first novel, Place d’Armes, in 1967, and now Civic Square. Place d’Armes had been a call to arms, he told me, a statement of such brilliance that Canada’s bloodless establishment quavered in its pristine sheets. While Jack was not the only person who recognized Scott’s brilliance, he was in a position to publish and promote what Scott wanted to say about Canadian society’s stultifying, emasculating ways.
Since we had to spend many hours with the Gestetner and the boxes, I came to know Scott reasonably well. Trinity College School in Port Hope, he assured me, had failed to break his spirit, though it had broken his body. Scott had been a brilliant gymnast: gymnastics suited his solitary ways, he said. He had practiced every day to keep his muscles tuned. One day he flew off the high bar, fell, and broke his back. That was not the only reason he had hated Trinity. Despite its appreciation of his intellectual abilities, despite the scholarships and suggestions he should go to Cambridge, he saw it as a hidebound place where future elite leaders learned their limp ways. At the University of Toronto he became a stellar member of the Zeta Psi fraternity—the erudite, wild boys—who thought they had a chance to discomfort the comfortable.
Scott went on to study at the Sorbonne, was appointed a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, and enjoyed occasional bouts as a journalist. His first love, he told me, had not even been his wife (I never understood why he had married) but a fellow male student with whom he had stopped short of enjoying sex. He was still too much infected by “the disease of society’s mores.”
His best friend (not a lover) since early school days was Charles Taylor, a brilliant journalist who would later manage the considerable estate, including thoroughbred racehorses left by his father, E. P. Taylor.II Charles’s 1982 book Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada would look back at the ideas of Scott and other Red Tories, including philosopher George Grant and poet Al Purdy. Charles’s definition of a Red Tory: “a conservative with a conscience.”
Charles saw Civic Square as a kind of testament: Scott’s break with conventional society and a rejection of all its comforts and traditions. Charles admired his courage.
When I met him, Charles had already published a book about China, based on his experiences as The Globe and Mail’s man in Beijing. We became friends over my trying and failing to persuade him to write another, about thoroughbred racing. As far as I could tell, horses and horse breeding were the only things Charles liked about his father’s activities. He looked splendid in his formal Kentucky Derby garb. His Windfields Farm had been the birthplace of Northern Dancer, one of the most famous thoroughbreds in racing history.
Scott absconded with a seventeen-year-old boy to Mexico, where he was chased by federales determined to return young John to his distinguished family in Montreal. John’s parents had charged Scott with inducing a minor into immoral acts.
After they returned from Mexico, Scott and his lover used to visit our apartment in the late evening, when he was sure no one had followed them. They made quite the pair: John, with long legs and red hair, sleek as a young colt; Scott in his trademark soiled black sweatshirt and his large silver medallion on a silver chain. Scott would be whispering stories about narrow escapes from the federales, his attempts to keep writing in impossible circumstances, assuring me that he was still—as far as Canadian society was concerned—“a very dangerous man,” a revolutionary who could change the world. He fulminated about the “death-dealing puritanism that lies at the base of the Canadian identity.”
I tried to like Civic Square because I liked Scott, but I found it wearying, shrill in tone, and, as Jack had told Scott, unrelentingly repetitious. Given that the late sixties were still anxious about sex, that there were banned books and homosexual behaviour was just being decriminalized, Scott was brave to have written his books, and Jack was brave to have published them. But I didn’t think they were good books. Still don’t. Yet, looking back, I admire Scott’s courage to challenge society, and his belief that words can be dangerous: that’s why tyrants are always eager to imprison or kill writers who confront them with words.
* * *
I WOULD WORK with Scott again in 1971. This time, it was a huge book called Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture. He knew his subject well and loved each piece he described. His only problem was that he couldn’t bring himself to sit and type, so we developed a working pattern where Scott marched about my small office glaring at the parking lot, talking, and I typed. Then I edited what he had said and read it to him. I remember Scott pacing, smoking his pipe, dribbling ash down his black sweatshirt, standing still for a moment, starting again, never missing the continuity of his words, though he did stop now and then to tell me about his love for “the boy” and how he had been liberated at last from the stultifying social strictures of this country, a country he had loved enough to try to change.
In the finished book each chunk of copy, except for the introduction, is accompanied by one of John de Visser’s stunning photographs.III Despite the strange way we produced it, I think Heritage is Scott’s best writing.
We stayed in touch while he was in BC with his lover, doing odd jobs for a living. When they broke up, he came to Toronto again, looking sad and dishevelled but determined to continue with “his mission.” Though he was openly and proudly homosexual, he insisted he was not “gay.” He was seeking a “new kind of man,” sentient, not effeminate, a male ideal that he thought might exist in other countries.
He chose Morocco.
His last book, Helmet of Flesh (1989), a novel set in Morocco, was neither scandalous nor a critical success, and no amount of editorial attention could save it from its author’s overwrought prose.
I. John had been one of M&S’s best book doctors before he became famous for his books of quotations. Now his website lists more than two hundred books.
II. E. P. Taylor, the former brewery king, had become one of the richest men in Canada and, later, in the Bahamas.
III. John de Visser’s photographs are some of Canada’s defining images. I had a chance to work with him on a number of books, including Winter with Morley Callaghan and Canada: A Celebration.