Meetings with the Messiah

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WHEN AL PURDY first met Irving Layton, he thought Layton was “so full of shit he couldn’t make up his mind from which end it would exit . . . paradoxically, Layton was also genuine.” Purdy admitted his comments may have been tinged with envy both of the parade of women who adored Irving and of the publicity Irving never failed to generate.

I felt it was a privilege to know him.

When I reread “The Bull Calf,” I am still amazed by the sheer force of Irving’s voice, and its utter sadness.

The thing could barely stand. Yet taken

from his mother and the barn smells

he still impressed with his pride,

with the promise of sovereignty in the way

his head moved to take us in.

The fierce sunlight tugging the maize from the ground

licked at his shapely flanks.

He was too young for all that pride.

I thought of the deposed Richard II.

“No money in bull calves,” Freeman had said.

The visiting clergyman rubbed the nostrils

now snuffing pathetically at the windless day.

“A pity,” he sighed.

My gaze slipped off his hat toward the empty sky

that circled over the black knot of men,

over us and the calf waiting for the first blow.

Layton had such a commanding presence and sonorous voice that everyone fell into a reverential silence when he recited his poems. Everyone did not include Harold Town, who protested at one of Sylvia Fraser’s parties that he would do a public drawing if Layton insisted on a public reading. Layton, undeterred, read “A Wild Peculiar Joy” and ignored Harold’s heckling. I was relieved he didn’t read the poem about the old Greek woman’s orifices.

Layton was wide, short, square-shouldered, barrel-chested, somewhat hairy, usually tanned, with a bit of a belly that increased in girth during the decades that I knew him. He had bushy eyebrows, a slightly hooked nose, and longish grey hair that made him look like an Old Testament prophet. He often wore a large silver medallion hanging from a chain around his neck. It reminded me of Scott Symons’s medallion.

He maintained that, just like the Messiah, he was born circumcised. On March 12, 1912, Jews came from far and wide to the tiny town of Târgu Neamţ to witness the miracle of little Israel Pincu Lazarovitch’s penis. His grandmother had died young, he told me, because she had made a deal with God to trade her own life for that of his mother.

In search of a better life, his family emigrated to Canada and settled in Montreal’s St. Urbain Street neighbourhood. Irving Layton, all agreed, was a better name for a Canadian poet than Israel Lazarovitch.

He told sad and hilarious tales about his father, the scholarly, frail, religious, rather distant man, and his mother, who railed against fate, and the horse-manure-throwing gentiles who messed up the alleyway in front of her small shop. His moving poem, “The Death of Moishe Lazarovitch,” commemorates both his father and his mother.

Irving learned to use his fists in territorial wars between street gangs on Montreal’s St. Elizabeth Street—the area where Jack Rabinovitch and Mordecai Richler also grew up.I His friends had nicknames like Cross-Eyed George and Benny the Beanpole, and they fought like their lives depended on winning—which they sometimes did. He played handball in the same gymnasium where Jack Rabinovitch played a couple of decades later. Jack, Irving, and Mordecai all went to Baron Byng High School, and studied Latin and algebra.

I used to visit Irving and Aviva Layton in their book-lined house in Toronto. Aviva, small, tanned, vivacious, rivetingly pretty, had been with Irving for a number of years by then. They spent most summers on Lesbos, a Greek island, hence the tans. They were loud and affectionate. She often quieted him when he indulged in some of his verbal pyrotechnics, complaining about Canada’s coldness, its refusal to talk about sex, or its unwillingness to be its best self.

Their young son David would sit at the table or perch on the arm of his father’s or his mother’s chair as his father declaimed. Though he tried a variety of methods, the boy was usually unsuccessful in attracting their attention. He hovered around Aviva, shouted and swore, tried to grab her as she walked past, but nothing seemed to work. The adults continued their conversations, Irving read his poems, Aviva produced more wine and food, and David shrank into aggrieved silence.

I remember sitting at their dining room table, when Irving talked of “Shakespeare, Milton, and I” all sharing the need to reach deep into the hearts of men. Of course he knew his Shakespeare and Milton, but also Keats, Spinoza, David Lewis and Canadian socialism, A. M. Klein, Louis Dudek, Maxim Gorky, Heinrich Heine, Jane Austen, Paul Celan, Nietzsche, and Nadezhda Mandelstam. His conversation ranged over a multitude of topics, including the Bible, Hitler, boxing, politics, Greek civilization, US elections, Vietnam, Roman emperors, the Soviet Union, Marxism, fascism, fads, fetishes, Anglo-Saxon puritanism, and, of course, sex and anti-Semitism. He told me that in the 1960s there were still places in the Laurentians that proudly displayed signs declaring No Dogs or Jews Allowed. Anti-Semitism may have been outlawed but it was alive and well under the veneer of civility.

Irving was surprisingly pro-American. He supported the US war in Vietnam. Most people I knew were fiercely opposed to the 1970 War Measures Act. Barbara Frum, for example, believed it was inimical to Pierre Trudeau’s own sense of a “just society.” Irving, on the other hand, supported the suspension of civil liberties in Quebec.

Like Purdy and Birney, he was generous with younger poets, introduced them to his publishers, gave them advice about poetry and their love lives. Leonard Cohen was his lifelong protégé. Aviva used to say jokingly that she had married Leonard, not Irving (though, in fact, she never formally married Irving). The three of them had gone to a jewellery store to select a ring, but since Irving didn’t have enough cash, Leonard purchased the ring and slipped it onto Aviva’s finger.

Leonard loved Irving. He often travelled to conferences and readings with Irving, listened intently when Irving read his poetry. At an International Festival of Authors event honouring Irving on his eightieth birthday, Cohen made a surprise appearance. He mentioned the theological implications of Irving having been born circumcised. Embellishing the version I had first heard from Irving, he said, “Rabbis and doctors of law came from many miles around to visit Irving Layton in his crib and to look between his legs at that which was not there.”

*  *  *

BECAUSE JACK PERSISTED in denying that he had editorial talents, I took the lead in discussing Layton’s work with him. It wasn’t easy. I had arrived at M&S just in time for The Collected Poems of Irving Layton. It weighed in at more than a thousand pages and we debated, poem by poem, about two hundred of them. I insisted that there was a limit to how many pages the book could have; he argued that a “collected” had to collect all his best work and that all the poems here were, indeed, his best. I was afraid the collection would diminish rather than burnish his image—and I knew Irving was insecure about reviews. While I thought he was brilliant, courageous, and passionate, some of the poems were quite dreadful, others were merely flawed. It was on that subject we parted ways.

Still, there is this wonderful poem “There Were No Signs,” in The Collected:

By walking I found out

Where I was going.

By intensely hating, how to love.

By loving, whom and what to love.

By grieving, how to laugh from the belly.

Out of infirmity, I have built strength.

Out of untruth, truth.

From hypocrisy, I wove directness.

Almost now I know who I am.

Almost I have the boldness to be that man.

Another step

And I shall be where I started from.

When it was published, the volume still had six hundred pages. It was accorded a few measured reviews, but many suggested that Layton lacked a critical sense. It didn’t sell as well as Irving’s shorter collections that rarely sold fewer than three thousand copies. However, he credited The Collected with his Italian nomination for the Nobel Prize. He was celebrated by Italian poetry lovers.

Irving felt so beholden to his translator, Amleto Lorenzini, that he talked Jack into publishing Lorenzini’s Assyrian Sculpture in the British Museum—a fascinating book, but it hardly fit into the M&S stable of Canadian literature, history, art, or politics.

A couple of years after The Collected, Irving retaliated with The Uncollected Irving Layton, the book with all the left-out poems and some additional ones he had written since. By then it was obvious that Irving would not be happy with only one new book a year. He demanded at least two despite my, I thought, convincing arguments that he would cut potential sales of each book in half. He ignored all efforts to weed out his weaker poems and raged at the notion that over-publishing was reducing his sales. If we resisted, he published elsewhere.

The year we published The Collected, we also published Nail Polish, a shorter book with a dreadful title and a vituperative introduction. Generally Irving used his introductions to launch unbridled attacks on his critics: “yahoos, sex-drained executives, pimps and poetasters.” He let loose another torrent of vitriol in Engagements: The Prose of Irving Layton, which shouldn’t have been published but was, a year or so later. The book, I thought, would harm Irving’s reputation. But Jack believed in publishing authors, not books, and Layton was an author M&S published.

I was amazed at Aviva’s willingness to overlook Irving’s serial infidelities and not surprised that she fell for a lovestruck sheik in Morocco (while she entrusted David to Scott Symons and his then lover, Aaron) or that Irving took off with his student Harriet Bernstein. I am not sure of the order of these events, but in 1974 Julian and I visited Irving and Harriet in a small house in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Harriet was trying to reform Irving’s lifelong habits of ignoring what happened around him when to observe those events did not suit him. Such events included the birth of children and the disorder that attended their arrival. While he loved the idea of his own virility and the pregnancies of women who loved him, he was more interested in the idea of fatherhood than in the children.

Eventually Harriet decamped with their baby daughter.

The poem that always brings me to tears is “Song for Naomi.” Perhaps it’s because I have daughters and have seen them running, carefree, through tall grass.


I. Much later, Jack Rabinovitch founded the Giller Prize.