Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
in the world. Perhaps that was what was wrong with Toronto!
Nor could he find any heart to Toronto … no central Place … unless one took the new City Hall and its monolithic Phillips Square. Anyway, La Place d’Armes had a two-century headstart on that … and any sense of dimension in time in Toronto was about to be extinguished by the destruction of the Old City Hall which gave all the conviction and perspective to the New — torn down to make room for a department store. Well that told the whole story. He grimaced. No, it was Montreal’s Place d’Armes all the way. He felt relieved, and settled back in his seat aboard the Rapido — “fastest commuter train in the world … 360 miles in 4 hrs. and 59 minutes!” For a moment his own smugness conjugated with this triumphant smugness of the train and taking out his little black notebook he began to make his Novel Notes — some for the Novel, but some for himself. The latter would, naturally, be the best — after all he wouldn’t be able to present the complete truth in the Novel. So it was important to have complete notes for his own private edification. A kind of private revenge against the restrictions of the Novel itself — a sort of intimacy. The intimate privilege of the first person.
“… spent the weekend skiing — a sort of final outing before Montreal. Left Mary & the two children to return with friends to Toronto. She is in good spirits & can handle the home easily enough till I’m back…. It all makes good sense. Ran into Jackson on the daytrain from Collingwood … haven’t seen him for two years. We exchanged supercilities last time — each politely contemptuous of the other — he of my publishing house respectability; I of his success in the mass media — a televisionary … mass mediocrity! Now we sat together like old buddies, confessing our faults … the vacuity of the media (Toynbee is right — TV is “the lion that whimpered!”) & the constipation of the business world. As though each of us had seen through ourselves in these last two years. And come out divested — & afraid. Things have changed. Everything has changed — absolutely. The very nature of reality has changed. Maybe that’s why I let Jackson quiz me overtly…. Jackson —“well, you’re a square in revolt. We’re all squares in
this country … I’m a square. But I still don’t
understand you.
You didn’t need to get fired. Your training was unique.
Experience with that Montreal publishing firm. A book of excellent critical essays on Canadian culture. A Governor General’s award. A powerful family name, a beautiful wife — & you say, two kids. Bilingual.& an appointment at the University of Toronto for special lectures. You were made, man. & we needed you. You didn’t need to capitulate….”
I laugh, and remember his public criticism of my essays.
“I can’t explain it. But I know what I’m doing. I simply know I had to demission — had to leave. I suppose it was the very fact that I felt I was a ‘made man’ — that all I had to do was become president of my company, & then die … or rather die, & then become president of the company. But much more important than that is the feeling that I’ve been unmade … that the events of the past few years in Canada have been systematically destroying me, my culture. I have slowly been eliminated — all my faiths…. Take the new flag (one floats by out the train window) — that is as good a symbol as any of the dissolution I feel. Every time I look at that frigging Maple Leaf I dissolve. I simply cease to exist. It’s not a question of patriotism — my family’s been tangled up with the New World for over two centuries now. It’s a question of reality. Take just the visual fact of the flag. It’s a non-flag…. I can’t explain it.”
And then they were at the Toronto Union Station. Jackson was gone … wishing him well. He was perplexed by their conversation — the complete frankness of it. It made him uneasy. Not because it was frank, but because it implied more to the novel than the novel he had planned. But he didn’t realize that yet.
He appraised the station … a splendid thermal bath. It was in the best style of the period: monumental Roman Classic. And at the same time he regretted its predecessor for which his grandfather had been an architect … it had been that brownstone Romanesque that Richardson had made famous — full of rough brawn. And inside the station he flinched at the juxtaposition of this muted thermal bath style, like some great banking house, and the constrained jazz of the new billboardings now around the wall. — The ads were representative, he mused, of the new Toronto: a pair of TV personalities “invited” you flagrantly to “Listen Here” — standing at ease in their red waistcoats and their glasses that made them look relaxed middle-class intelligent. Respectable hicks he decided. Or high-class jerks. It didn’t much matter. In either case they didn’t belong in the station. Not in this station, his station. Which meant that one day the station would be pulled down. But he didn’t dare admit that either. Another billboard boasted the “brightest paper in town” that it boosted. Beside it a forty-foot guarantee of medical insurance. Lastly a cigarette sanctioned by a wholesome lass in tartan. Yes — it was a good cross-section of Toronto-town. Add only the stationwagon perched comfortably over the stairwell — “Canadian built — for quality,” and you had the complete picture. The only difference between the Canadian and American stationwagon being that the Canadian had less chrome and cost more. All of this, and the conversation with Jackson, hackled him. He walked over to the ticket booth. Last time he had taken the CPR. This time he would take the “Rapido,” the “National” line.
“… the ticket booth is the same old bronzed respectable — like a bank wicket, but jazzed over now with a fay red-white-blue decor of posters. The attendants the same — a sort of cheap felt blazer, Minute-Man blue with red trims. Look like gas station attendants on a Labour Day parade … that’s it — the new Guild of All-Canadians. And they are descendants of the Amurrican Minute Men — same narrow folk culture that produced the car-spangled banner. It’s the colours … those folk hues. This is just a mutation of the same: part Rotary Club cheeriness, part cheerleader razzummatazz, part modern electronix.Christ I hate it: the Canadettes! Preview of 1984. Bless damned Orwell! Just time for a snack in the York Pioneer Room … ”
He settled in and looked it over … quickly discredited it as part of the new Canadian kick for their cottage pine past. Simply a comfortable Canadian variation of the American Abe Lincoln myth. It made posthumous peasants out of all their ancestors. He couldn’t take much of that. He enjoyed peasants; but he didn’t like retroactive peasanthood as a national patriotic pastime. There was something sick in it … an inverted snobbery. The fact was that the “log cabin legend” simply didn’t belong in Canada … it really belonged only to that initial, and belated, American yeoman tradition in Southwestern Ontario — Grit Ontario … Canadian equivalent of the New England Myth that still implicitly dominates Amurrican thought. The thought that Canada, at this late date would be subjected to a pirated and aborted American puritan legend depressed him. And he fled.
“… I thought of touring the new City Hall. Haven’t yet. A good idea now … after all if this New Canada is real and right I’m as much a tourist in Canada now as anyone else. & I can see the Old City Hall at the same time. But didn’t have the courage…. The exposure would rob me of the energy I need for Montreal.”
Suddenly the real magnitude of what he was doing and of what was being done to him shook him. He hadn’t as yet completely allowed himself to know. But every now and then he had a deep realization of what he was really doing — some deep tissue of him opened and he shook from stem to gudgeon. The only thing he could do now was to see someone: people still fortified him. He phoned Beatrice Ellis — he had kept in touch with her these past difficult months. She had edited his book of essays. Had done