Combat Journal for Place d'Armes. Scott Symons
even though it was the First Day. The First Day on the site. I just didn’t have the energy; it had all been consumed in getting to the hotel, into a striking position. I remember now that I had felt how dangerous my sense of calm was to the whole purpose of the expedition. Because it is war — and I realized already it was war, and that any placation was capitulation. Yet I persisted in feeling calm. And I had to keep telling myself that this adventure is essential. Of course I knew that it was — even if for some time yesterday I only knew abstractly and had to keep sending me mental telegrams, like “EXPEDITION URGENT STOP NO RETREAT STOP KEEP YOUR COCK UP STOP.” No, I knew well enough that it was essential. That was it: I was dangerously smug about the fact of the danger. That was what worried me. Lulled me into a security right in the face of absolute danger.
And then later yesterday — in the late afternoon, I harvested the exhilaration of recognized danger, and the whole thing was implicitly clear again. I could relent.
… 9:25 a.m. Breakfast at the hotel — while the waitress clucks about this dining room like some pullet over her brood — and I ponder the matter. Really wonder whether I can achieve it. It is mad. This “adventure.” I suppose the real question is whether it takes place at all. My fear now is for the adventure itself — because that is the basis of the novel. Amongst other things. And at this very instant, as the oatmeal porridge ballasts my grumble gut, I am denuded of everything except my faith in the possibility of the adventure. Yet even as I fear for the venture I realize that the fear is of no way out — fear of the final extinction of my plans. And once again I realize how serious it really is … this goddam “novel” of mine. It is a matter of life and death — whether I like it or not. Moreover, if I turn back, then it is automatic death. So I know again what is at stake, and the Adventure, the Novel, simply is. I am dedicated to victory, because I am dedicated to life against death.
In the strain of this recognition my appetite is gone … because my body is gone — has been nullified by the act of questioning. I have lost corporate credibility again. It is detached fingers that wipe detached mouth as I pick me up and carry me back to the room…. At least I can study the map of the quarter …
As I re-enter my room on the third floor my ear is cocked to the shunt of freight-yards just below the hotel…. I am huge again with the dream I forgot this morning … muster me once more to typewriter before it evades me again … if nothing else, I can keep the goddam log-book up to date …
It was home … in the home I’ve never built. In my old Toronto Rosedale … that house, on Crescent Drive, Tudorbethan, with park ground behind it…. the banquet hall in the basement — wine-cellar banquet hall; vrai cave! (Virulent in me … every detail — as I hear bells from trainshunt.) Twelve-foot dining table from Les Frères chrétiens of Montreal, a drawer for each monk’s pewter cutlery … 14 places in all. Generous places. Table with the trestled feet, wide plank top, and the iron crane drawing out from the end, for the marmite. Item #377 in Jean Palardy’s illustrated Furniture of French Canada. Around it those chairs I could never afford to buy … those chaises à la capucine, circa 1780. With their flowing arms joining balustered back and legs, front and back. And the cherub-winged backslats. Fourteen of them — a dozen in dark hardwoods — walnut, butternut, stained maple. Plus two in tiger-stripe maple — voluptuous in the wood’s countercurve to the curvette of the design of the chair itself. This in the very centre of the room…. Walls white plaster roughcast. Ceiling high (it keeps getting higher as I recollect it.) Around these walls — upjutting from every corner and pillar and beam — the strut of the cave — a dozen Coqs canadiens, rampant. At the far end immense rocaille hulk of sideboard — like some purebred milchcow decked out for a fête champêtre at Versailles. Clawed balled feet. Atop it, large carved cupboard for eaux-de-vie … straddled by six torchères that stand four feet each. All in white and gilt. On the left wall, a huge mural scene, a fire…. But scarce time to take all of this in, even in recollection, when the guests arrive. Who are they to be (trains — keep shunting — I would know who arrives!)? Suddenly candles blare, ignite, and She arrives in sheath dress that cracks my whip … followed by Him in dinner jacket and bespectacled smile, teeth wide-eying (High Church Ipana!) and hair in kempt dishevelled pelt. No Announcements. Simply an informal elegant investiture of this home hall à la canadienne … investiture of us, of what we are as citizens, as people … I serve them un vin d’Honneur — a Bernkastler Doktor 1959er goldbeerenauslese — in my grandfather’s high Victorian Hock glasses. High Victorian, High Hock, High Glasses … with Chinese waterchestnuts and bacon … serve them from the front seat of the Child’s Hearse — lifesize — from Lévis, P.Q., hearse all inordinate with angels and roses and garlands, steep carved pine, white and gold, and all celestially earthy (those trumpetting angels have firm French-Canadian buttocks.)
As I pour the Bernkastler into the onion-skin green of glass diaphanous under tremble of fingertits wine flows down necknape of Tony’s hairline, down vertebration into the roothouse that used to be behind Great-grandfather Jameson’s homestead at Grimsby (Ont.) … into roothouse and up spat back out at me into the glass of Princess Meg from her left breast that was cut clean from the dress, displacing the Order of the Garder. Eau de vie, I gasp, and kneel to let it tumble my crown…. Scene only interrupted by the Canadian Chairs that come assclasp us all to a stewboat of Oxtails stewed as meet for Mighty Methodists … and serve with a red wine that I grow myself, below the house on the slope behind the Toronto subway just to prove that Ontario wine need not be the red Niagara piss with which we glut our home market … a little red brute strong enough to grapple these tails — secret being, of course, that as in certain small crus of Pomerol, I leave the stems and all in the pressing, to flesh out the wine, give it mastication … un petit vin masturbateur de l’Ontario … l’état de l’Ontario, S.V.P. Till Margaret had been oxtailed, and Tony with, and everyone ordained therein because it is meat and right so to do … and as I look up (the bell of freight train clarifies the site now) I see that the sideboard is 18th century French-Canadian baroque-rococo church altar, Ecole de Quévillon, and that the angels are now suspended from our lowering ceiling, and that Tony is my chair and Princess Meg clutches regally every oxtail to her Order of the Garter, and all we guests concerted shout — “Alleluia, I’m a bum….”
I wake, just in time to curtail an unsolicited harvest of me, and now, in recollection, remember clearly that as a child I had been deeply preoccupied with the conjugation of OurBelovedKingandQueenandwasthereabeginningnoranendtosaidconjugationIwasconcernedtoknow atwhatpointitdi dallen din us, as I was sure it did.
Then I realized that there is a huge silence resonant in me, as dream dies on my vine … the freight-yards are tranquil, and the bells have stopped.
Sit in this sweet bereavement. Evacuated. Suddenly recall my tourist map. Bought it yesterday … but hadn’t courage to look it up. The least I can do now is circumscribe my area. On earth, in North America, in the Dominion of Canada, in l’Etat du Québec, in La Ville de Montréal, in the centre of the city, the old centre, by the side of the St. Lawrence, where Seaway begins as Lachine Canal, this area. The area — I pinpoint it now, with precision — bounded by the St. Lawrence, McGill Street, running up from the river, north-east to Craig Street, then easterly, past City Hall as far as Berri, down to the waterfront again. Le Vieux Quartier, plus a bit. Within that a still smaller area … bounded by la rue St. Jacques to the north, la rue St. Paul to the south, the Bonsecours Market to the east, la rue St. Pierre to the west. Within that — La Place itself, La Place d’Armes ….. and within that again, of course — but that will have to wait.
These are the names, the streets; the shorthand for the reality. I know that. It is the reality I seek. Yet even as I succumb to the map, looking at it, I feel La Place, the whole quarter, ebbing dangerously out of me … And I bitter realize that I have committed the cardinal sin, reducing the quarter to this map. To allow this map — even as guide. Perhaps if I slip out now, quickly, I will catch the quarter, La Place, the bulk of it, the embodiment of it, before it all folds away into this map that betrayed me … in a moment of weakness. Fling me into parka and beret, sortie out … not with intent to site the quarter definitively — but to make honourable amends for having slighted it — for having presumed to reduce it to a few square inches of map. Running down the stairs of the hotel, out the door, into La Place