Scott Symons died, age 75, early Monday, in a nursing home in Toronto. It was an event that would have splashed harder into the Canadian media a generation ago; he had faded from national view after a long period of self-exile in Morocco, and then failing health after he returned permanently to Canada a decade ago.
Though the author of several very bohemian, and arguably pornographic, soi-disant “novels,” and of a magnificent coffee table book on Canadian antique furniture—to say nothing of extensive unpublished memoirs—Scott was less an author than a rogue prophet.
I notice from the first mentions of Scott’s demise that he is being claimed as a pioneer of the “gay revolution.” He did scandalize polite Canadian society, and most certainly that of his native Rosedale, when he theatrically abandoned a high-society wife, wrote a “break-out” novel from a room in Montreal, and then fled to Mexico with the 17-year-old son of another distinguished Canadian family, in tow as his lover, to be pursued by the Federales at the request of the RCMP. And all this, years before the legalization of homosexuality was even a glint in Pierre Trudeau’s eye.
Symons hated Trudeau, with a real volcanic passion. He hated him for legalizing homosexuality, among other things. He hated “gays,” and vehemently denied being one himself. He was unquestionably homosexual—though I’m not sure women were safe from him, either.
He was, in his political outlook, fairly consistently a “violent Tory of the old school” (Ruskin’s beautiful phrase), and incidentally a war monger of the first water, who, back in 2002, was telephoning me several times a day to ask, “When the hell is Bush going to invade Iraq? What is he waiting for?”
In later life, he retroactively explained that his sexual preferences were a red herring, he had actually wished to launch a “male revolution” in retaliation for the “epistemological enormities” of second-wave feminism. His claim to an unambiguous masculinity was iterated in many colourful expressions, unquotable in a family newspaper.
Was he then a misogynist? “Of course! But not as much as the average woman.”
And while he continued to consort with self-described “gays,” Scott warred with the whole premise of “gayness,” which, as he saw, was an attack on the personhood of the human being, disguised as a defence of “personhood”—but only the redefined word, not the reality. He laughed maniacally when I remarked that, “All the marriages today are gay marriages, they are all between ‘two persons’; men and women don’t get married anymore.” (Alas, my remark was intended as serious.)
Let us dwell on this for another paragraph, for it is an idea so politically incorrect as to be currently beyond the reach of the young. “Gay” is a denial that “sex” (a word that must be glossed today as “biological gender”) is important. It is a relegation of everything dimorphically human to some transgendered continuum. But to the old-fashioned view of a man like Scott Symons, a person who is neither male nor female is lacking an essential attribute of a person.
Enough about Scott’s sexuality, which, as he once confided to me, “was all a mistake anyway.” The great value of his life was as witness to the Canada that predeceased him. His best work was in, for instance, a long series of articles commissioned by the late Richard Doyle that appeared in the Globe and Mail in the late 1970s, entitled “Canada: A Loving Look.” Or in the two long interviews we conducted with him in my old Idler magazine, now 20 years ago, in which Scott was at his scintillating best—for his conversation was actually better than his writing.
With sex out of the way, Scott’s topic was Canada: the dignity she had, and had lost. Paradoxically, he was a true son of that Rosedale heritage, very proud of its accomplishments, and painfully ashamed of its decline into trend-conscious mediocrity.
He cut a spectacular figure in his youth, and through university at Cambridge and Paris; was appointed at a ridiculously young age curator of the Royal Ontario Museum’s Canadiana galleries, and in his prime Scott was the leading authority on the domestic furnishings of the Canadian mind. The eccentric coffee table book I mentioned above (McClelland and Stewart, 1972; photos by John Visser), entitled, Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture, will have to stand as his monument.
In my copy of it, many years ago, Scott scrawled: “To David Warren—fellow Anglican (high!), ‘idler’, termagant, psychic Copt, and daemonic angel!!”
As the description applies so wonderfully to Scott, not to me, I have appended it. Scott was, in the best Byronic tradition, “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” I was honoured as well as inconvenienced to know him well. I loved him, and wish him success in his new vocation.
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