Scott Symons

Hugh Brennan Scott Symons (July 13, 1933 – February 23, 2009), known professionally as Scott Symons, was a Canadian writer."His life was his art. Alas, it was not a masterpiece"
''The Globe and Mail'', February 27, 2009. He was most noted for his novels ''Place d'Armes'' and ''Civic Square'', among the first works of LGBT literature ever published in Canada, W. H. New, ''Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada''. University of Toronto Press, 2002. . as well as a personal life that was often plagued by scandal and interpersonal conflict.

He was openly gay at a time when this was very difficult, publishing his first novel, ''Place d'Armes,'' which dealt directly with homosexuality, two years before gay sex was decriminalized in Canada. He was an avid diarist, and many of his observations and episodes from his life found their way into his novels. His writing style was marked by experimental forms and structures, with one of his novels being published as handwritten pages packaged in a box, and by a blurring of the lines between fiction and non-fiction.

Early life

He was born in Toronto, Ontario, the son of businessman and writer Harry L. Symons and the brother of academic Thomas Symons. A rebellious teenager, he was sent by his parents to Trinity College School in Port Hope, where he took up gymnastics and established a lifelong friendship with journalist Charles Taylor. He also first came to realize that he was gay, falling in love with a fellow student but repressing his feelings in sport. Symons would later describe the experience as emotionally crippling, leaving him an "eternal thirteen; eternally the boy reaching out to touch but never being allowed to do so… except as Mommy and Authority permitted." Ian Young, "A Whiff of the Monster: Encounters with Scott Symons". ''Encounters with Authors''. Toronto: Sykes Press, 2013. .

One night while practicing in the gymnasium, he fell off the high bar and broke his back, and was immobilized in a body cast for several months. After completing high school, he enrolled at the University of Toronto, where he earned a bachelor's degree in modern history as well as enlisting as a naval cadet and serving on the student government. He subsequently pursued graduate studies at Cambridge University.

Still attempting to repress his sexuality, Symons married Judith Morrow, the granddaughter of a president of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, in 1958.Christopher Elson, "Introduction: Siting La Place" in Scott Symons, ''Combat Journal for Place d'Armes''. Dundurn Press, 2010. . Taylor was his best man.

Early career

He briefly took a job on the editorial page of the '' Toronto Telegram'', but was soon fired for not being deferential to his bosses; he then took a job with the ''Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph'', and integrated so quickly into the intellectual elites of Quebec that he was invited to join the St-Jean-Baptiste Society even though he was neither francophone nor Roman Catholic.

Symons and his wife spent some time studying at the Sorbonne in 1959; during this time, he met writer Julien Green, whom Symons would later describe as having reawoken his dormant sexuality. Symons and his wife returned to Canada the following year with their newborn son Graham after Symons accepted a job with '' La Presse'' in Montreal. While there, he won a National Newspaper Award for a series of articles about the early stirrings of what would become Quebec's Quiet Revolution.

With the nomadic restlessness that would characterize much of his life, however, he soon quit journalism and returned to Toronto, taking a job as a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum; within a few years, he was also an assistant professor of fine art at the University of Toronto, and briefly held a visiting curatorship at the Smithsonian Institution and a research associate's position at the Winterthur Museum. He was later offered a permanent position at the Smithsonian, but declined.

During this period he began to write but never finished a book on Canadian history and a stage play, and botched an audition to host '' This Hour Has Seven Days''.

Writing

In 1965 he fled the family farm in Claremont and holed up in a small hotel in Montreal for 21 days, during which he wrote ''Place d'Armes''.

''Place d'Armes'' contained both autobiographical and metafictional elements; its protagonist Hugh Anderson was, like Symons, a wealthy but socially alienated man from Toronto abandoning his comfortable bourgeois life to hole up in a hotel in Montreal, rediscovering himself in sex with male prostitutes in Place d'Armes, and in turn writing his own novel within a novel about Andrew, a character who himself fit the same profile as both Symons and Anderson. The writing was liberally peppered with sexualized puns such as "fingertits", "cocktit" and "assoul". The novel did not garner favourable reviews upon its publication in 1967; writing in the ''Toronto Star'', Robert Fulford deemed Anderson as "the most repellent single figure in the recent history of Canadian writing", and criticized Symons, whom he called "the monster from Toronto", for being incapable of writing about love. Despite the criticism, however, ''Place d'Armes'' won the Beta Sigma Phi First Canadian Novel Award.Martin Levin
"Scott Symons, novelist, dies at 75"
''The Globe and Mail'', February 23, 2009. Its critical reception has improved over time; in 2005, the ''Literary Review of Canada'' named ''Place d'Armes'' as one of the 100 most important books in Canadian literary history.

He followed up in 1969 with ''Civic Square'', a novel whose working title ''The Smugly Fucklings'' was nixed by publisher Jack McClelland."Uncivil Elegies: The Mystery of Civic Square"
''Reading Toronto'', March 14, 2006. The novel was noted for its unconventional form—a series of polemical letters addressed to "Dear Reader"—and presentation; 848 pages in length, it was neither typeset nor bound, but rather the original handwritten manuscript was duplicated by Gestetner, hand-decorated by Symons and then packaged in a blue box which was wrapped in white ribbon and emblazoned with a wax seal, with the title stamped on the box in silver ink. (Due to its unique format, the novel was published only as a limited edition, and was not widely available until Dundurn Press reissued it as a conventional paperback in 2007.) Once the project had been completed, Symons took a copy of the novel and placed it in the collection plate at his parents' church, Toronto's St. James Cathedral.

Around this time, Symons left his wife and entered his first long-term relationship with another man, a 17-year-old student named John McConnell. This relationship led to an incident which came to define public awareness of Symons; while media reports claimed that Symons had "run off to Mexico with an underage boy", in reality Symons had travelled to Mexico to attend an artists' retreat in San Miguel de Allende with York Wilson and Leonard Brooks rather than with McConnell, who had been sent by his parents to Nassau; McConnell separately travelled to Mexico, of his own accord, when he learned of Symons' whereabouts. Regardless, McConnell's parents posted a reward for Symons' arrest, putting police forces in Canada, the United States and Mexico on his trail, although the reward and arrest warrant were rescinded after McConnell contacted his family and threatened to commit suicide if Symons were jailed. Symons and McConnell then spent some time living in northern British Columbia, although they returned to Toronto by 1970. The pair continued to move frequently, residing at different times in Toronto, San Miguel de Allende and Trout River, Newfoundland and Labrador."The spy staying out in the cold to fight Blandman and Methodism-on-the-make". ''The Globe and Mail'', April 28, 1973.

Despite this, Symons was hurt by the process of divorcing Judith, often insisting that he still loved her and wanted to stay married to her even if his actual conduct suggested otherwise. By this point, Symons was also virtually estranged from his own birth family, some of whom never saw him again until he was near death.

In 1971, Symons published the non-fiction book ''Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture''. Although packaged and formatted as a coffee table book, Symons conceptualized it as a "furniture novel", deliberately blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction by incorporating a narrative aspect which verged on erotic in some of its descriptions of the furniture.

He and McConnell broke up soon afterward.

Exile in Morocco

By 1973, Symons had left Canada to live in Essaouira, Morocco, which would remain his primary residence for much of the remainder of his life. He was the subject of a chapter in Graeme Gibson

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