square located in Old Montreal and bounded by Notre-Dame Ouest, St-Jacques Ouest, St-François Xavier, and Saint-Sulpice streets is the site of a range of architectural and monumental forms ranging from Georgian-Palladian to Neo-Gothic, from Art-Deco to High Modernist. A nineteenth-century sculpture by Louis-Philippe Hébert of Sieur de Maisonneuve, situated in the centre of the square, harkens back to the earliest moments of the settlement, Ville-Marie, and the epic character of the establishment and defence of the seventeenth-century colony.
Harold Kalman’s A History of Canadian Architecture (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994) mentions Place d’Armes in several places. It was the site of the first Bank of Montreal headquarters constructed in 1818–19, and with each addition to the bank’s properties, innovative and nationally important approaches were taken. Kalman also gives a fascinating account of how Notre Dame, “the most important landmark in the early Gothic Revival,” emerged from the competition among parishes and the desire of the Sulpicians to make a major statement by bringing in a foreign architect (James O’Donnell, a New York Irish Protestant!). Kalman’s text provides in a very condensed form some of the same factual, historical information dispersed throughout Symons’s more lyrical text and puts Place d’Armes at the centre of Canadian architectural evolution.
In her foreword to Montreal Metropolis 1880–1930, eds. Isabelle Gournay and France Vanlaethem (Montreal/Toronto: Canadian Centre for Architecture/Stoddart Publishing, 1998), Phyllis Lambert, founder and director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture, underlines this “initial duality of religion and commerce” (6). She plays off the very different Place d’Armes and Dominion Square as capacious and generous sites of some of Montreal’s necessary cultural and urbanistic accommodations: “The architecture of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Place d’Armes and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dominion Square is paradigmatic of Montreal, a city accustomed to change and to accommodating opposing values, able both to absorb the shock of the new and to create the variety of urban structures and infrastructures called for by the twentieth century.” (7)
A small pamphlet in the Quebec National Library, apparently self-published in 1968 by philosopher and theologian Michel Bougier, emphasizes the Catholic and French-Canadian elements of the square, including the importance of the International style Banque canadienne nationale building by architectural firm David et Boulva. But it is in considering the church that Bougier is at his most eloquent: “It is sweet and good to find oneself, on some wintry afternoon, in the grand, nearly deserted vessel. Its sombre and contemplative atmosphere encourages one to reflection, to just desires, to good will.” Symons’s apocalyptic communion must be set against this rather tamer vision of spiritual life.
Finally, perhaps the best single source of information and inspiration relative to Place d’Armes may be found in a text by Maryse Leduc, architect, which accompanies the book of cut-outs of buildings in the square prepared for Héritage Montréal by Conception-EditionsARC and available for purchase online at www.copticarchitecture.com/a.htm. Leduc bridges the competence of the architectural historian and the excitement of the urban dweller who finds herself enlivened by the “event” of this phenomenal ensemble of buildings. “At once both contemporary and classic, the square is truly an urban event, a place that enhances the buildings that enclose it. It is a pleasure for the eyes, inviting them to discover there a detail ornamenting a doorway or the grand interiors [sic] spaces that extand [sic] the square. The views and vistas that the square offers are each as impressive as the other, forming both tableaux and individual landmarks in the city.” (2) With its emphasis on the informed pleasure of seeing, on the conjugation, as Symons might have said, of interior spaces with the urban landscape, Leduc is very close to Symons’s perception of the “insite” of the sight.
Other sources for those interested in Place d’Armes include Marc Choko, Les grandes places publiques de Montréal (Montreal: Editions du Méridien, 1990); Madeleine Forget, Les gratte-ciel de Montréal (Montreal: Editions du Méridien, 1990); and Monique Larue with Jean-François Chessay, Promenades littéraires dans Montréal (Montreal: Québec-Amérique, 1989).
6. Heritage: A Romantic Look at Early Canadian Furniture (McClelland & Stewart, 1971; republished in the United States with the New York Graphic Society), with photographs by the still-prolific John Visser, completed the first trilogy. The book is an anatomy of furniture, a “furniture novel,” as Irving Layton is reported to have said. Leonard Cohen told Scott that he had done something very clever, producing a “hand grenade disguised as a coffee table book.” The volume’s long concluding essay, “Ave Atque Vale” (“Hail and Farewell”), is an account of the “furniture Safari” from southwestern Ontario to St. John’s, Newfoundland, taken by Symons and his lover in 1970. It evokes landscape, old, rooted Canada, the personalities and places associated with the most significant finds of Canadiana. Furniture is faith, Symons repeats again and again. The philosopher George Grant wrote the preface to “this splendid book” and noted that in it “Symons shows us consummately that the furniture of any time or place cannot be understood as a set of objects, but rather as things touched, seen, used, loved, in short, simply lived with through the myriad events which are the lives of individuals, of families, of communities, of peoples.”Who else but Scott Symons, reminiscing about a French-Canadian armchair, a chaise à la capucine, could persuasively argue, in the midst of intense connoisseurship and curatorial precision, that contact with such a chair constituted a breach of his marriage? “That was in 1959 — my core attained. My smug opacity ended.”
7. Helmet of Flesh (McClelland & Stewart, 1986; also published in New American Library in hardback and paperback editions) owes its existence to the editing of Dennis Lee, who helped bring the thousands of pages of draft into something resembling a coherent whole. Helmet I describes the arrival in Morocco of Symons’s alter ego York MacKenzie and a series of wild misadventures which ensue. There is a trip into the High Atlas with a band of misfit Englishmen that cannot end well. Constantly present in the overwhelming Moroccan setting, through flashbacks, letters, and photographs, however, are Osprey Cove, Newfoundland, and London, England. Simone Weil is a tutelary presence here with her spirituality of extreme attention, as she is in the still-unpublished installments of the second trilogy. There are remarkable set pieces in which Moroccan realities challenge and transform the sensibility of the main character, particularly through the experience and reading of carpets, the uncanny attractiveness of Moroccan music, and some crowd scenes in the Medina of a rare descriptive power. It is to be hoped that someday Waterwalker and Dracula-in-Drag may also be published.
It is important to note that Michel Gaulin has translated Helmet of Flesh into French as Marrakech (Québec-Amérique, 1997) and that his translation of Place d’Armes was published in the fall of 2009 with Montreal’s XYZ Éditeur. The French translation of Helmet of Flesh received some excellent reviews.
Excerpts from the unpublished volumes may be found in Christopher Elson, ed., Dear Reader: Selected Scott Symons (Toronto: Gutter Press, 1998).
8. Eleven Canadian Novelists, interviews with Graeme Gibson (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1973), 310.
9. Literary Review of Canada, November 2005.
10. In the first group: Elspeth Cameron, “Journey to the Interior: The Journal Form in Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes” (Studies in Canadian Literature, Summer 1977); Peter Briggs,“Insite: Place d’Armes” (Canadian Literature, Summer 1977). In the second: Terry Goldie, “The Man of the Land, the Land of the Man: Patrick White and Scott Symons (Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Fall 1993); Robert K. Martin, “Cheap Tricks in Montreal: Scott Symons’ Place d’Armes (Essays on Canadian Writing, Winter 1994); George Piggford, “‘A National Enema’: Identity and Metafiction in Scott Symons’s Place d’Armes” (English Studies in Canada, March 1998); Peter Dickinson, Here Is Queer: Nationalism, Sexualities and the Literature of Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
11. Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).
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