Canada's first openly gay author dies
Mar. 4th, 2009 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
felis_ultharusI've been gone from cyberspace for the most part for weeks, though occasionally I've been checking up on friends' journals -- skimming mostly. It's been a stressful few weeks, what with a financial report to be prepared through a haze of a flu, and the two contributing to a serious case of writer's block that's held me back to about two pages a day.
I had to mostly sit out a party on Sunday, and Monday after turning in my report I collapsed and slept for eleven hours. Yesterday and today I've been taking it very easy.
Other than that, there's not much to say. Scott Symons just died. He wrote the most influential work of Canadian lit you've never heard of, Combat Journal: Place d'Armes. It was an experimental, very autobiographical novel narrated by a man who's clearly had some sort of break reality because he can't deal with his homosexuality, or with the cultural change around him in the 1960s.
Malcolm Ross, who pretty much invented the study of Canadian literature, once said that every book he'd read after 1967 was influenced by either Place d'Armes or Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. Both came out in the same year, and are similar in being experimental, stream-of-consciousness novels by men who've lost touch with reality and which deal heavily and explicitly with sex, but Place d'Armes is far superior and more readable.
But Place d'Armes got forgotten while Beautiful Losers is remembered. Partly that's because of Cohen's fame as a singer, but also because Canada wasn't really ready for a gay novel outside the bohemian set of up-and-coming writers.
(Homosexuality was not only still illegal in Canada in 1967, and not only was the law still enforced, but it was probably the must brutal in the Western world. A man in 1967 was arrested for consensual gay sex, and sentenced to spend his natural life in jail without any chance of parole as a "dangerous offender.")
Symons eventually left the country, and continued to write about his two favourite subjects -- gay sex and antiques. He was largely forgotten, and still not remembered now the literary establishment of the country is eager to make the Canadian canon more diverse.
I'd say rest in peace, but if there's one thing hit home hard in Place d'Armes, it's that the ancestors and the past are always present. So I doubt he'll be far.
I had to mostly sit out a party on Sunday, and Monday after turning in my report I collapsed and slept for eleven hours. Yesterday and today I've been taking it very easy.
Other than that, there's not much to say. Scott Symons just died. He wrote the most influential work of Canadian lit you've never heard of, Combat Journal: Place d'Armes. It was an experimental, very autobiographical novel narrated by a man who's clearly had some sort of break reality because he can't deal with his homosexuality, or with the cultural change around him in the 1960s.
Malcolm Ross, who pretty much invented the study of Canadian literature, once said that every book he'd read after 1967 was influenced by either Place d'Armes or Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. Both came out in the same year, and are similar in being experimental, stream-of-consciousness novels by men who've lost touch with reality and which deal heavily and explicitly with sex, but Place d'Armes is far superior and more readable.
But Place d'Armes got forgotten while Beautiful Losers is remembered. Partly that's because of Cohen's fame as a singer, but also because Canada wasn't really ready for a gay novel outside the bohemian set of up-and-coming writers.
(Homosexuality was not only still illegal in Canada in 1967, and not only was the law still enforced, but it was probably the must brutal in the Western world. A man in 1967 was arrested for consensual gay sex, and sentenced to spend his natural life in jail without any chance of parole as a "dangerous offender.")
Symons eventually left the country, and continued to write about his two favourite subjects -- gay sex and antiques. He was largely forgotten, and still not remembered now the literary establishment of the country is eager to make the Canadian canon more diverse.
I'd say rest in peace, but if there's one thing hit home hard in Place d'Armes, it's that the ancestors and the past are always present. So I doubt he'll be far.