Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Personally, as a lover of eccentrics, I’m all for letting scribes and fans share the same conference. By concentrating on credentials, especially in recessionary times, the professional obituary writers in SPOW tolled their own death knell. After a hiatus, some stalwarts are planning a conference in Toronto for 2013.

  As for the ten rogues, rascals, and romantics I have gathered here, their lives can’t be separated from their achievements or, in some cases, their notoriety. To say they were colourful is too pallid a descriptor: they were cosmic singularities, in good ways and bad. That’s why I’ve written about them in all their livid outrageousness. They deserve nothing less.

  Irving Layton

  Poet

  March 12, 1912 – January 4, 2006

  STOCKY, WITH AN unruly mane and a ferocious glare, Irving Layton was fond of referring to himself in the same breath as Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Keats. Despite his bombast, he was a grand and glorious poet. In March 2012, celebrations were held across the country on the centen­ary of his birth to remember the man and to read from his work. Tales of his hyperbolic self-importance abounded, of course, but the poems themselves reminded listeners of Layton’s discerning eye, lyrical ear, and, above all, the virtuosity with which he used the English language. Nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature in 1981 — he lost out to Gabriel García Márquez — he was also a mentor to generations of younger poets, including Leonard Cohen and Al Purdy, and a proselytizer who brought urgency and passion to Canadian life and letters.

  “There was Irving Layton, and then there was the rest of us. He is our greatest poet, our greatest champion of poetry. Alzheimer’s could not silence him, and neither will death,” a grieving Leonard Cohen said after Layton died in Montreal, at age ninety-three, on January 4, 2006. “I taught him how to dress. He taught me how to live forever,” Cohen once said of his mentor and father figure.

  Years earlier, the late Al Purdy had described Layton’s personality as a fusion of opposites, saying he “was the Montreal magnet for me . . . I felt about him as I had not about any other Canadian writer, a kind of awe and surprise that such magical things should pour from an egotistical clown, a charismatic poseur. And I forgive myself for saying these things, which are both true and untrue.”

  Whenever he could afford it, and often when he couldn’t, Layton lived the overblown life of a poet, producing more than forty books. He made poetry important, wrenching it from pretty verse into raw, sensual, visual, and aural imagery. Believing he was one of the elect, Layton felt his poems would, “like the severed head of Orpheus, sing for all eternity,” as his son David Layton wrote in a biographical essay, “Irving Layton, Leonard Cohen and Other Recurring Nightmares” in Saturday Night magazine.

  He delighted in furious debate, defying authority, undermining conservatism, and ridiculing cant. He prided himself on his classical sensibility, and his writing was more orderly and rhythmical than his savage personal style suggested. But he hated to be tied down, in poetry or in marriage: “I am a Romantic with a sense of irony,” he once told a student.

  He loved women — their pursuit, their bodies, and their company. He had three wives and two partners, including Aviva Cantor Layton, who lived with him for more than twenty years and bore his second son, David. Describing the poet’s death as a “body blow,” she said his real wife was his muse.

  The stories about Layton, beginning with his claim that he was born circumcised, are legendary. “Who knows,” Aviva Layton responded when the question was put to her directly. “It is like asking whether Achilles or Zeus ever existed.” Everybody mythologizes his or her life to a certain extent, she said, adding that his mother certainly believed he had been born without a foreskin, the sign of the Messiah.

  In the early 1960s, the couple was in Rome and wanted to visit St. Peter’s Basilica. The guards barred her because she was wearing a mini-dress. Without pause, Layton opened his wallet, pulled out all his lira, pinned some to the bottom of her skirt to make a hem, then slipped the rest under the straps of her dress to fashion sleeves. “Now,” he demanded, “is she respectable?” The guards, seemingly oblivious to the poet’s eloquent deriding of mammon, made no objection as the couple swept past the barrier and into the holiest of Catholic churches.

  Editing Layton was a fraught experience because “he did not believe he had ever written a bad poem,” said Anna Porter, who worked with him at McClelland and Stewart beginning in the late 1960s. “He was brilliant,” Porter said, “and when he viewed himself in the pantheon of great poets, he wasn’t saying it lightly, he was saying it with some foreknowledge of the precedents.” She edited his Collected Poems, which was to be his magnum opus. The problem was that it kept growing. They had a temporary falling out over the number of poems. He was so angry with her that he went to another publisher, who released the “uncollected” Irving Layton.

  What made Layton special as a mentor and a teacher, according to Sam Solecki, who wrote the introduction to a selected edition of Layton’s poetry, A Wild Peculiar Joy, in 1982, was the way he nurtured younger poets without trying to turn them into models of himself. He was like Nietzsche, who said the best student is the one who goes beyond the master. And he left behind stellar poems such as “A Tall Man Executes a Jig,” “The Swimmer,” “The Birth of Tragedy,” “Song for Naomi,” “The Cold Green Element,” “On Seeing the Statute of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in the Church of Notre Dame,” “Keine Lazarovitch 1870–1959,” “The Tightrope Dancer,” and “A Wild Peculiar Joy.”

  IRVING LAYTON WAS born Israel Lazarovitch in Târgu Neamţ, Romania, on March 12, 1912, two years before the onset of the war that would change the map of Europe. His father, Moses, was shy and religiously observant and his mother, Keine, was domineering, ferocious, and besotted with Layton, the youngest of her several children — he slept in her bed until long past childhood. After his mother’s death, Layton wrote an elegy to her, “Keine Lazarovitch 1870–1959”: “O fierce she was, mean and unaccommodating; / But I think now of the toss of her gold earrings, / Their proud carnal assertion, and her youngest sings / While all the rivers of her red veins move into the sea.”

  When Layton was about a year old, the family left Romania for Montreal, settling in the Jewish ghetto in Montreal’s east end, later made famous by Mordecai Richler. He was a scrappy kid who learned to suppress his whimpering and keep on pounding in fistfights with local kids. His father died in 1925, the same year that Layton graduated from Alexandra Elementary School. He went to work as a peddler, selling dry goods on the streets of Montreal. But he longed for more, and he turned away from commerce and went to high school.

  He discovered literature from his teachers at Baron Byng High School, political and social theory from his older friend David Lewis (future leader of the NDP), and poetic cadence from Lewis’s friend A. M. Klein. Listening to Klein the poet read Virgil’s Aeneid made him realize, as he said later, “how very lovely and very moving the sound of poetry could be.”

  It was Lewis, then a student at McGill, who signed Layton up as a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, an association that administrators at Baron Byng found so threatening they expelled Layton in his final year of high school. Klein became Layton’s tutor, Lewis provided the ten-dollar examination fee, and Layton supplied the intellect and effort to pass his high school matriculation.

  Layton’s older friend A. M. Klein had already published his first poem, in an underground campus journal called The McGilliad. However, McGill University rejected Layton, perhaps because of its infamous Jewish quota, perhaps because of his reputation as a rabble-rouser. The alternatives were few. In 1934 he went to Macdonald College, a McGill affiliate, to study agriculture, graduating in 1939.

  By then he had met and married a woman named Faye Lynch. They moved to Halifax, where Layton worked as a door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. Discouraged by his occupation and aware that he felt more pity than
love for his wife, Layton returned to Montreal. He resumed his literary friendships with poets Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster, and John Sutherland (the editor of two early and prestigious magazines, Preview and First Statement, which later merged to become Northern Journey) and earned a meagre living teaching English to recent Jewish immigrants at the public library.

  Appalled by Hitler’s warmongering, he enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1942 but got no further than training camp in Petawawa before being granted a discharge. Back in Montreal, he published his first book of poetry, Here and Now, in 1945. Having divorced Faye Lynch, he married Sutherland’s sister, the painter and poet Betty Sutherland. They had two children, Max, who was born in 1946 — the same year Layton completed his MA thesis on Harold Laski, the English political theorist and politician — and Naomi, in 1950.

  Writing poetry and the occasional manifesto was not lucrative. Layton self-published his poetry and took work teaching wherever he could find it, including lecturing part-time at Sir George Williams (now Concordia) University while he dreamt of finishing a PhD and becoming a professor. This workload didn’t keep him from writing, or from getting noticed, though his self-assertive style earned equal blame and praise. In 1951 Northrop Frye wrote of The Black Huntsmen that “the successes are quiet and the faults raucous. . . . One can get as tired of buttocks in Layton as buttercups in Canadian Poetry Magazine.”

  Even so, Frye drew a line between Layton’s “serious” poetry and his “stage personality.” In his seminal work, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, Frye called Layton “the most considerable poet of his generation.” Robert Weaver and William Toye praised him even more lavishly in The Oxford Anthology of Canadian Literature, saying that he was “perhaps the best poet we have in Canada.”

  By the late 1950s he had made the leap from small literary presses to McClelland & Stewart, which published his selected poems, A Red Carpet for the Sun, in 1959. The volume, which was the only one of his books to win a Governor General’s Literary Award, included poems from a dozen previous collections. Showcasing some of his best work, the collection was packaged with a brooding photograph of the author on the cover and a polemical essay, disguised as a foreword, in which Layton dismissed his contemporaries as “insufferable blabbermouths” while extolling his own “impeccable ear for rhythm.” With this book, Layton the swaggering and defiant poet came down from the garret and stomped into mainstream society.

  By then he had met Aviva Cantor, the partner of his most prolific and celebrated years. She had arrived in Montreal from her native Australia in 1955 with a list of names and addresses of people to look up in Montreal, including the poets Frank Scott, A. M. Klein, and Irving Layton. For some reason she phoned Layton. He invited her to a party at the house he shared with Betty and their children in Côte Saint-Luc — and that was that.

  They never wed, although they came close. One day in the early 1960s Layton announced he was going to marry her; he summoned his metaphorical son Leonard Cohen, and the three of them trooped down to a jewellery shop in Old Montreal. There the poet became distracted and, instead of buying his lover a ring, he purchased a silver clasp for his estranged wife Betty and sauntered out of the store. The ever-debonair Cohen bought the ring that Aviva desired, slipped it on her finger, and pronounced her married.

  Aviva Cantor changed her name to Layton after their son, David, was born in 1964. They moved to Toronto at the end of the decade after the poet Eli Mandel engineered a teaching job for Layton at York University. These were the years of his greatest literary and public success. He published a volume of poetry almost every year into the 1980s, and began winning over enough doubters to get Canada Council grants that allowed him to roam the world, spending several summers in Greece, Italy, India, and Marrakesh.

  As his fame and his vanity grew, he liked to pretend that there was some sort of conspiracy against him in Canada. But he was a successful poet and a household name from his appearances on a CBC debate show that could have been named for him: Fighting Words. The late Hugh MacLennan declared him to be the best poet in Canada, a compliment that soothed Layton’s ego but did nothing to rein in his embattled nature or make him more self-critical.

  He objected strenuously to a biography written by Elspeth Cameron in the mid-1970s, igniting a high-octane vendetta against the literary biographer, and later wrote his own, self-serving memoirs, Waiting for the Messiah. After Aviva Layton left him for the writer Leon Whiteson in the late 1970s, he became captivated by Harriet Bernstein, one of his students at York University. They married after he finally divorced Betty Sutherland, and had a daughter, Samantha, in 1981, when Layton was almost seventy. Like so many of his closest relationships, this one ended badly. Bernstein took custody of the child and charged him with harassment when he unleashed his verbal dexterity to deride her.

  Layton the poet started to slow down at this point, but Layton the lover was still going strong. He soon took up with twenty-two-year-old Annette Pottier, changing her name to Anna. She left him in 1995 after his creeping Alzheimer’s was finally diagnosed. When his money ran out in 2000, leaving him as impoverished as he had been in his immigrant childhood, he was moved to the Maimonides Geriatric Centre in Montreal’s Côte Saint-Luc district, the same area where he was living when he met Aviva Cantor in the 1950s.

  Among his visitors was his former protegé and brother-in-arms Leonard Cohen. Cohen’s early poem “Last Dance at the Four Penny,” from The Spice-Box of Earth (1961), was written as a tribute to his mentor. It begins “Layton, when we dance our freilach / under the ghostly handkerchief,” and ends “I say no Jew was ever lost / while we weave and billow the handkerchief / into a burning cloud, / measuring all of heaven / with our stitching thumbs.”

  When combined with another poem, “Irving and Me at the Hospital,” from Book of Longing (2006), that early poem forms one of a set of elegiac bookends to their long friendship and love of poetry.

  He stood up for Nietzsche

  I stood up for Christ

  He stood up for victory

  I stood up for less

  I loved to read his verses

  He loved to hear my song

  We never had much interest

  In who was right or wrong

  His boxer’s hands were shaking

  He struggled with his pipe

  Imperial tobacco

  Which I helped him light.

  Gordon Lunan

  Spy

  December 31, 1914 – October 3, 2005

  GORDON LUNAN WOULD probably have ended his days in obscurity if Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, had not defected in September 1945 and offered him up as a trophy in what came to be called the Cold War.

  Compared with spies such as Kim Philby and Guy Burgess, Lunan, a left-leaning advertising copywriter, hardly rated as a threat to national security or the safety of the free world, as it was called then. His story is significant because of the lives he damaged, what it reveals about the times, and how Canadians responded to the news that we harboured Soviet spy rings during the Second World War.

  The Soviet Union was our ally against Nazi Germany in the war, but after the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the ground shifted under that carapace of loyalty. The Germans had lost the war; it was only a matter of time and resources before the British, Canadian, and American forces who were marching on the Fatherland from the west and the south met up with the Soviets, who were pushing towards the same target through the occupied territories of Eastern Europe.

  When the tanks rolled to a halt and the guns stopped blazing, the map of Europe would be redrawn, but how the spoils would be divided depended on who reached Berlin — or beyond — first. The balance shifted again after the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Suddenly the U.S. had the power to destroy not only a sovereign enemy but the world. Fear of nuclear ann
ihilation turned the Soviet Union and the United States, the two most powerful nations on earth, into enemies, despite the handshaking and speechifying at peace conferences. That abrupt shift in realpolitik put hapless fellow-travellers like Lunan on the wrong side of history.

  DAVID GORDON LUNAN was born in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, on December 31, 1914, one of four sons of a commercial traveller. When Lunan was nine, the family moved to London, where his father was put in charge of persuading the public to buy Congoleum, a cheap substitute for linoleum. He did so well that the company tried to renegotiate his contract to give him a smaller commission, a cheat that was not lost on his son, who tended even then to side with the underdog.

  His father’s earnings made it possible to send Lunan to Belmont, a feeder for Mill Hill, a non-conformist public school on the outskirts of London. A boarder from the age of ten, he liked school and did well, ending up as one of two head boys at Belmont. At Mill Hill he was taught music, theatre, and officer training along with standard school subjects. He graduated at seventeen in 1932 and immediately began an apprenticeship with the S. H. Benson advertising agency. It took him two years to secure a place in the copy department (where Dorothy Sayers had once toiled), becoming, at twenty, the agency’s youngest copywriter.

  Meanwhile, fascism was on the rise in Germany, where Adolf Hitler had become chancellor in 1933. The Soviet Union, ruled by Joseph Stalin, had joined the League of Nations in 1934 and become an active player in fascist/anti-fascist political machinations. In 1935 Mussolini invaded Abyssinia from the adjacent Italian territory of Somaliland.

  A year later, Lunan visited Spain and saw the anti-democratic and repressive effects of General Francisco Franco’s crusade to destroy the republican government. After returning to England, where Sir Oswald Mosley was gathering momentum for his British Union of Fascists, Lunan took a stand by joining the anti-appeasement movement. He was convinced that another war was inevitable. After British prime minister Neville Chamberlain capitulated to Hitler’s demands in Munich in September 1938, Lunan decided to immigrate to Canada and leave behind the politics that he found so cowardly.