Irving Layton

'There was Irving Layton, and then there was the rest of us' Leonard Cohen

ALAN HUSTAK, KATHRYN GREENAWAY of The Gazette and MARK ABLEY contributed to this report

The Gazette Thursday, January 05, 2006

Irving Layton, the flamboyant poet who died yesterday in Montreal at age 93, once described himself as "a quiet madman, never far from tears," who wrote poems to cause trouble.

As he put it: "The sparks fly / I gather each one / and start a poem." "There was Irving Layton, and then there was the rest of us," his long-time friend, poet, novelist and singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, wrote The Gazette in an email from Los Angeles yesterday.

"He is our greatest poet, our greatest champion of poetry. Alzheimer's could not silence him, and neither will death."

The author of more than 50 books of poetry, Layton died at Maimonides Geriatric Centre on Caldwell Ave. in Cote St. Luc, where he'd been a patient with Alzheimer's disease for the past five years.

Although arrangements have not been completed, the funeral is being planned for Sunday at Paperman and Sons, 3888 Jean Talon St. W.

Once described as being both "the Picasso and the Mae West of poetry," Layton will be remembered not only for his often erotic verse but also for his abrasive ego, outrageous opinions, entertaining love life and bitter feuds, as well as for being a provocative, stimulating teacher.

Layton was born Israel Pincu Lazarovitch in Tirgu Neamt, Romania, on March 12, 1912. His parents changed the family name after they immigrated to Montreal in 1913.

Young Irving was raised in the Plateau Mont Royal district. He went to Baron Byng High School, then to Macdonald College in Ste. Anne de Bellevue, where he took a BSc in agriculture. He later wrote of that experience:

"The college's single agitator, single poet and single Jew, I was too absorbed in my messianic dreams to realize what an outlandish figure I cut among the simple-minded Canucks from Quebec's farms and middle-class homes."

In 1936, when he was 23, he married Montrealer Faye Lynch and they moved to Halifax, where Layton became a Fuller Brush salesman. Before long, though, he walked away from both the job and his wife.

He enlisted in the Canadian army in 1942 but was not sent overseas. He was discharged with the rank of lieutenant.

With the war over, Layton went back to university and in 1946 earned a master's degree from McGill in economics and political science. He also became a card-carrying socialist.

Layton didn't start to write poetry until he was in his 30s; he once explained that as a schoolboy reading Wordsworth and Byron, he "naturally thought that in order to be a poet one had to be either English or dead, preferably both."

Layton's first collection of poetry, Here and Now, was published by First Statement Press in 1945.

For the next couple of decades, he taught English literature in Montreal, at the high school level and at Sir George Williams College, now Concordia University. One of his high school students was Irwin Cotler, today Canada's justice minister.

"As I remember it, I learned very little about physics, chemistry and math and a lot about philosophy and literature - the humanities," Cotler said yesterday. "He was an inspiration to me then, and he remains so today. He was a mentor, a colleague, a friend."

In 1946, Layton married Betty Sutherland, a sister of actor Donald Sutherland. The couple had a son, Max, and a daughter, Naomi.

He and Sutherland parted amicably several years later when Layton became involved with an Australian expatriate, Aviva Cantor, who became his soulmate for the next 25 years. Layton celebrated Cantor - and her pubic hair - in his poem The Day Aviva Came to Paris.

In it, he wrote, Parisians

"... leaped as one mad colossal Frenchman from their cafe Pernods Shouting, "Vive l'Australienne! Vive Layton who brought her among us! ..."

He and Cantor had a son, David. Six years ago, David Layton laid bare his painful memories of growing up "amid the mad gods of poetry" in a book called Motion Sickness.

In the 1950s, Irving Layton became one of Leonard Cohen's mentors, and the two remained close after Cohen became internationally famous.

"I taught him how to dress. He taught me how to live forever," Cohen once said of their relationship.

Layton's reputation as a poet became firmly established with his 1951 collection The Black Huntsmen. Once he hit full stride, he became amazingly prolific, producing almost a book a year between 1951 and 1991.

In 1959, Layton won the Governor-General's Award for his collection A Red Carpet for the Sun, Some of his other notable volumes - all published between 1953 and 1968 - are Love the Conqueror Worm, Balls for a One-Armed Juggler, The Laughing Rooster and The Shattered Plinths.

The books display what Montreal critic Joel Yanofsky called "the righteous zeal of an Old Testament prophet and the bravado of a streetwise brawler."

In 1969, Layton quit Montreal in a blaze of invective, "squeezed out by French-Canadian nationalism," and went to teach English literature at York University in Toronto. During the 1970s, he raged against the onset of age and had an increasingly complex marital life.

His relationship with Cantor ended, and he married one of his former students, Harriet Bernstein, a rich Toronto movie publicist. They had a daughter, Samantha. The marriage had a nasty ending, which Layton chronicled in his book The Gucci Bag.

Poetry was always Layton's prime focus, but he also wrote two books of essays and reviews, one with the apt title Taking Sides. He also edited a landmark anthology of Canadian love poetry, Love Where the Nights Are Long.

As he grew older, his view of human nature darkened.

"The Holocaust is my symbol," he said. "If you read today's poets, you'd never know the kind of barbarous world we live in. aMan forgets what a terrifying monster he can be. I want to keep reminding people how close they are to disaster."

In 1976, Layton was invested as an officer of the Order of Canada as "a prolific poet whose work has won him renown in Canada who is also widely known elsewhere through translation."

Chastened by his years in Toronto, which he described as "a godforsaken place where people know only material success, and nothing of love," Layton returned to Montreal in 1978.

In the 1980s, Layton was the subject of a National Film Board documentary, Irving Layton Observed.

The Italian Nobel committee twice nominated Layton for the Nobel Prize for literature. In 1993, he became the first non-Italian to win the distinguished Petrarch Prize for Poetry.

In later years, before Layton went deaf and slipped into what he once called in a poem "the bewildered ghost sounds" of dementia, Anna Pottier, an aspiring wrestler, shared his life.

In the end, though, he had to depend on lifelong friends like Montrealer Musia Schwartz.

"He was an incredible creature. It's unbelievable, a shock, that he's gone," Schwartz, who knew Layton for more than 50 years, said yesterday.

Layton is survived by his two sons and his two daughters.