MESSIANIC MINSTREL - IRVING LAYTON 1912 - 2006
Irving Layton liked to claim that he was born without a foreskin, which by Jewish tradition made the rambunctious and randy Canadian poet a candidate for the position of messiah. Layton, who died in Montreal on January 4, at the age of 93, titled his own 1985 memoir "Waiting for the Messiah," and once vowed that he would return from the abyss to pole-vault over his own open grave.
There was no rabbi at his funeral, and no pole-vaulting, but there were poets galore, including Layton's lifelong friend and protege Leonard Cohen, who declared, "There was Layton, and then there was the rest of us."
Outside of Canada, unfortunately, the rest of us would have found ourselves somewhat hard put to place Layton, even before age and illness had consigned him to relative obscurity. Though the recipient of his country's top honors, Layton never achieved anywhere near the renown and recognition afforded Cohen.
Yet "Gale's Dictionary of Literary Biography" minces few words in asserting Layton's significance as "Canada's most prolific and pugnacious poet." Layton, it observes, "sustained a powerful, if not to say domineering, position in Canadian letters for over 45 years." The entry describes Layton as "a writer of unflagging energy and undiminished anger who combines the rage of Jeremiah with the vitality of Nietzsche."
Born Israel Lazarovitch, in Targu Neamt, Romania, in 1912, Layton came to Montreal with his parents at the age of 1, and grew to his spirited majority in the St. Urbain Street Jewish ghetto immortalized decades later by novelist Mordecai Richler. He attended agricultural college, where, he later recalled, he was the "single agitator, single poet and single Jew," and following a wartime stint in the Canadian army, he completed an MA in political science and economics at McGill University. After that, Layton dedicated himself to a prolific life in poetry, but had to support himself by teaching, from 1945 to 1960, at Herzliah High School, the city's leading Jewish academy, and by intermittent stints as lecturer or writer-in-residence at a variety of universities.
He also led a famously social existence, cutting a dashing and refreshingly bacchanalian figure. A showman as well as a poet, during the early 1960s he became a widely recognized figure nationally, largely through regular appearances on the country's solitary TV channel. Married four times and involved with endless numbers of paramours, he alienated himself from his four children, one of whom published a memoir depicting him as profoundly narcissistic and aloof.
Layton's inclination to shock, in both behavior and words, and the self-righteous indignation with which he related to so many Jews and gentiles alike, did not sit well with either group. And when age and illness finally blunted his tongue and stunted his finances, a campaign to keep him out of a nursing home and within his own modest home in a middle-class neighborhood spirited up scarcely more than $ 3,000, enough, perhaps, for a month of in-house assistance.
Philistine that I am, I never had much use for poets or poetry, with one exception: "For My Two Sons, Max and David," a poem Layton wrote in Tel Aviv just after the Six-Day War. In it he listed the many ways non-Jews have perceived, and hated, the Jew down through the ages, concluding with the lines, "Be none of these my sons/My sons be none of these/Be gunners in the Israeli Air Force." It was this work that inspired me in part to up and join the Israeli army.
Throughout his life, Layton espoused a muscular Judaism that raged against a history of atrocities that culminated in the death camps of Europe. Among the verses that placed the Holocaust central in his concerns were "For Anne Frank," "The Final Solution" and "The Transformation," published in his 1974 collection "The Pole Vaulter."
Layton recognized that poets, forgetting they have descended from the Biblical prophets, have not traditionally been the first to mount the barricades, and that verse may not always be the choicest of weapons. "The up-to-date poet," he wrote, "besides labouring at his craft, should be a dead shot." He himself best demonstrated his marksmanship with a collection, published in 1976, called "For My Brother Jesus." Blasting Christianity for fomenting Jew-hatred, and reclaiming Jesus as a Jew, the collection caused a huge furor in Canada, which prior to and during the Holocaust had one of the most restrictively anti-Jewish immigration policies in the West.
Layton ultimately set aside both his prophetic rage and his satyr's pose, exposing himself in a poem as "a cynical, aging Jew who knows much about men's incurable viciousness and brutality." But in "Fortunate Exile" (1987), a book that convened many poems on Jewish themes, people and events, the net effect was surprisingly more celebratory than embittered.
Life, Layton declared toward the end of his own, had knocked him on the head, making it "ring like a tuning fork." His pitch was not always perfect, but when he hit the high notes, the fillings in your teeth would sometimes shake loose. Happily, there is no dearth of dentists in Canada. Pole-vaulting poets, however, are quite another matter.
Sheli Teitelbaum