Irving Layton - Waiting for the Messiah

Here and Now 1945
Now Is the Place 1948
The Black Huntsmen 1951
Cerberus (with Louis Dudek & Raymond Souster) 1952
Love the Conqueror Worm 1953
In the Midst of My Fever 1954
The Long Pea-Shooter 1954
The Blue Propeller 1955
The Cold Green Element 1955
Music on a Kazoo 1956
The Bull Calf and Other Poems 1956
The Improved Binoculars 1956
A Laughter in the Mind 1958
A Red Carpet for the Sun 1959
The Swinging Flesh (Poems and Stories) 1961
Balls for a One-Armed Juggler 1963
The Laughing Rooster 1964
Collected Poems 1965
Periods of the Moon 1967
The Shattered Plinths 1968
Selected Poems 1969
The Whole Bloody Bird 1969
Nail Polish 1971
The Collected Poems of Irving Layton 1971
Engagements: Prose of Irving Layton 1972
Lovers and Lesser Men 1973
Seventy-Five Greek Poems 1974
The Pole-Vaulter 1974
The Darkening Fire 1975
The Unwavering Eye 1975
For My Brother Jesus 1976
Taking Sides (Prose) 1977
The Covenant 1977
The Poems of Irving Layton 1977
The Uncollected Poems of Irving Layton 1977
The Tightrope Dancer 1978
Droppings from Heaven 1979
An Unlikely Affair 1980
For My Neighbours in Hell 1980
The Love Poems of Irving Layton 1980
Europe and Other Bad News 1981
A Wild Peculiar Joy 1982 (1989, 2004)
The Gucci Bag 1983
Waiting for the Messiah (Prose) 1985 (2006)
Dance with Desire 1986
Final Reckoning 1987
Fortunate Exile 1987
Fornalutx 1991

Copyright 1985 by Irving Layton.
Copyright 2006 by the Estate of Irving Layton.

First published in 1985
This edition published 2006

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Layton, Irving, 1912-2006.
Waiting for the Messiah : a memoir / Irving Layton
with David ORourke.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-712-4

1. Layton, Irving, 1912-2006 Biography. 2. Poets, Canadian (English) Biography. I. ORourke, David II. Title.

PS8523.A75Z53 2006 C811.54 C2006-901895-2

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development
Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the
Ontario Media Development Corporations Ontario Book Initiative.
We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the
Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
75 Sherbourne Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5A 2P9
www.mcclelland.com

v3.1

I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for the generous grant that gave me the time and leisure to work on this memoir. And Jack McClelland who, years ago, first put the notion of writing it into my head.

I also wish to thank David ORourke for helping me to begin these memoirs, and for his assistance in the assembling of early drafts of the manuscript. His sensitive probing of my brainfolds helped me recall long-forgotten episodes in my life and to observe experiential connections that might otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Thanks are also owing to friends and acquaintances for sharing with me their recollections, and for allowing me to see letters that I had written to them over the years.

Without the patience, good humour, and insights of Anna Pottier, who typed and retyped the manuscript, this memoir would never had reached completion.

I am greatly indebted to the good sense, intuitiveness, and devotion of Ellen Seligman, a truly superb editor. No praise of mine can do justice to the valuable suggestions she made for the books improvement.

Irving Layton

Montreal

July 1985

They dance best who dance with desire,

Who lifting feet of fire from fire

Weave before they lie down

A red carpet for the sun.

1912. The poet to be was born with the smell of baked challa in his nostrils. Other smells have come and gone, that smell has remained, dictating rage and tenderness, a metaphysics individual as himself and tougher than nose-hairs. For I was born into a world of fable, a world of stories charged with significant meanings, the world of the Jews, a people like no other on this planet. The stories I heard from my mother, and repeated by my older sisters, made me feel there was something mysterious and awesome about my life.

More than any other fact that sociologists and psychologists may unearth about me, it accounts for the glories and disasters I have known, my almost daily commuting between heaven and hell. For the feeling of strangeness became stronger as I grew older, and was reinforced by my readings about heroes and saviours Moses, Buddha, Alexander the Great and the unusual circumstances that always attended their birth. Didnt the story of my own birth fall neatly into this packet of legends, myths, or miracles? Conceit, or perhaps an imagination hungering for the extraordinary, enticed me to believe that I, Israel Lazarovitch, was also marked for something special. My life had been set on rails of a different gauge.

I must have been about six or seven when my mother told me that I had been born circumcised: the messianic sign. Rabbis, she said, had come from many hamlets, some had journeyed to our Roumanian village from as far as Poland and Russia to see for themselves my miraculously foreshortened member and, afterwards, their reverent gaze still fixed on it, to break into psalm-singing and prayer. Jews have always been on the lookout for a messiah. Picture a history of ghettos, discrimination, the nightmare of pogroms; is it that unnatural for them to engender out of their misery a messiah to lead them to the Promised Land or, at least, out of their unending tribulations? Moses had been the only Jew before me born circumcised and that was because the cruel Pharoah had ordered all Hebrew boys to be killed at birth. Because Yahweh had some mission for Moses, and because under the circumstances it was impossible to perform the rite of circumcision, it was by divine will that the child was born without a foreskin. He was born circumcised and destined to create a people.

It is not hard to understand how this would take a tremendous hold on the imagination of a child who, because he is Jewish, has been studying the Talmud in Hebrew, which he takes to be the original language of his forbears. Of Moses himself. The identification with the great Jewish leader was swift and unopposed. Despite my impoverished home, I was one of the favoured. Like Moses, in my eyes, I had a mission to perform. Great things were in store for me. My mind parts the bath water in the tiny washbasin as if it were the Red Sea. I throw my stick on the floor; it turns into a hissing viper.