It happened in Montreal, and it began in 1949. A young, struggling poet was giving night classes in English at the Jewish Public Library to recently-arrived refugees from Europe. According to my mother, who was one of his students, he was compassionate, kind, and demonstrated unfailing patience, especially to the older members of the class who had a hard time learning a new language.
She vividly conjures up the image of a warm, slim man in a rumpled brown suit dashing into class clutching a battered brown briefcase…Flash forward 24 years, to a Saturday afternoon at Dorval Airport. My mother is returning to Europe for the first time since having left it.
We're strolling through a corridor before her flight. The following afternoon, I am going to attend a panel discussion at the Saidye Bronfman Center Theater entitled The Jewish Mother in North American Literature. I am going because my former English teacher has invited me. She is going to be on the panel. She is working on her first volume of poetry, and I am typing the manuscript. Appearing with Mrs.Yelin will be Miriam Waddington and Irving Layton.
Because Layton is on this panel my mother begins to tell me the story of the library days in the late "forties". Forever after, whenever she is complimented on the high quality of her English I will say, “Of course she speaks well. My mother learn English from a poet!”
As we stroll through the airport lounge there appears, directly in our path, a tanned, burly, 60-year-old hipster with a flowing white mane wearing a cream-colored shirt open almost to the navel of his Buddha-sized belly, a heavy, shiny medallion hanging from a chain around his neck and resting against his bare, white-haired chest. He is flanked by two young female admirers-one on each arm.
My mother erupts, “Professor Layton! Oh! I was in your class in the library. I was one of the refugees. Do you remember me?” Layton gazes into her face. “Renata Skotnicka!” He bellows. “Of course I remember you! How are you?! What have you been doing all these years?” He seems as warm and as kind as my mother had described him. “I"m fine. I--I--married. I had a family-this is my daughter-and today I'm going to Poland, can you imagine! I came from Europe-and I'm going to Europe!”
“That's wonderful.” The encounter with Layton is friendly and pleasant. I am impressed, and look forward to seeing him on the stage of the Saidye the next day.
The performer I saw on stage was unrecognizable from the man I'd met at the airport. He hogged the panel, shutting up both Waddington and Yelin. Since the portrayal of Jewish mothers in North American literature, written mainly by men, is largely negative, the audience was studded with little old Yiddisher mamas who wanted to know where they went wrong. Layton told them. He harangued them. When he saw that he could hurt them, he hit them again.
As a master of the English language, Layton ran rings of invective around their heads. Most of what he said, they didn't understand. First he made them feel guilty; then he made them feel stupid. All they knew was that they were being insulted.
Layton relished his performance in what he had turned into a one-man show. He was the one person in the theater who did. The audience-mostly female; mostly old, was cowed into silence. On stage, he was flanked by two fuming, stone-faced poetesses-no adoring groupies were these. And there was one appalled teenager sitting in a side seat, who would remember this display, for life.
Twenty years later I saw Irving Layton, in old age, in the metro. His hair was short, and his shirt was closed. He was heading out just as I was coming in. Instinctively I smiled; I remembered my mother's experience of him in the library. He saw that I recognized him. A light went on behind his eyes. He grinned at me, turning sideways through a turnstile. He preened, preparing to hold court.
I watched his reaction, and recalled his performance during a long-ago Sunday at the Saidye. If I had entertained the thought of re-introducing myself, I dismissed it. I slipped through a neighboring turnstile, and left Layton appearing puzzled, and non-plussed.
The Nobel Prize-nominated poet with the photographic memory died of Alzheimer's at the beginning of 2006.
