Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter 23 First Section

      The Poet As Celebrity and Teacher - The Life of Irving Layton; First Section. 

      
     Irving Layton strode proudly into a Sir George Williams University classroom. It was late in the  fall of 1961. I had come to this classroom to hear and see one of Canada's foremost poets. He didn't disappoint me.
     His teaching style embraced humour, inspirational talk, and even envy. "I wish I'd have written such a line," this short, burly dark-haired man said in effect about a part of a poem by William Butler Yeats. Layton's approach to poetry differed totally from the teaching styles I faced at McGill University, that lay up the street from Sir George Williams.
     For in 1961 I was enrolled at McGill University in downtown Montreal. Here, university professors walked around in black gowns at times. This dress was an essential part of some British professors' wardrobes. And the English professors who taught me stressed the text of the poetry we studied. Everything else was not mentioned.
      McGill teachers knew a lot about poetry. Yet Layton explained poems with the eye and ear of a poet. Layton also projected more than knowledge. He had charisma and a love of poetry flowed out of him. I was listening to a passionate man and I realized that Layton's passion for poetry could rarely be found in McGill's classrooms.
     I returned one more time to see and hear Layton and once again he inspired me and a few dozen other students. Layton had struggled long and hard to get where he was when I first saw him. He was born Israel Lazarovitch  in Tirgul Neamt in Romania. "Eastern Europe is the graveyard of nations," one observer pointed out. For Jews like Keine and Moishe Lazarovitch who were Layton's parents,
Romania was a hell. Anti-semitism flourished everywhere. In the end, the whole family ended up in Montreal just before World War One.
     Life was tough here too. French-Canadians, Poles and Italians routinely attacked Jews in the streets. Meanwhile the ruling class Scottish and WASP millionaires looked down on them . Social programs were non-existent. Poverty was everywhere.
     Some of the Layton family survived. Others didn't. Of Irving's four brothers, Larry became a manic-depressive and died in middle age. Abraham succumbed to tuberculosis. Irving's father Moishe booted other sons out of the household while burying himself in Hebrew texts. Layton's three sisters, Gertie, Esther and Dora endured marital abuse and crushed ambitions. Layton's Jewish Orthodox father, died in middle age and his widow Keine kept the family alive by becoming a storekeeper and a business woman.
   Issie became Keine's favourite child. Very slowly  Layton climbed the educational ladder while at the same time becoming a Marxist. He graduated from Baron Byng High School later made famous under another name in Mordecai Richler's novel 'The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz'. For a time the Layton family lived in the district near Sainte Urbaine Street that Richler immortalized.
    Layton was the only one in his family to complete high school.
     (To be continued).