Tom Symons: A Canadian Life

Chapter 19: Tom the Radical Tory

Tom the Radical Tory MARCO ADRIA T his chapter offers some reflections on Tom as teacher, scholar, and citizen. I’m a former student, now a colleague and friend. Tom was my thesis supervisor at Trent University when I completed my MA in what is now called the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies, which he helped found. A year with Tom Symons the teacher was full of auspicious occasions. I remember sitting across the dinner table from Robert Stanfield in a Hull restaurant. I recall discussing human rights with Max Yalden, who was then the federal chief commissioner of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. I spent time in the cottage that Tom occupied as his university office at Trent’s downtown campus, where I could hear and be part of incoming and outgoing telephone calls with business and political leaders from across Canada. “Hamilton Southam on the line,” would cry Tom’s capable and quite hard-ofhearing secretary. My thesis committee was invited for tea to the cottage every few months; eventually I received my degree. My thesis topic was only modestly within Tom’s area of experience, although his expertise in relation to what I was studying was, I felt, of a particular quality. I had been writing about popular music and in particular the tradition of singer-songwriters that had grown up in Canada around figures in the 1960s and 1970s such as Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Gordon Lightfoot, and then later with Bruce Cockburn and k.d. lang. I wanted to complete my thesis on the C H A P T E R 1 9 374 TOM SYMONS: A CAnAdiAn Life life and work of Leonard Cohen. I felt that Tom would give me the latitude to look at Cohen in full context—not simply as a folk singer and not exclusively as a poet or novelist but as a figure on the ground of a Canadian mythology. I sensed some bemusement in Tom’s voice when he called me from Peterborough in early 1990 to ask about the thesis proposal I had sent him. Tom has a deep knowledge of Canadian culture and the powers of the poet. He knows Canada’s musical folklore. He knows that Cohen possesses an artistic stature to be reckoned with. But I would not say he was a folk song aficionado. In spite of his love of Canadian letters, he was never able to finish reading Cohen’s cryptic novel Beautiful Losers, with its amorphous structure, profanity, and undulating repetitions of theme and language. I mention my thesis, the cottage, and conversations with eminences in the nation’s capital because the lived experience is at the core of Tom’s approach to learning, the status of patriotism and citizenship in Canada, and the role of the university in our society. My study of Leonard Cohen became a study of Canada and a study of Tom Symons too. I doubt my experience was unique. Tom has shaped many people’s way of thinking about Canada and Canadians. He continues to stimulate new ideas about and approaches to the meanings of Canadian identity. This influence is more profound than it would be if it depended on finding sympathetic ears for any particular set of opinions or judgments. Instead, Tom’s life has an attractive exemplary character in itself. Those of us attuned to constant change and variation in current affairs and in our disciplines have much to gain from trying to understand the embodied mode within which he lives. I want to suggest that Tom is a Radical Tory.1 Radical Tories are difficult to name and locate because they have no manifesto. They are loosely tied together only by their experiences and by their lived expression of an ideal. We know that time and timelessness are always in view for the Radical Tory. The university and the church in western societies have created spaces and places for regarding and assessing the changes of historical time, alongside the contemplative attitude towards the timeless. Tom’s vantage point as a teacher has been from his seat at the university he created. His vocation is history, the art of TOM THE RADICAL TORY 375 measuring and assessing changes in time. He is a generalist and not a historicist or specialist. The generalist loves architecture, visual arts, folklore, geography, science. The Radical Tory can learn to love the songs...