Irving Layton by Harriet Bernstein

Author:Harriet Bernstein
Language: cat
Format: epub
Publisher: Inanna Publications
Published: 2019-10-23T16:00:00+00:00

Allan Ginsberg, to the left of Irving Layton, 1978.

Journal, October 31, 1978: “Happy Hallowe’en. Bought goodies but there hasn’t been one trick or treater yet. Irving is at class, it’s 8:49 and we’ve just returned from his weekly Ottawa trip and in addition to the usual there, he gave two readings and we met Natalia Babel, yes Isaac Babel’s [the great Jewish Russian short story writer] daughter. She’s teaching at the Slavic Studies Dept. at Ottawa U. When she and Irving met, it was one of those times when there’s an immediate bond. She told him she felt she’d known him all her life, and she wrote a beautiful inscription in a book she wrote on Crime and Punishment (which I’m just reading now) and Les Miserables. She was charming, dark, and with high colour in her cheeks, very rosy.”

Journal, November 9, 1978: “We are to be married two weeks from today, in Toronto, in a rabbi’s study, with a party afterwards at my parents’ house. It will be a small affair, but should be very lovely. From here, Irving has asked Musia and Leon [Irving’s lifelong close friends], Bill and Sandra,[Irving’s nephew and wife] and Leonard [Cohen, of course]. Also his sisters by way of courtesy, but they won’t be coming. Leonard may or may not—things like this with him are very iffy. Francesca Valente [from the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto and a great supporter of Irving’s; she also translated some of his poetry and helped facilitate readings in Italy] is to come and Lucinda Vardey [my friend/his agent]. For me, Gerry [my friend, Gerry Mandel] will come and my friend Andrea [Andrea Gilbert] is coming from Cambridge. Uncle and some of the parents’ friends, thirty or so in all. I am excited about it and happy and just a little scared. Irving seems to be happy about it, though perhaps not entirely without trepidations. He keeps asking if I’m sure I won’t change I keep telling him, only for the better! [Note to reader: Even though we had been through so much over all the years, Irving had a need to hear over and over again that I wouldn’t change—that who I was would remain the same. I often wondered about his experiences with other women that had made him so fearful that I would somehow morph into another form.] Lucinda just returned from Europe....

“Irving wrote two new poems this week—he’s very excited about ‘Shlemiel.’ He also revised about four from Droppings this morning. He was very pleased. He keeps saying how he needs Canada, how the schmuckiness of the people here is such wonderful fodder for him, fuel. Where else, he asks, would he get such good fuel, see such stupidity and blandness and obtuseness?

“He also says I’m ‘ruining a great erotic poet’ because he has not any of the desire he used to have for other women, which means he doesn’t get the stories and poems he used to get, along with all the attendant tensions and conflicts.

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