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BUTOVSKY / IRVING LAYTON: THE INVENT ION OF THE SELF
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revifying sun which would restore the lost vitality — a fecund
nature and a passionate Christ:
Come soon, 0 bright Tudor sun!
I do not like this monastic whiteness o f winter
—
I t is a Christ drained o f a ll blood.
The life-denying frozen landscape is imaged as the bloodless
body: winter is na ture’s blight symmetrical with the monk’s de
spoliation o f Christ. This central juxtaposition is embedded in
Jewish memory which reads the signification of the ice-bound
landscape as the work o f fearful, Christian zealots.
Taken together, Layton’s poems based on a Jewish subject
matter, whether written in a spirit of social criticism or intro
spection, are less frequent in the first twenty years of his pub
lishing history than his other topical or philosophic concerns.
The same can be noted in his critical or social commentary.
In a period which comprised the two major events in modern
Jewish history — the Holocaust and the establishment of a sov
ereign Jewish state — Layton’s voice is only intermittently heard.
His attention was elsewhere, devoted to the subjects which pre
occupied him in the first stage of his career: the dialectical na
ture of reality; the definition of an indigenous Canadian literary
identity in the post-colonial world; the open recognition o f our
sexual natures.
NEW STANCE
But since 1967 a significant change can be noted in his re
lationship to Jews and Judaism, signalling an open identification
with Jewish national circumstance: politically, in support o f be
leaguered Israel, and morally, in his condemnation o f Chris
tianity as the fomentor of anti-Semitism which culminated in
the Holocaust. In his characteristically resolute fashion, Layton
reacted dramatically to Israel’s threatened position in the days
leading up to the Six-Day War. Struck by the indifference of
the great powers before the loudly-trumpeted invasion plans
by Israel’s surrounding enemies, he saw the imminent destruc
tion of the Jewish state as a continuation of the genocidal sen
timents of Christian Europe. Little wonder then that with the
unexpected victory came an outpouring of pride in the Israeli
military power which had assured the State’s existence against