I was born in Montreal in 1946. My father, Irving Layton, who would later become the well-known Canadian poet, was at the time barely making ends meet working odd jobs and teaching English to Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. My mother, Betty Sutherland (who would later change her name to Boschka), was a painter working part-time as a cashier at a local restaurant.
My parents were, to say the least, unconventional. For one thing, they were atheists and socialists; for another, they were part of an avant-garde writers co-operative which, from my grandparents' point of view (on both sides), published pornographic trash. In my grandparents' opinion, it was bad enough that their offspring were bohemians living in the slummiest part of Montreal (one of the first houses torn down in Montreal's urban-renewal program was the house in which I was born); what made it worse was the fact that they were living together although they weren't married. And, as if it weren't scandalous enough that my mother was Scottish while my father was a Jew, it was utterly outrageous that they had already had a bastard child - me!
Luckily, I remember nothing of this: my first memory being the day we moved to a farmhouse in Cote St. Luc, then a country village on the outskirts of Montreal. I was four years old and, for the next eight years, my childhood was blissfully bucolic, surrounded by trees and creeks and fields. The interior walls of our house were lined with books and paintings and there were frequent parties - artists of all kinds: dancers, potters, sculptors, actors and, of course, writers. One of these was a young poet who always brought his guitar and played folk songs. His name was Leonard Cohen. He let me hold his guitar when I was nine and taught me my first chord (E minor) when I was ten. When I was twelve, my mother bought me a guitar and traded Leonard one of her paintings in return for guitar lessons for me. I've been in love with the guitar ever since.
My parents split up when I was 13. I remember my mother staring out the window and playing the same Leadbelly record over and over. Eventually, my mother and sister moved to California while I went to live with my father and stepmother in a downtown apartment. By then I had figured out the chords to "In The Pines" by Leadbelly and I remember being very unhappy and playing it over and over:
My girl, my girl, don't you lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun never shines
And I shivered the whole night through
I moved out when I was 16 and spent my last year of high school living in a rooming house where I shared the kitchen and bath with the floor's other outcasts - alcoholics, a sixty-year-old prostitute, a WW1 vet whose cough went on all night. The room cost $10 a month. There was vomit in the bathtub every morning.
Somehow I finished high school, then, after staying with my mother and sister who were living on an anarchist commune in Big Sur, hitch-hiked to British Columbia where I got a job in a lumber camp in the remotest northern tip of Vancouver Island. This was the first of many camps I worked in while putting myself through university. It took me ten years but finally I graduated Concordia University in Montreal with an honours BA in Eng. Lit. and Philosophy.
Along the way, I had briefly married and had had a daughter, Jessica, whose web site design you are looking at right now. Also, I had travelled and worked many other odd jobs - picking tobacco in Southern Ontario, laying track for the CNR in northern Saskatchewan and Manitoba, apprentice bedspread cutter and apprentice car mechanic in Montreal, etc., etc. My one constant was the guitar. I learned new songs wherever I went and played in coffee houses and on street corners whenever I got the chance:
I'm standin' on a corner with a dollar in my hand
I'm lookin' for a woman who's lookin' for a man
Tell me, how long do I have to wait?
Can I get you now, or must I hesitate?
I was 28 when I moved to Toronto and a new chapter in my life began. Instead of jobs involving manual labour, my adventures became more cerebral - and paid better! I started and sold a bookstore (Book City), managed a subsidiary of McClelland & Stewart, owned a small publishing company (Maximus Press), and became Vice President of a bank (Guardian Trust).
I left banking because I found counting other people's money boring. I went back to university and earned a Master's degree in English Literature from the University of Toronto. I wrote a novel, Some Kind of Hero, and a book of short stories, Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear (both published by Mosaic Press) and became a high school English teacher - a job which I am still doing and still enjoy.
The trouble with being sixty years old is that by now I have so many memories I can't possibly fit them all in - the women I've loved and the ones who loved me, friends, enemies, canoe trips in the wilderness, Karate, Aikido, Tai Chi, the delicious loneliness of reading a good book at four in the morning in an all-night greasy spoon, long rambling talks about books and movies and politics first with my father and then with my brother David, the first time I saw Sharon's eyes (my wife of almost twenty years now), the first time I saw an absolutely impossible bend in a telephone pole and knew I was going blind...
Sometimes I live in the country
And sometimes I live in town
And sometimes I take a great notion
To jump into the river and drown
Of course, I did not commit suicide. Instead, unable to read, I returned to my steel-string Martin guitar. And then a very strange thing happened - my fingers found new chords and new ways of strumming them and, in the dark, I found myself singing new words and melodies. You can read all about it in the booklet that goes along with the Heartbeat Of Time CD. I'd say more here, but I want the songs to speak for themselves...
Max Layton
Cheltenham, Ontario