An advertisement for a series of films presenting the stories of famous Montreal writers, featuring Irving Layton. 1986.
Photo Credit : Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
Tibi Rome, Saul Bellow, Irving Layton, and David Rome, Saul Bellow's visit to the Jewish Public Library, Jewish Book Month, Montreal.
Photo Credit : Jewish Public Library - Archives
Cartoon entitled Irving Layton: Poet of Passion by Shane, 1967.
Photo Credit : Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
Irving Layton, ca. 1960s.
Photo Credit : Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives
Irving Layton (top row, 3rd from right) as teacher at Herzliah High School, ca. 1950s. Photo taken in Fletcher's Field (now Parc Jeanne Mance). Herzliah High School in upper right-hand corner of image
Israel Pinchus Lazarovitch, better known as Irving Layton, was a world-famous poet and Nobel Prize nominee who helped pioneer the creation of a distinctly modern Canadian poetry.
Layton was born in 1912 in a small town in Romania. The following year, his family moved to the heart of the Jewish neighbourhood in downtown Montreal. In 1926, Layton entered Baron Byng High School, where his life was transformed by his introduction to the works of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Austen, among many others. His increasing involvement with the Young People’s Socialist League led to his expulsion in 1930. Shortly thereafter, Layton was blacklisted due to his left-wing political views, and barred entry to the US for nearly two decades. He studied agriculture at McGill University and was known around campus for his anti-bourgeois attitude and his increasing dedication to poetry and the life of the poet.
After short stints in New York, Halifax, and the Canadian army, Layton settled down in Montreal, and entered the publishing world as partner to his friend and fellow Montreal poet, Louis Dudek. Together with John Sutherland, they created First Statement, a literary magazine and press. The new, younger poets set themselves up as a challenge to older Canadian writers like Northrop Frye, who habitually looked back to England for cues on what poetry should mean and what poets should do. Layton, Dudek and their peers, on the other hand, believed Canadian poets should forge their own path forward, and above all should represent and comment on the social realities of Canadian life in the middle of the 20th century.
After World War II, Layton earned a master’s degree in political science, and began teaching humanities at Herzliah High School, where he taught Irwin Cotler and many others. In the 1950s, Layton gradually earned first national and then international renown as a poet, particularly with the publication of A Red Carpet in the Sun (1958) and The Pole-Vaulter (1974) – the latter of which revealed the poet’s preoccupation with the Holocaust and what it represents. In 1982, Layton was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but lost to Gabriel Garcia Marquez. After having spent the 1970s writing and teaching in Toronto, Layton returned to Montreal in the early 1980s. He continually published until being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1995.
