"Let JAS words stand": Publishing John Addington Symonds's Desires

(As if any man really knew aught of my life,
Why even I myself I often think know little or nothing of my real life,
Only a few hints, a few diffused faint clews and indirections
I seek for my own use to trace out here.)

Walt Whitman, "Inscriptions" (epigraph to the Memoirs of John Addington Symonds)

How can one define a work amid the millions of traces left by someone after his death? (144)

Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?"

By now, the basic history of John Addington Symonds's Memoirs is fairly familiar to scholars of Victorian literary culture—perhaps all too familiar, judging from the swiftness with which Christopher Craft sums it up: "[W]ritten between 1889 and 1891 in a fever of self- disclosure, consigned immediately thereafter to the closet, not to see public light until the Grosskurth edition of 1984" (1). Symonds did undertake the Memoirs rather feverishly. Having translated the autobiographies of Benvenuto Cellini and Carlo Gozzi from 1886 through 1889, the English translator, historian, and man of letters found himself "infected...with their Lues Autobiographica"—their autobiographical plague—and in March 1889 began "scribbling [his] own reminiscences" (Letters 3: 364), composing a lengthy and large manuscript detailing his lifelong struggle to comprehend and accept his homosexuality. But since 1891 the Memoirs have not simply passed through successively less private realms and into the public eye, from confession to concealment to revelation. For one thing, Symonds's self-disclosing manuscript has been neither completely closeted nor completely revealed, its secrets neither silenced nor spoken fully. Substantial portions of the Memoirs appeared in Horatio Forbes Brown's 1895 biography of Symonds, and much more reached the public through Phyllis Grosskurth's edition. But nearly one- third of the manuscript remains unpublished; moreover, because of the nature of the 1984 edition, this unpublished material's absence is virtually invisible, a fact which, inevitably, has shaped scholarly treatment of the Memoirs.

The far-from-(dis)closed case of Symonds's Memoirs demonstrates vividly that autobiographical "self-disclosure" entails not just singular acts undertaken by individual selves but also transhistorical processes of shaping and reshaping private texts into published works, in accordance with shifting interpersonal and sociocultural circumstances. The Memoirs' history dramatizes complicated questions that inform all autobiographical editing and publication. How and by whose (privileged) agency do private selves reach public readers? What (and when) is the public entitled to know about private autobiographers? How can (or should) autobiographical editors reveal their strategies for selecting and arranging the textual remains that disclose private selves and, in turn, determine interpretations of those selves?¹ More importantly, the Memoirs' history reminds us that these questions about autobiographical editing shade into broader questions about the very subjectivities of all autobiographical writers and readers. In both life and autobiographical writing, how are selves constituted and comprehended out of varieties of self-conception and experience, whether public, private, sexual, or familial? How do a person's senses of self correspond to or conflict with others' senses of him or her? If, as Symonds asserts late in his manuscript, "[n]o man can see himself as others see him,"² must any attempt to portray oneself or to perceive another's self—particularly through autobiographical writing and reading—be inevitably compromised, invariably incomplete? How can we reconcile Symonds's apparently incommensurable claims that, on one hand, an autobiography "has to be supplemented...in order that a perfect portrait may be painted of the man" and, on the other, "it is impertinent to maintain that anyone has the same right to speak about a person as the person himself has" (MS 501)? When does supplementing—or streamlining—an autobiography constitute a supplantation of the autobiographer's "right to speak"? When does such revisionary work instead represent a direct (if seemingly counterintuitive) response to that autobiographer's "speech," as communicated within his or her manuscript? [End Page...