An Arthur Symons Chronicle

31:4 Book Reviews by most critics, never forced her to buckle down and write a truly important challenge to her life-long hero, Marcel Proust. Her Magnum Opus was never anywhere near finished as a draft, though The Real Night and Cousin Rosamund have been published as splinters from the log. "Her opinions," as her biographer notes, "were sometimes so personal that they seemed to have no outward consistency or logic." That was said about her essays written in her final years for the Sunday Telegraph; but it applies, with equal force, to her novels and short stories. A woman who could be dead wrong about Tolstoy ("a loveless zestless boring egotist who wanted to write a big big book," i.e., War and Peace) could be, and often was, wrong about dozens of other issues: literary, political, sociological . She was constantly misjudging her friends. Toward the end she had fewer of them than a long, rich life of literary productivity entitled her to have. The obituaries written to mark her passing were, by and large, unfriendly and unawed. She had made enemies by the score. Alas, many of them were unforgiving . Victoria Glendinning's biography reminds us of how luminous and startling a presence she was. The book is well worth reading. I doubt, however, that many readers will feel inspired, after finishing it, to go back to Rebecca West's works. Harold Orel University of Kansas AN ARTHUR SYMONS CHRONICLE KarlBeckson. Arthur Symons: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. $49.95 In Arthur Symons: A Life Karl Beckson provides a richly informative, impeccably documented biography about the comings and goings, the many projects, and the literary friendships of this busy figure who achieved notoriety as a poet, shared rooms and thoughts with Yeats, edited The Savoy, and wrote The Symbolist Movement in Literature in the 1890s. Roger Lhombreaud's Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography (1963) is still very useful for its commentary on Symons's literary work in the context of his life in general, but Lhombreaud's documentation is very sketchy and his range of evidence is dwarfed by Beckson's. Professor Beckson has not only studied Symons's many published works, including many little-known, elusive essays and reviews in ephemeral periodicals and newspapers, but has also gathered over three thousand letters, at least six hundred of which he cites in his notes, and he has waded through the immense residue of Symons's other manuscript material at Princeton University and elsewhere. ELT readers will find useful and interesting material in Arthur Symons: A Life, and Symons specialists will be indebted to Beckson for his many precise and esoteric details. The curious specialist learns, for example, that (contra Lhombreaud, 267-68) Symons first met the American patron John Quinn not in 1909 451 31:4 Book Reviews but in 1904 through Yeats (233). Casual readers and specialists alike will be fascinated with Beckson's account of Symons's early years. The son of a provincial Methodist minister, Symons ended his formal education at seventeen in 1882 and lived in country towns with his parents until 1890. While still in his teens and early twenties, he parlayed his talent, membership in the Browning Society, and the interest of its founder, F. J. Furnivall, into assignments to write An Introduction to the Study of Browning (1886) and to edit volumes in Furnivall's Shakespeare Quartos Facsimile series and thence into a whole, flourishing, expanding tree of editorships, essays, reviews, and literary friendships, sometimes accompanied by reciprocal puffery, involving Browning, Pater, J. A. Symonds, George Meredith, Frank Marshall of the Irving Shakespeare , Ernest Rhys, Havelock Ellis, and a host of others. Even before moving to London, Symons could congratulate himself on his achievement as he prepared his first book of verse, Days and Nights (1889) for publication: "'(1) Browning (book about him); (2) Meredith (dedication to him [in the Browning book and by permission]); (3) Pater (ditto [Days and Nights, again by permission])'" (43). Precise, useful, interesting circumstantiality characterizes Beckson's narrative as he describes Symons's career in the 1890s, his marriage in 1901, the ensuing years including his mental collapse and partial recovery in 1908-10...