Memoirs of Symonds

Hemingway, Henry James, and a few others, the book is devoted to the short fiction of England and its dominions: a fine thing, but not a history of the development of modem short fiction, which has taken place largely elsewhere. Aside from these idiosyncrasies, Hanson's book is pleasant to read, especially on the less-known writers. When she moves away from her thesis, her readings of individual stories and writers are engaging and informative. Her survey of fin de siècle writing is economical, and her treatment of recent English writers is useful in bringing them to our attention. The book calls to mind earlier studies of the English short story, especially that of H. E. Bates, which also focuses on England but carries the comprehensive title The Modern Short Story (1941). In brief, Hanson's is a book whose audience is rather limited: undergraduates, perhaps sophisticated general readers who like criticism that is not too technical, but not genre theorists. Suzanne Ferguson Wayne State University 5. MEMOIRS OF SYMONDS The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds. Ed. and Intro. PhyUis Grosskurth. New York: Random House, 1984. $19.95 Following Symonds' wishes to protect his family and friends from the scandal that surely would have resulted from his memoirs' publication, Symonds' literary executor, H. F. Brown, held them until his death in 1926, whereupon they were bequeathed to the London Library with the provision that they be withheld from publication for fifty years. Grosskurth's edition, she tells us, excludes about one-fifth of the original—mainly "Symonds's execrable poetry and . . . self-conscious nature descriptions quoted from his own letters. However, this material is also accessible now that the embargo has been lifted. Involved with work on Symonds as I have been, on and off, for the past twenty years, I find it difficult to distance myself sufficiently to form a detached view of what the long-awaited pubhcation of his autobiography may mean to scholarship in general. At this point I am reminded of Grosskurth's review in Victorian Studies of the first volume of the Symonds Letters in which, if memory serves, she deplored the waste of time and paper in publishing all the letters of this second-rate Victorian writer. If a speciahst in this subject like Professor Grosskurth was appalled at the expense of time and effort in producing Symonds' letters, what will other Victorian scholars think of this present effort? Certainly, it contributes little more to our understanding of the man than Grosskurth's own biography of him offers; The Woeful Victorian (1964), which she composed after gaining access to these restricted materials, presumably in 1954, has the added virtue of providing references to other Symonds materials published by H. F. Brown in his John Addington Symonds: A Biography and his edition of The Letters and Papers of John Addington Symonds. It does not, of course, allow Symonds to speak to us in his own voice, as he does so poignantly in these pages. What this work offers, then, is not a greater understanding of 100 the man or the writer in any inteUectual sense. Instead, Symonds' words, however self-deceived or rationalizing, reach over the decades to offer a glimpse into the progress of a hyper-sensitive soul through its tortured life in the late Victorian world. The major thread of the work is Symonds' constant preoccupation with his homosexuality. Looking back and describing his life, he continually searches for clues that might explain the source of this love that became his lifelong torment. He studies his sexual inclinations, yearnings, and responses to both male and female sexual encounters of however slight or innocent an occasion— and "innocent" is the word that springs to mind in summing up Symonds' account of himself. His few chüdhood sexual experiments, which today's psychology teUs us are normal, produced in him a predictable but disproportionate guilt. At Harrow, he escaped the brutal homosexual practices—which sound rather like what might be expected in today's prisons-that were taken for granted or ignored, not only within the population of boys, but also between master and student, at least in the one case he reports. Symonds...