GLR July-August 2023

ESSAY

A Renaissance Man in Victorian Times A LLEN E LLENZWEIG

T HE TITLE of Shane Butler’s most recent book, The Passions of John Addington Symonds , and the portrait photograph that graces its cover—of a handsome, thick-necked, and mustachioed man looking upward—encourage a set of provocative expectations that will probably not be met. If the word “passions” implies the fever of erotic heat, be prepared for a decidedly cooler temperature. If the book’s striking jacket image is presumed to represent the title subject, be aware that the face in question belongs to one Angelo Fusato, a Venetian gondolier who in the 1870s became both a lover and a household servant to the British writer John Addington Symonds (1840–1893). If you are at all familiar with Symonds’ writings or his life, then you know that homoerotic attractions were central to his life and thought, yet hardly produced a tem perament we would call gay—in either its older or current meaning. And yet, for all that, it was Symonds who first im ported the word “homosexual,” a 19th-century coinage of Ger man origin, into English print. The Passions of John Addington Symonds cannot be charac terized as a “biography” in the usual sense. Professor Butler’s project is a work of impressive and sometimes frightening eru dition. I fear that even among today’s reasonably educated LGBT readers, few will have the background in Classical liter ature, in the arcane scholarship and mandatory language of queer theory, or in the foundational texts of the West’s philosophical canon (from the ancients to the postwar French, i.e. Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan) to appreciate Butler’s most theoreti cal and discursive inquiries, of which there are many. The organization of the book’s chapters corresponds to the various intellectual inquiries in which Symonds was engaged throughout his life. For example, in a chapter titled “Homer’s Deep: Ancient Greece and Reciprocal Love,” Butler reviews Homer’s rendering of the relationship of Achilles to Patroclus and its multiple interpretations and meanings over the years— a friendship? a chaste “Platonic” love? a model of ancient ped erasty dependent on differences of age and status? He traces the changing analyses by later Classicists, literary critics, and emerging sexual historians who, like Symonds himself, have grappled with homosocial or homoerotic interpretations ac cording to the mores and beliefs of their times. But let us back up to locate John Addington Symonds in his time. He was born in the port city of Bristol. His father, the sen ior John Addington Symonds, was a successful physician. His mother died early and young; Symonds retained few lasting memories of her. Ultimately, his father moved the family to the more bourgeois and respectable town of Clifton, though by then Allen Ellenzweig, a longtime G&LR contributor, is the author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford, 2021).

young John’s experience of Bristol, the “sometimes perilous port and its sailors,” had become the source of his earliest sexual fan tasies, which years later he recorded in his Memoirs , which re mained unpublished until 1986. By age thirteen, he was off to Harrow, the all-boys school where Symonds was introduced to “rampant sexual activity among the boys.” Later, at Oxford, the Plato scholar Benjamin Jowett was his mentor. It was at Oxford that Symonds “began expressing his desires in classicizing poems.” At age twenty, he was awarded a distinguished univer sity prize for English verse, and three years later, he received another Oxford honor for an essay he’d written on the Renais sance. By 1864, having met and married Catherine North, the pair was living in London, Symonds was preparing for a career in law, and over time the couple had four daughters. In 1871, after the death of his father, Symonds moved his wife and children to the grand family manse of his childhood, Clifton Hill House, where, due to ill health from tuberculosis, he abandoned the law and took up scholarly pursuits, publishing on a range of topics in British periodicals and assembling his pre vious articles on “Greek literature, on Dante, and on Italian travel” into a book. He lectured at Clifton College, and there

John Addington Symonds

July–August 2023

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