GLR July-August 2023

wider public, and even to many intimates.” Other papers that were part of the Brown bequest were taken in hand by the poet and critic Edmund Gosse, “chairman of the library’s committee of direction,” and he eventually burned them with the help of another librarian. As Butler acknowledges: “the bonfire had been lit long before all this—and by none other than Symonds himself. From the start, he was forever asking his friends to de stroy handwritten or privately printed copies of too-revealing works sent to them for review.” He continues: “From the burning and burying of Symonds’s poems in the 1860s to the publication and re ception of [Phyllis] Grosskurth’s biography in the 1960s, we have quickly bookended what already reads as an epic tale of sup pression and censorship over the course of a century—indeed, a century and a half, if we instead take the 2016 publication of the unabridged memoirs as its endpoint. They are distinguished by the fact that the censors are not clerics, policemen, or angry mobs but instead insiders: friends, family, and even Symonds himself.” Butler, of course, is not constrained by the same squea mishness that plagued the writers of the Victorian period who lived under an enforced regime of silence concerning the love that dared not speak its name. He gives a tantalizing account of the variously subtle codes by which we in our time can deci pher the textual references of Symonds himself and such liter ary eminences as Henry James, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in a chapter titled “Queer Sensibilities.” To different degrees,

we might conclude what Butler understood of the various dodges engaged in Symonds’ texts as applying to others from that time: “This story is as much one of the circulation of secrets as it is of their definitive concealment. ... Indeed, one is inclined here to note the obvious: that there surely can be no worse way to keep a secret than to write it down, to say nothing of having it printed, even privately. ... Symonds’s ‘secret homosexual life,’ in retrospect, often seems to have been hiding in plain sight all along.” We find in The Passions of John Addington Symonds a good

deal of engaging commentary and original interpretation, but it remains a work of con temporary scholarship aimed less at a gen eral readership than at other scholars in the field. Its language, while not consistently lapsing into the opaqueness of academic jar gon, nevertheless does not invite a spirit of shared conversation. That said, Butler’s own passion for Symonds makes this text foun

From the start, Symonds was forever asking friends to destroy handwritten or privately printed copies of too-revealing works sent to them for review.

dational ground for reading. It points us to essential literary ex amples from ancient times, through the Renaissance, and on to the Victorians. Butler’s scholarship is deep and wide, frequently enlisting obscure journal articles by both established and emerg ing scholars. Most importantly, for those inclined to explore a central figure in the formation of a queer history, The Passions of John Addington Symonds points one to the letters, the mem oirs, and the prime Symonds texts that would feed into the emerging disciplines of sexology and psychoanalysis and the coming cataclysm of Freudian thought.

July–August 2023

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