John Addington Symonds is usually remembered for his role as “gay liberator”, not as poet. His heroic status is due primarily to just two publications: his sexually frank autobiography, and his work with Havelock Ellis on the lauded and progressively tolerant sexology work, Sexual Inversion.
Symonds’s unedited memoirs did not emerge until 1984, a century after his death. Symonds’s friend and fellow homosexual Horatio Brown edited the first version of Symonds’s biography, removing all clues to Symonds’s homosexuality. Brown also helped obscure Symonds’s role in Sexual Inversion (published three years after his death) by buying up most of the copies of the first English edition. But Brown was not alone in hiding Symonds’s collaboration. The prominent sexologist whom Symonds contacted to write the book with him -- Ellis -- also managed to repeatedly diminish Symonds’s role: in the German edition of the book, published before the English edition, Symonds’ essay A Problem in Greek Ethics was the book’s third chapter. But in the first English edition, Ellis moved A Problem to an appendix. And in all subsequent editions, Symonds’s name is removed from the title page, his essay completely cut, and all his contributions (except his anonymous case study) attributed to a correspondent mysteriously named “Z”.
We know from these works, as well as from letters and other documents uncovered by scholars like Phyllis Grosskurth (who wrote a biography of Symonds in 1964 that revealed publicly, once and for all, Symonds’s homosexuality), that Symonds’ was, toward the end of his life, openly willing to reveal his homosexuality to an intolerant society. He hoped that his example would help legitimize same-sex desires, or at least shift thinking farther away from the language of morality and sin to the more objective language of medicine and science.
We know that even as a boy, Symonds was aware of his deep fascination with other men. It was in poetry -- specifically, Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis -- where his secret desires were given the space to exist, as well as the endorsement of beautiful language and images. We also know that as a boy, Symonds had highly conflicted thoughts about homosexuality (as we could only expect from someone growing up in the middle of the 19th century). But Symonds did not indulge in the sexual antics that were all but commonplace for a boy away at a British boarding school. The decidedly unromantic liaisons between the other students disgusted him, and shortly after leaving boarding school, he informed his father that the headmaster, Dr.Vaughan, had been sending love letters to Symonds’s schoolmate, Alfred Pretor. The elder Symonds discreetly forced Dr.Vaughan to resign.
Eventually Symonds had affairs with men, though in the beginning not many of them were actively sexual. Shortly after secondary school, he had torturous affairs with a couple of choristers. Those ‘friendships’ were discouraged (because one would generally frown upon fraternizing with lower classes; and the Symonds family were not only middle class, they were anxious about their standing). Symonds’s unfufilled relationships with the boys stimulated highly prolific bursts of writing. He talked negatively about this sexually fueled writing in his memoirs:
Nothing, I think, could have been worse for my condition than this sustained utterance through verse of passions which I dared not indulge. It kept me in a continual state of orexis, or irritable longing. And for my literary career it was at least unprofitable. I knew that all those thousands of lines, into which I poured my red hot soul, would never see the light of publication. Consequently I gave way to the besetting foibles of my literary temperament – facility, fluidity, or carelessness of execution. The writing of these poems was a kind of mental masturbation (Memoirs, 189).
Symonds parlayed fantasies of male love into a career as a scholar, critic and poet. He discovered, translated, remarked upon and traced homosexual history from Hellenistic times through to his own. He wrote poetry with gender-specific pronouns and names he had to switch for publication -- although some poems he left unaltered, and those he published for a small community of men with similar interests (Uranians, they often called themselves). While some feel that Symonds had little talent to begin with, the poet and some of his advocates felt that the “straightening” of his poetry for mass publication was the factor truly detrimental to his career, as the altered poems turned out strangely lifeless. It may be true that, with the butchered pronouns, the poems -- especially early ones dealing with the impossibility of loving another man -- make little sense when framed around a heterosexual longing. It may also be true that if Symonds were not using poetry as a form of “mental masturbation” -- if he was actually having healthy homosexual relationships in his life, and didn’t have to depend on poetry as much as a sexual outlet -- his writing could have grown in unknown ways. However, it is unknown whether or not we could not expect to have such prolific output today if Symonds did not focus this excess of anxious energy on his studies and his art.
Symonds felt conflicted about his homosexuality throughout his life; it was a constant fight between guilt and moral anxiety and the irrepressible inner demon of socially unacceptable desires. On the advise of his doctor and his father, he eventually married; he also had both minor (yet still anxiety-producing) encounters and tumultuous affairs with other men, which in turned fueled more poetry -- his total yield being something like a thousand poems. At least sixty-seven of the sonnets were inspired by one man, a gondolier named Angelo Fusto, with whom Symonds had a long relationship. But mostly, Symonds preferred to put his homosexuality (inversion is really what Symonds would have called it) in the framework of unreachable ideals.
It was again in poetry that the adult Symonds felt a renewed sense of excitement -- a sense of purpose and pride -- about his homosexuality. The poetry of Walt Whitman gave Symonds the sense that it was not only a grandly noble thing to love a male comrade, but that it was also the wave of what would be a democratic and loving future for the world.
Symonds’ poetic vision was greatly invigorated by Whitman, and he wanted to be the British ambassador for (if not the British version of) the American poet. He saw a chance to use his poetry to promote a tolerant society. He felt that the extravagant work of people like Oscar Wilde would only be detrimental to the fight of homosexuals in a time of oppressive, homophobic actions such as the Labouchere Amendment. Here Symonds again distanced himself from the more “animalistic” aspects of homosexuality, hoping to be redeemed by the pure (ie, asexual) “manly attachment”, or adhesiveness, that Whitman touted.
Eventually Symonds decided that if he was going to champion the cause of the invert, perhaps poetry was not the most effective tool. The objective, authoritative voice of medicine and science were powerful new forces in understanding human behavior; works by sexologists were written primarily for a legal field trying to figure out what was "criminal" and punishable in a world turning away from religion. Symonds decided that if he could speak in the language of those who were seen as impartial experts, his ideas would carry more weight than if he continued to use the poetic tongue, which was already associated with weakness, sickness, and immorality.
Symonds approached such an expert, the sexologist Havelock Ellis, through a mutual acquaintance. Symonds -- perhaps moved by Whitman’s ideas of comradeship -- suggested the idea of collaborating on a “scientific” work. “I need someone of medical importance to collaborate with,” Symonds wrote his friend Edward Carpenter. “Alone, I could make but little effect -- the effect of an eccentric" (Letters, 797). Although they never met, Symonds and Ellis worked together on Sexual Inversion. Symonds role was always that of the submissive patient, and he repeatedly allowed Ellis to do whatever he wanted with his (Symonds's) own ideas. Symonds wrote to Ellis: “I never regarded myself as really competent to deal with the psychology of this matter, and my sense of a great injustice having been done by law and social opinion has made me less judicial than the treatment requires" (Letters, 755). Ellis agreed that Symonds was the lesser expert, and therefore the lesser author; he dispersed Symonds’s contributions throughout the book, not allowing Symonds’s real, unified voice to be heard.
In the end, Ellis would deliver Symonds more injustice by making him invisible, erasing him from this scientific part of history. Symonds’s objective voice would be rendered forever mute, as he has yet to receive much credit for being Sexual Inversion’s co-author.
So in that way, Symonds’s move away from the world of poetry was unsuccessful. Yet since the sixties he has received attention from scholars, like Grosskurth, Jeffrey Weeks, and Wayne Kostenbaum , who wrote that Symonds was the “secret hero” of Double Talk, his book on literary collaboration (Koestenbaum, 67). None of these scholars have been particularly interested in Symonds’s poetry. They focus instead on his unique and relatively quiet stance, in which he sought to, through scientific and philosophic argument, convince society that homosexuality was not a fault or a sickness, but something natural and inborn; something that, like Whitman’s love of comrades, could eventually become a positive force in society.
At the very least, Symonds could not have written his autobiography without having composed such a voluminous amount of highly emotional and personal poetry. The candor and self-awareness in it could not have come so easily if he had not relied on writing the way he did. Koestenbaum writes of Symonds’s autobiography as a “explicit if fumbling account, in alternately lyrical and dissecting prose, of his sexual, spiritual, and intellectual development -- a work remarkable for recognizing no border between growth as a writer and growth as homosexual (Koestenbaum, 43)”.
Looking at Symonds’s history and work, it seems fairly certain that Symonds’s groundbreaking sense of self was the product of his artistic voice and vision. If he had not spent a lifetime turning his desires into art, associating them with the beauty of the poetic, he would not have been able to render the proper context in which to find grace within what others saw as sinful and horrendous. Of course, he could not completely escape the feeling that his same-sex desires were monstrous. But his research showed that the world had not always frowned upon homosexuality, that homosexuality had historically been associated with people who he admired. His poetry explored the depth and breadth of his emotions and ideas on the subject; other poetry, like Whitman’s, laid down plans for a world where, at least in Symonds’ reading of it, homosexuality would have value and nobility. Therefore, although Symonds saw only harmfulness in writing hundreds of homoerotic poems, they can be seen as a key piece in Symonds’s quietly “heroic” place in gay history.