There is one thing, however, that a print edition cannot do. It cannot recreate our haptic encounter with the material object: the sight and feel of Symonds’s handwritten pages. Print smoothes; it gives the impression of order, coherence, completion. But the manuscript is not a seamless text; it is replete with eccentricities and contingencies. My edition is not a surrogate; it is an artefact in its own right, a distinct version of Symonds’s text. As its editor, I hope the book will encourage readers to seek out the manuscript, to leaf through its pages, to discover its loquacious materiality.
14 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
Here I cannot hope to do full justice to the manuscript-as-object, but some brief forays, appropriately digressive and disjointed, might serve to pique interest (and the curious are reminded that permission to read the manuscript can be sought from the Enquiries desk in the Issue Hall). Towards the end of his Memoirs, Symonds pauses to reflect on the problems of writing a life. The egotism required for autobiography, far from beautifying the sitter, likely results in ‘the artistic error of depicting a psychological monster’ . For Symonds, ‘The report has to be
‘
The manuscript is not a seamless text; it is replete with eccentricities and contingencies
’
supplemented indeed, in order that a perfect portrait may be painted of the man’ . A significant portion of material in the Memoirs is supplementary, of a different order to the broadly linear, retrospective narration that forms its backbone. Symonds assembled the manuscript, collecting letters, diaries and poems to include among its pages. Many are the work of his own pen, his younger self: homoerotic poems, set in type and privately printed, are cut and pasted into the text; passages of lyrical prose are transcribed from letters and diaries. These extracts and documents provide an important counterbalance to autobiographical hindsight, with its unifying, simplifying and forgetful gaze. ‘No autobiographical resumption of facts after the lapse of twenty-five years, ’ he claimed, ‘[was] equal in veracity to such contemporary records’ . A small number of Symonds’s supplements, however, are the work of other hands: a letter from his sister’s governess, Sophie Girard; a letter from his former pupil and lover, Norman Moor; 9,000 words taken, quite literally, from his wife’s diary. Hearing these voices interrupt Symonds’s narrative is remarkable – wives and governesses do not often take centre stage in the written lives of Victorian men, and the figure of the male lover is all but absent. What is more, the sight and touch of these handwritten documents enables a different kind of encounter: contact, and imaginative re-embodiment. Moor’s careless, hard-to-read script, dealing frankly with the sexual culture of the British public school, bespeaks the confidence and privileges of his middleclass masculinity. Girard and Catherine Symonds, by contrast, write with looping precision in a legible hand, their letters well formed, and there is a pathos in the care taken over the writing of these
