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Ian Venables on John Addington Symonds
All heroes are teachers
in some extraordinary way and for me John Addington Symonds is without
doubt one such hero. A name that is now only occasionally mentioned
in the margins of history but who through his life has taught me so
much about what it is to be human and what it is to have ‘courage’.
The ‘courage to be’, the ‘courage to face adversity’ and the ‘courage
to become’. These special qualities he had in abundance and through
his life and work he has been for me a fixed point and a mentor. My
chance discovery of him in 1991 was a revelation and it quickly developed
into a something of a passionate obsession. Like so many wonderful discoveries
in life it led me in a new creative direction. I think it is no coincidence
that my re- discovery of the art of song writing was to a great extent
ignited by my intense desire to respond musically to Symonds’s poetry.
What lay behind my passionate enthusiasm for his work was closely bound
up with my own deep-seated feelings about my sexual identity. The world
seems to have credited Havelock Ellis with the first ground-breaking
work on the subject of homosexuality, but there on the cover of the
first edition of ‘Sexual Inversion’ (1897) for all to see, stands the
name of John Addington Symonds. It was h
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e who started
the initial research and made contact with Ellis and through their voluminous
correspondence the idea for a book immerged. Sadly, Symonds died before
he could see the book in print but nevertheless he is the unsung hero
and pathfinder from which our contemporary understanding of the subject
has been shaped. My apologies for this rather long-winded digression
but I think it is important to explain what motives lay behind Symonds’
own creative work and especially his poetry. Without going into too
much detail, the major part of his published poetry was drawn from a
reservoir of unpublished ‘gay’ poetry that he had been writing throughout
his adult life. However, when he came to publish it, he had to emasculate
it by changing all the pronouns to the feminine so as not to ‘give the
game away’. This is why his verse sounded an inauthentic note to his
Victorian readership. I am not in any way suggesting that he is a first
rank poet whose genius has somehow lain undiscovered all these years,
but rather that his true poetic voice has been obscured by this fact.
It is this ‘L’amour impossible’ that lies at the heart of both my Love’s
Voice Op.22 and ‘Songs of Eternity and Sorrow’ Op.36 cycles. Although
John Addington Symonds has been an important influence upon my creative
life, in the end his true significance is his humanness. In 1998, there
was convened, the first ever conference at Bristol University to commemorate
Symonds’s life and works. I spent the year before in collaboration with
Annie Burnside - the Warden of Clifton Hill House – Symonds’s former
home, organising the guest speakers and bringing the programme together.
I count this memorable event as one of the highlights of my life and
at the end of a magical weekend the conference concluded with a song
recital given by the tenor Kevin McLean-Mair and my partner Graham Lloyd,
that included my Symonds settings. Just before the recital began, I
said a few words to the audience that summed up what Symonds meant to
me. “Little more than a century separates us from his world, however,
his particular qualities as an individual stand out as an example to
us all – his unflinching devotion to the Truth and his continual fight
against hypocrisy and prejudice has a special relevance to our society
in its search for meaning”. I ended my introduction with Symonds’s own
words: ‘Experience of life, often extremely bitter, at times unexpectedly
blissful, has taught me that there is nothing extraordinarily great
in the greatest of achievements, nothing mean in the meanest of occupations;
briefly that human life is not to be estimated by what men perform but
by what they are’.