fell in love with one of his male students. He published some poetry, often changing the gender of the pronouns, while also privately printing “more explicit pieces” to share with friends. As the effects of tuberculosis became more acute, he moved the family to Davos, Switzerland. He frequently traveled further south, especially to Venice, where he made the acquaintance of the gondolier Angelo Fusato and brought him into the family, so to speak. In Davos, Symonds established a collegial friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson, author of such popular fare as Treasure Island and Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, who was a fellow disabled person. In a middle chapter subtitled “Symonds, Stevenson, and the Divided Self,” Butler uses the duality posed in Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde to interrogate the unlikely friendship of the two writers and Symonds’ rather tortured psychic life and his avoidance of uttering some core personal mystery. Symonds also engaged in what Butler describes as a “somewhat anguished correspondence” with the American poet Walt Whitman, which was generally an exchange of mutual regard. Yet when Symonds pressed the American bard for more frank clarification of the “sexual implications” in Leaves of Grass, the wily Whitman replied in a manner that struck Symonds as a near brutal rebuff, for he repudiated any such intended construction of the “Calamus” poems. Throughout the years before and after the onset of his illness, Symonds wrote prolifically, including work on Greek sexuality that would become his influential, privately printed essay A Problem in Greek Ethics, the companion toA Problem in Modern Ethics. This pair of volumes became the foundation for his “collaboration by correspondence” with Havelock Ellis onSexual Inversion.Meanwhile, Symonds’ seven-volume study, The Renaissance in Italy, was published between 1875 and 1886. While Butler’s biographical summary is covered in a few pages in the introduction, the preamble runs to 41 pages. Near the end, he feels required to make the following statement: “Occasional stretches of the book to follow will seem not to be ‘about’ Symonds, stricto sensu. Or rather, this book will oscillate between two meanings of ‘about.’ Sometimes, Symonds will be our central subject. At other times, our attention will be directed instead to things that swirl around and about his thought and work.” Just how “occasional” these stretches are is open to question, for we might justly characterize each of Butler’s chapters as detours of argumentation prompted by a text, a renowned literary personage, or a work of art, or all combined. Some of these detours provide piquant information or propose provocative lines of inquiry. In an early chapter on Dante, Butler spends time on the matter of the photographic frontispiece Symonds used for An Introduction to the Study of Dante, first published in 1872. The image was a plaster cast of the purported death-mask of the Italian poet, though not captioned in the first edition. Butler takes pains to detail the source of Symonds’ misattribution but then offers mini-treatises on the place of photography—that new invention from the mid-19th-century—in documenting the Symonds family, in the collecting habits of period photo-erotica by Symonds himself; in the medium’s integration into printed books; and in jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes perfecting an inexpensive “stereoscope” that enabled viewers to examine “pairs of photographs taken from slightly different vantage points that, with one placed before each eye, generated the illusion of a three-dimensional view.” We then move to philosophical ruminations on this “opto-haptic nexus” and how “sculpture is always an invitation to touch, or at least an invitation to imagine touching” and eventually, how the “the stereoscope’s synthetic illusions ... themselves depend on the eye’s learned ability to function as a shortcut to knowledge that would otherwise have to be obtained through movement and touch.” It’s easy to imagine a reader losing track of the main argument— and this doesn’t even consider the many content footnotes that support particular lines of inquiry or inject some fresh parenthetical reflection by Professor Butler. One of Butler’s principal objectives is to give Symonds the credit he’s due, credit that was withheld in part as a consequence of his early death at age 52. Another factor is the complicated history through which Symonds’ private letters, memoirs, and other papers were either suppressed, embargoed, or thrown to the fire. His Memoirs, “two hulking manuscript volumes,” for example, were given over to the private, subscription-based London Library in 1926 by Symonds’ friend and literary executor, Horatio Forbes Brown, who imposed a long embargo on consultation or publication that lasted until 1984. Brown was also Symonds’ first biographer, making use of the memoirs but selectively editing material referencing the writer’s “homosexual life” so as to protect such knowledge as a “‘secret’ to the THE PASSIONS OF JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS by Shane Butler Oxford University Press 389 pages, $129.99 22 TheG&LR
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