Crying in the Bathroom of The London Library
Is it odd to be in love with an obscure writer who has been dead for 130 years?
Is it odd to be in love with an obscure writer who has been dead for 130 years? Yes. Do I like that it's a bit odd? Yes. Am I worried that I am an ambivalent contributor to the gate keeping of him? Also yes.
John appeared again today. He was seated on a memorial bench in St James’ Square with his legs laxly crossed, his right hand in his lap, and his left loosely holding his resting cane against his thigh. Was I supposed to be concerned to see him watching me lie on the lawn? I’m not sure, but I felt a disquieting comfort. The bench was simmering with glittering early morning light, he nodded for me to come sit beside him. We both sat quietly watching the grassy spot where I had previously been; a patch of grass spangled with tiny daisies under the slanting Elm tree. Beneath the Elm’s new green, light danced like sparks; spinning and swaying with a palpable, ridiculous kind of magic. John leaned closer and told me a lewd joke about a nearby art installation, which appeared to us as the back of a giant bullhead atop an equally enormous naked (human) male torso. It was foregrounded by two budding red roses, threatening to bloom, one halfway more open than the other.
The first time John appeared to me, I was seated at my kitchen table. I was researching Victorian fin-de-siècle poets for a presentation for my class on Decadent writers. I had only chosen the course because it was (wo)manned by my favorite lecturer, and as always she did not disappoint. Although, at that moment I was questioning her choice to include some truly dreadful poems by Arthur Symonds. The worst of the few was one where he describes an “adorably white” women (purity or white supremacy or both?) laying on a white bed with her “tumbled skirts upon a chair”. Somehow (probably by Googling ‘Arthur Symonds gay’) I managed to find an article recalling his suppressed manuscript, which detailed his life as a closeted gay man. I was enthralled and read another article and then another. I went back to his poetry, could this explain why it was so awful? I then noticed that the articles I had been reading were about a writer named John Addington Symonds, and not the Arthur dipshit I was supposed to be researching.
In one of the articles, the author mentioned that John’s manuscript, which had been suppressed for over a century, was published in 2016, including one of his very rare surviving poems. I spent the next hour trying to find this poem, getting increasingly desperate; at one point emailing Jason at Imprints to see if I could special order the entire manuscript. In the end, I found it in a database connected to the uni. I read it with a relief that turned into grief, which is to say a deep, immediate love. I began to cry, which was really quite absurd because the poem is just about John being horny while watching naked men bathe in the Serpentine. If I had to defend my tears, I would say they had less to do with the poem and more to do with the suppression and then gatekeeping of what was just a horny little poem.
Elliot Freeman, writing on the ongoing failures of “Infrastructures of history” to hold queer stories, says:
“There is duality in the queer archive: absence magnifies presence, presence magnifies absence. At the crux of this tension, the archive is centred as both bane and benefactor of queer history; depriving with one hand and giving with the other.” (Freeman 34)
The London Library houses a million books according to their website. However, their archival department “collects, preserves and maintains” around 1800 items. The facade of the London Library is surprisingly understated. I don’t know what I had expected but looking up at the slender white building, with its undefined edges blurred into those surrounding it, I couldn’t help but feel a little underwhelmed. In between pale men in suits entering, I took a photo of the golden plaque above the doors. Perhaps I was trying to fashion a monument out of a white building just like any other on the street but it worked because by the time I got to the front counter I was buzzing again. The receptionist didn’t know what to do with me, I wasn’t a member like the men passing by the electric gates with the seamless swipe of a keycard. I said I had emailed the archivist and had an appointment. She found my name scribbled on a loose piece of paper. I was to buy a day pass, it became obvious this wasn’t a common thing as she pulled the eftpos machine out from a locked drawer. My excitement must’ve rubbed off on the receptionist because she gave me my locker key like she was passing on a wish, pushing a magical button behind the glass partition so I could enter.
I had to keep my belongings in a locker on the ground floor and anything I wanted to take up with me had to be placed into a plastic bag stamped with the London Library logo. I was given a map and told to meet the archive assistant “in the reading room”. The red carpeted staircase was lined the whole way up with portraits of famous writers who had been members of the library. Virginia Woolf. Charles Dickens. TS Elliot. EM Forster. I couldn’t help from hoping that the next one might be one of the glorious, campy photos of John, but he was nowhere to be seen, at least not in a framed portrait.
The second floor contained room after room of desks surrounded by books or art. I browsed the shelves but couldn’t hold my attention to a single title. I aimlessly picked up a recent collection of poems, opening it to a random page: Extract from Eclogue of Fire by John Kinsella, which began with the line “When I was nine I watched fire burning / through relieved rain.” John was winking at me again, refracted through this other John fellow. However, his dates were a little off, it was 2 weeks before my eleventh birthday that I watched my house burn from the bottom of the hill. My fire couldn’t be relieved from the rain from the CFS water bomb planes. Why was my John bringing my attention to burning? Perhaps, he wanted me to know that he had been with me a lot longer than I thought. Or maybe he wanted me to think about his own burnings; those that he ignited or watched throughout his life and beyond, but more on that later. I closed the book of poems and proceeded to get lost, and anxious, and had to ask a librarian to take me to the correct reading room. All the wandering through rooms had eaten into ten minutes of my allotted three hours with the manuscript.
The assistant stood up as I entered the room, gesturing to a small table in front of his desk before immediately sitting back down and continuing to type politely on his keyboard. On the table were two, enormous bound books. One of the grey covers was closed and set off to the side, the other was propped open to a page with a glued in note: Memoirs of J. A. Symonds the typed note declared and was dated from 1955. I sat incredibly still, not frozen, but trying to take in the moment. I was shocked by the amount of light drifting in through the various ajar windows. The room was ensconced by large, vibrant, contemporary paintings of women; all looking directly at the viewer so every time you looked up, the eyes of this matriarchy were on you. I looked back at the assistant, he did not look up. Was I supposed to turn the pages myself? I had expected more pageantry, white gloves or having to request him to turn the pages for me. Where did I get these lofty ideas from?
I struggled to turn the first page, I was genuinely terrified to touch it. It took several attempts. The first try, my sleeve brushed the pages, so I took off my overshirt. The second attempt, my bracelets rustled so I dropped them into my plastic bag. The third attempt, made me anxious about my rings. The fourth, I was worried about the potential stickiness of the Band-Aid housing a cut on my right index finger (from a fucking butter knife if you can believe it). I curled the finger into my palm and didn’t let it touch a single page. I felt time close in on me. My notes (written strictly in let pencil because pen ink might accidentally spoil the manuscript) start with logical descriptions in dot points, which slowly drift off:
Curled edges
Tea coloured flecks
Black ink
Margins ruled in led pencil
The light!
Sounds of construction workers somewhere outside
Haphazardly bound together. Written on seemingly scrap paper, some lined, mostly not.
Window looking out on a gray building outside (slightly purple in the sunlight) its gigantic slab perforated by only two small horizontal windows seemingly closed to nothing beyond them.
Taken by how messy / frantic his handwriting is… it looks boyish in an effeminate way like when I wrote with a fountain pen in primary school (gay).
Letters curled towards eachother like they want to touch as much of one another as possible.
I continued like this for eleven pages, written over the span of three hours, in between shaky turns of the 500+ pages. I did not move from my chair once. I did not pull my headphones up from their waiting place around my neck. Nor did I dare consider leaving the room for water.
Part of me worries that I like feeling as if John is mine, or that we share some special bond, because what is this if not the impulse to gatekeep? But I placate these worries with a fragile belief that they’re not true; ‘You’ll literally talk to anyone about him if/when you get the chance’, I try to convince myself. The most generous reading I allow myself is that it is less an active gatekeeping and more an ambivalent, limp wristed rattle against a pre-existing gate before closing it dutifully behind me. Is it this kind of ambivalence that keeps knowledge locked up inside impenetrable institutions?
This is what I was thinking about as I emerged from the library, clouded once again in that heavy kind of love that felt a little too much like grief for my liking. I worried I had grown too attached. “I feel John move through me, exist around me, speak to me, joke with me…” I wrote in my journal like a smitten teenager. I felt privy to a private connection between just the two of us, enhanced by gates, lockers, assistants, and the numerous, grave, serious men in suits at the surrounding desks. At one point, I slipped away from these men to go sob alone in a toilet cubicle. I don’t think I was sad, just very overwhelmed and no one else in the place seemed to be feeling anything at all.
I then mustered up the courage to ask a librarian if they knew where a 1890’s reference to “the courtyard of the London Library'' might've meant? He didn’t know and seemed a little annoyed that I was asking or continuing to ask follow up questions. I went back to Amber Regis’ Introduction to John’s manuscript. I (re)found the description from John’s Niece — who was told by the man who was entrusted with John’s unpublished work after his death — that he had “a bonfire in the garden [of the London Library] and burnt them all”, (evidently all except for his memoirs). It is easy to vilanise this act of burning, or let it punctuate John’s story; painting him as sadly omitted from history so quietly that he stood no chance next to the raging tragies of figures like Oscar Wilde (who was sentenced to hard labour for ”Gross Indecency” only a few years after John’s death).
However, it was John’s ability to hide in plain sight that kept him safe from persecution. In fact, throughout his life he asked his friends to burn his work after sending it to them to read. From what I believe, he did not leave his manuscripts to his friend solely so he could protect the work but also to protect his family in case the writing were to fall into the wrong hands and taint them along with the memory of him. To be clear, we are talking about a time period when even the mention of “indecent” acts had a contaminating effect on anyone who even mentioned such a thing. It was punishable in the British courts and faced hefty, irreversible social stigma. It is also worth noting that in the 1920s John’s youngest daughter, Katharine, upon hearing of the bonfire that was built supposedly for her sake, forthrightly disagreed. Further, insisted that the family— as a whole— did not condone the act. Actually, it was Katharine who is believed to have been the first one to be granted special access to John’s miraculously surviving memoir. It had been sealed inside the safe of the London Library, she discovered after years to trying to find it and then more of trying to access it.
While sitting in the Light Well, which was once a courtyard (potentially where John’s poems and pamphlets were incinerated) but has since been converted into yet another reading room, I choose to believe that knowledge and history, like matter, cannot be lost, only transformed. One of the reasons I am drawn to John is because he dodged the tropes of queer tragedy. While he had no language to describe his own experience and most of his attempts at articulating his experience have been lost, palpable fragments do remain. Some tangible examples include that he secretly coauthored Sexual Inversion by the German Sexologist Havelock Ellis, which was the first study of what we now call homosexuality. John was actually the first, that we know of, to use the term homosexual in the English Language (which he translated from German) in his book A Problem in Greek Ethics. History doesn’t remember it this way because he only privately printed it in 1883. Despite only making ten copies, and having his own copy burnt, the text has survived to this day. In a more intangible sense, I feel queer history — such as John’s story — in my body. It's in our gesture, dance, electric (im)pulse, and feverous joy. It’s in his presence, so close I can feel his laughter inside my own.
This feeling, that there is a private connection between him and I, doesn’t make logical sense for a number of reasons, including that I know for a fact that others have been and/or are entangled with him. For example, Shane Butler writes in his book The Passions of John Addington Symonds:
“I likewise have seemed to catch a fleeting glimpse of him looking back. Or rather, as I bought his books, read his letters, and retraced his steps from Bristol and beyond. I have sensed his presence in ways not fully reducible to the visual: a laugh, a sigh, a brush of his hand against mine.” (Butler xii).
Further, I only found John through other writers having written about him in (accidentally) Googleable ways. It wasn’t (just) magic that brought us together, it was the work of other writers finding and connecting to his works and story. But I can’t help but believe in the pious nature of him finding me. Deciphering how much of my entanglement with John is of my imagination or a higher power of some kind depends upon a question of belief. In other words, how much can I trust my feeling or am I experiencing some form of psychosis? To this I say, what is reality without feeling? And why must we be governed by logic and reason (as if they don’t also depend on feeling it out too)?
I step out from the electronic gates and weave my way through the tourists clouding Trafalgar Square. The heaviness of my love morphs into a gloating throb. “Oh, so you lot have spent your day out here, under the bronze gaze of the old king known for his love of pageantry and opium. The former directly influencing the royals to this day (most recently the absurd sights at Charles’ controversial coronation)”, I scoffed inside my head.
When I got back to my hostel, my bunk mates said they’ve been out shopping all day, because they “needed a break from sightseeing.” They politely asked what I’d been up to, and when I reluctantly said I’d been at the London Library for an invigilation of a manuscript from the 1800s their responses were two degrees from “wtf”.
I don’t want to believe that engaging with history —or the present for that matter— in any particular way makes me better than anyone else. It’s precisely this brand of uppity feeling that keeps the proverbial gates firmly locked. So long as the belief remains that only a special kind of person can or wants to engage with certain kinds of culture/artifacts/knowledges, then this “lively matter” (to borrow Jane Bennett’s turn of phrase) will continue to be gatekept. Due to my shock at being able to touch the manuscript with my porous, filthy human fingers I asked the archive assistant some questions before I left. Namely, “when is a text like this no longer allowed to be touched?” He seemed confused by my question, so I tried again, “You mentioned that the oldest texts in the stores are from the 1700s, are you suggesting that people are allowed to touch those too?” He explicitly said “yes” and implicitly said “of course”. I was left to interrogate my supposed prejudices of archives. It was true, I had pictured a dark, strict, and airtight container. However, according to that assistant, archives are in fact holding houses for touching (and being touched by) texts. But the question remains touched by whom?
Later on, I posted a queer coded message on an online backpackers messageboard asking if anyone would like to come with me to see Midsummer’s Night Dream at The Globe. A young Canadian responded and we met for pizza in Borough Market. I traversed seamlessly back into being just another tourist in the swarm. Over a shared margherita I told them about the conversation I had had with the assistant. They said “archives probably stop letting people touch stuff once too many people want to.” If this is true, how many people is too many? And who decides? I think of the old books (often religious texts) in museums that are kept in glass cases. Had I confused archives with museums? Perhaps. In those places, who decides which page lays open under the glass? Is it a logical decision or one just based on the feeling of the curator? Or, bare with me, does the text itself decide? What page of John’s life would I choose to lay open to your loving eyes if I was allowed to? Can you love something that is behind glass? Which is to say, can you feel it? Can it feel us?
Now, I’m holding back tears while waiting in line to buy a severely tourist-taxed soft serve. I realised after staring absently at the sign for a good ten minutes that I am at The Serpentine Bar and Restaurant. It’s going to sound ridiculous, but I had no idea where the Serpentine was. I imagined it as a river when I had read The Song of The Swimmer and had no clue it was the lake in Hyde Park. Now, I stand with my ice cream at the paved banks with a few hundred other people; all watching the blue paddle boats, swans, and ducks slip past ‘the no swimming or fishing’ signs.
Now, I am seated with my back against the trunk of an oak tree, just past the green striped deck chairs that you can hire for five pounds an hour.
Now, two men walk past with their arms around each other.
Now, I pluck a blade of grass and tuck it into my notebook.
Now, I am compulsively checking my maps app for other signs of John.
Now, I am standing before The Joy of Life Fountain. The monument drained of its water and the centrepiece of two lovers — without water to float in— are flying, frozen in midair. I stand looking at the muscular back of the suspended man. “Couldn’t you just burst like a star over that?” I say to John. He chuckles, smug that I’ve managed to turn a Rainer Maria Rilke poem into a cum joke.
With joy,
From Roisin
References:
Elliot Freeman, “Defying description: searching for queer history in institutional archives”, Archival Science, 2023.
Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion. Wilson and Macmillan, 1897
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2009.
John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics. Project Gutenbergberg, 2010.
John Addington Symonds, Ed. Amber K. Regis “The Song of The Swimmer”. The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
John Kinsella, “Extract from Eclogue of Fire” (I have no idea what collection I read this in but I believe it is part of his book The Pastoraclasm).
Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo: https://poets.org/poem/archaic-torso-apollo
Shane Butler, The Passions of John Addington Symonds. Oxford Academic, 2022.