Posted on 11/13/2006 8:16:04 AM PST by dighton
John Symonds, who died on October 21 aged 92, was the prolific author of imaginative, quirky fantasies, though he was better known as the literary executor and biographer of the voluptuary, occultist and megalomaniac Aleister Crowley (1875-1947).
Symonds met Crowley a year before his death, at a Hastings boarding house where the self-styled “Beast 666” was eking out his squalid final months as a spent mage on a diet of gin and heroin. Crowley’s will, which he apparently concocted himself, vested the copyright of his works in Symonds and made him his literary executor.
Symonds was initially fascinated by Crowley, but as time went on and his own political outlook moved from Left to Right, he became increasingly critical of the occultist’s lifestyle and ideas, particularly his advocacy of drugs and unrestricted sex. Although he edited and published (with Kenneth Grant) Crowley’s Autohagiography, and other books by Crowley, he provided an antidote to Crowley’s swashbuckling swankiness in his own four lively books on him: The Great Beast (1952), The Magic of Aleister Crowley (1958), The King of the Shadow Realm (1989) and Beast 666 (1997).
Although it did little damage to sales of his books, Symonds tended to deplore the recent public fascination with Crowley: “It’s strange that this wicked chap — and he was an evil fellow — should become, with the breakdown of society, a cult hero,” he said. “Crowley would have been shocked — he was a Victorian — by the extent to which the world has taken up his doctrine and rites. The lack of magic propriety would have shocked him.”
While he made no secret of his own disapproval, he enlivened his accounts of Crowley’s life with humorous anecdotes, recalling, for example, how, after his move to Boleskine House overlooking Loch Ness, Crowley had written to the local Vigilance Society complaining that “prostitution is most unpleasantly conspicuous” in the area. The society sent round an observer who found no evidence. Crowley wrote back: “Conspicuous by its absence, you fools!”
Why “the wickedest man in the world” entrusted Symonds with his literary legacy and reputation was a little puzzling, though it is possible that Symonds was the only sane and reliable person whom Crowley would have known. Possibly, too, Crowley sensed something sympathetic in Symonds’s unconventional and sometimes disconcerting imagination, which he expressed in a series of novels, plays and children’s books published after the war.
John Symonds was born on March 12 1914. His father, Robert Wemyss Symonds, was an eminent architect and an expert on antique furniture and clocks. His mother was a woman of Lithuanian origin with whom his father had had an affair. Because of his illegitimacy, John had a difficult childhood. His father, who later married “respectably”, refused to acknowledge him as his son and he was raised by his mother, who kept a boarding house in Margate.
Aged 16 John moved to London, where he set about educating himself at the British Museum Library. He then became a journalist working for Hulton Press on the Picture Post, writing reviews, poetry and short stories, and working as an editor on Hulton’s literary magazine Lilliput. He got to know George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender and Bill Naughton, and became the confidant of Peggy Ramsay, Joe Orton’s literary agent. He also re-established some sort of relationship with his father, who made use of him to research his books on antiques — research that provided Symonds with the background for some of his subsequent novels.
Exempted from military service, Symonds established his reputation as a biographer with The Great Beast, though fiction became his main genre. His first novel, William Waste (1947), a gothic fantasy, was followed by The Lady in the Tower (1955), a macabre love story set among antiques, clocks and curio collections. Another love story, A Girl Among Poets (1957), set in bohemian London, won praise from John Betjeman, who noted its author’s “gift for describing farcical situations”.
Among several children’s books, The Magic Currant Bun (1953, with illustrations by André François) concerns a boy chasing a magic bun through the streets of Paris. Isle of Cats (1955, with illustrations by Gerard Hoffnung) was a magic fantasy about felines; Lottie (1957), the story of a foundling dog and a speaking doll, was illustrated by Edward Ardizzone. Ardizzone also provided the illustrations for Elfrida and the Pig (1959), about a clever little girl who is not allowed dolls.
Symonds returned to biography in 1959 with Madame Blavatsky, Medium and Magician, an entertaining account of the life of the founder of Theosophy, a sharp-tongued medium who is said to have levitated her 17-stone self to a chandelier to light her cigarette. Thomas Brown and the Angels (1961) concerned a Methodist who, in 1798, was attracted to the Shakers, a prophetic celibate sect, hovering on their edge and making converts while never quite managing to convince himself.
Bezill (1962), a gothic fantasy, was followed by Light Over Water (1963), about a young journalist who delves into the world of magic and the occult. In With a View on the Palace (1966), a Russian highbrow film director suffering from basilicomania (fascination with the Royal Family) rents a flat overlooking Buckingham Palace, from where he can observe King George V from the window of his lavatory.
The Stuffed Dog (1967) concerns two girls who discover, in an attic, a life-like doll which has a man’s voice, stolen from her former ventriloquist. In Prophesy and the Parasites (1973), a wealthy and still-attractive widow waits for prospective suitors to come and tap her wealth. The Shaven Head (1974) concerns a dysfunctional household riddled with Freudian complexes. In Letters from England (1975) a humble German veteran of Stalingrad answers an advertisement to work as an au pair for a London doctor — who turns out to be female and a sado-masochist. In The Child (1976) a young girl founds her own religion.
Symonds also became friend and literary executor to Gerald Hamilton, an adventurer and reprobate whom Christopher Isherwood used as his model for Mr Norris in Mr Norris Changes Trains, the classic novel of Berlin in the Weimar era. In 1974 Symonds published Conversations with Gerald, an entertaining account of Hamilton’s scandalous adventures.
Symonds could be an intellectually aggressive man, and he was fiercely protective of his status as Aleister Crowley’s literary executor and copyright owner. This led to problems when publishers or film directors sought to ride the wave of Crowley’s notoriety, and led to a number of actual or threatened lawsuits. It was rumoured that Symonds once threatened to turn an eminent publisher into a frog, though he claimed, when asked, that the threat had been issued “in the friendliest possible way”.
Symonds was more successful as a novelist and biographer than as a playwright, and although he wrote a total of 26 volumes of plays published by Pindar Press, very few were ever performed. In 1961 he won critical praise for I, Having Dreamt, Awake, a play for ITV about a prodigal son and con-man who dreams up a fortune in America and returns home to dazzle the rest of his down-at-heel family in the London suburbs. His last play, The Poison Maker, about incest and occultism, was performed at the Old Red Lion Theatre, Islington, earlier this year and produced by his son Tom.
After a brief marriage to Hedwig Feuerstein, Symonds married, in 1945, Renata Israel, who survives him with their two sons.
Ah yes, Blavatasky. One of the founders of New Age spiritualism.
How curious. Don't we have a FReeper using that name?
Breakfast of champions.
TC...don't tell me you voted for that dead soil and water commission guy down there. /facepalm
}:-)4
I did!
Okay, I laughed.
If so, ask Madame Blavatsky for his whereabouts.
Glad somebody made some money off that sleaze Crowley.
Shucks. All the really neat things happened before video cameras were invented.
Wow, 17 stone!
These stories always leave out the good stuff. Did he do it?
RIP.
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