The Flight of an Odd Duck

I have been reading a number of books on everyday life in Britain in the Second World War recently and have been on the lookout for more titles to read. My friend Jack Walsdorf, bookseller, book collector, librarian and author of, among other things, a bibliography of Julian Symons, told me of the latter’s Notes from Another Country (1972). Having obtained a copy from a second-hand bookseller in Galway, I read this slim volume in a couple of hours and with enormous enjoyment.

Julian Symons (1912–94) was an odd duck – poet, magazine editor (of the influential Twentieth-century Verse), biographer (of people as various as Thomas Carlyle and Horatio Bottomley), historian of the General Strike, prolific and Edgar Award-winning detective story writer (of, among many others, The End of Solomon Grundy and The Belting Inheritance), and author of books on detective fiction (his Bloody Murder is still one of the very best studies of the English detective story). His older brother, A. J. A. Symons, wrote The Quest for Corvo (1934) about a far odder duck, the Englishman Frederick Rolfe, who styled himself Fr. Rolfe and Baron Corvo, without the benefit of either holy orders or an Italian peerage. Julian’s early years were spent in the shadow of a Micawber-like father, because of whom his family veered between plenty and penury, with the latter predominating. He left school at 14 and worked for years in the office of a rackety business run by another ineffectual dreamer. In the evenings he wrote poetry, read widely, played snooker and table tennis in Temperance Halls, and frequented cafés and pubs in which he managed to meet much of Thirties literary London. This book provides insight into how Symons’s unpromising beginnings led to his emergence as a substantial literary figure. Notes is not easily categorized. In at least one library catalogue it is described as ‘short stories’, but it can just as easily be viewed as a fragmentary memoir or a linked series of sketches from life. Symons writes, in the closing pages: ‘I have created a self-portrait mostly in terms of other people. What I have put down is not in every detail accurate, but it is all true in the sense that it expresses, as often a literal accuracy might not have done, “myself and my essence”.’ By turns mordantly funny and touching, it is a vivid picture of a life in a lost country. The book opens with Symons’s memories of playing cricket as a boy on Clapham Common with his friends and of a sad man in his twenties called ‘Bonzo’ (a Billy Bunter as rewritten by H. G. Wells or J. B. Priestley) who played with them, told fantastic stories of trying out for Surrey, and alternately cadged small sums of money from the boys and took them up West for a splurge. It all ended in tears. The next pieces treat of the deaths of Symons’s father and, later, his brother Maurice, with whom Symons played table tennis at the highest national level. Their stories are the stories of Symons’s adolescence. The chapter ‘A Glimpse of Thirties Sunlight’ tells how Julian Symons came to found Twentieth-century Verse with H. B. Mallalieu, how coteries of Thirties poets formed around that magazine and Geoffrey Grigson’s longer established New Verse, and how Symons made friends with the likes of Ruthven Todd, George Woodcock, Roy Fuller and other poets. Symons’s rich and closely observed characters include his employer for eleven years, Mr Budette, a business romantic who bought cheap and sold dear (in his case dynamos and small electrical appliances) and who seems to have spent as much time in the Albert pub as he did in their office in Victoria. Symons’s pen portrait of Cyril Y. Snaggs, who worked for Mr Budette in sales and was a man with a choleric manner and a ‘painfully firm’ handshake, is a masterpiece of tragi-comic description. He and the others seemed to Symons, in retrospect, fabulous figures for whom there is no longer a place: Snaggs, the most fabulous of them all, was ‘for all his bounce and bluster . . . a lost man in a lost world’. At the beginning of the Second World War, Symons was living with a Bohemian group of ineffectual revolutionary socialists in Denmark Hill. He was a wavering conscientious objector and when he appeared before a tribunal his objection was denied. He was faced with the prospect of prison or joining up and chose the latter, largely on the grounds that his new wife would benefit from a soldier’s allowance. He became a squadron clerk in the 57th Tank Regiment in Warminster, Wiltshire. Symons manages the near miracle of freshness in describing the quirky dreariness of barracks life, the bizarre cast of disparate characters, the stifling routines and unending petty evasions, and the stratagems he employed to remain in what was, after all, a cushy billet. Eventually he was found to have a medical condition that necessitated two operations. They left him with one arm incapacitated and so freed him from further military service. After the war, Symons went into advertising but, though he liked many of the people he met there, he found the work unendurable because of its ‘basic dishonesty’. George Orwell found him a job writing for the Manchester Evening News, but it was his success in having a detective novel accepted by Gollancz that enabled him to embark on a career as a full-time writer. It is there, in 1947, that this book ends. Though only a partial memoir, it is a small oblique masterpiece.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © Michael Gorman 2013