The Suicide of Henry Symons----bookman of the British Museum

“There is a Museum story that when a member of the staff committed suicide in this room ( the Cracherode) by shooting himself his superior’s first reaction was : ‘Did he damage the book bindings ?”

It sounds like one of those apocryphal remarks that are handed down from employee to employee through the decades in great institutions , but according to Barry C Johnson, author of a booklet entitled, A British Museum Legend (privately printed 1984), it was probably a genuine expression of concern by the Keeper of Books for his valuable  charges. The suicide in question had taken place in 1922, but as Johnson remarks in his account of the events leading up to the tragedy, no-one he spoke to about the event could recall the name of the unfortunate Assistant Keeper.

His name was, in fact, Henry Symons, and it would seem that he was a well liked and respected figure both at work and at home, though contemporaries agree that he was very reserved and essentially a loner. His low profile at the BM combined with the fact that he doesn’t seem to have published anything of note, or left any personal diaries and only a few letters, made the job of Johnson as biographer, a challenging one,

Harry Crosby remembered (1930)

Harry & Caresse Crosby

A personal note by Stuart Gilbert published in transition (Paris, June 1930) 6 months after Harry Crosby's suicide. Gilbert was a literary scholar and translator - he assisted in the translation of  Ulysses into French and was also a friend and correspondent of Joyce. This affectionate memoir of Crosby was not (until now)  available on the web.

“ Let us suppose, ” Montaigne has written, “ that a plank is fixed between the twin towers of Notre Dame Cathedral, quite wide enough for a man to walk along it; however great may be our philosophical wisdom, however staunch our courage, they will not embolden us to walk that plank as securely as we should, were it resting on the ground.”

The mere thought of that dizzy walk in air between the skyey towers, above Our Lady’s pinnacles, was enough, a later writer tells us, to make some of Montaigne’s readers blanch and sweat with fear. And yet how jauntily you and I parade that selfsame plank when it is laid out on the pavement of normal experience, little plainmen who rarely lift eyes above

the shop windows and studiously avert our gaze from the insistence of the sun!

Harry Crosby could stroll that dizzy, aerial plank as easily, as carefree,as though he were walking down a garden alley of his country home;not that, through defect of imagination, he ignored the danger, but because he knew and welcomed it. If he ever felt a qualm of vertigo, it was, I imagine when he tried to walk the plank laid out on terra firma, that safe and sensible promenade of whimpering “ hollow men". He feared

the terre a terre, the normal, as most of us fear celestial heights. Seeing Harry Crosby for the first time, one was at once impressed by the lithe, faunal elegance of his poise, but most of all, perhaps, by the curious remoteness of his gaze. In the Parisian salon where we first met he seemed out of place, unseeing, as though his eyes, by some trick of long-sightedness or a queer Roentgen quality of their own were watching some aerial pageant across the walls, out in the blue beyond. Such aloofness was almost disconcerting at first;  "a difficult man," one thought, "and perhaps an arrogant man," and turned for solace to the Marie Laurencin

flowers, pink and blue petals of artificial light glimmering from the wall. But, when one spoke to him, there was nothing aloof, nothing of arrogance, in Harry Crosby. An expert in the conversational vol plané, he could descend without the least gesture of condescension from his eyrie and

talk lightheartedly of the latest recipe for cocktails and the dilative influence of limp Parisian ice on their gay Gordon hearts, or of his latest trouvaille in New York ‘slanguage’.

I never heard him speak ill, or harshly, of any individual -and that is

to say much ; his only enemies were Mrs Grundy and Mr Bowdler, legendary

types. He never refused a service to a friend or even an acquaintance,

and his generosity was unbounded, whether it was a case of paying the fine

of some reveller whom the local police had sequestrated or of saving a

poet on the rocks.

Clearest, perhaps, of my memories of Harry Crosby is an interminable

automobile drive from a country village where I was staying, to Saint-

Dizier, where transition is printed. Summer was ending and from vineyards

stripped of a record grape-harvest (the wine of 1929 will yet be talked of

when you and I are dead) wraiths of night mist were creeping to blur the

pale French roads.

Sylvia Plath & the Professor

In a recent post we mentioned a book by Professor Trevor Thomas Sylvia Plath-Last Encounters (Bedford 1989). Having now obtained a rare (signed) copy the text contradicts our last piece on Sylvia Plath where some Camden / Regents Park locals (and friends of the professor) suggest Thomas only met her once, very shortly before her suicide. While not substantial his book must be over 10000 words. He says of Sylvia:

 I think it would be correct to say that I did not positively dislike her. She was not someone to get to know intimately at short notice, certainly not in the stressful circumstances in which we met. Because of my domestic situation I was very cautious about risking any scandal. She tended to be a self-centred person not letting herself become involved with other people's problems. Never at any time did she wonder about me and my sons and what stress we might be under. Nor did she manifested any interest in my paintings nor in what I did. The world revolved around her. This self preoccupation I have observed in  other creative people.

  Sylvia Plath lived in Fitzroy Road, Camden Town in a house where W. B. Yeats had lived. TT says she was very keen to get the place because of the Yeats connection. She would ask him favours like help in getting her car started. He writes

of a local ironmonger who asked him if he ever saw 'any of the  Willies (Yeats) ghosts around. Queer goings-on, the seances and those women, and some say black magic and plenty of carry-on.' The last part of the book has Professor T's channelled poems that came to him in the nights after her death (he was also suffering from some gas poisoning)- here is the first: 

Involved

We were involved  involuntarily

The garbage and perambulator
Between  the red blood fog
And the quiet extinction.

We were so happy you cried.

Not we but them,
The non-lovers of the
Momentary dream in Spain
Or Moroccan sun
That will not cleanse
Nor bleach the heart's tissue, 
Know but the ashes
And the dust of lust.

Will you be here? 
I am not sure
A threepence for the stamp
And you waiting
Outside
Only a door between
The compassion and eternity.

He showed the poems to a Dr Horder - 'he did not reject them or the experience.. he said she was known to have a powerful aura or psychic presence.' He also showed the poems to the 'renowned critic' A. Alvarez who 'more or less dismissed them' as a reflection of subconscious guilt about the professor's wife and children. The red cover is by Trevor Thomas.