Julian Symons

Julian Symons novel Sweet Adelaide was published earlier this year. His book of essays, Critical Observations, will appear next spring.

Letter

Teaching happily

5 December 1991

In a moment of mental aberration I said Randall Jarrell spent much of his life teaching happily at the University of South Carolina (LRB, 5 December 1991). Wrong. It was at the Women’s College of the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, though ‘teaching happily’ is correct. My apologies to his shade.
Letter

Outsider

15 August 1991

I am sorry that the words ‘patriotic German’ applied to Michael Hamburger’s father (who won the Iron Cross in World War One) should seem offensive (Letters, 12 September). Perhaps ‘good German’ would have been more acceptable, though it has a slightly canting sound I dislike.‘An outsider’: the point is that from adolescence Hamburger was an outsider in England who wanted to become an...
Letter

Burlington Bertie

14 June 1990

Norman Potter (Letters, 26 July) should read what I said more closely before writing that I found in Herbert Read only a ‘miserable catalogue of insufficiencies’. I praised him as a gentle man, for the most part saintly, a writer of cool orderly prose, the man who helped to purge the British of their inter-war artistic insularity. I can’t understand what he means by saying I rewrote the biography...
Letter

Uck

22 June 1989

‘Lewis’s manner tends to cancel itself out, to vanish up its own arsehole, as he himself might have put it,’ John Bayley writes in his review of The Essential Wyndham Lewis (LRB, 22 June). As he himself emphatically would not have put it, rather. The writer who early on expressed ‘my naif determination to have no “Words Ending in -Uck, -Unt and -Ugger" ’ certainly wouldn’t have made an...

Pieces about Julian Symons in the LRB

Diamond Daggers

Stephen Wall, 28 June 1990

Death’s Darkest Face is Julian Symons’s 27th crime story, and its appearance coincides with an award (the Diamond Dagger) for his long service to the genre. This isn’t quite...

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Porcupined

John Bayley, 22 June 1989

There is a cartoon by Beerbohm somewhere showing a distended G.K. Chesterton banging the table with his fist and saying he’d ‘had enough of all this bloody nonsense’. It seems...

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Barriers of Silliness

J.I.M. Stewart, 1 July 1982

The first of Julian Symons’s ‘original investigations’, entitled ‘How a hermit was disturbed in his retirement’, is an apocryphal Sherlock Holmes story in which the...

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