Julian Symons’s first book: a short collection of poems from the Fortune Press
A Debut Volume of Poems
Confusions about X is a collection of poems, and it is the first book by Julian Symons to appear in print. It was published in London by the Fortune Press in 1939, in a small octavo format running to forty-seven pages followed by a single unnumbered leaf. The volume is brief even by the standards of the poetry pamphlet and slim first collections of its period, and its physical description places it firmly in the modest, handsomely produced tradition of small-press English verse publication rather than in the commercial mainstream.
A Title That Withholds Its Subject
The book’s title is built around an unspecified quantity. It announces confusion, and then declines to say what the confusion concerns: X is left standing as a blank, an algebraic placeholder rather than a named thing, person or idea. That act of withholding is the most immediately distinctive feature of the book as a published object — the reader is given a problem with its terms unstated. What the poems themselves make of that opening is not something the title, or any surviving description of the volume, resolves.
The Wyndham Lewis Frontispiece
The volume carries a portrait frontispiece by Wyndham Lewis, the painter, novelist and controversialist, whose involvement gives the debut a notable association. The presence of a commissioned portrait plate in so short a book is a mark of the care taken over its production, and it makes the physical copy of Confusions about X as much a piece of designed bookmaking as a gathering of poems. Library descriptions record the frontispiece alongside the pagination and format as one of the volume’s defining characteristics.
A Beginning Rather Than a Landmark
Confusions about X is significant chiefly as a starting point: it is the book with which Symons, later far better known for his work in other forms, entered print. Its interest for readers now lies in that priority — a first collection, issued by a small London press, in a short print run and a deliberately understated format, before its author had any public reputation to trade on. Beyond its status as a debut, the record of the volume is essentially bibliographic: a title, a publisher, a date, a page count, and an artist’s frontispiece.
The Morgan Library & Museum’s copy (accession number PML 192258) is recorded as having some pages uncut. It was a bequest of Kenneth A. Lohf in 2002, with Kenneth A. Lohf, New York, listed as provenance. That copy is inscribed by Symons on March 24, 1948, to “Vnicent [sic] Marrot,” with the inscription “an object for critical taget practice!” [sic]. Another copy, described by James Cummins Bookseller, is inscribed on the front flyleaf to the poet Samuel French Morse in the month and year of publication: “Samuel French Morse/ with most sincere regards/ from Julian Symons/ 19th January 1939.”
Bindings and Catalog Records
The Morgan copy is described as black cloth over boards, stamped in gold on the spine, with a tan dust jacket as issued, printed in red, and a red cloth slipcase. The Cummins copy is described as green cloth, slightly rubbed, else a near fine copy; the bookseller’s entry cites d’Arch Smith, Handlist, 538, and Walsdorf B9, and notes Walsdorf’s conjecture that the book was published “circa December 1938.” HathiTrust’s catalog record lists the language as English and gives the imprint as London, Fortune Press, “[1928?]”; the same catalog also records the author as Symons, Julian, 1912-1994.
