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Victorian Poetry 39.3 (2001) 475-478



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Guide to the Year's Work

The Poets of the Nineties

Benjamin F. Fisher


In the present gathering of materials we confront heterogeneous quality, to say the least. A book that will doubtless draw many readers is Jerusha Hull McCormack's The Man Who Was Dorian Gray (St. Martin's, 2001), a biography of John Gray (1866-1934). A longtime writer on Gray, McCormack previously published John Gray: Poet, Dandy and Priest (1991), a far more worthwhile book than the present rewrite, as well as several shorter studies of Gray, plus a selective edition of his prose (1992). Why McCormack chose to rework her original biography into a somewhat expanded book wherein documentable events in Gray's life are linked with "fictive" passages is a question that I can not answer, but a suspect production is the result.

Anyone acquainted with Gray biography knows that he deliberately chose to suppress his early identity, as the most decadent of decadent poets during the 1890s, as one who converted from strong Low Church roots to Roman Catholicism, then launched into a season of lapses from that Catholicism, and as the model for Wilde's Dorian Gray. One is not certain whether his entering the priesthood is egg or chicken in such contexts, but once he undertook clerical duties he grew more and more austere as a religious figure. Father, much later Canon, Gray wished to eradicate knowledge about all of his early ventures, attempting to buy up and destroy copies of Silverpoints, that volume of arch-decadent verse which exemplified 1890s bookmaking as an art. Fittingly, this slender volume with ample page margins was published by the Bodley Head, the publishing firm so emphatically associated with books that were deemed avant garde in content and form. Gray soon became extremely reticent concerning his initial ventures into authorship and his associations with Wilde. Rather curiously in this light, since she "embroiders" repeatedly in creating dramatic scenes from his life, we find McCormack citing or repeating information about Gray's guardedness concerning any attempts to produce a biography of him, that guardedness being long carried on by surviving members of his family.

Moreover, McCormack herself admits her own and, implicitly, others' limits when Gray biography is in question, and some of the sources she cites repeatedly have long since lost credibility among serious scholars. Setting aside any hints of apology in the prefatory comments, one might well go to p. 263, for example, where we read words--which speak volumes--by a longtime friend of Gray, Peter Anson: "Did anyone ever understand John Gray?" I believe that we must respond with a decided [End Page 475] "No." At least, we must give a "No" because of several noticeable blanks for which McCormack provides no amplifications or clarifications, and which make the limits of her book the more striking. There is, for example, only the scantiest of scant documentation extant from the Wilde-Gray, the Sherard-Gray, or the Louÿs-Gray correspondence (p. 183)--which might prove interesting to 90s specialists. There is the vagueness concerning Gray's travel to Edinburgh in December 1893 (p. 149).There is a miscontextualizing of Ricketts' remark (p. 118), which was not made directly to Gray, as McCormack's presentation implies, and which was made in print years after the event McCormack presents had occurred. There are lacunae in other potentially revelatory bodies of documents (many of them probably destroyed by Gray himself). As to citations from unreliable sources, one may well ask why in the year 2000 we find McCormack drawing upon Frances Winwar's long superseded Oscar Wilde and the Yellow Nineties (1940)?

Truth to tell, John Gray's poems, fiction, and essays are far more interesting, or they probably should be, than the selected remains of biographical nature may permit us to know. McCormack's supposed details can exasperate a serious reader. Did Gray really call Raffalovich "Raffy"? Did Gray and Arthur Symons have the verbal interchanges McCormack offers as scenarios? Did some of the other events and conversations take place as...

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