Text and Context in John Gray's Park: Prester John's "Black Mischief"

Text and Context in John Gray's Park: Préster John's "Black Mischief" Philip Healy Westminster College, Oxford JOHN GRAY'S NOVELLA Park has puzzled readers ever since it was published in 1932. Eric Gill, who printed the book for the publishers Sheed and Ward, was one of the first to express his puzzlement ; he called it "a thoroughly weird business."1 Alexandra Zaina writes of the reader being "constantly fidgeted by the feeling that some esoteric joke is being played on him, the sense of which just escapes him."2 Jerusha McCormack sees the puzzle as in fact the theme of the book: No one really understands Park: not Park himself, nor the reader, nor his creator. The fact itself should be grounds enough for tragedy. Consciously, the story is never presented as tragic, only as a problem, the kind of puzzle to which the reader is sure there is a solution but which is in fact insoluble. If anything, Park is about the misery of blank disorientation, of a white man lost in black country, lost to his time, lost to himself.3 Yet the story of a Catholic priest who undergoes a strange experience whilst on a walking tour of the Cotswolds and dreams that he has awoken in a black theocracy with the white population living a subterranean existence calls out for a "solution." In a review article of Brocard Sewell's In the Dorian Mode, Isobel Murray has provided an excellent conspectus of the significant readings of Park.4 Her essay is a good point of departure in my attempt to solve the puzzle of Park, for Murray records "at least seven stages in appreciation of the novella."6 The first comes from Father Sewell's contribution to Two Friends, which Murray accurately describes as "one of the most potentially provocative and helpful remarks about the novel." Father Sewell reminds us of Gray's background: "Is Park the most 413 ELT 36:4 1993 priestly novel in the language?... Park is perhaps the only English novel of which it could be said that it must have been written by a priest."6 The second stage of appreciation comes from Alexandra Zaina's "The Prose Writings of John Gray," also in Two Friends. Zaina puts Park in context by reference to an early story of Gray's, The Advantages of Civilization": "It is perhaps significant that already in this story of 1893 it is the white men who are made to look fools."7 She sets out the evidence for Gray's sympathy with "the black man." Bernard Bergonzi's introduction to the second edition of Park provides the third stage, where Bergonzi emphasizes Gray the stylist and discourages "a large-scale symbolic explication."8 The fourth stage is Ruth Z. Temple's "The Other Choice: The Worlds of John Gray, Poet and Priest." Murray correctly values Temple's authoritative discussion and recognizes her appreciation of the quality of Gray's writing, but questions the degree of "serenity " that Dr. Temple finds in Park. Murray finds the fifth stage of interpretation of Park, G. A. Cevasco's John Gray (1982), "disappointing ," because, when Cevasco published his critical study in the Twayne's English Authors series, texts of Gray's works were not easily available. As a consequence too much of his book is taken up with description and quotation and not enough space devoted to analysis.9 The sixth stage is Jerusha McCormack's recent critical biography of Gray.10 McCormack discusses the relationship between the mask she believes that Gray adopted throughout his life, whether as dandy or priest, and his inner self. She rightly distinguishes between explaining the origins of Park and its significance, arguing that "what the story delineates is no less than a psychic map of the consciousness of John Gray": Ί have a sense I have nowhere else that I am within the mind of John Gray, subject to all its preoccupations, all its quirks, not the least of which is a deliberate suppression of significance." She finds the report of the commission of enquiry into Park "an objective correlative" to her own enquiry into Gray's life. For McCormack the...