A Fresh Look at an Almost Forgotten Writer

He tries too hard for verbal effect. Referring to Hastings, he comments: "The battle itself took place at Battle"; referring to castles in Kent: "The castles keep"; referring to Crane's early death: "he was a beginner at the end"; the list could continue. Occasionally he takes an earlier expression of verbal virtuosity (Pope's "What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed") and deflowers It: "The problem for the artist, then, is to find some sufficiently available innovative context for the old, old truths." He also becomes redundant: "five major talents worked in close proximity." In a book numbering two hundred twenty-four pages, Delbanco has written about one hundred seventy of text with copious margins good for annotation. This reviewer was especially frustrated when he realized, reading the last chapter, that Delbanco was obviously tired of his effort, and perhaps wanted to get to other things: The Polish word for paradise ... is pronounced "rye." Conrad would have found the coincidence pleasant and remarked upon it once or twice —perhaps even habitually—to his conferees in heaven. I have no doubt of this but cannot document it and have therefore (till this paragraph) left the pun alone. So, too, with much that's much more consequential: their politics, their sexual proclivities,_ their neuroses, poetry, siblings , and clothes. Group Portrait will have served its turn if a great deal remains still to say. This is not enough. He ought to have filled about thirty more of those two hundred twenty-four pages with incisive comment not dependent on the research of others. On two of the fourteen pages preceding the beginning of the text Delbanco acknowledges a list of critics who have read portions of the manuscript; classes of students who for two years helped him develop his arguments; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for support; various editors of the William Morrow Company who "shared in the project"; and "strangers [who] have willingly offered their aid, and scholars their attention." It is a shame that no one who helped to form Delbanco's own group portrait in the prefatory pages apparently read the work carefully enough to suggest that the editor place, on page 107, a [sic] after the spelling of Nostromo's "Capataz de Cargardores." Ray Stevens Western Maryland College 4. A FRESH LOOK AT AN ALMOST FORGOTTEN WRITER G. A. Cevasco. John Gray. Boston: Twayne, 1982. $17.95 Professor G. A. Cevasco of St. John's University, known to ELT readers as the compiler of primary and secondary bibliographies of John Gray [19:1 (1976)], has now written an excellent and expertly documented account of this all but forgotten writer, who generally is remembered only as a minor decadent poet of the 1890s. Actually, John Gray holds a rather ambiguous place in English literature. Although his name is frequently mentioned in passing by the authors of the various studies of the 1890s, they take little note of the fact that his productive life as 322 a writer continued, somewhat irregularly, until his death in 1934 as Canon John Gray, an honored parish priest in Edinburgh. Professor Cevasco, however, surveys his entire career, going far beyond those accounts in which, when Gray is mentioned, it is generally for his association with Wilde, Beardsley and others of the fin de siècle period, or for his conversion to Catholoclsm and subsequent taking of holy orders. Though perhaps he is most frequently referred to as the author of a volume of poetry, Sllverpolnts, which, according to one expert, is "generally considered to be completely typical of the book production of the nineties." When Sllverpolnts Is mentioned, it is not for its literary merits, but rather for its outward aspects of design, printing and decoration. It was produced by Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts at their Vale Press for Elkin Mathews and John Lane. "The narrow green octavo" has been described as being "exquisitely decorated" with its "lambent flames," striking "the eye at once as some bizarre and exotic work. " This distinctive and handsome book was issued in an edition of 250 copies, plus 25 on special paper, and as most of Gray's other writings (not all...