A Walk with John Gray

ELT 36:3 1993 purpose because the relationship is not obvious and there is no explanation for the similarity? The word may remind Bayley of its use in Hamlet and therefore have a dramatic connotation for him, but if his manner of being pleased is to be a good service to others, he must be more precise in explaining why the word has "the same sound and note of spoken drama" as it has in Hamlet rather than somewhere else. Why Hamlet and not a nondramatic poem or a nonliterary context? Nor is it apparent why "ta'en" suggests a dramatic context rather than a simply poetical one. One assumes these things are clear to Bayley, but he would do well to heed Housman's advice to his brother Laurence, which he himself quotes: "What makes many of your poems more obscure than they need be is that you do not put yourself in the reader's place and consider how, and at what stage, that man of sorrows is to find out what it is all about. You are behind the scenes and know all the data, but he knows only what you tell him." To be told such things would surely help, but even if furnished with an explanation for the allusion, I doubt I would see in this poem a jealous lover's need to communicate with me. What Carlyle said about the poet's seeing and, through his poetry, making the reader see applies equally to the critic, but in this book Bayley too seldom succeeds in conveying his insights to the reader. Nor does he organize these insights into a coherent whole. Lacking both introduction and conclusion, the book has no central, unifying thesis. Its twelve chapters are more like separate essays on loosely related topics than integrated and progressive stages of a larger whole. The twelve do seem to fall into three categories—subject matter, persona , and tone—but it is up to the reader to discern this pattern and to discover relationships among its parts. Having finished the book, the reader may be left confused, unable to see Housman's poetry whole, unable even to have perceived anything new about individual poems. Bayley has not done readers of this book the good service that he has done elsewhere and will very likely disappoint those who have come to expect better things from him. Michael Bright Eastern Kentucky University A Walk with John Gray John Gray. The Selected Prose of John Gray. Jerusha Hull McCormack, ed. Greensboro: ELT Press, 1992. xxxv + 316 pp. $30.00. 348 BOOK REVIEWS IN A RECENT ISSUE OF ELT (35:4,1992, 463-66), I questioned Jerusha Hull McCormack's psychological frame in her John Gray: Poet, Dandy, and Priest (1991), wondering whether it did not occlude some of the more broadly social issues of Gray's life and work. Now with McCormack's selection of Gray's fiction and nonfiction prose there is ready evidence for both perspectives. On the one hand, John Gray's ascent from working -class roots into the art circles of London and then into the priesthood in Edinburgh surely produced one of the more curious psychologies of Wilde's and then Raffalovich's circles. On the other, Gray's prose is surprisingly realist, in the sense of representing the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence. When McCormack reads Gray, as in her twenty-page introduction, she sees a suppression of self, at best a cold exterior housing a flamelike internality. Several of Gray's stories are sympathetic portrayals of just this type. The life of the "Yellow Princess," fixed in her box at the opera, is "a very empty but not a hollow life." Having once been surprised by the indiscrirninateness of her sexual desire, the princess "narrows her life for fear of losing her freedom." In Their Mothers," an elite, ostensibly enviable couple sit in the theatre, quietly despising each other in a doomed union. If these stories are of wasted lives oblivious to all drama but their own, others suggestively depict the inner forces driving invisible people. "Niggard Truth" represents the woman behind the man, behind the...