Thomas Gray: A Life.(Review)

Robert L. Mack Thomas Gray: A Life. Yale University Press, 701 pages, $39.95

One of the most important facts about Thomas Gray (1716-1771) is that he was the only one of his parents' twelve children to survive into adulthood, and survival is a recurrent theme in his poetry. The "Elegy" is spoken by a solitary man who turns the poem into his own epitaph. The "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" depicts its "little victims" as happily ignorant of the world that awaits them, into which they might prefer not to grow up; it is preoccupied with the "fearful joy" of breaking bounds, yet the boys "disdain/The limits of their little reign" only to come up against the unavoidable border between life and death. The sonnet (famously, and unfairly, censured by Wordsworth) on the premature death of Gray's closest friend, Richard West--who was also his parents' only surviving child--laments the desolation of the bereaved person surrounded by heartlessly burgeoning Nature. "The Bard" narrates an encounter between Edward I and the last living Welsh bard, whose fellows have all been slaughtered at the king's command, and who, having prophesied the overthrow of Edward's Plantagenet successors, commits suicide with the words "Be thine Despair, and scept'red Care,/ To triumph, and to die, are mine." Death is triumph because it brings poetic immortality, the only survival on which we can depend. "You see," Gray wrote to West in 1742, referring to his studies, "that I converse, as usual, with none but the dead: they are my old friends, and almost make me long to be with them." West nobly replied, "What, are there no joys among the living?" A month later he was dead himself, and his question echoed through the remaining thirty years of Gray's life.

The accidents of survival also set the course of our knowledge of Gray. His literary executor and first biographer, the Rev. William Mason, abetted by Horace Walpole, who ought to have known better, destroyed many documents and censored others. The hitherto standard biography by R. W. Ketton-Cremer (1955) is outdated and relentlessly dull. Thankfully, it is now superseded by Mack's engrossing, if sometimes over-elaborate, volume. Drawing on the excellent book by Robert F. Gleckner, Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship (1997), Mack temperately argues the case for homoerotic allusions in Gray's work, handling the topic, which was confined by Ketton-Cremer to dark hints about "secrets" and "temptations," with an admirable sense of proportion. Acknowledging the dangers of "imposing the restless categories of our own culture on the past," he recognizes that Grays strength as a man and a writer lies as much in his reticences, hesitations, and silences as in his confessions and published utterances. Mack remarks upon the "simultaneous accessibility and inscrutability" of the "Elegy": the phrase is equally apt for its author, who wrote to West in another letter that "to me there hardly appears to be any medium between a public life and a private one."

On both sides of his family Gray was of middle-class mercantile stock. His childhood, about which we know little, was overshadowed by the violent temper of his father, Philip, a scrivener and exchange broker whose wife left him and later attempted to obtain a legal separation because of his physical abuse of her and, by inference, their children. In 1725 Thomas, still not quite nine years old, was sent to Eton where his uncle was a master; he was to remain there for nearly ten years. With only four hours of lessons a day (largely Latin and Greek), frequent holidays, no set bedtimes, and no organized games, the onus was on the individual pupil to make the best use of his freedom. Gray's letters home were among the casualties of Mason's censorship, but he and three other boys, West, Walpole, and Thomas Ashton, formed a distinct set, the "Quadruple Alliance," aesthetic and dreamily introverted in character, and drawn together by common experience of disturbed domestic backgrounds. The "Eton Ode," as Mack says, is not straight autobiography but "a reinterpretation, a poetic palimpsest," the kind of cento (a multiply allusive composition) which Gray learned in the schoolroom and the form in which all his best work was done. Mack interestingly connects this technique with the epistemology of Locke, to which Gray adhered; the cento is "the literary-textual equivalent of the similarly acquisitive, recombinative workings of the human mind," although Gray's fusion of elements seems less mechanical than Locke's model. In similar vein, Mack urges the protoromantic character of Gray's travel writing, both on his Grand Tour with Walpole in 1739-41 and in his visit to the Lake District in 1768-9, persuasively claiming for it the power to "half perceive" and "half-create" the scenes it evokes with rapid notations in a manner worthy of Wordsworth or Ruskin.

In 1734 Gray proceeded to Cambridge, then still such a backwater that there was no daily postal link with London. There were only four hundred undergraduates--yet the same number of fellows. Cambridge was to be the center of Gray's life henceforward. He became a Fellow of Peterhouse, his old college, in 1742, transferring to Pembroke in 1756 after some drunken students cruelly exploited his pyrophobia--rooted, Mack intriguingly suggests, in a subconscious symbolic association of flames with destructive, uncontrolled passion--by falsely raising the cry of "Fire!" in the small hours one morning. Gray was appointed Professor of Modern History in 1768, and "constantly intended," in Mason's words, "to read lectures," but never did; he knew too much to know where to begin. Instead he amassed fabled quantities of learning. "To be employed," he revealingly wrote, "is to be happy"; work distracted him from the melancholy which deepened with the years. He ...