Gray, Piers 1947-1996

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GRAY, Piers 1947-1996

PERSONAL:

Born May 26, 1947; died of complications from alcoholism June 28, 1996; partner of Annie Carver; children: Gordon (stepson). Education: Attended Dalhousie University and Trinity College, Cambridge.

CAREER:

Literary critic, educator, and writer. Hong Kong University, Hong Kong, China, instructor, 1977-95.

WRITINGS:

T. S. Eliot's Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909-1922, Humanities Press (Atlantic Highlands, NJ), 1982.

Marginal Men: Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, J. R. Ackerley, Macmillan (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England), 1991.

Stalin on Linguistics and Other Essays, edited by Colin MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild, Palgrave (New York, NY), 2002.

Author of The Twelfth Man (play); contributor to periodicals, including Critical Quarterly.

SIDELIGHTS:

The late literary critic and educator Piers Gray was the son of a pathologist who worked in both Canada and England. Gray began his studies in Canada, then matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1967, when Theo Redpath was Cambridge University's English department's director of studies.

Gray's dissertation, later published as T. S. Eliot's Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909-1922, is based on his study of the famous American-British poet's philosophical idealism during this period and its relation to his early poetry. "It also makes clear," said Colin MacCabe in the Independent, "that Eliot's Anglo-Catholic solution, which linked individual and society through the church, was simply unacceptable."

Jewel Spears Brooker reviewed the volume in Southern Review, writing that "Gray's approach to intellectual biography is straightforward. He focuses on certain late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century figures—Laforgue, Bergson, Royce, Frazer, Durkheim, and Bradley—who were indisputably important in the growth of Eliot's mind. Approaching these mentors one at a time in the order in which Eliot encountered them, Gray tries to pinpoint the unique contribution each made."

Brooker continued, saying that "Gray also assumes, though he does not say so, that Eliot is threading his way through the modernist dilemma. Even as an undergraduate, Eliot is seen to be preoccupied with questions of disorientation, displacement, self-possession, self-consciousness, consciousness of consciousness, etc."

Modern Language Review's Marjorie Perloff felt the highlight of the study to be "The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual," a paper written by Eliot and presented at a seminar of Harvard's Josiah Royce on December 9, 1913. There had been some record of the paper, but Gray discovered the documents in the King's College library and obtained permission to publish portions of it. As Perloff noted, Gray writes that from this manuscript "we can begin to construct a reading of The Waste Land," one of Eliot's early works.

In 1977 Gray joined the English Department of Hong Kong University. MacCabe observed that he flourished in the department, which took linguistics and language "seriously. Eliot's Eurocentrism, once dismissed as intellectually untenable, was now perceived as politically wicked."

Gray's brother Simon is a noted playwright. Guardian's Denis MacShane remarked that "at least one play he [Piers] wrote, The Twelfth Man, about how the 1930s generation of Cambridge intellectuals were seduced by Stalinism, was as good as anything by his brother, Simon."

Gray left Hong Kong University after being denied the chair in English literature. Craig Hamilton wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that "when he returned to England in 1995 with no more illusions, and with his fiction and drama unpublished, he set out to drink himself to death; sadly, he succeeded very quickly." Gray died at the age of forty-nine after attending a party with friends. He was, at the time, preparing a collection titled Stalin on Linguistics and Other Essays.

Several years after his death, the collection was edited by MacCabe and Victoria Rothschild and published with memoirs by MacCabe, MacShane, and Roy Harris. Gray's writings run the gamut, with subjects as diverse as Wallace Stevens, William Shakespeare, and American pulp fiction. Royce's influence on Eliot is discussed in "The Community of Interpretation: T. S. Eliot and Josiah Royce." Hamilton pointed out that Gray's literary histories include "Hong Kong, Shanghai, the Great Wall: Bernard Shaw in China." This essay documents Shaw's visit to China in 1933, where he lectured Hong Kong students on the evils of capitalism and the advantages of Communism. "This made very big news at the time," wrote Hamilton, "and Gray sifts through plays, letters, memoirs, and newspapers (both English and Chinese) to understand what Shaw was up to. Ruffling feathers, seems to be the answer." Hamilton called two photographs "Gray's real scoop." These show that Lin Yutang and Harold Isaacs, both critics of communism, were airbrushed out of a picture of their lunch with Shaw on February 17, 1933.

In "Totalitarian Logic: Stalin on Linguistics" Gray writes of Stalin's attack of Soviet linguist N. Y. Marr in a series of letters the Soviet leader had printed in Pravda. Stalin was angered by Marr's linking of language to class, a concept now fully accepted. Hamilton added that "it was easy to divide and rule Soviet citizens when they misunderstood one another." Gray felt that this same concept was adopted by China.

"Oaths and Laughter and Indecent Speech" provides an accounting of a confrontation between a captain and an umpire during a cricket match and discusses works of literature, including Lady Chatterly's Lover. The final essay is titled "On Linearity."

Hamilton concluded, "Gray was rather unusual, but he was the type of critic that universities in England, and the bean counters who ran them, can no longer tolerate. He wrote at his own pace and about absolutely anything that interested him. He also knew Marx and Leavis as well as he knew the Bible or the canon. Unfortunately, he was not unusual in one respect. There may be many more like him, brilliant but bitter, in English departments everywhere."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Contemporary Review, October, 2002, review of Stalin on Linguistics and Other Essays, p. 254.

Modern Language Review, July, 1984, Marjorie Perloff, review of T. S. Eliot's Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909-1922, pp. 688-692.

Southern Review, spring, 1984, Jewel Spears Brooker, review of T. S. Eliot's Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909-1922, pp. 483-487.

Times Literary Supplement, September 10, 1982, John Casey, review of T. S. Eliot's Intellectual and Poetic Development, 1909-1922, p. 975; December 20, 2002, Craig Hamilton, review of Stalin on Linguistics and Other Essays, p. 23.