 | Studies in bibliography |  |
I
As matters turned out, Ray had only a year and a half to live after he
delivered his Lyell Lectures, and they are his last major piece of work. Although
they are not his masterpiece, they are certainly a triumphant and
elegant coda to an astonishing body of work. And they reflect in mature form
the subtlety of judgment and breadth of knowledge that he always displayed.
Most of the audience at Ray's lectures in 1985 would have been aware of his
distinction as a scholar and a collector and would have recognized his eminence
as a statesman in the intellectual and cultural world. I think it is in
order here, therefore, to sketch Ray's life and career, so as to provide present
and future readers of these lectures with some sense of the personal background
from which they emerged.
Gordon Norton Ray was born in New York City on 8 September 1915,
the son of Jessie Norton and Jesse Gordon Ray (who represented an Indiana
limestone company), and grew up on the Chicago north shore, graduating in
1932 from New Trier High School in Winnetka. Looking back, years later,
on his education, he recalled that the excellence of New Trier caused him to
regard some of the courses he took as a freshman at Indiana University as a
disappointment. (He added that his undergraduate years preceded the dramatic
rise of Indiana University under his friend Herman B Wells.) In 1932
his parents had moved to Bloomington, where both the university and their
new company were located: the Independent Limestone Company had been
founded in 1927, with his father as president, to quarry stone from the land
owned by his mother's family. (It was income from this company that later
allowed Ray to build his collections, and he accepted the presidency of it in
1974.)
Ray graduated from Indiana University in 1936 with A.B. and A.M. degrees
in French literature, having been elected to three honorary societies,
Phi Beta Kappa, Beta Gamma Sigma, and Phi Eta Sigma. From Indiana he
moved to Harvard for graduate work in English literature (holding an Austin
Scholarship in 1937-38). After receiving another A.M. in 1938, he settled on
Thackeray as the subject for his doctoral dissertation and went to England
in the summer of 1939 (on a Dexter Travelling Scholarship) to search for material.
Up to that time Thackeray's descendants, respecting the novelist's wish
to have no biography, had denied all access to the great mass of his papers.
But Ray's visit to Thackeray's granddaughter, Hester Thackeray Fuller, came
at a propitious time: the family had decided to select a scholar to work on the
papers, and Ray seemed to Mrs. Fuller the right one. He was promptly appointed
editor of the Thackeray letters and thus became the envy of graduate
students (and their advisers) throughout America. A decade later Richard
Altick, writing his account of the glamor and fascination of literary detective
work, The Scholar Adventurers (1950), called this episode "One of the most
book Ray continued to be a hero to later graduate students.
His work on the letters was inextricably linked with the disruptions of
war. He had arranged for the microfilming of the letters before leaving Europe
at the outbreak of war in 1939, and he performed much of his editorial
work on them (and on the material already in the United States) before
his own entry into military service. First he completed his dissertation on
"Thackeray and France" and received his Ph.D. in 1940; he then stayed on
at Harvard for two years as an Instructor in English (1940-42), assisted in
the summer preceding the first year by another Dexter Scholarship and in the
seventeen months from July 1941 by two Guggenheim Fellowships. By the
time he was ordered to active duty in the United States Navy on 1 December
1942, he had completed his edition of the letters; and he turned his voluminous
manuscript over to his adviser and friend Howard Mumford Jones, who
undertook to read proofs and check references for him. Ray's forty months in
the Navy (to 23 March 1946) included two and a half years in the Pacific
aboard the aircraft carriers Belleau Wood (April 1943-September 1944) and
Boxer (April 1945-March 1946) and service on the staff of Vice Admiral
Donald Duncan; as a fighter director and radar officer, he advanced to the
rank of Lieutenant, earning seven battle stars and a Presidential unit citation.
His war years made a deep impression on him and were the subject of many
later allusions: a model of the Boxer still sat on his office desk at the time of
his retirement. The first two volumes of The Letters and Private Papers of
William Makepeace Thackeray were published by Harvard University Press
in 1945, while Ray was still in the Navy. His discharge in the spring of 1946
allowed him to take over the proofreading from Jones beginning with the
middle of the third volume, and the third and fourth volumes appeared in
1946. This four-volume work was a superb achievement, presenting a vast
amount of new material in a form that still stands as a model of documentary
editing.
The next chapter of Ray's career was set at the University of Illinois,
where he moved as Professor of English in the autumn of 1946 and remained
until the end of June 1960. During the six months between leaving the Navy
and settling in Urbana, he had held a third Guggenheim Fellowship (awarded
in 1945), enabling him to return to Mrs. Fuller's London house for further
work in the Thackeray papers there and in other English collections. The
fruits of this research were a series of distinguished publications on Thackeray:
two editions (a facsimile, with his introduction, of the Morgan manuscript
of The Rose and the Ring in 1947 and a gathering of Thackeray's contributions
to The Morning Chronicle in 1955), a critical study based on the
lectures he delivered at the Lowell Institute in February 1950 (The Buried
Life: A Study of the Relation between Thackeray's Fiction and His Personal
History, 1952), and, finally, in 1955 and 1958, the two massive volumes of his
life of Thackeray (Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811-1846; Thackeray:
The Age of Wisdom, 1847-1863), which constitute—as Bradford A. Booth
masterpieces of literary biography in our time." Ray also wrote
an introduction to Thackeray's Henry Esmond for the Modern Library (1950)
and in 1954 began a long association with another series of classics, serving
for seventeen years as general editor of the Houghton Mifflin Company's
Riverside Series and arranging for the publication of some eighty titles in it
(one of them, in 1960, being his own edition of H. G. Wells's The History of
Mr. Polly). This productivity is all the more remarkable in the light of the
administrative duties he accepted at Illinois, serving as Head of the English
Department (1950-57) and then as Vice President and Provost (1957-60). He
did, however, have three interludes away from Illinois: in 1948-49 (after
spending the summer of 1948 as a visiting professor at the University of
Oregon) he was a Rockefeller Post-Service Fellow and a member of the United
States Educational Commission in the United Kingdom, which established
the Fulbright program; in 1952-53 he was Berg Professor of English and
American Literature at New York University; and in 1956-57 he held a fourth
Guggenheim Fellowship, to begin work on several projects relating to H. G.
Wells (including a biography).
In September 1956, just after that Fellowship began, his father died, leaving
him (his mother having died in 1954) with a large block of Independent
Limestone Company stock and thus a considerably increased annual income;
as a result he declined the monetary part of the Guggenheim award. He was
also in a position to enlarge the scope of his collecting, and he began concentrating
on English illustrated books; but he had already accomplished impressive
feats of collecting, both for himself and for his university. His collecting
had begun in earnest when he was abroad in 1948-49, inspired by the
sight of Michael Sadleir's collection of Victorian fiction (which was for him,
as he said in a 1964 autobiographical essay for The Book Collector, "a revelation").
From then on until the end of his life he made visits to England and
France nearly every summer searching for books; and until 1957 those trips
also produced major acquisitions for the University of Illinois Library. While
he was building for himself notably comprehensive collections of English
and French literature from 1789 to 1914 (including manuscript, as well as
printed, material), he was securing for the university massive archives and
whole collections of books (the papers of two important publishers, Richard
Bentley and Grant Richards, in 1951 and 1952; the Tom Turner library of
8000 volumes of twentieth-century English literature in 1953; and the papers
of H. G. Wells, amounting to 60,000 items, in 1954). Anyone who buys books
by the roomful (as he once did in a shop in Penzance) is bound to achieve
rapid celebrity in the antiquarian book world, and his book-buying trips of
the 1950s have become legendary; but he also added to the Illinois holdings
by the systematic purchase of individual titles, increasing the total by several
thousand volumes each year. These purchases in turn affected his own research:
his interest in H. G. Wells, reflected in his last Guggenheim application,
was obviously related to his bringing the Wells papers to Urbana; and
three books resulted, two of them editions that appeared while he was at
H. G. Wells in 1958) and the third, much later, his biographical study H. G.
Wells & Rebecca West (1974), an account of the love affair between Wells
and West based on Wells's letters to her and Ray's conversations with West.
In 1959 Henry Allen Moe, then Secretary General of the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, offered Ray (with whom, as a four-time
Fellowship recipient, he had become well acquainted) the position of Associate
Secretary General. Ray accepted, made arrangements to move to New York
during the summer of 1960 (his books to be placed on newly constructed
shelves lining the walls of a river-view apartment at 25 Sutton Place South),
and began work at the Foundation on September 1st. Eight months later,
following Mrs. Simon Guggenheim's decision to relinquish the title of President
and Moe's election to that office, Ray was named Secretary General; and
in 1963, when Moe left at the age of 69, Ray was elected president (and trustee)
and thus became on July 1st the second principal administrative officer in the
Foundation's thirty-eight-year history. During the twenty-two years of his
presidency (until his retirement just before his seventieth birthday in 1985),
he saw to it that the Foundation maintained the standards of excellence for
which it had become known, adhering unswervingly to the policy of awarding
Fellowships only to individuals who had significant accomplishments to their
credit and who showed promise of making further contributions. His views on
this matter and many others were expressed in a series of widely read annual
reports, each one an essay characterized by the lucidity and incisiveness with
which he could treat complex issues. In his time the Foundation awarded
$96,000,000 to 8100 Fellows.
Ray's position at the Foundation gave him a vantage point from which to
have a possibly unrivaled view of the scholarly, scientific, and artistic worlds,
and his role as adviser to the learned community grew steadily larger during
this period. Some idea of that role can be suggested by a recitation of the institutions
on whose governing boards he served: the Foundation Center (196268;
vice chairman, 1963-65; chairman, 1965-68), Grolier Club (1963-86;
president, 1965-69), Modern Language Association of America (trustee of
invested funds, 1966-85), Smithsonian Institution (1968-85; chairman, 197085),
Pierpont Morgan Library (1970-86; vice president, 1974-86), Rosenbach
Museum and Library (1972-81), American Council of Learned Societies (treasurer,
1973-85), Rockefeller University (1973-86), New York Public Library
(1975-86; honorary trustee, 1984-86), Columbia University Press (1977-82),
Winterthur Museum (1977-85), and Yaddo (1979-85). This list leaves out
some two dozen other committees, commissions, and advisory boards relating
to higher education and libraries, several of which give him particular pleasure—such
as the visiting committees to the Harvard University Library
(1966-85), the Watson Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1977-86),
and the Lilly Library (chairman, 1979-86); the council of the Fellows of the
Pierpont Morgan Library (1962-66; chairman, 1965-66) and of the Friends of
the Columbia Libraries (1970-86; chairman, 1973-86); and the board of the
American Trust for the British Library (treasurer, 1980-86).
He was also frequently (some three dozen times in the 1960s and 1970s)
asked to speak on ceremonial occasions, such as the opening of important conferences
or the dedication of new library buildings, and some of those addresses—particularly
those surveying the state of the humanities and of the
rare-book world—have become celebrated. All the while, the honors poured
in: election to the Royal Society of Literature (1948), the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences (1962), the American Antiquarian Society (1971), the
American Philosophical Society (1977; vice president, 1986), and the Roxburghe
Club (1982); the award of the University of Evansville Medal of Honor
(1970), the Sir Thomas More Medal for Book Collecting (University of San
Francisco, 1973), and the Joseph Henry Medal (Smithsonian Institution,
1980); and thirteen honorary degrees, from Monmouth College (Litt.D., 1959),
New York University (LL.D., 1961), Syracuse University (Litt.D., 1961), Tulane
University (LL.D., 1963), Indiana University (L.H.D., 1964), Duke University
(Litt.D., 1965), University of California (LL.D., 1968), University of
Illinois (Litt.D., 1968), Columbia University (LL.D., 1969), Northwestern
University (Litt.D., 1974), University of Southern California (LL.D., 1974),
University of Pennsylvania (L.H.D., 1978), and University of Maryland
(Litt.D., 1982).
During his Foundation years, Ray's activities as scholar, teacher, and book
collector continued unabated. He accepted a professorship in English at New
York University in his third year at the Foundation (1962-63) and taught
popular courses there (and directed dissertations) in Victorian literature
every year for the next seventeen, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1980. (He
also spent a summer during this period—in 1969—as Beckman Professor of
English at the University of California, Berkeley.) His generosity to his students,
welcoming them to his Foundation office and offering them the use of
materials from his collection, became widely known, and many of them have
recorded their indebtedness and appreciation. The focus of his own scholarship
in these years, and of the collecting that inspired it, was English illustrated
books of the nineteenth century and French illustrated books and
bindings from 1700 through the 1930s. (At the same time he was impressively
expanding his holdings of literary manuscripts.) By 1976 he was ready to display
the English items, and in March and April of that year the Pierpont
Morgan Library mounted a major exhibition on the subject, drawn almost
exclusively from his collection and accompanied by the publication of his
large volume The Illustrator and the Book in England from 1790 to 1914. Six
years later (from April through July 1982) the Library held a similar exhibition
of his French materials, in connection with which he delivered the
Library's Franklin Jasper Walls Lectures (4, 6, 11 May) and published his
two-volume work on The Art of the French Illustrated Book, 1700 to 1914.
These two exhibitions and their associated publications represent the culmination
of his life as a scholar-collector. There are few collectors of any period
who could provide, almost single-handedly, material of such quality (including
drafts and proofs) for two exhibitions of such breadth; and there are fewer
still who could write about their fields with such scholarly depth and stylistic
scholarship and collecting, are masterpieces of trenchant commentary, revealing
time and again his comprehensive knowledge of the history of book illustration
and his lifetime of reading in the literature that inspired the illustrations.
They are monuments as solid in their field as his Thackeray work is in
Victorian literary study.
To those monuments he was able to add a "small sequel" (as he called it)
that he had long planned: the invitation to deliver the 1985 Lyell Lectures
provided the occasion to survey French Art Deco books, bringing his analysis
of French bookmaking up to the chronological limit of his own collection.
The fortunate timing of these lectures seemed to epitomize the well-regulated
nature of his whole life. He liked order and routine, but there was always
room in his carefully controlled schedule for the entertainments he enjoyed—
such as, in Urbana, his weekend excursions by train to New Orleans; and, in
New York, his quiet hours at the Grolier Club reading booksellers' catalogues
(probably no other member in recent times used the Club library so regularly).
In his earlier years, he was athletic, engaging in basketball, baseball,
handball, bowling, and tennis, and he remained all his life a devoted follower
of sports: in New York he often invited groups of friends to baseball games;
he held a season ticket to the Knickerbockers' basketball games; and he was
known to decline social events in favor of games on television. He was an avid
reader of detective stories (amassing a fine collection of them as a by-product)
and a steady attender of movies; and he apparently remembered them all in
considerable detail, just as he seemed to keep straight the plots and characters
of all the major (and many minor) novels of English, French, and American
literature. His range of allusion was thus astonishingly wide; and, although
he sometimes revealed his impatience with small talk, he was an engaging
conversationalist, alternating anecdotes with pronouncements, bemused detachment
with magisterial gravity. (His obituary in the London Times was
particularly apt in describing him as "a man of solid and authoritative presence,
and of considered and consequential speech.") To some people he appeared
formidable at first, but many have reason to know how approachable
he could be. His formality and reserve, however, often made it difficult for
colleagues and friends to feel that they knew him well, even while they were
drawn to him by his charm, his sense of humor, and his balanced and sympathetic
concern for their problems.
No doubt more people experienced his conversation over a meal than in
any other setting, and his love of good food was probably his best-known diversion.
He made a point of inviting many Guggenheim Fellows to lunch,
sometimes at the Century Association but equally often at a favorite restaurant
(San Marino, La Toque Blanche, La Petite Marmite, Le Chantilly); on
summer trips his visits with book dealers were punctuated at midday by
lunches with Fellows who were spending their Fellowship periods abroad, and
those gatherings at the White Tower, L'Étoile, Le Crillon, and La Tour
d'Argent became part of the lore that Guggenheim Fellows share. Ray was a
tall man, with a large frame, and always handsome, but the trim figure of his
meals. He lived as he wished to until the end, but during his last five or six
years he experienced some of the problems that excessive weight can cause.
When he died of a heart attack in his apartment on the morning of 15 December
1986, his affairs were—characteristically—in order, his will having designated
the Morgan Library as the repository for his collection of manuscripts,
drawings, and some 15,000 books. Few scholars could have had more reason
to feel satisfied with their accomplishments. Gordon Ray left some projects
unfinished, as anyone with a lively mind is bound to do; but he had produced
four major works, which will be read long into the future, and had lived a
life that influenced many other lives, a life that will be a continuing model
and an object of respectful wonderment for those who contemplate a career
in literary scholarship.
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