Since there is not much else in the way of external influence, apart from a bullying first wife, the rest must come from dissecting the man himself. Unfortunately, Glass, who has been Gray’s secretary, attempts no sustained analysis of his master. Worse still, he seems not to notice detail. What Gray wears, how he paints, his taste in food, the time of his rising and sleeping, the colour of his eyes, the timbre of his voice, the very shape, smell and feel of him, all are missing. The result is a fussy, unfocussed, though affectionate, portrait.
What makes this amorphous style the more disappointing is the contrast with its subject’s own intense vision. Here is Gray contemplating his eczema-scurfed hands:
I brood for half-hours or more, on these half-dead, bark-like, not human-looking surfaces, brooding, filing some surfaces with all four nails at once, fastidiously pricking and plucking off, prising up the plaques of dead scab, distilling dust from flesh with quick fingertips.
Queasy, stylish, excessive, delicate, Gray’s image-making has always been driven by the need to find an inviting flesh beyond his scaly skin. It is the edge of the abyss that excites him, the swirl of an often sexual vertigo that will take him out of himself. In some books the outcome is only a squashy fall, in others nothing more than an unconvincing dance on the rim, but when terror matches desire, the pull of Gray’s absent God intoxicates the soul.
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