The index man
Humphrey Carpenter
Gilbert Murray: A Life Francis West (Croom Helm £17.95)
professor Gilbert Murray ought to be in Alan Bennett's Forty Years On, as one of those figures (like Ottoline Morrell) in the background of everybody's lives at a certain period. Francis West in this biography says you can find Murray's name in the index of 'most memoirs and collec- tions of letters, autobiographies and biographies of the first half of the twentieth century'. Indeed, fA Life in the Indexes' might have been a good title for West's book. The trouble is that Murray hovered in the background of all kinds of genuinely interesting and important people and things, but seems rarely to have got into the text itself, where the action was. At the end of the biography he's still grey and shadowy, the rather vague-looking old man who peers out from the jacket photograph — there are no pictures in the book itself, which somehow adds to the impression of Murray's shadowiness.
Most people think of him, of course, as the perpetrator of those ghastly pre- Raphaelite translations of Greek tragedy which fortunately were long ago succeeded by better stuff. West makes no apology for them, and quotes Maurice Bowra's remark that one of Murray's most florid lines — 'Death and a cold white thing within the house' — was a ridiculously inaccurate translation of 'eeaa, — four wordless shouts of grief. What West does show is that Murray embarked on the translation enterprise as a rather poor substitute for writing his own stuff. He'd had a go at being a novelist (he wrote a pastiche of Rider Haggard called Gobi or Shamo) and a playwright (this time the pastiche was of Ibsen), and he did the translations largely because they gave him an entrée to the Lon- don theatrical world where they were often staged. Sybil Thorndike and Mrs Pat Campbell were among those involved in the productions of them, Max Reinhardt directed Murray's Oedipus at Covent Garden, and there were sometimes queues stretching round the block. All this was meat and drink to Murray.
'I'm slimming' He was the son of a failed Irish-Austra- lian sheep farmer turned fairly failed politi- cian. After his father died, he was shipped to England, and in Suez at the age of 11 a small girl pushed him off the ship into the harbour, whereupon he clambered out, went back dripping to the cabin, 'and rang for port which he remembered that he had heard was good for such occasions'. At Merchant Taylors he got 100 per cent in an examination on the Agamemnon, and at Oxford, says West, 'he took a good First'.
(Thumbs down for all you folk who only got poorish Firsts.) At the age of 23, he became a professor at Glasgow, and mar- ried a wife whom West insists on calling 'The Lady Mary', quite correctly because she was the daughter of an Earl, but it does make her sound like a ship under full steam. Indeed, she and her mother Lady Carlisle seem to have been a pair of monstrous ocean liners, bearing down on poor little Gilbert and sweeping him along in their wash, and it was due to them that he became so colourless. No more glasses of port for Gilbert: as a married man, he had to be teetotal and vegetarian — the Murrays did offer meat to guests, but with the preamble 'Will you have some of the corpse, or will you try the alternative?' — and really the biography is at times little more than a catalogue of things Murray preferred not to do. These included produc- ing the definitive Greek text of Euripides, a task he called 'disgusting'. He never seems to have cared for textual scholarship, and became a Hellenist largely because of his mistaken belief that the great Greek writers were 19th-century-style rational liberal humanists like himself.
He didn't enjoy academic life either. Glasgow University was so severe in the early 1900s that he took to hypochondria to escape from it, and got his doctor to prescribe complete rest as a cure for his sup- posed physical deterioration. Since, as West says, Murray lived to be 91 and could scurry up and down the Alps until a few years before his death, the cure seems to have been effective. He spent some time as a gentleman of leisure on his wife's income (Castle Howard was the family home), then went back to Oxford and soon landed up as Regius Professor of Greek at Christ Church, a college which thought little of his liberal-and-water views and which he in turn hated. One wonders whether his pupils got much out of him; at one point he com- plained of overwork when his teaching load totalled precisely two hours a week. Eventually he seems to have lost all interest in academic life, and got himself appointed chairman of the executive of the League of Nations Union (not of the League of Na- tions itself, as the book's blurb states with fatuous inaccuracy). This grey job at the head of a grey organisation seems to have been perfectly suited to him.
Francis West, an Australian academic (not a classicist but a Professor of History and Government), has, I am afraid, written a grey book, though it is hard to imagine
how anyone could have made Murray seem exciting. West makes a few faint attempts to Pep things up. At the beginning, he sug- gests that the biography might be called 'Brideshead Before It Was Revisited,' aPPayently on the tenuous grounds that the television film of Waugh's novel was made at Castle Howard. Actually Murray's death does faintly resemble Lord Marchmain's, for though he was an agnostic all his life One of his daughters contrived for him to receive the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church when he was scarcely con- scious. But the only real connection with Waugh is that Murray's son Basil provided the model for Waugh's immortal and satanic Basil Seal. West mentions this, but glosses it over as quickly as possible, and One longs to know far more about this very 411-grey offspring of poor old Gilbert.
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