The Great Swell

THACKERAY: THE AGE OF WISDOM--1847-1863 (523 pp.)--Gordon N. Ray--McGraw-Hill ($8).

William Makepeace Thackeray was the greatest prose stylist of his day, and the tallest (6 ft. 3 in.). Once, staring over the heads of a crowd, he saw himself being watched at a distance by "a strange visage" that studied him "with an expression of comical woebegoneness." Just as he was getting interested in the "rueful being," he discovered that it was himself, reflected in a mirror.

In his previous volume, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, University of Illinois Provost Gordon N. Ray, No. 1 living authority on Thackeray, described the tragedies that went into the making of the "rueful being"--particularly the death of Thackeray's infant daughter Jane and the insanity of his young wife Isabella. The new volume shows the saddened giant in his prime--the famed, wealthy author of Vanity Fair and Henry Esmond; the doting father of two idolizing, teen-age daughters; the hero and leading spirit of all who detested the rambunctious literary supremacy of Charles Dickens. Author Ray's biography is less remarkable for its discussion of Thackeray as a novelist than for its description of Thackeray as a man--the best pen picture of the novelist that has been drawn.

Public & Private Man. In Dickens, the Victorian world came face to face with genius in its most overwhelming form, approaching the borders of madness and self-destruction. "No gentleman" was the well-bred Victorian's verdict on Dickens--confirmed when his home broke up because of his passion for Actress Ellen Ternan. But Thackeray was a gentleman--"as polished as a steel mirror and as cold," "a natural swell," a Platonic lover who politely bowed himself out of his passion for a married woman when her husband objected. In public, Thackeray came to represent everything that Dickens derided in the life of high society.

Much of Thackeray's hauteur was put on to conceal the violent, sudden spasms of pain that came from his malfunctioning stomach and bladder. Much was a disguise for his sensitivity and loneliness. The rest was a sort of game. He was proud of being a great gourmet--like his friend Lord Houghton. who died murmuring: "My exit is the result of too many entrees." He was a wit; once he greeted a quack doctor with "a very low bow" and the words: "I hope, sir, that you will live longer than your patients." He tempered the generosity of a prince with a biting common sense--as in his answer to a request for money for a friend's tombstone: "I lent Maginn -L-500 in his life time and he paid me -L-20 back. I think I have done enough in giving him bread--let other philanthropists give him a stone."

Sixpence per Line. With intimates, Thackeray's conversation was "decidedly loose" (lost forever, presumably, is the remainder of his limerick about "...the Countess Guiccioli Who slept with Lord Byron habitually"). He enjoyed going to pubs, or, as one enemy described it:"[He] not infrequently condescends to wither mankind through his spectacles from one of the marble tables." His love of bad puns was notorious ("A good one is not worth listening to"). Said a friend: "I recollect him now, wiping his brow after trying vainly to help the leg of a tough fowl, and saying he was 'heaving a thigh.' "

Thackeray delighted in debunking his own art. In his novel Philip, he wrote: "When I think how this very line, this very word, which I am writing represents money, I am lost in a respectful astonishment...I am paid sixpence per line. With [these last 67 words] I can buy a loaf, a piece of butter, a jug of milk, a modicum of tea--actually enough to make breakfast for the family." Such digressions helped to conceal the sweat and effort that Thackeray put into his work. "I can see him pointing now with his finger," wrote his daughter Anny, "to two or three little words. Sometimes he would show us a few lines & say, there that has been my days work. I have sat before it till I nearly cried & nothing would come."

Heaven or the Other Place. As a writer, he declined in the last years of his life. In The Virginians, Lovel the Widower and Philip he merely demonstrated the half-truth of a later dictum that "all authors are musical-boxes which play a limited number of tunes." And yet. at the time of his death he was, like Dickens with Edwin Drood and Stevenson with Weir of Hermiston, midway through what remained a brilliant fragment--Denis Duval, Dickens considered it "the best of all his works."

The day before Christmas 1863, when Thackeray was only 52, his digestion and what he amiably called his "defective waterworks" broke down for the last time, and with breakdown came a "cerebral effusion." As all London's great hostesses and VIPs were "out of town" for Christmas, it was "a vast assemblage of writers and painters" that escorted the Great Swell to his chosen grave beside his infant daughter. The glowing obituaries ranked him with the literary Olympians, but his friends recalled that he had never cared for that company. "If Goethe is a god," Thackeray once said. "I'm sure I'd rather go to the other place."

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