758. The Friendly Distance between Some Vale Artists

Only a handful of authors and artists created the contributions for the first issue of the magazine The Dial, issued by Shannon and Ricketts in 1889: Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, John Gray and Richard Savage. Gray's contribution consisted of an essay and a story.

Although Thomas Sturge Moore had already met Shannon in 1885 and Ricketts two years later, he had not yet joined the Dial circle of writers and artists. He would not make his debut as a poet and essayist until 1892, in the second number of The Dial, when he immediately provided a striking number of contributions: one essay, nine poems (including a translation) and a story. The issue also contained three poems (including a translation) by Gray and introduced Lucien Pissarro and Herbert Horne as contributors.

Charles Shannon, Portrait of John Gray, lithograph (1896)
[British Library: museum number: 1896,1028.25]
[© The Trustees of the British Museum]
[Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence]

However, the Vale coterie was not a closed circle of collaborators, consisting mainly of the core members, Ricketts and Shannon, surrounded by the others in varying formations. Based on their biographies and correspondence, we must conclude that Sturge Moore and Gray played almost no role in each other's lives.

This is confirmed by a late letter from Sturge Moore to Gordon Bottomley. On 20 November 1934, he wrote:

I hardly knew John Gray. I met him once at Christies just after the first Dial with poems by me came out and he was very flattering to me who felt very shabby by such a smart young man. And once I think he called for something at Holland Park but hardly stayed at all and then on my Scotch tour for a few minutes after his evening mass in his vicarage. We corresponded also very rarely.

The first meeting may have taken place shortly after February 1892 and the second one at the house of Ricketts and Shannon in Holland park (between 1902 and 1923). The last encounter must have been during Moore's tour of Scotland in March 1926, lecturing on the invitation of the  Scottish Verse-Speaking Association.

Perhaps the cause of the distance between the two lay more with Gray than with Moore – even Ricketts wrote to publisher John Lane in the early 1890s that he saw Gray 'only very occasionally'.