More About the Rev. Thomas Henry Truro Bray (Son of Lavinia Howe Truro and Richard Bray
Henry says the woman who cared for him would often repeat that when he was born he could fit into a picher. He spent his life bursting from the confines of that pitcher, writing himself as an epic of heroic proportions.
He did not lack love and his insistence in uniting emotional intution with academic rationalism mirrored the way he described his parents. His saw his father as a sensitive man who died an early death, in Henry`s opinion, because of the loss of a “favorite son.” In Henry’s daughter’s (Lavinia Korsmeyer) fictional version of the love affair between her grandparents, she emphasizes the unquestioning devotion of Richard to Lavinia. Lavinia’s resists, or love and first and then the wisdom of her parents, and is later plagued by rational doubts that she has delivered herself and her children into poverty through her headstrong actions. “Remember who you are,” she would later tell her granddaughter, by which I hope she means to say something akin to “have the courage to be yourself” but by which it is equally possible that she was reinforcing the idea of special orginis.
In a family of farmer and miners that lived through a serious depression, poverty and rejection by their wealthier relatives, each of the brothers and sisters found some peace if not fortune in the United States. Henry alone chose an intellectual path.
One can imagine that his daughter who knew both Henry and his mother Lavinia was echoing their words when she mentions little Egbert in her story. He is already precocious and pines for his father’s absence in a deep and meditative way.
Somehow this child succeeds to get the education he needed–and clearly highly values it. His biography, Evolution of a Life, dwells on the influence of professors on their assistance and charity even more than on the influence of his family. After his father passes away, Henry seems to see himself more as a force in his family than as a part of it. He has a strong sense of himself. His writing communicates this in an often bombastic style which nevertheless demonstrates a clarity of vision and a conciseness that verges on poetry. No, it is not easy to read and I do not expect we will see a resurgance of interest in his writings. If he had more fame I have the sense, and I mean it in an affectionate way, that he would have become unbearable.
Perhaps it is worth saying how I met Henry Truro Bray. Our family keeps a beautiful book of photos. It is one of those old fashioned Cornish books finished in velvet with a lock to keep itself safe. While it is falling apart with age, it has been guarded with care over the generations by my great great grandmother, my great grandmother my great uncle and my cousins who followed. Over all this time, various minds have pondered the photos, trying to recapture their stories and their names. Pencil marks on the photo backs and little labels have added their own character and personality to the faces and figures that present themselves as though the distant past were not so distant. But few of the photos can speak in their own words–and none like the photo of Henry Truro Bray. He has glorious whiskers–the kind that men cannot grow anymore–an impeccable but not dandy costume and a full face that speaks without talking. Somehow, you know looking at that photo that here is a man who believes in his own importance. Honestly, I do not know why–are his lips smug or is it that he seems to jump right out of the frame of his own picture in a way that others don’t? Maybe he is merely photogenic. I have heard that one must make love to a camera to be photogenic. Maybe, but there is another quality here. The photo practically proclaims that it does not belong with the others. It challenges you to underestimate a confidence that does not die with the person but lives on. I thought he could have been an idol of the time. Maybe my great-great or great grandmother had a secret passion and they chose to place in secret the photo of their passion in the family album. After all, they whiled away other long hours cutting the photos from greeting cards and magazines and placing them lovingly in albums, who knows what else they might do. This man would just not sit passively in his photo like the others. In fact, so sure was the subject of this photo that you would take him seriously that he had inscribed his name boldly across his chest. Not discretely on the back, but lavishly across the front. And , what’s more, there were no BRAYS in our family. GGgrandma was a Piper and Ggrampa was a Burn. So for me, the florid script was like a brazen declaration, “I am H. Truro Bray. I am in your family album. I am important and YOU do not know who I am.”
It was one of those little puzzles that never leave your mind, like why is the carpet in the basement damp in the spring, or how can big heavy airplanes actually stay in the sky or what color is a ripe orange supposed to be. And my mind takes leave to wander more than I should admit. Then, one day, while I was in grad school, I really did not feel like focussing on the enormous amount of useless reading that had been assigned. (Henry would be ashamed of me.) And so I started rehashing the mystery of Henry Truro Bray. Who was so arrogant as to sign their own photo? Lovers sign their photos but they usually say “with adoration and affection,” “forever yours,” “this puppy was made for your lap” or something like that. Movie stars sign photos. They autograph them by the hundreds and just a signature is enough for someone to value it. He did not look like a movie star–but a celebrity or someone who thought enough of himself to emulate a celebrity. That left a politician, which seemed likely to me, or a writer. Well, I was sitting in one of the best university libraries in the world. I could check that out. And so I moseyed over to the old fashioned card catalogue–some of the cards in there are older than Henry himself. And lo, what did I pull out? The knowledge that Henry Truro Bray was a writer and one who thought enough of himself to mix physics, medicine, religion and esoteric spiritualism into his own proposed view of the universe.
I believe that my sketch is not too far off. The Henry I have studied and thought about has both a monumental heart and ego. He followed his own intution enough to reject the dogma of religion with which he could not be reconciled to seek knowledge like a bloodhound on the trail and to never present publicly the doubts he may have had about his own assumptions and conclusions. He also was a care-giver in his family, adopted the baby daughter of his dead sister Elizabeth, assisted the orphaned daughters of his brother Joe, watched out for his widowed mother, cared for his parishoners and apparently loved his own children to distraction. I also imagine that Henry must have been unbearable at times to those who loved him. His descendants might wish to contradict this in significant ways but I cannot help if all of this is what Henry has said to me.
But there is something else behind his character that makes me warm to Henry because it reminds me of all that I love about my family. Henry slides from discussions of astral physics to relate tales of visits from ghosts–most particularly in one illuminating passage from a book of his, he tells of how he is visited by the ghost of an ancient Egyptian who has moved to Mars and is running for political office. While this is no more crazy than we have grown accustomed in both the sincere and insincere press of our day, it represents to me a strength and a non-conformity that I believe all the descendents of this family bear as a distinction. No, don’t worry aunts, uncles and cousins of mine, I do not accuse this family of being loony (not that this would be bad). No, of all the families I know, we appear on the whole to be like everyone else. What sets us aside is that we all know that we have this wild streak inside of us. We all know that if we met a ghost of an Egyptian from Mars we would want to believe in it. And we have spent a lifetime trying to prove that it is otherwise. As I write this, I suspect that I am not writing about my family at all, I am writing about what I love about humanity–this inner creative power that we fiercely hope we have and spend a lifetime trying to suppress. I don’t believe in genes enough to think that my biological family is any more prone to this than others. But I can hope, can’t I?
Here is what they said about Henry in Who Was Who in America:
Who Was Who in America
Volume 1, page 133
Bray –(Thomas) Henry Truro , author…… came to America at 16; matriculated and did first years work in Northwestern U., 1871; B.A., Victoria Coll. (U. of Toronto), 1875, M.A., 1878, LL.B., 1883: B.D., Drew Theological Seminary, Madison, N.J., 1876;LL.B., Univ. of Michigan, 1883; M.D., Hahnemann Med. College., Chicago,1902; past the ten years post grad. course of LL.D., Victoria U., Cobourg, Can., 1885;..lists marriages…Deacon, 1877 priest, 1879, P.E. Ch.; first charge in Canton, Miss.; rector various churches,; was deposed at own request in St. Louis, Mo., 1889, by the bishop of Mo.; later in practice of medicine, Chicago. Author: The Knowability of God, 1887: God and Man,1888, 3rd edit. 1917: The Evolution of a Life, 1890: Reason and Dogma,1894: The Living Universe, 1910, 3rd edit, 1917: The Voice of the Universe.
Here is what the Greeley Church Historians said about Henry:
“It will no doubt be interesting to others besides Episcopalians to know that Henry Truro Bray has become an author since leaving here and of the most pronounced radical type. His great ability and still greater aggressiveness will be remembered. When here he was a high-church-man of the narrowest type. The apostolic succession of priests, or rather bishops, of the English church was a position he was ready to defend against all comers. But he was well read in both modern science and philosophy. These seem at length to have got the better of his Athanasian theology, and historical criticism has upset his former views upon miracles and the Christian evidences. It appears that he is now out of the church, whether driven out or gone of his own accord we are not informed. Still the church that can still keep within its communion and priesthood Heber Newton ought to have a place for Henry Truro Bray if he wished to remain.” — A History of Greeley and the Union Colony of Colorado, pg 291-2.
And here is what the New York Times said about his book the Living Universe