ESC: English Studies in Canada

or conversation” is excused as a manifestation of Glassco’s lifelong habit of ‘borrowing’; “like all good fiction, it engages the reader’s imagination,” but in any event “it probably contains as much fact and truth as fiction” (these final statements seem to want to have it both ways). Such charitable assess­ ments contrast rather surprisingly with the more severe judgment Gnarowski previously made on Glassco for deceptively claiming that his work consti­ tuted “memoirs” of the era. In an essay included in K.P. Stich’s collection, Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature (1988), Gnarowski cas­ tigated the half-and-half blend of fact and fiction as “the process and the methodology of half-truth,” which is said to be “at the heart and the core of the Memoirs.” There is no indication in the introduction that Gnarowski had formerly viewed the Memoirs in a far different, harsher light. John Glassco would have been pleased that his effort (as he characterized it in a poem addressed to Kay Boyle) “to dress the naked facts” has been given such an attractive outward dress. The task of decoding what Glassco in his poem frankly describes as “the falsehoods of the printed page” so as to “find the inward sense of what he meant” is a formidable challenge. If Gnarowski in this edition has provided more illumination of the details of Glassco’s work than of its essence, he has nevertheless brought together much contextual information that will prove useful in the further interpretation of Memoirs of Montparnasse, a text that may be “a loose and lying chronicle,” but at the same time is among the best and most important of Canadian autobiographies. Th om as e . t a u s k y / University of Western Ontario Keith Wilson, Thomas Hardy on Stage (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). x, 202. $91.00 Cdn cloth. In Thomas Hardy on Stage Keith Wilson writes with authority on one of the more curious but least often discussed or understood aspects of Hardy’s ca­ reer, his fascination not just with the possibilities of drama as a written form but also with what might be called the “romance” of theatrical performance. Although it was, as Wilson demonstrates, a fascination that persisted from the early 1860s until Hardy’s death in 1928, it coexisted with contempt for the contemporary stage over its obsession with scenery and costume, scorn for the restricted resources of the dramatist as compared with those available to the novelist, and doubt as to whether the plays of Shakespeare— “& all poets of high rank whose works have taken a stage direction” (12) — should be performed at all. n o After an initial survey of Hardy’s theatregoing and demonstrated interest in the theatre up to 1914, Wilson backtracks in order to consider more closely “Hardy’s Experiments in Theatrical Adaptation,” including his dramatiza­ tions of Far from the Madding Crowd (written in collaboration with J. Comyns Carr and performed in 1882), “The Three Strangers” (performed as The Three Wayfarers in 1893), and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (written in 1895 but not performed until 1924, though an adaptation by Lorimer Stod­ dard was staged in New York in 1897). Wilson, making excellent use of unpublished letters written to Hardy, effectively guides the reader through the intricacies of negotiations with British and American producers and ac­ tors over adaptations both proposed and realized, offering in the process valuable insights into Hardy’s sometimes contradictory desire to achieve the­ atrical success and yet retain control over the content of the adaptations. In his analysis of both the completed dramatizations and the numerous — and often multiple — surviving draft schemes for potential adaptations of novels, stories, and poems, Wilson demonstrates his awareness of the exigencies of theatrical production and the problems inherent in adapting for the stage Hardy’s melodramatic and (at least with respect to the novels) multi-layered plots. He astutely points out that Hardy “structured his outlines around key scenes rather than attempting to replicate cohesive total structures” (48), thus frequently creating episodic and — especially for those unfamiliar with the original story — even incomprehensible sequences. The same confusingly staccato effect was characteristic of the Hardy...