John Glassco: An Essay and Bibliography by Fraser Sutherland

Abstract

tages (M 30). When Mr. Bankes approaches her easel and laconically suggests “A stroll?” she is “really glad to put her brushes down” (M 35). She begins to assert her independence as the manuscript progresses. By the time we meet her in the novel, she leaves her painting reluctantly to stroll with Bankes (L 34); she reluctantly answers Mrs. Ramsay’s mute appeal at the dinner table to be nice to Charles Tansley, feels a loss of sincerity as she does so, and turns with relief to thoughts of her painting (L 143-44). In_ deed, she is given the finest statements about art in the novel and, Job-like, finally gains the stature to ask ultimate questions about life: “What was it then? What did it mean? . . . Was there no safety? . . . why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable?” (L 277). These are some of the things that Susan Dick’s transcription of the manu­ script draft of To the Lighthouse enables us to see more clearly without travelling to New York. NOTES 1 P. 3. All subsequent references to the transcript of the holograph draft (M) of To the Lighthouse will be given in the text of this review. 2 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Hogarth Press, 1927), p. 87. All subsequent references to To the Lighthouse will refer to this edition (L) and will be given in the text of the review. j. k . Jo hn sto ne / University of Saskatchewan Fraser Sutherland, John Glassco: An Essay and Bibliography (Downsview, Ont.: ECW Press, 1984). 121. $8.95 Fraser Sutherland’s John Glassco: An Essay and Bibliography is intended “to further the serious study of the man and his oeuvre.” The 77-page bibliography of works by and about Glassco will almost certainly achieve that aim, but the 39-page essay, while well-written, enthusiastic, and often insightful, is too brief to do much more than summarize Glassco’s various accomplishments. The peculiar balance of this book, with its bibliography twice as long as the critical essay that precedes it, suggests an ill-conceived shotgun wedding of two sections which might have been more at home between the covers of separate publications. The bibliography, for instance, follows precisely the format of ECW’s Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors, while the essay adheres to the length and structure of ECW’s Canadian Writers and Their Works. Within those series, Suther­ land’s work would undoubtedly have found a worthy place, but the decision to accord it separate publication must be questioned. 497 The first three pages of Sutherland’s essay are devoted to a brief biog­ raphy of Glassco, based mainly on published sources, followed by eight pages roughly corresponding to CW TW ’s “Tradition and Milieu.” Sutherland argues that Memoirs of Montparnasse “provides a virtual syllabus of Glassco ’s artistic sympathies and antipathies.” Curiously though, having quoted a long passage from Memoirs in which Glassco compares his literary likes and dislikes with those of Kay Boyle, Sutherland concludes that “it would be wrong to deduce too much evidence of Glassco’s affinities and antipathies from this list,” an assertion plainly at odds with the intention of the quote. It would be useful to have Sutherland’s speculations on the effects on Glassco’s writing of his declared admiration for Firbank, Breton, and Proust, or some explanation for his dislike of D. H. Lawrence. His conclusions, however, are rather tame and unprovocative: “Glassco’s tastes in reading were catholic” and “Glassco was a man of extraordinarily deep and wide culture.” Are there any writers of whom this much could not be said? More interesting, if unproven, is Sutherland’s contention that Glassco’s view of life was greatly influenced by Berkeley and Schopenhauer. He sees the solip­ sism of Berkeley and the “pessimistic power” of Schopenhauer as having a profound effect on Glassco’s work, though he stops short of tracing these influences throughout the canon. Most readers will be forgiven if they have seen no philosophy more complex than hedonism reflected in Memoirs of Montparnasse, Glassco’s best-known work. In his brief discussion of the book, Sutherland seems to agree that Glassco...