Arthur Miller: A Bibliographical Checklist by George H. Jensen (review)

234 BOOK REVIEWS pendent poems, not taken from dramas. It might have been useful to note this trend. if only to give drama students- who after all will constitute a goodly number of the readers of this book -some sense of the changing relationshIp of Brecht's poetry and drama. Throughout the book Hill is refreshingly common-sensible in his assessments of the various critical wrangles over Brecht's politics. He does not hesitate to describe Brecht as occasionally confused or ambivalent or dissatisfied ' or downright wrong, as he sees fil, rather than attributing 10 him some Machiavellian Marxist or Byzantine Bourgeois motivation. All things considered, Hill's book can he viewed as a distinctly positive addition to the English criticism on Brecht: more inclusive than most of its predecessors; many provocative remarks on the individual plays: written in a style mercifully free of jargon. Could we hear more about Chapter 6? PETER HARRIS University of Toronto. ARTHUR MILLER: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL CHECKLIST. by George H. Jensen. Columbia , South Carolina: J. Faust & Company, 1976. xiv & 145 pp. $16.50. The art and craft of assembling an authoritative work of bibliography is too often taken for granted by scholars and researchers. not to mention graduate students and bibliophiles. This work- truly a model for future bibliographershas been prepared with the greatest of editorial and bibliographical intelligence . directed to both the scholar-researcher and the collector of books who seeks to distinguish among editions, impressions. states, and issues of an author's work throughout its publishing history. In the informative foreword to this series, editor Joseph Katz makes a useful distinction between enumerative and descriptive bibliographical approaches. which places at mid-point between the two the "bibliographical checklist." The appropriateness, as well as the rationale, for using the checklist format in the case of Arthur Miller is reOected in Katz's statement that: "the bibliographical record of a living author changes constantly, while the record for many authors of the past is obscured by so limited or unreliable a bibliographical tradition that it cannot yet be established with reasonable certainty. In such situations, the appropriate kind of record is the bibliographical checklist. It presents what can be established within the limited resources that bar the creation of a full-dress descriptive bibliography." Further evidence of the care with which this bibliography has been compiled is the statement of Katz's foreword that George H. Jensen, in an effort to follow the goals of accuracy and comprehensiveness set forth for the J. Faust & Company series of bibliographies, personally examined all the items listed in all of the book's eight sections, "unless otherwise indicated by a source note." As anyone who has ever dealt first-hand with the raw materials of a living author's bibliography will realize. this is a monumental task. especiaUy in the case of Arthur Miller's substantial body of work. which has BOOK REVIEWS 235 been badly handled in at least one previous bibliographical attemPl-3 bungled comedy of errors. All of this has been circumvented by Joseph Katz and George Jensen through their editorial and scholarly knowledge, judgment. and insight. In addition, Jensen, in his introduction, acknowledges his debt to and point of departure from previous short, enumerative bibliographical studies of Miller 's writings. and states that although his research has been as thorough as possible, the compilation "is, for several reasons, only an initial attempt to master Miller bibliography; the bibliographical theory of modern dramatic works is still virgin ground, and Miller scholarship itself is in a slate of infancy. This is not an apology but a statement of fact: much work remains to be done." And it is, as Jensen states, a fact - one that should give scholars and researchers in modern drama studies cause for concern and thoughtful consideration for future scholarly projects. American drama in particular, because of its nearly perverse reliance on and relationship with the commercial demands of the professional theater, needs to establish a continuing, historical relationship among American scholars, playwrights, and critics. As a fellow laborer in the Miller vineyard, I can testify to the "fact" that Jensen raises regarding the "infancy" of Miller scholarship and bibliographical theory of modern dram...