Granville-Barker

30:2, Reviews GRANVILLE-BARKER Eric Salmon, ed. Granville Barker and His Correspondence: A Selection of Letters by and to Him. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. $57.50 When J. P. Wearing reviewed Eric Salmon's Granville Barker: A Secret Life in 1984 for ELT (27:3, 258-60), he qualified his largely unfavorable assessment of the book with the following: "These facets [Salmon's seemingly exhaustive research] lead me to look forward to Salmon's promised edition of GranvilleBarker 's letters and to expect that that will be the richly rewarding work which . . . the current book is not." The volume of letters is here and it is indeed rewarding, though once again Salmon has gotten himself between the reader and Granville-Barker. Scholars of Granville-Barker will welcome this volume, but they will also have to work rather hard to make use of it. That Harley Granville-Barker has emerged as one of the more influential figures in the history of the theatre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is indisputable. He is best known today as the author of the Prefaces to Shakespeare, essays crucial to the development of a critical vocabulary for analyzing the relationship between a dramatic text and its production. Granville-Barker's experience as actor, director, and producer were sources for his discussion of such ideas as "double-time" in Othello and act-scene divisions in several of the plays. To his practical experience he brought an articulation and erudition that has made these essays classics of a kind of criticism rarely done with equal success since: the observations of a talented man of the theatre about one of its greatest artists. Had Granville-Barker written only the Prefaces, his place in literary and theatrical history would have been assured. However, he was also an actor of some note, remembered most for creating some of Shaw's most vibrant characters, including Cusins in Major Barbara (modeled on his good friend Gilbert Murray) and Dubedat in TAe Doctor's Dilemma. He distinguished himself as director and producer as well, and many of the letters document aesthetic and technical considerations in moving a play from page to stage, as well as his desire to establish a national theatre. Finally, he was a playwright of some accomplishment; and though none of his plays has stood the test of time, it is fascinating to read his exchanges with such playwrights as Shaw and William Archer, a reminder of the dramaturgic fertility of the era. The book's title and subtitle suggest its immediate limitations: it is a selection, and far from inclusive. What Salmon presents is something akin to a mosaic, in which Granville-Barker is seen through his exchanges with eight individual correspondents; several briefer correspondences are collected in chapters, grouped together by profession (actors, directors, playwrights). Most of the chapters, however, are devoted to a single correspondent, and include a detailed preface discussing the relationship between Granville-Barker and the correspondent. This structural design leads to what must be seen as 236 30:2, Reviews the volume's most serious drawback. The plan works well if one is interested primarily in Granville-Barker's relationship with a specific individual (as was the case with the only previous edition of his letters, C. B. Purdom's TAe Shaw-Barker Letters, a volume Salmon considers flawed), but proves immensely frustrating if one wishes to have easy access to all letters within a given time period (regardless of the correspondent) or regarding a specific play or production, or if one wishes to observe Granville-Barker's overall development as artist and correspondent over the course of his career. Though there is a diligent and dependable index, the volume remains cumbersome for any purpose but the limited one of examining Granville-Barker and each of his several individual correspondents, one at a time. I should, perhaps, add that this may be something of a dilemma for the editor of a volume of letters. It can be equally frustrating to have to sift through hundreds of pages of letters in order to find those exchanged by two conespondents, as is the case in most standard collections, arranged by...