Personal Battlegrounds

A former dancer and professional actor, Timothy Irving Frederick Findley, or Tiff to his family and friends, enjoyed performing as a public speaker and, more interestingly, as a writer. He wrote plays that dealt with the problems of his own psyche, and many of his short stories and novels contain stage directions, or what could be regarded as such. His best novels — The Wars and Famous Last Words, for example — have an innate sense of the theatre in their use of dialogue, characterization, and plot. Findley certainly found photographs, letters, and diaries inspiring, but he instinctively went for scenes with dramatic intensity, silences filled with significance, and a narrative voice that could sound like an onstage monologue.

As Sherrill Grace points out in her new workmanlike biography, Tiff’s journals help highlight the writer as performer: “The page serves as a mirror in which he observes himself posing, performing, talking to himself, or trying...