Nonage Novels

SELECTED NOVELS OF G. BERNARD SHAW (726 pp.)--Coxfon House ($2.50).

Between 1879 and 1883 a young unknown named George Bernard Shaw, living hand-to-mouth in London, dashed off five novels, one after the other. They piled up a grand total of 60 rejection slips before publication, and never made much of a splash when they were finally published.

In 1892 Shaw solemnly announced that royalties from their sale had jumped 170% in two years--from about three shillings in 1889 to about eight shillings in 1891. "I doubt," said he, "if any other living novelist can show such a record."

The original texts of The Irrational Knot, Cashel Byron's Profession and An Unsocial Socialist, all long out of print, are now available in a single volume (omitted: Immaturity and Love among the Artists). As novels they are pretty poor; Shaw himself observed that they were "just readable enough to be intolerable." But the three taken together are Victorian documents, and give a good idea of the audacious, irreverent young Shavian mind.

The Irrational Knot (1880), longest and woodenest of the three, is mostly about the hazards of marriage. It abounds in high-toned dialogue: "'Oh, Marmaduke! How dare you speak so of your betrothed.' " But even at 24, Shaw was already crusading (in this case against closed bedroom windows), commenting boldly on sex and sin, fluttering the gentry with open references to radicalism, atheism and the newfangled device called the electric light.

Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) is best known as the novel which glorified Gene Tunney ahead of his time.* Byron was a professional prizefighter but, like Tunney, he was contaminated by literature, music and the arts. He happened to fall in love with an heiress who combined an income of -L-40,000 a year with an interest in Spinoza. In the ring Cashel was superb; Lydia once heard him raging like a lion: "'Rules be d--d, he bit me, and I'll throw him to --.' "

An Unsocial Socialist (1883) is the most Shavian of the three reprinted novels. " 'Of course, she has proposed to you, and you have refused,' " says a scornful maiden to Sidney Trefusis, the hero. " 'On the contrary,' " he says. " 'I proposed, and she accepted. That is why I have to hide.' " Trefusis is a wealthy Socialist who disguises himself as a workman, lives in a gaudy ancestral mansion full of trapezes, plaster statues and carpenter's tools. He serves as a mouthpiece for Author Shaw, then a poverty-stricken young Socialist who wandered around London, a picture of "indescribable seediness," with a sharp eye cocked toward the future and the generation's best brains in his head.

In these slight novels of his nonage there is little promise of Shaw's latter-day achievements (Candida, Pygmalion, over 40 other plays). Yet, in retrospect, they show horizonal flashes of the approaching storm--the brightest literary lifetime of his age.

* Shaw later burlesqued the novel and Shakespearean drama--in a blank verse play, The Admirable Bashville.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.