A Man of Wealth & Very Old

SIXTEEN SELF SKETCHES (207 pp.)--Bernard Shaw--Dodd, Mead ($3.50).

FABIAN ESSAYS (246 pp.)--Macmillan ($3.50).

DAYS WITH BERNARD SHAW (327 pp.)--Stephen Winsten--Vanguard ($3.75).

The year: 1857; the place: Dublin's Synge Street. Mrs. Lucinda Shaw has gone off on a visit to County Galway, leaving her one-year-old son George Bernard (known as "Bob") in care of his father, George Carr Shaw, co-partner in the respectable grain firm of Clibborn & Shaw. Naturally, mother Shaw wants to know exactly what catastrophes are taking place in her absence, so dutiful father Shaw picks up his pen and briefs her:

July 17. Poor whiggedie whellow was very sick in his stomach . . . but . . . brisk as ever this morning.

July 20. The young beggar is getting quite outrageous . . . roaring and heaving like a bull . . .

July 22 ... The young chap . . . made a famous attempt [to walk] this morning.

July 27. Yup [sister Elinor Agnes] and Bob both fell out of bed . . . on the tops of their heads . . .

July 30 ... Bob is growing very unruly . . .

Aug. 3 . . . The young ruffian tore the newspaper this morning . . .

Aug. 11. Poor Bob . . . his head went slap through a pane of glass . .

Aug. 15. Poor Bob is annoyed with his teeth . . .

Ninety-one years have passed, but "whiggedie whellow" is as unruly and outrageous as ever, never missing a chance to roar, laugh and tear the newspaper apart. In three books just published, U.S. readers will have a grand chance to follow G.B.S. through those nine decades.

Father Shaw's notes on the Shavian infancy are included in George Bernard's own latest book, bits & pieces of autobiography called Sixteen Self Sketches. In Days With Bernard Shaw, Stephen Winsten, a writer and lecturer who lives next door to Shaw in Hertfordshire, gives an excellent record of their neighborly conversations over recent years. Fabian Essays, written 60 years ago by Shaw, Sidney Webb and others (and now re-issued with a new essay by Shaw himself) links up the years between. There is little of Shaw the playwright in these books, but much of Shaw the boy and Shaw the man.

"I Was Susceptible." The main facts of Shaw's life are already well-known--though, in Shaw's crusty opinion, most of them are scarcely worth knowing. "I am not at all interesting biographically. I have never killed anybody . . . Things have not happened to me: on the contrary it is I who have happened to them."

Reluctant to share the fate of Charles Dickens ("so much is known about him that might have happened to Wickens, or Pickens, or Stickens that his biographers have obliterated him"), Shaw devotes most of Self Sketches to correcting "what had been overlooked or misunderstood."* Sample restatements: P: "I have not yet ascertained the truth about myself. For instance, how far am I mad, and how far sane? I do not know." P: "Aunt Ellen, though humpbacked, was not a midget."

P: "O, Sex-Obsessed Biographer, get it into your mind that you can learn nothing about your biographies from their sex histories. The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be . . .rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation ... If you have any doubts as to my normal virility, dismiss them from your mind ... I was extremely susceptible."

Coward's Conversion. In a chapter headed "Shame and Wounded Snobbery," jesting G.B.S. turns dead-solemn and hands out a brand-new episode from his life--a "snob-tragedy" which profoundly influenced him although it caused him such anguish that he was never able to confess it even to his wife.

At the age of twelve he was taken away from the genteel and "very private" school in the Irish countryside, where he was loafing happily, and enrolled in Dublin's cheaper Central Model Boys' School, whose students were largely Catholic sons of "petty shopkeepers." Overnight, Shaw, who had been baptized in the Protestant Episcopal Church of Ireland, became "a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman would speak or play," and he burned with "a shame which was more or less a psychosis."

It was the Model School, Shaw thinks, that marked him for life. Out of its humiliations, he suddenly conceived "the birth of moral passion." Ignominy made him stand up for the first time ("When I was a boy I was a coward, and bitterly ashamed of it") and passionately demand respect--not only for himself but for his more humble schoolfellows. Humiliation made him a living example of his thesis that "the professional, penniless younger son classes are the revolutionary element in society: the proletariat is the conservative . . ."

It is no wonder that, years later, Shaw was to find his niche in the Fabian Society --"a minority of cultural snobs" who, he says, standing haughtily apart from the English proletariat, permeated the governing class and helped utterly to change the face of Britain.

Men of Letters. Much the same class-conscious humiliation caused Shaw to leave his clerk's stool in a Dublin office and seek his fortune as a literary man--for "you cannot be imposed upon by baronets ... if you belong to the republic of art." He is sure that men of letters have been made this way, time & again. "Think of . . . the boy Dickens [working] in the blacking warehouse, and his undying resentment of his mother's wanting him to stay there. Think of Trollope, at an upper-class school with holes in his trousers, because his father could not bring himself to dispense with a manservant. Ugh! Be a tramp or be a millionaire; it matters little which: what does matter is being a poor relation of the rich; and that is the very devil."

Ultimate Discoveries. No longer driven by the goad of poor gentility, Millionaire Shaw is as ready as any tycoon to bemoan the woes of being wealthy. In his conversations with Neighbor Winsten, the Shavian past & present unroll like an endless, multicolored ribbon:

"I am the first philosopher to make truth pay, and like Jesus I went among the sinners by getting my articles printed in the Tory and Hearst press . . . William Morris died weeping for the poor, I'll die denouncing poverty . . . The girl Leigh [Actress Vivien Leigh] was round today [and] I thought of walking . . . with her to attract attention to myself . . . Was [Rilke] a poet? ... I am not certain whether Picasso is the name of the latest car or a horse . . . Burne-Jones was a great artist . . . [Joseph] Conrad [once] challenged me to a duel. Unfortunately, [H.G.] Wells got in the way, otherwise Conrad would have taken his place among the saints . . . When I was a little boy I was always playing the devil. My chief delight was to paint . . . walls . . . with pictures of Mephistopheles . . . As a child dreams, so he becomes ... I was just an odious argumentative young man ... A great man is one whom "you instinctively believe . . .

"You talk of the age into which I was born as a great age. I regard it as the most villainous page of recorded history . . . And the twentieth century is no better ... I have become the father confessor of the whole world ... I often get letters addressed to the Reverend George B. Shaw. You can deceive people some of the time, but they ultimately discover your true vocation . . . What if the central figure [in a play] is a man of wealth and very old? And . . . people gather around to advise him what to do with his money? The joke will of course be, that there is no such thing as a wealthy person nowadays.

"I have altered my Will ... I shall probably write another one. It is good fun having a lot of money to throw about, the only fun . . . The only moments of happiness I have ever known have been in dream and it was horrible to wake . . . I tell you I'm going to die any day now ... I am tired. It is time I went ... I must go on living because the Life Force is in desperate need of an organ of intelligent consciousness ... Do you think the young are interested in my work? ... I want to be remembered like Mozart and Michelangelo."

Line-Bucker

EL ALAMEIN TO THE RIVER SANGRO (192 pp.) -- Field Marshal Montgomery --Dutton ($6.50).

British Field Marshal Montgomery fought and won his battles by the book. His own accounts of how he did it are written for soldiers, military historians and armchair strategists. Normandy to the Baltic was Monty's cool, professional account of his considerable part in engineering the defeat of the German armies on the Continent. Now he has backtracked in time and completed his story of World War II with El Alamein to the River Sangro, a brief, coldly competent blueprint of his strategy in North Africa, Sicily and Italy.

Chiefly, this is the story of how spare, fox-faced Martinet Montgomery chased Desert Fox Rommel's famed Afrika Korps 1,850 miles, from the gates of Alexandria into Tunisia. In his writing, as in battle, Monty has neither Eisenhower's scope nor Patton's dash and saltiness. Readers who want the smell and smoke of battle will not get it here. But El Alamein should appeal to chess players. Every move of every battle is explained with the logic, the patience and the bland assurance of an instructor demonstrating a foolproof system. Writes Monty: "I have always planned on the assumption of success."

The Eighth Army "Desert Rats," a melting pot of Britons, Australians, Indians, Free French, New Zealanders and others, were never defeated in battle after Monty took command. His method sounded simple: refuse to move until every detail of the battle plan is in place; then slug it out to the finish--chiefly with line bucks but with an end run when necessary. To a flashy quarterback like Rommel, such tactics must have seemed relentlessly dull, relentlessly successful.

*Not included: Shaw's reprimand of Neighbor Winsten. Writing (to the London Times) of Days With Bernard Shaw, G.B.S. barked: "It is a charming book . . . When I say anything silly or absurd to Mr. Winsten ... he corrects me ... by substituting what he himself would wisely and sensibly have said." However, Shaw admits, "When Turner had to paint a view of a city, and found the church or the castle ... ill situated, he put them in their right places and gave us a landscape worth a thousand photographs."

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