G. B. S. Revisited

BERNARD SHAW (628 pp.)--St. John Ervlne--Morrow ($7.50).

Writing a Bernard Shaw biography is perhaps the most inviting and yet the most thankless task in the literary game, because all his life Shaw wrote his own. He was the most articulate, most relentlessly self-documenting man of his time. The publication of yet another book about G.B.S., therefore, seems both foolhardy and unnecessary. But this one is timely, for it comes at a moment when pygmy critics are beginning to kick the dead giant around (TIME, Aug. 13). Irish Dramatist St. John Ervine suggests both why the critics are acting that way and why they are wrong. One trouble is that Shaw flouted the romantic conception of what a great artist should be.

G.B.S. never lay in a ditch all night, boozed up to the eyebrows. He never broke a promise, never let a friend down, stubbornly refused to die in poverty. And he was faithful to his wife--even when Mrs. Patrick Campbell toppled him to the floor, and herself on top of him, in an effort to change his mind.

Fabian as Lover. Biographer Ervine was a close friend of Bernard and Charlotte Shaw for more than 30 years. If Shaw had had some beastly secret tucked up his sleeve. Ervine could now disclose it--and send Shaw's stock booming. But the new material in his book, consisting of unpublished correspondence with the Shaws and diaries kept by G.B.S., merely stresses what has always been widely feared--that, though Shaw "enjoyed carnal concurrence" with women, he thought he had greater talent as a playwright.

Ervine's view is both more intimate and more level than that of earlier Shavian biographers, who usually presented him as a fabulous monster. Ervine is able to discuss his immense shyness, to chide him when necessary for the "tosh" that often came from his "spinsterly mind," to assert, against all previous evidence, that he was generous in money matters, and to dispose of Oxford Don A.J.P. Taylor's assertion that "Shaw was never unhappy." Shaw's loveless childhood, drink-ridden father and hungry adolescence make it quite clear that few university dons have started life with so many handicaps or so much courage. In some versions of his life, G.B.S. seems so cold and distant that friends appear merely as puppets. Not so in this book--as is evident from Biographer Ervine's memorable description of Mrs. Sidney Webb and her husband, both Shaw's fellow Fabians: "Her embraces sometimes seemed more like assaults than endearments. [Sidney] would sit in his chair, with a statistical abstract in one hand and a White Paper in the other, while she balanced on his lap like an entranced houri."

A similar picture might be drawn of Shaw himself and his long succession of aggressive girl friends. Biographer Ervine chronicles them all with a precision not diminished by his dignity. At one point, Shaw was carrying on six affairs at the same time, but of these women "only two were carnally known to him, and he was not the first lover of either of them."

Intellect as Passion. Shaw left no children and "expressed regret that his marriage had been fruitless." The fact was, says Biographer Ervine, that Charlotte Payne-Townshend had a morbid "horror of sexual relations." But no man ever had a better helpmate than Charlotte. When she died in 1943, Shaw became "hysterical" with sorrow, shedding tears one moment and trying to sing the next.

Few men are endowed with an intellectual genius that can compensate for physical deprivation. But Shaw was--and it is this quality that his detractors find so inhuman. "Recognize," Shaw once told Ervine, "that intellect is a passion; that is, an activity of life, far more indispensable than physical ecstasy."

Perhaps the most important service rendered by Biographer Ervine is a reminder that the critics are wrong in taking everything Shaw said about himself at face value. He told, for instance, how he had sponged off his mother while he was trying to learn his trade as a writer. This picture of the callous genius--which was to appear in many of his plays--delighted him, but it was totally untrue, says Ervine. Similarly, Shaw roared outrageous--and contradictory--political, social and economic opinions that, often as not, were hyperbole.

Debate as Poetry. He was not so much a born storyteller as a born debater. But debate to him was what poetry is to other men. Even in his teens, he wrote letters to the editor instead of verse, and to a girl he would say triumphantly: "Have I not made you think?" He played with opinions as versifiers play with words. Don Juan's speech in Man and Superman ("They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public-spirited, only patriotic," etc.), is really a prose aria balancing on a counterpoint of ideas.

On the whole, Biographer Ervine has written a solid, slow, yet readable account. It is duller, but more complete, than Hesketh Pearson's brilliant portrait (1950). And it firmly supports Shaw's claim to being the greatest dramatist in the English language since Shakespeare--a claim recently supported by his erratic fellow Irishman, Sean O'Casey. Wrote O'Casey in a memorable tribute: "Look at the Theatre as it was . . . So sob-sisterly, so stupid, so down to dust was the Theatre then that God turned his back to it, made for Shaw, caught him by the beard, saying, 'Go up, my Irish son, and show, Shaw, what my Theatre should be, can be, for you're the one to do it.' And the great man went up to do what he had been bidden to do, making once more the Theatre a fit place for man and God to go to, to laugh, and to think out life as life was lived."

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