Books: G. B. S. Revisited

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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 But the new material in his book, consisting of unpublished correspondence with the Shaws and diaries kept by G.B.S., merely stresses what has always been widely feared—that, though Shaw "enjoyed carnal concurrence"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."