Books: Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain

Two extraordinary publishing enterprises greet each other this month, just as their subjects did more than 80 years ago. The final entries in George Bernard Shaw's four-volume, 76-year-long correspondence present the master playwright bombinating into old age, dispensing unsolicited advice on every aspect of modern life from the flaws of the cinema to the indignities of sex. The first of a projected 20 volumes of Mark Twain's letters follows the literary apprentice -- at first still using his real name, Samuel Clemens -- as he flees Hannibal, Mo., to become a river pilot, then a journalist covering the gold-intoxicated frontiers of Nevada and California.

On the surface the two writers, separated by time and culture, seem wholly unrelated. The American is a sensual naif; the Anglo-Irishman is a sophisticated puritan. Twain is happy for small favors; Shaw is ungrateful for major rewards. Presented with the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, Shaw informs the Royal Swedish Academy that their award is a "lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety." Shaw's dramas brim with advocates of free thought and liberal policy, but his correspondence reveals him as a fool of the new totalitarians. Adolf Hitler is a "wonderful preacher of everything that is right and best in Toryism"; Joseph Stalin is the "greatest living statesman."

In contrast, Twain's letters show a simmering distaste for politicians and a maturing affection for the family he left behind. When his younger brother Henry is fatally wounded in a steamboat explosion, the youthful Clemens rushes to his side. He "prayed as never man prayed before," he writes his sister, "that the great God . . . would pour out the fulness of his just wrath upon my wicked head, but have mercy, mercy, mercy upon that unoffending boy."

From mining country, Clemens writes his mother that the land is "fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper . . . thieves, murderers, desperadoes, ladies, children, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamen . . . poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits." A sister receives more intimate intelligence: "I don't mind sleeping with female servants as long as I am a bachelor -- by no means -- but after I marry, that sort of thing will be 'played out,' you know."