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SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 26 (2006) 223-226


"Stump and Inkpot"
Reviewed by
Stanley Weintraub
A. M. Gibbs. Bernard Shaw: A Life. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xiii + 554 pp. Index. $39.95.

"My struggle," Bernard Shaw wrote to Thomas Demetrius O'Bolger, an aspiring biographer working on a doctoral thesis, " . . . was like learning to act. In fact the real Shaw is the actor, the imaginary Shaw the real one." Confused? This is Shaw at his beguiling best, a continuing challenge to biographers seeking the last word. Picking up the gauntlet, Tony Gibbs chastises G.B.S. for his autobiographical hyperbole about his boyhood, and other fictions, and chides earlier biographers for misjudgments and misreadings. Despite its adversarial tone, this newest of Shavian lives, the latest although not the last word, is the most authoritative yet and is likely to remain so for a long time to come. Given academic press book prices, it is also a bargain.

Gibbs writes from Australia after a lifetime of Shaw studies. Among his publications in preparation for the life are Shaw: Interviews and Recollections (1990) and A Bernard ShawChronology (2001). Shaw once told Archibald Henderson, his first major biographer, "The best authority on Shaw is Shaw," and presented him with a fifty-four-page memoir to get him started on a seductive Shavian track. Shaw also rewrote Frank Harris's awful biography and extensively revised, and added to, Hesketh Pearson's anecdotal life, long a standard work. These, and other biographies, uncritically adopt many of Shaw's self-serving accounts of himself, much of the documentation also coming from Shaw's letters, which sometimes were less, or more, than the reality. As Gibbs writes later, referring to G.B.S.'s alleged "mystic betrothal" to May Morris, one can find "many examples of his not wanting to spoil a good story with the truth." Perhaps geographical distance contributes to biographical objectivity. [End Page 223]

All self-portraits are suspect. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote two memoirs, each factually at odds with the other. James McNeill Whistler, as plaintiff in a libel action against John Ruskin in 1879, told the judge that he was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father designed railways for the czar. When the painter was reminded of his actual birth in Lowell, Massachusetts—a far less romantic setting for an artist—he insisted, "I do not choose to be born in Lowell, Massachusetts." Not long ago I read for review an analysis by David Reynolds, In Command of History (2005), of how Shaw's great contemporary, Winston Churchill, constructed his "magisterial" six-volume The Second World War (1948–53). The once and future prime minister not only employed a "syndicate" of researchers and ghostwriters, whose drafts he tweaked (somewhat) into his characteristic Augustan prose, but even distorted documents he then included as if authentic. Churchill's zeal to vindicate his wartime role overwhelmed the authenticity of the history, but critics surveying his volumes as they emerged annually (and made him rich) with few exceptions reviewed the celebrity author rather than the suspect work.

Shaw creatively rewrote his life all his life, often through his plays. His own biographers and editors happily (or protectively) conspired in such distortions, many now exposed. Mrs. Pat Campbell's daughter, Stella, censored her mother's letters in the published correspondence with Shaw, as did Molly Tompkins's son Peter and Dame Laurentia McLachlan's convent successors. Shaw even called himself a "pantomime ostrich," suggesting two poses in one. Shaw's melodramatic embellishments and prudential prunings are often recastings of the most successful yet most perplexing character in Shaw's variegated repertory—himself. Gibbs calls the Shavian portrait of his father, memorably, "rhetorical parricide." George Carr Shaw was not drunk as utterly and perpetually as described, and Bessie Gurly Shaw was not the aloof and uncaring mother whose only son had to shift for himself. Further, Shaw's bootstrap rise from social "downstart" status was not nearly as disadvantaged as he preferred it, in retrospect, to be. Yet...

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