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  • Bernard Shaw: A Life
  • Matthew Wilson Smith
A.M. Gibbs . Bernard Shaw: A Life. Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2005. Pp. 554, illustrated. $39.95 (Hb).

After so many biographies of Shaw, from Frank Harris to Archibald Henderson to Hesketh Pearson to William Irvine to St. John Ervine to Sally Peters, do we really need another? More specifically, after Michael Holroyd's magisterial multi-volume work, what more is there to say? According to Gibbs – Emeritus Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and a leading authority on Shaw – the answers are "yes" and "plenty." Above all, Holroyd is the prince whom any new Shaw biographer must challenge, and Gibbs tilts straight for him. He criticizes what he calls Holroyd's "reductive, trivializing, and condescending" approach to Shaw's life, with its depiction of Shaw as emotionally "lame" and ultimately seduced by "the lure of fantasy" (461). More than this, Gibbs argues that Holroyd "repeatedly misrepresents [End Page 300] and distorts primary biographical evidence in vitally significant areas of discussion" and he further rejects Holroyd's approach to biography as one "that allows the writer frequently to adopt a role akin to that of an omniscient narrator in a novel" (461). Whatever Holroyd's distortions of fact (the text mentions only a handful, some of them minor), the real gulf between Gibbs and Holroyd may be methodological. Gibbs clearly wants nothing to do with the sort of biography that puts its subject on the psychiatrist's couch. Moreover, he is inclined to see Shaw as – the words are mine, not Gibbs's – on the whole a pretty well-adjusted genius. Breaking with a long line of interpretation, Gibbs gives us a Shaw who is no mere thinking machine; his Shaw is great in both heart and brain, a man as Dionysian as he is Apollonian.

This is the most sympathetic biography of Shaw I have read, and it is a great biography. Gibbs is a skilful, engaging writer, and his book reads not like a novel, as Holroyd's does, but as beautifully crafted narrative history. Gibbs is also unafraid of going against the grain. Much of his account of Shaw's upbringing is revisionist: he argues that "Shaw exaggerated the poverty" of his father's side of the family (9); he debunks the speculation that Shaw was the adulterous child of Vandeleur Lee and Bessie Shaw (16); he argues that the marriage between Shaw's parents was happier and healthier than previous writers (including Shaw himself) have proposed. But the most important revision this book offers is the attention it devotes to the women in Shaw's life, beginning with Shaw's mother Bessie and his elder sister Lucy, passing through his numerous "passionate attachments" (Alice Lockett, Jenny Patterson, Florence Farr, and Ellen Terry, to name a few), to his wife Charlotte and, finally, to his extra-marital affairs with Stella Campbell and Molly Tompkins. While Shaw often considered these affairs to be "entanglements" – and howled against them through characters such as Jack Tanner – Gibbs shows us how much these women gave Shaw and how much of them there is in his plays. Gibbs's account of Shaw's relationship with the American actress Molly Tompkins, which began when Molly was just over thirty and Shaw just over seventy, is one of the most fascinating and original parts of the book. Since the case for the affair was not fully documented until 2004 (by Patricia M. Carter), it is still fresh meat for biographers, and Gibbs's account is nuanced, convincing, and moving. And against suggestions by numerous biographers (none more so than Sally Peters, in her controversial 1996 Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman), Gibbs gives us a portrait of Shaw as a robust heterosexual and incorrigible ladies' man. In a typical three-hander, we find Shaw, at the age of 83, trying to out-manoeuvre the equally antique H.G. Wells for the attentions of the newly crowned Miss Hungary, Zsa Zsa Gabor (104).

Gibbs also addresses, if not quite tackles, the most notorious questions about Shaw's career. Shaw's truly outrageous statements – such as his 1933 [End Page 301] remark that "[t]he...

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