Two on Shaw

BOOK REVIEWS (248), Laocoön (257), Niccolö Machiavelli (317), Maîtres Sonneurs (318), Málaga (318), Mazatlán (323), Moby-Dick (328), Neuchâtel (338), Ocotlán (344), Thaïs (395) and Velazquez (403). Some entries are out of alphabetical order: Walter Scott goes before Winfield Scott (375), Star before Star Review (389), Irita Van Doren before Mark Van Doren (403), Sir Ernest Waterlow before Sir Sydney Waterlow (409). Several entries are unintentionally listed in two different ways—sometimes with different page references: Arzapalo Hotel and Hotel Arzapalo (145 and 233), Beau-Sejour Hotel, without an accent, and Hotel Beau-Séjour (152 and 233), Chápala, Lake and Lake Chápala (177 and 257), Cunninghame Graham, Robert B. and Graham, R.B. Cunninghame (189 and 221). Many names are misspelled: Federico Alires (137), Lewis Gannett (214), Hearst's (227), Walter Lippmann (305), Alessandro Manzoni (320), Oswald Mosley (333), Noumea (344), Pieve a S. Stefano (353) and Vagabonde . . . Colette (402). Aleppo is in Syria (137), Prague in Czechoslovakia (358), Salonika in Greece (372). And the first name of Frere-Reeves is Alexander. Finally, many mistakes in the previous volumes have not been corrected in the corrigenda:Pagliacci (I.247nl), Huxley, 17-18 (1.339:2), the footnotes are not numbered (11.187 and 11.406), Wyndham Lewis was born in 1882 (II. 193n3), lemon tree blooms (II.217nl), Alexandre .. .Tusoli (II.270n4), Queen's College was, and is, on Harley Street (II.316n2), Anne Rice (II.404n7), Le Vergini delle rocce (III.43n3), the unidentified place, "quite near London,"is Guildford, Surrey (III.52n2), Wilbur Cross served two terms as governor (III.166nl), there's no "Reader in English" in American colleges (III.166n2), pescecane (IV33:10) means "shark" (IV33n3), Brett and Murry were lovers in 1919 (V203nl), Lawrence was not paranoid (VIL6-8 up), East Indian names do not have a tilde (VIL170n2), Mauriac was not a Catholic convert (VIL225n5) and John Tebbel is misspelled (VII.637n3). This edition, though masterful and impressive , is also seriously flawed. Jeffrey Meyers ______________ Berkeley, California Two on Shaw The Matter with Ireland. Dan H. Laurence and David H. Greene, eds. Second Edition. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 354 pp. $49.95 A. M. Gibbs. A Bernard Shaw Chronology. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 435 pp. $55.00 111 ELT 45 : 1 2002 ALTHOUGH BERNARD SHAW spent only his first twenty years in Ireland , he was to write about his native country all his life. He did so, however , not in a fictional mode—as did exiled fellow Dubliner James Joyce—but in a journalistic vein. Returning to Ireland only sporadically, Shaw remained intensely interested in the country's social condition and political upheavals. Often cloaked in the outsider's mantle, he spoke his mind frequently, passionately and controversially. The Matter with Ireland, a chronological collection of his pronouncements on all things Irish, reveals an exasperated and opinionated Shaw, but also a man who could be "not only objective but temperate and wise in an atmosphere of rabid partisanship," as editors Laurence and Greene point out in their fine introduction. No work other than this thoroughly annotated volume provides as comprehensive and coherent an overview of Shaw's opinions on all aspects of Irish politics—war, patriotism, empire, conscientious objection, Devolution, Home Rule, Sinn Féin, the IRA, the Easter Rising —and on key figures such as Sir Edward Carson, Sir Roger Casement , Éamon de Valera, William Gladstone, Lloyd George, Charles Stewart Parnell, and Sir Horace Plunkett. In debating issues and debunking myths, Shaw is at his feistiest: he suggests courses of (at times impractical) action, gives history lessons, promotes or protests a recent agreement, bill, or treaty, pleads for sanity. Witness the gadfly hubris of Shaw's synopsis ofhis November 1917 pamphlet (20 pages in this edition), "How to Settle the Irish Question": "I shall therefore begin by demonstrating to the entire satisfaction of Ulster that the Sinn Feiner s are idiots. I shall then demonstrate to the satisfaction of Sinn Fein that the Ulster Impossibilists are idiots. Having thus ingratiated myself with both parties, I shall venture upon a few incidental references to the interests of England and of the rest...