Shaw: "For God's sake, stop selling my books, or I shall be ruined"

Running your eye across a library shelf and encountering a title such as Author X's Letters to His or Her Publishers, you would probably not stop to pull the title. Author X's letters to a lover, probably; to another author, definitely; to the newspapers even—any such collection would seize your attention more readily. But if you do not stop to examine Michel Pharand's splendidly edited collection of Shaw's letters to his publishers, you are missing not only an opportunity to expand your knowledge of the ins and outs of printing, paper weight and thickness, typography, margins, book distribution, copyright laws, royalties, covers, and bindings but also a great deal of fun. For everything Shaw touched he turned to wit, humor, and paradox, as in the enjoinder (here the title of this review) to Otto Kyllmann, senior publisher at Constable & Co. As a bonus, one gains insights into Shaw's literary work from various remarks and observations about his own plays and novels.

The collection starts with a bang by reprinting Shaw's response to Macmillan's rejecting Immaturity, wherein Shaw explains that he wrote the novel in order "to deal with those ordinary experiences which are a constant irony on sentimentalism" but not so as to produce an ironic effect, but rather one "of oddity and unexpectedness." That goes a long way to explaining Shaw's aesthetic: intense Flaubertian irony was not his intent—nor his practice, for that matter. In a letter to an early publisher, Grant Richards, Shaw distinguishes his first three Unpleasant Plays (Widowers' Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs. Warren's Profession) as "realistic plays" as against his Pleasant Plays (Arms and the Man, Candida, and You Never Can Tell) "which are works of dramatic art purely." What to make of this astounding assertion? Shaw seems to mean that the Pleasant Plays are to be compared to A Midsummer Night's Dream as works of pure art in contradistinction to Ibsen's A Doll's House, which Shaw argued has a social purpose beyond its own art as its excuse for being. He certainly contradicted this view of his Pleasant Plays, specifically in regard to You Never Can Tell, which Shaw claimed was an experiment in the fusion of art's artificiality with real life. So we are left with the paradox of a Shaw who would not "for the sake of art alone face the toil of writing a single sentence," yet declaring three of his plays "works of dramatic art purely." The contradiction suggests Shaw's own internal battle between aestheticism on the one hand and the social utility of art on the other.

In our anything-goes world, it is difficult to imagine how Shaw's plays struck his contemporaries, but Shaw's exchanges with publishers here reproduced illustrate the effect nicely. When Shaw came to publish Man and Superman, he applied to John Murray, who rejected the play because its object was "to cast ridicule upon … to assail—marriage and other social & religious institutions." Shaw defended himself by assuring Murray that the play contained "a perfectly serious religion, a perfectly practicable and urgently needed policy, a view of heaven and hell that is quite real, and a criticism of life that drives most modern men to what I have depicted as hell, or to the pessimism of Ecclesiastes." Although Shaw certainly did find a publisher for Man and Superman in England (Constable), in America Shaw found he had to publish the play himself. Indeed, as Pharand ably explains, Shaw became in effect his own publisher, using various publishing houses mainly for distribution of his books. Most other matters relating to the production of books Shaw made himself a master of, for nothing escaped his scrupulous attention, whether in the details of his contracts or the ratio of space at the top of the page to that at the bottom, down to the point size of letters: his bitter complaint...