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64 similarity, between Pater and Camus: "Whereas Marius dies surrounded by prayer and in harmony with the new humanity, Meursault welcomes as the consummation of his martyrdom the spectators' cries of derision" (p. 121). Given the comparison, one wishes Conlon had addressed himself to whether this is a valid distinction or merely an accidental one. And since Conlon mentions the post-moderns, how, for example, might objects in their world(s) differ from those in Pater's? Does the missing sacred vessel in Marius for which the temple guards search among a host of secular cups, flagons, and diadems— neither shape nor material known, and unfortunately not inscribed with the name of its divine owner—have any equivalent in, say, Beckett's fiction? I have no idea if Camus ever had heard of Pater; but Beckett certainly had. And Proust, surely the central French novelist/autobiographer of our century, read Pater with care. I suspect Pater's impact cm French literature may be as important as French literature's impact on Pater. How rich a comparsion of Marius with A la recherche might be: both Proust and Pater read Ruskin avidly as young men but shied away from his emphasis on moral action; both sought to record their discrimination of impressions derived from the physical senses; both explored an interior, psychic reality. Conlon cites Proust only once, fleetingly; perhaps I should conclude by saying that I look forward to Conlon's continued work in this area since the scope of his present study is restricted to French culture as assimilated and disseminated by Pater up to the mid-1890s. Gerald Monsman Duke University 2. THE MANY LIVES OF G. B. SHAW Stanley Weintraub. The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical Approaches to G. B. S. and His Work. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982. $22.50 The indefatigable Stanley Weintraub has been at the center of Shaw studies for a generation and, turn and turn about, Shaw has been at the center of Weintraub's work, though that ranges from the Rossettis to the Spanish Civil War. Weintraub's approach is biographical, generously defined, and always with an eye to the links between the life and the work. Biography for Weintraub includes what a man reads, sees, thinks, and writes, as well as what he does and who he knows. The unifying focus of The Unexpected Shaw is on the byways and paradoxical sidelights that played along Shaw's very full life, a life that began in the first third of Victoria's reign and ended five years into the atomic age. Most of the essays in the book investigate one of these sidelights, and so concentrate what is othewise diffuse or overshadowed by so much else in the life and the work. In a way the book supplements the two-volume Autobiography that Weintraub put together from Shaw's own writings a few years ago; and indeed the preface to that work forms an item in this collection. The Unexpected Shaw brings together four items written in the 1980s, nine from the seventies, five from the sixties, and one from the fifties. The author assures us that all have been revised; and they are organized according to the rough chronology of Shaw's life. The last essay, on "The Avant-Garde Shaw," even takes us Into the afterlife. 65 The opening essay, "Everybody's Shaw," is different in that, written for a dictionary of literary biography, it offers pithy keynotes in a systematic summary of Shaw's life and oeuvre. It is excellent in its kind. The succeeding pieces, on Shaw as novelist, as "Pugilist and Playwright," as actor, as art critic and gallery-goer, as literary critic, are all admirable in their scholarship and lively and economical in their presentation. Occasionally the scholarship is not pressed as far as it might be, or the frame of reference is kept too close to the British scene. So, for example, Shaw's performance in Edward Rose's farcical comedy Odd : To Say the Least of It is represented by the printed announcement and Shaw's expenses as gleaned from his diary notes, but we hear nothing of the text or Shaw's role, though...

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