Shaw's Letters to Trebitsch

Book Reviews SHAW'S LETTERS TO TREBITSCH Samuel A. Weiss, ed. Bernard Shaw's Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. $45.00 A few years back I edited Shaw's correspondence with Frank Harris, who had turned in bad times he brought upon himself into whining, pleading, begging, cadging insufferability. Yet Shaw indulged him. Move over, Frank. Siegfried Trebitsch has defeated you at your own game. One puzzles over Shaw's continual indulgence of such incubuses of the mails over a lifetime, from the impossible poetess and harridan Erica Cotterill to the German propagandist and probable spy George Sylvester Viereck. What side of Shaw is exposed? With Trebitsch was it any more than the indulgence of an interesting old friend to whom he felt bound by old loyalties? Was he ever really a friend? Trebitsch was an unloveable, unattractive, unemployable Viennese hack writer fortunate to have some small family income he proceeded to fritter away. At the beginning he beguiled Shaw with his innocence and enthusiasm. Unfortunately , most of Trebitsch's letters are lost, but the impression we get from Shaw's responses is unmistakable. Trebitsch became another of Shaw's soured investments in people. Fortunately, Shaw knew enough German to keep Trebitsch up to the mark, for his authorized German translator was so weak in English that in 1910, after having Germanized G.B.S. plays for eight years, he hired a teacher of English, Wilhelm Lehmann, to help correct his errors. Style was less crucial, as letter after letter finds Shaw exasperated by Trebitsch's innocence of idiom and English usages in general. Shaw reacted almost merrily when Trebitsch's error-ridden lines turned less wooden. "The more you forget your English," Shaw assured him, "the better you translate." It was almost a suicidal approach to turning prose into another language, and indeed was exactly that in French, where Augustin Hamon was a good socialist but an execrable Frenchifier of Shaw's plays, and Shaw unhelpfully could barely order a breakfast in French. That Shaw's letters to Trebitsch have taken a long time to emerge into print is clear from the first page of the editor's preface, where the third volume of the Collected Letters, published early in 1985, is unmentioned. The second volume, we learn, published 37 letters to Trebitsch. The third, we can add, published 14 more. Thus the present volume now supplements Shaw's published correspondence by 480 additional letters, some of them revealing about play interpretation and play production, but even more of them revealing about Shaw's professional—and unprofessional— perspectives regarding translation of his works. One wonders throughout the correspondence, which begins in 1902 when a young Austrian writer of stupefying mediocrity offers to become Shaw's 333 30:3, Reviews German translator, and ends in 1950, when Shaw at 94 refuses to have anything further to do with him while permitting him to hang on as translator, why Shaw continued to condone translations that at best rose to adequacy. The time and place to review Shaw's long and checkered history of encouraging inadequate translators on grounds that they were eager, or impecunious, or Socialist, or all three, is not here. Siegfried Trebitsch, however, possessed also, we learn through the correspondence, a personality of unmitigated whimpering selfishness. Shaw's keeping him on may tell us something about Shaw. Because he used Trebitsch as a sounding board, the letters are crowded with vintage, quotable Shaw. "Laughter is my sword and shield and spear," Shaw advised him in 1902, early in the collaboration, but Trebitsch's sense of humor was heavy and labored, requiring immense reserves of patience on Shaw's part. The fun for the reader begins when Shaw's equanimity explodes, although his wit was usually wasted on Trebitsch. The "hideous and devastating errors" were often, Shaw charged, "unashamed, intentional crimes." But instead of withdrawing his patronage, Shaw suggested, "You must learn to laugh, or, by Heavens, you will commit suicide when you realize all the infamy of the world as it is. You must avoid literary people. . . . What is the use of people whose heads are full of the very same people you have read...