G.B.S. as a Correspondent: Eruption No. 3

30:3, Reviews small slips are unimportant, given the great boon of having the run of Shaw-toTrebitsch correspondence now available. More letters in the long exchange are likely to surface, but they should not change our picture of what an unsatisfactory writer-translator relationship Shaw permitted to exacerbate his most productive years. Stanley Weintraub Pennsylvania State University G.B.S. AS A CORRESPONDENT: ERUPTION NO. 3 Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1911-1925, Vol. 3. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. New York: Viking, 1985. $45.00 In prefacing the first volume of this series, Dan Laurence calculated that Shaw wrote more than 250,000 letters and postcards. This estimate—which tallies to an average of nine missives a day over a 75-year adulthood—indicates why an edition of Complete Letters remains an extravagant dream. As it is, some reviewers in the popular press have echoed Blake, crying "Enough! or Too much," and many readers may retreat from this 989 page tome to more circumscribed editions, such as those containing Shaw's correspondence to just one person—the likes of Ellen Terry, Harley Granville-Barker, Mrs. Patrick Campbell ("Stella "), Frank Harris, Molly Tompkins, Lord Alfred Douglas, et al. With their relatively limited contexts, such editions offer more manageable loops for lassoing the phenomenal Shavian energy. Yet the Collected Letters provide the fullest autobiography we have of Shaw. Displayed here in living detail is the wide range of character, interests, and talent which made G.B.S. such a striking personality, and giving depth to the range is the high quality of its components. Prolific as he was, Shaw seldom wrote a flaccid letter: vigorous, articulate, and pithy, his epistolary canon establishes him as one of the world's greatest correspondents. Given the abundance and richness of this literary outpouring, Dan Laurence has had an immense task of locating, sorting, selecting, and annotating. From tens of thousands of letters in 97 public collections, dozens of private collections , and 125 publications, he has culled 578 pieces for volume three, twothirds of which have not been previously published. At first glance, the result appears extremely heterogeneous. Addressed to 354 persons, the letters reveal their writer in a plethora of guises. He warns one correspondent, "You dont know the treacherous suddenness with which I can switch off from one character into another"; and he observes to another that "Hamlet was not a single consistent character: like most men he was half a dozen characters rolled into one" (184, 566-67). As an assertive critic, mentor, jester, friend, socialist, journalist, essayist, playwright, director, philosopher, politician, Irishman, businessman, editor, husband, philanderer, and world figure, Shaw himself exceeded a dozen. 336 30:3, Reviews All of these guises appear in Volume 3, yet a prevailing tone distinguishes this collection from the previous two. The writer is more somber; his renowned humor and antics surface at less frequent intervals. Laurence helps explain this change by dividing the volume with short essays on three events: Shaw's traumatic romance with Stella, his dismay over World War I, his concern about Irish independence. In light of the letters' prevailing content the categories are apt. They are disparate, however. Perhaps more significant is a unity beneath them, the heartbeat of a psychic evolution. The sober side of Shaw that emerges in the major events of these years is almost parabolic as it moves from flesh to world to spirit. Counterpointing his burgeoning fame is his painful awareness of growing old. He is like an aging actor who relishes a notorious role but also feels burdened by it. He queries an editor, "Why then drag me on to your stage when I am certain to act you off it?": he advises T. E. Lawrence to shoulder the role of Lawrence of Arabia: "Lawrence may be as great a nuisance to you sometimes as G.B.S. is to me, or as Frankenstein found the man he had manufactured; but you created him, and must now put up with him as best you can" (515, 803). Still, he chafes at the G.B.S. stereotype: "I have had enough of being the funny man and the privileged lunatic of a weekly paper. ... as I...