G.B.S.: Oedipal Energies and Love's Artful Dodger

BOOK REVIEWS G.B.S.: OEDEPAL ENERGIES AND LOVE'S ARTFUL DODGER Michael Holroyd. Bernard Shaw: Volume I: 1856-1898: The Search for Love. New York: Random House, 1988. $24.95 MEMORABLE AMONG MAX BEERBOHM'S many caricatures of G.B.S. is one that portrays Shaw at the counter of a men's clothing shop purchasing a rumpled, greatly patched suit offered by the Danish critic Georg Brandes. Brandes observes, "Coat, Mr. Schopenhauer's; waistcoat, Mr. Ibsen's; Mr. Nietzsche's trousers—". Shaw responds, "Ah, but look at the patches!" Michael Holroyd might be the subject of a similar jest were Beerbohm to bless the 1980s—the biographer sizing up a Shaw outfit offered by an agent of the Shaw Estate. But this suit would be a motley of patches from Archibald Henderson, Frank Harris, Hesketh Pearson, Stephen Winsten, St John Ervine, Thomas O'Bolger, B. C. Rosset, Stanley Weintraub, Dan Laurence, Daniel Dervin, Margot Peters, plus a host of editors, commentators, and critics; and the biographer would exclaim, "Ah, but look at the stitches!" Adding currency to the fun would be wads of £1000 notes (representing an advance of over 600 of them) protruding from pockets labeled Chatto & Windus, and wads of $1000 bills (a similar amount) more fully bulging pockets labeled Random House. Several unique circumstances account for the staggering sums that publishers have been willing to pay for Holroyd's labors: this is the first full-scale Shaw biography since those of Henderson and Ervine in 1956; Holroyd, a biographer of considerable repute, has produced it with a special smile from the Shaw Estate; its profits may accumulate from three volumes (numbers two and three will appear in the next several years) plus auxiliary rights. Furthermore, in the years since the previous major biographies fresh source materials have come to light, and this biography, unlike most of its predecessors , promises an overview less biased by the influence of G.B.S. himself. Shaw declared that all of his goods were in the shop window, but when it came to personal revelations he took care to arrange the goods himself. Henderson's three tomes were largely framed under his influence, he wrote most of Harris's Bernard Shaw, much of Pearson's (contributing to its success), and fed materials to Winsten, a neighbor, and Ervine, a longtime friend. The two large volumes of 471 Book Reviews Volume 32:4, 1989 Shavian autobiography compiled by Weintraub suggest that he opened himself freely to the world, yet when O'Bolger and Mrs. Patrick Campbell threatened to publish compromising views of his past, he withdrew publishing rights. Given these circumstances, Holroyd's position appears enviable beyond matters of mere lucre. Free from Shaw's controlling presence and with additional source materials at hand, the time is ripe for this effort. Still, Holroyd is caught in a dilemma: how can he satisfy both a popular audience, to whom much that is stale will seem fresh, and a scholarly one whose tastes will be more discriminating? Acknowledging the differing interests of these groups in a bibliographical note at the end of his volume, Holroyd explains that rather than charge general readers for scholarly notations they would not use, he has chosen to defer such materials for later publication. A few generalist critics have commented that this decision leaves even the uninitiated desiring additional data, but scholars are likely to suspect that Holroyd dodges footnotes for a reason more daunting than he may admit even to himself: were his documentation truly thorough, citing not only the sources of quotations but also facts and thoughts he has absorbed from others, the greater part of his work would be flagged as derivative. Inevitably, most of this volume recapitulates information from the former major biographies. In addition, prime sources include the letters and play facsimiles extensively collected by Dan Laurence (1965, 1981), letters from Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (1932), and the transliterations of Shaw's diaries of 18851897 recently published by Stanley Weintraub. Beyond these, materials for the volume's major themes derive from O'Bolger's unpublished manuscript and Rosset's book on Shaw's early years, as well as Peters's...