How to Become a Musical Critic by Bernard Shaw (review)

332 MODERN DRAMA December positive aspect of tWs spirit among the first named group of writers, but in overlooking the contributions of existentialism in its various forms, he distorts the picture he is attempting to draw. Most readers will be interested in Ws treatment of Anouilh. When a writer dislikes his subject enough to be critical but not enough to distort, the result is often some of Ws most lucid work. Anouilh's popularity in the American theater seems to be growing each year, yet one rarely finds much understanding of the playwright 's thought or dramatic theory. Mr. Fowlie's brief but stimulating analysis pictures Anouilh as a pessimist for whom the world presents two impossible alternatives of good and evil, the first being embodied in characters who fail because they ask too much of life, the second in characters who fail because they demand too little. The tension created by this view leaves Anouilh's work incomplete, unfinished , hanging in suspense. "It would seem that Anouilh, in an almost masochistic fashion, is determined to prolong Ws own suffering from an unwillingness or an impossibility of concluding-of depicting the triumph of good or evil." Finally, Mr. Fowlie brings his vast knowledge of French literature to bear in giving Ws reader an insight into the dramaturgy of such new playwrights as Adamov and Ionesco. His acquaintance with the aesthetic at work in such early modem French poets as Rimbaud and Mallarme gives Wm a clue to the thinking behind the revolutionary theater of Artaud in the 1930's and Beckett, Adamov, Genet, and Ionesco in the 1950's. The more extended analysis of certain critical writings on the theory of drama, especially of essays by Artaud and Mallarme, helps the reader realize that in such modem plays as La Cantatrice chauve and En attendant Godot, there is another tradition at work in French drama besides that of Aristotle and the neo-classical dramatists like Racine-it is the new, revolutionary , anti-logical tradition begun by poets like Rimbaud, Mallarme, and Apollinaire and passed on to the theater by early experimenters like the same Apollinaire, Cocteau, and Artaud. Mr. Fowlie does not present a thorough analysis of the major figures in contemporary French drama; he only suggests lines of thought that the individual must follow out more completely for Wmself. Considering the book in its nature as a survey, however, one can find much that is helpful in initiating him into what is, perhaps, the richest tradition of theater in our times. EMILE G. Me ANANY, S.J. St. Louis University HOW TO BECOME A MUSICAL CRITIC, by Bernard Shaw. Edited with an Introduction by Dan H. Laurence, Hill and Wang, New York, 1961, 360 pp. + xxiv pp. Price $5.00. Dan H. Laurence, who will probably succeed Archibald Henderson as the noblest and best informed Shavian of them all when his Soho bibliography of Shaw comes out, has now given Shavolaters an earnest of what may be expected in future years by locating, identifying, and reprinting, with some editorial comments, a large number of Shaw's previously "uncollected" writings on the subject of music from 1876 to 1950. This attractive little volume will therefore usefully supplement the several earlier published collections and selections of Shaw's better known musical observations as well as the various critical studies of his equipment, biases, and talents as a musical critic. The sources of Laurence's material are such relatively forgotten publications as The Scottish Musical Monthly, The Hornet, The Musical Review, The Dramatic Review, the Magazine of Music, OUf Corner, The Hawk, the Bradford Observer, and The Scots Observer, as well as both signed and unsigned con- 1961 BOOK REVIEWS 333 tributions to better known newspapers and periodicals like The Star, The World, The Times, The Nation, and the Pall Mall Gazette. With reference to some of the minor publications which have vanished into oblivion, the editor might have performed an additional useful service by giving the reader further information about their history and policies as he has begun to do in a few footnotes and in brief passages in his introduction. He has already performed a similar service by appending an...