Shaw's Collected Letters

SHAW'S COLLECTED LETTERS* The most vigorous and efficient of the earnest Victorians, Bernard Shaw spent his nineteenth-century years piling up credits toward the one mark of renown that everyone was willing to grant him by 1898: his reputation as "the ubiquitous G.B.S." He proclaimed in 1889: "My business is to incarnate the Zeitgeist"; and perhaps no writer before him had so resolutely and conspicuously moved like the Zeitgeist itself. Shaw's progress upward and outward was inexorable. He came to London in 1876, just short of twenty, deliberately fleeing a minddeadening job as cashier in a Dublin land agency, but also vaguely seeking the kind of total self-fulfillment that would leave him "thoroughly used up" before he was finally "tossed out on the scrap heap." By 1883 he had already composed five long novels, contributed to several study groups and debating societies, and infiltrated most of the avant-garde intellectual and social circles in the London area. The later eighties brought an even greater burgeoning of activities . He discovered the Fabian Society in 1884 and began his frenetic career as socialist committeeman and orator. Later that year, William Archer helped him get established as a reviewer, and he was soon greatly in demand as a critic of all the arts. In 1885 he lost his virginity , and from then on dedicated countless hours to philandering with every variety of New Woman. Meanwhile, he wrote the equivalent of a book on the shortcomings of Marx, labored on an index and glossary for an edition of the works of Thomas Lodge, and toyed in his notebooks with dramatic dialogues. The years from 18go to 1897 put Shaw on the verge of his goal: being thoroughly used up. His love affairs-and near escapes from others-multiplied. The Fabians, with Shaw still serving as their chief propagandist, extended their subtle and laborious strategy of permeation to national politics -and Shaw himself became borough councillor for the St. Pancras vestry. Moreover, week after week he met deadlines for long, rigorous criticisms of music and drama-and on the side wrote The Quintessence Of Ibsenism, The Sanity of Art, the seven Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, and The Devil's Disciple. It was not until 18g8 that Shaw more or less settled down, and then only under the pressure of a serious leg infection. Charlotte Payne-Townsend snagged·Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, I874-I897, edited by Dan H. Laurence, New York, Dodd, Mead, 1965, 877 pp. Price $12.50 190 1966 SHAW'S COLLECTED LETTERS 191 him in his defenseless condition and took over much of his busywork; he quit his post as dramatic critic for the Saturday Review; and he limited himself to one play, Caesar and Cleopatra, and one book, The Perfect Wagn.erite. His era of relentless self-permeation in all forms and directions came to a close. One of these forms of self-permeation usually goes unmentioned, yet the evidence in Shaw's Collected Letters, I874-I897 indicates that it was a highly important one to him. During his premarital, prelegendary years, Shaw was somehow motivated to write from thirty to fifty thousan,d letters. (Professor Dan Laurance, surely the world's most knowledgeable Shavian, estimates that he wrote a quarter of a million letters and postcards in his lifetime-an average of about nine per day for eighty years.) Such an apostle of efficiency and purposefulness would not waste arm movement, much less mental effort, on innumerable pages of correspondence if he did not consider them an integral part of his over-all campaign to de-sentimentalize, humanize , and socialize the human race. Take, for instance, the letters to the ladies he became infatuated with during this period. Laurence's volume, which includes only those both available and noteworthy, prints well over two hundred letters of this type. Many of them are unnecessarily long, and nearly all are to some degree feats of intellect: brilliant, witty, or analytical. (By 1914, Pat Campbell was induced to say: "If I could write letters like you, I would write letters to God.") We may well ask why he bothered. The answer lies in the relation between Shaw's means...