Shaw and the Charlatan Genius/A Memoir by John O'Donovan with Eighteen Illustrations (review)

BOOK REVIEWS SHAW AND THE CHARLATAN GENIUS/A MEMOIR BY JOHN O'DONOVAN WITH EIGHTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS. Printed in the Republic of Ireland by the Dolmen Press Limited, Dublin, for Dufour Editions Inc., Chester Springs, Pa., 1966, 160 pp. Price $4.50. One of the areas of at least semi-mystery confronting the Shavian biographerespecially the biographer of Shaw's early years-has been that of the famous "menage a trois," Shaw's own phrase to describe the relationship existing among his mother, his father, and the eccentric Dublin music teacher and conductor, George John Vandeleur Lee. Most of these biographers contented themselves-at least in print-with accepting Shaw's own reiterated and vociferous assurance that the relationship was "blameless;" but a few of them-in private-·retained their doubts. The list of the first group is impressive, for it includes people like R. F. Rattray (1934, 1951), Hesketh Pearson (1942), William Irvine (1949), Maurice Colbourne (1949), Stephen Winsten (1949, 1957), Audrey Williamson (1963), C. G. L. DuCann (1963), and Dan Laurence (1965). St. John Ervine, however , in accepting and reinforcing Shaw's story in 1956, diVUlged that G. B. S. "had difficulty in convincing Frank Harris [1931] that Lucinda Elizabeth was not Lee's mistress.... Even Dr. Archibald Henderson [1911, 1932, 1957] was deeply suspicious." A third-but very small-group, however, have given voice to their suspicions in print, or at least in manuscript. The first of these was the Irish-American, Thomas Demetrius o'Bolger, of the University of Pennsylvania, who-beginning with his doctoral thesis in 1913-set down a series of suspicious surmises which underwent various revisions and were prevented from publication only by Shaw's own denunciations and threats. Though O'Bolger's mss. are now in the Harvard University Library, material from them is accessible in print chiefly through some of Shaw's own comments on them as published in his Sixteen Self Sketches (1949) and through quotations and references in Benjamin C. Rosset's Shaw of Dublin (1964), the only work to attempt to prove in print that George Bernard Shaw was not the son of George Carr Shaw, but the son of another George-George John Vandeleur Lee. Mr. Rosset, an American who went to Ireland to pursue his investigations, was unable to persuade many of his readers and critics of the acceptability of his theories; in fact, he aroused most of them to paroxysmal rejections. (See, e.g., Walter King's review in Modern Drama, February 1966.) Yet, except for his conclusions about Shaw's paternal ancestry, Rosset's book will probably never be superseded in its research and discoveries of facts about Shaw's early life and the lives of members of his family and general circle. The relationship between Rosset's massive book and the present tiny one, Shaw and the Charlatan Genius/a memoir by John O'Donovan with eighteen illustrations, is in itself a rather mysterious one. O'Donovan, a Dublin journalist, has written plays for the Abbey Theatre and for radio and television. As a boy he became interested in Shaw and Lee, and in his introduction he tells how, when St. John Ervine was writing his Shaw biography, he provided him with various "odds and ends" of facts from the "obvious remaining public records." At that time he went no deeper. Ten years later, however, he "encountered an enthusiastic Shavian from 434 1968 BOOK REVIEWS 435 New York, Mr. Benjamin C. Rosset." Through Rossett, O'Donovan's interest in Shaw and Lee was renewed, and he wrote a play for the Abbey Theatre about them. Thus he began his own real researches into Lee's character and background, some of the results of which were published in the local press and voiced on radio. Moreover, "It had long seemed to me that in stressing his resemblance to his father so much and so often, Shaw was defending himself against a charge that no one brought against him: namely, that he was Lee's son." The whole situation eventuated in the present lively but loosely organized little book, which was apparently completed before Rosset's study came out, but was not published until afterward. At...