Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw 1914-18 by Stanley Weintraub (review)

1972 BOOK REVIEWS 219 of Shaw at different ages, which provided the frontispieces of the Dodd, Mead volumes. ERIC SALMON University of Saskatchewan Regina Campus JOURNEY TO HEARTBREAK: THE CRUCIBLE YEARS OF BERNARD SHAW 1914-18~ by Stanley Weintraub. NewYork: Weybright and Talley, 1971. 368 pp. $8.95. The four years in the ninety-four year life of Bernard Shaw that Stanley Weintraub has chosen to dissect are those of the turbulent period of the first World War, which began when Shaw was fifty-eight and ended when he was sixty-two. With authoritative scholarship he has documented the impact of the war upon Shaw and of Shaw upon the war. His chronicle brings us a vivid picture of the tragic course of the times, and of the resolute challenges this iconoclastic figure posed to Britain in wartime. More importantly, he has taken us on a journey into the recesses of Shaw's mind and spirit, tracing the effects of "the 1914-18 experi· ence" on the creative activity and output of the playwright. The result is an obligatory book for Shaw collectors, let alone for those who would add to their understanding of his later life and writings. Demonstrating that Shaw's own comprehensive book, What I Really Wrote About the War, is "inexplicably incomplete," Professor Weintraub has corrected details, filled in gaps, supplied historical background and perspective. and reported on numerous forgotten public and private Shavian publications, letters, and speeches of the day, as well as on the protean activities, events, and experiences in which Shaw was involved at the time. Shaw's journey, launched with the premiere of Pygmalion on the London stage several months prior to the outbreak of hostilities, quickly brought him center stage on the world battlefront in the Socratic role of gadfly and prophet once the war began. (The author, however, in identifying a Shavian restatement of Socrates' teaching that "the unexamined life is not worth living" mistakenly attributes it to Aristotle.) Admonishing. in an Hegelian paraphrase , that "We always learn in war that we never learn from war," Shaw issued his Common Sense About the War manifesto, as a consequence of which "the war was spoken of and written about as a war between the Allies on the one hand, and, OR the other, Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bernard Shaw," as G.B.S. himself quoted Robert Lynd as saying. An "unrecognized symbol of sanity" whose reasonableness was "often disguised with abrasive rhetoric" and stinging irony, his sober an~lyses of the war's causes and prospects, and the remedies he proposed, earned for him much obloquy and abuse, not only from purblind patriots. but from many of the most eminent persons in the nation. not excluding some of his own good friends and colleagues. Increasingly embattled, the heretical Shaw courageously yet provocatively defended the values and victims of civilization under the most trying circumstances. all the while displaying extraordinary forbearance and magnanimity even towards his worst detractors. As the war wore on, however . opinion gradually came his way. and by war's end he attained to an "apotheosis " as a "confirmed oracle." Although we follow the itinerary of his daily life down innumerable byways of personal relationship and public utterance. the main course of the journey leads to the resumption of his war-interrupted playwriting, yielding a variety of plays into which he translated his war experience. Preeminent among these "bitter fruit 220 MODERN DRAMA September of 1914" are Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah and Saint Joan. Forming "collectively perhaps the greatest creative achievement inspired in an individual by a war," each was conceived before the war, but "metamorphosed by it." "The war was more than a journey to Heartbreak House/' we are told, but it was at least that, for the metamorphosis that play underwent receives the most thorough examination in the book, spilling well beyond the confines of the Heartbreak House chapter and the Appendix essay, "Shaw's Lear." It is an instructive and rewarding treatment, even to one sceptical about particular points in the Weintraub interpretation of this perplexing play. Even in as detailed a study of Shaw as this is, omissions are inevitable, but most of those...