Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw: Bernard Shaw and William Archer ed. by Thomas Postlewait (review)

To begin at the end of this substantial and painstakingly edited volume of correspondence: just before undergoing an operation for renal cancer in 1924, theater critic and Ibsen translator William Archer sent letters to a few of his closest friends, including Bernard Shaw, to whom he wrote, "This episode gives me an excuse for saying, which I hope you don't doubt—namely, that though I may sometimes have played the part of the all-too candid mentor, I have never wavered in my admiration and affection for you, or ceased to feel that the Fates have treated me kindly in making me your contemporary and friend." Shaw's other close friend, Sidney Webb, who served for Shaw as Archer's counterpart in the political world, would in his turn say much the same thing, thus giving the lie to Oscar Wilde's quip, which Shaw so liked to quote against himself, that Bernard Shaw hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him. Shaw later reflected on Archer's death: "I still feel that when he went he took a piece of me with him."

Thomas Postlewait, an authority on both William Archer and theater historiography, has performed Herculean labors in bringing to publication Bernard Shaw and William Archer as the latest and—by some measure—largest of the nine volumes in University of Toronto Press's Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw series. Whereas Dan Laurence's four colossal volumes of Bernard Shaw's Collected Letters (in fact a large selection of the tens of thousands of letters Shaw wrote in his lifetime) published by Max Reinhardt concentrated on Shaw's own letters with editorial notes supplying information about his correspondents, Toronto's volumes give as much of both sides in the correspondence as still survives. Thus, while eighty out of one hundred twenty-five of Shaw's letters to Archer published here have already appeared in Collected Letters, we also get forty-four of Archer's, which in large part function as a commentary on Shaw's work and career in the theater as it proceeded, plus a few supplementary letters to Mrs. Archer and others to Archer from Charlotte Shaw, to whom Shaw also sometimes dictated his letters. However, Professor Postlewait, in ferreting out Archer's side of the correspondence, has had to contend with a problem that some but not all editors of the Toronto series have had to face: for reasons we can only speculate about (movement of effects between houses, especially during wartime, being most likely) a greater proportion of Archer's letters are missing than those of Shaw's. Consequently the editor assiduously supplies as much information as he can about the missing contributions, often drawing from the over two hundred pieces of Archer's contemporaneous published criticism on Shaw and his dramatic work.

Having met in 1884 (although they had spotted each other in the British Museum Reading Room earlier), William Archer, born like Shaw in 1856, became one of his closest friends. Among other things, Archer served as his banker when he began a string of reviewing jobs that the Scotchman, already an established critic, engineered for his Irish friend. They met frequently, either by arrangement or by chance at the theater, the British Museum, or elsewhere, and they also wrote to each other frequently, discussing and disputing anything and everything to do with the theater, from the implications of Diderot's Paradox for acting to Chekhov's modernism; this depth and breadth have ultimately resulted in the present volume. Both despised Henry Irving's Shakespeare adaptations at the Lyceum, and Archer may have been the only critic apart from Shaw not entirely entranced by Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest (Shaw had admired Wilde's earlier plays). In letters to Archer, Shaw wrote, as he always did, with his correspondent in mind: he invents neologisms like "tortology" and "amertumous...