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Book Reviews A.M. GIBBS. ed. Shaw: Iflterviews and Recollections. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press 1990. Pp. xxiv, 560, iIlustraled. $39.95. Especially inextinguishable in Shaw's readers who were alive when he was, the passion to recover everything about him must awe the shades of the mighty dead. The impulse is Boswellian, ramified to reach totality absolute. A transfixing example of that urge is Professor A. M. Gibbs's 328 passages about and by Shaw in over 500 pages. Nearly 250 passages provide nascently fresh, multi-angled vignettes of Shaw in countless states through indelible recollections of some 180 variegated authors: eminent writers, actors, MPs. economists, actresses, biographers, household staff, journalists, pianist/composers, school chum, air pilot, wife, boxer who wrote on boxing and Kant, Beatrice Webb, Zsa Zsa Gabor (at lunch between H. G. Wells and Shaw, discussing Kemal AtatUrk, about whom she noted with unintimidated surprise, Shaw "talked knowledgeably" [po445]), and many more. Intermingled among the recollections , Shaw's words appear in some 80 interviews, impromptu and revised. Enhancing scrutiny of every square millimeter of the living Shaw are inevitable photographs. The 328 passages cluster chronologically in seventeen topical Parts. A preface to each gives names, dates, places, occasions - spare facts belying Gibbs's passionate recognition of Shaw's exponential powers. Each selection has headnote and end notes detectably fiery with life underneath. Undaunted by mountainous sources (Shaw lived through "no less ... than the history oflhe world from 1856 to 1950" [poxv]), Gibbs, to provide a kinesthetic sense of Shaw, tracks Dan Laurence's monumental Bernard Shaw: A Bibliography, enlists four research assistants and his wife, and draws on the densest Shaw centers in England, America, and Australia. In choosing recollections of Shaw, Gibbs's cardinal criterion is "first-hand associations and actual meetings with Shaw, or direct observations of him on public and private occasions" (p. xxii). Gibbs, that is, properly goes to the epistemological edge, Modem Drama, 35 (1992) 478 Book Reviews 479 Error can occur or truth elude one in first-hand scrutiny, hut ignorance holds truth hostage at any remove from first-hand observation. His criterion adopted, Gibbs immediately, in "A Symposium" (pp. 3- 10), forces a fundamental issue which divides scholarly assumption and enterprise about authoritative assessment of Shaw: Is Shaw or are others the authority? When before his death in 1950 Shaw lectured and revised his biographers (e.g., Henderson, Pearson), was he suppressing infonnation? When. unthrcatcoed by transcendent Shavian articulateness after 1950, scholars plowed for evidence and applied critical theories to it, did they invalidate Shaw on Shaw? Or was Shaw so far ahead of everyone in exhaustive preternatural anatomizing of event and awareness of his role in it that only he could extrapolate the universe out of each grain of autobiographical sand? Gibbs's answer is a fonnula established in Part 1: three of ten selections on the subject (Shaw) are by the subject; throughout, 80 of the 328 passages (by some 180 writers) are by Shaw. Twenty-five percent reliance on a subject about the subject is astronomically favorable odds, but also severe test: See, says Gibbs, the fact and then the variegated witnesses. So we, as observers, watch the witness, a philosopher, C. E. M. Joad, for example, inspired to preternatural pique of curiosity. "high up in the wall" of Oxford University, awaiting a fact, a lecture by Shaw (p. 79). The book is symptom and result of Shaw's perennial power to awe and freshen readers through his sustained state of simultaneous cognition and creation cradled in honesty and moral responsibility. The primal impulse behind biography drives the collection: the desire not to forget the rare, winsome, and astonishing. The volume is in the line, so far as I can see, of a specialized biographical fonn - including, for example, Shaw's own Pen Portraits and Reviews (1932) and Sixteen Self Sketches (1949) and Allan Chappelow's Shaw the Vii/agel' alld Humall Beillg: A Biographical Symposium (196 1), followed by his Shaw - "The CIlltcker-Om",' A Biographical EJ.positioll and Critique (1969). Gibbs extends the spectrum of witness immensely and, through subtle juxtaposition, effects keenest dialectic. The most brilliantly daring juxtaposition is the last page...

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