The Loves of George Bernard Shaw by C. G. L. Du Cann (review)

1%5 . BOOK REVIEWS 229 THE LOVES OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, by C. G. L. Du Cann, Funk and Wagnalls Company, Inc., New York, 1963, 300 pp. Price $5.00. I should think that anybody who attempts to write a book on the subject of the love life of George Bernard Shaw would know how slim the pickings are and how fruitless the results are likely to be. We all know the legend and we have all been amused by the many stories-some real and some no doubt apocryphal -of the shy young Irishman who came to London, preserved his virginity without much effort for an unusually long time, had ambiguous relationships with a number of women, and finally divided his love life neatly into two partsmarriage in middle age to a plain and undistinguished woman who wanted sex as little as he did, and friendships-mostly platonic and mostly on paperwith other women who were anything but plain and undistinguished. Mr. Du Cann's book is not likely to alter the legend substantially. As a matter of fact most of his readers will not be surprised to discover that The Loves of George Bernard Sha·w took its origin in a series of ten newspaper articles entitled "The Love-Lives of G. B. S." Mr. Du Cann, who can write cliches with tlIe best of us, remarks in his preface that when the newspaper articles were given to an unsuspecting public in 1961 "a cry of despair rent the welkin." A fanatical fringe of Shavians, he tells us, objected violently to the revelations about their hero. But "only prudes and prigs of the last generation" could have been shocked by tlIe articles, Mr. Du Cann argues. The explanation was that his "children had been rebaptised and reclothed in sensational headlines, introductions and crossheadings so that they looked like juvenile delinquents." Now his delinquents appear in more dignified garb between the covers of a book whose color might be described as shocking pink. This book has little to tell us about Shaw's sexual activities that we do not already know. Shaw so artfully constructed the legend he wanted perpetuated that one can do little more than consult the cryptic references in his diaries and correspondence and try to assign a chronology and hazard conclusions about his friendships with many women. The useful thing that such a book as this can accomplish is to tell us something about the women-especially the lesser known women-whom Shaw consorted with over the years. And this Mr. Du Cann does, probably as well as his material allows him. But what a dreary list of uninteresting women he has to deal with most of the time. Number one was Alice Lockett, a music pupil of Shaw's mother. Here the pertinent material is "some twenty letters" from Shaw to Miss Lockett which are "of great psychological interest." Second, there is Jenny Patterson, a well-to·do friend of his motlIer who was fifteen years older than he and who, Mr. Du Cann tells us, was a woman of large sexual appetite. Even against her Shaw apparently held out for some time. One of his diary entries, written after an evening with Jenny reads, "Supper, music and curious conversation and a declaration of passion. Left at 3 A. M. virgo intacta still." Since Mrs. Patterson was a widow, Shaw was obviously the virgo, but one wonders who made the declaration of passion. Number three was Florence Farr, whose relationship with W. B. Yeats outshines her affair with Shaw. How pallid this affair was is suggested by a sentence Florence Farr wrote some years later about "passion served up with cold sauce as in the Shaw-Barker school of sex." After Florence Farr there was Annie Besant, May Morris, Eleanor Marx-Aveling. EditlI Nesbit, and Charlotte Payne-Townshend-called Charlotte Plain-Townshend -,-whom Shaw married and lived happily with until she died at the age of eightysix . After his marriage, the list of women whom Shaw knew, corresponded and 230 MODERN DltAMA September "philandered" with is lengthy and includes two famous and beautiful women whose friendships with Shaw have become legends of our time...