The Unexpected Shaw: Biographical Approaches to G.B.S. and His Work by Stanley Weintraub (review)

402 Book Reviews 1924 with the inscription, "To Mary Hankinson, the only woman I know who does not believe that she was the model for Joan, and also the only woman who actually was." Three stanzas of doggerel are quoted from a hitherto unpublished work entitled "Ode to Hanky on Her Birthday." and then a few lines from another verse tribute (this one by John Dover Wilson, as it happens). There is nothing wrong with a little attention to Hanky. or to some of the other marginal infonnation that the book includes, but it is odd to finish reading a book on Saint Joan and to find that nothing significant has been said about the play's relationship to Shaw's other works, or to the tradition of the history play, or to the genre of tragedy. The treatment of this last issue, for example, is pretty much confined to summaries of previous criticism. Nor does the book explore in any depth the dramatic structure of the play, and in particular, the dramatic functions of the much disputed Epilogue. The book offers us a modest, workmanlike account of certain aspects of the play, and for this it is worth looking at. What it lacks is the quality of insight, imagination, and originality that is the subject of the play itself. J.L. WISENTHAL, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA STANLEY WEINTRAUB. The Ullexpected Shaw: Biographical Approaches to G.B.S. and His Work. New York: Frederick Ungar 1982. Pp. x, 254, illustrated. $22.50. Shaw as novelist, pugilist, actor. art critic, and even Irish patriot are some of the "unexpected" roles highlighted by Stanley Weintraub in this collection of his Shavian essays and prefaces of the past quarter century. The first one published dates from 1958; two of what Weintraub here calls "chapters" date from 1982. Two of the essays first appeared in Modern Drama in the seventies. None of them appears in its original form, after what the author describes as revision, rewriting, augmentation, and coalescence. The result is a readable, attractive potpourri. The book provides exactly what the subtitle promises, and Weintraub has arranged his approaches as chronologically as possible. The parts that necessarily impose a degree of repetition are artfully muted. Even though the Shaw that emerges comes to us in bits and pieces, the biographer maintains a sober and discerning overview of his subject - a subject (Shaw and his works) dauntingly multifarious as well as multitudinous. Weintraub deals justly in an impartial manner, commonly referred to as academic. This sets him at a considerable remove from Bernard Shaw, who is quoted in this book as declaring, "Never in my life have I penned an impartial criticism; and I hope I never may." But we readers are at any rate spared 'the tedium of putting up with an obtrusive biographer. Many of us can but rue the day when Shaw exhorted Archibald Henderson to keep on the lines of Boswell's Johnson. Keeping on those lines successfully requires, after all, a personable biographer with a genius for writing. Weintraub is in no Hendersonian way obtrusive; nor is he objectionable in the manner of our psychohistorical detectives, who are on the prowl for possible or imagined evidence of the working out of personal conflicts in public action, or in writing, while scanting the cultural and political milieu of their subjects. Shaw has recently attracted one of these in Arnold Silver, whose Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side relentlessly pushes psychoanalytic theories to reductionist extremes. Book Reviews 40 3 While awaiting the Michael Holroyd biography of Shaw, students of the playwright are fortunate to have the biographical details of the Collected Letters as they are being edited by Dan H. Laurence; they are fortunate too in having the solid, exploratory work of Weintraub, including the present book. In it, by the way, Frank Harris is quoted as writing to Shaw: "You talk of Henderson's 600 pages as the only authorized biography. There is hardly a gleam of Shaw in the whole tome." From that very tome, it happens, Weintraub quotes an observation by Shaw that makes for curious reading in the America of today, ringed with its comic books and TV...