Bernard Shaw as Artist-Fabian (review)

It is not easy to write about George Bernard Shaw. His legacy—political, literary, and personal—presents a challenge to any biographer's whim. The historian faces a brilliant mesh of self presentation. Moreover, while Fabians had their disputes, their accounts of one another rarely challenged their opponents' significance. There are also the difficulties posed by secondary accounts. It was inevitable that the first Fabians would attract the attention of intellectuals of later generations but equally inevitable that they would mould Shaw's legacy to suit their various purposes. Another major difficulty is celebrity: Shaw's precipitous trajectory—the rise to world eminence from a discouraging background, the years of penury as he educated himself and honed his craft—is intellectual career as fairy tale. In his later years, and he enjoyed many, he was courted as a world-class sage on par with Albert Einstein, his opinions sought on any topic. Newsreels recorded the triumphs of "The World's Outstanding Literary Genius," to borrow from the title of one well-known item (1928). Shaw became an aphorist on a heroic scale, on par with Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, and Confucius. People wrote in the thousands seeking advice. There was the Nobel Prize, the Oscar; in his final years he was celebrated as a national treasure, rendered all the more endearing by his contrary opinions. Shaw Corner came to exude a faint but unmistakable odour of sanctity. It is difficult to avoid being blinded by the light.

Charles A. Carpenter's book is short, well crafted and written, and has clear objectives. He focuses on Shaw before his brand had gone global, first in the thick of Fabian activities and then his ten years of semi-detachment. Carpenter generalises reluctantly. He cautiously adopts the term artist-Fabian to capture Shaw's dual roles as radical dramatist and political activist, tracing his "relentless campaign to educate, permeate, and irritate in the inimitable style of the maverick artist-Fabian" (89). He offers a chronology of Shaw's political speeches and activities for the years 1885 and 1886 and then illustrates how Shaw's activities can be understood in several contexts through a careful interpretation of key plays. Carpenter is an insightful critic and in a short space unravels the most intriguing puzzle: given their openly propagandistic objectives, how could Shaw's plays turn out so well and endure so long? Even today they are not done as period pieces and are virtually impervious to reworking. Shaw was a controlling dramatist. For actors and directors his plays are comfortable vehicles, but with little room for manoeuvre. His intentions were precise and left no room for unintended effects.

Similarly, one might anticipate that the constancy of theme and style would wear thin. Shaw's trademarks are the zeitgeist and his characters' capacity to catch it, hypocrisy, bourgeois comfort that rests on ruthless exploitation, and paradox. The moral turn out to be the most immoral and vice versa, the strong weak, servants infinitely more capable than their masters, and flower girls possessed of more natural grace than duchesses. Few characters, moreover, achieve independent life. One never doubts who speaks the truth, or rather, which characters speak for Shaw. All of which sounds like a recipe for agonising nights of agitprop, but Carpenter shows how Shaw created great art in this tightest of spaces.

This aspect of the book is engaging and convincing but leaves one question: doesn't Carpenter take too seriously Shaw's protests that he wished only to spread discomfort? Wouldn't Shaw, as an Ibsenite, be fully aware of the pleasing frisson that discomfort can cause in the right sort of audience? Shaw spoke as if he confronted the bourgeoisie across the footlights, but surely the majority of his audience were, and still are, there to have their existing prejudices reinforced.

Carpenter's categorisation of Shaw as artist-Fabian suggests a neater distinction between art and politics than existed in Shaw's mind. Shaw made much of...