Shaw Absolutely Dated

A. M. Gibbs. A Bernard Shaw Chronology. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. xvi + 436 pp. Index. $59.95.

Over a career of writing about Shaw that began in the late 1960s, Arthur M. Gibbs has firmly established himself as one the most distinguished Shaw scholars in the world. I use the term "scholar" to emphasize his affinity for and mastery of grassroots scholarship, so marginalized in the present climate of literary academe and yet so vital to whatever publish-or-perish project anyone might choose. And I say "in the world" partly because his home base is far from the centers of Shavian research, Australia, yet he has apparently visited so many of them so often and with such great profit that he must be a remarkable world traveler indeed.

The book is his contribution to Palgrave's "Author Chronologies" series, which already numbers at least a dozen volumes on British and American authors. As Gibbs explains it, the chronology "aims at a record of significant events in Shaw's intellectual, emotional and creative life, and in the course of his relationships with other people, as well as occurrences which belong to the more public domain." Although the chronology form does not permit a sustained investigation of or reflection on these events, it can project "an almost uniquely graphic form of life-portrait" and "often reveal juxtapositions and patterns of events" in an individual's life. As a fact-respecting chronology-maker myself—on modern British, Irish, and American drama since 1865, and thus oriented not toward biography but literary cross-fertilization—I can vouch for the advantages he claims. Taken in short doses, detailed chronologies such as his, featuring a wealth of minor revelations and apt quotations, can also be downright enjoyable to read.

As one would expect with a subject whose activities reached out in so many directions and gained so much prominence during his life, the source materials that form the basis of this chronology are voluminous. Not only are there Shaw's writings of all sorts, including personal memoirs, private diaries, letters, interviews, film and radio recordings, and an unprecedented number of contributions to biographies of himself; there are also legal documents and local histories that pertain to him, theatrical and publication and speech-making records, letters written by a host of people both to him and about him, innumerable newspaper and magazine writeups, and discussions of him in memoirs by his friends (and enemies). Many of the biographies and critical studies on Shaw also yielded grist for Gibbs's mill. (He cites about eighty of the books he consulted most in his list of abbreviations, but these are by no means all of them.)

A very special source was the files and records of Dan H. Laurence, to whom the chronology is dedicated. Sprinkled liberally throughout the volume one encounters facts and details for which Gibbs found no other source than the Laurence collection at the University of Guelph Library or simply "DHL," indicating a private communication from the most formidable Shavian scholar of them all. In the Guelph collection Gibbs found Laurence's record of a 1912 motoring tour with Shaw and Granville Barker that Shaw's secretary at the time, Judy Gillmore, had told him about. It contains my choice for the human highlight of the book: "All through the journey the two men chatted and joked and giggled like schoolboys. Then Shaw suddenly threw a Shakespeare quotation at Barker, who threw one back, and they kept shouting quotations rhetorically back and forth, laughing uproariously all the while" (196). My vote for the most distinctive of the DHLs is a notation of the exact day (Christmas Eve, 1913) on which Madame Tussaud's Museum unveiled a wax figure of Shaw.

One of the most impressive features of this chronology is the number of obscure and elusive sources that Gibbs dipped into for revealing material about his multifaceted subject. He found an interview with Shaw in an...