French Without Tears

Michel W. Pharand. Bernard Shaw and the French (Florida Bernard Shaw Series, ed. R. F. Dietrich), Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xviii 1 412 pp.

Even the most lighthearted of reviewers is liable to approach this book with a degree of dread. The binding—to begin with what first hits one between the eyes—is of a sickly gray hue to which a black pen-and-ink likeness of a glum-looking Shaw on the front board offers no promise of cheer. Then there is what seems an unpromising title: Bernard Shaw and the French. As every Shavian knows, or thinks he or she knows, Shaw and the French simply did not get on and had as little to do with each other as possible. To be sure, there were the Hamons and their atrocious translations (mistranslations?) of Shaw's plays, and one recalls that G.B.S. did not think much of the divine Bernhardt's acting, and of course there was Shaw's inspired coinage of "Sardoodledum," by which he ruthlessly cut down (and paradoxically immortalized) the French playwright of large pretensions and limited talent. What else? Pieces of this and that. Sitting for Rodin, championing Brieux, Shaw's supposed "adoption" of Bergson's Élan Vital, and his eventual triumph in Paris with Saint Joan. This, more or less, is what your average Shavian knows (very superficially) of the relationship between Shaw and the French, and it is not much. Not enough, surely, for the four-hundred-page treatise Michel Pharand has delivered. An arduous trudge seems to lie ahead for even the most intrepid of readers.

We may relax. The first few pages of Pharand's text firmly contradict such negative presuppositions, and what the first few pages announce is borne out by the entire book. So far from making it merely "scholarly," which it is, and "thorough," which it also is, he has turned the base material of his research into one of the most readable and continually interesting treatises I have read. He writes well and is the more effective for being unaffected. He turns academic stodge into something light and buoyant and without straining his sentences or going for "effects" (in this way allowing himself, the critic, to upstage the subject in hand), he achieves stylistic poise, even when packing his text with references to and quotations from a vast range of sources. An arduous trudge? Perish the thought!

A reader-friendly text is only half the battle, if that. It matters what is being said, as Shaw himself once had occasion to remark when chiding a young critic, Dixon Scott, for making too much of his, Shaw's, "style." "It was very much as if I had told him the house was on fire, and he had said, 'How admirably monosyllabic!' and left the nursery stairs burning unheeded." There are no nursery stairs on fire here, but Pharand does have his "crusade" and this is to reveal that, so far from standing aloof and exchanging insults across the Channel, Shaw and the French had a lot to do with each other, a tremendous amount, as it turns out, in the sixty-odd years of their association. Pharand's is the exploration of hitherto only vaguely known territory, now charted with certainty, with authority, with flair. His story—to call it that—is enthralling.

The chapter headings indicate the route he follows. It is, as nearly as Pharand can make it, a chronological route, beginning with Shaw as an art critic in the 1880s, then proceeding to music critic and drama critic in the '90s, with the focus always on the given theme, Shaw's reactions to French artists, composers, playwrights and actors. From this, and moving on into the early years of the twentieth century, we meet Brieux with Shaw championing him as the only French playwright worth serious consideration, then Augustin Hamon, who, with his wife, managed somehow to retain Shaw's loyalty while continuing to make...