Two Ambitious Young Irishmen

My father, former boxing champion Gene Tunney, enjoyed telling a boxing anecdote that Bernard Shaw had shared with him during their first meeting at Shaw's flat in London in 1928. Shaw said that he had boxed a bit in earlier years, and that he had sparred regularly with a well-known poet of those times who fancied himself a boxer. "I had an easy time with him," Shaw related. "He was not tall, and I had such long arms that I held him off by keeping my left glove in his face. He was annoyed, very."

In retrospect, it's hard to say whether Shaw would ever have taken up boxing if he hadn't met the witty, quick-tempered, and charming Pakenham ("Paquito") Beatty. Shaw got so hooked on the sport that he created Cashel Byron, fictional boxer-hero of Cashel Byron's Profession, a novel based on his experiences with Beatty in a gymnasium run by Ned Donnelly, the boxing coach who became the model for the novel's trainer, Ned Skene. The poet Beatty and the writer Shaw grew close and Sidelights on GBS and His Friend Pakenham Beatty tries to shed new light on that friendship and their circle of mutual acquaintances, which eventually included members of their families as well as other writers and amateur boxers.

I was fortunate to become acquainted several years ago with Sidelights author, Dr. Claudius Beatty, thanks to an introduction by Dan H. Laurence. Beatty, a Thomas Hardy scholar and retired professor from the University of Oslo, had gathered family papers, photographs, and correspondence between Paquito and Shaw and given them to Laurence for his edition of Shaw's Collected Letters, Volume I: 1874–1897 and Volume II: 1898–1910. Lawrence encouraged Beatty to write a book on his great uncle, and Sidelights was self-published in 2002 and is available on Amazon.com and Alibris. Beatty and Laurence both died in 2008, but I have maintained contact with Beatty's charming widow, Audrey, who lives in Dorset, England.

Sidelights is a small, soft-cover book that is less about plot than about caption-style comments that communicate the intriguing story of a kinship between two young, ambitious Irishmen. It is a mixture of Beatty family insight, letters, and reprinted material that Shaw scholars will recognize from other sources. The book relates how the friendship flourished and expanded to include Beatty's family, the flirtations between Paquito and Shaw's sister, Lucy, and between G.B.S. and Beatty's in-laws, and the late-life correspondence between Beatty's wife, Ida, and Lucy. Although G.B.S. was held in affection by the Beattys, his wife, Charlotte, was not. "She was always lecturing me," remembered Paquito's daughter, Cecilia, who called her "Aunt Pumblechook."

Initially, Paquito lavishly spent his large inheritance on idealistic and revolutionary political causes and friends, including Shaw. But as money ran out, the Beattys relied increasingly on Shaw for financial assistance. Valuing his old friend's comradeship for standing him a dinner or tickets for boxing competitions in his early, penniless days, Shaw lent Beatty and Ida money until their deaths, and paid for much of their three children's education.

The author quotes Michael Holroyd as saying of the Shaw-Beatty friendship that "Shaw and the Beattys invaded one another's lives extensively. In this company Shaw was no longer his mother's unloved son, wilting in his father's shadow: he became a figure of attention and authority, someone to be relied on for his generosity and fun…. But he also had need of them, since, for all their hopelessness [in money matters], they had something almost entirely lacking in the Shaws: an atmosphere of family affection."

Although Sidelights is somewhat disorganized, its cast of characters make it worth the effort. For example, Lucy Shaw's relationship with her brother, as well as his generosity in giving her support, is revealed in the...