Shavian Self-Portrait Complete

BOOK REVIEWS SHAVIAN SELF-PORTRAIT COMPLETE Bernard Shaw. Collected Letters: 1926-1950. Volume 4. Dan H. Laurence, ed. New York: Viking Press, 1988. $45.00 IN 1946 A DESPERATE STRANGER announced to the already quite elderly Bernard Shaw his intention to kill himself and his children. Surprisingly, William Rowbottom's missive received a reply. In it Shaw begins by noting that "killing yourself is a matter for your own judgment," segues into pointing out the total unacceptability of hurting children, pivots brightly to the suggestion that "Life, happy or unhappy, successful or unsuccessful, is extraordinarily interesting," and finally snaps to with "In short, dear sir, dont be a damned fool. Get interested in something." With its rapid shifts in mood, its blend of cajolement and concern, and especially in the writer's sense of how far he can nudge his correspondent without pushing him over the edge, the letter reveals the compassionate side of Shaw at its best. It is my favorite selection in this fourth volume—the last of a project that has engaged editor Dan H. Laurence since the 1950s—which now completes the most revealing portrait we are ever likely to have of the flawed but wonderful human being known to the world as G.B.S. During any one calendar year, this "He-Ancient" wrote several times as many letters as Mr. Laurence has been able to include in a 900page book covering the final quarter-century of its author's life (19261950 ). As one would expect, Shaw's correspondents include the famous—Lady Astor, H. G. Wells, the Webbs, Edward Elgar, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, and many more. There are also lesser-known figures, deserving attention in their own right, who will be remembered mainly because of their association with Shaw: Gabriel Pascal (who directed successful films of his plays), Siegfried Trebitsch (his German translator), Mrs. Patrick Campbell (the first Eliza Doolittle), and Frank Harris (author and adventurer), to name a few. But as the case of the troubled Mr. Rowbottom suggests, it made no difference who you were. If Shaw was interested in your problem, you got an answer; and if he wasn't, you didn't. That was all. Among the finest sets of letters are the ones Shaw sent to his wife (Charlotte) while travelling in Russia; to his friend and eventual biographer St. John Ervine, in which he wrote in depth about his youth, plays, and view of life; and to E. Margaret Wheeler, a Cumberland housewife obsessed by the fear that her daughter had been 317 Book Reviews Volume 32:3, 1989 exchanged with another infant in the hospital at birth. A virtual minidrama in itself is the correspondence between "Brother Bernard," as he liked to sign himself, and Sister Laurentia McLachlin, Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey—an unlikely soulmate to whom Shaw sent brilliantly thoughtful accounts of his peregrinations to sites in the Holy Land and the Far East. Shaw was born in 1856 and died in 1950. At nearly eighty, he laments: "I look fairly well for my age; but it is only a stage effect: my faculties have all gone to pot." Don't believe it! Granted, his eyes and ears fail, he is "groggy" on his feet, he insists he ought to be dead—the litany is repeated from letter to letter. And to be sure, age took its toll on Shaw's productivity: the final six years of his life saw the addition of only four-hundred new items to his bibliography. But there is not the slightest falling-off in the quality of either style or thought in letters Shaw wrote right into his ninety-fifth year. Throughout, he delights in new coinages (obtuse pontiffs are "nincompopes ") and reinvigorates many a phrase by twisting its neck ("Perfect fear casteth out love"). A letter on the printing of his 1933 Metropolitan Opera House lecture ("The Political Madhouse in America and Nearer Home") is accompanied by a cartoon, in his own hand, of a bearded figure, clearly recognizable as G.B.S., kicking the Statue of Liberty off its pedestal. In 1940 he commends a German bomb for disposing of 86,701 warehoused sheets of his...