A Previously Unpublished Memoir

"'Tiger cat'—Not 'ah, tiger cat.'" A few lines later, Sergius says, "Engaged to Nicola! Ha! ha! Ah well, Bluntschli, you are right to take this huge imposter of a world coolly" (printed text). Shaw's note on this speech says: "'Ah well, B.'—not 'well, B.'" All of this detail, Dukore says, is to fulfill Shaw's goal as director: "to convince the audience that what they see on stage consists of real people doing real things." Shaw wanted the actors to create the illusion of real life, and in order to do that Shaw abandoned stage stereotypes, clarified characters' motives, encouraged "ensemble acting" (Actors responding to each other as though the action and dialog are new to them), avoided stage trickery and posturing, and utilized the technical points of lines, setting, costume, light, and sound that one sees in Shaw's promptscripts. One of the most telling of Shaw's comments, given the illusion of reality he was aiming for, is his note about the fruit bushes on which Catherine Petkoff's laundry lies drying at the beginning of Act II: "The tree looks artificial," he says. But finally one has to wonder of what real scholarly use these notes are. Shaw has, after all, provided in his printed texts some of the most complete stage directions in the history of the theatre, as the description (cited above) of Raina's "pale green silk" dress illustrates. When he published the Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant in 1898, Shaw announced his intention of making "a serious effort to convey their full content to the reader." He did so, including character analyses, character motivation, and explicit and detailed descriptions—falling back, as he says in the Preface to Plays Unpleasant, "on his powers of literary expression, as other poets and fictlonists do." The rehearsal notes in Dukore's Composite Production Book act as only footnotes to the copious stage directions printed in the standard text of the play. The book demonstrates effectively that Shaw possessed an amazing eye for theatrical detail, but it does not tell us anything new about the play or about the author. Elsie B. Adams San Diego State University 7. A PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED MEMOIR G. H. Neville. A Memoir of D. H. Lawrence (The Betrayal). Edited by Carl Baron. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981. $35.00 Poor D. H. Lawrence. Will his life, terminated by consumption in less than forty-five years, never be consigned a final—and honorable—burial? How much longer will meta-critics, with special axes to grind and hobby-horses to ride continue to exhume the lacerated Oedipalism of his relationship with his mother; the mortal tug-of-war between the memory of that mother-lover and the claims on the maturing youth of confounding (and confounded) blood, mind, and sexuality; the strident failures of all those Lawrencean quests on four continents for community (and communities) of souls and bodies? How much longer will the ghost of the prophet-seer haunt the literary territory long conceded to the novelist? Now comes still another exhumation. It is the issuance under a distinguished imprint of a previously unpublished memoir, written fifty years ago by one of the 66 two closest male friends of Lawrence's school days. This work, despite the impeccable and painstaking editorial assistance of Dr. Carl Baron, who has supplied an introduction, notes, and additional material, is almost sure to fuel such earlier speculations as David Garnett's that Lawrence was eighty-five percent heterosexual and fifteen percent homosexual. Written by a man whose irresponsibility in personal matters made him an autobiographical model for unsavory characters in several of Lawrence's lesser works, the memoir must also be considered suspect by reason of Neville's inadequacy as a reader of his subject's books and as a writer of serious biography. Editor Baron declares that what Lawrence thought about Neville "is the real interest, because here is an unexplored tract of raw material of Lawrence's art." But the meta-commentators will be titillated by the description of an afterbathing incident involving the two men. Neville quotes Lawrence as looking admiringly at the stronger boy's body and describing...