GBS: The Craftsman and the Subterranean

Perhaps it is because Johnson seems so embedded in his own period that I pose both the question of whether the body of his poetry is or should be of significant interest for other than literary-historical reasons, and that of whether, to the extent he deserves a new edition, he deserves a more comely one. Somehow one hopes that a reader's first acquaintance with Johnson's poetry will be made In one of those thin, paper-covered, elegantly printed sextodecimos published by Elkin Mathews or Thomas Mosher. But in any case, those already pursuing an informed interest in Johnson or the literature and culture of the 189Os will thank Professor Fletcher for his continued labor as they turn to a very good edition made even better. Wendell Harris Penn State University 2. GBS: THE CRAFTSMAN AND THE SUBTERRANEAN Brian Tyson, The Story of Shaw's "Saint Joan". Kingston and Montreal: McGiIlQueen 's UnIv. Press, 1982. $20.00 Arnold Silver, Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982. $25.00 Criticism produces strange pressfellows. These two recent studies of George Bernard Shaw are themselves almost a model of Shavian antithesis—opposed in their basic assumptions, in purpose, scope, approach, attitude, and contextual matter. Brian Tyson's The Story of Shaw's "Saint Joan" is sharply focused, modest in scope, workmanlike, compressed (116 pp. aside from Notes and Index), Informative and readable . Tyson is concerned with Shaw's art and accomplishment, the objective evidence of his genius. He studies the playwright at his craft, and his'detailed and scholarly account of the evolution of one of Shaw's finest plays should be of practical use in the classroom, to directors and performers of Shavian drama, and of Interest to the general reader as well as the specialist. Arnold Silver's Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side is, in contrast, ambitious, wideranging , diffuse, repetitive, lengthy, subjectively oriented, Innately conjectural, and bound to a theory of sado-masochistic causality which, perhaps, informs the reader less about Shaw than about his critic. Although Silver seems well-versed in current Shaw criticism, he has chosen a psychological approach that enjoyed its greatest vogue some two decades ago (e.g., Norman 0. Brown in Life Against Death [1959] and Love's Body [1966]). Silver hopes to arrive at knowledge of the inner man by an investigation of his work, and to correct the prevailing "misinterpretations " of his plays by inspecting the psychodynamic history of the playwright. At least that is what he says. Silver Invites the reader, in his introduction, to "commence thinking" about Shaw as "an inveterate fantasist whose dramas often sprang from primitive and childish and sexual impulses, from dark compulsions, and from more than a normal touch of madness." Characters from the plays and from an early novel are brought to the psychoanalytic couch to bear witness to neurotic, even psychotic, disturbances in "the deepest recesses" of their creator's psyche. In such plays as Candida and Pygmalion, interpretations of character often begin with spirited and knowledgeable exposition, but inevitably interpretation becomes reduced to mantra-like reiteration of "Freudian" themes: Oedipal conflict; autoeroticism; incest; genocidal urges, "a 315 flagellation impulse or a castration anxiety." Silver brings to this exposé a relentless didacticism—a Shavian attribute indeed—though unrelieved by any glimmer of that inspired wit with which the gods so richly endowed his subject. In The Story of Shaw's "Saint Joan", Tyson (referring to Charlotte Shaw's memoir) reports that the Idea for the play first came to Shaw "after he saw Sybil Thorndike play Hecuba in The Trojan Women in 1919." Shaw promptly announced that he was "going home to write Saint Joan." But four years were to pass before the play was written, cast, and given its first performance in New York by the Theatre Guild on 28 December 1923. Tyson marks the canonization of Joan in the spring of 1920 as likely to have exerted a further Influence on Shaw, and he points out the political relevance of the Maid's martyrdom—and the irony of her belated beatification—to the Fabian socialist who would become her chronicler: Joan's canonization . . . threw her into public prominence and...