Bernard Shaw
Hederman, Mark Patrick
BOOKS Shaw: behind the public mask W hen Bernard Shaw eventually died after nearly a century of exuberant and much publi cized life, he had become something of a myth almost as enduring as...
...Mark Patrick Hederman most of these have become ammunition for a century of bores...
...But, standing in the wings with all the patient perceptivity of his art, Holroyd also traces the fascinating life of the strangled child who never really died but lingered on in Shaw's intestines to provide the real drama and the vital interest in his life...
...Carlyle discussing Boswell's relationship with Johnson says that it was "not sycophancy, which is the lowest, but reverence, which is the highest of human feelings...
...As entertainment I would agree with this assessment of Holroyd's biography, although parts of it are hilarious (especially the history and rehearsals of Pygmalion in volume two...
...Holroyd is impishly aware of the market value of his product...
...In volume one Holroyd identifies the time and the circumstances of this psychic suicide...
...It is the essential book for libraries and universities...
...This personalitydivining empathy is Holroyd's immense gift...
...His Shaw is the definitive biography...
...Holroyd's Lytton Strachey must be one of the great biographies of all time...
...The most moving and revealing account of this, and one which should be of help to actors and directors, occurs in his analysis of Pygmalion...
...Shaw abandoned the real challenge early on and created a public mask which was the robot-like substitute...
...There is something stale and wearisome about Shaw's desperate attempt to turn his life into a virtuoso performance of quotable quotes especially as BERNARD SHAW: VOLUME III, 1918-1950 The Lure of Fantasy Michael Holroyd Random House, $30, 544 pp...
...Lawrence and Dame Laurentia of Stanbrook was nourished by this starving child...
...For those who have no intention of reading the book but wish to have the last word on the subject it is the ideal purchase or present...
...Nothing has been left out, everything has been meticulously catalogued and annotated...
...Holroyd traces the precise history of this almost accidental emergence of the playwright...
...And this is the reason why the life, for all its flamboyant panache, is fundamentally uninteresting...
...Holroyd's presentation of St...
...The exciting combination of this biographer and The Inca of Jerusalem (a nickname for Shaw taken from a play of the same title) himself promised to be the wedding of the century...
...So, the whole spectacular extravaganza seemed Too True to be Good...
...He remains one of the great biographers...
...His strange relationships with women, his cruelty and fickleness are shown to be the pathetic disability of a loveless and unlovable boy "unable to come to terms with women except in a makebelieve world...
...This makes him one of the great biographers of all time and this work one of the cleverest disguises ever used to protect as well as reveal the mystery of a life...
...Biography here was both a means of expression and the opening of a new and undiscovered world...
...The art of biography is somewhat belittled...
...It presents itself so imperiously who could afford to be without it...
...Commonweal 14 February 1992: 23 In the third volume it is painfully affecting to see how the very unusual admiration which Shaw had for people like T.E...
...His incapacity to write anything as an artist except plays is attributable to the war going on inside himself...
...His genius was something of a cancerous growth out of desolation and dislocation...
...In all three of these people Shaw recognized "a version of Sonny...
...its great exponents do not receive the acclaim that is their due...
...He shows how and why this timid, sensitive boy was dismembered and replaced by the gargantuan figure of G.B.S...
...But beware of Holroyd...
...Just before he passed away an offer came from the United States of a million dollars for one final message...
...What Holroyd tells is the full and terrifying story of a life lived as a theatrical substitute for the one that was unbearable...
...Shaw's reply: "There is nothing more to be said" has been resoundingly contradicted by Michael Holroyd who has spent eighteen years writing the definitive biography in three volumes almost as long as the life they record...
...24: 14 February 1992 Commonweal...
...He then shows with amazing subtlety how the voice of the semi strangled Sonny appears, in spite of G.B.S.'s attempts to silence it, even in the stage directions of the plays...
...One thousand four hundred and fifty pages of shavian wit was an overdose...
...Joan is masterly and shows why she was Shaw's heroine and this was his dramatic masterpiece...
...There was something déjà entendu about the endless yarns and anecdotes...
...Shaw recognized an alter ego in Lawrence who "lacking an adult sense of his identity...invited his heroes to invade his character and associate it with their own, as if gathering from these feats of empathy some nucleus of self-confidence...
...He describes the youthful Shaw as "Sonny," the petname he was called...
...But behind all that, if one is prepared to read the biography, there is the genius of Holroyd, that empathy which never becomes sentimental, that "detachment that stops short of incompatibility" which reveals the mystery of Bernard Shaw...
...It has been Shaw's great luck and ours to have it exercised in his case...
...This book is a complaint," he has written about his own Unreceived Opinions, "a pessimistic, nostalgic and I hope not too rhetorical complaint against the condition imposed on writers by society ....As a guide it is intended to be part of an anti-tourist brochure...
...Shaw was to say that as he wrote, Joan 'guided my hand, and the words came tumbling out at such a speed that my pen rushed across the paper and I could barely write fast enough to put them down...
...The literary world held its breath for eighteen years, devouring each volume as it emerged and eventually finding that their expectations had been disappointed...
...Who hasn't heard a thousand times about Winston Churchill and the first night or about the Lady's looks and Bernard's brains...
...Shaw's early existence was so miserable and deprived that he decided to perform a psychic abortion and invent a character who would assume his identity...
...Shaw himself had become unfashionable as a playwright...
...BOOKS Shaw: behind the public mask W hen Bernard Shaw eventually died after nearly a century of exuberant and much publi cized life, he had become something of a myth almost as enduring as his own Methuselah...
...Insights such as these which permeate this biography make one suspect that just as Boswell's knowledge of Johnson was guided by his inner being, so too Michael Holroyd's knowledge of Shaw is something magically cardiographed from his inner self...
...The rest of the biography is forced to trace the blazing trail left so deliberately by Shaw's dramatic production of himself...
...Give the last word to Shaw: "When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication...
Vol. 119 • February 1992 • No. 3
