Writers and Writing Shaw: A Classic in the Making
IRVINE, KEITH
WRITERS and WRITING Shaw: A Classic in the Making George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Survey. Ed. by Louis Kronenberger. Reviewed by Keith Irvine World. 262 pp. $6.00. British journalist and...
...British journalist and critic Like a cookbook or a guide to deportment, Shaw: A Critical Survey is not an end in itself, but a prop...
...No one has ever used historical examples, near or remote, with the detail, precision and directness to be found on every page of Shaw...
...This is because be primarily considers Shaw as what he was--a playwright--and, as a playwright, compares him not to the Cowards and Kaufmans but to his historical peers ?Moliere, Shakespeare and Aristophanes...
...Only one of them, Jacques Barzun, whose article is reprinted from the Kenyon Review (1942), attains any degree of success...
...There is more than a hint of this reflection in the note of apology struck by W. H. Auden, when he wonders whether biographies of writers are justifiable because "there is much to be said for the view that their own works contain all that is relevant...
...When Time at last dinted the father figure who had so long played the part of Zeus to the English Olympus, what a sense of relief it was to see, as it were, this long nineteenth-century postscript come to an end, and a clean sweep made in the world of ideas...
...Nor does he simply illustrate or argue from history...
...George Jean Nathan is more concerned with his own fireworks display than with hitting his target...
...As for a Shaw play being "twenty characters spouting Shaw," neither ancient drama, epic poetry, Cervantes, Swift or Rabelais had any characters whatsoever in the contemporary sense of detailed psychological studies...
...One gains the impression that he was scared off by the superior strength of Mr...
...Seen in this light, one gains an insight into Shaw's sense of form, his sense of drama and his sense of history...
...As Shaw departs from us in time, the historical perspective that is pointed up will not be that of the Marxist, the moralist or the propagandist, but that of the playwright...
...But it is by such standards, finally, that the "sinewy and diabolonian figure" must be judged...
...The very conception that one can be helped to understand Shaw better seems surprising when he himself has been so plain-spoken ("If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him"), and when his phrases make the prose of even the finest of the 21 critics whose writings comprise this book seem pallid...
...Shaw's formidable political batteries...
...For what, one felt, was Shaw to us now--now that his historical moment had passed and his Fabian revolution had been victoriously consummated...
...Shaw is no good at all...
...G. K. Chesterton locks himself in a deathgrip with the Atheistic Shaw, while others severally tussle with the Economic and Political Shaws, win their battles and lose their wars...
...One can almost imagine him landing suddenly beside them to criticize their aim and help them point their weapons better, before taking once more to the clouds ?a romantic griffin, roaring with laughter at the nature of his quest," as Stevenson called him...
...and then goes on to observe: "As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr...
...Whichever one of the 37 plays, whichever fragments of the four million words will survive as the quintessence of Shaw, his work is hardly likely to be completely forgotten, either in our own century or in epochs to follow...
...From the rest Shaw easily wriggles free...
...Thirdly, Barzun points out that Shaw's "amazing awareness is in the highest degree an awareness of history...
...But his "abnormality" lay in his emotional insecurity, which arose out of his early home life, and which, as Mr...
...Montaigne, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Aristophanes --these are powerful words...
...Max Beerbohm proves himself to have been unusually perspicacious by assuming (in 1901...
...In this regard, Shaw is a match for Montaigne, Rousseau and Voltaire, modern times being to him what classical antiquity was to them...
...Thus, he begins an unfortunate boutade about "Shaw's aversion to sex," which, he says, is a "notion" (borrowed from Wells) that had been "for some time impertinently agitating my encephalon...
...Secondly, he turns to the undoubted dramatic content of his plays, rightly observing that at this sort of skill Shaw had no rivals but Shakespeare and Moliere...
...For all the words thrown up by their groping intelligence, while they explode around their target like anti-aircraft shells round a super-acrobatic plane, fail to pin him down...
...And, as William James pointed out, the genius does not lie in the emotional abnormality but in the caliber of the mind which the dammed-up emotion propels toward its chosen goal...
...Assign what cause you will, the results are so far out of proportion with ordinary causes that it is best to go on describing effects...
...Barzun indicates, led the young Shaw to prepare himself against the world's inevitable counter-attacks: "These attacks never came, of course, except in the form of commonplace insults and denials, which left Shaw building out of his enormous insecurity impregnable bastions of knowledge, logic and wit...
...He was evidently unaware that Shaw was not averse to sex but bored by its intellectual content, and admitted he might have profited more from his experiences if he had not insisted on incessantly verbalizing his feelings...
...he assimilates it and thinks always under the corrective of historical relativity...
...The truth which lies behind these allegations is, of course, that Shaw--like Kropotkin, with whom he had temperamental affinities --was not deeply interested in sex...
...Thus, Edmund Wilson opens his salvo with the ponderous comment that "Shaw is still worthy of our contemplation," proceeds to shoot clown the Political Shaw with great precision--and fails to hit the "GBEsence...
...Barzun alone succeeds in penetrating the fog of words surrounding Shaw...
...that Shaw would live to be 90...
...The extent of Shaw's stature is seen by the difficulty that the 21 critics--whose writings range over a span of fifty years--experience in taking his measure at all...
...Certainly the Shaw who held that the reading of Lady Chatterley's Lover should be compulsory for girls about to be married did not suffer from what Mr...
...Of all the critics here represented, Mr...
...Yet, the Shavian will o' the wisp refuses to extinguish itself...
...But as a personality he is immortal...
...Firstly, pointing to his preservation of the classic unities, his skilful use of parabasis and chorus work, Barzun links Shaw to the continuous tradition of lyric drama...
...Yet, irritatingly enough--as if the age had not enough problems to perplex it--shaw, while dead, refuses to lie down...
...Nathan intimates was "not only an aversion to sex, but also what amounts almost to a fear of it...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 16
