The Young G.B.S

...Holroyd has managed a great deal in this first volume of his Shaw biography...

...The Dublin years occupy only a sixty-page chapter which Holroyd brings to a tidy close: "He had two ideas: learning to do something, and then getting out of Ireland to have the chance of doing it...

...By the age of forty-two, when this first volume of Holroyd's biography ends, Shaw was a Voltairean presence on the London scene...

...Holroyd's prose, filled with Shavian nods and turns, seems ideally suited to its subject...

...Moms was a great man and Webb a great brain...

...Archer was present to oversee the dramatic endeavors, much as the Webbs were on hand to orchestrate the Fabian commitment...

...Shaw wanted to unite the applied arts with the social sciences and use Webb's logic to circumvent Morris's sense of history...

...In this first volume of what is finally to be a three-volume biography, Holroyd follows Shaw from Dublin to London...

...We are told in fascinating detail "of the many jobs that he succeeded in not obtaining," of the rejection slips from publishers which accompanied the return of his five novels, of the loneliness and lack of self-assurance resulting from being "his mother's unloved son...

...Added to these activities were innumerable friendships and occasional enmities with men and time-consuming liaisons with women...

...His success, however, came slowly and grudgingly...

...During the early years in London he frequented the reading room of the British Museum, which was his workshop and laboratory as well as his substitute home...

...The dominant figures are William Morris, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and William Archer...

...The series of plays he wrote in the 1890s, from the apprenticeship Widowers' Houses and The Philanderer down through the mature Mrs...

...Melvin J. Friedman (Meivin J. Friedman is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee...

...While two Irish writers, Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats, pass through Holroyd's narrative, they are only ancillary presences on the Shavian scene...

...The complexities of the man who combined the writing of novels and plays with music and dramatic criticism—and yet had time for political, social, and amorous involvements—come through convincingly...

...Horatio Smith once commented on Voltaire: "He was born, so to say, with one foot in the grave, and sustained that asymmetrical position for eighty-four years...

...Warren's Profession, Arms and the Man, Candida, and The Devil's Disciple, firmly established his literary credentials...

...Morris a hero for all time and Webb a man of the times...

...His edition of Fabian Essays in Socialism and his Quintessence of Ibsenism were touchstones on the way to the gradual recognition of Shaw's talents...

...Yet his considerable strength is in the fleshing out of the London social and cultural scene with Shaw, increasingly, at its nerve center...

...Holroyd elegantly describes the roles of two of these: "Morris and Webb were more than friends to Shaw: they were his political mentors...

...Holroyd is highly effective in analyzing the novels, critical writing, and dramatic works...

...His music criticism for The Star and The World, followed by his drama criticism for the Saturday Review, offered further credibility...

...Although Michael Holroyd begins his Shaw biography less spectacularly—"Bernard Shaw died on 2 November 1950 aged one week, three months, and ninety-four years"—the arrangement of parts of his sentence offers something of the same eccentric ring...

...The London years, during which Shaw experienced his many apprenticeships as music and drama critic, spirited Fabian socialist, dabbler in local politics, novelist, and playwright, occupy the remainder of Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love...