Books: Masks of Genius

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: MAN OF THE CENTURY (969 pp.)—Archibald Henderson—Appleton-Century-Crofts ($12).

Fifty-one years ago, Bernard Shaw found his Boswell in Archibald Henderson, a stage-struck mathematics professor from the University of North Carolina. In 1911 and 1932, Henderson produced “authorized” biographies of Ireland’s cranky genius. This book lacks the official imprimatur, because it was completed after Shaw’s death, but it is the most massively, not to say crushingly, definitive Shaw biography ever written.

A half-century of hero worship is not the best school for criticism. But though Henderson’s judgments on Shaw are uniformly gentle, they are not undiscerning. The only writer of whom Shaw could be said to be jealous was Shakespeare; Henderson concedes the Beard’s criticism of the Bard to have been often “provocative, unilateral, unjust, savage and false.” And he credits Shakespeare with teaching Shaw “the technique of ultra-naturalism in dialogue,” just as Moliere schooled him in “the plotless conversation piece,” and Dickens showed him how to exaggerate characters “far beyond verisimilitude.”

Henderson sees that Shaw’s derision of love, romance, sexual passion, patriotism and family solidarity was the calculated result of a determined intellectual effort to make men look freshly at all they had previously accepted without question. Shaw repeatedly committed that sin against society for which Socrates was condemned to death: he made the worse seem the better part. As Albert Einstein once put it, Shaw had “succeeded in gaining the love and the joyful admiration of mankind by a path which for others has led to martyrdom.”

The book, which follows another vast, able biography by St. John Ervine (TIME, Sept. 24), contains much that is new, from correspondence with Sidney and Beatrice Webb to Shaw’s own words—enough of them to fill an ordinary volume. It is as thoroughly documented for the time when Shaw was a Dublin clerk as for the time of his London preeminence. Yet the total effect is one of mystery. All his life Shaw shouted his ideas from the world’s rooftops. But even an “authorized” biographer like Archibald Henderson is full of hesitancies in deciding which of Shaw’s contradictory views is the one he truly believed, and whether or not there was a true face beneath the many masks he wore. All he knows for certain—along with millions of theatergoers—is that all the masks show the touch of genius.