Books: Candida

THIRTY YEARS WITH G.B.S. (316 pp.)—Blanche Patch—Dodd, Mead ($3).

Of all the people who have written books about Bernard Shaw, or ever will, God-fearing Tory Blanche Patch, spinster daughter of a Church of England clergyman, had the best chance to observe her subject. For the last 30 years of his life, she was his private secretary. What gives her book its own rare fascination is the fact that, as Secretary Patch puts it herself, she was never “swept away.”

Shaw was a bit of a mystic, she thinks, and doubtless a bit of a revolutionary; but what really made him tick was neither the urgings of the Life Force nor the welfare of mankind, but simply an obsessive need “to write about something or other.” His days were “dominated by the fascination of finding words for ideas and sentences for the words”—and the only alternative, Shaw once told her, was “to die for want of something to do.”

Two Black Eyes. When his human “writing factory” was going full blast (as it always was), Shaw had not the slightest desire (he assured Miss Patch) “to talk to anyone, alive or dead.” His devoted staff rallied around his dedicated way of life without hope of an appreciative word (“he took one’s work for granted”). He was the last man to think of raising wages, in part, says Chronicler Patch, because he was much too absorbed in writing about economics to notice anything so obvious as rising living costs. Illness, whether his own or others’, was ignored or dismissed with a shrug. “Her injuries,” he informed Miss Patch, after 76-year-old Mrs. Shaw had been hurt in an automobile accident, “are only bruises and sprains and a troublesome hole in her shin plus two black eyes.”

Why, then, did people say, as did Shaw’s chauffeur, “I would do anything for Mr. Shaw”? For one thing, Shaw at home was the most placid and modest of men. In 30 years, Miss Patch only saw him lose his temper twice. He seldom “contradicted any of us,” and “of malice he was utterly incapable … He could be kind,” sums up the author in the most devastating remark of her book, “when he remembered you were there.”

Figures v. Ideas. From a secretary’s point of view, he was both admirable and incorrigible. In three decades of typing his manuscripts, she found only one word he was apt to misspell (“millionaress”). Together they figured out the massive Shavian income tax; so good was Shaw’s head for figures that he received a letter of thanks from His Majesty’s inspector of taxes. But when an idea became involved with the figures, Shaw’s acumen (and scruples) deserted him instantly. When he became convinced, as he did in his last years, that he was becoming penniless, he quickly “proved” that he paid the Exchequer £147 for every £100 he earned. When Miss Patch demolished his calculations, he retorted brusquely: “I am sticking to my figure of £147 as the easiest to remember.”

The Patch tone of cool appraisal is likely to arouse in U.S. circles both the amusement and the ire that it has already roused in Britain. “The real joke,” snorted the New Statesman & Nation, “is that a conventional and humorless vicar’s daughter should have been . . . chosen by [Shaw] just because she made no … intellectual demands upon him and should have then written … a book which shows no comprehension of him at all.” It is a good bet that Bernard Shaw would never have seen that particular joke. Secretary Patch sounds for all the world like one of those practical, indomitable, and, on the whole, efficient females who fill the plays of G.B.S.