Books: The Greatest Shaw on Earth

SHAW: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1856-1898), selected by Stanley Weintraub. 336 pages. Weybright & Talley. $10.

RECOLLECTIONS OF GEORGE BERNARD SHAW by R. J. Minney. 211 pages. Prentice-Hall. $7.95.

Posthumous polishers have labored for years restoring to its original luster the work of art called George Bernard Shaw. It is not an easy task. For one thing, Shaw himself spent a long lifetime creating his own image. Just where the real Shaw ends and Shaw’s Shaw begins is hard to discover. The great Victorian iconoclast, moreover, survives today mainly as a great Victorian icon — the last best literary ornament of the age he helped to destroy.

The Shavian sublime and the G.B.S. ridiculous are both visible in the two latest products of the Shaw scholastic industry. Dr. Stanley Weintraub, a leading Shavian expert in the U.S., has culled biographical bits from the detritus of Shaw’s mountainous writings to make a paste-and-scissors “autobiography.” British Historian R. J. Minney has formed a pattern of sorts from some industriously gathered anecdotal bits. Though the Shavian shavings do not quite add up to the beard of the prophet, Weintraub’s book at least proves that Shaw was perhaps the greatest autobiographer who never wrote one.

Fallen Among Fabians. As Shaw tells it, his socialist faith began as a personal thing — a bitterness against a class system that he felt at the patched seat of his pants. He writes of his Dublin boyhood as that of “a penniless snob.” But if his poverty denied him the class privilege of a university education, it gave him great freedom of mind. He could be depended upon to rush in where pedants feared to tread. At the drop of a bourgeois top hat, he would discourse on Moses or municipal drains, on Marx or Michelangelo. Browbeating the Church of England for paganism or instructing mothers on how they should train children—it was all one to Shaw.

In politics, as in much else, Shaw was often preposterous. One after the other, as the dictators appeared, he applauded Mussolini. Hitler and Stalin —in the no-nonsense manner of a Fabian socialist committee—on the grounds that they were cleaning up a mess. Such obtuseness in a man whose life is a record of devotion to decency in human life can be explained only as an aberration, perhaps a dramatist’s occupational disability of putting his own words into the mouths of other characters. Lenin saw Shaw as “a good man fallen among Fabians.” Shaw, perversely, seemed to regard dictators as good Fabians fallen among fanatics.

Shaw was never a comfortable man to have around, and not merely because he was a teetotaler and a lifelong vegetarian either. As a house guest he would immediately set about rearranging the furniture and taking over the education of the children. His passion for showing people how to do things extended to his biographers (“The best authority on Shaw is Shaw,” he told Archibald Henderson), and he insisted on writing a good part of his biographies by Henderson, Hesketh Pearson and Frank Harris. He simply could not bear to see anyone doing something he could do better.

Shaw’s aid to Harris, one of his early patrons and editors, went as far as a vest-pocket biography, full of Shavian anecdotes that Shaw wrote in a parody of Harris’ journalistic style and entitled “How Frank Ought to Have Done It.” His unique stunt no doubt contributed to Harris’ actual Shaw biography. But Shaw saw to it that his stories enhanced Shaw too, offering witty cracks about himself, which he attributed to his contemporaries. One was supposedly by Oscar Wilde: “He has not an enemy in the world; and none of his friends like him.” Another was attributed to his platonic lover, Mrs. Pat Campbell: “Give Shaw a beefsteak and no woman in London will be safe.”

Few Shavians are so pious as to be diverted by all the material in Minney’s compilations. Who cares to learn that Shaw once diverted traffic with his walking stick to make way for Greer Garson’s car? Or that his housekeeper used to smuggle whisky into Shaw’s soup? Still Minney has unearthed a few memorable anecdotes in which Shaw appears as the witty Irishman, some of his cracks as old as the Wicklow Hills. Alfred Hitchcock, on meeting Shaw: “One look at you, and I know there’s famine in the land.” Shaw, replying: “One look at you, Mr. Hitchcock, and I know who caused it.”

Shaw the iconoclast was not exempt from the Victorian passion for theological speculation. “Mere agnosticism leads nowhere,” he once wrote. “I hold as firmly as St. Thomas Aquinas that all truths, ancient or modern, are divinely inspired.” Shaw believed in evolution, but was worried about the diverse effects of Darwinist thinking. He agreed, with Samuel Butler, that “by banishing purpose from natural history Darwin had banished mind from the universe.” Shaw would have no part of a universe from which a first-rate mind (such as his own) was expelled.

How much has been lost to art, to journalism and to life itself by the extinction of the great Victorian know-it-alls, the proud and prodigious polymaths of an age whose greatness is now seen to lie in the clever children who wrote its obituary? As these collections again attest, the cleverest child of all was George Bernard Shaw, who could invent a new name for God and tackle anything and anyone, even though he could never learn to eat and drink or make love like other men, occasionally shut up, or even master the bicycle.