In Search of Shaw's DNA
2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/shaw.35.2.0265
ISSN1529-1480
Autores Tópico(s)Literature Analysis and Criticism
ResumoNo one has made a more significant contribution to the assembly of Bernard Shaw's biography than Stanley Weintraub. This book picks up many of the threads that constitute the immense log of his research on Shaw. It ends with a description of Shaw's curtain speech after the first performance of his first play, Widowers’ Houses, Weintraub noting that Shaw declared that “‘what he had dramatized was an unsavory reality in contemporary life, but he ‘heartily hoped that the time would come when the play … would be utterly impossible and wholly unintelligible.’ The passage of years would prove it to be neither. Although the first production achieved only two little-regarded performances, the stage had finally claimed Shaw. Now there would be no stopping him” (197).In fall 1987 began my friendship with Fred Crawford (1947–99), the amazing SHAW Annual editor (1989–99) to whom Weintraub has dedicated Bernard Shaw Before His First Play: The Embryo Playwright. Fred had just joined our English department. He soon gave me, as a gift, B. C. Rosset's Shaw of Dublin: The Formative Years (1964), with its dust cover proclaiming “A revealing inquiry into the little-known youth of GBS,” and informed me it was something of a game-changer in the writing of Shaw's life story. The dust cover also announced in font just a bit smaller than that for Rosset's name, “with a foreword by Stanley Weintraub.” At the end of Rosset's “Acknowledgments” are his thanks “to Dr. Stanley Weintraub of the Pennsylvania State University and editor of The Shaw Review for his Archer-like encouragement and guidance” (xii). Six pages into his introduction Rosset writes, “And what of the effects of the Hatch Street ménage à trois upon this artist in embryo?” (xviii), perhaps borrowing “embryo” from the 1959 Weintraub essay revisited in part 6 of the summary below. Weintraub, with “embryo playwright” in the title of this new book, repeats his own earlier use of the phrase. The metaphor is viral.The book's subject is Shaw's biography, and the intention of this review is mostly to salute its representation of the great body of Weintraub's scholarship on Shaw. The importance of the facts of the early life of a person cannot be overstated. But the meaning of an early life of Shaw cannot be comprehended without a record of the rest of his life. Weintraub's work, in one way or another, manages to account for it all. Biography and history are Weintraub's passion. In many books Shaw is his principal subject. In addition, he has written biographies of numerous other people whose lives run parallel to Shaw's in some part of the calendar of Shaw's long life: T. E. Lawrence, Reginald Turner, Aubrey Beardsley, James Whistler, the Rossettis, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert, Edward VII, Benjamin Disraeli, Lionel de Rothschild—and many, many others.Embryo Playwright's fourteen numbered parts “have been written and edited over more than half a century, and follow here … in much updated and augmented form. Several sections are new for this book” (4). Together, they are a progress report and an encore of the gargantuan work of Weintraub as Shaw's biographer, chronicler, and interpreter.The first chapter, “1. Passion without ‘Passion,’ Shaw's Abortive Jesus Play,” uncovers the imprint of the mythology, diction, and syntax of traditional Christian narratology on Shaw's discourse. Weintraub also provides a contrast to the “Jesus Play,” which Shaw left unfinished in 1878, with Tim Rice's/Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar and Shaw's Saint Joan, each of which dramatizes an existential passion and death. The essay then explains why Shaw ultimately chose against dramatizing the passion of Jesus.“2. Sketches for a Self-Portrait” shows how “Shaw made literary use of himself—and wrote his informal autobiography—all his life” (20). These pages elaborate Weintraub's preface to his two-volume assembly, Shaw: An Autobiography, 1856–1898 and 1898–1950. These volumes print 671 pages of selections from Shaw's writings, with Weintraub's extensive notes. How do you write a GBS biography? What are the necessary sources? What are the problems with biographies of Shaw written with the confounding living Shaw's permission and intervention and contributions? They produce an autobiographical contamination of the biographical facts. They also bequeath the confounding challenge of the “residue and remainder” of the Shaw life record to the post hoc biographer.“3. G.B.S., Pugilist and Playwright” is a reprise of what Weintraub has written on Shaw and the role of boxing in his life. In his mid-twenties Shaw had trained with both Pakenham Beatty (dilettante poet and gentleman pugilist) and his ring mentor, Ned Donnelly, for the Queensberry amateur competitions. Donnelly's book, Self-Defense, anchored Shaw's strong early and lifelong interest in boxing, manifest not only in Shaw's own experience in the boxing ring, but in his novel Cashel Byron's Profession (1882), its verse play The Admirable Bashville (1901), and his journalism and plays throughout his life. Moreover, during his last twenty years, Shaw became a close friend of Gene Tunney, the era's heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Weintraub reviewed Jay Tunney's biography of the friendship of Shaw and his father in The Prizefighter and the Playwright: Gene Tunney and George Bernard Shaw (2010), in these pages in 2011.“4. Bernard Shaw, Diarist”: Begun in his twenty-ninth year, Shaw's diaries are, of course, a priceless quarry of information about his life—much of them written in an antique Pitman shorthand. Weintraub is the editor of the almost unimaginably challenging, two-volume annotated edition of Bernard Shaw: The Diaries, 1885–1897 (1986). His summary here of the work it involved leaves us in awe.In “5. The Garnetts, the Fabians, and The Paradox Club,” Weintraub adds an interesting subnarrative to the larger story of Shaw as a Fabian. Among the society's members, Shaw is seriously attracted to Constance Black, but he's not ready to marry. Constance hooks up with and eventually marries Edward Garnett, another young Fabian, whose first novel, The Paradox Club, includes himself and Constance as lovers, with the socialist Martell very likely meant to represent Shaw. In the novel, Shaw and Garnett are opposed, as they also are in reality. Garnett's novel came out in 1886, just about the time Shaw's Cashel Byron was submitted for publication and rejected by Fisher Unwin, where Garnett was an editor. In the early 1920s, Garnett and Shaw would both write plays on Joan of Arc. Garnett's son David recalls that Shaw's eminence, and therefore that of his Saint Joan, in a reversal of the weak karma of Cashel Byron, “made it impossible for Edward's play to be put on for a run.”“The novels were less a false start for Shaw than a start at finding himself.… Shaw the playwright could never separate himself from Shaw the novelist” (61), so Weintraub writes in “6. The Embryo Playwright in Shaw's Early Novels.” Shaw knew soon enough that his talent was in writing for the stage. Nevertheless, “However fading in memory in his nineties, it is remarkable that the novels were so tenacious an aspect of Shaw's subconscious. Even if we reject some of the apparent foreshadowings of the plays suggested by the early fiction, many others are irrefutable” (84).In “7. Shaw in “Sallust's House,” Weintraub casts a spellbinding speculation about the extent of a willow-the-wisp influence upon Shaw of the Roman political philosopher, Caius Sallustius Crispus, who appears just once in Shaw's writing—in his novel An Unsocial Socialist. Sallust, also a Roman senator, called himself a novus homo (a “new man”) and “espoused the cause of the plebs” (86). Sallust's writings reveal a “keen sense of sarcasm and anticlimax [that] seems to have appealed to [the young] Shaw.… Samplings of Sallust after a perusal of Shaw suggest that G.B.S. himself dwelt, metaphorically, in Sallust's house” (90).“8. A.D. 3,000. The True Report of a County Council Candidate's Dream, The People He Saw, What They Thought of Him, and He of Them,” republishes the dream-vision text of Shaw's earliest significant, speculative, future history narrative, which appeared in the Star on 17 January 1889. The story and Shaw's clear prose have worn well. His vision of the future is one translation of how Shaw understood and lived his own present. For context, Weintraub reminds us of the ambitious fantasies of Shaw's mature years: Methuselah (1921), Apple Cart (1929), Simpleton (1934), and Farfetched Fables (1948).In “9. Ballads by Shaw: An Anonymous Star Versifier,” Weintraub's summary evaluation confirms the impression of most readers of Shaw's poetry: “Whether political versifier or love lyricist, he remained no Byron” (107). Indeed, considering the genius of Shaw for language, these 1880s specimens, printed in the popular press, are surprisingly pedestrian. The consensus among scholarly admirers of Shaw is how difficult it is to understand why GBS was such a bad poet.“10. Bernard Shaw, Actor” lists about a dozen descriptions of Shaw's acting experiences. Some are from his friendship with Eleanor Marx (Karl's daughter), who sought with him to bring Ibsen to English theater, when she persisted in having him play Ibsen's Nils Krogstad—even though it was a “mad” idea. Eleanor understood that the realism of an Ibsenite universe was a convincing imitation of lived life. A play that had “no end” mirrored life experience during which things don't end, but rather morph and persist with the progress of living. Weintraub relates that Charlotte Shaw's complaint to Shaw was that he was “always acting,” observing that “‘G.B.S.’ was Shaw's most successful and sustained characterization (witness his long run)” (108). Few personalities in world history are documented as more dramatically self-produced and consciously self-authored than that of Shaw. Even so, by comparison with other playwrights his experience in actually acting onstage was “minuscule.” Yet it remains essential to a complete understanding of his playwriting.“11. The Autobiography of Corno di Bassetto” rests upon the section on “Corno di Bassetto” in Weintraub's Shaw: An Autobiography, 1856–1898 (1969). It reveals a particularly famous instance of the importance of the Herculean work of Weintraub's editing of Shaw's autobiographical writing. It is foundational not only for all the biographers of Shaw thereafter, but for the Dan H. Laurence definitive edition of Shaw's Music: The Complete Musical Criticism of Bernard Shaw (3 vols., 1981; 2nd ed., 1989). Historians of music criticism rate Shaw's as among the most important to be produced at the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter reviews Weintraub's fixing of the text of the “life” facts of how “Bassetto”—Shaw conjured most of this achievement in one year of writing. It explains Shaw's declaration (as Bassetto) that “My specialties are political hypocrisy and autobiographical musical criticism” (116). “I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was then refined and academic to the point of being unreadable and often nonsensical” (130). The Bassetto cognomen would last appear in 1899.“12. In the Victorian Picture Galleries” is an account of 181 art reviews known to be by Shaw in the 1890s. While he was writing music criticism, he was also writing art criticism, although with far less satisfaction and desire to do so. At the time, Shaw said he did it mostly for the money: “My mind is unhinged by the contemplation of so much emptiness and so much bungling” (132). Among other features, this chapter is an inventory of references to art mentioned in the entire corpus of Shaw's writing, with emphasis upon the settings for his plays, and displays Weintraub's command of Victorian art.“13. Bernard Shaw Besieged: Early Progresses to Oxbridge, 1888–1892” recounts Shaw's visits to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge between 1888 and 1892, his own “higher” education having been famously undertaken in the reading room of the British Museum. This short piece remembers the ambivalence of the respect Shaw received at these bastions of the intellectual and political ancestry of England—up to the time when the staging of his very first play would mark the beginning of his great popularity.“14. Shaw Becomes a Playwright: July-December 1892” is a riveting narrative of the unlikely progress of six months of events that concluded in the first two performances of Widowers’ Houses. For most playgoers to the revivals of Shaw's plays, the humble circumstances of Shaw's life just before the first performance of his first play will be thrilling in this instance of Weintraub's description of them. It well conveys how it felt to be GBS at this evening of embarkation upon his life's major work.There is a set of reflections elicited by the publication and title word—“Embryo”—of this book. By his long record of immense and important scholarship, Weintraub also confers upon the gold mines of information he references here the confidence that it is accurate. We cannot ask for more from him, but we have questions that our ever-newer technologies for examining the “past” dare us to ask. The answers could bring about the convention of another order of biography. (1) Is there any promise for a recovery of a sample of Shaw's DNA? From his clothing, shavers, shoes? From a fugitive nail clipping at Ayot? What is Shaw's deep ancestral gene pool? How might this have predisposed him? (2) How about the wedding of data-mining superfast computers running corpus-linguistics programs seeking information for an anthropological poetics to be applied by psychiatric archeologists? Such programs uploaded with the oeuvres of the top five thousand writers in world history would ground us with the results of regression analyses applied to the texts of their works, coupled with information-rich caches of the developmental records and progresses of the writers. We can know a lot more about who writers really are than we now do. And when we reach this point, Stanley Weintraub will already be there to ask us, “What kept you?”
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