Iconoclast as Icon
GIRLS put up their hair, but one sometimes feels that the most important day in Shaw's life was the day he decided to put up his eyebrows. Pre- served by Rodin, Epstein, Augustus John, Topolski, Max Beerbohm and Low, and even by a stained glass window in the Ethical Church, Bayswater, those trellised tufts have become a sort of objective correlative for the diabolic waggishness -- or waggish devilry — of their master's writings. These may not seem serious reflections, but then Mr. Pearson's Life (Shaw must by now have almost as many Lives as a cat) is not a notably serious book. First issued to widespread critical acclaim in 1942, it now benefits from several additional chapters carry- ing the story down to Shaw's death eight years later and in one of these Shaw himself sounded the warning:
They will say, if they are intelligent enough, 'This is not classical biography: it is gossip.' But the old topsy-turvy bravura quickly inter- posed:
To this you can reply 'That is exactly what classical biography is: if you want Shavian philosophy instead, read Shaw's works.' This will be perfectly sound in principle and effec- tive as repartee. . . .
Possibly—but it isn't simply that Mr. Pearson has failed to do justice to `Shavian philosophy,' whatever that is: doing it justice might, after all, entail a courteous absence of comment. It's the jocose frankness of admissions like this, As one . . . who would far rather die than read Karl Marx, it is a little difficult for me to trace the precise nature of his influence on Shaw, that encourages one to question Mr. Pearson's qualifications for the job in hand.
But, then, the whole trend of Shaviana—the busts, photographs, paintings, letters, memoirs and biographies—has always been towards the pictorial and picturesque, away from the exposi- tory and critical. Shaw was always good copy and none knew it better than he did. He gave himself generously to his recorders, rewriting Harris's book on him env autobiography by Frank Harris') and keeping in close touch with Mr. Pearson while this Life was in the making.
And certainly anyone prepared to recreate Shaw's activities, for example, as a founding father of the Labour Party from little more than a string of excellent anecdotes, and to support some odd chops and shifts in the chronology of ninety-four multifarious years, will find that this co-operation, coupled with Mr. Pearson's dili- gence, has its own rewards. Not the least of these is the copiouS quotation from Shaw himself.
Shaw had a formula : 'Find the right thing to say, and then say it with the utmost levity.' In his magnificent forays into music and theatre criti- cism, where he was tied to specific occasions, he Showed how wonderfully effective this could be. His tragedy was to have pushed it too far. The arid chemistry of his private life, the infantilism and cruelty of his relations with women (there are those who find his correspondence with Mrs. Pat Campbell charming), the chill simple certain- ties of one who may be thought outside the ordi- nary human condition and therefore unqualified to legislate—these meant that the 'right things' he had to say were time and again corrupted by the effects of his 'levity.' Laughter reassures and his ironies became so habitual and equivocal as to rob his most passionate beliefs of reality. There are hints of all this in Mr. Pearson's Shaw (which is foully indexed but less partisan than St. John Ervine's). 'But GBS is a national figure, perhaps the first man to have availed himself fully of contemporary modes of publicity, and it will be some time before the image crumbles and the sorting of wheat from the chaff in his extraordinary achievement can begin.
JOHN COLEMAN
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