Shavings
ONE of the threats tha the famous writer must now face is the disciple who will sooner or later discover every hack piece he ever thought safely buried and triumphantly make a book of them, prefaced by the eager sleuth. ('Repeated winnow- ing has discovered much forgotten work of the prolific middle years, including science-fiction re- views in a short-lived quarterly of the Left and an autobiographical fragment in The Book- worm. 1 Shaw on Theatre, well winnowed by a scholar in Boulder, Colorado, arouses initial misgivings on these lines. Clearly the contents will not have the scale of the title, for the great mass of Shaw on theatre is excluded on the grounds that it has already appeared in book form. These are the mavericks of the library stacks: prefaces to the Malvern Festival pro- gramme, speeches, letters to editors, single contri- butions to magazines far away or long defunct; tame, dead stuff by the sound of it. The fact that the bulk of it turns out to be both trenchant and transplantable says much for Shaw's recalcitrance as a free-lance journalist. He demonstrably never took the faintest notice of what a nervous editor or a dull occasion required of him, and he addressed the readers of the Ladies' Home Jour- nal in exactly the same stinging vein as the inured public of the Saturday Review. In writing about the London theatre for American maga- zines, in fact, his only detectable regard for the alien context was his sly adoption of the tone of an anthropologist, as though describing some distant and far from viable phenomenon, with enemies such as Irving and the Lord Chamber- lain presented as interesting tribal aberrations, obviously doomed to disappear once civilisation reached the island.
As Wells added science, to literatures Shaw added economics to dramatic criticism. He saw that the theatre was bound to lag behind the drama as long as it was in the hands of actor- managers committed to making money out of a public that' cared far more about the actor- manager than the play, and much Of what he says about the implications of the star-system is still scathingly pertinent. So is his analysis of the cuts required in the film of Saint Joan by Catholic Action, a pressure group with its thumb on the Hays Office; the piece might well be re- printed as an adjunct to the current efforts to grasp the thinking of the British Board of Film Censors. Smaller lunacies included the excision of the word 'babes,' presumably on grounds of immodesty.
Shaw was always better on texts than on actors. In Mr. West's gleanings as elsewhere, one senses a mixture of contempt and anxiety in his relation to these go-betweens who are silly enough to allow someone else's words to be put into their
mouth, and at the same time permitted the dan- gerous responsibility of expelling them in public. The critic in Shaw was always the watchdog of the playwright, which explains his ambivalent attitude to Shakespeare: no one can ever have been more insulting about our master-dramatist, a rival whose very name opened with the same letters; but on the other hand no one ever fought more vigilantly against cutting his work, an in- fringement of union rights that could clearly repercuss On Shaw 'himself.
GBS was a great partisan, like all great drama critics. He also had a superb debating style, of course, a deft and sardonic intellect, and a deployment of erudition that Frank Harris once likened to George Jean Nathan's, 'throwing facts overboard in sackfuls in order to increase speed': but it was his bias towards a particular kind, of writer's theatre that influenced the drama. That this high cause of criticism happened to serve his own interests as a playwright can only have tickled him. The book-jacket shows him crouched over his typewriter, wily and solitary, looking like some mischievous seer : a prophet in the wilderness, living on wild honey and presumably refusing even locusts, but primed to the last with worldly cunning.
PENELOPE GILLIATt
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