G. B. S. Unveiled Again

THE REAL BERNARD SHAW--Maurice Colbourne--Dodd, Mead ($2.75).

The first third of The Real Bernard Shaw is biography; the rest is mainly comment and interpretation. The book is no world-beater in either respect. But thanks to abundant quotation from Shaw, who is almost as gifted a phrasemaker as Shakespeare, and to a graceful supporting performance by the author, it has its pleasant uses in both. The biography affords glimpses of Shaw during the 40 years before he began to advertise himself. The commentary, in its disarming enthusiasm, should serve as a persuasive reintroduction to readers for whom Shaw's powers have worn thin.

Biographical items: Shaw's father was a hard-drinking Dublin teetotaler. Shaw, at 10, was already "saturated" with Shakespeare and the Bible; he had almost no schooling. His effrontery, wit, savoir-faire were developed to veneer a shyness so painful that as a dinner guest he used to dawdle 20 minutes in the street before ringing the doorbell. For nine years his mother, by giving singing lessons, supported him while he studied Das Kapital and Tristan, made political speeches, wrote five novels. At 42, on crutches thanks to a breakdown from overwork, he married; was mistaken for a beggar at the ceremony. He likes to sit in empty churches.

Author Colbourne remarks upon Shaw's Puritanic mania for moral purpose in art, his worship of hard work, boils down his 4,000,000 words of public admonition to these two: "Breed Virtue."

The sad fact that Shaw is never taken seriously he aptly blames on "constitutional and incorrigible wit." He remarks on the curious sterility in Shaw's work (Yeats likened the effect of Shaw's writing to a sewing machine that "smiled, smiled perpetually"), muffs the fact that such brilliant rationalists breed their own philistinism, their own fear of humane warmth and breadth. As for Shaw's economic theories, he tries improving on them with an earnest sermon for Social Credit.

It is Shaw's own matchless knack for statement that gives the book its entertainment value; merely as a retrospective anthology of Shavian cracks it would be worth reading. Prize sample (on his nine lean years of young manhood): "I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it."

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