England's Greatest Living Dramatist: A Close, Good-Natured Portrait of George Bernard Shaw

G. B. S. A FULL. LENGTH PORTRAIT. BY Hesketh Pearson. Harper & Brothers. $3.75

THE publishers of this book describe it as the “most Boswellian biography since Boswell’s Johnson.” That is an exaggeration; it contains only a few recorded conversations and its chief resemblance to Boswell’s Johnson is that we finish reading it with an impression of a difference in size and force of character between the subject of the biography and its author.

Throughout most of its length it is a good, even an excellent, biography. Mr. Pearson writes well, and he has chosen his quotations from Shaw’s vast quantity of words with intelligence and point. They are the quotations which most clearly illuminate his subject, and we have as well-balanced and accurate an account of Shaw’s career, of his friendships with men and women, of his various interests, as we are likely to get. There are also a number of highly entertaining anecdotes, and we see Shaw’s character in relation to a number of events and people.

His early life in Ireland, the combined shyness and bravado of his first years in England, his concern with socialism, the history of his plays — all these things are clearly and vividly presented to us. Mr. Pearson, to be sure, does not attempt to describe in detail the sources and content of Shaw’s thinking. We see Shaw carving out his career and personality with the sharp tools of wit and common sense, until the well-known figure, with its bristling eyebrows and its aggressive beard, stands entertainingly and vigorously before us. In fact, when the reader is about two-thirds through Mr. Pearson’s book he feels that this is as satisfactory a biography of Shaw, on the purely personal side, as could be written.

But when the book is finished, that feeling has evaporated. This is partly Mr. Pearson’s fault and partly the fault of the circumstances. To read the biography of a man before the man has died is like leaving the theater before the curtain comes down on the last act. When a man becomes so eminent that he is part of the landscape of his age, and can only say the kind of thing that people expect him to say because his character and opinions are set, a description of his last years is almost bound to be discursive and undramatic, like the last acts of Shaw’s own recent plays. Though we know that the end can’t be very far off, we want — perhaps unfairly—to know that it’s happened, and how; the fall of the curtain is the only thing that can pull the story together by giving us a sense of finality.

Mr. Pearson suffers under this handicap — for which we cannot fairly blame him. But we can blame him for the fact that we miss, when we have come to the end of the book, both a complete account of Shaw’s later political opinions and a final estimate of Shaw’s character. Mr. Pearson says almost nothing, for example, of Shaw’s favorable regard for Mussolini—a regard which is a direct consequence of an important side of Shaw’s opinions and personality throughout his life. There is no need to pull any punches in describing Shaw’s private life or his other opinions; why should there be any pulling of punches here? In fact the book seems to have been finished in a hurry; it trails off into a series of rather haphazard descriptions of Shaw’s later adventures with places and people, and then suddenly stops.

Nevertheless, though it is not so satisfactory as one had hoped, Mr. Pearson’s book is a useful and authoritative account of Shaw’s life. Shaw has contributed to it a good deal himself, and has checked its accuracy. And the book leaves us with a real sense of Shaw’s importance to his time. Underneath all the anecdotes, the laughter and the wit, there has always been a vital concern, on Shaw’s part, with the welfare of mankind, and he has always had a sure sense of values as to what is important in human experience. That is why he can justly be called a great man. What has been unsympathetic about him is that he has been so much more aware of what he was doing than the majority of human beings. Most people live like icebergs; only one-eighth of their lives is consciously above water, and they are chiefly motivated by the unconscious seven-eighths that lies unseen below. Shaw’ is just the reverse. In his case the seven-eighths is not below, but above the surface, and his conscious mind has always done nearly all the work. To less sensible men the spectacle is admirable but exasperating: it is perhaps the final mark of Shaw’s greatness that he has only returned that exasperation with a rational argument and a smile.

THEODORE SPENCER