BERNARD SHAW'S LIFE-STORY.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20037, 19 September 1930, Page 19

BERNARD SHAW'S LIFE-STORY.

FIFTY-FOUR YEARS IN LONDON. Mr Shaw has stolen a march upon the public by providing the first volume of the new collected edition of his works with a preface containing a long f ra2 - jaeat o f autobiography. It is a d *. Ughtfully disorderly piece of work, beginning with his arrival in London, mak- ; »g its way back by easy stages to the days when ho required the care of a nurse, and then working up, in leisurely hif^V 0 *x e P eriod which produced numour V, ? iS frank " Uiß **« iXbi; ™ fr + T ently »t»7B into inentlv n P a ™ nth «e». And yet, apparitv tn«. ll to^ &ia no *«'ther'public od tS -n 6 1025 C °P iea of thia limited coition will secure. sZi° Sve , y° lumes Just published, Mr Shaw explained in a recent interview with a.- representative of the "ObnnlT' comprise, the wholo of his novels. These will be followed by tho Plays, and tho total edition will run to tairty volumes, which will also include on l J devoted to short stories, i*/ ,y e "ceived a large number of letters," sai d Mr Shaw, "from people who complain that some of the books included in this edition have never been published separately, and that thov couldn't afford to pay thirty guineas foY the set I should like you to mako it clear that everything published in this edition will bo published separately afterwards. 'The Apple Cart,' for instance, will be published by itself in. a few months' time; but it is only fair that those who have subscribed for this edition should have the enjoyment of a little priority. This edition," added Mr Shaw, with one of hi 3 characteristic, merry twinkles, "is only for idiots—and speculators." A Success as Cashier. By the latter reference Mr' Shaw was alluding to the fact that many subscribers have bought two copies of the complete edition, one to keep for their privatej use, and one to sell at the enhanced price which the edition is certain to reach in tho future. As the type has been distributed, there can bo no question of reprinting the edition. But it is tho first volume, which contains the autobographical fragment, over which most people will linger longest. It is fifty-four years since". Mr Shaw made his descent upon London. He was twenty. He had been in business some years. He had even made a success of the position of cashier, from a beginning at 18s a month. He fled from it. He had como to detest it "as cordially, as any sane person lets himself detest anything he cannot escape from"; and he resolved to join his mother and only surviving sister in London. .

\ - ; Of his father he has much to say. He had an unfortunate, addiction to drink, which enforced a virtual ostracism upon his family, But he had a "humorous/ sense, t. of =anti-climax" which Mr Shaw inherited, and used with much effect when he became a • writer of comedy. He has much also to say of his relatives and the picture of a_ family scene at Bushy Park with the" uncles and aunts sitting round sedately while "uncle Barney stood, solemnly playing 'Annie Laurie' on the ophicleide," crystallises an atmosphere, and describes a period. • He has, too, a sense of his family which appears to. have been strong among Mb relatives. One of them went so far as to publish 100 copies of his pedigree, in which Mr Shaw rejoiced to find that, according to tho Rev. Lacblan Shaw, a general tradition traced the descent of the Shaws to Macduff, Earl ( of Fife. Mr Shaw comments:— "I hastily skipped to the chapter about the Irish Shaws, to make sure that they were my people, and there they were, baronet and all, only traced to the third son of that immortalised yet unborn Thane of Fife who, invulnerable to normally accoutred swordsmen, laid on arid slew Macbeth. It was as good as being descended from Shakespeare, whom I had been unconsciously resolved to reincarnate from my cradle." » Father's Laughter at Euin. Yet it was a sufficiently well-con-nected family to make the impecuniosity in which they lived not that tolerable •sort of poverty ".which furnishes an element r* romance in tho early lives of many laraous men," but the poverty of "the younger son of the younger aan."' In some way, however, they appeared to make a 'useful substitute for happiness out of irresponsibility. AH of them, appeared to be able to play some musical instrument. They were partial, perhaps, to brass ones. Mr Shaw's father seems to have boon par excellence irresponsible. He found a subject for inextingnishablo laughter in the fact that he was brought .to the verge of ruin, and when the family "solved a desperate financial situation by emigrating to London he made no effort to. rejoin them., . And none of us ever dreamt of there being any unkiiadness in the arrangement; In our family we did not bother about conventionalities and sentimentalities." s

His Own, Prayers. There is an inimitable page in which Mr Shaw describes his early attitude to religion. He composed his own prayers: "'. 'l cannot recall the words of tho final form I adopted, tint I remember .thai, it was in three movemont*, like a sonata, and in' the best Church of lw land Style. It ended with the Lord's Prayer, and I repeated it every night in bed. I had been"-warned' by my nurse that warm prayers were of no use, and that only by kneeling by, my bedside in the cold conld I hop?,for a hearing; but I criticised this admonition unfavourably on various grounds, the real one being my preference for -warmth and comfort." He learned nothing at school, he says, and is content with the fact:— "I congratulate myself, on this, for I am firmly persuaded that every unnatural activity of the brain is as -.uischievous as any .nnuati.ral activity of the body, and that pressing penpiff to learn things they do not want to know !is as unwholesome and disastrous as needing them on sawdust. Civilisation is always wrecked bv giving the goVcrn ing classes what is called secondary education. Which produces invincible ignorance and intellectual and moral imbecility as a result of unnatural abuse of the apprehensive faculty.' ' It was not, however, because of his having learned nothing at school that he found himself so shy upon coming to London, but because the social seclusion in which his family had lived in, volved his losing "the social drill which puts one at one's ease in private society. People who met him, lie says, may well have found mo insufferable, aggressive, and impudent." He goes on to describe the awkwardness of the horn Communist "in plutocratic society before ho knows "what he is. and understands why"; and sums up:— "As it happens, I was a born Communist and iconoclast (or Quaker) without knowing it, afd I never got on easy terms with plutocracy and snobbery until I took to the study of economic?, beginning with Honry George and Karl Marx." '...,,•

Strange Taste for Stage Demons. But even when he was a "good boy" his taste ran so strongly on stage villains and stage, demons that he painted his bedroom wall with, frescoes of Mephistopholes, and thinks he must actually have bewitched himself. For "when Nature completed my counten-ance-in 1880 or thereabouts (I had only the tenderest sprouting of hair on my face until I was 24), I found myself equipped with the upgrowing moustaches and eyebrows and the sarcastic nostrils of the operatic fiend, whoso airs (by Gounod) I had sung as a child, and whose attitudes I had affected in my boyhood." He disclaims ambition, admits, that he had never thought about bein£ a great man because he took it for granted, and, full of such ( turbulences and an ineradicable hatred of an office desk, found himself in London. His many admirers will be pleased to learn a hitherto undisclosed quarry for his early work. He acted as ghost for a musician who had accepted a part as a musical critic, but a 8 a proper ghost with no real, existence ho could not enter the office to correct his proofs. They were full of inaccuracies and interpolations, and therefore those copies of "The Hornet" are quite accurately to be described as a quarry from which the veritable Shaw must be excavated. But in 1879 he had written a novel. He had disciplined himself to fill. five pages of manuscript each day, and ho had still "so much of the schoolboy and the,clerk" in him that if the five pages ended in the middle of a sentenco he did not finish it. till the next day. Upon this play he produced five novels in five years. He had. no success. Fifty or sixty refusals made him "un discouragcablc, acquiring a. superhuman insensitiveness to praiso or blame." The first novel was actually accepted by Blackwood, but the offer was withdrawn. Sir George Macmillan sent him a "longish and evidently consid ered roport by tho firm's reader, John (afterwards Lord) Morley." But it is only now that it finds Mts way into print. It is nearly 200,000 words long; but, says Mr Shaw, the manuscript was still legible, with the writing sloping slightly backwards, though the ends of the pages had been nibbled by mice and the words.had to be restored. This novel forms volume one in the new limitod edition which now appears with this attractive instalment of autobiography.