FROM THE ARCHIVES:Writer Frank O'Connor took this look at George Bernard Shaw while reviewing one of Shaw's final books, Everybody's Political What's What.
ALL WE need to know about any Irishman is with what sort of face he stepped off the gangway in Holyhead. When Shaw stepped off it in 1876 it was certainly with a very determined air.
Up to that moment his life had run dead true to the pattern imposed on every Irishman of talent. His father was a drunkard; Shaw has described him with a goose under one arm and a ham under the other, battering his top hat against the garden wall under the impression that it was a gate. Mr Shaw, senior, came a little too soon to have made friends with Mr Daedalus. One of Shaw’s uncles played the ophicleide, read the Bible and studied the figures of bathing belles through an opera glass before committing suicide by stuffing his head in a carpet bag.
Shaw himself was lonely, shy, and easily moved to tears; he invented imaginary worlds in which he was hero, lover or foundling left alone in the world – another such childhood as that which gave us A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Clerk in a land agent’s office at 18 shillings a week, he cannot have been thinking altogether of Larry Doyle when he wrote of “the dreaming! The dreaming! The torturing, heart-scalding, never-satisfying, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!”
And yet there is a difference. After the Holyhead boat there came for Joyce Paris and the study of Aquinas; for years London and the study of Blake. For Shaw it was the British Museum and “The Manners and Tone of Good Society.” He, unlike our other exiles, did not attempt to relate his adolescence and maturity. He simply drew a thick red line under an old account and began a new leaf with “The Manners and Tone of Good Society.” He is our first extrovert.
That deliberate extroversion has given him his matchless objective intelligence, moving freely about with no burden of experience. Nobody with any experience of life could have written “Cashel Byron’s Profession.” He has the eye of a savage or a child, at its best with the immediate fact which it perceives instantly, in its entirety, and with such a shock of delighted surprise that at once it begins to caricature it: the singer who attacked his aria with such enthusiasm “that he burst into a different key”; Maynooth, where young Irish priests are taught that “if the world is not exactly flat, it is not quite so round as it is generally supposed to be.” (I do not remember the exact quotations, only the joy with which I first read them.) It is an ageless mind, for it has practically no roots: it doesn’t dry up like a natural one.
And yet it doesn’t strike me as a happy mind. Shaw’s genius is in the fierce light which he focusses up into the conscious mind. It is like a searchlight.
There is never depth, never colour, and in the plays it flattens out character until the whole play become a frieze.