BERNARD SHAW: VOLUME I, 1856-1898, THE SEARCH FOR LOVE
by Michael Holroy
Random House; 486 pages; $24.95
A frustrated mama's boy who spent his life scorning family relations as unhappy when not downright unnatural. A product of a menage a trois who loathed his given name of George because he shared it with both a pathetic father and the self-styled musical genius who became his mother's lover. An eccentric who attributed ill health and body odor to cotton and linen clothing and advocated a wardrobe of unbleached woolen garments. A purported avatar of women's liberation who called himself a "philanderer" and preferred married women for romance. A lectern-thumping socialist who prided himself on his aristocratic if fallen lineage and chronicled protest rallies from the sidelines with amused disdain. A novelist whose books were rejected as unpublishable, a pamphleteer who seemed forever to be engaging in self-satire, a political leader who refused to seek office, a ghostwriter whose hand was not only detected but also thought to be female.
The George Bernard Shaw of Michael Holroyd's biography, which takes the playwright up to age 42 in the twilight of the 19th century, hardly seems likely to become one of the most lionized men of the 20th century. Yet this portrait, a dozen years in the making, in the end enhances Shaw's achievements. In place of the glib rhetorician, Holroyd poignantly brings into view the shy, resentful, self-thwarting youth who created the persona of G.B.S. Ashamed of his scandalous and impecunious family, embarrassed by his own awkward ways with peers, employers and especially women, yearning for a position as genius long before he found the particular talent that could confer it, the stagestruck young Shaw seemingly envisioned himself as an actor whose role was his life. At times Holroyd laughs along with Shaw as he smirks at himself. At times he evokes the true sacrifice in a life devoted to public debate rather than private pleasure.
Holroyd subtitles this volume, the first of a projected three, The Search for Love. It ends, fittingly, with Shaw's marriage to heiress Charlotte Payne- Townshend in 1898. By then Shaw had published many of the plays that ensure his reputation today, including Mrs. Warren's Profession, You Never Can Tell and Arms and the Man, each of which has had a major New York City production within the past three years. He had already abandoned a prodigious journalistic career as an essayist and a critic of art, theater and music -- although he insisted his dramas too were a form of journalism and derived their value from that. He had made the Fabian Society his personal soapbox and successfully promoted it as an intellectual center for the British left. Had he done no more, a place in history would have been secure. Yet he lived for another half-century of undiminished fame and scarcely mitigated activity, which is why Holroyd's opus will extend to another two volumes.