from SHAW 2 (1982)

John R. Pfeiffer

A CONTINUING CHECKLIST OF SHAVIANA

1. Works by Shaw

Shaw, Bernard. Bernard Shaw: Selected Plays. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1981. Includes a "Preface" by Rex Harrison, "Shaw and His Plays" by David Bearinger (not notable), Candida, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint ,loan, along with a number of accessory writings GBS supplied for these plays. The purpose of the collection is unclear, as the Collected Plays with their Prefaces text is used, but not the handy small-size format. Perhaps it will become a one-volume text. Price: $19.95. See Bearinger, David, and Harrison, Rex, under "Books and Pamphlets" below.

. Bernard Shaw. Plays. Moscow: Pravda Publishing House, 1981. The paperback volume (2 rubles), edited by N. A. Presnova and introduced by Z. Grazhdanskaya, includes Mrs Warren's Profession, Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, and Heartbreak House. The print run may be a record for a Shaw title in an initial printing: 500,000 copies.

. "Capital Punishment and Imprisonment." In Prose Models. Ed. George Levin. Fifth edition. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981. Not seen.

Collected Plays, vol. 4. Under the general editorship of A.A. Anikst, N. Ya. D'yakonova, Yu. V. Kovalev, A. G. Obraztsova, A. S. Romm, B. A. Stanchits and I. V. Stupnikov. Leningrad: Art Publishing House, 1980. The fourth of six projected volumes, in Russian, containing The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (M. Loriye, trans., with preface trans. by N. Rakhmanova), Fanny's First Play (A. Krivtsova, trans.), Androcles and the Lion (with preface, G. Ostrovskaya, trans.), Overruled [Russian title: Seething with Passion] (Ye. Lopyryeva, trans.), Pygmalion (P. Melkova, trans., with preface and afterword trans. by N. Rakhmanova), Great Catherine (with author's defense, G. Ostrovskaya, trans.), The Music-Cure (Ye. Lopyryeva, trans.), OTlaherty, V.C. [Russian title: O'Flaherty, the Cavalier of the Order of Victoria] (L. Polyakova, trans.), The Inca of Perusalem (V. Paperno, trans.), Augustus Does His Bit [Russian title: Augustus Does His Duty] (I. Zvavich, trans.), Annajanska, the Wild Grand Duchess (with preface, V. Paperno, trans.), Heartbreak House [Russian title: The House Where Hearts are Broken] (S.

'Professor Pfeiffer, SHAW Bibliographer, welcomes information about new or forthcoming Shaviana: books, articles, pamphlets, monographs, dissertations, reprints, etc. His address is Department of English, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan 48859.

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_,JOHN R. PFEIFFER

Bobrov and M. Bogoslovskaya, trans., with preface trans. by Ye. Lopyryeva). Translations and transliterations for this note by Roger Freling, Central Michigan University. Professor Freling occasionally makes his service available to parties interested in translations of Russian Shaviana, and welcomes requests.

. Collected Plays, vol. 5. Leningrad: Art Publishing House, 1981. The fifth volume contains, in Russian, Back to Methuselah (Yu. Korneev, trans., with preface trans. by S. Sukharev), Saint ,Joan (O. Kholmskaya, trans., with preface trans. by N. Rakhamanova), The Apple Cart (E. Kalashnikova, trans., with preface trans. by A. Staviskaya), and Too True to Be Good-Bitter, but True, in the Russian rendering (V. Toper, trans.)

. "The Devil Speaks." In Reading For Rhetoric. Ed. Caroline Shrodes, Clifford A. Josephson, and James R. Wilson. Riverside, New,Jersey: Macmillan, 1979. Not seen. - . "George Bernard Shaw." In Literary Criticism of the English Speaking World. Out of Print and Used Books & Back Date Periodicals. Catalogue 213. Cleveland: John T. Zubal, Inc., 1980, pp. 54-55; 2969 West 25th St., Cleveland, Ohio 44113. Lists nearly 100 items of Shaviana, including 37 titles presenting GBS correspondence, essays, stories, and plays. Also offers a 1933 sale catalogue of the Archibald Henderson collection, and a 1972 Sotheby, Parke-Bernet sale catalogue of GBS letters, manuscripts, and first editions.

. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism. To be issued in paperback by Penguin Books in May 1981. Price: $3.95.

. Lady, Wilt Thou Love Me? Eighteen Love Poems for Ellen Terry. Ed. Jack Werner. New York: Stein and Day, 1981. Listed here only for bibliographical convenience: This work is not by Shaw. Reviewed in this volume.

. Letter to a close friend (excerpts), owner of a yeast company, reporting receipt of a yeast shipment and commenting on the fall of Paris, 18 June 1940, advertised for sale in Catalogue 16, James Lowe Autographs Ltd., 667 Madison Ave., Suite 709, New York, New York 10021. Item # 122. Price: $650.00.

. Letter to Jonathan Cape, 8 November 1924, deliberating whether or not Cape should publish W. H. Davies' confessional work Young Emma. Included in an appendix and on dust jacket of W. H. Davies' Young Emma. New York: George Braziller, 1981. Cape issued a British edition of Young Emma in 1980.

. Letter to Kingsley Martin, 1934, in Kingsley Martin's "Shaw and Wells." Reprinted in H.G. Wells, Interviews and Recollections. Ed. J. R. Hammond. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1980, p. 85. GBS advises against publication of a pamphlet collecting correspondence of a dialogue about socialism made by Wells, Keynes and Shaw, among others.

. Major Barbara. In The Modern Age. Ed. Leonard Lief and James F. Light. Fourth edition. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. Not seen.

. Musical criticism of Wagner from various publications, in Robert Hartford, ed., Bayreuth: the early years. An account of the Early Decades of the Wagner Festival as seen by the Celebrated Visitors & Participants (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 139-148, 160-168, 223-238, 245-247. Shaw's first visit to Bayreuth was in 1889. The account of it, which he wrote for the London journal The Hawk, was signed, in Germanic pun, "By Reuter." Other reports of Bayreuth would appear in The English Illustrated Magazine, The World, The Star, and his own The Perfect Wagnerite, adding and revising to that through its fourth edition in 1922. Extracts from all of these accounts appear, as well as Shavian reactions to Wagner's music and to Bayreuth in letters to W. T. Stead, Beatrice Webb, his wife Charlotte, and others. Some of Shaw's criticism would hold for any work at any time. "The law of traditional performances," he writes in 1889, "is `Do what was done last time.'-the law of all living and fruitful performance is, `Obey the innermost impulse which the music

A CONTINUING CHECKLIST OF SHAVIANA 209

gives, and obey it to the most exhaustive satisfaction.' And as that impulse is never, in a fertile artistic nature, the impulse to do what was done last time, the two laws are

incompatible, being laws respectively of death and life in art. Bayreuth has chosen the law of death. Its boast is that it alone knows what was done last time, therefore it alone has the pure and complete tradition, or, as I prefer to put it, that it alone is in a position to strangle Wagner's lyric dramas, note by note, bar by bar, nuance by nuance. It is in vain for Bayreuth to contend that by faithfully doing what was done last time it arrives at an exact copy of what was done the first time when Wagner was alive, present and approving. The difference consists in just this, that Wagner is dead, absent and indifferent. The powerful, magnetic personality, with all the tension it maintained, is gone; and no manipulation of the dead hand on the keys can ever reproduce the living touch. . . ."

. The Screenplays of Bernard Shaw. Ed. Bernard F. Dukore. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980. Reviewed in this issue.

. Shaw's Music. The Complete Musical Criticism. Ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt; New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981. Three volumes. Reviewed in the next volume.

. "So He Took His Hat Round": A Facsimile of a Manuscript. St. Louis: Washington University Libraries, 1981. A charity appeal on behalf of the King Edward Memorial Hospital, Ealing, drafted in holograph in pencil by Shaw; with an introduction by Dan H. Laurence limning GBS as "probably ... the most charitable professional man of his generation." Published as "the first in a series of keepsakes to be issued for the Friends of the Libraries." Limited to 600 copies; none for sale. Apply to Friends of the Libraries, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130.

11. Books and Pamphlets

Anderson, Robert. "Shaw, (George) Bernard." In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Twenty volumes. London: Macmillan, 1981. Entry in vol. 17, pp. 22223. It is the longest essay on any music critic in the twenty volumes. "Shaw's collected writings on music stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability."

Bearinger, David. "Shaw and His Plays." In Bernard Shaw: Selected Plays. New York: Dodd, Mead & Compariy, 1981. A lightweight "Introductory Essay" to the volume. See "Works by Shaw" above.

Bell, Michael. The Context of English Literature, 1900-1930. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980. Characterizes Shaw's limitations with reference to the process of his "wit" in Mrs Warren's Profession, quoting from the play, "No normal woman would be a prostitute if she could afford to marry for love." Bell: "The way this remark appeals to the `normal' woman involves a reification that if you pause to think about it is surely abstract to the point of untruth." It works because of its rhetorical symmetry. Thus, there is "something untrue" about women not wanting to be prostitutes or to marry for money just as there is something false about the endings of Mrs Warren and Major Barbara. "Shaw's abstractive simplifications, while leaving him space for satiric points and comic paradox, are in some tangible if ambiguous measure his actual simplifications as well as formally chosen ones, and it is his unwittingness, or ambivalence, in this respect that makes him so irritatingly coy much of the time. Brilliant as they are as ways of criticizing the given, even Shaw's best plays reveal emotional blanknesses when obliged to express a larger sense of life."

Bergman, Ingrid, and Burgess, Alan. Ingrid Bergman: My Story. New York: Delacorte

210 JOHN R. PFEIFFER

Press, 1980. Bergman met GBS just once in 1948 on the occasion of Pascal's invitation to her to film or stage Candida. She used the opportunity to tell Shaw she didn't do Saint Joan because she thought it unrealistic. Shaw asked her to visit again. Saying she would like to, Bergman offered to bring her husband. GBS, she reports, indicated he wasn't interested in her husband. Bergman played Captain Brassbound's Conversion in 1972. She thought it was a bad play, but this run finished in the black because she was in it.

Berlin, Isaiah. Personal Impressions. Ed. Henry Hardy. New York: Viking Press, 1980. Berlin's perception in the 1920s found Shaw, Wells, and Chesterton part of the cultural establishment, recommended by his "solid, sentimental and unimaginative" schoolmasters. The emancipating writers were J.B.S. Haldane, Ezra Pound, and Aldous Huxley. Pointedly, Huxley's exposition was better than Shaw's.

Booth, Michael R. Prefaces to English Nineteenth-Century Theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press, n. d. [ 1980]. Shaw is excluded from direct treatment here, but his views are enlisted a number of times to comment upon the theatre and playwrights who formed the traditions that Shaw and Wilde drew upon.

Bradbury, Ray. "GBS and the Loin of Pork." In The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope. New York: Knopf, 1981. Bradbury, a long-time Shavian, imagines an incident based on Mrs. Campbell's remark, quoted by Shaw himself, that if G.B.S. were to turn to meat-eating, no woman in London would be safe. In Bradbury's verses, the porkchop sits on Shaw's plate while the world trembles at the outcome. ("Will now the atheist of meat turn carnal lover?") His beard quivers; he shuts his eyes in determination. But "The women [remain] unwomened and the pork unporked." He is unable to perform the carnivorous act. "Shaw's fled back to rice and beets." Bradbury concludes, "Safe our daughters, safe our streets." Printed complete in this volume of Shaw.

Darracott, Joseph. The World of Charles Ricketts. New York and Toronto: Methuen, 1980. The chapter on The Stage has a lot on Shaw, who was a good friend of Ricketts and utilized his stage designs, from Don Juan in Hell to Saint Joan. Ricketts dedicated to GBS his essay on stage design which appeared in 1913 in Pages on Art. The friendship was a cornerstone of Ricketts's career in the theatre. He did designs for Dark Lady of the Sonnets in 1910, also making suggestions for incidental music. He also designed costumes for Fanny's First Play and Annajanska, as well as his most notable Shavian work, the sets and costumes for Saint ,loan. On seeing them at first, G.B.S. disapproved: "Mr. Shaw came on to the stage and said, `Scenery and clothes have ruined my play. Why can't you play it in plain clothes, as at rehearsal? Sybil is much more like Joan in her ordinary jumper and skirt than when dressed up like this, with her face all painted.' " But the success of the play soothed Shaw, and he was delighted with the publication of the play in a deluxe edition illustrated with Ricketts's costume designs. At least six photographs of G.B.S., Shavian players and sets are included.

Davies, W. H. Young Emma. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980; New York: George Braziller, 1981. Uses a complete Shaw letter as an appendix to Davies' memoir of his wife and again uses the complete letter on the dust jacket. See "Works by Shaw" above.

Elliot, Vivian. Images of George Bernard Shaw. An exhibition at the National Theatre 2 March to 25 April 1981. London: National Theatre, 1981. A large-format, four-page guide to the exhibition mounted in conjunction with performances of the complete Man and Superman, including four caricatures of Shaw and one photograph. Ms. Elliot's essay observes that Shaw's success as self-publicist "trapped" him in the image he created, and that since caricature tends toward exaggeration of eccentricity, Shaw's public character diverged more and more, in his fame, from his private self.