. . . In which Hesketh Pearson sets out to play Boswell to Shaw’s Johnson. The heft of the book reminds one of a standard “life and times” treatment, but the subtitle, Life and Personality, reveals that it is not. Instead, the style is more that of the “new” biography practiced in the first half of the twentieth century, although other examples of that genre are usually shorter.
The personality referred to in the subtitle sets the tone for the book. Shaw’s personality was his greatest work of art and flows into the most successful characters in his many plays. Pearson is clearly under the influence of that personality and is afflicted (unfortunately) by a love of Shavian paradox. For example: “No really intelligent person could possibly have taken an exception to a syllable in it [a war-time pamphlet of Shaw’s, Common Sense]; which must be why nearly everyone took violent exception to every syllable of it.”
In sum, this book both profits and suffers from the author’s close acquaintance with its subject. Much of it consists of anecdotes told by Shaw. Even parts not set off by quotation marks sound as if dictated by him.
This book caught my eye more than a half-century ago in the bookstore of one of the colleges I, a high school senior, had applied to. I bought it, made a couple of fitful starts, and have packed it with my other books and moved it several times. This year I decided to give it one last chance. It doesn’t take the place of a standard biography, even less the place of the best of Shaw’s plays (and prefaces) or music criticism. The abiding value of the book is in its character of “Bernard Shaw as I knew him.” ( )