Molly’s Methuselah
Frank Kermode
- Bernard Shaw. Vol. III: 1918-1950, The Lure of Fantasy by Michael Holroyd
Chatto, 544 pp, £21.00, September 1991, ISBN 0 7011 3351 1
At the beginning of Mr Holroyd’s third volume Shaw, now 62, is expressing strong views, sensible but not attended to, on the conduct of the nation’s affairs in a difficult postwar period. He began this long last lap of life by campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, and the other anti-Coalition candidates, in Lloyd George’s opportunistic general election of December 1918. He opposed the blockade of Germany, the demand for reparations and the hanging of the Kaiser. Most of the candidates he favoured, including MacDonald, failed to get elected, but he went on, undismayed, to write a combative pamphlet on the Peace Conference, calling the Treaty of Versailles ‘perhaps the greatest disaster of the war’. There was now nothing to be done in foreign affairs, he said, but to ‘face the question of the next war pending the consolidation of the League of Nations’.
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[*] There was of course nothing new about this. The latest publication from that very efficient source of Shaw studies, the Pennsylvania State University Press, is a volume reprinting reviews written for the Pall Mall Gazette from 1885 to 1888: Bernard Shaw’s Book Reviews (511 pp., £50, October, 0271 007214). Edited by Brian Tyson, it is annotated with exemplary thoroughness. The reviews vary in seriousness with the subject; novelists are teased, though not Samuel Butler; the Society for Psychical Research is debunked and music and economics are strongly represented. The editor finds in these ephemera evidence that a dramatist was about to be born.