Shavian Shavings

ADVICE TO A YOUNG CRITIC AND OTHER LETTERS (208 pp.) -- George Bernard Shaw, with notes by E. J. West--Crown ($3).

As the curtain fell on the opening night of Arms and the Man, April 21, 1894, with the audience clapping and calling for the author, George Bernard Shaw stepped to the footlights to be greeted with one loud, clear "Boo!" Arching his Mephistophelian brows (as red in his 37th year as his beard), G.B.S. addressed himself to the lone dissenter: "My dear fellow, I quite agree with you; but what are we two against so many?" Shaw didn't know it at the time, but he had won himself a slightly pesky pen pal. Within the week, the booer, a brash 20-year-old named Reginald Golding Bright, was pestering the great man for advice on how to become a drama critic.

"There is no way of becoming a drama critic," fired back Shaw in his first letter. "It happens by accident." The accident never happened to Golding Bright, but the accidental correspondence lingered on for 34 years. Now published for the first time, it consists more of literary shavings than true Shavian glitter. Shaw gave his advice off the top of his head, but since there was more top to the G.B.S. head than most, his advice, aside from a few personal quirks, is better than most. Samples:

P: "Write a thousand words a day for the next five years ... A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself."

P: "Get your facts right first: that is the foundation of all style . . . You cannot express yourself genuinely except on a basis of precise reality."

P: "Be a teetotaler; don't gamble; don't lend; don't borrow; .don't for your life get married . . . Never take anybody's advice."

One of the most interesting letters in the collection is a Shaw editing job on Golding Bright's trial review of Sardou's Odette.

Golding Bright: "Under no circumstances can it be called a great play." Shaw: "It does not pretend to be a great play . . . The question is, is Odette a good play of its class." " Golding Bright: "I must be cruel only to be kind." Shaw: "Never say a thing like this. There is nothing more offensive to artists . . . than to make a show of sparing their feelings. It is right to be considerate, but horribly wrong to show it." Despite his coach, Golding Bright got "no forrader" (in his own words) on his would-be profession, and after a decade drifted into play-agenting for Shaw and other literary lights, e.g., Barrie, Maugham. Shaw's later letters to him are scrappy business notes mildly intriguing as a penny-pinching portrait of Shaw guarding his royalties as if he were a branch Bank of England. Golding Bright died in 1941, after some years of renown as a silver-haired dandy who showed up at London first nights in a swirling black cape, with a gold-knobbed stick, and regularly dozed through the play. Nonetheless, he could give uncannily accurate estimates of how long a play would run, suggesting that at least some of Shaw's precepts had stayed with him even in his sleep.

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