Incessant Scribbler

BERNARD SHAW: COLLECTED LETTERS (1874-1897) edited by Dan H. Laurence. 877 pages. Dodd, Mead. $12.50.

Probably no man wrote more letters. "There must be billions of them," George Bernard Shaw once told his American publisher. There were, in fact, more than 250,000. Six hundred and ninety-one are printed in this volume, and three more volumes are on the way. Shaw was what is called today a compulsive writer; he carried a cloth bag of unanswered correspondence about with him, to be dipped into and answered at any idle moment--"scrawled in trains, between acts, in fragments to amuse you at breakfast," he wrote. They will astonish today's telephone generation, which normally does not get letters at breakfast even if it has time for breakfast.

The present collection forms a kind of epistolatory biography, covering Shaw's life from the age of 17, when he was a Dublin real estate agent's clerk ("in a decaying green coat, cuffs trimmed with the scissors"), to the age of 41, on the eve of his first great success, which came with the production of Candida. In those intervening years, he migrated to London to join his mother (who gave music lessons to support him and his sisters), wrote novels that earned him almost nothing, and finally became an established music and drama critic.

Clothes Made the Lady. All his long life Shaw was hung up on two things--money and women. He did not make his own living until his 30th year. ("I did not throw myself into the struggle for life. I threw my mother into it. I made a man of myself [at my mother's expense] instead of a slave," he wrote.) He did not lose his virginity until his 29th birthday, as a direct consequence, he protested, of having bought a respectable suit of clothes. "Virgo intacta still," he confided to his diary before the event. "Forced caresses," he noted gloomily a few days later, true to his ungallant belief that woman is the predator, man the prey. "The ideal woman is a man," he wrote to Actress Ellen Terry --a bleak thought whose comic possibilities were brought out by My Fair Lady's Professor Higgins. ("Why can't a woman be more like a man?")

In his letters, Shaw lectured, hectored, reminded, advised, admonished, informed, reproached, insulted, encouraged, saluted and made love to an astonishing range of people. He wrote to women with the vanity of a lyrebird in a coopful of Rhode Island Reds. To one, he declared: "No use in looking for human sympathy from me. I am your very good friend, but hard as nails." Busy too. "No," he wrote to Alice Lockett, a non-bluestocking who wanted a date in a week in which he had to do three articles and two lectures. "See you this week! Avaunt, sorceress: not this month --not until next July. Remember my pleasures are music, conversation, the grapple of my intelligence with fresher ones. All this I can sweeten with a kiss [but] beware. When all love has gone out of me, I am remorseless: I hurl the truth about like destroying lightning."

Master; A Heart's Desire. What woman could resist a line like that? Not Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Shaw had hypnotized her with words and made her his secretary. In a love letter that combines a gruesome gallantry with settled ideology, he wrote: "Go then, ungrateful wretch: have your heart's desire: find a Master--one who will spend your money, and rule in your house, and order your servants about . . . and consummate his marriage in the church lest the housemaid should regard his proceedings as clandestine. Protect yourself forever from freedom and inde pendence, love, unfettered communion with the choice spirits of your day . . . and all the other blessings which 999 women cry for and the thousandth cries to get away from . . ."

Naturally, the woman who was told she was one in a thousand consented eventually to become Mrs. Shaw. So ends the first volume.

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