Over the Transom

By Melvin Maddocks

BERNARD SHAW: COLLECTED LETTERS (1898-1910)

Edited by DAN H. LAURENCE 1,017 pages. Dodd, Mead. $25.

Bernard Shaw wrote letters as an art form of onslaught, judging his success by the cries of the wounded. Reading a Shaw letter is a piece of luck, like hearing a superb harangue over a transom. One is infinitely grateful to pass within eavesdropping range. One is equally grateful not to be in that room, backed by scolding tongue and wagging finger into a far corner.

Between 1898 and 1910, Shaw, with all the exuberance of a honking Stanley Steamer, was making his belated run toward greatness. Marriage to the well-dowried Charlotte Payne-Townshend in 1898, when he was already 41, relieved him at last of journalism's curse, the deadline. As if illustrating his own theory of the life force, Shaw hurled himself into writing plays. Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra and Major Barbara are among the choicest products of these years. At their dashing best, the letters read like mini-prefaces to the plays, minor skirmishes in the battle against the bourgeois that was the avowed essence of Shaw's art. Shaw laid down doctrine to his correspondents--who included Tolstoy, Strindberg and Mark Twain--like an Irish pope with a megaphone.

On health: "Never eat meat or drink tea, coffee or wine again as long as you live. Don't take any exercise, and do exactly the opposite of what the doctor advises." On education: "High School is teaching you nothing except how to become a high school mistress."

Shaw gave advice to photographers on photography (he was a fanatic for "scientific timing" in the darkroom) and to printers on printing. He instructed Poet Laureate Robert Bridges about phonetic spelling: "If we do not spell words as they are pronounced, our readers will pronounce words as they are spelt." And he lectured practically everybody on love and sex:

"What people call love is impossible except as a joke...between two strangers meeting accidentally at an inn."

"The arch-incest is the sexual intercourse of husband and wife."

When Shaw did get personal, he was apt to be insulting. He declared to Henry James: "It is really a damnable sin to draw with such consummate art a houseful of rubbish." After passing on his post as drama critic of London's Saturday Review to Max Beerbohm, he panned him ferociously. Beerbohm annoyed the master by observing that Shaw honestly believed that logic, not passion, made the world go round. How vulnerable G.B.S. the puritan superra-tionalist seems today in his rebuttal, waffling on about something he called "Reasonable Emotion."

Was all Shaw's bullying insistence on his brand of sanity a coverup? Could he come close to people except in combat? Did G.B.S. the character actor exist as a device to escape intimacy with others, and perhaps himself? Interesting, unanswerable questions.

In 1972 Shaw can sound more orthodox than the orthodoxies he attacked. But as much as any writer of his time he made the new unorthodoxies possible. "The race is only struggling out of its dumbness," Shaw wrote in a moment of rare but convincing humility. "It is only in moments of inspiration that we get out a sentence. All the rest is padding." Here is the confession of the last of the Victorian papas, who took his age by the scruff of the neck and pummeled and thumped the little monster into a 20th that frightened even

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