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On the Wings of the Muse by D. J. Herda
Length:
Gift Book
Author's Representative:
The Swetky Agency 435-656-0426 Phone/Fax
fayeswetky@starband.net
Sample Entry:
Shaw was born to George Carr Shaw, who was in the wholesale grain trade, and Lucinda Elisabeth Gurly Shaw, 16 years her husband's junior and the daughter of an impoverished landowner. Lucinda was a professional singer, the sole disciple of Vandeleur Lee, a voice teacher whose primary claim to fame was having a "unique and original" approach to singing. As a boy, young George led a troubled life. His father was an alcoholic, which turned his son into a teetotaler. His father was a lout, which turned his son into a cynic. His father was a wife batterer, which turned his son into a pacifist. When Shaw's father died in 1885, neither his children nor his wife attended the funeral.
In 1876, Shaw, now free from school and nearing the age of adulthood, joined his sister and mother in London. He did not return to Ireland for nearly thirty years. In London, he lived off of his mother and sister while pursuing a career in journalism and writing. At first, he wrote prose, completing five novels before any of them was published. During the next two years, Shaw educated himself, mostly at the British Museum, where he used to go to appease his voluminous appetite for reading. His first novel, the semi-autobiographical Immaturity, was published without much fanfare. A vegetarian who eschewed both alcohol and tobacco, Shaw found flaws in British society wherever he looked. Together with friends Beatrice and Sidney Webb, he founded the Fabian Society, a middle-class Socialist group that eventually boasted H. G. Wells and other prominent thinkers of the day as members. He served on the executive committee of the Society, which would be instrumental in founding the London School of Economics and the Labor Party, from 1885 to 1911.
Before long, Shaw had become one of the most sought-after public speakers in England. He argued in his pamphlets in favor of equality of income and advocated the equitable division of land and capital. He believed that property was "theft" and felt, like Karl Marx, that capitalism was deeply flawed and was unlikely to last. Unlike Marx, however, Shaw favored gradual reform over revolution. In one pamphlet written in 1897, he predicted that socialism "will come by prosaic installments of public regulation and public administration enacted by ordinary parliaments, vestries, municipalities, parish councils, school boards, etc."
In 1892, Shaw wrote his first play, Widowers' Houses,
about the evils of slumlords.
In 1898, after a serious illness, Shaw moved out of his mother's house (where he was still living) and married Charlotte Payne-Townsend, an Irish woman of independent means. Their marriage would last until Charlotte's death in 1943. The newlyweds settled in 1906 in the Hertfordshire village of Ayot St. Lawrence. Upon their marriage, Shaw--who never believed in the institution personally--wrote up his own "terrible adventure" anonymously, in the manner of a farce, and sent it to the local tabloids:
The forty-five years spent together were, indeed, "blissful," although, by mutual consent, sexless. With the support of his wife's money and management, Shaw was able to maintain his remarkable productivity, as well as his infatuations with a series of actresses, throughout his life. Toward that end, he carried on a passionate correspondence with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, a widow and actress who won the starring role in Pygmalion because no other actress was willing to say the word "Bloody" in public--something that Shaw demanded of his lower class leading character, Eliza Doolittle.
Once, when dame Campbell told him that she was going to publish Shaw's love letters to her, he balked, proclaiming, "I will not, dear Stella, at my time of life, play the horse to your Lady Godiva."
With the outbreak of World War I, Shaw's life was changed forever. For him, the war represented the moral repugnancy of the Capitalist system, the last dying gasp of the British Empire, a tragic waste of young life under the guise of patriotism. Naturally, his feelings were too strong to keep welled up inside, so he began distributing anti-war articles under the title, Common Sense About the War. To him, Shaw's anti-war preaching made sense. Most of his fellow Brits, however, failed to agree. Before long, Shaw found himself an outcast, a social pariah in his adopted country. He was even accused of treason. Shaw's dramatic output screeched to a halt. He produced only one major play during the war, Heartbreak House, into which he poured his feelings of hopelessness and despair about British society and the future. Following the war, Shaw rediscovered his dramatic voice and slowly began rebuilding his reputation, first with a series of five plays about "creative evolution," including Back to Methuselah, and then, in 1923, with Saint Joan. Saint Joan (1923), the story of Joan of Arc who had been canonized four years earlier, was royally received. Critics called it the playwright's masterpiece, and it helped Shaw climb back up from the ashes into the good graces of both peers and public. He suddenly found himself acclaimed as a "Second Shakespeare," a new revolutionary in the staid British theater, a harbinger of light in a dismal Drury Lane. In the play, Shaw portrayed Joan of Arc not as a heroine or a martyr but
rather as a stubborn, sexless young
woman of uncommon spirit. Paradoxically, Shaw portrayed her judges
with sympathy. The play premiered in New York in 1923, in London in 1924,
and finally won for Shaw a Nobel Prize in 1925. Besides his prolific work as a playwright, Shaw was an obsessive letter writer, penning an estimated quarter million pieces of correspondence in his lifetime, averaging out to a little over nine letters a day. He had a strong opinion about nearly everything and never balked at expressing it. Eventually, he became better known for his outgoing personality and socialist views than for his writing. He once admitted, "Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week." He also coined the phrase: "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children." As witty as he was productive throughout his life, Shaw impressed everyone with his irascible humor and redoubtable spirit. One young journalist who interviewed the playwright on his 90th birthday said that he hoped to interview him again on his 100th, to which the author replied, "I don't see why not; you look healthy enough to me."
George Bernard Shaw died at Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, on November 2, 1950, at the age of 94. News of his passing raced around the world, leading the Indian cabinet to adjourn, Australian theater audiences to rise for two minutes of silence, and the lights on Broadway and in Times Square to be dimmed. Although Shaw rankled at the thought of Westminster Abbey and public ceremonies, one can't help but believe he would have been pleased at the way one Cockney woman who turned out to mourn him summed up her feelings: "We'll never see his like again."
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