Volume 6, Number 1 · February 3, 1966
Man of Letters
By Denis Donoghue
Collected Letters: Volume I (1874-1897)
by Bernard Shaw, edited by Dan H. Laurence
Dodd, Mead & Co., 877 pp., $12.50
The Unrepentant Pilgrim: A Study of the Development of Bernard Shaw
by J. Percy Smith
Houghton, Mifflin, 274 pp., $4.95
G. B. Shaw: A Collection of Critical Essays
edited by R.J. Kaufmann
Prentice-Hall, 182 pp., $1.95 (paper)
In April, 1894, Yeats's Land of Heart's Desire and Shaw's Arms and the Man were produced, in one strange bill, at the Avenue. Theatre in London. Yeats attended several performances, listening to Shaw's play 'with admiration and hatred.' 'Presently,' he reports, 'I had a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing-machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.' At the first performance Golding Bright booed when Shaw took a curtain call. The sewing-machine smiled and made his famous reply: 'My dear fellow, I quite agree with you, but what are we two against so many?' From that moment, Yeats says, 'Shaw became the most formidable man in modern letters.' The first volume of the correspondence shows more vividly than ever how he made that sewing-machine, and how he kept it smiling. Mr. Smith's study and many of the essays in Mr. Kaufmann's collection concentrate on Shaw's development in the same period.
Review, 2742 words
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