Volume 36, Number 20 · December 21, 1989
Shaw and Super-Shaw
By John Gross
Bernard Shaw Volume II: 1898–1918, The Pursuit of Power
by Michael Holroyd
Random House, 421 pp., $24.95
The first volume of Michael Holroyd's three-volume biography of Bernard Shaw was warmly received by reviewers, but offstage one has heard some moans about excessive length. All those hundreds of pages stretching out ahead…. Yet how could it have been otherwise? Shaw lived so long, wrote so much, fired off so many opinions, poked a finger into so many pies. And no biography of such a man can afford to restrict itself too closely to the man himself. There are larger historical questions to be considered, and there are the men and women whose lives crisscrossed his own. To cite a single instance from Holroyd's latest volume, you can't properly understand Shaw's role in the Fabian Society quarrels of 1906–1911 unless you also know a fair amount about the careers and temperaments of his allies, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and his main adversary, H.G. Wells.
Review, 4294 words
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