Volume 32, Number 13 · August 15, 1985
High Spirits
By Noel Annan
Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1911–1925
edited by Dan H. Laurence
Viking, 989 pp., $45.00
There is something heroic about those literary scholars—Wilmarth Lewis, Frederick Pottle, David Marquand, Gordon Haight, Leon Edel, Richard Ellmann—who have devoted a lifetime to chronicling the days and editing the papers of some luminary in the past. Dan Laurence has now been forty-four years in producing this edition of Bernard Shaw's letters and there is still at least one volume to come. Gordon Ray, who brought out four volumes of Thackeray's letters in successive years and added four more about his life and writings, appears insouciant by comparison. No doubt the torrent of Shaw's letters exceeds in volume the majestic flow of Thackeray's: and it goes without saying that this volume is as finely edited as the preceding two, obsessive in its care for detail, profuse in acknowledgments to a brigade of scholars and Shaw addicts, in every way a monument to erudition. It is the work of an editor and bibliophile of the first rank. But it is a quarry in which other scholars are anxious to work. They want to relate the man, so overpoweringly alive in his letters, to his work and his times; and they will be looking forward to the time when the warning signs are finally removed from the site where the dynamiting and clearing of debris take place.
Review, 3044 words
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