Letters:'The last refuge of the oppressed," Shaw ironically called a letter to the London Times. Hardly one of the oppressed himself, but certainly irrepressible, he first achieved this measure of Establishment recognition in 1898.
Aged 42, the red-bearded Irish journalist and left-wing agitator had arrived. Fifty-two years later, just months before his death, he was still at it, contributing his tuppenceworth, his several shillings worth, to every public controversy that caught his eye.
In this comprehensive collection there are letters on stopping flogging in the Navy, the knighting of Sir Henry Irving, the advantages of polygamy, propaganda in Italy during the first World War, the sculpture of Epstein, hydroelectricity in Scotland - Shaw was ahead of his time in advocating wave-power - De Valera's condolences on the death of Hitler, and the Nuremburg trials. Most of the first half of 20th-century history is here, with Shaw's peculiar reactions to it.
The editor, Ronald Ford, remarks on the way Shaw could turn "a local occurrence into a national issue". Less kindly, one might remark on how often his personal peeves were elaborated into matters of scientific, moral or political principle. In 1881, Shaw caught smallpox, in spite of having been vaccinated in infancy; the resultant scar may have been one reason for his growing the iconic full beard. For the rest of his life he preached against vaccination - there are no less than 12 letters on the subject in this volume alone.
His continuing interest in pronunciation and phonetics began when he was a young Irishman in London self-conscious about his accent. Some of his liveliest letters to the Times come from the time when he chaired the BBC's committee on spoken English. The banning of Mrs Warren's Profession in the 1890s stimulated his crusade against theatrical censorship. All of our beliefs are no doubt more or less thus formed by our lives, but few can have held so tenaciously, so undeviatingly and so argumentatively to their self-generated principles.
The collection brings to light also opinions good Shavians might prefer to forget. On August 28th, 1939, Shaw wrote to inquire why "everyone except myself is frightened out of his or her own wits". There was no cause for alarm, he claimed: "Herr Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming." He was of course not the only public figure who should have known better than to give his support to the 1930s dictators. Still, there is a chilling nonchalance in his remark, after a visit to the Soviet Union, that "in Russia liquidation means extermination". (In a very late letter he takes up the euphemism himself, arguing that criminals should not be hanged but "liquidated humanely").
With the breakdown of the efforts of the League of Nations to intervene in 1935, he justifies the Italian occupation of Abyssinia with a shoulder-shrugging imperialism: it represents an advance of civilisation against the barbarous natives. This is not the way one wants to remember the man who so passionately and so courageously upheld so many libertarian causes.
SHAW BELIEVED THAT if a thing was worth saying it was worth saying often. So we find here not just one but three long letters in support of The Times Book Club, which other writers and publishers wanted to boycott - no wonder the paper was so willing to print his letters. On the subject of surtax, on which he felt deeply, there are five separate contributions; a sardonic sub-editor has headed one of them "Sorrows of the Supertaxed". In cases like this, more means less. Shaw, who could be the wittiest and most pungent of letter-writers, becomes a bore when thus sounding the same notes repeatedly on his public trumpet. There are some passionate and amusing letters included in this volume but overall it feels like Puccini's much-quoted put-down on Wagner, some great moments but some terrible half-hours.
Shaw throughout was the champion of the non-specialist protesters, claiming to know more than all the experts in their own area of expertise: the doctors, the legislators, the economic pundits. He has, as a result, often attracted the devotion of the dedicated amateur, the editor of this collection, Ronald Ford, being one such - and sadly it shows. The letters themselves are often mistranscribed and the informative headnotes that preface them are full of errors or omissions. The normally reliable Irish Academic Press should not have allowed this poorly edited and badly proofread book to be published. Shaw, who acted as his own publisher for most of his career, and who in his own profession of author demanded the highest professional standards, would not have been pleased.
Nicholas Grene is professor of English literature in Trinity College, Dublin and is currently working on a book on Yeats's poetry
The Letters of Bernard Shaw to the Times Collected and Annotated by Ronald Ford Foreword by Michel W Pharand Irish Academic Press, 316pp. NPG