Word: holroyd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...George Bernard Shaw of Michael Holroyd's biography, which takes the playwright up to age 42 in the twilight of the 19th century, hardly seems likely to become one of the most lionized men of the 20th century. Yet this portrait, a dozen years in the making, in the end enhances Shaw's achievements. In place of the glib rhetorician, Holroyd poignantly brings into view the shy, resentful, self-thwarting youth who created the persona of G.B.S. Ashamed of his scandalous and impecunious family, embarrassed by his own awkward ways with peers, employers and especially women, yearning for a position...
...Holroyd subtitles this volume, the first of a projected three, The Search for Love. It ends, fittingly, with Shaw's marriage to heiress Charlotte Payne- Townshend in 1898. By then Shaw had published many of the plays that ensure his reputation today, including Mrs. Warren's Profession, You Never Can Tell and Arms and the Man, each of which has had a major New York City production within the past three years. He had already abandoned a prodigious journalistic career as an essayist and a critic of art, theater and music -- although he insisted his dramas too were a form...
...Holroyd's biography is, he says, the first major one of Shaw since a spate of centenary tributes in 1956, and among the first in which the subject was not an unacknowledged co-author. Holroyd was chosen by the beneficiaries of Shaw's estate -- the British Museum, London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and the National Gallery of Ireland -- and in consequence appears to have been able to unearth some new nuggets, although he offers no footnotes and has put off detailing his sources until after publication of his third volume. The advance from Holroyd's British publisher, Chatto...
What is striking about the book, however, is that it is so entertaining. Holroyd manages to make each successive phase of Shaw's life seem significant of itself, rather than simply as a foretoken of what was to come or as raw material for the plays. Even minor figures often have a Dickensian vividness. Each romantic indiscretion has its own distinct flavor; Holroyd pinpoints which of Shaw's innumerable affairs he believes were consummated, and quotes bawdy letters in proof. Even more precisely evoked are Shaw's nonsexual passions for comrades in causes, from his schoolmate Matthew McNulty...
...influential of this century's literary circles, the Bloomsbury group. He was also a homosexual who was incapable of sustaining an intimate relationship with any of his male lovers. Carrington was a painter of modest gifts who gave him constancy despite having, as Strachey's biographer Michael Holroyd put it, a "solitary and promiscuous nature, like that of a cat." Indeed, so intense was her necessarily platonic devotion that she committed suicide shortly after he died in 1932 rather than go on without...