Word: shavians
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...very much in charge of things. "If I were having a frontal lobotomy," she says, "I'd tell them how to do it, like 'try going in through the ear.' '' Possibly if Bernard Shaw had known American women better, he might have invented Jean Kerr. Like almost all Shavian heroines, she is articulate, cheerful, casually domineering, competent, simple ?a bit of the Earth Mother whom Shaw was forever recreating...
...chorus of Straw Hatters and meat packers drowns out her last words, and she is hypocritically canonized for her martyrdom. Although heavily loaded with nickelodeon sentimentality, St. Joan of the Stockyards is intriguing in the contrast of Shavian optimism and Brechtian pessimism...
Were or Hwen. Young Molly and her husband Laurence arrived in England as Shavian cultists. Laurence, a would-be architect, wanted to build a theater shrine; Molly, a would-be actress, wanted to play Shaw heroines. Though Shaw was not immune to Molly's shapely figure and "eyes like muscatel grapes," he quickly let her know that his first love was English. He packed her off to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to drop her "very queer R's" and pick up her elocutionary ABCs. One of his early obiter dictions: "Wot, wich, were, wen. weel...
...found her makeup appalling ("Some day I shall take your face and scrub it and show you that it looks much better unbuttered"), and she was always offending the Shavian dietary laws: "I exhort you to remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, and not a confectioner's shop." Some sample instructions...
...soundly written and the people they describe are interesting enough. But the book's structure is dissatisfying: the flashbacks bring John and Herta back to the present time and then simply drop them there on the last page-still sitting in grim, unhappy silence. The author promises a Shavian clash of right and left, Adam and Rib. and several times seems on the point of producing one. But he settles too easily for tepid psychologizing, of which Liere is a surfeit these days, rather than social satire, which is in short supply. What could have been a clever novel...