Word: shavians
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Once, Shaw used to fly through the air with the greatest of ease, from drama to politics and back, followed by the spotlight he loved and accompanied by the rolling drums of Shavian wit-which sometimes would be mistaken for the thunder of truth. But in his last three plays, now published in the U.S.-Buoyant Billions, Farfetched Fables, Shakes Versus Shav-the great performer, by 93, was plainly coming to the end of his long career under...
...master half a century earlier. The father has been a great Shaw character already-he is a reincarnation of the jovial merchant of death, Andrew Undershaft in Major Barbara, with less wit and more money (he is a billionaire instead of a millionaire). Most of the famed Shavian paradoxes have been reduced to formula; they sound as if they had been turned out by one of Harvard's giant calculators after it had digested the properly punched slips. The play's major morals: 1) there is nothing wrong with marrying for money, 2) poor people are as tiresome...
Figures v. Ideas. From a secretary's point of view, he was both admirable and incorrigible. In three decades of typing his manuscripts, she found only one word he was apt to misspell ("millionaress"). Together they figured out the massive Shavian income tax; so good was Shaw's head for figures that he received a letter of thanks from His Majesty's inspector of taxes. But when an idea became involved with the figures, Shaw's acumen (and scruples) deserted him instantly. When he became convinced, as he did in his last years, that...
...until the dictators, he holds everything. The England which gave him little recognition until he was known on the Continent and in America-which for years he refused to visit-has dropped him again; even the revolutions of the last 30 years have been made by war, not by Shavian gradualism, even in England. But he was the indefatigable showman at the door for more than half a century who, until the wars came, stole the show. It was war which established the final Fabian victory...
...unwelcome. "I am longing for my eternal rest," Shaw told a friend just after his 94th birthday. The broken thighbone that sent Shaw into the hospital when he slipped and fell in his garden last September had shown signs of knitting better than his doctors dared hope, but the Shavian spirit was broken for good. When Shaw guessed that he might live only to become a bedridden invalid, he lost interest in the business...