Bernard Shaw and the French by Michel W. Pharand

Abstract

ESC 28, 2002 Michel W. Pharand. Bernard Shaw and the French. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001. 432. $55.00 (U.S.) cloth. The title indicates that Pharand has read every word Shaw wrote about French actors and musicians as well as studied his contacts with French writers and translators, his three plays of French history, the reception of his work in France, and his travels in the country. The political Shaw, however, is largely left out, especially his thinking on World War I and about the Popular Front era in the 1930s. Pharand is thorough: nobody else will need to undertake this labour. W hat is not established is th at France was any more im portant to Shaw than, say, Italy, Germany, Russia, or the United States. The book in one way narrowly compartmentalizes; conversely, English (Anglo-Irish) literature is linked with a few aspects of French culture. Pharand states his aims twice at the start. His m ethod “is chronological insofaras Shaw’s earliest contacts with French cul­ ture were as an art and dram a critic. But the primary focus is on people” (xv). “This book attem pts to place Shaw within his French sociocultural milieu by analyzing his French enthu­ siasms and concerns, and by examining his plays through Gallic eyes to see why they were so often dismissed as outrageous or absurd” (11). In fact, only three of the sixteen chapters are directly about his plays. Every facet of the subject is of equal interest to the tireless Pharand. I wearied over fourteen pages of Shaw’s views on eight French composers and another fourteen on his judgments on the acting of Sarah Bernhardt. Although this may feed into Shaw’s theorizing about acting, the m aterial is in print anyway. Although The Man of Destiny is a jeux d’esprit, the playlet prom pts, it seems, all Shaw said over more than fifty years about Napoleon. Much is frankly peripheral. The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God is discussed because Shaw described it as a “Voltairian pam phlet” (258). Pharand looks at the “Don Juan in Hell” section of Man and Superman because Sartre’s Huis Clos is also set in Hell. Pharand struggles gallantly with what Shaw meant by the Life Force: he has to, because Berg­ son influenced Shaw. Anatole France and Romain Rolland each receive twelve pages because of Shaw’s contacts with them. As 756 REVIEWS both have now sunk into obscurity, I should have welcomed comment on whether or not this was deserved. Some comment on these men is needed, but I question the relevance of Pharand ’s section on Giraudoux’s Ondine and Anouilh’s The Lark, included for a sketchy link with Saint Joan. Moving on to what is both relevant and done well, Pharand shows why Shaw could admire a second-rater like Brieux so much. He demonstrates that French critics discovered Shaw much later than German and Austrian ones, and after the dis­ covery they remained puzzled on such issues as Candida’s sex­ uality. In fact, “the French found Shaw problem atic simply because his sensibility was not French” (133). Pharand dis­ plays through twenty pages that the Saint Joan that succeeded in Paris in 1925 was “entirely un-Shavian” (146) because it stressed the holy and mystic. For Canadians he adds two para­ graphs about the version of Pygmalion at the Théâtre du Nou­ veau Monde in 1968 in which the cockney was translated into jouai. Pharand splendidly documents the half-comic story of Shaw in French translation, where he has much correspondence to draw on. Shaw was evidently perverse and pigheaded in staying with a couple who were politically sympathetic but unqualified in both theatre and the English language. Pharand in the conclusion finally acknowledges that Shaw had “antipathy toward the French” (275) and goes on to show m utual m isunderstanding continuing to the present, in such re­ ceived ideas as that the French have no time for apparently sexless dram a and that Roman Catholic and Protestant tem­ peram ents are very different. This study is a constant reminder of how energetic Shaw was...