Bernard Shaw's Marxian Romance by Paul A. Hummert (review)

Abstract

238 BOOK REVIEWS from each year would have been more than a welcome addition to the volume; indeed, their absence creates a gaping hiatus. Not that newspaper reviews are altogether omitted - there are three - but they are the sort that appear, say, on some Sunday following the opening, and exhibit, accordingly, the quiet reflection allowed by that passage of time. Nothing in the collection captures that kind of immediate response only to be found in those reviews that appear "the morning after." What Ferres' collection does contain is an introduction by him satisfying in its biographical, historical, and critical commentary on Miller and The Crucible, neglectful only of the play's structure - followed by eighteen critical essays ( mostly excerpts from longer pieces) and the playwright's own "Additional Scene" of confrontation between Proctor and Abigail. Of the essays two provide background on witchcraft and McCarthyism, the latter especially useful for younger readers in the 1970s. The remaining sixteen are divided into the sub-sections "Reviews," "Interpretations," and "Viewpoints ," the distinction between the last two not immediately apparent except in the relative length of the selections. Most aspects of the play's meaning, dramatic technique, and structure are discussed, and conflicting attitudes are given fair and equal play by the editor. Much is made, of course, about whether the play is a tragedy, and with this question looming so large, it is strange that Miller's 1949 essay "Tragedy and the Common Man" perhaps excluded because it pre-dates the play - is not even mentioned in Ferres' introduction, footnotes, or "Selected Bibliography." After reading all the selections - generally illuminating and articulate as they are - I was struck and in a way saddened to find that such an emotionally-charged playas The Crucible has inspired only such pedestrian criticism. JOHN BUSH JONES University of Kansas BERNARD SHAW'S MARXIAN ROMANCE, by Paul A. Hummert. Lincoln: Univer.sity of Nebraska Press, 1973.227 pp. $7.50. Professor Hummert's book is a curiously dispassionate account of Bernard Shaw's on-again, off-again love affair with the Marxian world-view. It is Hummert's thesis that Shaw wavered between Marxism and Fabianism as between two lady-loves throughout his adult life, evolutionary Fabianism being the chief romance of his youth, revolutionary Marxism being the chief romance after the Russian Revolution, it all ending happily in some sort of Marxist Fabian synthesis. Consisting of a fairly superficial examination of Shaw's works, with emphasis on his plays, the book shows the extent to which Marxian tenets found their way into Shaw's art. As an example of Hummert's method, he reads Too True To Be Good as an expressionistic allegory of Marxian diagnosis. "The Patient ... is the personification of the idle rich with nothing to do but languish in her room bereft even of natural light and air, taking the BOOK REVIEWS 239 medicines of a capitalist doctor ... who ... caters to and encourages her every neurosis." She escapes from the "sickroom of capitalism" to a life of adventure in an earthly paradise, but after growing bored sets off to found a sisterhood that will "clean up this filthy world and keep it clean." And so it is with each play. Hummert pauses just long enough to point out the characters who are capitalists or Marxists or potential Marxists, and to quote a few lines that support the idea that Marxian economics are central to the dramatist's vision. Unfortunately, very little is pointed out that is not obvious, and Hummert gives small indication that he's aware that the plays contain matter other than Marxian. Hummert gives too little credit to Shaw's purposefulness. He presents Shaw as a typical Bloomsbury intellectual revising his revisions with each bit of news or hearsay from revolutionary Russia. Hummert, further, seems unaware of Shaw's powers of irony and strategy. Many of Shaw's most revolutionary statements were made tongue-in-cheek, as modest proposals, or as strategic frightening of the body politic, but Hummert treats them all as straightforward statements. Seldom has a writer's tone been so ignored. Tone, in fact, is one of the most serious problems here. For a book that purports...