Shaw's Sex Credo

Abstract

[Shaw's letter to Frank Harris, 24 June 1930, is published in Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters IV, 1926-1950 (New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 190-93. A slightly bowdlerized version appears at the end of the chapter entitled Sex Credo in Harris's Bernard Shaw: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931; London, Victor Gollancz, 1931). Substantial changes, deletions, and additions were made for republication as To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography, chapter XVI of Shaw's Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable, 1949). The letter is also found in Stanley Weintraub, ed., The Playwright and the Pirate: Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris: A Correspondence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), whose Introduction summarizes the Shaw/Harris relationship. For their published versions (upon which the one below is based), Laurence and Weintraub consulted the text of the original manuscript letter in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. However, the letter as it appears below is a conflation of three documents: Shaw's 1930 letter, the changes made for the 1931 Harris biography, and those made for the 1949 sketches. In one instance, for example, Shaw goes from copulations (1930) to gallantries (1931) to sex histories (1949). Given the context of certain publication by Harris, either verbatim or as (possibly distorted) narrative, Shaw's 1930 letter is surprisingly frank. Even his friends H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, both incorrigible womanizers, never publicized their sexual experiences in as much detail or with such desinvolture as Shaw does here. A few years earlier, on the other hand, the priapic Harris had unabashedly described his own sexual adventures in his notorious memoirs, My Life and Loves (4 vols., 1922-27; vol. 5, 1954) more fantasy than fact, cautions Weintraub (xiii) the first volume of which was burned by Charlotte Shaw in the fireplace! The reasons for Shaw's frankness on 24 June and for his closing ca-