Autor(en)

Holroyd, Michael:

Verlag / Jahr

New York: Random House., 09.09.1989.

Format / Einband

Halbleinen / Leinen mit Schutzumschlag. VIII, 486 / IX, 421 S. / p.

Sprache

Englisch

Gewicht

ca. 878 g

Bestell-Nr

1193888

Bemerkungen

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langjährigem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - sehr guter Zustand / very good condition - To his own generation Bernard Shaw’s greatest creation seemed to be himself. Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist and irresistible charmer, he was the most controversial literary figure of his age and the scourge of all that was most oppressive in late-Victorian England. In his writing and public speeches, he embodied the unfamiliar virtues of reason, sense and unanswerable good humor. And yet, as the opening volume of this masterly three-volume biography makes clear, Shaw’s invention of this monumental figure was a paradoxical method of concealment and his way of coming to terms with a world that had abandoned him in childhood. The Mephistophelean Irishman brought to the creation of “G.B.S.” the same vitality and delight that he devoted to his plays and to his innumerable causes, from the rights of women to the promotion of “hygienic” dress. -- With sympathetic insight Michael Holroyd takes us back to “Sonny,” the child who was reluctant father to this Superman. Shaw’s career was greatly influenced by his upbringing in Ireland. His early days in Dublin had been “rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities.” The last of a long line of increasingly impoverished Anglo-Irish gentry, he grew up in a curiously unsettling ménage-à-trois. His father, George Carr Shaw, was a redundant civil servant who had turned to drink; his mother became the right-hand woman for a Svengali-like teacher, George Vandeleur Lee. Fearing that he might have been illegitimate, Shaw later dropped the name George as the symbol of his uncertainty and set out to find a new and invulnerable identity. -- In The Search for Love, Michael Holroyd takes Shaw from his birth in 1856, through a series of poignant and tantalizing love affairs, to his marriage in 1898. Following his mother to London, he attempted to set himself up as a professional man of genius. He tried his hand at novels; elected himself a leading member of the Fabian Society; established a reputation, with his championship of Wagner, as a brilliant music critic; and composed his famous “pleasant” and “unpleasant” plays. In a crowded social life he collaborated with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, played amorous piano duets with Annie Besant, spent his evenings with May Morris and Eleanor Marx, and contributed to the newspapers of Frank Harris. Two strands in his character, love and power, competed over his affection for Ellen Terry and his struggle with Henry Irving. -- Michael Holroyd counterpoints the private and public Shaw with humor, compassion and originality. Listening to the subtle mind behind Shaw’s laughter and divesting G.B.S. of his pantomime clothing, he reveals the man who orphaned himself from his parents to become the child of his own writings. In The Search for Love subject and author are perfectly matched. The result promises to be one of the great literary biographies of our times. -- Michael Holroyd began his magnificent biography of Shaw with The Search for Love, published in 1988. The second volume, The Pursuit of Power, is the story of Shaw in his prime. He has put behind him the disappointments of his Irish childhood, as well as the years of his anonymity in London, and started on the terrible adventure of marriage. Bv 1914 the author of Pygmalion has become the most popular writer in England. -- An author’s business, Shaw believed, is to mind everyone else’s business, and that is what he did, so in a unique way his life is a history of the times. This is the period of his great middle plays: Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara and The Doctor’s Dilemma. He has opinions on medicai ethics, disarmament, unemployment, the conflict between men and women, and relations between Britain and the United States and between England and Ireland. With Granville Barker he revolutionizes the British stage and becomes the idol of the young. -- Shaw’s activities on the Fabian front helped advance socialism in Britain. He had an extraordinarv political instinct that makes his works remain topical - sometimes even ahead of their time. He used laughter as an anesthetic for the operation he wanted to perform on British society. (King Edward VII laughed so much at John Bull’s Other Island that he broke the chair he was sitting on.) Shaw is still making us laugh today. -- In The Pursuit of Power subject and author are once again perfectly attuned. Mr. Holroyd has risen to meet the challenge of Shaw’s protean personality and achievement with extraordinary versatility. He underscores the public man with the complex narrative of his private life: from perilous exploits in an automobile and on motorbike as he travels around the Continent from his home at Ayot St. Lawrence, to the jousting friendships with G. K. Chesterton and H. G. Wells and the unexpected passion and pain of his love for Mrs. Patrick Campbell. In this second volume, the author presents a magnificent portrait of a man born fifty years too soon that is at once a tragicomedy, absorbing, moving and intensely funny.

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