Shavian Shavings

SHORT STORIES, SCRAPS AND SHAVINGS --Bernard Shaw--Dodd, Mead ($2.50).

Oldster George Bernard Shaw, 77 last birthday (July 26), is tidying up his long career. Like all great writers* who have finished their race, have time to rest on their oars, Author Shaw is looking back with pardonable pride at his still effervescent wake, planning to preserve the worthier bubbles in a definitive collected edition. Still an active playwright though no longer the champion sculler he was, Shaw in his time has rowed nearly every position in the boat. He has written novels, music criticism, book reviews, theatre criticism, essays, short stories, speeches, pamphlets (of tremendous length), even-- though not very seriously--blank verse.

In Short Stories, Scraps and Shavings he has collected from various hiding places 14 Shavian pieces, dating as far back as 1885. Latest and largest item in the collection is The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (published separately in 1933). Shaworshipers who have grown old along with their idol will welcome reverently these half-forgotten fragments; to neo-Shavians the book will have a more archeological interest. One lengthy dramatic dialog, originally intended as a part of Back to Methuselah, has never before been published, contains a masterly caricature of Paradoxologist Gilbert Keith Chesterton, under the inspired name of Immenso Champernoon.

*Notable exception Shakespeare.

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