Mailman Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1911-1925 Edited by Dan H. Laurence Viking; 989 pages; $45

By Stefan Kanfer

"This correspondence is getting intolerable," George Bernard Shaw complained to his diary in 1891. Sixty years later he was still grumbling and still corresponding. According to Editor Dan H. Laurence, Shaw "must in his lifetime have written at least a quarter of a million letters and postcards." It was an incomparable output; only his ego was larger.

In Volume III of the correspondence, a portion of the mail from 1911 to 1925 is on view, not all of it flattering. Here is the adman: "I never let a book go out without a full list of my works at the end, with prices and descriptions complete . . . and I put it not only in the collected volumes, but in the single plays."

Here is the hectoring muse of the theater, certain of every wink and diphthong. For Pygmalion, a road company Liza Doolittle is counseled on Cockney sounds: "Liar is lawyer . . . Handkerchief is Enkecher . . . Brute is not broot: it is brer-ewt. The utterance is slovenly and nasal, colds in the head being almost chronic in the gutter."

The political Shaw bombinates in the wings: "Socialism without compulsory labor and ruthless penalization of idleness and exploitation is nothing but a hopeless confusion of Socialism with Liberalism." And the vegetarian is never far away: "I do not eat flesh, fish or fowl . . . You can be Sancho Panza on any food provided there is enough of it. If you want to be Pythagoras, you have to be more careful."

The two Shaws of greatest interest are the antiwarrior and the amorist. As Britain battles with the Kaiser's troops from 1914 to 1918, nationalism mounts to a frenzy. The playwright-polemicist refuses to be carried along. "War reduces us all to a common level of savagery and vulgarity," he writes to a colleague, "but at least we can shew how foolish the whole business is even from the point of view of British and German Junkerdom." In the hysteria of conflict this dual indictment earns Shaw the enmity of his countrymen. Friends cut him dead; libraries remove his books from their shelves. Still his letters refuse to compromise, and their integrity discloses a man of abiding principle, a humorist who, perhaps for the only time, refuses to regard life as an inverted comedy.

For even in disappointed love, Shaw could never quite play the tragedian; the best he could manage was Pagliacci. These are the years of Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the original Liza. Shaw was lured to her drawing room, Laurence notes, "at which time, by Mrs. Campbell's subtle contrivance, her bosom and his fingertips came into fleeting contact." Shaw is instantly smitten; he confesses to a friend, "I am on the verge of 56. There has never been anything so ridiculous, or so delightful, in the history of the world."

The lovers' correspondence, dramatized in 1960 as Dear Liar, is the quintessence of Shavianism. In matters of sex Shaw is fastidious to the point of repression. He once flirted emptily with a writer, Edith Nesbit, who responded, "You had no right to write the preface if you were not going to write the book." Mrs. Campbell is merely the latest, and greatest, of his vegetable loves. At first she is "a glorious white marble lady . . . I magnify the Life Force for creating you." But later, as she leans toward a more physical, less verbose rival, the beloved becomes an "infamous, vile, heartless, frivolous, wicked woman . . . promise breaker, cheat, confidence- trickster!" The tantrum continues for decades. When Shaw is 67, long after their separation, a pseudofriendly communique informs the recipient that "God intended you to play the serpent in (Back to Methuselah): I wrote it for your voice."

Although these letters are addressed to individuals, they are also written with an eye on posterity. It is an audience that cannot fail to be diverted by the writer's unflagging energy and curiosity. Nothing seems to escape his notice: he comments on James Joyce, boxing, psychical research, Antarctic explorers, airplanes, Zionism. He writes to everyone from Ezra Pound and Maxim Gorki to schoolboys and servants. But the same audience may be equally repelled by Shaw's increasing windiness and inability to see beyond the self. By the end of 989 pages, one finds considerable merit in Mrs. Campbell's remark to her overeloquent admirer: "When you were quite a little boy somebody ought to have said 'hush' just once."