Wrote His Own Obituary

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 18, 10 November 1950, Page 6

Wrote His Own Obituary

Bernard Shaw has died seven Weeks after breaking his thigh. The task of those who write his obituary has been made easier than usual, because Shaw has done most of it for them. In writing of his career he said some 15 years ago:— “My training has enabled me to produce an impression of being an extraordinarily clever, original, brilliant writer, deficient only in feeling; whereas the truth is that, though I am in a way a man of genius, yet I am not in the least naturally brilliant, and not at all ready or clever. If literary men generally were put through the mill I went through, and kept out of their stuffy little coterites, where Works of art breed in and in until the intellectual and spiritual produt becomes hopelessly degenerate, I should have a thousand rivals more brilliant than myself. There is nothing more mischievous than the notion that my works are the mere play of a delightfully clever and whimsical hero of the salons; they are the result of perfectly straightforward drudgery, persevered in every day.”