G.B.S. and Stella

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 720, 1 May 1953, Page 10

G.B.S. and Stella

BERNARD SHAW AND MRS. PATRICK CAMPBELL: THEIR CORRESPONDENCE, edited by Alan Dent; Victor Gollancz. English price, 21/-.

(Reviewed by

P.J.

W.

EATRICE STELLA CAMPBELL was half Italian, and none of her contemporaries had her gift for portraying passionate and tempestuous women on the stage. She was 47 and Shaw 55 when they first met to discuss his new play Pygmalion, in which he had written the part of Eliza for her. Their correspondence covers a period of 40 years, and unlike the Shaw-Terry correspondence, which Shaw himself described. as a literary affair existing only on paper, these "wicked" letters are often very real in their emotions. Shaw was not too old to clown and play the fool with his "darlingest Stella,’ and he could be witty or merely literary as the mood took him. But he was also not too old to be deeply moved. These letters reveal a true and enduring friendship: their wills may have clashed, as-they did over the question of who should play Higgins to Stella’s Eliza, -but temperamentally they were close kin. At the end of their angriest quarrel over professional matters Shaw could reply, "I know it is all vile, and that I see too far ahead to make any woman happy. But we great people have no need of happiness." "Oh, forgive these blasphemies," he concludes, and a little later she writes: "Most dear man of brass, full of grindstones and things." Indeed, the man who could write from Germany, "Stella, Stella, all the winds of the north are musical with the thousand letters I have written to you ‘on this journey,’ may have been just playing a game of love. But the letters which pass between them at emotional crisesStella’s .bad car accident, the death of Ghaw’s mother, the death of Stella’s only son in the war-come deep from the heart. A note of acrimony creeps in towards the end in the inglorious wrangling over Stella’s desire to publish his letters in "| her memoirs. But at the last, when + Stella is forgotten by the world while his own. fame ledps on, he writes again with the old tenderness and soft memories. e letters have been well and unobtrusively edited and contain much good conversation. But their chief value, apart from their great theatrical interest, is in the revelation of Shaw’s character. If anything, they diminish his stature: the unscrupulousness and supreme egotism obtrude-too much. His concern is always for himself and for money rather than for literature or art. But whether he is mocking or tender, savage or witty, he is all of a piece, a great playwright with a great fondness for the. beautiful and talented women who brought his plays to life on the stage.