Shavian travels
Thanks to Davy Sims for blogsitting while I've been away.
I'm back into the thick of things, working on in preparation for a Radio 3 interval programme I'll be presenting during this year's Â鶹Éç Proms to mark the 150th anniversary of Shaw's birth in Dublin. Wednesday is the actual anniversary, so I'll be going to Dublin for the day, accompanied by Declan McGovern, the programme's producer, and taking in a full schedule of events celebrating Shaw's life and legacy. We'll start our literary expedition in Dublin's Synge Street, the site of the Victorian terrace that was and first home (he ended his very long life at the old rectory in in Hertfordshire, that was to be his home for forty years).
Like Wilde's, Shavian aphorisms speckle our language -- "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children", "England and America are two countries separated by a common language", "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion", "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches", "All great truths begin as blasphemies" -- but that easy quotability can, ironically, reduce a writer's reputation so that we see him or her merely as a pun factory or a wit machine. Mark Twain is another case in point.
Shaw's literary contribution is far greater than a few entries in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, nor is his legacy merely literary. In this programme, I want to explore Shaw's gift to contemporary Dublin in his decision to leave a third of his postumous royalties to the -- a gift that multiplied massively following the worldwide success of the musical , based on his play (1912), which was first performed on stage in 1956 (six years after Shaw's death), becoming a phenomenally successful film in 1964 (though will want me to point out that a movie version of , of the same name, predates My Fair Lady by 26 years).
Shaw didn't need his Nobel prize money to be a wealthy man. He once commented that "Nobel prize money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety". But his legacy money has helped steer the National Gallery away from some trecherous waters over the years. And quite right too, since this self-educated Nobel laureate left school at the age of 15, and said that a good part of his childhood education came from vists to the National Gallery, where there is today a and a number of important acquisitions purchased with his gift, including works by Pissarro and Giovanni di Paolo. "In our ends are our beginnings," as Shaw might have put it, but he had to leave something aphoristic for his fellow Nobel laureate TS Eliot to say.
Comments
My favorite Bernard Shaw quote: "I often quote myself, it adds spice to my conversation."
I often think that one of the most interesting things about Shaw was his determination to see an overhaul of English spelling.
Sadly all his efforts came to naught, and have largely been forgotten.
Shaw is a grand figure, a hero to many: he read away for years in the old British Museum, wrote pamphlets for the Fabian Society, and unsuccessful novels before finding himself, fairly late, on the stage. This is not to take anything away from Shaw but his " Nobel prize money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety" recalls Samuel Johnson's rebuking reply to Lord Chesterfield that a belated patron is like one who looks on while someone struggles in the water and encumbers him with help once he has gained the shore through his own efforts. Johnson, like Shaw, had strugggled in London for years.
Shaw (and other thinkers of his time) helped bring about a new attitude to the orthodoxies of faith. Asked how he would spend Christmas, he said he would spend it like any other day: he was a teetotaler.
I like the truth of "All Great Truths Begin as Blasphemies". I can use it on status quo people everytime they criticize my Libertarian Opinions.
A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor liess, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.
WB Will :-)