2019 Annual Newsletter
International
Shaw Society
“Portrait of Bernard Shaw” by John Lavery (1929)
A Message from the ISS President and Vice President
Shaw in the Theatre in 2019: A Sampler
Shaw Meetings and Conferences in 2019
Upcoming Events and Calls for Papers
A Message from President of the ISS
Robert Gaines
The Very Best of Holiday
Wishes to All,
The
first year as your president has been a hectic one and one for which I am most
grateful to my three predecessors Dick Dietrich, Leonard Conolly, and Michael
O’Hara, each of whom has made my tenure more pleasant and, I trust, more
efficient. My thanks to each of them. In May, Toni and I visited Gustavo at his
university in Cáceres, Spain, the site of our 2020 Shaw
Conference--themed “Shaw in Europe.” What a magical,
thoroughly up-to-date and at the same time charmingly medieval city it is. The city
center is surrounded by 12th Century Moorish walls. I hope you
are all planning to experience its charms for yourself by attending the
conference May 27-29 next spring.
We
then flew to England and travelled to Ayot St. Lawrence for a planned visited
with Sue Morgan, the National Trust’s House Manager at Shaw’s Corner, a meeting
which, unfortunately, due to her illness did not occur. I accepted an
invitation to address the English Shaw Society at their new London location.
Evelyn Ellis hosted a lovely dinner the evening before, giving us a chance to
meet informally with Dame Ann Wright, her husband Martin, and other Society
members. The evening’s festivities were presided over by Evelyn’s cat in regal
majesty. Then it was off to Dublin to visit (from the outside) Shaw’s
birthplace, and, through the gracious auspices of ISS member Audrey McNamara,
we visited Torca Cottage (again from the outside) and
the surrounding area, including a fortification where Joyce sets the first
chapter of Ulysses. We ate at a lovely Irish pub called Finnegans, and Audrey and I began to discuss returning to
Dublin for a conference in a future year.
Returning
to the states, we found Brigitte and Ellen’s captivating SHAW issue on
“Shaw and Music,” dedicated to the late Christopher Innes. Please delve in if
you have not already done so. I fear too few of us realize that the journal is
the easiest method of keeping abreast with the latest research in Shaw Studies. Our summer symposium was pushed back a month from July to August
in 2019 so that we might see the first preview of the Shaw Festival’s six and a
half-hour production of Man and Superman, a decision that was made by the Festival with both
beneficial and not-so-beneficial effects. While the production was
superb on all fronts (I saw it five times), the late dates for the Symposium
clashed with the opening weekend of many of our North American universities,
and many members could not attend. But the program essay by Leonard Conolly is not
to be missed. Please contact him directly (lwconolly@gmail.com) for the essay if you missed
the production.
The
Festival also produced a lively version of Getting Married which
Symposium members enjoyed and which included another blockbuster program essay
by our venerable Vice President Jen Buckley. Again, please contact her for a
copy (jennifer-buckley@uiowa.edu).
The Symposium was another highlight with a program revised by our program
chair, the same Jen Buckley and her committee. They interspliced
panels of papers with a roundtable discussion and a fascinating textual
workshop led by Graeme Sommerville. Jen’s program
also featured our young researchers and Bryden Scholarship winners. In
addition, there were presentations by scholars from Russia, Japan, India,
Turkey, and North America, which truly underscored the International in The International Shaw Society.
In addition to plans for our conference in Cáceres, Spain next year, we began
putting together plans for a conference in North America in either 2021 or
2022. A shout out to David Grapes who is playing a leading role in that
endeavor, particularly since a conference is larger in attendance than a
symposium, usually covers a longer period of time, and has a specified
theme.
In
September, we were off to New York for David Staller’s and Gingold Theatre’s
production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. David had, as usual,
his unique interpretation, which was strictly textual, and his productions are
such a joy for that reason. This one featured a Cleopatra who learned
everything Caesar taught her, and, as we watched her mature under his
teachings, David reminded us that we were watching an early version of Eliza
under the not-always-pleasant mentorship of Henry Higgins. David is an immense
talent (just read the Wall Street Journal) and a joy to have on our
Advisory Board. I also had occasion to participate in his Shavian panel, along
with Ellen Dolgin, which he conducted at Symphony Space on a Monday night when
the production was not playing.
Our
next duty was a sad one as in September we journeyed to Jenner’s Pond, PA for
Stan Weintraub’s Celebration of Life. Stan had passed away earlier
last summer. I represented the Society and spoke first. Society member Michel
Pharand and Julie Sparks were students of his, although not at the same time,
and spoke in detail about their experiences with him as their mentor at Penn
State. Michel summed up what many of us felt when he said, “We have lost our
lodestar.” Rodelle welcomed each of us and offered her thanks for our being
there. The Life Celebration was followed by a luncheon in which Stan was
remembered in so many different ways by the many people whose lives he had so
meaningfully touched. His son David explained that Stan always had three books
in progress at any one time: one at the printer’s, one he was writing, and one
he was researching.
The
end of the year brought us another SHAW
issue containing articles from across the spectrum of Shaw Studies, this time
with our inexhaustible General Editor Chris Wixson at the helm (as he is again
with the newsletter). It is now time to renew ISS memberships for 2020 so
why not include a journal subscription with your membership renewal? Our
webmaster Dick Dietrich already has the membership page up for next year’s
renewal that includes an option for the journal (https:///www.shawsociety.org/ISSMembership.htm).
Dick has spent much of his year redoing the web site as well as bringing us
up-to-date information on all things Shavian for which we owe him a large debt
of gratitude.
In
summary, renew your membership, (and include a journal subscription—why not?)
and join us next year for our conference in Cáceres, Spain (May 27-29) and our
Symposium in Niagara-on-the-Lake (July 23-25). Enjoy your holidays and get your
rest, as 2020 promises to be one of the most exciting years for us to date.
A
Message from Vice President of the ISS Jennifer Buckley
During this first, wonderfully rewarding
year as ISS vice-president, I focused most of my effort on organizing and
facilitating the 2019 Shaw Symposium at the Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake,
Ontario. Working with the Festival's education director Suzanne Merriam and her
staff, and with the ISS's current and past presidents, I sought to offer a
program that would allow us to engage deeply with the two Shaw plays in
production during the Symposium dates: Kimberly Rampersad's Man
and Superman, and Tanja Jacobs's Getting Married. I was
especially pleased to welcome to the Symposium the 2019 Bryden Scholarship award
winners, Justine Zapin and Dr. Vishu W. Patil, as
well as travel grant recipient, Dr. Lisa C. Robertson.
As I write this message, I am preparing the
official Call for Papers for the 2020 Symposium, which will take place on July
23-25. While the Symposium will happily focus on The Devil's Disciple,
the other shows running that weekend offer us marvelous opportunities for
making connections between Shaw, his contemporaries, and his successors. I am
particularly excited to see Philip Akin's production
of Alice Childress's brilliant play Trouble in Mind, which deftly
blends comedy and drama to forward a fierce, and very necessary, critique of
the racism that exists in seemingly liberal, white-dominated spaces. I expect
that Shaw would have loved Childress's gift for skewering hypocrisy, as well as
the manner in which she combines laugh-out-loud humor with trenchant social
criticism. Further, we have extended a warm invitation to the Eugene
O'Neill Society's members, some of whom may join us as we see Desire Under
the Elms. That production offers us an opportunity to consider together the
careers of the Irish writer Shaw and the Irish-American playwright whom he
called a "Yankee Shakespeare."
As we prepare for another year in which we
work together to enrich and expand Shaw studies, I am grateful to the ISS
officers and to the membership for the trust you've placed in me in my role as
Vice President. I'm eager to hear from you at jennifer-buckley@uiowa.edu.
DON’T FORGET THERE IS MORE TO PERUSE IN THE NEWSLETTER
“SUPPLEMENT” AND “GALLERY”, INCLUDING PHOTOS FROM THE SUMMER SYMPOSIUM.
SHAW ON STAGE IN 2019: A SAMPLER
1) SHAW IN CHICAGO
The ShawChicago Theater Company’s 25th anniversary season featured productions of Candida (20 October to 12 November 2018), directed by Barbara Zahora, Arms and the Man (2 February to 25 February 2019), directed by Mary Michell, and The Doctor’s Dilemma (23 March to 15 April 2019), directed by Gary Alexander. Sadly, after overseeing over a hundred productions of works by Shaw and his contemporaries, the Board of Directors made the difficult decision to close ShawChicago on 30 June 2019. They deemed it fitting to end the company’s years of success with The Doctor’s Dilemma, the first show the company ever produced in 1994. Former members of the ShawChicago company are at work on a new venture called the Misalliance Repertory Theatre in order to continue to present productions and concert readings of Shaw’s plays. For more information and to sign up for their newsletter, go to http://misalliancerep.org/.
2) SHAW IN NEW YORK
The Gingold Theatrical Group (GTG), headed by producer and director David Staller, continues to stage a concert reading of one Shaw play per month at Symphony Space (2537 Broadway at West 95th Street, New York City). The 2019 season, the GTG’s fourteenth, included an Off-Broadway production of Caesar and Cleopatra at The Lion Theatre (3 September to 12 October 2019), readings of Misalliance, Man and Superman, The Philanderer, and Arms and the Man, as well as plays by Frederick Lonsdale, Githa Sowerby, Noël Coward, and Ferenc Molnar, and other Shaw-related events. See www.projectshaw.com.
On September 23, 2019, Project Shaw held their Shaw Talk Discussion at Symphony Space, including on its illustrious panel ISS president Robert Gaines and members James Armstrong and Ellen Dolgin.
3) SHAW AT AYOT ST
LAWRENCE
After 27 seasons, the UK’s National Trust decided in 2019 to place on hiatus the annual series of summer performances of Shaw plays at Shaw’s Corner, Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire. As such, Michael Friend Productions, in association with SHAW 2020 and Splitshift Theatre, performed its summer production of Arms and the Man at multiple locations, including Lauderdale House in north London (15 to 18 July), the Palladian Church in Ayot St. Lawrence (20 to 21 July), the Sarah Thorne Theatre in Broadstairs, Kent (25 to 28 July), and Harlington Manor in Dunstable (3 to 4 August). For more information, go to www.mfp.org.uk. For a lovely photographic record of earlier performances at Shaw’s Corner, go to www.mfp.org.uk/Personal/Albumpersonal.htm.
Sadly, Sue Morgan, the amazing House Steward for Shaw’s Corner and gracious host for the ISS Conference in 2013, passed away in August 2019. She will be greatly missed.
Leonard Conolly warmly remembers Sue Morgan at the 2019 Summer Shaw Symposium
4) SHAW AT NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE
The 57th season
at the Annual Shaw Festival, led by Artistic Director Tim Carroll, featured in
2019 Shaw’s Man and Superman with
“Don Juan in Hell” (directed by Kimberley Rampersad)
and Getting Married (directed by
Tanja Jacobs). The season’s slate of productions also included C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, adapted by Anna
Chatterton and directed by Christine Brubaker; Brigadoon, book and lyrics by Alan J. Lerner with music by Frederick
Loewe and directed by Glynis Leyshon; The Ladykillers,
written by Graham Linehan and directed by Tim
Carroll; Patrick Hamilton’s Rope,
directed by Jani Lauzon; Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano
de Bergerac, translated/adapted by Kate Hennig
and directed by Chris Abraham; The
Russian Play, written by Hannah Moscovitch and directed by Diana Donnelly; Tennessee
Williams’ The Glass Menagerie,
directed by László Bérczes;
Mae West’s Sex, directed by Peter
Hinton; and Howard Barker’s Victory, directed
by Tim Carroll. For further information about the Festival’s 2020 season, write
to Shaw Festival, Post Office Box 774, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada,
L0S 1J0; or call 1-800-511-SHAW [7429] or 905-468-2153; or go to www.shawfest.com.
5) SHAW IN BRAZIL
This
year, Rosalie Haddad produced the “2x Shaw” Project, comprised of stagings of Mrs
Warren’s Profession and The Millionairess, running from 10 August to
30 September in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
6) SHAW AROUND THE
GLOBE
As there were countless other productions of Shaw’s plays around the world, we regret that we haven’t
space to mention them
all. However, you can get notices of them by subscribing to Google Alerts at http://www.google.com/alerts.
Kay Li regularly and
generously continues to update production resources. For links to some Shaw
plays performed in the USA, Canada, and the UK, go to http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca and look
(to the far right) at the column headed International Shaw Calendar.
Click on play titles for production details. For past performances of
Shaw plays, go to http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca/the-shaw-project-3/past-and-present-performances/shaw-calendar-archives/.
For reviews of past performances of Shaw plays at the Shaw Festival, go to http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca/learn-about-our-partners-2/shaw-festival/shaw-festival-productions-reviews/
SHAW MEETINGS AND PANELS IN
2019
1)
Shaw sessions at the 43rd
Annual Comparative Drama Conference (4-6 April 2019) at Rollins College
in Winter Park, Florida, were facilitated by Tony J. Stafford (University of
Texas, El Paso) and included the following presentations: “Stage Sermons in Candida and Getting Married ” (Mary Christian, Middle Georgia State
University), “‘Ann is Everywoman’: Shaw’s Use of Everyman in Man and Superman”
(Valerie Gramling, University of Miami), “What is Major Barbara REALLY About?” (Jean
Reynolds, Polk State College), “Performing Capitalism with Impunity: Shaw’s
Neo-liberal Capitalism from Major Barbara
to The Millionairess” (Christa Zorn,
Indiana University Southeast), and “Ghosts,
Part 2 or Getting Married: Shaw’s emendation of the Ibsenian
New Woman” (Justine Zapin, American University). Abstracts for these papers can
be accessed at:
http://blogs.rollins.edu/drama/wpcontent/uploads/2019/03/FINAL2019ProgramAbstracts-March6.pdf
Time to Renew Your ISS Membership for 2020:
https://www.shawsociety.org/ISSMembership.htm
2)
The 16th annual Summer Shaw
Symposium was held at Niagara-on-the-Lake (15-17 August 2019), co-sponsored
by The Shaw Festival and the International Shaw Society. The keynote was
delivered by Tanja Jacobs, director of this season’s production of Getting
Married. Activities included two Shaw Festival theatrical performances (Man and Superman with “Don Juan in Hell” and
Getting Married), a discussion with
cast members, three sessions of panel presentations, a roundtable on teaching
Shaw, and a performance pedagogy workshop with a member of the Shaw Festival
Ensemble. Details about the speakers and abstracts for the papers delivered can
be found at the Symposium website: https://shawsymposium2019.weebly.com
3)
At the International Meeting of the
American Conference for Irish Studies (20-23 March 2019 in Boston Park
Plaza), a Shaw panel was convened by Mary Trotter and featured three talks:
“Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan: An Irish Patriot”, given by Audrey McNamara
(University College Dublin); “Bernard Shaw, Sean O’Casey and the Imaging of
James Connolly, 1916–1920”, given by Nelson
O’Ceallaigh Ritschel (Massachusetts Maritime Academy); and “Is Shaw’s
Shame Irish Shame?”, given by Stephen
Watt (Indiana University).
4)
The Shaw Society
(UK) was founded in 1941 and its members meet monthly in the John Thaw Room at
The Actors Centre, London, for talks, lectures, and play readings. For more
information and a sample issue of the society’s publication The Shavian, see www.shawsociety.org.uk/. You
can also follow them on Twitter @ShawSoc. In honor of their 75th
Anniversary, The Shaw Society continues to make available various GBS resources(especially for
scholars and teachers) at https://shaw-institute.com/
or accessed via the Shaw Archive at https://sites.google.com/view/shawarchive/home
On
May 12th, the Shaw Society, together with SHAW 2020 at the Actors
Centre, performed a two-hander written by Anne Wright
based on the correspondence between Shaw and actress Ellen Pollock (1902-1997).
Pollock was the leading lady in many of Shaw’s plays, often producing and
directing them herself, and also the President of the Shaw Society UK for 40
years from 1957. Wright, current Chair of the Shaw Society UK and Editor of The Shavian, is at work writing
a biography of Ellen Pollock, including her correspondence with Shaw. TOP
5) The
Spring meeting of the Bernard Shaw Society of Japan was held in the
conference hall of Jumonji High School in Sugamo, Tokyo, on 8 June 2019. In the afternoon, three
talks were delivered. Nicholas R. Williams suggested that, while Shaw’s The Sanity of Art “argues for greater self-discipline among those most influenced
by the developments in music, painting, and literature, the author’s arguments
in favor of this new art are
what most interests the reader today.” In the
second, Michiyo Yamaguchi, at work on a translation
of The Millionairess entitled Okumanchoja-Fujin,
discussed the differences between the play’s first
edition (1936) and the 1938 revision. The final speakers were Ryoichi Oura and Kaoruko Abe who
chronicled the history of Shaw’s plays in Japan following World War Two.
The Society convened its Fifth Shaw
Seminar in Atami on September 28th which featured the following
panel presentations: “Shakespearean Plays Watched by GBS the Drama Critic” by Ryuichi Oura; “Shaw’s Shakespeare
Seen from his Letters” by Masafumi Ogiso; and “Reading Shaw’s Cymbeline Refinished: A
Variation on Shakespeare’s Ending” by Minoru Morrioka.
The 2019 autumn meeting of the BSSJ was
held on December 7th at the Tempaku Campus
of Meijo University in Nagoya. Papers
delivered included “The Representation of Catherine in Great Catherine”
by Shoko Matsumoto; “’The Evolution of Consciousness’ and Shaw’s ‘Creative
Evolution’ by Minoru Morioka; and “Don Juan in Canada: Report on Shaw Symposium
and Festival 2019” by Hisashi Morikawa.
UPCOMING EVENTS & CALLS FOR PAPERS
1) “SHAW
IN EUROPE”, THE INTERNATIONAL SHAW CONFERENCE will be held at
the University of Extremadura (Cáceres, Spain) from May 27-29, 2020. For
details including the cfp and travel information, see
https://shawsociety.org/CFP-SHAW-IN-EUROPE.htm
2) THE
44th ANNUAL COMPARATIVE DRAMA CONFERENCE will
be held at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida, from 2 to 4 April 2020.
Please go to http://comparativedramaconference.org/
for
details. TOP
3) THE 17h ANNUAL SHAW SYMPOSIUM, co-sponsored
by the ISS and The Shaw Festival, will take place from July 24-26, 2020
at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Access all information for submitting paper
proposals and applications for Bryden Scholarships and ISS Travel Grants at https://www.shawsociety.org/ISSGrants&Scholarships.htm;
while papers on anything and everything Shaw are always welcome, talks that
focus on the Shaw plays the Festival is producing this year (The Devil’s
Disciple) are especially desirable.
Time to Renew Your ISS Membership for 2020:
https://www.shawsociety.org/ISSMembership.htm
BOOKS ABOUT SHAW
This year, Sophie Hatchwell’s
Performance and Spectatorship in Edwardian Art Writing and
John Pendergast’s Joan of Arc on the Stage and Her
Sisters in Sublime Sanctity appeared in Palgrave Macmillan’s
series, “Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries”. These and the other nine titles can be accessed at: https://www.palgrave.com/us/series/14785,
Editors Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel and Peter Gahan report that “Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries” was just renewed for another five years, is among the most productive of their current drama series. The books in the Palgrave Macmillan series strive to present the best and most current research on Shaw and his theatre and literary contemporaries and to further our understanding of Shaw and those who worked with him or in reaction against him. Queries and manuscripts may be sent to Nelson Ritschel (nocrsc@aol.com) and Peter Gahan (pgahan@me.com).
Check out the series blog at: https://bernardshaw.home.blog/.
Remember as
well that ISS members receive a 20% discount on the Shaw series titles; the
discount code is ISSGBC and can be entered at the checkout stage in the
‘basket’ when ordering.
At http://www.upf.com, books on Shaw are still available for purchase in the University Press of Florida’s Shaw Series, edited for nearly two decades by the indomitable R. F. Dietrich:
Shaw, Plato, and Euripides Sidney
P. Albert
Shaw’s Controversial Socialism James
Alexander
Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion Stuart E. Baker
Shaw and Joyce Martha Fodaski Black
Bernard Shaw as Artist-Fabian Charles A. Carpenter
Bernard Shaw’s Novels R.F.
Dietrich
Shaw’s Theater Bernard
F. Dukore
Shaw Shadows: Rereading the Texts of Bernard Shaw Peter Gahan
Bernard Shaw: A Life A.M.
Gibbs
Shaw and Feminisms: On Stage and Off D.A. Hadfield and Jean Reynolds, eds.
Bernard Shaw’s “The Black Girl in Search of God” Leon Hugo
Bernard Shaw and China: Cross-Cultural Encounters Kay Li
Bernard Shaw and the French Michel
W. Pharand
Pygmalion’s Wordplay Jean Reynolds
Shaw, Synge, Connolly, and Socialist Provocation Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel
Shaw’s Settings: Gardens and Libraries Tony Jason Stafford
Who’s Afraid of Bernard Shaw Stanley
Weintraub
What Shaw Really Wrote About the War J.L. Wisenthal and Daniel
O’Leary, eds.
WORKS BY SHAW
Contracted to appear in 2021 will be eight volumes in the Shaw series, overseen by Brad Kent, for Oxford World's Classics:
Mrs Warren’s Profession, Candida, You
Never Can Tell, ed. Sos
Eltis
Arms and the Man, The Devil’s Disciple,
Caesar and Cleopatra, ed.
Lawrence Switzky
Man and Superman, John Bull’s Other Island, Major Barbara, ed. Brad Kent
Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Saint Joan, ed. Brad Kent
The Apple Cart, On the Rocks, Too True to Be Good, The Millionairess,
ed. Matthew Yde
Playlets (Shorter Plays), ed. James Moran
Major Cultural Essays, ed. David Kornhaber
Major Political Writings, ed. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller
SHAW: THE JOURNAL OF BERNARD SHAW
STUDIES
SHAW 39.1 (June 2019) was a theme issue that focused upon “Shaw and Music”, with Brigitte Bogar and Ellen Dolgin as guest editors. SHAW 39.2 (December 2019) was a general issue featuring articles/book reviews, and the “Checklist” bibliography.
Next year is SHAW’s fortieth anniversary, commemorated by a spring issue on “Shaw and New Media” guest edited by Jennifer Buckley (University of Iowa) and a special winter issue centered on the idea of “Shaw and Legacy”, guest edited by Barry Houlihan (NUI Galway) and Ruth Hegarty (Royal Irish Academy). Slated future theme issues will be guest edited by Peter Gahan/Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel (SHAW 41.2 -- “Bernard Shaw, Journalist”) and Miguel Cisneros Perales (SHAW 42.1 -- “Shaw and Translation”).
Request for
Submissions
SHAW 42.1
(to be published in June 2022) is entitled “Shaw and Translation” and will
be guest-edited by Miguel Cisneros Perales. In relation to the writings of Bernard Shaw, the
practice of translation is complex because, perhaps above all else, he was a
masterful craftsman of the English language. His brilliant use of language,
which often borders on the metalinguistic, reveals itself as a major challenge
for translators. We may even ask ourselves if Shaw’s plays can be translated at
all and trace the role of translation in the shaping of Shaw’s reception
abroad. Thus far, translation studies among Shaw scholars have focused for the
most part on the people—at least far more so than on the texts. The epistolary
exchanges with his translators as well as the bibliographical record of his
works in translation are well documented. Studies that delve into the practical
questions involved in the process of translating Shaw’s works are, in contrast,
scarce. As a consequence, translation remains a fertile ground for discussion
and research in Shaw scholarship and forms the focus of this issue of SHAW.
Inquiries and proposals for SHAW 42.1 should be directed to
guest editor Miguel Cisneros Perales at mcisper@upo.es.
SHAW 41.1 (to be published in June 2021) and SHAW 42.2 (to be published in December 2021) will include articles on general topics, as well as book reviews, the Checklist of Shaviana, Notices, and ISS information. Prospective essays for SHAW should be submitted directly to http://www.psupress.org/journals/jnls_shaw.html. Please include an abstract and, for matters of style, refer to recent SHAW volumes. For all other information about SHAW or to suggest other
issue themes,
contact Christopher Wixson at cmwixson@eiu.edu. TOP
Come curl up with SHAW…
The latest issue (39.2) features insightful and important scholarship by
James Armstrong, A.M. Gibbs, Desmond Harding, Jesse M. Helman, Kay Li,
Derek McGovern, Reinhard G. Mueller, and Michel Pharand.
And
don’t miss the party for the journal’s fortieth anniversary in 2020!
The guest list includes: Jennifer Buckley, Richard Dietrich, Nicholas Grene, Alice McEwan, Fintan O’Toole, and Lawrence Switzky.
Plus:
Book Reviews /Interviews with Theatre Practitioners /The Annual Checklist /
News about the Development of the Shaw Trail by the National Gallery of Ireland
All in two issues -- “Shaw and New Media” (June) and “Shaw and Legacy” (December) -- that will continue to demonstrate how Shaw and his writing matter in the 21st century.
***ISS
Members receive a discount and can subscribe when they renew their membership
at https://www.shawsociety.org/ISSMembership.htm***
SHAW BEHIND THE CAMERA
A few years ago, the London School of Economics digitized its collection of some 20,000 photographs and negatives taken by Shaw, an inveterate photographer. To explore this amazing visual resource, go to http://archives.lse.ac.uk/Advanced.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog. In the field marked “Ref No” type in “Shaw Photographs*” (don’t forget the asterisk); then click “Search.” This will give you access to over 15,000 photographs, which you can view by clicking on the links. To read what Shaw himself has to say about one of his favorite pastimes, a good place to begin is Bernard Shaw on Photography: Essays and Photographs (1989), edited by Bill Jay and Margaret Moore.
ONLINE SHAW REFERENCE WORKS
A Chronology of
Works By and About Bernard Shaw is
regularly updated and can be accessed at http://www.shawsociety.org/Chronology-of-Works.htm.
Charles Carpenter’s A
Descriptive Chronology of His Plays, Theatrical Career, and Dramatic Theories can
be found at: http://www.shawsociety.org/ShawChron.htm.
A.M. Gibbs’s Chronology of Shaw’s Life can be reached at http://www.shawsociety.org/Shaw-Chronology.htm.
SHAW’S WORKS ONLINE
Since 2014, Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín (Universidad de Extremadura, Spain) has been collaborating with a computer programmer to develop an interface that will enable anyone to search Gustavo’s database without infringing on copyright restrictions (as most of Shaw’s works will not go out of copyright until 2020). To learn more about (and see samples of) this ground-breaking enterprise, go to http://shawquotations.blogspot.com.es/2014/09/digitizing-shaw-shaw-quotation-database.html and www.shawsociety.org/SEARCH.htm.
Scholars are welcome to submit concordance queries for Shaw's plays and novels—as well as any/all of the books in this Table of Contents (https://goo.gl/YvoTq7). Results will be retrieved as an Excel table.
SHAW UPDATES
As part of his
duties as editor of the “Continuing Checklist of Shaviana” for SHAW, the ambitious and hard-working
Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín regularly mines online repositories in search of
the latest pieces of Shaw scholarship. Some of these have been sent to ISS
members in regular updates, including previews of items to be listed in the
annual bibliography and myriad online
occurrences of Shaw and Shaw-related events and references.
Gustavo
continues to replenish the SHAW ARCHIVE, which allows you to go back over all
of his GEN contributions to Shaw scholarship and also to have access to:
GeoShaw - An interactive map of the key places
in Shaw's life.
George
Bernard Shaw (GBS) Youtube Channel.
Shaw Quotations Page
- Where you'll find the source of your favorite Shaw quotations.
This is a
fantastic collection that deserves both awe and applause. Please put https://sites.google.com/view/shawarchive/home among your
Favorites or create a shortcut to it on your desktop.
SHAW AT AYOT ST LAWRENCE
Produced by Martin Wright, a visual tour of Shaw’s Corner, Ayot St
Lawrence, is available at www.gamelabuk.com/shaws/.
Click play to hear Stanley Weintraub, the doyen of Shaw studies, comment at
various stops along the way. Our thanks to Stan and Rodelle Weintraub for
providing this vivid and unique glimpse into Shaw’s Hertfordshire home!
SHAW AND HIS WORKS ON FILM
In 2016, Gustavo A.
Rodríguez Martín launched a Shaw Youtube Channel (www.youtube.com/channel/UCxGpZjHhix37VN-zFfX6psg/playlists).
“A compendium of the best videos of and about Bernard Shaw and his milieu” is
divided into the following playlists: GBS in Performance, GBS Footage, Lectures
and Talks, Shaw in Film, Historical Context, Documentaries, and Miscellany. The
GBS Channel brings together the multitude of videos: documentaries about Shaw,
film footage of Shaw himself, film versions of his plays, and much more. Users
are encouraged to suggest/submit videos that may fit any of the
playlists. TOP
SHAW’S GEOGRAPHIES
Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín, with the assistance of former ISS membership secretary Ann Stewart, and Evelyn Ellis of the Shaw Society (UK), has created the GeoShaw map (http://www.shawsociety.org/GeoShawIntro.htm), a collaborative project that attempts to provide a geographical account of Shaw’s life via map markers of his travels, domiciles, meeting halls, and favorite vegetarian restaurants, to mention only a few examples of what’s available. Evelyn’s photographs of “Shaw’s Places Then and Now” can be seen at www.shawquotations.blogspot.com.es/2015/10/geoshaw-shaws-places-then-and-now.html.
SHAW DIGTIZED
The Sagittarius-ORION Literature Digitizing Project at http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca is constantly expanding its open access section to make it a useful tool for Shaw scholars and fans. This include Reviews of Productions of Shaw’s Plays Around the World: 2015-2017: http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca/shaw-reviews-for-season-2015-2016/, 2014-2015: http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca/the-shaw-project-3/shaw-reviews-for-season-2014/, before 2014 at http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca/learn-about-our-partners-2/shaw-festival/shaw-festival-productions-reviews/. In addition, there is the Shaw Bookshelf featuring especially new Shaw books at http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca/the-shaw-project-3/shaw-bookshelf/. Educators may find the Education Programs in Theatres Around the World useful: http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca/canadian-theatre-companies/.
A key attraction is the Virtual Tour of Shaviana at http://libra.apps01.yorku.ca/virtual-tour-of-shaviana/. Notable displays also include: 1) “Who is Bernard Shaw” written by Stanley and Rodelle Weintraub; 2) a calendar of productions of Shaw’s plays around the world; 3) theatre productions with links to reviews and videos of performances around the world; 4) Footsteps of Bernard Shaw, with videos showing Shaw’s world tour; 5) links to Al Carpenter’s Shaw Bibliography; 6) virtual tours of the late Isidor Saslav’s amazing Shaw collections; 7) links to updated Shaw holiday shopping; 8) links to numerous electronic Shaw texts; and 9) other classroom resources on specific plays. The restricted access platform continues to feature classroom resources, such as annotated full texts, study guides, reference materials written by Shaw scholars, an annotated bibliography, and concordances and a search engine.
TIME
TO RENEW YOUR ANNUAL ISS MEMBERSHIP FOR 2020!!
https://www.shawsociety.org/ISSMembership.htm
ISS ANGELS
It has long been the custom in the theater to refer to people who contribute to the enterprise beyond the going price as “angels.” While it may be true, as John Tanner says, that “In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular” (Maxims for Revolutionists: Greatness), we are clearly still on a planet where “angelic behavior” of this sort deserves notice. Yes, we appreciate that everyone contributes what they can afford, and we are thankful to everyone who pays the annual membership fee and/or orders journals, but “Shaw Bizness” needs the exceptional contribution as well as the standard in order to pursue its goals of encouraging the young with travel grants and of making Shaw’s works and the study of Shaw available to as many as possible. So here we wish to pay special notice to those who have made it possible for the ISS to “go beyond.”
The list, year by year, of those whose “angelic” contribution to the ISS has gotten them written in the ISS Book of the Life Force by the Recording Shaw (with horns holding up his halo) can be viewed at https://shawsociety.org/ISS-ANGELS.htm .
Facebook & Twitter: Follow the ISS on Twitter and receive ISS updates on Facebook (click “Like” on the International Shaw Society page; the more “Likes,” the more notice everywhere). For assistance, write to Jean Reynolds at ballroom16@aol.com.
Google Alerts: To sign up for your own Google Alerts on Shaw, go to
www.google.com/alerts.
ISS Homepage: There are countless pages about Shaw’s life and works
on or linked from www.shawsociety.org,
and many continuously updated by ISS Webmaster R.F. Dietrich.
ISS AWARD WINNERS FOR 2019
This year, Aileen Ruane and Sharon Klassen were each
recipients of the prestigious R.F. Dietrich Research Scholarship for Shaw
Studies. Named
in honor of the Founding President of the International Shaw Society, the award
supports research into any aspect of the life and work of Bernard Shaw by a
graduate student or early-career scholar.
In the photo above, ISS President Robert Gaines and ISS Vice President
Jennifer Buckley stand with (L-R) Lisa Robertson, Justine Zapin, and Vishnu Patil, the three
overjoyed recipients of ISS travel grants and Bryden Awards at the Shaw
Symposium (15-17 August
2019) at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
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2019 Director of Publications and Newsletter Editor:
Christopher Wixson TOP
**Thanks to those who generously shared from their
photo cloud vaults, especially Blaise Bullimore, Dick
Dietrich, Kay Li, Sashi Morikawa, David Staller, and
Ann Stewart**
Access newsletters from
previous years at: https://www.shawsociety.org/ISS-Newsletters.htm
2019 ISS Newsletter Supplement
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bernard Shaw’s Postmistress: The Memoir of Jisbella Georgina Lyth as told to Romie Lambkin was published February 8, 2019 by Rock’s Mills Press.
On May 11, 2019, the
volume’s editor, Leonard Conolly, gave a local
talk on the subject at the church not
far from Shaw’s Corner, the site where
most of the ISS conference was
held in 2013.
“Now barely legible, a headstone in the graveyard of the
Palladian Church is inscribed with the names of Ambrose Lyth
(died 1930, aged 54) and his wife Jisbella Georgina Lyth
(died 1964, aged 79). Ambrose lived in Ayot only briefly, dying just six weeks
after being appointed village postmaster in 1930. But Jisbella, who became
village postmistress on Ambrose's death, lived in Ayot until her own death.
Long forgotten, Jisbella was once described by a London newspaper as “the most
remarkable character in the village next to Bernard Shaw. In the mid 1950s, Jisbella told her life story to her friend Romie Lambkin, an Irish writer then living in Ayot. The
story remained unpublished, however, until it came to the attention of
Canadian Shaw scholar Leonard Conolly.” (www.ayotstlawrence.com)
Going to the website of the East Anglian Film
Archive (University of East Anglia) via
http://www.eafa.org.uk/search.aspx#&&page=1&navid=&vonly=1&psize=10&text=Bernard+Shaw will enable you to screen a
short silent film documentary about the village of Ayot St Lawrence and its
famous resident George Bernard Shaw who is shown in 1949 walking around the village of Ayot St. Lawrence,
talking to various people, such as the Winstons who
lived nearby, and the comedian Danny Kaye, paying a visit. In it, we also get a glimpse of “Shaw’s
Postmistress” Jisbella Georgina Lyth, who liked to
refer to herself as “the second most famous person in Ayot St Lawrence” and was
probably the model for one of the characters in Village Wooing.
The
May 11th event also included dramatized extracts from the memoir
performed by ex-Coronation Street actress Vicky Odgen
(Jisbella), Julia Faulkner (Romie), and Jonas Cemm
(GBS). Odgen and Faulkner are company members while
Cemm is Artistic Director of SHAW2020, The Shaw Society’s affiliated theatre
company.
The cast gathered with Leonard around Jisbella’s gravestone.
Leonard with
Blaire Bullimore, Romie
Lambkin’s son, and David Grapes, Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the
University of North Colorado and collector who acquired the Jisbella memoir and
made it available to Leonard.
**Thanks to Dick Dietrich and
Blaise Bullimore for sharing their photos.**
Two Bastions of the Church
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bedlam’s
Pygmalion ran at the
Central Square Theater in Cambridge, MA from January 31st to March 3rd.
Below, former ISS membership secretary
and co-creator (with Gustavo Rodriquez Martin and Evelyn Ellis) of ISS GeoShaw, Ann Stewart shares an account of the
February 7th performance and curtain talk, given by Nelson
Ritschel:
Bedlam Shaw
By Ann Stewart
Bedlam
Theater specializes in producing plays which feature as few as four actors. Founded
in New York City, Bedlam's first play was Saint
Joan in 2012. Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, brought
it to Boston the same year.
Seven
years later, the Bedlam-Central Square connection has been reaffirmed by a
production of Pygmalion, starring
Bedlam Artistic Director Eric Tucker, Bedlam co-founder Edmund Lewis, Bedlam
actors Grace Bernardo, James Patrick Nelson, and Vaishnavi
Sharma, and Central Square Theater actor Michael Dwan
Singh.
Surely,
Bernard Shaw would have approved of the fast-paced Pygmalion flavored with spice (Eliza, played by Ms. Sharma) and
curry (her father Alfred Doolittle, played by Mr. Singh). Sharma went on to receive the 2019 Eliot Norton (Boston
Theatre Critics Association's) Award for Outstanding Visiting Performer for her
performance as Eliza in Bedlam's Pygmalion run at the Central
Square Theatre.
Speaking
about the play's history and themes after the performance on February 7, for
Central Square Theatre’s “Scholar Social”, Nelson Ritschel stated: "This
production is superb. Doolittle understands class better than anyone else in
the play." He also noted that some of those in the 1914 London audiences
would have recognized the economic threat of prostitution (in its various
configurations) that stalks Eliza’s world—and all women in the face of men’s
ownership—from her adamant “I’m a good girl” to her resistance to enslaving
marriages and unequal unions. He further suggested that the purchasing of Eliza
from her father echoed W. T. Stead’s 1885 “The Maiden Tribute to Modern
Babylon” that depicted the purchase of a 12-year-old girl, named Eliza, from
her mother--emphasized by Stead’s 1912 death on Titanic, the year before Shaw completed Pygmalion.
Professor and ISS Member
Nelson Ritschel, is author of Bernard
Shaw, W. T. Stead, and the New Journalism: Whitechapel, Parnell, Titanic, and
the Great War (Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) and Shaw, Synge Connolly, and Socialist Provocation (University Press
of Florida, 2011).
Nelson
especially liked how Bedlam handled the play's ending, through a prolonged
scenario of Higgins alone and unable to process Eliza’s departure: "The
desire of audiences for Eliza and Higgins to come together is based on the
middle-class morality that Shaw was countering," he added. "The
brutality of what Shaw is dealing with is always there in his plays. It can be
deeply buried, made palpable through comedic moments, but such is what makes
Shaw relevant today."
Nelson with Kaley Bachelder, who introduced him and moderated the talk. She
is an Associate at Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Following
his well-attended talk, Nelson remarked privately, "The now retired
professor, Alan Brody, who first introduced me to Shaw when I was an
undergraduate was here, so that was another plus."
(The director had cast him in The Devil's Disciple.) “And they practically
had to throw us out of the theatre as the discussion that followed my talk went
well beyond the allotted time. It was a highly intelligent and enthusiastic
audience, and they saw a brilliant production.”
Echoing the excellent Boston reviews
the production garnered, Nelson later recounted that
“The Bedlam Pygmalion production
was superb, especially the handling of the play's ending. They had a full house
and about half remained for my talk. They were a highly intelligent and
informed audience. The talk went beyond the slotted time frame. It was
exhilarating. It was a grand night for Shaw. I was told the production it is
shaping up to be a successful run with regard to ticket sales. I urged more
Shaw, which I think will be emphasized by the audiences.”
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Passings
Charles Berst
(September 30, 1932 - September
28, 2019)
In Memoriam
By Henry Ansgar
Kelly (Emeritus Distinguished Research Professor, UCLA)
Charles
Berst, fondly known to all as Chuck, a much-admired member of the UCLA English
Department since 1967, passed away peacefully on September 28, 2019, just two
days short of his birthday, when he would have attained to the historic age of
fourscore and seven years.
Chuck was
born in Seattle, Washington, on September 30, 1932. He attended Leschi Elementary School, and, among other notable
achievements there, he won the Dead Man’s Float competition for eight-year-olds
by a full minute. On to Marshall Junior High School, where he ran the school print
shop. At Roosevelt High he fostered his life-long flair for the histrionic and
the bureaucratic, participating in drama productions and student-body
government. Immediately upon graduation he vaulted into the Merchant Marines
with the rank of Chief Petty Officer on a vessel making repeated visits to
Japan; not a bad summer job for a kid just out of high school.
In the fall
of 1949, Chuck started at the University of Washington, but in the middle of
his sophomore year, his father died at the age of fifty, from complications
connected with Marfan Syndrome, a genetic disorder of
the connective tissue, which Chuck inherited and would battle all his life.
Chuck made the difficult, even heroic, decision to leave his beloved studies to
work to support his widowed mother. Eventually, while maintaining a small
business, Chuck resumed his studies. He stayed on at Washington after
graduation and entered the Ph.D. program, and, after finishing his course-work
in 1962, further broadened his cultural, intellectual, and romantic horizons by
marrying a scientist newly emigrated from The Netherlands. . . .
Chuck
completed his doctorate in 1965, and took a job at the university of Alberta in
Edmonton, Canada. Then he was recruited to the UCLA English Department and arrived,
as one of six new assistant professors, in the fall of 1967. . . .
The chief
academic interests of Charlie Berst centered around the dramatic productions of
George Bernard Shaw. From the beginning he was struck by fact that Shaw’s stage
plays were lauded in globo, but not as
individual works of art. In his landmark book, Bernard Shaw and the Art of
Drama, which was published in 1973 by the University of Illinois Press, he
presented a meticulous analysis of ten of Shaw’s dramas, showing exactly where
the artistic quality lay, both literary (poetic) and dramatic, unearthing
hitherto unrealized features of their make-up. He made many of the dramatic
virtues of the plays part of his own pedagogic style, and, especially in the
large survey courses that were his forte, he became a literal one-man
drama. . . .
Another
interest of Chuck’s was religion. He himself was greatly influenced by the
Theosophist movement started by Madame Blavatsky in 1875. Theosophy had a
strong presence in Seattle when Chuck was growing up, and he actively
participated in it. This interest, joined to his field of Shavian studies, was
the inspiration for his book, Shaw and Religion, published by Penn in
1981. In his own contribution on “The Poetic Genesis of Shaw’s God,” he stressed
that Shaw’s experience of religion was largely based on esthetics, which played
a far larger role than philosophy, let alone theology, in his dramatic
presentations. Later on, Chuck returned in greater depth to Shaw’s Pygmalion,
which he had dissected in his earlier book under the rubric of “A Potboiler as
Art,” and he produced a whole book on it: Pygmalion: Shaw's Spin on Myth and
Cinderella (Twayne, 1995).
**The above are excerpts from a longer
piece that can be accessed at:
https://english.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/In-Memoriam.pdf
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Passings (continued)
Sue Morgan
(July 2, 1956 to
July 31, 2019)
In
Memoriam by Evelyn Ellis
Sue Morgan, former House Manager at Shaw’s
Corner, died at the beginning of August.
She was diagnosed with inoperable cancer shortly after returning from
last year’s Symposium at Niagara-on-the-Lake and a subsequent research tour of
university libraries which hold Shaw collections in Texas, Rochester, Syracuse,
and New York. The valuable material she collected is now being analyzed and
added to the archive at Shaw’s Corner.
The new House Manager, Wendy Adamson, is overseeing further research
into the history of the House, and there are plans to increase the display area
and make the Collection even more accessible for visitors and scholars.
Before coming to Shaw’s Corner in
2008, Sue was manager of a youth project in the North of England. She grew up
in Yorkshire, and moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne on the North East coast. She
worked with young people in Newcastle and with the army in Germany, teaching
mountaineering skills, skiing, sailing, and other outdoor activities aimed at
building self-confidence and fitness.
She organized Tall Ships’ training expeditions, and coached a ladies’
football team, at least one member of which went on to play for England. She was an enthusiastic traveler herself and
on a visit to Peru met her ex-husband Eddie, a talented musician from Cusco.
They had two sons, Gerry and Luke, who both share their mother’s love of the
outdoors and their father’s talent for music.
During her years running Shaw’s
Corner, Sue set about sorting and identifying the vast collection of Shavian
material dispersed throughout the House. She negotiated and helped
supervise a Ph.D. scholarship with the University of Hertfordshire to uncover
hidden treasures at Shaw’s Corner. Alice, now Dr. McEwan, completed her lengthy
thesis and revealed Shaw as a generous, innovative and discerning supporter of
the arts. Sue attended a number of ISS conferences before offering to host an
International Conference in at Ayot St Lawrence. The village church was
transformed into a lecture hall and a marquee in the village field a
hospitality center. It was a huge
success, and Shaw’s Corner became the center of the Shavian world, with Sue
Morgan as the link. Her people skills
helped build links with the local community, and inspire a growing team of
volunteers at the House. She joined
the Shaw Society, wrote a regular column in The Shavian and was a
founder member of the sub-committee that eventually became SHAW2020. Many of
the actor-members of SHAW2020 were introduced via the annual Shaw Festival at
Shaw’s Corner, which Sue supported with great enthusiasm and everybody hopes
will continue.
Sue is buried in the village churchyard at the
Palladian Church at Ayot where Shaw used to play the organ, and where a special
production of Arms and the Man played to capacity audiences only a few
weeks before she died. The funeral was
followed by a Peruvian concert and hog roast behind the church, and over a
hundred people attended. Sue loved her time at Shaw’s Corner and it was her
special wish to be buried nearby. She leaves many friends in the Shavian world
and will be remembered with great affection.
A toast to Sue Morgan (right, bottom), but we didn’t know it at the
time.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Passings (continued)
Stanley Weintraub
(April 17, 1929 - July 28, 2019)
Stanley
Weintraub, author or editor of more than fifty books in biography, culture
history, and military history, died on July 28 in Jennersville,
Pennsylvania. He was 90.
Born “Male Baby
Weintraub” to parents who could not decide between Stanley and Seymour in time
for the birth certificate to be filed and who never bothered to legally change
it once they’d made a decision, Weintraub liked to joke that, after fifty years
as an author, he had truly earned Stanley as his “ballpoint pen name.”
Weintraub
was a National Book Award finalist in 1967 for Beardsley, a 1968
Guggenheim Fellow, and his book Iron Tears (2005) was a finalist for the
George Washington Prize for best book on the nation’s founding era. As a
lieutenant with the Eighth Army in Korea, working as the admissions officer for
a prisoner of war hospital during the Korean War (1951-1953), he was awarded a
Bronze Star and developed the material for his book War in the Wards. At
the Pennsylvania State University, where he began as a teaching assistant and
retired as Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities in 2000, he was
Director of its Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies from 1970 to
1990. Throughout his writing and research career, his wife, Rodelle, was his
most trusted editor and thought partner. In 1982, West Chester University
established an archive of his books and manuscripts as the Rodelle and Stanley
Weintraub Center for the Study of the Arts and Humanities.
Toward the
end of his career, Weintraub fell backwards into a string of Christmas-themed
military histories, a development his children could never have predicted.
Throughout the 1960s, Weintraub’s children had begged their father for a
Christmas Tree, like the Christian families in their neighborhood put up.
Unsuccessful, they developed a new strategy: the children stuck an evergreen
branch into an empty rubber cement bottle, appropriated from their father's
office wastebasket, and hung matchboxes – decorated as miniature facsimiles of
his books – amongst the sprigs. He was charmed, and a tradition began, and
eventually his Christmas books ended up on what his children had long-ago
dubbed the Stanley Tree.
Notable
among his books are Private Shaw and Public Shaw: A Duel Portrait of
Lawrence of Arabia and G. B. S. (1963); Beardsley (1967); Journey
to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw (1971); The London
Yankees: Portraits of American Writers and Artists in London, 1894-1914 (1979);
Victoria: An Intimate Biography (1987); Long Day’s Journey
into War: Pearl Harbor and a World at War, December 7, 1941 (1991); Disraeli:
A Biography (1993); The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II,
July-August 1945 (1995); Uncrowned King: The Life of Prince Albert (1997);
Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2001); General
Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming, December 1783 (2003);
Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire, 1775- 1783 (2005);
11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944 (2006); 15 Stars:
Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall: Three Generals Who Saved the American Century (2007);
General Sherman’s Christmas: Savannah, 1864 (2009); Pearl Harbor
Christmas: A World at War, December 1941 (2011); A Christmas Far from
Home: An Epic Tale of Courage and Survival during the Korean War (2014).
Weintraub
edited Shaw Review, which became SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw
Studies, from 1956 to 1989. He was also editor of Comparative Literature
Studies from 1986 to 1993. As critic, he was a book reviewer for the Wall
Street Journal, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post and [London]
Times Literary Supplement (TLS). He wrote often for MHQ: The Quarterly
Journal of Military History.
Weintraub is
survived by his wife of 65 years, Rodelle; by their three children, Mark
(Judith) of Eugene, Oregon; David (Carie Lee) of
Nashville, Tennessee; and Erica (Bruce) of Pullman, Washington; and by their
eight grandchildren, MaryAlison, Sarah Beth, Sofia,
Jimmy, Hannah, Isaac (Kelly), Benjamin, and Noah.
A memorial
was held on 22 September 2019 in Jennersville, PA,
and the ISS was represented by Bob Gaines, Michel Pharand, and Julie Sparks.
Stan delivering a talk entitled "Shaw's
'The Emperor and the Little Girl' and the Epilogue to Saint Joan" at the 2017 “Shaw at the Shaw” Conference
SHAW
40.1 (June 2020) will include a Weintraub
bibliography (compiled by Michel Pharand updating Fred Crawford’s 1996 list)
and an excerpt from Crawford’s essay entitled “The Dreaded Weintraub” that
appeared in Shaw and Other Matters. A
Festschrift for Stanley Weintraub on the Occasion of His Forty-Second
Anniversary at The Pennsylvania State University, edited by Susan Rusinko (London: Associated U Presses,
1998).
SHAW 40.2, as part of the journal fortieth anniversary commemoration, features a
“pen portrait” on SHAW’s evolution, written by Stan and Michel Pharand in the fall of
2018.
In addition
to the above pieces in SHAW, tributes to Stan will be forthcoming at the
International Shaw Society Website (shawsociety.org); If you would like to
contribute, please send your piece to Chris Wixson at cmwixson@eiu.edu.
Kay Li reports that the ShawBot now
provides access to Stan and Rodelle’s many books and videos at https://sagittarius.apps01.yorku.ca/weintraub/
Michel
Pharand toasts Stan Weintraub at the 2019 Summer Shaw Symposium
Stan was one
of the chief architects and animators of Shaw Studies and profoundly inspired
and influenced generations of Shaw scholars; below, in their own words,
a few ISS members share their memories:
Adieu Stan Weintraub,
our Lodestar
Michel Pharand
A celebration of the
life and achievements of Stanley Weintraub (17 April 1929 – 28 July 2019), one
of our most eminent Bernard Shaw scholars, was held on 22 September 2019 at
Jenner’s Pond Retirement Center in West Grove, Pennsylvania. Approximately
fifty friends, former colleagues, and family members were in attendance.
Speakers included
Stan’s sons David (Vanderbilt University) and Mark (Eugene, Oregon),
International Shaw Society president Bob Gaines (Auburn University at
Montgomery), and former students Mike Lipschutz
(Purdue University), Martin Quinn (retired Foreign Service officer), and myself
(Kingston, Ontario). Familiar themes included Stan’s generosity and mentorship,
his patience and courteousness, and his amazing productivity: some 60 books!
Dozens of slides attested to Stan’s infinite variety as Korean War officer,
distinguished university professor, eminent scholar and prolific author, and as
loving husband, father and grandfather.
After the speeches,
former student Julie Sparks (San Jose State University) joined the attendees at
a wonderful luncheon. This was an opportunity to speak with family members,
including Rodelle Weintraub, who, it should be noted, played a crucial role in
what her husband of some 65 years called his “writing life.” In fact, Stan’s
unpublished memoir is entitled A Writing
Life, which I intend to copyedit and, in due course, submit to a publisher.
We shall not look upon his like again—but his legacy is ongoing.
Stanley Weintraub, in
all he did, in all he was, epitomized his favorite Shaw quotation: “This is the true joy in life, the being used
for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being a force of
nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances
complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
John McInerney
Michel Pharand is right in calling Stan our
“lodestar”. But tonight, as sad and bereft as I feel, I can’t help trying
to explore what that means, as if the search was something I owed to Stan right
now. The images that keep coming to my mind are of Stan the humorist,
entertaining us all with his stories of the very human foibles of the
celebrated people he studied and often knew personally. Whether he was
speaking to an audience, or talking to a few of us, his face would be animated
by barely contained laughter; he enjoyed telling the stories as much as we enjoyed
listening to them. In my experience, his humor was never cutting or dismissive;
it was civilized: knowing, smoothly phrased, tolerant and appreciative of the
frailties common to us all, gentlemanly — like Stan himself. Yes, I think
that’s one part of what made him so special; he seemed to define the term
gentleman in the way he interacted with everyone. And beyond that, when I
think of his astonishing output of books, prefaces, articles and speeches,
ranging from Shaw studies to literary criticism, to biographies and histories,
I think we have to call Stan not just a distinguished “man of letters,” but an
American public intellectual, helping to shape our culture and discourse, doing
for us what Fintan O’Toole does for Ireland.
But what I keep coming
back to is his kindness. Many years ago, as the editor of the old Shaw Review,
he published my first scholarly article, and even the routine correspondence we
had then seemed to be more courteous, more friendly than I expected. That
impression only grew stronger through the years, from all the conversations I
had with him. His manner, the interest he showed in me and what I was
saying, made me forget momentarily that he was a renowned scholar and author,
and I was an aging, relative newcomer to Shaw studies. Well, these
scattered reflections don’t do justice to the special presence Stan brought to
us all, but I couldn’t help trying to put what I’m feeling into words, and I
knew you folks would understand. Thanks for “hearing me out.”
Anne Wright
Stan
was a faithful follower of the Shaw Society as well as a founder of the International
Shaw Society. He founded The Shaw Review, and continued to contribute to
The Shavian as recently as this year. He and his wife Rodelle were often
to be seen at Shaw’s Corner for the Birthday Celebration plays, which they
fitted in to research trips to the UK over several decades; and they were
speakers and guests of honour at the “Shaw at Home
Conference” in 2013. Stan was a meticulous scholar with a prodigious knowledge
of Shaw and even more prodigious memory; he was also a born storyteller and
raconteur, with a sharp wit, flair for irony and sense of humour.
Always immaculately dressed and always deeply courteous, it was a delight to be
in his company. I was privileged to collaborate with him as co-editor of the
Garland Facsimile of the Revised Typescript of Heartbreak House. Stanley
Weintraub is simply one of the Shaw greats, and we all follow gratefully in his
footsteps.
Leonard Conolly, R.F. Dietrich, Suzanne
Merriam, Kay Li,
and the Sagittarius Literature Digitizing Program
Stanley Weintraub was one of the most brilliant scholars of
his or any other generation. He will remain an inspiration for us
all.
Bernard Dukore
As readers
of this newsletter know, Stanley Weintraub’s writings about Shaw and his
editions of Shaw’s writings are prolific and remarkable. I first knew him
professionally over half a century ago when he accepted a novice article of
mine for the Shaw Review, of which he
was editor, which he also was for its successor, SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies. Shavians are grateful for
both. I do not remember when we met—probably a decade or more after my article
appeared in the former. I wish I had got to know him other than professionally.
As it is, I applaud the numerous Shavian works he wrote and edited. At the start
of some of my Shaw projects, I knew I should “consult Weintraub.” After I had
begun others, I sooner or later realized that I had better consult him. I think
“indispensable” is the word for his accomplishments. He is one of the
preeminent Shavian writers.
R.F. Dietrich
The
size of Stanley Weintraub’s writing legacy is what first boggles the mind,
especially when you realize that over half of it was done on
typewriters. One gets the impression that seldom a day went by when he
didn’t get considerable writing done. As a Shaw scholar, I appreciated all the
Shaw work he did, to which I constantly refer, but I’m well aware that only
about half of his books and articles were on Shaw. He was more an historian and
biographer than a literary critic and so covered VIPs and very important events
for their historical value, providing the world some of the best in that line
of scholarship. But never mind the number of books and articles he wrote;
all you need to get a measure of his impact on Shaw Studies is to just count up
the number of references to his works contained in the works of others in Shaw
Studies. Conversely, to get a gauge from the other end, count up how many books
and articles published in Shaw Studies do not have at least one
footnote or endnote citing a Weintraub work; they will be few and far between.
And this phenomenon will go on and on because he provided a bedrock from which
Shaw Studies will continue to live and develop. Stan will be remembered with
much awe and appreciation for many years to come. He was indeed our
“lodestar”.
Julie Sparks
A Debt of Gratitude: Remembering my Doctorvater
I honestly
didn’t know where to begin in preparing this tribute to my Doctorvater--a
man who has given more to my life than any other, excepting only my actual
father. One risks the twin dangers of maudlin excess or hopelessly inadequate
understatement in attempting to express a gratitude of such titanic dimensions.
Still, Stan’s generosity as a teacher and mentor is not as often celebrated as
his brilliance as a writer and researcher, so I will add my tribute on that
theme.
There is a
certain irony in celebrating a Shaw scholar for excellence in teaching, as Shaw
is infamous among some teachers for having written the oft-quoted line: “Those
who can, do: those who cannot, teach.” Sadly, Shaw buried a more positive
statement about teaching in the preface of a much less famous play, Farfetched Fables. Describing the role
of tests in a fictional utopia, Shaw writes, "I avoid calling the tests
examinations because the word suggests the schoolmaster, the enemy of mankind
at present, though when by the rarest chance he happens to be a born teacher,
he is a priceless social treasure" (484).
Although I
certainly don’t want to minimize the importance of literary scholarship, I
would argue that Dr. Weintraub’s greatest professional contribution was his
teaching--the work that made him a “priceless social treasure” to all of us who
were so fortunate as to benefit from his brilliant teaching and the princely
generosity of his mentorship.
This
magnificent benevolence was evident from the first day I met Stan. Unworldly
cub that I was, I had not even written to the great man to say that I had
chosen Penn State primarily because he taught there. Having discovered his Shaw
scholarship during my master's program, I was eager to take his classes. I had
actually announced this motive in my application essay to the department, but I
hadn't thought to warn him that I was coming. Nevertheless, when I presented
myself in his office that morning, he graciously put aside whatever he had been
working on, came out from behind the stacks of paper on his massive rampart of
a desk, and seated himself across from me as if we were already colleagues.
After an intense hour or so of discussion about Shaw, my fall classes (which of
course included his Victorian seminar), and my first impressions of
Pennsylvania, he not only suggested some books for me to start reading--I
believe this is when he gave me a volume of Shaw’s diaries, because I remember
reading it before the rest of my books arrived from California--but he also
offered himself as a character reference to satisfy the apartment manager who
had demanded a co-signer from me that morning.
That
interview set the pattern for our relationship. I did eventually realize the
audacity of my demands on the great man’s time and attention, primarily when my
peers told me how they had to fight for the help and attention from their own
mentors. But with that inimitable blend of Olympian dignity and princely
graciousness, Stan never failed to offer the help and guidance that I needed,
not only through my time at Penn State but for the years that followed, even
when it must have become evident that I was not going to become one of his more
illustrious protégés. This relentless loyalty is the most perfect proof of
Stan’s merit not just as a mentor but as a human being.
In
particular, I will always be grateful for the way Stan helped me even after I
became a dropout. After spending a year wrestling with my dissertation
proposal, I had grown so disillusioned with the academic climate outside the
special kingdom of Dr. Weintraub’s Ihlseng Cottage
that I actually withdrew from the doctoral program as an ABD and fled back to
California. This was one of the lowest points of my life, but it was also the
time when my mentor’s tenacious benevolence really mattered.
He had
already done so much for me--patiently shepherding my earliest scholarly
efforts from seminar paper to conference paper to peer-reviewed journal
article. He and Rodelle even went so far as to let me hitch a ride with them to
Toronto for my first academic conference while patiently listening to me read
my paper aloud and offering encouraging remarks and expert advice. That
apprentice piece and two other articles Stan advised me on were actually
published while I was a grad student, which seemed a stupendous accomplishment
at the time. Still, this wasn’t enough to convince me I had a future in
academia. After five years in the doctoral program, I was just exhausted and
disillusioned by the impression I got from so many others at Penn State that
publishing was our primary role and that teaching was only for those who
couldn’t do scholarship.
Of course,
Stan was disappointed when I bailed out of the doctoral program, but he didn’t
give up on me. Even after I left Penn State, he kept sending me articles
related to my dissertation topic that I “might find interesting,” and he kept
up with my news as I tried other kinds of work. When I told him I was back in
the classroom and had decided to complete my dissertation after all--albeit
from California--he sprang into action, reassembling my dissertation committee
and sending a draft of my second chapter to an editor--who published it!
That was the
encouragement I needed. I bore down and wrote the rest, a chapter a week,
taking advantage of the long winter break at San Jose State, where I was then
teaching. I would send each chapter draft to Stan before turning to the next
one, and he would send back his remarks, suggestions, encouragement--just
exactly the right balance of rigor and kindness to keep me up to the mark and
keep me going. When I had finally finished revising and polishing that
monstrous project in the spring, it seemed fitting that the only date for my
dissertation defense when my whole committee could meet landed on the day
before Stan’s 70th birthday bash. Finishing my dissertation and passing the
defense was a meager recompense for all that my mentor had done for me, but I
was able to offer it up as a sort of birthday present that year.
Odd as this
might sound, I know I would have never finished my dissertation if I hadn’t
felt so deeply that my mentor deserved that tribute to his own hard work, and I
don’t believe I would have continued to pursue a university teaching
career--exhausting and impoverishing as that continued to be for me-- if I
hadn’t had his example before me of what a “priceless social treasure” a great
teacher can be.
Since
leaving Penn State, I have taught in less illustrious institutions out in the
provinces, mostly with students who were significantly less well prepared for
their studies than my Penn State students had been, but that made me all the
more determined to invite them to the grand intellectual feast Stan had spread
for his students. Whether they were ready for Weintraubian
rigor or not, I have always tried to give them the sort of hard work and
generosity that I received from my mentor.
I still use
Stan’s Portable Shaw anthology and
even some of his study questions when I teach Shaw now to the brainy,
Harvard-bound students I tutor in my semi-retirement. In this role, I have
really come to appreciate what Stan demonstrated in all of his dealings with
me--that the most important, impactful work of teaching happens not in the
lecture hall, nor even in the seminar room, but in conversations we have
one-on-one, mentor to apprentice. For the rest of my career, I will continue to
pay my debt of gratitude for having once been Stan's apprentice.
John Pfeiffer
My
testimonial is entitled “Bernard Shaw Studies and the particular immanence of
Stanley Weintraub” and knit with a singular refrain: “Another of Stan’s
students.” By most fortunate and mystifying (hence, “immanence”) default,
without ever sitting in his classroom, I became one of them.
In 1971, while still a member of
the USAF Air Force Academy English Department, I was offered the opportunity to
author “A Continuing Checklist of Shaviana,” then published as an installment
three times a year in Stanley Weintraub’s The Shaw Review (SR). The
invitation came through a then senior Academy English Department colleague, Lt.
Col. Michael Mendelsohn—himself a life-long Shavian and a member of the SR
editorial board. Stan, as he did many others whom he invited to the society of
Shaw studies, shepherded me and encouraged me as he continued to edit SR
and then SHAW: The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, which debuted in
1981, wherein the “Checklist” continued to appear annually. As the years
followed, the length of the Checklist increased—from three and a half pages in
eight-point font and three editorial sections to its iterations in 2012, 2013,
and 2014 of as many as forty pages in eight subject sections. The incomparable
Stan would send me Checklist nominations during my forty-two years of writing
it. Richard Winslow, another of Stan’s students, grown older with the rest of
us, sent enough potential entries over the years that a byline for him as a
special contributor to the Checklist was often warranted.
Soon enough, Stan wanted to
surrender his role as SHAW editor. He did so by enlisting the acceptance
of it by his brilliant student, Dr. Fred Crawford, who, after ten years (1989-1999)
as editor, passed away suddenly and too soon. Fred’s wife MaryAnn Crawford
filled in as a very able substitute editor for a few years, after which Michel
Pharand, also one of Stan’s students, agreed to take over as editor.
For forty-two years, in my
formal association with the Shaw periodicals with each event of publication, I
was identified as “Bibliographer” in its credits. Stan proliferated this
allegation of important scholarship that I was credited with by including my
name not only on the Shaw journals’ title pages but also by making me a member
of the editorial board of the Shaw journals in the listings of the publishers
that produced journals for other authors and related scholarly forums. The
result was to accord me an international recognition for importance to Shaw
scholarship. Without Stan as my advocate, none of this would have happened.
By the most fortunate default,
then, without ever sitting in his classroom, I became another of Stan’s
students.
Dorothy Hadfield
I have two favourite memories of Stan.
One I suspect I share with many Shavians: the occasion of his paper on Shaw's
music criticism at the Ayot Conference in 2013. Watching him on the stage in
the stately Palladian Church, fighting back the giggles while reading excerpts
from Shaw--he might have been successful, except that the audience, seeing his
struggle, amplified the hilarity of the situation, until the whole room
collapsed into the kind of laughter that brings tears streaming down everyone's
face. It was a profoundly communal, Shavian moment.
My
other favourite memory is from one of the first times
I met him, when he induced me to deface a library book. I believe it was
the ISS Confererence at Brown in 2006. It was my
first conference, and I was more than a little awed to be in the company of so
many people whose names were on the books on my shelves and the entries on my
Works Cited pages. Early in the conference, I found myself walking in a group
that included the Weintraubs. The group started to dissipate into smaller
clusters, and I eventually found myself walking with just Stan and Rodelle.
Like some idiotic starstruck teenager, I started to
gush about how honoured I was to meet them, and how
important their scholarship was, and how much I admired them...
Stan
didn't let me go on long before he interjected to point out that he didn't
always get things right. He said that in Journey to Heartbreak, there
was an anecdote about Shaw and Charlotte sending a care package to
Robert Loraine during the war. Charlotte had been advised by men returning from
the front to send "bromo paper." Stan
couldn't determine what "bromo paper" was
and, knowing that Loraine was an avid photographer, decided it must be a
reference to "bromide paper," a fast-printing photographic
stock. He included a footnote explaining that for readers.
Then
he flashed one of those wicked twinkling smiles, and said that he had
since learned that "bromo paper" was a
high-quality toilet paper. He wished that he could correct that footnote on
every copy of the book in circulation, and suggested I should also take up the
crusade. Rodelle crossly told him he shouldn't be asking me to wander through
libraries writing in books, but I promised him I would look up the copy in
the University of Guelph library when I got back home. That steered the
conversation to the superb Shaw collections in the L.W. Conolly Theatre
archives at Guelph, and from there to other topics related to Shaw. It
wasn't until later that I appreciated how kindly and effortlessly Stan had put
me at ease and made me feel like a colleague.
Since
then, if you open the U of Guelph library copy of Journey to Heartbreak to
page 80, you might see my handwriting under a printed footnote about
photographic bromide paper, explaining that “bromo
paper” is actually a type of toilet paper. When I managed to buy my own copy of
the book a few years ago, I made the same correction. I'm sure Stan would be
pleased if every Shavian with access to a copy of that book would do
likewise.
A.M. Gibbs
When I was working
on my first book on Shaw in the late 1960s, a friend told me that I had “a
rival” in Shaw studies in America. I already knew in fact that I had several
not exactly rivals but superiors in the field in that country. It took me a
while to ascertain that the rival referred to was a chap named Stanley
Weintraub, who was then well on his way to becoming one of the leading Shaw
scholars in the world. It also took me some time to discover the extraordinary
range of Weintraub’s interests and achievements. He was not only a Shaw expert;
he was also a Queen Victoria expert (and quite an authority on the love life of
her son Edward VII), a Disraeli expert, a Lawrence of Arabia expert, a Golding,
Whistler, and Beardsley expert and a writer on an amazing number of other
subjects. Stan had a great knack for thinking up good titles such as Journey
to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw and Private Shaw and
Public Shaw. His writing was punchy and confident with characteristic
touches of humour and dramatic revelation.
A scholarly work of his that I, along with
countless others, have been greatly indebted to was his two-volume edition of
Shaw’s early diaries. Together with the copious notes supplied by Weintraub,
these volumes contain one of the most important primary sources of information
about Shaw’s life and associations in early manhood. This work alone would have
been enough to establish the editor as an outstanding contributor to Shaw
scholarship. D1 and D2, abbreviations for the first and second volume, are two
of the most frequently employed references in the early sections of my A
Bernard Shaw Chronology.
The notes to Shaw’s Diaries are a goldmine.
When I met Stanley at an International Shaw Society conference at Brown
University in 2006, I remember discussing with him, among other things, one of
his notes about a diary entry on 8 November 1894 that records a parting of the
ways in his relationship with Florence Farr. The rather cryptic entry was the
single German word “Trennung” (separation, parting).
Weintraub’s note makes the to me completely convincing suggestion that Shaw was
alluding to two lieder by Brahms that carry the word “Trennung”
in their titles. One of the lieder (“Muss es eine Trennung geben”)
ends with the passionate cry: “Secretly my heart is breaking.” Shaw was very
critical of Brahms in his early music criticism, expressing views that he later
described as silly. But, in his 1894 diary entry, the Brahms allusion perhaps
underlines the painfulness of this moment in one of Shaw’s most significant
relationships with women in his early London days.
Stanley’s marriage to Rodelle was also a fine
literary partnership. Rodelle is a distinguished contributor to Shaw studies,
and her collection of essays Fabian Feminist: Shaw and Woman was a groundbreaking
and timely book. Future conferences of the International Shaw Society will be
the poorer without the presence of the Weintraub duo, as indeed will be the
whole community of Shaw scholars after the loss of Stanley.
Michel Pharand
Stanley Weintraub, Mentor
On the afternoon of Monday 23 August 1982, having
trucked through the Appalachian Mountains from Ottawa, Canada, I arrived at the
town of State College, nestled in the Nittany Valley
and adjacent to The Pennsylvania State University, where I was to begin a Ph.D.
in Comparative Literature. Truth be told, I hadn’t chosen Penn State in order
to study under the renowned Stanley Weintraub: my then wife had been accepted
as a grad student in the Philosophy department. Moreover—I now blush to admit—I
had no idea Stan was at Penn State or, for that matter . . . who he was.
That quickly changed.
Everyone, I soon discovered, knew who Stanley Weintraub was: distinguished
(and, according to some, daunting) Professor of English, Director of the
Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies, and prolific author of
biographical and critical studies of everyone from Beardsley and Whistler to
the Rossettis and Shaw.
If I recall, our
paths did not cross immediately, as the Comparative Literature department was
in stately Burrowes Building (home to the Liberal
Arts), while Stan’s office was in the Institute, housed in little Ihlseng Cottage, an 1898
faculty residence first occupied by one Magnus Ihlseng,
Dean of the School of Mines. However, I’d see Stan on Tuesdays at the ‘Comp. Lit.
luncheons’, a series of weekly talks (still ongoing) that he unfailingly
attended. When it came time for questions, one could always tell what he
thought of the lecture. If he hadn’t liked it: silence. If he had, he was always
the very first to raise his hand.
Stan was a barometer
of scholarly merit—which of course in my eyes made him all the more daunting.
The consensus among grad students was ‘Don’t waste his time’.
We were eventually
introduced and not long afterwards he agreed to become my official dissertation
advisor. In due course, I took his Shaw seminar. I’d cycle to campus, park in
front of Burrowes and then walk up the little hill
near Pattee Library to Ihlseng
Cottage for his 8:30 a.m. class.
I was probably Stan’s
least troublesome advisee, as I afforded him very few opportunities to actually
advise me. I certainly didn’t waste his time.
I used my courses and
their required readings and essays,
as well as my own teaching (one course per semester) and grading, as a
rationale not to work on my dissertation. Hence my infrequent trips to the Cottage,
where Stan’s office door was always open. On those rare occasions when I dared
show up, he’d raise his head from his work (or stop typing) and ask, in a
cordial but no-nonsense way, “What do you have for me?” I usually had precious
little “copy” (as Stan called it) to show for myself.
So for quite some
time I remained a most elusive advisee and did my best to avoid running into
“Dr. Weintraub.” I’d take the stairs in Burrowes
rather than the elevator; I’d arrive late to the Comp. Lit. luncheons, sit at
the back and sneak out early before he caught my eye. Before too long, however,
I retrieved from my Comp. Lit. pigeon-hole mailbox a little envelope containing
a small typed note, on Institute letterhead, which read as follows:
Dear Michel,
Shouldn’t you be
visiting me for some reason or other?
Stan
I can’t recall if
those dozen words—with their understated urgency—galvanized me into going up to
the Institute bearing a few pages of copy.
The inertia stemming
from my trademark perfectionism and procrastination was compounded by my
dissertation topic, which was absurdly wide-ranging: “Myth and Morals on the Modern Stage: Cultural
Ethics in the Theatre of France, England, and the United States from 1918 to
the 1980s.” After over a year of roaming the Pattee
Library stacks, ordering books from the interlibrary loan service, accumulating a
mountain of photocopies and compiling an interminable bibliography of books and
articles I swore up and down I would actually consult one day, it became clear
that I was floundering—and would soon be foundering.
This was also clear
to Stan, who—ever pragmatic—saved the day by suggesting, in another typed memo,
“a quick fix to your dissertation problem”: why not expand the paper I’d
written (on Shaw and Eugène Brieux1) for
his seminar and add other French individuals and themes? Stan not only provided
me with the necessary focus: he may have prevented me from being deported.
(That is not
hyperbole. Every year I was required to update my ‘foreign student’ status at
the Penn State International Student Office, where I would complete the
requisite paperwork extending my visa yet another year. While Stan waited
patiently for copy, I was trying the American government’s patience: being told
to leave the country became likelier with every passing year.)
But at long last,
thanks to Stan’s “fix” (and forbearance), I managed to complete my
dissertation, the grandiloquently-titled “French Thought in the Life and Works
of George Bernard Shaw: Influences and Affinities.”2 My committee
had copy, finally.
On 3 December 1989,
Stan and Rodelle held a reception for my external adviser at their lovely
Harris Acres home. “I went downstairs for the first time into S’s brightly-lit,
book-covered den,” I wrote in my journal. “He is such a very practical man: no ‘ambience’ or lamps or cozy
Victorian couch or anything at all for ‘comfort’. All of it was geared to work, and he is a veritable workaholic.”
The following morning,
at the large seminar table in Ihlseng Cottage, seven
long years after crossing the Appalachians, I defended my dissertation.
“Weintraub was superb,” I wrote that midnight, “and helped me through the
sticky situations.”
Five months later, on
12 May 1990, at graduation in Eisenhower Auditorium, diploma finally in hand, I
took my seat beside Stan, who turned to me and said, “We’ve both got Ph.D.s from the same place: call me Stan.” That was a
watershed moment for me.
*
* *
During my last few years
at Penn State, while I was busy not writing my dissertation, Stan was busy
writing a biography of Benjamin Disraeli. In March of 1990, shortly before I
graduated, I found, in a second-hand bookstore in New York City, a colored
engraving of Disraeli.3 I had it framed and duly presented it to
Stan as a token of thanks for his mentorship. Little did I know that many years
later Disraeli’s biographer would change the course of my professional (and
geographical) life.
In 2006, while I was
teaching at Kobe University, I received an email from Mel Wiebe, the director
of the Disraeli Project, a small research unit at Queen’s University in
Kingston, Ontario, dedicated to editing and annotating Disraeli’s letters for
publication by the University of Toronto Press. Recently retired, Mel was
looking for a successor, and he told me that I came highly recommended by Stan,
who many years earlier had visited the Project to research his Disraeli
biography. Unbeknownst to me, Stan had subsequently written to Mel to inquire
if there were any jobs at Queen’s for his recently-doctored advisee (then
teaching in a small college in upstate New York). Mel had somehow retrieved
that letter from his voluminous files.
And so it was that,
thanks to Stan, I returned to Canada in 2007 to reinvent myself as editor of
Benjamin Disraeli’s extensive correspondence, with on-the-job training in the
intricacies of nineteenth-century British political and parliamentary history.4
* * *
Stan and I remained
in close touch over the years despite my frequent relocations, which took me
from Canton (New York) to Toronto, Osaka, Ottawa, Columbia (South Carolina),
Sapporo, Kobe (where Mel found me), and Kingston. I saw Stan and Rodelle at
various Shaw conferences—at Brown University, Catholic University of America,
Fordham University, the Shaw Festival at Niagara-on-the-Lake, Shaw’s Corner at
Ayot St Lawrence—and I was their houseguest in Harris Acres, where I attended
Stan’s seventieth-birthday celebration, then in Newark, Delaware, and more
recently at Jenner’s Pond in West Grove, Pennsylvania. On more than one
occasion we shared gin martinis.
While I was busy
teaching hither and yon, Stan was busy publishing book after book—after book. A
few years ago, however, he wrote to tell me that his literary agent had “gone
AWOL” (as he put it). As Stan was growing increasingly frustrated with “my
delinquent agent,” I offered to act as his unofficial literary agent. That’s
what I called myself when I emailed publishers on his behalf; in my emails to
Stan, I was his “secret agent.” I think he enjoyed that.
I did manage to find
a publisher for The Recovery of
Palestine, 1917: Jerusalem for Christmas, which appeared in 2017. That was Stan’s last published book. My copy is inscribed, “As I get older, my
books get smaller.” At 140 pages, that may well be his shortest book; his
longest is likely The Last Great Victory:
The End of World War II, July / August 1945 (1995), which weighs in at 730
pages.5
Over the last few
years, I’ve been trying to place his latest MS, Deadlock: FDR and Charles de
Gaulle, 1940-1945.
I say
‘latest’ and not ‘last’ because on 20 November 2018, Stan sent me the following
email:
My only
continuing project is my memoir, which is ‘done’ in draft, but no prospect of a
publisher. My “agent” doesn’t even respond to my mention of A WRITING
LIFE. It is long, and could be longer. … I keep toying with it as memories
resurface. … I’ve concluded as of my 90th year, as some closure is
necessary.
I spent a
few weeks in November 2019 copyediting “A Writing Life”—over 460 typed
pages—and will try to get it into print in 2020. It’s a fascinating
behind-the-scenes look at a very long and very productive life of travels and
encounters, research and writing. As I told Stan’s son David, working on his
father’s memoir “has only increased my already-considerable admiration
for his accomplishments.”
Now, one can’t discuss the accomplishments of
Stan’s writing life without mentioning, and thanking, Rodelle Weintraub. “Every
writer needs a good editor,” Stan once wrote, “and I had prudently married
one.” Throughout his writing life, spanning some six decades, Rodelle was by
his side as research assistant and invaluable editor—and indeed as travel
agent, no small feat given their countless journeys. She orchestrated and
streamlined Stan’s writing life and was indispensable to its amazing legacy of
over sixty books. (The dedication to Charlotte
and Lionel. A Rothschild Love Story (2003) reads “For Rodelle—my
Charlotte.” That speaks volumes.)
All Shaw scholars owe Stan a tremendous debt
of gratitude for his scholarly legacy. We’ve used his books
in our research. We’ve quoted him in our own books and articles. We’ve thanked
him in our ‘Acknowledgments’ sections and in our footnotes. Stan’s legacy,
therefore, comprises not only his numerous
works, but our own.
And that is exactly how Stan would want to be
remembered: as the impetus to ongoing scholarship. Because above all else,
Stan, who was gracious to a fault and always so generous with his time, wanted to be helpful, to be useful. That was one of his favorite
words. Over the years, he’d send me a review or an article bearing a little
yellow sticky note that read “This might be useful” or “Can you use this?” And
he’d often tell me—and countless others—“Let me know how I can be useful.”
I count myself immensely fortunate to have
made full use of Stanley Weintraub: of his mentorship, his friendship, his
counsel, his wisdom.
And for all that, Stan, I remain truly
grateful.
* * *
The first and third sections
of this (revised and expanded) text were read at the Shaw Symposium in
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, on 15 August 2019, and at a memorial celebration
of Stanley Weintraub’s life in West Grove, Pennsylvania, on 22 September 2019.
Notes
1. Stan published that paper, my first-ever ‘scholarly
publication’, in SHAW: The Annual of
Bernard Shaw Studies in 1988. A second milestone that year was my
transition from IBM Selectric typewriter to Macintosh
Plus computer. Without it I might never have finished my dissertation.
2. Tripled in length after archival research, it was
published in 2000 under the less pompous title Bernard Shaw and the French. In it I thank Stan, “like Shaw an
undaunted pragmatist, for over a decade of generous guidance and invaluable
advice.”
3. The engraving, of an older Benjamin Disraeli
(1804–81), is from the ca. 1878 portrait by famous London studio photographers
W. & D. Downey. Stan used it to illustrate the back dust jacket cover of
his Disraeli (1993). (The first UK edition
used it as its front cover image.) Stan was equally gracious with other gifts.
A photograph of the 1914 Princess Mary Christmas brass gift box I gave him
while he was researching Silent
Night. The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914 (2001) is included
in the book, and a page from the Illustrated London News of 20 October
1860—reproducing an engraving of “His Royal Highness Descending a Timber-Slide
at Ottawa,” which I gave Stan on his seventieth birthday—is reproduced in Edward
the Caresser. The Playboy Prince Who Became Edward VII (2001).
4. I worked at the Disraeli Project from September
2007 until November 2015, when Queen’s closed it down due to insufficient
funding.
5. Close
runners-up include Disraeli. A Biography (1993)
at 717 pages, Long Day’s Journey into
War. December 7, 1941 (1991) at 706 pages, and Victoria. An Intimate Biography (1987) at 700 pages.
GALLERY A
Shaw
Symposium
Niagara-on-the-Lake,
Ontario, August 15-17, 2019
Design by
Punch & Judy Inc. --- a small design studio operated by Scott McKowen and Christina Poddubiuk
in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. https://punchandjudy.ca/
Keynote: A Conversation with Tanja Jacobs
[Shaw
Festival Ensemble Member and Director of Getting Married]
ISS Vice President Jennifer Buckley Interviews Keynote Speaker Tanja Jacobs
GALLERY B
– SYMPOSIUM PANELS
Symposium Welcomes from ISS President Robert Gaines
and Vice President Jennifer Buckley
Panel #1
Yulia Skalnaya
"’To Sleep, Perchance
to Dream…’: Dream Realm in Shaw’s
John McInerney
“The Disconnect between the Comic Plot and Juvenalian
Satire on Man and Superman”
Lisa Robertson
“’Vanitas Vanitatum’:
Revolutionary Individualism in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman
and Margaret Harkness’s George Eastmont, Wanderer”
Richard Dietrich, “Man and Roboman or The Secret
Co-Author of Man and Superman”
Featured Event: Kay Li demonstrates the Shaw Bot
Panel #2
Justine
Zapin
“Ghosts,
Part 2 or Getting Married”
Vishnu Patil
“Reality of the Virtual in Getting Married”
Sharon Klassan, “Should This
Couple Get Married?”
Featured Event: A Workshop
on Performing Shaw with Shaw Festival Company Member Graeme Somerville
Panel
#3
Barbara
Inglese “Italian and French Opera
Allusions in Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, and Man and
Superman”
Hisashi
Morikawa “Man and Superman:
First Part of the Shavian Ring Cycle”
Brigitte
Bogar, “The Sound of Music in Man and Superman”
Featured Event:
A
post-performance discussion, following Man and Superman (including “Don
Juan in Hell”)
ENTR’ACTE
Our Newest Shavian Enraptured by
Panel Presentations --- Brigitte Bogar and Victoria
GALLERY
C MISCELLANEOUS
An
Impromptu Meeting of the (mostly) North American members of
the
Bernard Shaw Society of Japan in Niagara-on-the-Lake, 2019
Suzanne
Merriam and Jennifer Buckley, in charge
Great Minds…..
Jean Reynolds, Bob
Gaines, Christa Zorn, and Mary Christian at the Comparative Drama Conference