COLUMBIA
LIBRARY
COLUMNS
 

How G. B. Shaw Destroyed
His Irish Biographer

DANIEL J. LEARY

yN June 28, 1922, George Bernard Shaw wrote to Thomas
Demetrius O'Bolger, a professor of English at the Uni¬
versity of Pennsylvania and a would-be Shavian biog¬
rapher, as follows:

Your view of my marriage is that it was an expedient to safeguard my
mother's old age. Even if that were so, you could hardly expect me to
sanction a statement to that effect on mv authoritv during my wife's
lifetime, or indeed afterwards. You are amazinglv stupid about such
delicacies; hence all your difficulties in this very delicate job.*

The "difficulties" to which Shaw refers extend over a dozen years
and they cast a revealing and rather unflattering light on the
dramatist.

The two men had been in communication at least since 1910.
According to Stanley Weintraub "the two never met" though
another Shaw scholar, B. C. Rosset in Shaw of Dublin: The Form¬
ative Years (University Park, Pcnn., 1964), does quote O'Bolger
as saying that he was personally acquainted with Shaw to "a slight

* Quotations from letters dealing with the O'Bolgcr-Shaw relationship, unless
otherwise indicated, arc from tlic iJritish Aluseum, MS 50565. For permission to
quote from this manuscript, we arc grateful to the Public Trustee of the Shaw
Estate and The Society of Authors.
 

3