Judge — November 14, 1931 — page 27: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUDGING““ BOOKS B all means get “Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw—An Intimate Cor- respondence,” but don’t expect to use it as a model for your letters to your own personal sweetie. For, before he is a man, old Spinach-and-Whiskers Shaw is a literary fellow and believes in the efficacy of the written word over the deed. We vulgar chaps and red-lipped lassies hold to the oppo- site—at least we do, Thus, from this very erudite, delightful and yoluble correspondence (the length, breadth and thickness of which must have broken at least half a dozen sturdy British postmen’s backs toting around) you gather that in the 90s Shaw fell quite in love with the love- ly Rosetti lady, and instead of telling her about it he told her about almost everything else in the world. She would get a (typical) letter from the Old Beaver explaining to her what a muckraker Shakespeare turned out to be and what a great chappie he (Shaw) was underneath the whiskers and she would write back that dear, clever Mr. Shaw was the bestest, wis- est old Mr, Mans in the world. Trans- lated into the language you and I and sweet cutie at Miss Chapin’s hool would use, his passionate let- meant “How about a date tonight, kidd but naturally Miss Terry, who was a sweet trick and not a mind reader, could only take him at his word, absorb his wisdom and have not the faintest idea that he wanted her to go off to some night club with him and down a few. And so on for about 700 pages, chockful of lots of wisdom but very little Mac West. However, in all fairness to the old Shaw evidently didn’t want ns to rise into the carnal In his preface to the book he goes to terrific pains to clean up any doubt that might spring up in your mind that his intentions weren't of the most honorable. He also gocs so far as to say that the great loves of this world are fought—beg pardon— worked out on paper, and do you re- member Dante and Beatrice? He was making love, in other words, for pos- terity’s and wisdom’s sake and not for the lady's. (Or maybe he didn’t like to have his whiskers mussed.) Shaw saw Miss Terry exactly three in his whole life, and tho Miss T. must have felt some vague, deep emo- tion for Shaw, much as a sweet stu- dent creature feels for a lovable, owl- ish professor, the heat ran out of their letters ina few years. In her old age Miss Terry wrote Shaw, begging him to do something fearless about the sparing of stage animals! class. It is, we reiterate, an inexhaustible, charming, informal encyclopwdia of a book. Shaw's insight into, and criti- cism of, his and Miss Terry’s mutual associates is remarkably” brilliant. Despite the general preface-to- plays tone to his letters, you learn a little more about him than you ready know (which is plenty, thanks to his press-agent habits). There is much that is amusing and informative about the turn of the century. Miss Terry’s letters manage a charm of their own, despite the fact Shaw made ber a moon to his sun. To return to the problem of you readers who may want a model for letters to their own Sweet Potato- Pies. The Shane-La Church letters will be published soon, a monument to the great natural love between a great critic and a chorus girl you may have seen in the Brothers Minsky’s “Vera Clean from Wash., D, C.” V J ® wish we could find out. why is Edna Ferber? Acknowledged hot stuff by the customers, her work, like that of the Dolly Sisters, has a charm that eludes us. We'd let it go at that, only once upon a time Edna-girl for- got herself and telegraphed our em- ployer that we were a moron. And being called a moron by an author, the printing of whose every new work required 1,700 gallons of oil a minute to keep the presses from overheating, ga s an inferiority complex like a rabbit ve've always, from that moment on, felt there must be a sub- tle power behind Miss Ferber our moronity couldn’t encompass. Not that our fear enabled us to finish a book of hers, but then we've never been able to finish the Koran, and at's a good book, too. So we read at Miss Ferber’s “Ame| and found it a hack epic of Connecticut life by a writer whose sole claim to the right to fashion Am n epics lies in a dinary imagination, a facile m style and the fact she knows how to t a novel out of an old land deed. The Homeric idea behind “American Beauty” is to envision the tremen- at work behind New En- ization and ponder with a god-like ponderer over the fact that the pure American stock has given way to the pure Polack, and what a hell of a note that is. 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