FROM THE ARCHIVES:G A Olden reviewed a BBC radio show entitled Bernard Shaw in Ireland by Belfast-born poet and broadcaster W R Rodgers as part of a series on Irish literary figures. – JOE JOYCE
IT MUST have been the most difficult of these [programmes] to arrange, for Rodgers and his colleagues were up against formidable problems from the start. The greatest of these was that, since Shaw left Ireland virtually for good in 1875, there are precious few people still living who remember anything of him in his Dublin days.
Of the many contributors to the feature, only Prof Tyrrell’s widow, who is now almost a centenarian, had first-hand knowledge of the clean-shaven gangling youth, with red hair severely parted, who eighty years ago shook the dust of his native city from his heels to set off (with rare courage and comical self-assurance) to conquer London. It was, you may remember, only after an attack of smallpox, contracted during the years when he was living on his mother in the London suburbs, that he sprouted the satanic Barbarossa which became his most valuable stage property.
“He was a very nice little boy,” mused Mrs Tyrrell; “Sonny, they used to call him.” Mr. Seán MacRéamoinn spoke of interviewing a Mr. Meegan, who used to live near Dalkey when the Shaws rented Torca Cottage. “We used to call him ‘Bullock Soup,’” was Mr. Meehan’s quaint contribution to the proceedings. Nobody quoted Shaw’s own later life comment on his appearance in those days: “I was just twenty years old and an arrant prig.”
Some of the other speakers, such as Lord Glenavy, had met or entertained Shaw on his rare visits to Ireland in the present century. But these visits were of little value for the purposes of this feature. Once Shaw had established himself his “act” in Ireland was no different from his deportment anywhere else. It is those first twenty years of his long, contentious life that must have done much to make him what he was.
For the rest, too many contributors supplied facts shamelessly garnered from “Sixteen Self Sketches” and the 1929 Preface to “Immaturity.” In these two books Shaw set down all that he could remember-or, perhaps, cared to recall-of his early life in Ireland.
All this is not to say that the feature was boring. Far from it! Seldom have so many distinguished men talked as freely or so well on the air, but hardly any fresh light was thrown on the picture of “Bernard Shaw in Ireland”. We could have done with more of Dr. [Oliver] Gogarty, who made no bones of his dislike of Shaw. (For his part, Shaw rather unfairly dismissed Gogarty’s conversational wit as “Dublin persiflage.”) Nor was there much of Mr. Seán O’Casey, who said of Shaw’s plays, in his sad and surly way, “there is poetry in many of them, emotion in most of them, and, of course, wit and the play of intellect in all of them. He will be remembered for ever.” It was a generous epitaph from the older man’s only serious rival among Irish playwrights.
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