Books in Brief

Mrs. G.B.S.: A Portrait, by Janet Dunbar (Harper, $5.95). To know the real man, some suggest a talk with his valet. To get George Bernard Shaw in focus, I recommend reading this book. Its author has spent discriminating hours with the letters and papers left by Mrs. Shaw, and what is given us here is a picture of the master propagandist which dissolves the veneer. And she does it by letting her subjects speak for themselves —always a welcome device. They reveal a “Mrs. G.B.S.” (Charlotte Payne-Townshend of Irish Protestant gentry) whose enthusiasms invite close reading even before she has met Shaw. But perhaps the most fascinating insights come from the disciplined pen of Beatrice Webb: “Silly, these phi-landerings of Shaw. He imagines that he gets to know women by making them fall in love with him. . . . But in fact it is not the end he cares for. It is the process. Was Charlotte a “process”? Shaw himself wrote: “I realize that there were many parts of her character that even I did not know, for she poured out her soul to [T. E.] Lawrence.” W. H. VON DREELE

The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture, by Eric Fromm (Holt, $3.95). The long title essay is a translation of a tract, written in the thirties, that re-interpreted the liberal theology of the turn of the century in such a way that Marx’s proletariat, suffering Freud’s Oedipal drives, produces Harnack’s dogmas. Like all servants of a mechanical theory of man, Fromm makes everything fit—except Everything. The Christian belief in a human Son of God is presented as the Hebrews’ way of displacing the repressive father figure of Jehovah. We are told that Christianity was based not on love, but on hatred of Jehovah in all his manifestations—in the Old Law (which Christ observed and described himself as fulfilling) ; in the Roman rulers (yet Christ was friendly to Roman soldiers, and expressed admiration for a centurian); in tax-gatherers (yet one evangelist was a tax-gatherer, and Christ taught the duty of paying taxes); in Pharisees (yet Nicodemus and Paul came from that sect). Fromm ignores most of the inconvenient evidence, and explains the rest by saying that the Christians’ hatred was not expressed in direct revolutionary ways, but in revenge fantasies of a Last Judgment and Heaven where they would triumph over their enemies. Yet such fantasy satisfactions are rebuked as frequently in the Gospels as is the direct politicizing of the Kingdom (cf. Matt. 20.20-8, 24.36 and 42, Mark 10.35-45, 13.32, Luke 10.17-20, 22.24-34). The book makes one feel it would be much more pleasant to live, like the ancient Hebrews, in fear of Jehovah than to be a modern psychologist doing obsessive battle with omnipresent “father-figures.” G. WILLS

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Mrs. G.B.S.: A Portrait, by Janet Dunbar (Harper, $5.95). To know the real man, some suggest a talk with his valet. To get George Bernard Shaw in focus, I recommend reading this book. Its author has spent discriminating hours with the letters and papers left by Mrs. Shaw, and what is given us here is a picture of the master propagandist which dissolves the veneer. And she does it by letting her subjects speak for themselves —always a welcome device. They reveal a “Mrs. G.B.S.” (Charlotte Payne-Townshend of Irish Protestant gentry) whose enthusiasms invite close reading even before she has met Shaw. But perhaps the most fascinating insights come from the disciplined pen of Beatrice Webb: “Silly, these phi-landerings of Shaw. He imagines that he gets to know women by making them fall in love with him. . . . But in fact it is not the end he cares for. It is the process. Was Charlotte a “process”? Shaw himself wrote: “I realize that there were many parts of her character that even I did not know, for she poured out her soul to [T. E.] Lawrence.” W. H. VON DREELE

The Dogma of Christ and Other Essays on Religion, Psychology and Culture, by Eric Fromm (Holt, $3.95). The long title essay is a translation of a tract, written in the thirties, that re-interpreted the liberal theology of the turn of the century in such a way that Marx’s proletariat, suffering Freud’s Oedipal drives, produces Harnack’s dogmas. Like all servants of a mechanical theory of man, Fromm makes everything fit—except Everything. The Christian belief in a human Son of God is presented as the Hebrews’ way of displacing the repressive father figure of Jehovah. We are told that Christianity was based not on love, but on hatred of Jehovah in all his manifestations—in the Old Law (which Christ observed and described himself as fulfilling) ; in the Roman rulers (yet Christ was friendly to Roman soldiers, and expressed admiration for a centurian); in tax-gatherers (yet one evangelist was a tax-gatherer, and Christ taught the duty of paying taxes); in Pharisees (yet Nicodemus and Paul came from that sect). Fromm ignores most of the inconvenient evidence, and explains the rest by saying that the Christians’ hatred was not expressed in direct revolutionary ways, but in revenge fantasies of a Last Judgment and Heaven where they would triumph over their enemies. Yet such fantasy satisfactions are rebuked as frequently in the Gospels as is the direct politicizing of the Kingdom (cf. Matt. 20.20-8, 24.36 and 42, Mark 10.35-45, 13.32, Luke 10.17-20, 22.24-34). The book makes one feel it would be much more pleasant to live, like the ancient Hebrews, in fear of Jehovah than to be a modern psychologist doing obsessive battle with omnipresent “father-figures.” G. WILLS