Even Shaw nodded
I've been asked today about the term 'Shavian', and why this curious adjective is used to describe Shaw-like char- acteri- stics (or, in its noun form, admirers of Shaw). The term is a of 'Shaw' (from Shavius), and is pronounced 'Shave Ian'. But that merely explains its origins. Why prefer this term to the more obvious 'Shawian'? Indeed, given Shaw's disparagement of the Roman-English alphabet and its logical and phonetic inconsistencies, wouldn't Shawian be more Shavian?
In any case, and continuing the Latin theme, I can't resist reproducing one of my favourite portraits of Shaw -- Augustus John's , which is titled 'When Homer Nods: Portrait of George Bernard Shaw, 1915'.
The literary reference here is, of course, to the Latin poet Horace (65-8 B.C.), who famously wrote: 鈥淪ometimes even the noble Homer nods鈥 (Ars Poetica I.359), meaning that even the author of the Illiad and the Odyssey was capable of a literary or factual slip here and there. Legend has it that Homer was blind, and critics are quick to point out how often Shaw was capable of a slip himself: he lauded regime, and made comments about policies that are extremely naive if not downright anti-semitic. Fair enough, but Shaw's greatest biographer, , is just as quick to point out that even these typically provocative interventions by Shaw need to be read with an eye to irony and context.
Comments
Quite a few intellectuals in Shaw's generation were enamored of the Soviet Union, even in its Stalinist phase. And American intellectuals were not exempt from this weakness, which was aided by massive Soviet sacrifices in the Second World War. Richard Crossman's collection "The God That Failed" (1950) was a monument to the disillusionment which followed.