A short life of the author
Robert Shaw was one of the most remarkable double careers in twentieth-century culture — a man who was simultaneously one of the finest character actors of his generation (Quint in Jaws, Doyle Lonnegan in The Sting, Red Grant in From Russia with Love, Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons) and a serious literary novelist whose work was praised by critics, won major prizes, and engaged with the most difficult moral and historical questions of the postwar era. The two careers existed in an uneasy symbiosis: the acting paid for the writing, the writing provided the intellectual depth that distinguished Shaw’s screen performances, and the tension between the two — between commercial celebrity and literary ambition — was a source of creative energy and personal torment.
Lancashire
Robert Archibald Shaw was born in 1927 in Westhoughton, Lancashire. His father, a doctor, was an alcoholic who committed suicide when Robert was twelve — an event that marked him permanently and that recurs, in various forms, throughout his fiction. He was educated at a succession of schools and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he trained alongside Peter O’Toole and Albert Finney. He joined the Old Vic company and quickly established himself as an actor of formidable power and intensity.
But Shaw always considered himself primarily a writer. He began writing novels in his twenties, driven by an ambition that was literary rather than theatrical, and he published his first novel, The Hiding Place, in 1959.
The Novels
The Hiding Place (1959) was a psychological novel about a group of survivors sheltering in a cave during an unspecified catastrophe — a compressed, claustrophobic narrative that explored how ordinary people behave under extreme pressure. The novel established Shaw’s characteristic method: the use of confined spaces and extreme situations to strip away social conventions and reveal the psychological dynamics — the cruelty, the selfishness, the unexpected courage — that lie beneath.
The Sun Doctor (1961) won the Hawthornden Prize and was Shaw’s most accomplished novel. Set on a remote tropical island, it depicted a charismatic doctor whose idealism degenerates into megalomania — a study of the corruption of power that drew on Conrad and Greene.
The Flag (1965) was a spare, intense novella about a group of climbers on a dangerous mountain ascent — a physical challenge that became, as in all of Shaw’s fiction, a test of moral character.
The Man in the Glass Booth
The Man in the Glass Booth (1967) was Shaw’s most important work — both as a novel and as a play (Shaw adapted it for the stage in 1967, and it was produced on Broadway in 1968 and as a film in 1975). The story concerned Arthur Goldman, a wealthy New York real estate developer who is arrested as a Nazi war criminal, put on trial in Israel, and who may or may not be the man he is accused of being. The novel/play’s central ambiguity — is Goldman a Holocaust survivor who has assumed the identity of a Nazi, or a Nazi who has assumed the identity of a Jew? — raised profound questions about identity, guilt, and the relationship between victim and perpetrator that resonated with the Eichmann trial and with the larger question of how the Holocaust could be represented in art.
The work was controversial — some critics felt that its ambiguity trivialised the Holocaust, while others praised it as one of the most intellectually honest attempts to grapple with the moral complexities of the Nazi era. It remains Shaw’s most discussed and most performed work.
The Actor
Shaw’s film career, which included over forty films, eventually overshadowed his literary reputation. His performance as Quint in Jaws (1975) — particularly the monologue about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis — is widely regarded as one of the greatest scenes in American cinema. His portrayal of Henry VIII in A Man for All Seasons (1966) earned him an Academy Award nomination. He died of a heart attack in 1978 at the age of fifty-one, leaving behind a body of literary and cinematic work that deserves more attention than it currently receives.
Collecting Shaw
The Hiding Place (Chatto & Windus, 1959) and The Sun Doctor (Chatto & Windus, 1961) are the primary literary collecting targets. The Man in the Glass Booth (Chatto & Windus, 1967) is sought both as a novel and in its various theatrical and film adaptations. Shaw’s literary output was small — six novels and one play — making a complete collection achievable.