I am a Mr Jorkins on the New Statesman; Clifford Sharp is Mr Spenlow.
Shaw to St John Ervine (1912)
Beatrice Webb was one of those who had viewed this emotional business between G.B.S. and his ‘somewhat elderly witch’ with distaste. Charlotte had told her all about it: and the two women shook their heads.
Beatrice, in her fashion, felt caught up in the wreckage of this affair. During the summer of 1912, she had begun appealing to G.B.S. to help her and Sidney launch a new Fabian weekly journal. But he had displayed little enthusiasm. Unless they established in the mind of the railway traveller, he told them, a certainty that he would be amused and interested by their paper for the next hour of his journey they would never capture the sixpenny public.
It was as bait for this public that Beatrice wanted Shaw’s name as a regular contributor. Yet he was reluctant to give up the time and energy. He would hand over some money, but ‘I wont write’. He believed they were too old. ‘Unless you can find a team of young lions... and give them their heads, the job cannot be done,’ he answered Beatrice. ‘...I should not serve you by attempting to lag superfluous on the stage I once adorned.’
But Beatrice persisted. The New Statesman, as it came to be called, was to be a platform for the reformist middle class, and her and Sidney’s last venture before their retirement. There was need for a well-informed pugnacious journal voicing Fabianism in the contemporary political debate – one that featured G.B.S., instead of leaving him to permeate their opponents.
So Shaw was persuaded. He became one of the New Statesman’s original proprietors and directors, put up (with a cheque for £1,000, equivalent to £43,000 in 1997) one fifth of its capital, purchased approximately 2,400 shares and sent out a series of letters soliciting subscribers. And Beatrice was pleased.
Almost everything, Shaw told Beatrice, would depend on the tact and dash of their editor. The Webbs had chosen Clifford Sharp whom Sidney thought a ‘weak, timid and slow’ man, but Beatrice believed to be ‘a good man of business’. His credentials were faultless. He was a steadfast member of the Fabian executive, had married H. G. Wells’s ex-love Rosamund Bland, and had helped the Webbs’ anti-Poor Law campaign as editor of the Crusade. But no one really liked him. He was like ‘an old, mangy, surly, slightly dangerous dog,’ wrote Leonard Woolf. Imperialist by temperament, Sharp did not share many of the radical preoccupations of socialism such as removal of the House of Lords, and introduction of proportional representation; he was not pro-birth-control or anti-vivisection. But he was a thoroughgoing collectivist: and that was what mattered most to the Webbs.
‘The first number has been a huge success,’ Shaw reported following its publication on 12 April 1913. Not wishing to find himself presiding over a raucous weekly symposium, Sharp relied on the anonymity of his contributions to help him achieve a single tone and unity of style throughout the paper. ‘It is not usual for a journal to communicate to the public the names of those of its staff who contribute unsigned articles,’ he wrote in the first number.
‘We feel, however, that, in view of the promises which have been made, and which have possibly induced many persons to subscribe to The New Statesman, we owe it to our readers to explain that Mr Bernard Shaw and Mr Sidney Webb will as a rule write editorially in our columns, and that the present issue includes, in fact, more than one contribution from each of these gentlemen.’
Shaw’s unsigned contributions on feminism and income tax, the performance of motor cars, the ethics of prize-fighting and the duties of the poet laureate were too surreal to blend into the mood of didactic common sense that Sharp wanted to establish. The two of them, it was said, saw eye to eye on nothing except Ireland and Death Duties – ‘we did not even agree about the Income Tax,’ Sharp added. He therefore proposed that G.B.S. should be treated as an exception to the rule of anonymity and be allowed to sign his contributions. But Shaw refused. ‘I have had enough of being the funny man and the privileged lunatic of a weekly paper.’ As a result ‘the New Statesman is in fact the one weekly in which Shaw’s name never appears,’ Beatrice complained in her diary that summer, ‘and it is Shaw’s name that draws... He will not cooperate on terms of equality.’
But he had agreed to co-operate on terms of equal anonymity. Collectivism did not mean to him a regimentation of opinion, but the release of differing individual talents for a generally harmonious purpose. Sharp reminded him somewhat of his father. He was a moral teetotaller who drank: a man of late hours and cloudy scandals. Though it was impossible for Shaw to trust him, ‘I never felt inclined to resent in the least the good-humoured contempt which he never concealed,’ Sharp told Beatrice. ‘I think he is much the most generous and sweetest-tempered person I ever came across.’ Sharp met the difficulties with courage and ingenuity. ‘I am very favorably impressed by his standing up to me,’ Shaw admitted.
The differences between the two men were to be exacerbated by the war, during which, Sharp wrote, the New Statesman represented Shaw’s views ‘in scarcely a single particular’. He needed fortitude against Shaw’s magnanimous and subversive tactics. Their battle was for authority. Sharp believed that authority belonged to him as editor: but Shaw needed this authority for his iconoclastic opinions. ‘The time has come for me to be old and savage,’ he asserted. He used everything except his money and his position as proprietor in their struggle. His weapons were words.
Beatrice, though she and Sidney were themselves to sever their relationship with Sharp later on (‘your turn will come,’ Shaw predicted), tended to support the editor. ‘The New Statesman enjoys the distinction of being the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me,’ Shaw was to write in the autumn of 1916, ‘...and I am compelled, as I have been more or less all my life, to depend for publicity on the more extreme Conservative organs of opinion.’
*
Beatrice had wished for closer intellectual intimacy with Shaw through the New Statesman. But his ‘big brain’, she became convinced, had been spoilt by Mrs Patrick Campbell. ‘He is the fly and the lady the spider.’
Shaw had been unusually subdued during the autumn of 1913 as he flew round France on what Stella called his ‘honeymoon’ with Charlotte. ‘I am horribly unhappy every morning,’ he wrote to her, ‘...you have wakened the latent tragedy in me.’ On his return he tried to keep hidden from their friends the memory of Stella that ‘tears me all to pieces’. Now that the affair had ended, Beatrice began to feel more sympathetic towards him. Instead of hanging around Mrs Pat’s bedroom he ‘has attended every one of our six public lectures, and taken the chair twice,’ she approved. It was not wholly displeasing to Beatrice that Shaw’s recent plays, of which she did not think much, had been unsuccessful. The Music-Cure was presented for just seven performances at the Little Theatre; Great Catherine ran for thirty performances at the Vaudeville and had not been very well reviewed. More surprisingly, Barker’s production of Androcles and the Lion, with shimmering Post-Impressionist designs by Albert Rothenstein, had come off after fifty-two performances at the St James’s Theatre. The play had puzzled people. ‘An English audience has not as a rule sufficient emotional mobility to follow a method which alternates laughter with pathos, philosophy with fun, in such rapid succession,’ explained Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman.
Everyone had loved the lion, a delicious beast with the most alluring howls and pussycat antics, and ‘the one character in the whole range of Shavian drama,’ commented A. B. Walkley warmly, ‘who never talks’. But it was the lion’s evening rather than the playwright’s. The Manchester Guardian’s critic reported that the words ‘vulgarity’, ‘blasphemy’, ‘childish’ were to be heard at the end of the performance, and predicted that ‘Mr Shaw’s new play will scandalise... the most characteristic part of the English public [which]... cannot understand being passionately in earnest about a thing and in the same breath making fun of it.’ And so it proved.
For Christmas and the New Year he went to Devon and Cornwall for a fortnight’s tour with the Webbs. The scenery had ‘an almost Irish charm’. Each day they would set off walking over ten or thirteen miles of researched country, with the car panting in attendance to take them, when exhausted, to the most luxurious hotel in the neighbourhood. ‘Our old friend and brilliant comrade is a benevolent and entertaining companion,’ Beatrice allowed. But he was ‘getting rapidly old physically, and somewhat dictatorial and impatient intellectually, and he suffers from restlessness,’ she observed. ‘We talked more intimately than we have done for many years.’
Shaw’s life was changing – everything was changing – from comedy to tragedy. From Cornwall he wrote to Charlotte: ‘I miss you, as you would be happy here, and I like to be with you when you are happy.’ From Devon he wrote to Stella, reminding her of their love a year ago: ‘I believe we were both well then, and have been ill ever since.’ He could not conceal these divisions from the sharp eyes of Beatrice. ‘He is still fond of Charlotte and grateful to her,’ she noted, ‘but he quite obviously finds his new friend, with her professional genius and more intimate personal appeal, better company.’
Stella had taken little notice of Joey’s letters this winter. ‘I ought to have written,’ she acknowledged. Barrie’s The Adored One had not been a success. She began to look differently at Shaw. ‘Be quite serious in your friendship for me,’ she appealed. Though not knowing whether Shaw still wanted her to play Eliza, she had recently approached Beerbohm Tree about Pygmalion. Having already heard from George Alexander that this play was ‘a winner’, Tree asked Shaw to come to His Majesty’s and read it to him. The reading took place high up in the dome of the theatre, and before the end of the third act Tree had made up his mind to stage it. Rehearsals were to begin in February 1914. Tree’s ‘admiration for you and the play is ENORMOUS,’ Stella wrote to Shaw. ‘I’ll be tame as a mouse and oh so obedient – and I wonder if you’ll get what you want out of me...’
Ibsen was compelled to acquiesce in a happy ending for A Doll’s House in Berlin, because he could not help himself, just as I have never been able to stop the silly and vulgar gag with which Eliza in Pygmalion, both here and abroad, gets the last word and implies that she is going to marry Pygmalion.
Shaw to William Archer (19 April 1919)
Pygmalion marks the climax of Shaw’s career as a writer of comedies. It is a return in feeling and form to the period of his Plays Pleasant, an integration of Faustian legend and Cinderella fairy-tale, a comedy of manners and a parable of socialism. Written so near to his mother’s death and to the flowering of his romance with Stella, the play weaves together a variety of Shavian themes and obsessions, imaginatively rephrasing the relationship between his mother and Vandeleur Lee, and casting Mrs Pat as the emotional replacement for Mrs Shaw. Its vitality and charm endeared Pygmalion to audiences, with whom it has remained Shaw’s most popular ‘romance’. ‘There must be something radically wrong with the play if it pleases everybody,’ he protested, ‘but at the moment I cannot find what it is.’
He enjoyed describing Pygmalion as an experiment to demonstrate how the science of phonetics could pull apart an antiquated British class system. ‘The reformer we need most today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast,’ he was to write in his Preface. This was Shaw’s gesture towards removing the power for change from fighting men who were threatening to alter the world by warfare, and handing it to men of words whom he promoted as ‘among the most important people in England at present’. In this context, the character of Henry Higgins (who appears as a comic version of Sherlock Holmes in Act I) takes his life from the revolutionary phonetician and philologist Henry Sweet, who had died while the play was being written. Writing to Robert Bridges in 1910 about the need for a phonetic institute, he had described Sweet as the man ‘I had most hopes of’. It was Bridges who, the following year, retained Shaw to speak at the Phonetic Conference on spelling reform at University College, London. ‘It is perfectly easy to find a speaker whose speech will be accepted in every part of the English speaking world as valid 18-carat oral currency,’ he wrote to Sweet afterwards, ‘NOT that the pronunciation represented is the standard pronunciation or ideal pronunciation, or correct pronunciation, or in any way binding on any human being or morally superior to Hackney cockney or Idaho american, but solely that if a man pronounces in that way he will be eligible as far as speech is concerned for the post of Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor at Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury, Emperor, President, or Toast Master at the Mansion House.’
It was this experiment that Shaw transferred to Higgins’s laboratory in Wimpole Street, with its phonograph, laryngoscope, tuning-forks and organ pipes. This is a live experiment we are shown on stage, and as with all such laboratory work it is necessary for the Frankenstein doctor to behave as if his creation were insentient. ‘She’s incapable of understanding anything,’ Higgins assures his fellow-scientist Colonel Pickering. ‘Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?’ When Pickering asks: ‘Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?’, Higgins cheerily replies: ‘Oh no, I dont think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about. Have you, Eliza?’
Shaw conducts a second social experiment through Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, an elderly dustman of Dickensian vitality. Doolittle is any one of us. When asked by Higgins whether he is an honest man or rogue, he answers: ‘A little of both, Henry, like the rest of us.’ Being his name, he does as little as possible – some bribery here or there, a little blackmail, more drinking, an occasional change of mistress: and he provides positively no education at all for his illegitimate daughter ‘except to give her a lick of the strap now and again’. Yet he has the quick wits and superficial charm of the capitalist entrepreneur. He is society’s free man – free of responsibilities and conscience. ‘Have you no morals, man?’ demands Pickering. ‘Cant afford them, Governor,’ Doolittle answers. Undeserving poverty is his line: ‘and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it,’ he adds. His disquisition on middle-class morality is intended by Shaw to have the same subversive effect as Falstaff’s discourse on honour.
Yet this is the man whom Shaw chooses as the first recipient of what he calculates to be a reasonable income-for-all. As the result of Higgins’s joking reference to Doolittle as the most original moralist in England in a letter to an American philanthropist, the undeserving dustman is left £3,000. In Act II he had made his entrance with ‘a professional flavour of dust about him’. In Act V when his name is announced and Pickering queries, ‘Do you mean the dustman?’, the parlourmaid answers: ‘Dustman! Oh no, sir: a gentleman.’ He is splendidly dressed as if for a fashionable wedding. Shaw’s point is not that a gentleman is merely a dustman with money in the same way as a flower girl with phonetic training can be passed off as a duchess: it is that moral reformation depends upon the reform of our economic system. As Eric Bentley writes: ‘He was giving the idea of the gentleman an economic basis.’ It is this that Doolittle dreaded and derided, and now finds himself dragged into. ‘It’s making a gentleman of me that I object to,’ he protests. ‘...I have to live for others and not for myself: thats middle class morality.’
Under Higgins’s tutelage Eliza becomes a doll of ‘remarkable distinction... speaking with pedantic correctness of pronunciation and great beauty of tone’, which Mrs Higgins tells her son is ‘a triumph of your art and of her dressmaker’s’. This dummy figure replaces the ‘draggle tailed guttersnipe’ whose life Higgins acknowledges to have been real, warm and violent. The classical Pygmalion had prayed to Aphrodite to make his ideal statue come alive so that he could marry her. Shaw’s flower girl, whom Higgins has manufactured into a replica duchess by the beginning of Act IV, is transformed into an independent woman whom Higgins refuses to marry. However, the transformation scene, in which Higgins lays his hands on Eliza like a sculptor’s creative act, is a struggle the implications of which are sexual:
‘Eliza tries to control herself... she is on the point of screaming... He comes to her... He pulls her up... LIZA [breathless]... She crisps her fingers frantically. HIGGINS [looking at her in cool wonder]... LIZA [gives a suffocated scream of fury, and instinctively darts her nails at his face]!! HIGGINS [catching her wrists... He throws her roughly into the easy chair] LIZA [crushed by superior strength and weight]. HIGGINS [thundering] Those slippers LIZA [with bitter submission] Those slippers’
These stage directions contain many sado-masochistic undertones. But Higgins himself resists every innuendo. This was important to Shaw. For, remembering Sweet’s genius for ‘making everything impossible’, he turned his mind to another ‘genius’ as a model for Higgins, the author of The Voice, Vandeleur Lee. Higgins’s asexual association with Eliza is consequently authorized by Shaw’s faith in his mother’s ‘innocence’, and written as an endorsement of his own legitimacy. The platonic arrangement depends on the professional circumstances of their relationship. ‘You see, she’ll be a pupil,’ Higgins explains to Pickering, ‘and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred.’ Higgins’s voice tuition of Eliza takes the place of the singing lessons Lee had given Bessie (Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw) and to reinforce this substitution Shaw provides Higgins’s pupil with the same name as Lee’s pupil:
THE FLOWER GIRL Liza Doolittle
HIGGINS [declaiming gravely] Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess, They went to the wood to get a bird’s nes’.
‘I’ve never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps,’ Higgins tells Pickering. He explains the reason to his mother who has regretted his inability to fall in love with any woman under forty-five. ‘My idea of a lovable woman is somebody as like you as possible,’ he tells her. ‘I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be changed.’
In his final act, Shaw was rewriting the legend of Svengali and his pupil Trilby. When Svengali dies of a heart attack, Trilby’s voice is silenced, she cannot sing at her concert, and she follows Svengali into death. In Shaw’s version Eliza’s true voice is heard once she emerges from Higgins’s bullying presence and walks out to a separate life. But other forces were at work in the final act obliging Higgins himself to speak increasingly with the voice of G.B.S., the public figure that had developed from Vandeleur Lee; while Eliza comes to represent the emotions that Stella Campbell was introducing into his life. Higgins’s description of Eliza as a ‘consort battleship’ has something of the armoured impregnability Shaw attributed to his mother (‘one of those women who could act as matron of a cavalry barracks from eighteen to forty and emerge without a stain on her character’). But no one else in the play regards Eliza in this light. Mrs Higgins calls her ‘naturally rather affectionate’; Doolittle admits she is ‘very tender-hearted’; and Eliza herself demands: ‘Every girl has a right to be loved.’
What Higgins wants is less clear. He claims he has created an ideal wife – ‘a consort for a king’ – yet he must resist her emotional appeal: ‘I wont stop for you... I can do without anybody.’ The purpose of Higgins’s experiment has been ‘filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul’. It is half successful, half a failure. The class gulf is filled at the garden party, dinner party and reception: the gulf between Eliza and Higgins remains. Eliza has changed, but Higgins admits ‘I cant change my nature.’ He seems ‘cold, unfeeling, selfish’ to Eliza. ‘I only want to be natural,’ she says. But can Higgins be natural? Where will things lead if she accepts his invitation to go back to him ‘for the fun of it’?
The original ending of the play is carefully ambiguous, reflecting Shaw’s uncertainties over his romance with Stella. He could not marry her: she could not remain for ever his pupil as an actress learning from his theatrical direction. But might they become lovers? The question is left open to our imagination:
MRS HIGGINS I’m afraid youve spoilt that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and gloves.
HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, dont bother. She’ll buy em all right enough. Good-bye. They kiss. Mrs Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.
This, as Eric Bentley argues, ‘is the true naturalistic ending’. But Shaw’s subsequent attempts to clear up its ambiguity have blurred the outline of its elegant structure. The faint poignancy of the ending lies in the half-emergent realization that there is to be no satisfactory marriage for this Cinderella; while a feminist reading tells us that Higgins cannot be approved of as a husband. But the public wanted the Miltonic bachelor to be transformed into the beautiful lady’s husband. ‘This is unbearable,’ Shaw cried out. Once his love affair with Stella had ended, he could not bear to speculate on what might have happened when ‘I almost condescended to romance’. ‘Eliza married Freddy [Eynsford-Hill],’ he told Trebitsch; ‘and the notion of her marrying Higgins is disgusting.’ In other words Eliza married a double-barrelled nonentity like George Cornwallis-West, and Higgins’s agonizing boredom with the Eynsford-Hill family reflects Shaw’s own impatience with the smart visitors who sometimes crowded him out of Stella’s house.
The history of Pygmalion was to develop into a struggle over this ending. For the play’s first publication in book form in 1916, Shaw added a sequel recounting ‘what Eliza did’. Her decision not to marry Higgins, he explained, was well-considered. The differences between them of age and income, when added to Higgins’s mother-fixation and exclusive passion for phonetics, was too wide a gulf to bridge. He told the story of Eliza and Freddy, Mr and Mrs Eynsford-Hill, as invitingly as he could: but the public went on preferring its own version. Shaw made his final version of the end on 19 August 1939:
MRS HIGGINS I’m afraid youve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be uneasy about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering.
HIGGINS Pickering! Nonsense: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! [He roars with laughter as the play ends]
But by now this laughter sounded as hollow as Higgins’s prediction, and even Shaw’s printers had begun to query his intentions.
The English-language film of Pygmalion gave Shaw an extra opportunity to remove ‘virtually every suggestion of Higgins’s possible romantic interest in Liza’. His screenplay even omits the word ‘consort’ and leaves Higgins calling Eliza a ‘battleship’. But the producer of the film hired other screenwriters who added a ‘sugar-sweet ending’ which Shaw found out for the first time at a press show two days before its première.
But one battle he apparently did win. ‘Hamon, my French translator, says that it is announced that Lehar is making an operetta of Pygmalion,’ he notified Trebitsch in the summer of 1921. ‘...Can you warn him that he cannot touch Pygmalion without infringing my copyright, and that I have no intention of allowing the history of The Chocolate Soldier to be repeated.’ For almost thirty more years he made the same reply to all composers. ‘I absolutely forbid any such outrage,’ he wrote when in his ninety-second year. Pygmalion was good enough ‘with its own verbal music’.
*
Pygmalion, which was first published in book form in Germany, Hungary and Sweden (plus an unauthorized edition in the United States), received its theatrical début at the Hofburg Theater in Vienna on 16 October 1913, and was played a fortnight later at the Lessingtheater in Berlin. The Times on 17 October 1913 reported that the opening night in Vienna ‘met with an excellent reception from the audience, which among a number of distinguished personages included the Archduke Francis Ferdinand’.
Shaw described this première as a compliment paid to him by German and Austrian culture ‘which I value very much’. Pygmalion had been performed in a beautiful theatre splendidly subsidized and free of rent. ‘I am handsomely paid for my work,’ he reported. ‘In London, with an equally popular play, the ground landlord leaves less than nothing for me and for the management... Meanwhile, huge endowments are proposed for football, pedestrian races, and throwing the hammer.’
However, there was a small cloud floating over this foreign production.
The central situation of the play also appears in Shaw’s novel Love Among the Artists where the Welsh Beethoven, Owen Jack, gives elocution lessons to Madge Brailsford. But an alert German critic pointed out the extraordinary resemblance of Shaw’s story to the adventures of Smollett’s hero with a sixteen-year-old beggar girl in Chapter 87 of his novel Peregrine Pickle – and the British press immediately took this up as the reason why Shaw had produced his play out of the country. It showed ‘an amusing ignorance of English culture,’ Shaw countered. ‘The one place where I should have been absolutely safe from detection is London.’ He had read Peregrine Pickle in his youth and not cared for it and he did not realize that ‘Smollett had got hold of my plot’. Later he was to speculate on the likelihood of this incident having ‘got lodged in my memory without my being conscious of it and stayed there until I needed it’. None of this affected the morality of his position. ‘If I find in a book anything I can make use of, I take it gratefully,’ he stated. ‘...In short, my literary morals are those of Molière and Handel.’ Shakespeare too had taken his goods where he could find them. ‘Do not scorn to be derivative,’ Shaw urged his friends, ‘...the great thing is to be able to derive – to see your chance and be able to take it... Read Goldsmith on originality.’
There was a rumour that the actor playing Higgins in Berlin had introduced a ‘horrible gag’ suggesting that he and Eliza shared the same bedroom. In London, where Shaw was producing the play himself, such travesties would not be permitted. But when he turned up for rehearsals in the second week of February he found His Majesty’s a madhouse.
Famous for his absent-mindedness, Tree was the despair of playwrights. He greeted Shaw warmly, but with obvious surprise. It was as if he believed himself to be the author of Pygmalion. His head hummed with plans. For he had experience of collaborating with other dramatists – for example, Shakespeare into whose Richard II he introduced a very effective pet dog, and whose Twelfth Night he had improved by the addition of four miniature copycat Malvolios. His performances were hugely entertaining to his fans, but they relied on a good deal of improvisation especially when he was not quick enough to reach the stage furniture in time and pluck from its niches the pieces of paper on which he had written out his more troublesome lines. He loved to disguise himself with beards, uniforms, vine leaves, ear-trumpets. In this respect, Professor Higgins was a disappointment. It seemed he was required to do little more than dress and speak normally: and this bewildered him. In vain did he plead with Shaw to let him take large quantities of snuff, to vault onto the piano from time to time, to indicate an addiction to port by walking with a limp and a stick.
Delays were often caused by Tree’s brainwaves for taking over other roles (such as Doolittle) or filling the theatre with philosophical dustmen and flower girls. To Shaw’s businesslike mind it seemed miraculous that any production ever took place at His Majesty’s. Tree had with dignity assured him that ‘I will not place myself in the position of receiving a rebuff’, and was taken aback when Mrs Campbell hurled a slipper bang in his face. His morale shattered, he collapsed into a chair while the cast tried to get him to understand that this was part of the play. The worst of it was, Shaw wrote, that ‘it was quite evident that he would be just as surprised and wounded next time’.
Shaw was strangely convinced that Tree was a tragedian and Stella a comedian. ‘I am sending a letter to Tree which will pull him together if it does not kill him,’ he informed Stella. But Tree reflected in his notebook: ‘I will not go so far as to say that all people who write letters of more than eight pages are mad, but it is a curious fact that all madmen write letters of more than eight pages.’
In her fashion, Stella worked hard at Eliza Doolittle. Her prompt copy of Pygmalion was pencilled with encouraging scribbles: ‘My hand is held out Joey... I’ll do my level best... Your delicious play needs real greatness... gentle Joey.’
But Shaw was not always so gentle. Though often maddened by Tree, ‘I could never bring myself to hit him hard enough,’ he regretted. But on Stella he believed that ‘no poker was thick enough nor heavy enough to leave a solitary bruise’. He had been partly persuaded of this by the knowledge that she thrived on conflict. She would put out her tongue, turn her back on Tree (‘But it’s a very nice back, isn’t it?’) and finally drive him screaming from his own stage.
Stella’s tantrums masked a lack of confidence. She had never played in comedy before and she was thirty years too old for the part. ‘Dreadfully middle-aged moments,’ Shaw observed in his rehearsal notebook. Occasionally he did not keep such observations to himself. At one moment, as he knelt before Stella imploring her to speak the lines as he directed, she told the actors: ‘That’s where I like to see my authors, on their knees at my feet.’
Opening night was set for 11 April 1914. The week before was marked by two spectacular disappearances. Instead of going to the theatre on Monday 6 April, Stella took off for the Kensington Registry Office where she married George Cornwallis-West two hours after his decree absolute came through. From there they went on a three-day honeymoon to a golfing resort near Tunbridge Wells, returning in time for Stella to take part in the dress rehearsal at His Majesty’s on Friday evening. ‘Of course I knew about the marriage,’ Tree lied to the press assembled in the dress circle bar, ‘and I’m very happy for both of them, but naturally I was sworn to secrecy... contrary to popular rumour there have been no quarrels between us, in fact rehearsals have progressed with the most delightful smoothness & harmony.’
Shaw could reflect now on the consequences of his own timidity. The day before the news of Stella’s marriage appeared in the papers, Charlotte had sailed for the United States. She did not know that her husband’s affair with Mrs Pat was over – how could you ever tell such things? The long rehearsals of Pygmalion had been agony for her. She did not want to witness their first night climax. On 8 April she left England with her friend Lena Ashwell to join their guru James Porter Mills and his wife. These last months, while G.B.S. occupied himself at His Majesty’s, Charlotte had been preparing an abstract of Mills’s ‘Teaching’ which he persuaded her to publish as a business prospectus entitled Knowledge is the Door: A Forerunner. It was a comfort to her that Dr Mills was not brilliant or literary. She felt calmed by his assurance that ‘there is no need to give way to human feeling... we can gradually quiet the waves of emotion.’
There was a great swell of excitement round the first night. Shaw sat by himself in the teeming theatre: not far off was the other George, Stella’s ‘GOLDEN man’. The curtain lifted on the first act. All went smoothly and well. In the second act Edmund Gurney, who had been listening to Lloyd George’s speeches in the House of Commons to pick up the right tone of contempt for the aristocracy, scored a colossal success as Doolittle. Stella ‘ravished the house almost to delirium’ throughout the third act, and ‘Tree’s farcical acting was very funny’. But Eliza’s sensational exit line, ‘Not bloody likely,’ nearly wrecked the play. The audience gave a gasp, there was a crash of laughter while Mrs Pat perambulated the stage, and then a second burst of laughing. The pandemonium lasted well over a minute. ‘They laughed themselves into such utter abandonment and disorder,’ Shaw wrote to Charlotte in the United States, ‘that it was really doubtful for some time whether they could recover themselves and let the play go on.’
Tree had been in a pitiful state of nerves, begging Shaw to substitute ‘blooming’ or ‘ruddy’ for Eliza’s dreadful word. Now he felt frightfully pleased. He relaxed. He expanded. ‘He was like nothing human.’ Much of the dialogue between Higgins and Eliza held special meanings for Shaw – echoes from the controlling influence of his mother (‘I cant change my nature’) and overtones of his unhappy romance with Stella (‘I hadnt quite realised that you were going away... I shall miss you Eliza’). Tree made it all absurd; ‘For the last two acts I writhed in hell,’ Shaw wrote to Charlotte. ‘...The last thing I saw as I left the house was Higgins shoving his mother rudely out of his way and wooing Eliza with appeals to buy ham for his lonely home like a bereaved Romeo. I went straight home to bed and read Shakespear for an hour before going to sleep to settle myself down.’
Stella had followed his directions as if she were Eliza imitating Higgins. To thank her, and because he could not endure going backstage after the performance, Shaw invited her and her new husband down to Ayot next day. ‘You must consent to receive Cornwallis-West in the country,’ he wrote to Charlotte that night. ‘He has a dog Beppo, a huge black retriever, who plays hide & seek, distinguishes between right & left when he is given instructions, takes people’s hats off when ordered, and is withal a grave & reverend signor. I believe you would ask them both to stay for a month on condition that Beppo came too... They treat me as a beloved uncle.’
Shaw doubted if Pygmalion could succeed. Once its success became apparent, Tree chivvied him to come back and see it. But Shaw was adamant. ‘Come soon – or you’ll not recognize your play,’ Stella appealed. But he would not. ‘Never no more.’ But at last he relented and came to the hundredth performance on 15 July.
It was awful. It was appalling. It was worse than anything he had imagined. His directions had been wonderfully circumvented. Instead of flinging the ring down on the dessert stand at the end of Act IV, Eliza on her knees clutched and gazed on it feelingly – there were no words because the emotion was obviously too deep. In the brief interval between the end of the play and fall of the curtain, the amorous Higgins threw flowers at Eliza, a theatrically effective gesture, as Nicholas Grene has observed, ‘reversing the image at the end of Act I where Eliza threw her flowers at Higgins’.
Tree claimed that his improvements delighted the audience: and it was this public that Shaw really blamed. What had happened to its serious instincts, its sense of proportion? During these hot summer months there had been turmoil in Ulster over Asquith’s Home Rule Bill, and hunger strikes among the militant suffragettes in London. Then on 28 June, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who had been at the première of Pygmalion in Vienna, was shot: and Europe moved to the edge of war. But for much of this time ‘all political and social questions have been swept from the public mind by Eliza’s expletive,’ Shaw reported. The Bishop of Woolwich cried out for it to be banned; Bishop Weldon felt saddened that such a vulgar word had to be uttered by a married lady with children. Scholars and intellectuals duelled in the columns of The Times over the origin of ‘bloody’. The Oxford Union met and voted in favour of a motion declaring ‘a certain sanguinary expletive’ to be ‘a liberating influence on the English language’, but the Debating Society at Eton deplored ‘the debasement and vulgarization of the commercial theatre’. The Daily Express got hold of an authentic Covent Garden flower girl called Eliza, took her to the play and reported her as being shocked. At 10 Downing Street the Prime Minister received a letter of protest from the Women’s Purity League.
The summer days persisted hot and sunny; the public continued to come to Pygmalion: but Tree was bored. He wanted a holiday and took off the play late that July. He had attributed the bloody rumpus over Pygmalion to ‘the flatness of the political situation’. ‘Triviality,’ Shaw wrote, ‘can go no further.’
As for going mad, dont you wish you could? The trying thing is to be sane with everyone else (except the rogues who are taking advantage of it) as mad as hatters.
Shaw to Rowley (7 January 1916)
The Fabians were unprepared for war. Most of them believed that modern war was caused by the capitalist struggle for markets and could be discouraged by means of the General Strike. Besides, as Sidney Webb said, ‘it would be too insane’.
Shaw also thought it insane – and all the more likely for that. Militarism in all countries had developed, he argued, ‘not from the needs of human society, but because at a certain stage of social integration the institution of standing armies gave monarchs the power to play at soldiers with living men instead of leaden figures’. German culture in particular had got stuck in this obsolete Roi Soleil system. This was why Shaw did not favour unilateral disarmament. ‘All nations should be prepared for war,’ he was to write. ‘All houses should be protected by lightning conductors.’ Until there existed a European police force, Britain must be prepared ‘to make war on war’ if she wanted to exercise an effective foreign policy. Sidney Webb’s pacifism was that of the sane man. But at a time of war ‘sanity is positively dangerous’.
Europe was ready for fighting, as if surfeited with the material gains of the previous hundred years. Germany’s militarism was apparent. Thomas Mann was to speak of the hearts of poets standing in flame ‘for now it is war!... Nothing better, more beautiful, happier could befall them in the whole world.’ In England, where Rupert Brooke was to thank God for matching us with His hour, romantic militarism was dressed up to fit the righteous Christian, the hard-headed businessman, travelling adventurer, puritan character-builder. In a letter to The Times Lord Roberts had written: ‘“My country right or wrong and right or wrong my country”, is the sentiment most treasured in the breast of any one worthy of the name of man’ – which Shaw paraphrased as ‘teaching a Christian to disobey Christ at the commands of a non-commissioned officer’. His Preface to Androcles and the Lion, written late in 1915, amounted to a denunciation of war as a method of solving international disputes.
Once war started, countries surrendered every other consideration except victory. ‘It is one of the horrors of war,’ he reminded Carl Heath, secretary of the National Peace Council, ‘that both parties abandon the ground of right and wrong, and take that of kill or be killed. That is a reason for making an end of war, and in the meantime keeping political power out of the hands of bellicose persons.’ He hated the silence of diplomacy. Laughter was one of his devices for shattering this silence: the mystique that in the public interest the public must know nothing. Preparation for war necessitated so much lying on the part of belligerent Governments as to develop an unthinking habit: ‘if anyone remarks at noon that it is twelve o’clock, some minister automatically articulates a solemn public assurance that there is no ground for any such suspicion,’ Shaw later wrote, ‘and gives private orders that references to the time of day are to be censored in future.’
The secret of Britain’s foreign policy was that there was no foreign policy. In an article for the Daily Chronicle on 18 March 1913 he proposed one: a triple alliance against war by England, France and Germany, the terms being that ‘if France attack Germany we combine with Germany to crush France, and if Germany attack France, we combine with France to crush Germany’. From that starting point, he continued, the combination might be added to from Holland and the Scandinavian kingdoms ‘and finally achieve the next step in civilization, the policing of Europe against war and the barbarians’. He repeated this formula, which was another magical trinity for achieving self-integration, in an article on the comity of nations entitled ‘The Peace of Europe and How to Attain It’ in the Daily News on New Year’s Day 1914. ‘I want international peace,’ he stated. Those barbarians within our frontiers, who advocated war as a tonic, should not be let loose on foreigners but rather sent for annual war sports to Salisbury Plain, he suggested, to ‘blaze away at one another’ until the survivors (if any) felt ‘purified by artillery fire’.
Lunching with the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky, Shaw asked what he thought of his peace proposals and was told that such problems were better left to politicians and diplomats – which might have been a better answer if politicians and diplomats were required to do the fighting. ‘Can anybody suggest an alternative policy?’ Shaw had asked. But there seemed no alternative. ‘Complete failure of my campaign,’ he noted. This failure, together with his feeling of isolation from other Fabians, contributed to the somewhat aggrieved tone and massive outpouring of Shaw’s writings on the war. A war symposium published by the Daily Citizen on 1 August he described as ‘about as timely and sensible as a symposium on the danger of damp sheets would be if London were on fire’. But, he added: ‘it is important that our statesmen and diplomatists should understand that there is a strong and growing body of public opinion to which all war is abhorrent, and which will suffer it now only as a hideous necessity arising out of past political bargains in which the people have had no part and the country no interest... We muddled our way in and we may have to fight our way out.’
*
Shaw and Charlotte were at a hotel at Salcombe in Devonshire on 4 August. Shaw first heard of the declaration of war on coming down to breakfast. A middle-aged Englishman ‘after a fairly successful attempt to say unconcernedly “I suppose we shall have to fight them” suddenly changed “them” into “those swine” twice in every sentence’. It was an early symptom of the epidemic that was soon covering the country: ‘the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad.’ People rejoiced at the prospect of a first-rate fight. The excitement, the dread of being thought unpatriotic even by fools with white feathers for brains, was to leave the country at the mercy of anyone in authority. ‘This is the greatest fight ever made for the Christian religion,’ the Bishop of London declared, ‘...a choice between the nailed hand and the mailed fist.’ Kitchener’s finger was to point at everyone. The upper and the upper-middle classes were exhorted to sacrifice their butlers, chauffeurs, gamekeepers and grooms for service at the front. Old men postdated their births, dyed their hair, and lined up at the recruiting offices; old women lamented that their ineligibility to serve as nurses would prevent their killing the German wounded; mothers hustled their sons into uniforms and off to the trenches; a fifteen-year-old cadet at the Royal Naval College was publicly flogged when he tried to go home.
People needed enormous doses of self-righteousness to endure the shock of war. A chauvinistic industry, manufacturing foreign monsters, quickly expanded. A general in France, writing to a journalist, apologized that ‘there has been only one atrocity lately and that was not a good one’. Not everyone was so meticulous. Newspapers competed for German atrocities to answer the clamour of their readers – ‘like the clamor,’ Shaw reported, ‘of an agonizingly wounded combatant for morphia’. The whole country buzzed with stories of Germans tossing babies on the points of their bayonets; Germans burning field hospitals full of British wounded; Germans going into battle driving crowds of women before them; Germans making collections of fingers. Shaw searched for some practical line of reasoning to set against this hell. Would it really encourage recruitment? Surely it was kinder to those who had sons and husbands at the front not to insist that they must be horribly mutilated if they fell into enemy hands? ‘Since you expect to go out soon, I really refuse to leave you troubled in spirit by that man with his eyes gouged out,’ he reassured George Cornwallis-West. It was amazing how this totally blinded refugee careered around – he was far too quick for anyone to have seen, though all had heard of him. Elsewhere, a number of Belgian nurses whose hands everyone knew to have been scissored off by the Huns had, he was glad to see, grown new ones.
Among the baying patriots were the British disciples of Dr Mills. They could not tolerate Charlotte’s refusal to assist this righteous war in any capacity ‘except that of a reluctant taxpayer’. Worst of all in their eyes were her anxieties over poor Trebitsch. She felt a spring of joy on hearing that he had failed his medical examination. ‘You will die prematurely,’ G.B.S. assured him, ‘at the age of 98 in a hotel lift, from ascending too rapidly.’
Shaw felt concern for all his translators – those other selves shredded in conflict. ‘YOU AND I AT WAR CAN ABSURDITY GO FURTHER,’ he had wired Trebitsch on 4 August. ‘MY FRIENDLIEST WISHES GO WITH YOU UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES.’ Next day he and Charlotte went on to Torquay where they were to stay for a couple of months at the Hydro Hotel. ‘This suits me pretty well too, as I have a lot of work in hand,’ he told Beatrice Webb.
In a statement, drafted on 6 August, he set out the predicament as he saw it.
‘We shall have to fight and die and pay and suffer with the grim knowledge that we are sacrificing ourselves in an insane cause, and that only by putting up a particularly good fight can we bring ourselves out of it with credit... For the present time there is only one thing to be done besides fighting... And that one thing is to set to work immediately to draft the inevitable Treaty of Peace which we must all sign when we have had our bellyful of murder and destruction.’
He accused the generals and politicians of being unable to think further ahead than the length of a bayonet, and he urged Beatrice Webb and other Fabians to cultivate ‘long range firing more than you do, or you will leave forts unreduced in your rear which will undo half your work later on’. The real enemy was not Germany, he maintained, but jingoists and junkers in all countries. Therefore, in moments of optimism, he would represent the war as an opportunity of victory for the Suffragettes, the Irish volunteers and socialists everywhere.
Shaw judged the responsibility for war as lying almost evenly between British commercial adventurers and Germany’s militarists, and denied that violation of Belgian neutrality was a casus belli. Using his new American literary agent Paul Reynolds, he placed an ‘Open Letter to the President of the United States of America’ in The Nation and the New York Times, appealing to him as ‘the spokesman of Western Democracy’ to rally the neutral powers for the purpose of demanding both sides to withdraw from Belgium (‘the effect of our shells on Belgium is precisely the same as that of the German shells’) and fight out their quarrel on their own territories. Behind this invitation lay a warning that history would judge Germany to have been the wrong side on which to intervene, and that Washington (‘still privileged to talk common humanity to the nations’) would inevitably chair the world conference that settled the peace.
The British press had been eager for Shaw’s war contributions. But after three months, when he had vented his disgust on England and Germany as ‘a couple of extremely quarrelsome dogs’ and advised the soldiers in both armies to ‘SHOOT THEIR OFFICERS AND GO HOME’, many newspapers blacklisted him. ‘In any ordinary time I should have been delighted to publish your letter with every word of which I agree,’ wrote the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C. P. Scott, ‘but at this horrible time one has to consider so many things which one would like to ignore... your letter would be highly disturbing to many minds. That of course is the object of it and a very excellent object. But I suppose one’s duty now is to encourage and unite people and not to exercise and divide.’ Shaw recognized the power of this call for suspending controversy in the face of national danger, but countered it with the argument that able-bodied soldiers in the trenches depended on able-minded civilians at home to guard their constitutional liberties. Soldiers must be protected while their backs were turned from those abuses of power – such as the suspension of by-elections – not necessary for the defeat of the enemy.
‘I have sat at England’s bedside during her delirium,’ Shaw was to write. He saw himself as a doctor who reluctantly admits that his horror-struck patient may need chauvinistic drugs, but believes that the quality of his recovery depends upon their withdrawal as soon as possible. ‘I do not grudge a mother the shelter of a lie any more than I grudge a soldier the shelter of a clump of briars,’ he wrote; ‘but the more thoroughly we realize that war is war, and death death, the sooner we shall get rid of it.’ After the monthly casualty figures began to arrive affecting almost every family in the country (already in November there were 89,954 British casualties), then people would need some antidote. His Common Sense about the War was a complicated prescription prepared for those emerging from these bloody fantasies. On 14 November it appeared as a monumental supplement to the New Statesman. ‘I have told the truth about the war,’ Shaw claimed; ‘and stated the democratic case for it.’
*
Until noon each day Shaw worked in the roof garden of the Hydro Hotel. Before lunch he would swim and after lunch continue working in his suite. Sometimes he went for rides in the car along the coast; sometimes he went and listened to Basil Cameron’s concerts at the pavilion. After dinner he read.
It was impossible to think of anything except the war. Never can there have been a war in which the belligerents had such correct cases. Austria had the assassination of an Archduke; Germany the mobilization of Russia and the threatening articles of the Franco-Russian alliance; Britain the impeccable Treaty of 1839. All the provocations were valid according to the most accredited precedents. Academically, on all sides, the war was perfectly in order. ‘I had to slave for months getting the evidence,’ Shaw wrote to Alfred Sutro. ‘...It makes me sick to recollect the drudgery of it all.’
The mood of the country was beginning to infiltrate Torquay. When a depressed Granville Barker came down for a few days, he and Shaw were threatened with shooting by a panicky coastguard as they walked along the beach. The hotel porter, a German who had registered as an enemy alien, was suddenly handcuffed and ‘deported to the innermost centre of Britain – to Exeter, in fact’ – so that he could not signal to German submarines.
Shaw needed to feel up to his chin in what was going on. Neither Asquith nor Grey, he believed, were the real spokesmen of their times. He hated Grey – ‘a Junker from his topmost hair to the tips of his toes... [with] a personal taste for mendacity’ – for his part in the sensational horror at the Egyptian village of Denshawai in 1906, when the British colonial power administered floggings, hangings and penal servitude for life after a rumpus arising from some pigeon shooting. This governing class was above listening to him. Shaw wanted his own class of men, Chesterton and Wells, Bennett and Bertrand Russell, to rise at the head of a popular movement and replace Asquith with someone such as Winston Churchill. He recognized that Churchill’s anti-German pugnacity was enormously more popular in the country than the moral babble of Asquith. So he kept his eye on Churchill. Meanwhile ‘our job is to make people serious about the war,’ he wrote to Bertrand Russell. ‘It is the monstrous triviality of the damned thing, and the vulgar frivolity of what we imagine to be patriotism, that gets at my temper.’
Shaw’s position in Common Sense about the War was that of the Irishman who, when asked for directions, replies that he wouldn’t start from here. It was given the Shavian dimension by the fact that England had not asked for directions. He was therefore obliged to step out dangerously into the traffic and transmit unsolicited signals.
He attempted to answer the question: what is the war about? It had erupted from a prodigious evil: that of mounting wealth throughout Europe untapped by any corresponding equitable distribution of this wealth. Borne on the soils and sighs of monstrous inequality this war had become a crude method of advancing social organization. Politicians still believed it was a question of Union Jacks and tricolours and Imperial Eagles – but ‘there are only two real flags in the world henceforth,’ Shaw wrote: ‘the red flag of Democratic Socialism and the black flag of Capitalism.’ The militarists of Europe had used this energy of dissatisfaction for their sport of war, and all the adventurous young men joined in. Shaw reasoned that the militaristic case led to what the militarists themselves most dreaded – a dramatic example was to be the collapse of tsardom and the rise of communism in Russia. ‘The Democratic case, the Socialist one, the International case is worth all it threatens to cost,’ he predicted. ‘Democracy without equality is a delusion more dangerous than frank oligarchy and autocracy.’
Shaw’s long-term aim was straight. He foresaw that the enormous demand for coal, cloth, boots, army rations, weapons, ammunition, transport vehicles, ships and all other accessories of war, would arrest the huge exports of capital and transform them into wages – besides doubling taxation on unearned incomes. He pointed out how the Government had already taken control of railways, bought up all the raw sugar, regulated prices, guaranteed the banks and achieved many of ‘the things it had been declaring utterly and eternally Utopian and impossible when Socialists advocated them’.
During war we live in a political truce; in peacetime the political war begins again. Shaw wanted socialists to prepare for this struggle by ensuring that on enlistment labourers found themselves better fed, paid, clothed than before. He recommended the appointment of working-class representatives to the War Office, and the reform of the ‘tyrannical slave code called military law’ so that the soldier could serve as a citizen with all his rights intact.
This was Shaw’s case for open diplomacy, full civil rights, a fair livelihood for the soldier and his dependants, and genuine working-class democracy in place of Asquith’s Mutiny Acts which, even in time of peace, ‘imprison Labour leaders and muzzle the Labour Press’. In his thirty years of public work Shaw had seen ‘man after man in the Labour movement sell out because he could not trust his future to the loyalty of the workers,’ he wrote, ‘and I should perhaps have had to sell out myself long ago if I had not possessed certain powers as a writer which made me a little more independent than others’. Armed with this independence, ‘I have put my best brains and skill at the service of the Labour cause’.
*
Shaw had modelled his Common Sense about the War on Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man, and it blew up a similar dust-storm of abuse. Libraries and bookshops removed his works from their shelves; newspapers instructed their readers to boycott his plays. The editor of The Clarion, Robert Blatchford, described his manifesto as ‘the meanest act of treachery ever perpetrated by an alien enemy residing in generous and long-suffering England’. At the Royal Naval Division the Prime Minister’s son, ‘Beb’ Asquith, announced that he ‘ought to be shot’. And former President Theodore Roosevelt called him a ‘blue rumped ape’ and lumped him with ‘the unhung traitor Keir Hardie’ among a ‘venomous’ herd of socialists, all ‘physically timid creatures’. ‘You are not so loved here as you were,’ Granville Barker reported from New York. ‘The “Common Sense about the War” raised you up many enemies and turned some of your friends very sour.’
Feeling themselves implicated, some writers reacted dramatically. The best-selling novelist W. J. Locke suddenly sprang up screaming: ‘I will not sit in the same room with Bernard Shaw!’ J. C. Squire put it to his readers that G.B.S. should be tarred and feathered. In an open letter, subtitled ‘A Manual for the Haters of England’, Henry Arthur Jones blasted him with an enormous vituperative sentence:
‘The hag Sedition was your mother, and Perversity begot you. Mischief was your midwife and Misrule your nurse, and Unreason brought you up at her feet – no other ancestry and rearing had you, you freakish homunculus, germinated outside of lawful procreation...’
More painful to Shaw was the response of those he loved. Archer’s son, whom from childhood Shaw had known as ‘Tomarcher’, sailed home from New York on the first available steamer to rejoin his volunteer corps and was sent to Flanders. ‘It is a sickening business this sending lambs to the slaughter,’ Shaw commiserated. But Archer, fiercely patriotic, felt differently.
Shaw had also hoped to get support from G. K. Chesterton. But Chesterton, who had been ill during late 1914 and early 1915, was ‘hungry for hostilities’. The war excited the dark side of his nature. ‘I have always thought there was in Prussia an evil will,’ he wrote to Shaw. ‘Of course there is an evil will in Prussia,’ Shaw agreed. ‘Prussia isn’t Paradise. I have been fighting that evil will, in myself and others, all my life.’ Chesterton’s hatred seemed to Shaw the product of a mind in which the war had lodged as medieval fantasy. And to Chesterton, Shaw appeared equally unreal. ‘I think you are a great man; and I think your first great misfortune was that you were born in a small epoch,’ he wrote. ‘But I think it is your last and worst misfortune that now at last the epoch is growing greater: but you are not.’
Wells too chimed in with the public outcry, describing G.B.S. as ‘one of those perpetual children who live in a dream of make-believe... that he is a person of incredible wisdom and subtlety running the world.
‘...It is almost as if there was nothing happening in Flanders. It is almost as if there was no pain in all the world... [he] flings himself upon his typewriter and rattles out his broadsides. And nothing will stop him. All through the war we shall have this Shavian accompaniment going on, like an idiot child screaming in a hospital... He is at present... an almost unendurable nuisance.’
‘If I were a German, I should criticize the Berlin Government with equal fierceness for having made the war,’ Shaw wrote to Trebitsch. In fact he did write ‘The German Case Against Germany’ in May 1916, but by that time he was widely regarded as a German sympathizer. ‘I am not what is called pro-German,’ he wrote, ‘...neither am I an anti-German.’ He insisted that a gentleman refused to hate his enemy in wartime. But this attitude had no comfortable place in a country exulting in the announcement that all German music was to be banned at concerts. People reminded one another how he had championed Wagner. Even ‘his Fabian ideas of social reconstruction,’ claimed the Daily Chronicle, ‘are inspired by Berlinese notions of symmetry’.
His reasoning was impeccable; his offence emotional. ‘In the right key one can say anything,’ he wrote to Bertrand Russell, ‘in the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part of the job is the establishment of the key.’ But many writers felt he had gone off-key. Henry James, who was soon to become a British citizen, claimed that he had not been able to read Shaw’s Common Sense at all because ‘his horrible flippancy revolts me’. Arnold Bennett, too, described as a ‘disastrous pity’ Shaw’s ‘perverseness, waywardness, and harlequinading’.
Shaw’s jokes, such as his tip to those who wanted unconditionally to smash Germany that they should go about killing all her women, were his natural method of expression. ‘If we did not die of laughter at the humours of war we should of horror,’ he admitted to Robert Loraine; and to his sister Lucy he confessed: ‘one has to learn to laugh at such things in war or else go mad.’ He asked those who objected that his jokes did not fit the hour to ignore the ‘imbecilities’ of his style and fix on the content. But this was impossible. ‘Shaw is often ten minutes ahead of the truth,’ wrote Woodrow Wilson’s brother-in-law Stockton Axson, ‘which is almost as fatal as being behind the time.’
He felt his isolation. ‘Thanks for your friendly hail,’ he wrote acknowledging a letter from Bertrand Russell. ‘It really is necessary for people who can keep their heads to pass the time of day occasionally lest they should begin to fear that they, and not the others, are the madmen.’ Most members of the Dramatists Club refused to meet him at their lunches; and when James F. Muirhead, editor of Baedeker, resigned from the Society of Authors, because ‘I cannot consent that any part of my affairs should be in any way under the control of a man of whom I think as I do of you’, Shaw stepped down himself from the two committees at the Society of Authors where for the past ten years he had been the chief source of energy and initiative. Muirhead was an admirer of Shaw, counting the shocks he had given Britain over the past thirty years ‘among the most salutary influences brought to bear on that country’. But by 1915 he was writing of his ‘myopia of genius... you really do not understand why you are at present a cause of offence to 99 out of every 100 people that I meet.’
It had needed courage to go on writing as he did. ‘It was not easy,’ Shaw admitted. ‘I know of no other literary man of anything like his eminence who would have taken such treatment so good-naturedly,’ wrote Desmond MacCarthy. Almost he seemed unperturbed. ‘I am not afraid of unpopularity,’ he told Beatrice Webb. He could not get angry with people he met – ‘it breaks my back completely,’ he explained in a letter begging not to be introduced to Lloyd George. But he was long-lastingly affected. Below the surface of his forbearance, layers of disillusion were forming. He would take imaginative revenge against this society by threatening it with his Zeppelin raid at the end of Heartbreak House, and by scoring victories over the ‘Goddams’ in the person of St Joan. He would recharge his optimism, too, by gazing through the heartbreaking facts into a haze of Shavian hypotheses. ‘I don’t expect anybody but myself to see as far as I do,’ he told the Webbs – an expectation amply to be justified by the public’s blindness over Back to Methuselah. Meanwhile, he kept his spirits whirring with colossal swanking. ‘The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything,’ he admitted to Wells.
He protected himself too with brighter paradoxes. The war, he complained, ‘has made me excessively popular’. He became expert at converting every rebuff into another victory. ‘All the forts opened fire on me,’ he had reported to Stella Campbell who was touring Pygmalion in the United States; ‘and they have capitulated one after the other... my enemies are my footstool.’
About those matters that might have stirred approval – his cheque for £200 to the Belgian refugees; his £20,000 (equivalent to £700,000 in 1997) contribution to the British War Loan – he kept uncharacteristically quiet. Partly it was a matter of self-respect, partly of outmanoeuvring those who wished to surround him with obloquy. ‘Unless you make a reputation at once for being utterly impossible, implacable, inexorable, you are lost,’ he was to advise his French translator, Augustin Hamon. But by making such a reputation, Shaw was becoming a lost man in politics.
‘When war comes the time for arguing is passed.’ But Shaw could not keep from arguing. He argued as other people in another war were to dig: for victory. Whenever he was criticized, he counter-attacked. When accused of giving propaganda ammunition to Germany he retorted that it was his accusers themselves who had done that, Germany having attacked him bitterly until it noticed similar attacks in England.
He had an answer for everything: often a wonderfully exasperating answer, formed in the conviction that it was as much his duty to face criticism as it was the soldiers’ to face bullets. Full of the appalling slaughter at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing, he mocked the outcry that arose in the spring of 1915 over the sinking of a popular Atlantic liner, the Lusitania. Here at last was something small enough – the killing of saloon passengers – for the public imagination to grasp. He heartily welcomed it, and the execution of Nurse Edith Cavell, for the effect it would produce on the United States, the moral centre of the neutral world. ‘I even found a grim satisfaction,’ he afterwards wrote, ‘very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants.’ During the first Zeppelin raids he advocated that movable metal arches should immediately be placed in school playgrounds so that children might know where to run when the Zeppelins came. But before this suggestion was implemented, people accused him of defeatism, goading him into recommending a judicious bombardment of London. ‘In fact if we had any sense we would bombard London ourselves, and demolish the Houses of Parliament and all the new government offices for aesthetic reasons just as we should demolish the slums for sanitary reasons.’
The most difficult long-term problem for Shaw was recruitment. There could be no denying that the Government’s painting of the war as a simple scene of knight errantry, with England as Lancelot-Galahad, Germany as the wicked giant and Belgium as the beautiful maiden, had been wonderfully popular. But after three months of war fever, recruitment had begun to fall off, and with it, Shaw claimed, the justification for keeping the nation in its fool’s paradise disappeared. ‘The recruiting got on its feet again,’ he wrote, once the War Office ‘withdrew the silliest of its placards, and faced the necessity for higher pay and better treatment of recruits’.
Shaw wanted to bring the same people up to the same guns equipped with a far better arsenal of attitudes, motives, opinions; to place them in the same trenches looking forward without detestation to the soldiers opposite, and looking back with scepticism at the politicians who had arranged this grotesque firing line. ‘The newspapers are so stupid that, simply because he’s Mr Shaw, they won’t report him – instead of running him as our leading patriot,’ wrote Lytton Strachey.
The newspapers did send their reporters to his speeches, but only to see him hissed and mobbed. The German press had already described him as being persecuted in London, fearful of assassination, and living under house arrest with sentries at his doors. The failure of his speeches to provoke mobbing – ‘reporters who were sent to see me torn limb from limb withdrew copyless’ – was partly due to the nature of his audiences which mingled ‘smart persons of the soulful type – Lady Diana [Manners] for example’ with clusters of prominent Fabians. They were, in short, very like theatre audiences, full of young people in bright clothes, for whom he gave excellent performances without benefit of reviews.
Most people did not know by now whether he was a pacifist or a conscriptionist – in fact he was neither. ‘It seems to me that all Socialists should advocate compulsory national service, both civil and military,’ he wrote. ‘But compulsory soldiering is another matter.’ It was agonizing to see the short, red-faced, Cecil Chesterton got up in khaki and looking as if he could camouflage himself ‘as a beetroot on a sack of potatoes by simply standing stock still’. Shaw himself would have cut a far sharper figure in uniform. In the first days of the war he had witnessed a company of volunteers come swinging along Gower Street and ‘to my utter scandal I was seized with a boyish impulse to join them’.
As a ‘superannuated person’ he felt the inappropriateness of urging young people to take up arms. He criticized the Derby Scheme, which was bullying and cajoling men into voluntary service, for its ‘appalling bad stage management’ as well as the perverted economic and emotional basis on which it was founded. ‘If the decision is to be Conscription, let it be faced, not as a temporary expedient,’ he wrote in the Daily News, ‘but as an advance in social organization.’ But the second Conscription Act, which became effective on 25 May 1916, a week before the Battle of Jutland, was an emergency measure, with little considered legal character. Every military authority now became a press gang. The superstition that all Britons were free was kept up by a clause in the Act which reserved the liberty of people to refuse service on conscientious grounds, but neither the qualifications nor the treatment of this category of exempt person were defined. The result was that conscientious objectors were in practice rancorously persecuted.
All over the country there were cases of ill usage and vindictive sentences: and though Shaw ‘should not have objected myself if I had been liable to serve’, he was greatly exercised by this widespread maltreatment. He intervened in the case of an employee in the Education Department of the London County Council who was sent for miscellaneous duties to a military barracks, because the decision meant that ‘public education is of no service to the country’. How could the Government reasonably claim that ‘to take an educated man of special literary talent and aptitude from the work of national education, and to set him to sweep barracks, dig latrines, or wait at table on an officers’ mess is to effect a stroke of national economy which will materially help to win the war’? He objected to the composer Rutland Boughton’s work being described as ‘not of the least national importance’. Despite all the musical entertainments for the troops it was as if military tribunals believed that fine art was frivolous and out of place in wartime, ‘and that all a man needs to be a complete Englishman is football in peace, fighting in war, and a formula about his duty to King and Country to save himself the trouble of thinking’. He appeared as a character witness at a court martial on behalf of Clarence Norman, a journalist whom he had employed to make verbatim reports of his speeches in shorthand and who was imprisoned for two and a half years for ignoring his call-up papers. And he used the cases of two other conscientious objectors of recognized integrity, Stephen Hobhouse and Clifford Allen, to demonstrate the common misuse of the Government’s legislation by military tribunals. ‘If Mr Hobhouse is imprisoned for a single hour,’ he wrote in Massingham’s Nation, ‘the law is broken and the good faith of the Government discredited.’
Shaw studied the evidence, took trouble to be legally exact, and chose each case with care. Repeated sentences for the same offence could with hard labour become sentences of death. A new crime had been created. ‘It is worth noticing that Quakers have been persecuted with the utmost ferocity,’ Shaw wrote, ‘whilst pugnacious objectors who simply objected to this particular war and openly declared that they would fight in a class war have been treated with comparative indulgence.’
He also gave sympathetic advice to one or two deserters, destroying the letters for their protection and writing confidentially so as not to undermine his own position as ‘an old advocate of compulsory service’. According to Rebecca West, he was like Swift rather than Shelley, and whatever he said, the effect of his words was to question rather than inspire the prosecution of the war. Watching him as he walked on to the platform and began speaking, she perceived that his virtue was getting thin with dilution. ‘The passing of middle age has wiped the aggressive strangeness from his face, by mitigating with silver the redness of his hair and the pirate twist of his eyebrows, and has revealed a predominant quality of noble and unhysteric sensitiveness,’ she wrote. ‘In public life there is not time for such sensitiveness... when he began to speak, and the Irish accent shivered over his musical voice like the wind over a lake, one perceived another reason why he should not enter into politics.’
But Shaw always worked against the grain of his natural sensitivity. ‘I go back to politics, religion & philosophy,’ he had written to Stella Campbell. ‘They give me frightful headaches, but satisfy my soul.’ He felt that he knew now ‘why Shakespeare and Swift were so bitter’ after the wars against Philip II and Louis XIV. To overcome early bitterness he had removed himself from the intimate thing and forced his way into politics, but now felt uncertain of his place in public life: ‘I no longer have any confidence in my notions of what this generation needs to have said to it,’ he told Wells.
It seemed impossible to go on writing plays. In these days of clashing events, art could ‘only be carried by the deaf,’ Rebecca West acknowledged. ‘And the artist who, like Mr Shaw, abandons it, at least shows that he has good hearing and is listening to the world.’
But he wanted a world that listened to him. The Fabian Research Department had commissioned Leonard Woolf to investigate the causes of the war. Against a background of Bloomsburgian scepticism, Woolf records, ‘I did an immense amount of work on this.’ His conclusions were published in 1916 as a book, International Government, to which Shaw supplied an American Preface.
Leonard Woolf argued that the first step towards the prevention of war must be the creation, as part of international government, of a supranational authority. His examination of the minimum requirements for such a body and his description of its probable structure comprised the first detailed study for the League of Nations. Shaw wanted to amplify this project. ‘I find myself installed as a great prophet,’ he pointed out. But he was a prophet without disciples, disestablished, needing affirmations. Shaw’s League of Nations floats with its dreaming spires like an academy for supermen and superwomen, a sublime factory where Undershaft’s weapons are manufactured by a professor of Greek and his wife, charged with defending democracy from those who, seeking mob popularity, sacrifice the eternal to the temporal. It is a Palace of Revolution, shimmering across the wilderness where Shaw preached, in which international matters are taken from those whose outlook is formed by official habits and given over to the welfare of us all. Finally, this visionary League stands as a temple for Shaw’s paradoxes, his Abbey of Theleme, where all is magnificently opposed to the ordinary world.
To a man who has produced a modern comedy, a campaign is child’s play.
‘Joy Riding at the Front’, Daily Chronicle (7 March 1917)
The ordinary world, over which crawled tanks, U-Boats and Zeppelins, appeared scarcely less fantastical than Shaw’s phalanstère. At the end of 1916 Lloyd George’s new War Cabinet rejected Germany’s peace proposals: but public opinion was veering more sympathetically towards ‘Dearest G.B.S. (who is splendid about the war)’ as Ellen Terry called him.
He had always found some supporters. Keir Hardie had ‘felt the thrill’ of his Common Sense and there had been the suggestion that a popular edition should be prepared by Arnold Bennett. When purged of the satirical absurdities readers accepted so literally, Bennett believed that Shaw’s writing, which contained ‘the most magnificent, brilliant, and convincing common sense that could possibly be uttered’, would inaugurate a period of open discussion. Nothing came of this plan, though Shaw himself endorsed it. ‘You, and I and Wells and Webb should be working together,’ he urged Bennett late in 1916. ‘...However, it can’t be helped – we must do the best we can ploughing our lonely back gardens.’ Shaw had looked for a coalition of the intelligentsia, believing it was the duty of representatives of art and literature in all countries to keep moral considerations above the nationalistic level of the war. But though these writers gained no authority beyond what each could separately extort by the persuasiveness of his or her pen, at least the atmosphere had eased. Both J. C. Squire and W. J. Locke had come up and shaken Shaw’s hand. Wells, too, having gone through ‘disillusionment about the beneficence of our war-making’, had reached conclusions similar to Shaw’s.
Adelphi Terrace had been damaged in an air raid; at Ayot St Lawrence an anti-aircraft station, with searchlights and soldiers’ sheds, was put up. Shaw continued, as in peacetime, to divide his weeks between the two places. The villagers suspected him of being a spy. After all, he had been there less than a dozen years. They knew his car and motor-bicycle well enough; they knew his dog Kim, ‘the village terror’: but they did not know what to make of his remarks about this ‘most maddening war’. Their suspicions began to blow away after the famous Hertfordshire Blizzard of 1915. ‘He came out and worked hard with the other menfolk for days on end, sawing up trees which had been torn up by their roots and lay blocking the road,’ one of them remembered.
It was the Zeppelin raids above all else that gave everyone a subject of conversation. One Zeppelin, after voyaging majestically over the Shaws’ house on its way to London, was shot down near Ayot on 1 October 1916. Next morning Shaw rode off through the rain to see the wreckage – two lumps of twisted metal framework in a watery field splashed over all day by happy crowds. ‘The police were in great feather,’ he reported, ‘as there is a strict cordon, which means you cant get in without paying.’ But admission was cheap and well worth the price. ‘I didnt half cheer, I tell you,’ Shaw heard one girl remark. Nineteen bodies lay in a barn at the edge of the field. ‘May I go in?’ asked one woman. ‘I would like to see a dead German.’
He had been enchanted by the sky-spectacle against the stars, with its magnificent orchestration. Having seen the Zeppelin fall like a burning newspaper, ‘with its human contents roasting for some minutes (it was frightfully slow)’, he had gone back to bed and was asleep in ten minutes. Reflecting on this, he confided to the Webbs: ‘One is so pleased at having seen the show that the destruction of a dozen people or so in hideous terror and torment does not count... Pretty lot of animals we are!’
Charlotte wrapped herself round with remoter preoccupations. She felt proud of her husband’s fame, but shared few of his interests; was wreathed in smiles, but seemed out of it all. To Virginia Woolf she appeared like a ‘fat white Persian cat’, which had rolled itself up on a cushion of Indian mysticism and gone to sleep. ‘When she got me alone she tried to convert me,’ Virginia wrote after a weekend together in the summer of 1916, ‘and lent me little books about the Seutras, which she had to hide from Mrs Webb.’ Unluckily for Charlotte, Beatrice Webb spied these little books beside her bed and nosed out their contents. ‘The thesis is that by continuous meditation, or self-hypnotism, you will rise above the self-conscious self and realize the “God Power” within you,’ Beatrice noted sceptically. Charlotte confided to Virginia Woolf that Beatrice, though a wonderful person, ‘had no idea of religion’. She reacted with irritation to Charlotte’s easy answers and (according to Virginia) ‘jeered at poor old Mrs Shaw’. But it was the spectacle of rich old Mrs Shaw that aggravated Beatrice – this woman whose decent restlessness had been stilled by a religious placidity removing her from ‘all efforts to make things better for those who are suffering from their heredity or environment’. Beatrice had felt sympathetic to Charlotte when she was suffering over her husband’s intrigue with Mrs Pat: what antagonized her now was Charlotte’s lack of suffering. It was exasperating to see her beaming with overflowing contentedness in the middle of this appalling war: she appeared so little inconvenienced by it all.
At the beginning of 1917 Shaw began a new diary. ‘I am going to try to keep it for a year,’ he noted, ‘as a sample slice of my life.’ Altogether he kept it for ten days, and the sample slice it cut from his Ayot routine shows why he did not prolong it. There was no time. Every morning he was hectically occupied pouring out his ‘intolerable opinions’ to readers of the Woman’s Dreadnought, Somerset County Gazette, and much of the American press. In the afternoons he and Charlotte would go into the garden where she sawed logs and he split them with a beetle and wedges. Sometimes he hurried through the village with his West Highland terrier; when he needed to go further he would set off for a spin and a spill on his motor-bike, and come rushing back to tighten nuts on the front wheel. At half-past four he allowed himself a cup of chocolate, while Charlotte drank tea. Then he would press on with his writing, often dealing with letters that Ann Elder had sent down from London. The second interval of the day – called dinner – began at half-past seven: then he would read and end the evening singing and playing the piano – Strauss’s Elektra and Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Gounod’s songs, arias from Mozart and Wagner operas, and a good deal of miscellaneous Berlioz, Elgar and Schumann. Finally he would go up to Charlotte’s room to say good-night, and retire to his own bed with the Economic Journal.
Early that month he received an invitation from Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British army, to visit the Front. ‘Charlotte said I must go, as I ought to see this terrible thing for myself,’ he noted. ‘I grumbled that I should see nothing except a conventional round on which all the journalists are sent; but... my interest increased as the day went on.’ By the following week he had come to feel that he ‘was not free to refuse’.
In the blunted landscape, with its splintered trees, its signposts without villages, Shaw found some devastating material. Privately he confided to Lady Gregory that his week at the Front had been ‘a most demoralizing experience’. Publicly in the Daily Chronicle he reported: ‘I enjoyed myself enormously and continuously.’ Both statements contained truth, and were a shorthand for his translation of a demoralizing early life into a career of sustained and serious comedy. He set out to console those who had husbands, brothers, sons, friends in the trenches, or who were themselves in training for that ordeal, with a display of black entertainment. He confidently assured everyone that there was no inevitability at the Front of being killed. On the contrary, death was very uncertain: the gas was crazily blown in the wrong direction, the high explosives were so appallingly imprecise that the ‘Somme battlefield was very much safer than the Thames Embankment with its race of motors and trams’. The devastation was terrific yet many of the old towns had been badly in need of demolition. The cathedral at Arras looked finer as a ruin than when he had last seen it intact; the Little Square, too, had been most ‘handsomely knocked about’ and many old buildings, such as the Cloth Hall at Ypres, would gain a more beautiful existence in the memory than they had ever achieved in actuality.
Drudgery was one of the hardships of war: but the military provided many colourful diversions. Whenever an aeroplane sailed across the blue, delightful white puff-balls blossomed in the sky around it. Every night was Guy Fawkes Night. The guns hurled their fiery shells joyously into the air and set up a bombardment finer than Tchaikovsky’s 1812. He had difficulty believing that the man lying by the roadside was not a tramp taking a siesta during the booming and whizzing of this band music, but a gentleman who had lost his head. Behind the lines bayonet practice was conducted without the least blood lost, and imparted a bank holiday air to the place which really looked magnificent in the snow and sunshine. The trenches were crammed with pacifists, socialists and internationalists, all freed from theoretical illusions, all damning the party politicians with the greatest heartiness, and despite uncomfortable conditions, ‘no more hopelessly wretched than I’. Fighting men, Shaw explained, escape the perpetual money worries of their civilian counterparts and the egotism of their preoccupation with commerce. At the Front something exciting was always happening that satisfied man’s heroic instincts.
The horror is forced invisibly between the lines of Shaw’s writing. War could do many things, he argued, but it could not end war. ‘A victory for anybody is a victory for war.’ He predicted that economic rather than military forces would eventually end it all, and that the only benefits of this vast calamity would lie in the employment of military virtues for a decently organized civilian life. For in the army, instead of your hand being against every man’s and every man’s hand against you, ‘you are continually trying to get things done in the best possible way for the benefit of your comrades in arms, of your country, of the whole of which you are a part... whereas commerce is normally competitive and places your individual pocket before all the higher objects of ambition’.
Shaw’s 10,000-word report of his experiences as a war tourist revived questions of his loyalty. One Member of Parliament demanded if this were the sort of man who should be officially invited to the British front line. ‘I have always found that when any gentleman visits the front in France,’ replied the Government spokesman, ‘he comes back with an added desire to help the British Army and is proud of it.’ The House of Commons filled with cheers – this time on Shaw’s behalf. Many who had accused him of German sympathies now wondered whether he was actually in the service of the British Government to advertise the country’s celebrated freedom of speech. Observing him to be ‘an interesting man of original views’, Haig had taken G.B.S. to a demonstration of experimental weapons. But though he later voted Haig ‘the most interesting new writer of the past twelve months’, Shaw privately judged him to be an academician of war ‘trained socially and professionally to behave and work in a groove from which nothing could move him, disconcerted and distressed by novelties and incredulous as to their military value, but always steadied by a well-closed mind and unquestioned code... He made me feel that the war would last thirty years, and that he would carry it on irreproachably until he was superannuated.’
Though he greeted the news of the first revolution in Russia that March as ‘a gain to humanity’, and described the entry of the United States into the war on 6 April as a ‘first class moral asset to the common cause against junkerism’, Shaw felt politically gloomy. The Prime Minister had struck out his name from the ‘list of persons with ideas’ proposed for the Reconstruction Committee to advise on post-war social problems. He was still an outsider.
That July he was sixty-one. ‘Any fool can be 60,’ he explained to Trebitsch, ‘if he lives long enough.’ Charlotte had taken off for Ireland that summer for the sake of her lumbago, leaving G.B.S. to revert somewhat to his bachelor ways. He was seeing much of Kathleen Scott, formidable widow of the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott – a model Shavian heroine ‘adventurously ready to go to the ends of the earth at half an hour’s notice with no luggage but a comb with three teeth in it, and always successful’. Her job was sculpting – she made a bust and full-length statuette of G.B.S. in bronze. During periods of grass-widowhood G.B.S. was sometimes allowed to stay with Kathleen, especially after her marriage in 1922 to Hilton Young. ‘We got on together to perfection,’ he recorded.
After Stella had gone off to marry Cornwallis-West ‘I really thought I was a dead man,’ Shaw admitted, ‘until I recovered my sanity by going right back to my economics and politics, and put in a hard stint of work on this abominable war.’ But by 1917 he had come to feel that ‘my bolt is shot as to writing about the war’, and that he ‘must get away for a moment from Fabians & politics or I shall go mad’. He decided to make for Ireland and enjoy the open skies of Parknasilla where Charlotte had been staying with her sister.
He arrived on 10 September and early the following month reported that he had been ‘boating and bathing and making butter in a dairy ever since’. Work was impossible. ‘In the Atlantic air one grows big and rank and Irish,’ he wrote to Beatrice Webb. ‘...this is the Land of the Free compared to England.’
The art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism.
Preface to Heartbreak House
Early in the war Shaw’s box office appeal had plummeted. ‘The moment is not happily chosen for resuming the old Shavian capers, which were among the strangest by-products of the long peace,’ declared A. B. Walkley in The Times. There were many who felt that theatres, museums and picture galleries should be converted into hospitals and barracks. To their surprise the stage grew incomparably popular between 1914 and 1918. Initially there were recruiting plays with patriotic songs which featured a harangue in the interval by the fire-eating chauvinist (and fraudulent financier) Horatio Bottomley. Shaw, who went to see one of Bottomley’s perorations, reported: ‘It’s exactly what I expected: the man gets his popularity by telling people with sufficient bombast just what they think themselves and therefore want to hear.’ For a specialist in the unexpected there was no audience. Producers and actor-managers ransacked their memories for out-of-date musicals and revues to exploit the bliss of soldiers who were happy to be no longer under fire and ready to be delighted by every young girl they saw, old joke they heard. London suddenly reverted to antique farces played in bedrooms with four doors and a window, identical to the bedrooms of flats above and below them, and all occupied by jealous husbands and wives mistaking one bedroom for another.
Shaw’s contribution to this wartime theatre was four playlets that caricature, in juvenile fashion, the economic and social changes brought about in Germany, England and Russia by the Great War: and the lack of any change in Ireland. His characters are preposterously named – Archdeacon Daffodil Donkin, Ermyntrude Roosenhonkers-Pipstein – and preposterously re-cast. Wives of fashionable architects take jobs as tea ladies; eminent medical men become waiters in hotels. Shaw made the plots of these playlets more ludicrous and their action more knock-about than any bedroom farce – then having appealed to the popular nonsensical mood, he tried to introduce a few moments of serious reflection. At the end of The Inca of Perusalem, for example, the absurd Inca, whose athletic moustache ‘is so watched and studied,’ we are told, ‘that it has made his face the political barometer of the whole continent’, ceases to be a lampoon on the Kaiser, and speaks in the tones of the Devil from Don Juan in Hell. Shaw wanted to remind his audiences that war had long been a favourite food of their imagination – when men had no battles to fight they played at war in their films and magazine stories. Since all of us were partly infected by the same passion, we could not simply blame one man, the Kaiser, for making us fight.
Shaw’s satire against wartime England was an exaggerated stunt, Augustus Does His Bit, which he threw off in August 1916 to be performed in aid of the Belgians. This skit on high-born officialdom and crass bureaucracy at home (Lord Augustus Highcastle produces a bullet which had been flattened by contact with his skull) was well recognized at the Front, but it did not gain much recognition in London. ‘He has simply evolved an idiot out of his own consciousness,’ noted The Times, ‘and ascribed to him the follies of his own imagination.’
Annajanska, his ‘revolutionary romancelet’, is a half-hour bravura piece written during three December days in 1917 – a month after the Bolshevik Revolution and a week before Russia signed an armistice with Germany. Shaw hands the derelict power created by the fall of tsardom back to a ‘wild grand duchess’. He wanted to exploit the apparent paradox of the most radical event in his lifetime having erupted in the most politically backward country. The extravaganza may best be regarded as a present to Lillah McCarthy. It enabled her to make a startling entrance dragging in two exhausted soldiers, fire off several fusillades and dominate the Coliseum stage in a magnificent green and black Russian fur coat designed by Charles Ricketts. ‘I went home very tired,’ she wrote happily.
O’Flaherty, V.C. had been conceived in the summer of 1915 while staying with Lady Gregory at Coole (‘the scene is quite simply before the porch in your house’). He had intended a four-handed light comedy (with small but important additional roles for a thrush and a jay) that would appeal to what he called ‘the Irishman’s spirit of freedom and love of adventure’. But as he wrote, a portrait emerged of the Irish character that ‘will make the Playboy seem a patriotic rhapsody by comparison,’ he apologized to Lady Gregory. ‘...C’était plus fort que moi. At worst, it will be a barricade for the theatre to die gloriously on.’
Having been asked by Sir Matthew Nathan, Under-Secretary for Ireland, for help over Dublin Castle’s disappointing recruitment campaign, he had taken a famous recent Irish exploit – the killing of eight German soldiers and capture of fifteen others singlehanded by Private Michael O’Leary – and Shavianized it for the stage. ‘Incomprehensible as it seems to an Englishman, Irish patriotism does not take the form of devotion to England and England’s king.’ More effective, he reckoned, would be to advertise the war as an opportunity to travel abroad at the British Government’s expense.
The enlargement of O’Flaherty’s experience at the Front induces in him an unbearable realism. ‘Knowledge and wisdom has come over me with pain and fear and trouble,’ he says. ‘Ive been made a fool of and imposed upon all my life.’ He sees everything for what it is: Irish patriotism is mindless ignorance; Irish family life grows more terrible than life in the trenches; his Irish sweetheart, no longer the angelic colleen, is ruthless and mercenary; and his mother becomes an appalling termagant whose ‘batings’ at home have proved good training for O’Flaherty’s acts of bravery in the army.
Shaw’s happy ending was hardly adequate compensation for a recruiting play that has its hero exclaiming: ‘Dont talk to me or any other soldier of the war being right. No war is right.’ And: ‘Youll never have a quiet world til you knock the patriotism out of the human race.’ This was not what Sir Matthew Nathan had been expecting. He consulted General Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces and soon to be made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and, having brooded on it with him, wrote to say that they both believed the production should be postponed. It was a tactful letter. Any performance, he suggested, might lead to ‘demonstrations’ smothering the ‘fine lessons’ of the play.
O’Flaherty, V.C. received its first presentation on 17 February 1917 at Treizennes in Belgium. Robert Loraine was O’Flaherty and the other parts were played by officers of the Royal Flying Corps, while the men put on a performance of The Inca of Perusalem. Later that year Shaw himself read the play to a hospital full of wounded soldiers near Ayot. ‘They gave me three cheers, and laughed a good deal,’ he told Lady Gregory; ‘but the best bits were when they sat very tight and said nothing.’
Though O’Flaherty, V.C. was not performed by the Irish Players until it had softened into ‘A Reminiscence of 1915’ at the end of 1920 – and then only in London – Shaw’s reputation seemed to have come alive in Ireland. After seven years without a Shaw production, the Abbey Theatre staged what amounted to an extraordinary festival – seven Shaw plays between the autumn of 1916 and the summer of 1917. And what was happening in Ireland appeared to be happening in other parts of the world. The American manager William Brady had presented Major Barbara in New York; the British-born actor William Faversham had broken the box office records set by Pygmalion with his United States tour of Getting Married. Throughout Europe all manner of Shavian productions were appearing – Androcles in Stockholm, Candida in Budapest, Pygmalion in Warsaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession in Helsinki, Widowers’ Houses in Prague and The Devil’s Disciple pretty well simultaneously in Copenhagen and Vienna.
In Britain too there was a recovery of interest in his work – Man and Superman had been performed in its entirety in Edinburgh, and half a dozen other plays were touring the country from Plymouth to Birmingham. The London theatre stood ready at last for a new drama from G.B.S. But he felt oddly undecided. He had begun a shorthand draft of a play, provisionally called The Studio in the Clouds, on 4 March 1916. ‘I dont know what its about,’ he wrote to Stella over thirteen weeks later. By the end of that year he had written a first act, ‘filling the stage with the most delightful characters under the pleasantest circumstances,’ he told William Archer. ‘...I have left them there for months and months, hopelessly stuck. This has never happened before.’ Later he changed the title to Heartbreak House. ‘We must be content to dream about it,’ he advised Lillah McCarthy in the summer of 1918. ‘Let it lie there to shew that the old dog can still bark a bit.’
The government of one nation against its will by another nation raises no question of whether such government is good or bad: it is itself misgovernment, and would be bad even if it produced perfect order and mutual material prosperity... I object to being governed by a superior race even more than by an inferior one, so that the Englishman may take it as he likes, as superior, inferior or equal: I object to his governing me.
Shaw to Sá (4 November 1917)
‘If you want to bore an Irishman, play him an Irish melody, or introduce him to another Irishman,’ Shaw had written. ‘...Abroad, however, it is a distinction to be an Irishman; and accordingly the Irish in England flaunt their nationality.’ His original motive for leaving Ireland, like his mother’s, had been economic: ‘a necessary transfer of my business to a European metropolis’. The Irish Renaissance had changed the literary business potential of Dublin. But Dublin was still the city of his discontent. Returning there after more than thirty years, he saw that ‘the houses had never been painted since and the little shops had eggs in the windows, with mice and rats running over them’. Later, after reading parts of Ulysses, he was to congratulate Joyce: ‘It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one,’ he wrote in a letter to the book’s publisher Sylvia Beach; ‘and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it... I have walked those streets and know those shops and have heard and taken part in those conversations. I escaped from them to England.’ He wanted to dissolve that squalid past into a radiant future: and he advised Ireland to cease puffing her sails with the rhetoric of stale grievances, and replace her preoccupation over national divisions with an overall political emancipation.
Shaw separated Dublin from Ireland and overlaid biography with history. ‘I am an Irishman and I have not forgotten.’ What other person could have demanded, but be refused, membership of the Irish Convention; be offered, but decline, nomination to the Irish Senate; and accept the first presidency of the Irish Academy of Letters. He recommended that Ireland be established as a sanatorium where the English should be sent to gain flexibility of mind: and advised Britain to sell Ireland to the United States in order to pay off her national debt. He was to leave the country to ‘stew in her own juice’ by not returning there after 1923: then registered as a citizen of the Irish Free State twelve years later.
His career was studded with illuminating acts of generosity to Ireland. He campaigned with Lady Gregory to recapture Hugh Lane’s pictures according to the wishes expressed in an unwitnessed codicil to Lane’s will; and he promised the Lord Mayor of Dublin a donation of 100 guineas as his contribution towards a good municipal gallery to house them. He presented the Assembly Rooms at Carlow, which he had inherited from his uncle Walter Gurly, to the Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin for conversion into a technical school and was largely responsible for the Technical College which later developed on that site. He attempted to set up an Irish film industry to which he offered to give Saint Joan, being ‘desirous that his plays shall employ and develop the dramatic genius of his fellow-countrymen and make Ireland’s scenic beauties known in all lands’. Later he would hand the manuscripts of his novels to the National Library of Ireland and finally leave the National Gallery of Ireland one third of his residuary estate.
But Shaw’s words spoke louder than his actions. He described Ireland’s political debates as ‘baby talk’, her papers ‘comics’, her history mere ‘police news’, and her education a hellish training that prolonged the ‘separation of the Irish people into two hostile camps’. He condemned the Censorship of Publications Act as an ‘exhibition of Irish moral panic’, and castigated her lack of birth control and sex education as a monstrous folly. He ridiculed the Gaelic League for loosening the country’s hold on a vital twentieth-century acquisition, the English language, and counselled all patriots ‘to go to bed and stay there until the Irish question is settled’. Nevertheless the fact that he was an Irishman ‘has always filled me with a wild and inextinguishable pride’. He would have preferred to be ‘burnt at the stake by Irish Catholics than protected by Englishmen’. And as a cure for the bad blood flowing from the unhappy historical marriage of England and Ireland, he prescribed a parting by consent rather than absolute divorce, together with a legal wand of oblivion moved over all past warring. To nurture malice, Shaw warned, ‘is to poison our blood and weaken our institutions with unintelligent rancor’.
Shaw used ‘every device of invective and irony and dialectic at my command’ to assuage Ireland’s longing for freedom. He had merged the subjects of divorce legislation and the constitutional independence of nations when covering the Parnell scandal of 1890. Home Rule had suddenly come within reach when a majority of Irish Members of Parliament pledged to the issue had been returned to Westminster. But at the height of his leadership of the Irish Party, Charles Parnell had been cited as co-respondent in a divorce case involving the wife of another Irish Member of Parliament and his political future seemed ruined. In letters to The Star, Shaw had argued that ‘the whole mischief in the matter lay in the law that tied the husband and wife together and forced Mr Parnell to play the part of clandestine intriguer, instead of enabling them to dissolve the marriage by mutual consent, without disgrace to either party’. He advised Parnell to ‘sit tight’ and urged the Irish Party to unite behind him – otherwise the Liberal Government would exploit the disunity and abandon its commitment to Home Rule. The verdicts of antiquated laws, he added, ‘can produce no genuine conviction of its victims’ unfitness for public life’. Similarly repugnant was the legally enforced tie between England and Ireland, he implied, where under the Coercion Act ‘constitutional reformers are driven to employ all the devices of criminals’.
In the ‘Preface for Politicians’ which he attached to John Bull’s Other Island in 1906, Shaw had predicted that ‘we can do nothing with an English Government unless we frighten it... under such circumstances reforms are produced only by catastrophes followed by panics in which “something must be done”.’ Ireland’s catastrophe was the ‘ghastly’ Easter Rising of 1916. Shaw made clear his support for ‘any Irishman taken in a fight for Irish independence against the British Government, which was a fair fight in everything except the enormous odds my countrymen had to face’. He felt anxiety lest relations between the two countries be fatally poisoned by acts of reprisal from the frightened English Government. ‘The men who were shot in cold blood after their capture or surrender were prisoners of war,’ he objected, after twelve of the insurgents had been executed.
Shaw’s most quixotic intervention into Anglo-Irish politics was on behalf of Roger Casement. Casement had taken advantage of the war to seek help from Germany for the cause of Irish independence, but on the eve of the Easter Rising he was captured by the British as he stepped ashore in Ireland from a German submarine. Feeling in England ran high against Casement who, as a British subject, would inevitably be found guilty of high treason. Much of the money for his defence was raised in the United States. In England writers as various as Conan Doyle and Arnold Bennett appealed for clemency on grounds that ranged from Casement’s mental health to Britain’s political expediency. Beatrice Webb noticed that, when Charlotte spoke in support of him, her ‘eyes flashed with defiance’. So Beatrice took Casement’s old friend, Alice Green, who was helping to organize his defence, to see the Shaws. It was a painful meeting. Alice Green desperately needed money to engage a first-rate defence lawyer: Shaw insisted that, since no credible denial of the facts was possible, paying lawyers to come up with technical ingenuities and exchange legal compliments would be throwing money down the drain. Instead he proposed a ‘daring frontal attack on the position of the Crown’. Casement was to conduct his own case, admit the facts, plead not guilty and apply as an Irish Nationalist to be held as a prisoner-of-war. Alice Green explained that Casement was extremely ill and incapable of handling a court full of lawyers: in which case, Shaw retorted, ‘we had better get our suit of mourning’. So the meeting broke up: Alice Green retiring in tears; Beatrice feeling a fool for having intervened; and G.B.S. striding into his study to compose a speech for Casement which would ‘thunder down the ages’.
Beatrice accused Shaw of conceitedly playing word games with the life of this poor man as if it were a ‘national dramatic event’. But Casement himself was delighted with the speech. ‘I shall be so grateful if you will convey to Bernard Shaw my warmest thanks,’ he told the Sinn Fein sympathizer Gavan Duffy; ‘his view is mine, with this exception – that I should never suggest to an English court or jury that they should let me off as a prisoner of war, but tell them “You may hang me, and be damned to you”.’
Such a man was beyond saving. Casement later regretted not using what he called ‘the only defence possible, viz., my own plan and that of G.B.S.’ There had been nothing to lose: but he was dissuaded by Alice Green and other friends, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged. Only then did ‘the virtually dead man’ rise to make his own lengthy speech from the dock, using a portion of what G.B.S. had written for him. In the fortnight between the court’s verdict and the date of sentence, Shaw tried hard to win Casement a reprieve. ‘I cannot make matters any worse than they are,’ he told H. W. Nevinson, ‘and there is just an off chance that I might make them better.’ He wrote to The Times which rejected his letter, published correspondence in the Manchester Guardian and the Daily News, and anonymously drafted a petition to Asquith warning him that hanging would make Casement a national hero. Casement was hanged on 3 August 1916.
To those claiming that the unification of Ireland would result in Protestants and Catholics cutting one another’s throats, Shaw had replied that ‘civil war is one of the privileges of a nation’. Such extermination was ‘too much to hope for,’ he added darkly, though mankind ‘still longs for that consummation’. If ‘hatred, calumny, and terror have so possessed men that they cannot live in peace as other nations do, they had better fight it out and get rid of their bad blood that way’.
‘What I have dreaded all along,’ he told Horace Plunkett, ‘is the usual political expedient of a settlement that is no settlement.’ To argue for his own federal solution, he accepted an invitation from the editor of the Daily Express, a newspaper specially hostile to him during the war, to tell its readers how to unravel the Irish problem. His series of articles, which were later issued in Dublin and London as a pamphlet, How to Settle the Irish Question, assembled a brilliant array of arguments for the inevitability of federation. This conclusion, which he described as ‘Home Rule for England’, possessed similar magical properties to the triple alliance in Common Sense about the War, and he frequently edged Wales out of the equation to achieve his mystical three-in-one – ‘the federation of the three nations (four if you count the Welsh)’. He then reinforced this combination by building three parliaments – National, Federal and Imperial – in his imagination for ‘the three kingdoms alike’.
After eight deliberating months Plunkett’s Convention, which had been set up by Lloyd George, voted for an Irish Parliament with authority over the whole country. ‘The story becomes more thrilling as it draws to an end,’ Shaw wrote to Plunkett in March 1918 after reading the proof sheets of his secret report to the King. ‘... I await the report with some nervousness.’ The moment came: the report made no sound. The Government had ‘funked it’, and Shaw was left feeling that it had been another instance of the unreality in Dublin politics.
The extreme nationalist party Sinn Fein, which had refused to participate in Plunkett’s Convention, rapidly evolved into a political power as Parnell’s old Irish Party passed away. Sinn Fein refused to attend Westminster and formed their own assembly (Dáil Éireann) in Dublin, representing a completely independent Republic of Ireland which was immediately declared illegal by the British Government.
Shaw had advocated federation as early as 1888 and he was still advocating it more than thirty years later. The flaw in his logic, as he had once expressed it himself, lay in the problem not being ‘one of logic at all, but of natural right’. England’s extreme procrastination had produced Ireland’s extreme reaction, leaving Shaw’s consistency as a remnant of historical academicism. He disliked Sinn Fein’s glorification of nationalism: yet thirty years before he had written of nationalism being ‘an incident of organic growth [which]... we shall have to accept’. The young Shaw believed that ‘like Democracy, national self-government is not for the good of the people: it is for the satisfaction of the people.’ The older Shaw warned against national independencies and neutralities which were set up ‘not by the internal strength of a nation’s position, but by the interested guarantees of foreign Powers’.
In his ‘Preface for Politicians’ he had diagnosed the condition of Ireland as being like that of ‘a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else... A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted... That is why everything is in abeyance in Ireland pending the achievement of Home Rule.’
Ireland’s cancer had worsened and now demanded the fiercer remedies of separatism. Shaw regarded the policies of Sinn Fein as symptoms of the disease and not parts of a homoeopathic medicine. ‘Sinn Fein means We Ourselves: a disgraceful and obsolete sentiment, horribly anti-Catholic,’ he wrote in How to Settle the Irish Question. ‘...Ireland is the Malvolio of the nations, “sick of self-love”, and... Sinn Fein’s delight is to propagate this morose malady.’
Ireland eventually placed its future in the hands of the quacks and windbags of the two rival religions, and in tearing itself away from England tore itself apart. Watching this process was to be intensely painful for Shaw. In his fashion he was devoted to Ireland. But he had become the reformer, philosopher and preacher to whom no one listened.
Literature should never be at war.
Shaw to Henry Newbolt (25 July 1920)
The Shaws did not enter the revelry on Armistice Day. They stayed at Ayot. These years of helplessness seemed to have made a cavity within G.B.S. ‘Every promising young man I know has been blown to bits lately,’ he told Lady Mary Murray; ‘and I have had to write to his mother.’ He had written to Stella Campbell at the beginning of 1918 when her son Alan Campbell was killed by the last shell from a German battery. ‘My beloved Beo is killed,’ she had scribbled to him – but he could not find words of polite consolation. ‘I cant be sympathetic: these things simply make me furious,’ he burst out. ‘...Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN DAMN! And oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dearest!’
A month later the news reached him that Robert Gregory had been shot down in his plane and was dead. In a letter prefiguring Yeats’s two poems ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, he wrote consoling Lady Gregory: ‘To a man with his power of standing up to danger – which must mean enjoying it – war must have intensified his life as nothing else could... I suppose that is what makes the soldier.’ He used Alan Campbell’s death – used Stella’s reaction – to bring Augusta Gregory comfort. ‘Like Robert he seemed to find himself in doing dangerous things. His mother thinks he got all the life he wanted out of the war and nothing else could have given it to him.’
‘I was hoping for a letter from you,’ Lady Gregory replied. ‘I knew it would be helpful.’
Most griefs were beyond help. ‘I know you will be very sorry for us,’ J. M. Barrie had written after his much-loved godson George Llewelyn Davies had been shot dead near Ypres. Though also living in Adelphi Terrace, he could not bear to give the news in person, but pushed his note through the door of the Shaws’ apartment. When he read it, Shaw wept.
William Archer was another who suffered bereavement. His son ‘Tom-archer’ was wounded at Mount Kearnel and died in a German hospital not long before the Armistice. ‘He left his young widow to take his place in his parents’ affection, the newly beloved daughter succeeding to the newly lost beloved son,’ Shaw recorded. ‘Yet Archer was loth to let the son go... and even experimented unsuccessfully in those posthumous conversations in which so many of the bereaved found comfort. And so, between daughter and son, the adventure of parentage never ended for Archer.’
And there were others, such as the hopelessly unsoldier-like Cecil Chesterton who had visited Shaw before leaving for the Front and died soon afterwards from trench fever. ‘It is impossible to describe what I used to feel on such occasions.’
Whenever possible Shaw used his comic energy to overcome his feelings. He lectured Robert Loraine who had been shot in the small of his back (‘the bullet coming out of his collar bone after going up through his lung and knocking his heart into his left elbow’) on the importance of being kept ‘in the lowest spirits, as laughing cannot be good for shrapnel in the lung’. In the summer of 1918 Loraine was again wounded, and his left kneecap being shattered, advised that his leg might have to be amputated. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, I suppose one can play Hamlet with a property leg,’ Shaw calculated. ‘...an artificial leg of the best sort will carry you to victory as Henry V. If you... are lame, it means a lifetime of Richard III, unless I write a play entitled Byron.’ As for flying, ‘when it comes to aerial combat, the more of you that is artificial the better’.
Loraine’s leg was saved. But to St John Ervine, who did lose a leg that summer, Shaw sent hasty congratulations on his being ‘in a stronger position’. Having two available legs, when had Shaw himself ever groused because he did not have three? ‘You will have all the energy you have hitherto spent on it to invest in the rest of your frame. For a man of your profession two legs are an extravagance,’ G.B.S. assured him. ‘...You are an exceptionally happy and fortunate man, relieved of a limb to which you owed none of your fame, and which indeed was the cause of your conscription; for without it you would not have been accepted for service.’
Such black parodies of the Shavian dialectic were ‘the cheering remarks one makes now to the sacrifice of this horrible war’.
*
The war also finished off the marriage between Granville Barker and Lillah McCarthy. They had gone to the United States where Barker ‘fell madly in love – really madly in the Italian manner’. The Helen who had enchanted him was an occasional poet and minor novelist, the wife of Archer Milton Huntington, heir of a railroad fortune, who had provided a guarantee against loss for Barker’s theatrical season in New York.
Barker had returned to England in June 1915 promising Lillah that his affair with Helen Huntington was over. He was some £5,000 (equivalent to £170,000 in 1997) in debt, but £2,000 of this was owed in royalties to G.B.S. who immediately wrote it off. After joining a Red Cross unit, Barker drove over to France – then in September headed off back to the United States, this time to give a series of lectures paying off his debts. He had made what Shaw called a resolution to devote himself to poverty and playwriting. ‘I cannot very well remonstrate, as I have been for years urging him to stick to his own proper job of writing plays and leave production and management to people who cant do anything else,’ Shaw explained to Pinero that October. ‘...Meanwhile Lillah is at a loose end.’
On his way to the States, Barker had written to Lillah: ‘my dear wife – I love you very much if you please – and I’m not very far from you. Distance doesn’t mainly count.’ But he was also corresponding with Helen, and instead of returning to England at the end of the lecture tour he sent Lillah a letter asking for a divorce. She went, ‘all frozen on a cold January night’, to Shaw’s flat in Adelphi Terrace. He ‘made me sit by the fire. I was shivering... presently I found myself walking with dragging steps with Shaw beside me... up and down Adelphi Terrace... he let me cry. Presently I heard a voice in which all the gentleness and tenderness of the world was speaking. It said: “Look up, dear, look up to the heavens. There is more in life than this. There is much more.”’
Back with the Red Cross in France, Barker asked Shaw to act as his agent to procure the divorce. Since Lillah had already made him her confidant, he was placed in an awkward position. He went to work instructing Barker to write Lillah a letter her lawyers could use, advising Lillah what he had done, what Barker was doing, and what she should do – which was to get someone to counsel her as he was counselling Barker. Accordingly she chose J. M. Barrie. He, like Shaw, believed that the domestic crockery had been too badly broken to be worth mending, but his advice was swamped by Lillah’s emotionalism. Was it likely, she demanded, that Barker knew his mind better than his own wife did? Once this affair was over, he would be coming back to her. This put Barrie’s and Shaw’s arguments into perpetual check, for it was impossible to recommend anything without offering Lillah a ‘vulgar insult’. Shaw tried to hand her the initiative. ‘Quite seriously, I have come to the conclusion that you had better get rid of Harley... as you are now at the height of your powers, and... I gravely doubt whether Harley is fit for married life at all... It is in your power to demand your release; he cannot refuse it.’
Barker had expected everything to be cleared up by the spring. He sailed back to the United States and continued fuming impatiently. ‘What in heaven’s name she is waiting for I don’t know. I really believe she has some idea in her head that no divorce is complete without a scandal.’
Poised between Lillah’s obduracy and Barker’s exasperation, ‘I had a difficult time of it,’ Shaw afterwards admitted. Once conscription was brought in, Barker returned to Britain, and went to an officer cadet school in Wiltshire. Many of these summer and autumn weekends he spent at Ayot nervily plotting divorce tactics with G.B.S. and Charlotte or with Barrie in London. Driven mad by the delay he implored Shaw to offer Lillah a settlement of five or six hundred pounds a year for life. Since Barker had no money, Lillah immediately realized that he must be in collusion with Helen – and informed the unsuspecting Archer Huntington. ‘There was an almighty explosion at the other end,’ Shaw later reported, ‘and Helen never forgave me for being, as she thought, solely responsible for Lillah’s letter.’
Barker’s decree was made absolute in the late spring of 1917; Helen’s in the summer of 1918. On 21 June that year G.B.S. and Helen met for the first time: and detested each other. ‘The guilty pair are not yet married,’ Shaw reported to Lillah. ‘...When it happens I will let you know as soon as I know myself.’ They were married on 31 July, but let Shaw know nothing. ‘I surmise that you are married; but it is only a surmise,’ he wrote to Barker on 26 August. ‘It is desirable that your friends should be in a position to make a positive affirmation on the subject. An affectation of ecstasy so continuous as to make you forget all such worldly considerations is ridiculous at your age.’
Shaw was not to know that they had both altered their ages, Helen reducing hers by almost eight years, on the marriage certificate. They wanted to free their lives from the sort of considerations he was emphasizing, and start again. Charlotte disapproved of Barker’s divorce as setting a precedent for G.B.S., and she blamed Helen for introducing such unpleasantness into all their lives. Shaw tried to take the long-term view and, during a visit to them near the end of 1918, read out part of his new play Back to Methuselah. But ‘it has never seemed quite so tedious before,’ he apologized afterwards to Barker; ‘...it was rather hard on Helen to have such a depressing beginning of my playreading.’
It was the end rather than a beginning. ‘Virtually we never met again,’ Shaw wrote. After her marriage in 1920 to the botanist Frederick Keeble, Lillah pretty well left the stage. ‘You must begin a new career as a new woman,’ Shaw was to tell her. And she responded: ‘Life begins again. I find new delights every day & am re-born.’
But it seemed to Shaw that Barker’s seclusion was a genuine loss to the theatre: and then there was the personal loss. ‘I could not intrude when I was not welcome.’ He was prepared to keep out of their way ‘for six months or six years’ if necessary. But after six years, ‘the devil entered into me’. Though he had not seen them during this time, he had picked up various reports. They had bought a Jacobean mansion in Devon called Netherton Hall (renamed by Shaw Nethermost Hell). Here, his name newly hyphenated, his socialism cast off, and attended by fifteen servants (including a liveried footman) Granville-Barker completed his perfectionist work on the sociology of the stage, The Exemplary Theatre, and an unperformed play called The Secret Life. ‘We shall have to keep on insulting him for his sterility,’ Shaw commanded St John Ervine, ‘or he will be dead before he gets another play on to the stage.’ He tried to stir him up by likening him to Swinburne at Putney; by spurring William Archer on to ‘tell him to do something thoroughly vulgar: he needs contact with earth’; and by inventing a Barker Relief Expedition consisting of Lawrence of Arabia, Thomas Hardy and J. M. Barrie.
In May 1925 Shaw was asked to give a vote of thanks after Granville-Barker’s address on the theatre at King’s College in the Strand. ‘I praised Barker’s speech to the skies and said that his retirement from the stage to become a professor was inexcusable,’ Shaw told Hesketh Pearson. Barker was now placed in a very ticklish position. Lord Balfour, who was in the chair, rose to the rescue with a clever closing speech during which Shaw suddenly began to feel in great pain – ‘as if my backbone had turned into a red-hot poker’ was how he described it to Lady Rhondda. He was determined to sit it out. Somehow he reached home on foot. ‘I really thought I was done for.’ Charlotte removed him to Ayot where he lay helpless on his bed until one day, a month later, with a great effort of will he decided to walk down the road – and instantly the pain vanished. Later on he related this experience to Lady Colefax who revealed that Helen Granville-Barker had been sitting exactly behind him, not three feet away, leaning forward with her eyes glued to his backbone. ‘I have never seen such hate in any eyes before.’
This story enabled Shaw to cast Helen as a witch who had placed her spell on Granville-Barker so that ‘he ceased to be the independent human being we had all known’. This was less disconcerting to him than the belief that they were both perfectly happy. In his position ‘I should regard myself as a damned soul,’ Shaw remarked to Archer. But Barker had been retreating into his ‘natural Henry Jamesism’ before he met Helen. She re-created him as a fairy-tale Prince. Every syllable Shaw uttered threatened to dissolve this fantasy. All communication with him was therefore shut down until early in the 1930s when Lillah McCarthy invited Shaw to contribute a Preface to her memoirs. He arranged for the publisher to send Granville-Barker this Preface (which contained a celebration of Lillah’s historic stage collaboration with Barker, as well as biographical sidelights on their marriage and divorce). As a result Barker suddenly turned up at Ayot demanding that the book be withdrawn. Barker wished to forget Lillah whose very name disturbed Helen. ‘Let it alone,’ he had written to Shaw. Rather to his dismay, Lillah’s book was to appear without any reference to him: his past had been obliterated. Twenty minutes after leaving Ayot he returned to take an effusive farewell of Charlotte: and this was the last time they saw him.
Shaw could not quench his pleasure on learning of Helen’s fury when, Frederick Keeble being knighted, Lillah became Lady Keeble. Helen wanted a glittering knighthood for her husband, but had she not cut him off from all commerce with the theatre might he not have been given one? Or so G.B.S. believed. ‘Cannot you persuade Mr Granville-Barker to stay here and produce Shakespeare,’ Raymond Mortimer was to ask Helen years later during one of her last visits to London. To his horrified embarrassment the old lady burst into tears. ‘Everyone blames me,’ she answered, ‘but it is not my fault: it is Harley’s.’
Shaw blamed Helen. When Barker died in 1946 the shock ‘made me realize how I had still cherished a hope that our old intimate relation might revive’. In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement enclosing an old photograph of his friend he had taken in the days of their intimacy, he was to quote Swinburne:
Marriage and death and division
Make Barren our lives.
*
This was a good epitaph for a war whose survivors would always be avenging their wounds. Many people have died ‘in simple horror, mercifully without quite knowing it,’ Shaw wrote to Henry Salt whose wife Kate died early in 1919. Janet Achurch had also died. ‘So that adventure is over,’ Shaw wrote to Charles Charrington, ‘...Now Janet is again the Janet of 1889, and immortal. Better that than half dead, like me.’
Another casualty was Shaw’s sister Lucy. She had never wholly recovered from the death of her mother. Suffering from a ‘nervous irritation’ she was looked after by Eva Schneider, the daughter of the German family she had lodged with in Gotha. Shaw helped to arrange Eva’s exemption from deportation through repeated applications to the Home Office establishing her as his sister’s permanent nurse-companion. Financially he was conscientious over Lucy’s needs, though otherwise ‘I am forced to neglect her as I am forced to neglect everything else’. He had seen most of her when he was seeing most of Stella. They had used Lucy’s home as one of their meeting places, enabling Lucy to boast that ‘among my most frequent visitors is Mrs Patrick Campbell’. Shaw complimented Stella on having ‘brought out the nice side of Lucy that I haven’t seen since she was a girl’.
Lucy’s tuberculosis was no longer active but her apprehension over the Zeppelin raids seemed to be killing her. ‘She is in bed, fearfully ill,’ Shaw notified Stella. ‘...[Her] address for the moment is 2 Grove Park, Camberwell Grove... Later, the Crematorium, Golders Green.’ Kept alive by the devotion of Eva, she somehow pulled through and in the Easter of 1917 the two of them moved to Sussex Lodge, a pretty house on Champion Hill in south-east London. Lucy had reckoned that, being close to an anti-aircraft battery ‘we shall always know when the Zepps are on the way’ and this would be a comfort. She had not realized that they were also near a bombing exercise ground and within sound of the gun testing at Woolwich Arsenal. Amid the continuous din, ‘we didn’t know whether a raid was on or not’. The booming of the big defence gun in the next field ‘which seemed to blow the house away every time it went off, the noise of exploding bombs and the terrifying sight of a Zeppelin descending through the sky in flames was too much for her. ‘I could not stand the strain.’
Shaw then rented a house at Okehampton in Devon where Lucy and Eva travelled in the summer of 1917. Despite eating almost nothing and going nowhere she had become ‘a very expensive person,’ she remarked wryly – ‘my brother indulges me in any extravagance I express the least wish for’. Shaw kept on Sussex Lodge with a caretaker and, a few weeks after the Armistice, Lucy returned in an ambulance to London. She was slowly starving herself to death. Eva did what she could to persuade her, spoonful by spoonful, to keep alive; and Mrs Pat sent all sorts of delicacies from Fortnum & Mason.
After Lillah’s wedding on Saturday 27 March Shaw went round in the late afternoon and sat by Lucy’s bed. ‘I am dying,’ she told him. ‘Oh no,’ he replied conventionally: ‘you will be all right presently.’ He took her hand and they were silent. ‘There was no sound except from somebody playing the piano in the nearest house (it was a fine evening and all the windows were open), until there was a faint flutter in her throat. She was still holding my hand. Then her thumb straightened. She was dead.’
The doctor informed him that she had been suffering from shell-shock and become anorexic. ‘My body to be cremated if possible and the ashes scattered,’ she had noted in her will. ‘No funeral, no flowers, no mourning.’ Shaw arranged for a private cremation, like their mother’s, at Golders Green. But finding the church crowded with people, he made up ‘a sort of funeral service’ of his own.
Fear no more the lightning-flash
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone.
Remembering the Zeppelins and awful guns that had made her want to die, Shaw ended the service with the dirge from Cymbeline. Lucy burnt with a steady white light, like a wax candle.