It is to be impressed on all officers and men that a state of war exists during the armistice.
The Times (21 November 1918)
The Cabinet had already decided on a quick post-war general election. A few days after the Armistice, Lloyd George dissolved Parliament and announced 14 December 1918 as polling day. It was a degrading election, exploiting people’s hatred of the Germans and their delirious gratitude for peace, to grab a renewed mandate for the old coalition of Tories and Liberals. To cries of ‘Vote for the Man who won the War’, and ‘Make Britain a fit country for Heroes to live in’, the electioneering was hurried through before the heroes themselves had a chance of getting their opinions known, or the opposition (silenced so long by the Defence of the Realm Act) make itself effectively heard. ‘I feel physically sick when I read the frenzied appeals of the Coalition leaders... to hang the Kaiser, ruin and humiliate the German people, even to deprive Germany of her art treasures and libraries,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary. ‘The one outstanding virtue of the Labour Party... is its high sense of international morality.’
Shaw, now in his sixty-third year, dropped almost all his engagements to go campaigning. He toured the country, speaking every day to enormous crowds of working people at Liverpool and Manchester, Birmingham and Wakefield, Leicester and Wolverhampton. He spoke in support of Ramsay MacDonald, who had preferred to resign his leadership of the Labour Party rather than endorse Grey’s foreign policy. He warned the electorate against making it a Jingo versus Pacifist contest: voters must look for the solid brickwork under all that political whitewash. He gave them facts; he gave them figures: more than 50,000 German children had died in 1917 alone, the civilian mortality rate had increased by thirty-seven per cent – and ‘these are only the deaths’. He was to call for the raising of the Allied blockade of Germany which Lord Balfour had declared ‘cannot cause the death of a single civilian’ but which later caused 763,000 persons to die of malnutrition, ‘a polite name for starvation’. Did they want more revenge? ‘When we break a German’s leg with a bullet and then take him prisoner,’ he explained, ‘we immediately set to work to mend his leg, to the astonishment of our idiots, who cannot understand why we do not proceed to break his other leg.’
Britain was vibrating with exultation over the most magnificent military triumph in her long record of victories. It was enormously important, Shaw insisted, that she should check the evil that could easily fester after the guns had stopped, and ‘set the world an example of consideration for vanquished enemies’. Surely we wanted to prosper by restoring trade with our best customer?
Shaw’s series of campaign speeches that winter was ‘my greatest platform success’. But on 14 December, Lloyd George’s coalition careered back to Parliament with 516 seats – a huge majority of 340 over the other parties. Most of the Labour candidates Shaw had championed – including Ramsay MacDonald – lost their seats because of their opposition to the war. However, with sixty-two seats over the twenty-seven of Asquith’s Liberals, Labour now sat in the House of Commons as the official Opposition.
Shaw ended the war as he had begun it: with a brochure. Ten thousand copies of Peace Conference Hints were published on 12 March 1919. Partly an admonition to Britain against exploiting her self-righteousness at the Versailles Peace Conference, and in part a collection of ‘hints’ to nerve President Woodrow Wilson against the wiles of Clemenceau and Lloyd George, the pamphlet represents a continuation of Shaw’s election campaign and the summation of his political writings about the war. It is a story retold and completed.
When asking for a mandate for his peace offensive against Germany, Lloyd George had demanded: ‘Is no one responsible? Is no one to be called to account? Is there to be no punishment? Surely that is neither God’s justice nor man’s?’ Shaw’s answer invoked another justice and brought the matter before a different court of morality. He believed that by fixing the guilt of history collectively or individually on others, Lloyd George was making a classic evasion of the human spirit. Through this duplicity of mind Britain risked restarting the mechanism that would bring the same tragedies back into people’s lives.
Peace Conference Hints is a Bunyanesque tract on the moral consequences of the war. He surveys botched-up British diplomacy between 1906 and 1914 to strengthen his case for the international acceptance of new rules of conduct in war and peace. He grinds out a history lesson to sharpen a moral point. ‘The moral cleaning-up after the war,’ he states, ‘is far more important than the material restorations.’ The Versailles Peace Conference must be made a nucleus for the League of Nations. Like an illuminated picture, the League of Nations that appears in Shaw’s missal is a ‘very vigorous organization of resistance to evil’, protected by an international police force but making conquests through the power of conscience. ‘Principle is the motive power in the engine,’ Shaw explains: ‘its working qualities are integrity and energy, conviction and courage, with reason and lucidity to shew them the way.’ This technology for human progress is shown being forced upon us not only by the inevitable march of civilization but by our fear of Armageddon. For the next war, if permitted to occur, ‘will be no “sport of kings”’.
Having raised up his Architecture of Nations, Shaw tries to set up as its mystical prophet from the New World, President Woodrow Wilson. With the rusty accoutrements of his fourteen points, he resembles a benighted Quixote of the Peace. The week after Wilson was to lay his patched-up rag of a treaty before the United States Senate, Shaw was declaring that he had known all along the Versailles Conference would come to nothing and that ‘in spite of anything that could be urged by the wisest and most powerful statesmen, the victorious side would skin the other alive... I had no illusions on that subject when I backed Wilson for all I was worth; and therefore I am not disillusioned nor disgusted now.’
He may have had no illusions; he did have hopes. Woodrow Wilson’s godlike procession through Europe before the conference had stirred people’s goodwill. ‘Nothing like this had ever been seen before,’ records one witness. ‘The full-throated acclamation of Londoners, Parisians and Romans was not the normal cordiality which crowds accord to a visiting monarch. The ovation surged from the depth of the wounded contrite universal heart to a deliverer, the shaper of a new world.’
Some echoes of these aspirations, like distant trumpets, sound through Shaw’s pamphlet. For if the war had not gained new moral territory for human beings, then it had been a defeat for everyone. The possibility of defeat is in his text. Pessimism and optimism are cross-stitched into the narrative, and in his subsequent reaction to the incompetent document Woodrow Wilson took away from Versailles may be glimpsed the extent of Shaw’s hopes. ‘The treaty of Versailles, which was perhaps the greatest disaster of the war for all the belligerents, and indeed for civilization in general,’ he wrote, ‘left nothing to be done in foreign affairs but face the question of the next war pending the consolidation of the League of Nations.’
Like Bunyan, Shaw had urged the peacemakers to climb the hill Difficulty. But they had fallen into the pit Destruction. At the end of that year another work of moral tension and stylistic force, Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was published. After a succession of dreadful weeks at Versailles, Keynes had quitted ‘the scene of night-mare’ and written up his account of ‘the devastation of Europe’. ‘A great sensation has been made here by Professor Keynes of Cambridge, who was at Versailles as economic expert, and resigned that position and came home as a protest against the peace terms,’ Shaw reported to Siegfried Trebitsch. ‘He has now published a book in which he demonstrates that the indemnity demanded from Germany is an economic impossibility.’ Keynes’s demonstration was Shaw’s vindication.
In the urgency of his despair, Keynes, the informed insider, became ‘an outlaw from British official circles’, while Shaw was to occupy the position of enemy rather than outlaw. ‘He felt that capitalism had caused the war,’ commented William Irvine, ‘and that democracy had lost the peace.’ Keynes dedicated his book to ‘the new generation [that] has not yet spoken and silent opinion [that] is not yet formed’. But Shaw, being a generation older than Keynes, felt his precarious faith in this generation diminishing. At the peace table, over the heads of his colleagues, Woodrow Wilson had appealed to the conscience of the public. But the public’s conscience had been subtly changed by the European free press; and the man whom no one dared criticize during the war was now openly jeered at and called a ‘dangerous radical’ by businessmen who controlled the newspapers. ‘He stood in great need of sympathy, of moral support, of the enthusiasm of the masses,’ wrote Keynes. ‘...And in this drought the flower of the President’s faith withered and dried up.’ Such personal reliance on applause, and journalistic manipulation of popularity, came as additional evidence to Shaw that government by the people was unworkable. Only ‘government of the people and for the people’ was practicable.
Is this England, or is it a madhouse?
Heartbreak House
Shaw’s response to the Great War is most deeply revealed in Heartbreak House. His depression had seeped into the play: his anger over what he saw at Versailles inflamed the Preface. It had ‘begun with an atmosphere’, the unjudgemental atmosphere of Chekhov’s plays. ‘An exquisite play by Tchekoff was actually hissed,’ Shaw had reported to George Moore before the war. ‘You cannot conceive how inferior we are (a small circle excepted) to the common playgoer.’ He was to subtitle his own play ‘A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes’. Heartbreak House is full of ‘the same nice people, the same utter futility’ as The Cherry Orchard. But, as the Preface makes clear, this is Shaw’s view of ‘cultured, leisured Europe before the war’.
At the centre of this atmosphere Shaw placed the supernatural storybook character of Captain Shotover. His model had been the actress Lena Ashwell’s seafaring father, Commander Pocock, who in retirement went to live on a sailing vessel on the River Tyne, fitting out the stern as his own quarters, placing bars on Lena’s nursery portholes, and equipping the upper deck with a drawing-room and greenhouse.
Heartbreak House was intended as tragedy. ‘Behold my Lear,’ he later gestured from his puppet play, Shakes versus Shav. He regarded King Lear as pure tragedy: ‘even the fool in Lear is tragic’. Like Lear, Captain Shotover’s heartbreak has apparently been caused by his two daughters, Ariadne and Hesione.
Ariadne Utterword, who is ‘as strong as a horse’, speaks for Horseback Hall which is mentioned in the Preface as ‘the alternative to Heartbreak House’, a very Irish alternative ‘consisting of a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them’. At the age of nineteen, Ariadne escaped from the overheated atmosphere of Heartbreak House and became part of the wooden-headed, outdoor tradition of English life. The Preface prepares us for a Peacockian dialogue in the style of Headlong Hall. Having run away from the eccentricity of her upbringing and the world of her emotions, Ariadne has pursued respectability which is represented by her decorous ‘numskull’ of a husband, a colonial Governor of the British Empire. Sir Hastings Utterword could ‘save the country with the greatest ease,’ she boasts, once he was given the necessary powers and ‘a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses’. Ariadne is an utter philistine. For much of the first act Captain Shotover has pretended not to recognize her. ‘You left because you did not want us,’ he eventually tells her. ‘Was there no heartbreak in that for your father?’
Hesione is the opposite of Ariadne. As the chatelaine of Heartbreak House she is a siren of sexual infatuation who lures people into her web and leaves them suspended. She has disabled the two ‘inventors’ in the house, her husband and her father. Hector Hushabye is a man of action reduced from being a creator of exploits to an inventor of stories; Shotover is the thinker whose intelligence has been trivialized into money-making. ‘Money is running short,’ Hesione informs him after his patent lifeboat has failed to earn them more than £500. ‘...Living at the rate we do, you cannot afford life-saving inventions. Cant you think of something that will murder half Europe at one bang?’
Shaw’s Cordelia is Ellie Dunn, a spiritual offspring of Shotover’s rather than his blood relation. She has been invited to the house by Hesione, and her unsentimental education is the play’s single continuous thread of narrative. When the curtain rises she appears as a solitary figure on stage dreaming over Othello, only to find a few minutes later that her own Othello, a man of wonderfully adventurous stories whom she has known by the name of ‘Marcus Darnley’, is actually Hesione’s husband Hector. She passes rapidly in the stage directions from ‘great distress’, through anger to look ‘curiously older and harder’. She had been going to marry a fifty-five-year-old ‘perfect hog of a millionaire’ nicknamed Boss Mangan, acting from sentimental gratitude for the financial help he had given her father. In Act II, as part of her disillusioning education, she learns that Mangan has in fact made a profit out of her father by assisting him into bankruptcy. But she is still determined to marry him, her motive now being to gain use of the money he has tricked out of her father, even though Mangan, who has followed her to the house, has fallen in love with Hesione.
In the last act Ellie reveals to Mangan that she ‘never really intended to make you marry me... I only wanted to feel my strength.’ She has reached a mystical union with Shotover, who lies in her arms as fast asleep as a baby while she tells the others that she has given ‘my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father’. Her emotional transformation-in-a-day is an accelerated dash through the long pilgrim’s progress of his life. All the optimism of the play centres on Ellie. ‘Heartbreak is not what I thought it must be,’ she says. For her it is the process of growing up and ‘the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling’.
But Shaw also makes his Goneril and Regan victims of heartbreak. Hesione suffers from the dangerous after-effects of a love that came once in her lifetime, then passed. What she shared with Hector, whom she has now reduced to the ‘household pet’ of their marriage, cannot be regained. All her flirtations and seductions will bring no more than fading reflections of that dream. She is forty-four and has no other interests; what can she do but cry to dream again? For her sister Ariadne heartbreak is paradoxically lack of heart. She is as fearful of emotion as Mangan is of poverty, and has fashioned herself into a rigidly conventional woman of the world whose tragedy is that ‘her heart will not break’.
Both sisters, we are given to understand, have been damaged by their wayward upbringing. ‘Old Shotover sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar,’ Hector romances. ‘The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and these two daughters are their mystical progeny.’ In a letter to Trebitsch, Shaw explained that by heartbreak he meant the chronic effects of heredity and childhood, rather than the setback of an unhappy love affair. Shotover is prevented from advancing to his ‘seventh degree of concentration’ by forces that swamped Shaw’s own childhood. He describes Heartbreak House itself as ‘my kennel’ – the word Shaw used for his birthplace in Synge Street – and, having retreated into ‘my second childhood’, he is diverted by habitual rum-drinking from pursuing his thought ‘so long and so continuously’ that it issues into action. ‘To be drunk means to have dreams’ – or Shavian fantasies. ‘You must never be in the real world when we talk together,’ Ellie soothes him. But this incapacity of the most gifted characters to use their abilities in the real world has by the last act developed into the collective heartbreak of the play. ‘We sit here talking,’ cries Hector, ‘and leave everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil.’
*
At the beginning, the house is ‘a palace of enchantments, as in the second act of Parsifal’. It contains light and dark, land and sea, sleeping and waking, fantasy and fact. The first act, with its complicated jigsaw of almost sixty entrances and exits, its ensemble playing of what appears to be a chaos of informality, is ‘as dependent on atmosphere as any of Tchekov’s’ plays. Shaw felt he had seen in The Cherry Orchard a method of advancing the disquisitory technique of Getting Married and Misalliance – which preserved the unities and removed the action outside the theatre – with the odd dramatic break-in by pilot, burglar or would-be assassin. In later acts he made a number of further references to Chekhov: the ‘splendid drumming in the sky’ accords with the snapping of the string in The Cherry Orchard; and the topsy-turvy burglar is the equivalent of Chekhov’s ominous tramp. But Chekhov’s world, with its fusion of impressionistic touches, is naturalistic; in Shaw’s house, which is full of surreal and disorientating episodes, ‘the very burglars cant behave naturally’.
From the moment the curtain goes up and the audience sees Ellie Dunn’s copy of Othello sink to her lap, as she dozes in slumber on the draughtsman’s chair, the theatre has moved into a world of dreams. Asleep in her bedroom upstairs lies Hesione, the mistress of Heartbreak House, who has changed her name from Shotover to the somnambulistic Hushabye as the result of her ‘enchanting dream’ of love with Hector. In the second act Mangan is sent into a hypnotic trance, and in the third act, as the thunderous bombers approach, it is the Captain who sleeps. This sleeping and dreaming allows Shaw additional licence for exploring his characters’ unconscious minds. In the pathetic scene in which Hector, left alone on stage, ‘falls into a daydream’ and performs a desperate duel with an imaginary opponent and then in ‘another reverie’ mimes a thrilling love scene with an invisible woman, we witness all the qualities of courage and imagination he has never been able to employ in waking life – qualities that, when Shotover enters, are immediately contracted into ‘a series of gymnastic exercises’.
Growing-up becomes allied to a process of waking-up. Ellie Dunn has the strength to wake herself and the power to mesmerize Mangan so that he cannot resist hearing the truth about himself. He exhibits the essential babyhood of capitalism. This is a revelation to Hesione, who has accepted him as he has presented himself to the world: a businessman ‘Boss’ with plenty of money and no heart. ‘It comes to me suddenly that you are a real person: that you had a mother, like anyone else.’ But it is too late for Mangan to grow up.
‘What is true within these walls is true outside them,’ announces Shotover. Heartbreak House has splendid views of reality which no one inside can reach. For the Palace of Dreams is a revelation as well as a refuge, and recalls an earlier dream sequence in Shaw’s plays: the hell scene in Man and Superman. Hector is the reluctant Don Juan of this hell and Hesione a Doña Ana who has long ago given birth to her children and now gives herself over to pleasure. Her house is a moral vacuum. ‘What do men want?’ she demands, reversing Freud’s question on women. ‘...Why are they not satisfied?’
Shaw shuffles the cards of identity with comic virtuosity. It is a matter of Shavian orthodoxy that every person should contradict the pose he adopts. ‘The great question is, not who we are, but what we are,’ sententiously remarks Mazzini Dunn, little realizing that he is to be shown up as a gullible sentimentalist wrong about everything except his daughter (‘you become quite clever when you talk about her,’ Hesione admits). Even comfortable Nurse Guinness, who asks disbelievingly: ‘now is it likely I’d kill any man on purpose’, is shortly afterwards demanding why the burglar (who turns out to be her husband as well as one of the Captain’s old crew) had not been shot. ‘If I’d known who he was, I’d have shot him myself,’ she swears. Shaw has her running at the end of the play ‘in hideous triumph... laughing harshly’ to the gravel pit where her husband has been blown up.
For Mazzini Dunn, Shaw borrowed some of the trappings of Ebenezer Howard, idealistic pioneer of the Garden City Movement. It had been Ebenezer Howard’s book To-morrow, A Peaceful Path to Rural Reform that Tom Broadbent had carried round with him as a blueprint of heaven and model for his business expansion scheme in John Bull’s Other Island. And it had been Ebenezer Howard’s dream-town that Shaw put on the stage as Perivale St Andrews, ‘beautifully situated and beautiful in itself,’ in Major Barbara.
Mangan is possibly the least sympathetic character in all Shaw’s work. He is the alternative captain to Shotover: a captain of industry who sees his job as getting the better of ‘other fellows in other departments’. His announcement that the Prime Minister had asked him to ‘join the Government without even going through the nonsense of an election, as the dictator of a great public department’, provokes a dismay which is part of the general humiliation of Mangan in Heartbreak House before his miserable death in a gravel pit. Nurse Guinness’s ‘Serves un right!’ is the signing-off of Shaw’s revenge on Mangan who was based on Hudson Kearley, head of a wholesale grocery firm, whom Lloyd George had brought into his Government at the same time as he rejected Shaw for a place on the Irish Convention.
Hesione is Shaw’s first portrait of Mrs Patrick Campbell since the end of their affair. Hesione’s talent for incapacitating those she seduces makes Hector liken her to a vampire. ‘When I am neither coaxing and kissing nor laughing,’ she says, ‘I am just wondering how much longer I can stand living in this cruel, damnable world.’ Mrs Pat had predicted that her life ‘is sure to be a short one. I wish it to be.’ Being denied her wish, she was to demand pathetically in old age ‘who is there here who still loves me?’ and receiving no reply, ask: ‘Why am I alive – what for?’ It is this emptiness that Hesione conveys, foreshadowing the career of a great actress who was to die ‘sans profession’.
Nobody could speak Hesione’s lines as she could, Shaw told Stella, ‘or give the quality of the woman as you could if you would’. But she fancied playing the eighteen-year-old Ellie – and that was impossible. For Ellie was conceived from Shaw’s memories of that hypnotic young girl, Erica Cotterill, who had lived in ‘a fanciful world of her own’ and now occupied a special place within the fanciful world of his plays. As ‘Incognita Appassionata’ in Getting Married, she had embodied the sexual passion lacking in his marriage; and as Ellie Dunn she is his spiritual intimate, which may be one reason why Heartbreak House was ‘loathed by Charlotte’.
Charlotte’s loathing of this play is reproduced in Ariadne’s disapproval of the house. Ariadne’s emotional rigidity, as well as her early determination to make a marriage unacceptable to her living parent, were Charlotte’s attitudes. Shaw had entered the world of Horseback Hall on visits to Charlotte’s friends and relations, when he put up in the castles and big houses belonging to the county families of Anglo-Irish society. But Ariadne’s affinity with Charlotte is well-disguised. Her appearance, it has been suggested, was taken from Virginia Woolf.
The Shaws, the Woolfs and the Webbs had come together during the weekend of 17 to 19 June 1916 at a house called Wyndham Croft in Sussex. ‘We talked quite incessantly,’ Virginia remembered. ‘...I liked it better than I expected. At anyrate one can say what one likes, which is unusual with the middle aged.’ In Shotover-style, Shaw slept, Virginia observed, ‘and then woke up and rambled on into interminable stories about himself... Poor Mrs Shaw was completely out of it.’ In the mornings Shaw would go into the garden where Leonard saw him writing his play ‘on a writing pad on his knee’. From this garden could be heard the guns of the Somme offensive which he turned into the ‘splendid drumming’ that Mazzini characteristically identifies as the sound of a goods train.
This weekend, with its coming together of Bloomsbury and the Fabians, helped Shaw over some of his difficulties with the play – which he acknowledged in a letter to Virginia twenty-four years later when the bombs of the Second World War had begun to fall. Though the Bloomsbury Group had published and exhibited little of its work before 1916, the principles of aesthetic sensibility and personal relationships which animated that work, and to which it gave priority over the economic and political values of the Fabians, would have become apparent to Shaw during these days of incessant talking, and it is these Bloomsbury values which he now injected into the play. ‘Shaw visits upon the age of Bloomsbury with its cult of sentimental personal relations the same scorn Carlyle visited upon the age of Brummel with its Byronism and its pococurantism,’ commented the critic Louis Crompton. But the inhabitants of Heartbreak House are more convincingly made up from that coterie of gallants and graces known as ‘the Souls’, who were more aristocratic than Bloomsbury and went on polishing their veneer of culture, went on sipping the sweet life, even after the declaration of war. Shaw added Bloomsbury to his mixture so as to make his play contemporary, but he had earlier and better knowledge of the Souls than of Bloomsbury.
Shaw’s pessimism had grown from his experience of contemporary history; his optimism was increasingly tied to a visionary future where the action of human will has broken the cyclical pattern of behaviour. Heartbreak House is less a visionary than a contemporary play, and Shotover wins only a misanthropic victory. ‘I cannot bear men and women. I have to run away,’ he cries out. ‘...Old men are dangerous: it doesnt matter to them what is going to happen to the world.’
The throbbing pessimism, bolts of anger, shivers of violence that build to the ambiguously explosive climax are also ingredients active in the great apocalyptic works of the war: Eliot’s The Waste Land, Lawrence’s Women in Love and Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. Shaw is in surreal territory several years before the arrival of the surrealists who courted loss of control to explore connections between dream and reality. The sudden spiralling of his wit, the curious patches of farce, the sideslips of tone (such as the nursery incantation at the end of Act I which seems to sound from the world of T. S. Eliot), all fill gaps in the play’s organic unity He had written a revenge tragedy without blood. As they drift in and out of this visionary house, these elemental characters seem to grow disembodied, as if made of air and fire. It is the play of an older man. ‘I have children,’ says Hector. ‘All that is over and done with for me’ – as it is for Hesione and Ariadne. Larry Doyle in John Bull’s Other Island had longed for a place where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal; but the brutality of the war had driven Shaw deeper into dreams. The love charades of Heartbreak House are the games that go on in ‘the house of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness’ which is Don Juan’s definition of hell in Man and Superman. He had come as close as he dared to ‘the blasphemous despair of Lear’.
*
Some 20,000 copies of Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War were published in North America and Britain during September 1919. In Britain the critical response was generally unfavourable. A. B. Walkley doubted whether the ‘fun’ of Heartbreak House ‘would stand the glare of the footlights’, and other critics shared this doubt. Eventually, in the summer of 1920, Shaw signed a contract with the newly incorporated Theatre Guild of New York, where his volume of war plays had been less condescendingly received. The world première took place at the Garrick Theater in New York on 10 November 1920. It was well reviewed, and the production ran for more than 100 performances over almost five months. In Vienna, where Trebitsch’s translation was staged later that November ‘with great respect for the intentions of the author’, Shaw’s loquaciousness seemed to weaken the power of the play. ‘The audience at first listened with great interest,’ one critic wrote; ‘...later, however, the interest lessened visibly, the signs of impatience were not wanting at the end.’
Shaw was to learn something of this difficulty for himself a year later during rehearsals of the English production which he directed with the new leaseholder of the Court Theatre, the Irish playwright and manager J. B. Fagan. ‘I am rehearsing Heartbreak House at the Court Theatre,’ he wrote to Edward Elgar. ‘It was like old times rehearsing John Bull there.’ But there was a difference. ‘The book of the words has been so widely read and so much discussed,’ wrote the critic of the Westminster Gazette, ‘...that the real hush of expectation was absent.’ In the old times, publication of Shaw’s plays had sharpened the public’s demand for their performance; now it seemed to dull the curiosity of an audience that already knew about the eccentricities of Shotover and the climax of the bombing raid. It was retitled ‘Jawbreak House’ and the play which took place in ‘a private lunatic asylum with many patients and no keeper’ was classed as being ‘about the worst there ever was’. The only reputation to be significantly lifted was Chekhov’s. ‘Tchekov always has an atmosphere,’ commented the Sunday Times; ‘this play has only a smell.’
Shaw blamed the lack of rehearsal time and immediately set about cutting it – exactly what he had forbidden the American and Austrian directors to do. ‘I never cut anything merely to save time,’ he told St John Ervine, ‘...[but] there are always lines which are dud lines with a given cast. Change the cast and you get other lines dud.’ This truth, however, obscured another truth: the play lacked the seventh degree of concentration. ‘As an entertainment pure and simple it is dull and incoherent... [with] all the author’s prolixities and perversities,’ reported James Agate in the Saturday Review, and yet ‘I found it quite definitely exhilarating and deeply moving, and it therefore ranks for me among the great testaments.’
You are becoming too famous.
Shaw to Blanche Patch
‘Would you care to be my secretary?’ Shaw enquired of a forty-year-old clergyman’s daughter. Blanche Patch seemed perfect casting for the vacancy. In appearance she reminded Shaw of Harold Laski – and since he was a prominent socialist at the London School of Economics, this counted in her favour. It may even have influenced Charlotte on whom Miss Patch made a ‘pleasant impression’. She had been a nurse, a hand-loom weaver, a pharmacist’s assistant in Wales and was currently typing for a London optician. She was ‘not a university woman’, but came recommended by the Webbs. She knew pretty well nothing about the literary or political world.
As a non-Shavian, Miss Patch was unaware of her advantages. Shaw’s ‘quick, witty, friendly way... [which] was new to me then’ increased her diffidence, and she wrote back declining his offer. Recognizing the uncertainty behind this refusal Shaw tried again. ‘I hardly like to steal you away from another man. Still, I will not take your first No for an answer; so will you let me have a second one, or a Yes, before I let loose a general announcement that the post is vacant?’
This tactful renewal gave her confidence to do what she really wanted. She started work as Shaw’s secretary at the end of July 1920 and remained with him until his death. During this time he treated her like a typewriter. ‘Nothing that you could possibly write,’ he told Stella Campbell, ‘could produce the slightest effect on her.’ Certainly nothing that he wrote ever affected her. She was completely ‘Shaw-proof’.
Ann Elder had observed that ‘my successor, Miss Blanche Patch, was older and more mature than I, but I’m not sure that her sense of humour was ever very strongly developed’. This lack of humour amused Shaw. ‘Patch is a born comedian,’ he insisted in a letter to Beatrice Webb, ‘and shews me photographs of herself as a Pierrot.’
She had been nervous at first. ‘Does he throw things at you?’ she asked one of the maids. But what responsible employer would deliberately damage his office equipment? During her thirty years’ employment only twice could she remember him losing his temper – and then it was not with her. ‘Even-tempered he always was, and that made working for him easy; but never a word of praise came from him.’ He was less a father to her than a maintenance inspector.
He never misused her, never spoilt her. ‘No man knows your value better than I do,’ he told her: and it was true she was wonderfully economic. ‘Will you think £3–10s per week too much?’ she had asked him and he immediately agreed to this, not telling her that it was ten shillings a week less than Ann Elder had been getting. Over the years, she was to witness him handing away many thousands of pounds, but such gifts were conferred ‘without human warmth,’ Miss Patch noted, and often to people she felt were undeserving. It struck her as odd too that he should be so spontaneous with strangers while remaining so cautious with herself. His scorn for capitalistic money-making affected her awkwardly. He had been paying Ann Elder more than union rates and would have paid her still more if she had asked. But by the time Blanche Patch took over he preferred to calculate his finances. These calculations, sometimes hampered by an elderly adding machine, seemed to her ‘finicky’. ‘The meaning to the ordinary worker of the increased cost of living never reached his conscious mind,’ she complained. She was not to know that he added a codicil to his will in the late 1920s leaving her an annuity of £260, which he raised to £365 in the late 1930s and to £500 in 1950 (equivalent to £9,300 in 1997). For a long time she puzzled over his financial aberrations until it suddenly occurred to her that he simply had no head for numbers. ‘He could never, for instance, remember how many brothers and sisters I had.’
Shaw had warned her that the Adelphi Terrace apartment was protected by a fortified obstacle giving it ‘the appearance of a private madhouse’. When she had got through this barbed-wire gate, she ascended to the study, a long ‘horribly pokey room’ on the third floor overlooking the Water Gate arches upon Hungerford Bridge, with Shaw’s desk at one end and hers at the other. His shorthand, which was without contractions or grammalogues, had all the vowel signs written in and difficult words spelt out in longhand, so it was easy for her to transcribe. He wrote 1,500 words of prime work a morning on blocks of water-lined paper with a green tint to rest his eyes, and would give her his shorthand draft in batches. ‘I used to rest his manuscript on a stand, such as violinists have, placed behind my typewriter and raised to eye height,’ she wrote. Very occasionally she made an error – ‘the profiteers of the theatre’ instead of ‘the proprietors of the theatre’, which struck Shaw as an improvement, and ‘porter’ for ‘torture’, which for some reason made him laugh.
Apart from swimming at the RAC, walking, motorcycling and motoring (with a little hedge-trimming and log-sawing in the country), Shaw did nothing but work, so far as Miss Patch could see. ‘His industry was terrific,’ she wrote. ‘I have always thought that he wrote too much.’ Privately she found Back to Methuselah ‘hard pedalling’ and On the Rocks ‘dull’, while Too True to be Good ‘bored me a bit’. The first two plays she worked on were Jitta’s Atonement, which was ‘slight’ and ‘rather dismal’, and Saint Joan, which she acknowledged to be not his best. She was still less enthusiastic about his non-dramatic work. ‘He would be an uncommonly devoted Shavian who to-day would cheerfully set out again to read through The Intelligent Woman’s Guide, followed by Everybody’s Political What’s What not to say explore once more the Sahara of the novels,’ she wrote after Shaw’s death.
Often she was obliged to put aside her 1,500 words of play-typing for the articles and long letters about Beethoven and Churchill, Walt Whitman and Santa Claus; on proposals for sex training and the question of rejuvenation by monkey glands, also whether dogs have an after-life and why he could not afford a peerage – all implacably typed out. Then there were the ‘pests’ and ‘busybodies’, who wanted autographs, prefaces, cheques, speeches, whom she would ‘fob-off with one of the printed cards from his coloured pack or a paragraph of careful explanation. ‘To most of them,’ she objected, ‘he was much too polite.’
Miss Patch herself was not so polite. Some of those who had been enchanted by her name (‘it suggests a vivacious person in a play by Sheridan,’ proposed Charles Ricketts) were soon addressing her: ‘Dear Miss Cross Patch.’ She referred to ‘my pretended irascibility’ as a necessary component of ‘our firmness’. The only person who really exasperated her was G.B.S. himself. ‘Oh, go away and write another play!’ she would exclaim when he came pacing near her typewriter – ‘he created a considerable draught as he swung past me’. His formal manners were invariably courteous, she admitted, but he was a shy man who shrank from people: how envious he must be of the way she herself got on with everyone. ‘He always appeared to be astonished that I knew much more about the working classes than he did.’
But what exasperated her most was the way he took her for granted. ‘I resented being looked on simply as a shorthand typist.’ Normally he behaved as if she wasn’t there at all. ‘I might be away for a week or so with influenza and he would receive me when I returned to work as if I had been there all the time.’
Planted beneath the cool surface of their relationship was a perpetually unflowering seed of emotion. Although she never showed it openly, Charlotte was ‘jealous of the fact that I had to read and transcribe his shorthand,’ Miss Patch noticed. It didn’t surprise her. Phonetic shorthand was a form of intimacy that ‘a lonely type of person’ like Charlotte would have loved. Miss Patch could appreciate that. What she could not appreciate was Shaw’s behaviour when, from time to time, he passed on ‘certain of my duties’ to another woman – by which she meant his former secretary and relative, Judy Gillmore. That really put a spark in the gunpowder. Why G.B.S. should still feel so fond of Judy Miss Patch could never comprehend. Judy had made her bed with Harold Musters in 1912; and that should have been that. Then there was the matter of the big toe of her right foot. Miss Patch must have injured it in her school days, for it had stiffened over the years and by the time she settled down at Adelphi Terrace it had become an agony. News of her toe never failed to stimulate G.B.S. By way of experiment, he even sent her at his own expense to a ‘Scandinavian Naturpath’ who applied hot fomentations to almost every part of her body except the foot, bringing no relief whatever. Shaw was anxious that she avoid ‘the operation panacea’ but all the extra walking during the General Strike finally disabled her and she decided to go into St Thomas’s Hospital to have her toe joint removed. It was when she went down to Frinton for what she hoped would be a peaceful convalescence that Shaw exploded his surprise. He had engaged Judy Musters as locum tenens, ‘so you need not hurry back if your foot needs a little more rest’. She hurried back.
But to do him justice, he seemed greatly relieved to have her back. ‘I am distracted and lost without you,’ he had appealed, and he had ‘footed’ the bill for her operation. So they settled down again until the next upheaval. Miss Patch realized that some people thought her attitude to G.B.S. was unfriendly; one of them (probably St John Ervine) was to send her an anonymous card marked JUDAS when she published her reminiscences of him. But Shaw himself understood the nature of their partnership. He cared for her as he did for his paste and scissors, which also contributed to the manuscripts and proofs of his life. And she looked after him as a matron of a nursing home might look after a long-term patient – with detachment and efficiency, occasionally telling him off when his foolishness went too far. ‘The faithful Patch,’ he once called her. She prized this tribute from one who had the tribute of the world.
*
‘Travelling is still very troublesome,’ Shaw had written to Trebitsch in the summer of 1919. For more than six years following the war the Shaws did not travel outside the United Kingdom, though Charlotte regularly hustled G.B.S. over England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland on a series of purposeful holidays, theatrical tours and to Fabian Summer Schools. Kilsby, going off to make aeroplane engines at Woolwich, had taken a long farewell of them during the war, and in May 1919 Charlotte engaged Fred Day from Codicote as their new chauffeur. G.B.S. was still a fiery motorcyclist, and he egged on Day to ‘ginger up’ his two-stroke machine – after which it would hurtle away, bucking him off and sometimes landing on top of him. Before Day’s arrival he had taken hypothetical instruction from the local chemist, E. P. Downing, on how to steer this motorcycle round corners, but he could not bring himself to accept the theory that it was necessary to slow down and to lean over at an angle. The chemist was impressed by Shaw’s ‘outstanding deficiency in mechanical sense’ and had no more luck with his hints on reversing motor cars, Shaw once taking half an hour to turn the car round, and demolishing some flower beds while doing so.
The village had grown proud of Shaw’s notorious road exploits. Local dogs, knowing him well, would play dead under his car while he anxiously crawled after them – when they would bounce out, barking triumphantly. In Fred Day’s opinion his employer was ‘rather reckless’ at the wheel, though ‘always very considerate’ afterwards. Whenever anything happened, such as a bump or a crash, he would leap out, offer to pay all expenses, scoop up the other driver and passengers and drive them trembling home.
Fred Day stayed on for thirty-one adventurous years and owned that he ‘would do anything for Mr Shaw’. Once, during a storm, Shaw noticed Day give a small wave to a woman and child at a bus stop. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘My wife,’ Day answered. ‘Stop,’ Shaw commanded, ‘ – turn round. We must take them home.’ Day had schooled his family never to recognize him if they met him on duty since ‘in those days [1925] it was definitely not usual for the gentry to have anything to do with the staff socially. But Mr Shaw was different. He put his arm round her shoulders and helped her into the car. She was terrified.’ Later on, Shaw offered to pay for his daughter to train as a schoolteacher though admitting ‘I’d rather be a crossing-sweeper’.
It was an interesting job being the Shaws’ chauffeur. You got to drive all sorts of machines – a Vauxhall or a Bianca with mechanical windscreen wipers, a straight-eight Lanchester with a harmonic balancer (which Mr Shaw spoke of as if he believed it to be a musical contraption), followed by a ‘run-about’ Lanchester ten, then a chocolate-coloured Rolls-Royce and finally a 25–30 m.p.h. Silver Wraith. Mr Shaw would ask Day’s advice on cars – such as the A.C. coupé they bought in 1923 – quiz him about helical pinions or differential gears and take him to the dealers. He liked to ride next to Day up front, and take the wheel until lunch, while Mrs Shaw preferred sitting at the back. Mr Shaw had the back seat specially upholstered for her, with the compartment sealed from draughts and fitted with a heater. Mrs Shaw designed the front seat for him, with a cushion at the head propping him bolt upright. In this manner, at various speeds, they travelled the country, very slow when Mrs Shaw was with them, very fast when she wasn’t and Mr Shaw was driving. His favourite trick, Day noticed, was to mistake the accelerator for the brake. Sometimes, when visiting their friends, his employers would travel by train and arrange for Day to follow with the bags. It seemed to him a funny sort of logic, using a Rolls-Royce for carrying luggage.
I am doing the best I can at my age.
Preface to Back to Methuselah (1921)
‘Messrs Constable & Co have to announce the publication early in the forthcoming season of an important and even extraordinary work by Mr Bernard Shaw,’ wrote Shaw in a press release for his publishers in the spring of 1921. The book would, he promised, ‘interest biologists, religious leaders, and lovers of the marvellous in fiction as well as lovers of the theatre’. It was ‘his supreme exploit in dramatic literature’.
He had begun this colossal affair, its 30,000-word Preface leading to a sequence of five plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah, more than seven months before the war was over, and completed it at the end of May two years later, though continuing to revise and prepare it for publication into the early months of 1921. Like Heartbreak House, it was struck out of him by the war; but where Heartbreak House exploits the forces of death, Back to Methuselah explores new powers of life. It is a vastly hopeful composition, and ‘the last work of any vigor I shall produce’.
In his mid-sixties Shaw sensed the encroachments of age not in ill-health and sexual loss, but more obliquely as philosophical pessimism and financial threat, a sense of falling out of step with the contemporary world and losing contact with his audience. The Continent was miraculously transformed from a battlefield into a playground. Don Juan’s picture of hell had been visited on earth. Below the whirling triviality, Shaw sensed a disillusionment. He was fighting disillusionment in himself. These terrible post-war years sometimes seemed to him more frightful than the war itself. Every day he received appeals to save babies who were starving overseas. Every week some unfortunate German author would ‘write me the whole history of his life, more to console himself and persuade his wife that he was doing something that might bring them the price of a sack of coals, than in any real hope of escaping from his miseries,’ he told the German playwright Julius Bab; ‘...it became part of the day’s routine to hear that So and So and his wife were starving and that there was not a child under 7 years of age left alive in Poland.’ Before the war Shaw had been remarkably generous to all manner of people who appealed to him for money. But the financial calamity now seemed beyond all reckoning. His generosity persisted but, seeming almost pointless, grew capricious – one tragedy more or less was hardly noticeable when the whole world was breaking up.
It was an immense relief to work in the futuristic world of Back to Methuselah, phasing out the miseries of life around him. The expectation of death (with which Heartbreak House concluded) had utterly exhausted people who had learnt to feel, think and act as if there were no future. In Back to Methuselah, Shaw struggled to discover what this discouraged generation needed to have said to it. He wanted to give it back a future with new prospects of living, and restore the certainty of his own position.
His cycle of plays is a metaphysical (or what he called a metabiological) enquiry into the causes of pessimism in the development of thought since Darwin, and a search for a legitimate philosophical basis on which to reengage optimism. His political experience suggested that men and women were incapable of solving the social problems raised by their civilization and had therefore been doomed to the poverty against which socialism vainly protested. But he insisted that this was no reason to abandon socialism. ‘I take the view that the worse a job is the more reason for trying to make the best of it,’ he wrote. ‘But my creed of creative evolution means in practice that man can change himself to meet every vital need, and that however long the trials and frequent the failures may be, we can put up a soul as an athlete puts up a muscle. Thus to men who are themselves cynical I am a pessimist; but to genuinely religious men I am an optimist, and even a fantastic and extravagant one.’
Back to Methuselah is the vision of an extravagant fantasist, a Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained which seeks to demolish our concepts of normality, reintroduces the imaginative quality of free will as an unconscious process, and treats the present as a passing phase of history in which crisis and even collapse might be interpreted as vital changes for the future. There was a peculiar satisfaction for Shaw in responding to what he believed were the needs of the present by removing himself into the future. ‘The present occupies all my time,’ he wrote. But his chief contact with the historic present comes through newspapers and his animosity towards journalism – which pretends to be an organ and not the exploiter of public opinion – is partly the awareness of its inadequacy as a primary source. He dreamed of a renewal of faith that would measure conduct by the longest conceivable perspective, and of an imaginative rather than academic lens through which to regard history. He wanted to go as far as thought, and much further than facts, could reach. An instinctively trained eye was needed to recognize the tiny shoots and buds sent out by the Life Force – for example, the natural tendency for people in the twentieth century to live longer. Maynard Keynes caught the mood of the moment when in 1923 he wrote that in the long run we were all dead. But what would happen if, in the long run, we were still alive?
*
‘Our will to live depends on hope,’ Shaw was to write; ‘for we die of despair, or, as I have called it in the Methuselah cycle, discouragement.’ Christ had reformed the vindictive morality of Moses with his perception of the futility and wickedness of punishment and revenge. But after almost two thousand years another Reformation was needed to adapt Christian morality to the mental habits of modern times. Shaw believed it was necessary to redistil religion by scientific methods. This meant a change in vocabulary: a matter of replacing the word God with the concept of an evolutionary appetite operating by trial and error towards the achievement of greater power over the environment. From our past it was easy to prove that mankind was incorrigible. But though all known civilizations had collapsed, and contemporary civilization was showing all the recorded symptoms of collapse, nobody could prove that men and women would not succeed this time, or next time, or sometime. And even if the human species were scrapped, like the megalo-organisms which were known through fossils, that was no cause for pessimism. ‘Man may easily be beaten: Evolution will not be beaten.’
Shaw called for the same sort of admission that Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin had demanded. He too removed human beings from their central position as unique instruments through which a divine will operated, but he restored to them their own will. As subjects of literary biographies will collaborate with their unknown biographers in the future writing of their lives, so our general history may be considered as part of an unfinished narrative that did not cater for our self-interest, but would be influenced by individual acts and thoughts. This collaborative hypothesis restored the value of instinct and the use of intelligence as controls for human destiny.
‘If I must explain what I dont understand,’ Shaw wrote, ‘I prefer to do it in an inspiring way and not in a stultifying one.’ His treatise is a modernizing of the first five books of the Old Testament (he subtitled his play ‘A Metabiological Pentateuch’) in which the Garden of Eden is comprehensively weeded. Back to Methuselah is Shaw’s version of Gulliver’s Travels, with longevity replacing size, and the element of the future added as a preventative against morbidity. For it had been a crude blunder, he argued, to treat causation as a process by which the present was determined by the past and would determine the future. ‘The true view is that the future determines the present,’ he wrote. ‘If you take a ticket to Milford Haven you will do so not because you were in Swansea yesterday but because you want to be in Milford Haven to-morrow.’
Shaw encouraged everyone to treat themselves, under a strictly impartial rent act, as tenant-caretakers of this planet. He regarded the isolated figure of Samuel Butler as a pioneer in the crusade against the environmental consequences of Darwinism. Butler had revealed his genius to Shaw in Life and Habit, the essay on evolution where he compressed his objections to the dogma of Natural Selection into six words: ‘Darwin banished mind from the universe.’ In 1887 Shaw had been sent Butler’s Luck or Cunning? for review by the Pall Mall Gazette. ‘I was indignant because the review was not printed at full length,’ he remembered, ‘presumably because the literary editor did not consider Butler important enough... From this time on I was acquainted with Butler’s view of evolution, though I do not think I grasped its full significance until years afterwards when I had arrived at it in my own way.’
The review treats Butler’s opinions as being of equal merit to Darwin’s. ‘The question at issue is – granted the survival of the fittest, were the survivors made fit by mere luck, or did they fit themselves by cunning?’ he wrote. ‘Mr Butler is for cunning; and he will have it that Darwin was all for luck.’ Shaw leaves undecided the matter of whether the controversy was one of semantics or metaphysical truth. Yet the review had felt almost epoch-making to Butler himself. Butler ‘admits pure luck as a factor in evolution,’ Shaw wrote,
‘but denies its sufficiency as an explanation of all the phenomena, and insists that organisms that have the luck to be cunning make further luck for themselves by the deliberate exercise of that cunning, and so introduce design into the universe – not design as we used to conceive it, all-foreseeing from the first, but “a piecemeal, solvitur ambulando design”, which, as it becomes more self-conscious and intelligent, tends to supplant natural selection by functional modification.’
In the decade following this review, Butler and Shaw met on several occasions. In his Notebooks, Butler admits to having ‘long been repelled’ by Shaw, though ‘at the same time attracted by his coruscating power’. At the Fabian Society, after Butler had advocated his ingenious theory that the Odyssey was written by a young woman living at Trapani, Shaw got up and ‘spoke so strongly that people who had only laughed with me all through my lecture began to think there might be something in it after all. Still,’ Butler continues, ‘there is something uncomfortable about the man which makes him uncongenial to me.’ Shaw did not mind being disliked: he had long been uncongenial to himself. He regarded Butler as the sort of person he himself might have turned into if he had not invented G.B.S. – someone who, having gone around ‘undermining every British institution, shocking every British prejudice, and deriding every British Bigwig with irreconcilable pertinacity’, was dismissed by the public as an oddity and a vulgarian, and could make no headway with his writings. ‘He died in 1902,’ Shaw wrote; ‘and, outside a small but highly select circle, nobody cared.’
As ‘one of the select few who read “Erewhon” and swore by it’, Shaw counted himself within this circle. By suggesting that poverty should be attacked as a crime instead of being coddled like a disease, Butler ‘made me reconsider a rather thoughtless contempt for money, and thereby led me towards the theme of Major Barbara,’ he acknowledged. In the Preface to Major Barbara he had described Butler as being ‘in his own department the greatest English writer of the latter half of the XIX century’. Thereafter he makes many references to Butler which reveal the kinship he felt for this uncomfortable man. He pictures Butler as being ‘naturally affectionate’ as a child, as having ‘sought for affection at home’ and gone on ‘assuming that he loved his dear parents’ whose good names he later slew in The Way of All Flesh ‘so reasonably, so wittily, so humorously, and even in a ghastly way so charitably’.
In a letter to Butler’s biographer Festing Jones, Shaw wrote: ‘Butler can stand on his own legs and carry most of us on his shoulders as well.’ It was as an evolutionist, and particularly in Back to Methuselah, that Shaw stood on Butler’s shoulders. As a great moralist, a writer whose Erewhon Shaw called ‘the only rival to Gulliver’s Travels in English Literature’, who used his instinctive knowledge of human nature instead of a collection of evidence based on guinea-pigs in laboratories, Butler had stood alone. But he had committed the strategic error of handling Darwin like a moral delinquent. In his Methuselah Preface Shaw comes to praise Darwin, not to dig him up and throw stones. He was ‘an amiable and upright man’ and an ‘honest naturalist’ who ‘never puzzled anybody’. Shaw congratulates him on ‘having the luck’ to be everybody’s good neighbour. ‘Darwin, by the way, was no more a Darwinist than I am a Shavian,’ he adds. But in order to separate Darwin from his followers and repair the damage done by Butler’s insults, he advances into factual error. Darwin had declared himself ‘convinced that Natural Selection has been the main but not exclusive means of modification’. Shaw paraphrases this by declaring that Darwin ‘did not pretend’ that Natural Selection ‘excluded other methods, or that it was the chief method’. Taking this extra step enables him to get beyond range of Darwin and to concentrate on the Neo-Darwinians whose minds Darwin himself had influenced only ‘unintentionally’.
In Shaw’s Preface Charles Darwin becomes a figure from The Doctor’s Dilemma: someone whose evolutionary ‘discovery’ had often been made in the past – by his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin among others. By describing Natural Selection as Circumstantial Selection, Shaw made it all seem rather unremarkable. He used all his dialectical skills to undermine the authority of determinism, accusing its adherents of having reduced Evolution to the level of external accident, ‘as if a tree could be properly said to have “evolved” into firewood by the storm which blew it down’.
Shaw felt an aversion to ‘the barren cruelties of the laboratories’, and objected to ‘manufactured evidence in a secret chamber’ because it produced knowledge that, being based on constructed and controlled events, was necessarily mechanistic. If the central debate in a scientific age was to be limited to the laboratory findings of people who would ‘guess eggs if they saw the shells’, then he was once more the complete outsider. He wanted to erase the distinction between scientists and imaginative artists such as Leonardo and Goethe. ‘I have made observations and experiments in the spacious laboratory of the world with a marvellous portable apparatus compactly arranged in my head.’
Shaw’s Preface to Back to Methuselah is an example of that compound of Will and Hope called wishful thinking. He took his readers to a high place and made them look round. What better evidence was there of where a belief in the ‘survival of the fittest’ had led than the contest of a world war?
But was all this necessary? Shaw says not, if we regard such disasters as evidence of the results and not as evidence of the truth of Neo-Darwinism. For we are co-authors of our world and our ‘imagination is the beginning of creation’. Organic Natural Selection was unrepeatable in our life-span. Shaw therefore used the time-scale of his imagination. But he thought less about the scientific origins than the social effects of Darwin, whose theory of competitive survival could so conveniently be used to justify individualistic capitalism. ‘I argue out the statements until I reach a verdict – often comic in its simplicity – and then I give the verdict,’ he declared. But Shaw’s verdicts were to sound as predetermined and his statements, hammered out in the secret chamber of his head, as much ‘put up jobs’ as any laboratory trial.
‘Posterity will believe what it wishes to believe; and if its wishes jump with my guesses I shall be among the prophets,’ he concluded. ‘If not, I shall be only Simon Magus.’
*
After this appeal to the intellect came a demand of the imagination. Even the history of science carried its tales of witchcraft and wonders, from Archimedes in his bath to Newton under his apple tree. Shaw had begun to make a dramatic parable of his religion in the dream sequence of Man and Superman; and in the science fiction of Back to Methuselah he attempted to provide it with an iconography. ‘I abandon the legend of Don Juan with its erotic associations, and go back to the legend of the Garden of Eden,’ he announced. ‘I exploit the eternal interest of the philosopher’s stone which enables man to live for ever.’
The hell scene in Man and Superman took a Mozartian form; the Methuselah cycle, though it quotes from Mozart, advances as a series of Wagnerian leitmotifs. ‘Back to Methuselah is my Ring,’ Shaw confirmed. Despite its machinery of ghosts and miracles, with a cast that includes a couple of lethal Pavlovian dolls, one huge badly-behaved egg, a hooded serpent and a terrifying Oracle, Shaw did not intend it as a work of remote antiquity or impossible futurism, but as a contemporary drama gathering up the styles of political satire and drawing-room comedy, disquisition and extravaganza he had developed in earlier plays, and pointing the way to his future mystical fantasies.
The long journey begins in the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve come across a fawn that has stumbled and broken its neck. It is their discovery of death, and Shaw’s illustration of how accident controls dying rather than living. The discourse that follows this discovery between the two of them and the serpent is a wonderful seminar in which vocabulary and understanding advance together. In the beginning there was Lilith, the Mother of Creation. ‘I was her darling as I am yours,’ says the Serpent, which represents Shaw’s evolutionary belief that all habits are acquired and inherited – inherited by infinitesimal instalments and, when discarded, recapitulated in leaps and bounds.
While Lilith remained alone, all humankind was vulnerable to extinction by a single accident. So, like the snake, she renewed herself and overcame death by the miracle of birth. She imagined; she desired; she dared; she willed – and then she conceived. But since the labour of renewing life was too dangerous for one, she divided herself in two and created Adam and Eve to share this burden in the future.
Adam and Eve are suspended between two terrifying possibilities – the prospect of living for ever, and the accidental extinction of themselves. But they have not been created equal. ‘Fear is stronger in me than hope,’ Adam says. ‘I must have certainty.’ But hope is stronger than fear in Eve. She identifies improvement with the species rather than with herself, and accepts uncertainty, even death, as an inevitable risk in the process of creation.
The first scene of the play ends with the Serpent whispering the secret of conception to Eve. The stage directions read: ‘Eve’s face lights up with intense interest, which increases until an expression of overwhelming repugnance takes its place. She buries her face in her hands.’ This passage was criticized by St John Ervine. Was it not more likely, he demanded, that Eve ‘leapt with joy’? Shaw defended his representation of a woman ‘in a state of complete pre-sex innocence as making a wry face when it was explained to her that in consequence of the indelicacy with which Nature, in a fit of economy, has combined a merely excretory function with a creatively ejaculatory one in the same bodily part (she knowing only the excretory use of it), she is to allow herself to be syringed in an unprecedented manner by Adam... It is true that the indignity has compensations which, when experienced, overwhelm all the objections to it; but Eve had not then experienced them.’ Coming at the end of this magical first scene which shows life expanding in an atmosphere of strangeness, as idea gives birth to idea in the sunny stillness of that garden, Eve’s repugnance is theatrically powerful.
In the second scene ‘a few centuries later’ at an oasis in Mesopotamia, Adam and Eve have given birth to their family. What had taken place is a series of moral descents. The moment Adam invented death, it was ‘no longer worth his while to do anything thoroughly well’. That was the first step of the Fall; the second came as a result of inventing birth, before which Adam dared not risk killing Eve because he would have been ‘lonely and barren to all eternity’. But the invention of birth has meant that anyone who is killed can be replaced. One of Adam’s sons ‘invented meat-eating. The other... slew his beefsteak-eating brother, and thus invented murder. That was a very steep step. It was so exciting that all the others began to kill one another for sport, and thus invented war, the steepest step of all.’
Which is the stage reached in Mesopotamia in 4004 BC. Adam’s fear has stopped his development with the invention of the spade. Cain is an early example of the Superman who sets the standards for further human advancement. Like his brother Abel, whom he envied, copied and killed, he is ‘a discoverer, a man of ideas, a true Progressive’. From his father he has inherited fear which he overwhelms daily with acts of courage and the ecstasy of fighting. From his mother, he has taken hope, but he has no imagination to make creative use of his will and daring. ‘I do not know what I want,’ he tells Eve, ‘except that I want to be something higher and nobler than this stupid old digger.’ In Cain, the first murderer, Shaw embodies his belief that what we have learnt to call evil is technically an error in the experimental process of trial and error by which the Life Force must advance.
Cain is the dominant man. His fearful inventions of murder and war are reducing life to its new brevity. ‘Through him and his like,’ Eve declares, ‘death is gaining on life.’ She blames Lilith’s miscalculation in sharing the labour of creating so unequally between man and woman. ‘That is why there is enmity between Woman the creator and Man the destroyer.’
The twentieth century is largely populated by Adam’s successors. In ‘The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas’, the second part of his cycle, Shaw stages his revenge on these mean material people whom he typifies in Joyce Burge and Henry Hopkins Lubin, his lampoons of Asquith and Lloyd George. These are his contemporary idealists. They have one quality, which is Will, necessary to the Life Force. But it is Will without imagination, loveless, and by itself destructive. ‘The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas’ is designed as a humiliation of these two Liberal leaders who arrive at Franklyn Barnabas’s house as a couple of campaigning political candidates. They have come on fools’ errands, having carefully read between the lines of several newspaper reports and made the erroneous conclusion that Barnabas is going to enter politics and contest the approaching general election. Almost everything they hear they misunderstand; almost everything they say is trivial or untrue.
The play demonstrates the incompatibility between Adam’s offspring and the children of Eve – that incompatibility which Shaw felt to be his own inheritance. Lubin and Burge cannot take a long view even of the possibilities of longevity. They imagine the gospel of Creative Evolution to be a marketable elixir (‘The stuff. The powder. The bottle. The tabloid. Whatever it is. You said it wasnt lemons’) which must be kept secret. When they discover it to be an idea (or ‘moonshine’), they have no further use for it.
For half an hour in the third part of the cycle, ‘The Thing Happens’, almost no progress is detectable. We have edged forward another 250 years. The Lilliputian President of the British Islands is named Burge-Lubin, symbol of soldered fixity. Equally unchangeable is Barnabas, the Accountant-General with a likeness to his ancestor Conrad Barnabas, a bureaucrat who has made a god of statistics. Two other characters resemble figures in the previous play of the cycle: the Archbishop of York is ‘recognizably the same man’ as the Reverend William Haslam who was engaged to Franklyn Barnabas’s daughter Cynthia; and the Domestic Minister, Mrs Lutestring, seems remarkably similar to Franklyn Barnabas’s parlourmaid. A statistical survey leads accidentally to the dramatic revelation that they are indeed the same people, and since, ‘like all revolutionary truths, it [longevity] began as a joke’, this gives Shaw’s absurdist talent excellent scope. He chose for this experiment two of the least promising candidates from ‘The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas’ so as to demonstrate that the change would not take place as the result of individual self-interest. ‘If the geniuses live 300 years,’ Shaw explains, ‘so will the chumps.’ Since there are more chumps than geniuses, most of those to whom the thing happens will be ordinary people, like the parlourmaid.
It is the story of Adam and Eve once again, with a vital difference. When this new word is made flesh, the mother and father of the long-lived (their own ages presently totalling more than 557 years) are animated solely by hope. These two long-livers have experienced a hostility and strangeness among the short-lived that reflects Shaw’s own isolation. ‘I have been very lonely sometimes,’ reflects Mrs Lutestring; and the Archbishop reveals that it is ‘in this matter of sex [more] than in any other, you are intolerable to us’.
All this is reversed in the fourth part of the cycle, ‘The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman’, which propels us forward to a colony of long-lived people at Galway Bay in the year AD 3000. The deputation of short-lived visitors has come to consult their oracle. Among them is Napoleon, ‘the finest soldier in the world’ and Cain’s most perfect descendant. ‘War has made me popular, powerful, famous, historically immortal,’ he explains. ‘But I foresee that if I go on to the end it will leave me execrated, dethroned, imprisoned, perhaps executed. Yet if I stop fighting I commit suicide as a great man and become a common one.’ The Oracle answers that his only escape is death, and he is immobilized. For this scene Shaw developed the electric emanation, Vril, with which the subterranean sages of Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (a favourite book of his boyhood) slayed at sight. The invisible mesmeric field, naturally accumulating round the long-lived, is that same fantasy of intellectual power that Captain Shotover had struggled to invent. By using this force finally to arrest the progress of his own ‘Man of Destiny’, Shaw seals the destiny of the shortlived.
‘The Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman’ is perhaps the weakest play of the cycle. It explains differences between the two species that could be more imaginatively charted through the use of differing languages. Shaw recognized this growing challenge of vocabulary: he would get round it in the final play by having an 800-year-old She-Ancient tell a three-year-old that ‘we have to put things very crudely to you to make ourselves intelligible’. Yet the short tragi-comic scene with which the fourth play ends is peculiarly effective. This introduces the Elderly Gentleman who is Shaw’s partial self-portrait. In the short-lived world he has prided himself on daringly advanced thinking which, in the long perspective, becomes mere obscurantism. At home in neither world, he must choose between the despair of living among people to whom nothing is real, and consenting to be phased out among the superior long-lived. ‘I take the nobler risk,’ he decides, like Gulliver seeking to escape the Yahoos. The Oracle offers him her hands. ‘He grasps them and raises himself a little by clinging to her. She looks steadily into his face. He stiffens; a little convulsion shakes him; his grasp relaxes; and he falls dead.’
The Elderly Gentleman’s grasping of hands is a commitment to the spiritual future set out in the fifth and last play of the cycle. ‘As Far as Thought Can Reach’ combines past, present and future as paraded before a viewing platform set in the year AD 31,920. We are given ‘a glimpse of the past’ through a grotesque puppet play performed by two ‘artificial human beings’ that have been manufactured in the laboratory. This synthetic couple proclaim themselves to be the products of Cause and Effect, and offer a pantomime of the determinists’ concept of human life. They are ourselves, motivated by fear, enveloped in illusions, playing fantastic tricks that kill their Frankenstein-creator, the fanatical scientist Pygmalion, and finally, though shrinking from death at any cost, dying of terror and discouragement.
The future is a stateless society inhabited entirely by the long-lived. They have been born from artificially hatched eggs in which they were incubated for two years, developing from all sorts of creatures that no longer exist, to emerge as newly-born human beings roughly equivalent to our sixteen-year-olds. Before them stretch four years of what is called childhood, devoted to arts, sports and emotional pleasures, during which they pass through the immaturity that members of the audience begin to shed at the age of fifty. But whereas the short-lived audience will soon die of decay, the long-lived cast are like the original Adam and Eve, and will evolve over hundreds of years into a breed of intellectual voluptuaries known as the Ancients, who are Shaw’s version of Swift’s Houyhnhnms.
Such a prospect appals the children, just as it appals the audience, for we cannot sense anything in the existence of these Olympians to enchant us. Shaw’s artistic problem is one experienced by many creators of Utopias. ‘I could not shew the life of the long livers, because, being a short liver, I could not conceive it,’ he wrote. The imaginative effect is handed over to the actors, directors and designers.
In the final minutes of Back to Methuselah the ghosts of Lilith, Adam and Eve, Cain and the Serpent appear. Cain acknowledges that there is no future role for his offspring in the world; Adam too can make nothing of a place where matter does not rule the mind. But the Serpent feels justified. She has chosen the knowledge of good and evil, and she sees a new world in which, hope having vanquished fear, ‘there is no evil’. Eve too concludes that all is well: ‘My clever ones have inherited the earth.’ Finally, as an epitome of the whole cycle, Lilith delivers her testament.
‘Is this enough; or must I labor again?... They did terrible things... I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made... The pangs of another birth were already upon me when one man repented and...so much came of it that the horrors of that time seem now but an evil dream... Best of all, they are still not satisfied... they press on to... the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force... when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend... Of Life only is there no end... for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.’
Earlier in the play, the She-Ancient defined art as a ‘magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures’. Lilith’s speech is Shaw’s magic mirror. Following his courting of disorder in Heartbreak House, he had made a greater effort than in any play since Major Barbara towards a new coherence. The end of Back to Methuselah foretells the dissolution of matter and, with it, all that had vexed his mind. He sent his optimistic signal infinitely far beyond personal experience. The distant echo he received underscores Lilith’s words with a poignancy that against all odds makes them perhaps the most moving of all Shaw’s speeches for the theatre.
*
‘The sale of the book here and in America has been greater than that of any other of my works,’ Shaw told Karel Musek, his translator into the Bohemian language. Back to Methuselah seemed to answer a need of the times. ‘Your mind was never more infernally agile, your intellectual muscle was never better,’ William Archer reassured G.B.S. ‘...When a man can walk on a tightrope over the Falls of Niagara, turning three somersaults to a minute, it’s no use his appealing to the census paper to prove himself decrepit.’ More surprising was Max Beerbohm’s opinion – that Back to Methuselah was the best book Shaw had written because he had got away ‘from representation of actual things... and thought out a genuine work of art’.
Shaw sent complimentary copies of the book to any number of old friends and comrades, including one inscribed to Lenin. Lenin seems to have found in the Preface confirmation of his view that Shaw was ‘a good man fallen among Fabians’. In those places where the shortcomings of capitalism were exposed, Lenin wrote his favourite expression – ‘Bien dit!’ – in the margin. But where Shaw appeared to be ‘in the power of his Utopian illusions there are marks of disapproval’.
Almost everyone agreed with Shaw’s eventual view that ‘I was too damned discursive’. In the critical opinion of T. S. Eliot such garrulity had been a product of the ‘potent ju-ju of the Life Force [which] is a gross superstition’. This ‘master of a lucid and witty dialogue prose hardly equalled since Congreve, and of a certain power of observation,’ he wrote, was now ‘squandering these gifts in the service of worn out home-made theories, as in the lamentable Methuselah’.
Shaw had not counted on a performance in the theatre. He had calculated, however, without the ‘lunatic’ founder of the American Theatre Guild, Lawrence Langner, who came to Adelphi Terrace in the spring of 1921. He was examined, as Trebitsch had been, by Charlotte: ‘a gentle gracious lady with plain, pleasant features,’ Langner observed, ‘of medium height and comfortable build’. G.B.S. had introduced her ‘in the grand manner’ as if she were a prima donna, then ostentatiously seated her in a chair and stayed unfamiliarly quiet. Once her mystic scrutiny of Langner was over, Shaw sprang from his chair and dashed ‘like a sprinter to the door’ which he held open ‘with a deep bow until she had passed into the hall’. Herself being favourably impressed, Himself was free to give Langner a brief synopsis of his play, lasting two hours, at the end of which Langner concluded that ‘Shaw had more than a touch of the fanatic about him’. But between fanatic and lunatic an oddly effective partnership developed. Heartbreak House, Shaw cautioned Langner, was like ‘a musical comedy’ compared with Back to Methuselah. But despite its eight changes of scene, a cast of forty-five characters, and a duration exceeding twelve hours, Langner decided it was ‘just the kind of thing for the Theatre Guild to do’.
The rehearsals, which began early in 1922, called for a group of actors who were sufficiently talented to play several parts, and sufficiently flexible not only to play them on succeeding weeks but to rehearse them almost simultaneously – ‘much as the Grand Central Station had to be built while the trains were run’. Back to Methuselah opened in New York on 27 February 1922 with a matinée of Part I and evening performance of Part II. The cycle was completed over three weeks. Over nine weeks, twenty-five performances of the complete cycle were given, at the end of which the financial loss had risen to $20,000. On the other hand, the Theatre Guild had nearly doubled its subscribers. ‘The Garrick Theater was too small for us to make money out of the play,’ Langner explained. ‘If we had had a theater twice the size, there would have been a profit instead of a loss.’ ‘It isn’t likely that any other lunatic will want to produce Back to Methuselah!’ Shaw concluded.
He had seriously underrated his attraction for lunatics. Going up to Birmingham in 1923 for a matinée of Heartbreak House he met Barry Jackson, known locally as ‘the Butter King’ after the Birmingham Maypole Dairies founded by his father, from which he derived a large private income. Jackson’s madness took the form of philanthropy: over a period of twenty-one years he was to spend more than £100,000 (over £2 million in 1997) of his own money on the Birmingham Repertory Theatre which he had founded in 1913. Jackson had been disenchanted by the fashion machine of the London West End theatre. His repertory staged both classical and contemporary plays including continental expressionist drama – he put on Georg Kaiser’s Gas and the Čapeks’ Insect Play. Heartbreak House was the ninth of Shaw’s plays to be produced there since its opening, and Jackson now proposed a tenth, the impossible Methuselah. ‘I asked him was he mad,’ Shaw remembered. ‘...I demanded further whether he wished his wife and children to die in the workhouse. He replied that he was not married. I began to scent a patron.’
Barry Jackson’s patronage between the wars became the equivalent in England of Lawrence Langner’s promotion of Shaw’s plays through the Theatre Guild in the United States. Almost twenty-five years younger than G.B.S., Jackson inherited Granville-Barker’s kinship of the stage. ‘Elegant, urbane, unselfconsciously dominating, always seeming to be a head taller than his companions’, he appeared like one of the superior long-lived among the short-lived inhabitants of Birmingham. Though his theatre was one of the happiest places in which to work, it offended Birmingham’s respect for profit-making.
Jackson appealed to Shaw as someone whose speciality was to make the impossible take place: a conjuror converting dreams into reality. He therefore handed over Back to Methuselah! (which at that time ended with an exclamation mark) and saw it staged in the autumn of 1923, with sets by Paul Shelving and featuring a cast of ‘provincial nobodies’ that included Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, Cedric Hardwicke, Raymond Huntley and Edith Evans (who played the Serpent, the Oracle, and the She-Ancient). ‘It is a mighty work,’ Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies wrote during the rehearsals, ‘...but opinion is divided about it in the theatre... I do not myself know whether it will be as enthralling to see as it is to read.’
Four consecutively played cycles were performed at Birmingham and produced a loss of around £2,500 (equivalent to £62,000 in 1997), of which a little was recovered from a further four cycles put on at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square early the following year. But Shaw was happy. ‘This has been the most extraordinary experience of my life,’ he declared after the first performance.
From the sequence of secrets and revelations in the Garden of Eden to the terrible cry of the Elderly Gentleman receding into the distance, there were thrilling moments. Desmond MacCarthy, who had been told that, though marvellous, the play was rather boring, listened with riveted attention to the final part. He had learnt that those of Shaw’s ideas which ‘first struck me as silliest were the ones which I subsequently found had modified my thoughts most’, and he recognized that G.B.S. was placing his ghostly faith out of reach of human discouragement. This kind of drama, with its chords of inspiration, flashes of moral passion, and searching chaos, was rare in the theatre. ‘The superb merit of the play is that it is the work of an artist who has asked himself, with far greater seriousness and courage than all but a few, what is the least he must believe and hope for if he is to feel life is worth living.’
What we need is not a new edition of rules of the ring but the substitution of law for violence as between nations.
Shaw to Jerome N. Frank (13 April 1918)
In the first four and a half years of Fred Day’s employment, the Shaws made four journeys into Ireland. Usually they spent some weeks bathing, boating, walking and writing at Parknasilla, which Charlotte had known as a child and which to her mind always rejuvenated G.B.S. Near the opposite coast, they would stay with Horace Plunkett of Foxrock outside Dublin – ‘the kindest and most helpful of my Kilteragh guests,’ he called them.
‘One reason that I am anxious to get him here,’ Plunkett had told Charlotte, ‘is that I feel it in my bones that the time has come for him to do his great service to Ireland.’ It was difficult for Shaw to resist such unusual trust, and when Plunkett’s new party, known as the Dominion League, was formed in 1919, he began numerous contributions to its paper, the Irish Statesman edited by AE.
In Shaw’s imagination the Dominion League became a forum for all extremists whose opposing views could be beguiled into a visionary Irish Bill that none of the extremist factions could obtain separately. To pull off this amazing trick ‘the ace is the public opinion of the world,’ Shaw reckoned, ‘especially the English-speaking world’. He promoted the League as a sensible way forward for businessmen, an attractive vehicle for patriots, and an honourable solution for the British Government. ‘What the Irish want is the freedom of their country,’ he declared. But no one could agree what freedom meant. Was it complete independence, or the gaining of a position similar to Australia and Canada, or the occupation of a place equal to England’s within the British Commonwealth, or the beginning of a federated partnership of the United Kingdom?
Meanwhile Ireland continued to exist under a virtual state of martial law. ‘Laws are enforced, not by the police, but by the citizens who call the police when the law is broken,’ Shaw argued. ‘...But in Ireland nobody will call the police, nobody will give away another Irishman to the policeman.’ The result was a miserably weak British regime holding on to power through Black and Tan coercion. In Ireland ‘you have every sort of liberty trampled on,’ Shaw told the Fabians. ‘...all these petty persecutions, annoyance, these flingings of men into jail, putting down newspapers, charging political meetings with bayonet and baton charges have produced a condition of the most furious revolt against the British Government and, of course, you have the governing class in this country quite deliberately and unmistakeably going on with that in order to provoke revolts against them which will enable them to say it is impossible to give Ireland self-government.’ Amid the raids, ambushes and weekly acts of terrorism, the attempted assassination at the end of 1919 of Lord French, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, which appeared to shock the English, came as no surprise to Shaw.
But what did take him by surprise was the sudden action of Lloyd George who announced a Bill for the ‘better government of Ireland’, partitioning six of the nine Ulster counties from the twenty-six so-called ‘southern’ counties, north and south being provided with separate home rule and a local Parliament. Lloyd George’s Bill led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and semi-finalization of the partition of Ireland at the end of the year. The Dáil ratified the treaty, but the minority opposing it, led by Éamon de Valera, attracted the support of a majority section of the Irish Republican Army. The Anglo-Irish war had ended: in June 1922 the Irish Civil War began.
‘This is an impossible situation,’ Shaw wrote in the Irish Times that summer. It was literally impossible in the sense that the men he had always called ‘marginal impossibilists’ had won the day. The IRA was flushed with success – though to Shaw’s eyes it represented only ‘the stale romance that passes for politics in Ireland’. His purpose throughout all these complicated Anglo-Irish troubles had been to promote any act of grace that could sweeten the atmosphere of this war-tortured country. ‘We must all, at heavy disadvantages, do what we can to stop explosions of mere blind hatred.’
After the ratification of the treaty, whatever skirmishes went on between IRA and Irish Free State Army troops, the country would have to govern itself, ‘which means that her troubles are beginning, not ending,’ Shaw warned. He continued to come over, keeping himself up-to-date with political developments. On 19 and 20 August 1922 he and Charlotte had stayed once more with Horace Plunkett at Kilteragh where they met Michael Collins, one of the most attractive of the Free State leaders. Collins had been a member of the Irish delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty and now, as Commander-in-Chief of the Free State Army, was leading the fight against some of his ex-comrades in the IRA. A few days before this meeting, following the death of Arthur Griffith, he had been appointed head of the new government of the Irish Free State. To be dining with Michael Collins at Kilteragh seemed entirely appropriate to Shaw. With the political realignment between Irishmen, Collins had been moving from extremism to the moderate centre until he now occupied Plunkett’s old role – the very change that Shaw had looked for, by non-violent means, in his proposals for the Dominion League.
The Shaws left Kilteragh next day; and a day later Collins was shot dead in an ambush near Cork. ‘How could a born soldier die better than at the victorious end of a good fight, falling to a shot of another Irishman – a damned fool, but all the same an Irishman who thought he was fighting for Ireland – “a Roman to a Roman”?’ Shaw wrote to Michael Collins’s sister. ‘I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory... So tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colors in his honor; and let us all praise God that he had not to die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.’
It was a handsome letter, masking Shaw’s own pessimism under its shining style. Shaw had returned with Charlotte to Ireland for a couple of months in mid-July 1923, burning up the thirty miles of mountainous Cork and Kerry roads between Glengarriff and Parknasilla ‘in a new 23–60 h.p.’. Despite alarms in the papers, excursions across the south of Ireland were safer than anywhere else in Europe, he reported to The Times. There was some outdoor economic socialism-in-action – ‘the loot from plundered houses has to be redistributed by rough methods for which the permanent law is too slow and contentious’ – but none of this was exercised at the expense of the errant Englishman. ‘The tourist’s heart is in his mouth when he first crosses a repaired bridge on a 30 cwt. car, for the repairs are extremely unconvincing to the eye,’ he wrote; ‘but after crossing two or three in safety he thinks no more of them.
‘Since I arrived I have wandered every night over the mountains, either alone or with a harmless companion or two, without molestation or incivility... there is not the smallest reason why Glengarriff and Parknasilla should not be crowded this year with refugees from the turbulent sister island and the revolutionary Continent, as well as by connoisseurs in extraordinarily beautiful scenery and in air which makes breathing a luxury.’
On 12 September he fell on some rocks along the Kerry coast, damaging two ribs and badly bruising himself. He came back to England six days later, like an Irish hero himself, to be attended by an osteopath, a surgeon and radiographer.
This was his thirteenth visit to his country since he had emigrated from Dublin almost fifty years ago, and he would not go back again. His last political hopes for Ireland had appeared to go up in smoke when Horace Plunkett’s house Kilteragh was burnt to the ground by the Republicans earlier that year. He had already written his valediction.
‘I am returning to England because I can do no good here... I was a Republican before Mr de Valera was born... I objected to the old relations between England and Ireland as I object to the present ones, because they were not half intimate enough... I must hurry back to London. The lunatics there are comparatively harmless.’
Nature must have a relief from any feeling, no matter how deep and sincere it is.
Jitta’s Atonement
‘The war is over,’ Shaw wrote. ‘...All the literary, artistic and scientific institutions should be hard at work healing up the wounds of Europe.’ What he advocated as public policy he tried to implement in his private dealings, seeking to invest his German royalties in German industry. ‘It is with great pleasure that I find myself able to correspond with my German friends again,’ he had written to Carl Otto in the autumn of 1919. ‘I need hardly say that the war did the most painful violence to my personal feelings.’ He felt a special tenderness for Siegfried Trebitsch. For much of the war they had hardly been able to communicate at all, and even during the long months of the Armistice Shaw had to obtain official authorization to write Trebitsch a letter – all his correspondence to Austria and Germany being inspected to make certain it was confined to business and ‘expressed in terms suitable to the existing political relations between our respective countries’. When Trebitsch moved for a time to Switzerland, Shaw vented his relief: ‘At last I have got you in a country which I can write to without being shot at dawn.’
Shaw instructed Trebitsch to hold on to all monies due and use them for himself and his wife. ‘Spend my money: steal it: do anything you like with it as if it were your own until you are in easy circumstances once more.’ But Trebitsch could not get the hang of these economic reversals. Despite all Shaw’s urgings, he would convey strange sums by dubious routes at odd intervals, imperilling their licence to trade. Because he was aware of Trebitsch’s dismay at becoming principally known as ‘Shaw’s translator’ (‘my name as a writer in my own right faded away’), G.B.S. hit on the corrective paradox of translating his translator. When Trebitsch sent him a copy of his latest play, Frau Gittas Sühne, shortly after the war, he accepted it as an opportunity to make this singular counter-reparationary gesture with Jitta’s Atonement. ‘I have read Gitta,’ he wrote in May 1920, ‘though most of your words are not in the dictionary.’ Within this tangle of difficulties there opened a beautiful advantage for Shaw: ‘I had to guess what it was all about by mere instinct.’
He took a year over the translation. Using ‘some telepathic method of absorption, I managed at last to divine, infer, guess, and co-invent the story of Gitta’. He had asked Blanche Patch’s German-speaking locum tenens to provide him with a literal translation of the play which served as a helpful departure guide. ‘I hope my tricks wont make you furious,’ he wrote uneasily to Trebitsch after completing the first act. ‘Charlotte says I have made it brutally realistic; but this is an unintended result of making the stage business more explicit for the sake of the actress...The stock joke of the London stage is a fabulous stage direction “Sir Henry turns his back to the audience and conveys that he has a son at Harrow”.’
Sending him this first act, Shaw advised Trebitsch to ‘tear the thing up if it is impossible’, but not to do so ‘merely because it is disappointing’ since all translations were that. ‘It is much better than the original,’ gallantly responded Trebitsch who had learnt Shaw’s politeness without its component of irony. He eagerly exhorted G.B.S. to complete his version which ‘proves again your stage-genious’, and add his name as co-dramatist to increase its chances of production. ‘I feel a childish delight reading Trebitsch in English,’ he wrote happily. ‘...Please handle that play like your own.’
This, increasingly, is what Shaw did. At the end of the first act, the fifty-year-old Professor Bruno Haldenstedt lies dead of a heart attack on the floor of an apartment where he had been keeping an assignation with his mistress, Jitta Lenkheim, the wife of a medical colleague. ‘I was horribly tempted to make Haldenstedt sit up after Jitta’s departure, and make a comedy of the sequel,’ Shaw warned Trebitsch. His struggle to resist these temptations weakened in the second act and was joyously abandoned in the third where the cast, with ‘a paroxysm of agonizing laughter’, evolves into a hilarious troupe of Shavians. ‘The real person always kills the imagined person,’ announces Jitta as Trebitsch’s characters die away; and the dead lover’s daughter, Edith Haldenstedt, agrees that it is ‘such a relief to be acting sensibly at last.’
Studying the typewritten transcription from Shaw’s shorthand turned out to be a strange experience for Trebitsch. ‘I was puzzeled very much reading your bold alterations,’ he admitted. ‘...The III Akt is in your version almost a comedy!’ Shaw was quick to provide healing explanations. It was true, he acknowledged, that he had not done justice to Trebitsch’s poetry. But Trebitsch would be overjoyed to discover that by making the characters rather less oppressively conventional, and then inserting a little mild fun into their lives, he had managed to rescue the hero and heroine from their dark fates of misery and despair. ‘That is the good news,’ he confirmed. Then he had been obliged to replace Vienna (which still lay in the romantic haze of Strauss waltzes) with London and New York (where the delicious anaesthetic of romance was only tolerated in Italian opera). The hopeless gloom into which Trebitsch flung everyone would be fatal to the play in Britain and America. ‘Life is not like that here,’ he explained. Trebitsch was surprised to learn that even with such artificial aids as black clothes, the British exercised a reaction against grief over death – an irresistible reaction into cheerfulness. Also ‘nine tenths of the adulteries end in reconciliations,’ Shaw notified Trebitsch, ‘and even at the connivance of the injured party at its continuation’.
The delight that had initially flowed through Trebitsch was by now rather confused. To what degree was Jitta’s Atonement his own work? The tragedy of his first act and the melodrama of the second act had been dissolved in the sparkling comedy of Shaw’s ending. It was true that he had been invited to refashion the play if he found these treacheries unbearable – but he trusted Shaw’s ‘diabolical skill’ and his estimate of the play’s increased chances of performance. So he gave the go-ahead to prepare an acting version of the text. ‘What could I do but agree?’
‘You will find that in this final acting edition of the play I have committed some fresh outrages,’ Shaw wrote. ‘...Nothing has been lost by this except the characteristic Trebitschian brooding that is so deliriously sad and noble in your novels but that I could never reproduce... My method of getting a play across the footlights is like revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion... so you must forgive me: I have done my best.’
Lee Schubert’s production in Washington and New York, with Bertha Kalich as Jitta, ‘did not succeed even as a comedy,’ Langner recorded. For two years Shaw held up Jitta in England in the hope of getting a West End production – then he handed it to Violet Vanbrugh who ‘will try it at a rather nice suburban theatre at Putney Bridge, called the Grand Theatre’. Shaw was abroad for this first English production, but caught up with it two months later at Leicester. ‘The funniest thing about it is that I was very much struck with your play when I saw it on the stage,’ he told Trebitsch. Most of the reviews made it clear that (as the Daily Telegraph reported) ‘Mr Shaw conjugates the verb “to translate” very differently from most men’. But whenever the reviewers should have felt like ‘holding up our hands in horror at the shameful way the original author has been manhandled,’ wrote the Nation & Athenaeum critic, ‘we are laughing too loud to remember to do so... it cannot possibly have been better entertainment.’ One of those most deeply entertained had been Arnold Bennett. ‘The thing is simply masterly, & contains a lot of the finest scenes that Shaw ever wrote.’ In his diary he recorded that the effect of re-engineering a machine-made drama with Shavian wit had been electrical. ‘The mere idea of starting on a purely conventional 1st act and then guying it with realism and fun, shows genius.
‘In the other acts there is some of the most brilliant work, some tender, some brutal, and lots of the most side-splitting fun that Shaw ever did – and he is now approaching seventy, I suppose. The “hysterics” scene of laughter between the widow and the mistress of the dead man is startlingly original. The confession scene between the mistress and the daughter of the dead man is really beautiful.’
Though none of his fantasies of film versions and West End triumphs became facts, Trebitsch had already decided that ‘the play was indeed a success’. Shaw paid Trebitsch £100 (equivalent to £1,750 in 1997) for a perpetual non-exclusive licence to translate and publish Frau Gittas Sühne, and then diverted Trebitsch’s interests elsewhere. ‘Did I tell you that I am working on a play about Joan of Arc?’ he asked. There was, he had supposed, ‘no chance of your coming over here’. Not having seen Shaw now for some ten years, and feeling it was his ‘destiny and privilege’ to meet his friend again, Trebitsch swore ‘a vow that in spite of all difficulties and all qualms I would receive the master’s new work only from his own hand. Saint Joan summoned me, and I had to go and receive her.’ Shaw provided information on the prices and standards of London hotels, added an unglamorous assessment of Ayot – ‘a village where nobody dreams of dressing’ – and noted some of the house rules: ‘If you smoke cigars, you will give Charlotte asthma.’ All the same, he conceded, ‘I hope to be able to give you printed proofs of Joan’.
The main obstacle to his visit was what Shaw called ‘a disgraceful Aliens Act’. The British Embassy had cautioned Trebitsch against trusting to his visa alone. To avoid the risk of being sent straight back across the Channel, he would need an authoritative letter from a British citizen. The letter Shaw sent him admirably fulfilled its purpose, disarming ‘the austere passport control officials’ at Dover with ‘considerable merriment’. Shaw met him at Victoria Station, ‘coming with long strides along the platform,’ Trebitsch remembered, ‘...a laughing giant... I grasped the hand this long-missed man held out to me.’ They drove to Ayot where, for the first time, Trebitsch heard Shaw read one of his own works out loud.
Afterwards they spoke of the dreadful war years – experiences, moods and opinions that could never have been sent through the mail. ‘My generation has passed away and I shall soon have to follow its example,’ Shaw said. The days passed all too quickly for Trebitsch. When they said auf Wiedersehen it seemed to him that the additional unspoken phrase ‘in a better world’ was plainly implied. He carried with him the latest work. ‘There is no other new play,’ Shaw told him: ‘Joan is the new play.’