We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
Saint Joan
Shaw had been long familiar with Joan of Arc in the theatre. In his Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra he had classed her with Nelson and Charles XII – all ‘half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded by all races to certain forms of insanity’. Some ten years later, in the Preface to Getting Married, she is no longer a lunatic but gifted with ‘exceptional sanity’. In the interval, Quicherat’s factual testimony had been translated and published in England, providing authentic evidence of the real Joan.
Shaw does not seem to have considered adding to Joan literature himself until 1913 when, returning from Germany through the Vosges and ‘pleasing myself as to my route, I took Domremy on my way for the sake of St Joan of Arc’. He had often travelled through ‘Joan of Arc country’, but never before visited Orléans. It was here, at the Musée Historique, that he saw the fifteenth-century sculptured head of St Maurice, traditionally believed by the inhabitants to have been modelled from Joan after her triumphant relief of their town from the English. Shaw was happy to embrace this belief. For the Gothic image showed a remarkable face – ‘evidently not an ideal face but a portrait, and yet so uncommon as to be unlike any real woman one has ever seen,’ he wrote. ‘...It is a wonderful face... the face of a born leader.’ This was the image before Shaw ten years later when he presented Joan in the turret doorway of his play – ‘an able-bodied country girl of 17 or 18, respectably dressed in red, with an uncommon face: eyes very wide apart... a long well-shaped nose... resolute but full-lipped mouth, and handsome fighting chin’.
From Orléans he wrote to Stella Campbell: ‘I shall do a Joan play some day.’ He imagined it beginning with the ‘sweeping up of the cinders and orange peel after her martyrdom’, and ending with Joan’s arrival in heaven. ‘I should have God about to damn the English for their share in her betrayal,’ he wrote, ‘and Joan producing an end of burnt stick in arrest of Judgment.’
The play’s epilogue, a bedroom cabaret in Charles VII’s dream, has some affinities with Shaw’s original fantasy. But more significant is the change of surroundings in which Shaw places his ‘masterful girl soldier’ after the First World War, and the different task he assigns her. The chronicle play he wrote in 1923 is his ‘one foray into popular myth-making,’ Irving Wardle has written, ‘undefaced by his usual ironic graffiti’; while the epilogue is a Shavian revue sketch which does not remove Joan up to heaven, but brings her forward from the fifteenth into the twentieth century – a move implicit in the previous six scenes.
Shaw felt he recognized in Joan the spirit needed for the regeneration of society in the modern world. A quarter of a century earlier in The Perfect Wagnerite, ‘Siegfried as Protestant’ had anticipated Joan, the first Protestant. Siegfried and Joan both quell their fear of fire, and are transfigured by the flames. Describing Protestantism in the late fifteenth century as a ‘wave of thought’ that led ‘the strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every man’s private judgement was a more trustworthy interpreter of God and revelation than the Church’, Shaw concluded:
‘The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth century is that of a perfectly naïve hero upsetting religion, law and order in all directions, and establishing in their place the unfettered action of Humanity... This conception, already incipient in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, was certain at last to reach some great artist, and be embodied by him in a masterpiece.’
Saint Joan is Shaw’s attempt at this masterpiece and the vehicle for a dialogue between ancient and modern worlds. If Joan’s rehabilitation was an example of a modern show trial, the original court hearing seemed to Shaw one of history’s secret trials – like those of the Star Chamber. ‘Joan was killed by the Inquisition... The Inquisition is not dead,’ he wrote in 1931. ‘...when in modern times you fall behind-hand with your political institutions... you get dictatorships... and when you get your dictatorship you may take it from me that you will with the greatest certainty get a secret tribunal dealing with sedition, with political heresy, exactly like the Inquisition.’
The hero as victim transformed into saviour had been in Shaw’s mind as early as the Passion Play he had started to compose at the age of twenty-one. Like Jesus, Joan was an agent for change inspired against the idealist status quo of the established Church. Cauchon’s great cry – ‘Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?’ – makes the connection plain. So Saint Joan became Shaw’s passion play and represents Joan’s life as another coming of Christ to the world.
Shaw interprets Joan’s voices as evidence of a living imagination – the ‘inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned conclusions of genius’ – which are miraculous not by virtue of their alleged source but because of exceptional consequences. These voices and visions, being the manifestations of Joan’s instinct (‘the voices come first,’ she explains, ‘and I find the reasons after’), operate similarly to Shaw’s own methods of writing. ‘I am pushed by a natural need to set to work to write down the conversations that come into my head unaccountably,’ he had explained ten years before. ‘At first I hardly know the speakers and cannot find names for them... Finally I come to know them very well, and discover what it is they are driving at, and why they have said and done the things I have been moved to set down.’ By this telepathic process Shaw hoped to attune himself to Joan, he echoing her when following the court testimony, she echoing him when he departs from it, and together collaborating in the miraculous creation of the play.
To many it seemed that the miracle had been Saint Joan’s transformation of G.B.S. Johan Huizinga claimed that she had brought Shaw ‘to his knees’. But the wretched innocent who had ‘talked with angels and saints from the age of thirteen,’ Marina Warner reminds us, who had defended the ‘external and objective reality of those voices’ and ‘turned to the Pope for help in her long and appalling trial’, reappears in Shaw’s play as a ‘sharp-witted individualist, who attributes her motives and ideas to hard common sense... [and is a] protesting prophet, subverter, active agent of the Life Force, rational dresser’. To have succeeded in getting this ‘pert spitfire’ to enter English consciousness as the true Joan was the final miracle.
‘The first thing he invariably does when his setting is in the past, is to rub off his period the patina of time,’ wrote Desmond MacCarthy; ‘...he will scrub and scrub till contemporary life begins to gleam through surface strangeness and oddities.’ Shaw worked fast, filled with relief at having lifted himself free from the post-war débâcle and entered a previous century to fight another war against English imperialism. He translated his own assertion of style into Joan’s inspired efficiency of action – ‘She is so positive, sir,’ Robert de Baudricourt’s steward says to account for her effect on everyone. Shaw presents her as the warrior-saint he had sometimes thought of dramatizing as Cromwell and Mahomet, and had looked for in a play about the Unknown Soldier. But after Saint Joan he needed to write none of these works. ‘It’s a stupendous play,’ Sybil Thorndike wrote to him, ‘& says all the things that the world needs to hear at the moment.’
*
Sybil Thorndike had felt destined to act St Joan and in 1923 commissioned Laurence Binyon to write a play for her about the Maid. Shaw, too, had begun writing his Saint Joan that year. On 27 August, he was able to write: ‘Saint Joan is finished (except for the polishing)... and I thought I should never write another after Methuselah!’
It was not until he had finished the play that Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson got to hear of it. In some consternation they wrote, telling him of Laurence Binyon’s work-in-progress and asking what should be done. G.B.S. was flatteringly adamant: ‘Sybil is to play my Joan; let someone else play Binyon’s.’ In the event, Binyon gracefully withdrew and the difficulty lifted.
Charlotte seems to have been instrumental in Shaw’s choice of subject. ‘Yes, I sometimes find ideas for plays for the Genius,’ she conceded. ‘If we can find a good subject for a play, he usually writes it very quickly.’ The same proposal had also been made by the man he had named as his literary executor, Sydney Cockerell, curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, to which, early in 1922, the Shaws had presented one of Augustus John’s portraits of G.B.S. ‘I have always been under the impression that I was in a small way responsible for St Joan,’ Cockerell wrote to Shaw twenty years later, ‘by giving you or introducing you to Douglas Murray’s book containing the full proceedings at her trial and rehabilitation and suggesting that you might do something with it.’
There was yet another begetter, a teacher at St Mary’s College, Hammersmith, called Father Joseph Leonard, whom the Shaws had met in 1919 on holiday at Parknasilla. Shaw later sent him a letter asking where he could find a record of the proceedings of Joan’s canonization. ‘What I want to know is how the Church got over the fact, which must have been raised by the advocatus diaboli if he did his duty to his client, that Joan asserted a right of private judgment as against the Church,’ he explained. ‘...I may write a play about her some day; and this is the only point on which I do not feel fully equipped.’
This letter initiated a long exchange between Shaw and the priest who became his ‘technical adviser’ on the play, though not all his advice was accepted. Shaw held Joan’s private judgement to be inspired and the Church’s judgement banal. He took the evidence from the court – often in Joan’s words – and dramatized it in the theatre as the speeches of a natural rebel against the Church’s authority. Father Leonard declared Joan’s loyalty to the Pope to be of far greater significance than any number of eccentric voices, for ‘the Church is large enough to contain all sorts of queer fish’. But to have made Joan a queer fish within the Catholic aquarium would have destroyed the Protestant purpose of Shaw’s play, which was to bring a realist heroine before a perfectly conducted court of idealists.
The play seemed almost to write itself. More difficult was the revision, in which he eliminated many tempting digressions. This was well advanced by the late autumn when Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson came down to Ayot to hear G.B.S. read his play. ‘He read it beautifully – he ought to have been an actor really and from the moment he started we couldn’t move!’ Sybil Thorndike wrote to her son John. The reading lasted three hours and three minutes. ‘When it came to the Epilogue Lewis and I were in tears,’ Sybil Thorndike recalled.
*
Though Sybil Thorndike was the theatrical vehicle Shaw had in mind for the role, he had used another model as Joan’s contemporary equivalent – the middle-aged Fabian Mary Hankinson. Hanky, as she was known, had been born in Cheshire, physically trained in Kent and employed as Head of a Sunday School. For thirty years she acted as Spartan hostess at the Fabian Summer Schools, captaining their cricket teams, drilling their country dancers and policing their morals. She was vividly remembered for teaching Shaw to waltz backwards: ‘an unforgettable sight!’ She seemed entirely sexless, pouring her energies into gymnastics and flute-playing, and sharing her domestic life with her friend Ethel Moor. Shaw had attended the Summer School in 1919 at Penlee where Hanky had miraculously quenched a Fabian uprising. But though a rigid disciplinarian, this
‘maid with silver hair
With school-boy heart and skipper air’
as John Dover Wilson serenaded her, inspired much admiration, for she was a woman of ‘unusual good sense,’ St John Ervine observed. When Saint Joan was published in 1924, Shaw presented her with a copy inscribed: ‘To Mary Hankinson, the only woman I know who does not believe she was the model for Joan, and also the only woman who actually was.’
‘It is difficult,’ wrote the critic Maurice Valency, ‘to understand in what way Miss Hankinson... could have served as a model for Saint Joan.’ But her feminism, which modulated Joan’s speech so that it sounded to Desmond MacCarthy like the voice of ‘a suffragette and a cry from a garden city’, was the influence to which T. S. Eliot took exception when criticizing Shaw for having created ‘perhaps the greatest sacrilege of all Joans’ by turning ‘her into a great middle-class reformer... [whose] place is little higher than Mrs Pankhurst’s’. Shaw may have had Eliot in mind when, delivering a radio talk in 1931, he stated that although no modern feminist was quite like St Joan, ‘St Joan inspired that movement... If you read Miss [Sylvia] Pankhurst, you will understand a great deal more about the psychology of Joan.’
Shaw’s play carries on the historical business of literature, reconstructing the roles of past figures and keeping the dead in perpetual employment. He uses Joan’s symbolic dimensions to add credentials to his vitalist philosophy, as Voltaire and Anatole France had used her for their purposes, and as Shaw’s contemporaries were themselves using her for opposing ends. Not long before, Charles Péguy had re-created Joan as a socialistic mystic and martyr who found her equivalent in the government-persecuted figure of Dreyfus; and Charles Maurras had rediscovered her as a proto-fascist emblem of the Action Française, reinforcing military and national authority as Joan had reinforced the French army and the King.
Shaw’s Joan is the complete outsider who feels most lonely when she is in company with those who voice opinions of the day. Her own timeless voices echo her unworldliness and establish her kinship with the man who felt a stranger on this planet and at ease only with the dead. Shaw’s methods of composition were too oblique and multifaceted for straight-forward self-portraiture. To illustrate how the progress of humankind still depended on some people regarded by philistine society as sick and even lunatic, Shaw enlisted more than one contemporary parallel. In addition to Mary Hankinson there was Lawrence of Arabia.
Shaw had been introduced to T. E. Lawrence in March 1922 when Sydney Cockerell brought him along to help carry away the portrait by Augustus John. Shaw was one of Lawrence’s heroes, and five months later he received a letter from Lawrence asking him to read ‘or try to read, a book which I have written’. By the middle of September one of the eight copies of Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, cumbersomely printed on a linotype machine by the Oxford Times, arrived at Ayot. This awkward and prodigious work, ‘about twice as long as the Bible’, stood at the centre of Shaw’s working life. ‘You are evidently a very dangerous man: most men who are any good are,’ he told Lawrence. ‘...I wonder what, after reading the book through, I will decide to do with you.’
His detailed revisions (including virtuoso use of the semi-colon), which affected ‘the spirit as well as the letter of the book,’ Lawrence acknowledged, and ‘left not a paragraph without improvement’, were not completed until some two years later. But Shaw had read the book ‘to the last morsel’ much sooner. By the time he started on Saint Joan he had only forty pages left to read, and when he finished it early in the summer he felt convinced that here was ‘one of the great books of the world,’ he told Lady Gregory.
In the meantime he had found out some facts about this puzzling man. Lawrence had quit his Arabian adventures, left the Colonial Office, erased his old name and, having been discharged from the RAF following his public identification as ‘Private Ross’, enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps in Dorset using as his new alias – of all names – Shaw.
Lady Gregory visited Ayot St Lawrence that May, and her diary records that the two people most on Shaw’s mind were Joan of Arc and Lawrence of Arabia. To some degree The Seven Pillars of Wisdom may be read as a cross-referring work to Saint Joan. Lawrence was what Shaw called ‘a grown-up boy, without any idea of politics’. He had gone to the Paris Peace Conference expecting President Wilson to secure self-determination for the Arab peoples, and had come away full of the bitterness of defeat. His inspired leadership of the Arab revolt against the Turks, which kept the Arabs fighting for the Allies instead of among themselves, helped to redeem them from their Ottoman servitude. Like Joan, Lawrence had been ‘in the grip of a nationalistic impulse to create a unified state from a feudal order, and to set a monarch representative of that unity upon the throne of the nation-state’. Joan had succeeded with the Dauphin and been martyred; Lawrence had failed with King Feisal and seemed, after Versailles, to be backing into oblivion.
As a man-of-letters in peacetime who became a man-of-action in war, Lawrence provided a living connection between G.B.S. and Joan that helped Shaw to bring his heroine ‘close to the present day’. Lacking an adult sense of his identity, Lawrence invited his heroes to invade his character and link it with their own. His choice of Shaw’s name, the opening he gave G.B.S. to edit and amend his vast first-person chronicle of the Arabian campaign, and the visits he began making that summer to the Shaws’ village, the name of which so coincidentally sanctified his own, were part of the mechanics by which G.B.S. was encouraged to merge their destinies.
Already, by the beginning of 1923, Shaw was advising Lawrence to ‘get used to the limelight’, as he himself had done. Later he came to realize that Lawrence was one of the most paradoxically conspicuous men of the century. The function of both their public personalities was to lose an old self and discover a new. Lawrence had been illegitimate; Shaw had doubted his legitimacy. Both were the sons of dominant mothers and experienced difficulties in establishing their masculinity. The Arab revolt, which gave Lawrence an ideal theatre of action, turned him into Colonel Lawrence, Luruns Bey, Prince of Damascus and most famously Lawrence of Arabia. ‘I note that you have again moulded the world impossibly to your desire,’ G.B.S. wrote to him. ‘There is no end to your Protean tricks... What is your game really?’ It was natural to interpret it all as a Shavian game, and to see in the shy bird who had helped to carry the Augustus John portrait a version of Sonny. ‘I was naturally a pitiably nervous, timid man, born with a whole plume of white feathers,’ he confided to Lawrence; ‘but nowadays this only gives a zest to the fun of swanking at every opportunity.’
But it is this swanking and fun that makes Shaw’s Joan into the Principal Boy of a pantomime, and the play into a charade exhibiting ‘all Shaw’s most irritating stylistic habits,’ as Irving Wardle wrote: ‘... garrulousness, flimsy poeticism, and thick-skinned flippancy’. Like another of Pygmalion’s experiments, he had constructed a likeness of Joan by grafting the eccentric muscle of Mary Hankinson, and framing her with the aura of ‘an accomplished poseur with glittering eyes,’ as Beatrice Webb described Lawrence. G.B.S. gave Lawrence several copies of Saint Joan — variously dedicated ‘to Shaw from Shaw’ and ‘to Pte Shaw from Public Shaw’ – but Lawrence, who mislaid these copies, was an unreliable chaperon for the rendezvous of G.B.S. with his saint and remained as much of a mystery to Shaw as Joan herself whom, he conceded, ‘I do not profess to understand’.
*
‘Mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic,’ warns Cauchon in the Epilogue. From the perspective of history it may be easy to see that Joan is inspired and that the other fanatic, de Stogumber, who throws himself into Joan’s chair after her burning, is heretical. But there exists a more sophisticated fanatic in the Inquisitor, who gives a warning of where the toleration of fanaticism may lead. His fearful condemnation of change is made with such idealistic sympathy that some critics have understood it to define G.B.S.’s own attitude. What Shaw intended to voice through this ‘most infernal old scoundrel’ was his audience’s opinion of the Church and Empire, before demonstrating where such opinions led. The Inquisitor’s attack on Joan’s masculine dress is also a denunciation of Shaw’s Jaeger costume. Changes in fashion exhibit how the unorthodoxy of one time becomes the convention of another, a point dramatically made in the Epilogue by everyone’s amusement at the appearance of the clerical-looking gentleman wearing ‘a black frock-coat and trousers, and tall hat, in the fashion of the year 1920’. The Inquisitor’s court has reduced justice to the dictatorship of fashion.
Saint Joan is a tragedy without villains. The tragedy exists in human nature where the mad credulity and intolerant incredulity of religious and secular forces meet and fix the status quo. Against this social structure Shaw’s heroine gains no victory; she can win a battle as Shaw can win a debate, but she will never change the social order until the world truly becomes a fit place for heroes to live in.
The Epilogue, which reflects the flames of Joan’s burning in the summer lightning against the windy curtains and brings us into the present century, gave Shaw the chance to step forward and ‘talk the play over with the audience’. What he tells us is that we too would burn Joan at the stake if we got the chance. It was not surprising that much of the hostile criticism of Saint Joan centred on this Epilogue, which ‘shattered the historical illusion’ – and made way for Brecht.
The historical illusion was cherished by the public. In vain did the American critics protest after the play opened in New York that it contained ‘too little comedy’ and ‘a good deal of fustian’, and was ‘a mere historical scaffolding upon which the dramatist drapes the old Shavian gonfalons’. Alexander Woolcott warned readers of the New York Herald that ‘certain scenes grow groggy for want of a blue pencil’; and in the New Republic Edmund Wilson was to complain that it had the characteristic over-explicitness of the social historian turned dramatist, giving the audience a sense ‘that it is reading a book instead of witnessing a real event’.
On the opening night a number of these critics and some of the audience began leaving the theatre before the final curtain came down at 11.35 p.m. Lawrence Langner cabled urgently to Shaw stating that if he refused to shorten it, Saint Joan could not be a success. Shaw replied declaring the press notices, which had so frightened him, to be ‘magnificent’. For it was true that Alexander Woolcott had also called the play ‘beautiful, engrossing and at times exciting’, and Edmund Wilson described it as ‘a work of extraordinary interest’; that the New York Times critic who found the play ‘monotonous’ had nevertheless thought it a ‘great triumph’, that the New York Post critic who found it ‘exasperating’ still thought it ‘brilliant’. All these favourable points seemed to have been gathered together in a long review for the New York Times Magazine by Luigi Pirandello. ‘I have a strong impression that for some time past George Bernard Shaw has been growing more and more serious... he seems to be believing less in himself, and more in what he is doing,’ Pirandello wrote. ‘...In none of Shaw’s work that I can think of have considerations of art been so thoroughly respected as in Saint Joan... There is a truly great poet in Shaw.’
Shaw ranked Pirandello as ‘first rate among playwrights’, believing that he had ‘never come across a play so original as Six Characters’. He advised the Theatre Guild to recover its nerve. ‘It is extremely annoying to have to admit that you are right,’ Lawrence Langner replied the following January. ‘People are coming in droves to see Saint Joan, and it is a great success.’ The production had to be transferred from the Garrick to the larger Empire Theater, and ran for 214 performances before being sent on tour.
The English production at the New Theatre in St Martin’s Lane marked the culmination of Charles Ricketts’s partnership with Shaw which had begun in 1907 at the Court Theatre with his ‘inscenation’ of Don Juan in Hell. His costumes there, modelled on Velázquez, had stood blazing against a stage dowsed in black velvet and appeared magical to Shaw. ‘If only we could get a few plays with invisible backgrounds and lovely costumes like that in a suitable theatre,’ he had written, ‘...there would be no end to the delight of the thing.’ He had again turned to Ricketts for The Dark Lady of the Sonnets in which Shakespeare, clothed in greys and russets, Queen Elizabeth in silver and black, and the Dark Lady, wearing crimson and black, appeared before an ‘intense and abnormal starlit sky of a fabulous blue’. The following year Ricketts had attired the Venetian père noble Count O’Dowda after Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of George IV and given his daughter a strict Empire dress to lend her the look of a fillette ‘depicted on elegant pre-revolution French crockery’ in the successful run of Fanny’s First Play. The ‘gorgeous white uniform, half covered by an enormous green overcoat trimmed with black fur’ he designed for Lillah McCarthy’s role as Annajanska seven years later had been so successful that Margot Asquith copied the overcoat for her dressing-gown.
For Saint Joan, Ricketts created costumes designed to be an ‘intelligent blend between Pol de Limbourg and the Van Eycks, avoiding the bright fourteenth-century colour of the first and the rather prosy phase in dress in the second’. He ‘flung himself into the job’, authenticating heraldry on the magnificent tapestries, tents and curtains, designing the stained glass for Rheims Cathedral, and basing the sunny stone chamber in the Castle of Vancouleurs on the kitchen of a Norman keep at Chilham which he shared with Charles Shannon. In his history of British theatre design, George Sheringham was to describe the visual effect as being, within its conventions, ‘one of the most beautiful things that has ever been seen on the London stage’.
Partly perhaps as a heritage from William Morris and partly in response to Gordon Craig’s influence, Shaw had used artists such as Albert Rutherston and Ricketts to carry the theatre away from Victorian scene-painting into twentieth-century realms of stage design that could produce a style to match the director’s view of a play. This had gradually become accepted as part of a Shaw play-in-performance by the time Barry Jackson took over the Vedrenne–Barker tradition and appointed Paul Shelving as his regular designer.
Both Shelving and Ricketts designed productions of Saint Joan. The public’s delight in the beauty and vitality of Ricketts’s designs for the first production helped to establish it as Shaw’s most successful play. At last he had done what Archer had been goading him to do: he had written a realistic or symbolic work that ‘should go to every city in the world and shake the souls of people’. In Berlin and Vienna, Max Reinhardt’s production, presenting Elizabeth Bergner as Joan, scored ‘the greatest theatrical success that I have ever known,’ recorded Trebitsch. Before long, the play was being performed in Scandinavia, throughout Eastern Europe, and even in Paris where seven unsuccessful productions of his previous plays in the Hamons’ translations were thought to have established complete ‘barriers of language, thought and feeling between Shaw and the French’. The play’s producer and star actress, George and Ludmilla Pitoëff, who were to revive it in Paris no less than a dozen times in ten years, had been appalled by the Hamons’ version. In collaboration with Henri-René Lenormand they revised it so as to present a dreamlike vision of a miraculously sublimated Joan. For the first time, the French critics united in their praise of the Hamons’ brilliant rendering; for the first time they praised Shaw for an innovative structure of hagiography that contrasted the saint with the farcical world of Shavian satire, and parodied the court in the manner of an Offenbach operetta, while leaving Joan spiritually uncontaminated. This original technique was hailed as an effective means of dramatizing the supernatural, and Shaw was credited with having invented a new type of historical drama.
‘Woe unto me when all men praise me!’ says St Joan in the Epilogue. Shaw greeted his own popularity with similar scepticism. He had sent out his play to rescue Joan from canonization and restore her heresy, but found it was to lead to his own canonization with the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had been put up, and turned down, for the Nobel Prize four or five times previously. But the literary adviser to the Swedish Academy, Per Hallström, was converted by Saint Joan: ‘even if the real Saint Joan was a different figure,’ he acknowledged, ‘Shaw has created a great one.’ Shaw was appalled. ‘The Nobel Prize has been a hideous calamity for me,’ he told Augustin Hamon. ‘...It was really almost as bad as my 70th birthday.’
He had never encouraged prizes. ‘You cannot give examination paper marks to works of art,’ he had written in 1918. He had not changed his mind. ‘If the prizes are to be reserved on Safety First principles for old men whose warfare is accomplished,’ he wrote to his Swedish translator Lady Ebba Low, ‘the sooner they are confiscated and abolished by the Swedish Government the better.’ After politely describing the award as a reinforcement between British and Swedish culture that, especially after W. B. Yeats’s prize two years earlier, would not be lost on his native Ireland, he went on to discriminate between the award, for which ‘I have nothing but my best thanks’, and the prize of some £7,000 (equivalent to £175,000 in 1997) which ‘I cannot persuade myself to accept’. His readers and audiences ‘provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs,’ he explained, ‘and as to my renown it is greater than is good for my spiritual health.’ He therefore proposed that the Swedish Royal Academy confer on him the ‘final honor of classing my works in that respect hors concours’, and use the money to commission good English translations of Sweden’s literature. But the Swedish Academy refused this suggestion. He was therefore obliged to accept the prize, assist in the creation of an Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation, and hand over to its Trust Fund all his prize money.
‘He is now the most famous author in the world,’ one newspaper declared. ‘Such steps towards Mr Shaw’s canonization are being made,’ wrote an Evening Standard reporter, ‘that people are forgetting that he was formerly almost always described as Mephistophelean.’ Though the press announcement was made in 1926, he had officially been awarded the prize for the year 1925. ‘I wrote nothing in 1925,’ he told the newspapers, ‘and that is probably why they gave it to me.’ But everyone recognized that, as Shaw himself phrased it in a letter to Edith Evans, ‘I am in the very odor of sanctity after St Joan.’
I can scarcely believe that the septuagenarian in the looking glass is really G.B.S.
Shaw to Beatrice Mansfield (3 August 1927)
‘On the 26th we sail for Madeira,’ Shaw notified William Archer in mid-December 1924. ‘My wife expects me to return in the middle of February; but my private intention is never to come back...’
He was in his seventieth year, ‘too old’ he told his publisher Otto Kyllmann, who nevertheless prevailed upon him to prepare a collected edition of his writings for Constable. ‘I ought to be retiring,’ he protested; ‘and my business is advancing instead.’ His passage to Madeira, with its ‘flowers, sunshine, bathing, and no theatres’ was not a retirement from business – he took with him a sack of correspondence. But since the war there were fewer people he liked to see. An exception was Archer. ‘I don’t know whether you are in England or not, and should be glad of a hail if you are,’ he signalled him shortly before sailing. Earlier that year he had been invited to chair a lecture by his friend, enthusiastically entitled ‘The Decay of Decency’, and replied: ‘As Archer and I are the same age (though he doesn’t look it) I think we should be meditating on the Decency of Decay.’ But the truth was that when he and Archer got together and relived their old campaigning days, they felt quite startlingly young. Archer still saw in the extravagance of G.B.S. a deep menace to the exercise of his friend’s talent. It was still not too late, he felt, to get Shaw on to the right lines. He never wearied of attempting this feat and G.B.S. never wearied of retaliating. They had been at it now for forty years.
‘Oblige me with a hammer, a saw, a beetle and a couple of wedges that I may operate on your all but impervious knowledge box,’ Shaw had requested in the summer of 1923 after looking through Archer’s new book, The Old Drama and the New. What lay between them was the name and nature of drama. Shaw believed that Archer treated the theatre as a fairyland. Archer believed that for all Shaw’s sociological interests, he was a blatant fantasist. Where then lay reality? There was a chance of settling the matter, Archer urged, if Shaw would simply use different words. As a professional translator, Archer felt well-qualified to change Shaw’s language, and generously offered to do so. ‘I say a cat is a quadruped, with a brain, a backbone, and (unless of the Manx variety) a tail,’ he explained. ‘You say, “Oh no – a cat is a round, mushy iridescent object with long streamers, usually observed on the shingle at low tide.” “Why,” I reply, “that is not a cat but a jelly-fish.”’
‘The alternatives are not a cat and a jelly-fish,’ Shaw countered, ‘but a clockwork cat and a live cat.’
‘It won’t do,’ Archer wrote.
‘You haven’t got it yet,’ Shaw wrote.
But there was still time. In December 1924 Archer changed his tactics and published in The Bookman a long exegesis entitled ‘The Psychology of G.B.S.’. Most readers, Archer believed, would be shocked to learn that G.B.S. was governed by a passionate sense of right and wrong. Though considering himself exceptionally skilful in the art of persuasion, he was ‘so unique, so utterly unlike the overwhelming majority of his fellow-creatures, that he has never mastered the rudiments of that art’. He had gained the ear of the public, but he had never got at its will. ‘Shaw, a professed revolutionist, will revolutionise nothing.’
Unless, that was, Archer could bring him into a new relationship with his public. In his Bookman essay, he was appealing to the public itself. He invited his readers to overlook the irresponsible tic of Shaw’s joking, forgive the Shavian blunders of tone. For in G.B.S. they had among them an original thinker and artist, and where Archer himself had benefited, so could they. ‘There is no man for the fundamentals of whose character I have a more real respect,’ he wrote. ‘I own myself deeply indebted to him for many lessons taught me in the years of our early intimacy.’
Shaw read ‘The Psychology of G.B.S.’ that December. He knew how much affectionate sensitiveness lay beneath Archer’s reticence. Being emotionally reticent himself he sent off a letter simply asking for news of Harley Granville-Barker, and whether, before sailing for Madeira, there was any chance of seeing Archer. For he was someone of whom Shaw had ‘not a single unpleasant recollection, and whom I was never sorry to see or unready to talk to’.
‘G.B.S. has taken like an angel to my article,’ Archer reported to Granville-Barker. ‘I am especially glad in view of this operation business.’ Archer had been told he had to undergo an operation for the removal of a cancerous tumour ‘one of these days’ – in fact he was going into hospital the following day. ‘I feel as fit as a fiddle.’ But because ‘accidents will happen’, for a few apologetic sentences, Archer suddenly broke their code of reticence. ‘Though I may sometimes have played the part of the all-too candid mentor,’ he wrote, ‘I have never wavered in my admiration and affection for you, or ceased to feel that the Fates had treated me kindly in making me your contemporary and friend. I thank you from my heart for forty years of good comradeship.’ It was said – and time to leap quickly back into a joke about the King of Norway.
Shaw played his part rather well: ‘I was not seriously alarmed, and presently sailed for Madeira.’ Actually Archer had got through his operation and was recovering by the time Shaw and Charlotte sailed. They arrived at Reid’s Palace Hotel on 30 December, and saw as they entered the hall a news bulletin announcing Archer’s death three days earlier. Now it was G.B.S.’s turn to break the code – but too late. Each morning after breakfast he would work frantically, emptily, then plunge into the Gulf Stream. In the afternoons, while others played roulette and tennis, he sat miserably in the glorious sunshine. ‘This is one of those unnaturally lovely hells of places where you bathe amid innumerable blossoms in midwinter,’ he wrote bitterly to William Rothenstein.
He had never been able to regard a death caused by an operation as natural death. ‘My rage may have been unjust to the surgeons; but it carried me over my first sense of bereavement.’ Later he overcame this anger with a whimsical piece of therapy on the dance floor, which would surely have impressed Archer as quintessentially Shavian. Having heard that the wife of the hotel proprietor Max Rinder had been successfully operated on for cancer, he joined her as a dancing partner and together they learnt the tango. A photograph of them, correctly positioned, still hangs in the hotel. They are preparing to put their best foot forward under the watchful instruction of Max Rinder, ‘the only man who taught me anything,’ the caption reads. But the lesson was symbolically Archer’s. By recognizing the practice of modern operative surgery to be ‘often more successful than its reasoning’, Shaw was taking a step towards Archer’s view that, outside the theoretical world of his own construction, a real world existed with which he should move in rhythm.
‘All good wishes for 1925 – Ever yours, W.A.’ These had been Archer’s last words to him. But when Shaw returned on 16 February 1925 to London, ‘it seemed to me that the place had entered on a new age in which I was lagging superfluous’.
*
To some extent life continued as it had before the war. The Shaws often stayed with the Webbs at Passfield Corner and with Charlotte’s sister and brother-in-law at Edstaston; and Lady Gregory, the ‘charwoman of the Abbey’, sometimes came and stayed with them at Ayot. In London, Charlotte continued to give her lunches for old friends and new acquaintances. ‘You can imagine how excited I was to be invited [to lunch] and how disappointed to find an old old gentleman and a cushiony wife,’ wrote E. M. Forster in 1926. ‘Shaw was pleasant and amusing, but I felt all the time that he’d forgotten what people are like... She wanted to talk mysticism, and denounced “atheists” with the accents of a rural dean. I came away with the hump.’
With the Trebitsches and the Hamons, Shaw maintained his literary-business relationships and replaced other translators as they fell away in exhaustion with still more exaggerated figures, such as the impoverished Polish adventurer Floryan Sobieniowski, who had been the lover and blackmailer of Katherine Mansfield. He remained in friendly communication with G. K. Chesterton and Gilbert Murray and continued to see Barrie, Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy. But he could not forget those who had died. ‘I still feel that when he went he took a piece of me with him.’ Archer’s death had also closed Shaw’s best means of access to Granville-Barker. He had written to G.B.S. after seeing Saint Joan, and they were both to compose obituaries of Archer, after which there followed years of silence. No single person could understudy Harley, though Barry Jackson, Lawrence Langner and T. E. Lawrence between them filled part of the vacuum.
While G.B.S. acted as editor of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Charlotte volunteered to be its proofreader. ‘I devoured the book from cover to cover as soon as I got hold of it,’ she told Lawrence. ‘I could not stop. I drove G.B.S. almost mad by insisting upon reading him special bits when he was deep in something else.’ It was an extraordinary experience, sending her back on a wave of excitement to her twenties when, ‘reaching out for something that was beyond her understanding’, she had become absorbed in Eastern religions. From the pages of his book, Charlotte had an impression of Lawrence as ‘an Immense Personality soaring in the blue (of the Arabian skies)’, and he became ‘the strangest contact of my life’. She sent him honey and chocolates and marrons glacés, nectarines and peaches; records, particularly of Elgar’s music, to play on the gramophone G.B.S. had given him. Usually ‘a very grudging taker’, Lawrence defended himself by giving her his manuscripts. But he accepted a motor-bicycle (from Charlotte and G.B.S. together) which he called Boanerges (a name he transferred from one bike to another), and would roar up in his goggles, gauntlets and peaked cap to arrive without warning at Ayot – Charlotte’s Arabian Knight. Sometimes he stayed a weekend in what became known as ‘the Lawrence room’. At other times the quietude induced such a terrifying reluctance ever to leave that, after an hour or two, he would have to jump on his machine and hurtle back to barracks or on to another of his sanctuaries – to Max Gate to see Thomas and Florence Hardy, or to Alderney Manor and Fryern Court to visit Augustus and Dorelia John. Charlotte, seeing his gleams of happiness, felt that ‘Ayot is justified – it lifts its head’.
They grew closer when apart. After Lawrence went to India, they started up a ‘tennis game’ of correspondence. ‘I want to tell you something about myself,’ she wrote. She told him what she had once begun to tell G.B.S. about her parents and childhood, and after ‘a fearful lot of cogitation’ she told him about the ‘teachings’ and ‘treatments’, meditations and healings of her religion which were ‘such a help’. Lawrence responded by confiding some of his secrets – the emotional disturbances with his mother and his sexual trauma at Deraa. He sent her poems, his private anthology Minorities, and the unexpurgated text of The Mint. ‘It is a wonderful book... that no one but yourself could achieve,’ she replied, ‘...[it] has stirred me to the very depths of my being.’
To no other woman could Lawrence write quite so frankly. It was their solitariness that seemed to have brought them together. Lawrence felt curiously untaxed by their relationship. By unburdening his emotions to this anonymous wife of the celebrated G.B.S., he was also secretly communicating with posterity. Over thirteen years they were to exchange some six hundred letters in which Charlotte revealed to him things ‘I have never told a soul’. She had never met anyone like him, though she had met all sorts of people, being now ‘an old woman, old enough at any rate to be your mother’. This image, however, suddenly chilled Lawrence. ‘Let me acquit you of all suspicion of “mothering me”. With you I have no feeling or suspicion of that at all.’ His mother’s inquisitorial letters ‘always make me want to blow my brains out’ – no trust ‘ever existed between my mother and myself’. At Ayot he was on neutral ground. ‘I do not wish to feel at home,’ he warned her. ‘...Homes are ties, and with you I am quite free, somehow.’
They were not disloyal to G.B.S. Lawrence felt grateful for all his help as literary agent and editor, and curious over what G.B.S. might try to make of him in future plays. He was determined to evade a Shavian takeover, though his letters to Charlotte teem with praise of her husband’s strength, confidence and mastery. ‘He has given himself out to his generation year by year, without reserve or grudge.’ When Lawrence compares his own career, the advantages all seem to be with Shaw. Yet it was strange how sympathetically Lawrence came out of comparisons so heavily weighted against himself (‘he’s great and I’m worthless... G.B.S. has brought forth twenty books; and I’m in a mess over one’). ‘G.B.S. has become too famous any longer to be really great,’ he suggests. ‘His reputation is dwarfing him. However,’ he adds with apparent tact, ‘that will pass.’
The tone of these letters was perfectly judged. Charlotte was proud of her husband and his achievements, but hated the publicity that rose around their lives. Fame had been an emollient for G.B.S., but it ‘has closed his pores’. And it was true, Charlotte agreed, that G.B.S. was not ‘interested in anything but his work’. In Lawrence she saw again the suffering and loneliness that had been exposed in her husband at the time of his physical breakdown and their marriage. Now, feeling sometimes stranded in this marriage, she gazed towards Lawrence and formed a half-undisclosed friendship that counterbalanced her husband’s letter-writing relationships with women. ‘Marriage is not natural – but unnatural and disastrous,’ she wrote to Lawrence. ‘...The idea [of having children] was physically repulsive to me in the highest degree.’ Yet these revelations, which she felt unable to disclose to another soul, could have appeared in Man and Superman or Getting Married. Her lack of reticence, however, did surprise Shaw. ‘I realize that there were many parts of her character that even I did not know,’ he later owned to Hesketh Pearson, ‘for she poured out her soul to Lawrence.’ Perhaps he had once known them, and forgotten.
Lawrence had approached the Shaws’ marriage like an undercover agent. Charlotte and G.B.S. ‘mix like bacon and eggs into a quintessential dream,’ he eulogized. He was at his best in their company ‘for they loved and comprehended him,’ Osbert Sitwell observed; ‘and there was, I noticed, a sort of audacity of mischief about his attitude and conversation when they were present, that was enchanting’. But the strange self-immolation that Lawrence sought in order ‘to keep sane’ reminded Shaw painfully of his own early obscurity. Their relationship became a teasing tug-of-war between Shavian possessiveness and assertion and Lawrentian waywardness and ambiguity. ‘You and I,’ Shaw told Lawrence, ‘are worse than characters: we are character-actors.’ ‘You have read too much of yourself into me,’ Lawrence warned, and ‘Your advice would sink my ship.’ But this was how G.B.S. went into operation. His friendship was a form of patronage. He ushered him into the Cliveden Set, introduced him to Elgar, and helped to elect him a Fellow of the Irish Academy of Letters which actually pleased Lawrence ‘because it is a gesture on my part that I am Irish’.
Lawrence ‘always had one eye on the limelight,’ Charlotte admitted. Perhaps that was why she sometimes suspected that she had been used as a messenger service between him and G.B.S. But as a vehicle for Shaw’s theories, he proved ‘a most troublesome chap’: a man of marvellous dual abilities who failed to unite literature with action, believing he could ‘never quit myself of the consequences of my past actions till I am dead’.
Another candidate for this romantic synthesis was a neighbour of the Shaws at Ayot. Apsley Cherry-Garrard had been one of the youngest members of Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic. Cherry, as he was known, won golden opinions from Scott for his pluck and popularity, especially on the ‘weirdest bird-nesting expedition there has been or will ever be’, gathering the eggs of the Emperor Penguin at Cape Crozier. Their zoological jaunt was a wonderful example to G.B.S. of the evolutionary appetite.
Cherry was approximately the same age as Lawrence and some thirty years younger than G.B.S. His exploration of the Antarctic, with its awful outcome (he was one of the team that had found Scott dead in his tent on the Great Ice Barrier), marked the rest of his life, as the Arab campaign had marked Lawrence’s. This legendary exploit, while he was still in his early twenties, had been the apotheosis of his career. ‘Nature would be merciful if she would end us at a climax and not in the decline,’ Lawrence wrote. It was the same for Cherry-Garrard.
Cherry became a great favourite of the Shaws. When Charlotte told Lawrence in December 1922 that ‘both G.B.S. and I have lots of experience about books and we would both like to put it at your service’, the joint experience she had in mind was over Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World. After the Shaws’ editorial advice and textual emendations, the book had been published by Constable earlier that month. This account of the journey was originally commissioned by the Captain Scott Antarctic Fund, but finding himself becoming critical of his leader, Cherry had withdrawn from his official commitment and produced an independent narrative on which, Shaw believed, ‘the expedition will be finally judged’. Several passages were drafted or rewritten by G.B.S.
Shaw’s presentation of Cherry took no account of the Lawrence-like agonies of self-doubt that had prompted his writing of the book. ‘Lawrence had never escaped himself nor his nerves which drove his muscles,’ Cherry was to write. ‘He knew that he had shot his bolt.’ His own readjustment was complicated by the death of his father, a rival spirit who had spurred him with initiative. He had travelled to the end of the earth to find a separate identity his father could admire, and made Scott a temporary replacement for his father. He had worshipped Scott but, after his father’s death, came to resent his influence. To reconcile these feelings of worship and resentment he divided Scott in two. ‘He considers Scott a schizophrenic,’ Shaw later told Lord Kennet, ‘two different persons.’
Like Seven Pillars, The Worst Journey was partly the open-air theatre of boyish adventure in which G.B.S. retrospectively took part and, with great delight, almost took command. The two books attracted him strongly. ‘Why should not sand have the same appeal as snow?’ he demanded after Lawrence had demurred over the public interest in his own work. Cherry-Garrard had described his life-and-death experiences so effectively ‘that the reader forgets how comfortable he is in his armchair, and remembers the tale with a shiver as if he had been through it himself’. Lawrence too possessed this power of re-creating action. He ‘made you see the start of Feisal’s motley legions as plainly as he saw it himself’, and gave you a sense of the ‘track underfoot, the mountains ahead and around, the vicissitudes of the weather, the night, the dawn, the sunset and the meridian [that] never leaves you for a moment’.
Shaw stole into these heroic landscapes but took care to conceal his literary stage management of them. ‘It would be fatal to make any suggestion of collaboration on my part,’ he advised Cherry-Garrard. ‘...As my experience on the ice dates from the great frost of 1878 (or thereabouts) when I skated on the Serpentine, my intrusion into the Antarctic Circle would be extraordinarily ridiculous.’
There was another reason for attempting secrecy. He risked losing the sympathy of Scott’s widow Kathleen, ‘a very special friend’. She had recently married Hilton Young who came to believe that Shaw denigrated Scott because Cherry-Garrard, ‘an egotistical man, with a grievance against his leader’, had worked his way into Charlotte’s esteem and ‘flattered Shaw by letting him rewrite [his] book, more or less’. Shaw wrote as gently as possible to Kathleen explaining that ‘bringing a hero to life always involves exhibiting his faults as well as his qualities’.
In his imagination the appalling conditions of the Antarctic became a metaphor for the moral climate of Britain between the wars, and Cherry-Garrard’s survival a triumph of human will over social adversity. The idealized adolescence of both Lawrence and Cherry-Garrard touched his own parent-damaged emotions. Over twenty years later he reported Cherry as having ‘recovered his health rather miraculously’ and escaped his pessimistic destiny. But Beatrice Webb, who met him in the 1930s, left a grimmer picture. ‘He is at war with all his neighbours; he has closed footpaths, dismissed tenants, and cannot keep servants. Years ago he was personally attractive, a rather distinguished youth with artistic and intellectual gifts, today he is drab and desolate, looks as if he were drinking and drugging as well as hating. I should not be surprised to hear that a revolver shot had solved his problem.’
*
‘On the very threshold of seventy I have fallen through with a crash into ninety,’ Shaw told Kathleen Scott. As his vigour declined, so his need for vicarious exploits through younger men-of-action-and-letters intensified. Feeling as if ‘I have left half of me behind’, he replaced the missing half with a team of athletic candidates.
One of these was Cecil Lewis, a wartime flying ace with the Military Cross whose war memoirs, Sagittarius Rising, showed him also to be ‘a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet,’ Shaw reckoned. Lewis submitted some of his early writings to G.B.S. and came to count him ‘one of the great influences of my life’. As a founding member of the British Broadcasting Corporation, he arranged for Shaw to give a reading of O’Flaherty, V.C. (which was broadcast live on 20 November 1924) and fired his interest in radio technology. Before long, G.B.S. had bought a Burndept four-valve set with loudspeaker and was issuing the BBC with advice.
The ‘invisible play’ was a phenomenon that fascinated him, and he quickly recognized the unstoppable power of radio. It would enable those who could not bear the degradation of public speaking to address their fellow-countrymen in solitude and out of sight, ‘using no art except that of giving each syllable its value’.
He asked no fees for his radio talks, regarding them as an extension of his political speaking in the 1880s and 1890s. The vast size and variety of his new audience delighted him, and he celebrated it grandiloquently. ‘Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses, your Excellencies, your Graces and Reverences, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow citizens of all degrees,’ he began a talk in the BBC series ‘Points of View’ on 14 October 1929; ‘I am going to talk to you about Democracy...’
Cecil Lewis records that Shaw had ‘impeccable verve and artistry’ as a broadcaster, and he made it his business to see that G.B.S. was given a modern platform. For years Shaw watched over his career ‘with parental care and I grew to idolize him,’ Lewis was to write, ‘for, in those days when I was part of the spearhead of the exploding mass media which were changing the whole shape of society and in touch with many of the leading figures of the day, he was the only man among them who appeared to have any social conscience or any practical suggestions to offer to combat the Dragon’s Teeth which I felt were everywhere being sown among us’.
To push his political ideas into renewed life Shaw needed to make contact with younger men and women. By his contemporaries he was celebrated for his past, and usually for his literary rather than his political past. At a ‘Complimentary Dinner’ for his seventieth birthday he declared that he did not care a snap of the fingers for this literary success in comparison with his pioneering work as one of the Fabian founders of the Labour Party – but the BBC refused to broadcast the speech, ‘Socialism at Seventy’, on the grounds that it was politically controversial (it was printed in full by the New York Times – and pirated throughout the country).
Shaw was not displeased to have his celebratory dinner at the St James Room of the Hotel Metropole hosted by the Parliamentary Labour Party and chaired by Ramsay MacDonald. He had admired MacDonald’s courage in resigning from the Labour Party leadership to oppose the war, and campaigned for him in the coupon election of 1918 at Leicester in which MacDonald lost his seat. To many it appeared as if MacDonald were politically destroyed. But his oratory, and the polished humour with which he had defended himself against attacks, added to his credentials and on his re-entry into Parliament in 1922 he became a natural choice as Labour leader. His brief premiership two years later established the Labour Party as a valid alternative government to the Conservatives and himself as the first socialist of national stature.
When MacDonald first became Prime Minister in January 1924, with Sidney Webb as President of the Board of Trade, Shaw had hailed him as the ‘ablest leader in England’. By the time he came to form his second Labour Cabinet in June 1929, with Webb now translated into Lord Passfield and Colonial and Dominions Secretary, Shaw like some others was already preparing to discard him. MacDonald was a Liberal at heart, though his position as leader of the Labour Party had been legitimately won during his days as a rebel and an outcast. At the peak of his career he struck Shaw as being politically dead. But who among the living should take his place? Shaw backed someone forty years younger than himself, Oswald Mosley.
Mosley’s political career in the 1920s had the radicalism and unorthodoxy that Shaw admired. At the beginning of the decade Mosley had broken with the Conservative Party over its Irish policy and exhibited his superiority to the party system by standing as an independent candidate, and winning. After MacDonald first came to power, Mosley joined the Labour Party and, following two years in the wilderness during Labour’s opposition, became a junior minister in MacDonald’s second administration. He was tipped by many as a future Prime Minister, an outsider increasingly fancied to overtake the tiring leader in the 1930s.
Mosley was a wonderful manipulator of words. He sounded rational, he sounded omniscient, and when he vented his full powers of assertion it seemed as if heroic deeds were being performed. He was athletic and quick-minded, part child and part strong man – could this be the superman whose advent Shaw had been prophesying?
Mosley had come to see himself, his biographer Robert Skidelsky writes, ‘acting out in real life the central dramatic situation of Shaw’s plays: the vital man, with ideas and impulses, confronting the inert creature of ideology and habits’. By the beginning of the new decade he had become an amalgam of Keynesian economics and Shavian political philosophy. ‘Has MacDonald found his superseder in Oswald Mosley?’ Beatrice Webb wondered in 1930.
In January that year Mosley made his move with a memorandum to MacDonald proposing a recovery plan that called for the mobilization of national resources to combat unemployment. This programme of state intervention and large-scale public works was casually turned down by a Cabinet committee and on 20 May Mosley resigned – a ‘melodramatic defection from the Labour Party,’ Beatrice Webb called it, ‘slamming the door with a bang to resound throughout the political world’. Using this memorandum as a political manifesto, in the spring of 1931 Mosley formed his New Party which was planned as a Labour ginger group but which evolved eighteen months later into the British Union of Fascists.
Shaw watched Mosley’s operatic career with a mixture of emotions. ‘Oh, if Oswald had only waited,’ he wrote after the New Party had been created, ‘ – if only he had known that MacDonald was contemplating political suicide!’ To some extent Shaw preserved his loyalty to Mosley by attacking the National Coalition Government that came to power in the summer of 1931. This, rather than Mosley’s splinter group, seemed to Shaw the real danger. Twice the Labour Party had been elected, and still there was no socialism in Britain.
Shaw believed that the implementation of Mosley’s programme (similar to Roosevelt’s New Deal) would have gone some way to averting the financial crisis of 1931, which had been brought about partly by the cost of unemployment benefits. In his view, the government should have abandoned free trade and the gold standard. He thought that MacDonald had been imposed upon by American bankers and exploited by British politicians using the economic situation to split the Labour Party. MacDonald’s ‘clear course when the crisis came was to go into the Opposition and lead the Labour Party in a strenuous fight to balance the Budget at the expense of property instead of at the expense of Labour. That, at least, he could understand, if he could not understand the currency question,’ Shaw wrote at the beginning of 1932. ‘When he went over to the enemy and led the attack on wages and doles instead without ever mentioning the alternative, he was lost to Socialism for ever.’
Shaw interpreted the extraordinary rally to the Nationalist idea, which gave MacDonald his landslide victory in the autumn of 1931, as a sign that ‘people are tired of the party system’. This was how he himself felt, though he knew that a coalition was the opposite of strong government. By his mid-seventies Shaw was disenchanted with the Fabian concept of weakness permeated by strength and the politician’s empty head continually filled with other people’s ideas. He had tried permeation all his life and it did not work – the ideas leaked away. ‘The Fabian parliamentary program was a very plausible one,’ he wrote in 1932, ‘but, as MacDonald has found, parliament and the party system is no more capable of establishing Communism than two donkeys pulling different ways.’
While addressing an audience ‘in praise of Guy Fawkes’ at the Kingsway Hall in November 1932, Shaw singled out Mosley as ‘one of the few people who is writing and thinking about real things and not about figments and phrases’. MacDonald was applauded by the people for his phrases; Mosley was feared because he represented change. Shaw translated the one into a Shavian idealist and the other into a realist. He ignored Mosley’s layers of dissimulation and his uninhibited private ambition, and used his fascism (‘the only visible practical alternative to Communism’) as a stick with which to beat a philistine parliamentary system.
Shaw’s speech was largely an attack on speech-making. The chief function of Parliament, he declared, had become the defeat of democracy through the art of fooling the public. His ‘painfully incoherent tirade’ (as Beatrice Webb called it) eloquently communicates a despairing sense of impotence. For almost fifty years he had been making political speeches and ‘so far as I can make out, those speeches have not produced any effect whatever... I have come to see at last that one of the most important things to be done in this country is to make public speaking a criminal offence.’
In which case Shaw himself was a major criminal. This indeed was how he had come to feel. All Tanner’s revolutionary ‘talking’ from Man and Superman had merged with ‘this continual talk, talk, talk in Parliament’. What could be more appropriate in a speech praising the man who ‘saw that the first thing to enable the Government to do anything was to blow up Parliament’, than to threaten people with Mosley? ‘The moment things begin seriously to break up and something has to be done, quite a number of men like Mosley will come to the front...’ he warned. ‘Let me remind you that Mussolini began as a man with about twenty five votes. It did not take him very many years to become the Dictator of Italy. I do not say that Sir Oswald Mosley is going to become Dictator of this country, though more improbable things have happened... You will hear something more of Sir Oswald Mosley before you are through with him.’
What the public was to hear in the later 1930s was the stamp and chant of Mosley’s Blackshirts. In Shaw’s experience of British politics the only precedent for these rallies were the ineffectual marches of Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. A measure of Mosley’s political invalidity in Shaw’s mind after 1933 is his absence from both The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism in 1937 and Everybody’s Political What’s What? in 1944. Even his campaign for Mosley’s release from prison in the Second World War was to be based on the assumption of his political insignificance.
Shaw distanced himself from the unsavoury aspects of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. ‘Anti-Semite propaganda has no logical connexion with Fascism,’ he said. ‘...Anti-Semitism is the hatred of the lazy, ignorant, fat-headed Gentile for the pertinacious Jew who, schooled by adversity to use his brains to the utmost, outdoes him in business.’ He was to define fascism as ‘State financed private enterprise’ or ‘Socialism for the benefit of exploiters’. From the 1930s onwards Shaw chose to call himself a communist: ‘that is, I advocate national control of land, capital, and industry for the benefit of us all. Fascists advocate it equally for the benefit of the landlords, capitalists and industrialists.’
Beatrice Webb protested that Mosley, Mussolini and Hitler had ‘no philosophy, no notion of any kind of social organization, except their own undisputed leadership instead of parliamentary self-government – what was the good of it all?’ Admitting this lack of economic principle, Shaw asserted that they all had the personality to change the world. Britain was in decline because she did not recognize that social progress depended on leadership. But Beatrice was not convinced. ‘This strange admiration for the person who imposes his will on others, however ignorant and ugly and even cruel that will may be, is an obsession which has been growing on G.B.S.,’ she reflected a year later.
‘...As a young social reformer, he hated cruelty and oppression and pleaded for freedom. He idealized the rebel. Today he idealizes the dictator, whether he be a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin, or even a faked-up pretence of a dictator like Mosley... And yet G.B.S. publicly proclaims that he is a Communist... What he really admires in Soviet Communism is the forceful activities of the Communist Party... lifting the whole body of the people to a higher level of health and happiness.’
Man is the occupation of the idle woman.
Shaw to Mary Hamilton (23 November 1918)
‘Hello, Bernard Shaw.’
‘Hello.’
‘We’ve come to see you.’
In the late summer of 1921 an American girl had accosted G.B.S. on the sidewalk outside Adelphi Terrace. She was twenty-four with dark hair, eyes like muscatel grapes ‘and a fine shape’. Her name was Molly Tompkins. She had come from Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband Laurence and their two-year-old son Peter to ‘find’ him, she explained; they had got his address at Hatchards. ‘Then where is Laurence?’ asked Shaw. He was round the corner nervously drinking coffee. Leaving him there, and under the spell of her good looks, Shaw invited her to ‘come upstairs and tell me all about it’. She came and, over buttered crumpets, unfolded their plan. Laurence was rich and had ambitions as a sculptor; Molly herself had been in Ziegfeld’s Follies. Together they dreamed of creating a Shavian theatre, he carving in stone the story of Creative Evolution, she interpreting it on stage.
He saw that Molly was ‘as vain as a goldfinch’ and reckoned that ‘poor Tompkins’ had ‘taken on a fine handful’. Yet her eagerness ‘softened my stony heart a little,’ he admitted; ‘and now I suppose I am in for taking some interest in you occasionally’. So it began.
He instructed Laurence to get a studio and arranged for Molly to take the written and oral examinations for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He had been on the Council of RADA since W. S. Gilbert’s death in 1911 and his bracing influence was largely responsible for broadening its constitution and liberalizing the students’ education. But Molly did not think much of it. The two houses which comprised the Gower Street part of the premises (and which, with the help of £5,000 from G.B.S., were later replaced by a larger building) impressed her as being ‘dim and dingy’; the director Kenneth Barnes was ‘pompous’; and she took an ‘instant dislike’ to her first teacher, the actor Claude Rains. Indeed, she behaved so badly that Kenneth Barnes threatened to expel her. ‘You are a disgrace to me,’ Shaw admonished her. ‘...[they] ask me despairingly what they are to do with you and why I didn’t bring you up properly.’
But he could not help being tickled by his protégée’s goings-on or conceal his entertainment at the beaux gestes with which, at the very last moment, she would avoid their consequences. For every quality, she seemed to have some infamous defect. ‘You are worse than the tragédienne who rehearsed Pygmalion in the upper division for me some years ago,’ he told her. This, perhaps, was her appeal. She challenged him to re-embrace past sentiments, improving his old performances and rephrasing some painful scenes, this time painlessly – for surely he was beyond pain now.
*
Recently Stella Campbell had been pressing Shaw to let her publish the ‘dear letters’ she had inspired him to write. ‘What have you written?’ he demanded. ‘Your life or mine or both?’ She called it My Life and Some Letters. Knowing how much she needed the money (‘the poor woman can hardly lay her hand on a hundred pound note’) he wrote to her publisher stating that he had made a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with her not to raise the question of copyright over his correspondence.
Awakened by Charlotte to the implications of what he had done, he asked Stella to send him the proofs: he might perhaps ‘spot some dangers that you may not have thought of’. She did not dare let him see all her proofs, but had a copy made of the correspondence she proposed publishing. ‘People talk carelessly, but nobody will think anything but what lovely letters and what a dear man you are,’ she prompted him.
This ‘terrible wadge of letters’ arrived at Ayot St Lawrence shortly after Christmas 1921 and it appalled him. He dared not reveal its contents to Charlotte. ‘Public exposure’ of them would be as ‘utterly impossible,’ he warned Stella, as for ‘you to undress yourself (or me) in the street’. Their only chance was for him to edit them. ‘My treasure, my darling, my beloved, adored, ensainted friend of my very soul’ was pared down to ‘my adored ensainted friend’, and his ‘most agitating heart’s darling’ vanished altogether. What remained, he told himself, was ten times more than any publisher had the right to expect. ‘There is the requisite touch to set Charlotte right without which I would have seen the whole universe damned before consenting to the publication of a line,’ he soothed Stella. ‘It will be hard enough on her as it is to see her husband as the supreme ass of a drama of which you are the heroine.’
But Stella was not soothed. ‘You have spoilt my book,’ she objected. ‘You have spoilt the story... Lustless Lions at play... It is really sad: you creep on the ground, instead of flying in the air – through taking away those delicious letters.’
‘You must have some more love letters,’ he appealed desperately. ‘You cannot appear as a famous beauty who had only one catch: an old idiot of 56. Will there be nobody to keep me in countenance?’ The truth was that she had been more feared by men than loved, and Shaw’s correspondence with her was unique. This was partly why she felt so angry. These ‘massacred’ letters, she let him know, had become ‘the only insincere thing in the book’. And really he agreed with her. ‘I hate the whole thing, because it is impossible to present it in its simple truth to the public,’ he explained, ‘and it is dishonest to disguise it, and disloyal to pretend that it was all play-acting. I felt a great deal more than you did; and I still feel a great deal more about it than you. You are doing – if you only knew it – a dreadful thing.’
Being unexpectedly hurt, Stella stretched forth her claws. ‘You have ceased to amuse me. You have revoked – that’s your game always.’ Her book was to be serialized in May 1922 by the New York Herald to which the corrected proofs had been sent with the lines Shaw had excised still legible. ‘Oh Joey – oh lor! oh Hell! I have just seen the New York Herald, they have put in all the letters uncut, this in spite of all their promises,’ she apologized. ‘...I feel very unhappy because I know how much you will mind.’
He did mind – because of Charlotte. As for himself, he considered the publication of a love letter as ‘an indecent exposure’. But if Stella regarded it as ‘a splendidly courageous declaration... I have no argument to oppose: it is instinct against instinct,’ he explained to G. K. Chesterton. ‘She has a right to her view, and to her letters. I cannot call a policeman... I cannot control her... Besides, it was delightful while it lasted; one cannot refuse gratitude when it has absolutely no damned nonsense of merit about it; and the money was very badly wanted. Still, a dreadful thing to do.’
He had always loved Stella’s dreadfulness. ‘I forgive you the letters because there is a star somewhere on which you were right about them,’ he wrote to her, ‘and on that star we two should have been born.’ Molly Tompkins too seemed to have arrived from that star. But perhaps he could teach her to live on this one. Then he need not hurt Charlotte. He would police their correspondence in exemplary fashion. ‘I read your letters diligently,’ he assured Molly. ‘I even read them aloud to my wife (with an occasional skip)... they make me feel romantic at times, which is pleasant at my age.’ His friendship with Molly blossomed as the struggle over publication of Stella’s love letters was warming up, and it appeared to offer him an opportunity for rewriting the past. ‘If you knew the trouble those unlucky letters made for me you would understand a lot of things,’ he later confessed to Stella. His exchange with Molly was intended as a simple series of letters between a ‘delightful correspondent’ and a ‘useful bore’ which would record a relationship as innocent as that of Higgins and Eliza. He had lost ‘all specific interest in women,’ he told a disbelieving Stella in 1923. ‘... I can no longer tell myself love stories.’
*
Shaw was well aware that Molly Tompkins brought out qualities he shared with Professor Higgins. He sent her twice a week for lessons in diction to Professor Daniel Jones, who taught phonetics at London University. But principally he tutored her himself. ‘You just do what I tell you,’ he explained. He told her how to address an envelope and stick stamps on it; when to use make-up and how to order a vegetarian meal at a restaurant without risking early death. He described the correct manner of bargaining for white oxen when in Italy; went through the drill for curing a fear of bats; and strongly recommended parrots as preferable to dogs as pets for beautiful women. He instructed her in the art of having rows (‘for heavens’ sake make them as rowdy as possible’) and of saying ‘No!’ with conviction (‘It is the most useful accomplishment in the world’). Finally he provided hints on how to take all this advice: ‘When you get a bit of advice, don’t bolt it. Chew it fortyseven times; and then it will digest all right.’
It was curious that the more advice his ‘Mollytompkins’ heard, the more she appeared to need. ‘The old should not prevent the young making fools of themselves,’ he concluded. In this sense at least he was successful.
He went to see her at Gower Street, where she was learning eurhythmics and fencing as well as acting, and invited her to lunches at Adelphi Terrace where she met Barrie, Galsworthy and others who ‘didn’t register with me’. In the afternoons he sometimes gave her help with the lines she was learning. ‘I was supposed to be able to go to Adelphi Terrace whenever I felt like it and make myself at home,’ she remembered, ‘but when Shaw wasn’t there Charlotte was cool, and she could be very icy indeed... so I just went when I was invited.’
Molly was invited to spend part of the spring at Stratford-upon-Avon with the Shaws in 1922, and Laurence (her husband) came too. Then, when RADA broke up for the summer and Charlotte went to Ireland, G.B.S. invited them both to meet him at a Fabian Summer School at Godalming and accompany him on a motor tour of English cathedral towns.
At Godalming Molly and Laurence acted as a shield against some of the more pressing Fabian ladies, especially one fiery redhead. And then there was a moment in the garden at Godalming when Molly spoke her feelings for Shaw. ‘You will grow out of your Shavian infatuation (alas! for I hope it is a great pleasure to you),’ he had told her. Later on he explained ‘why I was so shy at Godalming’. Whatever age they might be in fairyland, in prosaic society (and what could be more prosaic than a Fabian garden) they were an old man and a young thing. ‘La Rochefoucauld says that the very old and the very young, if they desire to avoid making themselves ridiculous, should never allude to the garden at Godalming.’
They began the tour, bowling along the English lanes in Shaw’s car, ‘open, high, doorless, with gears outside, and painted a hideous brown, but it was enchanting,’ Laurence thought. ‘...We took turns sitting up front with the chauffeur or in the back with Shaw.’ They went to the music festival at Glastonbury, to Salisbury Cathedral, to Wells in Somerset and then diagonally across the country up to Northumberland. Shaw dressed for this adventuring in what Molly called ‘old-fashioned knickers with stockings and a Norfolk jacket with pleats down the front and belt’. At night, while Molly and Laurence changed into evening clothes, Shaw presented himself in a buttoned-up, double-breasted, blue outfit, ‘like a sailor’s reefer’.
Molly was not an easy travelling companion, wanting to go off with G.B.S. to less historical sites and objecting to being booked into a separate hotel with Laurence. Their destination was Scarborough where another Fabian Summer School was taking place, and where they saw again the Fabian redhead. It was obviously she who had placed Molly in an annexe, sharing a cramped little room with Laurence far removed from Shaw. So ‘just before dawn we packed and walked out,’ Molly recorded, ‘hired a car and went into Scarborough to catch a train to London’. But there were no London trains till the afternoon, so they took a room in a hotel and went out to ‘a movie’.
Shaw came into Scarborough, searched the station, searched the hotels, and found them. There were no explanations. They sat through the film to its end, then he took them to their train, promising to see them in London that autumn. Laurence had thought Shaw would never speak to them again after they had run away without a word. But their bad behaviour actually seemed to have made him more friendly.
Shaw wanted Molly to finish her course and win the Gold Medal. But, hearing that the Plymouth Repertory needed a leading lady, she caught a train to Plymouth where the hypnotized manager engaged her. Kenneth Barnes and Claude Rains breathed with relief, and Shaw wrote to congratulate her. Yet there remained a problem. ‘If you had a sense of humor...’ Shaw began. But she hadn’t. Unfortunately the stock company at Plymouth wanted comedies. ‘I do not think she’s any good for the stage,’ the theatre manager notified Shaw. So she took to the road searching for a tragic lead.
Besides G.B.S., she had another champion in Johnston Forbes-Robertson, three years older than Shaw and soon to be knighted. A quarter of a century ago there had been a romance between Shaw’s handsome Caesar and the girl Shaw had wanted for his Cleopatra and who became his Eliza. Now, for the second time, playwright and actor were led away by similar good looks. Forbes-Robertson ‘seemed to ask me to every first night at the theatre,’ Molly noticed, ‘and to lunch or supper whenever I had a free moment’. A shadow-rivalry soon developed between her two septuagenarian suitors. ‘I envy Shaw being so near you at the play, and seeing you in your lovely green dress,’ Forbes-Robertson lamented: ‘Oh, he doesn’t like your earrings, doesn’t he? Well I do, and I must come first, so there.’ And Shaw enquired reprovingly: ‘I gather that another gentleman of my age, and famous for his good looks and charm, was bolder.’ Molly was always opening letters from these two fond old men. It seemed that G.B.S. wrote ‘every day and Forbes-Robertson two or three times a day’.
These letters were also read by a Plymouth drama critic called Mollie Little, who had taken on the role of secretary and housekeeper to the Tompkins family in London, and who in 1925 tried to use them to blackmail Molly’s admirers. With Forbes-Robertson, whose knighthood might have been imperilled by such revelations, Miss Little appears to have had some success. But, following the publication of his correspondence to Stella Campbell, Shaw was unable to take the threats seriously.
‘Suddenly I was sick of the whole business,’ Molly decided. ‘...I wasn’t supposed to be an actress.’ She turned to Shaw for further advice. ‘I see no reason on earth why you should not go to Italy,’ he volunteered. ‘Everybody should go to Italy.’
So Molly went to Italy, taking Laurence and inviting G.B.S. to join them. ‘I will not come to Italy to share the fate of Achilles,’ Shaw replied. In England – at Godalming for example – he had been ‘bound to behave very well indeed for the credit of the [Fabian] Society,’ he explained. But there were not the same constraints abroad.
*
During the late spring and early summer of 1925, Shaw’s diary and letters record, he had been ‘ill in bed’ and ‘crawling about a bit’; after which, between July and October, Charlotte raced him away on a bracing tour of the Orkneys and the Shetlands ‘up to our eyes in scenery’. But by spring the following year his health had seriously collapsed. ‘I had been ill for many months,’ he later told Harriet Cohen. Charlotte was determined to take him somewhere so that he could get over his shivers. On 5 August 1926 they arrived at the Regina Palace Hotel at Stresa, overlooking Lake Maggiore.
It seemed an inspired choice. Before starting out by train, he had felt ‘an obscure fire within me that craves for cold water’. At Lake Maggiore he was able to bathe every morning – ‘& I bathe sometimes,’ added Charlotte in a letter to Apsley Cherry-Garrard. ‘Altogether I think we have fallen on our feet & GBS is far more bright and happy.’ They were particularly lucky to have found ‘some gay bright young friends here’. She was referring to the conductor Albert Coates who owned a villa three miles from their hotel on the opposite side of the lake, ‘a magnetically charming person,’ Charlotte described him, with a ‘wife [Madelon] we like too’, and some interesting guests including Cecil Lewis and his wife ‘Dooshka’, who turned out to be a ‘Prima Donna from Moscow’.
When not listening to music and bathing ‘on the clean side’ of the lake, Shaw was at the other side near Pallanza sitting for a statuette by Prince Paul Troubetzkoy who had ‘a big studio & an astonishing wife,’ Charlotte reported to Beatrice Webb. ‘...It has kept GBS employed & amused going over day after day & sitting.’ Much of the time ‘we are on the lake in motor boats’. One of the Isole Borromee round which they boated – the tiny luxuriant island of San Giovanni – was advertised in their hotel as being available for renting from an Italian prince. In fact, it had been taken by Molly and Laurence Tompkins.
Shaw knew this before setting out for Stresa. ‘At last an address!’ he had written to Molly the previous month. But when he arrived, their palazzo was being renovated and Molly and Laurence were in Paris. ‘I cannot tear myself away from the Isola Molli,’ he wrote. ‘I sailed round it again today...’ On receiving his letter, Molly left Laurence and rushed down on the Orient Express. She arrived at the Regina Palace in a horse and carriage, the dust rising in the sunlight behind her.
She went bathing and picnicking with the Shaws’ ‘gay bright young friends’, but could not enjoy herself. The presence of Charlotte, invariably dressed in black – sometimes in a black taffeta swimsuit with a stuffed canary on the shoulder – clouded her spirits. ‘I like it best without Charlotte,’ she stated. And when she was with Shaw alone, she found that Charlotte had been watching them through powerful binoculars. ‘You and Charlotte have got to come to some arrangement,’ Shaw insisted. But they could not. Molly hated Charlotte’s air of ladylike superiority, and could not understand why everyone else seemed to like her. One day, Charlotte had accused her of having ‘an evil mind’. Molly wondered as she lay in her lonely room that night what was making her so cross. Next morning she caught an early train back to Paris. Four postcards from Shaw pursued her: ‘Your life seems to be one of considerable quite unnecessary friction,’ he wrote. ‘I didn’t exactly want to leave,’ Molly explained to Laurence. So, she despatched a telegram and let Laurence put her on the train for Italy.
Back at the Regina Palace, the concierge handed her a note from Shaw. They had not known when she was arriving, had stayed in till half-past two and were now on a previously arranged excursion to Orta, the silent green lake to the west, from which they would be back at dinner. ‘Fury blazed up inside me,’ Molly remembered. He had not detached himself and waited for her. ‘So sorry to miss you this trip. Returning to Paris immediately,’ she scribbled on a Tiffany card, and caught the afternoon train back. ‘Return immediately to hell,’ Shaw replied to her that night, ‘...and never dare write to me or approach me or mention your poisonous island to me again as long as you live.’
Even Laurence was ‘almost beginning to lose patience’. There seemed only one thing to do. ‘I suppose it’s the only thing you can do,’ Laurence agreed. So once more he put her on the train, the same train, and she checked into the Bellevue Hotel at Baveno on the edge of the lake two and a half miles from Stresa. ‘Driving along the road to Stresa, which Shaw called the road to Baveno, I promised myself this time I’d be good.’ And she very nearly was. After sun-filled days and quiet evenings, when they sat in a boat rowed by the leisurely stroke of the fishermen, Shaw would walk her back to Baveno, ‘and then I would walk back with him halfway to Stresa and then he would return again to leave me at Baveno on the steps of the Bellevue, striding off into the night, the sound of his brogues fading into the lap-lap of wavelets from the lake’. On her last day, with autumn in the air, Molly accompanied the Shaws to a garden-party; then after they had taken Charlotte back to the hotel, Shaw ‘came with me up to the station and put me on the train to Paris’.
*
He felt miraculously restored, ‘better and much stronger than I had been for years before my illness’. This new vigour was ‘partly you, I think,’ he wrote to Molly. She had confided her growing adoration of him in a ‘bothersomely honest letter’ at Stresa, and this adoration was now ‘an indispensable Vitamin in my bread of life’.
‘I have still two years of youth left,’ he had assured her when retreating from their tête-à-tête at Godalming: ‘so make the most of them.’ Now that he was seventy and she not yet thirty, it was time for some advice: ‘Find your own way,’ he tried to tell her; ‘never mind me.’ She must also mind Laurence who ‘will certainly be vamped, and elope,’ he warned. ‘You have trained him to be imposed on.’ Unless he found his roots back in the United States, Laurence would never do anything: the Jamesian era for ‘deserting America to live in Europe as an artistic vagabond (like the sculptor Story, whom Charlotte knew quite well) is gone by’. But after this direct exhortation to Laurence came the irresistible afterthought: ‘By the way, you might leave Molly behind if you are tired of her.’
He tried again. Molly was a coquette ‘and the sooner you realize that what is fun to you is heartbreak and homebreak to your victims, the better,’ he admonished her. ‘Not that that will stop you; for the instinct which delights in dancing on the edge of a precipice when you have lured a giddy man there, knowing that your own head is sound and that you can get back in safety, is incurable.’ In which case she had better leave all those young Italians she mentioned in her letters, and ‘remain faithful to me, your ancient Shotover’.
Something had gone seriously wrong with the Shavian advice-machine. ‘Love me as long as you can,’ he wrote; ‘but make young friends.’ Yet he did not always want to shield her. ‘You would get wearied if I were always nice and considerate of your feelings,’ he wrote early in 1927. ‘...And anyhow, you must take me as I come... I am beginning to let the mask slip occasionally and damn the consequences.’
Early in 1927 Charlotte took G.B.S. to stay with the Webbs at Passfield Corner. Beatrice and Charlotte appeared to be getting on more affectionate terms as they grew older. Charlotte interested Beatrice. ‘She has developed admirable manners and a pleasing and cheerful personality... there is fascination in an exquisitely clothed and cared-for person, if those artifices are combined with personal dignity and graciousness. Certainly she holds fast GBS’s respect and affection.’
In her analysis of the Shaws’ married happiness, Beatrice took no account of Charlotte’s incurable arthritis and the pain she sought to rise above, through religious meditation; nor did Beatrice sense the dangerous restlessness that took possession of G.B.S. whenever he relaxed from his writing. In this state the attraction of Molly on her magic island grew ‘very strong’. He knew that ‘it is a mistake to go back anywhere’ and that if he did go back to Lake Maggiore ‘my infatuation would be suspected at once’. All the same, he still dreamed of the Baveno road.
To the Webbs, Charlotte had kept discreetly silent about Molly. Only to T. E. Lawrence did she show a glimmer of her feelings. ‘She has no influence, but what she has is bad – you will understand.’ Charlotte knew that G.B.S. wanted to return and felt another holiday in Italy would benefit his health. He could listen to music again with Albert Coates, and pose for a full-length statue this time by Troubetzkoy. By the first week of July 1927 they were back in the same corner suite at the Regina Palace.
Laurence and Molly were now living in their palazzo on the Isolino San Giovanni, and each morning Shaw and Charlotte came over the Bay of Pallanza in a small motorboat to swim. After lunch all four of them would return to the mainland and go off by car into the Lombardy hills. As the summer progressed and the heat intensified, Charlotte more often preferred to stay on the island during these afternoons: it was cooler to sit reading on one of the terraces under the trees in her black taffeta bathing dress than to bounce over the country roads at a mile a minute with Molly at the wheel. Laurence, too, was grateful to get back to his studio. So, while Charlotte read and Laurence worked, Shaw and Molly would drive off together into the mountains, sometimes staying late to eat supper at a trattoria or to watch movies in one of the towns round the lake, and coming home so late that Charlotte began to feel uneasy and ‘even Laurence would frown’.
One day, as they were raising a cloud of white dust behind them, Molly turned off the road and bumped the Renault over the hollows and rough grasses of a field until they reached a copse of trees by a concrete emplacement ‘just right for parking a car’. Not far from these trees flowed the river Toce, its smooth green surface concealing strong currents and treacherous whirlpools. They walked to the low sandy banks, and sat down under the eucalyptus trees. ‘For a long time we lay on the river bank looking down at the water, or up at the tree limbs and sky, content and with no need to talk,’ Molly remembered. ‘All the million things I had to say to Shaw were forgotten.’ Later, in his ‘curiously enchanting voice’, he began talking of what was ‘uppermost in both our minds’, and at the end Molly turned to him, ‘so full of you, and the river, and trees, and sweetness’ – but suddenly out of the landscape a soldier appeared and informed them that they were in a military zone, had perched their car on a gun emplacement and must remove it. Subito! He saluted and was gone.
This afternoon was the high point in their romance. Molly, who confessed to being ‘dazed by the violence of my desire’, went on to imply that there had been some sexual liaison between them that ‘gave my body and my mind and my heart peace when I lay by the side of a river’. Shaw, too, appears to suggest that he may have come near to celebrating his seventy-first birthday that July as he had celebrated his twenty-ninth. ‘I hoarded my bodily possessions so penuriously that even at seventy I had some left,’ he reminded Molly eighteen months later, ‘but that remnant was stolen from me on the road to Baveno and on other roads to paradise through the same district. Now they are all dusty highways on which I am safe because nobody can rob a beggar.’
Whatever happened, it led to different expectations. Shaw was to warn Molly against her erotic imagination because it could not make her happy. ‘You thought that when you had secured your Ogygia and lured me to its shores you could play Calypso to my Odysseus and make a hog of me. Aren’t you glad you didn’t succeed?’ But Molly was not glad. She wanted a fulfilled love affair with Shaw. That summer they all had a dreadful time: Shaw falling ill and Charlotte feeling wretched, Laurence like a helpless prisoner on the island and Molly a ‘predestinate damned soul, a Vamp fiend’. ‘You will prowl round that lake, making men’s wives miserable, tormenting yourself whenever their glances wander from you for a moment,’ Shaw wrote, ‘until the lake water changes to fire and brimstone and rises up and scorches you into nothingness.’
During a sudden storm one night Molly and Laurence were almost drowned as they tried to reach Stresa in a canoe. The evening had been planned as a reconciliation. Arriving very late at the hotel, Molly was still trembling with fear and cold. Shaw picked up her shipwrecked figure in his arms and put her in his bed upstairs. Lying on his bed she told him she was pregnant, that she did not want another baby and was going to Milan for an abortion. ‘Please don’t go to Milano, Molly,’ she remembered him saying. ‘It will be my spiritual child at least.’ But being in love with one man and apparently pregnant by another, Molly was determined. Later she noticed that Shaw’s eyes looked old and tired ‘and I felt I had committed a murder’. After this Shaw came every day to the island and would sit in the garden holding her hand. ‘But there was little to say... it was almost a relief when the last day came.’
Shaw and Charlotte took the Orient Express back to London on 6 October. It had been a troubling episode. ‘I must not think about you; for I cannot save you; I have done my best and only made matters worse,’ he wrote to Molly, as he had written to Florence Farr and Janet Achurch. He asked her the same question he had asked Stella: ‘Can you not learn how to live in the world?’ But if he had taught them that, he would have destroyed what he loved in them. There seemed no future for Molly, though her future, like Stella’s, was to stretch out as a long vexed sequel, shadowing their aborted romance. Molly’s love-island, Shaw told her, was ‘a place to spend six weeks a year in, but not a place to live in’. Yet it lingered like a sea fantasy over his last plays and continued to haunt his memory. ‘Write oftener, far oftener, even if I cannot answer,’ he appealed. ‘The restless hands sometimes tire of the pen and remember the road to Baveno... angels will always love you, including G.B.S.’
Such books are never written until mankind is horribly corrupted, not by original sin but by inequality of income.
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide
‘My dear GBS
You will think me a dreadful bore when I tell you that I want you to send me a few of your ideas of Socialism. Unfortunately the Study Circle to which I belong have got hold of the fact that you are my brother-in-law, so I promised I would write to you. We want to know so many things... Will you answer my questions quite plainly...’
‘It would be easy, dear madam, to refer you to the many books on modern Socialism which have been published since it became a respectable constitutional question in this country in the eighteen-eighties. But I strongly advise you not to read a line of them until you and your friends have discussed for yourselves how wealth should be distributed in a respectable civilized country, and arrived at the best conclusion you can.
For Socialism is nothing but an opinion held by some people on that point...’
So Shaw began The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, his 200,000-word reply to ‘Mrs Chumly’s’ modest request. When the going was good he welcomed the challenge ‘to do a real hard literary job, all brains, instead of writing plays’. But in other moods he would admit to having ‘nearly killed myself’ over ‘my confounded book for women on socialism!’ After three years, on 7 March 1927 it was ‘within a chapter of its end,’ he told T. E. Lawrence, and nine days later Charlotte wrote to Lawrence: ‘The book – the Socialism book – is finished! Last words written this morning!’
There was a good deal more to follow these last words. He prepared two private copies of the Guide with special title pages: one for T. E. Lawrence and the other for his sister-in-law, Mary Cholmondeley, whose name he misspelt in the dedication. The four-colour dust-jacket was designed by Eric Kennington and showed a naked woman (actually Mrs Kennington) ‘making a copious display of bare breasts and indolently scratching a swelling on her right forearm’, protested a Dublin reader, as she peered in a well for the truth like a figure in a fairy story. The olive cloth binding had a woven-chain pattern by Douglas Cockerell in gilt and green; the laid paper was opaque and marked with wide vertical chains; there were green endpapers and a gilt top to the pages. Over 90,000 copies were published simultaneously on 1 June 1928 in Britain and the United States, costing 15s. and $3.00. ‘The reception of The Guide has been overwhelming,’ he reported four months later. ‘I meant it to be.’
*
It should have been the work on socialist economics that Havelock Ellis had tried to commission from him in the 1880s. In or about December 1910, when first advocating ‘the abolition of class by the abolition of inequality of income’, he had composed what was in effect the opening chapter of this book as an exploration of how to get the economic basis of society right in a civilized country. Six years later, when resigning from the New Statesman, he wrote to Beatrice Webb that he would be taking ‘my solution and my policy elsewhere. And there is nowhere else except in a book doing at long range what should be done by a journal at short range.’ In one form or another his Guide to Socialism had been waiting in the wings for forty years.
Six weeks before publication an Act had been passed in Parliament lowering the voting age for women from thirty to twenty-one and giving them the same residence qualification as men. With the small exception of business and university franchises, the democratic equality of one adult one vote was finally reached in the 1929 general election. This extension of the franchise added five million newly qualified women to the electoral register. Since Labour increased its support in the country by three million votes, Shaw’s special appeal to women had been perfectly timed. For its fifth reprint in May 1929 his publisher brought out a five-shilling ‘popular’ edition, called by Lord Lothian ‘a Manifesto for the election of 1929’.
But otherwise Shaw had delayed too long. ‘The sources of his intellectual creed are the tenets of the late Victorian era,’ wrote Father Martin d’Arcy. His faith in government power and compulsory labour was unshadowed by auguries of totalitarianism. The Guide contained more John Eliot Cairnes than John Maynard Keynes and was addressed to women from his sister-in-law’s class. He explicitly links his work to that of European authors of the nineteenth century, and admits his lack of involvement with post-war society:
‘Ibsen’s women are all in revolt against Capitalist morality... The modern literature of male frustration, much less copious, is post-Strindberg. In neither branch are there any happy endings. They have the Capitalist horror without the Socialist hope. The post-Marxian, post-Ibsen psychology gave way in 1914–18 to the postwar psychology. It is very curious; but it is too young, and I too old for more than this bare mention of its existence and its literature.’
But the Guide’s merits did not depend on topicality. Here was the summary of a lifetime’s thought, a work of eloquent insight and fantasy, and Shaw’s political autobiography. As he marches forward on his pilgrimage the social landscape behind him is brilliantly lit up, while ahead the Promised Land glows with an eerie light. Only the marching figure himself is lost in the midst of current confusions, so that we cannot see whether he has struck an original route or is losing himself on some precipitous digression. By making use of simple definitions, such as ‘capital is spare money’, Shaw had set out to demystify a subject that, like medicine, was increasingly viewed as being impenetrable to non-specialists. ‘Economics is supposed to be an involved and abstruse subject,’ acknowledged Martin d’Arcy, ‘yet here we have the secrets of it set forth in a prose worthy of Platonic dialogue.’ The Guide is a sustained act of teaching that aims at driving the reader back to the foundations of her own beliefs (Shaw uses throughout the feminine pronoun which in certain contexts, he points out, ‘includes the masculine’). Most works on economics and political science had been addressed to an abstract reader conceived as aridly male: ‘You might read a score of them without ever discovering that such a creature as a woman had ever existed.’ He concluded that ‘because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman’s work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it’.
Anyone who can manage her domestic economy, Shaw maintains, can understand the political economy of twentieth-century capitalism. He further raises the self-esteem of his readers by attributing the greater success of men in business and the professions to their sexual inferiority, the jobs of accountants, barristers, doctors, managers, shopkeepers and so on being generally neuter. Since women have a natural monopoly in bearing children, it followed that, ‘being as it is the most vital of all the functions of mankind, it gives women a power and importance that... men cannot attain to at all. In so far as it is a slavery, it is a slavery to Nature and not to Man... The only disadvantage the woman is at in competition with the man is that the man must either succeed in his business or fail completely in life, whilst the woman has a second string to her bow.’
Feminism was only one aspect of his general theory of equality; nevertheless, as Margaret Walters has written in the 1980s, the Guide ‘remains an important feminist document’ which impressed politicians, historians and intellectuals. ‘After the Bible this is in my eyes the most important book that humanity possesses,’ Ramsay MacDonald remarked, an aside that revealed him to be ‘more of a wit than I suspected,’ Shaw granted. ‘It is a very great book,’ T. E. Lawrence wrote to Charlotte. ‘...It is like the aged Hardy writing poetry.’
The poetry is in the dogma. In Shaw’s Paradiso all citizens have as natural a right to equal incomes as they have to air and sunlight, justice and education. He examines seven ways of distributing wealth, exposing all but one of them as deadly sins. This logical annihilation, which appears to drive capitalism into a series of surrenders and retreats, is a bewitching display in the art of political pamphleteering. He surveys the nation’s institutions, from the courts of justice and the institution of marriage to the usefulness of its schooling and the quality of its newspapers, and finds them all ingeniously bedevilled by the effects of dividing people into rich and poor.
Shaw’s Purgatorio is here and now. He struggles to free himself from his own respectability and retrieve the power of anger, the sense of disgust, that had so impressed William Morris during their street-campaigning days. ‘His criticism of the modern capitalist muddle is so damaging, his style so trenchant, and so full of reserves of indignation and righteous scorn,’ Morris had written, ‘that I sometimes wonder that guilty, i.e. non-socialist, middle class people can sit and listen to him.’ Now that he was addressing an audience of Conservative matrons and obliged to be charming, reasonable, elementary, Shaw wondered whether his old fires were failing. ‘I miss from its babytalk the sweep of my ancient periods,’ he confessed. But in his early chapters, and again in the peroration at the end, he rekindles these flames of his youth. They rise most brilliantly when swept by the disillusions and betrayals of political events he had lived through, and when seen against the clouds of his own rising despair. He writes as one whose normal affections have been gouged out by capitalism and whose politics have rushed in to fill the emotional void. ‘I do not want any human child to be brought up as I was brought up... Life is made lonely and difficult for me in a hundred unnecessary ways.’
Shaw’s peroration to the Intelligent Woman is similar to Swift’s ‘unanswerable’ indictment of mankind as ‘the wickedest of all known species’. He finds his redemption in a formula that, substituting inequality of income for original sin, provides him with an abstract optimism. If moral triumphs, like mechanical triumphs, are reached by trial and error, he reasons, then it is possible to despair of capitalism without despairing of human nature. Under more benign conditions we would discover human nature to be good enough for reasonable purposes and would come to read Gulliver’s Travels as a vivid clinical lecture on extinct moral diseases ‘which were formerly produced by inequality as smallpox and typhus were produced by dirt’.
Capitalism diminished the collective well-being by directing so much of a nation’s energies to maintaining the parasitic rich. Under these conditions we can see ‘half-fed, badly clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the money that should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being spent in millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs,’ he complained. ‘...[This] is a badly managed, silly, vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the long run no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth.’
Shaw’s socialism was a means of achieving social responsibility by active interference in the production and distribution of the nation’s income – that is, by a well-managed public service to replace the quarrelsome and divisive effects of private competition. The great basic industries needed to be managed for the benefit of all, though not, he urged, until an efficient organization was in readiness to take over control from private hands whose insatiable drive for profit had shown no concern with the public interest. The railways, the mines and, above all, the banks which were the chief factor in determining the level of prices and the use of capital for development, should be made community property.
Placing himself ahead of events, Shaw looked back at the contemporary world. Such a peculiar focus gave the Guide some of its originality, but also explains its lack of political impact. He is especially critical of Britain’s complacent acceptance of the parliamentary circus as the best available type of government. ‘If democracy is not to ruin us,’ he warned, ‘we must at all costs find some trustworthy method of testing the qualifications of candidates before we allow them to seek election.
‘When we have done that we may have great trouble in persuading the right people to come forward. We may even be driven to compel them; for those who fully understand how heavy are the responsibilities of government and how exhausting its labor are the least likely to shoulder them voluntarily. As Plato said, the ideal candidate is the reluctant one.’
Shaw’s economic proposals were not so much methods for changing the present as fantasies for escaping from it. He wanted the world to be controlled by dreams rather than experience. But when he draws close to contemporary politics his pen takes on a self-destructive cunning, as if the boy once neglected by his mother has grown into a man convinced he is neglected by his adopted mother country. Nobody understood what was happening except ‘here and there a prophet crying in the wilderness and being either ignored by the press or belittled as a crank’. He threatens smug British democracy with all sorts of bogeymen dictators. In such recurring passages he invites the disrespect of which he is complaining. His tone wavers, his judgement narrows, and there is another symptom. ‘To put the same thing in another way... I could go on like this for years.’ All this was ‘too boring for the intelligent man, if I’m any sample,’ commented D. H. Lawrence. ‘Too much gas-bag.’
Shaw was at his best when passionately defending his plan. When questioned as to what income would content him, he retorted: ‘Who cares what I would or would not be content with?... We shall have to be content with our share... It is our public business to see that everyone shall have as much as possible, and not less or more than anyone else.’ To a correspondent who had questioned the compatibility of socialism with foreign trade, he replied: ‘I need not remind you that trade, home or foreign, is something to be minimized, not maximized and regarded as an index to prosperity,’ he wrote.
‘...the garden of Eden was happy without trade. But to many of our statisticians it seems as if Eve, instead of handing Adam the apple, had sold it for a bunch of Algerian dates, and the purchaser had sold it for a pound of Italian olives, and the olive sellers sold it for some Spanish figs, and the fig merchant sent it to Ireland in payment for a blackthorn stick, and so on round the globe until it came round to Mesopotamia again and was purchased by Adam for an ostrich feather, both Adam and Eve would have been much more prosperous.’
Harold Laski objected that ‘for a man to tell you that the desirable thing is equality of income without telling you how to get it is simply irritating’. But Shaw had argued that people would win socialism by desiring it, and his Guide, like an alchemy, had been written to create that desire. ‘The difficulty of applying the constructive program of Socialism lies not in the practical but in the metaphysical part of the business; the will to equality,’ he wrote.
He was sometimes accused of attempting to banish evil from the world. He would respond that his Guide simply traced certain avoidable evils to inequality and suggested that they would not occur under his plan. ‘No woman would have to turn her back on a man she loved because he was poor, or be herself passed by for the same reason. All the disappointments would be natural and inevitable disappointments; and there would be plenty of alternatives and consolations.’
Shaw’s economic solution for uniting people in a true democracy was the invention of a man who believed his own disunities to have arisen from the marriage of his parents made under economic dictatorship. By changing the economic basis of society, he hoped to change natural behaviour. Beatrice Webb, who had thought it would ‘be a marvel if it is not a bad book’, came to marvel at its autobiographical sincerity and pathos. ‘His acknowledged genius, his old age, the warmth and depth of his earnestness and his amazing literary brilliance have paralysed his would-be critics and opened the hearts of fellow-socialists, especially those on the left,’ she wrote. ‘He denounces society as it is, he gives no credit and no quarter, and he preaches a curiously abstract Utopia, which eludes criticism because of its very unreality.’