Didnt you know that English politics wont bear thinking about?
On the Rocks
It had always been a relief to get back to Ayot. The staff there were fiercely loyal. The new young Irish parlourmaid, Margaret Cashin, often came upon Shaw slipping money into envelopes and he always paid for her trips back to Ireland. He was a thorough gentleman. When she married he lent her the Rolls-Royce. ‘It was grand.’
Out of doors he still looked spry and active. Chopping wood, making bonfires, sawing logs, collecting acorns, eyeing the strawberries while patrolling up and down with his notebook, camera and secateurs, he appeared ‘like a magic gardener in a fairy story’. He would write in the garden too, stepping out from a veranda at the back of the house (‘my Riviera’) and hurrying past the flowers and trees to a small revolving hut, like a monk’s cell, with its desk and chair and bunk. Here, in what some visitors mistook for a toolshed, he was conveniently out of the staff’s way and the world’s reach.
As for Mrs Shaw, she was ‘one of the best’, the assistant gardener Fred Drury reckoned. ‘She used to help him a lot with his work.’ The two gardeners often speculated over what was going on between Mr and Mrs Shaw as they watched them circumnavigating the lawn together. ‘They had a special route round the garden which was just about a mile, and they put one stone down every time they passed,’ Fred Drury observed. Henry Higgs noticed these stones too, and how they ‘used to take them off the window sill on the way back, one by one’.
Such symmetry was particularly characteristic of Mr Shaw. He was a very tidy man. ‘He always put chairs back in place, and his pyjamas on his bed in his room, neatly folded,’ Margaret Cashin noted. ‘...[He] was very particular about his erectness and appearance – proud of his person and figure... He always changed for the evening meal regardless of whether anyone was coming to see him or not.’ Sometimes there were famous guests: heavyweight boxers, film actresses, war heroes, prime ministers – those sorts of person. But that didn’t bother the staff who saw one of their prime jobs as protecting Mr Shaw from the outside world: by which they meant the villagers.
This became easier when, after his eightieth birthday, he more or less gave up driving. In recent years he had grown more reckless and Fred Day, his chauffeur, was often obliged to pull the wheel out of his hand crying ‘Brake, sir!’ and ‘That will do sir’. It was an anxious time. ‘I was fully occupied trying to keep him out of trouble,’ Day admitted. ‘I don’t know why on earth they let me have a driving licence at my age,’ Shaw complained one day after plunging into some hot water pipes at a garage.
As a pedestrian he went on into his mid-eighties disappearing downhill and updale for walks of up to six miles. He was supremely noticeable as he sailed by in his knee breeches, wide-brimmed hat and Norfolk jacket. For wood-chopping, to the delight of local children, he appeared helmeted. A bright mackintosh sometimes illuminated him at night.
He had some funny ideas too. When invited to present a prize at the village school for the best-conducted boy or girl, he suggested starting a rival prize for the worst-conducted boy or girl, ‘and we will watch their careers and then find out which really turns out best’. After returning from South Africa, he came up with a notion that all the villagers should dance to the hymns in church and add to their repertoire ‘O, You Must be a Lover of the Lord’: he actually gave a demonstration for them in the street.
Then there was the rubbish dump a mile or so south of his house where the Wheathampstead refuse was deposited. His campaign to reclaim this acreage, which vented its poisonous gases through a layer of old trays, perambulators, bicycle wheels, umbrella frames and hovering flies, was sustained over ten years. In 1931 he informed the District Council that he had recently been cruising in the Mediterranean ‘where I was very strongly reminded of the dump by the fumes of the island volcano of Stromboli’. Eventually, in 1932, changes were made and four years later Shaw received an enormous green apple that had grown from a tree on the site. ‘I swallowed some of it before I was told what it was,’ he wrote. ‘I shall never be the same man again; but Mrs Shaw rather liked it.’
This was the bitter taste of success – success delayed too long. Would it have tasted sweeter, could he have achieved more, had he been capable of campaigning differently? The trouble was he seemed so strange to ordinary people. He had ‘a funny way of expressing himself,’ a fellow-villager objected after hearing him lecture for the local Women’s Institute on ‘How to Quarrel Properly’. It didn’t sound like proper quarrelling at all. And he was so unpredictable. It was disconcerting for the chemist to be invited to ‘try out’ some of his bottles of medicine on himself so that his customers could witness how they worked; or for other villagers when greeting him in the street with a ‘How are you?’ to be answered: ‘At my age, Sir, you are either well or dead.’ You never knew where you were with such a person.
He had been living at Ayot now some thirty years. He was invariably courteous, but ‘remote as a god’. And, like a god, he seemed made of mystifying contradictions. Why would someone rumoured to be an atheist contribute so generously to the cost of repairing the roof of the parish church, pay for the renovation of the organ, and keep up what he called his ‘pew-rent’ to the church’s funds? And why would someone who attacked standard education for children arrange at his own expense to put Vitaglass into the school’s windows? Finally, why did he keep so quiet about these things when he was well known to be a colossal publicity seeker?
There were various answers. According to the apiarist, a diffident man who came to give a hand with the bees, he seemed ‘nervous and shy if anything’. To a local joker he appeared ‘the greatest leg-puller the world has ever known’. And it was obvious to the Conservative party agent that he was no more a socialist than the man in the moon. ‘Politics was not in his line,’ said the barber who cut his hair.
But on one point there was general agreement: he had natural good manners. He ‘made you feel you were his equal,’ said the organist; he was ‘prepared to engage in conversation on my level,’ said the oculist; ‘he always put you completely at your ease,’ said the landowner. But few of them would really claim to know him. ‘If you ignored Mr Shaw he took more notice of you than if you didn’t,’ recalled Mrs Harding. And Mr Williams observed that he was easier with children and animals. ‘He always stopped and spoke to my little dog, Judy,’ said Mrs Hinton to whom he did not speak much. ‘He always talked to my children as an equal,’ said another villager. Each year he sent the headmistress of the school a cheque to be spent on sweets. She would pass the money over to the village shop and the children were allowed to get their sweets, without paying, to a maximum of one shilling each.
‘He never talked about his plays or anything like that,’ one villager gratefully remembered. This was a mercy because, though they all accepted him as a great playwright, practically no one had actually seen his plays. It was a wonder he continued writing them. At the rate he was going he would soon ruin what reputation he had left. But he gave no sign of stopping. It must have been the love of money-making, people thought, that kept him working. His hairdresser did not think much of him as a dramatist; and in the view of Jisbella Lyth, the village postmistress, some of his work ‘lacked suspense’.
Mrs Lyth was a widow. She had started her career as a kennel-maid and, after some adventurous travelling, returned to England where in 1931 she and her husband took over the post office at Ayot. Almost immediately Mr Lyth had died of a heart attack in the garden. ‘Oh! What a glorious death to die,’ G.B.S. complimented her. ‘I hope I die like that in my garden underneath the stars.’ ‘Yes sir,’ Mrs Lyth replied, ‘but not at fifty-four, surely.’ On leaving, Shaw said: ‘I hope we shall have you here in Ayot for many years.’
And they did. ‘Mr Shaw wrote personally to me for every batch of stamps he needed,’ Mrs Lyth recorded over twenty years later. ‘...I’ve sold almost all those letters... I believe he meant them to be a sort of legacy to me.’
Shaw let his imagination play on this relationship. During January 1933, while steaming along between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, he wrote the first draft of a Comedietta for Two Voices in Three Conversations which he initially called The Red Sea. He had developed a habit of labelling his characters with sequences of letters, from A onwards for the males, and Z backwards for the females. He needed only two letters, A and Z, for this short play and when he completed the last draft that summer, changing its title to Village Wooing, he kept these letters in place of names.
‘I do not see myself as the Man,’ he told Lillah McCarthy: ‘he is intended as a posthumous portrait of Lytton Strachey.’ A represents the side of Shaw that most closely approximated to Strachey – a man of letters as opposed to a political writer. As for Z, she is not Charlotte but an approximation of Jisbella Lyth. ‘Many’s the time he’s helped me with my crossword puzzles,’ she said. Shaw’s alphabetical characters may derive in part from the lettering of these puzzles, but the effect is to give general application to their ordinariness. They are any one and every one of us.
In the First Conversation on board the pleasure ship Empress of Patagonia, ‘a literary looking pale gentleman under forty in green spectacles, a limp black beard, and a tropical suit of white silk’ is crustily anxious not to be disturbed by Z, ‘a young woman, presentable but not aristocratic, who is bored with her book’. A is an isolated intellectual obliged for financial reasons to write the popular ‘Marco Polo’ series of guidebooks; Z, who insists on interrupting his work with her life story, is the daughter of a ‘man of letters’ – a postman – who is using the money she has won in a newspaper competition to see the world. The Second Conversation takes place in a village shop and post office on the Wiltshire Downs where Z is putting through telephone messages. A enters as a customer on a hiking holiday, but does not recognize Z. She describes their cruise as having destroyed her romantic illusions of the world (partly created by A’s books). But in half an hour it is A who has surprisingly been persuaded to give up the occupation of literary gentleman and buy the village shop. In the Third Conversation A has been the shop’s proprietor for three months and learnt more than he had over three years at Oxford. Z, who is working as his assistant, replies that he still has more to learn since the shop does not earn enough to keep three. The play ends with the Rector’s wife, telephoning for vegetables, being asked by Z to fetch the Rector as she wants to put up the marriage banns.
Village Wooing is a celebration of change. The first conversation is ostensibly between an intellectual and a simpleton; the second is between a gentleman and a villager; and the third between an employer and employee. In all three scenes Shaw is demonstrating the need to break down these academic, class and economic barriers to change.
He is also speculating on change within himself. What might have happened if ‘some habits [that] lie too deep to be changed’ could be changed after all and, unlike Professor Higgins, the ‘Complete Outsider’ at ease only with the mighty dead could ‘change my nature’ and feel at home with ordinary living people?
*
Village Wooing encapsulates many Shavian themes and obsessions from phonetics to the Life Force, and forms a miniature pendant to Man and Superman and Pygmalion. The other play he composed at this time, On the Rocks, is a political fable in The Apple Cart line and ‘a coda to Heartbreak House’.
The time is ‘The Present’ – still the Depression. Shaw takes us to the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, and keeps us there throughout the two long acts of his play. Governing ‘within democratic limits’ the genial Prime Minister, Sir Arthur Chavender, presides over a dictatorship of democracy. ‘I cannot go faster than our voters will let me,’ he explains. The result is that the ‘country isn’t governed’, his wife points out: ‘it just slummocks along anyhow.’
Sir Arthur Chavender is an empty cavernous man who epitomizes the change wrought in Ramsay MacDonald by parliamentary life, as well as the change Shaw feared had taken place in himself. ‘I make speeches,’ he says: ‘that is the business of a politician.’ In the Shavian analysis, orators had once been powerful because, in their inspired utterances, they caught the spirit of the times. But the frivolity of public opinion turned these men and women of words into the exploiters of people’s fears and prejudices.
Sir Arthur is responding to the unemployment crisis by preparing a soothing oration about the sanctity of family life. Shaw accompanies the rhetorical composition of this speech with interruptions from the Prime Minister’s own family whose uncontrollable bickering (like the uncaring sounds from Sonny’s Dublin home) gives the lie to every melodious phrase.
Sir Arthur is an emblem of the times. He has piloted not only England but himself on to the rocks. His wife, who sees that he will soon have a nervous breakdown, makes him promise to see a strange lady doctor who then mysteriously appears, in ghostly robes, near the end of the first act. This Lady Oracle, who was modelled by Shaw on the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, and influenced by Lady Astor, is a ghost from the future, a healer as well as a messenger of death.
In the unwritten interlude between the two acts, Sir Arthur passes three or four months at this lady’s sanatorium in the Welsh mountains. ‘It’s amazing,’ exclaims the Chief Commissioner of Police Sir Broadfoot Basham at the beginning of the second act. ‘I could have sworn that if there was a safe man in England that could be trusted to talk and say nothing, to thump the table and do nothing, Arthur Chavender was that man. Whats happened to him?’ What has happened is that he has been resurrected as a born-again Shavian. On the Rocks is Shaw’s version of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, with Avalon (the Celtic Isle of the Blest) transposed into the Welsh sanatorium and the legendary Round Table remodelled as an imposing Cabinet table. Sir Arthur himself is a Once and Future Prime Minister and the second act his promised second coming in the hour of England’s need. To lift the country off the rocks he brings with him a programme of regeneration which gathers together many of the political remedies G.B.S. had been picking up and putting out during his world travels.
The programme contains subtle ingredients to appeal to each section of English society. Since everyone approves the items which favour his own interests and regards all other items as caprices that will never be implemented, there seems to be some chance that the National Government will be able to introduce this programme by means of parliamentary democracy. But the plan is shipwrecked by the coming together of two political extremes: the bedrock of the far left and the rocklike uncompromising right.
The symmetry of On the Rocks comes from the attraction of opposites. The Duke is attracted to the factory girl; the Prime Minister’s son is determined to marry a trade unionist and his daughter has sworn to marry a poor man (though she actually becomes engaged to an aristocrat who, as a member of the Labour deputation, dresses and talks as she imagines poor men dress and talk). The Prime Minister himself is married to a shadowy woman who apparently has no enthusiasm either for politics or for her children: her boredom with public life and inability to ‘take an interest in people’ derive from Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw’s indifference to both Sonny and G.B.S. She is a complex woman nevertheless, capable of manipulating the plot and preparing the way for her husband’s political illumination.
The dramatic opinions that fill the Cabinet Room are the voices that reverberate in Shaw’s mind. The play exhibits Shaw’s ‘anarchic comic gift doing spirited battle with his authoritarian opinions,’ Irving Wardle has observed, ‘and the separate factions are orchestrated with effortless fluency and the ability to spring surprises’. The virtues of law and order match themselves against the vices of a police power state. ‘I wonder should I find any bombs in your house if I searched it,’ the Chief Commissioner of Police asks the elderly East End socialist, Hipney, who knowingly answers: ‘You would if you put them there first, Sir Broadfoot. What good would a police chief be if he couldnt find anything he wanted to find?’ The paradox of power, according to Shaw, is that anciens régimes are defended by oppressed and oppressors alike. ‘Chained dogs are the fiercest guardians of property; and those who attempt to unchain them are the first to get bitten.’
After its opening in London Shaw reported a ‘unanimously good press (for once)’. The Morning Post praised him for having ‘made politics amusing’; The Times applauded his refusal to be canonized after Saint Joan; and Kingsley Martin in the New Statesman & Nation made the crucial observation that G.B.S. ‘warns rather than advocates. Make up your mind, he says, that Parliament, as you know it, cannot be the instrument of salvation. Devise a constitution which gives scope to personal and national loyalty, but do not imagine that it can succeed without transformation of the social order.’
The play was to retain and renew its topicality. When it was revived at the Mermaid Theatre in the 1970s, Robert Cushman in the Observer called it ‘quite the most topical play in London’; J. W. Lambert in the Sunday Times wrote of his ‘astonishment at how little things, and people, have changed since 1933’; Irving Wardle in The Times pointed in detail to ‘the numerous parallels between the Depression years and the economic ills of the 1970s’; and the critic J. C. Trewin summed up: ‘What appeals to us now is the prophetic quality. The date is 1933, yet the dramatist could well have been thinking of 1975.’ Again, when it was brought back at Chichester during the Falklands War in the 1980s, critics remarked on the play’s contemporaneity – as if time had stopped and was pointing for ever at ‘the Present’. On the Rocks seemed ‘topical when I read it 10 years ago,’ wrote Robert Cushman in the summer of 1982, ‘prescient when the Mermaid staged it a couple of years after that, and positively uncanny at Chichester now’. But the critic Benedict Nightingale, referring to the ‘peculiarly bloodthirsty’ Preface, described a performance of the play in 1982 as being ‘precisely the sort of thing decent people should not have resurrected at a time like this, when unemployment is once again rife, party alignments confused, and parliamentary democracy itself under attack from both right and left’.
The writer of the play subverts the writer of the Preface. The artist in Shaw cannot accept the Shavian polemicist. He cannot abandon conscience for efficient action. ‘I’m not the man for the job,’ Chavender admits. ‘...And I shall hate the man who will carry it through for his cruelty and the desolation he will bring on us and our like.’
But why should such desolation be necessary? Shaw believed that though Britain might be good at finding leaders in wartime when socialism advanced, her politicians were uninspired in peacetime, and the country instinctively felt the need for a peacetime fighter, whatever party he or she might lead. The Cabinet meetings in both The Apple Cart and On the Rocks ‘are something Shaw had to give us some day,’ wrote Eric Bentley, ‘ – a rounded picture of the political madhouse which directs our destinies’. These two plays are less surreal than his other plays of this period. The crash of breaking windows at the end of On the Rocks, like the bomb explosion near the end of Heartbreak House (or the Day of Judgment in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles and the planetary disaster in the last act of Geneva), are all symbols, as Eric Bentley indicates, of the atomic age and the global threat to our environment, as well as the anticipation of Hitler’s Germany.
Playwriting is becoming a Platonic exercise with me.
Shaw to Leonora Ervine (12 May 1934)
By the mid-1930s Shaw seemed to have become again what he had been in the 1890s: a versatile composer of experimental play-texts. Village Wooing received its world première at the Little Theater in Dallas, Texas, and was first presented in Britain by his fellow-dramatist Christopher Fry at the Pump Room in Tunbridge Wells. On the Rocks waited until the summer of 1938 before reaching New York when it was brought in by the government-sponsored Federal Theater which took over Shaw’s plays from the Theatre Guild. In Britain the play was given its world première at the unfashionable Winter Garden Theatre in London where it was presented by Charles Macdona.
The Macdona Players, with Esmé Percy as their director, ‘led the forlorn hope of advanced drama in England’ between the wars and toured many of Shaw’s plays through Britain, round the Continent (staging the long-banned Mrs Warren’s Profession in Paris in 1925) and in South Africa, India and the Far East. On the Rocks was the only world première produced by Charles Macdona. Shaw had wanted Esmé Percy to direct the play, ‘but now there is a nice man, a man G.B.S. likes nearly as well,’ Charlotte wrote, ‘& I hope, later, G.B.S. will throw a good deal of work on to him’. This ‘nice man’ was Lewis Casson. He had worked with Shaw when directing the London production of Village Wooing which starred Casson’s wife, Sybil Thorndike, as Z. Shaw enjoyed interfering with his own plays. He ‘had a disgraceful appetite for “getting the laughs”,’ recalled Stephen Murray who played the part of the Prime Minister in the Malvern production of On the Rocks in 1936.
He also appeared a more dictatorial figure than in the Vedrenne-Barker days, talking more and listening less. He had been ‘all eyes and ears,’ remembered Cedric Hardwicke when rehearsing Back to Methuselah. Now his eyes and ears had dimmed, but not his opinions. According to Edith Evans, he was getting old-fashioned. One of the Macdona Players recalled that he made ‘no attempt to help one to gain an imaginative feeling for the character and situations. Instead he went through the part line by line instructing me how he wanted every sentence emphasized and pronounced in his own, idiosyncratic Anglo-Irish accent.’ He insisted on placing his dominant speaking character well up-stage to get absolute clarity, grouped the other actors decoratively round and gave a highly coloured orchestration to the vocal tempo and pitch. ‘You’ve got to go from line to line, quickly and swiftly, never stop the flow of the lines, never stop,’ he told Ralph Richardson when rehearsing Arms and the Man at the Old Vic. ‘It’s one joke after another, it’s a firecracker. Always reserve the acting for underneath the spoken word. It’s a musical play, a knockabout musical comedy.’ Richardson remembered him as ‘a wonderfully courteous, wonderfully polite man, I think perhaps the most polite man I’ve met in my life’. And John Gielgud, who played the Emperor in Androcles and the Lion ‘with a red wig, a lecherous red mouth, and a large emerald through which I peered lasciviously’, remembered that the cast was ‘so amused that we forgot to be alarmed’ when G.B.S. turned up to read his play to them. There were still characteristic outbursts of generosity. ‘I dare say your words are as good as mine,’ he told Phyllis Nielson-Terry who kept fluffing her lines during a revival of Candida.
On the day of the final rehearsal of On the Rocks, Shaw came into his own. After a morning ‘word-rehearsal... which lasted until 3.p.m.,’ wrote Stephen Murray. ‘There was a photo-call at six, which Shaw insisted on attending. Dress-rehearsal at eight, and the curtain went up on it with Shaw on-stage. He never sat down for four hours, turning everything upside down and this way and that. At midnight he gave us vigorous notes for twenty minutes and then walked home. He had his eightieth birthday that week.’
As the opening night of On the Rocks approached, a current of excitement went through the Winter Garden Theatre. It was like the old days. ‘An extraordinary evening,’ Charlotte wrote. ‘The way that enormous audience took the points and flung themselves into the whole thing was startling. I never met anything like it before.’ Macdona and Shaw had experimented by charging ‘popular prices’ – between one and five shillings a seat, which was half the regular cost. They needed to fill the large out-of-the-way theatre to keep the play profitably running – and after the huge first night success and excellent notices it seemed they might succeed. The fans came over and over again, but the general playgoing public seemed to agree with Shaw’s Prime Minister – ‘This is not the time to talk about economic difficulties: we’re up to the neck in them’ – and stayed away. Beatrice Webb, who went to the theatre a fortnight after the play had opened, reported: ‘the hall cold and cheerless, the cheap stalls not completely occupied, the gallery practically empty, a badly tuned gramophone playing during the one interval, did not constitute an attractive setting.’
After forty-one performances the shutters went up towards the end of January 1935. ‘My popularity does not increase,’ Shaw wrote to his publisher. But then he had never counted on commercial success. ‘I shall not take any trouble to have them performed,’ he had assured Trebitsch, ‘but publish them in the same volume as Too True.’ Early in 1934, 27,000 copies of this book containing On the Rocks, Village Wooing and Too True to be Good were published in Britain and the United States, and two years later it was joined in the Standard Edition by another volume, The Simpleton, the Six, and the Millionairess, containing the last three plays from his world travels.
*
‘The greatest fact of your lifetime is that nothing has happened in the twentieth century except the impossible,’ Shaw wrote to St John Ervine in 1932. ‘...nothing has succeeded like impossibility.’ The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles is Shaw’s enhancement of ‘impossibility’ far-advanced into some unspecified time he calls ‘Approaching Judgment Day’.
The Unexpected Isles have recently risen out of the Pacific Ocean (where Shaw completed the play) and been occupied as a Crown Colony of the British Empire. In the three short scenes of the Prologue, past, present and future are brought together. A modern young woman arrives at the emigration office without her papers but with the catch-phrase (which becomes a theme of the play) ‘Let life come to you’. She marches the Emigration Officer out of his office to show her round the island, leaving his clerk alone. This shabby clerk is recognizable partly as Shaw’s father. Life has never come to him. He begins singing ‘Rule Britannia’, blows his brains out and falls dead – the fifth such suicide that month.
Meanwhile the Young Woman and Emigration Officer have progressed to Scene II – ‘a grassy cliff top overhanging the sea’ reminiscent of the Dover Cliffs in Act IV scene vi of King Lear where Gloucester, Edgar and the King himself meet within a foot of the extreme verge, and trifle with despair. The Emigration Officer too has reached despair: ‘If you hadnt come in this morning I’d have done myself in,’ he tells the Young Woman who is amazed that he should feel so wretched in this ‘earthly paradise’. The explanation is given by a dark native Priest who rises into view up a concealed cliff path. The Emigration Officer, he says, comes from a country whose inhabitants ‘die from their own hands to escape what they call the horrors’ when ‘in the midst of life and loveliness’ they feel that only man is vile. The Emigration Officer, determined to go over the fearful cliffs, continues bending tremendously on the edge – until the Priest shoots out a foot against his posterior and he is sent catapulting into the sea. The Young Woman is appalled, but, as in King Lear, the cliffs are not simply what we have been led to expect; they mark the line of redemption as well as the abyss of death. ‘There are nets below,’ the Priest explains to the Young Woman as they advance into the third scene.
This is set in a temple made out of a shelf of rock halfway down the cliff, reminiscent of the Skelligs off the south-west coast of Ireland. Upon this cathedral of the sea, and representing the coming together of East and West, Shaw imposed the gigantic images of Oriental deities he had seen on Elephanta Island, off the coast of Bombay. The Priest and Priestess, perfectly attuned to their paradisiacal surroundings, treat visitors from the old country with something of the backward-looking contempt that British imperialists have treated natives of their annexed territories. ‘I find these heathen idolaters very trying,’ sighs the Priestess after encountering an affected English lady tourist, guidebook in hand. This turns out to be Lady Farwaters, the wife of Sir Charles Farwaters, a man of pleasant aristocratic appearance who owes a little to Shaw’s Fabian friend Sydney Olivier.
What is to be done with such specimens? The Priest and Priestess decide they might be used in a eugenic experiment blending the flesh and spirit of East and West, and they all retire into a magical cavern (like the Abode of Love from Too True to be Good).
The Emigration Officer rises into view in a spotless white robe looking pale but regenerated. Writing of Shaw in the 1920s T. E. Lawrence had noticed ‘some sea-change [that] has come over G.B.S. in the last ten years’. It is a sea-change, compressed into ten minutes, that Shaw has granted his Emigration Officer. Now ‘the tables are turned’, and just when the Young Woman thinks that life is ‘coming a bit too thick for me’, he rushes her screaming to the edge of the rock shelf and hurls her over. So ends a Prologue remarkable for its surplus of action over talk.
In a letter to Trebitsch, Shaw called The Simpleton ‘an ultra-fantastic oriental modern (or futurist) play... contents indescribable’. With a peculiar blend of fantasy and satire, the two acts of the play survey the delights and drawbacks of the pantomime Utopia that arise from the Prologue. The first act takes up the story about twenty years later and carries it on through the experiences of an accidental traveller to this Otherworld: a young, highly credulous clergyman who, like the Elderly Gentleman in Back to Methuselah, gives an ironic view of Shaw’s own pilgrim’s progress from the perspective of the future. This simpleton has been kidnapped by pirates at Weston Super Mare and forced to sail round the world, making them ill with laughter by giving Church of England sermons. They are like the ex-criminals of Captain Brassbound’s crew and use the clergyman to make people believe they are respectable. And Shaw uses them, the stock-in-trade crew of island literature, to echo Captain Shotover’s warning in Heartbreak House against capitalism’s ship of fools and to remind us of its stranded destination in On the Rocks.
Suddenly released and set ashore, the simpleton wanders through the Unexpected Isles and comes to a terraced garden overlooking the port of Good Adventure. He is lost in enchantment. ‘It’s like the Garden of Eden: I should like to stay here forever.’ The garden is given a hieratic aspect by four Oriental shrines at the corners of a raised flowerbed. As he gazes at the two magically beautiful girl-goddesses and two wonderful boy-gods, the simpleton’s heart is filled with longing. ‘How I wish you were alive and I could kiss your living lips,’ he addresses the fair goddess. But in this wonderland wishes come true. The stage directions tell us what then happens: ‘He does so and finds that she is alive. She smiles as her eyes turn bewitchingly towards him.’ In this variation of the Pygmalion legend, both the two goddesses and the two gods reveal themselves as four children from the Prologue.
‘We formed a family of six parents,’ explains Sir Charles Farwaters, who is now Governor of the Isles. His wife has changed from an affected tourist to a matronly silhouette of Charlotte Shaw; while the Emigration Officer is transformed into a ‘very different man, disciplined, responsible and well groomed’ – and married (a distant image of the Webbs’ marriage) to the Young Woman who is ‘still very much her old self’. The other two parents are Pra and Prola, the Priest and Priestess.
But there is something lacking in the constitution of these four super-children. They are all, like Hitler’s Aryan ideal, physically perfect, but they cannot muster ‘between the whole four of them a scrap of moral conscience’. They are the embodiment of art for art’s sake. From the idea of loving one another the superchildren have advanced to the ideal of being one another.
Shaw’s Garden of Eden is unclouded by any evil. No serpent slides through the undergrowth, no original sin flowers in the grounds: this is a paradise without demons. We are shown a pure fairy story, like an adolescent’s daydream, that joins Oriental fable to allegorical romance, and reflects Shaw’s view of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetic principle. ‘His kingdom is not of this world,’ he had written of Poe. ‘...Life cannot give you what he gives you except through fine art.’ Shaw’s Unexpected Isles are located near Eureka, the prose poem in which Poe sought to relate poetic intuition to scientific thought. The first act is perhaps the nearest Shaw came to writing what is apparently art for art’s sake in the theatre. The mood is celestially light – until the ominous ending in black darkness.
This eugenic experiment profoundly agitates the rest of the world. As their name suggests, the Unexpected Isles are islands of relativity, and the theory of relative values once formulated in Poe’s Eureka and now perfected by Einstein, is violently opposed by the fundamentalist forces of the contending mainlands. The simpleton learns what Shaw himself has learnt from his early search for love. ‘It is a terrible thing to be loved,’ he says. ‘...Nothing human is good enough to be loved.’
With Act II comes Judgment Day, but it is ‘hardly what we were led to expect’. The Angel, who has some difficulty in flying, apologizes: ‘I am afraid you will find it very dull.’ Judgment turns out to be the valuation of what the Young Woman and the clerk had discussed in the Emigration office: ‘Dispensables and indispensables’. Those who wish to emigrate to God’s Empire must be of value to the future. Others, the Angel offhandedly remarks, ‘will simply disappear’. It is Surrealpolitik.
The simpleton finally learns what Shaw wants his audience to learn: that we create a fool’s paradise by falling in love with our ideals. The quartet of exquisite superchildren, who recall the puppets created by the fanatical scientist Pygmalion in Back to Methuselah, have been the illusory ideals of Love, Pride, Heroism and Empire. Maya is love itself, the emanation of Shaw’s young actress ‘Mollytompkins’ on her enchanted Isola, and the apparition created by the simpleton’s inexpressible longing. ‘I held Maya in my arms. She promised to endure for ever; and suddenly there was nothing in my arms.’ When the simpleton ceases to believe in them, these ideals vanish so completely that no one can remember their names or even how many of them there seemed to be. The simpleton, too, vanishes back into his real self, an apprehensive clergyman nicknamed Iddy who, released from the island spell, will go homing back to England.
The world advances to the foreground of the play at its conclusion. ‘There is no Country of the Expected. The Unexpected Isles are the whole world.’ It is a world of miracles but not of ideological Utopias and Millennia. ‘We are not here to fulfil prophecies and fit ourselves into puzzles,’ says Prola. The heaven on earth that Shaw has raised at the beginning has dissolved at the end but there is no despair. Left alone on stage Pra and Prola unite in a hymn to unexpectedness: ‘Let it come.’
The Simpleton is the deepest and happiest of Shaw’s fantasies, ‘openly oriental, hieratic and insane’ as he called it himself. This magical gathering on an island, with its dreams and illusions, and its departure to the real world after the political lessons have been delivered, is reminiscent of The Tempest.
Yet though there were plenty of literary signposts in these Unexpected Isles (to Coleridge, W. S. Gilbert, Goethe, Voltaire, and the Book of Revelation among others), though it drew on the prodigious literature of Utopias as well as on those romances and adventures which had taught Shaw how to dream as a boy, and though there were connections also with the popular Oriental extravaganzas that had played in Dublin and London theatres during the late nineteenth century, as well as with the fabulous Chu-Chin-Chow in the Great War, drama critics reacted to The Simpleton as if it were like nothing else.
Part of this confusion arose from the publication of Shaw’s disconcerting Preface. But there were other difficulties too. Some of the sexual scenes shocked American audiences ‘even in these days of theatrical improprieties’. In Austria, the play’s strange divinities and eugenic impurities worried the censors, and it was banned. In Germany, where audiences burst spontaneously into cheering at such statements as Vashti’s ‘Obedience is freedom from the intolerable fatigue of thought’, the Nazi newspaper Hamburger Tageblatt commented that ‘the applause of those eternally behind the times neither surprised nor frightened us... And just as little can Shaw upset us.’
But he had upset Stanbrook Abbey. Plainly the play was tinged with heresy. Sometimes Sister Laurentia wondered whether Brother Bernard really knew the difference between Truth and Error; then she would recollect that of course he must do. She had instructed him herself. So when his own Day of Judgment came round ‘you will not be able to plead ignorance as the excuse of the evil that your books may do,’ she warned him. ‘I wish we could take Laurentia to the east,’ Shaw confided to Sydney Cockerell, ‘and make her pray in all the Divine Mother’s temples.’
Shaw wished he could take all the directors and designers of his play to the East. In the West, the confidence of theatre directors was to be long undermined by Edmund Wilson’s influential judgement, delivered in the late 1930s: ‘The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles is the only play of the author’s which has ever struck me as silly.’ It is silly; but in such ‘silliness’, though it may be traced to a psychological weakness, lies Shaw’s genius. ‘Why don’t you do “The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles”?’ he asked William Armstrong at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre in 1937. ‘It is a lovely play; and you can let yourself go on the production.’ But repertory theatres had settled into a routine of some dozen Shavian comedies, histories and pleasant plays.
*
Early in 1917, while joy-riding in France, Shaw had filled his ‘last evening stretch of the journey by inventing a play on the Rodin theme of The Burgesses of Calais, which,’ he told readers of the Daily Chronicle, ‘like the play about the Rheims Virgin, I have never written down and perhaps never will’. What Quicherat’s Procès supplied for his Saint Joan, Froissart’s Chronicles now provided for The Six of Calais. In Froissart’s story, Edward III agreed to lift the eleven-month Siege of Calais by the English in 1347 on condition that six starving hostages surrendered themselves to be hanged, wearing sackcloth and halters and carrying the keys of the town. Rodin’s sculpture group (a duplicate of which stands at the Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster) ‘commemorates the bravery and selflessness – and misery – of the six burgesses who submitted themselves to Edward’s humiliating conditions,’ wrote Stanley Weintraub, ‘and immortalizes the wretched men, half-naked and wearing halters at the moment of their surrender’.
But Froissart was an ‘absurd old snob’ and had ‘got it all wrong’. Rodin had cast one of the burghers in an attitude that suggested a diehard even more extreme than the King. All that remained for Shaw to do was ‘to correct Froissart’s follies and translate Rodin into words’. In his comic-strip version of history, the mulish burgher and the donkey of a King (‘Neddy’) confront each other, sense an animal bond between them; and the play ends with a bray of hilarious laughter in which everyone joins.
He wanted to create a nursery world where cruelties arose, not from evil, but from the whims and reflexes of bored and frightened children. Like an imaginary entry in a child’s encyclopaedia, complete with a King from A. A. Milne, this painless lesson shows us that the first step towards maturity is to cease playing at being adults and admit our childhood status.
*
‘I was like a princess in a fairy tale,’ exclaims Shaw’s athletic millionairess, Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga. In a reversal of Portia’s test from The Merchant of Venice, Epifania’s late father, ‘the greatest man in the world’, had made her promise that whenever a man proposed marriage to her, she was to ‘give him one hundred and fifty pounds, and tell him that if within six months he had turned that hundred and fifty pounds into fifty thousand, I was his’. Epifania has been led into an unsatisfactory marriage with a magnificent empty-headed sportsman, Alastair Fitzfassenden, who won her by a mixture of pure luck and criminal ‘kiting’ – thieves’ slang for a system of speedily raising money on false credit (later to be recycled from Shaw’s play into Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses).
In Act I Epifania is making her will before committing suicide. She recounts this story to her solicitor whose office becomes filled with the dramatis personae – her estranged husband and his demure girlfriend as well as Epifania’s own bland admirer – while the smart young solicitor vainly attempts to take instructions. His attitude to these clients is Shaw’s attitude to the world: an incredulous striving to discover what advice he should give.
In the second act, which takes place that evening at a dismal riverside inn, the Pig and Whistle, Epifania throws her parasitical admirer over (over her shoulder, downstairs, and into hospital) and sets her cap at a serious-looking, middle-aged Egyptian doctor who keeps a clinic for penniless Mahometan refugees. He has made his mother a solemn financial promise that forms the counterpart to Epifania’s vow to her father. So a contract is struck between them: Epifania, ‘the plutocrat of plutocrats’, sets out to live for six months on his 35 shillings, while the doctor resigns himself to losing her £150.
Shaw’s fairy-tale is a treasure hunt which begins next morning at a basement sweatshop along the Commercial Road where Epifania sets out to remake her fortune. ‘The sweater and his wife speak Whitechapel Cockney,’ Shaw wrote to the producer Matthew Forsyth in 1936. ‘...There is not a gleam of fun in these two poor devils.’ This scene is unique in Shaw’s plays and at the end, when Epifania has used her managerial genius to take over the business, the stupefied sweater rubs his eyes. ‘It seems to me like a sort of dream,’ he says – and we are about to re-enter Shaw’s dream world.
His Cinderella soon wins her Egyptian Prince. Like the miller’s daughter, she has learnt Rumpelstiltskin’s secret of how to spin straw into gold; like King Midas she can turn everything, even her emotions, into money. Beginning as a scullery maid at the Pig and Whistle, Epifania has transformed the place within five months into an attractive riverside inn and appointed herself its new proprietor. ‘It was cruel for us; but we couldnt deny that she was always right,’ acknowledges the son of the previous owner, who is now its manager. ‘...My father had a stroke and wont last long, I’m afraid. And my mother has gone a bit silly. Still, it was best for them; and they have all the comforts they care for.’
As in the first act, the characters assemble on stage round Epifania. The Egyptian doctor has given away his £150 to a widow whose husband had omitted to patent a successful invention – but this is interpreted by Epifania as a profitable retrospective investment, which meets her father’s stipulation (and provides a nice example of Shaw’s belief that logic is merely a device for getting what you want). The doctor too gets what he wants. He has fallen in love with Epifania’s pulse ‘like a slow sledge hammer... it is a pulse in a hundred thousand.’ The play ends with the solicitor finally taking instructions.
Epifania is a monetarist heroine and the genius of capitalism. She dominates the play much as Undershaft dominated the action of Major Barbara. Shaw had been forced to rework the last act of Major Barbara and, for similar reasons, he offered a highly implausible alternative ending to The Millionairess. Here the happy couple contemplate going to Russia but decide instead to ‘make the British Empire a Soviet republic’. Shaw was following the advice he had fathered on Henry James over his play The Saloon, as well as responding to those Marxist critics who ‘since virtually the beginning of his career,’ the critic Bernard Dukore wrote, had been urging him to ‘provide an upbeat ending’. In Shaw’s version for ‘countries with Communist sympathies’, Epifania’s assets (not her life) will be liquidated, and her abilities converted into worthwhile social and political power. In this never-performed alternative Shaw abandons the last illusion of reality and floats his make-believe like a fragile soap-bubble in the air – without trying to satisfy his reader’s credulity or appease his scepticism.
Epifania is an amalgam of every powerful woman Shaw had known. Though the cocks may crow, it is the hens that lay the eggs. ‘People will say you are the millionairess,’ he had written to Nancy Astor,’ – an awful, impossible woman.’ The short third act in the Commercial Road uses some of Beatrice Webb’s experiences in a tailor’s sweatshop in London’s East End; and the title itself is a reference to his ironic description of Charlotte at the time of their courtship and marriage – ‘my Irish millionairess’.
Shaw’s attitude to this superwoman is conveyed by his Egyptian doctor: ‘You are a terrible woman; but I love your pulse.’ Here is the irresistible beat of the Life Force reduced by capitalism to the rhythmic rise and fall of market forces. ‘I have to take the world as I find it,’ Epifania claims. To which the doctor replies: ‘The wrath of Allah shall overtake those who leave the world no better than they found it.’ In The Millionairess a great princess in prison lies. ‘She has no sense of humor,’ Shaw told Edith Evans. ‘Except the solicitor, who is mildly amused at the follies of the others, everyone in the play is intensely in earnest.’ Her tragedy lies both in the dissipation of her natural powers into pointless money-making and also in the fortress-like personality she shares with Shaw’s mother which bars emotional relationships. G.B.S. knew her tragedy well. She is a person ‘that no one can live with’.
‘What makes the play rabidly distasteful is Shaw’s patent admiration for the eroticism of wealth and power,’ wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian after a revival of the play in 1988. This is much the same distaste felt by Beatrice Webb when she read the play in 1935 and saw in it a representation of her friend’s ‘admiration of what is forceful, however ugly and silly’. Unlike Shylock, humiliated at the end of The Merchant of Venice, or Volpone cast in irons at the end of Jonson’s comedy, Epifania begins on the verge of suicide and ends triumphant.
‘My third manner is going to be more trying than my second,’ Shaw had predicted in a letter to J. C. Squire after the Great War; ‘but then third manners always are.’ His digressions and lapses into buffoonery had grown more frequent, his flights from reality more extreme. ‘I was always in the classic tradition,’ he explained. These plays depend for their effects upon the gargantuan acting tradition he had witnessed as a boy in nineteenth-century melodramas and music-hall entertainments. With their emphasis on vocal contrast, they all bear the marks of his musical knowledge. ‘Opera taught me to shape my plays into recitatives, arias, duets, trios, ensemble finales, and bravura pieces,’ he was to write towards the end of his life, ‘to display the technical accomplishments of the executants.’
The Millionairess seemed an unlucky play for Shaw, but he continued to keep his eye out for the ‘very vigorous actress’ who could take on Epifania. ‘The part requires just such a personality as Miss [Katharine] Hepburn,’ he wrote to Lawrence Langner in 1940. ‘Has she ever read the play?’ In fact she had read it but decided she did not like it enough; then she read it again ten years later and persuaded the Theatre Guild in New York and Binkie Beaumont of Tennant Productions in London to produce it with her in the title role. Shaw had been dead for two years but, just as he ‘had prophesied, Hepburn was superb in the part’, recalled Lawrence Langner. This was the last new Shaw production by the Theatre Guild in New York and it played to packed houses. In London, too, it was welcomed with enthusiastic notices by critics unfamiliar with such prodigious acting. A young critic, Kenneth Tynan, describing it as ‘that terrible hybrid, a didactic farce... written in the twilight of a civilization and of its author’s life’, and believing the part of Epifania to be ‘nearly unactable’, found himself carried away.
‘Miss Hepburn took it, acted it, and found a triumph in it. She glittered like a bracelet thrown up at the sun; she was metallic, yet reminded us that metals shine and can also melt. Epifania clove to her, and she bestowed on the role a riotous elegance and a gift of tears... The Millionairess scores a bull’s-eye on the target of her talents... in her last long speech, a defence of marriage and all the risks it implies, an urchin quaver invades the determination of her voice and coaxes the heart.’
I cannot tell you the exact date of my death. It has not yet been settled.
Shaw to Hannen Swaffer (26 February 1938)
‘...I dropped dead on the 24th Nov,’ G.B.S. notified John Reith on 3 December 1934. The doctor had diagnosed a ‘not serious’ heart attack and Shaw slept continuously for almost three days and nights. It was ‘the greatest pity,’ he told his old friend Henry Salt ‘that I revived like Lazarus. I was literally tired to death.’
It was a matter of Shavian pride to be sending Maynard Keynes within a week of his attack what Virginia Woolf was to call ‘a long magnificently spry & juicy letter’ done in his most breathtaking style with ‘the whole of economics twiddled round on his finger’. Keynes, recognizing that ‘the old gentleman is weak and ill’, wondered why the great men of that generation went in for such stunts. Were these Shavian stage effects simply a box of cosmetics for colouring up morale as he grew out of date, or some acoustical gesture for catching the ear of the young? In the mid-1920s Virginia Woolf had sighed over her teenage nephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, for believing ‘Bernard Shaw greater than Shakespeare’. By the mid-1930s Keynes was showing an ‘unmitigated contempt,’ Beatrice Webb noticed, ‘for the Communist undergraduates’.
Beatrice and Sidney went up to London in the second week of January 1935 and found G.B.S. much recovered. But Charlotte lay ill in bed. Three doctors attended her, with a day nurse, a night nurse and a maid – ‘yet she lives!’ Shaw rejoiced. What would have happened to her had he died? ‘The two old couples are each other’s oldest friends,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary, ‘and we all dread the death of anyone of the quartet, and would feel responsible for the remaining partner.’
From the middle of the 1930s onwards Shaw struggled to reduce his volume of work. ‘I Have Retired,’ he insisted during a speech in the summer of 1936 at the People’s Theatre, Newcastle. He did retire from the drudgery of directing his plays, but the bibliography of his writings lists thirty-seven contributions to the press that year; fifty-five in 1937; fifty-nine in 1938; and sixty-three in 1939. ‘We cant take G.B.S. away from all his business & papers & interviews & usual occupations,’ Charlotte admitted to Nancy Astor.
But how well was he writing? ‘Give him a good situation, like Edward VIII’s abdication, or the coronation of George VI, and his literary response is brilliant and wise, witty and worthwhile,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary. But she could not endure his late plays with all their slapstick and knockabout. Without this daily task of playwriting his life would be meaningless. ‘There is no remedy for the defects of old age,’ Beatrice concluded, ‘ – whether they take the form of continuous discomfort or poor quality of output – or both.’
But sometimes G.B.S. seemed to have found a remedy. The actress Irene Hentschel saw him entering the Globe Theatre in London at the end of 1936 ‘with the vigour of a hurricane’. Virginia Woolf too marvelled at his wires, his spring. ‘What an efficient, adept, trained arch & darter!’ she exclaimed. ‘...And the hands flung out in gesture: he has the power to make the world his shape.’ Visiting him in Whitehall Court, the Irish writer John Stewart Collis noticed how ‘easy and ungrand’ his manner still was. But he had grown terribly thin, his body supporting a white-bearded head ‘like a long stem holding up a large flower’. Another Irish writer, the poet Brendan O’Byrne, watched him advancing along Pall Mall
Before the other as if he could – if he wished – so
Bestride the earth, his stout ash walking-stick
Striking the pavement before him as if
To teach it a lesson.’
Recently come over from Dublin and sleeping rough in the London streets, the young man
‘had a hat I remember, and that
Is most important, for the whole point of this story is
That I raised my hat to Bernard Shaw, and he
Raised his hat to me.’
In such ways, for as long as possible, G.B.S. kept in touch with his own youth. ‘But alas! we are old.’ Old age brought the Shaws renewed problems. G.B.S. reckoned that ‘the only way I can keep Charlotte up at present is by deciding that we are NOT going to do something’. Even so, she still fretted over his work and her own weakening ability to interrupt it. Each summer they would move to a country town hotel, usually by the sea, and declare themselves the better for it. ‘We sleep like anything...’
When Beatrice had fallen ill earlier in the 1930s, Shaw arranged for £1,000 (equivalent to £29,000 in 1997) to be credited to Sidney’s account at the Soviet Bank in London. ‘We need, I think, have no scruple in accepting this most generous gift from my oldest friend,’ Sidney reassured Beatrice who was then in a nursing home. In Sidney’s letter to Shaw himself there is an unusual tremor of emotion. ‘I am overwhelmed... It comes most timely to remove our anxieties [and]... as an immense relief to me,’ he wrote. The Webbs and the Shaws continued their annual visits to each other’s houses through most of the 1930s. In the summer of 1937 the Shaws went to Passfield and G.B.S. helped the Webbs with the proofs of their revised edition of Soviet Communism while Sidney helped the Shaws to redraft their wills. ‘So continues the old unbroken comradeship in work, started forty-five years ago, between GBS and the Webbs,’ observed Beatrice.
Though these were affectionate meetings, each one seemed to mark another stage on a downward journey. Early in the New Year, a few days after Beatrice’s eightieth birthday, Sidney had a stroke. ‘The inevitable has come,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary. ‘...So there he is lying in the bed... He will have care and love so long as I am strong enough to give it.’ ‘Sidney has given us rather a fright,’ Shaw wrote to her, ‘...we shouldnt do such things... we should arrange to die quietly in our beds of heart failure.’
Though he was able to read and follow conversations, Sidney remained a semi-invalid at Passfield, partially paralysed and with his speech impaired. ‘I suppose it is best for you to be alone at Passfield with nobody to bother you, except your invalid,’ Shaw wrote to Beatrice; ‘but somehow it does not feel that way to us: the impulse to stand by is so strong that it needs an exercise of conscious reasoning to stifle it.’
‘I dare say it’s time for all us nineteenth century writers to clear out,’ he was reported as saying when he learnt of Maxim Gorki’s death. ‘You’d better prepare my obituary,’ he instructed the New York Times. In May 1938, he suddenly fainted under Charlotte’s eyes. Sidney managed to send him one of his first short letters since his own illness. ‘What a long life you and I have had, and done so much in it, with the aid of wifes!’ But Charlotte found it almost impossible to aid him. He lay on a sofa claiming that he was curing himself by prolonged relaxation. ‘I nearly went mad!’ Charlotte protested.
He was diagnosed as suffering from pernicious anaemia. Until recently the treatment had been ‘swallowing pounds of raw liver’, as Gilbert Murray confirmed, ‘but I think perhaps death is preferable to that’. A new remedy consisted of fifteen monthly injections of liver extract which he allowed the doctors ‘to squirt’ into ‘my lumbar regions’. Almost at once the Daily Express reported ‘G.B.S. Takes Meat’. ‘I do not,’ he answered, and he went on to reassure the Vegetarian News that ‘My diet remains unchanged.’ But he was not entirely happy. The liver extract had apparently set up a rejuvenated supply of red corpuscles, but ‘my own view is that I am by nature a white-blooded man,’ he confided to Henry Salt.
The weapons in Shaw’s armoury were still bright from the last century and he took out all the old and glittering arguments. But the battleground was changing and he found himself having to combat not only Charlotte’s anxieties and the doctors’ conventionalities, but also the new militancy of vegetarians themselves. They bombarded him with queries and complaints. ‘Poor G.B.S. just returned from death’s door,’ wrote Charlotte, ‘...forced to write letter after letter when he could hardly hold the pen.’
He eventually replaced the liver injections with tiny grains, clean and tasteless, of a naturist’s concoction called Hepamalt. ‘Of this I have consumed tons to please the doctors and redden my blood counts, without as far as I can make out, producing any effect whatever,’ he told Kathleen Kennet several years later. ‘But the anaemia and all its symptoms are gone. The liver gets the credit, though I suspect I have cured myself. I believe in the Nature Cure.’
By the end of January 1939 G.B.S. was calling for research into vegetable hormones and developing a theory of protein poisoning which he later added to a new Vegetarian Diet postcard. But this was not good enough for vegetarian fundamentalists. Shaw was stung by their hostility. ‘Liver extract you would take if you developed pernicious anaemia,’ he answered one subscriber to the American Vegetarian. ‘If you were diabetic you would take insulin. If you had edema you would take thyroid. You may think you wouldn’t; but you would if your diet failed to cure you. You would try any of the gland extracts, the mineral drugs, the so-called vaccines, if it were that or your death.’
Shaw’s anger was partly political. He believed that his own arguments were more honest than the claims of disease-free longevity made by radical vegetarians, and he felt convinced he was the better public advocate for vegetarianism. But privately he was in sympathy with some of their views. Though he was to claim that ‘I had no more scruple about trying it [liver extract] than I have eggs and butter’, the truth was that he had felt ‘intense disgust’ at being filled with such ‘loathsome stuff’. He had made the unpleasant discovery that ‘modern hormones have been arrived at by thousands of experiments on dogs, and that many of them are extracted from unappetizing materials which,’ he wrote to Henry Salt, ‘I shall not nauseate you by particularizing’. He was greatly relieved when he could bring ‘this repulsive story’ to an end and replace the hormones with yeast. His response to militant vegetarians was to seek an official assurance early in the Second World War that, when rationing began, special provision would be made for them. It was a fighting diet. ‘Vegetarians are the most ferocious class we have; and any underfeeding of them would produce a reduction of our national fighting spirit out of all proportion to their numbers.’
Charlotte was the reason why Shaw consented to live. ‘My most distressing complaint is Anorexia, or dislike of food,’ he told Henry Salt: ‘...if I were not a married man and could do as I pleased, [I] would not lift a finger to survive.’ This was how Beatrice felt about Sidney. If he died, ‘I would gladly sleep and rise no more,’ she had written. But since his illness she slept less, rose earlier, and felt a greater stimulus to keep going. Visiting the Shaws during G.B.S.’s illness she had found him a ‘white-skinned shadow’ with Charlotte ‘bending over him with motherly affection’. He was so delighted to see her that they ‘actually embraced, and for the first time I kissed GBS!’
The war was to make travelling difficult, but in the early summer of 1940 Sidney prevailed on Beatrice to take him up to London for one last meeting with G.B.S. and Charlotte. ‘Of the four I think I am the most willing to sink into nothingness and GBS least so,’ Beatrice observed. If she felt resentment, it was quickly dissolved, as it always had been, by his admiration for Sidney and his wonderful kindness to them both. She felt more warmly now towards Charlotte too. Her stamina and loyalty were extraordinary. At lunch they spoke about politics which for fifty years had been the fabric of their friendship. ‘They were delightfully affectionate,’ Beatrice wrote. ‘Why have we lived so long,’ Shaw asked her. ‘One war was enough.’
*
As his life lengthened so the Lives continued to multiply around it. Frank Harris’s ‘unauthorized biography’ had been published in Britain in 1931, the year before Archibald Henderson’s authorized Playboy and Prophet came out in the United States. These books, largely ghosted by G.B.S. himself and supporting in different ways his commitment to socialism, represent the aspects of his personality and career he was prepared to make visible to the public. But the public was not wholly satisfied and by the mid-1930s St John Ervine was preparing to show them how Harris and Henderson should have done it.
Shaw tried to head him off. He had known Ervine for twenty years and recognized him to be an aggressively independent man-of-letters. He was less likely to allow his book to be taken over and rewritten than Henderson had been; and he could not be humorously disparaged like Harris. ‘Dont,’ Shaw advised him. But Ervine was obstinate: ‘I began to write it.’ So Shaw was obliged to redouble his disparagement. He gave Ervine particulars as to why he was quite the wrong sort of chap. But as he began warming to this exposition of his friend’s shortcomings, so he started to dig out some of the essential material Ervine needed for his book. It took Shaw until 1942 to abort this biography; and it took St John Ervine until 1956 to resurrect it for publication with a Foreword revealing how G.B.S. had ‘hoped that I would one day finish what I had begun’.
Shaw’s method of postponing this biography until after his death was peculiarly exasperating to Ervine. He made absolutely certain that the market was glutted by publishing at the Gregynog Press an autobiographical miscellany misleadingly entitled Shaw Gives Himself Away and then by helping into print another biography which he felt more confident of controlling: the celebrated Life by Hesketh Pearson.
Pearson, like Ervine, had known Shaw for many years. Before taking up biography he had been an actor and created the part of Metellus in the first production of Androcles and the Lion. His Lives of Hazlitt, Labouchère, Tom Paine and Gilbert and Sullivan were establishing him as the most popular British biographer of the 1930s. But he cared little for Lenin and Marx, and hinted that he would rather die than read Das Kapital.
Why then did Shaw prefer Pearson to Ervine? ‘You will understand the Irish side of me better than anybody who is not Irish,’ St John Ervine was later to quote Shaw as saying to him. But perhaps he did not want the Irish side of him ‘understood’: Demetrius O’Bolger’s ‘understanding’ of his Irish years was a daunting precedent. Shaw needed to dissolve his Irish past into international socialism. Pearson would cover his politics skimpily and let G.B.S. augment it with his own version. He was in the line of previous biographers: G. K. Chesterton had written a friendly Introduction to his Life of Sydney Smith; Frank Harris had been his youthful literary hero. So it was really the old game all over again and a good way, in the last decade of Shaw’s life, of forestalling any other game.
He tested his biographer with the customary shot across the bows and when in 1938 Pearson sent him a proposal for his book, replied: ‘I shall dissuade you personally any time you like to see me.’ Pearson called at Whitehall Court that autumn and over a long conversation, he tells us, demolished Shaw’s innumerable objections. ‘So you may go ahead with my blessing,’ Shaw wrote to him at the beginning of December. ‘There is no one else in the field’ – which effectively disposed of St John Ervine.
Shaw liked Pearson. He liked his lack of formal education, his cheerfulness, his robust opinions – all Shavian attributes. ‘It is far better to know nothing like me,’ Pearson told him, ‘than to know everything and get it all wrong like you.’ Here was a man with whom Shaw could work. ‘I find your company both restful and invigorating,’ he wrote.
He was ‘increasingly generous with help and advice,’ Pearson remembered. But Charlotte felt uneasy. She thought Pearson was rather too assertively good-looking and suspected him of being a ‘cad’. G.B.S. however assured her she would be omitted from the book. ‘The biography is the usual thing,’ he notified Beatrice Webb. ‘...As he and I are old acquaintances since the days of Frank Harris I have promised to tell him anything he wants to know, and to recommend him to you, which I do accordingly, as anything is better than to leave biographers to their imagination and to press gossip.’
With this breezy assistance Pearson sailed along fast. ‘My wife did most of the research work... and I took about a year to write it.’ At the end of 1939 he had pretty well completed it but before sending off his typescript to the publisher he enquired whether Shaw would care to glance at it.
Over the next year Blanche Patch would come across chapters strewn all over the place as Shaw went to work altering, amplifying, editing and embellishing the biography. This revision of Pearson’s text ‘took me rather longer than writing the book myself,’ he told Beatrice Webb who noted in her diary: ‘G.B.S. insisted on correcting it – much to H.P.’s disgust.’
At first the corrections were fairly light and made in pencil. But as Shaw grew more interested in his Life so he turned to ink, using (as with Archibald Henderson) red ink for unpublishable outbursts: ‘This is all poppycock... You jumping idiot.’ Pearson had derived his technique as a biographer from his earlier career on the stage. To some degree he acted his characters on the page. Shaw’s method of ghostwriting his Lives involved borrowing something of the character of his biographer. As Pearson’s ‘uninvited collaborator’, he was faced with an intriguing linguistic exercise of impersonating someone who was Pearsonifying him. He saw in Pearson’s stage career an opportunity to dramatize himself. He placed Charlotte out of bounds, revised the Fabian chapters heavily, and in two other areas suppressed or contradicted what Pearson had written.
‘I came to the conclusion that the one event in his personal life that had brought him regret almost amounting to sorrow was his estrangement from Granville Barker,’ Pearson recorded. ‘...This break in their friendship was his most keenly felt loss... it was the only important matter about which he asked me to be reticent.’
But there was another important matter on which G.B.S. overrode Pearson. This was the chapter entitled ‘Retreat to Moscow’. In the original typescript Pearson had distanced himself from Shaw’s Stalinism, given an ironic description largely based on Nancy Astor’s evidence of their ‘Russian elopement’, and traced a vein of insensitivity to suffering in Shaw’s character. Here, momentarily, was a man who shifted the centre of gravity from the individual to the state, filled his emptiness with facts, and let collectivism come like a curtain between himself and reality. ‘He praised and upheld the Russian dictatorship, which suppressed free speech, murdered its political opponents, starved its recalcitrant peasants to death,’ Pearson wrote.
To Shaw’s mind the danger of Stalin and the Russian Revolution to Britain was similar to the danger of Napoleon and the French Revolution at the beginning of the previous century. Reacting to bloodshed that had stained originally noble causes, the British became more insular, resistant to all experimentation and change. As Hazlitt and Shelley held to their vision of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, so Shaw clung to his belief in pure communism as the dayspring of a new era. Affecting less emotion than he felt, he treated Soviet atrocities as unnecessary boulders stopping the passage of fresh ideas in Britain, and simply rolled them away.
Shaw condensed Pearson’s objections into a single paragraph and allowed a transitional passage ending with the sentence: ‘But we must make an effort to see what happened from his own angle.’ Then he eliminated the rest of Pearson’s account and substituted more than 4,000 words of his own, painting an exhilarating picture of the Soviet political landscape. ‘To Shaw it was better than he expected, and full of novelty and promise,’ he wrote.
By the end he had given so much of what he called his ‘unique private history’ to the book that Pearson suggested that his contributions should be shown in the text between square brackets or by indentation. But Shaw was horrified at the thought of his collaboration being exposed. His reply to Pearson is a revealing description of his semi-autobiographical technique. ‘Not on your life, Hesketh,’ he wrote. ‘What I have written I have written in your character, not in my own.
‘As an autobiographer I should have written quite differently. There are things that you may quite properly say which would come less gracefully from me. I have carefully avoided altering your opinions except where you had not known the facts... But if a word is said to connect me with the authorship of the book or its first proposal or its commercial profits I shall be driven to the most desperate steps to disclaim it. It must appear as Harris’s book did... [and] I strongly advise you to do what I did in the Harris case. When the book is safely in print, take the copy and burn every scrap of it.’
In fact Pearson did not burn the typescript. It is now in the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin and betrays a similar quantity of rewriting to the Henderson proofs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But Pearson’s biography was far more entertaining than Henderson’s. To the end of his life Shaw would refer readers to this biography (‘there is nothing better than Hesketh Pearson’), using this recommendation as a deterrent to other potential biographers (‘they are the plagues of my life’) and as a protection against a third blockbuster from Henderson (‘Drop it... are there not other geniuses... much less written-to-rags than I?’). He felt so pleased by Pearson’s success that, having warned him never to reveal his co-authorship, he began speaking openly of his involvement. In Pearson’s own copy, under the biographer’s signature, Shaw added his own name: ‘Also his humble collaborator G. Bernard Shaw.’
These accursed films are complicating life beyond endurance.
Shaw to Trebitsch (28 April 1931)
When planning to launch the New Statesman before the war Shaw had written to Beatrice Webb: ‘I have no faith in the success of any sixpenny journal that cannot be bought by the casual railway traveller with the certainty that there will be something in it to while away an hour of his journey in a pleasant and amusing way.’ It was a casual railway traveller, searching Exeter railway station one weekend for a pleasant and amusing book, who went on to create the sixpenny paperback revolution of the 1930s. Allen Lane’s idea of mass-producing reprints of good contemporary writing in ‘strong paper covers’ and selling them for the price of ten cigarettes seemed to his cautious rivals a formula for bankruptcy. ‘The steady cheapening of books is in my opinion a great danger in the trade,’ the managing director of Chatto & Windus warned him at the end of 1934.
In several ways Lane was rather a Shavian character: leaving school at sixteen, pursuing his vision on Exeter railway station in opposition to all the experts, puzzling many employees with his superior claims to near-illiteracy, and rising to become (as the publishing historian Ian Norrie called him) ‘a man of action in the world of words’.
Shaw bought many of these early Penguins – the novels in their orange covers, biography in blue and detective fiction in green – and in August 1936 he wrote to Lane recommending his friend Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World. Lane replied that the book he really wanted was The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism. He offered G.B.S. the same terms as other Penguin authors and G.B.S. did not quibble: he was eager to be part of this new paperback movement. Having arranged for his paperback to be set by his Edinburgh printer, R. & R. Clark, ‘who is accustomed to my ways’, Shaw added two new chapters ‘dealing with events that have occurred since its first publication in 1928’, extended the title to The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, and drafted a note explaining that ‘the present edition is in fact a better bargain than the first edition was, though the price is so much more modest’.
The Intelligent Woman’s Guide, appearing in two pale blue volumes at sixpence each, heralded a parallel series of paperbacks called Pelicans. This was an even more radical enterprise than the Penguin list, breaking the convention of reprinting only books already published by other houses, and aiming to extend adult education by making works on politics, economics, the social sciences, literature, the natural sciences and the visual arts cheaply available to ‘the intelligent layman’. The Mysterious Universe by Sir James Jeans, The Inequality of Man by J. B. S. Haldane, Sigmund Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life and H. G. Wells’s A Short History of the World were among the early Pelican titles, as well as works by Julian Huxley, R. H. Tawney, the Fabian economist G. D. H. Cole and Beatrice Webb. The future of this ambitious list, to which Clement Attlee credited the Labour Party victory in 1945, was guaranteed by the success of Shaw’s two opening volumes in the summer of 1937.
This success also guaranteed his own future as a Penguin author which was to be celebrated on his ninetieth birthday by the ‘Shaw Million’ – simultaneous publication in Britain of ten titles in editions of 100,000 copies each. It was Allen Lane’s most risky speculation yet: ‘no venture which I have undertaken in thirty years of publishing has given me so much pleasure,’ he later wrote. Nearly all the staff were involved in the project and they were in the office by eight o’clock on 26 July 1946. The first telephone call came from the manager of W. H. Smith’s in Baker Street. He had been surprised by the length of the bus queue that morning outside his shop. Surprise swelled to amazement as he realized that these were members of a rare – perhaps dying – species, the general reader, lining up for the Shaw Million. In six weeks the Shaw Million was sold out.
*
Shaw’s Penguins included ‘screen versions’ of Pygmalion and Major Barbara which were offshoots of his new career in the cinema. From the early years of the century he had loved silent films. He could not keep away from them. And the new motion picture companies could not keep away from G.B.S. The offers flowed in – from $50,000 for one play to $1 million early in 1920 for the rights to all his plays. He gave a variety of reasons for his refusals: that he was too old a dog to learn new tricks; that he had no wish to become a ‘dumb dramatist’; that films killed plays and ‘my plays are still alive’.
During the 1920s, films were suspected of being a threat to the work of novelists and playwrights in much the same way as photographers in the late nineteenth century had been seen as the enemies of Victorian painting. Shaw’s enthusiasm for films was a development of his interest in photography. He predicted that the cinema would be an invention of even more revolutionary significance than printing. Films told their stories to the illiterate as much as to the literate – ‘that is why the cinema is going to produce effects that all the cheap books in the world could never produce’. He foresaw a time when motion pictures would ‘form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct,’ he had written in 1914, ‘will be those of the film.’ One day pictures would be ‘brought to my home for me’ and it was in this direction, he told a journalist, ‘that you must look for the most important changes’.
His cat and mouse tactics with the movie moguls partly reflected his sense of a film world in transition. The screen’s silence had been ‘the only reason I did not permit the filming of my plays, because their greatest strength was in their dialogue’. Meanwhile he did not want to sell his rights and lose control of his property.
The day he had long awaited began with The Jazz Singer, shown in the United States by Warner Brothers in the fall of 1927. Shaw had already conducted a studio experiment that summer at the DeForest Phonofilm Company employing Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson to test five minutes of the Cathedral Scene from Saint Joan, and in the next two years he made several appearances himself on Movietone newsreels and in screen interviews. ‘I believe that acting and drama can be portrayed far more effectively as well as lucratively from the screen than from the stage,’ he wrote in 1930. Yet he hesitated, did not proceed with the filming of Saint Joan, and three years later turned instead to his one-act skit, How He Lied to Her Husband.
The choice was significant. This pièce d’occasion had originally been composed in 1904 as a curtain-raiser ‘to satirize those who took Candida to be a sentimental glorification of eroticism’ and now came to serve its turn again, illustrating Shaw’s contention that ‘the whole history of the “movies” showed that “sex-appeal” was a thing that could be neglected almost altogether’. The heroine of Shaw’s play is ‘a very ordinary South Kensington female of about 37’, and there are only two other people: her thick-necked City husband and a dreamy young admirer. The action, which revolves round a missing bundle of love poems (signifying the missing sex-appeal), takes place in a curtained room on the Cromwell Road and its shadowy simplicity reflects Shaw’s view of the technical limitations of British films in 1930.
The question Shaw was examining with the film version of How He Lied was whether the best use of the medium lay in recording a perfect production of a play for showing round the world. He chose Cecil Lewis, the wartime flying ace who had been so helpful with his wireless career, to direct it, and persuaded British International Pictures to accept this ‘absolutely unknown, untried man as director’. It was shot ‘without transpositions interpolations omissions or any alterations misrepresenting the Author whether for better or worse except such as the Author may consent to or himself suggest’ – a standard clause in Shaw’s later contracts. Cecil Lewis rehearsed the cast of three until they were word and action perfect, worked out some camera angles for the cameraman, and completed the film in four days. But it ‘was as much like a movie as a cow is like a pianola’. When it came to be shown in London in January 1931 The Times commented on ‘the folly of those who suppose that the right use, and the commercial use, of the talkie invention is direct transference from stage to screen’.
Shaw defended this trial film as part of his campaign against the ‘children’s picture book’ story-telling of Hollywood. The acting in Hollywood was good, the photography excellent and the expenditure one of the wonders of the world. But when it came to the script, Shaw liked to imagine, they called in the bell boy. ‘The bell boy’s vision of life is a continual arriving in motor-cars and going upstairs and disappearing through doors that immediately close and leave life a blank... 95 per cent of a film must consist of going up and down stairs and getting in and out of motor-cars... My plays do not depend on staircases for their interest.’
Shaw’s guerrilla warfare against the big Hollywood corporations and movie moguls is a reminder of his embattled days fighting the West End theatre managements and actor-managers of the Victorian stage. Both were happy to mutilate texts to suit their star performers. The dialogue of How He Lied was continuous, he pointed out, and the entire action took place in the same room.
‘The usual changes from New York to the Rocky Mountains, from Marseilles to the Sahara, from Mayfair to Monte Carlo, are replaced by changes from the piano to the sideboard, from the window to the door, from the hearth rug to the carpet. When the husband arrives he is not shewn paying his taxi, taking out his latchkey, hanging up his hat, and mounting the stairs. There is no time for that sort of baby padding when the action of a real play is hastening to its climax.’
Lewis’s next film with Shaw was Arms and the Man. Shaw had received an offer from Sam Goldwyn who ‘wants to cut the play down to forty minutes’. He trusted Lewis to make a full-length version, but the filming was a dismal experience. ‘We were a little like a pilotless ship,’ remembered Barry Jones who played Bluntschli. The actor cast in the part of Nicola, the manservant, died of a heart attack; and the prolonged attempts to recreate Bulgaria in North Wales were wonderfully unconvincing. In the end Lewis surrendered the film into the hands of what Shaw had called ‘the business staff’ who, no less philistine than their colleagues in the United States, cut it ineptly.
Working with Lewis’s scenario, Shaw had this time made a real attempt to adapt his play into a film. His alterations to the script show that he was beginning to develop a film technique, and had come to accept that, though the dramatic principles of stage and screen might be the same, the methods must differ. ‘The whole action of the play has to be confined to three scenes, two of them indoors,’ he wrote.
‘In the picture the battle is shewn, and the flight of the fugitive whom the heroine shelters. There is no pinning of the characters to one spot: they pass in and out of doors, upstairs and downstairs, into the gardens and across mountain country, with the freedom and variety impossible in the room with three walls which, however scene-painters may disguise it, is always the same old stage.’
This statement, contradicting what he had written after How He Lied, is Shaw’s commitment to future film-making. ‘My mind is always changing – it is not only a woman’s privilege,’ he said when asked in January 1933 to comment on his decision to allow RKO Studios in the United States to film The Devil’s Disciple starring John Barrymore. British films were hopeless because ‘they have no money,’ he wrote that April to Kenneth MacGowan, an associate producer at RKO, ‘and want to put in minutes (mostly wasted) where months are needed’.
The script by Lester Cohen arrived at Ayot St Lawrence in January 1934. A month later, Shaw called the deal off. Cohen’s script was beyond rescue. ‘I cannot be expected to lend a hand to my own murder.’
This episode left G.B.S. curiously stranded. ‘Hollywood is not within half a century of knowing how to handle my stuff,’ he wrote to Theresa Helburn, the executive director of the Theatre Guild. ‘...I contemplate the popular Hollywood productions in despair.’ But he did not despair of the future of films. His optimism soon appeared justified. By the summer of 1934 he was considering proposals from both Paris and Berlin for the filming of Pygmalion. In February 1935 he signed an agreement with Eberhard Klagemann, head of a Berlin film company. Helping Trebitsch was one of his incentives. He bought Trebitsch’s half-share in the German language rights of Pygmalion, insisted that Klagemann should use his own screenplay and arranged that Trebitsch be employed to translate it.
The German film of Pygmalion (first shown in Berlin in September 1935) and the Dutch Pygmalion (first shown in Amsterdam in March 1937) were commercially quite successful: but Shaw loathed them. ‘I don’t know what they did with my scenario, but they certainly did not use it for the film,’ he said after seeing the German version at the beginning of 1936. In fact Shaw was not credited with the screenplay and Trebitsch not listed as translator.
Almost immediately after finishing the Pygmalion script, Shaw had started on one of Saint Joan. At the end of November 1934 he handed it to the Viennese actress Elizabeth Bergner who had created the role of Joan ten years earlier in Max Reinhardt’s Berlin production. Bergner had recently married the Hungarian producer-director Paul Czinner who planned to form a syndicate including Twentieth Century-Fox and produce the film of Saint Joan starring his wife. But Czinner, who professed himself delighted with this screenplay, then sent it without consulting G.B.S. to the Scottish dramatist James Bridie for rewriting; and Bridie contacted Shaw to ascertain whether this was being done with his approval. The cat was out of the bag.
Worried that Twentieth Century-Fox would not put up money if there was a risk of Saint Joan being subjected to a Catholic boycott, Czinner had also submitted Shaw’s scenario to a newly created organization at the Vatican, called Catholic Action, which monitored the lay activities of the Church. Their report condemned the film as ‘a satire against Church and State’, and an ‘attack to the R.C.C.’ by the ‘mocking Irishman’. Unless the film script was substantially altered, the film would be met by a Catholic veto.
Shaw knew that during the Depression film speculators in the United States traded in near-pornography and that there had been a counterattack from such organizations as the Legion of Decency. To regain control of their industry, American movie producers formed a Production Code Administration in 1934 which was already leading to what Shaw called ‘an epidemic of censorships’. He saw Hollywood as being in a pitiable condition, and urged film corporations in the United States to ‘pluck up enough courage and public spirit to insist on the control of film morality being made a federal matter, independent of prudes, of parochial busy-bodies, and doctrinaire enemies of the theatre as such’.
‘I have now cried off the film, and excommunicated Czinner with bell, book, and candle,’ Shaw informed James Bridie in the summer of 1935. How long would he have to wait for an independent director who would carry his films to victory over these ‘goddams’ of Hollywood?
*
After more than fifteen years with G.B.S., Blanche Patch was an expert at fobbing off pests. The mail bulged with petitions from burglars, chemists, coffin makers, sailors, schoolboys, all of them ‘howling to be answered’; and Miss Patch typed out the answers.
Those who wanted money were tiresome. They would demand anything from £2 to £20,000 and for all sorts of far-flung reasons: to save fifteen repertory theatres; help thousands of refugees; marry off an Indian gentleman’s six daughters. It vexed Miss Patch to see the amounts of money her employer simply handed away – often, she thought, to the most undeserving. Such people, ‘greedy for a flicker from the flame’, were trying to ‘poach on his reputation’. At a distance he seemed all things to all people, a father- and eventually a grandfather-confessor to the whole world.
Everyone turned to him: men who were thinking of entering the priesthood or taking up carpentry; women wondering whether to risk a divorce or send their daughters on the stage; children who wanted to name a pig or hedgehog after him. There were explorers needing radio apparatus for a whaling expedition; importers eager to bring a frost-resistant potato into Britain; inventors seeking Shaw’s endorsement to promote schemes for causing clouds to dissolve and distilled water to consolidate into stone, or his testimonial to prevent cures for cancer, lunacy and hallucinations being stolen.
‘I believe you have always had a warm corner in your heart for women and fanatics,’ wrote a woman. ‘I am a non-entity, you an entity,’ wrote a man. G.B.S. was peculiarly the saint of the isolated, the odd, drowning women, desperate men – ‘a doctor of the human soul,’ one correspondent called him. Like Sherlock Holmes, he had a reputation for solving people’s problems. They wrote to enquire where they should live, what they should do in retirement, how they should get out of jail. A number of people on the verge of murder or suicide tried him as their penultimate resort. ‘I feel a little lonely,’ admitted a twenty-one-year-old girl from New York, ‘...I love you very dearly.’ ‘I am rather stout and ugly,’ explained a boy in South Africa, ‘...how should I go about getting friends.’ ‘I think your patronage was the greatest pleasure my poor father ever had,’ claimed the son of a Colchester newsagent after his father’s death.
‘Irresponsible nonsense had an attraction for Shaw,’ Miss Patch observed, ‘which would lure him into correspondence of the most futile sort.’ She found herself conveying his views on world slaughter, the fourth dimension, the existence of fairies. ‘Why are you silent on public affairs?’ demanded one man. That was a tricky one to answer. So was the woman who wrote regarding the forceps inside her, and the London busman who objected to Shaw’s lack of interest in King George V and threatened to run him over with his bus.
Though it was all water off a duck’s back to Miss Patch, much of what she fingered on to the paper and sealed into envelopes had that mixture of rare sense and inspired nonsense the world had learnt to call Shavian. A cheque for £400 to a poet whose clothes had gone up in smoke was accompanied by a note explaining how much Shaw disliked his poems. Someone in search of shock therapy was recommended to shave her head, put on a white wig and stand in front of a mirror. One fan who wanted a lock of his hair was advised to ‘cut a wisp off the nearest white dog’. A family called Shaw who had christened their son George Bernard was accused of perpetrating a ‘shocking outrage on a defenceless infant’.
Some of Miss Patch’s typed replies were to gain fame. When he was asked ‘Have we Lost Faith?’, she sent back: ‘Certainly not, but we have transferred it from God to the General Medical Council.’ When G.B.S. came across one of his works in a second-hand bookshop with his handwritten inscription on the flyleaf, Miss Patch was able to pack it up carrying a Shavian postscript – ‘With the author’s renewed compliments. G.B.S.’ — and post it back to the original dedicatee. She rather relished some of their point-blank rebuffs. To a hostess who sent a card stating that on a certain day she would be ‘At Home’, the succinct reply had been: ‘So will G. Bernard Shaw.’ Then there was the matter of the Prime Minister: ‘Absence from town and a strong sense of humor,’ she typed, ‘will prevent me from accepting your invitation to dine in acknowledgement of the political eminence of Ramsay MacDonald.’
Over the worst period Miss Patch had to cope with up to three proposals of marriage a week. She helped to see off an actress from Zurich who claimed that since she had the greatest body in the world and Shaw had the greatest brain, they ought to produce the most perfect child, with a celebrated transposition: ‘What if the child inherits my body and your brains?’ But not all the famous stories were true. For example she had never sent Winston Churchill two tickets for the first night of a Shaw play inviting him to bring a friend ‘if you have one’; and she had never received an answer from Churchill saying that he could come to the second night ‘if there was one’. That was a journalistic invention.
Among Miss Patch’s skills was the making of parcels. People liked to send things to Whitehall Court and, if they were not mislaid, she could send them back. ‘I hate presents,’ Shaw had said and on the whole she agreed with him, because they received such silly presents. A few presents, such as the rather handy axe, she could see he actually liked; but the bits of coal garnished with ivy, the seaweed, the bison-foot inkstand and enamel washing-bowl with its base deeply registering the G.B.S. profile were nothing but trouble.
More often people wanted things from Whitehall Court – hats, handkerchiefs, trousers, really anything at all. One man of the streets demanded G.B.S.’s boots, and despite the awkwardness of packing them up, Miss Patch was actually obliged to post them off to him. But they had not reckoned on this pedestrian returning them whenever they were in need of repairs. Such episodes, Miss Patch noticed, seemed to amuse G.B.S.
But she was not so easily amused, particularly by the hordes of time-wasters who arrived at the door. Right up to the end they came. She didn’t mind Charlotte’s lunch guests – Barry Jackson, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the aviator Amy Johnson, the actress Ellen Pollock, though Lady Astor rather overrated herself, she was inclined to think. She quite liked some of the more casual visitors, such as Maurice Chevalier who seemed ‘exceedingly nervous’ in her company, or even Charlie Chaplin who was ‘quiet and serious’ when she took him round the flat. When people were separated from her and got stuck with G.B.S., they had to take their chances. ‘Shaw talked knowledgeably about Kemal Atatürk,’ remembered the Hungarian actress Zsa Zsa Gabor who had been invited to London by the British Council. Of course there was no accounting for tastes and all tastes seemed to be catered for at Whitehall Court. ‘There was such a wonderfully free atmosphere about, you were sure that nothing you said or did would shock or surprise them,’ D. H. Lawrence’s widow Frieda declared. ‘If you had suddenly turned a somersault they would have taken it along with the rest.’ Blanche Patch was rather glad she hadn’t. ‘You have no notion,’ she typed, ‘of the hosts of people who knock at my door every day... because my picture in the papers resembles their grandfathers.’ There was the young man who had been directed in a séance to make off with the doormat in case ‘some benefit might accrue to me’ and landed up in an asylum; and, perhaps worst of all, the climbing American who, after publishing letters to them in the personal columns of The Times, scaled his way into the flat and had to be arrested by Scotland Yard.
After all this it was hardly a great surprise for Miss Patch to find on the doorstep one day towards the end of 1935 a swarthy Transylvanian gentleman commanding her to ‘go and tell your master’ that the film producer from Rome he had once met at Cap d’Antibes was here. ‘Tell him,’ he added, ‘the young man with the brown buttocks.’ How did he get past Miss Patch? ‘He had no appointment, and we knew nothing of this caller who was obviously a foreigner,’ she objected. But there was something appealing about him. At any rate, perhaps because ‘his name made Shaw curious’ too, he agreed to see this stranger and she ushered Gabriel Pascal into the study.
*
‘The man is a genius,’ Shaw announced ten years later. Like Vandeleur Lee, Pascal was a charlatan genius ‘quite outside all ordinary rules’. He made Shaw laugh with his whole body, throwing his shoulders about ‘while the laughter ran up his long legs and threatened to shake his head off’. As Blanche Patch saw, ‘G.B.S. never met a human being who entertained him more’.
Pascal was a short, powerful-looking man with broad shoulders, high cheekbones, a strong head and dense black hair. When he smiled he gave an enormous grin with a gap at the centre of his front teeth. He entered Shaw’s study like a gorilla.
Their previous meeting had been something Pascal would have shrugged off had it not already entered the repertoire of his legendary past. One blue and golden summer morning, his story went, he had been swimming naked in the Mediterranean and, coming across G.B.S. treading water far out from shore, made himself known as the person whose destiny it was to make wonderful pictures from the Shavian playground. As he swam away, revealing his buttocks, Shaw had called out: ‘When you are utterly broke... come and call on me... and I will let you make one of my plays into a film.’ So here he was. He spoke in low solemn tones and with a strong Central European accent – then cracked open his enormous grin like an urchin. It was impossible to resist him.
‘He reminds me of Frank Harris,’ Shaw wrote to Trebitsch. Pascal was to gain a reputation in films similar to Harris’s in journalism: that of a Svengali who discovered new stars while remaining curiously in need of discovery himself. In fact his name was not Pascal any more than Harris’s name had been Frank. He was born Gabor Lehöl, yet ‘Gabriel Pascal’ was not so much an invention as a mutation – as Samuel Goldwyn was a mutation of Schmuel Gelbfisz.
When Pascal recalled his early years, the air would fill with fleeting images and sounds – the bright flames of a burning house, the despairing cries of women, a ramshackle gypsy caravan sauntering across the Alps; then cut to the life of a poor shepherd boy deeply attached to the earth; and afterwards to a daring circus acrobat who miraculously defied gravity, a rebel cadet at a famous military academy, a prodigy at the Imperial Hofburg Theatre in Vienna... and behind all these sets and scenes hovered the mysterious Jesuit priest who was his patron. Did Royal Blood course through his veins? Had he been kidnapped? Everything depended on the translation, the direction, and the rewrites.
He knew he had been born for great things but (again like Frank Harris) might be stopped from reaching them by his lack of height. ‘Someday,’ he promised, ‘I shall try to figure out why this incomprehensible world confuses heroism with height.’ He gained in mythical stature from his tall stories. To Shaw, who knew so well the springs of self-dramatization, there was a gallantry about adventures that could turn failure, poverty, obscurity and the ostracism and contempt which these invite, into such gorgeous entertainment. When he spoke of his wartime escapades either as a cavalry officer advancing along the Italian Front accompanied by two dachshunds, or hosting sumptuous banquets for his prisoners on the Russian Front, he brought back the innocent world of Arms and the Man. His favourite play was Shaw’s melodrama The Devil’s Disciple with its picturesque hero; but the talk in Shaw’s study turned to the filming of Pygmalion.
There had been little in Pascal’s career since the war, except perhaps his production of Franz Lehár’s operetta Friederika in Germany, to raise confidence. ‘I believe that the prospect of too much success frightened me,’ he explained. Around the time of Hitler’s rise to power he had left Germany (for he could have been a Jew as well as a Catholic and a Jesuit) and began roaming the world. ‘I loved the California climate, but I did not like the coldness of Hollywood, where they called me the hobo producer.’ He went to India to see his ‘awakener’ Meher Baba. But though he was presented with Baba’s magic sandals, Pascal could not find his way to the Oriental film he longed to make on reincarnation. At last his vagrant path led to Whitehall Court.
He claimed that ‘only a foreigner could translate Shaw into films’. But Shaw had received plenty of these proposals from foreigners – Samuel Goldwyn, Alexander Korda, Louis B. Mayer, Harry Warner – all immigrants or the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe, now creating from gangster and horror movies, musicals and westerns, a vast national fantasy for native-born Americans. Pascal was the joker in this pack. He was driven by a similar need to bury his unstable past under an empire made from other people’s dreams. Only this time it should be an empire of Shavian myths and dreams.
At their first interview on 8 December Shaw had asked Pascal what capital he had – ‘How are you fixed for money?’ – and Pascal, emptying his pockets, cracking open his smile, pointed to one or two small coins. At their second meeting at Whitehall Court, G.B.S. decided to take a big chance. ‘I have disposed of the English film of Pygmalion to Gabriel Pascal,’ he wrote to Trebitsch two days later.
As for Pascal, ‘I was the happiest man in the world.’
‘I have had to forbid Pascal to kiss me,’ Shaw wrote again to Trebitsch, ‘as he did at first to the scandal of the village.’
*
Shaw estimated that his Pygmalion contract was worth £60,000 (equivalent to over £1.5 million in 1997) to Pascal. But although there ‘wasn’t a studio in the world that wouldn’t have given its gold teeth for the rights to Shaw’s plays’, S. N. Behrman wrote, ‘...Pascal found it seemingly impossible to get the money to screen them’. His headlong optimism carried him over two miserable years during which his gift for lighting up people’s enthusiasms was regularly quenched by what one of his wives was to call ‘Gabriel’s genius for messing up anything’.
Shaw’s letters of agreement, which were always confined to one play at a time, gave Pascal only restricted rights to produce the film and retained for himself the contractual rights with all those clauses (five-year licence, author’s control of script and a royalty of ten per cent of the gross receipts) to which film companies objected. Pascal felt corralled by these bristling business habits. For G.B.S. did not want extra fame and money. He wanted victory over Hollywood and had chosen Pascal as his champion.
So Pascal rode desperately on. But he appeared to be permanently riding into a setting sun. His head blazed with visions of a dozen simultaneous schemes and whenever he was on the verge of roping one of them, he would utter his jubilant refrain: ‘I go now see the old man to talk cast.’ After a year of galloping activity he had got nowhere. As one studio after another turned him down, Pascal looked shabbier and shabbier. He kept visiting Shaw and one day brought with him a financial backer who had made his fortune in flour. This was Joseph Arthur Rank. Suddenly he had the beginnings of a syndicate.
Pygmalion was finally scheduled for production at Pinewood Studios on 11 March 1938. ‘I do not propose to interfere in the direction of the picture,’ Shaw notified Pascal, ‘since I cannot, at my age, undertake it myself.’ He interfered as much as possible from a distance and whenever Pascal came ‘to talk cast’. Wendy Hiller had been Shaw’s choice for Eliza and he predicted that she would be ‘the film sensation of the next five years’. He had wanted Charles Laughton to play Higgins and felt that Pascal’s choice of Leslie Howard was ‘fatally wrong’ – ‘the trouble with Leslie Howard is he thinks he’s Romeo’. In his screenplay Shaw had tried to strengthen the role of Freddy Eynsford-Hill to make him a romantic second lead, but he suspected that the public would love Leslie Howard ‘and probably want him to marry Eliza, which is just what I don’t want’.
It was Anthony Asquith who made Pygmalion a success. Pascal as producer was a whirlwind. There was ‘a terrible row and throughout the whole shooting of the picture we were never on speaking terms,’ remembered Wendy Hiller. ‘But as the direction was in the expert hands of Anthony Asquith we managed remarkably well.’
Shaw’s scenario cut down the dialogue and opened up the play for the screen. He also added some extra scenes at Pascal and Asquith’s suggestion, but did not accept all their proposals for giving the film more exteriors, greater movement and visual variety. It was then modified by various unseen hands which came together to sweeten the story and glamorize Higgins. Nevertheless, by Hollywood standards it was faithful to Shaw’s work.
And Charlotte liked it. Two days before the première she and G.B.S. came to a preview and at the end Charlotte told everyone: ‘This is the finest presentation of my husband’s work.’ Pascal had been trembling with nerves, clutching Charlotte’s hand and almost wringing these favourable words from her. He had shot three alternative endings to the film and chosen the romantic one anticipating the marriage of Higgins and Eliza. When questioned about this happy ending, Shaw answered that apparently some ‘20 directors seem to have... devised a scene to give a lovelorn complexion at the end to Mr Leslie Howard: but it is too inconclusive to be worth making a fuss about.’
Pygmalion went on to break all box-office records and, as Lawrence Langner wrote, ‘won the hearts of audiences and the plaudits of critics all over the world’. In the United States, where a censored version had to be shown to meet the Protection Code Administration’s objections to ‘comedy treatment of illicit sex’, it was given two Academy Awards. Shaw happily described his Oscar for the year’s best-written screenplay as ‘an insult’, by which he meant that Pygmalion should be advertised as an ‘all British film made by British methods without interference by American script writers... a revolution in the presentation of drama on the film’. This served well in his propaganda war, and Pygmalion was soon being spoken of as having ‘lifted movie-making from “illiteracy” to “literacy”’.
Against most odds, Pascal had carried Shaw to the top of the most powerful myth-making empire in the twentieth century. It was ‘a tremendous triumph’. He felt as if Pascal had opened an Aladdin’s cave, and the effect was spectacular. ‘You... persist in making plans for me on the assumption I am 35; but actually speaking I am a dead man; and a grasshopper is a burden,’ he tried to complain. ‘I discovered you ten years too late.’ But as Charlotte saw, Pascal’s extraordinary vitality had rejuvenated her husband so that he was ‘twenty-five years younger’.
‘I am Cagliostro to Shaw,’ Pascal boasted, ‘ – I keep him alive fifteen years more.’
‘Does it matter?’ My reply is that it does.
What I Really Wrote About the War (1931)
If it had been the love of money-making that kept him at work, as some neighbours at Ayot suspected, Shaw would have moved wholeheartedly into films. ‘It would pay me better to turn my old plays into scenarios,’ he wrote to Trebitsch who was growing increasingly dependent on his Shavian income. But ‘I cannot do this’. He still had new work to do. In the late 1930s he composed a pleasant and an unpleasant play, began a ‘Comedy of No Manners’ and completed a variant ending to a Shakespearean romance.
Cymbeline Refinished was conceived at a Governors’ meeting at the Stratford-upon-Avon Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. The business of improving on Shakespeare had been going on since Colly Cibber’s popular adaptation of Richard III and the ‘happy’ version of King Lear by Nahum Tate. As a drama critic Shaw had often ridiculed the acting versions put on by Henry Irving and other actor-managers of the Victorian theatre which he now saw as precursors to the sentimentalities of Hollywood. But, by perpetrating ‘a spurious fifth act to Cymbeline’ was he not joining this optimistic band of saboteurs himself?
Shaw’s battles were fought against the surrender of power from composers to performers. In principle he had little objection to a ‘collaboration’ between authors. Updating a post-Marlowe play into a post-Ibsen play was a type of translation.
It was while preparing Ellen Terry for her part in Irving’s mutilated production at the Lyceum that he had become involved with the text of Cymbeline. His flights of invective against ‘this silly old “Cymbeline”’ were largely improvised to raise Ellen’s spirits and get her over the difficulties of giving a convincing performance. But it had fixed the last act in his mind as a hopeless mess. Now, while preparing to tie the dangling ends into a Shavian knot, he found that Shakespeare’s last act was full of verbal workmanship and theatrical entertainment.
Biographical criticism has treated Cymbeline as the dream-work of a man in the sunset of his life, too exhausted to invent new devices, filling it with echoes from Othello, King Lear, As You Like It. In this interpretation the contortions of the plot, grandiloquences of speech, emotional disorientation all become symptoms of Shakespeare’s second childhood; signposts in a world of fairy-tales which ‘complete existence for the young, and replace it for the old’. But in the context of historical criticism Shakespeare’s change of mood reflects a change in the country under a new monarch, King James I, a generous patron of Shakespeare’s company, who claimed descent from the mythical King Arthur and encouraged the arts to draw their inspiration from ancient English history. The extraordinary last act, with its profusion of dénouements leading to the King’s final speech, ‘Publish we this peace to all our subjects’, becomes in this historical context a commentary on King James’s intricate policy of appeasement – with a flattering masque served up to appeal to the new Court’s love of pageant. Later, in post-modernist criticism, Cymbeline was to be transformed into a post-Shakespearean romance that deconstructs the forms of Elizabethan tragedy.
What Shaw does is to replace Shakespeare’s fairy-tale with his own, introduce a number of contemporary political comments, and continue the work of deconstruction with a parody of diplomatic realism. He makes short work of the ‘ludicrous’ battle sequences, jettisons the masque, banishes all apparitions, gods, soothsayers, and, condensing five scenes into one, straightens out Shakespeare’s meanderings in little more than twenty minutes (‘Are there more plots to unravel?’ demands Cymbeline impatiently). He also uses the English victory over the Romans as a history lesson for Neville Chamberlain, advocating the preparedness of military training and rearmament. Finally, in the dismayed reactions of Guiderius and Arviragus to the discovery that they are the King’s sons (‘Not free to wed the woman of my choice... I abdicate and pass the throne to Polydore,’ cries Guiderius, to which Arviragus objects, ‘Do you, by heavens? Thank you for nothing, brother’), Shaw makes an approving reference to the abdication of Edward VIII which was announced while he was writing the play.
Cymbeline Refinished retains eighty-nine of Shakespeare’s lines, but Shaw gives none of them to Imogen whom he converts, as if she were a posthumous gift for Ellen Terry, into the incipient New Woman. Though some beautiful lines are forfeited, there is more than one ‘hilarious sensation’ in the best Shavian manner and fleeting moments of beauty, such as Imogen’s plea to the smiling Iachimo (who is made cleverer at the expense of Posthumus) and his response to her:
IMOGEN Oh, do not make me laugh.
Laughter dissolves too many just resentments
Pardons too many sins.
IACHIMO And saves the world
A many thousand murders.
Cymbeline, by William Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw opened at the Embassy Theatre for a three-week run on 16 November 1937, the day before Chamberlain began his policy of appeasement with Lord Halifax’s visit to Hitler. The performance ‘left the impression that the actors were saving themselves up for Shaw at the expense of Shakespeare,’ wrote The Times. ‘...[They] visibly thrilled to a brand new challenge when the fifth act began.’ But the general public, worried by the news of the Japanese capture of Shanghai, General Franco’s blockade of the Spanish coast, and the riots in Sudeten Czechoslovakia, were in no mind to enter fairyland. They wanted something that spoke to the problems of the present – which is what Shaw, in his next play, tried to give them.
*
Shaw’s expedition to the League of Nations Palace in September 1928 had been made towards the end of its ascendant phase. In this age of early tanks and aeroplanes, poison gas, new guns and bombs, people looked to the League to quell their anxieties. ‘I see again Mr Bernard Shaw stalking out of the dining-room of the Residence,’ wrote the diplomatist Bruce Lockhart, ‘an object of greater hero-worship and reverence to the throng of League visitors than any political delegate.’
Shaw was vividly aware of his starring role. ‘Fortunately, the young ladies of the Secretariat, who have plenty of theatrical instinct, arrange the platform in such a way that the president, the speakers, and the bureau are packed low down before a broad tableau curtain which, being in three pieces, provides most effective dramatic entrances right and left of the centre,’ he wrote.
‘When a young lady secretary has a new dress, or for any other reason feels that she is looking her best, she waits until the speaker – possibly a Chinese gentleman carefully plodding through a paper written in his best French – has reduced half the public galleries to listless distraction and the other half to stertorous slumber. Then she suddenly, but gracefully, snatches the curtains apart and stands revealed, a captivating mannequin, whilst she pretends to look round with a pair of sparkling eyes for her principal on the bureau. The effect is electric: the audience wakes up and passes with a flash from listless desperation to tense fascination, to the great encouragement of the speaker, who, with his back to the vision beautiful, believes he has won over the meeting at last.’
Swarms of journalists circled through the whispering atmosphere, plunging after gobbets of scandal, as the politicians, like monsters from the past, grappled clumsily for personal advantage. Among these relics of what seemed like a species already extinct, G.B.S. saw sparks of hope. The smaller states had sent to Geneva their ‘heaviest champions’ to hold the fort for sane internationalism against the cabinets of big Powers seeking to reduce the League to impotence. In such a situation the Whitehall socialite ‘soon suffers a Lake change,’ Shaw noticed. ‘In the atmosphere of Geneva patriotism perishes... In short, the League is a school for the new international statesmanship as against the old Foreign Office diplomacy.’
The social, economic and humanitarian work of the League was carried out by the International Labour Organization, whose offices occupied a newly designed building where Labour was glorified in stained glass and muscular statuary. ‘Here the air is quite fresh: no flavor of Whitehall leather and prunella can be sniffed anywhere,’ Shaw wrote. ‘These neo-Carthusians are of a new order.’ To his eyes they were genuine internationalists working at what he had regarded all his Fabian life as the realities of politics: improving labour conditions; fighting epidemic diseases; finding accommodation and work for displaced people; controlling the traffic in opium; establishing the rights of women; caring for children, protecting strangers, welcoming sojourners like Shaw himself, and generally forcing up the moral standards of the big Powers.
Shaw’s Fabian Tract No. 226 put the question: ‘What do all these people do besides pretending that the League can prevent war?’ He gave as his answer that Geneva could justify its existence ten times over through this work of the International Labour Organization.
His play, Geneva, written mainly in the late 1930s, when the League was diminished by the Japanese invasion of Chinese Manchuria, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and the German invasion of the demilitarized Rhineland, was a make-believe about what might have happened if the Geneva Idea had spread. He pretends that there is no veto to make the League sterile, that the Idea has blown a fresh moral climate into the political atmosphere. He converts the natural theatre of the League’s Palace into a Platonic forum for international opinion, using none of the three institutions at its centre, but two of its satellites: the International Court at The Hague and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris.
Of all the functions of the League, the permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague was the most widely understood. ‘The League is still too uncertain of its powers to call the offenders to account,’ Shaw wrote in 1930. Six years later he gives his Judge in Geneva this certainty and makes the Hague Court the League’s operative organ.
This Judge, who presides over the last act of the play, has been called forth by applications for warrants against the dictators of Europe issued in Act I from the office of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation. So little known was this organization that many of Shaw’s audiences believed he invented it. In fact he had merely invented its usefulness.
The first chairman had been Henri Bergson, but it was not until Gilbert Murray took over the chairmanship in 1928 that Shaw began to grow interested in its possibilities. Murray himself had shied away from this ‘beastly Intellectual Travail’ which attracted what Arthur Koestler called the intellectual ‘Call Girls’ of the world to its conferences. ‘It was rather like a Shaw play,’ Murray decided after one of these bureaucratic comedies. Yet in spite of himself ‘I find that I am getting interested in the wretched business, from having to explain and defend it!’ By the end of 1933 Murray had come to see its meetings as ‘a record – fragmentary indeed and imperfect – of the unseen process which creates and maintains human progress; a process which seldom gets into the front page of any popular newspaper, because it does not consist of explosions or spectacular triumphs; only of the steady growth, and amid much discouragement, of the activity that will save civilisation, if civilisation is to be saved’.
Gilbert Murray was godparent to Shaw’s Geneva. In 1933 he published a study of Aristophanes which he dedicated to Shaw, ‘lover of ideas and hater of cruelty, who has filled many lands with laughter and whose courage has never failed’. ‘Thanks mainly to Gilbert Murray, I know as much as anyone need know of the ancient Greek drama,’ Shaw later wrote. In Geneva he went back to the Old Comedy of Aristophanes, satirizing contemporary politicians to illustrate recurring historical processes. ‘The play is a lampoon with Hitler and Mussolini unmistakably on the stage,’ he told the theatrical producer H. K. Ayliff. Though still making fun of Murray’s Institute, Shaw gives it something to do at last.
The first act opens in its invented Geneva office, a ‘rotten little room’ on the third floor of a ‘tumbledown old house full of rats’. With her heels on the dingy table, sits a good-looking self-satisfied young Englishwoman smoking and reading an illustrated magazine. Her name is Begonia Brown. ‘Nobody ever comes in here,’ she says. But that May morning near the end of the 1930s she is astonished to be called on by five claimants in succession, ‘each with a grievance which they expect her to remedy’. Begonia Brown refers all grievances to the International Court at The Hague.
As the play proceeds into and beyond the second act we are introduced to the Spirit of Geneva in the person of the League’s Secretary: Shaw’s portrait of the permanent British Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond, to whom he grants the ‘Lake change’ he referred to in his Fabian Tract. Opposing him is the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Orpheus Midlander, ‘a very well-dressed gentleman of fifty or thereabouts, genial in manner, quick-witted in conversation, altogether a pleasant and popular personality’ – a damning Shavian description. He represents time present – ‘Nothing wrong with the world: nothing whatever,’ he tells the League of Nations Secretary in the manner of Tom Broadbent cheering up the disfrocked Irish priest Peter Keegan in John Bull’s Other Island; and he prescribes ‘a cup of tea’ to cure despair rather as Broadbent recommends phosphorous pills to brighten up Keegan’s view of the world. Sir Orpheus is opposed to change and believes that politics should be left to professional politicians (‘we cant have literary people interfering in foreign affairs’). He is Shaw’s portrait of Sir Austen Chamberlain (Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs between 1924 and 1929) whose naїve patriotism had been a standing joke at Geneva, ‘so outrageous that only a man with a single eyeglass could have got away with it,’ Shaw recalled in his Fabian Tract.
Begonia Brown’s unprecedented action creates European chaos and a war, in consequence of which she grows so popular in Britain that the government is obliged to make her a Dame of the British Empire. Like Sir Orpheus she is a patriot, but she is far more pugnacious and parochial than the Foreign Secretary, treating all ‘foreigners as her inferiors, especially when they differ in colour’. She represents the spirit of the past, and its aggressive resurgence into the present. ‘If you want to know what real English public opinion is, keep your eye on me,’ she tells the League’s Secretary. ‘I’m not a bit afraid of war...’ Though everyone agrees she is a political ignoramus, ‘she has courage, sincerity, good looks, and big publicity,’ Sir Orpheus acknowledges, ‘...Everything that our voters love.’ She is also intensely ambitious and knows that ‘victory in war is the key to fame and glory’. This Boadicea is to become ‘the first female Prime Minister, too late for inclusion in the play,’ Shaw was later to tell readers of Everybody’s Political What’s What? This is his prophetic warning against the backward-looking culture of a nation in decline that will raise from its legendary depths a Warrior Queen to relive its heroic days.
It is to gain the good opinion of the world that the three dictators present themselves at the international court. ‘Where the spotlight is, there will the despots be gathered.’ Signor Bardo Bombardone, ‘a man of destiny’ got up in the British première as a Roman emperor, has had previous reincarnations as Nero and Napoleon; Herr Battler with his ‘resolutely dissatisfied expression’ and attired as Lohengrin suggests Hitler’s permanent place in German medieval romance; and the name General Flanco de Fortinbras connects the contemporary Spanish leader to the Prince of Norway who calls for ‘Soldiers’ music and the rites of war’ over Hamlet’s body at the end of Shakespeare’s play.
‘What an actor!’ exclaims Battler in admiration of Bombardone. He is indeed a wonderfully bumptious presence, with a flight of words for every occasion, enunciating the doctrine of power, the praise of war, the belief in will and impulse that belong to Nietzsche. Bombardone is somewhat contemptuous of Flanco, a limited archetypal gentleman-soldier from the old school; but he feels wary of Battler whom he sees on a razor’s edge between inspiration and the megalomania that is a recurrent theme in Shaw’s later work.
Hitler had turned out to be ‘a very difficult character to dramatize’. It was not easy for Shaw to get ‘any credible account of the man’. He distrusted the newspaper stories he read and in 1936 and 1937 there was little else to go on. Some people he questioned, such as the German biographer Emil Ludwig, described Hitler as ‘an illiterate semi-idiot’. However a book called I Knew Hitler (1938) by Kurt Ludecke, an early Nazi who had left the party and gone into exile, gave Shaw a picture he could recognize – that of a patient learner determined to rise above his obscurity.
In trying to explain the phenomenon of Hitler, Shaw involves everyone. His Battler has been born a nobody, grown up in a humiliated country and matched his life to Germany’s history. This is no freakish homuncule accidentally visited upon an unfortunate world, but a terrible combination of us all, and it is we who have created him and called him forth. He bears witness to having been carried forward by ‘a mighty movement in the history of the world.
‘Impelled by it I have stretched out my hand and lifted my country from the gutter into which you and your allies were trampling it, and made it once more the terror of Europe, though the danger is in your own guilty souls and not in any malice of mine... You must all come my way, because I march with the times, and march as pioneer...’
But for those who expected him to prove the most ominous of the dictators, bringing extra intensity to the last act, Battler is a disappointment. Partly it may have been that Hitler was beyond Shaw’s range: he had chosen a brief period when he played ‘understudy’ to Mussolini. Partly it may be that his interest in power had declined in old age: many of Battler’s lines lack bite and he is given no confrontation with his chief accuser, the Jew, to match the confrontation between Warwick and Cauchon in Saint Joan. Partly, too, Shaw may have been worried by the consequences on Trebitsch of a horrifying stage presentation of protofascism (‘I could not involve you in such a controversy,’ he had written earlier, ‘...you would run all the risks and I none’).
Shaw tried to develop the character of Battler through the many revisions of Geneva. The first draft had been written between the second week of February and the first week of April 1936. ‘I think I shall be able to turn Geneva into a presentable play after all,’ Shaw wrote that May. A year later, now nearing his eighty-second birthday, he announced: ‘Geneva is finished. So am I – very nearly.’ Both statements were untrue. The world première, however, took place in Warsaw on 25 July 1938 while Germany was preparing to mobilize. The British première opened at Malvern on 1 August in a last-minute revised version that with further modifications was then transferred to London towards the end of November.
Shaw’s alterations to Geneva were of three kinds: changes ‘to cut it to the bone’, changes to keep it up to date, and changes to appease Jewish feelings. None was perceived as being successful.
The fashionable length for a play in the 1930s was a little over two hours – 18,000 words. Shaw’s plays were from a third to half as long again. ‘I now overwrite to such an extent,’ he had said at the end of 1933, ‘that I have to cut the play down by a full third to pull it properly together and bring it within possible limits of time.’ Yet they were still too long – and when he added a new penultimate act in 1945 the length of Geneva was extended to nearly three and a half hours.
‘All plays with topical gags (and there is nothing else in Geneva) must have been altered almost from night to night in pantomimes and burlesques,’ Shaw wrote to the producer, H. K. Ayliff. The most substantial of his topical changes was to be the 600-word scene he added in September 1939. ‘The declaration of war is the making of Geneva which has always lacked a substantial climax,’ he told the theatrical presenter Roy Limbert. In the last weeks of 1938 and during the first eight months of 1939 Geneva had scored a spectacular success, playing for 237 performances in London before going on tour. ‘When do you sail?’ Shaw asked Maurice Colbourne on 17 September 1939. ‘I can let you have the new version by the end of the week.’ But Colbourne, who with Barry Jones was to give it an adventurous tour through Canada and the United States, believed that ‘Hitler worked too fast... the play was out of date before its ink was dry.’ By the time Geneva opened at the Henry Miller Theater in New York on 30 January 1940, the League of Nations was moribund and Shaw’s courtroom proceedings sounded ‘extraordinarily futile’.
Yet one day something would have to take the place of the League of Nations. Though ‘weak and slow and helpless and confused’ as Gilbert Murray acknowledged, it had been a first tentative step towards Shaw’s court of pure justice now being dismissed by critics as a midsummer night’s dream. Shaw had wanted to use his audiences as juries who would evaluate this Platonic investigation into public morals and hear the case for open government where ‘no walls can hide you, and no distance deaden your lightest whisper’; he wanted to show them the enormous pains that dictators will take to win public opinion – their opinion; he wanted them to attend another Shavian Judgment Day and see in the false apocalypse the falsity of despair.
But many critics disliked it. They had hoped to see a grand Shavian paradox with the tyrants tumbled from their thrones and the victims raised up into high places. Where audiences laughed, these critics felt uneasy. Shaw had admitted that his play ‘flatters them [the dictators] enormously’. This embarrassed many Shavians. Reviewing the London production, Desmond MacCarthy objected: ‘In this disputatious extravaganza, which Mr Shaw calls “A Play of the Moment”, the case for the Jew ought of course to have been vigorously put. It was not. Nor was the case of the democrat... [Shaw] has been false to his mission in life. Until recent years one of the things I have admired most in him has been a spontaneous chivalry... Speaking for myself, it [Geneva] made me ask if it were possible that I had been a fool about Bernard Shaw all my writing life.’
Shaw’s extra act is an attempt to give a technical answer to MacCarthy’s objections without destroying the genre in which he was working. The act defines the ‘Lake change’ that has turned the League Secretary away from the philistine mainland towards the rich and strange figure of the Judge. It also separates everyone into their political and biological components by allowing them a few minutes’ privacy in this public play. As political beings they have come to Geneva to air their grievances and push their interests. In this political aspect they are all their own worst enemies. But biologically their differences are life-enhancing. Begonia Brown pairs off with the Judge; the Jew dines with the Widow; and Sir Orpheus spends his evening with the Soviet Commissar. All this supports the Judge’s statement in the last act that even the dictators themselves seem ‘personally harmless human beings’ though their political deeds call for ‘nothing short of your immediate execution’.
Shaw believed that critics were reacting to his characters as if they were actual people rather than political abstractions. They had wanted him to take sides. The result was that Shaw’s play was equally unpopular with pro- and anti-Nazis – the proper fate, perhaps, for an unpleasant play.
The question remains as to whether his use of Aristophanic comedy was appropriate in presenting part of history that would culminate in the killing of six million Jews in concentration camps. Lysistrata had been written to stop a war and Geneva was written in the hope of helping to prevent one. It is a piece of stage diplomacy, a variant to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, by someone who remembered the horror and futility of the first war against Germany and refused to be drawn into popular confusion between reality and myth. All that a playwright can do, Shaw wrote, ‘is to extract comedy and tragedy from the existing situation and wait and see what will become of it’. The tragedy is implicit in his play, the comedy broad and explicit. Battler protests to the Judge that the court is ‘making fun of us’, and one of the prosecutors gives Shaw’s answer: ‘God has ordained that when men are childish enough to fancy that they are gods they become what you call funny. We cannot help laughing at them.’
But it was not possible to laugh in the 1940s and Geneva was to become Shaw’s ‘most frequently disparaged play’. He disparaged it himself. ‘What a horrible play!’ he exclaimed. But ‘I have to write plays like Geneva. It is not that I want to.’ He believed that the effective way of exposing his dictators was not to falsify historical fact by allowing their accusers to dominate the court, but to let us see the authentic miming of their dramaturgical tricks, their bluster and defiance, mystical flights and neurotic fears, and the face-saving gestures that reveal the littleness of their brief authority.
‘Authority is a sort of genius: either you have it or you have not,’ Bombardone tells the court. The nature of authority is the theme of Geneva. ‘Your objective is domination,’ the Judge replies to the dictators. His own objective is to create a code of justice that serves the desire for harmony underlying the discord of our lives. The dictators’ authority stands on Will, is violent, and artificially imposes order; the Judge’s authority proceeds from the imagination, is settled, and stands on faith. When the future of the world is threatened by a science fiction disaster, the dictators are suddenly reduced from archetypes to stereotypes.
‘A moment ago we were important persons: the fate of Europe seemed to depend on us. What are we now?’ asks the Judge. Only he and the Secretary retain their stature. Only they, at the final curtain, can still tell truth from falsehood and know that the end of the world is not in fact at hand.
*
Shortly before the opening of Geneva in London, Shaw began his last pleasant play, ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’. ‘It’s about the time of Charles II,’ Charlotte wrote. ‘Such a lot of interesting people lived then & he is throwing them all in together to sink or swim. I am rather pleased about it.’ Beatrice Webb also felt pleased. ‘I read the first scene – brilliant dialogue... ’ she wrote on 11 January 1939. ‘If he can bring in some sort of striking incident into the play and not limit himself to sparkling talk, it may turn out A.1.’
Written in the aftermath of Pygmalion’s cinema triumph, ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’ was begun as an ‘educational history film’ for Gabriel Pascal. The cast were to be sumptuously clothed in seventeenth-century costumes ‘regardless of expense, numbers and salaries’. By the time he completed it on 3 May 1939 it had turned into a Shavian Restoration comedy. Either because he now lacked the vitality or else because he had no interest left in the devices and excitements of dramatic action, the play lacks the ‘striking incident’ that Beatrice Webb believed characterized his best work. It is a conversation piece, diversified by moments of burlesque, recitation and vaudeville, and alive with anachronisms that anticipate the future. ‘Playwrights have their just privileges,’ wrote Maynard Keynes, celebrating ‘the proleptic quality’ of these anachronisms.
The two continuous scenes of the long first act are set in the cheerful library of a large house Shaw invents for Isaac Newton at Cambridge. Here, one golden day, Newton’s calculations into the future and the past are creatively interrupted by a procession of unheralded visitors. Charles II (travelling incognito as Mr Rowley) and a big man dressed in leather with bright eyes and a powerful voice who turns out to be George Fox arrive together (‘the spiritual powers before the temporal,’ says Charles, ushering in Fox before him). They are pursued by Charles’s brother James, an obtuse and bigoted Catholic; and three of the King’s ladies, Nell Gwynn, Barbara Villiers, the jealous Duchess of Cleveland, and the ‘baby-faced’ Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, who has called on Isaac Newton for a love philtre. Finally the portrait painter Godfrey Kneller turns up in search of the King. All of them stay to lunch.
‘You find yourself dining with all sorts,’ Begonia Brown had remarked in the extra act to Geneva. There are several cross-references between the two plays. In Charles, whose education was completed ‘at the Hague’, the Geneva spirit resides. But Shaw has now turned from the riddle of authority to the mysterious process of learning. From the blends and clashes of this diverse group everyone learns something. ‘You unsettle my mind,’ Fox tells James, Duke of York. ‘I find your company agreeable to me, but very unsettling,’ he tells Nell Gwynn. Charles encourages this unsettling process: ‘The settled mind stagnates, Pastor.’ Fox’s imagination acknowledges that ‘Divine grace takes many strange forms’ as he goes in to lunch arm in arm with ‘the player woman’ Nell Gwynn. ‘You remind me that where my Master went I must follow.’
The meeting Shaw arranges in his play between Newton and Kneller had its origin in his own meeting with Einstein at the Savoy in 1930. Here he coupled Einstein’s name with Newton’s as great ‘makers of universes’ (as opposed to the ‘makers of empires’ who populate Geneva). ‘Newton invented a straight line,’ he said.
‘...he invented the force which would make the straight line fit the straight lines of his universe – and bend them – and that was the force of gravitation... the book of that universe ... was not a magical marvellous thing like a Bible. It was a matter-of-fact British thing like a Bradshaw... Then an amazing thing happened. A young professor got up in the middle of Europe and [said]... “The world is not a British rectilinear world. It is a curvilinear world, and the heavenly bodies go in curves”... I reminded myself that Leonardo da Vinci, the artist, born twenty-one years before Copernicus, wrote down in his notebook... “The earth is a moon of the sun.” And later on the English artist, William Hogarth, a contemporary of Newton – their lives overlapped by thirty years –... said “The line of nature is a curve”. He anticipated our guest.’
When he came to write Good King Charles, Shaw found that Hogarth’s life had overlapped with Newton’s by only twenty-two years and could not be fitted into the year of his modern genesis 1680. So he fell back on Kneller, whose dates just fitted in, granting him a paraphrase of Hogarth’s ‘the line of beauty is a curve’. When the artist’s ‘different kind of understanding’ joins issue with the scientist’s, Newton suddenly wakes from his dream of a rectilinear universe and is endowed with the foresight of an Einstein. ‘I have made Newton aware of something wrong with the perihelion of Mercury,’ Shaw gleefully explained in his Preface. ‘Not since Shakespeare made Hector of Troy quote Aristotle has the stage perpetrated a more staggering anachronism.’
‘You presume to teach me my profession,’ objects the arrogant Kneller in his first speech of the play. Good King Charles is a demonstration of how every professional can learn something from the amateur. The atmosphere, over which the King presides rather like the Waiter in You Never Can Tell, is largely created by Charles’s mistresses – it is, for example, Louise de Kéroualle who sees that ‘Mr Kneller and Mr Newton seem to mean exactly the same thing; only one calls it beauty and the other gravitation.’
Charles II’s regular business on the stage had been to act the principal lover in historical romances. He would stride on as a gorgeously costumed walking gentleman and from time to time sit down so that Moll Davis and Sweet Nell could nest on his knee. Shaw transforms the Merry Monarch who lived so badly and died so well, who never said a foolish thing nor ever did a wise one, into a version of King Magnus from The Apple Cart, a man whose reputation has been warped by official histories.
Good King Charles is both the culmination of Shaw’s work as a historical dramatist, which had begun in 1895 with the ‘Fictitious Paragraph of History’ about Napoleon he called The Man of Destiny, and a merging of the chronicle play into allegorical fable and extravaganza. The third scene, which takes the form of a short second act, reads like an epilogue to the play – but it does not resemble the Epilogue to Saint Joan; it is a companion piece to the Interlude from The Apple Cart.
In the ‘late afternoon’ the Shavian King comes to the untidy boudoir of his wife, Catherine of Braganza. He has left ‘one of Nature’s queens’ and come home to his domestic queen, who is ‘guiltless of sex appeal’.
They talk and the fifty-year-old Charles asks: ‘can anything I can ever do make up to you for my unfaithfulness?’ Shaw allows Catherine to answer: ‘People think of nothing but that, as if that were the whole of life. What care I about your women?... You have never been really unfaithful to me.’ Though this reads like a sentimental gloss on what Charlotte had once felt, it may approximate to her retrospective view, at the age of eighty, of G.B.S.’s flirtations. But Shaw has the honesty to hold some balance between the two women ‘I was born to love’. Charles admits to one real unfaithfulness, with the beautiful childish Frances Theresa Stuart, whose portrait as Minerva by Sir Peter Lely he insisted should figure on the coinage of the realm. By making the woman who represents Stella Campbell no longer a Queen of Nature with an act to herself, but merely one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour who does not actually have a part in Good King Charles, Shaw was making amends to Charlotte for The Apple Cart Interlude. ‘I never touched her,’ Charles tells his wife. ‘But she had some magic that scattered my wits... I was furious when she ran away from me and married Richmond.’ And Catherine admits: ‘it was the only time I ever was jealous.’
But they had come through: ‘we are grown-up now,’ Charles hopes. The play exhibits Charles as ‘the best of husbands’, and the message he is sending to Charlotte is that theirs had been the best of marriages made on earth. The ‘hopeless tenderness’ that attaches the King to the Queen at the end of The Apple Cart unites the King and Queen throughout this second act of Good King Charles. There is only one fear that falls between them, and that is a fear of the other’s death. ‘Long live the King!’ cries Catherine. ‘May the Queen live for ever!’ exclaims Charles.
And the curtain descends on them both.
I am tired of the way in which the newspapers... continue to make it appear that I am an admirer of dictatorship. All my work shows the truth to be otherwise.
‘G.B.S. Replies to the Man in the Street’, The Star (4 August 1938)
By the end of the 1920s Shaw had acquired the status of a German classic. While ‘Sudermann has long disappeared from the stage... while even Hauptmann occupies a very limited space,’ wrote Leon Feuchtwanger in 1928, ‘...Bernard Shaw since the war reigns supreme’.
Despite the record run of Saint Joan Shaw was alarmed by what he began to learn of Reinhardt’s production. Scenes had been scissored, speeches superimposed, and Trebitsch had been a wide-eyed collaborator in this ‘monstrous misrepresentation’. When they met in 1927 Shaw rather took to Reinhardt. ‘He looked extraordinarily well and open-airy, as if he had never been near a theatre in his life,’ he wrote. ‘I never saw a man less spoilt by his profession.’
But The Apple Cart was an even greater travesty than Saint Joan. Reinhardt had sandwiched his political comedy between episodes of jazzed-up Bach and Chopin, and served it to German audiences as a racy operetta. Boanerges, attired like a racegoer’s bookie, appeared as a Jew; Proteus was a ‘bilious fool’; and the goddess Orinthia prostituted as an ‘unscrupulous little kiosk-mamselle’. ‘Why have you not challenged him [Reinhardt], shot him, sabred him, buried him in unconsecrated ground,’ Shaw demanded of Trebitsch; ‘...you must either quarrel with Reinhardt or quarrel with me. Clearly you must quarrel with Reinhardt.’
Alas, it was almost impossible to quarrel with Trebitsch. He was as sensitive as a child and full of innocent happiness. What neither he nor Reinhardt realized at the time was that their versions of these plays fed the atmosphere that, substituting one sort of pornography for another, was lifting the Nazi regime into power. No wonder Hitler was to declare that St Joan was portrayed ‘much more faithfully by Shaw than by Schiller’ when the German version emphasized the mystical nature of power vested in someone physically unimpressive yet gifted with the oratorical magic of patriotic ‘voices’. No wonder William Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, expressed the conviction that Hitler ‘will one day rank with Joan of Arc’. The lonely genius of power was again underscored by Reinhardt’s King Magnus in The Apple Cart. The King’s ‘strangely innocent relations’ with the flapper-cocotte Orinthia were presented as the sexual recreations of a Nietzschean Superman whose political inspiration rose clear above the poisoned well of anti-German Jewish democracy. What had been intended by Shaw as a warning against dreaming the old dreams became the inducement to a new nightmare, in short ‘a pornographic Jew baiting farce,’ he told Trebitsch. ‘How can I ever expect a decent German to speak to me again?... Rheinhardt [sic] must find other authors to drag through the mud... I have been kinder with him than he deserves (merely for your sake)... I cannot afford another such disgrace, nor can you.’
A colleague of Reinhardt’s, Robert Klein, directed Too True to be Good. Shaw was accused of nihilism and warned that the new Germany would no longer tolerate attacks on the family. When the play moved to Mannheim early in 1933, it was disrupted by Nazi shouts of ‘Jew Shaw!’ until the police came to restore order. ‘Can it be possible that my vogue in Germany, of which I have been so proud, has been all a mistake?’ Shaw had asked.
At the beginning of 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, Shaw’s reputation seemed to be on the turn. In March Reinhardt left Germany for Austria and that summer ceded his theatres via the government to the German people. By 1937 he was safely unemployed in the United States. ‘In all he had introduced nine of Shaw’s plays to Berlin, produced another five and added two others in Vienna for over 1,300 performances,’ Professor Samuel Weiss notes, ‘second only to Shakespeare in Reinhardt’s repertory.’
Until Hitler entered Austria early in 1938, Trebitsch experienced the Nazi phenomenon chiefly as an economic setback. The new Germany did not want foreign playwrights: ‘snobbish trifles’, as Shaw and Pirandello were described. Trebitsch came from a wealthy family and was married to the widow of a Russian Grand Duke. Expensive habits were ingrained. During the 1930s he looked towards Shaw’s films to buoy him up. But G.B.S. was oddly unhelpful. He refused to license a German film of The Chocolate Soldier (the musical version of Arms and the Man), he was downright discouraging about the Hollywood prospects of Jitta’s Atonement and he accused Trebitsch of deception over his German-language film of Pygmalion. Rather than be a party to such bargains, he preferred to ‘advance’ Trebitsch money. ‘Shall I lend you £500 (equivalent to £15,000 in 1997) on account pending some transaction between us for your translation rights?’ he asked at the end of 1935. ‘If so, send me a wire with the single word Yes, and I will remit.’ But such sums were small in comparison with Trebitsch’s dreams of a movie fortune.
Most years, right up to 1939, Trebitsch would come over to England and every time Shaw would amaze him by picking up the conversation exactly where they had left it twelve months previously ‘as though the earth had not, after all, travelled once around the sun since we had last been face to face with each other’. Trebitsch had come to know ‘what English hospitality meant’. At Ayot it meant sessions round the piano while G.B.S. sang Tristan to Tina’s Isolde, periods of tranquillity while he disappeared into ‘his tent at the bottom of the garden’, and when they all came together again there were ‘the blessings of vegetarian cookery’. There were also regular walks in the ‘hilly’ countryside. Keeping up with Shaw’s long joyful strides had put a terrible strain on the seams of Trebitsch’s suits. With the passing years, as his own panting figure solidified and slowed, G.B.S. appeared to be sprinting into the future, his arms swinging, nostrils eagerly extended.
To mitigate the rigours of English hospitality, Shaw would book Trebitsch into a first-class London hotel. He also encouraged him to bring German friends to lunch at Whitehall Court – often refugees like Stefan Zweig – so that he could learn more of what was going on in Germany. It was difficult learning much from Trebitsch himself, though G.B.S. could pick up something from the fate of his translations. The Black Girl remained unpublished because ‘it would have been banned by the German censorship’ (it was eventually brought out in 1948). In 1934 On the Rocks ‘was a very great success,’ Trebitsch insisted, yet he had been obliged to give it the subtitle ‘England, Arise!’ which was taken as a summons to follow Germany’s example. The Simpleton, which was banned in Austria, and in Germany did not transfer from Leipzig to Berlin, was the last of Shaw’s plays ‘I was to translate into German while still living in my native country,’ Trebitsch recalled.
Joseph Goebbels attended the Berlin première of The Millionairess in December 1936, but the play had to be published without its ‘Preface on Bosses’ speculating on Hitler’s Jewish ancestry and diagnosing Judophobia as ‘one of those lesions which sometimes prove fatal’. Shaw’s reputation in Nazi Germany was by now full of anomalies. Whatever he wrote for the British press was, to Trebitsch’s bewilderment, carefully edited in the German newspapers. Hitler himself went to a revival of Caesar and Cleopatra in 1939, but Geneva was forbidden to be either published or performed that year and the actor who had played Battler at Warsaw’s Teatr Polski was imprisoned after the annexation of Poland. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg placed Shaw among the ‘army of half-breed “artists”’ opposing the ‘revived racial spirit’; yet tributes were still paid to him in Germania, Berliner Tageblatt, and Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on his eightieth birthday. Even during the war, his work was protected from wholesale censorship and he was classified by Goebbels as a satirical, anti-plutocratic Irishman: a case on his own.
As the 1930s advanced, Shaw felt increasingly responsible for Trebitsch. Hitler’s name is not mentioned in their correspondence until May 1933 when, condemning the Nazi Judenhetze, Shaw advised him to ‘keep out of the mêlée as much as possible. If you are pressed as to why you translate me, who am a notorious Communist... you must say that you are not concerned with all that – that you have introduced me to Germany as a great artist... But you are not committed to my opinions.’
For much of this time Shaw treated Hitler as if he were a fellow-playwright under attack from foreign critics whose animosity was driving the Nazi national theatre crazy. Certainly the Nazis were mad on the Jewish question. ‘It is idle to argue against this sort of insanity,’ he wrote in 1933. ‘Judophobia is as pathological as hydrophobia... The Nazis are suffering from an epidemic of a very malignant disease.’ Setting aside the Jewish question, he took care to be ‘scrupulously polite and just to Hitler (which nobody else in England is)’. He welcomed the incorporation of the German trade unions into a state-directed Labour Front, as well as the introduction of a compulsory labour service.
Shaw recognized the human instinct called nationalism that made people ‘dissatisfied unless they think they are governed by themselves and not by foreigners’. He believed that the Treaty of Versailles, which placed Germany in an inferior position, was an affront to that instinct, and that Hitler had been hoisted to power by the force of national resentment. Such was the outcome of an abuse of victory. He had urged the Allies to dismantle the military frontiers imposed by the Treaty, and believed that the weak liberal parliamentarianism of Western democracies had produced a ‘Four Power Funk’ that was positively encouraging Nazi expansionism. He saw the best hope of peace in a rearmament programme by the Allies and a pact between Britain, France, the United States and Soviet Russia which would banish the communist taboo and hold a broad equilibrium until Germany and Italy inevitably split apart and Hitler’s supremacy came to its natural end.
Every country, Shaw believed, was entitled to its civil wars without foreign interference. He looked on the Spanish Civil War as an internal class war with Franco standing for property, privilege and ‘everything we are all taught to consider respectable’. But ‘Spain must choose for itself,’ he wrote: ‘it is really not our business.’ As Stanley Weintraub concluded: ‘For Shaw, a victory for the wrong side in Spain was preferable to a general European war, which the internationalizing of the Civil War seemed to be making inevitable.’
‘My slogan is “Africa for the Africans!”’ Shaw wrote in 1938. His most extreme expression of this principle came in a letter to Beatrice Webb where he admitted ‘the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable’. This was written when, wishing himself to ‘intervene’ over Sidney Webb’s stroke, he was obliged to stifle the impulse by ‘an exercise of conscious reasoning’. He had called the Nazis ‘a mentally bankrupt party’, and described Hitler as a reincarnation of Torquemada, meaning that he was not uniquely beyond historical processes but part of a pattern in human behaviour that, at some time or another, had infected all nations. ‘In every country you can find rabid people who have a phobia against Jews, Jesuits, Armenians, Negroes, Freemasons, Irishmen, or simply foreigners as such,’ he had written in the Jewish Chronicle in 1932. ‘...Political parties are not above exploiting these fears and jealousies.’ When asked by a journalist in 1938 whether Hitler had solved the Jewish problem, he replied: ‘He has created it.’ But no single nation could tackle this problem with clean hands. G.B.S. persisted in reminding readers of unfortunate facts (such as England’s treatment of the Irish or the Ku-Klux-Klan’s lynchings of Negroes) in case the itch to intervene grew virtuously irresistible. But although making the miscalculation that Hitler ‘shrinks from the massacre which the logic of his phobia demands’, he recognized that by the late 1930s this had become a world problem.
In much that he wrote about Germany in the 1930s Shaw had Siegfried and Tina Trebitsch in the back of his mind. On 13 March 1938, the day after Hitler’s troops entered Austria, their car had been commandeered by the Nazis and their chauffeur beaten up. Three days later, having obtained Czech passports, they left Vienna, travelling to Prague and some time later to Zurich.
‘I dare not write a line frankly to anyone in Germany,’ Shaw had explained. The day after Hitler announced Austria’s annexation, he sent a card to Trebitsch in Vienna welcoming the ‘glorious news’ and suggesting that ‘if Tina’s health obliges you to travel, why not come to England, where we are having an extraordinarily fine spring?’ This card was forwarded to Prague. It upset Trebitsch. He could not crack its code. ‘And now you reproach me because I did not write letters pointing out that you are a Jew marked out for Nazi persecution,’ Shaw explained.
Even after this escape, Shaw refused to take the terrible verbal revenge on Hitler that Trebitsch longed to translate. ‘What good does it do?’ he wrote. ‘...I might do you a great deal of harm.’ He immediately despatched almost £1,000 and advised Trebitsch to ‘keep very quiet within reach of Zurich until the atmosphere is a little less electric’. After reading a report by the Berlin correspondent of the Observer stating that his translator was a Jew, he wrote to the paper describing him as ‘an uncircumcized and baptized Lutheran German... married to a lady of unquestioned Christian authenticity’ – a description puzzling to Trebitsch, who wanted to know what uncircumcised meant.
Though living in exile, the Trebitsches did not regard themselves as refugees. They were to pass little of the next year in Switzerland, but resided at rather grand hotels in Nice and Paris. From time to time their chauffeur and housekeeper would smuggle out some of their possessions. Otherwise they lived on what they had taken with them (including Tina’s jewels) supplemented by what Shaw gave them (another £1,000 in April 1939).
‘I am still very sceptical as to the likelihood of war,’ Shaw wrote in March 1939. Raising Trebitsch’s morale was a method of keeping up his own spirits. He based his predictions not on what he feared but on what he hoped would happen. Having urged the Allies to make a pact with Soviet Russia, he represented Germany’s non-aggression pact with the USSR as the next best thing because now ‘Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming’. Everyone else seemed terrified. ‘Why? Am I mad?’ he asked in The Times. A week later Britain and Germany were at war.
Such optimism had become a necessary bond between Shaw and his German translator. At Whitehall Court that year they had both experienced what Trebitsch called ‘the justifiable premonition that this would have to be my last visit for a long time’. Before parting, they took special care to ask whether they had not forgotten anything, since it might be years before they saw each other. But, Shaw affirmed: ‘We shall both survive this bloody business.’