“There are some experiences which should not be demanded twice from any man,” [George Bernard Shaw] remarked, “and one of them is listening to Brahms’s Requiem.” And, in his most famous dismissal of the work, he referred to it as “patiently borne only by the corpse.” … There are no rights and wrongs in criticism, only opinions more or less in conformance with the consensus of enlightened observers over time. By that criterion Shaw was “wrong.” But … musical polemics fade far faster than music itself, thankfully. —John Rockwell in the Times
TO anyone who has tried to sit down and just enjoy a composition by Johannes Brahms, the sensation is all too familiar. As the musical phrases begin to wash away the cares of the day, transporting one into a delightful never-never land of artistic transcendence, one’s brain is rudely skewered by George Bernard Shaw’s unforgettable dictum about Brahms: “Like listening to paint dry.” Once Shaw penned this zinger, it became impossible (even for an independent-minded music critic like myself) to relax and surrender to the simple pleasure of knowing that Brahms is no longer considered passé. And another thing: Each time a Brahms piece is ruined by an ineradicable nagging memory of that effortless Shavian one-liner, the annoyance is nothing compared to what Brahms must feel, squirming eternally in his grave, his reputation forever etched by the acid of Shaw’s scorn.
Brahms was but one victim of Shaw’s many pinpricks in the hot-air balloons of his era’s cultural biases. Yet a host of the myriad names he lambasted have nonetheless survived. Yet so has a lingering respect for Shaw. In the mind of today’s critic, this poses a problem. Must we say that Shaw was “wrong”? We may be tempted to utter a definitive “Yes,” while on the other hand bearing in mind that critical truth is an ever-shifting flux of historically relative pros and cons. Shaw’s derision of all the things he had scorn for has stood the test of time—because what he said has remained a touchstone, memorized and quoted again and again by generations of critics willing to encounter such a mind at the height of its powers even though we may possibly disagree, living as we do in a differing cultural context.
By way of qualification, however, I should point out that Shaw was not merely a negative hatchet man. For example, take his blistering assertion that “Brahms makes the lowest hack jingle-writer look like Mozart.” Even someone such as myself who unashamedly rather likes Brahms (when well performed) is forced to concede Shaw’s positive foresight in defending the populist craft of the jingle-writer. (Not that this means I must obsequiously agree with every single last nuance of Shaw’s statement.)
In any case, Shaw’s poison-tipped barbs were aimed at such a multitude of targets that to say he missed once or twice would be to say very little at all. Whatever the topic, Shaw never left any doubt as to where he stood:
On Hamlet: “A tour de fuss.”
On Oscar Wilde: “A man out of touch with his funnybone.”
On the Code of Hammurabi: “The sort of thing that would be considered profound by girls named Misty.”
On the formation of a local committee in Brighton to study the feasibility of allowing tourists to transport their beach gear on special storage racks affixed to the sides of buses: “A worse idea hasn’t crossed this battered old desk of mine in lo, these many moons.”
From 1914 to 1919, Shaw’s razor-tongued gibes were overshadowed by a vogue for bright quips about World War I. By 1921, however, he was again riding high—thanks to a series of personal appearances billed as “Shaw and His Skunk of the Week.” Playing to packed houses that rocked with expectant hilarity when he led off with one of his typical catchphrases—“Am I hot under the collar tonight!” or “Here’s something that really steams my butt”—he administered verbal shellackings to contemporary follies and pretensions ranging from Peter Pan (“It has plot holes you could drive a truck through”) to the scientific community’s renewed interest in Isaac Newton’s idea of putting a cannonball into orbit (“One of those notions worth thinking about while you clean your teeth: a tour de floss”).
For the next twenty years, nothing and no one seemed safe from Shaw’s merciless stabs—not even his fans. Abhorring the nuisance of uninvited visitors, he posted on his door the following notice:
1. If you don’t see what you want, don’t be too shy to ask. Probably we don’t have it anyway.
2. If the service is not up to snuff, just holler. Nobody will pay you any mind, but your tonsils can use the exercise.
3. We will gladly cash your check if you leave your watch, fur coat, or car as collateral. No wives or in-laws accepted.
4. If you are displeased in any way by the attentions of the resident Doberman pinscher, just remember—things could be worse. You could be at a Brahms concert.
But his visitors, instead of feeling rebuffed, copied out the notice and awarded it pride of place in their dens. Thus, a truism became widely established once and for all (until recently): that the name of Johannes Brahms was a joke (even to people who had never heard a note of his music), and that George Bernard Shaw was an unimpeachable de-bunker of sacred cows. Indeed, by 1940 so secure was Shaw’s reputation that there was only one person in the entire English-speaking world capable of cutting him down to size.
LYNDON Baines Johnson was a young congressman from Texas when, in July 1940, Shaw came through the state on a lecture tour of the U.S. At the Houston airport, Johnson headed the delegation of local celebrities assigned to greet the distinguished visitor from abroad, who was to address a luncheon at the Houston Junior League Tea Room and then spend the night as Johnson’s guest at his ranch (which probably he wasn’t rich enough to own yet, but it could have been a summer rental). Waiting on the tarmac, Johnson took a minute to riffle through the press release he had been given on Shaw, and remarked, “This son of a bitch has got some kind of mean mouth on him.” So Johnson was really up for a confrontation. Whereas Shaw was too busy hating Brahms to be bothered thinking about a junior U.S. congressman whom he hadn’t even heard of yet. As soon as they met, Johnson immediately established dominance by a tactic he later became famous for—his “laying on of hands.” The spindly, white-bearded Irishman, who didn’t like being mauled by strangers, tried to counterattack by snapping at the big Texan in boots and Stetson. “What is this—some kind of tour de horse?” But it came out sounding pretty feeble. Nobody laughed, and Shaw lost crucial momentum. Johnson sensed right away that he had the edge, and he kept it. He was just a master of humiliation. On the way to the Junior League Tea Room, he asked Shaw to get him his dress boots out of a gym bag that he had purposely put on Shaw’s side of the seat. At that point, Shaw overthought the situation and drew a bad conclusion. He decided to just go along with everything Johnson did and cater to him, on the theory that Johnson would quit bothering him once he saw he couldn’t get a rise out of him. This was a huge mistake. The more quiet and docile Shaw got, the more Johnson tortured him.
At the luncheon, Johnson pretended not to be able to hear anything Shaw said, so Shaw had to repeat himself in a louder voice and came off as strident. The whole time, Johnson sat with his body angled subtly away from him, as if they weren’t really together. During the lecture, he had a phone brought to the table and called his answering service. Then there was a question period, so Johnson asked Shaw his opinion of a book, Pratfall into the Abyss, which didn’t exist. When Shaw said he had never heard of it, Johnson said, “What’s the matter—you too dumb to recognize a joke when you hear one?,” but he said it in a funny way that would have made Shaw look oversensitive if he got mad.
Then—here’s another thing Johnson did. At the end of the luncheon, they were supposed to go right to the ranch, but Johnson dawdled a lot, which drove Shaw totally nuts. Finally, after a two-hundred-mile ride in a bouncing pickup truck, which Johnson drove himself—fiddling with the radio the whole time and refusing to talk, because they were alone, and if Shaw complained to anybody later he could never prove it—they got to the ranch, where the vegetarian Shaw was confronted with the sight and aroma of grotesque sides of beef barbecuing over smoking mesquite in earth trenches sodden with fat drippings. (Johnson hadn’t even known that Shaw was a vegetarian—it was just a lucky break that fed into his strategy.)
The final blow was that night, when Johnson made Shaw dress up in an oversize cowboy suit with woolly chaps and showed him off like a performing monkey to a crowd of oil barons. The most galling part of it for Shaw was that by this time he had forfeited his right to protest. If he said anything now, Johnson could come back with “Well, why the hell didn’t you speak up sooner?” or accuse him of being passive-aggressive. Anyway, so much of it was the kind of stuff Shaw couldn’t exactly put his finger on.
Shaw’s wounds were still raw the next morning when he woke up in an uncomfortable bed made out of a wagon wheel and saw hanging on a wall the following notice, framed in mesquite:
1. Never cross LBJ.
2. Obey all rules.
Shaw later claimed that he escaped by walking a hundred and ten miles, in sandals, to a private landing strip outside Waco, where he bummed a flight to L.A. But Johnson always told reporters that while he remembered Shaw’s lecture, Shaw had spent the night in Houston at a friend’s who was out of town, and never set foot on the ranch. He knew this would get back to Shaw and make him feel psychologically annihilated.
In 1950, when Shaw died, his last words were “Don’t tell LBJ. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction.” Every year since their meeting, Johnson had bugged Shaw by sending him a Christmas card with the printed message “Thank you for your support.” Johnson enjoyed this joke so much that no one had the heart to tell him when Shaw died. Every Christmas, he personally signed the card, and his secretary pretended to mail it. Although he suffered some reverses late in his own life, this annual power play lightened his spirits until the very end. He rests in peace, unlike Brahms.
1985