Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  In the urgency of his despair, Keynes, the informed insider, became ‘an outlaw from British official circles’, while Shaw was to occupy the position of enemy rather than outlaw. ‘He felt that capitalism had caused the war,’ commented William Irvine, ‘and that democracy had lost the peace.’ Keynes dedicated his book to ‘the new generation [that] has not yet spoken and silent opinion [that] is not yet formed’. But Shaw, being a generation older than Keynes, felt his precarious faith in this generation diminishing. At the peace table, over the heads of his colleagues, Woodrow Wilson had appealed to the conscience of the public. But the public’s conscience had been subtly changed by the European free press; and the man whom no one dared criticize during the war was now openly jeered at and called a ‘dangerous radical’ by businessmen who controlled the newspapers. ‘He stood in great need of sympathy, of moral support, of the enthusiasm of the masses,’ wrote Keynes. ‘...And in this drought the flower of the President’s faith withered and dried up.’ Such personal reliance on applause, and journalistic manipulation of popularity, came as additional evidence to Shaw that government by the people was unworkable. Only ‘government of the people and for the people’ was practicable.

  2

  Shaw’s Heartbreak

  Is this England, or is it a madhouse?

  Heartbreak House

  Shaw’s response to the Great War is most deeply revealed in Heartbreak House. His depression had seeped into the play: his anger over what he saw at Versailles inflamed the Preface. It had ‘begun with an atmosphere’, the unjudgemental atmosphere of Chekhov’s plays. ‘An exquisite play by Tchekoff was actually hissed,’ Shaw had reported to George Moore before the war. ‘You cannot conceive how inferior we are (a small circle excepted) to the common playgoer.’ He was to subtitle his own play ‘A Fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes’. Heartbreak House is full of ‘the same nice people, the same utter futility’ as The Cherry Orchard. But, as the Preface makes clear, this is Shaw’s view of ‘cultured, leisured Europe before the war’.

  At the centre of this atmosphere Shaw placed the supernatural storybook character of Captain Shotover. His model had been the actress Lena Ashwell’s seafaring father, Commander Pocock, who in retirement went to live on a sailing vessel on the River Tyne, fitting out the stern as his own quarters, placing bars on Lena’s nursery portholes, and equipping the upper deck with a drawing-room and greenhouse.

  Heartbreak House was intended as tragedy. ‘Behold my Lear,’ he later gestured from his puppet play, Shakes versus Shav. He regarded King Lear as pure tragedy: ‘even the fool in Lear is tragic’. Like Lear, Captain Shotover’s heartbreak has apparently been caused by his two daughters, Ariadne and Hesione.

  Ariadne Utterword, who is ‘as strong as a horse’, speaks for Horseback Hall which is mentioned in the Preface as ‘the alternative to Heartbreak House’, a very Irish alternative ‘consisting of a prison for horses with an annex for the ladies and gentlemen who rode them’. At the age of nineteen, Ariadne escaped from the overheated atmosphere of Heartbreak House and became part of the wooden-headed, outdoor tradition of English life. The Preface prepares us for a Peacockian dialogue in the style of Headlong Hall. Having run away from the eccentricity of her upbringing and the world of her emotions, Ariadne has pursued respectability which is represented by her decorous ‘numskull’ of a husband, a colonial Governor of the British Empire. Sir Hastings Utterword could ‘save the country with the greatest ease,’ she boasts, once he was given the necessary powers and ‘a good supply of bamboo to bring the British native to his senses’. Ariadne is an utter philistine. For much of the first act Captain Shotover has pretended not to recognize her. ‘You left because you did not want us,’ he eventually tells her. ‘Was there no heartbreak in that for your father?’

  Hesione is the opposite of Ariadne. As the chatelaine of Heartbreak House she is a siren of sexual infatuation who lures people into her web and leaves them suspended. She has disabled the two ‘inventors’ in the house, her husband and her father. Hector Hushabye is a man of action reduced from being a creator of exploits to an inventor of stories; Shotover is the thinker whose intelligence has been trivialized into money-making. ‘Money is running short,’ Hesione informs him after his patent lifeboat has failed to earn them more than £500. ‘...Living at the rate we do, you cannot afford life-saving inventions. Cant you think of something that will murder half Europe at one bang?’

  Shaw’s Cordelia is Ellie Dunn, a spiritual offspring of Shotover’s rather than his blood relation. She has been invited to the house by Hesione, and her unsentimental education is the play’s single continuous thread of narrative. When the curtain rises she appears as a solitary figure on stage dreaming over Othello, only to find a few minutes later that her own Othello, a man of wonderfully adventurous stories whom she has known by the name of ‘Marcus Darnley’, is actually Hesione’s husband Hector. She passes rapidly in the stage directions from ‘great distress’, through anger to look ‘curiously older and harder’. She had been going to marry a fifty-five-year-old ‘perfect hog of a millionaire’ nicknamed Boss Mangan, acting from sentimental gratitude for the financial help he had given her father. In Act II, as part of her disillusioning education, she learns that Mangan has in fact made a profit out of her father by assisting him into bankruptcy. But she is still determined to marry him, her motive now being to gain use of the money he has tricked out of her father, even though Mangan, who has followed her to the house, has fallen in love with Hesione.

  In the last act Ellie reveals to Mangan that she ‘never really intended to make you marry me... I only wanted to feel my strength.’ She has reached a mystical union with Shotover, who lies in her arms as fast asleep as a baby while she tells the others that she has given ‘my broken heart and my strong sound soul to its natural captain, my spiritual husband and second father’. Her emotional transformation-in-a-day is an accelerated dash through the long pilgrim’s progress of his life. All the optimism of the play centres on Ellie. ‘Heartbreak is not what I thought it must be,’ she says. For her it is the process of growing up and ‘the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling’.

  But Shaw also makes his Goneril and Regan victims of heartbreak. Hesione suffers from the dangerous after-effects of a love that came once in her lifetime, then passed. What she shared with Hector, whom she has now reduced to the ‘household pet’ of their marriage, cannot be regained. All her flirtations and seductions will bring no more than fading reflections of that dream. She is forty-four and has no other interests; what can she do but cry to dream again? For her sister Ariadne heartbreak is paradoxically lack of heart. She is as fearful of emotion as Mangan is of poverty, and has fashioned herself into a rigidly conventional woman of the world whose tragedy is that ‘her heart will not break’.

  Both sisters, we are given to understand, have been damaged by their wayward upbringing. ‘Old Shotover sold himself to the devil in Zanzibar,’ Hector romances. ‘The devil gave him a black witch for a wife; and these two daughters are their mystical progeny.’ In a letter to Trebitsch, Shaw explained that by heartbreak he meant the chronic effects of heredity and childhood, rather than the setback of an unhappy love affair. Shotover is prevented from advancing to his ‘seventh degree of concentration’ by forces that swamped Shaw’s own childhood. He describes Heartbreak House itself as ‘my kennel’ – the word Shaw used for his birthplace in Synge Street – and, having retreated into ‘my second childhood’, he is diverted by habitual rum-drinking from pursuing his thought ‘so long and so continuously’ that it issues into action. ‘To be drunk means to have dreams’ – or Shavian fantasies. ‘You must never be in the real world when we talk together,’ Ellie soothes him. But this incapacity of the most gifted characters to use their abilities in the real world has by the last act developed into the collective heartbreak of the play. ‘We sit here talking,’ cries Hector, ‘and leave everything to Mangan and to chance and to the devil.’

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  At the beginning, the house is ‘a palace of enchantments, as in the second act of Parsifal’. It contains light and dark, land and sea, sleeping and waking, fantasy and fact. The first act, with its complicated jigsaw of almost sixty entrances and exits, its ensemble playing of what appears to be a chaos of informality, is ‘as dependent on atmosphere as any of Tchekov’s’ plays. Shaw felt he had seen in The Cherry Orchard a method of advancing the disquisitory technique of Getting Married and Misalliance – which preserved the unities and removed the action outside the theatre – with the odd dramatic break-in by pilot, burglar or would-be assassin. In later acts he made a number of further references to Chekhov: the ‘splendid drumming in the sky’ accords with the snapping of the string in The Cherry Orchard; and the topsy-turvy burglar is the equivalent of Chekhov’s ominous tramp. But Chekhov’s world, with its fusion of impressionistic touches, is naturalistic; in Shaw’s house, which is full of surreal and disorientating episodes, ‘the very burglars cant behave naturally’.

  From the moment the curtain goes up and the audience sees Ellie Dunn’s copy of Othello sink to her lap, as she dozes in slumber on the draughtsman’s chair, the theatre has moved into a world of dreams. Asleep in her bedroom upstairs lies Hesione, the mistress of Heartbreak House, who has changed her name from Shotover to the somnambulistic Hushabye as the result of her ‘enchanting dream’ of love with Hector. In the second act Mangan is sent into a hypnotic trance, and in the third act, as the thunderous bombers approach, it is the Captain who sleeps. This sleeping and dreaming allows Shaw additional licence for exploring his characters’ unconscious minds. In the pathetic scene in which Hector, left alone on stage, ‘falls into a daydream’ and performs a desperate duel with an imaginary opponent and then in ‘another reverie’ mimes a thrilling love scene with an invisible woman, we witness all the qualities of courage and imagination he has never been able to employ in waking life – qualities that, when Shotover enters, are immediately contracted into ‘a series of gymnastic exercises’.

  Growing-up becomes allied to a process of waking-up. Ellie Dunn has the strength to wake herself and the power to mesmerize Mangan so that he cannot resist hearing the truth about himself. He exhibits the essential babyhood of capitalism. This is a revelation to Hesione, who has accepted him as he has presented himself to the world: a businessman ‘Boss’ with plenty of money and no heart. ‘It comes to me suddenly that you are a real person: that you had a mother, like anyone else.’ But it is too late for Mangan to grow up.

  ‘What is true within these walls is true outside them,’ announces Shotover. Heartbreak House has splendid views of reality which no one inside can reach. For the Palace of Dreams is a revelation as well as a refuge, and recalls an earlier dream sequence in Shaw’s plays: the hell scene in Man and Superman. Hector is the reluctant Don Juan of this hell and Hesione a Doña Ana who has long ago given birth to her children and now gives herself over to pleasure. Her house is a moral vacuum. ‘What do men want?’ she demands, reversing Freud’s question on women. ‘...Why are they not satisfied?’

  Shaw shuffles the cards of identity with comic virtuosity. It is a matter of Shavian orthodoxy that every person should contradict the pose he adopts. ‘The great question is, not who we are, but what we are,’ sententiously remarks Mazzini Dunn, little realizing that he is to be shown up as a gullible sentimentalist wrong about everything except his daughter (‘you become quite clever when you talk about her,’ Hesione admits). Even comfortable Nurse Guinness, who asks disbelievingly: ‘now is it likely I’d kill any man on purpose’, is shortly afterwards demanding why the burglar (who turns out to be her husband as well as one of the Captain’s old crew) had not been shot. ‘If I’d known who he was, I’d have shot him myself,’ she swears. Shaw has her running at the end of the play ‘in hideous triumph... laughing harshly’ to the gravel pit where her husband has been blown up.

  For Mazzini Dunn, Shaw borrowed some of the trappings of Ebenezer Howard, idealistic pioneer of the Garden City Movement. It had been Ebenezer Howard’s book To-morrow, A Peaceful Path to Rural Reform that Tom Broadbent had carried round with him as a blueprint of heaven and model for his business expansion scheme in John Bull’s Other Island. And it had been Ebenezer Howard’s dream-town that Shaw put on the stage as Perivale St Andrews, ‘beautifully situated and beautiful in itself,’ in Major Barbara.

  Mangan is possibly the least sympathetic character in all Shaw’s work. He is the alternative captain to Shotover: a captain of industry who sees his job as getting the better of ‘other fellows in other departments’. His announcement that the Prime Minister had asked him to ‘join the Government without even going through the nonsense of an election, as the dictator of a great public department’, provokes a dismay which is part of the general humiliation of Mangan in Heartbreak House before his miserable death in a gravel pit. Nurse Guinness’s ‘Serves un right!’ is the signing-off of Shaw’s revenge on Mangan who was based on Hudson Kearley, head of a wholesale grocery firm, whom Lloyd George had brought into his Government at the same time as he rejected Shaw for a place on the Irish Convention.

  Hesione is Shaw’s first portrait of Mrs Patrick Campbell since the end of their affair. Hesione’s talent for incapacitating those she seduces makes Hector liken her to a vampire. ‘When I am neither coaxing and kissing nor laughing,’ she says, ‘I am just wondering how much longer I can stand living in this cruel, damnable world.’ Mrs Pat had predicted that her life ‘is sure to be a short one. I wish it to be.’ Being denied her wish, she was to demand pathetically in old age ‘who is there here who still loves me?’ and receiving no reply, ask: ‘Why am I alive – what for?’ It is this emptiness that Hesione conveys, foreshadowing the career of a great actress who was to die ‘sans profession’.

  Nobody could speak Hesione’s lines as she could, Shaw told Stella, ‘or give the quality of the woman as you could if you would’. But she fancied playing the eighteen-year-old Ellie – and that was impossible. For Ellie was conceived from Shaw’s memories of that hypnotic young girl, Erica Cotterill, who had lived in ‘a fanciful world of her own’ and now occupied a special place within the fanciful world of his plays. As ‘Incognita Appassionata’ in Getting Married, she had embodied the sexual passion lacking in his marriage; and as Ellie Dunn she is his spiritual intimate, which may be one reason why Heartbreak House was ‘loathed by Charlotte’.

  Charlotte’s loathing of this play is reproduced in Ariadne’s disapproval of the house. Ariadne’s emotional rigidity, as well as her early determination to make a marriage unacceptable to her living parent, were Charlotte’s attitudes. Shaw had entered the world of Horseback Hall on visits to Charlotte’s friends and relations, when he put up in the castles and big houses belonging to the county families of Anglo-Irish society. But Ariadne’s affinity with Charlotte is well-disguised. Her appearance, it has been suggested, was taken from Virginia Woolf.

  The Shaws, the Woolfs and the Webbs had come together during the weekend of 17 to 19 June 1916 at a house called Wyndham Croft in Sussex. ‘We talked quite incessantly,’ Virginia remembered. ‘...I liked it better than I expected. At anyrate one can say what one likes, which is unusual with the middle aged.’ In Shotover-style, Shaw slept, Virginia observed, ‘and then woke up and rambled on into interminable stories about himself... Poor Mrs Shaw was completely out of it.’ In the mornings Shaw would go into the garden where Leonard saw him writing his play ‘on a writing pad on his knee’. From this garden could be heard the guns of the Somme offensive which he turned into the ‘splendid drumming’ that Mazzini characteristically identifies as the sound of a goods train.

  This weekend, with its coming together of Bloomsbury and the Fabians, helped Shaw over some of his difficulties with the play – which he acknowledged in a letter to Virginia twenty-four years later when the bombs of the Second World War had begun to fall. Though the Bloomsbury Group had published and exhibited little of its work before 1916, the principles of
aesthetic sensibility and personal relationships which animated that work, and to which it gave priority over the economic and political values of the Fabians, would have become apparent to Shaw during these days of incessant talking, and it is these Bloomsbury values which he now injected into the play. ‘Shaw visits upon the age of Bloomsbury with its cult of sentimental personal relations the same scorn Carlyle visited upon the age of Brummel with its Byronism and its pococurantism,’ commented the critic Louis Crompton. But the inhabitants of Heartbreak House are more convincingly made up from that coterie of gallants and graces known as ‘the Souls’, who were more aristocratic than Bloomsbury and went on polishing their veneer of culture, went on sipping the sweet life, even after the declaration of war. Shaw added Bloomsbury to his mixture so as to make his play contemporary, but he had earlier and better knowledge of the Souls than of Bloomsbury.

  Shaw’s pessimism had grown from his experience of contemporary history; his optimism was increasingly tied to a visionary future where the action of human will has broken the cyclical pattern of behaviour. Heartbreak House is less a visionary than a contemporary play, and Shotover wins only a misanthropic victory. ‘I cannot bear men and women. I have to run away,’ he cries out. ‘...Old men are dangerous: it doesnt matter to them what is going to happen to the world.’

  The throbbing pessimism, bolts of anger, shivers of violence that build to the ambiguously explosive climax are also ingredients active in the great apocalyptic works of the war: Eliot’s The Waste Land, Lawrence’s Women in Love and Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. Shaw is in surreal territory several years before the arrival of the surrealists who courted loss of control to explore connections between dream and reality. The sudden spiralling of his wit, the curious patches of farce, the sideslips of tone (such as the nursery incantation at the end of Act I which seems to sound from the world of T. S. Eliot), all fill gaps in the play’s organic unity He had written a revenge tragedy without blood. As they drift in and out of this visionary house, these elemental characters seem to grow disembodied, as if made of air and fire. It is the play of an older man. ‘I have children,’ says Hector. ‘All that is over and done with for me’ – as it is for Hesione and Ariadne. Larry Doyle in John Bull’s Other Island had longed for a place where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not unreal; but the brutality of the war had driven Shaw deeper into dreams. The love charades of Heartbreak House are the games that go on in ‘the house of the unreal and of the seekers for happiness’ which is Don Juan’s definition of hell in Man and Superman. He had come as close as he dared to ‘the blasphemous despair of Lear’.