5
Home Rule for England
What we need is not a new edition of rules of the ring but the substitution of law for violence as between nations.
Shaw to Jerome N. Frank (13 April 1918)
In the first four and a half years of Fred Day’s employment, the Shaws made four journeys into Ireland. Usually they spent some weeks bathing, boating, walking and writing at Parknasilla, which Charlotte had known as a child and which to her mind always rejuvenated G.B.S. Near the opposite coast, they would stay with Horace Plunkett of Foxrock outside Dublin – ‘the kindest and most helpful of my Kilteragh guests,’ he called them.
‘One reason that I am anxious to get him here,’ Plunkett had told Charlotte, ‘is that I feel it in my bones that the time has come for him to do his great service to Ireland.’ It was difficult for Shaw to resist such unusual trust, and when Plunkett’s new party, known as the Dominion League, was formed in 1919, he began numerous contributions to its paper, the Irish Statesman edited by AE.
In Shaw’s imagination the Dominion League became a forum for all extremists whose opposing views could be beguiled into a visionary Irish Bill that none of the extremist factions could obtain separately. To pull off this amazing trick ‘the ace is the public opinion of the world,’ Shaw reckoned, ‘especially the English-speaking world’. He promoted the League as a sensible way forward for businessmen, an attractive vehicle for patriots, and an honourable solution for the British Government. ‘What the Irish want is the freedom of their country,’ he declared. But no one could agree what freedom meant. Was it complete independence, or the gaining of a position similar to Australia and Canada, or the occupation of a place equal to England’s within the British Commonwealth, or the beginning of a federated partnership of the United Kingdom?
Meanwhile Ireland continued to exist under a virtual state of martial law. ‘Laws are enforced, not by the police, but by the citizens who call the police when the law is broken,’ Shaw argued. ‘...But in Ireland nobody will call the police, nobody will give away another Irishman to the policeman.’ The result was a miserably weak British regime holding on to power through Black and Tan coercion. In Ireland ‘you have every sort of liberty trampled on,’ Shaw told the Fabians. ‘...all these petty persecutions, annoyance, these flingings of men into jail, putting down newspapers, charging political meetings with bayonet and baton charges have produced a condition of the most furious revolt against the British Government and, of course, you have the governing class in this country quite deliberately and unmistakeably going on with that in order to provoke revolts against them which will enable them to say it is impossible to give Ireland self-government.’ Amid the raids, ambushes and weekly acts of terrorism, the attempted assassination at the end of 1919 of Lord French, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, which appeared to shock the English, came as no surprise to Shaw.
But what did take him by surprise was the sudden action of Lloyd George who announced a Bill for the ‘better government of Ireland’, partitioning six of the nine Ulster counties from the twenty-six so-called ‘southern’ counties, north and south being provided with separate home rule and a local Parliament. Lloyd George’s Bill led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and semi-finalization of the partition of Ireland at the end of the year. The Dáil ratified the treaty, but the minority opposing it, led by Éamon de Valera, attracted the support of a majority section of the Irish Republican Army. The Anglo-Irish war had ended: in June 1922 the Irish Civil War began.
‘This is an impossible situation,’ Shaw wrote in the Irish Times that summer. It was literally impossible in the sense that the men he had always called ‘marginal impossibilists’ had won the day. The IRA was flushed with success – though to Shaw’s eyes it represented only ‘the stale romance that passes for politics in Ireland’. His purpose throughout all these complicated Anglo-Irish troubles had been to promote any act of grace that could sweeten the atmosphere of this war-tortured country. ‘We must all, at heavy disadvantages, do what we can to stop explosions of mere blind hatred.’
After the ratification of the treaty, whatever skirmishes went on between IRA and Irish Free State Army troops, the country would have to govern itself, ‘which means that her troubles are beginning, not ending,’ Shaw warned. He continued to come over, keeping himself up-to-date with political developments. On 19 and 20 August 1922 he and Charlotte had stayed once more with Horace Plunkett at Kilteragh where they met Michael Collins, one of the most attractive of the Free State leaders. Collins had been a member of the Irish delegation that negotiated the Anglo-Irish Treaty and now, as Commander-in-Chief of the Free State Army, was leading the fight against some of his ex-comrades in the IRA. A few days before this meeting, following the death of Arthur Griffith, he had been appointed head of the new government of the Irish Free State. To be dining with Michael Collins at Kilteragh seemed entirely appropriate to Shaw. With the political realignment between Irishmen, Collins had been moving from extremism to the moderate centre until he now occupied Plunkett’s old role – the very change that Shaw had looked for, by non-violent means, in his proposals for the Dominion League.
The Shaws left Kilteragh next day; and a day later Collins was shot dead in an ambush near Cork. ‘How could a born soldier die better than at the victorious end of a good fight, falling to a shot of another Irishman – a damned fool, but all the same an Irishman who thought he was fighting for Ireland – “a Roman to a Roman”?’ Shaw wrote to Michael Collins’s sister. ‘I met Michael for the first and last time on Saturday last, and am very glad I did. I rejoice in his memory... So tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colors in his honor; and let us all praise God that he had not to die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.’
It was a handsome letter, masking Shaw’s own pessimism under its shining style. Shaw had returned with Charlotte to Ireland for a couple of months in mid-July 1923, burning up the thirty miles of mountainous Cork and Kerry roads between Glengarriff and Parknasilla ‘in a new 23–60 h.p.’. Despite alarms in the papers, excursions across the south of Ireland were safer than anywhere else in Europe, he reported to The Times. There was some outdoor economic socialism-in-action – ‘the loot from plundered houses has to be redistributed by rough methods for which the permanent law is too slow and contentious’ – but none of this was exercised at the expense of the errant Englishman. ‘The tourist’s heart is in his mouth when he first crosses a repaired bridge on a 30 cwt. car, for the repairs are extremely unconvincing to the eye,’ he wrote; ‘but after crossing two or three in safety he thinks no more of them.
‘Since I arrived I have wandered every night over the mountains, either alone or with a harmless companion or two, without molestation or incivility... there is not the smallest reason why Glengarriff and Parknasilla should not be crowded this year with refugees from the turbulent sister island and the revolutionary Continent, as well as by connoisseurs in extraordinarily beautiful scenery and in air which makes breathing a luxury.’
On 12 September he fell on some rocks along the Kerry coast, damaging two ribs and badly bruising himself. He came back to England six days later, like an Irish hero himself, to be attended by an osteopath, a surgeon and radiographer.
This was his thirteenth visit to his country since he had emigrated from Dublin almost fifty years ago, and he would not go back again. His last political hopes for Ireland had appeared to go up in smoke when Horace Plunkett’s house Kilteragh was burnt to the ground by the Republicans earlier that year. He had already written his valediction.
‘I am returning to England because I can do no good here... I was a Republican before Mr de Valera was born... I objected to the old relations between England and Ireland as I object to the present ones, because they were not half intimate enough... I must hurry back to London. The lunatics there are comparatively harmless.’
6
Free Will in Translat
ion
Nature must have a relief from any feeling, no matter how deep and sincere it is.
Jitta’s Atonement
‘The war is over,’ Shaw wrote. ‘...All the literary, artistic and scientific institutions should be hard at work healing up the wounds of Europe.’ What he advocated as public policy he tried to implement in his private dealings, seeking to invest his German royalties in German industry. ‘It is with great pleasure that I find myself able to correspond with my German friends again,’ he had written to Carl Otto in the autumn of 1919. ‘I need hardly say that the war did the most painful violence to my personal feelings.’ He felt a special tenderness for Siegfried Trebitsch. For much of the war they had hardly been able to communicate at all, and even during the long months of the Armistice Shaw had to obtain official authorization to write Trebitsch a letter – all his correspondence to Austria and Germany being inspected to make certain it was confined to business and ‘expressed in terms suitable to the existing political relations between our respective countries’. When Trebitsch moved for a time to Switzerland, Shaw vented his relief: ‘At last I have got you in a country which I can write to without being shot at dawn.’
Shaw instructed Trebitsch to hold on to all monies due and use them for himself and his wife. ‘Spend my money: steal it: do anything you like with it as if it were your own until you are in easy circumstances once more.’ But Trebitsch could not get the hang of these economic reversals. Despite all Shaw’s urgings, he would convey strange sums by dubious routes at odd intervals, imperilling their licence to trade. Because he was aware of Trebitsch’s dismay at becoming principally known as ‘Shaw’s translator’ (‘my name as a writer in my own right faded away’), G.B.S. hit on the corrective paradox of translating his translator. When Trebitsch sent him a copy of his latest play, Frau Gittas Sühne, shortly after the war, he accepted it as an opportunity to make this singular counter-reparationary gesture with Jitta’s Atonement. ‘I have read Gitta,’ he wrote in May 1920, ‘though most of your words are not in the dictionary.’ Within this tangle of difficulties there opened a beautiful advantage for Shaw: ‘I had to guess what it was all about by mere instinct.’
He took a year over the translation. Using ‘some telepathic method of absorption, I managed at last to divine, infer, guess, and co-invent the story of Gitta’. He had asked Blanche Patch’s German-speaking locum tenens to provide him with a literal translation of the play which served as a helpful departure guide. ‘I hope my tricks wont make you furious,’ he wrote uneasily to Trebitsch after completing the first act. ‘Charlotte says I have made it brutally realistic; but this is an unintended result of making the stage business more explicit for the sake of the actress...The stock joke of the London stage is a fabulous stage direction “Sir Henry turns his back to the audience and conveys that he has a son at Harrow”.’
Sending him this first act, Shaw advised Trebitsch to ‘tear the thing up if it is impossible’, but not to do so ‘merely because it is disappointing’ since all translations were that. ‘It is much better than the original,’ gallantly responded Trebitsch who had learnt Shaw’s politeness without its component of irony. He eagerly exhorted G.B.S. to complete his version which ‘proves again your stage-genious’, and add his name as co-dramatist to increase its chances of production. ‘I feel a childish delight reading Trebitsch in English,’ he wrote happily. ‘...Please handle that play like your own.’
This, increasingly, is what Shaw did. At the end of the first act, the fifty-year-old Professor Bruno Haldenstedt lies dead of a heart attack on the floor of an apartment where he had been keeping an assignation with his mistress, Jitta Lenkheim, the wife of a medical colleague. ‘I was horribly tempted to make Haldenstedt sit up after Jitta’s departure, and make a comedy of the sequel,’ Shaw warned Trebitsch. His struggle to resist these temptations weakened in the second act and was joyously abandoned in the third where the cast, with ‘a paroxysm of agonizing laughter’, evolves into a hilarious troupe of Shavians. ‘The real person always kills the imagined person,’ announces Jitta as Trebitsch’s characters die away; and the dead lover’s daughter, Edith Haldenstedt, agrees that it is ‘such a relief to be acting sensibly at last.’
Studying the typewritten transcription from Shaw’s shorthand turned out to be a strange experience for Trebitsch. ‘I was puzzeled very much reading your bold alterations,’ he admitted. ‘...The III Akt is in your version almost a comedy!’ Shaw was quick to provide healing explanations. It was true, he acknowledged, that he had not done justice to Trebitsch’s poetry. But Trebitsch would be overjoyed to discover that by making the characters rather less oppressively conventional, and then inserting a little mild fun into their lives, he had managed to rescue the hero and heroine from their dark fates of misery and despair. ‘That is the good news,’ he confirmed. Then he had been obliged to replace Vienna (which still lay in the romantic haze of Strauss waltzes) with London and New York (where the delicious anaesthetic of romance was only tolerated in Italian opera). The hopeless gloom into which Trebitsch flung everyone would be fatal to the play in Britain and America. ‘Life is not like that here,’ he explained. Trebitsch was surprised to learn that even with such artificial aids as black clothes, the British exercised a reaction against grief over death – an irresistible reaction into cheerfulness. Also ‘nine tenths of the adulteries end in reconciliations,’ Shaw notified Trebitsch, ‘and even at the connivance of the injured party at its continuation’.
The delight that had initially flowed through Trebitsch was by now rather confused. To what degree was Jitta’s Atonement his own work? The tragedy of his first act and the melodrama of the second act had been dissolved in the sparkling comedy of Shaw’s ending. It was true that he had been invited to refashion the play if he found these treacheries unbearable – but he trusted Shaw’s ‘diabolical skill’ and his estimate of the play’s increased chances of performance. So he gave the go-ahead to prepare an acting version of the text. ‘What could I do but agree?’
‘You will find that in this final acting edition of the play I have committed some fresh outrages,’ Shaw wrote. ‘...Nothing has been lost by this except the characteristic Trebitschian brooding that is so deliriously sad and noble in your novels but that I could never reproduce... My method of getting a play across the footlights is like revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion... so you must forgive me: I have done my best.’
Lee Schubert’s production in Washington and New York, with Bertha Kalich as Jitta, ‘did not succeed even as a comedy,’ Langner recorded. For two years Shaw held up Jitta in England in the hope of getting a West End production – then he handed it to Violet Vanbrugh who ‘will try it at a rather nice suburban theatre at Putney Bridge, called the Grand Theatre’. Shaw was abroad for this first English production, but caught up with it two months later at Leicester. ‘The funniest thing about it is that I was very much struck with your play when I saw it on the stage,’ he told Trebitsch. Most of the reviews made it clear that (as the Daily Telegraph reported) ‘Mr Shaw conjugates the verb “to translate” very differently from most men’. But whenever the reviewers should have felt like ‘holding up our hands in horror at the shameful way the original author has been manhandled,’ wrote the Nation & Athenaeum critic, ‘we are laughing too loud to remember to do so... it cannot possibly have been better entertainment.’ One of those most deeply entertained had been Arnold Bennett. ‘The thing is simply masterly, & contains a lot of the finest scenes that Shaw ever wrote.’ In his diary he recorded that the effect of re-engineering a machine-made drama with Shavian wit had been electrical. ‘The mere idea of starting on a purely conventional 1st act and then guying it with realism and fun, shows genius.
‘In the other acts there is some of the most brilliant work, some tender, some brutal, and lots of the most side-splitting fun that Shaw ever did – and he is now approaching seventy, I suppose. The “hysterics” scene of laughter between the widow and the
mistress of the dead man is startlingly original. The confession scene between the mistress and the daughter of the dead man is really beautiful.’
Though none of his fantasies of film versions and West End triumphs became facts, Trebitsch had already decided that ‘the play was indeed a success’. Shaw paid Trebitsch £100 (equivalent to £1,750 in 1997) for a perpetual non-exclusive licence to translate and publish Frau Gittas Sühne, and then diverted Trebitsch’s interests elsewhere. ‘Did I tell you that I am working on a play about Joan of Arc?’ he asked. There was, he had supposed, ‘no chance of your coming over here’. Not having seen Shaw now for some ten years, and feeling it was his ‘destiny and privilege’ to meet his friend again, Trebitsch swore ‘a vow that in spite of all difficulties and all qualms I would receive the master’s new work only from his own hand. Saint Joan summoned me, and I had to go and receive her.’ Shaw provided information on the prices and standards of London hotels, added an unglamorous assessment of Ayot – ‘a village where nobody dreams of dressing’ – and noted some of the house rules: ‘If you smoke cigars, you will give Charlotte asthma.’ All the same, he conceded, ‘I hope to be able to give you printed proofs of Joan’.
Bernard Shaw Page 73