Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  Shaw was not displeased to have his celebratory dinner at the St James Room of the Hotel Metropole hosted by the Parliamentary Labour Party and chaired by Ramsay MacDonald. He had admired MacDonald’s courage in resigning from the Labour Party leadership to oppose the war, and campaigned for him in the coupon election of 1918 at Leicester in which MacDonald lost his seat. To many it appeared as if MacDonald were politically destroyed. But his oratory, and the polished humour with which he had defended himself against attacks, added to his credentials and on his re-entry into Parliament in 1922 he became a natural choice as Labour leader. His brief premiership two years later established the Labour Party as a valid alternative government to the Conservatives and himself as the first socialist of national stature.

  When MacDonald first became Prime Minister in January 1924, with Sidney Webb as President of the Board of Trade, Shaw had hailed him as the ‘ablest leader in England’. By the time he came to form his second Labour Cabinet in June 1929, with Webb now translated into Lord Passfield and Colonial and Dominions Secretary, Shaw like some others was already preparing to discard him. MacDonald was a Liberal at heart, though his position as leader of the Labour Party had been legitimately won during his days as a rebel and an outcast. At the peak of his career he struck Shaw as being politically dead. But who among the living should take his place? Shaw backed someone forty years younger than himself, Oswald Mosley.

  Mosley’s political career in the 1920s had the radicalism and unorthodoxy that Shaw admired. At the beginning of the decade Mosley had broken with the Conservative Party over its Irish policy and exhibited his superiority to the party system by standing as an independent candidate, and winning. After MacDonald first came to power, Mosley joined the Labour Party and, following two years in the wilderness during Labour’s opposition, became a junior minister in MacDonald’s second administration. He was tipped by many as a future Prime Minister, an outsider increasingly fancied to overtake the tiring leader in the 1930s.

  Mosley was a wonderful manipulator of words. He sounded rational, he sounded omniscient, and when he vented his full powers of assertion it seemed as if heroic deeds were being performed. He was athletic and quick-minded, part child and part strong man – could this be the superman whose advent Shaw had been prophesying?

  Mosley had come to see himself, his biographer Robert Skidelsky writes, ‘acting out in real life the central dramatic situation of Shaw’s plays: the vital man, with ideas and impulses, confronting the inert creature of ideology and habits’. By the beginning of the new decade he had become an amalgam of Keynesian economics and Shavian political philosophy. ‘Has MacDonald found his superseder in Oswald Mosley?’ Beatrice Webb wondered in 1930.

  In January that year Mosley made his move with a memorandum to MacDonald proposing a recovery plan that called for the mobilization of national resources to combat unemployment. This programme of state intervention and large-scale public works was casually turned down by a Cabinet committee and on 20 May Mosley resigned – a ‘melodramatic defection from the Labour Party,’ Beatrice Webb called it, ‘slamming the door with a bang to resound throughout the political world’. Using this memorandum as a political manifesto, in the spring of 1931 Mosley formed his New Party which was planned as a Labour ginger group but which evolved eighteen months later into the British Union of Fascists.

  Shaw watched Mosley’s operatic career with a mixture of emotions. ‘Oh, if Oswald had only waited,’ he wrote after the New Party had been created, ‘ – if only he had known that MacDonald was contemplating political suicide!’ To some extent Shaw preserved his loyalty to Mosley by attacking the National Coalition Government that came to power in the summer of 1931. This, rather than Mosley’s splinter group, seemed to Shaw the real danger. Twice the Labour Party had been elected, and still there was no socialism in Britain.

  Shaw believed that the implementation of Mosley’s programme (similar to Roosevelt’s New Deal) would have gone some way to averting the financial crisis of 1931, which had been brought about partly by the cost of unemployment benefits. In his view, the government should have abandoned free trade and the gold standard. He thought that MacDonald had been imposed upon by American bankers and exploited by British politicians using the economic situation to split the Labour Party. MacDonald’s ‘clear course when the crisis came was to go into the Opposition and lead the Labour Party in a strenuous fight to balance the Budget at the expense of property instead of at the expense of Labour. That, at least, he could understand, if he could not understand the currency question,’ Shaw wrote at the beginning of 1932. ‘When he went over to the enemy and led the attack on wages and doles instead without ever mentioning the alternative, he was lost to Socialism for ever.’

  Shaw interpreted the extraordinary rally to the Nationalist idea, which gave MacDonald his landslide victory in the autumn of 1931, as a sign that ‘people are tired of the party system’. This was how he himself felt, though he knew that a coalition was the opposite of strong government. By his mid-seventies Shaw was disenchanted with the Fabian concept of weakness permeated by strength and the politician’s empty head continually filled with other people’s ideas. He had tried permeation all his life and it did not work – the ideas leaked away. ‘The Fabian parliamentary program was a very plausible one,’ he wrote in 1932, ‘but, as MacDonald has found, parliament and the party system is no more capable of establishing Communism than two donkeys pulling different ways.’

  While addressing an audience ‘in praise of Guy Fawkes’ at the Kingsway Hall in November 1932, Shaw singled out Mosley as ‘one of the few people who is writing and thinking about real things and not about figments and phrases’. MacDonald was applauded by the people for his phrases; Mosley was feared because he represented change. Shaw translated the one into a Shavian idealist and the other into a realist. He ignored Mosley’s layers of dissimulation and his uninhibited private ambition, and used his fascism (‘the only visible practical alternative to Communism’) as a stick with which to beat a philistine parliamentary system.

  Shaw’s speech was largely an attack on speech-making. The chief function of Parliament, he declared, had become the defeat of democracy through the art of fooling the public. His ‘painfully incoherent tirade’ (as Beatrice Webb called it) eloquently communicates a despairing sense of impotence. For almost fifty years he had been making political speeches and ‘so far as I can make out, those speeches have not produced any effect whatever... I have come to see at last that one of the most important things to be done in this country is to make public speaking a criminal offence.’

  In which case Shaw himself was a major criminal. This indeed was how he had come to feel. All Tanner’s revolutionary ‘talking’ from Man and Superman had merged with ‘this continual talk, talk, talk in Parliament’. What could be more appropriate in a speech praising the man who ‘saw that the first thing to enable the Government to do anything was to blow up Parliament’, than to threaten people with Mosley? ‘The moment things begin seriously to break up and something has to be done, quite a number of men like Mosley will come to the front...’ he warned. ‘Let me remind you that Mussolini began as a man with about twenty five votes. It did not take him very many years to become the Dictator of Italy. I do not say that Sir Oswald Mosley is going to become Dictator of this country, though more improbable things have happened... You will hear something more of Sir Oswald Mosley before you are through with him.’

  What the public was to hear in the later 1930s was the stamp and chant of Mosley’s Blackshirts. In Shaw’s experience of British politics the only precedent for these rallies were the ineffectual marches of Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. A measure of Mosley’s political invalidity in Shaw’s mind after 1933 is his absence from both The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism in 1937 and Everybody’s Political What’s What? in 1944. Even his campaign for Mosley’s release from prison in the Second World War was to be based on the assump
tion of his political insignificance.

  Shaw distanced himself from the unsavoury aspects of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. ‘Anti-Semite propaganda has no logical connexion with Fascism,’ he said. ‘...Anti-Semitism is the hatred of the lazy, ignorant, fat-headed Gentile for the pertinacious Jew who, schooled by adversity to use his brains to the utmost, outdoes him in business.’ He was to define fascism as ‘State financed private enterprise’ or ‘Socialism for the benefit of exploiters’. From the 1930s onwards Shaw chose to call himself a communist: ‘that is, I advocate national control of land, capital, and industry for the benefit of us all. Fascists advocate it equally for the benefit of the landlords, capitalists and industrialists.’

  Beatrice Webb protested that Mosley, Mussolini and Hitler had ‘no philosophy, no notion of any kind of social organization, except their own undisputed leadership instead of parliamentary self-government – what was the good of it all?’ Admitting this lack of economic principle, Shaw asserted that they all had the personality to change the world. Britain was in decline because she did not recognize that social progress depended on leadership. But Beatrice was not convinced. ‘This strange admiration for the person who imposes his will on others, however ignorant and ugly and even cruel that will may be, is an obsession which has been growing on G.B.S.,’ she reflected a year later.

  ‘...As a young social reformer, he hated cruelty and oppression and pleaded for freedom. He idealized the rebel. Today he idealizes the dictator, whether he be a Mussolini, a Hitler or a Stalin, or even a faked-up pretence of a dictator like Mosley... And yet G.B.S. publicly proclaims that he is a Communist... What he really admires in Soviet Communism is the forceful activities of the Communist Party... lifting the whole body of the people to a higher level of health and happiness.’

  3

  An Idle Romance

  Man is the occupation of the idle woman.

  Shaw to Mary Hamilton (23 November 1918)

  ‘Hello, Bernard Shaw.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘We’ve come to see you.’

  In the late summer of 1921 an American girl had accosted G.B.S. on the sidewalk outside Adelphi Terrace. She was twenty-four with dark hair, eyes like muscatel grapes ‘and a fine shape’. Her name was Molly Tompkins. She had come from Atlanta, Georgia, with her husband Laurence and their two-year-old son Peter to ‘find’ him, she explained; they had got his address at Hatchards. ‘Then where is Laurence?’ asked Shaw. He was round the corner nervously drinking coffee. Leaving him there, and under the spell of her good looks, Shaw invited her to ‘come upstairs and tell me all about it’. She came and, over buttered crumpets, unfolded their plan. Laurence was rich and had ambitions as a sculptor; Molly herself had been in Ziegfeld’s Follies. Together they dreamed of creating a Shavian theatre, he carving in stone the story of Creative Evolution, she interpreting it on stage.

  He saw that Molly was ‘as vain as a goldfinch’ and reckoned that ‘poor Tompkins’ had ‘taken on a fine handful’. Yet her eagerness ‘softened my stony heart a little,’ he admitted; ‘and now I suppose I am in for taking some interest in you occasionally’. So it began.

  He instructed Laurence to get a studio and arranged for Molly to take the written and oral examinations for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He had been on the Council of RADA since W. S. Gilbert’s death in 1911 and his bracing influence was largely responsible for broadening its constitution and liberalizing the students’ education. But Molly did not think much of it. The two houses which comprised the Gower Street part of the premises (and which, with the help of £5,000 from G.B.S., were later replaced by a larger building) impressed her as being ‘dim and dingy’; the director Kenneth Barnes was ‘pompous’; and she took an ‘instant dislike’ to her first teacher, the actor Claude Rains. Indeed, she behaved so badly that Kenneth Barnes threatened to expel her. ‘You are a disgrace to me,’ Shaw admonished her. ‘...[they] ask me despairingly what they are to do with you and why I didn’t bring you up properly.’

  But he could not help being tickled by his protégée’s goings-on or conceal his entertainment at the beaux gestes with which, at the very last moment, she would avoid their consequences. For every quality, she seemed to have some infamous defect. ‘You are worse than the tragédienne who rehearsed Pygmalion in the upper division for me some years ago,’ he told her. This, perhaps, was her appeal. She challenged him to re-embrace past sentiments, improving his old performances and rephrasing some painful scenes, this time painlessly – for surely he was beyond pain now.

  *

  Recently Stella Campbell had been pressing Shaw to let her publish the ‘dear letters’ she had inspired him to write. ‘What have you written?’ he demanded. ‘Your life or mine or both?’ She called it My Life and Some Letters. Knowing how much she needed the money (‘the poor woman can hardly lay her hand on a hundred pound note’) he wrote to her publisher stating that he had made a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with her not to raise the question of copyright over his correspondence.

  Awakened by Charlotte to the implications of what he had done, he asked Stella to send him the proofs: he might perhaps ‘spot some dangers that you may not have thought of’. She did not dare let him see all her proofs, but had a copy made of the correspondence she proposed publishing. ‘People talk carelessly, but nobody will think anything but what lovely letters and what a dear man you are,’ she prompted him.

  This ‘terrible wadge of letters’ arrived at Ayot St Lawrence shortly after Christmas 1921 and it appalled him. He dared not reveal its contents to Charlotte. ‘Public exposure’ of them would be as ‘utterly impossible,’ he warned Stella, as for ‘you to undress yourself (or me) in the street’. Their only chance was for him to edit them. ‘My treasure, my darling, my beloved, adored, ensainted friend of my very soul’ was pared down to ‘my adored ensainted friend’, and his ‘most agitating heart’s darling’ vanished altogether. What remained, he told himself, was ten times more than any publisher had the right to expect. ‘There is the requisite touch to set Charlotte right without which I would have seen the whole universe damned before consenting to the publication of a line,’ he soothed Stella. ‘It will be hard enough on her as it is to see her husband as the supreme ass of a drama of which you are the heroine.’

  But Stella was not soothed. ‘You have spoilt my book,’ she objected. ‘You have spoilt the story... Lustless Lions at play... It is really sad: you creep on the ground, instead of flying in the air – through taking away those delicious letters.’

  ‘You must have some more love letters,’ he appealed desperately. ‘You cannot appear as a famous beauty who had only one catch: an old idiot of 56. Will there be nobody to keep me in countenance?’ The truth was that she had been more feared by men than loved, and Shaw’s correspondence with her was unique. This was partly why she felt so angry. These ‘massacred’ letters, she let him know, had become ‘the only insincere thing in the book’. And really he agreed with her. ‘I hate the whole thing, because it is impossible to present it in its simple truth to the public,’ he explained, ‘and it is dishonest to disguise it, and disloyal to pretend that it was all play-acting. I felt a great deal more than you did; and I still feel a great deal more about it than you. You are doing – if you only knew it – a dreadful thing.’

  Being unexpectedly hurt, Stella stretched forth her claws. ‘You have ceased to amuse me. You have revoked – that’s your game always.’ Her book was to be serialized in May 1922 by the New York Herald to which the corrected proofs had been sent with the lines Shaw had excised still legible. ‘Oh Joey – oh lor! oh Hell! I have just seen the New York Herald, they have put in all the letters uncut, this in spite of all their promises,’ she apologized. ‘...I feel very unhappy because I know how much you will mind.’

  He did mind – because of Charlotte. As for himself, he considered the publication of a love letter as ‘an indecent exposure’. But if Stella regarded it as ‘a splendidly courageous declaration... I ha
ve no argument to oppose: it is instinct against instinct,’ he explained to G. K. Chesterton. ‘She has a right to her view, and to her letters. I cannot call a policeman... I cannot control her... Besides, it was delightful while it lasted; one cannot refuse gratitude when it has absolutely no damned nonsense of merit about it; and the money was very badly wanted. Still, a dreadful thing to do.’

  He had always loved Stella’s dreadfulness. ‘I forgive you the letters because there is a star somewhere on which you were right about them,’ he wrote to her, ‘and on that star we two should have been born.’ Molly Tompkins too seemed to have arrived from that star. But perhaps he could teach her to live on this one. Then he need not hurt Charlotte. He would police their correspondence in exemplary fashion. ‘I read your letters diligently,’ he assured Molly. ‘I even read them aloud to my wife (with an occasional skip)... they make me feel romantic at times, which is pleasant at my age.’ His friendship with Molly blossomed as the struggle over publication of Stella’s love letters was warming up, and it appeared to offer him an opportunity for rewriting the past. ‘If you knew the trouble those unlucky letters made for me you would understand a lot of things,’ he later confessed to Stella. His exchange with Molly was intended as a simple series of letters between a ‘delightful correspondent’ and a ‘useful bore’ which would record a relationship as innocent as that of Higgins and Eliza. He had lost ‘all specific interest in women,’ he told a disbelieving Stella in 1923. ‘... I can no longer tell myself love stories.’