Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  Whatever happened, it led to different expectations. Shaw was to warn Molly against her erotic imagination because it could not make her happy. ‘You thought that when you had secured your Ogygia and lured me to its shores you could play Calypso to my Odysseus and make a hog of me. Aren’t you glad you didn’t succeed?’ But Molly was not glad. She wanted a fulfilled love affair with Shaw. That summer they all had a dreadful time: Shaw falling ill and Charlotte feeling wretched, Laurence like a helpless prisoner on the island and Molly a ‘predestinate damned soul, a Vamp fiend’. ‘You will prowl round that lake, making men’s wives miserable, tormenting yourself whenever their glances wander from you for a moment,’ Shaw wrote, ‘until the lake water changes to fire and brimstone and rises up and scorches you into nothingness.’

  During a sudden storm one night Molly and Laurence were almost drowned as they tried to reach Stresa in a canoe. The evening had been planned as a reconciliation. Arriving very late at the hotel, Molly was still trembling with fear and cold. Shaw picked up her shipwrecked figure in his arms and put her in his bed upstairs. Lying on his bed she told him she was pregnant, that she did not want another baby and was going to Milan for an abortion. ‘Please don’t go to Milano, Molly,’ she remembered him saying. ‘It will be my spiritual child at least.’ But being in love with one man and apparently pregnant by another, Molly was determined. Later she noticed that Shaw’s eyes looked old and tired ‘and I felt I had committed a murder’. After this Shaw came every day to the island and would sit in the garden holding her hand. ‘But there was little to say... it was almost a relief when the last day came.’

  Shaw and Charlotte took the Orient Express back to London on 6 October. It had been a troubling episode. ‘I must not think about you; for I cannot save you; I have done my best and only made matters worse,’ he wrote to Molly, as he had written to Florence Farr and Janet Achurch. He asked her the same question he had asked Stella: ‘Can you not learn how to live in the world?’ But if he had taught them that, he would have destroyed what he loved in them. There seemed no future for Molly, though her future, like Stella’s, was to stretch out as a long vexed sequel, shadowing their aborted romance. Molly’s love-island, Shaw told her, was ‘a place to spend six weeks a year in, but not a place to live in’. Yet it lingered like a sea fantasy over his last plays and continued to haunt his memory. ‘Write oftener, far oftener, even if I cannot answer,’ he appealed. ‘The restless hands sometimes tire of the pen and remember the road to Baveno... angels will always love you, including G.B.S.’

  4

  Intelligent Women and the Body Politic

  Such books are never written until mankind is horribly corrupted, not by original sin but by inequality of income.

  The Intelligent Woman’s Guide

  ‘My dear GBS

  You will think me a dreadful bore when I tell you that I want you to send me a few of your ideas of Socialism. Unfortunately the Study Circle to which I belong have got hold of the fact that you are my brother-in-law, so I promised I would write to you. We want to know so many things... Will you answer my questions quite plainly...’

  ‘It would be easy, dear madam, to refer you to the many books on modern Socialism which have been published since it became a respectable constitutional question in this country in the eighteen-eighties. But I strongly advise you not to read a line of them until you and your friends have discussed for yourselves how wealth should be distributed in a respectable civilized country, and arrived at the best conclusion you can.

  For Socialism is nothing but an opinion held by some people on that point...’

  So Shaw began The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, his 200,000-word reply to ‘Mrs Chumly’s’ modest request. When the going was good he welcomed the challenge ‘to do a real hard literary job, all brains, instead of writing plays’. But in other moods he would admit to having ‘nearly killed myself’ over ‘my confounded book for women on socialism!’ After three years, on 7 March 1927 it was ‘within a chapter of its end,’ he told T. E. Lawrence, and nine days later Charlotte wrote to Lawrence: ‘The book – the Socialism book – is finished! Last words written this morning!’

  There was a good deal more to follow these last words. He prepared two private copies of the Guide with special title pages: one for T. E. Lawrence and the other for his sister-in-law, Mary Cholmondeley, whose name he misspelt in the dedication. The four-colour dust-jacket was designed by Eric Kennington and showed a naked woman (actually Mrs Kennington) ‘making a copious display of bare breasts and indolently scratching a swelling on her right forearm’, protested a Dublin reader, as she peered in a well for the truth like a figure in a fairy story. The olive cloth binding had a woven-chain pattern by Douglas Cockerell in gilt and green; the laid paper was opaque and marked with wide vertical chains; there were green endpapers and a gilt top to the pages. Over 90,000 copies were published simultaneously on 1 June 1928 in Britain and the United States, costing 15s. and $3.00. ‘The reception of The Guide has been overwhelming,’ he reported four months later. ‘I meant it to be.’

  *

  It should have been the work on socialist economics that Havelock Ellis had tried to commission from him in the 1880s. In or about December 1910, when first advocating ‘the abolition of class by the abolition of inequality of income’, he had composed what was in effect the opening chapter of this book as an exploration of how to get the economic basis of society right in a civilized country. Six years later, when resigning from the New Statesman, he wrote to Beatrice Webb that he would be taking ‘my solution and my policy elsewhere. And there is nowhere else except in a book doing at long range what should be done by a journal at short range.’ In one form or another his Guide to Socialism had been waiting in the wings for forty years.

  Six weeks before publication an Act had been passed in Parliament lowering the voting age for women from thirty to twenty-one and giving them the same residence qualification as men. With the small exception of business and university franchises, the democratic equality of one adult one vote was finally reached in the 1929 general election. This extension of the franchise added five million newly qualified women to the electoral register. Since Labour increased its support in the country by three million votes, Shaw’s special appeal to women had been perfectly timed. For its fifth reprint in May 1929 his publisher brought out a five-shilling ‘popular’ edition, called by Lord Lothian ‘a Manifesto for the election of 1929’.

  But otherwise Shaw had delayed too long. ‘The sources of his intellectual creed are the tenets of the late Victorian era,’ wrote Father Martin d’Arcy. His faith in government power and compulsory labour was unshadowed by auguries of totalitarianism. The Guide contained more John Eliot Cairnes than John Maynard Keynes and was addressed to women from his sister-in-law’s class. He explicitly links his work to that of European authors of the nineteenth century, and admits his lack of involvement with post-war society:

  ‘Ibsen’s women are all in revolt against Capitalist morality... The modern literature of male frustration, much less copious, is post-Strindberg. In neither branch are there any happy endings. They have the Capitalist horror without the Socialist hope. The post-Marxian, post-Ibsen psychology gave way in 1914–18 to the postwar psychology. It is very curious; but it is too young, and I too old for more than this bare mention of its existence and its literature.’

  But the Guide’s merits did not depend on topicality. Here was the summary of a lifetime’s thought, a work of eloquent insight and fantasy, and Shaw’s political autobiography. As he marches forward on his pilgrimage the social landscape behind him is brilliantly lit up, while ahead the Promised Land glows with an eerie light. Only the marching figure himself is lost in the midst of current confusions, so that we cannot see whether he has struck an original route or is losing himself on some precipitous digression. By making use of simple definitions, such as ‘capital is spare money’, Shaw had set out to demystify a subject that, like medicine,
was increasingly viewed as being impenetrable to non-specialists. ‘Economics is supposed to be an involved and abstruse subject,’ acknowledged Martin d’Arcy, ‘yet here we have the secrets of it set forth in a prose worthy of Platonic dialogue.’ The Guide is a sustained act of teaching that aims at driving the reader back to the foundations of her own beliefs (Shaw uses throughout the feminine pronoun which in certain contexts, he points out, ‘includes the masculine’). Most works on economics and political science had been addressed to an abstract reader conceived as aridly male: ‘You might read a score of them without ever discovering that such a creature as a woman had ever existed.’ He concluded that ‘because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman’s work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it’.

  Anyone who can manage her domestic economy, Shaw maintains, can understand the political economy of twentieth-century capitalism. He further raises the self-esteem of his readers by attributing the greater success of men in business and the professions to their sexual inferiority, the jobs of accountants, barristers, doctors, managers, shopkeepers and so on being generally neuter. Since women have a natural monopoly in bearing children, it followed that, ‘being as it is the most vital of all the functions of mankind, it gives women a power and importance that... men cannot attain to at all. In so far as it is a slavery, it is a slavery to Nature and not to Man... The only disadvantage the woman is at in competition with the man is that the man must either succeed in his business or fail completely in life, whilst the woman has a second string to her bow.’

  Feminism was only one aspect of his general theory of equality; nevertheless, as Margaret Walters has written in the 1980s, the Guide ‘remains an important feminist document’ which impressed politicians, historians and intellectuals. ‘After the Bible this is in my eyes the most important book that humanity possesses,’ Ramsay MacDonald remarked, an aside that revealed him to be ‘more of a wit than I suspected,’ Shaw granted. ‘It is a very great book,’ T. E. Lawrence wrote to Charlotte. ‘...It is like the aged Hardy writing poetry.’

  The poetry is in the dogma. In Shaw’s Paradiso all citizens have as natural a right to equal incomes as they have to air and sunlight, justice and education. He examines seven ways of distributing wealth, exposing all but one of them as deadly sins. This logical annihilation, which appears to drive capitalism into a series of surrenders and retreats, is a bewitching display in the art of political pamphleteering. He surveys the nation’s institutions, from the courts of justice and the institution of marriage to the usefulness of its schooling and the quality of its newspapers, and finds them all ingeniously bedevilled by the effects of dividing people into rich and poor.

  Shaw’s Purgatorio is here and now. He struggles to free himself from his own respectability and retrieve the power of anger, the sense of disgust, that had so impressed William Morris during their street-campaigning days. ‘His criticism of the modern capitalist muddle is so damaging, his style so trenchant, and so full of reserves of indignation and righteous scorn,’ Morris had written, ‘that I sometimes wonder that guilty, i.e. non-socialist, middle class people can sit and listen to him.’ Now that he was addressing an audience of Conservative matrons and obliged to be charming, reasonable, elementary, Shaw wondered whether his old fires were failing. ‘I miss from its babytalk the sweep of my ancient periods,’ he confessed. But in his early chapters, and again in the peroration at the end, he rekindles these flames of his youth. They rise most brilliantly when swept by the disillusions and betrayals of political events he had lived through, and when seen against the clouds of his own rising despair. He writes as one whose normal affections have been gouged out by capitalism and whose politics have rushed in to fill the emotional void. ‘I do not want any human child to be brought up as I was brought up... Life is made lonely and difficult for me in a hundred unnecessary ways.’

  Shaw’s peroration to the Intelligent Woman is similar to Swift’s ‘unanswerable’ indictment of mankind as ‘the wickedest of all known species’. He finds his redemption in a formula that, substituting inequality of income for original sin, provides him with an abstract optimism. If moral triumphs, like mechanical triumphs, are reached by trial and error, he reasons, then it is possible to despair of capitalism without despairing of human nature. Under more benign conditions we would discover human nature to be good enough for reasonable purposes and would come to read Gulliver’s Travels as a vivid clinical lecture on extinct moral diseases ‘which were formerly produced by inequality as smallpox and typhus were produced by dirt’.

  Capitalism diminished the collective well-being by directing so much of a nation’s energies to maintaining the parasitic rich. Under these conditions we can see ‘half-fed, badly clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the money that should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being spent in millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs,’ he complained. ‘...[This] is a badly managed, silly, vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the long run no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth.’

  Shaw’s socialism was a means of achieving social responsibility by active interference in the production and distribution of the nation’s income – that is, by a well-managed public service to replace the quarrelsome and divisive effects of private competition. The great basic industries needed to be managed for the benefit of all, though not, he urged, until an efficient organization was in readiness to take over control from private hands whose insatiable drive for profit had shown no concern with the public interest. The railways, the mines and, above all, the banks which were the chief factor in determining the level of prices and the use of capital for development, should be made community property.

  Placing himself ahead of events, Shaw looked back at the contemporary world. Such a peculiar focus gave the Guide some of its originality, but also explains its lack of political impact. He is especially critical of Britain’s complacent acceptance of the parliamentary circus as the best available type of government. ‘If democracy is not to ruin us,’ he warned, ‘we must at all costs find some trustworthy method of testing the qualifications of candidates before we allow them to seek election.

  ‘When we have done that we may have great trouble in persuading the right people to come forward. We may even be driven to compel them; for those who fully understand how heavy are the responsibilities of government and how exhausting its labor are the least likely to shoulder them voluntarily. As Plato said, the ideal candidate is the reluctant one.’

  Shaw’s economic proposals were not so much methods for changing the present as fantasies for escaping from it. He wanted the world to be controlled by dreams rather than experience. But when he draws close to contemporary politics his pen takes on a self-destructive cunning, as if the boy once neglected by his mother has grown into a man convinced he is neglected by his adopted mother country. Nobody understood what was happening except ‘here and there a prophet crying in the wilderness and being either ignored by the press or belittled as a crank’. He threatens smug British democracy with all sorts of bogeymen dictators. In such recurring passages he invites the disrespect of which he is complaining. His tone wavers, his judgement narrows, and there is another symptom. ‘To put the same thing in another way... I could go on like this for years.’ All this was ‘too boring for the intelligent man, if I’m any sample,’ commented D. H. Lawrence. ‘Too much gas-bag.’

  Shaw was at his best when passionately defending his plan. When questioned as to what income would content him, he retorted: ‘Who cares what I would or would not be content with?... We shall have to be content with our share... It is our public business to see that everyone shall have as much as possible, and not less or more than anyone else.’ To a correspondent who had questioned the compatibility of socialism with foreign trade, he replied:
‘I need not remind you that trade, home or foreign, is something to be minimized, not maximized and regarded as an index to prosperity,’ he wrote.

  ‘...the garden of Eden was happy without trade. But to many of our statisticians it seems as if Eve, instead of handing Adam the apple, had sold it for a bunch of Algerian dates, and the purchaser had sold it for a pound of Italian olives, and the olive sellers sold it for some Spanish figs, and the fig merchant sent it to Ireland in payment for a blackthorn stick, and so on round the globe until it came round to Mesopotamia again and was purchased by Adam for an ostrich feather, both Adam and Eve would have been much more prosperous.’

  Harold Laski objected that ‘for a man to tell you that the desirable thing is equality of income without telling you how to get it is simply irritating’. But Shaw had argued that people would win socialism by desiring it, and his Guide, like an alchemy, had been written to create that desire. ‘The difficulty of applying the constructive program of Socialism lies not in the practical but in the metaphysical part of the business; the will to equality,’ he wrote.

  He was sometimes accused of attempting to banish evil from the world. He would respond that his Guide simply traced certain avoidable evils to inequality and suggested that they would not occur under his plan. ‘No woman would have to turn her back on a man she loved because he was poor, or be herself passed by for the same reason. All the disappointments would be natural and inevitable disappointments; and there would be plenty of alternatives and consolations.’

  Shaw’s economic solution for uniting people in a true democracy was the invention of a man who believed his own disunities to have arisen from the marriage of his parents made under economic dictatorship. By changing the economic basis of society, he hoped to change natural behaviour. Beatrice Webb, who had thought it would ‘be a marvel if it is not a bad book’, came to marvel at its autobiographical sincerity and pathos. ‘His acknowledged genius, his old age, the warmth and depth of his earnestness and his amazing literary brilliance have paralysed his would-be critics and opened the hearts of fellow-socialists, especially those on the left,’ she wrote. ‘He denounces society as it is, he gives no credit and no quarter, and he preaches a curiously abstract Utopia, which eludes criticism because of its very unreality.’