Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  Shaw had a more direct influence on such political ideologists and philosophers as John Strachey, the Labour Member of Parliament who published his polemical The Coming Struggle for Power in 1932; on the zoologist and film-maker Ivor Montagu; and on C. E. M. Joad, the naturist civil servant and teacher for whom G.B.S. became ‘a kind of God’.

  It had still been possible in the summer of 1931 to go to Moscow and see some evidence of an enthusiastic socialist country. But as the 1930s ticked away, the Shavian wonderland of Sovietism appeared more fanciful, and he was obliged to force his political views by way of letters, speeches, articles and interviews into a hostile press. He knew, as the American journalist Henry Dana admitted, that ‘if he said nine things favorable to the Soviet Union and one thing hostile, the reporters would cable over to America the one hostile comment and suppress the nine favorable’. So he said ‘ten favorable and not one thing hostile’. Such absolutism appeared to lead readers into politics of the absurd, so ‘airily detached’ (in Churchill’s words) had he become from reality. Yet who can say whether Churchill’s anti-Soviet obsession was not a factor in setting off reactionary Stalinism?

  The Life Force seemed in league with the politics of death. Shaw’s imagination flirted pleasurably with death and, in more extreme fantasies, killing. Yet people like himself were temperamentally unfitted for signing death warrants. There is nevertheless a misanthropic relish in his tone when he writes about such things. As he told Henry Salt at the end of 1934, he believed that ‘really the human race is beyond redemption’. He knew well enough the dark side of Soviet Russia – the OGPU, for example, was ‘an Inquisition pure and simple’. He realized that the Soviet Constitution of 1936 could properly be ‘dismissed as a feat of window dressing to conciliate Liberal opinion in Europe and America’. Though lacking first-hand news, he described Stalin’s show trials that same year as ‘another witch burning epidemic’; and, although he refused to join the committee for Trotsky’s defence, he dismissed the accusations against him as politically malicious, adding: ‘I hope that Trotsky will not allow himself to be brought before a narrower tribunal than his reading public where his accusers are at his mercy.’ In 1937 he went out of his way to salute André Gide’s Retour de l’URSS as ‘a really superfine criticism of Soviet Russia’, praising Gide’s ‘complete originality and sincerity’, and perhaps reflecting on his own wisdom in not returning. ‘Charlotte and I are old and in our second childhood. We can no longer feel things (except little things) as you do,’ he wrote to Trebitsch in 1940, ‘which is very fortunate for us, because human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.’

  Shaw’s journey to Russia had been in the nature of a revelation – a revelation, some said, inspired by a hallucination. In 1932 he set out to bear witness to Soviet Communism using ‘the famous execution on Calvary’ as a metaphysical basis. The Crucifixion ‘has never been challenged in respect of the two thieves who suffered on that occasion along with the Communist’, he wrote in this work which he was never to finish.

  ‘...All the controversies have arisen on the point whether the execution of the Communist was not a mistake – whether he was not rather the sort of person who should be encouraged rather than liquidated. Was he really an enemy of mankind or was he a saviour? Our general conclusion so far seems to be that, whether or no, we are well rid of him.

  I think we go to the opposite extreme ourselves in glorifying thieves, provided their booty is big enough and they play the game according to the rules they have themselves made, meanwhile holding up that particular Communist as the prince of such thieves.’

  ‘You must not expect a paradise,’ Shaw would tell travellers to the Soviet Union. Yet his book, called The Rationalization of Russia, was an attempt to rationalize an ideal. Russian children in the future would be born without the original sin of inequality. He confided to the Reverend Ensor Walters that the absence of social and religious castes, which had so complicated his Dublin childhood, and of competitive commercial friction, which had oppressed his early years in London, was ‘indescribable’ in Moscow. He could not put into words the wonder of this equality; or describe how it uplifted and enchanted him during the Depression, the Second World War, and his old age. He wanted to rid human beings of ‘the miserable delusion that we can achieve it [happiness] by becoming richer than our neighbours’. His writing glows and fades as it circles round this hope, then hesitates, repeats, and peters out. For what he feels is not directly communicable, but will find its way obliquely into memories, dreams, reflections: the fables, spells, extravaganzas, visions, miracles and marvellous history lessons of his final period.

  2

  A Pilgrim’s Progress

  There is something fantastic about them, something unreal and perverse, something profoundly unsatisfactory. They are too absurd to be believed in: yet they are not fictions...

  Too True to be Good

  Shaw began his first play of the 1930s as he and Charlotte left the coast of Marseilles on 5 March 1931 for a month’s tour of the Mediterranean. By the end of May, Charlotte was writing to Nancy Astor that ‘so far it is unlike anything I ever have read... only the 1st Act is done’. ‘It is up to date and a little beyond,’ Shaw notified his British publisher Otto Kyllmann, ‘...I call it provisionally Too True to Be Good.’ He completed the first draft on 30 June, and decided to keep the provisional title. ‘I call it a Super Farce,’ Charlotte confided in Nancy.

  Working from unconscious impulses, Shaw had used one idea to summon up another in an apparently random sequence of impressions. In his dreamscape of land and sea Shaw places his apocalyptic vision of humanity poised between drowning in despair and making an awakening ascent. ‘G.B.S. is like a Gulf-Stream: and I wondered where he would bring up,’ T. E. Lawrence wrote to Charlotte. ‘...I get up from reading dumb struck and rather scared.’

  Shaw drafted a paragraph for The Times. ‘It is not a sequel to the Apple Cart, and it is not a historical play like Saint Joan. Its main theme is the dissolution of established morals by the shock of the war; but the examples may prove unexpected.’ The peculiar echoes and associations bring a transcendental air to Shaw’s last plays, comparable in its heightened quality to Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken or Shakespeare’s The Tempest, carrying audiences far from their familiar shores and out of sight of naturalism. It is the supernatural that Shaw exotically sets against the tropical jungles, islands, deserts, temples, and seas of these final period plays.

  *

  When the curtain goes up on Too True to be Good it is night in ‘one of the best bedrooms in one of the best suburban villas in one of the richest cities in England’. The bedside table is congested with medicine bottles; a young lady lies heavily asleep under blankets and eiderdowns. Near her, reclining on an easy chair, sits a Monster made of ‘luminous jelly with a visible skeleton of short black rods’. Nobody who enters the room will be able to see this Monster: it is a phantasm of the young lady’s, and this is her dream that we are witnessing.

  The Monster, who proclaims itself ‘a poor innocent microbe’, soliloquizes futuristically on the Rights of Microbes. ‘These humans are full of horrid diseases,’ the unfortunate bacillus complains: ‘they infect us poor microbes with them; and you doctors pretend that it is we that infect them.’ Throughout this act the Monster keeps up a subversive commentary on the common sense that kills.

  The repository of this conventional common sense is the Patient’s elderly mother, a ‘maddening woman’ named Mrs Mopply whose rule is Safety First and Last. She is spending a fortune on her daughter’s illness, and her neurotic attitude brings to mind Charlotte’s attitude to health.

  Left alone with her charge, a young nurse begins behaving very oddly. She is signalling to her ‘gentleman friend’ who clambers through the window. But this is not an amorous tryst, as the Patient indignantly assumes. The young woma
n is actually the business partner of the gentleman who, wearing rubber gloves and a small white mask, introduces himself as a burglar somewhat in the fashion of E. W. Hornung’s amateur cracksman, Raffles. Together ‘Popsy’ and ‘Sweetie’, as these Bright Young Things call each other, are after the Patient’s celebrated pearl necklace. The Patient, however, springs from her bed and defends her jewel case with unexpected athleticism, before fainting from the exertion.

  ‘Then I awoke and dreamed again.’ Bewildering Shavian paradoxes, proliferating identities, shifting illusions and inversions now spring up. The Burglar peels off his mask and, revealing himself to be a clergyman, explains that he was secretly ordained while up at Oxford. But ‘my father, who is an atheist, would disinherit me if he knew’. He proposes that the Patient steal the necklace herself and divide the proceeds among the three of them. ‘Sell it; and have a glorious spree with the price.’ His proposal ‘may make another woman of you,’ he adds, ‘and change your entire destiny’. As he continues speaking, the Burglar’s ideas grow more dazzling. ‘Lets stage a kidnap,’ he suggests. Mrs Mopply will then pay a ransom and her daughter ‘will realize not only the value of the pearls, but of yourself’.

  The stage is finally left to the Monster which has been luminously bounding about, perching on pillows and even getting into bed beside the Patient. It is transformed from a ‘bloated moribund Caliban’, the stage directions tell us, into ‘a dainty Ariel’. Just as Ariel obeys Prospero’s (and therefore Shakespeare’s) commands, and Caliban represents Shakespeare’s audiences, so Shaw uses this preposterous creature to speak for the most monstrous members of his own audiences: the critics. ‘The play is now virtually over,’ the Monster says, anticipating their notices; ‘but the characters will discuss it at great length for two acts more. The exit doors are all in order. Goodnight.’

  Shaw created Sweetie, the Burglar, and the Patient as the trinity of the capitalist religion: sex, intelligence and money. The Burglar conjures up an enchanting adventure: ‘in dreamland generosity costs nothing,’ the Patient reflects. ‘...I’m going to make the most of this dream.’ So her pilgrimage begins, in a capitalist nirvana at ‘a sea beach in a mountainous country’. Also occupying these glaring sand dunes, and registering the colonial aspect of capitalism, is a British military cantonment. Here we are introduced to a couple of new characters, Colonel Tallboys VC DSO, and Private Meek.

  Private Meek is famously modelled on Lawrence of Arabia. In a letter to G.B.S. Lawrence had written from India: ‘I do what I am told to do, and rewrite the drafts [of routine orders] given to me, meekly.’ Meekly, too, Lawrence persuaded G.B.S. to add almost two dozen ‘squalid accuracies’ to his play, strengthening the farce with authentic detail and guiding Private Meek between the dangers of servility and impudence.

  Meek is a Shavian notion of genius. He is ‘never at a loss’: an omnicompetent, omnipresent human being who appears whenever the Colonel calls for an interpreter, quartermaster’s clerk or intelligence orderly. Colonel Tallboys believes that the other men ‘put everything on the poor fellow because he is not quite all there’. It takes an attack by local tribesmen, which Meek repulses with irresistible authority, to show the Colonel that the man whom it is socially correct to address as ‘a very distant inferior’, is in fact the commanding spirit. The Colonel rather than the Private is actually the halfwit because he has never followed his vocation. ‘I have a passion of sketching in watercolours,’ he tells the others. ‘...Henceforth I shall devote myself almost entirely to sketching, and leave the command of the expedition to Private Meek.’

  The British expeditionary force has been sent to this nameless country to rescue Miss Mopply from the brigands who have kidnapped her. It is not wholly the Colonel’s fault that the three English tourists who have put themselves under his protection are actually the people he is supposed to be seeking, for they are spectacularly altered. Sweetie is now a flamboyantly unconvincing foreign aristocrat, the Countess Valbrioni, ‘brilliantly undressed for bathing under a variegated silk wrap’; while the Patient is ‘disguised en belle sauvage by headdress, wig, ornaments and girdle proper to no locality on earth except perhaps the Russian ballet’. The Burglar too has changed. He now uses, for the purposes of concealment, his real name, the Honourable Aubrey Bagot, and emerges from a bathing tent ‘very elegant in black and white bathing costume and black silken wrap with white silk lapels: a clerical touch’.

  The parts played by Shaw’s characters multiply rapidly as their adventures proceed. While they are adjusting masks, confusing ranks, assembling disguises, aliases, nicknames, they gradually expose layers of biographical origins. Sweetie owes something to Molly Tompkins. She has soon become bored with this capitalist Utopia. Aubrey, too, is without occupation in this sunny place. But the Patient is transformed: ‘I have forgotten what illness means,’ she says. She is also disillusioned: ‘I am free; I am healthy; I am happy; and I am utterly miserable.’ Shaw uses this second act of his play to demonstrate how even the rich in a capitalist society have to drug themselves into pretending they are happy when they are actually maddened with boredom.

  Passing through a narrow gap between two grottoes and down a meandering path to the beach, they all assemble for Act III. Over the more gothic-looking of the grottoes soldiers have scrawled ST PAUL’S; over the wider grotto, which is illuminated rosily with bulbs wrapped in pink paper and contains a bench long enough to accommodate two people, is carved AGAPEMONE in Greek characters beneath which has been chalked in red THE ABODE OF LOVE to which is added in white chalk NO NEED TO WASTE THE ELECTRIC LIGHT. These two grottoes recall the preceding two scenes of the play: the house of decaying superstitions and the fairyland of pleasure.

  St Paul’s is occupied by a ‘very tall gaunt elder’ through whom Shaw presents the evolution of the fanatical Old Testament prophet into an imposing Victorian intellectual. His moral authority has suddenly collapsed with the coming of Einstein’s relativity and ‘his attitude is one of hopeless dejection’. These stage directions emphasize the Elder’s resemblance to W. R. Inge, the most famous clergyman in the Church of England between the wars, and popularly known as ‘the Gloomy Dean’. Inge ‘detested the twentieth century’, A. N. Wilson has written approvingly.

  Shaw’s own position in the play is surprisingly represented by Sergeant Fielding, the occupant of THE ABODE OF LOVE. He is a man ‘completely absorbed in two books’, the Bible and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. ‘I carry them with me wherever I go,’ he tells Sweetie who joins him in THE ABODE OF LOVE. ‘I put the problems they raise for me to every woman I meet.’

  Shaw’s dream play is a version of Bunyan’s fable ‘delivered under the similitude of a dream’. It is the pilgrimage of Hopeful rather than of Christian and pushes Shaw’s spiritual autobiography into a land of allegory and abstraction, like Bunyan’s Beulah, the illuminated country this side of death, near the Celestial City. He provides a ‘narrow gap’ between the grottoes, but his path is far from straight: it is an expressionist convolution. The profusion of mishearings, coincidences, accidents, illusions all suggest that dreams and the unconscious mind are as much aspects of reality as the familiar outlines of the known world. Our guide to reality is not the straight line of logical thought but an instinct that communicates, sometimes with crazy seriousness, from our buried selves.

  This is the instinct that has brought Sweetie and the Sergeant together in THE ABODE OF LOVE. To the intelligent eye they look an extraordinarily ill-matched pair. ‘God help the woman that marries you,’ Sweetie tells him. Shaw’s joke is that God will help Sweetie when she marries the Sergeant since theirs is a truly instinctive merging of complementary natures (‘a top story as well as ground floor’). The Sergeant concludes that in this world of vanities neither the Bible nor Bunyan sufficiently values sexual love. ‘That’s a hard fact of human nature,’ he says after kissing Sweetie; ‘and its one of the facts that religion has to make room for.’ The implication for G.B.S. himself is that Talkative
and Mr Head-mind have had rather too much control over his career.

  Only two characters in the play seem damned: the empty Aubrey and the unadaptable Elder. Shaw uses one of his more casual coincidences to make them father and son (‘Hello, father, is it really you? I thought I heard the old trombone: I couldnt mistake it’). But Mrs Mopply who, dressed in black like the Elder, distractedly re-enters the play in Act III to urge on the rescue party, undergoes a miracle when she interrupts the Colonel’s painting and so exasperates him that he whacks her sun-helmeted head with his umbrella – and literally knocks some sense into her.

  At the end of the play, like a different species of Monster, Aubrey is left alone. ‘I am by nature and destiny a preacher,’ he declaims as the others hurry away. ‘...I must have affirmations to preach... I must find the way of life, for myself and all of us, or we shall surely perish.’ He has helped others; himself he cannot help. He has indeed lost his way while all but his father have begun to find theirs. But the pathos lies in the fact that they are finding their various ways without his guidance.