The Americans had pirated his early books and called him an ‘Irish Smut Dealer’ when issuing arrest warrants for disorderly conduct to the entire cast of Mrs Warren’s Profession after its opening performance in New York. They had also removed Man and Superman and other volumes from the shelves of the New York Public Library; and actually imprisoned a man in Detroit for reading An Unsocial Socialist in a streetcar.
‘Personally I do not take the matter so lightly,’ Shaw had written to the New York Times when asked for his reaction to the withdrawal of his books from the state’s libraries. ‘American civilization is enormously interesting and important to me, if only as a colossal social experiment, and I shall make no pretence of treating a public and official insult from the American people with indifference.’
The resentment he felt at having his moral authority impugned, income cut, and early illusions extinguished sharpened his criticisms and gave them a vindictive edge. He argued that the anarchical plan of letting everyone mind his own business and do the best he could for himself was only practicable in a new country without any common industrial tradition. North America had been incapable of developing beyond this village stage. ‘Every social development, however beneficial and inevitable from the public point of view, is met, not by an intelligent adaptation of the social structure to its novelties,’ he wrote, ‘but by a panic and a cry of Go Back.’
Before the Soviet Revolution Shaw had accepted that American politics had to be co-ordinated with the collective interest of civilization round the world. He took issue with revolutionaries who threatened the United States with the breakdown of capitalism for want of markets and who prophesied that socialism would build on its ruins. He preferred a more inviting evolutionary scenario. ‘Socialism is only possible in the consummation of successful Capitalism,’ he wrote, ‘...only possible where Individualism is developed to the point at which the individual can see beyond himself and works to perfect his city and his nation instead of to furnish his own house better than his neighbor’s.’
After 1917 he gave up these diplomatic manoeuvres with relief. ‘I am not an American,’ he admitted, ‘but I am the next worst thing – an Irishman.’ His tirades against Americans were partly self-inflicted criticisms – an involuntary response to the damage he sometimes felt he had done himself by manufacturing an ostentatious G.B.S., designed to travel in a world increasingly governed by the culture of the USA. ‘For what has been happening during my lifetime,’ he had written in 1912, ‘is the Americanization of the whole world.’
When he returned from the Soviet Union he had used a special broadcast from Savoy Hill to give ‘A Little Talk on America’, heaping up his Dickensian invective to giddier, more ecstatic heights. The event was recorded by Movietone with G.B.S. at his most child-devilish encircled by immense lights like furnaces welcoming Americans into hell. ‘Hello, America! Hello, all my friends in America! Hello, all you dear old boobs who have been telling one another for a month past that I have gone dotty about Russia...’ Even Charlotte had to laugh. ‘My dear!’ she wrote to Nancy Astor. ‘All the insults he sent over! Too bad – but so funny.’
Yet it was not all so funny. Lifting the lid on the volcanic activity within himself, he covered this ‘most awful country’ with colossal contempt. Sometimes in the past he had singled out the coast-to-coast desire for money as the most encouraging social aspect of American life. But since the accepted method of acquiring this money in the United States was theft, he liked to add, the country had grown rich only in paper dollars that were no protection against a real financial crash.
‘That is what makes you so popular all over the world,’ he persisted, moving into rare sarcasm: ‘you make yourself at home everywhere; and you always have the first word.’ Shaw wanted the last word. With his long-range artillery he aimed to smash the glitter of Western plutocracy and arm an infatuated British public against surrendering to its culture. When he lets off his word-fire at the United States he often has a Britain of the future in his sights.
He was happiest at long range and somewhat uneasy at the prospect of coming ashore and mixing with these ‘uncommonly nice people personally’. His preliminary exercises in tact – ‘Americans are conceited enough to believe they are the only fools in the world’ – show his diplomatic skills to have been somewhat rusted. Free love and anarchism had given way after the war to alcohol and communism as the most dreaded social perils in the United States, enabling G.B.S. to use his awkward status as a teetotal communist to challenge American orthodoxy. He looked forward to obliging the immigration authorities with answers of the utmost frankness.
In matters involving others he was careful. He answered the appeal of Thomas Mooney, a militant American labour leader wrongly imprisoned more than fifteen years before in connection with a bomb explosion, by explaining that the interference of a ‘Communist foreign celebrity’ would do more harm than good. ‘I do not consider it humane to use you as a stick to beat Capitalism,’ he wrote to him in San Quentin prison. He would try to remain as non-committal with Mooney as he had over the Krynin family in Moscow, but ‘I cannot pretend that I am not shocked at having any person put into a vault for 16 or 17 years,’ he told reporters on landing at San Francisco. And he made it clear that his own political views were far more extreme than those of this fifty-year-old American who was to wait several years more for a pardon.
Leaving the Empress of Britain at San Francisco, Shaw and Charlotte were flown to San Simeon to stay with the millionaire newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst. ‘I do not write for the people intelligent and instructed enough to share my views,’ Shaw would later explain, ‘...but to startle and wake up the readers of the H[earst] P[ress].’ For four days they put up at his prodigious castle-ranch with the seventy-year-old Hearst and his young mistress, Marion Davies, together with more than forty starlets, sirens and swells of all sorts, as well as the apes, eagles and zebras that occupied the grounds outside.
Afterwards they flew by plane from Hearst’s vivarium, swooping down as if ‘to catch a fish’ below a sudden thunderstorm and making a forced landing on the beach near Malibu. There they were picked up by a college sophomore who rattled them into Malibu Airport. Then, in a dignified cavalcade, they entered the MGM studio-village of Culver City – to be welcomed, as in a nightmare, by the people they had recently left, William Hearst and Marion Davies.
So far Shaw had refused all American offers to film his plays. He went out of his way to praise Eisenstein at the expense of Hollywood, offering him the film rights in Arms and the Man after meeting him in London in 1929, though refusing Mary Pickford the film rights to Caesar and Cleopatra in 1930. Eisenstein’s disastrous experiences in Hollywood during the early 1930s strengthened Shaw’s hostility.
Charlotte and G.B.S. were in Hollywood only two and a half hours, but ‘bitterness and rancor of a kind hovered in their wake’. Years afterwards Marion Davies (who had wanted the film rights to Pygmalion) described Shaw as having ‘that caustic Irish wit which is very detestable’. Though RKO Studios was also seeking the rights to The Devil’s Disciple for John Barrymore and Saint Joan for Katharine Hepburn, ‘I don’t believe that Hollywood is within ten years of tackling my stuff,’ Shaw wrote shortly after leaving. His relations with the United States film industry were commemorated by the ‘caustic Irish wit’ of his reply to Samuel Goldwyn who tried to flatter him into signing a contract for the screen rights of his plays: ‘The trouble is, Mr Goldwyn, you are interested in art, whereas I am interested in money.’
They rejoined the Empress of Britain at Los Angeles, sailed down the Pacific coast to Panama, and up the Atlantic coast towards New York. Shaw had agreed to give one public lecture in the States – for the Academy of Political Science at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. He was anxious for it to be known that ‘I shall not take a cent out of America on this visit’ so as to avoid the charges thrust at Dickens of grabbing as many dollars as he could.
He had agreed to give
this formal lecture so as to produce an authentic record of his beliefs. ‘I have been misquoted everywhere,’ he was quoted as saying, ‘and the inaccuracies are chasing me round the world.’ The American freedom to tell lies worked like an ingenious form of censorship. He had forewarned the New York reporters that he would not be interviewed before his lecture. But when the Empress of Britain docked, two hundred journalists and photographers swarmed on deck in search of him. They found a message pinned to his cabin door which was guarded by the ship’s master-at-arms:
‘The New York press may return to its firesides and nurse the baby until tomorrow morning, except the enterprising section which came on board at Havana, and discussed everything with me for an hour and forty minutes. Today I am in training for the Metropolitan Opera House tonight, and may be regarded as deaf and dumb for the moment. With regrets and apologies. GBS.’
But they would not leave. After a couple of hours Shaw sent out his biographer Archibald Henderson, like a dove from the Ark, with a message that he would pose for photographs but say nothing. ‘It was a terrible business for me,’ he wrote afterwards to the actress Constance Collier, ‘...I had to fight off a raging press to get some sleep and quiet before my big effort.’ Eventually he was spirited away through the throng by his new American publisher, Howard Lewis, of Dodd, Mead. ‘I can think of no private citizen with the exception of Lindbergh who had been greeted by more reporters and publicity than Mr Shaw,’ he wrote to the British publisher Otto Kyllmann.
Charlotte had been getting increasingly worried over Shaw’s ‘big effort’ at the Metropolitan Opera House. ‘I do not feel he is up to it. It will be a terrible strain after all the exertions & fatigues of this amazing journey,’ she had written to Nancy Astor. They arrived at the Metropolitan Opera House a little after 8.00 and were steered by police through the fast-flowing crowds. With ‘the lithe step, all but prancing, of a cavalier’, Shaw walked on to the platform led by his chairman – the President of the First National Bank – at 8.35. He had agreed to a national radio broadcast of his lecture on condition that it was not edited, and was now obliged to wait ten minutes for the National Broadcasting Company’s schedule, while a standing ovation from the audience of more than 3,500 people changed into an impatient stamping of feet. Among this audience was Edmund Wilson, observing the ‘arms folded of the schoolmaster’ and ‘the reddish nose of the old Irishman’ dressed formally in his ‘double-breasted black coat buttoned up high under the collar with an austere effect almost clerical so that it sets off the whiteness of his beard as his eyebrows against his pink skin look like cotton on a department-store Santa Claus’. Shaw stood up, a dark arrowy figure, slim and straight; and then his caressing accent began to permeate the auditorium, blending courtesy with irony, touching the imagination with a peculiar enchantment.
‘Finding myself in an opera house with such a magnificent and responsive audience,’ he began, ‘I feel an irresistible temptation to sing.’ But it soon became clear that he was not there to sing America’s praises. He told them he had visited ‘two plague spots’ in the United States, Hollywood and New York. Hollywood was everywhere bringing public and private morals under its influence. But its philosophical answer to every challenge was a sock in the jaw. ‘When shall we see a film issuing from Hollywood,’ Shaw asked, ‘in which the hero acts like a civilized man?’
The ‘vast dumb audience’, likened by Edmund Wilson to a ‘demoralising aquarium of blind deep-sea creatures’, was no better pleased by Shaw’s picture of New York ‘under the thumbs of your private racketeers, from the humble gunman to the great financial magnate’. His main target was the money kingdom of Wall Street whose power was ‘so irresistible that it becomes a political and industrial power, not to say a religious power’. The United States had grown into ‘a wonderful night clubby sort of nation; but there is nothing so helpless as a raided night club’.
Ostensibly Shaw’s lecture was an examination of American government. He accurately predicted that private financiers would not allow Franklin Roosevelt to carry through his National Recovery Program, and that if necessary they would use the American Constitution to stop him. This Constitution had become a paradoxical symbol of Shaw’s own frustration: ‘a great protest against the tyranny of law and order’, representing the struggle of his early career, that had been turned into a Charter of Anarchism guaranteeing ‘to the whole American nation that it never should be governed at all’, shadowing his sense of powerlessness in late middle age.
The United States did not want to be governed, Shaw reasoned, because it did not trust its own electoral system: ‘those scandalous and disgusting spectacles that are called election meetings, at which sane and sober men yell senselessly until any dispassionate stranger looking at them would believe that he was in a lunatic asylum for exceptionally dreadful cases of mental derangement’. But Shaw is not a dispassionate stranger. He is painfully involved. ‘I have never spoken nor listened at an election meeting without being ashamed of the whole sham democratic routine. The older I grow the more I feel such exhibitions to be, as part of the serious business of a nation, entirely intolerable and disgraceful to human nature and civic decency.’
In private he admitted to telling people ‘all sorts of things that I do not believe, because I think it will please them’. But ‘speeches made through the microphone to millions of listeners,’ he later said, ‘...take on a necessary sincerity’. It was as if the microphone could pick up the voice of Sonny using this climax to Shaw’s missionary travels to make his objection heard to the fêted progress of G.B.S. around the world. Was not the spell of money on G.B.S. an American spell; his trick of overstatement ‘an American trick; his gift for monologue, an American gift’, as Blanche Patch was to suggest? Playing with these spells and tricks and gifts like sparks in the air, translating the child who had never grown up into the country that remained so juvenile, Shaw blinds and illuminates, angers and amuses his audience with this variety show of his dissatisfaction. In his urgent warning to Western civilization that it had ‘reached the edge of the precipice’ over which previous civilizations ‘fell and were dashed to pieces’ rose the anguish and relief of someone nearing the end of his own life.
‘Mr Roosevelt, by a happy chance, got photographed with a baby. The baby was a success: Mr Roosevelt went to the White House in its arms.’ There is a charm in such passages where the voices of Sonny and G.B.S. seem to blend, and a peculiar insight where they combine against a common enemy such as the financiers who ‘live in a world of illusion’. Circling this illusory world Shaw presents a stereoscopic vision of the planet manoeuvred by the calculations of exchange value judgements from one great war towards another. All the gold in the world was being shipped to the United States – but what use was it? ‘Ask your armies of the unemployed.’ This question and command mirror Shaw’s own position as someone financially successful, who felt politically ‘unemployed’ in the modern world.
‘Whenever in the search for truth I hit the nail exactly on the head, there is always a laugh at first.’ But in several places where he expected laughter in the Metropolitan Opera House there was a ‘curious dead silence’. It was evident to Edmund Wilson that he had not been able to sense what kind of audience he was up against. His need for self-dramatization had delivered him into the hands of modern publicity, making the effect a little compromising, as if he were having to ‘handle like hot potatoes convictions which were once incandescent,’ Edmund Wilson judged. And yet ‘he can still thrill us from time to time as he is able to make the timbre of the old daring, the old piercing intellectual clarity, ring out... in the pompous opera house... he continues to stand for something which makes us see audience and theatre as we have never quite seen them before.’
He had invited several people to come and see him next morning on board the Empress of Britain before it sailed, but they were quickly rushed aside by reporters and cameramen all over the ship. ‘Evidently under instructions to “get Shaw’s goat”, th
ey did everything possible to irritate and disconcert him,’ Lawrence Langner observed. ‘In one instance, a lout set off a flashlight bulb almost in his face, amid loud guffaws, and took advantage of Shaw’s shocked surprise to snap an absurd picture of him which was later published in a New York journal. Not one of these hoodlums showed the slightest respect for the man.’ Langner went up to a steward and asked whether some gangway could be made for Shaw. ‘You’d need fixed bayonets, sir,’ he was told. Eventually Shaw reached his cabin and ‘literally had to throw his weight against his stateroom door’. ‘We left the boat sadly,’ recorded Lawrence Langner, ‘wishing that GBS might have taken away with him a better impression of our national manners.’
As soon as the ship sailed, Shaw re-entered the world of his plays, and Charlotte was left reflecting on the ‘very mixed business’ of their wanderings: ‘it is a sort of worthlessness that comes over one in this vagabond life.’ On 19 April the Empress of Britain steamed up Southampton Water, her bunting flying, and the sirens hooting from the shore. Two days later they were ‘off the map’ back at Ayot.
They were to have another brief look at the United States early in 1936 as part of a second world tour – this one from west to east aboard the SS Arandora Star. Shaw was now in his eightieth year and this was a postscript to his missionary travels. He gave a ‘low-keyed’ interview to crowds of reporters at Miami and kept the rest of his trip private. Across a stormy Atlantic, between spasms of sickness, he wrote prefaces; along the Gulf of Panama, in temperatures of almost 90°F, ‘I try to write plays falling asleep between every sentence’. At Honolulu they had lunch in a Chinese restaurant with Charlie Chaplin. At the Grand Canyon, startlingly covered with snow, they met J. B. Priestley.
‘We have seen some glorious places & made some delightful friends & learned quite a lot of things,’ Charlotte had written to Nancy Astor. Shaw would remember best the natives in Equatorial countries, who were the originals of Britain’s Smiths and Browns, still unsmudged by commerce, and always looking carefree. But in the developed countries he had found people worried and anxious. Was it any wonder that he had paused to ask his audience at the Metropolitan Opera House: ‘What is wrong with us?’
Bernard Shaw Page 94