The main obstacle to his visit was what Shaw called ‘a disgraceful Aliens Act’. The British Embassy had cautioned Trebitsch against trusting to his visa alone. To avoid the risk of being sent straight back across the Channel, he would need an authoritative letter from a British citizen. The letter Shaw sent him admirably fulfilled its purpose, disarming ‘the austere passport control officials’ at Dover with ‘considerable merriment’. Shaw met him at Victoria Station, ‘coming with long strides along the platform,’ Trebitsch remembered, ‘...a laughing giant... I grasped the hand this long-missed man held out to me.’ They drove to Ayot where, for the first time, Trebitsch heard Shaw read one of his own works out loud.
Afterwards they spoke of the dreadful war years – experiences, moods and opinions that could never have been sent through the mail. ‘My generation has passed away and I shall soon have to follow its example,’ Shaw said. The days passed all too quickly for Trebitsch. When they said auf Wiedersehen it seemed to him that the additional unspoken phrase ‘in a better world’ was plainly implied. He carried with him the latest work. ‘There is no other new play,’ Shaw told him: ‘Joan is the new play.’
FIFTEEN
1
Collaborating with a Saint
We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
Saint Joan
Shaw had been long familiar with Joan of Arc in the theatre. In his Notes to Caesar and Cleopatra he had classed her with Nelson and Charles XII – all ‘half-witted geniuses, enjoying the worship accorded by all races to certain forms of insanity’. Some ten years later, in the Preface to Getting Married, she is no longer a lunatic but gifted with ‘exceptional sanity’. In the interval, Quicherat’s factual testimony had been translated and published in England, providing authentic evidence of the real Joan.
Shaw does not seem to have considered adding to Joan literature himself until 1913 when, returning from Germany through the Vosges and ‘pleasing myself as to my route, I took Domremy on my way for the sake of St Joan of Arc’. He had often travelled through ‘Joan of Arc country’, but never before visited Orléans. It was here, at the Musée Historique, that he saw the fifteenth-century sculptured head of St Maurice, traditionally believed by the inhabitants to have been modelled from Joan after her triumphant relief of their town from the English. Shaw was happy to embrace this belief. For the Gothic image showed a remarkable face – ‘evidently not an ideal face but a portrait, and yet so uncommon as to be unlike any real woman one has ever seen,’ he wrote. ‘...It is a wonderful face... the face of a born leader.’ This was the image before Shaw ten years later when he presented Joan in the turret doorway of his play – ‘an able-bodied country girl of 17 or 18, respectably dressed in red, with an uncommon face: eyes very wide apart... a long well-shaped nose... resolute but full-lipped mouth, and handsome fighting chin’.
From Orléans he wrote to Stella Campbell: ‘I shall do a Joan play some day.’ He imagined it beginning with the ‘sweeping up of the cinders and orange peel after her martyrdom’, and ending with Joan’s arrival in heaven. ‘I should have God about to damn the English for their share in her betrayal,’ he wrote, ‘and Joan producing an end of burnt stick in arrest of Judgment.’
The play’s epilogue, a bedroom cabaret in Charles VII’s dream, has some affinities with Shaw’s original fantasy. But more significant is the change of surroundings in which Shaw places his ‘masterful girl soldier’ after the First World War, and the different task he assigns her. The chronicle play he wrote in 1923 is his ‘one foray into popular myth-making,’ Irving Wardle has written, ‘undefaced by his usual ironic graffiti’; while the epilogue is a Shavian revue sketch which does not remove Joan up to heaven, but brings her forward from the fifteenth into the twentieth century – a move implicit in the previous six scenes.
Shaw felt he recognized in Joan the spirit needed for the regeneration of society in the modern world. A quarter of a century earlier in The Perfect Wagnerite, ‘Siegfried as Protestant’ had anticipated Joan, the first Protestant. Siegfried and Joan both quell their fear of fire, and are transfigured by the flames. Describing Protestantism in the late fifteenth century as a ‘wave of thought’ that led ‘the strongest-hearted peoples to affirm that every man’s private judgement was a more trustworthy interpreter of God and revelation than the Church’, Shaw concluded:
‘The most inevitable dramatic conception, then, of the nineteenth century is that of a perfectly naïve hero upsetting religion, law and order in all directions, and establishing in their place the unfettered action of Humanity... This conception, already incipient in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, was certain at last to reach some great artist, and be embodied by him in a masterpiece.’
Saint Joan is Shaw’s attempt at this masterpiece and the vehicle for a dialogue between ancient and modern worlds. If Joan’s rehabilitation was an example of a modern show trial, the original court hearing seemed to Shaw one of history’s secret trials – like those of the Star Chamber. ‘Joan was killed by the Inquisition... The Inquisition is not dead,’ he wrote in 1931. ‘...when in modern times you fall behind-hand with your political institutions... you get dictatorships... and when you get your dictatorship you may take it from me that you will with the greatest certainty get a secret tribunal dealing with sedition, with political heresy, exactly like the Inquisition.’
The hero as victim transformed into saviour had been in Shaw’s mind as early as the Passion Play he had started to compose at the age of twenty-one. Like Jesus, Joan was an agent for change inspired against the idealist status quo of the established Church. Cauchon’s great cry – ‘Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?’ – makes the connection plain. So Saint Joan became Shaw’s passion play and represents Joan’s life as another coming of Christ to the world.
Shaw interprets Joan’s voices as evidence of a living imagination – the ‘inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned conclusions of genius’ – which are miraculous not by virtue of their alleged source but because of exceptional consequences. These voices and visions, being the manifestations of Joan’s instinct (‘the voices come first,’ she explains, ‘and I find the reasons after’), operate similarly to Shaw’s own methods of writing. ‘I am pushed by a natural need to set to work to write down the conversations that come into my head unaccountably,’ he had explained ten years before. ‘At first I hardly know the speakers and cannot find names for them... Finally I come to know them very well, and discover what it is they are driving at, and why they have said and done the things I have been moved to set down.’ By this telepathic process Shaw hoped to attune himself to Joan, he echoing her when following the court testimony, she echoing him when he departs from it, and together collaborating in the miraculous creation of the play.
To many it seemed that the miracle had been Saint Joan’s transformation of G.B.S. Johan Huizinga claimed that she had brought Shaw ‘to his knees’. But the wretched innocent who had ‘talked with angels and saints from the age of thirteen,’ Marina Warner reminds us, who had defended the ‘external and objective reality of those voices’ and ‘turned to the Pope for help in her long and appalling trial’, reappears in Shaw’s play as a ‘sharp-witted individualist, who attributes her motives and ideas to hard common sense... [and is a] protesting prophet, subverter, active agent of the Life Force, rational dresser’. To have succeeded in getting this ‘pert spitfire’ to enter English consciousness as the true Joan was the final miracle.
‘The first thing he invariably does when his setting is in the past, is to rub off his period the patina of time,’ wrote Desmond MacCarthy; ‘...he will scrub and scrub till contemporary life begins to gleam through surface strangeness and oddities.’ Shaw worked fast, filled with relief at having lifted himself free from the post-war débâcle and entered a previous century to fight another war against English imperialism. He translated his own assertion of style into Joan’s inspired eff
iciency of action – ‘She is so positive, sir,’ Robert de Baudricourt’s steward says to account for her effect on everyone. Shaw presents her as the warrior-saint he had sometimes thought of dramatizing as Cromwell and Mahomet, and had looked for in a play about the Unknown Soldier. But after Saint Joan he needed to write none of these works. ‘It’s a stupendous play,’ Sybil Thorndike wrote to him, ‘& says all the things that the world needs to hear at the moment.’
*
Sybil Thorndike had felt destined to act St Joan and in 1923 commissioned Laurence Binyon to write a play for her about the Maid. Shaw, too, had begun writing his Saint Joan that year. On 27 August, he was able to write: ‘Saint Joan is finished (except for the polishing)... and I thought I should never write another after Methuselah!’
It was not until he had finished the play that Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson got to hear of it. In some consternation they wrote, telling him of Laurence Binyon’s work-in-progress and asking what should be done. G.B.S. was flatteringly adamant: ‘Sybil is to play my Joan; let someone else play Binyon’s.’ In the event, Binyon gracefully withdrew and the difficulty lifted.
Charlotte seems to have been instrumental in Shaw’s choice of subject. ‘Yes, I sometimes find ideas for plays for the Genius,’ she conceded. ‘If we can find a good subject for a play, he usually writes it very quickly.’ The same proposal had also been made by the man he had named as his literary executor, Sydney Cockerell, curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, to which, early in 1922, the Shaws had presented one of Augustus John’s portraits of G.B.S. ‘I have always been under the impression that I was in a small way responsible for St Joan,’ Cockerell wrote to Shaw twenty years later, ‘by giving you or introducing you to Douglas Murray’s book containing the full proceedings at her trial and rehabilitation and suggesting that you might do something with it.’
There was yet another begetter, a teacher at St Mary’s College, Hammersmith, called Father Joseph Leonard, whom the Shaws had met in 1919 on holiday at Parknasilla. Shaw later sent him a letter asking where he could find a record of the proceedings of Joan’s canonization. ‘What I want to know is how the Church got over the fact, which must have been raised by the advocatus diaboli if he did his duty to his client, that Joan asserted a right of private judgment as against the Church,’ he explained. ‘...I may write a play about her some day; and this is the only point on which I do not feel fully equipped.’
This letter initiated a long exchange between Shaw and the priest who became his ‘technical adviser’ on the play, though not all his advice was accepted. Shaw held Joan’s private judgement to be inspired and the Church’s judgement banal. He took the evidence from the court – often in Joan’s words – and dramatized it in the theatre as the speeches of a natural rebel against the Church’s authority. Father Leonard declared Joan’s loyalty to the Pope to be of far greater significance than any number of eccentric voices, for ‘the Church is large enough to contain all sorts of queer fish’. But to have made Joan a queer fish within the Catholic aquarium would have destroyed the Protestant purpose of Shaw’s play, which was to bring a realist heroine before a perfectly conducted court of idealists.
The play seemed almost to write itself. More difficult was the revision, in which he eliminated many tempting digressions. This was well advanced by the late autumn when Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson came down to Ayot to hear G.B.S. read his play. ‘He read it beautifully – he ought to have been an actor really and from the moment he started we couldn’t move!’ Sybil Thorndike wrote to her son John. The reading lasted three hours and three minutes. ‘When it came to the Epilogue Lewis and I were in tears,’ Sybil Thorndike recalled.
*
Though Sybil Thorndike was the theatrical vehicle Shaw had in mind for the role, he had used another model as Joan’s contemporary equivalent – the middle-aged Fabian Mary Hankinson. Hanky, as she was known, had been born in Cheshire, physically trained in Kent and employed as Head of a Sunday School. For thirty years she acted as Spartan hostess at the Fabian Summer Schools, captaining their cricket teams, drilling their country dancers and policing their morals. She was vividly remembered for teaching Shaw to waltz backwards: ‘an unforgettable sight!’ She seemed entirely sexless, pouring her energies into gymnastics and flute-playing, and sharing her domestic life with her friend Ethel Moor. Shaw had attended the Summer School in 1919 at Penlee where Hanky had miraculously quenched a Fabian uprising. But though a rigid disciplinarian, this
‘maid with silver hair
With school-boy heart and skipper air’
as John Dover Wilson serenaded her, inspired much admiration, for she was a woman of ‘unusual good sense,’ St John Ervine observed. When Saint Joan was published in 1924, Shaw presented her with a copy inscribed: ‘To Mary Hankinson, the only woman I know who does not believe she was the model for Joan, and also the only woman who actually was.’
‘It is difficult,’ wrote the critic Maurice Valency, ‘to understand in what way Miss Hankinson... could have served as a model for Saint Joan.’ But her feminism, which modulated Joan’s speech so that it sounded to Desmond MacCarthy like the voice of ‘a suffragette and a cry from a garden city’, was the influence to which T. S. Eliot took exception when criticizing Shaw for having created ‘perhaps the greatest sacrilege of all Joans’ by turning ‘her into a great middle-class reformer... [whose] place is little higher than Mrs Pankhurst’s’. Shaw may have had Eliot in mind when, delivering a radio talk in 1931, he stated that although no modern feminist was quite like St Joan, ‘St Joan inspired that movement... If you read Miss [Sylvia] Pankhurst, you will understand a great deal more about the psychology of Joan.’
Shaw’s play carries on the historical business of literature, reconstructing the roles of past figures and keeping the dead in perpetual employment. He uses Joan’s symbolic dimensions to add credentials to his vitalist philosophy, as Voltaire and Anatole France had used her for their purposes, and as Shaw’s contemporaries were themselves using her for opposing ends. Not long before, Charles Péguy had re-created Joan as a socialistic mystic and martyr who found her equivalent in the government-persecuted figure of Dreyfus; and Charles Maurras had rediscovered her as a proto-fascist emblem of the Action Française, reinforcing military and national authority as Joan had reinforced the French army and the King.
Shaw’s Joan is the complete outsider who feels most lonely when she is in company with those who voice opinions of the day. Her own timeless voices echo her unworldliness and establish her kinship with the man who felt a stranger on this planet and at ease only with the dead. Shaw’s methods of composition were too oblique and multifaceted for straight-forward self-portraiture. To illustrate how the progress of humankind still depended on some people regarded by philistine society as sick and even lunatic, Shaw enlisted more than one contemporary parallel. In addition to Mary Hankinson there was Lawrence of Arabia.
Shaw had been introduced to T. E. Lawrence in March 1922 when Sydney Cockerell brought him along to help carry away the portrait by Augustus John. Shaw was one of Lawrence’s heroes, and five months later he received a letter from Lawrence asking him to read ‘or try to read, a book which I have written’. By the middle of September one of the eight copies of Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, cumbersomely printed on a linotype machine by the Oxford Times, arrived at Ayot. This awkward and prodigious work, ‘about twice as long as the Bible’, stood at the centre of Shaw’s working life. ‘You are evidently a very dangerous man: most men who are any good are,’ he told Lawrence. ‘...I wonder what, after reading the book through, I will decide to do with you.’
His detailed revisions (including virtuoso use of the semi-colon), which affected ‘the spirit as well as the letter of the book,’ Lawrence acknowledged, and ‘left not a paragraph without improvement’, were not completed until some two years later. But Shaw had read the book ‘to the last morsel’ much sooner. By the time he started on Saint Joan he had only forty pages left t
o read, and when he finished it early in the summer he felt convinced that here was ‘one of the great books of the world,’ he told Lady Gregory.
In the meantime he had found out some facts about this puzzling man. Lawrence had quit his Arabian adventures, left the Colonial Office, erased his old name and, having been discharged from the RAF following his public identification as ‘Private Ross’, enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps in Dorset using as his new alias – of all names – Shaw.
Lady Gregory visited Ayot St Lawrence that May, and her diary records that the two people most on Shaw’s mind were Joan of Arc and Lawrence of Arabia. To some degree The Seven Pillars of Wisdom may be read as a cross-referring work to Saint Joan. Lawrence was what Shaw called ‘a grown-up boy, without any idea of politics’. He had gone to the Paris Peace Conference expecting President Wilson to secure self-determination for the Arab peoples, and had come away full of the bitterness of defeat. His inspired leadership of the Arab revolt against the Turks, which kept the Arabs fighting for the Allies instead of among themselves, helped to redeem them from their Ottoman servitude. Like Joan, Lawrence had been ‘in the grip of a nationalistic impulse to create a unified state from a feudal order, and to set a monarch representative of that unity upon the throne of the nation-state’. Joan had succeeded with the Dauphin and been martyred; Lawrence had failed with King Feisal and seemed, after Versailles, to be backing into oblivion.
As a man-of-letters in peacetime who became a man-of-action in war, Lawrence provided a living connection between G.B.S. and Joan that helped Shaw to bring his heroine ‘close to the present day’. Lacking an adult sense of his identity, Lawrence invited his heroes to invade his character and link it with their own. His choice of Shaw’s name, the opening he gave G.B.S. to edit and amend his vast first-person chronicle of the Arabian campaign, and the visits he began making that summer to the Shaws’ village, the name of which so coincidentally sanctified his own, were part of the mechanics by which G.B.S. was encouraged to merge their destinies.
Bernard Shaw Page 74