Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  SIXTEEN

  1

  Striking an Attitude

  In fact all men are comic.

  Shaw to Stanley W. Bull (6 July 1926)

  Adelphi Terrace was scheduled for demolition. While G.B.S. and Charlotte were in Stresa during the summer of 1927, the servants moved their belongings to a service flat in 4 Whitehall Court. This was a wonderfully turreted old building, with pavilion roofs and loggias, facing the Thames at Westminster between Charing Cross Bridge and Old Scotland Yard. Number 130 was a corner flat with five rooms and a surrounding balcony overlooking the Embankment and the river.

  They moved in early that October. Shaw was determined not to like the place, but gradually Charlotte rearranged the furniture, positioned her Chinese pottery around it, and settled in the Dolmetsch clavichord, the Rodin bust, the Sartorio watercolour landscapes, the print of William Morris and other treasures. G.B.S. organized his study – a dozen filing cabinets, hundreds of books, a big flat-topped desk for himself opposite a smaller one for Blanche Patch, and between them a typing table. They were in business again.

  ‘G.B.S. was not fond of Whitehall Court,’ observed St John Ervine who was a neighbour there for the first year and a half, ‘but Charlotte loved it.’ There was positively nothing to do in the way of housekeeping, except to study the menu which was discreetly slipped under the door each morning from the restaurant downstairs. In the eight-storey block there were some 150 service flats as well as a selection of clubs – the Junior Army and Navy, Golfers & Lady Golfers and, with its separate entrance at the end of the building, the National Liberal Club. The ceilings were high, the floors of marble and the walls panelled. It was a world apart, a temple to the rich. The residents included tea-merchants, oil magnates and diplomats from around the world, as well as retired officers, the editor of Punch and various commuters to the House of Lords.

  G.B.S. was always going in and out. The young bookshop assistant in the foyer would watch him striding across the hall. He was often followed, she noticed, by two women of contrasting appearance. The first, slightly behind him loaded with a bundle of papers and looking firmly ahead, was tall and austere; the second, who was older and more solid, wearing a squashy hat and carrying a travelling rug, smiled and nodded as she passed. One morning when G.B.S. was hurrying out alone, this young girl held the door open for him. ‘Never hold open any door for a man,’ he said to her. ‘It embarrasses him and belittles you.’ He seemed to think this all the more important as she had only one arm. After this introduction, he would sometimes come over and chat to her at the bookstall. He was interested in how ‘she spent her time, where she had her lunch and how much it cost and other everyday details of daily life’. She took on jobs for him – selecting books for a journey, or ringing his bell when she saw newspaper reporters going up so that he could nip down the back stairs. Occasionally she went up and had tea in the flat and was surprised to find that the dumpier of the two ladies (whom she had guessed must be a housekeeper) was Shaw’s wife, ‘a very homey, comfortable person’ who told her she was ‘undernourished’ and presented her with a tin of biscuits each month.

  *

  ‘I have seen very little of anyone who has not worked with me,’ Shaw wrote early in 1928. ‘Except with my wife I have no companionships: only occasional contacts, intense but brief. I spring to intimacy in a moment, and forget in half an hour.’ One vital new companion for Charlotte and workmate for G.B.S. was Lady Astor. In 1927, Nancy Astor invited them to spend Christmas with her at Cliveden and they were snowed up there for eighteen days. It was for both of them a surreal expanse of time. ‘We both agree that all that has occurred during the last 3 weeks is a wonderful & impossible dream,’ Charlotte wrote to Lady Astor. ‘...I feel as if I had known you and your husband all my life.’

  Nancy Astor had acquired a taste for English country life in Virginia where it was assiduously imitated. She had apparently been attracted to her first husband, Robert Shaw, by his spectacular polo: he had an uncanny knack of tumbling off his one-eyed pony without damaging himself. Was he intoxicated? The teetotal Nancy left him several times, beginning on the second night of their marriage. Sex had come as a shock to her: it was so rude.

  After the final break-up of her marriage and the death of her mother, Nancy had come to England, a politer country. Here in 1906 she married Waldorf Astor, a perfect gentleman of German origin who had a bad heart and plenty of excellent racehorses. She was to enter the history books as the first woman Member of Parliament to take her seat, though she achieved little in the House of Commons except a series of vivid interruptions.

  ‘Charlotte is very fond of you,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy. ‘So am I. I don’t know why.’ Nancy’s devastating personality guarded a rather frail character but admitted others to her protection. She was supported by a wilful belief in Christian Science and, unlike Beatrice Webb, was never derisive about Charlotte’s mystical wanderings. She did not dream of flirting with G.B.S. The liberties she took with him were spectacularly safe – and rather tickled Charlotte. Once, approaching his shed at Ayot, she pulled open the door and seeing G.B.S. at work on a manuscript barked out: ‘Come out of there, you old fool. You’ve written enough nonsense in your life!’

  The tone they took with each other was part of what Nancy Astor’s biographer, Christopher Sykes, called the ‘freemasonry’ of famous people. Nancy was a mixture of combustible qualities – a ‘volcano’, Shaw called her. He did not really expect to convert her to socialism. Occasionally he might try to permeate a Private Member’s Bill or influence an amendment to some clause in a Government Bill, but what he chiefly wanted was to demonstrate how people of absolutely different ideological commitments could strike up a lasting friendship. Flourishing in the limelight rather than in sunlight, Nancy seemed like a Shavian creation. At Cliveden, a vast nineteenth-century Italianate mansion overlooking the Thames, she created a fantasy kingdom that surrendered to reality only under extreme pressure – such as the Great War, when it was converted into a hospital and convalescent home.

  Nancy invited G.B.S. to this amphitheatre in Berkshire as a new star, and provided him with a new audience. ‘I “peacock” here (Charlotte’s expression) amid week end crowds of visitors,’ he wrote to Molly Tompkins near the end of his first visit. ‘The mutual liking of the Shaws and Astors grows apace,’ Beatrice Webb noted disapprovingly in her diary.

  Shaw brought such celebrities as Lawrence of Arabia to Cliveden and performed before people who belonged neither to his Fabian nor to his theatre worlds. He would hold reading parties for his new political comedies there, going through the supporting guest list with Nancy. ‘What about Balfour?... what about Mosley & his Cynthia (to represent the Labor Party)?’

  Cliveden appeared an ideal place for the presentation of Shaw’s extravaganzas. It also became renowned as the headquarters of a secret conspiracy to make a second Western accord with Hitler. Shaw himself was contemptuous of this theory. He conspired with no one, treated his own opinions as unique, and was not secretive about them. ‘Never has a more senseless fable got into the headlines,’ he wrote. The fable had floated up from a series of articles by Claud Cockburn in his paper, The Week, recreating Cliveden as a castle of plot and machination. Shaw resented his own theatre being converted into a branch of the Foreign Office, and ridiculed ‘the silly notion that big historic changes can be effected by the country-house clique of a wicked British aristocracy’. In the wake of these rumours, Nancy Astor was referred to in the House of Commons as ‘the honourable member for Berlin’, and treacherous scandals were passed among the newspapers. Shaw went to her defence in the American magazine Liberty, pointing out that, far from being German fifth column agents, the Astors ‘have become the representation of America in England; and any attack on them is in effect an attack on America’.

  This defence of his friend – taken up after an uncharacteristic appeal from Nancy – was read by Beatrice Webb with a wry smile. ‘Alas! poor Shaw, you have succumbed to
Charlotte,’ she had written in her diary. Arnold Bennett had observed that Charlotte ‘plays the role of the super-celebrity’s wife with much tact’. But this tact did not impress Beatrice. She disapproved of the Cliveden Set as she had disapproved of ‘the Souls’ before the First World War. Both were aspects of a world she had renounced in order to be a socialist. ‘What troubles us is that this new intimacy will widen the estrangement of G.B.S. from the Labour Movement,’ she wrote, ‘build higher the barrier between him and the young intellectuals who are working out the better way of life for the bulk of the people – and dishearten and discourage his old admirers.’

  Democracy, Shaw believed, meant the trial and error of political experiment through representatives of opposing ideologies exchanging thoughts independently of party political whips. Cliveden, where a ‘vociferous Marxist Communist’ such as himself could meet Colonel Lindberg (the friend of Hitler’s chief-of-staff), a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal Lord Lothian, and Charlie Chaplin, was fundamentally more democratic than Parliament. Shaw did not flatter himself that he had influenced Chamberlain’s appeasement policy; he had no special knowledge of Lord Halifax’s visit to Goering and Hitler late in 1937. But he believed that, if denied war, both Hitler and Mussolini would fall: ‘Twopence worth of manners may make all the difference.’

  What discouraged young intellectual socialists and disheartened old Fabian admirers was Shaw’s championing of Mussolini in the 1920s. People ‘are so tired of indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock,’ Shaw wrote, ‘that they feel the need of a strenuous tyranny, and think Mussolini the right sort of tyrant’. Certainly Mussolini’s remarkable coup de théâtre could not have been brought off without popular support.

  ‘All dictators begin as reformers and are encouraged by all sensible people until they find that their subjects do not understand their reforms and respond to nothing but military glory,’ Shaw was to write. ‘I applauded both Hitler and Musso while they were in their reform phase, just as Churchill did.’ On the road to dictatorship, with the official title Il Duce, Mussolini had begun a campaign of beating up his opponents. The murder in June 1924 of Giacomo Matteoti, Secretary-General of Italy’s Socialist Party, led to a reign of oppression lasting until his fall from power nineteen years later. Shaw had picked up some bits and pieces of information about Mussolini from one of the neighbours at Stresa, Carlo Emanuele Basile, a novelist who had become Federal Secretary of the province of Novara in 1925, and would be condemned in 1945 to thirty years’ imprisonment for war crimes. Shaw learnt that Mussolini was accepted as the only competent leader available. He was a ‘Big Simpleton’, in Shaw’s view, and initially a man of the people.

  Some people assumed that Shaw was unaware of the assassination of Matteoti and other atrocities. ‘I knew about them,’ he replied. Acknowledging that the dictatorship of Il Duce had been established with ‘all the usual villainies’, he assured the Austrian socialist politician Friedrich Adler that such brutalities ‘which accompany the eternal struggle of government with anarchy... disgust me as much as they disgust you’. But he considered these savageries so customary in history as to be hardly worth remarking. ‘The only question for us is whether he [Mussolini] is doing his job well enough to induce the Italian nation to accept him faute de mieux,’ he wrote. ‘They do accept him, some of them faute de mieux, several of them with enthusiasm.’ Shaw placed himself in the first category: ‘I have no “enthusiasm for Mussolini”,’ he insisted; ‘but I back every ruler until he goes wrong.’

  But Mussolini had gone wrong in the early 1920s, the historian Gaetano Salvemini argued, and Shaw had put himself in the wrong by openly accepting fascist Italy. Shaw replied that what he was accepting were facts: he would have preferred the Italian workers and liberals not to have been ‘so hopelessly incompetent that Italy gave Mussolini carte blanche to extirpate them’. Italian exiles had the right to cry ‘Tyranny! Murder!’ British citizens, with no such locus standi, must insist on a practical foreign policy.

  Shaw handled Mussolini as a theatrical director might, removing him in his imagination from Italy and making him perform before a crowd of anxious British onlookers. His Mussolini was the actor-scoundrel Britain would deserve if it continued to neutralize socialism with the procrastinations of sham democracy.

  What made socialists indignant was the lack of moral perspective in someone who had asserted that progress depends on changing moral sensibility. The social critic who once challenged rule by historical precedent now appeared to slot fascist Italy into an inevitably recurring historical pattern going back to Caesar and Antony. Where was the sense of proportion in giving precedence to diplomatic courtliness over physical barbarity, to train times over terror? ‘What G.B.S. has lost is any sympathy with the underdog,’ Beatrice Webb was to comment after reading the ‘Preface on Bosses’ he wrote for The Millionairess. ‘...He feels the frustration of old age and resents it.’

  As a product of this frustration and resentment, Mussolini became a figure of make-believe whom G.B.S. could command to conquer old enemies. When Mussolini invades Abyssinia, Shaw goes with him – and invades Ireland, imposing on her all Mussolini’s hypothetical improvements (‘policed and water-supplied roads for a savage or waste country’). So, satisfying many urges, Mussolini appears on picture postcards on which Sonny draws bubbles and balloons, while G.B.S. is simultaneously extolling Il Duce as an emblem of national efficiency. ‘He is still obsessed about Mussolini,’ Beatrice Webb wrote, ‘and his obsession takes queer forms.’

  2

  Upsetting The Apple Cart

  What takes place in a theatre is not always a simple matter of you please me and I’ll pay you.

  Malvern Festival Book (1935)

  Sitting alone in Whitehall Court, his typewriter on his knees ‘like a sailor with his lass’, Shaw would sometimes wonder whether he had finally shot his bolt. At least his migraines had gone after The Intelligent Woman’s Guide: ‘I transferred them to my readers.’ While still at work on this book he had got a notion of a play which went on germinating in his mind. ‘I slept very well last night; and the morning was all sunshine,’ he wrote to his printer William Maxwell on 5 November 1928. ‘Consequently I began a new play.’ He wrote it with extraordinary ease and swiftness. The subject matter and stimulus had been provided by Granville-Barker’s long-maturing tragicomedy His Majesty. In less than eight weeks he had a complete play ‘in the rough’ – just in time for it to be read to Nancy Astor’s guests at Cliveden over the New Year. ‘The name of the play is The Apple Cart,’ he wrote, ‘and it is as unlike St Joan as it possibly can be.’

  *

  Shortly after mounting the British première of Back to Methuselah, Barry Jackson had announced that he was closing the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in Station Road. This ultimatum, which paradoxically saved the theatre, was a measure of his discouragement. ‘The condition of the English Theatre has moved steadily downward, and today it may be said to have touched its lowest level on record,’ wrote the stage-director William Poel in 1920. ‘...The public has for so long seen theatrical amusements carried on as an industry, instead of an art, that... the plays of Shaw, Galsworthy, Barker, Masefield, with those of all men who respect themselves and their calling, are put on one side as being impossible compositions, written by those who do not understand the needs of the public, meaning those who are not with the Stock Exchange financiers.’ Shaftesbury Avenue had been taken over by Threadneedle Street, driving the majority of Shaw’s London productions in the 1920s to a drill hall out in Hampstead converted by Norman Macdermot into the Everyman Theatre; while his touring rights in thirteen plays were leased to the Macdona Players led by Esmé Percy ‘with whom I never meddle’.

  Barry Jackson shared Shaw’s dislike of the West End which had contaminated so much of the repertory movement in London. He wanted to found a pastoral theatre, similar to the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester. It was while walking with Shaw one day near Jackson’s home at Blackhill that the idea ca
me to him of fulfilling this dream in Malvern. The place had everything to recommend it. Malvern was a spa town built on terraces along a steep range of hills, and it had a newly reconstructed theatre. In the socialist England of Shaw’s dreams, Barry Jackson would have found himself manager of a national theatre. But without public endowment there was nothing for it but to leave London and make a fresh start in the country where rents were comparatively low. While London’s West End had become one of the most depressing growths of capitalism, Jackson’s private enterprise impressed Shaw. So he made a pact. If Jackson went ahead with his scheme for a festival at Malvern, he would write a new play for it.

  And Barry Jackson had gone ahead, assembling a company of more than sixty players who rehearsed for seven weeks at Lillian Baylis’s Old Vic before the Malvern Festival opened. The pattern was to present a different play each evening for one week and then to repeat this programme over a second week. Visitors were encouraged to stay a whole week, enjoying the extra-theatrical enjoyments of morning lectures and concerts in the Winter Garden, donkey rides up the hills, gondoliering and night bathing in the pools. Afterwards the productions would transfer to Birmingham and only after that would the more successful ones advance into London.