Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  *

  ‘EXPECT THE WORST,’ Shaw cheerfully cabled the New York Theatre Guild which was to produce the world première in Boston at the end of February 1932. Though it contained ‘some of the funniest lines and situations Shaw ever wrote,’ observed Lawrence Langner, for the most part it ‘fell on indifferent ears in the depths of the depression period’. What success it achieved in the United States was attributed to the acting of Beatrice Lillie as Sweetie: it was a case, not of gilding the lily, Alexander Woolcott wrote, but of ‘Lillie-ing the Guild’.

  It opened at the Malvern Festival on 6 August. Ernest Thesiger, who had created the Dauphin in Saint Joan, became the Monster; Cedric Hardwicke, a successful King Magnus in the first British production of The Apple Cart, entered as the Burglar; and Ralph Richardson, who had recently played Zozim and Pygmalion as well as Bluntschli in revivals of Back to Methuselah and Arms and the Man, created the role of Sergeant Fielding. Barry Jackson chartered ‘a sumptuous aeroplane’ to carry London critics to the opening matinée. But the pilot lost his way in the mist and, overshooting their destination, deposited everyone at Hereford. From here they arrived by charabanc over an hour late, pale and disgruntled, one of them collapsing dramatically in the auditorium at the start of the second act.

  ‘My new play will not, I am afraid, please everybody,’ Shaw had promised. ‘It is not meant to.’ H. W. Nevinson, who hated The Apple Cart, found Too True to be Good ‘one of his greatest and more unpopular plays’. But Charles Morgan scolded him in The Times for the ‘fantastic irrelevance’ of his ‘leaky farce’; and even the sympathetic Desmond MacCarthy complained of his complete indifference to form: ‘Here am I, an attentive playgoer, yet I can’t tell you what the play I have just seen at the Malvern Festival is about.’

  Never, it seemed to Charlotte, had there been such a discrepancy between the public and critics. She saw audiences wriggling with pleasure, and was convinced that this play was ‘Deeper & more searching – & incidentally, much more amusing!’ than Heartbreak House.

  ‘Too True filled the cheaper seats and moved people as no play of mine has moved them before,’ Shaw wrote. But it came off after forty-seven performances in London. Beatrice Webb had thought it despairing, and so did St John Ervine. His review of the London production drew from Charlotte an uncharacteristic retaliation. ‘It is a play of revolt,’ she countered. ‘...it will be understood that this is among G.B.S.’s big plays.’

  Desmond MacCarthy, who knew Shaw’s work well and found Aubrey’s peroration at the end ‘an astonishing and moving feat’ in the theatre, sensed that they were responding to G.B.S.’s own predicament. Shaw himself denied this. In the shell-shocked-young-gentleman-burglar-clergyman he had created an omen of capitalism whose spending-without-earning was leading to a moral bankruptcy not to be identified with someone who had placed his capital in the bank of communism. He had scattered aspects of himself through most of his characters, and made Aubrey a good preacher ‘to warn the world against mere fluency’.

  But this warning against fluency remains like a distant protest from Sonny against the pilgrimage of G.B.S.; and the law of equal action and reaction, which Shaw cites, tells us from what dark centre he had to call forth his affirmations.

  3

  Missionary Travels

  I am myself a missionary.

  Shaw to Clara M. Kennedy (27 September 1947)

  Shaw’s travels in the 1930s were planned as a series of evangelical missions. He journeyed as one who believed he had seen his conception of the good society being born. In the 1920s he was ready to dream of literary retirement; now in his late seventies he once more had affirmations to preach. He was determined to put his international fame to good use.

  ‘English writers are not revolutionaries,’ Shaw said while visiting South Africa. ‘I, on the other hand, am.’ He and Charlotte had discussed going to South Africa in the late 1920s, postponed a decision, and then ‘in a moment of insanity’ booked their passage on the Carnarvon Castle which sailed on Christmas Eve 1931. They steamed into Cape Town on Monday 11 January 1932 and were immediately encircled by crowds of journalists, photographers and a movie camera crew which persuaded G.B.S. to perform an on-the-spot ‘talkie’ up on deck (‘Good Morning, South Africa... Now that you have seen my face, I shall show you my left profile... and the back of my distinguished head’), while Charlotte waited below in her cabin. ‘Only the advent of Don Bradman or Mahatma Gandhi would have aroused greater interest,’ commented the Cape Argus. Everyone was impatient to find out ‘What Will G.B.S. Say to South Africa?’

  This became clear the next day following an interview with the Cape Times. ‘Our religious codes are obsolete in many ways,’ he was reported as saying. ‘Where will you get genuine religious fanaticism? You get it in Russia... [The Russian] carries out the Christian doctrine that “all are equal”... No one believes here that the black man is equal of the white.’ To the objection that a transformation from individual Christianity to collective communism might lead to tyranny such as was rumoured to be developing in Soviet Russia, Shaw answered that the Russian people had been hardened by tsarist persecution and needed to go to greater lengths than people in the West. ‘In pursuit of knowledge and power men will suffer the most appalling sacrifices and endure terrible hardships.’

  What were his plans? ‘Seeing South Africa and saying nothing,’ he replied. Yet he soon found himself criticizing the University of Cape Town for excluding women from its dining-club and advising students at the University of Stellenbosch to believe nothing they were told. Addressing a huge audience at the City Hall, he spoke of the example set by the Soviet march to prosperity through the pit of revolution. The Cape Times reported him describing communism as ‘the absence of a competitive commercial system... There would be no greater crime, he declared, than to attempt to thrust Russia back to the conditions which existed in the majority of capitalist countries today. Your business is to study the experiment in Russia.’

  Over his four weeks in Cape Town the newspapers put together an identikit picture of G.B.S.: a ‘charming old gentleman’, with ‘the fresh complexion of a child’, the ‘springiness of an athlete’ and a ‘gurgling chuckle that is irresistible’. Readers liked to see him sitting on top of a famous escapologist’s box at the Opera House declaring himself mystified; or advancing with his parasol from the tearoom and leaping among the rocks at the summit of Table Mountain. With its fruit gardens and its vineyards, hot and cold oceans, mountains, sunshine, Cape Town seemed enveloped by pleasantness. Charlotte bloomed in the climate like an autumn rose and Shaw swam frequently, allowing some children to duck him for a bet.

  They had put themselves under the charge of Commander C.P. Newton of the Cape Town Publicity Bureau, and the publicity continued to roll jauntily along, with just a hint of menace to come. ‘On the whole Cape Town has been extremely polite to Mr Shaw and has respected his wish for a restful holiday,’ commented the Cape Argus after he had been there a week. ‘Mr Shaw, for his part, has been quite exceptionally polite to Cape Town – so far.’

  He tried his best to answer the large local mail he received each day, drafting replies in shorthand to be typed by Commander Newton’s secretary. ‘On the whole, I sincerely desire to say the best I can of it,’ he pleaded. Rumours of his wit breezed spicily through Cape Town society. When General Smuts was retelling stories of his guerrilla exploits at lunch one day and happened to mention T. E. Lawrence, Shaw brought him to a confusing halt by mentioning D. H. Lawrence: ‘Every schoolgirl of sixteen should read Lady Chatterley’s Lover.’ Smuts, suddenly outflanked, found himself agreeing: ‘Of course, of course.’

  South Africans relished Shaw’s apparent enjoyment of their country. Topping everything was a flight over the Cape Peninsula in a Junker monoplane. ‘It was one of the most thrilling experiences I have had,’ he said to the waiting journalists at Wingfield Aerodrome. Charlotte too had reached for the skies. ‘It was glorious!’ she wrote to Blanche Patch in London. �
�...We flew over two oceans, and back over a chain of mountains... we went about 120 miles an hour... I believe I shall be very sorry to leave!’

  They accumulated much goodwill at Cape Town, and on the eve of their departure Shaw spent it all. ‘Hullo, South Africa. Bernard Shaw speaking from Cape Town.’ He was the first person to be given a simultaneous broadcast from all five stations in South Africa. ‘I have been asked to say some nice things to you... But you must excuse me. Saying nice things is not my business.’ Fifteen hundred miles of telephone wire carried his voice out of Cape Town to stations at Bloemfontein, Durban, Johannesburg and Pretoria. The advantage of having the finest sun trap in the world, he told his listeners, ‘depends altogether on what you catch in it’. This was not the beginning his audience had expected.

  ‘Sun traps have a powerful attraction for people with plenty of money and nothing to do; and you can prosper on the money they fling about – as long as it lasts.

  You may easily, if you are short-sighted enough, become dependent on their expenditure, and put all your capital into splendid hotels, golf links, polo grounds and the rest of the elaborate and expensive machinery for fleecing them.

  And you can devote all your skilled labour and professional resources into the arts of amusing them, doctoring them and burying them when they die of six meals and 20 cocktails a day.’

  At the first sign of trouble, Shaw warned, these unproductive plutocrats would collect their money and go. He could hardly keep the joy from his voice as he imagined the hotels taken over by people from the slums and the golf links covered by playing children. ‘Do not hesitate to fill your suburbs with delightful dwellings, which only the rich can now afford,’ he urged. ‘They will be wanted as much as ever when the rich of all lands have gone the way of the Russian grand dukes. What you have to do is to abolish your slums, for which, let me tell you, Cape Town deserves to be destroyed by fire from Heaven.’

  This was appalling – and there was worse to come. ‘One of the first things I noticed when I landed was that I immediately became dependent on the services of men and women who are not of my own colour. I felt that I was in a Slave State, and that, too, the very worst sort of Slave State.’

  What he had seen in Cape Town during these four weeks had disturbed him. ‘Darkies do all the work,’ he wrote privately to his friend Emery Walker, ‘...but the social problems... are insoluble.’ The race war between blacks and whites was complicated by the other race war between Dutch and English. Thousands of Afrikaners had been forced off their farming lands and, migrating to the cities, became ‘poor whites’, in competition for jobs with the unskilled black population.

  He knew that the affluent white population was uneasy over the danger of a violent uprising, and calculated that for the next half-century it had the power to suppress any such rebellion, with the help of black men if necessary. So he avoided making the usual threats of black revolution. ‘If you let other people do everything for you you soon become incapable of doing anything for yourself,’ he told his predominantly white listeners.

  ‘You become an idler and a parasite, a weakling and an imbecile; and though you may also become a very pretty lady or gentleman you will be helpless in the hands of your slaves, who will have all the strength and knowledge and character that come from working and from nothing else.

  The coloured man is terribly dangerous in this way. He can reduce you to a condition in which you cannot open a door for yourself or carry a parcel... He actually dictates your ideas of right and wrong, respectable and disreputable, until you are his mental as well as his bodily slave, while all the time you flatter yourself that you are his lord and master... If white civilisation breaks down through idleness and loafing based on slavery... then, as likely as not, the next great civilisation will be a negro civilisation.’

  Though this moral rebuke was deeply insulting to the rich whites, Shaw had not been rude. He took care to remind his audience that he frequently criticized England’s politics. He ended by giving his thanks ‘from a heart full of gratitude and a stomach full of peaches. Good-night and good luck.’

  He had advocated ‘such control of the production and distribution of wealth as will ensure equality of opportunity to every member of the community regardless of race, colour, sex or creed’. Lacking such an economic basis, he believed that the South African regime was heading for moral degeneration. It was a widely unpopular message. Many white South Africans wrote angrily to the newspapers. But none of these protests answered his indictment of the slave state. As Leon Hugo was to write: ‘Only Shaw could have said this – could have eschewed the platitude and seen the disturbing paradox in the master-servant, white-black relationship.’

  Shaw left Cape Town with Charlotte the next morning and, sharing the motoring with Commander Newton, drove along the Garden Route towards Port Elizabeth. After three days they reached a pretty seaside place called Wilderness and then travelled towards Knysna. ‘I negotiated several mountain tracks and gorges in a masterly manner,’ Shaw later told Nancy Astor. Then he came upon half a mile of smooth road, ‘and I let the car rip.

  ‘Suddenly she twisted violently to the left over a bump. I twisted her violently to the right, and rising with all my energy to the sudden peril, stood on the gas hard as I held the wheel in a grip of iron. The car responded nobly. She charged and cleared a bank with a fence of five lines of barbed wire; carried the wires to a bunker (a sunken path) three feet deep; banged her way through; and was thrashing down a steep place to perdition when at last I transferred my straining sole from the accelerator to the brake and stopped her with the last strand of barbed wire still holding, though drawn out for miles.’

  It was really the fault of the De Dietrich that he had bought back in 1908 which had its ‘loud pedal’ on the left. The Commander received a few negligible knocks and Shaw ‘a clout on the jaw and a clip on the knee’. But ‘oh! poor Charlotte! When we extricated her crumpled remains from the pile of luggage which had avalanched her I feared I was a widower,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy Astor, ‘until she asked were we hurt.

  ‘Her head was broken; her spectacle rims were driven into her blackened eyes; her left wrist was agonizingly sprained; her back was fearfully bruised; and she had a hole in her right shin which something had pierced to the bone.’

  They entered Knysna, fifteen miles away, and the Shaws took up quarters at the Royal Hotel. For once Charlotte was in the spotlight. ‘She is still flat on her back with the shin hole giving no end of trouble,’ Shaw wrote a week later. ‘She put up a temperature of 103 yesterday (my heart jumped into my mouth)... She is very miserable.’ He cancelled all his arrangements, and engaged a nurse to come in every day while he himself sometimes accompanied the doctor on his car-journeys to patients in the country districts. Early each morning he would go swimming in the lagoon; and then, at 9 a.m., he settled down at a hard bench on the stoep of the hotel annexe. Cars hooted and screeched round him, people came up close to stare, but as one resident noticed ‘he seemed to be in a dream’.

  It was an opportunity to get ahead with his Soviet book. Instead, he found himself beginning a fairy tale: The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God. He had been set thinking about the contact of ‘black minds with white religions’ five years before by a missionary in Northern Rhodesia called Mabel Shaw, ‘a woman with a craze for self torture, who broke off her engagement with a clergyman (he died of it) to bury herself in the wilds of Africa and lead Negro children to Christ’.

  This is the starting point of Shaw’s fable. The black girl does not share the masochistic excitement of her teacher who ‘found in the horrors of the crucifixion the same strange joy she had found in breaking her own heart and those of her lovers’. She is as ‘interesting but unsatisfactory’ a convert as Lueli in Mr Fortune’s Maggot, the novel which Sylvia Townsend Warner (another 1930s Stalinist) had written ‘in a very advanced stage of hallucination’ five years earlier. ‘Where is God?’ the black girl demands. And when the miss
ionary tells her, ‘He has said “Seek and ye shall find me”,’ she accepts this literally and strides off into the African forest. Each god she meets in the jungle of Old and New Testaments marks the Ascent of Man until she reaches Jesus’s concept of a godhead that incorporates itself in human beings.

  In the context of South African society, Christ is portrayed as ‘a poor white’ teacher who is obliged to play the conjuror in order to attract a following ‘as they wont listen to his preaching but like his miracles’. Lying on a big wooden cross with his arms stretched out, he is being skilfully carved by a sculptor because, he tells the black girl, ‘I am so utterly rejected of men that my only means of livelihood is to sit as a model to this compassionate artist’. This economic motive, Shaw suggests, reinforced by aesthetic power and the exploitation of something dark in human nature, has perverted Christianity and made the instrument of torture a symbol of faith. Using the method of Voltaire’s Candide, Shaw attempted to replace this doped wine of religion with his own élan vital.

  Christ’s message that we should love one another is unsatisfactory to the black girl: ‘our souls need solitude as much as our bodies need love,’ she says. ‘...We need the help of one another’s bodies and the help of one another’s minds; but our souls need to be alone with God.’ Shaw reasoned that Christ’s commandment was intended for his disciples and not the whole world. He makes Jesus tell the black girl that to find God ‘you must go past me’.

  Her pilgrimage leads to the garden cultivated by Candide, where she comes across a potato-digging Irishman. If G.B.S. looks something of a trespasser here, it is because he had cultivated a communal garden, seeing an author’s business as minding everybody else’s business. But he believed that ‘Voltaire, Swift, Shaw make almost a special literary category’, and likened Voltaire to Bunyan as one of the ‘would-be saviors’ of the world. What he shared with them was the threat of despair. Jesus says: ‘I am the poorest of poor whites; yet I have thought of myself as a king. But that was when the wickedness of men had driven me crazy.’ Shaw’s craziness was his Soviet Communism which rose, like a magic carpet, lifting him above the darkness. In a letter to Mabel Shaw, he had written: ‘we all have our superstitions and our complexes, the difference between a rather mad writer like Saint Paul and a rather sane one like Voltaire being only one of degree.’ Shaw was both ‘a rather mad writer’ and ‘a rather sane one’. In a work modelled on Candide, which Voltaire had ironically subtitled Optimism, he could not risk exposing the complex roots of a political ideology that protected him from Swift’s despair but that could too easily be linked within his fable to Christ’s exalted megalomania.