This eugenic experiment profoundly agitates the rest of the world. As their name suggests, the Unexpected Isles are islands of relativity, and the theory of relative values once formulated in Poe’s Eureka and now perfected by Einstein, is violently opposed by the fundamentalist forces of the contending mainlands. The simpleton learns what Shaw himself has learnt from his early search for love. ‘It is a terrible thing to be loved,’ he says. ‘...Nothing human is good enough to be loved.’
With Act II comes Judgment Day, but it is ‘hardly what we were led to expect’. The Angel, who has some difficulty in flying, apologizes: ‘I am afraid you will find it very dull.’ Judgment turns out to be the valuation of what the Young Woman and the clerk had discussed in the Emigration office: ‘Dispensables and indispensables’. Those who wish to emigrate to God’s Empire must be of value to the future. Others, the Angel offhandedly remarks, ‘will simply disappear’. It is Surrealpolitik.
The simpleton finally learns what Shaw wants his audience to learn: that we create a fool’s paradise by falling in love with our ideals. The quartet of exquisite superchildren, who recall the puppets created by the fanatical scientist Pygmalion in Back to Methuselah, have been the illusory ideals of Love, Pride, Heroism and Empire. Maya is love itself, the emanation of Shaw’s young actress ‘Mollytompkins’ on her enchanted Isola, and the apparition created by the simpleton’s inexpressible longing. ‘I held Maya in my arms. She promised to endure for ever; and suddenly there was nothing in my arms.’ When the simpleton ceases to believe in them, these ideals vanish so completely that no one can remember their names or even how many of them there seemed to be. The simpleton, too, vanishes back into his real self, an apprehensive clergyman nicknamed Iddy who, released from the island spell, will go homing back to England.
The world advances to the foreground of the play at its conclusion. ‘There is no Country of the Expected. The Unexpected Isles are the whole world.’ It is a world of miracles but not of ideological Utopias and Millennia. ‘We are not here to fulfil prophecies and fit ourselves into puzzles,’ says Prola. The heaven on earth that Shaw has raised at the beginning has dissolved at the end but there is no despair. Left alone on stage Pra and Prola unite in a hymn to unexpectedness: ‘Let it come.’
The Simpleton is the deepest and happiest of Shaw’s fantasies, ‘openly oriental, hieratic and insane’ as he called it himself. This magical gathering on an island, with its dreams and illusions, and its departure to the real world after the political lessons have been delivered, is reminiscent of The Tempest.
Yet though there were plenty of literary signposts in these Unexpected Isles (to Coleridge, W. S. Gilbert, Goethe, Voltaire, and the Book of Revelation among others), though it drew on the prodigious literature of Utopias as well as on those romances and adventures which had taught Shaw how to dream as a boy, and though there were connections also with the popular Oriental extravaganzas that had played in Dublin and London theatres during the late nineteenth century, as well as with the fabulous Chu-Chin-Chow in the Great War, drama critics reacted to The Simpleton as if it were like nothing else.
Part of this confusion arose from the publication of Shaw’s disconcerting Preface. But there were other difficulties too. Some of the sexual scenes shocked American audiences ‘even in these days of theatrical improprieties’. In Austria, the play’s strange divinities and eugenic impurities worried the censors, and it was banned. In Germany, where audiences burst spontaneously into cheering at such statements as Vashti’s ‘Obedience is freedom from the intolerable fatigue of thought’, the Nazi newspaper Hamburger Tageblatt commented that ‘the applause of those eternally behind the times neither surprised nor frightened us... And just as little can Shaw upset us.’
But he had upset Stanbrook Abbey. Plainly the play was tinged with heresy. Sometimes Sister Laurentia wondered whether Brother Bernard really knew the difference between Truth and Error; then she would recollect that of course he must do. She had instructed him herself. So when his own Day of Judgment came round ‘you will not be able to plead ignorance as the excuse of the evil that your books may do,’ she warned him. ‘I wish we could take Laurentia to the east,’ Shaw confided to Sydney Cockerell, ‘and make her pray in all the Divine Mother’s temples.’
Shaw wished he could take all the directors and designers of his play to the East. In the West, the confidence of theatre directors was to be long undermined by Edmund Wilson’s influential judgement, delivered in the late 1930s: ‘The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles is the only play of the author’s which has ever struck me as silly.’ It is silly; but in such ‘silliness’, though it may be traced to a psychological weakness, lies Shaw’s genius. ‘Why don’t you do “The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles”?’ he asked William Armstrong at the Liverpool Repertory Theatre in 1937. ‘It is a lovely play; and you can let yourself go on the production.’ But repertory theatres had settled into a routine of some dozen Shavian comedies, histories and pleasant plays.
*
Early in 1917, while joy-riding in France, Shaw had filled his ‘last evening stretch of the journey by inventing a play on the Rodin theme of The Burgesses of Calais, which,’ he told readers of the Daily Chronicle, ‘like the play about the Rheims Virgin, I have never written down and perhaps never will’. What Quicherat’s Procès supplied for his Saint Joan, Froissart’s Chronicles now provided for The Six of Calais. In Froissart’s story, Edward III agreed to lift the eleven-month Siege of Calais by the English in 1347 on condition that six starving hostages surrendered themselves to be hanged, wearing sackcloth and halters and carrying the keys of the town. Rodin’s sculpture group (a duplicate of which stands at the Victoria Tower Gardens, Westminster) ‘commemorates the bravery and selflessness – and misery – of the six burgesses who submitted themselves to Edward’s humiliating conditions,’ wrote Stanley Weintraub, ‘and immortalizes the wretched men, half-naked and wearing halters at the moment of their surrender’.
But Froissart was an ‘absurd old snob’ and had ‘got it all wrong’. Rodin had cast one of the burghers in an attitude that suggested a diehard even more extreme than the King. All that remained for Shaw to do was ‘to correct Froissart’s follies and translate Rodin into words’. In his comic-strip version of history, the mulish burgher and the donkey of a King (‘Neddy’) confront each other, sense an animal bond between them; and the play ends with a bray of hilarious laughter in which everyone joins.
He wanted to create a nursery world where cruelties arose, not from evil, but from the whims and reflexes of bored and frightened children. Like an imaginary entry in a child’s encyclopaedia, complete with a King from A. A. Milne, this painless lesson shows us that the first step towards maturity is to cease playing at being adults and admit our childhood status.
*
‘I was like a princess in a fairy tale,’ exclaims Shaw’s athletic millionairess, Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga. In a reversal of Portia’s test from The Merchant of Venice, Epifania’s late father, ‘the greatest man in the world’, had made her promise that whenever a man proposed marriage to her, she was to ‘give him one hundred and fifty pounds, and tell him that if within six months he had turned that hundred and fifty pounds into fifty thousand, I was his’. Epifania has been led into an unsatisfactory marriage with a magnificent empty-headed sportsman, Alastair Fitzfassenden, who won her by a mixture of pure luck and criminal ‘kiting’ – thieves’ slang for a system of speedily raising money on false credit (later to be recycled from Shaw’s play into Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses).
In Act I Epifania is making her will before committing suicide. She recounts this story to her solicitor whose office becomes filled with the dramatis personae – her estranged husband and his demure girlfriend as well as Epifania’s own bland admirer – while the smart young solicitor vainly attempts to take instructions. His attitude to these clients is Shaw’s attitude to the world: an incredulous striving to discover what advice he should give.
; In the second act, which takes place that evening at a dismal riverside inn, the Pig and Whistle, Epifania throws her parasitical admirer over (over her shoulder, downstairs, and into hospital) and sets her cap at a serious-looking, middle-aged Egyptian doctor who keeps a clinic for penniless Mahometan refugees. He has made his mother a solemn financial promise that forms the counterpart to Epifania’s vow to her father. So a contract is struck between them: Epifania, ‘the plutocrat of plutocrats’, sets out to live for six months on his 35 shillings, while the doctor resigns himself to losing her £150.
Shaw’s fairy-tale is a treasure hunt which begins next morning at a basement sweatshop along the Commercial Road where Epifania sets out to remake her fortune. ‘The sweater and his wife speak Whitechapel Cockney,’ Shaw wrote to the producer Matthew Forsyth in 1936. ‘...There is not a gleam of fun in these two poor devils.’ This scene is unique in Shaw’s plays and at the end, when Epifania has used her managerial genius to take over the business, the stupefied sweater rubs his eyes. ‘It seems to me like a sort of dream,’ he says – and we are about to re-enter Shaw’s dream world.
His Cinderella soon wins her Egyptian Prince. Like the miller’s daughter, she has learnt Rumpelstiltskin’s secret of how to spin straw into gold; like King Midas she can turn everything, even her emotions, into money. Beginning as a scullery maid at the Pig and Whistle, Epifania has transformed the place within five months into an attractive riverside inn and appointed herself its new proprietor. ‘It was cruel for us; but we couldnt deny that she was always right,’ acknowledges the son of the previous owner, who is now its manager. ‘...My father had a stroke and wont last long, I’m afraid. And my mother has gone a bit silly. Still, it was best for them; and they have all the comforts they care for.’
As in the first act, the characters assemble on stage round Epifania. The Egyptian doctor has given away his £150 to a widow whose husband had omitted to patent a successful invention – but this is interpreted by Epifania as a profitable retrospective investment, which meets her father’s stipulation (and provides a nice example of Shaw’s belief that logic is merely a device for getting what you want). The doctor too gets what he wants. He has fallen in love with Epifania’s pulse ‘like a slow sledge hammer... it is a pulse in a hundred thousand.’ The play ends with the solicitor finally taking instructions.
Epifania is a monetarist heroine and the genius of capitalism. She dominates the play much as Undershaft dominated the action of Major Barbara. Shaw had been forced to rework the last act of Major Barbara and, for similar reasons, he offered a highly implausible alternative ending to The Millionairess. Here the happy couple contemplate going to Russia but decide instead to ‘make the British Empire a Soviet republic’. Shaw was following the advice he had fathered on Henry James over his play The Saloon, as well as responding to those Marxist critics who ‘since virtually the beginning of his career,’ the critic Bernard Dukore wrote, had been urging him to ‘provide an upbeat ending’. In Shaw’s version for ‘countries with Communist sympathies’, Epifania’s assets (not her life) will be liquidated, and her abilities converted into worthwhile social and political power. In this never-performed alternative Shaw abandons the last illusion of reality and floats his make-believe like a fragile soap-bubble in the air – without trying to satisfy his reader’s credulity or appease his scepticism.
Epifania is an amalgam of every powerful woman Shaw had known. Though the cocks may crow, it is the hens that lay the eggs. ‘People will say you are the millionairess,’ he had written to Nancy Astor,’ – an awful, impossible woman.’ The short third act in the Commercial Road uses some of Beatrice Webb’s experiences in a tailor’s sweatshop in London’s East End; and the title itself is a reference to his ironic description of Charlotte at the time of their courtship and marriage – ‘my Irish millionairess’.
Shaw’s attitude to this superwoman is conveyed by his Egyptian doctor: ‘You are a terrible woman; but I love your pulse.’ Here is the irresistible beat of the Life Force reduced by capitalism to the rhythmic rise and fall of market forces. ‘I have to take the world as I find it,’ Epifania claims. To which the doctor replies: ‘The wrath of Allah shall overtake those who leave the world no better than they found it.’ In The Millionairess a great princess in prison lies. ‘She has no sense of humor,’ Shaw told Edith Evans. ‘Except the solicitor, who is mildly amused at the follies of the others, everyone in the play is intensely in earnest.’ Her tragedy lies both in the dissipation of her natural powers into pointless money-making and also in the fortress-like personality she shares with Shaw’s mother which bars emotional relationships. G.B.S. knew her tragedy well. She is a person ‘that no one can live with’.
‘What makes the play rabidly distasteful is Shaw’s patent admiration for the eroticism of wealth and power,’ wrote Michael Billington in the Guardian after a revival of the play in 1988. This is much the same distaste felt by Beatrice Webb when she read the play in 1935 and saw in it a representation of her friend’s ‘admiration of what is forceful, however ugly and silly’. Unlike Shylock, humiliated at the end of The Merchant of Venice, or Volpone cast in irons at the end of Jonson’s comedy, Epifania begins on the verge of suicide and ends triumphant.
‘My third manner is going to be more trying than my second,’ Shaw had predicted in a letter to J. C. Squire after the Great War; ‘but then third manners always are.’ His digressions and lapses into buffoonery had grown more frequent, his flights from reality more extreme. ‘I was always in the classic tradition,’ he explained. These plays depend for their effects upon the gargantuan acting tradition he had witnessed as a boy in nineteenth-century melodramas and music-hall entertainments. With their emphasis on vocal contrast, they all bear the marks of his musical knowledge. ‘Opera taught me to shape my plays into recitatives, arias, duets, trios, ensemble finales, and bravura pieces,’ he was to write towards the end of his life, ‘to display the technical accomplishments of the executants.’
The Millionairess seemed an unlucky play for Shaw, but he continued to keep his eye out for the ‘very vigorous actress’ who could take on Epifania. ‘The part requires just such a personality as Miss [Katharine] Hepburn,’ he wrote to Lawrence Langner in 1940. ‘Has she ever read the play?’ In fact she had read it but decided she did not like it enough; then she read it again ten years later and persuaded the Theatre Guild in New York and Binkie Beaumont of Tennant Productions in London to produce it with her in the title role. Shaw had been dead for two years but, just as he ‘had prophesied, Hepburn was superb in the part’, recalled Lawrence Langner. This was the last new Shaw production by the Theatre Guild in New York and it played to packed houses. In London, too, it was welcomed with enthusiastic notices by critics unfamiliar with such prodigious acting. A young critic, Kenneth Tynan, describing it as ‘that terrible hybrid, a didactic farce... written in the twilight of a civilization and of its author’s life’, and believing the part of Epifania to be ‘nearly unactable’, found himself carried away.
‘Miss Hepburn took it, acted it, and found a triumph in it. She glittered like a bracelet thrown up at the sun; she was metallic, yet reminded us that metals shine and can also melt. Epifania clove to her, and she bestowed on the role a riotous elegance and a gift of tears... The Millionairess scores a bull’s-eye on the target of her talents... in her last long speech, a defence of marriage and all the risks it implies, an urchin quaver invades the determination of her voice and coaxes the heart.’
3
Spontaneous Resurrection
I cannot tell you the exact date of my death. It has not yet been settled.
Shaw to Hannen Swaffer (26 February 1938)
‘...I dropped dead on the 24th Nov,’ G.B.S. notified John Reith on 3 December 1934. The doctor had diagnosed a ‘not serious’ heart attack and Shaw slept continuously for almost three days and nights. It was ‘the greatest pity,’ he told his old friend Henry Salt ‘that I revived like Lazarus. I was literally tired to death.’
/> It was a matter of Shavian pride to be sending Maynard Keynes within a week of his attack what Virginia Woolf was to call ‘a long magnificently spry & juicy letter’ done in his most breathtaking style with ‘the whole of economics twiddled round on his finger’. Keynes, recognizing that ‘the old gentleman is weak and ill’, wondered why the great men of that generation went in for such stunts. Were these Shavian stage effects simply a box of cosmetics for colouring up morale as he grew out of date, or some acoustical gesture for catching the ear of the young? In the mid-1920s Virginia Woolf had sighed over her teenage nephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, for believing ‘Bernard Shaw greater than Shakespeare’. By the mid-1930s Keynes was showing an ‘unmitigated contempt,’ Beatrice Webb noticed, ‘for the Communist undergraduates’.
Beatrice and Sidney went up to London in the second week of January 1935 and found G.B.S. much recovered. But Charlotte lay ill in bed. Three doctors attended her, with a day nurse, a night nurse and a maid – ‘yet she lives!’ Shaw rejoiced. What would have happened to her had he died? ‘The two old couples are each other’s oldest friends,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary, ‘and we all dread the death of anyone of the quartet, and would feel responsible for the remaining partner.’
From the middle of the 1930s onwards Shaw struggled to reduce his volume of work. ‘I Have Retired,’ he insisted during a speech in the summer of 1936 at the People’s Theatre, Newcastle. He did retire from the drudgery of directing his plays, but the bibliography of his writings lists thirty-seven contributions to the press that year; fifty-five in 1937; fifty-nine in 1938; and sixty-three in 1939. ‘We cant take G.B.S. away from all his business & papers & interviews & usual occupations,’ Charlotte admitted to Nancy Astor.
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