Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Fabianism and the Empire was produced as a Fabian foreign policy document, one hundred pages long, published at one shilling by Grant Richards and directed at the ‘Khaki’ election in the autumn of 1900. The first draft, which took Shaw three months to complete, was sent to every member of the Fabian Society, 134 of whom returned comments which, with extraordinary ingenuity, he attempted to stitch into his text. The final version was such a ‘masterpiece’ of literary craft that no more than fourteen Fabians voted against its publication. ‘By this time the controversy over the war had reached an intensity which those who cannot recollect it will find difficult to believe,’ Pease remembered, ‘and nobody but the author could have written an effective document on the war so skilfully as to satisfy the great majority of the supporters of both parties in the Society.’

  He recommends reforms for the army, the Consular Service and the administration and social justice of Imperialism, drafting what Beatrice Webb called ‘the most prescient and permanently instructive public document of its date’. But on the General Election, the Treaty of Vereeniging and the subsequent social conditions in South Africa, Fabianism and the Empire had no influence at all, and 1,500 copies were remaindered the following year.

  In the new Parliament the Tories had won 402 seats, the Liberals 186 and the Nationalists 82. Keir Hardie was the only independent Labour politician to survive the election, but it was not through him that the Fabians sought to operate. As Beatrice noted, ‘a Conservative Government is as good for us as a Liberal Government’. The Fabians were ascending in society, becoming friendly with Bishops and Tory Cabinet Ministers, while among the Liberals they chose Lord Rosebery as their man – partly on account of his admiration for Shaw’s manifesto. ‘Our policy is clearly to back him for all we are worth,’ Shaw urged Beatrice who noted in her diary: ‘We have succumbed to his flattery.’ A few weeks later, in the autumn of 1901, Sidney published ‘Lord Rosebery’s Escape from Houndsditch’ – an invitation for him to lead the progressive Liberals in their campaign to raise each department of national life to its maximum efficiency.

  NINE

  1

  Some Unexpected Characters

  I stand just now at a point where a failure would put me quite out of court, and a success would ‘chair me ever’.

  Shaw to William Archer (26 March 1902)

  After six years’ ‘Borough Councilling’, Shaw concluded in 1903, ‘I am convinced that the Borough Councils must be abolished’. His method of quitting local politics was characteristically ‘Shavian’. In the spring of 1904 he stood as a Progressive candidate for one of the two London County Council seats in South St Pancras. ‘The Shaws have been good friends to us,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary, ‘and we would not like them to have a humiliating defeat.’ The party organizers however had long ago given up the seat as lost and even Beatrice admitted ‘he is not likely to get in’. But this was not good enough for G.B.S. He needed, while campaigning with tremendous gusto and geniality, to make absolutely certain of not getting in. Every day of the campaign he showed himself as ‘hopelessly intractable’ – except to his enemies, to whom he was ‘the most accommodating candidate that was ever known’. He insisted that he was an atheist; that, though a teetotaller, he would ‘force every citizen to imbibe a quartern of rum to cure any tendency to intoxication... chaffed the Catholics about transubstantiation; abused the Liberals, and contemptuously patronized the Conservatives – until every section was equally disgruntled’. As a result, he was triumphantly beaten into third place. And so, with honour high, Shaw paraded out of party politics. ‘We are not wholly grieved,’ Beatrice wrote. ‘His... quixotic chivalry to his opponents and cold drawn truth, ruthlessly administered, to possible supporters, are magnificent but not war.’

  Shaw’s election defeat was probably more disappointing to Charlotte than to the Webbs. She wanted to find him a respectable career in politics. Though she believed in his gifts as a playwright she could not blink the facts. In the summer of 1903, he was in his forty-eighth year and still almost wholly unknown to British audiences. From such facts and her conflicting reactions to them, Charlotte hit on a curious programme of nudging him into professional politics at home while furthering his reputation as a dramatist abroad.

  Her opportunity to help Shaw’s plays on to the European stage came with a visit early in 1902 of a young Austrian writer, Siegfried Trebitsch. Trebitsch was a sentimentalist of wonderful persistence – the sort of person Shaw had been sent into the world to quell but who in practice so often got the better of him. ‘I held forth for quite a while about his plays,’ Trebitsch remembered.

  ‘What do you mean to do with me?’ Shaw interrupted.

  Trebitsch knew the answer to this. He meant to become Shaw’s ‘apostle in Central Europe’ and conquer the German stage for him. In short he allowed himself to ‘speake straight forward’ and give his ‘dear adored Shaw’ what he called ‘a piece of my mind’. The result was that Shaw jumped up and ran out of the room, crying out for Charlotte to ‘try to calm’ this ‘young lunatic’.

  Obediently Charlotte appeared and Trebitsch ‘expounded my intentions to her’. The grandeur of these intentions, contrasted with the inadequacy of the language in which they were expressed, did not strike Charlotte as funny. She summoned her husband back into the room and Shaw spoke forbiddingly about the ‘extremely important matter of copyright’ of which Trebitsch knew nothing. Trebitsch left soon afterwards and a few days later received a letter from Charlotte inviting him to lunch. It became clear to him during this meal that, though she took no part in the conversation, Charlotte approved of him and that this approval had been responsible for a change in her husband’s manner.

  For Trebitsch to translate his plays into German involved Shaw in mastering the German language – or at least buying ‘a devil of a big dictionary, also a grammar’. He teased and tutored Trebitsch terrifically. His translation of Caesar and Cleopatra was stuffed with misunderstandings; Arms and the Man ‘full of hideous and devastating errors’; and Candida, Trebitsch’s favourite, was worst of all. ‘You didnt understand the play: you only wallowed in it... I tore out large handfuls of my hair and uttered screams of rage... I plucked up my beard by the roots and threw it after my hair.’

  From such comments, over several years, Trebitsch began to sense that something was not quite right. ‘I have just met the most beautiful Shavian I have ever seen,’ Trebitsch deciphered at the end of one of Shaw’s letters to him. ‘She is the wife of one of our diplomatic staff, who is joining the British Embassy in Vienna very soon. I think I will ask her to correct your translations: you can make mistakes on purpose.’ What could this mean? ‘You must learn to laugh,’ Shaw suggested. Was it all some joke? Perhaps not, since Shaw had also advised him: ‘I have no objection to being taken seriously. What ruins me in England is that people think I am always joking.’

  To be the perfect translator of Shaw’s plays Trebitsch needed to be resolved into a German edition of G.B.S. Shaw spelled out the prescription minutely. Trebitsch must use the same menu as Shaw himself. ‘Never eat meat or drink tea, coffee, or wine again as long as you live,’ he warned. ‘...If you are very very very bad, become religious, and go... round all the Stations of the Cross on your knees, and pray incessantly. When you begin to feel sceptical you will be getting well.’

  It was agreed that Trebitsch should translate three plays and hold exclusive rights in them for one year. He chose The Devil’s Disciple, Candida and Arms and the Man, and kept them ‘ceaselessly circulating among publishers, theatrical people, producers’. The proprietor of the Entsch theatrical publishing firm in Berlin refused ‘to have anything to do with this crazy Irishman’ whom he described as ‘a lost cause’. Trebitsch was advised to ‘stop being so obstinate’ or he would endanger his own career. ‘I was somewhat desperate,’ he wrote. ‘But I did not lose heart.’ He continued working ‘feverishly, usually the whole day, and often half the night as well, for, after all, I had a time li
mit’.

  Within the year Trebitsch began to accomplish what Shaw had been failing to achieve in Britain over more than a decade. He persuaded the director of the Raimund Theatre in Vienna to stage The Devil’s Disciple in February 1903, and the Stuttgart publishers Cotta to bring out all three plays, Drei Dramen, in the same year. In 1904 the Deutsches Volkstheater produced Candida and Arms and the Man; and within the next three years there were productions by leading directors of You Never Can Tell, Mrs Warren’s Profession and Man and Superman, all in Trebitsch’s translations. Germany came to recognize Shaw’s ‘importance to the modern stage,’ Thomas Mann wrote, ‘indeed to modern intellectual life as a whole, earlier than the English-speaking world.

  ‘His fame actually reached England only by way of Germany, just as Ibsen and Hamsun conquered Norway, and Strindberg Sweden, by the same roundabout route, for London’s independent theatre fell short of doing for Shaw’s reputation – soon to grow to world-wide dimensions – what men like Otto Brahm and Max Reinhardt... were able to accomplish, for the simple reason that at that time the German stage was ahead of its British counterpart.’

  Trebitsch recorded that it ‘made a very great impression on Shaw that I had kept my word and accomplished what I set out to do’. What Shaw felt for Trebitsch was naked gratitude – the emotion he usually denied and invariably distrusted. Trebitsch in his autobiography presents a chronicle of unchecked success. The first night of The Devil’s Disciple ‘was one of the most remarkable I have ever experienced,’ he writes. Mrs Warren’s Profession ‘was the greatest success of the season’. The production of Candida ‘turned out to be a sensation’ and so on. The stream of Shaw’s letters along this triumphant passage form a curious undercurrent. Over a period of two and a half years, he writes:

  ‘Give up all anxiety about those plays... let this experience cure you of your excessive sensitiveness to reviews... If I bothered about such things I should go mad three times a week, and die on the alternate dates... you must not lie awake and get neuralgia... As to the play being ruined for all German stages, do not trouble about that. When you have been ruined as often as I have, you will find your reputation growing with every successive catastrophe. Never ruin yourself less than twice a year, or the public will forget about you... Dismiss it from your mind now: there is no use bothering about a commercial failure... we can say that it is the public that failed... let us laugh and try again... nothing succeeds like failure... We shall be hissed into celebrity if this goes on.’

  Shaw developed a paternal tenderness for Trebitsch. For many years Trebitsch was violently attacked in Germany for knowing neither German nor English. He never learned what Shaw called ‘the grand style of fighting’, falling upon your opponent and clubbing him dead with the weapons of generosity and politeness. In spite of Shaw’s work with the dictionary, many misunderstandings persisted, the most notorious being Trebitsch’s interpretation of the Waiter’s remark in You Never Can Tell: ‘I really must draw the line at sitting down’ – after which, following Trebitsch’s stage directions, he goes to the window and, before taking his seat, draws the curtains. Shaw knew all about these howlers. ‘Never join in attacks on translators,’ he advised one of his biographers. His loyalty to Trebitsch took the form of claiming for these ‘so-called translations’ the status of ‘excellent original plays’. Had they been the least like his own, he explained, they could never have succeeded so well.

  Shaw’s experiences with Trebitsch influenced his arrangements with other translators. ‘I calculated that the only way to make the job really worth doing was to catch some man in each country who would undertake all my work, and thus get something like an income out of half the fees,’ he wrote to Henry Arthur Jones in 1908. ‘At last I succeeded everywhere except in Portugal... Sometimes I picked a man who had never dreamt of the job and hypnotised and subsidised him into it. Whenever possible, I got a man with an English or American wife... The results have been very varied.’

  He chose his translators because they charmed him, touched his sense of humour or presented impeccable political credentials. His most extreme translators were Augustin and Henriette Hamon. He was a socialist and an anarchist of ‘terrific intellectual integrity... whose main means of subsistence has always been borrowing money’; she knew some English, which was helpful. Hamon did what he could to wriggle away. He was not a literary man, had never written a play and knew little of the theatre. It was true that he had published a number of works on hygiene and sociology. It was also true that he was the radical editor of L’Humanité Nouvelle, a periodical frequently visited by the police. Yet Shaw seemed determined to prove Hamon ‘a born homme de theatre’. That Hamon was an individual bicyclist and a revolutionary with exemplary collectivist principles pleased him. As evidence of his good choice, Shaw pointed to the ‘dramatic liveliness’ of Hamon’s reports on various socialist congresses.

  So Shaw bought a Larousse dictionary and set about becoming a co-translator of his plays into the French language. He enjoyed firing off letters in a French that was so ‘extremely Britannic’ that it ‘must be positively painful’ to any man of literary sensibility to read them. ‘“Hard as nails” – “dure comme un clou” – is an expression which ought,’ he judged, ‘to enrich the French language.’ The Hamons were able, he discovered, to concentrate into ten amazing lines of their translated text ‘all the errors which I spend my life in combating’. Hamon had no notion that he might be translating comedies, and was once seen rushing from the theatre when the audience began to laugh, crying to his wife, ‘Mon Dieu! On rit. Tout est perdu.’

  All Shaw’s schooling could not make these translations good. They were caustically attacked in France as forming a permanent barrier to the acceptance of Shaw’s plays by the French public. Hamon never fathomed ‘the utter illiteracy of the playgoing public’, to prepare for which, Shaw reminded him, Molière used to read his plays aloud to his cook. The great failing of the Frenchman, Shaw maintained, was his academicism. ‘Every Frenchman is a born pedant,’ he advised Hamon. ‘He thinks it a crime to repeat a word – the crime of tautology.’

  Despite the pleas of many eminent translators, Hamon went on to translate almost all Shaw’s plays. Only seven or eight of these plays were produced in Paris, not at the commercial théâtres du boulevard but the small coterie theatres. ‘I have given up all hope of getting into touch with France,’ Shaw conceded in the 1920s, shortly before the success of Saint Joan.

  ‘This is all the more annoying as I do not believe for a moment that the French reading public is less accessible to my methods than any other public... I still believe that if only I could have secured a pulpit in France, I could have amused the inhabitants quite as effectively as the Germans.’

  In the words of Vicomte Robert d’Humières, Shaw became attached to his translator ‘like a criminal is attached to the rope which hanged him’. It was ‘a defiant and heroic act’, intensely Shavian, that would end in ‘suicide on the threshold of our admiration’. To a perpetual gunfire of criticism Hamon dug in for the rest of his life with the work he had never wanted to do. He and his wife remained desperately poor. Feeling perhaps his own part in the Hamons’ poverty, Shaw purchased their house in Brittany for them and in the 1930s bought ‘an annuity for his own and his wife’s life, of £12 a month,’ Shaw revealed to Trebitsch. ‘And this enables him to live comfortably according to his standard of comfort.’

  Trebitsch and Hamon were two principal members of Shaw’s family of translators over whom he exercised great power and generosity. The antagonism which their amateur status and exclusive rights brought them in their own countries intensified their loyalty. They became part of a special Shavian clan (their intimacy seldom tested by an actual meeting) through which, like pollen on the wind, Shaw’s words were eccentrically spread across the world.

  2

  Home Life and Holidays

  A true dramatist should be interested in everything.

  Shaw to Trebitsch (16 Aug
ust 1903)

  Charlotte treated her husband partly as an employer, partly as her child. It was the employer whose correspondence she dealt with, whose manuscripts she took to the typist. She also arranged lunches with people he should meet and protected him from other people who would worry him needlessly. It was on behalf of this employer, too, that she still sat on committees at the London School of Economics and the School of Medicine for Women, and had joined the play-reading committee of the Stage Society.

  But it was the child who exercised her talent for anxiety. Some of his young hobbies – photography or the piano – were harmless. She didn’t mind him taking her picture in the least (though she hated others doing so) and she grew to like his playing to her in the evening. Bicycles were dangerous; and he did very naughty things in newspapers – writing, for example, after the Queen died to denounce the rapturous lying-in-state as ‘insanitary’.

  She had given instructions to the servants to vary his diet as much as possible, and from time to time felt half-persuaded to try it herself. Whenever she was unwell she would pick at something of his vegetarian food, washed down with a glass of whisky. ‘My wife has at last become a convinced vegetarian,’ Shaw reported to Henry Salt in the summer of 1903, ‘...and she now eats nothing but birds & fish, which are not “butcher’s meat”.’