Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Charlotte regarded G.B.S.’s lust for publicity as part of the odder equipment of his genius. There was no other respectable way of explaining it. He literally asked for what he got sometimes, arriving at Max Beerbohm’s house on his bicycle and requesting the cartoonist to do a drawing of him. ‘Max was less gratified by this than might have been expected,’ Lord David Cecil wrote, ‘...and suspected that Shaw was actuated less by admiration than by a desire for the publicity the cartoon might bring him. Max also found Shaw’s appearance unappetizing; his pallid pitted skin and red hair like seaweed. And he was repelled by the back of his neck. “The back of his neck was especially bleak; very long, untenanted, and dead white,” he explained.’

  Max did over forty caricatures of G.B.S.’s ‘temperance beverage face’ and, as dramatic critic, reviewed more than twenty of his plays. ‘My admiration for his genius has during fifty years and more been marred for me by dissent from almost any view that he holds about anything,’ Max was to acknowledge in a letter written for Shaw’s ninetieth birthday. And G.B.S. endorsed this: ‘Max’s blessings are all of them thinly disguised curses.’ Max reinforced the disgust Shaw himself felt at the Shavian publicity phenomenon. After a couple of highly successful speeches in Glasgow during the first week of October 1903 he wrote to Trebitsch: ‘I have hardly yet quite recovered from the self-loathing which such triumphs produce...

  ‘I always suffer torments of remorse when the degrading exhibition is over. However, the thing had to be done; and there was no doing it by halves... I am not at all ashamed of what I said: it was excellent sense; but the way I said it – ugh! All that assumption of stupendous earnestness – merely to drive a little common sense into a crowd, like nails into a very tough board – leaves one empty, exhausted, disgusted.’

  Max and Charlotte found themselves in agreement over G.B.S. He was never an artist, they said, but a reformer. ‘That is what I always tell him,’ insisted Charlotte. But in their married life it was she who attempted to reform him. Since it was only on holiday that, as he put it, ‘I prefer to leave my public character behind me and to be treated as far as possible as a quite private and unknown individual’, she tried to lead him on a succession of long holidays. During April and May 1901 she had him touring through France with her; and in July and August she planted him in Studland Rectory at Corfe Castle in Dorset. ‘This is a very enchanting place – to look at,’ Shaw informed Beatrice Webb. ‘It also has the curious property of reviving every malady, every cramp, every pain, every bone fracture even, from which one has ever suffered.’

  Next year Charlotte packed them both off to a safe hotel on the Norfolk coast for the summer. ‘The only way to rest and get plenty of work done at the same time is to go to sea,’ Shaw later concluded. This was not what Charlotte had in mind. She wanted to take him away from all his work. She wanted to banish the employer and make him wholly, for a time, her child.

  In the spring of 1903 she rushed him through Parma, Perugia, Assisi, Orvieto, Siena, Genoa and Milan. ‘I am getting old and demoralized,’ he confessed to Janet Achurch, ‘I have been in Italy for three weeks.’ Three months later she placed him in Scotland, and held him there for ten weeks. ‘There is no railway, no town, no shops, no society, no music, no entertainments, no beautiful ladies, absolutely nothing but fresh air and eternal rain,’ Shaw wrote. ‘Our house is primitive; our food is primitive; we do nothing but wander about, cycle against impossible winds, or pull a heavy fisherman’s boat about the loch...’

  For most Christmases Charlotte would board him out with her at a bracing hotel or in one of the houses she had rented. In April 1902 they had given up Piccard’s Cottage at Guildford and the following year took instead a country house, Maybury Knoll, in a favourite part of Surrey, near Woking. Here they spent winter weekends and the whole of Christmas at the end of 1903, after which Charlotte was to rent a grander place at the top of a hill overlooking Welwyn which she liked better.

  No sooner had Charlotte marched him up to the top of the hill than she marched him down again – and back to Italy. They started out on 1 May 1904 and arrived back in London on 10 June. A week later Shaw began a new play, his thirteenth, to be called John Bull’s Other Island. Charlotte shuttled him between Adelphi Terrace and Welwyn, and then returned him, protesting, for the summer to Scotland. ‘Our expedition has been so far a ruinous failure,’ he calculated. ‘The place is impossible – no place to write – no place to bathe... Oh these holidays, these accursed holidays!’

  For fourteen years they were to go through every holiday side by side, despite his belief that married people ‘should never travel together: they blame one another for everything that goes wrong.’ It was particularly irritating for him to see how she preened herself on toning up his health while really driving him mad; it was exasperating for her to find, however exorbitant their journeys, he never failed to carry his work with him everywhere. But still they manacled themselves, each for the sake of the other. ‘I am overacting the part of a respectable married man,’ Shaw admitted. ‘But I am only rehearsing for my old age: my guiltiest passions are still glowing beneath the surface.’

  3

  Shakes versus Shav

  I am not writing popular plays just now.

  Shaw to Alma Murray (19 February 1901)

  ‘You know all about “The Admirable Bashville”, or at least you would know if you ever read my books,’ Trebitsch read in one of Shaw’s letters.

  The Admirable Bashville or Constancy Unrewarded was itself a translation from Shaw’s novel, Cashel Byron’s Profession, into a three-act play in ‘the primitive Elizabethan style’. This was Shaw’s eleventh play and he had finished it in a week on 2 February 1901. Hearing rumours that there were several pirated stage versions of his novel in the United States, and that one of these productions was coming to Britain, he ‘took the opportunity to produce a masterpiece’ in order to protect his copyright. He squeezed out of this exercise all the fun he could, using it as another squib against bardolatry and claiming that he had been forced to employ the rigmarole of Shakespearian verse (of which ‘I am childishly fond’), occasionally patching in actual lines from Shakespeare and Marlowe, because he did not have the time to write it all in prose. Having plagiarized his own work and parodied Shakespeare’s, he produced a caricature of his advertising methods. It was, he assured Trebitsch, ‘my greatest play’. But this delight in what was ‘my only achievement in pure letters’ began to recoil once other playwrights hit on the notion of agreeing with him.

  A number of Shaw’s ‘serious intentions’ are planted in the burlesque. He has some fun with phonetics; he airs his expertise on self-defence; he owns up to the loneliness of excellence and devotes some mighty lines to family and filial sentiment. There is a surge of real feeling when Cashel contrasts the presumed barbarities of boxing with the concealed cruelties of polite life.

  ...this hand

  That many a two days bruise hath ruthless given,

  Hath kept no dungeon locked for twenty years,

  Hath slain no sentient creature for my sport.

  I am too squeamish for your dainty world,

  That cowers behind the gallows and the lash,

  The world that robs the poor, and with their spoil

  Does what its tradesmen tell it. Oh, your ladies!

  Sealskinned and egret-feathered; all defiance

  To Nature; cowering if one say to them

  ‘What will the servants think?’ Your gentlemen!

  Your tailor-tyrannized visitors of whom

  Flutter of wing and singing in the wood

  Make chickenbutchers. And your medicine men!

  Groping for cures in the tormented entrails

  Of friendly dogs. Pray have you asked all these

  To change their occupations? Find you mine

  So grimly crueller? I cannot breathe

  An air so petty and so poisonous.

  Shaw assisted Harley Granville Barker in directing the first professional p
resentation of the play, put on by the Stage Society on 7 and 8 June 1903 at the Imperial Theatre in London. It was an early instance of the working association between the two men, and laid down the lines for their later collaborative work at the Court Theatre. Barker was (in the modern sense) stage-manager and Shaw arrived fairly late in the preparation of his play. He hunted enthusiastically for bird-whistles, some soft-nosed spears, a white beaver hat, post-horn, one enormous blue handkerchief with white spots, a throne: also ‘We shall want a crowd’; and directed it in the Elizabethan stage manner with traverses, and two beefeaters with placards denoting the scenes. He insisted that it should be announced as ‘Bernard Shaw’s celebrated drama in blank verse with, possibly, an epigraph: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.” Shakespeare.’

  As in his subsequent ‘Interlude’, The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, the humour depends upon the audience’s familiarity with Shakespeare. Those with no Shakespearian knowledge would sit bewildered or else, in all earnestness, break into applause. Despite its awkward playing length, the Stage Society production ‘went with a roar from beginning to end’. The policeman (played by the cricketer C. Aubrey Smith, later to become famous as a Hollywood film actor) was made up as G.B.S. so effectively that his mother, sitting next to him, was deeply perplexed.

  Also performed was the copyright trick of upstaging all American dramatizations of the novel – including one by Stanislas Strange (who was to write the libretto for The Chocolate Soldier) and starring, as Cashel Byron, former world heavyweight champion ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett.

  The Admirable Bashville was published by Grant Richards in October 1901 as part of a new edition of Cashel Byron’s Profession that also included Shaw’s essay ‘A Note on Modern Prizefighting’. The book was reviewed at length, and disconcertingly, by Max Beerbohm.

  ‘As a passage by steam is to a voyage by sail, so is Mr Shaw’s fiction to true fiction... he wants to impress certain theories on us, to convert us to this or that view. The true creator wishes mainly to illude us with a sense of actual or imaginative reality. To achieve that aim, he must suppress himself and his theories: they kill illusion. He must accept life as it presents itself to his experience or imagination, not use his brain to twist it into the patterns of a purpose. Such self-sacrifice is beyond Mr Shaw.’

  Here was the most coherent argument so far raised against the Shavian art. Shaw could not create: his characters were all victims of Shavian theses, all parts of himself differentiated only by quick changes and superficial idiosyncrasies. On another level, as a personality, G.B.S. was immortal. There was no one like him. Seriousness and frivolity were the essence of Shavianism. ‘He is not a serious man trying to be frivolous,’ Beerbohm explained. ‘He is a serious man who cannot help being frivolous, and in him height of spirits is combined with depth of conviction more illustriously than in any of his compatriots.’ It did not matter what he wrote. All his writing was filleted with Shavianism – that quality whose deep seriousness served artistically to raise the humour. ‘As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr Shaw is no good at all,’ Beerbohm joyfully concluded. It was as a comedian whose frivolity, vampire-like, sucked the seriousness from his work, that he was unique. So when he claimed apropos his next play, Man and Superman, that ‘the matter isnt really in my hands. I have to say the things that seem to me to want saying’, everyone sharing Beerbohm’s view of G.B.S. drew in their breath and prepared to greet it with a good laugh.

  4

  Man and Superman

  You must not translate it, as you would get six years in a fortress for the preface alone.

  Shaw to Trebitsch (7 July 1902)

  The characters had started talking inside Shaw’s head over two years before. In May 1900 he began outlining a Parliament in Hell between Don Juan and the Devil. Around the Socratic debate he composed a three-act comedy, completing the scenario between 2 July and 8 October 1901. He worked between accidents and on journeys, in hotels and at home: he worked whenever Charlotte took her eye off him until, in June 1902, this many-layered work, now called Man and Superman. A Comedy and a Philosophy, was finished – when the business of revision immediately began. In January 1903 Shaw read it aloud to the Webbs at the Overstrand Hotel at Cromer in Norfolk. ‘To me it seems a great work; quite the biggest thing he has done,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary. ‘He has found his form: a play which is not a play; but only a combination of essay, treatise, interlude, lyric – all the different forms illustrating the same central idea.’

  Since it was ‘useless as an acting play’, he explained to Hamon, being ‘as long as three Meyerbeer operas and no audience that had not already had a Shaw education could stand it’, he had decided to publish Man and Superman himself, abandoning Grant Richards and signing an agreement with Archibald Constable to act as distribution agent for his works – an agreement that lasted the remaining forty-seven years of his life.

  Man and Superman was published on 11 August 1903. ‘I cannot be a bellettrist,’ Shaw wrote in his Preface. ‘Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him. Disprove his assertion after it is made, yet its style remains.’

  Between style and art and power and reality Shaw crossed the lines of his argument with such dexterity as to bring almost everyone into confusion. Critics were fixed in his net of words – though not Max Beerbohm who seemed to slip between the meshes. Max was to draw a caricature of Shaw bringing a bundle of clothes to the Danish critic, Georg Brandes (who is represented as a pawnbroker), and asking for immortality in exchange for the lot. Brandes protests: ‘Come, I’ve handled these goods before! Coat, Mr Schopenhauer’s; waistcoat, Mr Ibsen’s; Mr Nietzsche’s trousers – .’ To which Shaw answers: ‘Ah, but look at the patches!’ As for style, Max astutely judged his Alpha and Omega to be ‘more akin to the art of oral debating than of literary exposition. That is because he trained himself to speak before he trained himself to write.’

  For the same reason, Max conceded, Shaw excelled in writing words to be spoken by the human voice. ‘In swiftness, tenseness and lucidity of dialogue no living writer can touch the hem of Mr Shaw’s garment,’ Max wrote. ‘In Man and Superman every phrase rings and flashes. Here, though Mr Shaw will be angry with me, is perfect art.’ For Shaw used art ‘as a means of making people listen to him...

  ‘He is as eager to be a popular dramatist and... willing to demean himself in any way that may help him to the goal... I hope he will reach the goal. It is only the theatrical managers who stand between him and the off-chance of a real popular success.’

  Man and Superman, Max concluded, was Shaw’s masterpiece so far. This ‘most complete expression of the most distinct personality in current literature’ showed G.B.S. able to employ art without becoming an artist and excelling in dialogue without developing into a playwright. From this opinion Max somewhat recanted two years later when he saw Man and Superman (in its three-act version) performed on stage. It was not only the humanizing of Shaw’s words by living actors that changed his mind. He also appears to have been swayed by Shaw’s argument that, as a caricaturist, Max also did not ‘see things and men as they are’, but that his distortions, far from disqualifying him as an artist, were the essence of his art. The artist creates his own reality and his own epoch: and Britain was about to enter a Shavian epoch. Max sensed this. Shaw was one of those for whom the visible world had largely ceased to exist and was being replaced by a world seen through his mind’s eye. That it was a world disliked by Max was partly the reason why he had denied its creator artistic capacity. The production of John Bull’s Other Island in 1904 was to convince him that Shaw had ‘an instinct for the theatre’. And when he saw Man and Superman on stage in 1905, he prepared to make way for the coming Shavian revolution in the British theatre:

  ‘Mr Shaw, it is insisted, cannot draw life: he can only di
stort it. He has no knowledge of human nature: he is but a theorist. All his characters are but so many incarnations of himself. Above all, he cannot write plays. He has no dramatic instinct, no theatrical technique...

  That theory might have held water in the days before Mr Shaw’s plays were acted. Indeed, I was in the habit of propounding it myself... When Man and Superman was published, I... said that (even without the philosophic scene in hell) it would be quite unsuited to any stage. When I saw it performed... I found that as a piece of theatrical construction it was perfect... to deny that he is a dramatist merely because he chooses, for the most part, to get drama out of contrasted types of character and thought, without action, and without appeal to the emotions, seems to me both unjust and absurd. His technique is peculiar because his purpose is peculiar. But it is not the less technique.’

  *

  Man and Superman is the first in a trilogy of plays in which Shaw’s thesis and antithesis of fact and fantasy produced the synthesis of evolutionary progress. Creative evolution had the potential for replacing his lonely sense of being ‘a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it’ with the feeling of being part of the collective consciousness ‘up to the chin in the life of his own time’. The Life Force was not a rival scientific theory to Darwin’s Natural Selection, but a different outlook on life. By making external a division he felt to exist within himself Shaw was able to use an intellectual method – the Hegelian triad which he had picked up from the British socialist philosopher Belfort Bax – of reconciling opposites and bringing harmony to his life. He wished to create the new drama in which, as in a series of parables, he could rewrite history and set it on a new course.

  The Hegelian structure became a model for his thought. Reviewing a novel by Moncure Conway early in 1888, he had written of Hegelianism as never having been positively ‘adapted and translated into practical English politics’. In the hands of Marx, it had been ‘chiefly effective as a scathing but quite negative criticism of industrial individualism’.