There are more false starts, deletions and drastic changes in the holograph manuscript of Major Barbara than in any of Shaw’s previous plays. In the intervals and ‘mostly in Great Northern express trains’, he polished off a ‘new and original tragedy’ early that summer. Passion Poison and Petrifaction or The Fatal Gazogene completed a trilogy of ‘tomfooleries’ done while still at work on his ‘big three’. The invitation had come from Cyril Maude on behalf of the Actors’ Orphanage which each year commissioned a playwright to compose a burlesque of old-time melodrama to be performed in the Royal Botanical Gardens of Regent’s Park during the Theatrical Garden Party. Shaw’s idea came from a story he had once told the Archer children about his aunt, who liked making plaster of Paris figures, and her cat which one day mistook the liquid plaster of Paris for milk and, while asleep, turned into a ponderous mass of cement – to be used by the aunt as a doorstop. From the beginning when the cuckoo clock strikes sixteen (signifying eleven o’clock at night) to the moment when Lady Magnesia Fitztollemache’s lover is obliged to eat part of the ceiling (containing lime) as an antidote to the jealous husband’s poison, we are, as Irving Wardle writes, ‘into Ionesco territory’.
This ‘brief tragedy for Barns and Booths’ by the ‘Chelsea Shakespeare’ was performed ‘for the first time in any tent’ at intervals during the afternoon of 14 July. The author, who was absent, described it as a ‘colossal success’, and arranged for the royalties on all performances for the rest of its copyright life to be paid to the Actors’ Orphanage Fund. ‘Charities are remorseless,’ he explained.
He returned to, but could not finish, Major Barbara. At the beginning of July Charlotte took charge. She proposed returning G.B.S. to Ireland. It was twenty-nine years since he had boarded the North Wall boat for London. Like Larry Doyle, he had ‘an instinct against going back to Ireland’. Nevertheless, like Larry Doyle, he went. It was not of course on his own initiative. ‘I went back to please my wife; and a curious reluctance to retrace my steps made me land in the south and enter Dublin through the backdoor from Meath rather than return as I came, through the front door on the sea.’
They were to stay at Charlotte’s father’s house three miles out of Rosscarbery, a little market town in County Cork. It was a solid grey stone structure built on rising ground with gardens that sloped down to a lake. From the terrace, facing south, they ‘could look out on a great sweep of the bay, with a lighthouse rising like the stub of a pencil on the farthest point of land’. But could he work there? Did the house have a sitting-room well away from the drawing-room? This was vital since they were to be joined by Charlotte’s sister, Mary Cholmondeley, and her husband who was a colonel. It was important to be out of earshot.
G.B.S. spent much of the next three months in that sitting-room getting on ‘scrap by scrap’ with his new play. It progressed very slowly – ‘a speech a day or so,’ he informed Vedrenne. ‘I have not yet finished the play,’ he wrote to Eleanor Robson on 21 August; ‘and my inspiration, as far as the heroine is concerned, is gone. I shall finish it with my brains alone.’ On 11 September he reported that it was ‘just finished’: but he had been left ‘in a condition of sullen desperation concerning it’.
He had turned back from autobiography to politics – from his marriage and the country of his childhood to the economic questions that had first provided the themes of his Plays Unpleasant. Over twenty years separated the beginning of Widowers’ Houses from the completion of Major Barbara, and though the living standards of the middle class had risen in this period there were now almost a million people in the country receiving Poor Law relief. In London at the beginning of 1905 the number of paupers had risen to 150,000, of whom 1,500 were ‘casual paupers’ sleeping in the streets or the casual wards of workhouses and living, according to William Booth, ‘below the standard of the London cab-horse’. Booth had founded the Salvation Army in 1878 to make war on poverty. Though Britain was still at the summit of her imperial power, much of her population existed on the edge of destitution. It was this paradox that Shaw investigated in his play using, as a symbol of Imperialist prosperity, the armaments industry.
‘One never really makes portraits of people in fiction,’ he wrote: ‘what happens is that certain people inspire one to invent fictitious characters for them, which is quite another matter.’ The millionaire munitions capitalist, Andrew Undershaft, seems to have had a composite inspiration: there was the dramatist Charles McEvoy’s father, a benign grey-haired gentleman who, after fighting on the side of the Confederacy in the American Civil War, settled down quietly to establish a torpedo factory; there was Hans Renold, a businessman who came to lecture the Fabian Society on the principles of ‘service before self’ in the manufacture of high explosives. Another prototype was Alfred Nobel, ‘the gentle Bolshevik’ who had patented dynamite in 1867 and in 1901 endowed the Nobel Peace Prize which, as the critic Louis Crompton commented, ‘challenged the humanitarian liberals among his personal friends to solve the problems his discoveries had created’. William Manchester has argued that Shaw’s model was Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the Prussian ‘Cannon King’ whose paternalistic welfare arrangements for his workers in Essen may have suggested Undershaft’s model town. Krupp had died in 1902 and was succeeded by his daughter Bertha. ‘In 1906 – the year after the publication of Major Barbara – she married Dr Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach,’ wrote Maurice Valency, ‘who later assumed the name of Krupp, and took over the management of the Krupp combine, thus fulfilling in reality the role of Dr Cusins in Shaw’s play.’ Shaw himself wrote that Undershaft emerged into the world as Henry Ford. Other critics assumed that he derived from the legendary Basil Zaharoff, chief salesman of Vickers, who ‘made wars so that I could sell arms to both sides’.
Such a multiplicity of candidates attests to the rise of arms traffic throughout the world at the turn of the century. Some, like Zaharoff, made no apology for their merchandise. Others, such as Britain’s largest arms maker Sir William Armstrong, placed the responsibility for ‘legitimate application’ of weapons on the buyer and speculated that better armaments might well render war less barbarous. Others again, such as Nobel, argued for the deterrent effect of explosives.
Undershaft expresses all these attitudes. But when he challenges Cusins to ‘make war on war’ he is deliberately tempting him with the conventional paradox of those times which soon led to German, French and British soldiers being shot down with guns made by their fellow-countrymen in a ‘war to end wars’.
The first act of the play is a drawing-room comedy set in the library of Lady Britomart’s house in Wilton Crescent which displays the wealth of capitalist society; the second act is a Dickensian melodrama showing capitalism’s destitution at the West Ham Shelter of the Salvation Army. Shaw had got as far as Undershaft’s arrival at West Ham when he took his manuscript to Ireland. From then on Undershaft begins to take control of the play and in the third act, a political fantasy set in Perivale St Andrews, a futuristic model town, he dominates the stage.
On 8 September Shaw scribbled ‘End of the Play’ at the conclusion of the third act. But Undershaft’s annihilation of everyone else had left him feeling dissatisfied. Why had it happened? He appeared to have let his unconscious Will, with its fantasies of violence, speak through Undershaft. That name itself brings together the wishes of the unconscious and the underground kingdom of the Devil.
In London earlier that year he had blamed the pressure of business for his difficult progress on the play; at Rosscarbery he attributed his difficulties to the moisture of the Irish climate. His aggressive instincts, however, are more likely to have been aroused by ‘Mrs Chumly’, Charlotte’s sister. Mary Cholmondeley’s determination never to see her brother-in-law had gradually wavered. She had heard a good deal about him and, pricked by curiosity, allowed Charlotte to persuade her after half a dozen years to meet him. For the first week or two, perhaps feeling her disapproval, G.B.S. stayed working all day in the sitting-room. Charlotte joined him
there in the mornings to do secretarial work; and in the afternoons she would visit friends in the neighbourhood with ‘Sissy’. Soon G.B.S. was accompanying them on these walks. ‘Mrs C and I, in view of our previously rather distant relations, laid ourselves out to conciliate one another, and rather more than succeeded,’ he confided to Beatrice Webb.
‘I have the important advantage in such matters of not being nearly so disagreeable personally as one would suppose from my writings. I am now completely adopted on the usual lunatic privileged terms in the Cholmondeley household. I have taken several photographs of Mrs C and taught her to swim. The Colonel has presented me with a watch which tells the date and the phases of the moon. I play accompaniments to Mrs C’s singing and the past is buried.’
From that past and behind the patina of politeness the sinister figure of Undershaft expanded. So favourable an impression meanwhile was G.B.S. making on the Cholmondeleys that they invited him to go with them on a round of Irish peers in their castles and only accepted his refusal (‘the worm turned at last’) on the understanding that he would rejoin them the following month at Edstaston, their home in Shropshire.
Shaw arrived back in London alone on 30 September and the next day went down to read his play at Gilbert Murray’s house in Oxford. The ostensible reason for his visit was to ensure that those people on whom his characters were modelled would not be offended. He had written to Murray asking whether Murray himself minded being represented as a foundling. Murray replied that the only thing that Shaw did at his peril was to fasten on him the Christian name Adolphus. In Shaw’s first draft the professor had been called Dolly Tankerville. But he changed this Wildean surname to Cusins, suggesting the foundling’s curious relationship (his own cousin) to himself.
His audience at Oxford that day included Murray and Granville Barker who was shortly to play the part of Cusins. At the end of the second act they were, Murray remembered, ‘thrilled with enthusiasm, especially at the Salvation Army scenes. Act 3, in which the idealists surrender to the armaments industries, was a terrible disappointment to us.’
Shaw returned to London and that night wrote to Murray confessing that he felt ‘quite desperate about my last act: I think I must simply rewrite it.’
To encourage himself he went next day to the Albert Hall where the Salvation Army was holding a festival to commemorate dead comrades. As the band played
‘When the roll is called up yonder
I’LL BE THERE’
he stood in the middle of the centre grand tier box, in the front row, ‘and sang it as it has never been sung before,’ he told Vedrenne. ‘The Times will announce my conversion tomorrow.’
The following afternoon he joined Charlotte and the Cholmondeleys at Edstaston. He had received a letter from Gilbert Murray enclosing some ideas set down in dialogue for the third act. ‘What I am driving at, is to get the real dénouement of the play, after Act ii,’ Murray explained. ‘...It makes Cusens come out much stronger, but I think that rather an advantage. Otherwise you get a simple defeat of the Barbara principles by the Undershaft principles.’
The rewriting of his last scene took Shaw eleven days. ‘I want to get Cusins beyond the point of wanting power,’ he replied to Murray. The Edstaston manuscript was completed on 15 October 1905. It is perhaps the most complex and ambiguous scene Shaw ever wrote. The debate between Undershaft, Barbara and Cusins takes place at many levels. Barbara, who represents evangelical Christianity, has lost her faith by the end of Act II, using Christ’s words upon the cross: ‘My God: why hast thou forsaken me?’ Cusins represents scepticism, a purely negative force by itself; and Undershaft embodies Shaw’s concept of the Life Force, a mindless power for good-or-evil depending (like all technology) on what human beings themselves decide to do with it.
Barbara’s transfiguration must come through a resurrected faith that involves Cusins and Undershaft – her future husband and her father: three in one and one in three. While she occupies the position of the Son, Cusins is the Holy Ghost and Undershaft God the Father. But Undershaft is also the Devil – ‘You may be a devil; but God speaks through you sometimes,’ Barbara admits. In the religion of Creative Evolution, life arises from the anonymous concept of energy. It is a force without morality and, as Barbara discovers, ‘there is no wicked side: life is all one.’
Cusins recognizes in Undershaft the mysterious spirit of Dionysus, capable of creation and destruction. Human beings therefore ‘create’ God or the Devil according to the way in which they employ Divine Energy. On the psychological level Barbara is the superego, Cusins the ego and Undershaft the id: three in one and one in three. According to the system laid out in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Barbara is the idealist, Cusins the realist and Undershaft the philistine. In his last scene Shaw attempts to unite all three: Cusins is to be Barbara’s husband and, as the foundling inheritor of his father-in-law’s munitions factory, will become Andrew Undershaft VIII. He will be able to join his intelligence and Barbara’s spiritual passion to his father-in-law’s money and material strength.
For all his pragmatism and lack of hypocrisy, Undershaft is a limited man. He writes up UNASHAMED as his motto and is contemptuous of democratic shams. The ‘ballot paper that really governs,’ he says, ‘is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it’. But though he exults in his power he is also its prisoner. Armaments are the instruments of revolutionary change and also the means by which authoritarian governments repress change. The will to live must do battle with the tendency to self-destruction.
The ambiguity of the play partly derives from the conflict of Undershaft’s motives. By inviting Cusins to be his successor is he tempting him, as Mephistopheles tempted Faust, to his damnation? Or is he an instinctive agent for the Life Force seeking in Cusins a better use of the power he commands? In fact he is doing both: that is how life operates. ‘You cannot have power for good without having power for evil, too.’
Cusins believes that he will reject the armourer’s faith and ‘sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to whom I please’. To this Undershaft replies: ‘From the moment when you become Andrew Undershaft, you will never do as you please again.’ This seems to be the percipient voice of the Devil having recruited a partner in his hellish trade. But elsewhere Undershaft appears to challenge Cusins and Barbara to use this power in a fundamentally different way: ‘Society cannot be saved,’ he says (paraphrasing Plato’s Republic), ‘until either the Professors of Greek take to making gunpowder, or else the makers of gunpowder become Professors of Greek.’
In the earlier manuscript Undershaft had posed a conundrum for Cusins: ‘Why is a government a government?’ And Cusins answered: ‘Because the people are fools.’ In the Edstaston manuscript Cusins states his belief in the common man:
‘I love the common people. I want to arm them against the lawyer, doctor, the priest, the literary man, the professor, the artist and the politician, who, once in authority, are the most dangerous, disastrous and tyrannical of all the fools, rascals and impostors. I want a democratic power strong enough to force the intellectual oligarchy to use its genius for the general good or else perish.’
Cusins enshrines something of Gilbert Murray’s political idealism – it is not surprising that Murray’s later work for the League of Nations should be in line with Cusins’s decision to ‘make war on war’. Shaw and Barker felt the excitement of working in the theatre with this brilliant young Oxford professor. He was, Shaw told Pinero, a ‘genuine artistic anarchic character’. Shaw wanted to bring Murray’s classical scholarship to bear on twentieth-century politics and he uses Undershaft to give muscle to a man D. H. Lawrence was to call ‘all disembodied mind’. The passionate thinking Shaw put into Major Barbara was partly the result of this association with Murray; and their friendship became a bonus added to the successful breakthrough of Shaw’s plays at the Court. Both these factors helped to make the positive ending to Major Barbara – an ending with the ‘inconsequence of madness in it’.
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nbsp; This hard-won optimism had survived the initial effects of Shavian irony, but there are signs of rejection to the graft. Beatrice Webb records Shaw as arguing ‘earnestly and cleverly, even persuasively, in favour of what he imagines to be his central theme – the need for preliminary good physical environment before anything could be done to raise the intelligence and morality of the average sensual man’. But Undershaft’s general attitude towards life continued to trouble people.
Of all the play’s aphorisms and ideas echoing from Plato, Euripides, Nietzsche, the most significant derive from Shaw’s reading of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. What Shaw believed to be the central theme of Major Barbara – that ‘the way of life lies through the factory of death’ – is similar to several proverbs of Blake, with whom Shaw shared a religious faith in Energy. He could expound this faith so well that even Beatrice Webb ‘found it difficult to answer him’. Yet, she added, ‘he did not convince me.
‘...the impression left is that Cusins and Barbara are neither of them convinced by Undershaft’s argument, but that they are uttering words, like the silly son, to bridge over a betrayal of their own convictions.’
Shaw’s genius went into the creation of Undershaft. The armaments manufacturer loves his enemies because they have kept him in business. Like Christ, he comes ‘not to send peace but a sword’. Cusins he had constructed ‘with my brains alone’ – and with Gilbert Murray’s. ‘But you are driving me against my nature,’ Cusins protests to Undershaft. ‘I hate war.’ Shaw, too, seems to be driven against his nature. He had wanted to move Cusins and Barbara ‘beyond the point of wanting power’. But their final permeation of the Undershaft firm lacks conviction on stage. Shaw knew this. He continued tinkering with this last scene up to 1930 when the Standard Edition of the play was published, trying to make Barbara and Cusins ‘more prominent’ and giving them ‘more commanding positions on stage and stronger movement’. But as he told Robert Morley ten years later during the making of the film version of the play: ‘That’s always been a terrible act. I don’t think anyone could do anything with it.’
Bernard Shaw Page 45
