Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  It was Charlotte who reminded him of a good dramatic subject he had come across earlier that year at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. The Principal of the Institute of Pathology there was Almroth Wright who had recently created a scientific sensation by claiming to have found a method of measuring the protective substances in the human blood. Wright ‘discovered that the white corpuscles or phagocytes which attack and devour disease germs for us do their work only when we butter the disease germs appetizingly for them with a natural sauce’. The chemical condiments ebbed and flowed like the tide. Wright believed he had invented a means of calculating the periodical climaxes. Vaccine therapy could now proceed, he announced, on a scientific basis.

  Shaw was keen to let the London drama critics know that the ‘scientific side’ of his play was ‘correct and up to date’. Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the hero, ‘is, serum pathologically, Sir Almroth Wright, knighted last birthday (May [1906]) for his opsonic discovery,’ he informed A. B. Walkley. Some of Sir Almroth’s friends would drop in to his research institute at St Mary’s at night and, among the glass tubes, bottles, powders, plasters, discuss the newest theories of ‘Vaccinotherapy’. Shaw was present at one of these late-night tea parties when a discussion arose among the physicians over admitting an extra tuberculosis patient who had arrived that day for experimental treatment. Wright’s chief assistant objected: ‘We’ve got too many cases on our hands already.’ Shaw then asked: ‘What would happen if more people applied to you for help than you could properly look after?’ And Wright answered: ‘We should have to consider which life was worth saving.’

  This weighing of human worth on the scales of life and death is superficially the problem at the centre of Shaw’s play. Whose life is of greater value: the unprincipled artist of genius or the honest sixpenny doctor? If there is an air of unreality about this choice it is because, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out, nobody at sea shouts ‘Bad citizen overboard!’ In real life, the doctor ‘doesn’t fool himself that the moral value of the characters comes into it,’ James Fenton was to write. ‘He chooses the people he has the best chance of saving.’

  The real dilemma in the play, and the pivot of Colenso Ridgeon’s choice, involves the nature of our unconscious motives and the idealizing process of logic by which we justify them to ourselves and represent them to one another. Almroth Wright was a misogynist who had concluded in The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage that the feminine mind ‘accepts the congenial as true, and rejects the uncongenial as false: takes the imaginary which is desired for reality’. In The Doctor’s Dilemma, Shaw takes Wright’s view of the inferior and irrational feminine mind and applies it to his gallery of scientific men. In particular he focuses on the unconscious sexual motives of Sir Colenso Ridgeon, the fashionable physician modelled on Wright who, listing his symptoms, innocently takes medical advice when he is about to fall in love.

  Shaw liked Wright and disagreed with him about almost everything. Lord Moran, who heard some of their contests at St Mary’s, remembered feeling sorry for Wright once Shaw had finished speaking. ‘I felt that he had been pulverized, but at the end of Wright’s reply I blushed to think that Shaw, who was after all a guest, had been so mercilessly shown up. The devastating effect of such speech depends on the art of selection. Every single sentence was a direct hit; there was not a single word which did not contribute to the confusion of the enemy.’

  Here is a source and echo of the medical crosstalk in The Doctor’s Dilemma. Shaw’s sense of vulnerability to the power of this medical élite, displacing a fear of death, gave his satire its edge; his sparring matches with Wright also enabled him to parody his own habit of presenting himself as morally superior to human frailty and devastatingly up to date with scientific fashion. Unlike Wright, who had won an extraordinary pile of medals, honours and academic prizes, Shaw had never learned anything at school. ‘I could not pass an examination and win a certificate in an elementary school to this day.’ He was an academic manqué and resented his exclusion from university excellence – that nest of singing birds.

  Behind these years of controversy with Wright, and the play that derived from their association, there lay a wish to take authority from the orthodoxly educated and give it to outsiders. Like the scholastic profession, the medical freemasonry was a closed circle of privileged people whose mesmeric power over other human beings angered Shaw. ‘It is awful how these scientific men wallow in orthodoxy, when they get the chance,’ he complained to Gilbert Murray. ‘...Free thought really depends on the men of letters – and progressive thought, too.’

  *

  The Doctor’s Dilemma shows us a cabal of physicians driven into the position of private tradesmen, abjectly dependent upon their patients’ incomes and delusions. Beneath the invented drama of the play with its surface tension of ethics versus aesthetics, lies a theme that confronts the philosophies of science for science’s sake with the social usefulness of art, balancing Wright’s way of looking at the world against Shaw’s. Sir Colenso Ridgeon’s choice, which is intended to illustrate the subjective foundations of scientific reasoning, exposes him at the end of the play as having been so emotionally self-deluded as to have ‘committed a purely disinterested murder!’

  The most effective sections of the play depended on Shaw’s instinct rather than his research. He sensed that something was wrong with Wright’s reputation. The War Office, wanting to use Wright’s anti-typhoid injections, ‘first had him knighted and then used his knighthood as evidence of the unassailability of his theories’ – a similar process to that of Ridgeon’s knighthood in Act I of the play. One reason for the popularity of Wright’s treatment seems to have been its novelty. No Harley Street specialist could afford to see his patient leave him for someone more ‘up to date’. But looking back from 1970, W. D. Foster concluded in A History of Medical Bacteriology: ‘It is doubtful if this form of treatment produced any good results and certainly in most instances, it was valueless to the point of fraudulence.’

  Shaw said of Wright that it was ‘useful to know a man who has discovered the philosopher’s stone but does not know the value of gold’. It was a percipient statement. The concept of certain body cells reacting in a measurable way to an invasion by bacteria ‘had great importance for the future development of bacteriology and immunology,’ wrote Dr Gregory Scott in British Medicine. But the significance of this discovery was taken up by Wright’s junior at St Mary’s, Alexander Fleming. While accidentally finding a drug that would take the place of vaccine therapy, Fleming was financed by money raised from the use of Wright’s vaccine, and obliged to pay perpetual lip-service to the man who became nicknamed ‘Sir Almost Wright’. The story was to end with the renaming of St Mary’s laboratory as the Wright-Fleming Institute and the development of the wonder-drug penicillin by Florey and Chain. Shaw’s instinct had alerted him to recurring and timeless patterns within the medical community.

  There were several models for the artist Dubedat. Chief among them was Edward Aveling, the basilisk-eyed ‘blackguard’ whom Eleanor Marx had idolized. When Ridgeon assures Jennifer Dubedat that ‘your hero must be preserved to you’, he is protecting her from Eleanor Marx’s suicidal destiny by ensuring that her illusions survive her husband’s death. Shaw also recycled some of his feelings for H. G. Wells and Charles Charrington, used the case histories of Beardsley and Rossetti, as well as a scandal from the career of Sir Alfred Gilbert, sculptor of Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and cast a backward look at Vandeleur Lee.

  In the play Dubedat becomes the figure through whom ‘the Shavian devil is most active,’ writes Margery Morgan. ‘For the debate reflects a division that ran deep in the author himself.’ Critics have proposed that since Dubedat admits ‘I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw’, he represents G.B.S. But he had taken this statement from a court case. A youth called Rankin, sentenced early that year to six months’ imprisonment for attempting to blackmail his father, a schoolmaster, had pleaded guilty to being a disciple of Bernard Shaw as the
explanation of his crime. In Wormwood Scrubs he refused the ministrations of the chaplain, and asked that G.B.S. be sent for. As Shaw was abroad, Stewart Headlam visited him in gaol. ‘It was quite clear that he was under the impression that my teaching was simply an advocacy of reckless and shameless disregard of all social and moral obligations,’ Shaw later reported, ‘an error which he owes, I should say, not to reading my works unsophisticatedly, but to reading the follies which the press utters about me... It was as a reductio-ad-absurdum of this error and partly as a warning against it that I made Dubedat in the play use Rankin’s defence.’

  Shaw subtitled his play ‘A Tragedy’. To peddle self-delusion and advertise it as a happiness-drug was to manufacture human tragedy. Shaw recommended people to ‘stop taking any opiates or palliatives if you can endure life without them’; and he used the medical profession as a metaphor for every conspiracy of self-deception that worked against the public interest. The doctors in his play are all amiable men. It is public fear that insists on their omniscience, public superstition that equips them with their hocus-pocus of charms and cures, public ignorance that obliges them to trade in hypochondria. They are the idealists of Shaw’s philosophy, who are paid to give the philistines what they want and will be out of a job unless they do so.

  Shaw believed that most progress depended on heretics but that most heretics were not vehicles for progress. In Dubedat we are shown a realist infected by poverty and the atmosphere of idealism. Ridgeon, the physician, romantically idealizes Jennifer who romantically idealizes her artist-husband Dubedat who idealizes his work as the murderous doctors idealize theirs.

  The embodiment of romanticism is Jennifer. ‘Provisionally I have called her Andromeda; but Mrs Andromeda Dubedat is too long,’ Shaw wrote to Lillah McCarthy from Cornwall. ‘Here in King Arthur’s country the name Guinevere survives as Jennifer.’ The names reveal Shaw’s intention to parody the Greek and Arthurian myths of chivalry. Ridgeon sees himself as a Perseus rescuing his beautiful Andromeda by killing her monster-husband. By calling her Jennifer and preserving the connection with Arthurian legend, Shaw recalls his own ‘Mystic Betrothal’ to May Morris whose mother Jane had been painted as Guinevere by William Morris. The more recent case of Guineverism, Shaw implies, had been Lillah and Barker.

  Shaw wrote his play, he said, in response to a challenge from Archer who had written that G.B.S. was incapable of writing a convincing death scene. ‘It is not the glory but the limitation of Mr Shaw’s theatre that it is peopled by immortals,’ he wrote. Shaw intended The Doctor’s Dilemma to be a ‘tragic comedy, with death conducting the orchestra’. To assist the critics, who had not yet heard of black comedy, Shaw issued a press release in which he prophesied ‘it will probably be called a farce macabre’; and as an aid for his audiences he added a quotation to the programme: ‘Life does not cease to be funny when people die, any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.’

  The death of Dubedat is usually more interesting to scholars than spectators. The serious artist in Dubedat is already dead and the tragedy over. What remains is an actor performing a death scene for his audience on stage. The long operatic farewell, with its comic chorus, has none of the sordidness of death from tuberculosis.

  Shaw was fond of his death scene. He described it as ‘none the worse because its climax is “derived” (not to say stolen) from Wagner’s End of a Musician in Paris’. The scholarship in which he wrapped the King of Terrors round becomes the weapon for a perfect riposte to charges of bad taste and cheap art.

  ‘The creed of the dying artist, which has been reprobated on all hands as a sally of which only the bad taste of Bernard Shaw could be capable, is openly borrowed with gratitude and admiration by me from one of the best known prose writings of the most famous man of the nineteenth century. In Richard Wagner’s well known story, dated 1841... the dying musician begins his creed with the words, “I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven”. It is a curious instance of the enormous Philistinism of English criticism that this passage should not only be unknown among us, but that a repetition of its thought and imagery 65 years later should still find us with a conception of creative force so narrow that the association of Art with Religion conveys nothing to us but a sense of far fetched impropriety.

  I am, Sir, your obedient servant

  G. Bernard Shaw.’

  5

  Invasion of the West End

  Touchstone: Wast ever at the Court, shepherd?

  Corin: No, truly.

  Touchstone: Then thou art damned.

  Shakespeare, As You Like It

  The materials for his play had accumulated gradually: but the writing was fast. Shaw had begun it on 11 August 1906 at Mevagissey on the coast of Cornwall. By 21 August, on Polstreath Beach, he finished the first act. A week later another act was completed. ‘It springs into existence impetuously with leaps & bounds,’ he told Trebitsch; ‘the only trouble is to get it inked.’

  He wrote everywhere, ending the third act on St Austell Station in Cornwall and starting the fourth the same day after joining the train from Exeter to London. He came to the end of this act at the village of Moulsford in the Thames Valley, then started the last on the train from Reading to London. The first draft was completed at twenty minutes past six in the evening aboard a steamer on the Thames, as it docked at Cherry Garden Pier below Tower Bridge.

  Shaw’s revisions (‘a slower job than the writing was’) persisted, through rehearsals, almost up to opening night on 20 November. From the Carfax Gallery the Court leased pictures by Augustus John, William Orpen and Will Rothenstein, suggesting an extraordinary diversity in Dubedat’s style.

  Again the critics were divided. But Shaw himself noticed how they were beginning to compare him somewhat unfavourably to himself. ‘In the future, instead of abusing the new play and praising the one before, let them abuse the one before and praise the new one,’ he recommended. He was genuinely anxious for the press to act as a helpful patron to the Court. The ‘atmosphere of good humour’ which the newspapers could promote, he told Vedrenne, was ‘next to an atmosphere of solid money’ the most precious possession they could own. He felt a commitment to their enterprise not simply because it had given him an audience and made his name as a dramatist of performable plays, but because it represented a step towards establishing the theatre in England. ‘It is a huge factory of sentiment, of character, of points of honour, of conceptions of conduct,’ he wrote later when appealing for the building of a National Theatre, ‘of everything that finally determines the destiny of a nation.’

  *

  Barker used these years at the Court to test some of the ideas he and Archer had proposed in their book, A National Theatre: Scheme and Estimates. This book, ‘the blueprint and the bible for the National Theatre movement’, envisaged a large repertory of plays, both ancient and modern, foreign and English. The Court was more avant-garde than anything that, for pragmatic reasons, they were recommending to the general public. But its success was an excellent advertisement for the scheme. Privately printed and circulated before the Court pilot project began in October 1904, their book was published shortly after the Vedrenne–Barker management left the Court in June 1907.

  Barker and Shaw had introduced repertory into the London theatre and achieved what the young actor Hesketh Pearson called ‘the most famous epoch in theatrical management since the days of the Globe on Bankside’. But besides Barker and Laurence Housman, none of the contemporary playwrights (who included Galsworthy, St John Hankin, John Masefield and W. B. Yeats) wrote work that was really popular. The only outstanding success was G.B.S. himself. Of the thirty-two plays by seventeen dramatists presented at the Court over almost three years, eleven were his; and of the 988 performances altogether, Shaw’s plays made up 701. Everything could be explained away as having depended upon one man. After June 1907, when Don Juan in Hell and The Man of Destiny were presented in a double bill, Shaw’s portfolio was pretty well exhausted. There was a feeling
that he had been rather too successful. John Quinn, the American patron and collector, reported that the theatre was ‘brimming over with Shaw and Shaw’s plays at present... Yeats says he will soon become a public nuisance.’

  But the reputation of the Court partly owed its solidity to ‘the prudent pessimism’ of Vedrenne. ‘Barker, aiming at a National Repertory Theatre, with a change of program every night, was determined to test our enterprise to destruction as motor tyres are tested, to find out its utmost possibilities,’ Shaw wrote. ‘I was equally reckless. Vedrenne... was like a man trying to ride two runaway horses simultaneously.’ Vedrenne wanted to make money out of the theatre. Barker felt constantly balked by his subtle economies, his greeting of all fresh ideas with extravagant horror. Shaw represented their mutual dislike as a miraculous bonus. ‘The partnership of V & B has every aspect of permanence: you are exactly on the terms which bind men to one another for ever & ever,’ he promised Vedrenne, ‘each with a strong grievance against the other to give interest & life to what would otherwise be a tedious & uneventful routine.’

  Everything was enlivened by what Barker felt to be Vedrenne’s ‘vendetta’ against Lillah McCarthy. ‘My position between you is very fearful,’ Shaw warned Lillah. ‘I ask myself repeatedly Is Lillah the greatest liar known to history, or is Vedrenne?’ And he cautioned Vedrenne: ‘You will end by busting up Vedrenne & Barker.’ Under this pressure they were all driven to abuse each other. ‘What with Barker gradually losing all desire to act, and Vedrenne gradually losing all desire to do anything else but act, the position has become more & more impossible,’ complained Shaw. ‘If I could only get V on the stage & B off it, I should amaze the world.’