Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  He wanted to use his biographer to re-create the life of G.B.S. ‘who is up to the chin in the life of his own times’. In his fashion G.B.S. was a truth-teller; but the fashion was far from literal. It needed ingenious interpretation and independent checking – and neither temperamentally nor geographically was Henderson able to supply these. He was a ‘disciple’ rather than a scholar, who manufactured what Shaw himself was to call ‘a colossally expanded extract from Who’s Who’, and then went on manufacturing it. The surviving galley proofs of Playboy and Prophet reveal how large a part of this narrative was actually drafted in the third person by G.B.S. himself. He did not do this for facile self-aggrandizement, but to provide his ideas with the endorsement of biographical authority. If his childhood had been ‘rich only in dreams, frightful & loveless in realities’ this was because the social and economic conditions of those times were frightful. After leaving Ireland, Shaw believed he had turned his back on dreams and set out through the body of his literary and political work in England to make the realities of his times less frightful. He feared that if his instincts, like a compass, were seen as having been eccentrically affected by his early experiences, then his thinking itself might be regarded as eccentric. He used biography therefore as adjustments to the rudder, keeping his work in the mainstream. From these secret collaborations he learned how to ghost his own life through later biographers until he became the very author of himself.

  ‘You are threatened with more than one competitor,’ Shaw had written to Henderson in 1907. The chief competitor seemed to be G. K. Chesterton. Shaw completed the comic circle by reviewing Chesterton’s book in The Nation, describing it as ‘the best work of literary art I have yet provoked’. This compliment was not all it appeared to be. Shaw separated art from information rather as he divided feeling from thought. Henderson had the information; Chesterton was the literary artist: one book complemented the other. He was reasonably happy with Chesterton’s Shaw because, despite its title, it ‘has little to do with me’. ‘My last word must be,’ Shaw concluded, ‘that gifted as he is, he [Chesterton] needs a sane Irishman to look after him.’ In other words, Chesterton needed Shaw to write the book for him. Reviewing it was the next best thing.

  ‘I have found that if I invent all my facts on a basis of my knowledge of human nature I always come out right, whereas if I refer to documents and authorities they weary me and set me wrong,’ Shaw was to write to another biographer, St John Ervine. ‘Trust to your genius rather than to your industry: it is the less fallible of the two.’ This is what Chesterton did – and what Shaw complained of his having done. He represented Chesterton’s commentary as a washing-line on which hung all manner of crucified shirts and dancing trousers. But none of them fitted him. Indeed, some more nearly fitted G.K.C. For biographers, like portrait painters, ‘put something of themselves into their subjects and sitters when there is anything of themselves to put in,’ Shaw explained.

  ‘The truth is I have a horror of biographers,’ Shaw admitted to Frank Harris. Chesterton had loaded his gun with guesses, but from time to time his aim was true. In his review, Shaw gave a wonderfully clownish performance, trying on all the conjectures that were ‘madly wrong’. On others he turned his back, leaving them strung out along the line of Chesterton’s impressions:

  ‘quick-witted [and]... long-winded... the very forest of the man’s thoughts chokes up his thoroughfare... if there is anything that Shaw is not, it is irresponsible. The responsibility in him rings like steel... a kind of intellectual chastity, and the fighting spirit... Shaw is like Swift... in combining extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness... benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt... sincere, unsympathetic, aggressive, alone... He never gives his opinions a holiday... Socialism is the noblest thing for Bernard Shaw; and it is the noblest thing in him... he cares more for the Public Thing than for any private thing... This is the greatest thing in Shaw, a serious optimism – even a tragic optimism...’

  Shaw recognized in Chesterton, as he had in Wells, a quality absent in himself. Wells, who claimed to ‘have got Great Britain Pregnant’, had the power of sexual attraction; Chesterton, as champion of the common people against intellectuals and politicians, could magically elicit affection. People adored him for his wit and extravagance, his whacking style. His creation of the jolly toby-jug Chesterton had similarities with Shaw’s invention of the pantomime ostrich. These cheery images displaced for both what Chesterton called ‘the morbid life of the lonely mind’.

  Shaw developed a proprietary interest in Chesterton. In a discarded segment of Back to Methuselah, he pictures him as Immenso Champernoon, ‘a man of colossal mould, with the head of a cherub on the body of a Falstaff... friendly, a little shy, and jokes frequently enough to be almost always either still enjoying the last or already anticipating the next’. Shaw thought of Chesterton as a marvellous boy who never grew up, a political innocent who, by prodigious literary journalism, had taken the position created in the eighteenth century by Dr Johnson. In short: he was ‘the greatest publicist we possess’. For over a quarter of a century, Shaw struggled to convert him to socialism and creative evolution.

  Their debates began in 1911. On 29 May, in the Victoria Assembly Rooms at Cambridge, Shaw addressed the Heretics Society on ‘The Religion of the Future’. He told his audience that superstitious religion had died in the Middle Ages, though it was artificially kept in existence by the stimulants of idolatry and intimidation. The English, he declared, had no fundamental religion: they simply made idols of people who were capable of giving orders and resorted to the stage management of them. Such people were given crowns, or gold lace on their collars, a certain kind of hat, a different income and a particular kind of house to live in. Their sons and daughters could not marry common people: and we pretended to believe that they were agents of a loftier idol. But in our democratic age we were gradually getting rid of idols. ‘As for my own position, I am, and always have been, a mystic,’ Shaw announced. ‘I believe that the universe is being driven by a force that we might call the life-force.

  ‘We are all experiments in the direction of making God. What God is doing is making himself, getting from being a mere powerless will or force. This force has implanted into our minds the ideal of God. We are not very successful attempts at God so far, but... there never will be a God unless we make one... we are the instruments through which that ideal is trying to make itself a reality.’

  ‘The Religion of the Future’ was one of a series of heterodox sermons Shaw had started to give after the writing of Major Barbara. His new theology redefined the terms and vocabulary of Christianity. God was impersonally reshaped into the Life Force; the Trinity was interpreted as ‘You are the father of your son and the son of your father’; and the Immaculate Conception made an everyday happening: ‘I believe in the Immaculate Conception of Jesus’s mother, and I believe in the Immaculate Conception of your mother.’

  The effect of Shaw’s addresses on the public was extraordinary. They sat appalled, fascinated, squirming and twisting in their seats. ‘The sight of his tall, tense figure in the pulpit, electrical in its suggestion of vital energy completely under the control of his will... compelled a similar intensity of interest and attention from his hearers,’ wrote a reporter on the Christian Commonwealth. ‘...Several times I looked round upon my fellow-auditors to mark the effect of his words. I saw consternated faces, hostile faces, faces which bore an expression of alarm and even horror.’

  Many who heard him were convinced that here was the finest public speaker in England. He was admired, especially by the young; but he was not loved. His intellectual authority on the platform provoked extreme reactions from the press. The Academy, which described his lecture as a ‘Detestable Outrage... vile and blasphemous ravings’, protested against his ‘dissemination of poisonous theories amongst young persons’ and regretted that Shaw had not been ‘kicked out of the window, or... thrown into the Cam’.

  When they inv
ited Chesterton to reply with a speech entitled ‘Orthodoxy’, the Heretics at last found a Christian champion capable of standing up to Shaw. Chesterton delivered his reply on 17 November at the Guildhall, Cambridge, and the first thing he did was to defend his adversary from newspaper attacks. The Academy report had been ‘not merely written by an idiot but by an idiot who had no belief in the Christian religion,’ he pronounced. ‘...How could Mr Shaw blaspheme by saying that Christ or the Christian religion had failed in England when the remark is obviously true.

  ‘The majority of the governing classes believe in no religion. I have known many editors and newspaper proprietors but I have yet to meet one who believed in religion... Mr Shaw is living in a comparatively Pagan world. He is something of a Pagan himself and like many other Pagans, he is a very fine man.’

  This was characteristic of the intellectual magnanimity existing between the two men. ‘I enjoyed him and admired him keenly,’ Shaw was to write of Chesterton in the late 1930s; ‘and nothing could have been more generous than his treatment of me.’ And at about the same time Chesterton was saluting Shaw in his autobiography. ‘I have never read a reply by Bernard Shaw that did not leave me in a better and not a worse temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of inexhaustible fountains of fair-mindedness and intellectual geniality.’

  When they moved from religion to politics, the contest was between Shaw’s socialism and Chesterton’s distributism, of equality of income against peasant proprietorship. Shaw defined socialism as ‘that state of society in which the income of a country would be divided exactly equally amongst all the people of that country, without reference to age, sex or character’. Chesterton warned against the totalitarianism and artificiality within socialism.

  ‘You cannot draw the line across things and say, You shall have your garden hose, but not your garden; your ploughshare, but not your field; your fishing rod, but not your stream; because man is so made that his sense of property is actually stronger for such things as fields or gardens or water than for such comparatively unnecessary things as garden hoses or rakes or fishing rods... if you want self-government apart from good government you must have generally distributed property. You must create the largest possible number of owners.’

  Shaw conceded that collectivism without socialism might indeed be a system of tyranny – the tyranny that was later to emerge as fascism. He suggested therefore that the difference between Chesterton and himself appeared to be that one wanted distribution of property and the other equal distribution of property. ‘This is not the normal definition of the term [socialism],’ Chesterton objected. ‘That the State should be in possession of the means of production, distribution, and exchange was always called Socialism when I was a Socialist.’

  It was a good and serious contest. Their jousting over the years developed into a perfect balance of contrasting styles, with breathtaking displays of analogy and tricks of paradox. Chesterton’s bulky swaying presence matched the immense range of illustration he gave his ideas, lit up by a spirit of enjoyment and comic inventiveness. Shaw was more incisive, his emphatic eyebrows like two supplementary moustaches, an assured and wiry figure standing with arms folded who could speak with a force thrilling to all who heard it. But to Chesterton’s eyes, Shaw’s strengths were limited in their humanity. ‘Shaw is like the Venus de Milo,’ he declared: ‘all that there is of him is admirable.’

  Chesterton’s conversion to Catholicism in 1922 showed how far he was from agreeing with Shaw. ‘If I wandered away like Bergson or Bernard Shaw,’ he wrote at the end of his life, ‘and made up my own philosophy out of my own precious fragment of truth, merely because I had found it for myself, I should soon have found that truth distorting itself into a falsehood.’ Chesterton’s truth seemed to Shaw a blind alley up which he had been led by Hilaire Belloc, ‘with the odd result,’ Shaw wrote to Wells, ‘that he is now dreadfully in earnest about beliefs that are intellectually impossible’.

  The two warriors met for their last public exchange at Kingsway Hall in the final week of October 1927. Tumultuous crowds struggled in the corridors, burst open the doors, flowed round the building like hot lava. Belloc presided and the British Broadcasting Corporation relayed their words through the country. ‘Do We Agree?’ was the question they debated. Both spoke well. They spoke of socialism and distributism, income and property – of all they had spoken about sixteen years and one world war earlier in the Memorial Hall. And they said similar things. The change was in the audience, baying for good sport. ‘This is not a real controversy or debate,’ Chesterton admitted. What they said was what they could most effectively perform as actors. ‘I suspect that you do not really care much what we debate about,’ Shaw said, ‘provided we entertain you by talking in our characteristic manners.’ This they did. ‘Obviously we are mad,’ remarked Shaw, taking what seemed a good embarkation point for a voyage of agreement. But it was when Shaw drew on his reservoirs of optimism that Chesterton felt dispirited, Shaw insisted on agreement. ‘I find that the people who fight me generally hold the very ideas I am trying to express.’ He tried to wrap Chesterton up in a jacket of agreement. The agreement of two mad people (in the East they would be reverenced) was important.

  ‘If you listen to them carefully and find that at certain points they agree, then you have some reason for supposing that here the spirit of the age is coming through, and giving you an inspired message. Reject all the contradictory things they say and concentrate your attention on the things upon which they agree, and you may be listening to the voice of revelation.’

  And did they agree? ‘Ladies and gentlemen. The answer is in the negative.’ Chesterton did not agree with Shaw and ‘nor does Mr Shaw’. And the people watching and listening did not experience a voice of revelation. The spirit of the age had moved from the platform to themselves: it would be heard in their interruptions, their urging for disagreement to flourish, and their belief that none of it any longer mattered. ‘In a very few years from now,’ Belloc concluded, ‘this debate will be antiquated.’

  6

  Shewing up the Censorship

  Success in the theatre is very largely a matter of being able to flirt with the public.

  Shaw to Maud Churton Braby (18 May 1908)

  Shaw had joined a society ‘for the Prevention of Cruelty to Authors’ in 1897 when deciding to publish his plays as books. Soon afterwards he started making his views and experiences known through the Society of Authors’ Journal. He paid The Author the compliment of treating it as a serious business paper. He wrote there of the beauties of phonetic spelling and simplified punctuation; warned schoolmasters against inflicting literature compulsorily on children; described the pathos of British bookselling, calculating that ‘the average man wears out over fifty pairs of boots whilst he is reading a single book’; and he gave advice on publishers: ‘Whenever a publisher gives me literary advice I take an instant and hideous revenge on him. I give him business advice... and I urge him to double his profits by adopting my methods.’ Some of these contributions to The Author – such as his recommendations to novice playwrights on the submission of manuscripts – were printed as circulars.

  In most matters of negotiation, it seemed to him, authors presented themselves as a flock of sheep bleating to be fleeced. ‘Nothing will save the majority of authors from themselves,’ he declared, ‘except a ruthlessly tyrannical Professional Association.’

  He had been elected to its committee of management in February 1905, and joined its dramatic subcommittee the following year. He took this work seriously, believing that the literature of a country created its mind since each country largely took its ideas from what it read. What he looked for within the Society was the creation of a corporate consciousness. In Shaw’s perfect world there would have been no law of copyright, no advances or retreats, no giving or receiving of royalties (the very word sounded dreadful to a republic-minded person). Pending this, authors were necessarily capitalists and literature a sw
eated trade. As an artistic and learned profession, it had to be defended against the presumption that its interests must give way to the most trivial political consideration.

  Authorship was a good example of a profession that was helpless without collective action. A writer who was poor, Shaw argued, had no means to defend himself; and when, suddenly, he became famous, his time was so valuable that it was not worth his while wasting it on bad debts. It was pitiable to see these ‘professional men on whom the Copyright Acts have conferred a monopoly of enormous value unable to do for themselves what is done by porters and colliers and trade-unionists generally with no monopoly at all at their backs’. Although unionism was most practicable in trades where the members worked together in large bodies, lived in the same neighbourhoods and belonged to the same social class, Shaw believed that the Society of Authors should be careful how it disclaimed the idea of being unionized. He looked on trade unions as conspiracies against the public interest that would become unnecessary in a socialist society, but that acted meanwhile as a corrective to the capitalist account.

  Shaw was prepared to spend hours drafting and revising documents. It was admirable: but did he succeed? On the whole, he concluded, the ten years he spent on the Society’s ‘two big committees’ might have been passed at the top of Everest. Over such matters as the model treaty with West End managers, on which he negotiated interminably, no progress was made. His frustration led him eventually to lose faith in the validity of unrefined democracy. For who, in their efforts to make improvements, had used the democratic process more thoroughly than himself? Had he not earned the right to a dissenting opinion? In the interests of getting things done much had been suppressed and little accomplished. His deepest disenchantment sounded from suppression itself: the censorship laws. What a heartbreaking business it had been. ‘I had ten years of it; and I know.’