Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Archer, Granville Barker, J. M. Barrie, Chesterton, Galsworthy, Gilbert Murray and Pinero gave evidence against the censorship. Some of their recommendations were attached to the Report which proposed that future licensing be optional and that unlicensed plays take their chance in the courts; that music halls be treated equally at law; and that doubtful cases be referred to a special committee of the Privy Council. But no legislation was passed to implement these proposals. Instead, an advisory committee was appointed the following year to assist the Censor. So matters stayed as they were.

  Shaw had tried to improve things by letter and by law: this was temperamentally the most natural way for him to act. He was a scholar-revolutionary. His tactics for changing society had not been to break its laws, but to obey them pedantically, ingeniously, literally, until by laughing consent they were finally rendered impractical. But for the first time it seemed as if all the thought and feeling of this work was issuing nowhere. He was in his fifty-fifth year; as he grew older this sense of powerlessness was to intensify. Looking back, he came to believe that it had been this Censorship Committee that altered his views on how to obtain political results. He was forced into a belief in the inevitability of violence: ‘the whole ridiculous transaction,’ he wrote, ‘...was a lesson to me on the futility of treating a parliamentary body with scrupulous courtesy and consideration instead of bullying them and giving them as much trouble as possible.’ He had forgotten how much trouble he gave.

  The philosophy of violence that makes its appearance in Shaw’s later life was a product of his sexual and then his political neutering; a reaction to having been made to feel as ineffectual as his mother had believed him to be. This was the true misery of life, the being used up for no purpose. The means were not justified that brought no ends: he had no children and he had no power. Increasingly he was to find compensation in the world of his imagination. His fantasies of longevity and dictatorship, which in the actual world did harm to no one, brought some relief to his despair, acting like Prospero’s prayer

  Which pierces so that it assaults

  Mercy itself, and frees all faults.

  TWELVE

  1

  The Gods and Misalliance

  I am a specialist in immoral and heretical plays. My reputation has been gained by my persistent struggle to force the public to reconsider its morals. In particular, I regard much current morality as to economic and sexual relations as disastrously wrong; and I regard certain doctrines of the Christian religion as understood in England today with abhorrence.

  Preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet

  ‘To me God does not yet exist; but there is a creative force constantly struggling to evolve an executive organ of godlike knowledge and power; that is, to achieve omnipotence and omniscience; and every man and woman born is a fresh attempt to achieve this object,’ Shaw wrote in a letter to Tolstoy accompanying The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet. ‘...Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes in His attempts to make a perfect being.’

  The incomprehensibility of life was comforting to Tolstoy on whom Shaw’s ‘intelligent stupidities’ jarred painfully. ‘Life is a great and serious affair,’ he rebuked him. Whatever G.B.S. could not reduce to intelligibility, he expelled as a joke. ‘Why should humour and laughter be excommunicated?’ he had asked. ‘The problem about God and evil is too important to be spoken of in jest,’ answered Tolstoy. But as Shaw had previously told Henry James, ‘Almost all my greatest ideas have occurred to me first as jokes.’

  Shaw had made a similarly painful impression on Henry James. James’s god was art. But Shaw ‘would not lift my finger,’ as he wrote to Tolstoy, ‘to produce a work of art if I thought there was nothing more than that in it’. When the Reading Committee of the Stage Society rejected James’s one-act adaptation, called The Saloon, from his story ‘Owen Wingrave’, Shaw was asked to write and tell James.

  ‘Shaw’s writing – Bernard Shaw,’ he began. James’s adapted ghost story about a young pacifist in a military family who dies from an act of self-assertion is an exploration of the irreversible forces of the past – ‘one of the most “deterministic” [tales] James ever wrote,’ his biographer Leon Edel calls it. It was this horror of inevitability that Shaw found ‘sticking in my gizzard ever since’.

  James seemed a man of the past and Shaw of the future – the novelty of the future. James believed that the imagination of the artist reached back and, planting itself in unconscious motives, gave the artist psychological energy with which to create beautiful things. ‘It is art that makes life,’ he instructed H. G. Wells. James recognized in art a force as mysterious and unalterable as Tolstoy’s God. It was this fatalism, breaking out at the word of Darwin in the 1860s, and purveyed through the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, that was gaining new intellectual ground and, so Shaw protested, persuading people who had lost their faith in a Tolstoyan God ‘that Man is the will-less slave and victim of his environment’. Shaw wanted to replace God with a more positive substitute. ‘What is the use of writing plays?’ he demanded, ‘ – what is the use of anything? – if there is not a Will that finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods with heaven for an environment.’ To Tolstoy this was impious vanity. And to James, the advice that proceeded from it – that he stick on a happy ending to his play since he ‘could give victory to one side just as artistically as to the other’ – revealed a wholly ‘shallow and misleading’ conception of what art was.

  Shaw wanted more control over his destiny. ‘You have given victory to death,’ he accused James. Tolstoy had given victory to the next world. But Shaw wanted to win battles for this world. Blanco Posnet, no less than Widowers’ Houses or Mrs Warren’s Profession, had been written for contemporary use – even Press Cuttings was a farce designed to blow up a farcical situation. Yet all Shaw’s works, however topical, had been determined in form by precedents from the past.

  The Bernard Shaw not writing to Henry James was a playwright who had lost his sense of pragmatic certainty as to what his plays were saying and whose unconscious processes filtered into these plays layers of suppressed autobiography. This mysterious alter ego was a ghost that mocked the champion of free will and floated free of the scholar bent over his theatrical formulas. He seemed invisible to the writer of prefaces. For he was not obviously an executive organ of a creative force, but a dreamer of the absurd, wondering whether ‘the world were only one of God’s jokes’.

  *

  In April 1909 advertisements had begun to appear for a new repertory scheme opening in the West End of London. The man behind this enterprise was a powerful Broadway impresario Charles Frohman and the man behind Frohman was J. M. Barrie. Frohman was ‘my kind of man,’ Barrie decided – someone shy and successful who had tumbled in love with the stage and converted one of his London theatres, the Duke of York’s, to experimental repertory. Productions of plays new, revived, and unwritten were placarded there, including works by Granville Barker, Henry James, John Masefield, Somerset Maugham, Gilbert Murray, Pinero, Shaw and Barrie himself – though not Galsworthy’s Justice, with which, almost a year later, the season actually began.

  People had faith in Frohman. He was a man of sumptuous generosity and wonderful schemes. They entrusted their capital to him, confident that here was a hard-headed businessman who would look at nothing that didn’t pay. ‘If Mr Frohman were really that sort of man, I should not waste five minutes on his project,’ wrote Shaw in a dissenting opinion. ‘He is the most wildly romantic and adventurous person of my acquaintance.’

  The play, called Misalliance, Shaw wrote for Frohman between early September and early November 1909, was a return from the melodrama Frohman had hoped for after Blanco Posnet to the disquisitory tactics of Getting Married. ‘I have again gone back to the classic form, preserving all the unities – no division into acts, no change of scene, no silly plot, not a
scrap of what the critics call action,’ Shaw wrote.

  According to Barrie’s biographer, Andrew Birkin, Frohman ‘worshipped mothers and children’. Shaw had chosen the theme of parents and children because it was close to Frohman’s heart but treated it comically. ‘We cant all have the luck to die before our mothers, and be nursed out of the world by the hands that nursed us into it,’ says one of the characters mocking Frohman’s reverence for the family. ‘...No man should know his own child. No child should know its own father,’ he adds, matching Shaw’s doubts against Frohman’s ideals.

  Shaw told Archibald Henderson that Misalliance ‘is on the plan of The Taming of the Shrew’. Characteristically he reverses matters. If Shakespeare’s farce is the chastening of a woman whose moods tormented him, Shaw’s ‘debate in one sitting’ is a humbling of men from the governing classes at whose homes he had felt miserably ill at ease when he came to England, and who had recently humiliated him over the censorship. Misalliance is also a re-working of Barker’s play The Madras House. Barker used the metaphor of the drapery trade, with its haute couture, to represent the decadent culture of contemporary Western civilization: Shaw uses Tarleton’s Underwear.

  Contemporary critics, to whom these derivations were not apparent, responded to Misalliance as an oddly disintegrating work. ‘The debating society of a lunatic asylum – without a motion, and without a chairman,’ was The Times critic’s description. Desmond MacCarthy, too, was to feel that Shaw ‘had not a clear notion where his perceptions in this case were leading him. It is inconclusive.’ And Max Beerbohm, on whom it produced ‘a very queer effect’, objected to ‘the unreality, the remoteness from human truth, that pervades the whole “debate”’.

  Monitoring a revival of the play in 1939, The Times critic commented: ‘With the lapse of time inconclusiveness comes to seem a positive merit.’ With a further lapse of time these qualities of unreality and madness, and the fracturing of standard plot procedures, may be seen as having affinities with the drama of Pirandello, where events ‘erupt on the instant, arbitrarily,’ as Eric Bentley described them, ‘just as his characters do not approach, enter, present themselves, let alone have motivated entrances; they are suddenly there, dropped from the sky.’

  The extravagant ideas and incidents that cluster within the second part of Misalliance – an abrupt descent from the skies of a Polish equilibrist demanding a Bible, music-stand and six oranges (‘billiard balls will do quite as well’); the emergence from a portable Turkish Bath of a cringing homicidal clerk, pistol in hand, crying ‘I am the son of Lucinda Titmus’ – all help to establish Shaw’s kinship with Ionesco (who was not born until late in 1912) and show him to be, in R. J. Kaufmann’s words, ‘the godfather, if not actually finicky paterfamilias to the theatre of the absurd’. G.B.S. was familiar with early modernist experiments and had his own agenda for clearing away the dominance of the well-made play.

  The house of Misalliance (which owes something to his sister-in-law’s home at Edstaston) is an arena where incompatible aspects of Shaw’s personality confront one another. Julius Baker, alias Gunner, arises from the Turkish Bath, prophesying revolutions despite being unable to fire a single bullet, to speak for the loveless ineffectual Sonny. Bentley Summerhays exhibits Shaw’s thin-skinned capacity when young for provoking dislike (and occasionally protectiveness) from others; Joey Percival shares with him the culturally advantageous experience of having three fathers (his natural one, a tame philosopher in the house and his Italian mother’s confessor corresponding to George Carr Shaw, Uncle Walter Gurly and Lee); Lord Summerhays, the experienced man who feels ‘still rather lost in England’, voices some of Shaw’s political convictions about government and reveals a shrinking Shavian sensitivity to sexual matters (‘Can no woman understand a man’s delicacy?’); John Tarleton has Shaw’s money-making abilities and a self-educated obsession with book-learning (‘Have you learnt everything from books?’ he is asked); and his son and daughter, Hypatia and Johnny, convey something of Shaw’s contempt for these Shavian characteristics, in particular the actionless vacuum with its polished walls of ‘Talk! talk! talk!’

  Into this Shavian mansion comes the heavenly invader Lina Szczepanowska (pronounced [fi]sh-ch[urch]-panovska). She comes in answer to Shaw’s prayer for positive action as much as to Hypatia’s plea for ‘adventures to drop out of the sky’. Like a bird she lands from above: the authentic superwoman who, arriving from the future, is to have her second coming in St Joan. Lina’s appearance ‘in full acrobatic trapeze dress, as dazzling as possible, to make her effect when she throws off her masculine cloak’ is the most astonishing entrance to be made in a Shaw play. Up to this point the audience has been at an Edwardian country house party and heard the capitalist middle class in conversation with the aristocracy. It is a conventional drawing-room comedy of manners – Johnny even has the celebrated query popularly supposed to have been coined in the 1920s: ‘Anybody on for a game of tennis?’ The old are divided from the young, the rich from the poor, men cut off from women, parents from children: almost everyone is inhibited from any kind of initiative.

  Lina comes from a different world: she is a foreigner to the class system whose manners and values look absurd. ‘Wont you take off your goggles and have some tea?’ enquires Mrs Tarleton after Lina has crashed into the greenhouse. The tone of the play now changes from realism into magic realism. ‘These woods of yours are full of magic,’ exclaims the aviator Joey Percival to John Tarleton. ‘I must be dreaming,’ remarks John Tarleton. ‘This is stark raving nonsense.’ Mrs Tarleton agrees: ‘Well, I’m beginning to think I’m doing a bit of dreaming myself,’ she says. But their dreams explode the British class system into fragments of comedy. ‘It should be clear by now that Shaw is a terrorist,’ wrote Brecht. ‘The Shavian terror is an unusual one, and he employs an unusual weapon – that of humour.’

  The play is obsessed with action, though the characters themselves are unable to change anything. The captain of industry and the colonial administrator have grown obsolete. John Tarleton is incensed that his human destiny should be restricted to underwear. ‘I ought to have been a writer. I’m essentially the man of ideas,’ he insists. Lord Summerhays (the name deriving from Wells’s Samurai) also feels redundant in the twentieth century. ‘I dont understand these democratic games; and I’m afraid I’m too old to learn... Democracy reads well; but it doesnt act well, like some people’s plays.’ Tarleton’s two children representing sex (Hypatia) and money (Johnny); and Lord Summerhays’s son representing fear – the emotional and economic fear of growing up – are the poisoned fruits of capitalism.

  Capitalism is threatened in Misalliance by two types of invader. Julius Baker, alias Gunner, comes as revolution fuelled by personal grievance and carried out by force of arms. ‘I came here to kill you and then kill myself,’ he tells John Tarleton, his mother’s alleged seducer. In the behaviour of the various inhabitants of the house we see the tactics bourgeois society uses to tame potential revolutionaries – how it tricks and intoxicates them, how it torments them with assistance: ‘Let me hold the gun for you,’ John Tarleton politely offers. And when Mrs Tarleton hears of Julius Baker’s attempt on her husband’s life, she exclaims: ‘Oh! and John encouraging him, I’ll be bound!’ In such a contrived atmosphere the political terrorist sounds ridiculous: ‘Rome fell. Babylon fell. Hindhead’s turn will come.’

  Shaw’s other invaders represent salvation from the future not the past, the air and not the earth. Lina brings Joey Percival, the best mate for Hypatia who demands that her father ‘buy the brute for me’. This is the biological method of serving the Life Force. The intellectual method is advanced by Lina’s invitation to take Bentley Summerhays off in the aeroplane. Bentley’s terrified acceptance of this is comparable to the birth of ‘moral passion’ in Sonny, lifting him above the religious climate of Ireland.

  The part of Lina went to Lena Ashwell. She was celebrated for playing heavily emotional roles that called upon her ‘to bea
r an illegitimate child or stab someone to death and then suffer gorgeously for her sins’. But though Yeats believed she had brought to the role something ‘extremely rare: beautiful gaiety’, she disliked the goggles, tunic and pants, and felt thrown off balance by the craziness of the play. Her imperviousness to G.B.S. was warmly approved by Charlotte and she became one of the few actresses whom Charlotte befriended.

  Frohman’s season opened on 21 February 1910. Barker’s production of Galsworthy’s Justice was a major contribution to the campaign for prison reform – the impact of a wordless scene in a cell was used by Churchill when introducing a provision into Parliament for more humane legislation. But a play dealing with solitary confinement was a brave choice for an evening’s entertainment in London’s West End. Shaw’s country house burlesque, opening two nights later, made a confusing contrast. The Globe judged it to be ‘absolutely his worst play’, and The Standard doubted whether it would have ever reached the stage if written by someone else.

  Instead of the capacity houses he anticipated, Frohman was getting less than half. He sat there paralysed, amazed, caught between his investors who wanted quick returns and big profits, and his new colleagues in the drama who, explaining that repertory needed time to accumulate its audience, congratulated him on doing so well. A triple bill of two small plays by Barrie and a posthumous comedy, partly in verse, by Meredith, was introduced at the beginning of March, and followed nine days later by The Madras House which Barker had been slow in finishing. The confusion deepened. Desperately, Frohman fell back on two popular revivals, Pinero’s Trelawny of the Wells and Barker and Laurence Housman’s Court Theatre success Prunella, which helped to restore the confidence of his backers.