Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Conceived as a one-act burlesque of Sydney Grundy’s fashionable three-act ‘tissue of artificialities’ Slaves of the Ring, which involved ‘a quadrille of lovers instead of a pair’, Overruled was offered as a ‘model to all future writers of farcical comedy’. Twenty years later this option was to be taken up by Noël Coward in his own version of Shaw’s world-cruising quartet, Private Lives, where the couples once again meet in a hotel with each other’s partners.

  Overruled demonstrates certain truths about the married man who was now entering his late fifties. ‘You see, it’s a great many years since Ive been able to allow myself to fall in love,’ explains one of the husbands. ‘...I thought I had lost the power of letting myself fall really and wholeheartedly in love.’ And the second husband confesses: ‘Year after year went by: I felt my youth slipping away without ever having had a romance in my life; for marriage is all very well: but it isnt romance.’ In his optimistic fantasy Shaw assigns the wives of these marriages a perfect tolerance of adultery. ‘If you will be so very good, my dear, as to take my sentimental husband off my hands occasionally, I shall be more than obliged to you,’ says one wife to the other who is perfectly willing to comply since, she says, ‘I like to be loved. I want everyone round me to love me.’

  But Charlotte was far from feeling this. Shaw’s comedy was an outlet for his wishes rather than a clinical study of how polygamy was soon to threaten their marriage. In the Preface, where he maintains that those who profess advanced views are mostly ‘the last people in the world to engage in unconventional adventures of any kind’, he opposes the ‘demonstration’ of his play. Was the play to overrule the Preface, or the Preface overrule the play? The dilemma registers the tension and uncertainty with which he entered the great romance of his life, for which Overruled had served as curtain-raiser.

  4

  On the Sub-text of Success

  I can’t stand people who will not believe anything because it might be false nor deny anything because it might be true.

  Shaw to Cliff Keene (12 June 1914)

  The quantity of objects, duties, events from which Charlotte had to remove G.B.S. was mounting. ‘Anything to avoid Christmas in England!’ he had exclaimed on 23 December 1910. For a fortnight Charlotte and he rolled on the rough seas, arriving on the evening of 6 January at Kingston, Jamaica. They were met by their old Fabian friend Sydney Olivier, the Governor-General, who put them up at his post-earthquake palace, ‘a masterpiece of nouveau art’ in reinforced concrete. ‘I am taking photographs in 100th of a second through yellow screens & watching the lizards and dragon flies,’ Shaw wrote to Granville Barker. ‘...The trees & mountains look pleasantly theatrical through the mosquito curtains.’ After six days on the island, they embarked for another fortnight at sea. ‘On the whole it was a good move, this,’ Shaw concluded, though he’d hardly had time to get used to the novelty of ‘bananas and sugar canes and coloured villages and eighty in the shade in January’.

  An enormous parcel of work and his first commercial stage success awaited him in London. Fanny’s First Play, which he finished on 5 March 1911, had been born of Shaw’s interest in some of the most topical events in England. But he had worked on it anywhere but in England: in the remote Gothic hotel at Parknasilla on the south-west coast of Ireland; and at sea while steaming to and from Jamaica. One consequence of writing in such far-off places about up-to-the-minute issues seemed to be a strange unfastening of the theme from its treatment – a dislocation which was to produce what some critics would later see as ‘the type of alienation which Brecht thought necessary to a dispassionate argument’.

  The play depicts two middle-class families, the Gilbeys and the Knoxes, associated in business and by their strictly brought-up son and daughter, Bobby and Margaret, who are engaged to be married. After short spells of imprisonment for assaulting the police, they are released from their social prison and acknowledge that their feelings for each other are those of brother and sister. Bobby then marries a prostitute and Margaret a footman who (in characteristic Shavian reversal) reveals himself as the younger brother to a Duke. Both are acting in accord with the natural morality of sexual instinct rather than the rules of an enclosed system.

  That was the complete play when Shaw and Charlotte arrived from their holiday in Jamaica at 10 Adelphi Terrace, and when Lillah McCarthy (who could spy their arrival from her rooms at 5 Adelphi Terrace) came to see Shaw. She told him that she had borrowed some money from Lord Howard de Walden; that she was setting herself up as an actress-manager at Gertrude Kingston’s Little Theatre below her apartment: and she asked him for a play. Fanny’s First Play was too short. But on the plan of The Taming of the Shrew, Shaw ingeniously added an Induction and an Epilogue, and early in March handed Lillah this ‘Easy Play for a Little Theatre’. ‘The idea of the Induction is this,’ Shaw explained to Charles Ricketts who designed the costumes. ‘A certain Count O’Dowda... loathes modern industrial England, and has spent his life in Venice, in the footsteps of Byron, Shelley, and the Brownings.

  ‘He has lived the perfect artistic life, with his daughter, tolerating nothing later than the XVIII century. But he has consented to send his daughter to Cambridge for two years as it is his own university, and he feels quite sure that it is still untouched by the XIX century. The young lady... writes an ultra modern suffragette play – Fanny’s first play – the performance of which nearly kills the unfortunate old gentleman.’

  Fanny O’Dowda has persuaded her father to have her play anonymously performed, ‘with real actors and real critics’, at his country house for her nineteenth birthday. The differences separating father from daughter reinforce the conflict of the parents and children in Fanny’s play; and the sexual liberation of the young people in her play is complemented by Fanny’s intellectual liberation from the rule of the theatrical critics, who are a police force of the mind. In the Epilogue these critics debate the authorship of the play they have just seen, offering scholarly comparisons with The Admirable Crichton, The Madras House and The Second Mrs Tanqueray. ‘I believe it’s Shaw,’ blurts out Flawner Bannal. ‘Rubbish!’ retorts Gunn. ‘Rot!’ exclaims Vaughan. They all agree that Shaw is incapable of writing a play. All he wants is to ‘set us talking about him’, which to their disgust he makes them do.

  Fanny’s First Play had evolved in much the same way as had the full version of Man and Superman, and it takes to the point of caricature the Shavian practice of ending the drama in the middle of the play and letting the discussion take over. ‘I have not put my name to it,’ he told Lillah McCarthy when handing her the typescript, and he urged her to reveal that the author’s name began with a B, so encouraging the rumour that it was by Barrie.

  Fanny’s First Play by Xxxxxxx Xxxx opened at the Little Theatre on 19 April 1911. ‘It was like old time at the Court,’ Shaw told Vedrenne two days later, ‘except for the void left by Vedrenne.’ But this was not repertory: they ran the play continuously for as long as the public wanted it – the way Vedrenne had always wished to run Shaw’s plays at the Court. ‘It is really amusing – considering who wrote it,’ Shaw admitted: and the public agreed. The Shavian drama seemed to have won through to genuine popularity. On 1 January 1912 it transferred to the Kingsway Theatre and later completed a run of 622 performances. ‘I thought that... you touched your highest, often striking the human note,’ wrote Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

  *

  The coronation celebrations of King George V and Queen Mary that summer provided a good incentive for Shaw and Charlotte to get abroad again. Shaw’s diary lists some forty towns in France, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Italy that he and Charlotte saw over the next sixteen weeks. They travelled with the patient Kilsby and his boisterous motor car and spent many hours motor-mountaineering along impassable tracks over the Alps and Dolomites. ‘In the valleys, in the towns, in the hotels, in the hideous heat, I have been wretched,’ he informed Trebitsch; ‘but on the mountains I revive.’

  He was back in harness
in the second week of October. Charlotte kept him gently on the move between Ayot and Adelphi Terrace, then boarded him up at Edstaston with her sister and brother-in-law for Christmas and the New Year. Here, on 2 January 1912, he began a new play, ‘a religious harlequinade,’ he described it to Frances Chesterton. ‘Do you know anyone who can play a lion well, with a practicable tail, for the Christian Martyr scene in the arena?’ he asked Pinero three days later. The last of the seventy-eight pages of shorthand manuscript was finished on 6 February and sent to his secretary Judy Gillmore for typing.

  Androcles and the Lion was an offshoot from Major Barbara. Desmond MacCarthy’s description of it as a ‘religious pantomime’ recalls Count O’Dowda’s execration of this genre in Fanny’s First Play: ‘that vulgar, ugly, silly, senseless, malicious and destructive thing the harlequinade of a nineteenth century English Christmas pantomime!’ This was a view that Shaw could share, having as Corno di Bassetto written that, rather than sit out another pantomime, ‘I should choose death’.

  Death was the subject of Shaw’s pantomime. MacCarthy believed that in Androcles and the Lion Shaw had invented a new form, the nearest equivalent to which were ‘those old miracle plays in which buffoonery and religion were mixed pell-mell together’. Shaw, who subtitled the work ‘A Fable Play’, turned his Roman arena into a variety theatre with a Call Boy announcing the successive entertainments: ‘Number six. Retiarius versus Secutor... Number eleven! Gladiators and Christians!... Number twelve. The Christian for the new lion.’ It was a flourish of Shavian extravaganza.

  Androcles and the Lion was born of two other plays. The first was J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, written for idealized children and then in its first great vogue. Max Beerbohm had drawn a caricature of Barrie ‘reading it to a circle of elderly people and children,’ Shaw remembered. ‘The elderlies were beaming with enjoyment; the children were all asleep. I agreed, and wrote “Androcles” to show what a play for children should be like.’

  The play was also intended as an antidote to Wilson Barrett’s enormously popular religious melodrama The Sign of the Cross. Shaw had reported on this production in the Saturday Review. ‘The whole drama lies in the spectacle of the hardy Roman prefect, a robust soldier and able general, gradually falling under the spell of a pale Christian girl, white and worn with spiritual ecstasy,’ he wrote. ‘...As she gradually throws upon him the fascination of suffering and martyrdom, he loses his taste for wine; the courtesans at his orgies disgust him; heavenly visions obsess him; undreamed-of raptures of sacrifice, agony, and escape from the world to indescribable holiness and bliss tempt him; and finally he is seen, calm and noble, but stark mad, following the girl to her frightfully voluptuous death.’

  ‘Depend on it,’ G.B.S. alerted readers of the Saturday Review, ‘we shall see Mr Wilson Barrett crucified yet.’ Prior to crucifixion, he had been festooned with praise by the most celebrated writer of the day, author of The Sorrows of Satan, Marie Corelli, who had found in his ‘choice and scholarly’ language, ‘the unpurchasable gift of genius’. ‘I must either hold my tongue or else re-write the play to shew how it ought to be done,’ Shaw responded. Holding his tongue was never in the Shavian line.

  Wilson Barrett’s scripture-drama had traded on the whip, the stake and the lions. But the audience at Androcles is forbidden these sensations. ‘It is a crime to gratify that passion,’ the Roman Captain tells Lavinia. Shaw renounces too the fairy-tales of Christianity which had been the substance of The Sign of the Cross but which Lavinia, as she waits for death, finds ‘fading away into nothing’. ‘Are you then going to die for nothing?’ the exasperated Captain demands. And Lavinia answers that she is dying for something greater than dreams, something too big to give a name to. This is the same undefined decision to die as Dick Dudgeon made in The Devil’s Disciple. The fact that Shaw’s spokesman and spokeswoman for the Life Force should both volunteer for death and be saved only by the improbabilities of extravagant event-plots, reflects a pessimism that needed the constant somersaulting of paradox to turn up at the surface so courageously cheerful – like the Christian prisoners in Androcles who are ‘determined to treat their hardships as a joke’.

  After leaving the Fabian executive Shaw fixed his imagination on far-off solutions to political problems. To Beatrice Webb, still active in the Fabian campaigns, he seemed fantastically impractical. But this was what Shaw meant by the term ‘religious’. He set his gaze over the horizon at a time when Christianity would have expressed itself politically as communism; when our system of punishments had been abandoned; when we had established an equal income for everyone and could trust our future to a sense of fellow-feeling with all living beings. This distant view, imbued by what Shaw understood as the essence of Christianity, was what moved him to take up Aulus Gellius’ ancient legend of Androcles and set his play some sixteen hundred years off from the contemporary world.

  In the Shavian sense Jesus was one of a number of Supermen who appear in history to show us the future of human evolution. It was a future for which Shaw was to make his appeal in the sombre Preface to Androcles: ‘Why Not Give Christianity a Trial?’ Jesus had been the first Christian, but by choosing a death that was not to be avoided by any Shavian manipulations of event-plot, he had become the last Christian too. ‘Christianity was a growing thing which was finally suppressed by the crucifixion.’ Since then all civilizations had been elaborate organizations for the prevention of Christianity.

  Shaw’s imaginary journey gave him the distance to comment dispassionately on the twentieth century. The Roman centurions are our own police and soldiers; the Emperor, who is ‘a divine personage’, is our monarchy; Lavinia and Androcles embody aspects of a religious spirit, but ‘the saint is always embarrassed by finding that the dynamiter and the assassin, the thief and the libertine, make common cause with him’. The powerful and choleric Ferrovius, whose ‘sensibilities are keen and violent to the verge of madness’, is a human lion in the prime of life whose kingdom is very much of this world: which is to say he belongs to the present. In the hour of trial he reverts from passive Christianity to the warrior’s faith that sees God in the sword. ‘Mars overcame me and took back his own,’ he says. ‘The Christian god is not yet. He will come when Mars and I are dust; but meanwhile I must serve the gods that are, not the God that will be.’

  As the chocolate soldier gets the better of the professional cavalry officer in Arms and the Man, so the ‘small, thin, ridiculous little’ Greek tailor Androcles triumphs over the Roman Emperor who behaves like the Mayor of Toy Town. Androcles is a Wellsian hero, recognized by Wells himself in a letter to Shaw as ‘one of your greatest creations, the holy silly man... I could almost find it in me to try an imitation.’ The dreadful monster of death is reconstituted as a nursery animal called Tommy, a frisky, clever, coquettish creature which ‘purrs like a motor car’ and transforms the ghastly arena of death into a dance hall. ‘What a pretty liony-piony situation it is, with no thought at all for the realities of Christian martyrdom,’ Stevie Smith later wrote. ‘And underneath there beats a heart of fear that cannot allow suffering.’

  In the lion that ‘holds up his wounded paw and flaps it piteously before Androcles’, Brigid Brophy has seen a likeness to the literary lion who once boasted to Beatrice Webb he was ‘untameable’ and who had then been tamed by Charlotte into marriage ‘on one leg’ and led off for a honeymoon on crutches.

  But there is another way of seeing the paradisiacal dance that Androcles and this wonderful animal perform in the forest at the end of the Prologue. Androcles is a long-suffering married man ‘addicted to Christianity’ (as his wife Megaera complains) in much the same way as Shaw was addicted to work. The journey through the forest with his wife has all the tension and bickering that were beginning to fill the Shaws’ holidays. When Androcles ‘embraces the lion’ and ‘the two waltz rapturously round and round and finally away through the jungle’, he is expressing Shaw’s desire to be off on some escapade. When he triumphantly danc
es again with the lion at the end of the play in the Roman arena, his wife Megaera has gone – no one cares where. Her last words of the Prologue – ‘you havnt danced with me for years; and now you go off dancing with a great brute beast that you havnt known for ten minutes’ – are a comic variation of a complaint Shaw was soon to hear from Charlotte.

  *

  Early in 1912 there had been an eruption of labour disputes among railway workers, cotton operatives and dockers. The coal miners were on strike; feminists were breaking windows; there was fresh agitation in Ireland for Home Rule and new legislation covering military emergencies. Shaw exercised himself over everything: making political speeches at Coventry and Southampton; discussing Ireland with Winston Churchill and corresponding with Keir Hardie; writing on free speech for the Fabian News and, as an illustration of free speech, letting it be known in the Saturday Review that he would be prepared to shoot industrial malingerers. Malingerers, of course, were not miners or feminists, but ladies and gentlemen living the lives of social parasites on unearned incomes. Their social disadvantages of family, public schooling and vaccination had given them little chance.

  There was little time for Charlotte. When alone they hardly spoke; when they did speak they broke out into quarrelling. Charlotte was making a selection of passages from Shaw’s writings. By April the work for this compilation, arranged alphabetically under a hundred and ninety-five headings, was pretty well complete, and it was obvious to her that the time had come for a resounding holiday. She proposed that they go to Rome – and G.B.S. said no. In the fourteen years of their marriage, this was unprecedented. Charlotte made it clear that she needed a change; but still he would not go with her. What she needed, he believed, was what they both needed: a change from each other. How stupid, then, to change everything – air, language, meals, habits, country – except that main condition of their lives, and to intensify that condition violently by isolating themselves in a foreign place where they knew practically no one else. Their nerves would never stand it. Eventually she decided to sail alone. ‘She took leave of me,’ Shaw told Beatrice, ‘...in a way that left Charles I taking leave of his family simply nowhere.’