Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Drudgery was one of the hardships of war: but the military provided many colourful diversions. Whenever an aeroplane sailed across the blue, delightful white puff-balls blossomed in the sky around it. Every night was Guy Fawkes Night. The guns hurled their fiery shells joyously into the air and set up a bombardment finer than Tchaikovsky’s 1812. He had difficulty believing that the man lying by the roadside was not a tramp taking a siesta during the booming and whizzing of this band music, but a gentleman who had lost his head. Behind the lines bayonet practice was conducted without the least blood lost, and imparted a bank holiday air to the place which really looked magnificent in the snow and sunshine. The trenches were crammed with pacifists, socialists and internationalists, all freed from theoretical illusions, all damning the party politicians with the greatest heartiness, and despite uncomfortable conditions, ‘no more hopelessly wretched than I’. Fighting men, Shaw explained, escape the perpetual money worries of their civilian counterparts and the egotism of their preoccupation with commerce. At the Front something exciting was always happening that satisfied man’s heroic instincts.

  The horror is forced invisibly between the lines of Shaw’s writing. War could do many things, he argued, but it could not end war. ‘A victory for anybody is a victory for war.’ He predicted that economic rather than military forces would eventually end it all, and that the only benefits of this vast calamity would lie in the employment of military virtues for a decently organized civilian life. For in the army, instead of your hand being against every man’s and every man’s hand against you, ‘you are continually trying to get things done in the best possible way for the benefit of your comrades in arms, of your country, of the whole of which you are a part... whereas commerce is normally competitive and places your individual pocket before all the higher objects of ambition’.

  Shaw’s 10,000-word report of his experiences as a war tourist revived questions of his loyalty. One Member of Parliament demanded if this were the sort of man who should be officially invited to the British front line. ‘I have always found that when any gentleman visits the front in France,’ replied the Government spokesman, ‘he comes back with an added desire to help the British Army and is proud of it.’ The House of Commons filled with cheers – this time on Shaw’s behalf. Many who had accused him of German sympathies now wondered whether he was actually in the service of the British Government to advertise the country’s celebrated freedom of speech. Observing him to be ‘an interesting man of original views’, Haig had taken G.B.S. to a demonstration of experimental weapons. But though he later voted Haig ‘the most interesting new writer of the past twelve months’, Shaw privately judged him to be an academician of war ‘trained socially and professionally to behave and work in a groove from which nothing could move him, disconcerted and distressed by novelties and incredulous as to their military value, but always steadied by a well-closed mind and unquestioned code... He made me feel that the war would last thirty years, and that he would carry it on irreproachably until he was superannuated.’

  Though he greeted the news of the first revolution in Russia that March as ‘a gain to humanity’, and described the entry of the United States into the war on 6 April as a ‘first class moral asset to the common cause against junkerism’, Shaw felt politically gloomy. The Prime Minister had struck out his name from the ‘list of persons with ideas’ proposed for the Reconstruction Committee to advise on post-war social problems. He was still an outsider.

  That July he was sixty-one. ‘Any fool can be 60,’ he explained to Trebitsch, ‘if he lives long enough.’ Charlotte had taken off for Ireland that summer for the sake of her lumbago, leaving G.B.S. to revert somewhat to his bachelor ways. He was seeing much of Kathleen Scott, formidable widow of the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott – a model Shavian heroine ‘adventurously ready to go to the ends of the earth at half an hour’s notice with no luggage but a comb with three teeth in it, and always successful’. Her job was sculpting – she made a bust and full-length statuette of G.B.S. in bronze. During periods of grass-widowhood G.B.S. was sometimes allowed to stay with Kathleen, especially after her marriage in 1922 to Hilton Young. ‘We got on together to perfection,’ he recorded.

  After Stella had gone off to marry Cornwallis-West ‘I really thought I was a dead man,’ Shaw admitted, ‘until I recovered my sanity by going right back to my economics and politics, and put in a hard stint of work on this abominable war.’ But by 1917 he had come to feel that ‘my bolt is shot as to writing about the war’, and that he ‘must get away for a moment from Fabians & politics or I shall go mad’. He decided to make for Ireland and enjoy the open skies of Parknasilla where Charlotte had been staying with her sister.

  He arrived on 10 September and early the following month reported that he had been ‘boating and bathing and making butter in a dairy ever since’. Work was impossible. ‘In the Atlantic air one grows big and rank and Irish,’ he wrote to Beatrice Webb. ‘...this is the Land of the Free compared to England.’

  5

  The Recruiting Officer

  The art of the dramatic poet knows no patriotism.

  Preface to Heartbreak House

  Early in the war Shaw’s box office appeal had plummeted. ‘The moment is not happily chosen for resuming the old Shavian capers, which were among the strangest by-products of the long peace,’ declared A. B. Walkley in The Times. There were many who felt that theatres, museums and picture galleries should be converted into hospitals and barracks. To their surprise the stage grew incomparably popular between 1914 and 1918. Initially there were recruiting plays with patriotic songs which featured a harangue in the interval by the fire-eating chauvinist (and fraudulent financier) Horatio Bottomley. Shaw, who went to see one of Bottomley’s perorations, reported: ‘It’s exactly what I expected: the man gets his popularity by telling people with sufficient bombast just what they think themselves and therefore want to hear.’ For a specialist in the unexpected there was no audience. Producers and actor-managers ransacked their memories for out-of-date musicals and revues to exploit the bliss of soldiers who were happy to be no longer under fire and ready to be delighted by every young girl they saw, old joke they heard. London suddenly reverted to antique farces played in bedrooms with four doors and a window, identical to the bedrooms of flats above and below them, and all occupied by jealous husbands and wives mistaking one bedroom for another.

  Shaw’s contribution to this wartime theatre was four playlets that caricature, in juvenile fashion, the economic and social changes brought about in Germany, England and Russia by the Great War: and the lack of any change in Ireland. His characters are preposterously named – Archdeacon Daffodil Donkin, Ermyntrude Roosenhonkers-Pipstein – and preposterously re-cast. Wives of fashionable architects take jobs as tea ladies; eminent medical men become waiters in hotels. Shaw made the plots of these playlets more ludicrous and their action more knock-about than any bedroom farce – then having appealed to the popular nonsensical mood, he tried to introduce a few moments of serious reflection. At the end of The Inca of Perusalem, for example, the absurd Inca, whose athletic moustache ‘is so watched and studied,’ we are told, ‘that it has made his face the political barometer of the whole continent’, ceases to be a lampoon on the Kaiser, and speaks in the tones of the Devil from Don Juan in Hell. Shaw wanted to remind his audiences that war had long been a favourite food of their imagination – when men had no battles to fight they played at war in their films and magazine stories. Since all of us were partly infected by the same passion, we could not simply blame one man, the Kaiser, for making us fight.

  Shaw’s satire against wartime England was an exaggerated stunt, Augustus Does His Bit, which he threw off in August 1916 to be performed in aid of the Belgians. This skit on high-born officialdom and crass bureaucracy at home (Lord Augustus Highcastle produces a bullet which had been flattened by contact with his skull) was well recognized at the Front, but it did not gain much recognition in London. ‘He has si
mply evolved an idiot out of his own consciousness,’ noted The Times, ‘and ascribed to him the follies of his own imagination.’

  Annajanska, his ‘revolutionary romancelet’, is a half-hour bravura piece written during three December days in 1917 – a month after the Bolshevik Revolution and a week before Russia signed an armistice with Germany. Shaw hands the derelict power created by the fall of tsardom back to a ‘wild grand duchess’. He wanted to exploit the apparent paradox of the most radical event in his lifetime having erupted in the most politically backward country. The extravaganza may best be regarded as a present to Lillah McCarthy. It enabled her to make a startling entrance dragging in two exhausted soldiers, fire off several fusillades and dominate the Coliseum stage in a magnificent green and black Russian fur coat designed by Charles Ricketts. ‘I went home very tired,’ she wrote happily.

  O’Flaherty, V.C. had been conceived in the summer of 1915 while staying with Lady Gregory at Coole (‘the scene is quite simply before the porch in your house’). He had intended a four-handed light comedy (with small but important additional roles for a thrush and a jay) that would appeal to what he called ‘the Irishman’s spirit of freedom and love of adventure’. But as he wrote, a portrait emerged of the Irish character that ‘will make the Playboy seem a patriotic rhapsody by comparison,’ he apologized to Lady Gregory. ‘...C’était plus fort que moi. At worst, it will be a barricade for the theatre to die gloriously on.’

  Having been asked by Sir Matthew Nathan, Under-Secretary for Ireland, for help over Dublin Castle’s disappointing recruitment campaign, he had taken a famous recent Irish exploit – the killing of eight German soldiers and capture of fifteen others singlehanded by Private Michael O’Leary – and Shavianized it for the stage. ‘Incomprehensible as it seems to an Englishman, Irish patriotism does not take the form of devotion to England and England’s king.’ More effective, he reckoned, would be to advertise the war as an opportunity to travel abroad at the British Government’s expense.

  The enlargement of O’Flaherty’s experience at the Front induces in him an unbearable realism. ‘Knowledge and wisdom has come over me with pain and fear and trouble,’ he says. ‘Ive been made a fool of and imposed upon all my life.’ He sees everything for what it is: Irish patriotism is mindless ignorance; Irish family life grows more terrible than life in the trenches; his Irish sweetheart, no longer the angelic colleen, is ruthless and mercenary; and his mother becomes an appalling termagant whose ‘batings’ at home have proved good training for O’Flaherty’s acts of bravery in the army.

  Shaw’s happy ending was hardly adequate compensation for a recruiting play that has its hero exclaiming: ‘Dont talk to me or any other soldier of the war being right. No war is right.’ And: ‘Youll never have a quiet world til you knock the patriotism out of the human race.’ This was not what Sir Matthew Nathan had been expecting. He consulted General Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces and soon to be made Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and, having brooded on it with him, wrote to say that they both believed the production should be postponed. It was a tactful letter. Any performance, he suggested, might lead to ‘demonstrations’ smothering the ‘fine lessons’ of the play.

  O’Flaherty, V.C. received its first presentation on 17 February 1917 at Treizennes in Belgium. Robert Loraine was O’Flaherty and the other parts were played by officers of the Royal Flying Corps, while the men put on a performance of The Inca of Perusalem. Later that year Shaw himself read the play to a hospital full of wounded soldiers near Ayot. ‘They gave me three cheers, and laughed a good deal,’ he told Lady Gregory; ‘but the best bits were when they sat very tight and said nothing.’

  Though O’Flaherty, V.C. was not performed by the Irish Players until it had softened into ‘A Reminiscence of 1915’ at the end of 1920 – and then only in London – Shaw’s reputation seemed to have come alive in Ireland. After seven years without a Shaw production, the Abbey Theatre staged what amounted to an extraordinary festival – seven Shaw plays between the autumn of 1916 and the summer of 1917. And what was happening in Ireland appeared to be happening in other parts of the world. The American manager William Brady had presented Major Barbara in New York; the British-born actor William Faversham had broken the box office records set by Pygmalion with his United States tour of Getting Married. Throughout Europe all manner of Shavian productions were appearing – Androcles in Stockholm, Candida in Budapest, Pygmalion in Warsaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession in Helsinki, Widowers’ Houses in Prague and The Devil’s Disciple pretty well simultaneously in Copenhagen and Vienna.

  In Britain too there was a recovery of interest in his work – Man and Superman had been performed in its entirety in Edinburgh, and half a dozen other plays were touring the country from Plymouth to Birmingham. The London theatre stood ready at last for a new drama from G.B.S. But he felt oddly undecided. He had begun a shorthand draft of a play, provisionally called The Studio in the Clouds, on 4 March 1916. ‘I dont know what its about,’ he wrote to Stella over thirteen weeks later. By the end of that year he had written a first act, ‘filling the stage with the most delightful characters under the pleasantest circumstances,’ he told William Archer. ‘...I have left them there for months and months, hopelessly stuck. This has never happened before.’ Later he changed the title to Heartbreak House. ‘We must be content to dream about it,’ he advised Lillah McCarthy in the summer of 1918. ‘Let it lie there to shew that the old dog can still bark a bit.’

  6

  Anglo-Irish Politics

  The government of one nation against its will by another nation raises no question of whether such government is good or bad: it is itself misgovernment, and would be bad even if it produced perfect order and mutual material prosperity... I object to being governed by a superior race even more than by an inferior one, so that the Englishman may take it as he likes, as superior, inferior or equal: I object to his governing me.

  Shaw to Sá (4 November 1917)

  ‘If you want to bore an Irishman, play him an Irish melody, or introduce him to another Irishman,’ Shaw had written. ‘...Abroad, however, it is a distinction to be an Irishman; and accordingly the Irish in England flaunt their nationality.’ His original motive for leaving Ireland, like his mother’s, had been economic: ‘a necessary transfer of my business to a European metropolis’. The Irish Renaissance had changed the literary business potential of Dublin. But Dublin was still the city of his discontent. Returning there after more than thirty years, he saw that ‘the houses had never been painted since and the little shops had eggs in the windows, with mice and rats running over them’. Later, after reading parts of Ulysses, he was to congratulate Joyce: ‘It is a revolting record of a disgusting phase of civilization; but it is a truthful one,’ he wrote in a letter to the book’s publisher Sylvia Beach; ‘and I should like to put a cordon round Dublin; round up every male person in it between the ages of 15 and 30; force them to read it... I have walked those streets and know those shops and have heard and taken part in those conversations. I escaped from them to England.’ He wanted to dissolve that squalid past into a radiant future: and he advised Ireland to cease puffing her sails with the rhetoric of stale grievances, and replace her preoccupation over national divisions with an overall political emancipation.

  Shaw separated Dublin from Ireland and overlaid biography with history. ‘I am an Irishman and I have not forgotten.’ What other person could have demanded, but be refused, membership of the Irish Convention; be offered, but decline, nomination to the Irish Senate; and accept the first presidency of the Irish Academy of Letters. He recommended that Ireland be established as a sanatorium where the English should be sent to gain flexibility of mind: and advised Britain to sell Ireland to the United States in order to pay off her national debt. He was to leave the country to ‘stew in her own juice’ by not returning there after 1923: then registered as a citizen of the Irish Free State twelve years later.

  His career was studded with illuminating acts o
f generosity to Ireland. He campaigned with Lady Gregory to recapture Hugh Lane’s pictures according to the wishes expressed in an unwitnessed codicil to Lane’s will; and he promised the Lord Mayor of Dublin a donation of 100 guineas as his contribution towards a good municipal gallery to house them. He presented the Assembly Rooms at Carlow, which he had inherited from his uncle Walter Gurly, to the Catholic Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin for conversion into a technical school and was largely responsible for the Technical College which later developed on that site. He attempted to set up an Irish film industry to which he offered to give Saint Joan, being ‘desirous that his plays shall employ and develop the dramatic genius of his fellow-countrymen and make Ireland’s scenic beauties known in all lands’. Later he would hand the manuscripts of his novels to the National Library of Ireland and finally leave the National Gallery of Ireland one third of his residuary estate.

  But Shaw’s words spoke louder than his actions. He described Ireland’s political debates as ‘baby talk’, her papers ‘comics’, her history mere ‘police news’, and her education a hellish training that prolonged the ‘separation of the Irish people into two hostile camps’. He condemned the Censorship of Publications Act as an ‘exhibition of Irish moral panic’, and castigated her lack of birth control and sex education as a monstrous folly. He ridiculed the Gaelic League for loosening the country’s hold on a vital twentieth-century acquisition, the English language, and counselled all patriots ‘to go to bed and stay there until the Irish question is settled’. Nevertheless the fact that he was an Irishman ‘has always filled me with a wild and inextinguishable pride’. He would have preferred to be ‘burnt at the stake by Irish Catholics than protected by Englishmen’. And as a cure for the bad blood flowing from the unhappy historical marriage of England and Ireland, he prescribed a parting by consent rather than absolute divorce, together with a legal wand of oblivion moved over all past warring. To nurture malice, Shaw warned, ‘is to poison our blood and weaken our institutions with unintelligent rancor’.