Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Shaw used ‘every device of invective and irony and dialectic at my command’ to assuage Ireland’s longing for freedom. He had merged the subjects of divorce legislation and the constitutional independence of nations when covering the Parnell scandal of 1890. Home Rule had suddenly come within reach when a majority of Irish Members of Parliament pledged to the issue had been returned to Westminster. But at the height of his leadership of the Irish Party, Charles Parnell had been cited as co-respondent in a divorce case involving the wife of another Irish Member of Parliament and his political future seemed ruined. In letters to The Star, Shaw had argued that ‘the whole mischief in the matter lay in the law that tied the husband and wife together and forced Mr Parnell to play the part of clandestine intriguer, instead of enabling them to dissolve the marriage by mutual consent, without disgrace to either party’. He advised Parnell to ‘sit tight’ and urged the Irish Party to unite behind him – otherwise the Liberal Government would exploit the disunity and abandon its commitment to Home Rule. The verdicts of antiquated laws, he added, ‘can produce no genuine conviction of its victims’ unfitness for public life’. Similarly repugnant was the legally enforced tie between England and Ireland, he implied, where under the Coercion Act ‘constitutional reformers are driven to employ all the devices of criminals’.

  In the ‘Preface for Politicians’ which he attached to John Bull’s Other Island in 1906, Shaw had predicted that ‘we can do nothing with an English Government unless we frighten it... under such circumstances reforms are produced only by catastrophes followed by panics in which “something must be done”.’ Ireland’s catastrophe was the ‘ghastly’ Easter Rising of 1916. Shaw made clear his support for ‘any Irishman taken in a fight for Irish independence against the British Government, which was a fair fight in everything except the enormous odds my countrymen had to face’. He felt anxiety lest relations between the two countries be fatally poisoned by acts of reprisal from the frightened English Government. ‘The men who were shot in cold blood after their capture or surrender were prisoners of war,’ he objected, after twelve of the insurgents had been executed.

  Shaw’s most quixotic intervention into Anglo-Irish politics was on behalf of Roger Casement. Casement had taken advantage of the war to seek help from Germany for the cause of Irish independence, but on the eve of the Easter Rising he was captured by the British as he stepped ashore in Ireland from a German submarine. Feeling in England ran high against Casement who, as a British subject, would inevitably be found guilty of high treason. Much of the money for his defence was raised in the United States. In England writers as various as Conan Doyle and Arnold Bennett appealed for clemency on grounds that ranged from Casement’s mental health to Britain’s political expediency. Beatrice Webb noticed that, when Charlotte spoke in support of him, her ‘eyes flashed with defiance’. So Beatrice took Casement’s old friend, Alice Green, who was helping to organize his defence, to see the Shaws. It was a painful meeting. Alice Green desperately needed money to engage a first-rate defence lawyer: Shaw insisted that, since no credible denial of the facts was possible, paying lawyers to come up with technical ingenuities and exchange legal compliments would be throwing money down the drain. Instead he proposed a ‘daring frontal attack on the position of the Crown’. Casement was to conduct his own case, admit the facts, plead not guilty and apply as an Irish Nationalist to be held as a prisoner-of-war. Alice Green explained that Casement was extremely ill and incapable of handling a court full of lawyers: in which case, Shaw retorted, ‘we had better get our suit of mourning’. So the meeting broke up: Alice Green retiring in tears; Beatrice feeling a fool for having intervened; and G.B.S. striding into his study to compose a speech for Casement which would ‘thunder down the ages’.

  Beatrice accused Shaw of conceitedly playing word games with the life of this poor man as if it were a ‘national dramatic event’. But Casement himself was delighted with the speech. ‘I shall be so grateful if you will convey to Bernard Shaw my warmest thanks,’ he told the Sinn Fein sympathizer Gavan Duffy; ‘his view is mine, with this exception – that I should never suggest to an English court or jury that they should let me off as a prisoner of war, but tell them “You may hang me, and be damned to you”.’

  Such a man was beyond saving. Casement later regretted not using what he called ‘the only defence possible, viz., my own plan and that of G.B.S.’ There had been nothing to lose: but he was dissuaded by Alice Green and other friends, found guilty, and sentenced to be hanged. Only then did ‘the virtually dead man’ rise to make his own lengthy speech from the dock, using a portion of what G.B.S. had written for him. In the fortnight between the court’s verdict and the date of sentence, Shaw tried hard to win Casement a reprieve. ‘I cannot make matters any worse than they are,’ he told H. W. Nevinson, ‘and there is just an off chance that I might make them better.’ He wrote to The Times which rejected his letter, published correspondence in the Manchester Guardian and the Daily News, and anonymously drafted a petition to Asquith warning him that hanging would make Casement a national hero. Casement was hanged on 3 August 1916.

  To those claiming that the unification of Ireland would result in Protestants and Catholics cutting one another’s throats, Shaw had replied that ‘civil war is one of the privileges of a nation’. Such extermination was ‘too much to hope for,’ he added darkly, though mankind ‘still longs for that consummation’. If ‘hatred, calumny, and terror have so possessed men that they cannot live in peace as other nations do, they had better fight it out and get rid of their bad blood that way’.

  ‘What I have dreaded all along,’ he told Horace Plunkett, ‘is the usual political expedient of a settlement that is no settlement.’ To argue for his own federal solution, he accepted an invitation from the editor of the Daily Express, a newspaper specially hostile to him during the war, to tell its readers how to unravel the Irish problem. His series of articles, which were later issued in Dublin and London as a pamphlet, How to Settle the Irish Question, assembled a brilliant array of arguments for the inevitability of federation. This conclusion, which he described as ‘Home Rule for England’, possessed similar magical properties to the triple alliance in Common Sense about the War, and he frequently edged Wales out of the equation to achieve his mystical three-in-one – ‘the federation of the three nations (four if you count the Welsh)’. He then reinforced this combination by building three parliaments – National, Federal and Imperial – in his imagination for ‘the three kingdoms alike’.

  After eight deliberating months Plunkett’s Convention, which had been set up by Lloyd George, voted for an Irish Parliament with authority over the whole country. ‘The story becomes more thrilling as it draws to an end,’ Shaw wrote to Plunkett in March 1918 after reading the proof sheets of his secret report to the King. ‘... I await the report with some nervousness.’ The moment came: the report made no sound. The Government had ‘funked it’, and Shaw was left feeling that it had been another instance of the unreality in Dublin politics.

  The extreme nationalist party Sinn Fein, which had refused to participate in Plunkett’s Convention, rapidly evolved into a political power as Parnell’s old Irish Party passed away. Sinn Fein refused to attend Westminster and formed their own assembly (Dáil Éireann) in Dublin, representing a completely independent Republic of Ireland which was immediately declared illegal by the British Government.

  Shaw had advocated federation as early as 1888 and he was still advocating it more than thirty years later. The flaw in his logic, as he had once expressed it himself, lay in the problem not being ‘one of logic at all, but of natural right’. England’s extreme procrastination had produced Ireland’s extreme reaction, leaving Shaw’s consistency as a remnant of historical academicism. He disliked Sinn Fein’s glorification of nationalism: yet thirty years before he had written of nationalism being ‘an incident of organic growth [which]... we shall have to accept’. The young Shaw believed that ‘like Democracy, national self-government is
not for the good of the people: it is for the satisfaction of the people.’ The older Shaw warned against national independencies and neutralities which were set up ‘not by the internal strength of a nation’s position, but by the interested guarantees of foreign Powers’.

  In his ‘Preface for Politicians’ he had diagnosed the condition of Ireland as being like that of ‘a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else... A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. It will listen to no reformer, to no philosopher, to no preacher, until the demand of the Nationalist is granted... That is why everything is in abeyance in Ireland pending the achievement of Home Rule.’

  Ireland’s cancer had worsened and now demanded the fiercer remedies of separatism. Shaw regarded the policies of Sinn Fein as symptoms of the disease and not parts of a homoeopathic medicine. ‘Sinn Fein means We Ourselves: a disgraceful and obsolete sentiment, horribly anti-Catholic,’ he wrote in How to Settle the Irish Question. ‘...Ireland is the Malvolio of the nations, “sick of self-love”, and... Sinn Fein’s delight is to propagate this morose malady.’

  Ireland eventually placed its future in the hands of the quacks and windbags of the two rival religions, and in tearing itself away from England tore itself apart. Watching this process was to be intensely painful for Shaw. In his fashion he was devoted to Ireland. But he had become the reformer, philosopher and preacher to whom no one listened.

  7

  Casualties of War

  Literature should never be at war.

  Shaw to Henry Newbolt (25 July 1920)

  The Shaws did not enter the revelry on Armistice Day. They stayed at Ayot. These years of helplessness seemed to have made a cavity within G.B.S. ‘Every promising young man I know has been blown to bits lately,’ he told Lady Mary Murray; ‘and I have had to write to his mother.’ He had written to Stella Campbell at the beginning of 1918 when her son Alan Campbell was killed by the last shell from a German battery. ‘My beloved Beo is killed,’ she had scribbled to him – but he could not find words of polite consolation. ‘I cant be sympathetic: these things simply make me furious,’ he burst out. ‘...Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN DAMN! And oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dearest!’

  A month later the news reached him that Robert Gregory had been shot down in his plane and was dead. In a letter prefiguring Yeats’s two poems ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ and ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’, he wrote consoling Lady Gregory: ‘To a man with his power of standing up to danger – which must mean enjoying it – war must have intensified his life as nothing else could... I suppose that is what makes the soldier.’ He used Alan Campbell’s death – used Stella’s reaction – to bring Augusta Gregory comfort. ‘Like Robert he seemed to find himself in doing dangerous things. His mother thinks he got all the life he wanted out of the war and nothing else could have given it to him.’

  ‘I was hoping for a letter from you,’ Lady Gregory replied. ‘I knew it would be helpful.’

  Most griefs were beyond help. ‘I know you will be very sorry for us,’ J. M. Barrie had written after his much-loved godson George Llewelyn Davies had been shot dead near Ypres. Though also living in Adelphi Terrace, he could not bear to give the news in person, but pushed his note through the door of the Shaws’ apartment. When he read it, Shaw wept.

  William Archer was another who suffered bereavement. His son ‘Tom-archer’ was wounded at Mount Kearnel and died in a German hospital not long before the Armistice. ‘He left his young widow to take his place in his parents’ affection, the newly beloved daughter succeeding to the newly lost beloved son,’ Shaw recorded. ‘Yet Archer was loth to let the son go... and even experimented unsuccessfully in those posthumous conversations in which so many of the bereaved found comfort. And so, between daughter and son, the adventure of parentage never ended for Archer.’

  And there were others, such as the hopelessly unsoldier-like Cecil Chesterton who had visited Shaw before leaving for the Front and died soon afterwards from trench fever. ‘It is impossible to describe what I used to feel on such occasions.’

  Whenever possible Shaw used his comic energy to overcome his feelings. He lectured Robert Loraine who had been shot in the small of his back (‘the bullet coming out of his collar bone after going up through his lung and knocking his heart into his left elbow’) on the importance of being kept ‘in the lowest spirits, as laughing cannot be good for shrapnel in the lung’. In the summer of 1918 Loraine was again wounded, and his left kneecap being shattered, advised that his leg might have to be amputated. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, I suppose one can play Hamlet with a property leg,’ Shaw calculated. ‘...an artificial leg of the best sort will carry you to victory as Henry V. If you... are lame, it means a lifetime of Richard III, unless I write a play entitled Byron.’ As for flying, ‘when it comes to aerial combat, the more of you that is artificial the better’.

  Loraine’s leg was saved. But to St John Ervine, who did lose a leg that summer, Shaw sent hasty congratulations on his being ‘in a stronger position’. Having two available legs, when had Shaw himself ever groused because he did not have three? ‘You will have all the energy you have hitherto spent on it to invest in the rest of your frame. For a man of your profession two legs are an extravagance,’ G.B.S. assured him. ‘...You are an exceptionally happy and fortunate man, relieved of a limb to which you owed none of your fame, and which indeed was the cause of your conscription; for without it you would not have been accepted for service.’

  Such black parodies of the Shavian dialectic were ‘the cheering remarks one makes now to the sacrifice of this horrible war’.

  *

  The war also finished off the marriage between Granville Barker and Lillah McCarthy. They had gone to the United States where Barker ‘fell madly in love – really madly in the Italian manner’. The Helen who had enchanted him was an occasional poet and minor novelist, the wife of Archer Milton Huntington, heir of a railroad fortune, who had provided a guarantee against loss for Barker’s theatrical season in New York.

  Barker had returned to England in June 1915 promising Lillah that his affair with Helen Huntington was over. He was some £5,000 (equivalent to £170,000 in 1997) in debt, but £2,000 of this was owed in royalties to G.B.S. who immediately wrote it off. After joining a Red Cross unit, Barker drove over to France – then in September headed off back to the United States, this time to give a series of lectures paying off his debts. He had made what Shaw called a resolution to devote himself to poverty and playwriting. ‘I cannot very well remonstrate, as I have been for years urging him to stick to his own proper job of writing plays and leave production and management to people who cant do anything else,’ Shaw explained to Pinero that October. ‘...Meanwhile Lillah is at a loose end.’

  On his way to the States, Barker had written to Lillah: ‘my dear wife – I love you very much if you please – and I’m not very far from you. Distance doesn’t mainly count.’ But he was also corresponding with Helen, and instead of returning to England at the end of the lecture tour he sent Lillah a letter asking for a divorce. She went, ‘all frozen on a cold January night’, to Shaw’s flat in Adelphi Terrace. He ‘made me sit by the fire. I was shivering... presently I found myself walking with dragging steps with Shaw beside me... up and down Adelphi Terrace... he let me cry. Presently I heard a voice in which all the gentleness and tenderness of the world was speaking. It said: “Look up, dear, look up to the heavens. There is more in life than this. There is much more.”’

  Back with the Red Cross in France, Barker asked Shaw to act as his agent to procure the divorce. Since Lillah had already made him her confidant, he was placed in an awkward position. He went to work instructing Barker to write Lillah a letter her lawyers could use, advising Lillah what he had done, what Barker was doing, and what she should do – which was to get someone to coun
sel her as he was counselling Barker. Accordingly she chose J. M. Barrie. He, like Shaw, believed that the domestic crockery had been too badly broken to be worth mending, but his advice was swamped by Lillah’s emotionalism. Was it likely, she demanded, that Barker knew his mind better than his own wife did? Once this affair was over, he would be coming back to her. This put Barrie’s and Shaw’s arguments into perpetual check, for it was impossible to recommend anything without offering Lillah a ‘vulgar insult’. Shaw tried to hand her the initiative. ‘Quite seriously, I have come to the conclusion that you had better get rid of Harley... as you are now at the height of your powers, and... I gravely doubt whether Harley is fit for married life at all... It is in your power to demand your release; he cannot refuse it.’

  Barker had expected everything to be cleared up by the spring. He sailed back to the United States and continued fuming impatiently. ‘What in heaven’s name she is waiting for I don’t know. I really believe she has some idea in her head that no divorce is complete without a scandal.’

  Poised between Lillah’s obduracy and Barker’s exasperation, ‘I had a difficult time of it,’ Shaw afterwards admitted. Once conscription was brought in, Barker returned to Britain, and went to an officer cadet school in Wiltshire. Many of these summer and autumn weekends he spent at Ayot nervily plotting divorce tactics with G.B.S. and Charlotte or with Barrie in London. Driven mad by the delay he implored Shaw to offer Lillah a settlement of five or six hundred pounds a year for life. Since Barker had no money, Lillah immediately realized that he must be in collusion with Helen – and informed the unsuspecting Archer Huntington. ‘There was an almighty explosion at the other end,’ Shaw later reported, ‘and Helen never forgave me for being, as she thought, solely responsible for Lillah’s letter.’