Already, by the beginning of 1923, Shaw was advising Lawrence to ‘get used to the limelight’, as he himself had done. Later he came to realize that Lawrence was one of the most paradoxically conspicuous men of the century. The function of both their public personalities was to lose an old self and discover a new. Lawrence had been illegitimate; Shaw had doubted his legitimacy. Both were the sons of dominant mothers and experienced difficulties in establishing their masculinity. The Arab revolt, which gave Lawrence an ideal theatre of action, turned him into Colonel Lawrence, Luruns Bey, Prince of Damascus and most famously Lawrence of Arabia. ‘I note that you have again moulded the world impossibly to your desire,’ G.B.S. wrote to him. ‘There is no end to your Protean tricks... What is your game really?’ It was natural to interpret it all as a Shavian game, and to see in the shy bird who had helped to carry the Augustus John portrait a version of Sonny. ‘I was naturally a pitiably nervous, timid man, born with a whole plume of white feathers,’ he confided to Lawrence; ‘but nowadays this only gives a zest to the fun of swanking at every opportunity.’
But it is this swanking and fun that makes Shaw’s Joan into the Principal Boy of a pantomime, and the play into a charade exhibiting ‘all Shaw’s most irritating stylistic habits,’ as Irving Wardle wrote: ‘... garrulousness, flimsy poeticism, and thick-skinned flippancy’. Like another of Pygmalion’s experiments, he had constructed a likeness of Joan by grafting the eccentric muscle of Mary Hankinson, and framing her with the aura of ‘an accomplished poseur with glittering eyes,’ as Beatrice Webb described Lawrence. G.B.S. gave Lawrence several copies of Saint Joan — variously dedicated ‘to Shaw from Shaw’ and ‘to Pte Shaw from Public Shaw’ – but Lawrence, who mislaid these copies, was an unreliable chaperon for the rendezvous of G.B.S. with his saint and remained as much of a mystery to Shaw as Joan herself whom, he conceded, ‘I do not profess to understand’.
*
‘Mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic,’ warns Cauchon in the Epilogue. From the perspective of history it may be easy to see that Joan is inspired and that the other fanatic, de Stogumber, who throws himself into Joan’s chair after her burning, is heretical. But there exists a more sophisticated fanatic in the Inquisitor, who gives a warning of where the toleration of fanaticism may lead. His fearful condemnation of change is made with such idealistic sympathy that some critics have understood it to define G.B.S.’s own attitude. What Shaw intended to voice through this ‘most infernal old scoundrel’ was his audience’s opinion of the Church and Empire, before demonstrating where such opinions led. The Inquisitor’s attack on Joan’s masculine dress is also a denunciation of Shaw’s Jaeger costume. Changes in fashion exhibit how the unorthodoxy of one time becomes the convention of another, a point dramatically made in the Epilogue by everyone’s amusement at the appearance of the clerical-looking gentleman wearing ‘a black frock-coat and trousers, and tall hat, in the fashion of the year 1920’. The Inquisitor’s court has reduced justice to the dictatorship of fashion.
Saint Joan is a tragedy without villains. The tragedy exists in human nature where the mad credulity and intolerant incredulity of religious and secular forces meet and fix the status quo. Against this social structure Shaw’s heroine gains no victory; she can win a battle as Shaw can win a debate, but she will never change the social order until the world truly becomes a fit place for heroes to live in.
The Epilogue, which reflects the flames of Joan’s burning in the summer lightning against the windy curtains and brings us into the present century, gave Shaw the chance to step forward and ‘talk the play over with the audience’. What he tells us is that we too would burn Joan at the stake if we got the chance. It was not surprising that much of the hostile criticism of Saint Joan centred on this Epilogue, which ‘shattered the historical illusion’ – and made way for Brecht.
The historical illusion was cherished by the public. In vain did the American critics protest after the play opened in New York that it contained ‘too little comedy’ and ‘a good deal of fustian’, and was ‘a mere historical scaffolding upon which the dramatist drapes the old Shavian gonfalons’. Alexander Woolcott warned readers of the New York Herald that ‘certain scenes grow groggy for want of a blue pencil’; and in the New Republic Edmund Wilson was to complain that it had the characteristic over-explicitness of the social historian turned dramatist, giving the audience a sense ‘that it is reading a book instead of witnessing a real event’.
On the opening night a number of these critics and some of the audience began leaving the theatre before the final curtain came down at 11.35 p.m. Lawrence Langner cabled urgently to Shaw stating that if he refused to shorten it, Saint Joan could not be a success. Shaw replied declaring the press notices, which had so frightened him, to be ‘magnificent’. For it was true that Alexander Woolcott had also called the play ‘beautiful, engrossing and at times exciting’, and Edmund Wilson described it as ‘a work of extraordinary interest’; that the New York Times critic who found the play ‘monotonous’ had nevertheless thought it a ‘great triumph’, that the New York Post critic who found it ‘exasperating’ still thought it ‘brilliant’. All these favourable points seemed to have been gathered together in a long review for the New York Times Magazine by Luigi Pirandello. ‘I have a strong impression that for some time past George Bernard Shaw has been growing more and more serious... he seems to be believing less in himself, and more in what he is doing,’ Pirandello wrote. ‘...In none of Shaw’s work that I can think of have considerations of art been so thoroughly respected as in Saint Joan... There is a truly great poet in Shaw.’
Shaw ranked Pirandello as ‘first rate among playwrights’, believing that he had ‘never come across a play so original as Six Characters’. He advised the Theatre Guild to recover its nerve. ‘It is extremely annoying to have to admit that you are right,’ Lawrence Langner replied the following January. ‘People are coming in droves to see Saint Joan, and it is a great success.’ The production had to be transferred from the Garrick to the larger Empire Theater, and ran for 214 performances before being sent on tour.
The English production at the New Theatre in St Martin’s Lane marked the culmination of Charles Ricketts’s partnership with Shaw which had begun in 1907 at the Court Theatre with his ‘inscenation’ of Don Juan in Hell. His costumes there, modelled on Velázquez, had stood blazing against a stage dowsed in black velvet and appeared magical to Shaw. ‘If only we could get a few plays with invisible backgrounds and lovely costumes like that in a suitable theatre,’ he had written, ‘...there would be no end to the delight of the thing.’ He had again turned to Ricketts for The Dark Lady of the Sonnets in which Shakespeare, clothed in greys and russets, Queen Elizabeth in silver and black, and the Dark Lady, wearing crimson and black, appeared before an ‘intense and abnormal starlit sky of a fabulous blue’. The following year Ricketts had attired the Venetian père noble Count O’Dowda after Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of George IV and given his daughter a strict Empire dress to lend her the look of a fillette ‘depicted on elegant pre-revolution French crockery’ in the successful run of Fanny’s First Play. The ‘gorgeous white uniform, half covered by an enormous green overcoat trimmed with black fur’ he designed for Lillah McCarthy’s role as Annajanska seven years later had been so successful that Margot Asquith copied the overcoat for her dressing-gown.
For Saint Joan, Ricketts created costumes designed to be an ‘intelligent blend between Pol de Limbourg and the Van Eycks, avoiding the bright fourteenth-century colour of the first and the rather prosy phase in dress in the second’. He ‘flung himself into the job’, authenticating heraldry on the magnificent tapestries, tents and curtains, designing the stained glass for Rheims Cathedral, and basing the sunny stone chamber in the Castle of Vancouleurs on the kitchen of a Norman keep at Chilham which he shared with Charles Shannon. In his history of British theatre design, George Sheringham was to describe the visual effect as being, within its conventions, ‘one of t
he most beautiful things that has ever been seen on the London stage’.
Partly perhaps as a heritage from William Morris and partly in response to Gordon Craig’s influence, Shaw had used artists such as Albert Rutherston and Ricketts to carry the theatre away from Victorian scene-painting into twentieth-century realms of stage design that could produce a style to match the director’s view of a play. This had gradually become accepted as part of a Shaw play-in-performance by the time Barry Jackson took over the Vedrenne–Barker tradition and appointed Paul Shelving as his regular designer.
Both Shelving and Ricketts designed productions of Saint Joan. The public’s delight in the beauty and vitality of Ricketts’s designs for the first production helped to establish it as Shaw’s most successful play. At last he had done what Archer had been goading him to do: he had written a realistic or symbolic work that ‘should go to every city in the world and shake the souls of people’. In Berlin and Vienna, Max Reinhardt’s production, presenting Elizabeth Bergner as Joan, scored ‘the greatest theatrical success that I have ever known,’ recorded Trebitsch. Before long, the play was being performed in Scandinavia, throughout Eastern Europe, and even in Paris where seven unsuccessful productions of his previous plays in the Hamons’ translations were thought to have established complete ‘barriers of language, thought and feeling between Shaw and the French’. The play’s producer and star actress, George and Ludmilla Pitoëff, who were to revive it in Paris no less than a dozen times in ten years, had been appalled by the Hamons’ version. In collaboration with Henri-René Lenormand they revised it so as to present a dreamlike vision of a miraculously sublimated Joan. For the first time, the French critics united in their praise of the Hamons’ brilliant rendering; for the first time they praised Shaw for an innovative structure of hagiography that contrasted the saint with the farcical world of Shavian satire, and parodied the court in the manner of an Offenbach operetta, while leaving Joan spiritually uncontaminated. This original technique was hailed as an effective means of dramatizing the supernatural, and Shaw was credited with having invented a new type of historical drama.
‘Woe unto me when all men praise me!’ says St Joan in the Epilogue. Shaw greeted his own popularity with similar scepticism. He had sent out his play to rescue Joan from canonization and restore her heresy, but found it was to lead to his own canonization with the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had been put up, and turned down, for the Nobel Prize four or five times previously. But the literary adviser to the Swedish Academy, Per Hallström, was converted by Saint Joan: ‘even if the real Saint Joan was a different figure,’ he acknowledged, ‘Shaw has created a great one.’ Shaw was appalled. ‘The Nobel Prize has been a hideous calamity for me,’ he told Augustin Hamon. ‘...It was really almost as bad as my 70th birthday.’
He had never encouraged prizes. ‘You cannot give examination paper marks to works of art,’ he had written in 1918. He had not changed his mind. ‘If the prizes are to be reserved on Safety First principles for old men whose warfare is accomplished,’ he wrote to his Swedish translator Lady Ebba Low, ‘the sooner they are confiscated and abolished by the Swedish Government the better.’ After politely describing the award as a reinforcement between British and Swedish culture that, especially after W. B. Yeats’s prize two years earlier, would not be lost on his native Ireland, he went on to discriminate between the award, for which ‘I have nothing but my best thanks’, and the prize of some £7,000 (equivalent to £175,000 in 1997) which ‘I cannot persuade myself to accept’. His readers and audiences ‘provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs,’ he explained, ‘and as to my renown it is greater than is good for my spiritual health.’ He therefore proposed that the Swedish Royal Academy confer on him the ‘final honor of classing my works in that respect hors concours’, and use the money to commission good English translations of Sweden’s literature. But the Swedish Academy refused this suggestion. He was therefore obliged to accept the prize, assist in the creation of an Anglo-Swedish Literary Foundation, and hand over to its Trust Fund all his prize money.
‘He is now the most famous author in the world,’ one newspaper declared. ‘Such steps towards Mr Shaw’s canonization are being made,’ wrote an Evening Standard reporter, ‘that people are forgetting that he was formerly almost always described as Mephistophelean.’ Though the press announcement was made in 1926, he had officially been awarded the prize for the year 1925. ‘I wrote nothing in 1925,’ he told the newspapers, ‘and that is probably why they gave it to me.’ But everyone recognized that, as Shaw himself phrased it in a letter to Edith Evans, ‘I am in the very odor of sanctity after St Joan.’
2
The End and a Beginning
I can scarcely believe that the septuagenarian in the looking glass is really G.B.S.
Shaw to Beatrice Mansfield (3 August 1927)
‘On the 26th we sail for Madeira,’ Shaw notified William Archer in mid-December 1924. ‘My wife expects me to return in the middle of February; but my private intention is never to come back...’
He was in his seventieth year, ‘too old’ he told his publisher Otto Kyllmann, who nevertheless prevailed upon him to prepare a collected edition of his writings for Constable. ‘I ought to be retiring,’ he protested; ‘and my business is advancing instead.’ His passage to Madeira, with its ‘flowers, sunshine, bathing, and no theatres’ was not a retirement from business – he took with him a sack of correspondence. But since the war there were fewer people he liked to see. An exception was Archer. ‘I don’t know whether you are in England or not, and should be glad of a hail if you are,’ he signalled him shortly before sailing. Earlier that year he had been invited to chair a lecture by his friend, enthusiastically entitled ‘The Decay of Decency’, and replied: ‘As Archer and I are the same age (though he doesn’t look it) I think we should be meditating on the Decency of Decay.’ But the truth was that when he and Archer got together and relived their old campaigning days, they felt quite startlingly young. Archer still saw in the extravagance of G.B.S. a deep menace to the exercise of his friend’s talent. It was still not too late, he felt, to get Shaw on to the right lines. He never wearied of attempting this feat and G.B.S. never wearied of retaliating. They had been at it now for forty years.
‘Oblige me with a hammer, a saw, a beetle and a couple of wedges that I may operate on your all but impervious knowledge box,’ Shaw had requested in the summer of 1923 after looking through Archer’s new book, The Old Drama and the New. What lay between them was the name and nature of drama. Shaw believed that Archer treated the theatre as a fairyland. Archer believed that for all Shaw’s sociological interests, he was a blatant fantasist. Where then lay reality? There was a chance of settling the matter, Archer urged, if Shaw would simply use different words. As a professional translator, Archer felt well-qualified to change Shaw’s language, and generously offered to do so. ‘I say a cat is a quadruped, with a brain, a backbone, and (unless of the Manx variety) a tail,’ he explained. ‘You say, “Oh no – a cat is a round, mushy iridescent object with long streamers, usually observed on the shingle at low tide.” “Why,” I reply, “that is not a cat but a jelly-fish.”’
‘The alternatives are not a cat and a jelly-fish,’ Shaw countered, ‘but a clockwork cat and a live cat.’
‘It won’t do,’ Archer wrote.
‘You haven’t got it yet,’ Shaw wrote.
But there was still time. In December 1924 Archer changed his tactics and published in The Bookman a long exegesis entitled ‘The Psychology of G.B.S.’. Most readers, Archer believed, would be shocked to learn that G.B.S. was governed by a passionate sense of right and wrong. Though considering himself exceptionally skilful in the art of persuasion, he was ‘so unique, so utterly unlike the overwhelming majority of his fellow-creatures, that he has never mastered the rudiments of that art’. He had gained the ear of the public, but he had never got at its will. ‘Shaw, a professed revolutionist, will revolutionise nothing.’
Unless, that was, Archer could bring him into a new relationship with his public. In his Bookman essay, he was appealing to the public itself. He invited his readers to overlook the irresponsible tic of Shaw’s joking, forgive the Shavian blunders of tone. For in G.B.S. they had among them an original thinker and artist, and where Archer himself had benefited, so could they. ‘There is no man for the fundamentals of whose character I have a more real respect,’ he wrote. ‘I own myself deeply indebted to him for many lessons taught me in the years of our early intimacy.’
Shaw read ‘The Psychology of G.B.S.’ that December. He knew how much affectionate sensitiveness lay beneath Archer’s reticence. Being emotionally reticent himself he sent off a letter simply asking for news of Harley Granville-Barker, and whether, before sailing for Madeira, there was any chance of seeing Archer. For he was someone of whom Shaw had ‘not a single unpleasant recollection, and whom I was never sorry to see or unready to talk to’.
‘G.B.S. has taken like an angel to my article,’ Archer reported to Granville-Barker. ‘I am especially glad in view of this operation business.’ Archer had been told he had to undergo an operation for the removal of a cancerous tumour ‘one of these days’ – in fact he was going into hospital the following day. ‘I feel as fit as a fiddle.’ But because ‘accidents will happen’, for a few apologetic sentences, Archer suddenly broke their code of reticence. ‘Though I may sometimes have played the part of the all-too candid mentor,’ he wrote, ‘I have never wavered in my admiration and affection for you, or ceased to feel that the Fates had treated me kindly in making me your contemporary and friend. I thank you from my heart for forty years of good comradeship.’ It was said – and time to leap quickly back into a joke about the King of Norway.
Bernard Shaw Page 75
