Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘Of course they don’t realise that he is an Irishman,’ remarked the British ambassador Sir Esmond Overy, ‘and he is growing more so every day since he has been here.’ The British Embassy had given a reception for G.B.S. and his party on their arrival in Moscow. ‘Noah’s Ark had not a more varied and bizarre collection of creatures,’ wrote one of the guests. ‘The Soviet leaders of those days, who as a rule never entered those luxurious surroundings (Communism was still in its Puritan stage) have shelved their prejudices in order to meet the great playwright, and are sipping the dry Martinis and champagne cocktails presented to them on brilliantly polished silver plates... Suddenly, Lady Astor’s red foulard dress drops in a deep curtsey before Litvinov...’

  Both Nancy Astor and Shaw had been handed ‘a piteous volley of telegrams’ from Dmitri Krynin, a professor of civil engineering at Yale University, asking them to intercede on behalf of his wife who had been refused an exit visa to join him and their son in the United States. Nancy went into action at once. But after a flustered glance at the telegram Litvinov brushed it aside: ‘This matter is not within my jurisdiction.’

  Shaw seemed more anxious over Nancy’s distress than about the plight of the Krynin family. ‘Dont worry about the sorrows and terrors of the poor things in Russia,’ he tried to reassure her. But she did worry. Only with difficulty was she dissuaded from going to worry the police. Later she presented the cables to the Soviet authorities at the Kremlin, while Waldorf Astor sought out Mrs Krynin, ‘a pathetic sight terrified lest her husband or son should be induced to return to Russia, evidently afraid of what might happen to them if they did come,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It seems to me that he probably must have gone to America with a permit limited as to time and had not returned... I wrote to Khalatov telling him that the lady had no complaints to make against the authorities about her treatment but was merely anxious to join her husband in America.’

  And Shaw did nothing. It is not easy to sympathize with such unresponsiveness, especially when set against the Astors’ courage and persistence. In the years following the war G.B.S. had increasingly detached himself from such appeals. He suspected that telegrams delivered on public occasions with newspapermen present were likely to be propaganda stunts. The Western press found Mrs Krynin, and reported the affair extensively. The Astors consoled themselves with the thought that, in the light of such publicity, the Soviet authorities were unlikely to contrive her ‘disappearance’. Shaw reasoned differently. It was far easier to do harm than to do good. ‘The notion that I am persona grata with the dictators is one of the Shaw myths,’ he was to write to the novelist William Gerhardie who later appealed to him during the Stalinist purges on behalf of his brother-in-law, an expert in bee culture, who was imprisoned in Soviet Russia. ‘...foreign interference is not only resented as such, but taken as additional evidence of disaffection.’

  Such a letter reveals the dark sense of reality that underlay Shaw’s ideological make-believe and the spirit of pragmatism by which he reconciled reality with fantasy. The assertive language he cultivated sprang from his need to affirm a faith. In his essay ‘A Short View of Russia’, Maynard Keynes had analysed Leninism as a combination of two factors usually kept separate, business economics and religious conviction. The economics, he argued, were destined to fail; only the religious power could survive. When Shaw travelled to Moscow he was chiefly interested in Soviet methods of social and economic reconstruction; by the time he left he had been converted to the religion of communism. From Darwin to Einstein, the landscape of knowledge had been broken up during his lifetime, destroying many apparently absolute values that he had attacked, but leaving no solid ground of morality from which to survey the past and future. In their maze of anxieties people needed new rules of conduct. This was the appeal in the 1920s and 1930s of autocracies such as Mussolini’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis whose dogmatic myths gave Italy and Germany a sense of national purpose. ‘I doubt whether the mass of men can live without a common metaphysic and a common scale of values,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in 1926. Advancing across the continent like a medieval religion, Soviet communism appealed to her emotional needs and seemed to satisfy her intellectual beliefs. ‘I wish Communism to succeed,’ she wrote in 1932. And Shaw agreed. ‘In all the prophecies of Russia’s failure the wish is father to the thought,’ he said. ‘We have a lot of foolish people who want the experiment to fail.’

  Shaw was eager, while in Russia, to meet Stalin. He was granted an audience on the evening of 29 July and insisted on taking the Astors and Lord Lothian with him. Litvinov accompanied them, and two interpreters were present. During the interview, which lasted two and a half hours, the realities of Stalinist Russia were suspended and Shavian theatre prevailed. The set was simple: a large table and some chairs in an office. The costumes varied from Stalin’s tunic and black top boots and Shaw’s Norfolk jacket to Nancy Astor’s spotted dress, Lord Lothian’s lounge suit and the shirtsleeves of Litvinov. It was as if the encounter between Undershaft and Cusins from Major Barbara were being replayed in the Kremlin, with a remarkable transformation of the Soviet dictator. Like Undershaft, Stalin is UNASHAMED. He also believes that the ‘ballot paper that really governs is the paper that has a bullet wrapped up in it’. Shaw grants Stalin an ‘extraordinary military ability and force of character’ but cloaks these iron qualities with the pious toga of Fabian respectability: ‘he is said to be a model of domesticity, virtue, and innocence.’ This is the priggish endorsement of Cusins which becomes sinister in the light of Stalin’s wife’s suicide.

  In this staged seminar Stalin was also cast to play Shaw’s Caesar opposite Nancy’s spirited if elderly Cleopatra. ‘The attempt to abash and silence Lady Astor was about as successful as an effort by a fly to make head against a whirlwind,’ remembered Shaw. Stalin is shown as ‘patient, assured, letting us talk back to our heart’s content, and disarming us at every attack by a smile in which there is no malice but also no credulity’. But, to the audience beyond, it appeared that though Stalin, like Undershaft, deceived others he was not self-deceived. ‘The Russians have always been fond of circuses and travelling shows,’ wrote Churchill. ‘Since they had imprisoned, shot or starved most of their best comedians, their visitors might fill for a space a noticeable void. And here was the World’s most famous intellectual Clown and Pantaloon in one, and the charming Columbine of the capitalist pantomime... Arch Commissar Stalin, “the man of steel”, flung open the closely guarded sanctuaries of the Kremlin, and pushing aside his morning’s budget of death warrants, and lettres de cachet, received his guests with smiles of overflowing comradeship.’

  ‘The secret of Stalin is that he is entirely opportunist as to means,’ Shaw was to tell Augustin Hamon, ‘discarding all doctrinaire limitations, and confident that Russia is big enough to achieve Socialism by itself independently of the capitalist world, which can follow his example or go its own way to perdition.’ But Shaw overlaid this realistic outline of Stalin with the image of ‘Uncle Joe’, head of the communist family.

  For this brief period Shaw and Nancy Astor set the agenda and Stalin was obliged to respond agreeably. Though he never lost his self-command, it was for him a most disagreeable experience, and he later complained to his daughter Svetlana that Shaw was an awful person. On their return to the Hotel Metropole reporters crowded round. Shaw slowly mounted the marble staircase, turned at its summit, and crossed his arms. Everyone waited. ‘Stalin,’ he said, ‘has splendid black moustaches.’ Then he went to bed, leaving everyone seething.

  From Shaw’s writings Stalin emerges as a Soviet icon, an instrument needed to implement Leninism and to break the pattern of collapsing civilizations – the concept that Shaw had absorbed from the work of the archaeologist Flinders Petrie.

  ‘We know from our recent historical researches that there have been many civilizations, that their history has been very like the history of our civilization, and that when they arrived at the point which Western capitalist civilizati
on has reached, there began a rapid degeneracy, followed by a complete collapse of the entire system and something very near to a return to savagery by the human race. Over and over again the human race has tried to get round that corner and has always failed.

  Now, Lenin organized the method of getting round that corner... if this great communistic experiment spreads over the whole world, we shall have a new era in history. We shall not have the old collapse and failure, the beginning again, the going through the whole miserable story to the same miserable end...’

  For the first time anywhere, Shaw thought he saw the realists in command of the philistines. When progressive ideas appeared in Soviet Russia ‘the entire state apparatus, all its organs, the press and public opinion set about realizing these ideas,’ he said to Litvinov and Lunacharsky, ‘whereas any progressive idea which appears in England is met not by sympathy, but by furious opposition from the powers that be and from the press’.

  Shaw’s pleasure at finding one of the forms of socialism he had preached almost fifty years before apparently coming to birth in Russia makes itself felt at the end of a speech he delivered on his seventy-fifth birthday at the Trade Union Central Hall (formerly the Hall of Nobles of the Nobleman’s Club and later to be the showplace of Stalin’s notorious treason trials). ‘Tovarishchi,’ he began, struggling to pronounce the Russian word ‘Comrades’. It came out as a meaningless blur of Slavonic sounds and was lost in the storm of laughter and applause. He went on to joke about his British ‘valour’ in making this journey into Communist Russia.

  ‘Our weeping families clung to us... they loaded us down with enormous baskets and parcels of food, so we wouldn’t die here of hunger... The railway from the frontier to Moscow is strewn with the things we threw out [of] our carriage windows as we saw with what comfort, attention and kindness the new regime in Russia surrounded us.’

  He then neatly changed this extravaganza into an elegant tribute.

  ‘We don’t know how to adequately express our gratitude for all that your country’s Communist government has done for us. We can only say that if the Soviet government succeeds in providing to all the peoples of the Union those same conditions which it has provided us – and we believe this is one of the Soviet government’s goals – then Russia will become the most fortunate country on earth.’

  Halfway through his speech ‘my mind went blank suddenly,’ he wrote to Charlotte, ‘and I had to frivol rather vulgarly’. He tried out one appalling pun: ‘I have seen all the “terrors”, and I was terribly pleased by them.’ This was not the usual G.B.S. His wit had dried up. Then, suddenly, in a changed voice, he got going again. ‘It is very difficult for me to end my speech,’ he said. ‘I can’t talk to you as I generally do. As I look around I see in your eyes something I have never met in the audience of other countries...

  ‘It is a real comfort to me, an old man, to be able to step into my grave with the knowledge that the civilization of the world will be saved... It is here in Russia that I have actually been convinced that the new Communist system is capable of leading mankind out of its present crisis, and save it from complete anarchy and ruin.’

  He sat down disgusted at not having spread himself as imposingly as he wished. Yet for some listeners this hesitant sincerity was more effective than other polished presentations.

  On their last night in Moscow they handed to the hotel staff the biscuits, cereals and tins of food which G.B.S. had pretended were littering the Russian railway tracks, and caught the night train to Warsaw. Shaw had warned Charlotte that ‘I am at least 20 years younger’ and he was soon busy denying rumours that his rejuvenation was due to a sexual gland transplant by the Soviet surgeon Serge Voronoff.

  Charlotte was overjoyed to see him so well when he arrived back at Adelphi Terrace on the morning of 2 August. Nancy had obviously taken tremendous care of him: ‘he never got a bite, or saw any sign of insects or infection,’ Charlotte told a friend. And it was wonderful to hear him talk of Soviet Russia. ‘He says,’ she wrote, ‘it all seems like a “splendid, sunny dream”.’

  *

  The Webbs were particularly keen to question G.B.S. on his return. ‘He was tired and excited by his visit to Russia; carried away by the newness and the violence of the changes wrought,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary for 8 August. But she felt sceptical of his religious conviction, if such it was, after ‘ten days’ inspection of show institutions, surrounded with admiring crowds’. He was ‘a supreme charmer’ in old age, she reflected as she listened to him weaving his spell over the Fabians: ‘appearance, voice, manner, gesture, outlook on other human beings, build up a perfect old man to be adored by the multitude.’ But she soon came to realize that he was in earnest about Soviet communism. Its egalitarian principles, which aimed to do away with the disastrous motive of pecuniary self-interest and replace it with a way of life based on common property, were the Webbs’ principles too; and Soviet brutalities, he argued, were manifestations of a backward country with a barbarous history. By the beginning of 1931 Stalin had not yet introduced any methods that would have raised an eyebrow during the tsarist regime; what he had done, Shaw said, was to build on Lenin’s work in revolutionizing the purpose of government and the motives of human beings. This was the great adventure of transforming the environment of which Don Juan had spoken in Man and Superman. The only hope for the world was to change human nature – and that, Shaw claimed, was what the Russians were achieving.

  ‘Putty is exactly like human nature. You cannot change it, no matter what you do. You cannot eat it, nor grow apples in it, nor mend clothes with it. But you can twist it and pat it and model it into any shape you like; and when you have shaped it, it will set so hard that you would suppose that it could never take any other shape on earth... the Soviet Government has shaped the Russian putty very carefully... and it has set hard and produced quite a different sort of animal.’

  What becomes lost in this vision is the Devil’s warning from Man and Superman that when we grow over-ambitious on behalf of the human race we threaten to destroy ourselves. Beatrice was aware of this danger. Yet she felt more inclined, after the fall of the Labour Government later that August, to place her faith in Soviet social engineering than in the haphazard ways of Western democracy. The economic depression signalled to many people the breaking-up of capitalism, and it was difficult for disillusioned socialists to place much hope in the Labour Party.

  Shaw’s challenge to Sidney and Beatrice was made at a critical moment in their lives. ‘The tension between those who accept and those who denounce the USSR increases day by day,’ Beatrice was to write. The Webbs could agree with the political diagnosis Shaw made when he pictured MacDonald, at the head of a Conservative-dominated National coalition, as having ‘led his flagship, on the eve of Trafalgar, into the enemy’s line, and hoisted the enemy’s colors’. They also began to accept his prognosis: ‘For really intelligent and longsighted leaders there is nothing hopeful now except a new departure to the left of the Labor Party to begin scientific communism with the experience of Russia to profit by.’ There was a danger, Shaw believed, of members of the Labour Party abandoning socialism to gain power.

  ‘Everybody who can possibly do so should go to Russia,’ Shaw had said. The following year Sidney and Beatrice made the first of their own expeditions to ‘the Russian show’. Shaw’s reconnaissance had given him an impression based on instinct: their visit would be an investigation ostensibly based on facts. On 21 May 1932 Shaw came down to Hay’s Wharf to see them off. For over forty years Shaw had been looking for a way of bringing together the two heralds of his political career – Webb, the constitutionalist, who ‘made no mistake’ and Morris, the revolutionist, who was ‘right after all’ – on the same territory. That territory was to be the Soviet Union.

  The Webbs were Shaw’s pre-eminent converts to Soviet communism. But numerous fellow-travellers in the 1930s took their inspiration from him.

  ‘You happen to be the man who, nearly thirty y
ears ago, gave me my first ideas of socialism, and... I am hoping that you will find a little of the thrill which I myself find in living here, and that it will draw you back again to see for a longer time... one of the forms in which the things you fifty-years ago prophesied, are coming to birth’

  wrote an American journalist, Anna Louise Strong, whom David Caute depicts as thriving ‘like a cactus in the desert, devoting her whole life to Russia and China during the most punishing phases of socialist construction’. Edgar Snow, whom Caute calls ‘America’s most widely read advocate of Chinese Communism’, revealed the influence of G.B.S. on many left-wing intellectuals:

  ‘It was Shaw who convinced me that the advancement of mankind beyond the predatory stage of human development and the replacement of existing systems of economic cannibalism by planned co-operation for the common good... were attainable and good ends and inevitable if men were to survive.’

  Shaw’s political position was aligned with that of Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair in the United States, with Anatole France, Romain Rolland and with Ernst Toller on the European continent. In Britain he appeared to converge with a new literary movement that caught up Stephen Spender, Edward Upward, and other poets and novelists in their twenties. Big was beautiful and distance opened vistas of romance: electrification from the steppes was seen as a futuristic construct and the drumming of Soviet machinery heard as the sound of modernism. ‘Beauty breaks ground, oh, in strange places,’ C. Day Lewis wrote in celebration of the ‘grain-Elevator in the Ukraine plain’; and Charles Madge bowed down before the spectacle when ‘Power and the factories break flaming into flower’. Shaw formed no personal attachment with this new generation of writers who hardly heard his footfall just ahead of them on the stair. ‘He’s a kind of concierge in the house of literature,’ Katherine Mansfield had written to Middleton Murry, ‘ – sits in a glass case – sees everything, knows everything, examines the letters, cleans the stairs, but has no part – no part in the life that is going on.’