Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘Life is a flame that is always burning itself out; but it catches fire again every time a child is born.’ Shaw’s fable plants a series of prophecies: that ‘the next great civilization will be a black civilization’; that future gods may be female rather than male; and that the biological solution to the race war between black and white is intermarriage.

  Shaw wrote The Black Girl over seventeen days, giving his shorthand draft by instalments to a local stenographer, Dorothy Smith. Like many white Knysnaites, Dorothy Smith had imagined G.B.S. to be ‘a terrible cynic’. She was surprised by his soft voice and considerate manner. During the five weeks Charlotte and the car were laid up for repairs, Shaw got to know a number of the rich whites and they found him charming. ‘He never made me feel he was the great G.B.S., but always thanked me as if I were doing him a favour,’ remembered Dorothy Smith. ‘I must confess I liked him exceedingly.’

  Shaw chartered a Union Airways Junker and on 18 March they flew back to Cape Town, the first passengers to make this three-hour journey by air. ‘We were met at the Aerodrome – taken to the ship [the Warwick Castle] where we lunched & then there arrived such a crowd as I never saw,’ Charlotte wrote to her doctor.

  ‘There is a possibility that he will come back to South Africa,’ reported the Cape Times. Shaw and Charlotte did return to South Africa three years later, ‘rolling down’ the Red Sea and along the east coast and disembarking at Durban at the end of April 1935. In celebration of King George V’s Silver Jubilee, Shaw appeared as guest of honour at an Indian sports event between two celebrated wrestlers, the Masked Marvel and the Terrible Turk. He also escorted Charlotte to a Zulu war dance, joining in with a few ecstatic steps, chanting and clapping and delighting in the music which, he said, had probably inspired Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. ‘All attempts to keep them [Zulus] in an inferior position,’ he concluded, ‘seem to break down before the fact that they are not inferior.’

  On this second voyage he carried with him proofs of the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? which, like a prophetic text, took the place of his own aborted book on Russia and seemed to refuel his missionary fire. At a press conference on his departure a month later from Cape Town he proposed the introduction of collective farms which, operating like open-air universities, would contribute to a fusion of the races. ‘I believe in fusion. The more fusion the better. All that talk of Hitler’s about pure race is all nonsense.’

  Shaw’s ideas on racial fusion, which transported his coffee-coloured children from the end of The Black Girl onto the front pages of many newspapers, brought him notoriety round the world. While in Durban he had heard the pro-Nazi Minister of Transport and Defence, Oswald Pirow, make a public appeal to immigrants to keep up the white population, and it occurred to him that the effect of excessive sunshine on white skins might have something to do with white sterility. ‘If so,’ he reasoned, ‘the remedy is clearly pigmentation, which can be brought about most easily by interbreeding with the colored races.’ On his arrival back in England he announced himself to be ‘an advocate of intermarriage between the white and black inhabitants’ of South Africa. This was now his final solution to the racial problem.

  ‘Marriages of White and Black’, ran a Daily Telegraph headline. ‘Startling Plan by Mr Shaw’. The South African press reported that Shaw’s ‘notorious’ views were regarded in Britain as a bad joke. But in Germany they were described as ‘blasphemy’. The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung reassured its readers that there was no danger of Germans on the African continent losing their political hold for want of reproductive vigour.

  G.B.S. was unrepentant. ‘The future is to the mongrel, not to the Junker. I, Bernard Shaw, have said it.’

  *

  The army of missionaries which had moved across the world during Shaw’s lifetime offered a strange trinity of Christian God, modern medicine, and market capitalism. The road to a new heaven and a new earth led unexpectedly through a jungle of business civilization. In his Preface to Major Barbara, Shaw had made reference to the ‘part played by Christian missionaries in reconciling the black races of Africa to their subjugation by European Capitalism’. During the 1930s he travelled as a counter-missionary armed with an opposing set of coercive myths and texts. He brought his message to mass-circulation newspapers, students at universities and politicians. The most ambitious of these proselytizing tours was a four-month world cruise on a Canadian Pacific liner, the Empress of Britain, sailing from Monaco in the middle of December 1932.

  They travelled in a suite of two staterooms, carrying Shaw’s vegetarian menus typed out by Blanche Patch which Charlotte would hand the chief steward and head waiter, and sometimes forward to their hotels. They did not join the Captain’s table, but sat at a small one of their own in a corner, reading from a large bookbag of recent publications. While Charlotte stayed late in bed, Shaw would rise early, complete several laps of the outdoor pool and orbits of the deck and, after a breakfast of oatmeal porridge, grapefruit and refreshing ‘Instant Postum’, take up an isolated position on the lounge deck, wearing a cap with a large flap to protect his neck against the trade winds. ‘All the time we have been on the ship he has done his mornings’ work and there is a lot to show for it,’ Charlotte reported back to Blanche Patch. He would hand his correspondence to the ship’s stenographer for transliteration. But he was also writing plays again: ‘you have to work or go mad’.

  All aboard at Monte Carlo; first stop Naples. They gazed down the crater of Vesuvius, glanced at Pompeii, then sailed on to Athens where they were assailed by journalists. ‘If you are ever tempted to go to Athens, I advise you not to bother,’ Shaw had counselled. ‘Just buy a few second hand columns, and explode a pound or two of dynamite amongst them, and there you are.’ They plunged into Egypt under a blanket of heat. ‘I did some awful journies,’ Charlotte admitted. On New Year’s Day 1933 they sailed from Suez and a week later came to Bombay.

  It had been widely reported in the Indian newspapers that he might be visiting Gandhi, then in Yeravda Jail at Pune. They had met in November 1931 while Gandhi was in London attending the Second Round Table Conference on India. Though Shaw believed he was wasting his time keeping company with conference playactors, he saw in Gandhi a natural leader (‘Superman = Mahatma’) whose ‘tactics like all tactics are subject to error and readjustment’ but whose ‘strategy is sound’. The two of them had taken an instant liking to each other (‘Now look here, Gandhi, wouldn’t you be comfortable on the floor’). Gandhi emerged from their interview in London paying tribute to G.B.S. as ‘a generous ever young heart, the Arch Jester of Europe’, adding later (after having read The Black Girl): ‘In everything of his that I have read there has been a religious centre.’ Shaw told Gandhi during their meeting that ‘I knew something about you and felt something in you of a kindred spirit. We belong to a very small community on earth.’ It was this kinship he stressed when later chiding Nancy Astor for reverting to the Churchillian view of Gandhi as a dangerous charlatan. ‘Mahatma G. is not a crook: he is a saint, and as such under the covenant of grace,’ he wrote.

  Shaw viewed India as being in much the same political state as Ireland had been earlier in his life. ‘India should be free to manage her own affairs,’ he was to write. ‘If she chooses to divide herself into fifty Pakistans and fight it out in fifty civil wars that is her business: not ours.’ An editorial in the Star of India had warned Shaw to beware of Indian politics: ‘there is nothing so dangerous as a sarcastic philosopher who tries to get a rise out of politicians.’ Shaw concurred: ‘the present situation in India will not bear being talked about,’ he wrote to Rabindranath Tagore. ‘I understand it only too well.’ He understood it as part of a world-historical narrative, with each country poised at a different moment in the story. He refused to make statements about untouchability except when referring back to Britain: ‘we have untouchability in England. Ask the labourer who wants to marry the duchess’s daughter.’

  Gandhi’s existence was
encouraging to Shaw because ‘there might come a future when the whole population of India would be much more like Gandhi than they were at present’. He was also reported as saying: ‘Mr Gandhi is the clearest-headed man in India, and he is so tired of you all that he goes on a “fast unto death”.’ From someone who was himself beginning to suffer from anorexia the kinship is transparent. After their meeting in 1931, Gandhi had said of Shaw: ‘I think he is a very good man.’ When Gandhi was assassinated in 1948, Shaw was to say: ‘It shows how dangerous it is to be too good.’

  While other passengers scurried across the country for five days and nights, Shaw and Charlotte remained on board. He was visited by Annie Besant’s adopted son, the handsome Jeddu Krishnamurti. Shaw had kept intermittently in communication with Annie on her infrequent trips back to England. ‘Do you consider me an intelligent or an unintelligent woman?’ she had asked rhetorically on receiving a copy of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide. ‘Whichever I may be, I keep a corner for an old friend. I am ever a fighting Home Ruler and Socialist.’ But she was many other things besides. ‘What a forcing house of religious leaders the old atheists proved,’ Henry Salt had written to Shaw: ‘Annie Besant is now the leader of the Theosophists and looks, in her white robes, as though she sits on the right hand of God.’ It was difficult for Shaw, contending with a world of superstition, to sympathize with Annie’s aspirations, and he applauded Krishnamurti’s refusal to be put forward as a new Messiah, the Star of the East. ‘Do you ever see Mrs Besant now?’ he asked.

  ‘Every day,’ Krishnamurti equivocated.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Very well; but at her great age she cannot think consecutively.’

  ‘She never could,’ whispered Shaw, and Krishnamurti smiled.

  Later that year Annie Besant died. She had been in Shaw’s estimate both intelligent and unintelligent – like himself – like everyone.

  ‘I have been hung with flowers in the temples and drenched with rose-water and dabbed with vermilion in the houses; and the ship is infested with pilgrims to my shrine,’ he wrote after five days at Bombay. According to Nirad Chaudhuri he had become ‘almost an idol of educated Indians’. He was also, like his Black Girl, searching for something, and during his eight days at Bombay he appeared to find it unexpectedly.

  Of all the religious denominations he had felt nearest to the Quakers, by temperament if not by faith. During the Great War he was impressed by their refusal to fight and willingness to serve as ambulance staff. He also liked their lack of ritual. ‘When we want to talk with God,’ he was to write, ‘we use the same language that we ordinarily use, not prayers composed for us by other people, and we do not need a church to hold communion with him.’ By the late 1920s he declared himself to be ‘more nearly a Quaker than anything else that has a denomination’. But by the end of the 1930s, when he wrote a play ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’ that introduced the seventeenth-century founder of the Quakers George Fox onto the stage, he used it partly to chart the limitations of Quakerism: the denial of access to religion through music and the arts. Near the end of his life Shaw ‘ceased to reply that my nearest to an established religion is the Society of Friends, and while calling myself a Creative Evolutionist, might also call myself a Jainist Tirthankava of eight thousand years ago’.

  The ancient Jain religion, which recognized God as human-being-and-animal as well as man-and-woman, black-and-white, provided the presuppositions for Shaw’s prophecies in The Black Girl, as well as the sublime Shavian double paradox of a temple that contained all the gods and a temple containing none. After visiting these Jain temples he came to believe that Hinduism must be ‘the most tolerant religion in the world’ because, he wrote to the Reverend Ensor Walters as he sailed away from India, ‘Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolator are equally at home in it... There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which excludes God, not on materialistic atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.’ Shaw the worshipper and Shaw the iconoclast were joined in the Jainist understanding of all gods and no gods. Bergson, Butler, Lamarck share the Shavian temple with William Morris and Sidney Webb, Marx and Lenin.

  Shaw had always accepted that religion was based on need and not dependent on evidence or reason, and that it must be feeling which set people thinking and not thought which set them feeling. He would refer to the Jains often in conjunction with Protestants and Catholics, indicating what he felt to be the Jain potential for healing. ‘It is in these temples that you escape from the frightful parochiality of our little sects of Protestants and Catholics,’ he wrote to Dame Laurentia McLachlan, ‘and recognize the idea of God everywhere.’

  Shaw liked to say that all his ‘globe-trotting’ left little mark on his later plays except for The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles which he wrote in 1934. The Preface to that play, which called for ‘greatly increased intolerance of socially injurious conduct’, was strongly pro-Soviet, while the play itself was imbued with Jainism, ‘the most tolerant religion in the world’.

  *

  Leaving Bombay, the Empress of Britain steamed south-east, via Ceylon and Singapore, into the Pacific area that was already a testing ground for the Second World War. The whole Pacific was afraid of Japan since she had invaded Manchuria. A League of Nations commission had laboriously toured the Far East and on the basis of its report Japan was rebuked early in 1933 for using force to restore peaceful conditions to the province before trying all other means – whereupon Japan resigned from the League.

  The League of Nations had been the creation of a pre-war generation. ‘There was no living man to whom the generations which came to maturity between 1900 and 1914 owed as much as to Mr Shaw,’ Leonard Woolf was to write in 1934. ‘...Nothing less than a world war could have prevented [him] from winning the minds of succeeding generations... ever since [the war] the barbarians have naturally been on top.’ Shaw supported the work done by Woolf, which by 1920 had helped to set up the League of Nations. He also watched his friend Gilbert Murray’s involvement with the League and was to witness his optimism change to disillusion. ‘It seems to me clearer than ever,’ Murray wrote in 1932, ‘that public opinion is the real weapon of the League of Nations.’ Shaw believed that collective security could only be achieved if its members pooled their military resources. For what could the League do otherwise?

  On arriving in Hong Kong on 11 February, Shaw told the crowds of reporters who came scrambling on board that ‘Japan is going to take Manchuria... She pledged herself to the League of Nations that she would not declare war on anyone. Consequently she has not declared war on China, but has contented herself with fighting... the League has funked the issues. And now it is gradually ceasing to exist... Japan has called the League’s bluff.’

  He was to give one public speech in Hong Kong as the guest of Sir Robert Ho Tung, a picturesque Eurasian millionaire. The Shaws arrived at his house on Monday 13 February and were taken upstairs to a domestic temple that G.B.S. was later to incorporate into the third act of Buoyant Billions. ‘It was a radiant miniature temple with an altar of Chinese vermilion and gold, and cushioned divan seats round the walls for the worshippers,’ he remembered. ‘Everything was in such perfect Chinese taste that to sit there and look was a quiet delight.’

  On these world pilgrimages Shaw was trying to combine the long and short views of human nature. Such a combination would be essential to his foreign-policy thinking. But to professional politicians he looked dangerous: in dreams begin irresponsibilities. The Hong Kong Government could not prevent Shaw from saying what he wanted, but it did try to prevent the Chinese press from reporting what he said. ‘You do not look very much like Chinese,’ he welcomed a group of local journalists waiting to interview him, but even this remark was to smuggle its way into the North China Herald.

  The Great Hall of the University where Shaw was to give his
speech was overflowing as he arrived. As in South Africa, his political opinions were not affected by hospitality or vested interests. He began, as he had begun at the University of Stellenbosch in Cape Town, by exhorting the students to argue with their teachers, form their own opinions and read none of the books they were assigned. ‘If you read, read real books and steep yourself in revolutionary books. Go up to your neck in Communism, because if you are not a red revolutionist at 20, you will be at 50 a most impossible fossil. If you are a red revolutionist at 20, you have some chance of being up-to-date at 40.’

  From the prolonged applause they gave Shaw’s peroration the students were ‘clearly overwhelmed by the brio, the iconoclast gaiety... the metaphysical defiance of the man,’ wrote a Senior Lecturer at Hong Kong University, Piers Grey.

  In its correspondence to the press the British community in Hong Kong made it known that ‘few people in Britain take Shaw’s social or political views seriously and it is unfortunate that any of the British in Hong Kong should have done so’. The Hong Kong Telegraph accused him of endangering the lives of his student audience at a time when Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists were shooting and beheading communists in the streets. Shaw answered this charge during a talk to the PEN club in Shanghai four days later. ‘I urged the students to start revolutions,’ he explained. ‘But please don’t misunderstand.