Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘I didn’t ask them to go to the streets and fight the police. When the police come to suppress revolutionaries with their clubs, the safest way is to run... for policemen are like the gun in a robber’s hand... those with guns in their hands should still be beaten down. But this takes time and you cannot make it by sheer force.’

  Despite tight censorship, a number of correspondents from the larger newspapers in China had slipped into his audience at Hong Kong University and telegraphed inflammatory accounts back to Shanghai. When the luxury liner with its dangerous cargo docked, ‘the entire Shanghai foreign press was in hiding that morning for fear of coming into contact with him’.

  Shaw had planned to stay on board with Charlotte during their short stop at Shanghai, but changed his plan on receiving an invitation from Soong Ching Ling (‘Madame Sun’), the sister of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and widow of the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen. This was a risky initiative. Shanghai was then bursting into turmoil with many contending warlords – nationalists, communists, Japanese imperialists and European colonialists. At no distance from the night-clubs, banks and luxury restaurants were the prison-factories, miserable refugee camps, and dead babies in the gutters. Into this ‘feast of human flesh’ Madame Sun secretly brought the notorious agent provocateur G.B.S., conveying him by tender from the Empress of Britain at five o’clock in the morning of 17 February to her house in the rue Molière.

  He was officially the guest of the Chinese League for the Protection of Human Rights, co-founded by Madame Sun and Cai Yuan-pei, a radical ex-Chancellor of Peking National University. Apart from these two, with their assistant Yang Xingfo and the historian Lin Yutang, the guests included Lu Hsun, China’s celebrated short-story writer and essayist, the political historian Harold Isaacs, and Agnes Smedley, whose career was to range from promoting birth-control clinics in Germany (from where she had recently arrived) and the raising of funds for the Indian revolutionary movement against the British, to nursing wounded guerrillas in the Chinese Red Army and, at the end of her life, opposing McCarthyism in the United States.

  All of them wanted something special from G.B.S. Harold Isaacs wanted him ‘to denounce Kuomintang [nationalist] repression and make a worldwide propaganda score’; others wanted him to warn the world against the International Settlement under which they believed China was being handed over to the Japanese; Madame Sun herself pointed to Soviet infiltration into Jiangxi Province as a greater menace and wanted Shaw to point there too. ‘So everybody hopes for different things,’ wrote Lu Hsun observing them all close in on G.B.S. ‘...You can tell the result is not too satisfactory by the great number of people who are complaining.’

  But Lu Hsun was not complaining. He admired the composure with which, while perfecting his use of chopsticks, Shaw fielded the questions, and also his absolute refusal to please. He was able to make all the subgroups of Chinese intellectuals equally uncomfortable, and therein ‘lies Shaw’s greatness,’ Lu Hsun concluded. G.B.S. was ‘a great mirror’ and ‘from the antics of those who want to look in it or do not want to look in it, men’s hidden selves are revealed’. Watching him being interviewed by journalists after lunch, Lu Hsun noticed that when Shaw spoke frankly, people roared as though he had made a satirical thrust; when he joked about not being infallible (at least not always), they insisted on treating him as an encyclopaedia; and when he excused himself as being on holiday, they besieged him the more earnestly to expound his political principles.

  By reflecting in his own mirror a world comedian who forced paradox on to others, Lu Hsun was declaring his fellow-status with the legendary G.B.S. Harold Isaacs and Lin Yutang were later removed from the commemorative photograph taken in Madame Sun’s garden that afternoon; Agnes Smedley’s reputation was clouded by accusations of her involvement in a Soviet spy ring at Shanghai; Yang Xingfo was shot dead by a group of unidentified gunmen three months after this lunch; and Qu Quibai, the Marxist poet who compiled a book, Bernard Shaw in Shanghai, was executed by Chinese nationalists in 1935.

  Shaw’s day-trip into this nightmare was ‘very jovial’, Agnes Smedley recalled, ‘filled with thought-provoking and witty remarks and Soong Ching Ling’s [Madame Sun’s] laughter’. ‘But, as the situation outside was getting extremely tense, we were getting ready to be jailed by the Chinese fascists ... Shaw said his Fabianism would probably collapse and he would become a revolutionary if he were tried by Chinese law and jailed in a feudal prison... Soong Ching Ling laughed so hard she cried and had to wipe away her tears with a handkerchief.’ This was Shaw’s role: to add the solvent of fantastic humour and to subdue divisive detail wherever he went.

  Near Peking the Empress of Britain became icebound and they had to transfer to a heavy ice-breaking steamer and slowly smash their way to shore. Inland all the lakes and rivers were frozen hard. ‘I have fallen in love with China,’ Charlotte wrote to Nancy Astor. ‘...I felt at home there – I belonged there!’ Shaw attended his first classical Chinese theatre in Peking and later told a baffled Chinese novelist how deeply impressed he had been by ‘the throwing and the catching of bundles and hot towels deftly performed from great distances in the auditorium by the ushers’. But to an English composer, he wrote:

  ‘When there is a speech to be delivered, the first (and only) fiddler fiddles at the speaker as if he were lifting a horse over the Grand National jumps; an ear splitting gong clangs at him; a maddening castanet clacks at him; and finally the audience joins in and incites the fiddler to redouble his efforts. You at once perceive that this is the true function of the orchestra in the theatre and that the Wagnerian score is only gas and gaiters.’

  In matters of art, Shaw felt, the Chinese had an instinct for doing things right. At Tientsin he heard ‘a most lovely toned gong, a few flageolets (I don’t know what else to call them) which specialized in pitch without tone, and a magnificent row of straight brass instruments reaching to the ground... They all played the same note, and played it all the time, like the E flat in the Rheingold prelude; but it was rich in harmonics, like the note of the basses in the temple.

  ‘At the first pause I demanded that they should play some other notes to display all the possibilities of the instrument. This atheistic proposal stunned them. They pleaded that they had never played any other note... and that to assert that there was more than one note was to imply that there is more than one god. But the man with the gong rose to the occasion and proved that in China as in Europe the drummer is always the most intelligent person in the band. He snatched one of the trumpets, waved it in the air like a mail coach guard with a posthorn, and filled the air with flourishes and fanfares and Nothung motifs. We must make the BBC import a dozen of these trumpets to reinforce our piffling basses.’

  Shaw and Charlotte ended the expedition in a Chinese air-marshal’s biplane, its seats open to the skies as they soared high over the Great Wall where the Chinese and Japanese armies were fighting, and higher still on its flight back, so high they could see neither the Great Wall nor the fighting because ‘the Chinese do not study identification marks before they fire’.

  *

  They arrived in Japan showing signs of exhaustion. Though the Empress of Britain made stops at Beppu, Kobe and Yokohama, Charlotte had withdrawn into her cabin like a snail in its shell. Shaw was using a walking-stick, but could still fence with fifty journalists for an hour or so. Dazzled by his pink cheeks and keen eyes ‘like an airplane pilot’, they conveyed to readers the wonder of his straight back, white tennis shoes, and all the other cheerful features of his seventy-seven-year-old boyishness.

  One advantage of age was that it made you recklessly candid. Shaw’s visit had been heralded by the first eruption for more than a century of Mount Aso, the world’s largest active volcano, and coincided with an earthquake. To the Japanese authorities this seemed ominous. ‘Foreigners with technical knowledge have always been welcome here, foreigners with ideas much less welcome,’ explained a British resident in Tokyo. ‘Now Mr Shaw is the “fo
reigner with ideas” par excellence, and from the Japanese point of view the worst possible ideas at that.’ For a month the newspapers had been filled with explanatory and emollient articles about him. Now he spoke to them direct.

  Turning his back on the beautiful Bay of Beppu, Japan’s Inland Sea, he began what was to lengthen into a ten-day press conference, uttering seismic criticisms round a country where, as he later wrote in the Preface to On the Rocks, ‘it is a crime to have “dangerous thoughts”’. He was referring to Japan’s Peace Preservation Law under which the harbouring of ‘dangerous thoughts’ was punishable by imprisonment. The knowledge that he was speaking for those who could not freely speak for themselves charged his words with extra force.

  He started by trying to weaken the heroic central spring of Japan’s militaristic foreign policy. The conflict in Manchuria ‘won’t be won by courage and Bushido,’ he warned; ‘it will be won by machinery’. Like all wars it was being fought in ‘self-defence’, but of what value was such an alibi, he asked, when more women could be killed by bombs in modern warfare than soldiers by shells? All thinking people had learnt from the Great War that no one could control or predict the consequences of war in the twentieth century: even the victors risked revolution and bankruptcy. Though careful not to involve the Imperial Family in his criticisms, he trained his guns on imperialistic patriotism as a force that, though temporarily uniting Japan, must ultimately destroy it.

  After a few days’ reconnaissance at Kobe, Osaka, Nara and Kyoto, he switched his offensive to Japan’s social and economic policies which were as much feared abroad, he said, as her militarism. The exploitation of men, women and children who were willing to work twice as long as people in other countries for half the wages made Japan the deadly enemy of workers throughout the rest of the world. Japan was ‘measuring her prosperity by the magnitude of her exports instead of the well-being of her people’.

  At Osaka he felt he was entering ‘a huge industrial hell’. He noticed the dirty women and children, saw their squalid huts and breathed in the acrid fumes of the place, recognizing that ‘Japanese cities are like our cities one hundred years ago’. They had abandoned their own feudal system and having been converted to Victorian values were ‘busy making fortunes for half a dozen people’.

  Shaw emphasized that he had ‘no feeling against Japan where I was treated extremely well’. Though he was spreading a rash of embarrassment among ambassadors, consuls, cultural attachés and high commissioners in British embassies round the world, his popularity had soared. Diplomatically it was baffling. ‘The more ruthless his statements, the more the public loved him,’ a British consular official G. B. Sansom reported in an embassy memorandum.

  ‘When, instead of praising the cherry blossom and the samurai spirit, he said that... Japanese cities were slums that ought to be blown up... everybody was delighted. In fact, one prominent journalist complained to me that Mr Shaw had been far too mild... On the other hand, a secretary in the Chinese Legation told me with great pride, that Mr Shaw had said far more awful things about China than about Japan.’

  George Sansom was deputed to look after Shaw and arrange his programme in Tokyo. Arriving at Yokohama, his wife Katharine discovered ‘an old man wandering with a slightly lost look on the deck of the ship’ who became rejuvenated in conversation. ‘G.B.S. will love to go with you,’ Charlotte instructed her. ‘But don’t let him talk too much; he always does. And please, make him rest after lunch.’ During lunch at the Sansoms’ house in the British Embassy compound, he performed such antics while demonstrating points of musical instrumentation that the elderly butler and two maids ‘gave up the struggle for correct deportment and fled from the room’. Protesting at being made to rest after lunch, he immediately fell asleep.

  His appearance in the streets of Tokyo on his way to theatres, museums, Waseda University and the Upper House of the Diet (where he brought all business to a halt) was like the progress of a hero, interrupted yard by yard with ‘old countrywomen climbing into buses, children, old men, chic girls, shop assistants – you could see each and every one with excited gaze and gaping mouth saying, “Shaw San!”’

  Sansom had arranged for him to have a private meeting with the Prime Minister, Admiral Makoto Saito. A reporter in the next room overheard them laughing exuberantly as they discussed old age. Afterwards Shaw remarked to Sansom that he did not understand how state affairs could be conducted by such an ‘amiable old nincompoop’.

  ‘Above all,’ he told one of his Japanese audiences, ‘I am a man of the theatre.’ His encounter with the fanatical Minister of War, General Araki, was remarkable theatre. The playwright and General introduced themselves in a grand waiting-room watched by some splendidly bemedalled officers. Suddenly large double doors sprang open and a pack of thirty snapping press photographers poured in, driving back the soldiers and encircling the two protagonists. The air filled with the explosions and smoke, as the chorus of cameramen ‘grinning and snarling like wild beasts... mauled the general and Mr Shaw... It was an awful scene,’ George Sansom later recalled.

  Meanwhile the full cast assembled round a table: G. B. Sansom seconding G.B.S., a Japanese Colonel shadowing the General, and somewhat in the manner of Pamphilius and Simpronius, the Private Secretaries to the King in The Apple Cart, ‘two ridiculously earnest young officers taking notes’. Each time their conversation started up, they were tantalizingly interrupted by a soubrette in the shape of the General’s daughter, a pretty girl ‘who kept on bringing cakes and tea and sandwiches at inconvenient moments’.

  The comedy gave way to philosophy as General Araki strove to convert G.B.S. to his ‘philosophy of earthquakes’. The General believed that earthquakes were good. They prevented people from becoming too attached to their possessions. They were deeper, the General ventured, than air-raids. In his reply, Shaw conceded that England was unhappily deficient in moral advantages of this kind. Possibly General Araki would favour the planting of dynamite by the British War Minister to provide artificial earthquakes periodically. ‘But we have our earthquakes in England,’ Shaw added. ‘When people think that their institutions, their religions, their beliefs are firm and immutable, some disagreeable fellow like me comes along and upsets their cherished convictions. Now you need that kind of earthquake in Japan!’

  In his conversation with Madame Sun, Shaw had described Stalin as ‘a practical man’ who paid ‘little attention to theory’ and was ‘unscrupulous in trying to reach his goal’. Now, reflecting how closely General Araki resembled Stalin, he assured him that were he to visit Moscow he would return to Tokyo a devout Communist. He also offered the General a military tip: give priority to octogenarians, followed by septuagenarians then sexagenarians, when conscripting men for the army and sending them to the front.

  In a memorandum sent by the British ambassador to the Foreign Secretary in London the occasion was judged to be ‘a great success’. General Araki praised Shaw’s epigrammatic ‘life view’. But he still did not think Englishmen understood earthquakes: one ‘does not just experience an earthquake and then forget about it’.

  In Shaw’s honour a special performance had been arranged at the Kudan Noh Theatre. Shaw had read some articles by his Japanese translator Yonejirō Noguchi on Noh theory and was quoted as saying: ‘I understand though I don’t understand.’ In particular he had been struck by some of the contrasts in technique, such as the deployment of ghosts, use of chorus, and the sense of continuity suggested by the passageway of the thrust stage as opposed to the picture-frame of the proscenium stage in Western theatre.

  Following the performance of the first work, a warrior-ghost play of the Komparu school called Tomoe, Shaw rose to give a short speech of thanks saying he had comprehended the ‘artistic intention’ of what he had seen. Artists and poets of the theatre would always do their work out of the necessity to follow a sincere impulse, he said, even if doing it meant destroying the human race – an outcome that might cause ‘some of us’ to follow
it more enthusiastically. He seemed overcome by a sudden revulsion against all his trekking through the insincerities of international politics. In this theatre and among these actors he felt at home. ‘I belong to it and it belongs to me.’

  *

  The climax of this world tour in March 1933 was Shaw’s first visit to North America. In his twenties, Shaw had momentarily thought of emigrating to the United States. ‘I could have come when I was young and beautiful,’ he wrote when in his sixties he turned down an invitation from the New York chapter of the Drama League of America. ‘I could have come when I was mature and capable.’ But in his seventies, ‘I cannot help asking myself whether it is not now too late’. Invitations had come in ‘at the rate of 60 per minute all the time’, but ‘I am as far as ever from seriously contemplating it,’ he wrote when refusing an offer in 1921.

  These refusals masked a real and complicated fear. He was in some ways a natural American (‘I’m like New York. It’s hell and damnation for me to be doing nothing’) who carried on a life-long quarrel with the United States very much in the manner of Charles Dickens. ‘This pretence of being affectionate cousins is pure poison,’ he wrote. ‘...Better, where there is volcanic activity under the lid to lift the lid once in a while than sit on it until it blows off!’ ‘I do not want to see the Statue of Liberty,’ he added. ‘...I am a master of comic irony. But even my appetite for irony does not go as far as that!’