Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  *

  Between these two world cruises Shaw made one last evangelical venture, the most far-flung of all his sea-voyages, to New Zealand. By now he had perfected his boat drill. After early morning exercises, he would search the promenade deck for an ‘unprotected lady who is ripe for a friendship with a celebrity. I plant my deck chair beside hers and ask her whether she minds my working at a new play instead of talking. She is so delighted at being given the role of protector of G.B.S. that whenever anyone comes near she makes agitated signs to warn him off, whispering that Mr Shaw is at work on a new play. So I make a new friend and get perfect peace during the entire voyage.’ At the end of this trip he was able to present Blanche Patch, who had as usual remained on duty at Whitehall Court, with shorthand drafts of three new plays: The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, The Millionairess and The Six of Calais.

  New Zealand had passed a law enabling the government to refuse landing to ‘persons who have recently visited Communist countries’. A few people had advocated that Shaw be disbarred from entry and there was ‘some lively press discussion as to what would happen to me’ before his arrival. As he and Charlotte came down the gangway the dockers began cheering – and so began ‘a sort of Royal progress’.

  ‘I shan’t do it again,’ he had promised after his lecture at the Metropolitan Opera House: ‘I am too old for these feats of endurance.’ But he could not quite hold to this resolution. In the event he gave one lecture to the hastily formed Wellington Fabian Society and a national broadcast, also relayed to Australia, entitled ‘Shaw speaks to the Universe’. His address to the Wellington Fabians was a cheerful demolition of parliamentary democracy. In Britain, he told them, the House of Commons had become a House of Hypocrisy, which seemed to suit Ramsay MacDonald but had confounded Keir Hardie. ‘He was the finest gentleman in Parliament. But that meant that he never understood that an English gentleman could get up in Parliament and tell a lie, or, still worse, convict him who never told a lie anywhere, of telling a lie in Parliament.’ Shaw appealed to New Zealand socialists to free themselves from this lying model of government based on Westminster. If the sublime virtue of democracy was a mirage then so also was the black vice of totalitarianism. All law had to be totalitarian and everyone lived under a dictatorship of the proletariat or a dictatorship of the plutocracy. Shaw’s advice was categorical: stick to socialism and let it dictate, rather than a clique of wealthy businessmen.

  The New Zealand Government waived its broadcasting regulations which barred all controversial statements and allowed Shaw to say whatever he wanted. He was seeing a number of socialist politicians during his visit, including two future Labour Prime Ministers, Peter Fraser and Walter Nash, and he had briefed himself carefully. ‘You have in Wellington a remarkable milk supply, which is the envy of the whole world,’ he said.

  ‘...But your milk I think costs too much. I just want to ask, why not distribute milk freely?... when you have distributed free milk, which is just as possible as free water, I would then suggest that you should go on from free milk to free bread... [then] such a thing as a hungry child will be impossible in New Zealand.’

  The first Labour Government that came to power at the end of 1935 distributed half a pint of free pasteurized milk each school day to all schoolchildren. Shaw would receive grateful letters from New Zealand mothers (children themselves grew up feeling less grateful) but replied that the credit lay with the New Zealand Government for implementing his suggestion. The scheme lasted for thirty years and was expanded in 1941, not by free bread, but by free apples once the war had cut New Zealand’s export market to Britain. This was therefore less of a socialist initiative than a solution to the problem of an unsaleable agricultural surplus.

  To writers of a younger generation watching him stalk across the international scene like one of ‘those big heads on stilts in carnival processions’, it was astonishing how G.B.S. got away with his polemical feats. Fame was his passport. He had no job to lose and he exploited the world’s fame-snobbery in order to break the conventions that harnessed other people. He aired unspeakable opinions vital to a democracy. With a prophetic eye on the German Olympic Games, he pointed to competitive sport as creating ‘more bad feeling, bad manners and international hatred than any other popular movement’; he criticized the exclusivity of New Zealand’s immigration laws which let in only Scandinavians, British and a few other people from north-west Europe; and he described as ‘nonsensical’ a system of employment that encouraged overtime from some workers and left others without jobs.

  Above all, he begged New Zealand to stop acting as a dairy for the rest of the world (which was learning how to milk its own cows) and, once everyone in the country had plenty of cheese, cream, and butter on their bread, for pity’s sake to ‘produce something else’. Foreseeing something of what would happen with the European Common Market, he attacked the illusions of imperial-patriotic ‘En-Zeds’ who called England ‘Home’ and relied on this special relationship for trade protection to the end of the century. ‘Keep your wool on your own backs; harness your own water power; get your fertilising nitrates from your own air; develop your own manufacturers and eat your own food; and you can snap your fingers at Britain’s follies.’

  Happy the country that would not be dependent on trade in the years to come, for she would not be dominated by foreign capitalists. After a reminder that ‘all tourists are not exemplary characters like myself, he warned people against too much reliance on tourist traffic: ‘If New Zealand wants to develop a big tourist industry it means that New Zealanders are to become hotel-keepers, waiters, cooks... the attractions of New Zealand are better kept for the recreation of New Zealanders themselves.’

  After five days in Auckland they hired a chauffeur and sped off on a three-week motor tour of the North and South Islands. Charlotte was fearful that ‘G.B.S. will get the bit in his teeth and drag me about travelling’. By travelling she meant walking. Herself, she ‘never walks a yard when there is a vehicle – even a wheelbarrow – to be had for love or money,’ G.B.S. had told Lady Gregory. Himself, he loved walking and, according to their breathless Maori guide at Rotorua, was the fastest walker in the Antipodes. Charlotte however could usually catch up by car, and together they examined strange thermal peaks, craters, and sulphurous steam holes reeking of brimstone like Hades – ‘pure and boiling & bubbling & making the most absurd faces at one’ – over which Charlotte could not help laughing and which Shaw complimented as being the most damnable spot he had ever visited, adding admiringly that he would have willingly paid £10 not to have seen it. They floated through the wonderful glow-worm cave at Waitomo, a firmament of blue shimmering lights that, since noise would extinguish them, completely silenced G.B.S. They motored beside the sub-tropical vegetation of the bush, climbed high up to the national park at Chateau Tongariro, and saw the sacred mountains covered in snow.

  Wherever he went he had to combat a tendency to assume that he had come to New Zealand to study the Maoris. He could see nothing wrong with the Maoris – except that they were probably better off before the Europeans arrived. It was a pity that everyone had to study a pedantic treaty in differing versions from the last century to find out how to behave to one another rather than consult their own best instincts.

  They ended their tour in Wellington. At the Truby King Karitane Hospital, G.B.S. spoke with the matron, mothers and nurses but unlike a politician, reporters observed, took little notice of the babies. Afterwards he was driven round to meet Sir Truby King. This pre-Spock revolutionary of infant care appealed to many facets of G.B.S. The socialist warmly approved the New Zealand system of free clinics for mothers; the adolescent who had been so impressed by Vandeleur Lee responded to Truby King’s insistence on the health-giving properties of ‘fresh air, light, warmth, proper food’; and the boy who had suffered from the neglect of his mother and transferred his loyalty to the adopted mother country applauded a reformer who placed more importance on nurse-educators than on moth
erly instinct.

  Bouquets of flowers were passed through their portholes as the Rangitane cast off from Wellington on 14 April. Legendary stories were already floating in their wake: how G.B.S. had borrowed a lady’s scarlet bathing-suit and plunged into the breakers at Mount Maunganui; how at Auckland he had presented Adolf Hitler’s My Struggle to the Turnbull Library. It had been a carefree month – even the journalists were amiable, presenting this ‘old elf in the zip-fastened jersey’ as a brilliant social diagnostician and advocate of national welfare.

  He had sensed that the country was on the verge of a political ascent to socialism. It was like looking at ‘a growing child,’ he said. On his arrival at Auckland he had announced that ‘I have been in Russia. It is a very remarkable place. I want to see if New Zealand is any better.’ In one respect he did find it better. ‘Changes which have been made peacefully and reasonably in New Zealand have been made violently and even ferociously in other parts of the Empire.’ One observer in Wellington noticed that ‘Mrs Shaw, quietly knitting in the far corner of their Midland hotel sitting-room, stirred uneasily’ as she heard her husband embark on a long eulogium of the Soviet system and that she ‘ordered a mug of cocoa’ to comfort herself. But as Charlotte later told a journalist: ‘I only appear conventional on the surface... underneath I am the most unconventional of persons.’

  After crossing the sea to what Mark Twain had called ‘Junior England’, Shaw experienced something of what Trollope had found the previous century – ‘You are, as it were, next door to your own house.’ So New Zealand came to suggest an idealized Ireland. ‘If I were beginning life, I am not sure that I would not start in New Zealand,’ he said. ‘...I, being an old Victorian, am much more at home here than in London. You are quite natural to me...’ Such tributes suggest a mirage reflecting what his life might have been like in another Ireland without a tearful childhood and the divisive violence of Irish politics. ‘If I showed my true feelings I would cry,’ he told a photographer on board the Rangitane who had asked him to give his brightest smile on leaving New Zealand: ‘it’s the best country I’ve been in.’

  4

  Prefaces to Death

  I feel apologetic for my existence now that all decent men of my age are committing suicide... But I can still write to some purpose, and so must brazen it out until some assassin saves me the trouble of shooting myself.

  Shaw to Mrs Patrick Campbell (16 April 1932)

  The prefaces Shaw wrote in these years of travel are his missionary tracts. It is a loveless territory which these writings of the early 1930s illuminate. The prefaces to On the Rocks and Too True to be Good, the ‘Preface on Bosses’ and the ‘Preface on Days of Judgment’ that precede The Millionairess and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles parade the history of the axe, the stake, the guillotine, garotte, electric chair, the disembowellings, floggings, burnings, hangings, lynchings that infest our history. He writes as one maddened by all this savagery. It was not true that it took all sorts to make a world, ‘for there are some sorts that would destroy any world very soon if they were suffered to live and have their way’. Therefore, he asks: ‘Is there really nothing to be done with such men but submit to them?’ Why should we not treat these people ‘as we treat mad dogs or adders’? For who can say that those granted premature retirement from the appalling misery of life would not be better off?

  The problem of who should earn promotion into oblivion leads Shaw to a treatise on dictatorship. Dictators were thriving in the 1930s, he believed, because parliaments had removed themselves from the needs and feelings of the people. The capitalistic system, with ‘its golden exceptions of idle richery and its leaden rule of anxious poverty’, was a desperate failure. Shaw called for a new social creed and legal code, an economic Reformation in which the nobler coinage would drive out the baser currency. He wanted to draw up a set of conditions fundamental to human society and commission a new work of social philosophy to bring Mill’s essay On Liberty into the twentieth century – what John Rawls was to attempt in A Theory of Justice in 1971.

  Shaw had put his heart into politics and grown obsessed with dictators and by death. The peculiar tension of these prefaces arises from this relish and his recoil from it. Dividing himself into two voices, the old Shaw insists on the political necessity of killing people who are already pretty well dying from too much luxury; while the young Shaw raises the banner of tolerance and argues that there may be good biological reasons for the workshy. The old Shaw declares that no hostile critic of the existing social order should behave as if he were living in his own particular Utopia: ‘Not until the criticism changes the law can the magistrate allow the critic to give effect to it.’ The young Shaw answers that ‘civilization cannot progress without criticism, and must therefore, to save itself from stagnation and putrefaction, declare impunity for criticism’. The old Shaw writes that ‘the community must drive a much harder bargain for the privilege of citizenship than it now does’. The young Shaw reminds us of Morris’s saying that ‘no man is good enough to be another man’s master’ and warns us that most ‘autocrats go more or less mad’. The old Shaw points to ‘the final reality of inequality’; the young Shaw insists that ‘rulers must be as poor as the ruled so that they can raise themselves only by raising their people’.

  So irreconcilable are Shaw’s two voices that in his Preface to On the Rocks he separates them in a dialogue between Pontius Pilate and Jesus. This experiment of a play-within-a-preface underscores the imaginative voice of the young Shaw which sounds clearer in the plays. The prefaces are increasingly dominated by the will of the old Shaw.

  *

  ‘I don’t know what I shall do with this Black Girl story,’ Shaw had written to his Edinburgh printers. But when William Maxwell suggested that, with the addition of some good illustrations, it might make an attractive little book, he began to see possibilities. After seeing a trial drawing, he picked a then unknown draughtsman and wood-engraver in his early thirties called John Farleigh who had been recommended by Maxwell. Shaw wanted pictures designed as part of the book, not ‘illustrations’ stuck into it. He was seeking to do something new in publishing that anticipated the Penguin paperback revolution of the later 1930s. ‘Half a crown is the extreme limit,’ he wrote to Otto Kyllmann.

  By publishing the book on 5 December 1932 got up to look like a Christmas card, Shaw was scheming to enter thousands of Christian homes with a fable that exposed the contemporary state of religion. Describing G.B.S. as a wonderful ‘weedkiller’ and his Black Girl as an ‘illustrated tract for the times’, Beatrice Webb judged it to be a courageous indictment of a creed ‘which is no longer practised or believed in by the majority of the citizens, rich or poor, enlightened or ignorant’.

  A first printing of 25,000 copies was followed by five additional impressions before the end of the year, and in a letter to one of his translators the following summer Shaw reported sales as being ‘roughly 100,000’ – in addition to more than 50,000 copies brought out early in 1933 by Dodd, Mead & Company in the United States.

  ‘If it were not for the author’s prestige,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary, ‘it would be considered blasphemous by all churchmen, conventional or genuine.’ Six months after publication, the Irish Government banned all sales of the Black Girl, alleging its ‘general tendency’ to be ‘indecent and obscene’. Shaw was curious to know whether the ban would be lifted if he issued a special Irish edition with the women draped in long skirts. ‘The reverend censors are not nudists, and probably regard a nude negress as the last extremity of obscenity,’ he wrote to W. B. Yeats who was marshalling the Irish Academy of Letters to challenge this censorship, which was revoked fifteen years later, in 1948.

  ‘I shall not protest,’ Shaw had written to Yeats, ‘if the Churchmen think my book subversive they are quite right from their point of view.’ But he was ‘ridiculously surprised’ by the hostility of Laurentia McLachlan. Dame Laurentia, recently elected Abbess of Stanbrook, had ‘demanded
to see the book’, and Shaw sent her a proof inscribed on the flyleaf: ‘An Inspiration which came in response to the prayers of the nuns at Stanbrook Abbey and in particular to the prayers of his dear Sister Laurentia for Bernard Shaw.’ She had not finished reading the proof when she received a tiny playlet from him set in ‘God’s office in heaven’ where God and the Archangel Gabriel are discussing the impasse between Dame Laurentia and G.B.S. It is God who represents Shaw’s view (‘I gave him a first class job in his own line’) and merely the Archangel (‘You’d better let her have her way’) who speaks for the Abbess. Nevertheless Dame Laurentia took this to mean that Shaw was withdrawing the book. ‘You have made me happy again by your nice little play and I thank you from my heart for listening to me,’ she wrote ominously. ‘...if you had published it I could never have forgiven you.’

  Nine days after its publication, and just as he was setting out on his world cruise, Shaw sent her a copy. ‘This black girl has broken out in spite of everything,’ he wrote. It was as if he had thrown a bomb. As a natural authoritarian (‘faithful servants are the worst of tyrants,’ Shaw has God tell the Archangel Gabriel), Dame Laurentia was used to deference from her famous admirers. Indignation welled up in her at Shaw’s incredible stubbornness. At the same time she felt humiliated. She had prayed that God might use her for the salvation of his soul, and now had to bear witness to a revolting profanity. Even her beloved crucifix had been twisted into the symbol of a neurosis.