Yet one day something would have to take the place of the League of Nations. Though ‘weak and slow and helpless and confused’ as Gilbert Murray acknowledged, it had been a first tentative step towards Shaw’s court of pure justice now being dismissed by critics as a midsummer night’s dream. Shaw had wanted to use his audiences as juries who would evaluate this Platonic investigation into public morals and hear the case for open government where ‘no walls can hide you, and no distance deaden your lightest whisper’; he wanted to show them the enormous pains that dictators will take to win public opinion – their opinion; he wanted them to attend another Shavian Judgment Day and see in the false apocalypse the falsity of despair.
But many critics disliked it. They had hoped to see a grand Shavian paradox with the tyrants tumbled from their thrones and the victims raised up into high places. Where audiences laughed, these critics felt uneasy. Shaw had admitted that his play ‘flatters them [the dictators] enormously’. This embarrassed many Shavians. Reviewing the London production, Desmond MacCarthy objected: ‘In this disputatious extravaganza, which Mr Shaw calls “A Play of the Moment”, the case for the Jew ought of course to have been vigorously put. It was not. Nor was the case of the democrat... [Shaw] has been false to his mission in life. Until recent years one of the things I have admired most in him has been a spontaneous chivalry... Speaking for myself, it [Geneva] made me ask if it were possible that I had been a fool about Bernard Shaw all my writing life.’
Shaw’s extra act is an attempt to give a technical answer to MacCarthy’s objections without destroying the genre in which he was working. The act defines the ‘Lake change’ that has turned the League Secretary away from the philistine mainland towards the rich and strange figure of the Judge. It also separates everyone into their political and biological components by allowing them a few minutes’ privacy in this public play. As political beings they have come to Geneva to air their grievances and push their interests. In this political aspect they are all their own worst enemies. But biologically their differences are life-enhancing. Begonia Brown pairs off with the Judge; the Jew dines with the Widow; and Sir Orpheus spends his evening with the Soviet Commissar. All this supports the Judge’s statement in the last act that even the dictators themselves seem ‘personally harmless human beings’ though their political deeds call for ‘nothing short of your immediate execution’.
Shaw believed that critics were reacting to his characters as if they were actual people rather than political abstractions. They had wanted him to take sides. The result was that Shaw’s play was equally unpopular with pro- and anti-Nazis – the proper fate, perhaps, for an unpleasant play.
The question remains as to whether his use of Aristophanic comedy was appropriate in presenting part of history that would culminate in the killing of six million Jews in concentration camps. Lysistrata had been written to stop a war and Geneva was written in the hope of helping to prevent one. It is a piece of stage diplomacy, a variant to Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, by someone who remembered the horror and futility of the first war against Germany and refused to be drawn into popular confusion between reality and myth. All that a playwright can do, Shaw wrote, ‘is to extract comedy and tragedy from the existing situation and wait and see what will become of it’. The tragedy is implicit in his play, the comedy broad and explicit. Battler protests to the Judge that the court is ‘making fun of us’, and one of the prosecutors gives Shaw’s answer: ‘God has ordained that when men are childish enough to fancy that they are gods they become what you call funny. We cannot help laughing at them.’
But it was not possible to laugh in the 1940s and Geneva was to become Shaw’s ‘most frequently disparaged play’. He disparaged it himself. ‘What a horrible play!’ he exclaimed. But ‘I have to write plays like Geneva. It is not that I want to.’ He believed that the effective way of exposing his dictators was not to falsify historical fact by allowing their accusers to dominate the court, but to let us see the authentic miming of their dramaturgical tricks, their bluster and defiance, mystical flights and neurotic fears, and the face-saving gestures that reveal the littleness of their brief authority.
‘Authority is a sort of genius: either you have it or you have not,’ Bombardone tells the court. The nature of authority is the theme of Geneva. ‘Your objective is domination,’ the Judge replies to the dictators. His own objective is to create a code of justice that serves the desire for harmony underlying the discord of our lives. The dictators’ authority stands on Will, is violent, and artificially imposes order; the Judge’s authority proceeds from the imagination, is settled, and stands on faith. When the future of the world is threatened by a science fiction disaster, the dictators are suddenly reduced from archetypes to stereotypes.
‘A moment ago we were important persons: the fate of Europe seemed to depend on us. What are we now?’ asks the Judge. Only he and the Secretary retain their stature. Only they, at the final curtain, can still tell truth from falsehood and know that the end of the world is not in fact at hand.
*
Shortly before the opening of Geneva in London, Shaw began his last pleasant play, ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’. ‘It’s about the time of Charles II,’ Charlotte wrote. ‘Such a lot of interesting people lived then & he is throwing them all in together to sink or swim. I am rather pleased about it.’ Beatrice Webb also felt pleased. ‘I read the first scene – brilliant dialogue... ’ she wrote on 11 January 1939. ‘If he can bring in some sort of striking incident into the play and not limit himself to sparkling talk, it may turn out A.1.’
Written in the aftermath of Pygmalion’s cinema triumph, ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’ was begun as an ‘educational history film’ for Gabriel Pascal. The cast were to be sumptuously clothed in seventeenth-century costumes ‘regardless of expense, numbers and salaries’. By the time he completed it on 3 May 1939 it had turned into a Shavian Restoration comedy. Either because he now lacked the vitality or else because he had no interest left in the devices and excitements of dramatic action, the play lacks the ‘striking incident’ that Beatrice Webb believed characterized his best work. It is a conversation piece, diversified by moments of burlesque, recitation and vaudeville, and alive with anachronisms that anticipate the future. ‘Playwrights have their just privileges,’ wrote Maynard Keynes, celebrating ‘the proleptic quality’ of these anachronisms.
The two continuous scenes of the long first act are set in the cheerful library of a large house Shaw invents for Isaac Newton at Cambridge. Here, one golden day, Newton’s calculations into the future and the past are creatively interrupted by a procession of unheralded visitors. Charles II (travelling incognito as Mr Rowley) and a big man dressed in leather with bright eyes and a powerful voice who turns out to be George Fox arrive together (‘the spiritual powers before the temporal,’ says Charles, ushering in Fox before him). They are pursued by Charles’s brother James, an obtuse and bigoted Catholic; and three of the King’s ladies, Nell Gwynn, Barbara Villiers, the jealous Duchess of Cleveland, and the ‘baby-faced’ Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, who has called on Isaac Newton for a love philtre. Finally the portrait painter Godfrey Kneller turns up in search of the King. All of them stay to lunch.
‘You find yourself dining with all sorts,’ Begonia Brown had remarked in the extra act to Geneva. There are several cross-references between the two plays. In Charles, whose education was completed ‘at the Hague’, the Geneva spirit resides. But Shaw has now turned from the riddle of authority to the mysterious process of learning. From the blends and clashes of this diverse group everyone learns something. ‘You unsettle my mind,’ Fox tells James, Duke of York. ‘I find your company agreeable to me, but very unsettling,’ he tells Nell Gwynn. Charles encourages this unsettling process: ‘The settled mind stagnates, Pastor.’ Fox’s imagination acknowledges that ‘Divine grace takes many strange forms’ as he goes in to lunch arm in arm with ‘the player woman’ Nell Gwynn. ‘You rem
ind me that where my Master went I must follow.’
The meeting Shaw arranges in his play between Newton and Kneller had its origin in his own meeting with Einstein at the Savoy in 1930. Here he coupled Einstein’s name with Newton’s as great ‘makers of universes’ (as opposed to the ‘makers of empires’ who populate Geneva). ‘Newton invented a straight line,’ he said.
‘...he invented the force which would make the straight line fit the straight lines of his universe – and bend them – and that was the force of gravitation... the book of that universe ... was not a magical marvellous thing like a Bible. It was a matter-of-fact British thing like a Bradshaw... Then an amazing thing happened. A young professor got up in the middle of Europe and [said]... “The world is not a British rectilinear world. It is a curvilinear world, and the heavenly bodies go in curves”... I reminded myself that Leonardo da Vinci, the artist, born twenty-one years before Copernicus, wrote down in his notebook... “The earth is a moon of the sun.” And later on the English artist, William Hogarth, a contemporary of Newton – their lives overlapped by thirty years –... said “The line of nature is a curve”. He anticipated our guest.’
When he came to write Good King Charles, Shaw found that Hogarth’s life had overlapped with Newton’s by only twenty-two years and could not be fitted into the year of his modern genesis 1680. So he fell back on Kneller, whose dates just fitted in, granting him a paraphrase of Hogarth’s ‘the line of beauty is a curve’. When the artist’s ‘different kind of understanding’ joins issue with the scientist’s, Newton suddenly wakes from his dream of a rectilinear universe and is endowed with the foresight of an Einstein. ‘I have made Newton aware of something wrong with the perihelion of Mercury,’ Shaw gleefully explained in his Preface. ‘Not since Shakespeare made Hector of Troy quote Aristotle has the stage perpetrated a more staggering anachronism.’
‘You presume to teach me my profession,’ objects the arrogant Kneller in his first speech of the play. Good King Charles is a demonstration of how every professional can learn something from the amateur. The atmosphere, over which the King presides rather like the Waiter in You Never Can Tell, is largely created by Charles’s mistresses – it is, for example, Louise de Kéroualle who sees that ‘Mr Kneller and Mr Newton seem to mean exactly the same thing; only one calls it beauty and the other gravitation.’
Charles II’s regular business on the stage had been to act the principal lover in historical romances. He would stride on as a gorgeously costumed walking gentleman and from time to time sit down so that Moll Davis and Sweet Nell could nest on his knee. Shaw transforms the Merry Monarch who lived so badly and died so well, who never said a foolish thing nor ever did a wise one, into a version of King Magnus from The Apple Cart, a man whose reputation has been warped by official histories.
Good King Charles is both the culmination of Shaw’s work as a historical dramatist, which had begun in 1895 with the ‘Fictitious Paragraph of History’ about Napoleon he called The Man of Destiny, and a merging of the chronicle play into allegorical fable and extravaganza. The third scene, which takes the form of a short second act, reads like an epilogue to the play – but it does not resemble the Epilogue to Saint Joan; it is a companion piece to the Interlude from The Apple Cart.
In the ‘late afternoon’ the Shavian King comes to the untidy boudoir of his wife, Catherine of Braganza. He has left ‘one of Nature’s queens’ and come home to his domestic queen, who is ‘guiltless of sex appeal’.
They talk and the fifty-year-old Charles asks: ‘can anything I can ever do make up to you for my unfaithfulness?’ Shaw allows Catherine to answer: ‘People think of nothing but that, as if that were the whole of life. What care I about your women?... You have never been really unfaithful to me.’ Though this reads like a sentimental gloss on what Charlotte had once felt, it may approximate to her retrospective view, at the age of eighty, of G.B.S.’s flirtations. But Shaw has the honesty to hold some balance between the two women ‘I was born to love’. Charles admits to one real unfaithfulness, with the beautiful childish Frances Theresa Stuart, whose portrait as Minerva by Sir Peter Lely he insisted should figure on the coinage of the realm. By making the woman who represents Stella Campbell no longer a Queen of Nature with an act to herself, but merely one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour who does not actually have a part in Good King Charles, Shaw was making amends to Charlotte for The Apple Cart Interlude. ‘I never touched her,’ Charles tells his wife. ‘But she had some magic that scattered my wits... I was furious when she ran away from me and married Richmond.’ And Catherine admits: ‘it was the only time I ever was jealous.’
But they had come through: ‘we are grown-up now,’ Charles hopes. The play exhibits Charles as ‘the best of husbands’, and the message he is sending to Charlotte is that theirs had been the best of marriages made on earth. The ‘hopeless tenderness’ that attaches the King to the Queen at the end of The Apple Cart unites the King and Queen throughout this second act of Good King Charles. There is only one fear that falls between them, and that is a fear of the other’s death. ‘Long live the King!’ cries Catherine. ‘May the Queen live for ever!’ exclaims Charles.
And the curtain descends on them both.
6
Trebitsch über Alles
I am tired of the way in which the newspapers... continue to make it appear that I am an admirer of dictatorship. All my work shows the truth to be otherwise.
‘G.B.S. Replies to the Man in the Street’, The Star (4 August 1938)
By the end of the 1920s Shaw had acquired the status of a German classic. While ‘Sudermann has long disappeared from the stage... while even Hauptmann occupies a very limited space,’ wrote Leon Feuchtwanger in 1928, ‘...Bernard Shaw since the war reigns supreme’.
Despite the record run of Saint Joan Shaw was alarmed by what he began to learn of Reinhardt’s production. Scenes had been scissored, speeches superimposed, and Trebitsch had been a wide-eyed collaborator in this ‘monstrous misrepresentation’. When they met in 1927 Shaw rather took to Reinhardt. ‘He looked extraordinarily well and open-airy, as if he had never been near a theatre in his life,’ he wrote. ‘I never saw a man less spoilt by his profession.’
But The Apple Cart was an even greater travesty than Saint Joan. Reinhardt had sandwiched his political comedy between episodes of jazzed-up Bach and Chopin, and served it to German audiences as a racy operetta. Boanerges, attired like a racegoer’s bookie, appeared as a Jew; Proteus was a ‘bilious fool’; and the goddess Orinthia prostituted as an ‘unscrupulous little kiosk-mamselle’. ‘Why have you not challenged him [Reinhardt], shot him, sabred him, buried him in unconsecrated ground,’ Shaw demanded of Trebitsch; ‘...you must either quarrel with Reinhardt or quarrel with me. Clearly you must quarrel with Reinhardt.’
Alas, it was almost impossible to quarrel with Trebitsch. He was as sensitive as a child and full of innocent happiness. What neither he nor Reinhardt realized at the time was that their versions of these plays fed the atmosphere that, substituting one sort of pornography for another, was lifting the Nazi regime into power. No wonder Hitler was to declare that St Joan was portrayed ‘much more faithfully by Shaw than by Schiller’ when the German version emphasized the mystical nature of power vested in someone physically unimpressive yet gifted with the oratorical magic of patriotic ‘voices’. No wonder William Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, expressed the conviction that Hitler ‘will one day rank with Joan of Arc’. The lonely genius of power was again underscored by Reinhardt’s King Magnus in The Apple Cart. The King’s ‘strangely innocent relations’ with the flapper-cocotte Orinthia were presented as the sexual recreations of a Nietzschean Superman whose political inspiration rose clear above the poisoned well of anti-German Jewish democracy. What had been intended by Shaw as a warning against dreaming the old dreams became the inducement to a new nightmare, in short ‘a pornographic Jew baiting farce,’ he told Trebitsch. ‘How can I ever expect a decent German to speak to me again?..
. Rheinhardt [sic] must find other authors to drag through the mud... I have been kinder with him than he deserves (merely for your sake)... I cannot afford another such disgrace, nor can you.’
A colleague of Reinhardt’s, Robert Klein, directed Too True to be Good. Shaw was accused of nihilism and warned that the new Germany would no longer tolerate attacks on the family. When the play moved to Mannheim early in 1933, it was disrupted by Nazi shouts of ‘Jew Shaw!’ until the police came to restore order. ‘Can it be possible that my vogue in Germany, of which I have been so proud, has been all a mistake?’ Shaw had asked.
At the beginning of 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, Shaw’s reputation seemed to be on the turn. In March Reinhardt left Germany for Austria and that summer ceded his theatres via the government to the German people. By 1937 he was safely unemployed in the United States. ‘In all he had introduced nine of Shaw’s plays to Berlin, produced another five and added two others in Vienna for over 1,300 performances,’ Professor Samuel Weiss notes, ‘second only to Shakespeare in Reinhardt’s repertory.’
Until Hitler entered Austria early in 1938, Trebitsch experienced the Nazi phenomenon chiefly as an economic setback. The new Germany did not want foreign playwrights: ‘snobbish trifles’, as Shaw and Pirandello were described. Trebitsch came from a wealthy family and was married to the widow of a Russian Grand Duke. Expensive habits were ingrained. During the 1930s he looked towards Shaw’s films to buoy him up. But G.B.S. was oddly unhelpful. He refused to license a German film of The Chocolate Soldier (the musical version of Arms and the Man), he was downright discouraging about the Hollywood prospects of Jitta’s Atonement and he accused Trebitsch of deception over his German-language film of Pygmalion. Rather than be a party to such bargains, he preferred to ‘advance’ Trebitsch money. ‘Shall I lend you £500 (equivalent to £15,000 in 1997) on account pending some transaction between us for your translation rights?’ he asked at the end of 1935. ‘If so, send me a wire with the single word Yes, and I will remit.’ But such sums were small in comparison with Trebitsch’s dreams of a movie fortune.
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