Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Most years, right up to 1939, Trebitsch would come over to England and every time Shaw would amaze him by picking up the conversation exactly where they had left it twelve months previously ‘as though the earth had not, after all, travelled once around the sun since we had last been face to face with each other’. Trebitsch had come to know ‘what English hospitality meant’. At Ayot it meant sessions round the piano while G.B.S. sang Tristan to Tina’s Isolde, periods of tranquillity while he disappeared into ‘his tent at the bottom of the garden’, and when they all came together again there were ‘the blessings of vegetarian cookery’. There were also regular walks in the ‘hilly’ countryside. Keeping up with Shaw’s long joyful strides had put a terrible strain on the seams of Trebitsch’s suits. With the passing years, as his own panting figure solidified and slowed, G.B.S. appeared to be sprinting into the future, his arms swinging, nostrils eagerly extended.

  To mitigate the rigours of English hospitality, Shaw would book Trebitsch into a first-class London hotel. He also encouraged him to bring German friends to lunch at Whitehall Court – often refugees like Stefan Zweig – so that he could learn more of what was going on in Germany. It was difficult learning much from Trebitsch himself, though G.B.S. could pick up something from the fate of his translations. The Black Girl remained unpublished because ‘it would have been banned by the German censorship’ (it was eventually brought out in 1948). In 1934 On the Rocks ‘was a very great success,’ Trebitsch insisted, yet he had been obliged to give it the subtitle ‘England, Arise!’ which was taken as a summons to follow Germany’s example. The Simpleton, which was banned in Austria, and in Germany did not transfer from Leipzig to Berlin, was the last of Shaw’s plays ‘I was to translate into German while still living in my native country,’ Trebitsch recalled.

  Joseph Goebbels attended the Berlin première of The Millionairess in December 1936, but the play had to be published without its ‘Preface on Bosses’ speculating on Hitler’s Jewish ancestry and diagnosing Judophobia as ‘one of those lesions which sometimes prove fatal’. Shaw’s reputation in Nazi Germany was by now full of anomalies. Whatever he wrote for the British press was, to Trebitsch’s bewilderment, carefully edited in the German newspapers. Hitler himself went to a revival of Caesar and Cleopatra in 1939, but Geneva was forbidden to be either published or performed that year and the actor who had played Battler at Warsaw’s Teatr Polski was imprisoned after the annexation of Poland. The Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg placed Shaw among the ‘army of half-breed “artists”’ opposing the ‘revived racial spirit’; yet tributes were still paid to him in Germania, Berliner Tageblatt, and Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on his eightieth birthday. Even during the war, his work was protected from wholesale censorship and he was classified by Goebbels as a satirical, anti-plutocratic Irishman: a case on his own.

  As the 1930s advanced, Shaw felt increasingly responsible for Trebitsch. Hitler’s name is not mentioned in their correspondence until May 1933 when, condemning the Nazi Judenhetze, Shaw advised him to ‘keep out of the mêlée as much as possible. If you are pressed as to why you translate me, who am a notorious Communist... you must say that you are not concerned with all that – that you have introduced me to Germany as a great artist... But you are not committed to my opinions.’

  For much of this time Shaw treated Hitler as if he were a fellow-playwright under attack from foreign critics whose animosity was driving the Nazi national theatre crazy. Certainly the Nazis were mad on the Jewish question. ‘It is idle to argue against this sort of insanity,’ he wrote in 1933. ‘Judophobia is as pathological as hydrophobia... The Nazis are suffering from an epidemic of a very malignant disease.’ Setting aside the Jewish question, he took care to be ‘scrupulously polite and just to Hitler (which nobody else in England is)’. He welcomed the incorporation of the German trade unions into a state-directed Labour Front, as well as the introduction of a compulsory labour service.

  Shaw recognized the human instinct called nationalism that made people ‘dissatisfied unless they think they are governed by themselves and not by foreigners’. He believed that the Treaty of Versailles, which placed Germany in an inferior position, was an affront to that instinct, and that Hitler had been hoisted to power by the force of national resentment. Such was the outcome of an abuse of victory. He had urged the Allies to dismantle the military frontiers imposed by the Treaty, and believed that the weak liberal parliamentarianism of Western democracies had produced a ‘Four Power Funk’ that was positively encouraging Nazi expansionism. He saw the best hope of peace in a rearmament programme by the Allies and a pact between Britain, France, the United States and Soviet Russia which would banish the communist taboo and hold a broad equilibrium until Germany and Italy inevitably split apart and Hitler’s supremacy came to its natural end.

  Every country, Shaw believed, was entitled to its civil wars without foreign interference. He looked on the Spanish Civil War as an internal class war with Franco standing for property, privilege and ‘everything we are all taught to consider respectable’. But ‘Spain must choose for itself,’ he wrote: ‘it is really not our business.’ As Stanley Weintraub concluded: ‘For Shaw, a victory for the wrong side in Spain was preferable to a general European war, which the internationalizing of the Civil War seemed to be making inevitable.’

  ‘My slogan is “Africa for the Africans!”’ Shaw wrote in 1938. His most extreme expression of this principle came in a letter to Beatrice Webb where he admitted ‘the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable’. This was written when, wishing himself to ‘intervene’ over Sidney Webb’s stroke, he was obliged to stifle the impulse by ‘an exercise of conscious reasoning’. He had called the Nazis ‘a mentally bankrupt party’, and described Hitler as a reincarnation of Torquemada, meaning that he was not uniquely beyond historical processes but part of a pattern in human behaviour that, at some time or another, had infected all nations. ‘In every country you can find rabid people who have a phobia against Jews, Jesuits, Armenians, Negroes, Freemasons, Irishmen, or simply foreigners as such,’ he had written in the Jewish Chronicle in 1932. ‘...Political parties are not above exploiting these fears and jealousies.’ When asked by a journalist in 1938 whether Hitler had solved the Jewish problem, he replied: ‘He has created it.’ But no single nation could tackle this problem with clean hands. G.B.S. persisted in reminding readers of unfortunate facts (such as England’s treatment of the Irish or the Ku-Klux-Klan’s lynchings of Negroes) in case the itch to intervene grew virtuously irresistible. But although making the miscalculation that Hitler ‘shrinks from the massacre which the logic of his phobia demands’, he recognized that by the late 1930s this had become a world problem.

  In much that he wrote about Germany in the 1930s Shaw had Siegfried and Tina Trebitsch in the back of his mind. On 13 March 1938, the day after Hitler’s troops entered Austria, their car had been commandeered by the Nazis and their chauffeur beaten up. Three days later, having obtained Czech passports, they left Vienna, travelling to Prague and some time later to Zurich.

  ‘I dare not write a line frankly to anyone in Germany,’ Shaw had explained. The day after Hitler announced Austria’s annexation, he sent a card to Trebitsch in Vienna welcoming the ‘glorious news’ and suggesting that ‘if Tina’s health obliges you to travel, why not come to England, where we are having an extraordinarily fine spring?’ This card was forwarded to Prague. It upset Trebitsch. He could not crack its code. ‘And now you reproach me because I did not write letters pointing out that you are a Jew marked out for Nazi persecution,’ Shaw explained.

  Even after this escape, Shaw refused to take the terrible verbal revenge on Hitler that Trebitsch longed to translate. ‘What good does it do?’ he wrote. ‘...I might do you a great deal of harm.’ He immediately despatched almost £1,000 and advised Trebitsch to ‘keep very quiet within reach of Zurich until the atmosphere is a little less electric’. After reading a report by the B
erlin correspondent of the Observer stating that his translator was a Jew, he wrote to the paper describing him as ‘an uncircumcized and baptized Lutheran German... married to a lady of unquestioned Christian authenticity’ – a description puzzling to Trebitsch, who wanted to know what uncircumcised meant.

  Though living in exile, the Trebitsches did not regard themselves as refugees. They were to pass little of the next year in Switzerland, but resided at rather grand hotels in Nice and Paris. From time to time their chauffeur and housekeeper would smuggle out some of their possessions. Otherwise they lived on what they had taken with them (including Tina’s jewels) supplemented by what Shaw gave them (another £1,000 in April 1939).

  ‘I am still very sceptical as to the likelihood of war,’ Shaw wrote in March 1939. Raising Trebitsch’s morale was a method of keeping up his own spirits. He based his predictions not on what he feared but on what he hoped would happen. Having urged the Allies to make a pact with Soviet Russia, he represented Germany’s non-aggression pact with the USSR as the next best thing because now ‘Hitler is under the powerful thumb of Stalin, whose interest in peace is overwhelming’. Everyone else seemed terrified. ‘Why? Am I mad?’ he asked in The Times. A week later Britain and Germany were at war.

  Such optimism had become a necessary bond between Shaw and his German translator. At Whitehall Court that year they had both experienced what Trebitsch called ‘the justifiable premonition that this would have to be my last visit for a long time’. Before parting, they took special care to ask whether they had not forgotten anything, since it might be years before they saw each other. But, Shaw affirmed: ‘We shall both survive this bloody business.’

  NINETEEN

  1

  Uncommon Sense and Careless Talk

  History always repeats itself and yet never repeats itself.

  Shaw to C. H. Norman (22 April 1940)

  A young boy on holiday at Frinton-on-Sea saw them walking along the parade the day war was declared. They were arm in arm: he measuring his springy pace to hers and looking grave: she very slow and in tears. After the shocks of Shaw’s illnesses this news of a second world war in Charlotte’s lifetime produced a sort of nervous breakdown. She retreated miserably to her bed, while Frinton filled up with evacuee children carrying gas masks and paddling like ducks in the sea (‘they are having the time of their lives’). G.B.S. strove to lift everyone’s spirits with displays of bravado. ‘“War is Over”, Shaw Says,’ announced the New York Journal-American in the first week of October; and the following week the Daily Worker carried more Shavian optimism across its front page: ‘Cease Fire, Turn up the Lights.’

  All over the country false alarms were carrying their single note of warning through the air. ‘I absolutely refused to budge,’ Shaw wrote to Blanche Patch; ‘...there are no safe places in Frinton and the beds are very comfortable, besides being respectable places to die in.’

  It seemed that everyone had reluctantly acquiesced to this war. Public libraries and schools were commandeered, petrol was rationed, mortgage rates raised. All were exhorted to make sacrifices – the Daily Telegraph gave up its book reviews. A National Service Bill came into force conscripting men between eighteen and forty-one. Up and down the streets paraded army officers, their boots and belts aggressively polished. The King opened Parliament wearing a splendid naval uniform.

  Shaw studied the papers and listened to the news bulletins on the wireless which were becoming a focal point of the day in every home. Unlike the last war, everything was unnaturally dark and quiet. ‘The psychology of September 1939 was terribly different from that of August 1914,’ wrote Leonard Woolf. During the 1930s one political crisis had piled upon another until people now waited for the catastrophe with feelings of helplessness. ‘Yet the catastrophe we braced ourself to face did not happen,’ recorded Cecil Beaton in his diary. On 10 December Sir Henry Channon, a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Foreign Office, noted that ‘the war is 100 days old, and a damned bore it is...’ As these months of what Churchill called the ‘pretended war’ lengthened into 1940, London began to fill with ‘pathetic couples having last flings together’, crowds of bony youths, airmen on leave, debutantes, tarts, all jostling to the jazz bands of the night-clubs, gazing at the tableaux vivants at the Windmill Theatre.

  Could the war itself have been a false alarm? ‘There is still half a chance of a negotiation,’ Shaw wrote to Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman. He saw Neville Chamberlain as having been bullied by British Imperialists, without the ghost of a mandate from the people, into challenging Hitler with an unconvincing ultimatum when Britain was unprepared for war. He described the British guarantee to Poland as ‘thoughtless’ because it had nerved the Polish army to put up a desperate resistance to the German invasion, leading to the loss of many thousands of lives on both sides – while Britain, without ‘a soldier within hundreds of miles of her frontiers nor a sailor in the Baltic’, could not use her bombers for fear of starting a series of retaliatory raids.

  When, early in October, Hitler extended peace feelers to Britain and France, Shaw responded with an article ‘Uncommon Sense about the War’ in the New Statesman. This proposed setting up truce negotiations (accompanied by a suspension of hostilities) to which Britain would go ‘with quite as big a bundle of demands as Herr Hitler’ to find out whether another world war was truly unavoidable. That much was owed to those who had known the heartbreak of the last war.

  There was little enthusiasm for war in the country. ‘Everyone I speak to seems utterly bewildered and downcast,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary. Harold Nicolson, then a National Labour Member of Parliament, shared this apprehension. Like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, he privately supplied himself and his wife Vita Sackville-West with the means of committing suicide, but kept up a brave face in public. ‘I would rather go down fighting and suffering than creep out after a month or two at the cost of losing our pride.’

  G.B.S. felt no such pride. ‘I am an Irishman and you an Englishman,’ he reminded Maynard Keynes.‘...bear with me. I am sometimes useful.’ On this occasion, however, Keynes was convinced that Shaw’s uncommon sense might do harm ‘both to the chances of success in peace and the prospects of success in war’, and he recommended that his article for the New Statesman be forwarded to the Censor. When Kingsley Martin consulted the Foreign Office, he found to his surprise that Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was ‘strongly in favour of publication’. The Cabinet, some of whom wanted to ‘cease fighting Hitler and join Germany against Stalin’, was evidently curious to see what this debate between ‘responsible writers’ would reveal about public opinion. The correspondence columns of the New Statesman prolonged the debate for two months. Shaw still hoped that the defence of freedom might be left to the German people themselves. Surely they must wake up soon from the spell of Hitler’s eloquence. Keynes, too, though he quarrelled with Shaw’s mischievous tone and tactics, did not yet ‘rule out the ideal peace. It may fall within our grasp’, he wrote in the New Statesman, ‘in ways we cannot yet foresee. And then we could indeed cease fire...’

  *

  ...and turn up the lights. At the beginning of the war the Home Secretary had decided to close all ‘places of amusement’ – art galleries, cinemas, concert halls, museums, theatres. Only churches and public houses were exempt. Shaw, who believed that the arts and learned professions must be defended against any presumption that they were ‘an immoral luxury’, advised the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to follow the example of the Windmill Theatre and stay open every day, backing up his advice with a cheque for £1,000 (equivalent to £27,000 in 1997). In letters to The Times and Daily Telegraph he recalled that during the Great War the theatres had been overflowing with soldiers on leave desperately needing recreation after their miseries in the trenches. ‘Are there to be no theatres for them this time?’ he asked. ‘We have hundreds of thousands of evacuated children to be kept out of mischief and traffic dangers. Are there to be no pictures for t
hem?’

  These war years, which began and ended with productions of Saint Joan, were to witness an extraordinary refuelling of Shaw’s popularity. At the end of 1939 the curtain went up on Major Barbara at the Westminster Theatre, and the following summer The Devil’s Disciple, with Robert Donat appearing as Dick Dudgeon, came in after a successful tour to the Piccadilly Theatre. During 1942 The Doctor’s Dilemma, with Vivien Leigh playing Jennifer Dubedat and John Gielgud replacing Cyril Cusack as Louis Dubedat, ran for 474 performances at the Haymarket Theatre. Outstanding among the four London revivals the next year was a luxurious production of Heartbreak House at the Cambridge Theatre, with costumes by Cecil Beaton and starring Edith Evans and Deborah Kerr, which ran for 236 performances. But the topmost year was 1944 when no fewer than nine of Shaw’s plays were put on in London, including the Old Vic Company’s production of Arms and the Man with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton – all players lured back to the stage after making their names on the screen. ‘The London stage is transformed out of knowledge,’ wrote the theatrical manager Ashley Dukes. ‘...We laugh at the Balkans with a good conscience, and the shafts of wit aimed at heroism fall lightly at the feet of the returning warriors.’