Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘Another “success” would ruin me,’ Shaw cried out. On incomes of over £30,000, after the deduction of income tax at ten shillings in the pound, every two pounds of gross income yielded one pound of net income, on which nineteen shillings of surtax was payable – giving the Shavian total of one pound and nineteen shillings taxation on one pound of net income. Nevertheless he let his reputation boom, with occasional reminders to the press that he was paying handsomely for everyone’s fun. A touring Bernard Shaw Company took seven of his plays round the country in 1942 and 1943; and half a dozen of them were also regularly performed by the Travelling Repertory Theatre which went to villages and munitions factories, mining towns and blitzed towns, and established ‘Plays in the Parks’ in support of the Lord Mayor’s War Relief Fund. ‘They were a delight to do because they filled the theatre with laughter,’ remembered Basil Langton, actor-manager of the Travelling Repertory Theatre, ‘required little scenery or lighting, and provided wonderful acting parts for every member of the company.’ It was his illuminating unconventionality, Beatrice Webb believed, that had relit this interest in his work. Revivals of his comedies, romances, fables, fantasias were appearing everywhere to meet the needs of a new public educated by the wireless. But ‘I have written nothing for the stage since Charles,’ Shaw told Beatrice in 1941, ‘and will perhaps not write for it again.’

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  Meanwhile he poured forth journalism – over 250 broadsides, contributions to symposiums, answers to questionnaires. In his fashion he sought to fill the role Carlyle had occupied in the nineteenth century as keeper of the public conscience. But the world was larger, more uncertain, fragmented. ‘One has to gather any major news nowadays by means of hints and allusions,’ wrote George Orwell in 1940. Shaw used these hints and allusions as best he could, resenting his exclusion from more central sources of information. ‘It was indeed a wonder to note how carefully the old man watched the news and kept up with events,’ observed the Labour Member of Parliament Emrys Hughes.

  One of the new war posters warned the populace that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. But the most careless talk of all, to Shaw’s mind, came from Cabinet Ministers. Britain needed a speaker who was the mouthpiece of a nation, giving precise replies to Hitler and Stalin, because, as Sir Henry Channon was to write from the Ministry of Information in March 1940, ‘we are being defeated all along the diplomatic line’. Shaw recommended a different set of guidelines on ‘how to talk intelligently about the war’ and disentangle the mesh of enemy-impregnated words – appeasement, communism, fascism, Hitlerism and National Socialism. ‘We must not let Adolf give Socialism a bad name,’ he rallied Beatrice Webb. In the Shavian dictionary appeasement on a grand scale was to be read as our war aim (rather than a defeatist term carrying ‘accidental associations with unpopular bygones at Munich’); and he defined Hitlerism as a government founded on the idolatry of one person laying claim to the world on behalf of Germans as the Chosen Race. Such personal autocracy had no special connection with either fascism (which was the imposition of State-assisted privatization), or democracy (government in the interests of everybody and not a privileged class) or communism. ‘If you are a Communist then the word requires a new definition,’ Lord Alfred Douglas was to press him. But Shaw’s definition was catholic, noncombatant, free from party political commitment, and unaffected by the abuse of power or the fall of empires. ‘Communism has a hundred doors; and they do not all open and close at the same moment,’ he wrote. ‘Everywhere already we have communism in roads, bridges, street lighting, water supply, police protection, military, naval and air services... Civilization could not exist for a fortnight except on a basis of Communism.’

  During 1941 he began a campaign to outlaw the reciprocal bombing of cities, calling on Britain to initiate this agreement with the German Government, since no military advantage could be won by a method of warfare that stiffened the resistance of the attacked and gratified passions among the attackers ‘which civilised nations should not gratify’. Both sides were depending for victory on famine by blockade, he characteristically added, so any reduction in the number of civilian mouths to feed would be a tactical gain.

  More serious, from the Government’s view, was Shaw’s conciliatory policy towards the Soviet Union. He represented Stalin’s invasion of Finland as inevitable once the Finnish Government had allowed the country to be used by the United States and Western Allies. ‘No Power can tolerate a frontier from which a town such as Leningrad could be shelled.’ He asked his readers to imagine what England would do if threatened from the West. ‘Ireland is the British Finland,’ he wrote. ‘Rather than allow Ireland to be occupied or invaded or even threatened by a foreign Power... England would be strategically obliged to reoccupy Ireland... That is exactly the Russo-Finnish situation.’

  By the early summer of 1940, when the war had settled into its routine and Churchill’s Cabinet replaced Chamberlain’s, Shaw was invited to broadcast on the Overseas Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Though he believed he could get the better of William Joyce – the notorious ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain – ‘I should scare the wits out of the official home front,’ he warned. ‘Better let this sleeping dog lie.’ But the BBC persisted. It wanted someone whose vivacity and insight would stir foreign listeners as J. B. Priestley’s broadcasts had inspired audiences in Britain. At the beginning of June Shaw sent in his script. He portrayed the British as ‘champion fighters for humanity’ and gave, as the Big Idea that ‘we must risk our lives for’, the need to defeat anti-Semitism. A year before Germany invaded Soviet Russia and eighteen months before the United States came into the war, he inserted one passage that sounded peculiarly Shavian in its prophetic unorthodoxy. ‘The friendship of Russia is vitally important to us just now. Russia and America may soon have the fate of the world in their hands; that is why I am always so civil to Russia.’

  The Ministry of Information immediately vetoed this broadcast. ‘Shaw’s main theme is that the only thing Hitler has done wrong is to persecute the Jews,’ explained Harold Nicolson, then Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information and later to be appointed a Governor of the BBC. ‘As the Minister [Duff Cooper] remarks, millions of Americans and some other people [believe] that this is the only thing he has done right.’ The Controller of Overseas Programmes, Sir Stephen Tallents, tried to reverse this decision. ‘The value, especially in America, of a broadcast talk by Shaw endorsing the war against Germany and Italy would be very high,’ he explained. ‘...Australia, too, urged me some months ago to secure a talk by him.’ In an attempt to free Shaw from a total ban at the microphone, Tallents informed the Ministry of Information that Shaw had ‘responded with entire good temper and generosity’ to the cancellation of his talk, and had been ‘willing to alter the text at any points which had been felt to give difficulty’. But Duff Cooper was adamant: ‘I won’t have that man on the air.’

  ‘I shall have to confine myself to articles in The Daily Worker,’ Shaw wrote. But when, at the beginning of 1941, this English Communist Party newspaper was banned for twenty months, another wartime outlet closed. Not wishing to embarrass Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman, he gave much of his war journalism to Forward, a socialist weekly edited in Glasgow by Keir Hardie’s son-in-law Emrys Hughes. Here he warned the public against any government alliance with the Axis to destroy Russian Socialism because one day we would have to sit down with Stalin – and preferably Roosevelt also – to settle the ceasefire.

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  By 1939 Shaw gave Gabriel Pascal the go-ahead to film Major Barbara. The invasion of Holland and Belgium had put a stop to Pascal’s plans for European financing, and Shaw agreed to let his syndicate use £12,774 of his royalties from the Pygmalion film until it could raise in Britain the full £125,000 (equivalent to over £3 million in 1997) Pascal reckoned was needed.

  The sixteen new film sequences Shaw supplied to help modernize his play were almost his only dramatic wr
iting during these war years. One reason for making this film was Wendy Hiller’s desire to play the title role. Shaw vetoed Pascal’s choice of Leslie Howard for Cusins (‘quite out of the question’) and suggested ‘a young actor named [Alec] Guinness’ who had recently come to lunch at Whitehall Court. But eventually the part went to Rex Harrison, and Undershaft was played by Robert Morley.

  ‘My film future depends on you,’ Shaw appealed to Pascal. ‘Ought I have your life insured?’ But wars were little deterrent to Pascal. Towards the end of the 1930s Time magazine had placed him, along with Hitler and the Pope, among the ten most famous men in the world. With Shaw’s help he had become a naturalized British subject, bought a large Tudor house in Buckinghamshire and, so G.B.S. hoped, ‘shifted the artistic center of gravity of the film industry from Hollywood to Middlesex’.

  On 26 May 1940, as the British prepared to evacuate Dunkirk, the location shooting of Major Barbara began on the Dartington Hall Estate in South Devon, later moving to Tower Bridge for some Salvation Army scenes and round Sheffield for distant views of Undershaft’s factory. Three weeks after the shooting started at Denham Studio on 17 June, the Nazi bombing of Britain began. Pascal was to count 125 bombs that fell in the vicinity of Denham while they were making the picture. Technical equipment was destroyed, transportation often made impossible by land mines and railway disruptions, and when they did get to London to take exterior shots they would find everything in rubble the next day before their shooting was completed. Everyone agreed with Wendy Hiller that ‘without Pascal’s courage and almost demoniac energy the film would never have beaten all the difficulties of wartime production’.

  The cast and crew bedded down ‘as close to the studio as possible: dressing rooms, pubs, the homes of friends’. Whenever air-raid warnings interrupted a scene they would go to ground in a concrete shelter under the sound studio. Here Robert Morley filled the dim light with fantastic tales of Pascal’s adventures culminating in a luxurious private shelter nearby, lined by tiger skins and crowded with ‘lovvly vimmen’, where they imagined him to be taking his ease.

  In fact Pascal never went to a shelter but would hold his infatuated scenario editor, Marjorie Deans, on the lawn in extended discussion of the script as the bombers raced overhead. ‘Pascal bullied everyone,’ Robert Morley remembered. Each morning his shouts of ‘You are ruining my picture – you are crucifying me!’ would greet the actors and at the end of the day the empty sets still rang to his cries. During the course of the film he sacked almost everyone and then, with a kiss and a grin, made it up again.

  What ruined Pascal, in the opinion of Alexander Korda, was his mania to be a director. For he was determined to direct as well as produce Major Barbara. ‘I was sadly missing the helpful direction of “Puffin” Asquith which I had on Pygmalion,’ wrote Wendy Hiller. ‘Pascal was no director.’ He had, however, two directorial assistants: Harold French who rehearsed the actors with their lines; and David Lean, who was in charge of the shooting. When Pascal ordered impossible camera angles, Lean and the crew would turn over the camera with no film in it to keep him happy and these were referred to as ‘Gaby’s takes’.

  On his eighty-fourth birthday G.B.S. was invited to the Albert Hall to watch the shooting of the Salvation Army revival meeting. ‘Everyone wanted to be in that,’ wrote the theatre historian Joe Mitchenson who was one of 500 extras assembled for the scene. Getting over-excited Shaw plunged into the sound equipment, spreading silent but expensive chaos, and played with the camera mounted on a trolley with a boom. Raising himself into its chair he began pulling handles and pressing buttons, lifting and swivelling and tilting himself until he almost crashed to the floor. After that he sheepishly climbed down and tried to behave better. But when the large band began to play, he darted down the main aisle and dived in among the chorus, voice uplifted, arms flailing. Next day he sent Pascal his ‘apologies for interfering on Friday. I tried to keep quiet; but suddenly felt twenty years younger, and couldn’t.’

  Originally scheduled for ten weeks, the film eventually took six months to shoot, while the costs rose to almost £300,000 (equivalent to £7 million in 1997). Flushed with modified triumph, Pascal accompanied Katharine Hepburn to the grand opening in Nassau on 20 March 1941 ‘under the aegis of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’. But Major Barbara was not to be the film of his or Shaw’s dreams. ‘They cut the last third of the film all to pieces,’ he told Gilbert Murray. ‘I saw the finished film once only – I wept with disappointment,’ wrote Wendy Hiller. But Gilbert Murray was ‘moved and thrilled’ by parts of it, Beatrice Webb found its ‘expression of the brutal power of mass murder in modern war’ dramatically topical, and the general public relished the performance by Robert Newton as the ‘rough customer’ Bill Walker, the burlesque playing of Robert Morley’s Undershaft and Wendy Hiller’s achievement in catching Barbara’s idealism yet making it so humorously attractive. Seldom had a film sought such sustained intellectual engagement with its audience. The final vision of Perivale St Andrews looked forward to the socialist-inspired plans for post-war reconstruction. ‘The house was packed... and you could not have had a more responsive audience,’ H. G. Wells wrote. ‘They laughed at all the right places. Mostly young people in uniform they were... We shall rise again sooner than Marx did and for a better reason.’

  Some of the best acting came from G.B.S. in a three-minute ‘visual prologue’ made for American audiences. By now reluctantly convinced that the only way of gaining peace was simply to defeat Hitler and Mussolini, and that ‘a single handed victory would not be so good for us as an Anglo-American one’, Shaw recorded a preface that was seen by many Americans as a rallying call for them to come and fight. The British argument was simple, he told one United States correspondent: ‘there is a very dangerous madman loose in Europe who must, we think, be captured and disabled. If we are right, he is as dangerous to you as to us; so we ask you to join the hunt.’

  Made a few days after the exchange of US destroyers for the lease of naval bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean, Shaw’s prologue announces his own contribution to the deal: ‘I am sending you my old plays, just as you are sending us your old destroyers.’ The Battle of Britain had reached its peak the previous month and one hundred and three German planes were shot down over London three days after Shaw made his recording. ‘I am within forty minutes’ drive of the center of London, and at any moment a bomb may crash through this roof and blow me to atoms,’ he told the United States. An air-raid warning sounded while he was speaking and Pascal charged forwards – then stopped as G.B.S. imperturbably went on (‘We’ll keep it in the picture’) against the grunting of the enemy planes. For this was a valedictory to which he had summoned his unseen audiences. When he was a little boy, he continued, the Dublin newspapers reported how America had abolished black slavery. When he grew up ‘I determined to devote my life as far as I could to the abolition of white slavery’ – the sort of slavery to economic dictatorship that had erupted in this war.

  Then he lifted one hand, trembling slightly, to his forehead and held it there in a salute. ‘When my mere bodily stuff is gone, I should like to imagine that you are still working with me... at that particular job... farewell!’

  2

  Wife and Widower

  Think of us always as we were.

  Shaw to Lillah McCarthy (24 October 1942)

  After Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain ‘[we] are snapping our fingers at Hitler and his threat of invasion,’ Shaw notified Trebitsch. They carried on normally: from Wednesday noon to Saturday afternoon at Whitehall Court then at Ayot from Saturday afternoon to Wednesday morning, sleeping through the all-night air-raids in both places. ‘My wife does not give a damn for bombs,’ G.B.S. wrote to Alfred Douglas, ‘but dreads shelters and prefers death to getting up and dressing.’

  So it was business as usual until, one Saturday afternoon early in September 1940, arriving at Ayot a day before the German Blitzkrieg opened on London, Charlotte fell heavily o
n the gravel. For the rest of that month she was unable to walk and could go upstairs only backwards, with G.B.S. precariously at the helm. ‘I have accidents,’ she wrote to Nancy Astor, ‘ – but they seem to do me good.’ This accident, G.B.S. added, had given them ‘an excuse for skulking down here instead of coming up to town for half the week in our regular routine’.

  By the time Charlotte recovered it seemed foolish to go back to London at all. Ayot had a small squeaky siren that importantly echoed all the alarms from the capital thirty miles away, and they could see the flashes in the sky and hear the thunder of the guns, like far-off celebrations. Stray raiders would occasionally float overhead and release a bomb near enough to shiver the house, and Charlotte ‘is infuriated by the big bangs, which she takes as personal insults,’ Shaw told Nancy Astor. In London one bomb destroyed almost 90,000 unbound sets of sheets of his collected edition (‘plus their dustwrappers,’ his bibliographer notes) and threw up enough insurance money for him to pay off his supertax. Another bomb whistled past Blanche Patch’s bedroom ceiling, spilling her onto the floor and shattering a house nearby. Feeling rather ‘out of sorts’, she hurried down to join Shaw and Charlotte at Ayot.

  In the middle of November came a ‘full dress bombardment’ with high-explosives crashing onto the roads and fields around them and the rattle of shrapnel on the roof. Shaw seemed chiefly worried by the effect all this was beginning to have on Charlotte. ‘All through the war his nerve remained steady,’ Miss Patch conceded, ‘and often in the late evening when we heard the wail of the Alert siren, and the planes were droning overhead, he would sit down at the piano and play and sing the old Italian operas... Charlotte liked to lie in her room upstairs and listen to him.’