Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  *

  A week after his eighty-ninth birthday, Shaw began writing plays again. His playwriting was an elixir, he sometimes felt, similar in its exotic effects to his mother’s spirit communications on the ouija board. In any event, it gave him ‘moments of inexplicable happiness’ and he was taken ‘out of the realm of logic into that of magic and miracle’.

  Buoyant Billions was a play he had started while sailing to Honolulu in February 1936, briefly picked up again in August 1937, now retrieved and would continue to revise until the middle of July 1947. In a short preface he asked readers to forgive a ‘trivial comedy which is the best I can do in my dotage... At least it will not rub into you the miseries and sins of the recent wars, nor even of the next one.’ On the contrary, it is a romance spun around the theme of avoiding warfare. After his educational history play celebrating the use of good manners he had characteristically come up with ‘A Comedy of No Manners’. But the manners he was dispensing with were verbal conventions that confused meaning and confined people to their social compartments. The characters in Buoyant Billions ‘are simply frank, which is the extremity of no manners,’ Shaw explained.

  In the first act a father and son confront each other. ‘We resist changes until the changes break us,’ says the son. But Mr Smith does not resist his son. He pays his fare to go round the world investigating the beneficial use of atomic fusion. By the second act Junius Smith has reached the Panama Canal, on the tropical shore of which he comes across a young woman, ‘Babzy’ Buoyant, who charms the Punch-and-Judy-like snakes and alligators with her saxophone. They argue, but are so irresistibly attracted to each other that Babzy runs off into the third act and the safety of her father’s Belgrave Square house in London. Junius pursues her and they both turn up in its curious drawing-room in time to contribute to a symphonic discourse on death and its duties which is being conducted by the family solicitor. Shaw manipulates everyone’s views to illustrate his belief that ‘differences of creed must be tolerated, analysed, discussed, and as far as possible reconciled’. In the short fourth act, the billionaire Old Bill Buoyant gives his blessing to the marriage of Babzy and Junius, and this human fusion quickens their faculties in the surprise and wonder of a happy ending.

  ‘My fans must not expect from me more than a few crumbs dropped from the literary loaves I distributed in my prime,’ Shaw wrote in the preface to his next play Farfetched Fables, ‘plus a few speculations, as to what may happen in the next million light years...’

  This ‘batch of childish fables’, written between July and August 1948, is a post-atomic fantasy in five conversation pieces and one monologue. Here the young man does not pursue the attractive young woman who is refusing to bring children into the modern world, but goes off to invent a peculiarly lethal gas. Having sold his terrible invention he retires to a safe place, the Isle of Wight, where unfortunately the first gas bomb is exploded. From here, we see the dark ages return and human beings change into a breed of super-gorillas. Time moves on bringing with it the discovery that humans need not after all eat grass but can live on air and water. They evolve into a race of supermen, superwomen and superhermaphrodites, and eventually thought struggles free from the body. In the sixth and final fable a schoolroom of sixth-form children, throw-backs to the twentieth century, are visited by a disembodied mind. Impelled by intellectual curiosity it has used the power of evolution, ‘which can go backwards as well as forwards’, to appear before them as a feathered youth named Raphael and experience what is called the word made flesh. The lesson for audiences as well as sixth-formers is that regardless of consequences the pursuit of knowledge and power will go on into the infinity of time.

  Farfetched Fables is a toy version of Back to Methuselah and ‘suitable only for little groups of amateurs,’ he wrote. For its first presentation he handed the play to the Shaw Society which, led by Ellen Pollock, directed by Esmé Percy and with futuristic designs by Feliks Topolski, gave it thirty performances at the Watergate Theatre in the autumn of 1950. It was to be posthumously published in Shaw’s standard edition together with Buoyant Billions and Shakes versus Shav, a ten-minute play for puppets which he wrote during four January days in 1949.

  Puppets had some Shavian advantages over human material. They could preserve an unvarying facial expression and sustain treatment impossible for mere living actors. ‘When I first saw them in my boyhood,’ Shaw wrote, ‘nothing delighted me more than when all the puppets went up in a balloon and presently dropped from the skies with an appalling crash on the floor.’ He gave his own puppets some glorious acrobatics – Shakes and Shav sparring and knocking each other down, while their champions Rob Roy and Macbeth dance and spin until Rob Roy cuts off Macbeth’s head with a claymore and Macbeth marches off, head under arm, to the tune of the British Grenadiers. This marks the culmination of what the critic Sally Peters was to call ‘Shaw’s unending duel with the ghost of Shakespeare’. In this playlet the ‘real Shakespeare’ is someone who ‘might have been myself’.

  Shakes is the darker face of Shav, a vengeful protagonist who introduces himself with excerpts from the soliloquies of his villainous Richard III and Macbeth. Their intertextual battle has Macbeth quoting Macduff from whose third son, Shaw had told his biographers Hesketh Pearson and Archibald Henderson, ‘I am supposed to be descended’. It is a duel between the contradictory impulses Shaw had struggled all his life to reconcile. But Shaw is also one of Shakespeare’s heirs and so after their jousting comes a plea for peace. A light appears between them, the stage directions tell us. Then the candle is puffed out and darkness embraces them both.

  Shakes versus Shav had been commissioned by England’s ‘chief puppet master’ Waldo Lanchester who sent G.B.S. ‘figures of two puppets, Shakespeare & myself, with a request that I should supply one of my famous dramas for them’. It was then performed at Lanchester’s Malvern Marionette Theatre during the 1949 Malvern Festival.

  *

  Nowhere were Shaw’s plays more enthusiastically welcomed than in German-speaking countries where most theatres had been closed down by Goebbels in 1944 as part of the ‘total war’ effort. Between 1945 and 1970 in the Soviet and Allied sectors of Berlin there were to be forty-nine productions of twenty-four of his plays – more than Chekhov or Ibsen, Gorki or Strindberg, Pirandello or Eugene O’Neill.

  All this should have benefited Trebitsch. During the war he had appealed desperately for money from the luxurious Dolder Hotel in Zurich. But Shaw’s replies were often delayed or misdirected since Trebitsch could not bring himself to reveal where he and his wife were living. In his seventies Trebitsch did not know how to live otherwise than as a rich man. ‘I have not forgotten you and Tina in the least; you are very much in my mind at times,’ Shaw wrote in 1945. But he was anxious to avoid seeing them after the war. It was too late. He was too old. ‘We must make up our minds not to meet again,’ he urged.

  But Trebitsch had already made up his mind to fly over and pay his condolences over Charlotte’s death. He remembered Charlotte vividly: her devotion to ‘long walks’, her exploits as a ‘brilliant cyclist’, how she ‘loved sport and enjoyed riding’ like her sister who was ‘one of the best-known women riders to hounds in the British Isles’. Trebitsch gloried in these memories and was eager to bring G.B.S. the comfort of them.

  Shaw looked forward to his visit with dread. But Trebitsch knew his duty. He came in the spring of 1946 and was in excellent spirits. It was six years since they had last met. ‘You dont know what it is to be 90,’ Shaw had warned him and it was true that Trebitsch, who was not quite eighty, did not know. He was surprised to see his old friend failing in a strange way. ‘He was impatient, was afraid of falling asleep when he leaned back in his chair, and... of showing this understandable weakness even in front of a familiar visitor as I was.’ Other failings such as his inability to ‘walk more than a mile, very unsteadily and leaning on a stick’ were not without their advantages.

  On no account, Shaw insisted, could Trebi
tsch afford another sentimental journey to England. Trebitsch however had some important business to discuss: a scheme for aiding G.B.S. with his income tax by taking over the burden of his income. ‘I shall not see you starve if I can help it,’ G.B.S. assured him. With this small encouragement Trebitsch was back again in the Dorchester Hotel in the spring of 1947 and hurrying down all smiles to Ayot St Lawrence. It was a lesson to Shaw of how unwise he had been to offer any encouragement at all. He would never do so again. ‘I am no longer the Shaw you knew,’ he had cautioned. But like the ageing Falstaff, Trebitsch was ever-confident of some special favours from his old companion. He simply could not believe Shaw’s ‘heartless’ words and responded to them like a rejected lover with spells of recovery in expensive spas. Exasperation rose in G.B.S. What else could he do except run out a string of terrible blowings-up and dressings-down? ‘Damn it, man, do you imagine that I am a pretty girl of 17 and you a blithering idiot of 18... Can you not bear the thought of my having any friend in the world except yourself? Pull yourself together... I dont want to shake hands with you nor to contemplate your wrinkles.’

  This bombardment halted Trebitsch at the Dorchester Hotel during his annual pilgrimage to England in the spring of 1948. He still sweated to see his friend for one last farewell, or perhaps two, or better still three. ‘What do you suppose I care about last meetings at my age?’ Shaw had demanded. ‘I never see anyone now without being conscious that it is probably our last meeting... When the cat leaves the room it may never see me alive again.’

  For Trebitsch, however, Shaw was still ‘the last, greatest and strangest hero of my life’. He could not wait another year. In the early autumn of 1948 he slipped back into England and down to Ayot for what was to be their final meeting, leaving ‘after a farewell that was kept light and airy’.

  But their old business relationship had been broken up by the war and when Shaw advised Trebitsch not to ‘speak or write to anyone over 40’ he was trying to break his translator’s dependence on royalties that must further diminish ‘after my death, which is imminent’. But like Gabriel Pascal and Molly Tompkins, Trebitsch was lost without G.B.S. Shaw had been like a father to them all and they could not detach themselves. Trebitsch felt ‘alone upon this earth, except for the one man whom I still had: Bernard Shaw’.

  ‘If imaginary riches make you happy, by all means imagine them; but they will never materialize,’ Shaw wrote after the production of Buoyant Billions which he had made Trebitsch translate as Zu Viel Geld (‘Too Much Money’). It was a sad ending to almost fifty years of a relationship which Trebitsch counted as ‘the greatest event of my life’.

  6

  A Very Late Conclusion

  Well, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye – all of you.

  BBC television talk by Shaw on his ninetieth birthday

  ‘Mr Bernard Shaw becomes a nonagenarian to-day,’ announced The Times on 26 July 1946. He was threatened by a bristling programme of celebrations. ‘I am doing what I can to escape,’ he pleaded. ‘...If I can survive it I can survive anything.’ Congratulations and gifts converged on him from all around the world. There were tributes from Churchill and de Valera, salutations from the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress, sweets from local schoolchildren, greetings from anyone who had seen a play or read a preface. For a fortnight huge numbers of these messages and gifts went on avalanching into Ayot where Shaw desperately marshalled Loewenstein and Winsten to destroy the happy returns as if they were high explosives.

  A policeman had been stationed outside his house earlier that month to repulse enthusiasts. ‘I am fighting off all photographers and news-reelers,’ Shaw insisted. But a few wriggled through his defences. ‘I hope I shall interview you again on your 100th birthday,’ said a young journalist. ‘I don’t see why not,’ Shaw answered; ‘you look healthy enough to me.’

  ‘Mr Shaw is so vast a subject,’ concluded The Times, ‘that none will envy the ultimate biographer.’ He had been asked by Oxford University Press to choose the five hundredth title in their World’s Classics series from among his own work and he chose his masterpiece of wishful thinking, Back to Methuselah, using the chance to revise the play and its preface and attach a postscript. Besides this new volume and the million Penguin paperbacks, there was also a symposium, G.B.S. 90, in the bookshops, compiled by Stephen Winsten and containing memories from old friends such as H. G. Wells and Sidney Webb, Gilbert Murray and Max Beerbohm, together with surveys of his plays and music criticism, examinations of his ideas on phonetics, economics and education by C. E. M. Joad, J. D. Bernal and others, and statements of literary goodwill from J. B. Priestley, Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley.

  On stage the Arts Theatre was playing Don Juan in Hell; on radio the BBC produced The Man of Destiny and later broadcast a Shaw Festival for its new Third Programme; in the evening Shaw appeared on television complaining that his popularity ‘shews that I am getting old and feeble and nobody is afraid of me any longer’.

  At the prompting of the Irish Trade Unionist James Larkin, he had been offered the Honorary Freedom of Dublin and replied in his letter of acceptance: ‘Dublin alone has the right to affirm that in spite of my incessantly controversial past and present I have not disgraced her.’ A little later in the year he accepted the Honorary Freedom of the Borough of St Pancras on whose vestry and borough council he had worked, and used the occasion to argue for the virtues of a local government system independent of central party political control.

  ‘I need no publicity: I have already much more than my fair share of it,’ Shaw wrote to the Liberal peer Lord Samuel a few days later. Public attention had once been his compensation for meagre family affection. Now it had expanded, he sometimes felt, into a substitute for political achievement. He would have traded all this publicity for an Act of Parliament legalizing the Coupled Vote, and he took more pleasure from legislation in the Dáil to municipalize his Carlow estate than anything else that happened that year.

  ‘I wish you were not too far off to be within my reach,’ he had written earlier in the year to Sidney Webb. Their old colleague Sydney Olivier had died within a few months of Beatrice and Charlotte, leaving Webb and Shaw the last two Fabian musketeers. ‘So let us hold on as long as we can,’ G.B.S. exhorted his friend. ‘Everywhere I gained something,’ Webb had written of their peripatetic work together. On 13 October 1947, in his eighty-ninth year, he died at Passfield Corner. ‘I hope we have been a pair of decent useful chaps as men go,’ G.B.S. wrote to him in his last letter; ‘but we have had too short a lifetime to qualify for real high politics.’

  In 1949 Shaw brought out a revised and expanded version of the autobiographical miscellany Shaw Gives Himself Away which the Gregynog Press had published in a limited edition ten years earlier. ‘I have changed the title to SIXTEEN SELF SKETCHES,’ he wrote to his American publisher, ‘because a title must be easy to speak, easy to spell, and unmistakeable to pronounce.’ The new title gives helpful evidence of Shaw’s innumeracy since, as Brigid Brophy first noticed, the book contains seventeen self sketches. In his ninety-fifth year he completed what was to be the last of his ephemeral works for publication. Bernard Shaw’s Rhyming Picture Guide to Ayot is a series of doggerel verses accompanying some endearingly awful photographs of the village.

  Actors and authors liked coming down to see him occasionally in the belief that G.B.S. occasionally liked seeing them. ‘Especially actresses,’ the actress Lilli Palmer added. But when she asked him after an hour if he would like her to ‘stay a little longer, Mr Shaw,’ he answered truthfully: ‘No. I’m always glad when people go.’ ‘Keep the old skeleton out of sight and touch as much as you can,’ he wrote to the American showgirl Frances Day who wanted to see him. ‘...Only in dreams is he young. Do not disturb them.’

  Burlesques were less disturbing to him than gallantries. In his young nineties he performed a garden pantomime with Danny Kaye and, his eyes sparkling, sang a duet from Aladdin with Gertrude Lawrence.

  ‘Come,
little girl, for a sail with me

  Round and round the moon.

  No one to see us behind the Clouds

  Oh, what a place to spoon.’

  ‘My voice is no penny whistle now!’ he remarked to Kingsley Martin after bursting out with an aria from Verdi outside his house. ‘I had not expected the strong Irish brogue,’ wrote James Lees-Milne. ‘This peasant origin makes him all the more impressive... When he smiles his face softens and becomes engaging.’ To a journalist from the Palestine Post he looked like ‘a very old and rather dangerous bird...

  ‘Shaw is shockingly thin now. The famous beard has shortened... His skin is like parchment. The whole figure seems more like an echo of itself... [But] you see the eyes of a youth. Blue, radiating, quick and alert, they are the real Bernard Shaw... the great firebrand... who has gradually become an object of admiration and love, first in the world and then in his country.’

  Many of his visitors felt like invaders in the separate world he inhabited. He ‘looked more alone than any man I have ever seen,’ wrote the American drama critic John Mason Brown. ‘I can always tell myself stories,’ he explained, ‘and so am never lonely.’

  Occasionally he would listen to other people’s stories. Not long after Charlotte’s death he had received the first instalment of a remarkable story-in-letters by Margaret Wheeler, a thirty-five-year-old housewife from Workington in Cumberland. ‘I wanted an intelligent man to discuss things with,’ she later explained, ‘so I deliberately picked him up.’ Her only chance, she reckoned, was to choose something close to his heart. So she wrote to him about phonetic alphabets. It was a sprat to catch a whale. ‘I should like to give you my thanks now, anyway,’ she ended her letter, ‘for the enjoyment of reading and the stimulus of thought you have given to me many and many a time.’