Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

by John Updike

  The world, like women, found it difficult to keep in step with Shaw. He courted fame, creating in “G.B.S.” a persona scarcely needing caricature, yet hid in the hamlet of Ayot St. Lawrence and avoided London literary society. To give himself relief from his mail and his admirers, he and Charlotte in the Thirties took to long ocean voyages, from each of which he emerged with a new play or two. He seemed to enjoy celebrity up to the point where it kept him from working; he thrashed to maintain a certain space around himself. To receive a letter from Shaw could be as soothing as a cold shower. Between 1926 and 1950 he advised various correspondents:

  I think you ought to leave your head to the College of Surgeons to ascertain what wonderful impressionable substance it contains instead of brains.

  What a tiresome idiot you are!… To the British Post Office the name G.B. Shaw means nothing. Bernard is the trade mark; and if you had been intelligent enough to use it (you really are an idiot) your letter would have reached me.

  Tell the Committee with my compliments that they are sentimental idiots, and have grossly overstepped their function in this business.

  You certainly are a jumping sillybilly.

  Politically you have the brains of a grasshopper.

  As illustrations to a story they must surely be the very worst on record from an artist of your calibre.

  You are always readable; but you have no intellectual conscience.

  To save you from being written off as the stupidest woman on earth I must give you a testimonial.

  You really are a pack of duffers.

  It is amazing how players of genius, like you, can be such hopeless idiots as they mostly are when they try their hands as playwrights.

  Devotion to an old crock like me is sentimental folly.

  He was gruff with himself, too: in the course of these letters he tells Mrs. Pat Campbell, “Of course we are a pair of mountebanks,” assures Frank Harris, “I am really a detestable fellow,” and instructs the prospective founder of a Shaw Society, “I am old, deaf, and dotty. In short, a Has Been.” To the friends of his Dublin boyhood, his clownish self-characterizations go somewhat deeper. In the year of his death, he wrote Ada Tyrrell, a surviving childhood playmate: “You and I will soon be the oldest inhabitants of the globe. It is perhaps as well that we cannot meet.… I had rather be remembered by you as Sonny than as the ghastly old skeleton of a celebrity I now am.” Twenty-two years earlier, in 1928, he had written this same old acquaintance an unusually thoughtful and melancholy account of himself:

  My life has rushed through very quickly: I have seen very little of anyone who has not worked with me. Except with my wife I have no companionships: only occasional contacts, intense but brief. I spring to intimacy in a moment, and forget in half an hour.… Those who see me now are those who shove and insist and will not take no for an answer, with, of course, the great people who must be seen because they have earned a right of entry everywhere.

  And to Matthew Edward McNulty, a friend made at the Dublin Commercial School and the only sharer of his youthful ideas and dreams, Shaw wrote the same year, “How are you? I have come through the shadows and am enjoying a hardy and unscrupulous old age in insufferable celebrity.”

  Seventy years in England did not shake Shaw’s Irishness; his voice falls into a deeper resonance when addressed to these Irish survivors from his boyhood. When he decided to marry, it was to an Irishwoman. The relentless mischief and provocativeness of his public persona can be understood, in part, as a colonial’s hostility toward the occupying power. British hypocrisy, snobbishness, inefficiency, and illogicality never ceased to animate his pen; twitting the English was his favorite sport. He would not get into step with them. No sooner did they, after his seventieth birthday, decide to accept him as an avuncular old genius with cranky views on vivisection and spelling than he announced himself an admirer of Mussolini and Stalin. As late as 1942, with German bombs falling around Ayot St. Lawrence, he was finding good things to say about Hitler. To Nancy Astor he wrote:

  I have been reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf really attentively instead of dipping into it. He is the greatest living Tory, and a wonderful preacher of everything that is right and best in Toryism. Your Party should capture him and keep him as a teacher and leader whilst checkmating his phobias. On the need for religion, on the sham democracy of votes for everybody, on unemployment and casual labor, he is superb.

  Shaw shared with the Fascist and Communist dictators a deep contempt for parliamentary democracy, which he saw as a mere bumbling front for the rapacious workings of capitalism. As a young man educating himself in the British Museum, he was caught up in the same Marxist radicalism as Jack London on the other side of the English-speaking world. But his political education had begun in his exposure to the Dublin slums, where, Mr. Holroyd’s biography tells us, his nurse would take him while she visited her friends and even, possibly, prostituted herself to soldiers. His experience of the actual poor, from which his family’s precarious gentility held him at no great distance, was a genuine inspiration among his many facile inspirations. In 1932 he lectured Margaret Haig Thomas, Viscountess Rhondda of Llalanwern:

  Are you sure you haven’t a family habit of classing “poor devils with only ten thousand a year” as the poor? The submerged nine tenths dont all consider themselves poor. Most of them hate the poor. The real poor hate the poor. I hate the poor. That I prefer them, on the whole, to the rich, doesn’t affect the case in the least.

  “Oppression, starvation, compulsory prostitution and all the villainies of capitalism” were more than rhetorical concepts to Shaw; to Harold Laski he wrote, apropos of William Morris’s social conscience, “No theories could get over the simple fact that the rich lived by robbing the poor and got nothing by it but ugly unhappy lives.”

  The heartless man came out of Dublin with two real passions: a love of music, and a hatred of poverty. The second emotion steels his realpolitik in some brutal assertions: “The danger is that Capitalism, instead of crashing, may peter out without ever producing a revolutionary situation. We may get no further than a succession of Kerenskys or Macdonalds trying to make omelettes without breaking eggs.” This was written in 1932, when millions felt desperate about capitalism, and totalitarianism had not yet given the world a real taste of its omelettes. But till the end of his days Shaw, though never a card-carrying Party member, called himself a Communist, and in the 1940s, after the Moscow show trials, the nonaggression pact with Hitler, the campaign against the kulaks, the assassination of Trotsky, the Siberian gulags, and the enslavement of the once-progressive Soviet arts had all become history, Shaw could boast of the “Russo-Fabian state” and write to Alfred Douglas, “Why do you recommend me to go to Russia? I’ve been there. It is a paradise: no ladies and gentlemen there.” Of Stalin he claimed, “When I met him in 1931 I knew that I was face to face with the ablest statesman in Europe; and the personal impression he made on me did not change my opinion. I still rank Stalin first, Roosevelt second, and the rest nowhere.” And at the age of ninety-two he troubled to chastise the London Times: “A most discourteous practice is beginning to call the chief Russian statesman Mister Stalin. This is inexcusable. He is Marshal D[z]hugashvili or Generalissimo Vissionarovich; but under no circumstances should the soubriquet which he has made famous be mentioned or written with a prefix, as if he were a small shopkeeper.”

  The Man of Destiny, the philosophical Caesar creating and controlling a government like a work of art—these were the Shavian ideal, rather than an inglorious scramble of contending petty interests. It was the style, after all, in which he had launched and managed his imperial career. To Gabriel Pascal, negotiating for a Shavian film in Hollywood, he wrote, “No American feels safe until he has at least five other Americans raking off him, most of them contributing nothing except their entirely undesirable company. They get so settled in that way of doing business that they do not understand how a European with a cast iron monopoly under his own hat can play his game single
handed.” That Stalin appeared to exert such a cast-iron monopoly argued for him, as Mussolini’s success in Italy argued for him against liberal and Socialist “atrocity mongering” that would preclude “common sense and common civility in dealing with a foreign statesman who had achieved a dictatorship in a great modern state without a single advantage, social, official, or academic, to assist him.” As both political observer and playwright, Shaw loathed the impracticable, and to the “Libertarian Impossibilists” posed the question of “why both the workers and the Liberals were so hopelessly incompetent that Italy gave Mussolini carte blanche to extirpate them.” In 1927 he was sternly writing Friedrich Adler, “We must get the Socialist movement out of its old democratic grooves.… We, as Socialists, have nothing to do with liberty. Our message, like Mussolini’s, is one of discipline, of service, of ruthless refusal to acknowledge any natural right of competence.” In a lesser matter, discussing his cherished project of a phonetic alphabet with I. J. Pitman, whose grandfather had invented the system of shorthand Shaw employed, he revealingly wrote, “There is one exception to my statement that there would be no squabble about details. There would be if the alphabet were thrown open to discussion. A few master spirits must decide it and get it designed by an artist both for print and handwriting.… It must be presented to the mob of spelling cranks as a fait accompli, as the Pitman alphabet was.”

  For all his political speaking, writing, and—in his six years as an elected municipal vestryman in the London district of St. Pancras—participation, Shaw’s model of governmental procedure was artistic: the autocratic decisions of a “master spirit” with a monopoly over his own creation. While the hope of a political revolution eased his pain at what he perceived as a cruelly mismanaged world, it was art, in almost all its shapes, that had actually comforted his formative Dublin years. In 1948 he remembered in an advisory letter to Margaret Wheeler:

  I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be a musician. But I couldnt draw. I couldnt compose. If anyone had taught me I could have been a mediocre artist or painter or actor or singer or pianist. But nobody taught me; and I was a born writer. You must use the talent you have, not the talent you have only a taste for.

  His taste was for music, and throughout these letters, even when the weariness of old age is shortening his replies, the subject of music excites him to bursts of fondness and specificity—recalling how a singer he heard in the 1870s weighed “19 stone at the least I should say” and how she damaged her voice “by attempting Donizetti’s Favorita, and forcing her chest voice up to [he draws the note]”; and how his uncle played the ophicleide; and how only “celibate male singers after years of practise together can do [Palestrina’s] polyphony justice”; and how as a boy he learned music theory by studying the texts of Day, Ouseley, and Stainer. He writes in his most respectful, least chaffing tone to the contemporary composer Edward Elgar, and takes the motto of his old age from Verdi’s Iago—La morte è nulla (“Death is nothing”). In writing for the stage, he was “only reviving the old operatic declamatory technique,” Shaw told the actor O. B. Clarence. “There is nothing I like better than composing arias, cavatinas, and grand finales for good actors. My technique I had learnt, not in the cup and saucer school, with its ‘reserved force’ which was so welcome to actors who had no force to reserve, but from Salvini and Ristori, and from Barry Sullivan, last of stage supermen.” After travelling to Peking, he advised Elgar, “The Chinese will reveal to you the whole secret of opera, which is, not to set a libretto to music, but to stimulate actors to act and declaim.” The extraordinary loquacity of Shavian characters is a convention, like the impromptu melodiousness of operatic performers, which gives voice to the inner being: “What makes my plays unlike others is that my characters say what they feel and would not say in real life.” In his letters and prefaces Shaw always stressed the “essentially aesthetic” nature of his education, and his professional dependence upon inspiration rather than conscious thought: “As I write plays as they come to me, by inspiration and not by conscious logic, I am as likely as anyone else to be mistaken about their morals.”e To Virginia Woolf (perhaps the only one of the many correspondents in this volume who could give Shaw back language as fluent, arch, and winning as his own) Shaw wrote, “As a matter of fact I am an artist to my finger tips.” William Butler Yeats, after attending the first night of Arms and the Man, famously dreamed “a nightmare that I was haunted by a sewing-machine, that clicked and shone, but the incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.” But G.B.S. came out of the same fin de siècle as Yeats and Wilde, and was in his fashion an acolyte of art as devoted as they; Shaw describes himself and William Morris as “both Aestheticists.” His aestheticism subsumed his ethics and never failed to supply him with innocent enthusiasm and courage. His gaiety and naïveté, in the perpetuation of airy stage spectacles and handsomely, idiosyncratically printed books, distinguish him from a contemporary like H. G. Wells, whose work, but for the early fiction, has faded with the timeliness of his opinions and expertise. Shaw’s musicality—and an Irish element, the wryness and self-mockery of a nation that has known repeated defeat—subverts his own opinions even as he announces them, leaving us with irreducible images of human vitality.

  Although the fourth volume of his collected letters can be comfortably read only when propped up on one’s chest in bed, and one’s eyes sometimes weary of assimilating Dan H. Laurence’s fact-packed editorial headnotes to almost every missive, Shaw’s company is invigorating to the end. We are moved through this accumulation by the certainty that every letter will be, in some fashion, honest, confrontational, and amusing—the sheer impudent efficiency of the prose is exhilarating. Shaw’s prose, however amply supplied in this multitude of casual, hasty paragraphs, rarely feels padded or hedged; its enlivening and elusive essence is caught in his typically loyal praise of another writer and old friend, Frank Harris: “his power of assertion and readability will carry the day with posterity if posterity ever troubles itself about any of us.” “Power of assertion” is what brims in Shaw’s transparent-seeming prose, with its fearlessness of flat statement and its instinctive, swift recourse to the concrete. The power is so great as to overflow into recklessness, tumbling about with comic effect. His tonic purity of unimpeded assertion can be sampled at virtual random:

  Lady Cockerell keeps her good looks magically. Many many years ago she went to bed; found it comfortable; and has lain there in a sort of glory ever since. I have never pretended to believe that there is or ever was anything the matter with her.

  So I began with a prejudice against him [Henry Irving] through the disappointment of a strong fancy for him.

  As a Socialist it is my business to state social problems and to solve them. I have done this in tracts, treatises, essays and prefaces. You keep asking why I do not keep repeating these propositions and principles Euclidically in my plays. You might as well ask me why I dont wear my gloves on my feet or eat jam with a spade.

  As the raiders are highly scientific, and fly blindly by their instruments, they begin every night by bombarding us in the firm conviction that they are making direct hits on Churchill’s hat.

  The phrase “Churchill’s hat” may have been current in wartime Britain, or Shaw may have invented it; in either case, it arises from a source in the language that only living slang or a born writer can easily tap. Shaw still “plays,” though his estate has been most enriched by what he stoutly resisted when he was alive—a musical version of Pygmalion. Even if all the plays come to seem too declamatory and farcical for the contemporary stage, and all his brusque propaganda for a saner world sinks into the dust of discarded tracts, he will linger as a lightsome spirit whose heart, these private communications from his old age indicate, was in the right place.

  The Virtues of Playing Cricket on the Village Green

  COLLECTED ESSAYS: Volume 2, The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel, by Q. D. Leavis, edited by G.
Singh. 280 pp. Cambridge University Press, 1985.

  As novelists sometimes comfort themselves by marrying other novelists, filling adjoining rooms with the hesitant clatter of two typewriters, critics can marry critics. Think of the Trillings. Think of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy. Queenie (not a nickname) Dorothy Roth, born in 1906, was a literary adept before she married F. R. Leavis, in 1929, and she continued on her own, though in striking harmony with her celebrated husband’s convictions and crotchets, to practice the critic’s art, at the lecterns of Cambridge University and in the pages of his influential quarterly journal Scrutiny. Since the death of Q. D. Leavis in 1981, Cambridge University Press has been assembling a three-volume collection of her essays, published and unpublished, of which the second volume, The American Novel and Reflections on the European Novel, especially recommends itself to our attention. Though not so frantic in style or pugnacious in homage as D. H. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature, Mrs. Leavis’s observations have the same value, of the generalizing external glance. The Americans and the English share a language and a long historical interaction, but their literatures indicate a difference between them as great as that between Hawthorne and Trollope, or between Moby-Dick and Middlemarch. Mrs. Leavis was, like her husband, one of that vanishing breed of critics who can feel they have read all the novels that matter—who have been enough saturated in the all-too-copious genre of prose fiction to make brisk and authoritative assertions that cover the field and, in the guise of literary criticism, characterize whole nations. Whereas her husband organized his confident estimations into a number of book-length studies of poetry and fiction which systematically distinguished the sheep from the goats, Mrs. Leavis’s opinions must be gathered piecemeal, from reviews and essays and lectures she did not bother to collect or, in the case of eight of the fourteen pieces in this volume, to publish in any form.