Odd Jobs (53 page)

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:

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:

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:

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:

“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 singlehanded.” 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:

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: