When I was invited to write the authorized biography of Bernard Shaw in the early 1970s, he was still accepted as a great force in the world, an influence on the young, a bearded prophet from a past age warning us provocatively, uncomfortably, of the dangers in our contemporary world. He did of course acclaim some social changes that had taken place, such as the National Health Service. But his role was mainly to challenge rather than to celebrate. His plays were quite regularly performed at the National Theatre and politicians such as Tony Benn and Robin Cook made no secret of having read him attentively and of having been influenced by his writings – nor did that legendary insurgent on his prison island, Nelson Mandela. American and Canadian academics in particular were devoting their careers to studying his work – his letters, his diaries, his music and drama criticism as well as his prefaces, political essays and plays. He was so prolific, so voluminous, so various, that there seemed plenty to keep them busy well into this century.
But now that we are half a dozen years into it, Shaw seems to have gone largely out of fashion – presented more as a matinee playwright than an exciting, revolutionary dramatist. In the age of Beckett and Pinter those plays of his seemed increasingly wordy and windy. There was so much of him, too much of him. People took against him. He was no longer a stimulus to radical progressive thought but an insensitive supporter of dictators – particularly Stalin. In fact he was seen as an enemy of democracy itself, a fifth column agent in our society. We appear to have more need these days of villains than of guides, philosophers and friends, more need of cautionary than exemplary tales. And there was something else that counted very strongly against him: he lacked what was once called sex appeal and appeared to have ink rather than blood in his veins. Was there not something rather inhuman about him, something seriously lacking? Of course you could not wholly discount his writings; he was not altogether off the page as it were, but he had been marginalized, he was no longer centre stage – he was somewhere in the wings. That, it seems, is where he stands today, in this, the 150th anniversary of his birth on July 26, 1856. And the questions I want to ask are: Does it matter? Is it just?
I can hear his voice mocking these questions. To hear his voice is of course poetic licence, or rather a prose writer’s licence, claimed on the strength of having lived and worked so long among his published and unpublished writings. It is a conceit, like St Joan’s gift for hearing voices, which enables me to speak his lines with an air of confidence. So what do I hear him say? Something very unsettling: that there is no such thing as natural justice unless it be red in tooth and claw. Spin the coin and one man’s justice is another man’s revenge. Look through the history of the human race, that mixture of all our races, and it is often the acts of justice that most horrify us in retrospect – acts performed in cold blood with pomp and circumstantial evidence that exceed the crimes of lesser breeds without the law. Justice is fickle, blown hither and thither by the winds of fashion and climate of ideology, instigated by fear (what we have recently learnt to call “terror”) and dictated by those who win their wars – or think they have won them. Shaw, it must be remembered, opposed the Nuremberg trials – or rather the punishments handed out by the trial judges because he believed that an ideal justice contained no element of punishment. I can hear his voice years later pointing out the awful fate of Rudolf Hess and challenging us to call this just.
By the same token Shaw believed that the only revolutions which would not lead to counter-revolutions, landing us back to approximately where we had begun, were bloodless revolutions, revolutions that arose through changing the mind of a country by its writers, philosophers, thinkers, men and women of imagination. If you are bombed, for heaven’s sake, do not go blindly bombing back – unless you actually want more bombing, more deaths, indiscriminately all over the place. The way to judge people’s motives is to look at the results of their actions: that is the pragmatist’s philosophy. One of the ironies of history is that in most wars both sides eventually come to resemble each other and impose defeat on themselves. Or as Shaw succinctly put it: “A victory for anybody is a victory for war”.
What would Shaw be telling us today? Would he, for example, have supported suicide bombing? I hear him answer this with a resounding No! But then he would never have been so stupid, so uncomprehending, as to label suicide bombers “cowardly” – that really is the voice of terror. Early in the twentieth century, Shaw proposed giving all Irishmen guns so that they could enjoy the privilege of a civil war without the intervention of the English. Such a man would not have hesitated to advocate the elimination of suicide bombing by giving Palestine an army equal in strength to that of Israel. He would, however, have castigated a Palestinian culture that encouraged young people to throw away their lives and be applauded for doing so by their parents and grandparents. It would have been far more honourable, I hear him saying, for old people to volunteer – indeed he had recommended calling up seventy- and eighty-year-olds for military service before turning to the young in time of war. In short: send Shaw out to the Middle East and he would unite all enemies in opposition to himself. Send Shaw today round the world and he would be called mad for recommending publishers in every country to put all sacred texts, from the Bible to the Koran, on their backlists and find new sacred works from contemporary writing.
Two or three years ago, the Lincoln Center Theater in New York staged an updated version of Aristophanes’ The Frogs. In the original version, Dionysos brings back Euripides from the underworld. In the new version, he has to choose either Shakespeare or Shaw to visit the post-9/11 world. Which would be the more useful? At the beginning he thinks it will be Shaw, but finally he returns with Shakespeare. I argued that this was the wrong choice because Shaw exercised his democratic right to be unpopular in time of war, which is especially valuable. “You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race”, he wrote, in his recruiting play, O’Flaherty V. C. Shakespeare’s poetry often touches war with glamour; Shaw’s headlong, fantastical wit never does this. He asked no favours from those in power. As W. B. Yeats acknowledged: “He could hit my enemies, and the enemies of those I loved, as I could never hit, as no living author who was dear to me could hit”. Surely this was the man Dionysos needed – the man we need today.
The case against Shaw, which may well have persuaded Dionysos not to retrieve him from the underworld, is partly based on the number of newspaper articles and prefaces to plays he wrote, mainly during the 1930s, that were favourable to Hitler and Stalin. He did not do this because he liked either of them – the world, he thought, would have been a far better place without them. But they existed. They had to be dealt with. Shaw’s articles were written in the hope of modifying British foreign policy – a policy that was full of strong words and weak initiatives. People were to blame Neville Chamberlain for appeasing Hitler. Shaw blamed the Versailles Treaty for humiliating Germany and making Germans feel they were the enemies of humankind. Was it any surprise they chose others to replace them as objects of such loathing? Was it any surprise that, robbed of their self-esteem, they should have chosen a man such as Hitler to be their leader – a leader who set out to regain self-esteem by embarking on a policy of revenge (revenge that initially seemed so much like a search for justice)? In 1919 Shaw had predicted that there would be another World War in his lifetime, and his writings between the wars must be read in that rather desperate context. It might surprise anyone reading these writings to learn that Stalin thought him an awful man and that Hitler banned some of his plays – in particular Geneva, his satire on Fascist dictators, as well as the preface to The Millionairess, in which he speculates on Hitler’s Semitic forebears.
In my opinion Shaw wrote one serious tragedy and that was his Saint Joan. In the preface to this play he likens Joan to the Prophet Mahomet, both conquerors, prophets, saints who, like Mary Baker Eddy, the naive founder of Christian Science, were “always ready with a private revelation from God to settle every question and fit every occasion”. God, it seems, was an accomplished ventriloquist. For almost every religion is a blasphemy or insult in the face of every other religion, Shaw argued, which is one reason why he would have eliminated all faith schools – in the interests, that is, of social unity. In his play it is Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, the most lenient of Joan’s judges, who asks what would become of the world when every girl thinks herself a Joan and every man a Mahomet. “I shudder to the very marrow of my bones when I think of it”, he says.
It is extraordinary how often the Prophet Mahomet appears to force his way into Shaw’s prefaces and plays. In the preface to his political comedy On the Rocks, we see him ruling the Arabs by means of “promises of a paradise and threats of a hell the details of which he must have known to be his own invention even if he did believe generally in a post mortem life of rewards and punishments for conduct in this world”. Shaw likens him to a nurse disciplining and coaxing a group of small children so that they might behave well. For as he explains in the preface to The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, the Prophet could not trust his followers to behave correctly when his back was turned. It was for this reason that he was obliged to invent the most disgusting penances awaiting those who behaved badly and all sorts of sensual delights for those who behaved well. To inspire credulity he allowed his followers to believe that the angel Gabriel acted as a celestial postman between him and Allah. In short, like Moses and John Smith the Mormon, he had to plead divine revelation in order to gain authority.
And there was something else that did not wholly escape Shaw’s attention. Like Henry VIII, he reminds us, Mahomet had a good many wives. When writing his Fable Play, Androcles and the Lion, Shaw conjured up a spectacle of the great Prophet “lying distracted on the floor of his harem whilst his wives stormed and squabbled and henpecked round him”. This picture brings to mind the interlude from his political extravaganza The Apple Cart, which takes place in Orinthia’s bedroom – though it would have been a far more crowded extravaganza had he actually written a play about Mahomet. The reason why the Prophet keeps turning up on his pages is that he had “long desired to dramatize” his life, he tells us. His drama, which was to be set in a slave market, would, he claimed, rescue the Prophet from Voltaire, whose play Mahomet was an outrage. In the 1890s the novelist Hall Caine had written a drama called The Prophet for Henry Irving. It could not be produced, however, because the censor forbade this on the grounds that any play dealing with the founder of Islam “would give offence to many of Her Majesty’s subjects”. Shaw described this “restriction of the historical drama” as an “absurdity”. But when the Queen died the embargo lived on. All his life Shaw campaigned against theatre censorship – and only won this battle posthumously.
So where are we now? In December 2004, the dramatist Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti had her play called Behzti (meaning dishonour), which was produced by the Birmingham Repertory Theatre as an alternative to the season of pantomimes, removed from the stage because of fears for her safety and that of the cast and theatre staff after violent protests by members of the Sikh community. The Arts Minister at that time, Estelle Morris, was reported as having issued a surprising statement. “Although today is a sad day for freedom of speech,” she said, “I think the Rep has done the right thing.” It is certainly a sad day when a government minister, appointed to represent the art of drama, can so easily turn back the clock more than one hundred years by supporting the removal of a play that, like Hall Caine’s The Prophet, might “give offence to many of Her Majesty’s subjects”.
In such a climate of terrified legislation, we have need of Bernard Shaw – need of his stimulating incorrectitudes, need of his ability to show where dishonour truly lies and of his power to ridicule such absurdities out of court. It is time for Dionysos to go back and find him for us.
