George Bernard Shaw: Man, Superman, and Socialism
By Laurie Morrow
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called him "George." It was his father's name, and George Bernard Shaw
hated his father. Disrespect for authority became the theme of his life,
along with the complementary certainty that he had better answers to
life's questions than anyone else. Usually, such a personality merely
annoys a small circle of friends, family, and associates, but Shaw had
an unusual talent--he was one of the most brilliant of British
playwrights. He annoyed just about everybody and still does. With the
passion of a Puritan minister dispensing hellfire sermons, Shaw preached
through his plays his vision of How Things Ought to Be. This included,
at various times, such harmless beliefs as vegetarianism and abstention
from alcohol, but they also included such vile beliefs as the
endorsement of fascism and a blind devotion to Stalinism. All had a
cynical edge to them, of disdain for lesser folk.
George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26,
1856, to a Scottish-Protestant family. His father, George Carr Shaw,
was a grain wholesaler who suffered from a serious squint, which Oscar
Wilde's father, a famous Dublin ophthalmologic surgeon, operated on. But
squinting wasn't his worst problem--alcoholism was. George Shaw's wife,
Lucinda "Bessie" (Gurley) Shaw, came to have contempt for his weakness,
even though they remained sufficiently well off to have their children
reared by servants.
In a letter to Ellen Terry (June 11, 1897), Shaw describes
how his sudden recognition of his father's alcoholism converted him into
a cynical teetotaler: "The first moral lesson I can remember as a tiny
child was the lesson of teetotalism, instilled by my father, a futile
person you would have thought him. One night, when I was about as tall
as his boots, he took me out for a walk. In the course of it, I
conceived a monstrous, incredible suspicion. When I got home, I stole to
my mother and in an awestruck whisper said to her, 'Mamma, I think
Papa's drunk.' She turned away with impatient disgust, and said, 'When
is he ever anything else?' I have never believed anything since: then
the scoffer began. ... Oh, a devil of a childhood, Ellen, rich only in
dreams, frightful in realities." Bessie Shaw brought her children up to
loathe George Shaw so much that, when he died in 1885, neither she nor
they attended his funeral.
Although Bessie was an affectionate mother to her daughters,
she remained emotionally distant from George, her only son and youngest
child. A singer who taught music to her daughters, Bessie made no
effort to teach "Sonny" music, nor to send the obviously bright boy to
university. What Shaw became was by dint of his own efforts. He never
knew encouragement or praise from his mother. "Fortunately I have a
heart of stone," the playwright would write as an adult, "else my
relations would have broken it long ago."
George Shaw was not the only George whose influence prompted
the playwright to eschew his first name. Bessie, who was sixteen years
younger than her husband, studied voice under the tutelage of a man who
called himself Vandeleur Lee. Lee, also known as George Lee, George John
Lee, and George Vandeleur Lee, developed a passionate relationship with
Bessie. In 1866, he moved in with the
Shaws, in a ménage à trois, which may or may not have been consummated.
In 1876, Bessie, Lee, and Shaw's elder sister, Lucy, moved away together
to London. Shaw left his father and followed soon after. It would be
almost thirty years before he would return to Ireland.
 o pay his bills, Shaw ghostwrote a music column for Vandeleur Lee, for the London newspaper the Hornet.
He also produced several novels but was unable to get any published.
Shaw supported himself by expanding his repertoire of critical writing
to include art, literary, and drama criticism for magazines such as the Dramatic Review, Our Corner, the Pall Mall Gazette, the World, and the Star.
He wrote for this last under the pen name Como di
Bassetto, which is Italian for a type of high-pitched clarinet, poking
fun at the timbre of his own voice. In 1895, Shaw became the drama
critic for the Saturday Review, where he startled readers by revealing his contempt for Shakespeare.
The turning point in Shaw's career was his discovery of
socialism, the religion in which he found his life's calling. Of this
conversion, he remarked, "I became a man with some business in the
world." In 1882, Shaw heard political economist Henry George lecture and
was intrigued by George's theory that if government owned the land,
while individuals owned their labor, poverty could be alleviated without
destroying individual incentive.
This made sense to Shaw, and, in search of like-minded men,
he joined the Social Democratic Federation, where he became friends with
such figures as William Morris, Eleanor Marx, and Annie
Besant. He read Karl Marx but recognized that Marxism would not be
embraced by ordinary workers. As Shaw observed, "Marx never got hold of
[the working man] for a moment. ... The middle and upper classes are the
revolutionary element in society; the proletariat is the conservative
element." Shaw believed that the change to socialism must come
gradually, "by prosaic installments of public regulation and public
administration enacted by ordinary parliaments, vestries,
municipalities, parish councils, school boards, etc."
Shaw became one of the earliest members of the Fabian
Society, a group of middle-class socialists, which was named after the
Roman general Quintus Fabius
Maximus, famous for advocating a war of attrition over direct
confrontation with Hannibal. The Fabian Society was founded in May 1884,
and Shaw served on the executive committee from 1885 until 1911. The
organization believed in "the inevitability of gradualism" and
emphasized a gradual replacement of capitalism with socialism. The
Fabian Society also endowed government with the quasi-religious role of
the development of individual character, believing that society could be
rebuilt "in accordance with the highest moral possibilities." Shaw's
own description of socialism reflects his cold perspective on humanity:
"Socialism is not charity nor loving-kindness, nor sympathy with the
poor, nor popular philanthropy ... but the economist's hatred of waste
and disorder, the aesthete's hatred of ugliness and dirt, the lawyer's
hatred of injustice, the doctor's hatred of disease, the saint's hatred
of the seven deadly sins." Basing society on hatred fit well with Shaw's
disdainful character.
 lthough
socialism promised future benefits for the masses, it had a more
immediate benefit for Shaw. It was a fashionable belief. Shaw's interest
in socialism, and the networking it afforded with some of England's
most wealthy
 |
 Shaw speaks with some of the actors and actresses on the London set of the 1930 film production of his play How He Lied to Her Husband.
and powerful people, paid off nicely for him. His fifth attempt to publish a novel, The Unsocial Socialist,
was accepted for serialized publication in 1884. As a member of the
Fabian Society, he produced pamphlets such as The Fabian Manifesto
(1884), The True Radical Programme (1887), The Impossibilities of Anarchism (1893), Fabianism and the Empire (1900), and Socialism for Millionaires
(1901). He briefly translated his ideas into action and, from 1897 to
1903, served as councillor for the London borough of St.
Pancras. This bit of authority produced no revolution. His most
significant achievement was establishing the borough's first public
ladies' room.
In Shaw's time, as now, social progressives out to improve
human character were drawn to ideological micromanagement. Even their
clothing was employed as a billboard for their belief in progress
through "scientific" knowledge, which is more theory than examined and
proven fact. The trendy Dr. Jaeger, professor of zoology at Stuttgart,
proclaimed wool the most healthful fabric, which he recommended wearing
from the skin out; the suits Jaeger designed became the politically
correct fashion statement of the 1880s. In 1885, along with William
Morris and Oscar Wilde, Shaw started wearing garments designed by
Jaeger--two suits, one brown, the other silver gray. He rigidly adhered
to this sartorial correctness, long after the fashion had passed. About
Shaw's choice of garments,
G.K. Chesterton observed (1910), "His costume has become part of his
personality: one can come to think of the reddish-brown Jaeger suit as
if it were a sort of reddish brown fur. ... His brown woolen clothes, at
once artistic and hygienic, completed the appeal for which he stood;
which might be defined as an eccentric healthy-mindedness."
Although Shaw professed interest in helping laborers, like
many socialists today, he confined his personal relationships to the
intellectual and social elite. What friends he did make were primarily
political allies within his socialist circles. He was profoundly
uncomfortable around ordinary people, preferring words over actions and
ideas over human contact when it came to helping the poor.
 t
is when we look at Shaw in love, however, that his lack of any interest
in or ability to form normal attachments becomes most apparent. His
cool relationship with his mother, contempt for his father, and
awareness of the curious trilateral arrangement between his parents and
Vandeleur Lee convinced him that a permanent, loving commitment within
marriage was sustainable only in fiction. Shaw remained a virgin until
the age of twenty-nine, when he surrendered to the charms of Jenny
Patterson, a widow who was one of his mother's friends. At the same
time, however, he pursued actress Florence Farr (who was also
Yeats' mistress), with whom he would spend the evenings reading Walt
Whitman.
On one memorable evening, Patterson, who had been in Italy,
returned unexpectedly and discovered Shaw and Farr involved in a fairly
unusual means of interpreting Whitman's verse. In a scene straight out
of a bad play, Patterson screamed at Farr that she couldn't have Shaw.
The next morning, at Shaw's urging, Patterson sent an apology to Farr,
giving her note to May Morris Sparling to deliver--unaware that this
young woman, the married daughter of Shaw's friend William Morris, was
yet another object of his seductions. When Shaw heartlessly turned the
embarrassing catfight between his two mistresses into a scene in The Philanderer, the outraged Farr wrote a novel, The Dancing Faun, in which an angry woman gets away with murdering her lover.
Melodramatics were, however, largely uncharacteristic of
Shaw's own philandering. It seemed that unconsummated seductions were
more appealing to him than consummated relationships, that he derived
more pleasure from the romantic conquest than from the spoils of love's
war. While this might seem an exercise in chaste romance, it was more a
game of dominance and withheld self. Generally, Shaw's loveless love was
channeled into mere flirtations with young actresses, so much so that
biographer Frank Harris deemed him "the first man to have cut a swathe
through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins." In a peculiar
iteration of his parents' relationship with Vandeleur Lee, Shaw
repeatedly entered into chaste mŽnages ˆ trois with married women. This
pattern was evident in his relationships with Edith Nesbit (Mrs. Hubert)
Bland, May Morris (Mrs. Henry) Sparling (the aforementioned messenger),
and actress (Alice) Ellen Terry (1847--1928), who was involved in a
long-term relationship with Henry Irving. Shaw each time positioned
himself as an innocent pursued by an unavailable but ardent woman.
The fear of death finally inspired him to involve himself
with a woman free to accept his proposal. In 1898, mistakenly believing
himself near death, Shaw married the wealthy Charlotte Payne-Townsend, a
fellow member of the Fabian Society. Though the couple had engaged in
sexual relations prior to marriage, the marriage itself remained
unconsummated for its forty-five-year duration. This was as much
Charlotte's wish as Shaw's, as she wanted to ensure that she did not
have children--a wish he seems to have shared.
Among the most passionate of Shaw's amours was with the
actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell (Beatrice Stella Tanner, 1865--1940), with
whom he became obsessed while reviewing plays in which she appeared.
Shaw wrote Pygmalion for her, including its determinedly unhappy
ending, where the lovers nearly merge, then part, presumably forever.
"The quantity of Love that an ordinary person can stand without serious
damage," claimed Shaw, "is about ten minutes in fifty years." When
Stella came upon hard times, she asked Shaw if she might publish his
love letters to her to make some money. Shaw refused to give her
permission, responding, "I will not, dear Stella, at my time of life,
play the horse to your Lady
Godiva." Shaw's affection for her did, however, last the rest of her
life--indeed, beyond it. When she died in poverty in the south of France
in 1940, Shaw secretly paid for her funeral, and when her family tried
to repay him, he accepted their checks but never cashed them.
he
one true love of Shaw's life was socialism. Shaw did not start out to
be a playwright. He decided to become one, after he realized the
propaganda possibilities of the drama, which occurred to him while
reading the translations of Ibsen done by his friend William Archer.
Ibsen's plays deal compellingly with social and moral problems. Shaw
studied his technique and, in 1891, published "The Quintessence of
Ibsenism," one of the most important essays in modern drama criticism.
In this essay, Shaw explains that man is a philistine (a category to
which he relegates most of us), an idealist (intellectual
revolutionaries), or a Great Man, the rare, Nietzschean leader
characterized by great personal force. Greatness, for Shaw, meant
power--and the men he deemed great would, unfortunately, include
fascists and Stalinists.
Shaw's early attempts to use plays to promote socialism were
thinly veiled lectures on social and moral problems, in which
capitalism plays the
top-hatted, mustachioed villain. In Widowers' Houses (1892),
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Shaw with his wife, Charlotte Payne-Townshend, at their London home, 1905.
the capitalist evildoers were slum landlords. His next effort, Mrs. Warren's Profession (1894), was banned, as Mrs. Warren's Profession
turned out to be the oldest one. Shaw classified these early efforts as
"Plays Unpleasant," as they focus on unpleasant ideas, though he could
have called them with equal accuracy "Plays Unsuccessful." In part, this
was because he conceived of characters not as flesh-and-blood human
beings but as mouthpieces for conflicting political and social points of
view.
If he were to have any influence, Shaw realized, he would
have to write plays people were willing to watch. He had greater success
with his comedy Candida, about a woman who must choose between
remaining with her contented, if dull, clergyman husband and running off
with an 18-year-old poet who wants to rescue her from respectability.
Candida is considered a wise and strong woman, except by feminist
critics, who are contemptuous of her choice to remain with the man who
needs her, rather than to embrace short-lived pleasure with a flattering
naîf. Similarly, Arms and the Man (1894) balances serious themes
with a plot that evokes interest and sympathy--in this case,
contrasting a romantic with a realistic view of war--and culminates in a
happy, romantic ending.
Shaw recognized that another means of expanding his
influence was to print his plays with detailed introductions and stage
directions articulating his views, thus fusing two genres, the polemical
essay with the drama. Man and Superman (1903), for example,
offers a discussion of his Great Man theory, particularly in the famous
dream sequence, "Don Juan in Hell."
The play that really launched Shaw's career as a playwright, however, was John Bull's Other Island
(1904), which Yeats commissioned for the Abbey Theatre, then rejected.
The plot concerns an Anglo-Irish plan to transform worthless
It is when we look at Shaw in love that his lack of any interest in or ability to form normal attachments becomes most apparent.
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land into a garden city. Shaw presents Irish concerns
about independence unsentimentally but with a recognition of the
importance of home rule to Ireland, as evidenced by comments such as
this: "A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a
healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it
will think of nothing else but getting it set again." Though making many
serious points, the comedy was so successful that British King Edward
VII fell off his chair, laughing.
Among Shaw's most popular plays is Major Barbara
(1905), which focuses on an idealistic heiress who joins the Salvation
Army, hoping to help the poor by saving their souls. She rejects the
capitalism of her father, the arms manufacturer
Undershaft, until she visits the village in which his contented workers
lead happy lives and comes to recognize the importance of financial
stability to spiritual and social growth. "I am a Millionaire," explains
Undershaft when his daughter offers to save his soul. "That is my
religion." Major Barbara comes to see that people desperate for bread
are not in a position to make fine distinctions about theology.
"Spiritual values," asserted Shaw, "do not and cannot exist for hungry,
roofless and naked people. Any religion that puts spiritual values
before physical necessities is what Marx meant by opium and Nietzsche
called a slave morality."
Of all Shaw's plays, his greatest commercial success was Pygmalion
(1912), despite the unhappy, unromantic ending, which Beerbohm Tree,
who played the male lead, tried to persuade Shaw to change. Pygmalion
articulates one of Shaw's theories about language--that the poor lack
social mobility, at least in part, because of their inability to
pronounce or use English well. Being almost entirely self-taught, Shaw
sympathized with those who tried to teach themselves by reading. He
believed that the unphonetic nature of English was a serious obstacle to
economic and social advancement. In the preface to Pygmalion,
Shaw writes, "No man can teach himself what [English] should sound like
from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his
mouth without making some other Englishman despise him." In Pygmalion,
through intensive tutoring in pronunciation, language use, and manners,
Professor Henry Higgins transforms Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle
into a lady--and in the course of the transformation, the two develop an
intense mutual attraction. Shaw keeps the two determinedly apart at the
end of his play, but in the two movies made of Pygmalion and the musical comedy My Fair Lady, the conclusion is revised to unite the lovers.
hough Pygmalion
was an enormous success, Shaw soon fell out of favor with the public,
on account of his insensitive and unpatriotic antiwar newspaper
commentaries called "Common Sense About the War" (1914). As a socialist,
Shaw felt no special allegiance to England; he saw the war as merely
the crumbling of a corrupt capitalist system
Shaw did not start out to be a playwright. He decided to become one after he realized the propaganda possibilities of the drama.
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he had no wish to repair. Shaw's countrymen, who often
had little or no intellectual distance between themselves and the
brutalities of war, responded to his flip condescension with contempt,
and he became something of a pariah for several years. He would,
however, regain his standing, as postwar cynicism became fashionable.
Shaw would go on to write many more plays, including Androcles and the Lion (1913); Heartbreak House (1919), a scornful view of the Bloomsbury circle in the days before World War I that was a critical but not a popular success; Back to Methuselah (1921), a kind of fusion of metaphysics and Darwin, which Shaw considered his Ring
cycle; and St. Joan (1923), startling for its sympathetic portrayal of
Joan's judges. Shaw's Joan is bloodless and sexless, more pigheaded than
ecstatic.
T.S. Eliot described Shaw's Joan as "a great middle-class reformer ...
[whose] place is little higher than Mrs.
Pankhurst's." Whatever its weaknesses, St. Joan captured for Shaw
the Nobel Prize in literature in 1925. Shaw donated the prize money to
support the translation of Strindberg's drama into English.
After Charlotte died in 1943, Shaw continued to lead an
active life on his property at Ayot St. Lawrence in Hertfordshire. (Like
most socialists, he had no objection to owning property himself.) He
continued to write until very shortly before his death. He had written
some sixty-five plays and dozens of pamphlets, on subjects as varied as
feminism, marriage, vivisection, the Soviet Union, natural selection,
and capital punishment. His ironic wit endowed the language with the
adjective Shavian, to refer to such clever observations as
"England and America are two countries divided by a common language."
While trimming a tree at the age of 94, he fell off a ladder, dying a
few days later, on November 2, 1950, from complications. Shaw was
cremated, and, at his request, his ashes were mixed with his wife's. His
memorial ceremony was not religious, though Sydney Cockerall read,
ironically, from The Pilgrim's Progress, a religious allegory
most popular among fundamentalist Christians. Among the greatest
beneficiaries of Shaw's will was a project to revise the English
alphabet to make it more phonetic--with at least forty letters--a
project that failed utterly.
 haw's
values have either puzzled critics or prompted them to ignore or
whitewash his attraction to and ultimate embrace of evil. The Shaw who
objected to World War I may, indeed, have been a genuine, if
undiplomatic, pacifist: "I regard war as wasteful," he wrote,
"demoralizing, unnecessary, and ludicrously and sordidly inglorious in
its reality. This is my unconditional opinion. I don't mean war
in a bad cause, or war against liberty, or war with any other
qualification whatever: I mean war. I recognize no right of the good man
to kill the bad man or to govern the bad man."
As the years passed, however, he grew impatient that the
world was not turning socialist fast enough to suit him. Shaw came to
see value in brutality. As the old saying goes, you can't make an
omelette without breaking eggs, and Shaw wanted his
omelette. He found a new hero in Oswald Mosley, the founder of the
British Union of Fascists. Shaw would describe Mosley admiringly, as
"the only striking personality in British politics." He also admired the
Italian fascist Mussolini and, even more, the communist Stalin. Shaw
visited Stalin in Moscow, in 1931, and found nothing disconcerting about
Stalin's mass murders: "Our question is not to kill or not to kill, but
to select the right people to kill ...
[T]he essential difference between the Russian liquidator with his
pistol (or whatever his humane killer may be) and the British hangman is
that they do not operate on the same sort of person." The playwright
famous for inventing Shavian irony would, without irony, recommend
Joseph Stalin for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Some readers rationalize Shaw's attraction to fascism and
communism--two philosophies he knew to be responsible for the murderous
oppression of millions of people--as a puzzling aberration, or, yet more
bizarrely, as evidence of his determination to believe in human
perfectability. This attraction is, however, fully consistent with
Shaw's cold-blooded calculus in human relationships. His relationships
with women consisted mainly of intellectual masturbation. His marriage
to Charlotte was a marriage in name only. His friendships were more
political alliances than true friendships--as Wilde quipped, "Mr.
Bernard Shaw has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by all his
friends."
Individual human beings were of no consequence to Shaw--he
sympathized with men only in the aggregate--and he found human passions
uncompelling. He spent his last half-century nearly celibate and without
the pleasures of a slice of roast beef, a glass of cognac, or even a
good cigar. Worse, he possessed an unrelenting and unquiet passion to
convert others to his joyless, jackbooted asceticism. As Benjamin de
Casseres observed, "Shaw is a Puritan who missed the Mayflower by
minutes." Shaw's writing is amusing but brittle. It is far more brittle
than that of Oscar Wilde, who, for all his shortcomings, at least had a
heart to be broken.
Indeed, everything about Shaw himself and Shavian drama is
cold, sterile, calculated. It is brilliant; it is clever; it contains
some truth; but there is no heart to it, and what flame burns is an icy
one. What limits Shaw as both man and artist is his unwillingness to
acknowledge the difference between idea and flesh; to see that people,
in both art and life, are meant to be more than mere mouthpieces for
ideology. In his vanity, he refused to recognize fascism and communism
as evil, or to acknowledge that he was a fool for being deluded by them.
Shaw's political pontificating transformed the literary giant into a
Lilliputian, whose socialism mutated, unapologetically, into a worship
of murder, of force in its most raw and ugly form.
Shaw's plays should, then, be read because they pose
important questions in an interesting way. His life should be read as a
cautionary tale, illustrating the unintended consequences of playing
with grand plans to order others' lives. But Shaw must be read in the
context of Shaw. As one is delighted by the sparkling wit and charmed by
characters engaged in adolescent rebellion against a world that does
not live up to their expectations and desires, one must remain mindful
that the hand which created Major Barbara penned, with equal
fervor, defenses of Stalin's vilest practices. Had Shaw set out to be
merely a playwright who wished to amuse, we could hold him to a lower
standard; but he considered his plays a means of seducing others to his
ideology, which, like himself, ends in sterile darkness.
For Shaw, it was all about his being the only way.
Everything was simple to him: One only need do what he believed correct.
Like a socialist version of Ross Perot, he evinced a blustery
self-confidence that was self-indulgent and intellectually dishonest.
While Perot embraced simpleminded "common sense," Shaw went to the
opposite extreme, proclaiming intellectuals as the true masters of
mankind and setting himself up as the foremost intellectual. It is
indeed curious that a man who hated his father would come to see himself
as a father figure to all mankind.
Laurie Morrow is the host of True North With Laurie Morrow, heard weekdays on WKDR 1390 AM, in Burlington, Vermont.
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