Part Two — English Inning
V Adventuring in Search of George Bernard Shaw
When I was a lad I wrote a rhyme about wanting to visit England and my desire to see the famous streets and places and the “factory chimneys pouring smoke.” Later, when I began reading the Bernard Shaw plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, and the sparkling prefaces, I added Shaw to the list of people and things that I wanted to see. Shortly before I left Jamaica for the United States, Shaw arrived in the island on a visit to the Governor, the Fabian Socialist, Sydney (Lord) Olivier, who was his friend. As my friend Mr. Jekyll was well acquainted with the Governor, I urged him to invite the Governor to bring Bernard Shaw up to Jekyll’s cottage in the Blue Mountains. But Mr. Jekyll refused. He said he was opposed to the pursuit of celebrities as if they were public property, and that if Bernard Shaw was visiting Jamaica on a quiet tropical holiday, he, Jekyll, wouldn’t be the first Englishman to attempt to intrude upon him. And so I had to be content with reading Shaw’s one interview in the local paper, in which he said that the Governor was big and capable enough to boss the colony alone. Mr. Jekyll was amused by that and remarked that when Socialists obtained power, they would be more autocratic than capitalists.
Now that I had grown up in America and was starting off to visit England, I realized that I wasn’t excited any more about the items I had named in my juvenile poem. Only the item that I had added mentally remained of lasting interest—Bernard Shaw. With the passing years he had grown vastly bigger in my eyes. I had read most of his published works and seen two of his plays in New York. And my admiration had increased. I considered Bernard Shaw the wisest and most penetrating intellectual alive.
And so it was a spontaneous reply, when Frank Harris asked me what person I would like most to meet in London, and I said “Bernard Shaw.” I really never thought of anybody else. Perhaps because the purpose of my voyage was a poetical vacation and I hadn’t been thinking about meeting people.
In that season of 1919-20 in London, Shaw was triumphant in the theater. There were three of his plays drawing full houses: Arms and the Man, You Never Can Tell and Pygmalion. After seeing Arms and the Man, I forwarded Frank Harris’s letter of introduction to Shaw. Soon I received a reply inviting me to his house.
Besides knowing Frank Harris and Pearson’s Magazine, Shaw was acquainted with the old Masses and also The Liberator, in which my poems had been featured. Anything he had to say on any subject would be interesting to me, as it would be to thousands of his admirers everywhere. For Shaw was a world oracle. And the world then was a vast theater full of dramatic events. The capital of the Empire was full of British and Allied officers and soldiers. And they and the newspapers impressed upon one the fact that the world was passing through a universal upheaval.
Shaw received me one evening alone in his house in Adelphi Terrace. There was an elegance about his reedlike black-clothed figure that I had not anticipated, nor had I expected such a colorfully young face and complexion against the white hair and beard. I told Shaw that Frank Harris had been extremely kind to me and that when he gave me the letter to him, he had said that Shaw was perhaps the only friend he had left in London.
Shaw said that Harris was a remarkable man, but a difficult character, that he chafed under the manners of ordinary society, and even his voice seemed to have been trained as a protest. He then asked me how I came to know Frank Harris. I told him, saying that Harris was the first editor to introduce me to the public. Shaw said that Harris was a good hand at picking possibilities.
I reminded Shaw of his visit to Jamaica. He said he had enjoyed visiting his friend, Lord Olivier. Then he mentioned some of the interesting exotic persons with whom he had come in contact. He told me about a Chinese intellectual who had come all the way from China to visit him, and wanted to talk only about Irish politics. He laughed, thinking it was funny. And I laughed too, yet I could understand a little why an educated Chinaman could have the Irish situation on his subtle Oriental mind. Shaw also mentioned an Indian who had brought him a play, which he said had a fine idea and excellent situations in it, only it couldn’t fit into the modern theater.
After Shaw had recalled his Indian and his Chinaman he turned to his Negro visitor and said: “It must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet. Why didn’t you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?” he demanded. “You might have developed into a successful boxer with training. Poets remain poor, unless they have an empire to glorify and popularize like Kipling.” I said that poetry had picked me as a medium instead of my picking poetry as a profession.
As Shaw had mentioned the theater, I told him that I had seen his plays and also two of Galsworthy’s and one of Arnold Bennett’s. Shaw said that Galsworthy was a good playwright, a craftsman; but that Arnold Bennett wasn’t, and that he had no sense of the theater. “But,” said I, “Arnold Bennett’s play, Sacred and Profane Love, was a big success.” Shaw admitted that it was, but nevertheless it was not excellent theater, he said, adding that the play was badly constructed. I thought I understood. I remembered the most sentimental scene as the most unreal—the one in which the hero plays the piano to the thrilled woman. The actor could not play the piano, at least not enough for anyone to consider him a pianist, and one felt that the scene did not belong on the stage, although it might have been the pièce de résistance of a novel.
Shaw said that writing a play was much more difficult than writing a novel, and I agreed, although I had not yet tried my hand at either. But the technique of the theater seemed naturally harder to me. Shaw said many writers thought it was easy until they tried to master it. His friend, Lord Olivier, for example, who compiled excellent Socialist treatises, once wrote a play and thought it was excellent. He showed it to Shaw, who read it and said he could not understand what it was all about. Yet Lord Olivier insisted that anybody could understand it!
When Shaw discovered that I was not particularly interested in Irish or world politics, because my social outlook was radical, and that I was not expecting him to say something wise about the colored people in a white-controlled world, he turned to an unexpected subject—cathedrals. He spoke of their architectural grandeur, the poetry in their spires and grand arches, and the prismatic beauty of their great windows. He said there were fine cathedrals outside of London, structures full of poetry and music, which I ought to see—Salisbury, Lincoln, Canterbury, York, Winchester—as interesting in their style as St. Sophia, Rheims and Cologne, although people did not talk so much about them. And he informed me that the best way to get at the essential beauty of a cathedral was to stand in the center and look up.
I was enchanted with this monologue on cathedrals. It was so different from Shaw’s hard direct hammering writing. It was soft, poetic. And Shaw’s voice is like a poem, it is so finely modulated. Once he mentioned the World War, and let out a whinny which sounded exactly like a young colt in distress or like an accent from his great drama, Heartbreak House. I felt at once that in spite of his elegant composed exterior, the World War must have had a shattering effect on him. Perhaps, prior to 1914 he had thought, as did other Fabian Socialists, that a wholesale war of slaughter and carnage between the civilized nations was impossible; that the world was passing gradually from the cutthroat competitive to a co-operative stage. I myself, under the influence of the international idealistic thought of that period, used to think that way. I remember when I was a school boy in Jamaica that the local militia was disbanded by the Governor, Lord Olivier, Shaw’s friend and the most brilliant statistician of the Fabian Socialists. The local paper printed his statement that “such training for citizens is not necessary in an age of established peace, and anyway the people of the West Indies could not be concerned in any imaginary war of the future.” Seven years later conscription was declared in Jamaica, the most intensely British of West Indian colonies, before it became effective in England, and West Indian contingents served in France, Egypt, and Arabia.
I had read such a lot about Shaw’s athletic appearance and his interest in boxing, and his photographs made him look so strikingly vigorous that I was surprised by his actual physique. Shaw looked healthy, but not like the ordinary healthy rugged man. Under his fine white hair, his complexion was as soft and rosy as a little child’s. And there was something about him that reminded me of an evergreen plant grown indoors.
As an animal he suggested an antelope to my mind. And his physique gave an impression of something brittle and frail that one would want to handle with care, like chinaware. I thought that it was perhaps his vegetarian diet that gave him that remarkably deceptive appearance.
Some time after my visit with Shaw I went to hear him lecture at Kingsway Hall, where he unreservedly declared himself a believer in Lenin. I was present with William Gallacher, now Communist member of Parliament. At question time Gallacher said that it was all right for Shaw to come out in theoretical praise of Lenin, but that the workers needed practical action. Shaw replied that action was all right, but that he was getting old and so he would have to leave action to younger men like Gallacher. Yes, indeed, I had a vast admiration for the purely animal cunning and cleverness that lay underneath that great Shavian intellect.
Shaw was helpful in recommending me so that I could obtain a reader’s ticket for the British Museum. That may seem easy enough for an ordinary person to acquire, but try, as a stranger in London, to find the responsible householder to sponsor you according to the regulations!
Some months later, when I was getting out my little book of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire, my publisher tried to get Shaw to write a foreword for it. But he refused, saying that my poetry should stand on its own. I did not mind, even though a short foreword by Shaw might have helped the selling of the book. But I could never visualize Shaw as a poet or a subtle appreciator of the nuances of profound poetry. As a poet, I preferred the prefatory note which was contributed by Professor I.R. Richards of Cambridge University.
However, that Bernard Shaw discourse on cathedrals was an exceptional thing. I haven’t discovered anything like it in any of his writings. The only writing of his with which I could compare it is the play, Candida. It is pregnant with poetry. As different from his other writings as the innumerable caricatures of Shaw are from his real self. I like to look at a great piling cathedral from the outside. And also I love the vast spaciousness of the inside when it is empty. During the many years I spent on the continent of Europe, I never stopped in a cathedral town without visiting the cathedral. I have spent hours upon hours meditating about modern movements of life in the sublime grandeur of cathedral silence. And as I stood in the nave of those concrete miracles of the medieval movement of belief and faith, transported by the triumphant arches of Gothic glory, often I felt again the musical vibrations of Shaw’s cathedral sermon.