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Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw: Bernard Shaw and William Archer

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.39.1.0128

1529-1480

Peter Gahan,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

To begin at the end of this substantial and painstakingly edited volume of correspondence: just before undergoing an operation for renal cancer in 1924, theater critic and Ibsen translator William Archer sent letters to a few of his closest friends, including Bernard Shaw, to whom he wrote, “This episode gives me an excuse for saying, which I hope you don't doubt—namely, that though I may sometimes have played the part of the all-too candid mentor, I have never wavered in my admiration and affection for you, or ceased to feel that the Fates have treated me kindly in making me your contemporary and friend.” Shaw's other close friend, Sidney Webb, who served for Shaw as Archer's counterpart in the political world, would in his turn say much the same thing, thus giving the lie to Oscar Wilde's quip, which Shaw so liked to quote against himself, that Bernard Shaw hasn't an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him. Shaw later reflected on Archer's death: “I still feel that when he went he took a piece of me with him.”Thomas Postlewait, an authority on both William Archer and theater historiography, has performed Herculean labors in bringing to publication Bernard Shaw and William Archer as the latest and—by some measure—largest of the nine volumes in University of Toronto Press's Selected Correspondence of Bernard Shaw series. Whereas Dan Laurence's four colossal volumes of Bernard Shaw's Collected Letters (in fact a large selection of the tens of thousands of letters Shaw wrote in his lifetime) published by Max Reinhardt concentrated on Shaw's own letters with editorial notes supplying information about his correspondents, Toronto's volumes give as much of both sides in the correspondence as still survives. Thus, while eighty out of one hundred twenty-five of Shaw's letters to Archer published here have already appeared in Collected Letters, we also get forty-four of Archer's, which in large part function as a commentary on Shaw's work and career in the theater as it proceeded, plus a few supplementary letters to Mrs. Archer and others to Archer from Charlotte Shaw, to whom Shaw also sometimes dictated his letters. However, Professor Postlewait, in ferreting out Archer's side of the correspondence, has had to contend with a problem that some but not all editors of the Toronto series have had to face: for reasons we can only speculate about (movement of effects between houses, especially during wartime, being most likely) a greater proportion of Archer's letters are missing than those of Shaw's. Consequently the editor assiduously supplies as much information as he can about the missing contributions, often drawing from the over two hundred pieces of Archer's contemporaneous published criticism on Shaw and his dramatic work.Having met in 1884 (although they had spotted each other in the British Museum Reading Room earlier), William Archer, born like Shaw in 1856, became one of his closest friends. Among other things, Archer served as his banker when he began a string of reviewing jobs that the Scotchman, already an established critic, engineered for his Irish friend. They met frequently, either by arrangement or by chance at the theater, the British Museum, or elsewhere, and they also wrote to each other frequently, discussing and disputing anything and everything to do with the theater, from the implications of Diderot's Paradox for acting to Chekhov's modernism; this depth and breadth have ultimately resulted in the present volume. Both despised Henry Irving's Shakespeare adaptations at the Lyceum, and Archer may have been the only critic apart from Shaw not entirely entranced by Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest (Shaw had admired Wilde's earlier plays). In letters to Archer, Shaw wrote, as he always did, with his correspondent in mind: he invents neologisms like “tortology” and “amertumous recritication” and uses arcane words like “Archimandrite” that Archer seems to have enjoyed, and Shaw quotes more Latin proverbs here than usual because Archer liked to do the same. More productively, Shaw served as a skillful editor for Archer's theater books, just as he did for other author friends including the Webbs and T. E. Lawrence. And an incidental benefit of a collection like this is that we get insight into such things as Shaw's linguistic ability. We know he could read, write, and converse to some extent in French, but his knowledge of German has been more difficult to gauge. He himself felt confident enough, as he tells Archer, to go through Siegfried Trebitsch's German translations of his plays to spot the mistakes, “which are mighty ones and millions,” and to read one of Archer's German articles well enough to scold him about it.Presumably he had the use of a dictionary as well as Charlotte Shaw, who spoke enough German to communicate with Strindberg in that language when the Shaws met the Swedish dramatist in Stockholm. Archer, a skillful linguist fluent in German as well as Ibsen's Dano-Norwegian, warned Shaw on another occasion that his German, unless it had improved, would be insufficient for the task at hand.A negative side to all this familiarity, and which may have been a feature of their banter in person, is careless anti-Semitic remarks (Shaw, for instance, ascribing certain stereotypical characteristics to fellow playwright Arthur Wing Pinero). Shaw was not generally anti-Semitic (rather the reverse), but he always felt free to place the individual in relation to the stereotype and employ (what is now and presumably was then to the people involved) commonly employed offensive nomenclature when referring to Jews, blacks, Chinese, and even Irish, although in all cases he was likely to be supportive of these ethnic or national groupings, often consciously seeking to overturn the stereotypes.After reading everything in this volume, we might easily reflect on how we would all like to have a friend like Archer, endlessly supportive and steadfast in his liking for and admiration of the brilliant if sometimes wayward Irish writer and activist. Archer explained why to Robert Louis Stevenson not long after the friendship began: “[I] found him without exception the most entertaining man I had ever come across, and a man of very varied knowledge.” Yet friendship did not preclude Archer from being highly critical of Shaw's work, and indeed mutual criticism functioned in large part as the modus operandi for their forty-year camaraderie. However, because we have only the written part of this forty-year-long argument, a few curious gaps punctuate the collection. For instance, nowhere here does it come across that Peer Gynt was Shaw's favorite Ibsen play. Indeed, before Archer's translation was published, Shaw knew Ibsen's masterwork only because Archer translated it to him viva voce. Even Archer was surprised by Shaw's acute analytic understanding of those Ibsen plays Shaw only knew in this way: “[Your] analysis of the plays are little masterpieces of dialectical and literary dexterity. Your treatment of Brand and Peer Gynt fills me with envious awe. I have read and re-read these poems … [but] you have never read them at all, but merely picked up a vague second-hand knowledge of their outlines; yet you have penetrated their mystery (I speak in all seriousness) much more thoroughly than I have.”In the same way, because we lack letters directly about it, little emphasis is given here to that key moment in the Ibsen campaign, Shaw's famous “two hour” Fabian Ibsen lecture of 18 July 1890, from which he derived The Quintessence a year later. From frequent entries in his Diaries, we know he spent over six weeks writing this lecture, having first “sketched my Ibsen paper” between the acts of a performance of La Traviata on 31 May and that on 14 June he called on Archer because he needed the first scene of Brand to be read to him again! Five days after presenting his paper, Shaw spent an afternoon reading the entire literary portion to Archer and their mutual critic friend Arthur Bingham Walkley in the garden of Archer's house in the country, as noted by Professor Postlewait, who then presents a refreshingly accurate account of consequent events in line with Joan Templeton's meticulous account in her recent book, Shaw's Ibsen: A Re-Appraisal. When reported in “the German, Danish, and Norwegian papers,” Shaw's lecture sparked a controversy that drew in Ibsen himself (rather than labeling Ibsen a socialist, as the reports implied, Shaw's lecture had in fact criticized his fellow socialists for being the type of idealist depicted in Ibsen's plays). Horrified that he might have offended the great Norwegian dramatist, Shaw wrote with some urgency to Archer about this political part of the lecture, from which he now included passages omitted at his reading for Archer and Walkley. He asked Archer, due to meet Ibsen in Munich, to clear up any misunderstanding caused by the inaccurate reports, which Archer duly did, reporting back to Shaw that Ibsen had been in no way offended. The false perception that Shaw had labeled Ibsen a socialist, and indeed the accompanying willful misreading that would vitiate twentieth-century English literary criticism in a way highly damaging to Shaw's own literary reputation, to wit that The Quintessence of Ibsenism was really a quintessence of Shavianism, Professor Postlewait goes some way to rectify here.Prompted by the March 1891 Independent Theatre production of Ibsen's Ghosts, which in broaching the question of syphilis caused an uproar in the press, Shaw spent several months revising his Ibsen lecture for publication, which as The Quintessence of Ibsenism appeared in September 1891, his first published book. Archer used the occasion to pen his first open letter to Shaw so as to further publicity for the Ibsen campaign. Shaw preferred to respond privately to Archer's critique with a blistering point-by-point rebuttal, but refused to be drawn into a public controversy as Archer had hoped. He cursed Archer over his criticism of The Quintessence and for forcing him to restate what he had already written, “merely because you will go fooling over a serious bit of thinking.” Not for the first or last time, Archer failed to comprehend how completely serious Shaw was in both his critical and artistic work, a situation not dissimilar to the opening night a few years later of Arms and the Man when everyone thought Shaw was joking in agreeing with the single booer in the audience; but he had been, in fact, genuinely appalled at the audience's laughter as if they were at a French farce. Nevertheless, the great value of this volume results precisely from Archer's criticisms drawing from Shaw responses that reveal more of his “serious” thinking about his plays and their composition than can be found anywhere else. That serious thinking is in full view in this collection, Shavian dialectic with its conceptual sophistication, analytical clarity, intricate reasoning, counterintuitive logic, paradoxical insights, and endless allusions drawn from a huge bank of cultural knowledge, all punctuated with humor as well as a curious combination of self-knowledge, brash self-worth (as an artist), and, yes, modesty. From the very beginning Shaw's certainty as to the quality of his work is striking; even his detailed advice to Mrs. Archer on her novel writing is disarming with its preternatural wisdom given his own not so successful career as a novelist up to that point (1887).This volume, then, gives us a string of significant epistolary colloquies in which Shaw defends his practice as playwright, an occupation he somewhat surprisingly found himself practicing thanks (again) to Archer, who had initiated a collaboration on a play to be called Rheingold in 1884 (the year Shaw joined the Fabian Society and a year before this correspondence begins). After several abortive attempts, with Archer eventually withdrawing from the collaboration, Shaw completed it as his first play in 1892, now retitled as Widower's Houses, which—with its indictment of ordinary middle-class people for such a social evil as rack renting—still retains something of the shock-of-the-new in present-day revivals. Thereafter Shaw usually kept Archer informed about his plays as they were being written (e.g., Caesar and Cleopatra and Heartbreak House), which included reading them aloud to him and then, following publication or theatrical production, debating their qualities or faults, accompanied by much incidental and interesting information. In a letter of 21 April 1898, for example, Shaw not only gives Archer perhaps his best explanation of the young poet's flight into the night at the end of Candida but also supplies a useful (for us) list of the individuals he had used as models for characters in his plays up that point (often more than one per character).In 1895, to Archer's miscomprehension, Shaw felt forced to withdraw You Never Can Tell from what would have been his first commercial West End production (he then had to wait almost twenty years for his first West End success—Pygmalion in 1914). Assuming control of the stage management right from the start, Shaw saw clearly at rehearsals that the relatively well-known actor playing the leading role of Valentine simply did not have the rhetorical versatility to play the key scene at the end of Act II, on which, for Shaw, the success or failure of the play depended. Out of courtesy to the actor, however, Shaw would not let that be given as his reason for withdrawing the production, and so he wrote up a burlesque of the situation for publication by its producer Cyril Maud. This episode and that of their failed collaboration on Rheingold / Widower's Houses became emblematic for the whole correspondence as the two critics kept returning to their significance, rehashing them yet again in one of their last series of letters. The end was in the beginning.Archer took issue with Shaw's work, not because it was bad (it was hardly ever that), but because he held such high, if somewhat conventional, aesthetic expectations for what his friend produced. Almost always he judged Shaw as not fulfilling his extraordinary potential, of being capable of better. However Archer especially liked Candida (for which Shaw dubbed him a Candidamaniac, his derogatory term for those besotted with his fictional heroine) as well as two plays he placed in the farce category (not a genre Shaw cared for): Arms and the Man (while dismissing the author's claim as to its military realism) and You Never Can Tell (after reversing his initial negative criticism on seeing the revelatory 1906 Court Theatre production). He also admired Mrs. Warren's Profession, although he thought Shaw's raising the subject of incest aesthetically unnecessary—just as he had judged Blanche's bad temper in Widower's Houses artistically unmotivated. Shaw's explanations in response to such criticisms illustrate the rigor of his structural or dramatic logic. The subject of incest was not added on as an optional extra, he insisted to Archer; rather, given the enclosed world of prostitution with its promiscuous sexuality, where paternity and therefore consanguinity could never be certain, incest had been integral to his original idea for the drama. We also discover, by the way, that in naming his brothel-keeper Warren, he had at least two specific allusions in mind (if not more): one a case sensationalized by W. H. Stead involving the radical liberal politician Sir Charles Dilke, who had reportedly seduced “a young married woman” (the daughter of his lover) in a house in Warren Street, while the name also invokes Madame de Warens, who initiated the young Rousseau into the arts of sex as part of a ménage à trois with some literary consequence. Such information—and much more—gleaned from these letters only reinforces the view that Shaw's knowledge was encyclopedic.Shaw's first ten plays, which would constitute a whole oeuvre for anyone else, met with little immediate success in the theater (although the 1894 Avenue Theatre production of Arms and the Man did bring in ninety pounds for Shaw, with which he was able to open a bank account), but when published in three landmark volumes as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant and Plays for Puritans performed a minor revolution in making play scripts readable by totally eliminating technical stage directions; Postlewait points out, however, that Archer's translations of Ibsen sold significantly more than these first three Shaw play volumes. Next came “that Nietzschean motorcar,” Archer's metonym for Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, one of Shaw's most ambitious plays, which both friends hoped would demonstrate his full talents as a playwright (to put all his goods in the shop window, as Shaw later put it). Of all the pitched battles fought between Shaw and Archer, perhaps the most important occurred following its 1903 publication. Archer was deeply disappointed when the long-gestating tour de force eventually appeared, a variegated, fragmentary, modernist cornucopia encompassing Shaw's version of a Don Juan play; a related dream play within the play as a type of Socratic dialogue in which Mozart's Don Juan (Giovanni), Donna Anna, and the statue of her late father, the Commendatore, encounter Gounod's Mephistopheles in Hell; a “Revolutionist's Handbook” akin to the Communist Manifesto but written in the persona of the play's main character (as a revolutionary Member of the Idle Rich Class); a compendium of aphorisms (à la Rochefoucauld); and all prefaced with an Epistle Dedicatory to an aesthetically conservative London theater critic (not Archer but their mutual friend Walkley). This last positively boasted of his masterpiece's diverse origins, manifold intellectual ancestry, and copious literary qualities while ironically off-loading authorial responsibility for it all onto Walkley for requesting a Don Juan play in the first place. Archer was not impressed by such authorial exuberance. His high hopes were dashed precisely when he felt Shaw should be making his biggest impression, and he sternly warned his friend, “In no way are you making the mark either upon literature or upon life, that you have it in you to make…. You are a great force wasted.” As Archer saw it, with this Don Juan play Shaw was indulging—just as in his second play The Philanderer, which Archer had greatly disliked—his own penchant for sensuality (meaning realistic displays of sexual attraction with resulting complications). This sexual realism, although inimical to Archer's conservative aesthetic, we might now judge rather as a sign of Shaw's modernism. Archer further deemed as superfluous and indeed detrimental to the play's design, as it had been also to The Quintessence of Ibsenism, what he called its “Shawpenhauerism”: Shaw's appropriation of a metaphysics of the will from that other German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer (as distinct from his pessimistic philosophy, a crucial difference Shaw makes clear to Archer). While Shaw maintained in response to Archer that “I look on at the Superman just as helplessly as you do: I could not have produced anything else,” he was supremely confident as to what he had accomplished with his first twentieth-century play, insisting that he had delivered all that Archer had demanded, and more: “To all your heart-searching questions I answer without a moment's hesitation or affectation. Yes, I am astonished at what I have done with so little means. I am as willing to hang up my théâtre beside Shakespear's—leaving everything that has been written for the stage in the interim out of account as completely negligible—as Turner was to hang his landscapes beside Claude's; and I attach no importance to that or any other comparison.”Three years later, in response to what he called a “remarkable dithyramb to Death” by Archer (the article “Death and Mr. Bernard Shaw” published in the Tribune on 14 July 1906), Shaw wrote his great comic play The Doctor's Dilemma: A Tragedy. In taking issue with Shaw's criticism of Ibsen and other modern practitioners of the New Drama for clinging onto stale old theatrical conventions when using death sensationally or symbolically (one need only think of Hedda Gabler or Little Eyolf), Archer countered that death for the greatest playwrights is, rather, “the ultimate adventure of humanity … [and] the most penetrating search-light in the armory of [their] craft.” Shaw, in interpreting Archer as denying his claim to “the highest rank as a dramatist until he had faced the King of Terrors on the stage,” accepted the implied challenge to write “a play all about death,” but which, in the form he adopted—a Molieresque satire on the medical profession—would also be “the most amusing play [I have] ever written.” The climax of the play would be an onstage death of one of its two main characters presented as a virtuoso display of playwriting skill that would not only serve as a deconstruction of stage-death conventions, featuring Father Time prominently on stage while introducing an inept newspaper reporter to report (inaccurately) the onstage death, but also intensify both the scene's dramatic effectiveness and affectiveness, never failing to produce total silence in the theater (a rare phenomenon in Shavian drama). Unsurprisingly Archer was unconvinced by the result, though we can now step back from Shaw's stage trickery, and away from the surface comedy and wit of his “tragedy,” to consider the play's subject of an artist dying of that nineteenth-century scourge, consumption. Just as the sparkling comedy about comedy You Never Can Tell was rooted in family pain, the breaking apart of the Shaw family in Dublin, so also was The Doctor's Dilemma. Shaw's younger sister, Agnes, had already died of tuberculosis (her death being the immediate cause for Shaw moving to London in 1876), while his other sister, Lucy, had been diagnosed with the disease and was living in Germany seeking a cure at the time he wrote the play.By now the most famous playwright in Edwardian England (with his reputation well established in both North America and continental Europe), Shaw was especially influential on the younger generation. This faced Archer with a new complication: the need to defend his very public criticisms to Shaw's younger supporters. In so doing, he wrote what may be one of the better contemporary critical observations on Shaw the dramatist: “The merits of Mr. Shaw, the playwright, are not for a moment in question…. Mr. Shaw is a law unto himself. It is a mistake to apply to him the criticism of a pedestrian realism. He is so original a dramatist as to be above the trammels of technique. His sins against it are trifling in comparison with his abounding merits.” Nevertheless, in later critical disputes over Getting Married and Misalliance, Archer could not accept Shaw's veering even more sharply away from traditional plot construction toward that specifically Shavian genre, the full-out discussion play that emerged fully born in that Shavo-Socratic dialogue Don Juan in Hell before being further developed in the last act of Major Barbara. The same debate reignited over Heartbreak House, whose nighttime mysteries (displays of sexual attraction again) Archer could not fathom, though he saw clearly enough that it belonged with the two earlier discussion plays. Archer showed little sympathy for Chekhov in this respect, and his blaming the Russian for similar aesthetic faults helps us appreciate better both Shaw's own theatrical modernism as well as his consciousness of it, something Postlewait understands better than most critics when he writes that, in contrast to Archer, “Shaw understood and appreciated how modern drama in the twentieth century was developing.” One of the major contemporary European critics of this first post-Ibsen wave of modernism who understood better than Archer Shaw's importance in this respect was the Dane Georg Brandes. As Shaw points out to Archer, “The one overwhelming characteristic of my plays is the friction between people on different planes of thought, of character, of civilization & of class prejudice … these contrasts of which Brandes speaks are just the ones that interest me and are handled by me with the greatest care.” Even as late as Back to Methuselah (1921), another ambitious work written on the grand scale, and which Archer thought in ways brilliant and of whose author he continued to write that “there is no one living who has more light & leading in him,” he still judged Shaw as not living up to his potential, urging his old friend, “Why not set the dramatist in you to work and project a new avatar of your godhead, persuasive & convincing, instead of merely startling & titillating.”As journalists, both Archer and Shaw played public roles in some notable theatrical campaigns, including those against stage censorship and for a National Theatre. In the early days, those on behalf of Ibsen, the New Drama, and the New Theatre were the most significant. Whereas Shaw seems to use the terms interchangeably, Professor Postlewait more accurately distinguishes the New Drama, as referring to new types of play texts, from the New Theatre, which refers to new aesthetic approaches to stage production. Both arose in opposition to the practices of late nineteenth-century commercial theater. Along with Maeterlinck and Hauptmann and later Strindberg and Chekhov on the continent, Ibsen inaugurated the New Drama with his revolutionary transformation of the well-made play genre (which Shaw would damn in his theater criticism as “Sardoodledom,” implicating its chief French practitioner, Victorien Sardou), which was then followed up in Britain most notably by Shaw along with other Court Theatre dramatists including Gilbert Murray's translations of Euripides as well as by Synge and the Irish theater movement, whose London performances were so important for the New Drama as Postlewait emphasizes. Antoine's Theatre Libre in Paris had led the way for the New Theatre, with its influence on the Independent Theatre in London, which first staged both Ibsen's Ghosts and Shaw's Widower's Houses to some sensational effect, Stanislavski's Moscow Arts Theatre, and Max Reinhardt's productions in Germany, while reaching a high point in Britain especially with Granville Barker's productions at the Court Theatre 1904–7, along with Shaw's. The New Theatre made a positive virtue of usually limited resources in comparison to, say, Irving's scenic spectaculars at the Lyceum, or even the well-furnished English adaptations of French farces (Shaw criticized the high number of doors the genre required for a set), and the conventionalized naturalism that Shaw castigated as “cup & saucer” realism. Such neat binary categorization can break down, and although both Archer and Shaw were dead set against the actor-manger model, such examples as George Alexander at the St. James's Theatre and Herbert Beerbohm Tree at first the Haymarket and later at Her Majesty's Theatre tried with limited success to reach out to the New Drama. While in the opposite direction, the emphasis on the scenic at the expense of the text by that exemplar of the New Theatre in terms of stage design, Gordon Craig, was redolent, indeed symptomatic of Irving's old-fashioned spectaculars.Given these campaigns, Archer's lack of sympathy for both William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society and the Stage Society, two of the more important English enterprises striving to bring the New Theatre and the New Drama into existence, comes as a surprise. The paucity of resources in both organizations seems to have troubled Archer, whereas Shaw understood better the significance of Poel's attempts at reviving Elizabethan practice, despite inadequate and even wrongheaded stage management, and especially did he appreciate the crucial position of the Stage Society in the development of modern theater. Giving just one or two matinee performances of a large number of noncommercial literary plays with professional casts as a private society (to bypass censorship laws), the Stage Society proved vitally important to both Shaw's dramaturgy and the development of modern drama in Britain generally. Much of the New Drama from continental European would be first staged by the Stage Society in Britain, as were such absolutely noncommercial new plays as those by his fellow Irish writers, Yeats's Where There Is Nothing and Joyce's Exiles, both put on with Shaw's support and even enthusiasm. Even the famous 1904–7 Vedrenne Barker Court Theatre repertory seasons, which cemented Shaw's reputation as a playwright, would not risk putting on his more difficult plays, whereas the Stage Society did. Vedrenne and Barker had even shied away from putting on what became one of their most notable Shaw successes, Man and Superman, which happened only after Shaw suggested they pick up the production due to be staged by the Stage Society. As Shaw put it, “The Stage Society has altered the situation … completely. It has caught on to the modern side of things,” and in several letters here, we see him trying to get Archer to support it, but without much success.These letters also show us how with his increasingly well-defined, if contentious public persona, Shaw was liable to upstage fellow campaigners. His mischievous enthusiasm amounting to interference at times tended to get in the way of Archer's more carefully calibrated plans. This would happen in both the Theatre Censorship and National Theatre campaigns, and, most sadly, toward the end in Shaw's desperate attempt to get Granville Barker to return to practical theatrical work after Barker's second marriage led him both to withdraw from directing (while continuing to write and plan) as well as to cut off all ties with Shaw, though not with Archer. Even in the early Ibsen campaign of the 1880s and 1890s, when Archer as Ibsen's English translator play