Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
There's plenty to be found on the internet for students of literature interested in learning more about George Bernard Shaw, though for completeness of scholarship and detail, I recommend Michael Holroyd's comprehensive biography published originally in three separate volumes by Random House.
Volume One The Search for Love 1856-1898 appeared in 1988.
Volume Two The Pursuit of Power 1898-1918 in 1989.
Volume Three The Lure of Fantasy 1918-1951 in 1991.
Mr. Holroyd has condensed his trilogy into a single "definitive" volume. I'm in awe of the time, energy, patience and dedication and research that must have gone into this work.
To learn five things you never knew about Shaw, visit The National Gallery Of Ireland: https://www.nationalgallery.ie/art-and-artists/exhibitions/shaw-and-gallery-priceless-education/five-things-about-GBS
For all the information you'd need to visit Shaw's house, known as Shaw's Corner, situated in Ayot St. Lawrence and maintained as part of England's National Trust: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/essex-bedfordshire-hertfordshire/shaws-corner
Seema Anand Chopra’s unpretentious Timeless Trails blog. Seema offers a room by room tour od Shaw's Corner and focuses with charming enthusiasm on the author's interest in India, his practice as a vegetarian, and his friendship with Mohandas Gandhi. https://www.timelesstrails.in/2022/10/10/part-3-george-bernard-shaw-from-nobel-prize-to-oscar-award/
I took the photo above from the back of the house.
Here above is a view extending directly behind the house, of Shaw's garden. Though it can't be seen in this photo, Shaw's garden includes, just as it did in his lifetime, an orchard for apples, plums and pears. National Trust gardeners harvest the fruit and sell it. All proceeds go back into the Trust.
Front view of Shaw's writing hut, facing away from the house. Still on premises, furnished as it was in his lifetime, the hut was built to turn on a spindle to allow Shaw sunlight from certain directions while writing any time of day. This is where his creative work was alleged to have been accomplished. He used the study inside his house for administrative tasks.
A side view of the hut. Note the elevation at the hut's base, allowing the spindle fuction and the hut to rotate. Note, too, how small the whole structure is.
Above, the hut's interior, his typewriter, all furnishings original. Below, Shaw's spectacles on the desk in his hut.
To get to Shaw's house in Ayot St. Lawrence without a car, my wife and I needed to ride a bus that originates at Heathrow Airport and passes through Watford where we picked it up and rode to St. Albans, where we got off. From there on the St. Albans High Street, we caught a second bus to the village of Wheatstable. From there, we walked just under 3 miles one way following one of a few trails that crosses scenic pastures and rolling dells and also follows alongside the River Lea. https://wheathampstead-pc.gov.uk/the-river-lea/
Even without an OS map, or an All Trails subscription app on our phones, we were able to navigate the walk based on directions provided by the Natonal Trust website. A long vigorous walk Shaw allegedly enjoyed daily.
We did, however, take a couple of wrong turns, getting lost but benefitting from the kindness of other hikers, two of whom were also lost but heading toward a different destiantion.
During his lifetime, a train that ran from a depot in Wheathampstead allowrf him easy access to London. What's left of the depot, seen below, acted as our starting point.
Shaw might have approved of our persistence, chatting it up with friendly strangers on the trail, as much as we approved of the weather and the views of the Hertfordshire countryside.
What intrigues me about Shaw is how much of his own eccentric man he was, a noncomformist, a lightning rod, a champagne socialist and an eye witness to the end of the 19th and a sizeable piece of the 20th Century. Born on July 26, 1856 in Dublin, Ireland, he died on November 2, 1950 at his home in Ayot St. Lawrence. He was 94 years old. 
He remains as a literary and political figure something akin to Marmite in that he's either loved or hated. My wife and I watched recently in London's West End, Imelda Staunton and her daughter, Bessie Carter, play the lead roles in Shaw's play, Mrs. Warren's Profession.
Despite Shaw's ability to polarize as artist, judging by the reception to Ms. Staunton's and Carter's performances, respectively, in a wonderful production, Shaw's ideas, use of language, and sense of the dramatic still remain fresh and relevant today. Though no doubt some of the original play was edited for the sake of brevity, just as the works of Shakespeare often are.
In my opinion, it's not his literary works, but the man's politics that detractors take issue with. I'm with them, believing their skepticism warranted. Shaw advocated quite loudly for eugenics, Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.
To learn more about Shaw in this regard, I recommend Fintan O'Toole's 2017 book, Judging Shaw.
Here's a link to a lecture he presented at Columbia University in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bW9WB-QPDo&ab_channel=SOFHeyman
Pictured to the right is the 40-letter phonetic Shavian Alphabet. Such a work requires an overbearing amount of monomania, but according to scholars, Shaw had beneficent intentions. He believed the English alphabet thwarted literacy and the upward mobility of the poor. He even established in his will a pair of Alphabet Trusts. One meant for research and the gathering of statistics to demonstrate how the Shavian Alphant could conserve labour, money and time. The other to manage publicity and the transliteration of his Shavian Alphabet version of the Androcles and the Lion fable.
In February of 1957, the British Courts ruled against Shaw's will, though an out-of-court settlement allocated £8,300 to the Alphabet Trusts, and Androcles and the Lion was reproduced in the Shavian alphabet and distributed to public libraries in the United Kingdom and to national libraries abroad. Shaw’s supporters continued to promote the Shavian alphabet, but it's never been applied anywhere else.
Shaw's industriousness deserves to be lauded. He took jobs as a ghost writer for a musical column in the weekly satirical publication The Hornet. He wrote a column for The Star under the name, Corno di Bassetto. Writing as G.B.S. he penned reviews as an art critic for The World, and as a theatre critic for The Saturday Review. He even worked for the Edison Telephone Company.
At the start of his career, he struggled to publish his novels. Undeterred, he eventually published five of them, none of which were a success.
For one year, from 1886 to 87, his friend Annie Besant, pictured below, serialized his novel The Irrational Knot in her publication, Our Corner. The novel as a whole wasn't published until 1905.
When in 1881 he was afflicted with smallpox, needing months to recover and choosing to grow his signature beard as a method for concealing his facial scars, he began a novel Cashel Byron’s Profession. The story of a prize-fighter, it garnered no commercial interest or critical praise.
He advocated for women's rights and gender equality despite indulging in affairs with married women and widows. The details of these affairs can be found in his letters, notably to the actresses Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Ellen Terry. Jerome Kilty's play, Dear Liar, uses Shaw's letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and hers to him, telling of the zealous romanticism between these two intensely theatrical personalities.
When he finally married on June 1, 1898, it was to Charlotte Payne-Townshend. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Payne-Townshend.
In 1906, the couple moved into Shaw's Corner.
Note the body language in the photo above. Shaw was 42 when he married, and Payne-Townshend only six months younger. Some scholars argue their political activism and their interest in literary accomplishments, rather than sexual appetites and physical attaction, kept them together. I've little passion for such hair-splitting. As I view it, rightly or wrongly, Charlotte Payne-Townshend was a philantthropist and scholar, choosing to become Shaw's wife and most likely his secretary following the social demands and rigors of that time. She wasn't his muse and literary biographers may be correct in their assumptions that she most likely was never his wild lover.
Shaw himself, no doubt, wasn't an always faithful husband. This should be noted for those inclined to canonize the man. Their marriage, however, lasted until their deaths. For me, as friends to the poor and wretched who lived in quite bourgeois and splendid comfort, they epitomize what some label as practitioners of champagne socialism.
Nonetheless, by all accounts, he was a gifted writer, and she a remarkable woman. Over the years, finally, as someone more than just Mrs. Shaw, Charlotte Payne-Townshend has garnered some deserved attention. These links provide information about past performances of the one-woman play, Mrs. Shaw Herself.
Devised by Helen Tierney and Alexis Leighton (Helix Productions), Mrs Shaw Herself was refined in production from their initial script through a series of early performances before premiering its final version at The Tristan Bates Theatre, London on 21 January 2018. This production was co-sponsored by the Shaw Society. The play has been performed in adapted versions for other venues, including a substantially shorter one for performance online. The text was drawn from letters and diary entries.
Charlotte Payne-Townshend translated Eugène Brieux's play Maternité, and it was peformed by the Stage Society in 1910 at Daly's Theatre in London.
As Shaw's tireless supporter, acting as his secretary and manager, it must be remembered that in his lifetime Shaw wrote 60 plays, not to mention his political essays and polemics, his theatre, music and art reviews, and the Prefaces to his plays, which I still find delightful reading. Which author can accomplish so much work without some form of consistent support? Few, I believe, if any.
The quotation below from author Elizabeth Gaskell sheds some light on Charlotte's personality.
In short, I suppose we can say that the woman was unselfish. An outspoken defender of women’s rights and fairer treatment of the working class, the wealthy Ireland-born Payne-Townshend became a member, along with Shaw, of the Fabian Society, founded in 1884. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society.
Having already served on the London City Council, Shaw drafted the Society's first manifesto. Generally speaking, the Fabian Society worked to guide Britain into a socialist future.
Here is a link to a recent discussion about The Fabian Societyhosted by Alex Phillips on the right-leaning British TalkTV show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6TKF94tEaI&ab_channel=TalkTV
Journalist Joseph Robertson, interviewed in the discussion, describes The Fabian Society as a "gradualist movement" toward "incremental socialism" in Britain. The current prime minister, Keir Starmer, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, former prime minister Tony Blair, practically all of Britain's Labor Party are members. They advocate for open borders, the destruction of capitalism without the bloodshed of a revolution, and as Joseph Robertson states, "Marxists love nothing more than beheading a king."
Would Shaw be happy to view the often charmless, chaotically littered, balkanized and disfunctional Muslim-centric city streets of London, Bradford and Birmingham, to name a few, that this island of strangers Britain has become? I don't know.
I'm sure, however, he'd be pleased to see so many socialists in positions of power. After all, he was also involved in the 1893 foundation of the Independent Labour Party.
It's safe to label him a political acitivist. As his popularity as a speaker continued to grow, he started to write what he called his “missionary books.” These included The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898. Prior to that, The Quintessence of Ibsenism in 1891.
For more on Henrik Ibsen, pictured above, this link is an appealing place to start: https://www.factsnippet.com/site/facts-about-henrik-ibsen.html
Turning away from politics to theatre, I want to place Shaw side by side with Ibsen. This was how his work was introduced me. It's not difficult to find the roots of a Western theatre of realism that's till with us today. A theatre that isn't afraid of challenging social and cultural norms and taboos. Drama, as such, that doesn't seek to please or provide escape. This kind of theatre allows for criticsm and attacks on the status quo. This is why I think Shaw would despise wokeness, for example. Or that horrid state of misery known as cancellation culture. Shaw was intent on slaying all beasts, cutting them down to size. Work culture in any form is not.
Realism isn't as popular, say, as it was during the angry young man period of the sixties. This is to be expected. Theatre everywhere will support and reflect trends and moods. Though a three-act play isn't as expensive to mount as a musical or a fantasy, it's often less profitable financially.
As a genre, it has legs, so to speak. A section of he theatre-going public returns to it, and I include myself in this group, as if in need of refreshing their sense of a moral and social conscience. Theatre of this kind cleanses one of grudges held too long. It's cathartic on more than a merely emotional level. I'd argue that we need this now more than ever. Not on the stage alone, but in its progeny, the long-form subscription-based film narratives that are streamed into homes daily via, say, Netflix, across the developed world.
Shaw embraced elements of what we might coin "pop culture" today. When not reviewing plays or declaiming as an art critic, he penned columns about music, specifically from 1888 to 1894. He raved about Elgar, and promoted Puccini, Mascagni, and Wagner. Nor did he shy away from cinema. What I like about him is that it appears he was always looking ahead. Those who do this, though they may be critical, abide by hope.
Note below the large wooden record player next to the fireplace in the Shaw's dining room.
Note the radio below in the corner between the large window and the record player.
And the books! Original volumes are on diplay at the house.
Below are some photos of the study at Shaw's Corner, where both husband and wife spent many hours steeped in toil. According to the National Trust, everything in the study belonged to and was used by Shaw and his wife.
Above, his study desk and typewriter.
Above, Shaw's tool box affixed to the wall in his study. Below, his metamorphic library step ladder in the Arts and Crafts style, his leather travel bag on top of it.
Shaw could not have been an easy man to live with. It's a gross understatement to say he had strong opinions and no fear of presnting them. We owe a debt of gratitude to one friend, William Morris, pictured below in a portrait on the wall in Shaw's study. Morris, another socialist, a novelist and an aritst with a unique visual style, was a talent and confidante Shaw wisely chose to heed when he suggested that he try writing plays rather than novels.
Thus, Widowers’ Houses, his first play, was performed twice in 1892. However, Mrs Warren’s Profession, completed in 1892, his third play, grew in popularity through privately held performances. These were private due to censorhsip regarding any play concerned with prostitution. The play didn't see a public stage until 1925. Responding to this, Shaw stated in an 1897 interview: "My reputation as a dramatist grows with every play of mine that is not performed."
This list ranks the plays. Please don't think you must agree with the rankings. I certainly don't. https://www.famousfix.com/list/plays-by-george-bernard-shaw
Getting back to his vegetarianism, to understand better how Shaw defined it, one can consult Alice Laden and R. J. Minney's 1972 The George Bernard Shaw Vegetarian Cookbook.
The man died at the age of 90, a vegetarian for 66 years, openly critical of vivisection, and any form of cruelty in sport. https://ivu.org/history/shaw/ I doubt he'd support MMA.
To learn more about his views on socialism, here's a link to his 1926 essay on the subject: https://www.britannica.com/topic/George-Bernard-Shaw-on-socialism-1985101 I don't doubt he'd support the young Ugandan socialist currently running as a Democrat for mayor of New York City.
All of which leads me to this. In my opinion, Shaw doesn't fit into today's narrower more homogenized and globablized political framework. For example, he was by all accounts an anti-vaxer. He would have probably despised the shutting down of the world economy during Covid. He was a rabidly independent thinker, and yet he supported forms of socialism that call for more stringent government control in any society. As I've already written, he supported the likes of Hitler and Mussolini. Though I admire and enjoy his plays, his politics make no sense to me. Naturally, I must view them through the prism of his era. But how can he love and pity and champion the working man while saying in an interview that the biggest problem with the United States is its Constituition. Anyone with any knowledge of Western-style democracy would find that the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution allows for priviledges that no socialist or communist government has ever supported.
His bed, above. His dresser, below. Hard to imagine him sleeping much.
The activism and the politics, in particular, are where I find far too many contradictions and foms of hypocrisy in Shaw. As I do in any bureacratic administative-centered top-down approaches to governance. The State exists to look after itself. It's no surprise that primarily the young throw themselves at it. They're in search of new parents and a utopia. They haven't yet seen the bait and switch that The State, despotic sheep or tortoise in wolf's clothing -- and not unlike the symbol of The Fabian Society -- is capable of becoming.
Along with documentaries and critical assessments, there are a handful of short original videos on You Tube in which Shaw is interviewed. These are from British Movietone, British Pathe, and the British Film Institute. Here's a link to the BFI tribute:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN6n-Sfc5_U&list=PLRyr3thLd7H40Pcpv_LsZIMeS3EpcfcaP&index=15&ab_channel=BFI
This next one is from August 26, 1929, filmed in the garden at Shaw's Corner. He speaks about his first visit to America: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEESoO7cN_g&list=PLRyr3thLd7H40Pcpv_LsZIMeS3EpcfcaP&index=14&ab_channel=BritishMovietone
Watching these, and others, I find again that Shaw's politics aren't much different from the muddle-headed approaches seen coming from the Left today. Coming from the Right, Shaw displays a knack for the theatrical. Naturally, he's a champion of the worker. As long, of course, the worker stays in his lane and knows his lowly place. Though he strives, how he strives, this glorious worker. All this nonsense becomes apparent rather quickly. In one of the videos, he makes his disdain clear regarding the American Constitution, a document, as I've mentioned, he had no use for.
I'm done with his politics. I prefer discussing his awards. Below, on the mantle in his drawing room, as if to represent the old world, stands a porcelain figurine of the Bard of Avon, one of his heroes. Next to it, as if to represent the new world, stands his Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay earned in 1938 for the film version of Pygmalion starring Wendy Hiller, and Leslie Howard.
Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxUTv_C9PPw&list=PLRyr3thLd7H40Pcpv_LsZIMeS3EpcfcaP&index=10&ab_channel=DKClassicsIII
This links to the 1973 BBC version with Lynn Redgrave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meK4ujnlohM&list=PLRyr3thLd7H40Pcpv_LsZIMeS3EpcfcaP&index=6&ab_channel=CantaraChristopher
Here is Margot Kidder and Peter O'Toole, also from the 1970's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhNk2eniBQ4&list=PLRyr3thLd7H40Pcpv_LsZIMeS3EpcfcaP&index=7&ab_channel=AndyLuk
I don't know which one is the best. I'll leave that for you to decide. I like them all for different reasons.
I'm also fond of the film versions of Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan, and Major Barbara. I believe all of these can be found on You Tube.
Visitors to Shaw's Corner will find upstairs just outside of Shaw's bedroom, his other significant award, the 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature. It's encased in glass, which explains the blurriness of my photo above.
The Nobel Prize Committee recognized Shaw "for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty."
Shaw declined the prestigious award, and for this act of selflessness I must give him credit. He took a jab at Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, saying, “I can forgive Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."
According to a periodical known as The Week, he also stated regarind the award, "It's perfect nonsense! To offer me an award of this sort is an insult, as if they had never heard of me before — and it's very likely they never had."
After a controversial brouhaha which was more likely a tempest in a teapot, Shaw chose to accept the award itself, but not the prize money. His recommendation was that the sum be used to fund translations into English of works by Swedish playwright August Strindberg.
For a long time, from 1925 to 2016, Shaw held the sole honor of being the only invidividaul to receive the Nobel, and the Oscar prizes. Bob Dylan, in 2016, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He had previously won an Oscar in 2001 for Best Original Song, "Things Have Changed" featured in the Michael Douglas vehicle, The Wonder Boys.
I know I'll make a few enemies with this comment, but, sorry, this I can't comprehend. It's a reminder of why I dislike awards of any kind. Popularity contests, if you will. Marketing campaigns. I've never even heard this Bob Dylan song allegedly deserving of an Oscar. And Dylan getting the Nobel Prize for literature is astounding when the likes of Vladimir Nabokov, nominated ten times, never recieved one. Nor James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Anton Chekov, and Henrik Ibsen. I could rant on all day about this, but I'll spare you.
Here's a link to an interesting artcile that shows I'm not the only one to find how remarkably baffling and distressing this is for those who care about how literature is perceived and promoted. https://eyeoflynx.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/great-authors-who-didnt-win-a-nobel-prize-for-unlikely-reasons/
The article's list, by the way, starts with non-recipient Tolstoy and includes George Orwell, and W.S. Maugham. Three of my all time favorite writers.
So, as I tell myslef, I tell all you writers and justice warriors out there, be warned, don't do anything for accolades or to change the world. There's no justice, no utopia, and the world will change itself with or without your assitance and demands. There's only you and either your rejection of or your willingness to make Faustian bargains with the machine. Or, as in the case of Robert Zimmerman from Minnesota, to take the name of a Welch poet, to convince the world you're important while you sing horribly, and clearly fashion some clever lyrics, though all the while pretend you're Woody Guthrie, some kind of real deal, and with each million earned, each wing added to one of your mansions in California or the South of France, to more or less become the machine while posing as its harshest critic.
Sad, really, because I kind-of-sort-of liked a few Bob Dylan songs way back when. I can't stand him now. With Shaw, I have many of the same reservations, but somehow the works of Shaw, outside of his dubious politics, have found a way to revive themselves in me. Perhaps this will happen with Bob Dylan. Who knows? Only time will tell. Not that anyone is holding their breath.
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