Vol. 4 No. 22/23 · 2 December 1982
pages 11-12 | 4648 words
Shaviana
Brigid Brophy
- Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side by Arnold Silver
Stanford, 353 pp, $25.00, January 1982, ISBN 0 8047 1091 0
- Bernard Shaw and Alfred Douglas: A Correspondence edited by Mary Hyde
Murray, 237 pp, £15.00, November 1982, ISBN 0 7195 3947 1
The most charming fact I have stumbled on in intellectual history is that Freud and Shaw were shocked by one another. Freud’s wounded romanticism speaks in his reference (in Group Psychology, 1921) to ‘Bernard Shaw’s malicious aphorism to the effect that being in love means greatly exaggerating the difference between one woman and another.’ If I am right in supposing that what he had in mind is one of the speeches Undershaft addresses to Cusins at the climax of Major Barbara, ‘Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another,’ then Freud has performed a little secondary elaboration. In substance it is fair. The ‘being in love’ is extrapolated from the dramatic context, where Cusins is indeed in love. But in giving the words the formal and impersonal turn of an aphorism Freud suppresses the dramatic characterisation, including that of Undershaft as the Prince of Darkness, and attributes to Shaw himself both the supposed aphorism and its supposed taint of the ‘malicious’.
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Letters
Vol. 5 No. 5 · 17 March 1983
From Arnold Silver
SIR: I will ignore the personal insults Brigid Brophy feels compelled to include in her review of my book Bernard Shaw: The Darker Side (LRB, Vol. 4, No 22/23). I will respond instead to some of the insults she directs at Shaw while supposedly defending him. For example, Shaw’s identification with Man and Superman’s Tanner was so pronounced that Shaw ordered the actor who first played the role to look as much like him as possible. Ms Brophy, however, accuses me of missing ‘the simple reversal of genders in the play. Ann Whitefield, driven to unscrupulous lengths by the Life Force in order to secure the best father for her future children, is Shaw driven by the same Force to the unscrupulous and unsocialist length of marrying a “millionairess” in order to secure the future of his works of literature.’ This traduces Shaw. That he took what he called ‘a reasonable interest’ in Charlotte’s wealth is undeniable, but at the time he married her he was finally beginning to make money as a dramatist. (The American production of The Devil’s Disciple earned him over £2000.) Why should not Ms Brophy take at face value Shaw’s assertion that ‘not until I was past 40 did I earn enough money to marry without seeming to marry for money’? In my book I explore Shaw’s reasons for marrying Charlotte and must insist that they were more complex and honourable than Ms Brophy allows. Ms Brophy also denies Shaw the right to have been sexually frustrated by an unconsummated marriage. She apparently believes that emasculating a man will not affect his outlook. I believe quite the opposite and try to trace the effects in my analysis of Man and Superman.
Having turned Shaw into an unscrupulous fortune-hunter without sexual desires, Ms Brophy next implies that he was a prudish dramatist who did not know what he was doing. I remark that Shaw wittily hints that Higgins engages in masturbation by having him nervously play with his hands in his trouser pockets, fingering his keys and his cash. Ms Brophy thinks this ‘as obtuse as it is perceptive’. For ‘it was historically and personally impossible that Shaw was consciously hinting any such witty thing for exhibition on the stage.’ The credit should be directed ‘to the wit of his unconscious’. I fear that Ms Brophy here betrays a disabling ignorance of Shaw and his age.
Why was it historically impossible? By 1912 frank discussion of sexual matters was routine among the English intelligentsia. Krafft-Ebing’s famous book was over a quarter of a century old. Freud had published major works on dreams and on the psychopathology of everyday life. Havelock Ellis’s study of erotic symbolism had been out for several years, and his ‘Auto-Eroticism’ had been available in a journal for 14 years and as part of a book for 12 years. (Though officially banned in England, these books by Ellis were nevertheless circulated there.) Shaw not only knew Ellis but had rallied to his defence during the Bedborough Trial of 1898 when the first volume of Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex was confiscated by the police. Shaw had read that volume carefully and had declared ‘that its publication was more urgently needed in England than any other recent treatise.’ Thus knowledge of revealing sexual gestures was readily available to Shaw in 1912.
Was it nonetheless ‘personally impossible’ that he should have used it? Not at all. Shaw’s pioneering treatment of erotic subjects on the stage had prompted even his friend Beatrice Webb to complain in her diary that his plays portrayed the morals of a rabbit warren. His very first play (1892) exhibits a woman’s lust; his second (1893) begins with lovemaking on a sofa and deals throughout with what he termed ‘clandestine sensuality’; his third (1893) centres on a rich whore and also touches on incest. Why, then, by the time he wrote his 21st play, in which a father thinks he has sold a daughter for sexual purposes, could Shaw not also hint at masturbation – the hint being quiet enough to have gone unnoticed for seventy years!
The real Shaw, darker side and all, is thus a more impressive figure than the waxwork St George that Ms Brophy carries in her head; and when someone introduces her to the real Shaw, she flinches, grows angry, and lashes out in every direction. I doubt that the real Shaw, who was unafraid of the truth, would respect her behaviour.
Arnold Silver
University of Hawaii, Manoa, Honolulu
Brigid Brophy writes: Mr Silver misses the distinction between what was known and, perhaps, privately discussable and what Shaw would have wanted to represent (or, with uncharacteristic slyness, to hint) in the theatre or on the page printed under his name, just as he misses the distinction between a regular and secure ‘private income’ and the chancy earnings of a freelance writer.
