Sting like a butterfly, buzz like a bee
Bernard Shaw
By Michael Holroyd
Chatto & Windus, 1997. 834 pp., $49.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
"A good man fallen amongst Fabians" — so Lenin was alleged to have summed up the playwright George Bernard Shaw. Michael Holroyd's biography of Shaw, whose life stretched from 1856 to 1950, reveals an ambiguous Shaw, the witty critic of laissez-faire capitalism and social privilege who nevertheless scorned democracy and who became the patron saint of political reformism.
Shaw was born in Dublin to a dull life of "genteel poverty" before fleeing to London seeking success as a writer. He summarised his early life in London as nine years of "unbroken failure and rebuff, with crises of broken boots and desperate clothes ... penniless and loveless".
The last of his five early novels, An Unsocial Socialist, much overrated by Shaw as "the first English novel written under the influence of Karl Marx", indicated Shaw's discovery of socialism during the great labour struggles of the 1880s and '90s.
Shaw's socialism was a stunted seedling, however. He read Das Kapital but absorbed only a vulgar economic determinism and an explanation of why the working class suffered but not why they could revolt.
Unmoved by the active revolutionary politics of Marx, Shaw joined, not Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation, which could mobilise 20,000 in demonstrations, nor the Socialist League of William Morris, but rather the tiny Fabians, a small group of middle class intellectuals, "all so gruesomely respectable" according to William Morris' daughter May.
The Fabians derived their name and politics from the Roman general Fabius, whose cautious tactics of waiting patiently to strike against Hannibal turned into perpetual delay and inaction.
Shaw's decision to pitch his tent with the comatose army of Fabians was a political choice dictated by an instinctive class feeling for "men of my own bias and intellectual habits", critical of the way society was run but very distant from, and hostile to, the working class.
The Fabians were not just Tories in reformist clothing, although the disguise was good. Shaw, for example, delivered fiery lectures on capitalism and social issues, deploring class, militarism and religion, often having to flee from enraged conservatives through windows or back doors. One conservative journal puffed up with indignation at his "detestable outrage ... vile and blasphemous ravings ... poisonous theories".
But though the Shavian bee buzzed angrily, it stung like a butterfly. The Fabians "took socialism off the streets and sat it down in the drawing-room", says Holroyd, where the expert, technocratic elite-in-waiting contemplated the planned society of the future, achieved by a quiet revolution of Fabian good sense.
Shaw renounced Marxist economics, then class war — the "old barricades revolutionists" were "wrong" and "childish", said the prophet of "constitutional socialism".
Engels, too, had rejected the romantic insurrectionary phrase-mongering of many of the "Marxists" of his day. However, the Fabian alternative was not Engels' mass political mobilisation against capital and state (of which insurrection is the necessary tip of the iceberg), but rather "permeation" of the capitalist state, which the Fabians saw as a neutral body. The Fabians' "reasoning power" would win over the parliamentary and civil service elite to moderate the private sector and boost the role of the state.
Starting with local government (Shaw himself was a local government councillor for six years), the Fabians' municipal "gas-and-water socialism" would move on to conquer the heights of national government through influencing bishops and Tory prime ministers.
Shaw's political involvement in "municipal bakeries, fire insurance and the milk supply", however, proved just as unthreatening as some of his plays which were the favourites of Tory leaders and kings.
The Fabians, however, were not just harmless utopians who believed that socialism would evolve without struggle, revolution or serious inconvenience. They had a more dangerous potential.
They saw the working class as duffers and dupes, incapable of self-emancipation, who had to be guided into what was best for them by middle class intellectuals. This elitist view disparaged democracy and opened doors to eugenics — limiting the breeding of "inferior" people. Shaw was sympathetic to the Eugenics Society.
Shaw's philosophy, much aired in his plays, was also anti-democratic, albeit wrapped in a woolly-headed mysticism. According to Shaw, a benevolent power called the Life Force is at work in the universe, struggling to evolve a higher type of human (Superman), more intellectual (and less obsessed by sex) — very much like Shaw, indeed.
Shaw's philosophy of so-called "Vitalism" amounted to no more than admiration for forceful people who could impose their will on others.
Even when Shaw shed his parliamentarist illusions in the '30ss ("two Labour governments and still no socialism in Britain!", he complained), he still went looking for the strong man, aided by the engine room of Fabian intellectuals, as the agent of social change.
Shaw, who had a "strange fascination" for Mussolini as early as the '20s, also found some virtues in Hitler. Although Shaw thought Hitler's anti-Semitism was repulsive, "the other nine-tenths of what Mr Hitler says" was true, like the incorporation of independent unions into the state-run Nazi Labour Front. Stalin also loomed as a "Superman", his planned economy seen as the Fabian dream come true.
Government by the people was unworkable; "only government of the people and for the people" was practicable, according to Shaw. There was plenty of "governing of the people" by Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin.
Although Shaw was no fascist, and although he was clear-eyed enough to denounce Stalin's political terror as "an Inquisition pure and simple" and the show trials as "a witch-burning epidemic", Shaw had a weak spot for strong rulers and a society planned from the top down.
Fabians like Shaw were not part of the revolutionary left. Although Shaw, for example, was critical of the "king and country" hysteria during World War I, he donated £20,000 (£700,000 in today's currency) to the British War Loan.
Shaw was the "revolutionary writer" who denounced revolution. His The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, for example, was astute enough on how the economic divide between rich and poor turned law, marriage, school, newspapers and so on into tools of capitalist oppression, yet Shaw argued that all people "recoil with repugnance and dread" from a revolution which might end the class divide.
Be prepared to work hard, however, for any enlightenment on all this from Holroyd, a master at the gossip-column version of biography, extremely industrious in retailing every little detail of Shaw's life (with a particular obsession for Shaw's motoring tours), and above all not greatly overburdened with ideas. A "Biographer For Hire" sign may well hang outside Holroyd's literary shop.
Engels, Shaw's early contemporary, summed up Shaw as "very talented and witty as a writer but absolutely worthless as economist and politician". Harsh but accurate.
A later contemporary, the writer and critic Edmund Wilson, also found Shaw to be not much of a politician but still valuable for "stirring new intellectual appetites, exciting our sense of moral issues, sharpening the focus of our sight on the social relations of our world". Like the rose, Shaw must be handled with gloves on, and heavily pruned, to get the best results.