This is another of those posts, written ages ago, which I am only just now putting up. Please bear with any references to dates or times and try not to chuckle too much over my optimism as I predict the future.

TBR: 4 /20

Following right on the heels of the Kabbalah, here is a text of a completely different sort: three plays of George Bernard Shaw. It’s difficult to know even what I am expected to review here. There is so much, but it feels rather more conducive to a book club than a book review because these plays (all accompanied with lengthy explanations by the author) are really just chock full of social commentary that begs to be debated. And yet, the commentary is rather the worse for being wrapped in the absurdities and witticisms that make them so delightful to read. For instance, despite Shaw’s lengthy introductory letter to his Man and Superman, I still cannot say for certain what the take away from his play was supposed to be except that: a) women are all devious and conniving in one way or another and, b) Hell is not an awful place nor even so very distant from heaven.

Interestingly, it’s opinions about religion and the sexes, and not eugenics or socialism or politics in general, that are spoken loudest throughout his plays. The quite frightening concept of Hell is repeated in his play Saint Joan, alongside a strange mix of cheap shots at, and blatant respect for, the catholic church. He spends his entire introduction defending the court that tried Joan originally and takes great pains to display them in the best light possible in the play itself, showing a consideration not just for the culture which would  surely have existed at that time, but for the heart and soul of the church itself. A soul that is in perfect odds with the apparent spiritual blindness of everyone else in the play, Joan excused – a disturbing reminder that, when faith is expected, it is very often only skin deep.

While that dichotomy warred its way through my brain, his proposition that Joan cemented not just protestantism, but also nationalism, filled me with delightful confusion. The idea of nationalism not being an idea is  . . . . difficult to imagine. Hasn’t it existed since Cain? How could the English and the French not think of themselves as such? But his reasoning, at least within the play, is quite clear, and it is hilarious to see the bishop unaware of how acknowledgment of the king as owner of the land, rather than the feudal lords, would lead to the dissolving of nobility (just as it’s rather sad to see his conclusion that the natural outcome of Protestantism would be a dissolution of all religions into one). If anyone knows of any books about the development and impact of nationalism as a concept in Europe, or any other nation, please share.

To summarize the other plays: Man and Superman makes a rather ambitious political statement about what romance really is, that is, woman’s compulsion by Nature to secure the best possible situation for having and rearing children. It is hard not to remember Chesterton’s comment about replacing God with a Goddess, for nature is a real force in this work, more real than any god or devil, and the characters can be divided into those who worship her and those who don’t. In the first camp we find thoughtless ignorants who mean well but see little and intelligent revolutionaries who see all but somehow still bungle everything. In the second camp there are women.

I think I will have to go back and read it again for a better impression, for I started out by hating Anne and hoping Jack could be well clear of her and finished by condemning him to her and thinking marrying her was exactly what he needed, and yet I’m still not sure what made me change my mind. Probably Jack’s complete surety that he had all the answers and was perfect and self-sufficient – see following paragraph. Obviously, the idea that women have nothing to do in the wooing process but sit and look pretty has never been anything more than {{1}}bunk (though sitting and being pretty are certainly good cards to play if you have them), even before the modern laws that Shaw constantly references as putting the power in woman’s hand so that men, at least in matters of home and hearth, are hardly their own masters once married. Any doubts, please see Dido. Or Ruth. Or any Austen book ever. All written years before Shaw was born. This being the case, it’s hard to take Anne’s aggressive wooing with anything but a raised eyebrow. However, Shaw himself fully admits that he has written Anne in response to a particular play, and that I am sure explains all her tasteless indiscretion away. It does not, however, make me very eager to read his inspiration.

As for Pygmalion, I have actually read this one before, though I was not then able to fully catch all the meanings. More to the point, there was a period some years back when we watched My Fair Lady all. The. Time. It was funny to see the lines I was so used to hearing, and to watch them be lengthened or shortened or put in a different context or, even, in a different mouth. I’m sorry that My Fair Lady didn’t emphasize more that Freddy was stone broke, for somehow it makes him more helplessly lovable and his inevitable marriage to Eliza more acceptable, whereas in the movie it is only a little pathetic. Eliza is too thoroughly modern for a Cinderella story, but Freddy is so old fashioned there seems little harm in making him a Cinderella man. And what in the world did H. G. Wells write?

Anyway, I feel Shaw basically shot himself in the foot at every turn with this play, for he proposes that it is meant to bring awareness of phonetics to the public attention when, really, it makes the matter somewhat of a silly hook (to an American in the 21st century) and instead illustrates the unthinking, shortsightedness of the main “educated” characters and the rather more practical bent of the flower girl from the gutter. That he calls it a romance is unfortunate, and shows that he himself suffers a little from shortsightedness. Seriously, if you consider the great majority of your audience as uneducated, as Shaw clearly does, why would you expect them to have any other assumption than “love story” when they are promised a romance? Luckily it is not that kind or romance (or really, any kind of romance), for Shaw is right: only that innate desire to show up insufferable egotists can lead us to match Eliza with Higgins. This is the same desire that rises in us occasionally with Sherlock (though, he is really much better than Higgins), or any other “Darcy” type (which, by the way, is a term which must go, for Darcy was never self-absorbed and only occasionally rude). I suspect when we do this we are casting around for a way in which to show such characters that they are not a man-among-men and love just happens to be the most convenient and most humiliating blight at hand. Plus, it implies a happy ending, so win-win. However, it’s not fair to Eliza to make her live with someone who will only ever care for her in the manner which he cares for his slippers just because he gets our backs up, and it is refreshing to see a character who can realize that’s so and therefore deftly nix the possibility in her head and heart and marry the man who is slavishly devoted to her. Rather like seeing another Elizabeth discard any plans of marrying Wickham when her aunt asks her what kind of income she expects him to have. Would that human’s were more often represented as having this much insight and control over their emotions.

So, the verdict: these plays are definitely worth reading. They are well written and full of concepts with which to stimulate our stagnating brains, or else merely put us in convulsions of laughter if the brain is too tired to come out. My favorite was Saint Joan, simply because it was new and such an interesting problem. It’s nice to read someone who you can understand, at least in theory, but still completely disagree with. It keeps the grey cells alive and working.

Having had such success with plays, I think I’ll move on to my three volumes of Shakespeare, cravenly choosing the more modern bard over some frightfully classic tragedies. Part of this is mental laziness, and part of this is the hope that familiarity will lend me speed. In theory I should be 14 books in by the end of July, but I think I’ll settle for 10 by the end of August.

[[1]]Footnote: Or should I say, Buncombe? I seem to be using this word an awful lot lately, and so I finally gave in and looked up its etymology. Guess what, it’s not British! Jolly rum discovery that, wot?[[1]]