Books: From Shaw

From Shaw—Without Love

EVERYBODY’S POLITICAL WHAT’S WHAT—George Bernard Shaw—Dodd, Mead ($3).

At 88, George Bernard Shaw’s favorite reading is “an American magazine called Thrilling Detective Stories.” It puts him to sleep. He works in a workshop that revolves to keep him in the sun all day long. He chops wood for relaxation. He is as ruthless with societies of his admirers as Stalin with the opposition, and buys the postage stamps for his enormous correspondence in £5 lots. He orders them from the village postmistress on a three ha’penny postcard. She sells the postcards to his fans for 10s. 6d. apiece. This is typical of the economic contradictions that beset the old socialist, and of which he discourses in his new book.

He is now agitating for a reform of the income tax, wants all earned incomes over £20,000 to be taxexempt. Says he (after having been enormously overpaid for Pygmalion) : “I lately received a further windfall of £29,000 on account of my film rights. The financial result was that I had to pay £50,000 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer within two years. And the result of that catastrophe is that I am now using my copyrights not to have my plays filmed and thereby give employment and enjoyment to my fellow citizens, but to forbid and suppress them in order to reduce my income to a point at which it will be possible for me to live on it.”

Hopeless Prospect. Everybody’s Political What’s What is not likely to reduce Shaw’s income much. A book of 380 pages and 44 chapters, it covers the ponderous questions: Is Human Nature Incurably Depraved? (“If it is, reading this book will be a waste of time . . .”) and The Land Question (“It is so fundamental that if we go wrong on it everything else will go wrong automatically”). The book has more than its share of the humorously wreathed sagacity that Shaw las offered British life & letters for the past 70 years:

¶”There is also the difficulty that the clearest knowledge of what needs to be done does not carry with it the knowledge how to do it. Dickens describes our ruling classes as perfect masters of the art of How Not To Do It. But then, thinking themselves very well off as they are, they do not want to do it.”

¶”In Russia declared military atheists only are admitted to the Communist Party (the only tolerated party). … Its effect was that the Russian Communist Party, aiming at the complete abolition of priesthood, made itself a priesthood. To eliminate orthodoxy, it set up the most intolerant orthodoxy in,the world. To get id of the religious orders, it instituted the League of the Godless, with medals for its emblems . . . you may see them oftener in Russia than scapulars in Ireland.”

¶”When it was proposed that Queen Elizabeth should marry Ivan the Terrible, the case was not prejudiced by difference of income or class. They might have bred excellent children; but either they would have separated pretty promptly or else Ivan would now be known as Ivan the Terrified.”

¶ “I am not suggesting that the States of the future will or should tolerate what is called Free Love. They will hardly tolerate Free Anything that they can regulate with advantage to the general welfare.”

¶”Children are not childish all through any more than dotards are dotards all through. I have been a child and am a dotard; and I know.”

¶ “An English laborer is an inveterate snob who regards himself as an aristocrat under a cloud, and votes always for the Conservative candidate at elections whilst dukes and marquesses are supporting the Labor Party in the House of Lords.”

¶”The poverty of people who do not know how to live poorly is much more painful than the poverty of a casual laborer who gets as much as he has ever been used to. … Even now idle lives are not happy: their victims have to bore and torment each other with a senseless routine of fashion which is not even invented by themselves, but imposed on them by the luxury trades which prey on them. . . .”

Argument. Everybody’s Political What’s What contains discourses on banking, education, marriage, religion. It contains an attack on Pavlov as merciless as the experiments Pavlov worked on his dogs, and what is probably the most pointed attack on the medical profession in modern literature. The book is a plea for the diluted Marxian Socialism of the British Fabians. Its effectiveness is not increased by Shaw’s repeated statement that he probably would disapprove of whoever applied his thought. “Diderot and Rousseau made Robespierre and Napoleon possible. Lassalle and Marx . . . made Hitler and Mussolini possible as well as Lenin, Stalin and Ataturk. Carlyle and Ruskin, Wells and Shaw, Aldous Huxley and Joad, are making possible the devil knows who in England: probably someone of whom these sages would vehemently disapprove.”

To socialize England, Shaw would abolish the party system. All officials would be chosen as municipal officers are now—they are appointed by elected councils—except that examinations and intelligence tests would determine the qualifications of candidates. “The change from our system to the Russian system,” he says, “would be no change at all as far as the multiplicity of governing bodies is concerned. . . . What the Russians can do, we can do.” He would take over lands just as municipalities now purchase power sites and park sites.

Well-to-do people, he says, would scarcely be conscious of the change taking place. It would bring about a land of plenty in which everyone worked a 20-hour week. Far from producing a nation of robots, it might accentuate individuality so much that it produced a nation of cranks. Classes would be ended, but there would be parties, creeds, trade unions, clubs, sects and cliques, plus the new “panels” of qualified bureaucrats — “possibly on fighting terms, but always on speaking and marrying terms; that is, on equal terms.”

Autobiography. What Shaw is proposing is, in effect, a dictatorship oftrained and specialized bureaucrats. He intends that it should be intelligent and humane, but his system holds no opening, as does the sprawling, inefficient, but changeable system it would supplant, for a change in case intelligence and humanity went over board. Even Shaw admits that his new officials chosen from qualified panels might sterilize people they disliked. What gives Everybody’s Political What’s What clinical and ironic interest is the fact that Shaw’s autobiography quarrels at so many points with his arguments.