What has a lecturer in English in an obscure corner of the world, have to do with Shaw you would wonder – besides the fact that she just might be lecturing on him (and as my students know I don’t do that either). How did this obscure teacher find herself connected to one of the greatest playwrights of all time? Patience, my friends, is the greatest virtue and I ask you, reader, to practice it, as we go about this arduous task of determining this historical link between Shaw and I – a link I hope and pray will ensure my greatness among the coming generations.
First and foremost I would like to congratulate my parents for ensuring I was born on Shaw’s birthday with much proximity in terms of the year as well, thus entitling me to my fame to claim and vice versa. It is my proud honour to explain to u friends, that the great Shaw was born on the day I made history (at least in my personal world) – 26 of July. What difference do a few decades make? It is irrelevant that he was born in 1886 and I in 1981. It is the common denominator of the digits – that matters. Numerology counts too you know, if you want to be great. Wasn’t Shaw a lucky man to be born the day I was born! May the date remain blessed throughout history.
Shaw has been referred to as “the most important English playwright since Shakespeare.” Since I haven’t proved myself as a playwright, the title is yet to be bestowed on me. Shaw’s first play was written in his 20th year in 1885. I certainly proved better and did the same at 19 (though what happened to my playwriting career after that is an equal mystery to me as well).
Our early lives have much in common. Like me, Shaw came from a family of five: he had two sisters, and I, two brothers. When he was 16, his family moved to London without his father. In my case, it was the mother, and we moved to Kottayam, not London. Shaw descended from landed Irish gentry and had a wide knowledge of music, art, and literature as a result of his mother's influence. My family has had no Irish blood in it, except for my sister-in-law, and neither have we been traditionally landed gentry, being the administrative kind. But like Shaw, it was my mother who introduced me to the world of learning and music. The similarity ends there. Young Shaw or “Sonny” as he was called at home was an emotionally neglected boy, the outcast among the children of the family, never able to obtain even the slightest approval from his own mother. His knowledge of music was self-taught and his eventual emergence as one of the greatest music critics in the language not only shows his determination, but also in a way his revenge against his family’s scorn.
A tiff with the fourth estate is part of any writer’s career. In our case, it was at the beginning. Tina’s writing career included a stint with journalism (i.e. I studied it), and so did Shaw’s. Shaw worked as a drama critic for the Star newspaper and Saturday Review magazine before becoming established as a playwright. He used the pseudonyms "GBS" and "Corno di Bassetto" (basset horn) as a columnist. Not only do we both have three initials (mine are TAJ), he at 6.2”, and me at 5.8,” cut imposing figures in our very statures - quite enough to command respect even when unwarranted.
Brilliant as a critic, Shaw could regard himself and his own performances with complete detachment. Feeling his plays were incompetently criticized, he used his critical abilities, to inform his readers exactly how good and how bad his plays really were. This in turn acquired him a reputation for vainglory. But one must realize that very few playwrights can claim to possess this unique quality of detachedly criticising their own works, not even the great I.
Shaw’s first venture into the writing arena, with no capital and the tiniest of incomes, was with his five novels, none of which were ever published in his lifetime. Thankfully I have neither the patience nor the interest to write novels. Shaw’s experiments have certainly helped me save my literary career from becoming a disaster. But like Shaw, who in his 20s suffered continuous frustration and poverty, I too have had to come to terms with my early share of disappointments, and wrestling with various forces.
As a young social reformer, Shaw hated cruelty and oppression and pleaded for freedom. He idealized the rebel and until he was about thirty. Shaw called himself an atheist – something I experimented with for a short while in my heydays till I returned to my original religion. But not Shaw. In the 1890s, Shaw renounced atheism and repackaged himself as a mystic.
Shaw, like me, being a victim of chronic migraines, turned to vegetarianism at 25 as a hopeful cure. I followed suit at 24 but for different reasons. Shaw was later a strong advocate of this dietary style and also became an anti-vivisectionist. In addition, he adopted my healthy practice of being a teetotaller, ensuring his long life.
A freethinker, Shaw believed that “life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.” And he set about doing the same by turning his literary genius to playwriting (which I have yet to perfect). His first published play was Widowers’ Houses (1885), in collaboration with critic William Archer and was a commercial failure. Shaw would later call it one of his worst works, but he had found his medium. Shaw had already begun experimenting with drama from his early twenties. His strength lay in dialogue. His first successful play was Candida published and performed in 1898.
Shaw’s aim, when he turned to writing plays, was to replace the hack melodramas and farces that made up contemporary British theatrical fare with a new theatre of ideas. His theatre of ideas was his greatest invention and achievement. In the process he also created a new genre, the serious farce, which consisted of using the techniques of comedy to advance serious views on humanity, society, and political systems. His seriousness accounts for his brilliance. He is ready for everything and everybody because he has seriously considered everything and seriously regarded everybody. Shaw can extemporize on most subjects because he has seriously thought about them.
Shaw liked to classify his works into two categories: “Plays Pleasant” and “Plays Unpleasant”. “Plays Unpleasant” include Widowers’ Houses and Mrs. Warren’s Profession. Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), since it dealt openly with prostitution, was refused a license by the Censor of Plays. The play was not performed in Britain until 1925 but it set the tone for subsequent Shavian drama and established the distinctive Shavian style. It also established Shaw’s characteristic position of externalizing evil into a general, social guilt.
The biting tone of Shaw’s first plays had brought him attention but hardly popularity. This accounted for his transition to his “Plays Pleasant,” which included Arms and the Man (1894), Candida (1894), The Man of Destiny (1895), and You Never Can Tell (1896). Early on in his career, Shaw decided to publish his plays in book form, and added lengthy prefaces, replacing traditional stage directions with discursive narrative. Thus he created an entirely new and still unimitated genre - part play, part essay, part oratory.
Phew! Try competing with that! And to top it all he went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 for Saint Joan. The extraordinary fact is that Shaw is the only person to have ever won both the Nobel Prize and an Academy Award. He won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his immensely popular Pygmalion in 1938. You and I would probably be familiar with its Audrey Hepburn version – My Fair Lady. Keeping with his extraordinary nature, Shaw refused the £7000 from his Nobel Prize, commenting that “the money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.” At his behest, the money was given to the Anglo-Swedish Literary Alliance. That’s Shaw for you.
If your head is still whirling with facts about Shaw, I’m not done yet. There’s more to Shaw than you can imagine. Being an ardent socialist, Shaw became a founding member of the Fabian Society in 1884, along with Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who would become his closest friends. The society was a middle class organization established in 1884 to promote the gradual spread of socialism by peaceful means. In the course of his political activities he met Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and fellow Fabian, and they married in 1898. By 1911 the Fabian Society had, in Beatrice Webb’s words, reached a crisis “not of dissent, but of indifference,” and Shaw, along with Bland and three others, resigned from the executive committee. But Shaw always remained an active member.
Obviously such an astonishing writer would not be excluded from the political arena. Shaw was quite well known as a public speaker, capable of holding an audience in thrall for two hours at a time, fascinating listeners with his outrageous rhetoric, his flaming beard, and his face that one friend likened to “an unskillfully-poached egg.” He had also ventured into political writing. Though he always refused to stand for Parliament, he was elected to the Vestry Committee of St. Pancras, holding the seat for six years.
With the onset of World War I, Shaw laid out his strong objections in “Common Sense about the War” (1914). His stance ran counter to public sentiment and cost him dearly at the box-office, but he never compromised. Shaw got the reputation for being pro-German. During the last two years of the war it had become evident that Shaw was speaking sense rather than treason. He regained his popularity. Revivals of his plays were produced all over Europe, and his new plays were now received with intense interest.
It was in his nature to propound his philosophy of the life force. In his writings he expounded on the life force - a mysterious power, immanent in living matter, that supposedly drove evolution. Every species had been an instrument of the life force’s effort to acquire power, knowledge and understanding. Through trial and error, at an extremely slow pace, it inched its way upward. In its attempt to achieve fruition, the life force would create ever-higher forms of humanity - supermen, super-supermen, supermen to the third power. Shaw’s motive for believing in the life force was more emotional than intellectual. The conviction that virtue and wisdom will ultimately vanquish wickedness and ignorance justified his humanitarian zeal.
After the death of his wife in 1943, Shaw was physically frail but still mentally active. In his last letter to Sidney Webb, who was himself aged eighty-nine, he wrote, “I hope we have been a pair of decent useful chaps as men go; but we have had too short a lifetime to qualify for real high politics.” Shaw died on November 2, 1950, at the age of ninety-four from injuries received after falling from a ladder while he was trimming a tree on his estate. “I believe in life everlasting; but not for the individual,” he had said the week before. His last words were, “Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.” His ashes, mixed with those of his wife, were scattered along footpaths and around the statue of Saint Joan in their garden.
The Shaw known to the public and the extremely private gentleman he was, were as similar as chalk and cheese. Despite being known as a vigorous controversialist and acquiring the reputation of being a great humorist, Shaw has explained that his attitude was a mere stratagem: he had to fool people into laughing so they should not hit upon the idea of hanging him. Here again we start sharing similarities. Like two sides of a coin, Tina and Shaw exhibit two different and contrasting personalities.
Shaw exhibited spiritual freedom, honesty, courage, and clearness of thought not only in his writing, but also in speech. Sample the Shavian wit: “He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches;” “I often quote myself, it adds spice to my conversation;” and “We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”
So why exactly are people still praising this weirdo? Because his genius is not from anything new he has to say, but because he has a passionate and a personal way of saying it. It is his novelty that endures. “I never knew what a vivid personality meant until I met Shaw,” said the actress Lillah McCarthy. “He, of all men, is most alive; not only on grand occasions but all the time.” Shaw’s output is tremendous: he wrote sixty-three plays and his output as novelist, critic, pamphleteer, essayist and private correspondent was prodigious. He is known to have written more than 250,000 letters. His popularity is evident from the fact that his picture appears on the cover of the Beatles' album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
A philosopher, defender of women's rights and a preacher of equality, like me, Shaw wanted to hand to future generations the torch of life. Said Shaw, “I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community, and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.” And that he proceeded to do.
So what if he’s dead and gone? His books are still there - his legacy. And then there’s his very eminent successor – me, for after all, my name is There Is No Alternative.
