GEOSHAW: THE MAP

For those of you who have not visited the GeoShaw Map Project yet, we have brought Muhammad to the mountain.

 

GEOSHAW: SHAW'S PLACES THEN AND NOW

Below is a list of the addresses and locales that have been included in our GeoShaw Map thus far. Each address is linked to a picture of the site as it stands today. All the pictures have been taken and generously donated by Evelyn Ellis and her collaborators.

• 1 Cheyne Walk
• 1 Essex Street
• 10 Oakley Street
• 11 Darlaston Road
• 12 Well Walk
• Store Street Music Hall, 16 Store Street
• 14 Dean's Yard
• 14 Downing Street
• 14-10 Old Park Lane
• 15 Cheyne Walk
• 152 Old Kent Road
• 166 Strand
• 17 Osnaburgh Street
• 17 Saville Row
• 185 Tottenham Court Road
• 2 Courtfield Road
• 218 High Holborn
• 23 Brompton Square
• 23 King Street
• 25 Rathbone Place
• 28 Theobalds Road
• 29 Abbey Street (now Buckfast Street)
• 29 Fitzroy Square
• 3 Hammersmith Terrace
• 3 Whitehall Court
• 32 Ormond Street
• 32 Weymouth Street
• 351 Battersea Park Road
• 36 Osnaburgh Street
• 37 St. Martin's Lane
• 4 Whitehall Court
• 41 Grosvenor Road
• 5 Queen Square
• 55 Great Russell Street
• 65 Fleet Street
• 663 Commercial Road
• British Museum
• British Museum Reading Room
• Clifford's Inn
• Criterion Theatre, Piccadilly Circus
• Crystal Palace Park
• Gower Street
• Ludgate Circus
• Old Chelsea Town Hall
• Panton Street
• Piccadilly (formerly St. James's Hall)
• Ranston Street
• South Place
• St. Agnes Place
• St. Catherine Street. Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
• St. George's Place
• St. George's Road
• St. Martin's Place

SHAW AND ISLAM (I)

A few days ago, someone posted a question on the ISS Facebook page wondering if Bernard Shaw ever "praised Islam or Mohamed in any of his books or statements." It is no wonder someone should ask such a question, because the issue is all over the Internet. Admittedly, very few of these claims are based on known sources or sound research, as some have noted. 

At any rate, there is no gainsaying the fact that Shaw's opinions on Islam are certainly of interest to many, given that I have found more than 450 mentions of words like "Islam," "Mohammed," Mahometan," and "Muslim" - in their various forms and spellings - in Shaw's works and, more importantly, in the pieces of criticism in my database.  I will try to bring to light as much material as I possibly can, and I am sure my intelligent readers will be able to draw their own conclusions. 

Well, where do I begin? Perhaps the plays are a safe choice (there will be another entry devoted to his non-dramatic texts exclusively). Generally speaking, Shaw does not go beyond a few scattered cultural commonplaces in the text of his plays, albeit with a pinch of Shavian humor on occasion. The most trite include the phraseological "If the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must come to the mountain" (The Doctor's Dilemma) and the merely descriptive, like the Egyptian doctor in The Millionairess, who is "what you call a Mahometan" and keeps "a clinic for penniless Mahometan refugees." 

More often than not, however, there is a conventional component in the references to muslims and their religious practices. Thus, in the first act of Captain Brassbound's Conversion, which takes place in "Mogador, a seaport on the west coast of Morocco," we are reminded that "Mahometans never spend money in drink." Likewise, in Man and Superman Jack Tanner urges Straker to take him to "any port from which we can sail to a Mahometan country where men are protected from women" - but not viceversa, I may add. In this play, like in the rest - as we shall see - most references to Islam are intertwined with other creeds, amidst a general sense of religious relativism, at least as regards the established religions Shaw was acquainted with. Fittingly, it is in the "Don Juan in Hell Scene" that we find this type of discussion: 

DON JUAN. That is perhaps why battles are so useless. But men never really overcome fear until they imagine they are fighting to further a universal purpose—fighting for an idea, as they call it. Why was the Crusader braver than the pirate? Because he fought, not for himself, but for the Cross. What force was it that met him with a valor as reckless as his own? The force of men who fought, not for themselves, but for Islam. They took Spain from us, though we were fighting for our very hearths and homes; but when we, too, fought for that mighty idea, a Catholic Church, we swept them back to Africa.

THE DEVIL. [ironically] What! you a Catholic, Senor Don Juan! A devotee! My congratulations.

THE STATUE. [seriously] Come come! as a soldier, I can listen to nothing against the Church.

DON JUAN. Have no fear, Commander: this idea of a Catholic Church will survive Islam, will survive the Cross, will survive even that vulgar pageant of incompetent schoolboyish gladiators which you call the Army.

THE STATUE. Juan: you will force me to call you to account for this.

DON JUAN. Useless: I cannot fence. Every idea for which Man will die will be a Catholic idea. When the Spaniard learns at last that he is no better than the Saracen, and his prophet no better than Mahomet, he will arise, more Catholic than ever, and die on a barricade across the filthy slum he starves in, for universal liberty and equality.

Similarly, in Major Barbara, Undershaft expresses an equally relativistic idea about faith with special reference to Islam when he claims that "It is cheap work converting starving men with a Bible in one hand and a slice of bread in the other. I will undertake to convert West Ham to Mahometanism on the same terms."

In addition, the social, political, and cultural nature of religion allows for hilarious scenes with a running thread of earnestness "in the womb of time." Take, for instance, the different takes on marriage that three different religions (including Islam) have, as discussed in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles: 

HYERING. Anything fresh from London or Delhi?

SIR CHARLES. The same old songs. The Church of England wont tolerate polygamy on any terms, and insists on our prosecuting Iddy if we cannot whitewash him. Delhi declares that any attempt to persecute polygamy would be an insult to the religions of India.

PRA. The Cultural Minister at Delhi adds a postscript to say that as he has been married two hundred and thirtyfour times, and could not have lived on his salary without the dowries, the protest of the Church of England shews a great want of consideration for his position. He has a hundred and seventeen children surviving.

SIR CHARLES. Then there's a chap I never heard of, calling himself the Caliph of British Islam. He demands that Iddy shall put away all his wives except four.

HYERING. What does the Foreign Office say to that?

PRA. The Foreign Office hails it as a happy solution of a difficulty that threatened to be very serious.

There exists, however, a very peculiar element shared by a few of Shaw's plays that is worth commenting on. On two different occasions, characters of Shaw's plays foresee (or live in) a world in which Mohammedanism is the dominant religion. So, for example, Hotchkiss (Getting Married) remarks that 

HOTCHKISS. [...] I happen, like Napoleon, to prefer Mohammedanism. [Mrs George, associating   Mohammedanism with polygamy, looks at him with quick suspicion]. I believe the whole British Empire will adopt a reformed Mohammedanism before the end of the century. The character of Mahomet is congenial to me. I admire him, and share his views of life to a considerable extent.

Although Hotchkiss's speech ends with the explicit acknowledgement of "the quintessential equality of all the religions," it is also true that this idea of Islam as the official religion of the world remained in Shaw's dramatic arsenal for decades. So, for instance, part IV of Back to Methuselah (Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman) depicts a futuristic world where the long-lived want to destroy the British Commonwealth (Capital City: Baghdad) before its short-lived inhabitants destroy themselves. The British Envoy is shocked to learn that "the old uns prefer Mahometans." As the Elderly Gentleman explains: 

THE ELDERLY GENTLEMAN [...] There can be no doubt, I am afraid, that by clinging too long to the obsolete features of the old pseudo-Christian Churches we allowed the Mahometans to get ahead of us at a very critical period of the development of the Eastern world. When the Mahometan Reformation took place, it left its followers with the enormous advantage of having the only established religion in the world in whose articles of faith any intelligent and educated person could believe.

If I may interrupt my train of thought for a second, reading Shaw makes many of the so-called "enfants terribles" of literature appear outmoded and conventional - I don't know what the hype is about. 

At any rate, I personally believe that Shaw tries to provoke his audiences when he portrays a muslim future, especially as a counterpoint to the prevailing religious (not exclusively religious) bigotry of his time - an issue that also pervades some of his plays, hence the following exchange from On the Rocks: 

SIR ARTHUR. [...] The Archbishop says "Avoid figures; and stick to the fact that Socialism would break up the family." I believe he is right: a bit of sentiment about the family always goes down well. Just jot this down for me. [Dictating] Family. Foundation of civilization.  Foundation of the empire. 

HILDA.  Will there be any Hindus or Mahometans present? 

SIR ARTHUR. No. No polygamists at the Church House. Besides, everybody knows that The Family means the British family.

Needless to say, there is a play where the religious element is so strong and the tone so serious that any reference to Islam should be considered carefully. I am talking, as you have rightly guesssed, about Saint Joan. Towards the end of Scene IV, there is a lively discussion between Cauchon and Warwick that involves several references to the muslims in the Middle Ages. Shaw's natural tendency to anachronism in his historical plays, and his habit of comparing even the most remote places and eras to the British Isles of his own lifetime, would lead anyone to believe that there is a bit of twentieth-century philosophy in what follows. In fact, as we shall see, practically all the notions that have been discussed hitherto can be found in this scene. 

To begin with, Cauchon, the man of the Church, certifies Joan's heresy on the grounds that she does not use the Church as the rightful interlocutor in her conversations with God. 

CAUCHON. [...] She sends letters to the king of England giving him God's command through her to return to his island on pain of God's vengeance, which she will execute. Let me tell you that the writing of such letters was the practice of the accursed Mahomet, the anti-Christ. Has she ever in all her utterances said one word of The Church? Never. It is always God and herself.

The idea that Mahometanism may one day be successful because it has a philosophy/creed but not a caste of clergymen seems to be turned on its head here for dramatic purposes, but it remains basically unaltered. 

Warwick, the seasoned soldier who has travelled the world, embodies the idea of religious relativism that has previously been discussed. 

WARWICK. I am a soldier, not a churchman. As a pilgrim I saw something of the Mahometans. They were not so ill-bred as I had been led to believe. In some respects their conduct compared favorably with ours.

After these words, when Cauchon reprimands him for his lack of theological knowledge and the boldness of his statement, Warwick once again stands his ground and addresses the question of religious bigotry as the basis for religious conflict - be it the Crusades or any of their present-day counterparts, I guess. 

WARWICK. [...] I am sorry you think I must be either a heretic or a blockhead because, as a travelled man, I know that the followers of Mahomet profess great respect for our Lord, and are more ready to forgive St Peter for being a fisherman than your lordship is to forgive Mahomet for being a camel driver. But at least we can proceed in this matter without bigotry.

After all, in Warwick's own words, Christendom and Islam "are only east and west views of the same thing."

If we forget for a moment about the abstract - and sometimes abstruse - concept of religion, Shaw also makes some personal comments about the figure of the prophet Mohammed (Mahomet). Although most of the juicy bits about him belong in the second part of this post, I think it is fair to end this one with the comments included in Buoyant Billions, especially because they frame Shaw's vision of Mohammed. First of all, this play lists the prophet of Islam as one of the "World Betterers" the world has known, with some illustrious company: 

SON. No: you have always been a model father. But the profession I contemplate is not one that a model father could recommend to his son. 

FATHER. And what profession is that, pray?

SON. One that is always unsuccessful. Marx's profession. Lenin's profession. Stalin's profession. Ruskin's profession. Plato's profession. Confucius, Gautama, Jesus, Mahomet, Luther, William Morris. The profession of world betterer.

Despite this, we have to take Mahomet as a "righteous man" who perhaps had no other choice but to do what he did: 

SON. Yes; and when they find them why do they run after them? Only to crucify them. The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth. Charlemagne, Mahomet, St Dominic: these were righteous men according to their lights; but with Charlemagne it was embrace Christianity instantly or die; with Mahomet the slaying of the infidel was a passport to Heaven; with Dominic and his Dogs of God it was Recant or burn.

Finally, in a brilliant flash of Shavian wit, we cannot possibly forget that Mahomet's wisdom may have something very earthly about it.

THE WIDOWER. Oh, she is not dead: I let her divorce me. We are now quite good friends again. But to understand this question it is not enough to have been married once. Henry the Eighth would be the leading authority if he were alive. The prophet Mahomet was married more than fourteen times.

In this blog entry, the first of a series of posts on "Shaw and Islam," I have tried to illustrate how this religion and its symbols are portrayed in Shaw's plays. Because of the filter of literary language and dramatic technique, one cannot take the above excerpts as representing Shaw's personal opinions - at least not faithfully. However, they provide a background against which I hope the next set of fragments (from prefaces, letters, speeches, and interviews) will stand out. Let us hope we can shed some light on the subject and leave unsourced voices to the sphere of mysticism. 

99% OF THESE STORIES ARE FLAT FALSEHOODS

Because of that funny thing we sometimes call "coincidence," one of my latest posts triggered a message by Bernard F. Dukore. In it, he remembers having asked Dan H. Laurence about the proposal Isadora Duncan allegedly (most likely, apocryphally) made to Shaw. Laurence, instead of providing a straight answer, used another Shaw quotation regarding how few of the quotations attributed to him were actually true. Bernard (Dukore) wants to know if (and where) Shaw said such a thing - he laughed at the witty response, but forgot to ask for the source. The answer is - should we say synergically - linked to the rumours about whether Isadora Duncan was the mystery lady who had approached Shaw with breeding intentions. 

Apparently, two different European newspapers (Corriere della Sera and Sächsisches Volksblatt) had described slightly different versions of the same conversation between Shaw and an unknown lady (Sächsisches Volksblatt) or Isadora Duncan (Corriere della Sera). Given that the Italian newspaper had published the earlier article, Max Hayek had been accused of plagiarism in his German version of the anecdote. Shaw was asked to clear the case, and this is the letter he wrote, reproduced in Dan H. Laurence's Bernard Shaw Collected Letters: 1926-1950 (pages 16-17): 

Dear Sir

        You ask me to clear up the case of Herr Max's story Das Kind and the paragraph in the Corriere della Sera [...] Clearly the Bernard Shaw story is the plagiarism, and Das Kind the original. [...]

      But Herr Max must not blame me. No beautiful American dancer has ever proposed marriage to me, on eugenic or any other grounds. The Italian journalist invented the dancer and her proposal; stole the witty reply from Herr Max; and chose me for the hero of his tale because newspapers always buy stories about me. 99% of these stories are flat falsehoods. 1/2% are half true. The remaining 1/2% are true, but spoilt in the telling.

As we all know, it is difficult to believe everything people say Shaw said and wrote. We did not know Shaw would agree with us. 

In this case in particular, although Shaw denies either version of the story, it is worth reminding readers that Hesketh Pearson quotes a generic version of this story as having occurred (Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, pages 310-311). In addition, Shaw admitted to having "made that reply" - though not to Isadora Duncan - in an interview included in Sewell Stokes's Hear the Lions Roar (p. 37).

As Chico Marx would put it - in the famous scene in Duck Soup when he impersonates Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho): "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

THE SHAVIAN (1946 - 2014): SCHOLARSHIP, HISTORY, AND PEOPLE (EXHIBITION).

A few months ago I offered my readers a sneak peek of a digitation project that included an almost complete collection of past issues of The Shavian, generously donated by Evelyn Ellis. After all the journals (and attached ephemera) were digitized, a sample of the most interesting issues in the set was displayed in an exhibition entitled: The Shavian (1946-2014): Scholarship, History, and People. 

Here's the promotional poster: 

The exhibition was set up in the main hall of the Faculty of Letters (University of Extremadura, Spain). I just wanted to share a few pictures I took the first day, right after the display cabinets had just been arranged. I hope you enjoy them. 

A CHILD WITH YOUR BRAINS AND MY LOOKS: SHAVIAN REVERSALS

It is not difficult to come across the phrase "Shavian reversal" among the countless pages that critics and scholars have devoted to the plays of Bernard Shaw. Generally, the phrase refers to the many instances of Shaw subverting a particular dramatic convention. For example, Steve Vineberg  (High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present, p. 43) describes Cluny's attitude in Cluny Brown (1938) thus: 

"Cluny (Jennifer Jones) embodies the trademark Shavian reversal when she gets excited about the challenges of unclogging a sink - a verboten subject for the well brought up."

Likewise, Christopher Innes (The Cambridge Companion to George Bernard Shaw, p. 172) comments on the archetypal characters who engage in "discussion" in Getting Married that "in a typical Shavian reversal," as individuals they contradict the stereotypes they represent. 

To quote another example, John Louis DiGaetani (Stages of Struggle: Modern Playwrights and Their Psychological Inspirations, p. 15) acknowledges that "Shaw's presentation of Valentine is another Shavian reversal of a comic stereotype."

The list goes on, including such eminent Shavians as Michael Holroyd (Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition, p. 407) "Bobby then marries a prostitute and Margaret a footman who (in characteristic Shavian reversal) reveals himself as the younger brother to a Duke."

Another example of the use of the phrase "Shavian reversal" has been brought to my attention recently, albeit with a rather unexpected meaning. Janna Jackson, in a chapter devoted to "How Principles of Video Games Can Transform Teaching" (Learning to Play: Exploring the Future of Education with Video Games, p. 116), speaks of a "Shavian reversal" as "someone who inherits the worst characteristics of both parents."

This definition, of course, must have borrowed from the anecdote alluded to in Hesketh Pearson’s Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality (p. 310-311) when “a strange lady giving an address in Zürich wrote him a proposal, thus: “You have the greatest brain in the world, and I have the most beautiful body; so we ought to produce the most perfect child.” Shaw asked: “What if the child inherits my body and your brains?”

Although the lady in question has often been identified with Isadora Duncan, the truth is that this is likely another spurious association. Regardless of this apocryphal ascription, Shaw's encounters with Isadora must have been memorable - no wonder they even inspired a play. 

At any rate, the anecdote (whoever the other interlocutor may have been) must have caught on in the collective imagination, because this novel use of "Shavian reversal" can be found in yet another publication. Curiously enough, although the two authors are different, both papers deal with educational video games. I guess it takes all Shaws. 

ALL GREAT TRUTHS BEGIN AS BLASPHEMIES - OR ARE THEY DIVINELY INSPIRED?

I guess most readers will immediately recognize the first part of the title of this post. In Annajanska, The Bolshevik Empress, the Grand Duchess admits how decayed and disintegrated her reigning house is, a fact that Strammfest cannot wrap his head around:

THE GRAND DUCHESS. Do not deceive yourself, General: never again will a Panjandrum reign in Beotia. [She walks slowly across the room, brooding bitterly, and thinking aloud.] We are so decayed, so out of date, so feeble, so wicked in our own despite, that we have come at last to will our own destruction.

STRAMMFEST. You are uttering blasphemy.
THE GRAND DUCHESS. All great truths begin as blasphemies. All the king's horses and all the king's men cannot set up my father's throne again. If they could, you would have done it, would you not?

Before we move on, has anyone ever tried looking up the two German words that plausibly make up Strammfest's name? 

At any rate, if it is easy to see how Shaw would probably agree that great truths begin with an upturn of the statu quo, the paradox remains all the more striking when we read the following lines, from  the preface to The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God:

"I hold as firmly as Thomas Aquinas that all truths ancient or modern are divinely inspired; but I know by observation and introspection that the instrument on which the inspiring force plays may be a very faulty one."

In other words, truths may strike many people on the head, but not so many will recognize them when they're struck. It is also to be noted that Shaw admitted to having experienced the incapability to ascertain the truth "by introspection" amidst his many inspired thoughts. A rare example of modesty. 

At the same time, the leap from blasphemy to divine inspiration is rather shocking. Given that Annajaska was written more than 10 years before The Black Girl, this evolution in Shaw's philosophical outlook is quite striking - if, of course, you believe that there is a piece of Shaw in the words of his characters. 

Perhaps we can bridge the gap between divine revelation and blasphemy if we understand, as we read in the preface to Back to Methuselah, that 

"Freethinkers read the Bible: indeed they seem to be its only readers now except the reluctant parsons at the church lecterns, who communicate their discomfort to the congregation by gargling the words in their throats in an unnatural manner that is as repulsive as it is unintelligible. And this is because the imposition of the legends as literal truths at once changes them from parables into falsehoods [...] All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain. And nothing stands between the people and the fictions except the silly falsehood that the fictions are literal truths, and that there is nothing in religion but fiction." 

In other words, divine inspiration must be filtered by an intelligent - however unreasonable - mind if you want to create something good out of it. 

If we return to Shaw's seemingly contradictory - paradoxical, to say the least - views on how truth is to be known, it is also important to point out that Shaw tried to separate philosophical truth from practical truth. This is perhaps one of the keys to understanding the paradox. In the question of practical truth, as we read in the preface to On the Rocks, 

"It was very generally believed as lately as in Victorian times that religious education consisted in imparting to children certain eternal, final, and absolute truths. I, for instance, being the son of an Irish Protestant gentleman, found myself, at the dawn of my infant conscience, absolutely convinced that all Roman Catholics go to hell when they die, a conviction which involved not only a belief in the existence of hell but a whole series of implications as to the nature and character of God. […] No future education authority, unless it is as badly educated as our present ones, will imagine that it has any final and eternal truths to inculcate: it can only select the most useful working hypotheses and inculcate them very much as it inculcates standard behaviour throughout that vast field of civilized conduct in which it does not matter in the least how people act in particular situations provided they all act in the same way, as in the rule of the road.  All the provisional hypotheses may be illusions; but if they conduce to beneficial conduct they must be inculcated and acted on by Governments until better ones arrive."

Even if it is hard for us to reconcile Shaw's philosophy and his practical ideas - both regarding the truth and in more general terms - I think we cannot forget that, in the words of Tarleton (Misalliance): 

TARLETON.  [following him and sitting down on his left]  Paradox, paradox.  Good.  Paradoxes are the only truths.