0820 Bee Keepers Assn debates on withdrawal of life membership; incensed over book

    12/30/32 Bernard Shaw's latest book, Adventures of a Black Girl in Her Search for God, has so incensed members of the Bee Keepers Association that withdrawal of his life membership was demanded today.
    Dr George G Green urged that Mr Shaw's name be removed from the rolls because of the book's allegedly blasphemous statements. Another member said the association had no authority to compel Mr Shaw to retract statements, but could mark its disapproval. The matter was adjourned until the annual meeting next month.

    12/24/32 The church's first retort to Bernard Shaw's story, Adventures of a Black Girl in Her Search for God, was delivered today by the Bishop of Winchester, the Right Rev Cyril Garbett.
    "We have a real cause of complaint against brilliant writers like Shaw who attack Christianity as set forth by its weakest, not its strongest exponents or who label a construction of their own ignorance on Christianity and then show how easily they can destroy it," the Bishop wrote in The Diocesan Chronicle.
    "Many of those foremost in the attack on Christianity apparently have never taken the trouble to inform themselves of its true nature. Religion is attacked and criticized to an extent unknown before in the history of the world and these assaults are more effective as they are read by many who already find it difficult to reconcile modern discoveries with the faith of their childhood.
    "On the issue of this conflict the nature of the civilization of many generations to come will largely depend. Spread education to all classes as many reject hastily any belief for which they cannot immediately find intellectual justification."

0818  Ed on suggestion that Gt Britain cede Ireland to U S to settle war debts

12/17/32   Bernard Shaw makes his contribution to the war-debt question by proposing that Great Britain give Ireland to the United States and so wipe the slate clean. The plan is a bold one, but not so Shavian as it might be. It is not sufficiently topsy-turvy and it does not rap any heads in the process - two things which we have come to expect in anything Bernard Shaw says. What he should have said was that unless the United States canceled the British debt, Great Britain would insist on giving Ireland to the United States. That would contain about the right amount of surprise and injury to somebody's feelings.    The idea of settling international debts by giving up territory Mr Shaw must have got from some of our own Congressional thinkers. To some of the best minds at the Capitol it is quite consistent to be getting ready to let the Philippines go and to reach out for new territory. Yet the plan might find a response in England if the territory to be ceded were left to her decision. There must be a couple of thousand miles of British coast line in the arctic and Antarctic ice that she could well spare. It would be an appropriate substitute for her frozen credits

0817  Excerpts from s to Fabian Soc on gov't, London; Por

   12/11/32 What is parliament in this country? Parliament is a sort of central organization. It is the central engine of public speaking spread through the community. I do not know whether you have heard anybody ask a question as to the qualifications of a member of parliament for the work of legislative governing the country. I never did, but there is one question which you may sometimes hear asked: Is he a good speaker? If it turns out that he is a good speaker, or is believed by a certain number of people to be a good speaker then that is considered sufficient qualification.
    And I think it is. I think that the real function of parliament in this country is to prevent anything being done by talking about it, endlessly talking about it.
    Of all the madnesses that afflict this country politically, I should think the worst is to expect that this instrument (parliament) could possibly be an instrument of Socialism or an instrument of any modern system which requires government to be an organization which has its hand on not merely human conduct in the police sense, but on industry, on foreign trade, on the accumulation of capital in this country, on all its vital industries, controlling them, and consequently not a negative body, defeating government, but a positive body, not only controlling government but actually executing it and itself being the government.

    In the first place the candidate must be known to the electorate. That is obviously the first thing. He must also belong to the same class as the electorate. He must also have no interest in being elected, no interest in becoming a representative except the satisfaction of his own taste and faculty for doing public work. He must get no other advantage than doing that.
    Our friend, Sir Oswald Mosely, goes for an occupational franchise, and in Russia they practically have an occupational franchise. Only in that way is it conceivable that you will get groups of people who are electing people whom they actually know. So that, when a man is put forward as a candidate, if he is a man of questionable character, somebody is sure to get up and mention that fact.
    We will suppose that the Congress was elected; it then has to proceed to elect with a certain amount of the same knowledge the chiefs of industry throughout the country, the immense civil service which is necessary for the Socialist or Fascist or Communist state, or whatever is coming.

    It will be sort of a hierarchy. When we get this state here, probably in order to conceal the truth we will call it the conservative state or the national state or the imperial state or perhaps the King Georges state, which really does not commit you to anything whatever.
    In this system you will see that, when you go to the final thinking organ, the cabinet or thinkers, the secretary of that organ, the dictator of that, or the moving spirit of that, will be as near a dictator as you can very well get.

    I go back like a child to the innate simplicities, the old Fabian simplicities. And it is there that I come to the point as to what this new organization of government is going to do with its power. How is it going to arrange things?
    In the early Fabian days there were certain things that we kept rubbing into the public. One of them was that the existing system was really nothing in essence but a gigantic robbery of the poor, namely, that what was the matter with society was that there was not a very large mass of people who were getting for nothing whatsoever an enormous share of the wealth produced in this country.
    At the present time, when the state, as we now know, is enabled to take enormous masses of that money back from them by income tax and super-tax, you cannot pretend that there is any difference in getting all you want back from them, and look at the advantage you get. You not only make sure of an enormous accumulation of capital, because you put a stop to all waste and extravagances, and all that you add to the capital which you can use in a productive way, but there is something else you can do.

    Here we were with our cities rotted out with slums, with the most urgent need for capital to do away with those slums, and to improve the condition of our people, to give them better food, clothing, housing accommodations, for removing the machinery in our coal mines, the obsolete machinery which has done us so much mischief, for bringing our own machinery up to date and introducing all the new things. We wanted it for these things.

    This business of the export capitalist - there is not the slightest doubt that an intelligent government would put a stop to that, would not let a single farthing of capital go out of this country until we were quite saturated with capital in it, and we are very far from that being the case.

    But at any rate an active and capable government can regulate trade. It can effectively prohibit the export of capital, and take the accumulation of capital into its own hands; and it can also regulate the quantity of imports.

    I attach great importance to that. I believe that the present movement throughout the world to make every state self-supporting is not merely a healthy movement but an absolutely necessary movement. To begin with, the old notion that there were certain things that one country could produce much better than another, all that has gone. It only meant that Europe could produce a great many things better than other people, and we went in for free trade.
    As a matter of fact, they all now produce with the same machinery. They are able to harness all the water power and all the rest of it.
    People who have any power of observation are beginning to feel that one of the first necessities is for a nation to become self-supporting, and if you are going to do that you must absolutely put a stop to private trading in foreign trade. If you want to protect a native industry you must not put a tariff on the foreign goods. You must prohibit the importation of foreign goods.

0816  Ed

12/7/32     That Bernard Shaw had something up his sleeve in the biblical line a person could almost have guessed in advance of the announcement of his new religious fable. It was made known some time ago that he would spend the Christmas holiday in the Holy Land. To any one who knows his Shaw it seemed inevitable that before running over to take a look at the Land of the Book he would tell the truth about both. Before he drops in on this country next year it will be no great surprise if he publishes a book summing up America.
    Shaw finds much to praise in the Bible, and has resisted the temptation to be original. When he would discard the folklore and tribal legend of the Bible and retain its high spiritual aspirations, he does what a great many people have been doing for generations. He actually calls to account the Soviet leaders for throwing out the spiritual values with the superstitions. Coming at a time when preparations must be under way in Moscow for the regular Christmas anti-religious campaign, Shaw's insistence on spirituality will get rough handling from the materialistic dialecticians in the Soviet press.

0815  Explains purpose of new religious fable, Adventures of a Black Girl in Her Search               For God

    12/6/32 GBS's new religious fable Adventures of a Black Girl in Her Search for God which he was inspired to write, he says, during an African summer, has received mixed criticism in London newspapers.
    The purpose of the short story is simply to enforce the evolutionary view of the Bible and preserve what he considers its true spiritual values from being cast out along with its "primitive folk lore and rude conceptions of a tribal and vindictive deity, as has been done in Russia."
    He describes the ten commandments as "mere lumber" and the Bible generally as "reduced to modern tastes," but in a note of admiration he says: "A great deal of the Bible is much more alive than the mornings newspaper and last nights parliamentary debate. Its Chronicles are better reading then most of our fashionable histories and less intentionally mendacious. In revolutionary invective and Utopian aspiration it cuts the ground from under the feet of Ruskin, Carlisle, and Karl Marx, and in the epoch of great leaders and great rascals it makes Homer seem superficial and Shakespear unbalanced."
    Shaw's Black Girl, with her Bible in one hand and a club in the other encounters blood thirsty and legalistic divinities, from pagan spokesmen to red-headed Irishmen who are modern Socialists, and believes God "not properly made and finished yet."

0814  Writing play about St Augustine

    11/27/32 Bernard Shaw's new play will tell Londoners what might happen if St Augustine returned to earth, descended upon Piccadilly and began preaching a sermon. Mr Shaw has been toying with the idea for several years, but it has finally taken shaped and he is busy writing the play. According to Beverly Nichols, who writes an advance account in The Sunday Chronicle, the first act is likely to create a sizable commotion when Londoners have their first view of it.
    'St Augustine comes to Piccadilly,' writes Mr Nichols, describing the unfinished play, 'and walks down that highly domesticated thoroughfare from Hyde Park Corner to Piccadilly Circus. At the Circus he pauses, surveys the crowd, takes a deep breath and begins to preach.

    'Nobody takes very much notice except a policeman. He approaches St Augustine. He says: 'Move along, please'
    'St Augustine turns his bland and luminous eyes on the policeman.
    "But I'm St Augustine," he says. You can't possibly move me along."
    'Can't help who you are.'
    'St Augustine pauses and sighs. Then he says, very gently, 'If I work a miracle here and now will you believe that I'm St Augustine and let me stay?'

    Mr Nichols does not tell what happens next, but suggests that the Saint turns the policeman's club into a cucumber.

    The idea resembles another which Mr Shaw developed soon after the war, but never made into a play. This time the Unknown Soldier is summoned back to life during a disastrous war which England is fighting, sometime in the distant future. The King, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the dignitaries of the land all pray him again to lead England to victory. But the Unknown Soldier is puzzled.
    "There must be some mistake gentlemen," he says, "You see, I am a German."

11/25/32     GBS tonight delivered his verdict on the United States election which, he declared, accomplished exactly nothing.
    Mr Shaw speaking before the Fabian Society, admitted a little sadly he had been talking to Fabian audiences and others for 48 years without making the least impression or changing the world in the slightest. His lecture tonight was his last before leaving on a world cruise during which he will visit the United States for the first time.
    "An election nowdays has become not an election but a stampede," said Mr Shaw speaking in praise of Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up parliament in the seventeenth century. "We in England have had a stampede of the Zinoviev letter and a stampede of the gold standard, but they have been quite wiped out by the really magnificent stampede of the presidential election of America.
    "There never was such a thing seen on the face of the earth. You saw in the papers the white maps and the black maps and how white suddenly became black - the whole of America swept in one magnificent rush to substitute Roosevelt for Hoover. The substitution won't make the slightest difference to anybody. I don't suppose anybody thinks it will and what people thought they were voting for I don't know. I suppose they were tired of Hoover and thought they'd try Roosevelt. Four years from now they'll be tired of Roosevelt and will try some one else.
    "On each of these occasions we have a vague idea something will happen in consequence and nothing does. Nothing will happen except, of course, a very large consumption of hot air, as usual. All this mass deception, all this stampeding, all the perpetual talk, talk, talk, and the old machine going on exactly as it was - this is supposed to be democracy.
    "For 48 years I have been making public speeches and I have not produced the slightest effect, I have solved all the worlds problems time and time again and still they go on being insolvable."
    This did not prevent him from solving them once more. He lashed out at the world at large, asserting, among other things, that he was more enthusiastic than ever for some from of dictatorship in England. He did not care whether it was of the Mussolini type, the Stalin type or the sort advocated by Sir Oswald Mosely, who is trying to build up a British Fascist Party.
    Mr Shaw thought it was to be regretted that Guy Fawkes had not blown up parliament, for he probably wanted the government of the day to do something, which is impossible, he said, as parliament is only an engine of public speaking.

    11/20/32 Bernard Shaw will have his first sight of the New York Skyline next Spring when he arrives on the Empress of Britain at the end of a world cruise. Mr and Mrs Shaw have arranged to join the Empress of Britain at Monaco on Dec 15 bound for the Holy Land and the Far East.

    "It is fairly certain," according to Mr Shaw's friend, G W Bishop, writing in The Sunday Times, "that they will stay on the ship and reach England again by way of Los Angeles and New York. Despite all his vows never to step on American soil, Mr Shaw is likely to go ashore at Los Angeles for a glimpse of Hollywood and later spend a day or two seeing the sights of New York. Mr Shaw said today he and his wife intended to fly over the Great Wall of China after reaching Peking in February. Their itinerary brings them to Palestine for Christmas and later to India, Ceylon, Singapore and Hongkong.

0811  Accepts place on committee to celebrate tricentennary of B Spinoza

   11/19/32 A letter from Bernard Shaw accepting an invitation to act on the honorary committee in connection with the tricentennial celebration of the birth of Spinoza, the philosopher, was made public yesterday by George S Hellman, 331 West Seventy-first Street, chairman of the celebration.
    "I cannot pretend," Mr Shaw wrote, "that my thought has been affected - directly, at all events - by Spinoza; and I am in some doubt as to whether you ought to place me on the committee. However, I feel that I cannot refuse my support, such as it is, to any demonstration that some value is still set upon purely intellectual activity; so I leave myself in your hands, and am much honored by your invitation."
    Thanksgiving Day marks the 300th anniversary of Spinoza's birth, which will be commemorated with a dinner in the Hotel Plaza which leaders in public and academic life will attend.

0810  Ed.

11/15/32     When Trotsky emerges from three years of exile in Turkey and sets foot on West European soil he will probably be met by almost as many reporters as if he were Bernard Shaw himself. This will be due to the fact that outside of Soviet Russia reporters are still under the sway of the old capitalist ideology. They think that a world-famous personality like Trotsky makes good newspaper reading, but Communist editors know that people would much rather read about a new tractor factory than about Greta Garbo. Trotsky himself, being a Communist, ought to subscribe to the impersonal news standards that obtain in the columns of Pravda and Izvestia. But from what one knows of his temperament, he will not refuse to meet the newspaper boys.
    His presence in Western Europe is bound to create enormous interest and speculation. His itinerary, as reported by The Associated Press, tentatively includes Berlin and Vienna in addition to his first objective, Copenhagen. This suggests that the governments are not afraid of his presence, as seemed to be the case only a few months ago. And that again would mean that European capitalism feels pretty well stabilized and is willing to take a chance.

0809  Says he may visit U S for 5 mins in 1933

    11/5/32 Bernard Shaw, whose good-humored scoffing at America has been a source of financial profit to him for many years, today confirmed reports that next year he may visit the United States, a land where he has said many times that he never would risk his neck.
    "Next year," said he, "I shall be on the high seas and perhaps in the neighborhood of the United States. I may even land for five minutes."
    He refused to disclose further details on the ground that his announcement might "disorganize the United States. I understand," he said, "that the population of the united States is in the neighborhood of a hundred millions, and any announcement of my intentions would be most dangerous, for the whole of that population would rush to the spot, thus disorganizing the country."
    Mr Shaw heretofore has consistently refused to visit the United States unless he could have a double, such as movie stars have for dangerous scenes, to "bear the brunt" of the adulation of his thousands of admirers here. One newspaper man, having in mind the noted dramatist's inclination to welcome publicity, suggested 5,000 reporters would be waiting to greet him on his arrival in New York.

    "And that," retorted Mr Shaw without hesitation, "is exactly why I don't intend to go to New York."

    A year ago, however, Mr Shaw did consent to talk to America over the radio, describing vividly his visit to Russia.

    10/31/32 Bernard Shaw is described as a "professional celebrity" in Archibald Henderson's authorized biography, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet. The book, of more than 800 pages which Shaw delayed in proof for many months while he searched it for errors of fact, is published today by Appleton.
    Although Dr Henderson hails his subject as the comedic genius who fills the niche of England in the "unending gallery of the immortals" which includes Cervantes, Rabelais, Heine, Voltaire and Mark Twain, he hazards that Shaw's writings alone would never "have sufficed to procure him during his lifetime the peculiar eminence he enjoys today."
    "Bernard Shaw is one of those curious figures in literary history - Rabelais, Stendhal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Blake, Swift, Ruskin, Nietzsche - who preoccupy and obsess us with that affectation of singularity which is the monomark of a deeper reality of singularity," Dr Henderson writes.

    "Shaw's real foundation was a mass of work which never left his hands until he had perfected it to the utmost of his powers. Any one who will examine the entire bulk of his output will be surprised to find how little is known of it. His swanking is only his fun, done to amuse himself and the public in his scanty leisure.
    "There is no reason to doubt his sincerity when he declares that his enormous publicity has distracted attention from his work instead of limelighting it, and that he is really the worst advertised author of his age in the world."
    Although Shaw is the best known Communist in contemporary letters, Dr Henderson says, he has become "something less than a millionaire under capitalism."

    Dr Henderson says that Shaw constantly talks about himself "because he has had so many interesting and significant experiences and believes that their narration will prove of evidential value to others."
    "There is a touch of effeminate, lissome softness in the male mannequin," he writes. "Shaw dons all his flashiest costumes and parades them for our approval. He is a natural showman, a congenital Barnum; and always displays his best goods in the window. In this age of frantic publicity, Shaw is a genius in salesmanship."
    Dr Henderson is head of the mathematics department at the University of North Carolina. He wrote a biography of Shaw in 1911, the first of eight books by him in which Shaw figures importantly, but he and his subject agreed that this earlier biography has been outdated and this second book therefore resulted. It is not a continuation of the first biography, but is complete in itself.

    "When I was announced Shaw came from another room to find me looking at a book, Bernard Shaw and Karl Marx:: A Symposium 1884-1889 that I had picked up from his table," Mr Wells said. "He told me that it was a pirated edition and as it occurred to him that it might interest me asked me if I would like to have it. I said that I would and he picked up a pen to inscribe it. But with the pen poised he interrupted himself.

    "'Perhaps I had better not put your name on it,' he said. I asked 'Why not?' He explained, 'You might want to sell it. It might be worth something.'
    "'Do you,' I asked, 'sell books that are given to you?'
    "'Of course not,' he said, 'but I am not a book dealer.'"

    The volume finally was inscribed.

    One of the rare books that Mr Wells brought home with him is a first translation of Confucius into a European language, one of three known copies. The book is printed in Roman and Chinese characters and is dated 1669.

    It must have been "John Eglinton's" modesty that made him an associate member; though Stephen Gwynne, Lord Dunsany, Lawrence of Arabia and somewhat of its Nights may be thought to prove that the twenty-five full members are only first among equals. Ths is made clear to American eyes by the admission of Eugene O'Neill, whose Strange Interlude and Mourning Becomes Electra are scarcely intended for latitudes of strict censorship such as prevails in the Free State. Obviously the Irish Academy is mostly composed of persons of distinguished literary achievement. In that respect it far outshines the French Academy, whose composition takes into account of other elements.

0805  Rabbi L I Newman scores views

    10/1/32 Bernard Shaw's "Shofar Blast," with "its insulting sentiments and language," published yesterday on the occasion of the Jewish New Year, was denounced as "an affront to the Jewish people and their faith" by Rabbi Louis I Newman in his Rosh ha-Shanah eve sermon last night before Congregation Rodeph Sholom, 7 West Eighty-third Street.
    Celebration of Rosh ha-Shanah was ushered in at sundown last night, marking the year 5693, according to the ancient Hebrew calendar. It will be celebrated today and tomorrow and will be followed by the celebration of the Day of Atonement on Oct 10.
    The traditional sounding of the ram's horn or "shofar" occurs at certain times during the celebration as a reminder to all Jews of their duty to live lives of righteousness. At the conclusion of the Day of Atonement services the "shofar" is sounded again.
    Services marking the beginning of the Jewish holy days were held in all temples and synagogues throughout the city last night.

    "In this latest attack he maligns not only the Jews in Palestine but also advises Jews elsewhere to cease being Jews and 'start being human beings.' He asks that the Jews disappear, placing them in antithesis to the human community, and says that Jews are anachronisms. Shaw forgets that he himself has become an anachronism in contemporary life.
    "Shaw ought to lead the way to a better understanding of the Jew, but instead he has upheld the hands of the anti-Semites and proved himself again an enemy of Israel."

0804  Ed on comment on Jews in Amer Hebrew

    10/1/32     "You asked for a shofar blast and now you have got it." Thus Bernard Shaw concludes his New Year's greetings to the editor of The American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune. The "shofar" is the ram's horn or trumpet, blown in the synagogue at certain solemn moments in the Rosh ha-Shanah ritual. By some it is supposed to symbolize the trumpet that summons to Judgment Day. If there is any one who feels qualified to sit in judgment anywhere any time upon any one, it is, of course, Mr Shaw. His message in the present case boils down to the statement that Jews' synagogues and Rosh ha-Shanah ought to be abolished. Otherwise it left nothing to be desired.
    On one thing, however, Mr Shaw has gone astray. If he thinks the editor of the Jewish weekly was surprised or chagrined by the nature of his reply, Mr Shaw is very much mistaken. The one thing about which there is no suspense whatever is the kind of reply Bernard Shaw will make to a stated question, or the kind of speech he will deliver on a particular occasion. The Shavian pronouncement will always be the exact opposite of what the proprieties require.

0803  Says day of races is over, in comment on Jews in article in Amer Hebrew and Jewish           Tribune

    9/30/32 Bernard Shaw, sounding what he terms a "shofar" blast, in the New Year issue of The American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune, issued today, declares that the day of nations and race is over. "The future," he says, "belongs to the citizens of the world who know they are no better than other people."    

    Mr Shaw's statement, obtained by M J Woddis, London correspondent of the periodical, says: "This craving for bouquets is a symptom of racial degeneration. The Jews are worse than my own people, the Irish, at it. Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race - chosen by the late Lord Balfour - can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings. The day of races and nations is over. The future belongs to the citizens of the world who know that they are no better than other people.
    "Let the great human community swallow up the Hittite as the Hittite swallowed up the Canaanite: both are now anachronisms. Why should I encourage their contempt for me by flattering them?
    "Do not accuse me of Judenschmerz; it is a more weakening disease than Judenheze. Fishing for compliments and playing for sympathy will not cure either of them. You asked for a shofar blast and now you have got it."
    Contributions by Thomas Mann, Sigmund Freud, Arnold Zweig, Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, Stfan Zweig, Max Brod, Samuel Schulman, Louis Untermeyer and Arthur Guiterman appear in the same issue.

 0802  Talks About Ireland & Several Related Matters;  He Discusses the Oath, Land                  Annuities, and That Self-Sufficing State That "All the Nations Are                                        Struggling Toward"

   9/4/32 Where Langland dreamed and brooded centuries ago, where Piers Plowman had his vision, Bernard Shaw dreams and prophesies today. He is the Monarch of the Malverns; here striding the hills with a vigor that would make many people fifty years his junior footweary after a few hours, and holding court with his liege subjects in all kinds of public places except public-houses. He may be seen stalking in solitary state, dressed in that Norfolk suit that may easily revive the male fashions of the 90's, his white beard flaunted as a challenge of age to flaming youth.
    On the lawn of a Malvern hotel Mr Shaw talked of many things; of Soviets and commissars, capital and kings. But as he had not hitherto expressed his views on the subjects at present in dispute between the British and Irish Free State Governments, I asked for his views.
    "I have said nothing for publication on Irish affairs until now," he said giving me the feeling that he was still as Irish as anything that walks a Dublin street in a saffron kilt and lace ruffles. His Dublin accent, not a brogue by any means, is still excellent and indestructible, and his clarity of enunciation might be studied by some actors who are in his plays.
    "Three years ago in Malvern," I reminded him, "you said: 'I know nothing about the future of Ireland. Neither does any one else.' Is that your feeling still?" 

    "I was not expressing a feeling," he said, "I was stating a fact. It remains a fact."

    'But have you any views about the oath?'

    "I have very decided views about it," he said with great animation. "I think Mr de Valera, in his preoccupation with the British Islands, missed a chance there. All these oaths are ridiculous superstitions: their total abolition is long overdue. England may cling to the oath of allegiance as an excuse for her habit of killing prisoners of war when they happen to be Irishmen, and she may reasonably object to that particular oath being singled out for abolition; but if Ireland had given a lead to civilization by abolishing the oath as an institution, and taken the ground that in a progressive community no citizen can bind his political or spiritual future, and that experience has proved that all attempts to do so by oaths are as futile as they are absurd, I can see no position which England could have taken to the contrary except one of pure perversity. And the Senate would not have had a leg to stand on."

    "Well," he said, "look at Ottawa! When England arrived there in her usual attitude of condescending self-complacency the dominions set on her like a pack of hounds on a fox. The thing I foretold is being enacted before your eyes. The Irish are comparatively friendly. As to the Irish Republicans, they will take a share in anything that is directed against England. They have not yet learned how to take some little interest in Ireland.

    "But the I. R. A. is useful. It frightens tourists away from Ireland, and as so much of Ireland is beautiful but barren and is much more valuable as a great sanatorium than as a means of working very poor men to death in the effort to drag a livelihood out of it, there is a real danger that the country may become too dependent on foreign tourists and valetudinarians. The fear of being shot up by the I. R. A. acts as a salutary check on such development."

    When it is remembered that thousands of pounds are expended every year, the greater portion of that sum coming from the rates paid by farmers and working folk in the Free State, in the effort to attract tourists in ever-increasing numbers, it would seem that the youngsters of families are very busily engaged in nullifying the work of their hardworking fathers and brothers. The Irish Tourist Association is backed by the Free State Government, so that Mr de Valera and his colleagues may be accused of being favorably disposed to "foreign tourists and valetudinarians."

    'What is your opinion,' I ventured, 'on the matters in dispute between the Irish Free State and British Governments? Do you think the land annuities should continue to be paid?'
    "I don't know," he replied ruminatively. "The case is sub judice; and I have not gone into it myself. But it is clear that Ireland has as much right to demand a judicial revision of the treaty which founded the Irish Free State as Germany has to challenge the Treaty of Versailles, or France to repudiate 80 per cent. of their debt to British and Irish subscribers to her war loan, or England to demur to her financial obligations to the United States.

    "Instead, the Irish Government's perfectly correct assumption that the inquiry should be disinterested was met by a peremptory demand that Mr de Valera should confine his choice to the British Empire, in every province of which there is a violently anti-British party. The most recalcitrant Irish pig would have been ashamed of such a blunder. But worse remained behind. Mr MacDonald would have been perfectly in order in asking Mr de Valera to deposit the annuities, pending the inquiry, in the International Bank in Basle.
    "But what did he actually do? He allowed Mr de Valera to make a second journey to London under the impression that the Cabinet had come to its senses and was prepared to discuss the matter reasonably, and then met him on the threshold with the direct and intolerable insult of a refusal to discuss anything until the annuities were deposited in England's on pocket.
    "What are you to do with men who behave like this in responsible positions? What - short of punching Mr MacDonald's head - could Mr de Valera do but go home and add his traveling expenses and the value of his wasted time, plus an adequate solatium for Ireland's wounded dignity, to the claims to be adjudicated? I wonder what Mr MacDonald would have said if the Free State Government treated a Lossimouth caddie so insolently."

    'Do you believe that the whole matter should go to arbitration? And, if so, what do you thingt ought to be its composition?'

    Mr Shaw overlooked the fact that Great Britain signed the "optional clause" which makes it necessary to submit international disputes to the International Court at The Hague with the reservation that imperial matters were not subject to it. The Irish Free State, on the other hand, signed the clause without any reservations whatever. It is probably the knowledge of this, and the desire to make use of its independence in such matters, that have induced the Free State Government to make such a determined stand against the selection of judges or arbitrators from within the British Commonwealth of Nation only.

    'Do you believe, Mr Shaw,' I asked with some little trepidation, 'that Mr de Valera's self-sufficing State is either possible or desirable? Particularly for Ireland?'

    "It is so desirable," he replied emphatically, "that all the nations are struggling toward it, because all wars are now settled not by fighting but by blockades. But they are confused by their bankers and foreign traders, who fill the papers with assumptions that prosperity is directly proportionate to the volume of trade.
    "The truth is the exact contrary. The nearer the consumer is to the producer the greater is the prosperity. Only in the cases, now exceptional, where home production is impossible: for example, tea and tigers in Ireland, or where the natural conditions enable a foreign country to produce luxuries so much more easily and cheaply that the expenses of transport are worth incurring and the risk of blockade negligible, is foreign trade an advantage. But as Ireland can, at a pinch, do without tea and tigers, and modern production so artificial that it can be established almost anywhere, the old case for free trade is greatly weakened.

    'You are reported as having said, Mr Shaw,' I continued, 'that Parliamentary opposition is an impossible institution, but that criticism is necessary. Is there a distinction?'

    "It is also reported," he retorted with a merry twinkle in his friendly eyes, "that the Pope has declared that modern women's dress is indecent and that Austrian nudist clubs hold that women would be much more decent if they wore nothing at all. You might ask me, 'Is there a distinction?' There is no distinction in the minds of people who do not know what they are talking about, and won't take the trouble to find out. All I can tell you is that Ireland will never be really governed for the good of the people, or indeed governed effectively at all, as long as her notion of the business is to send Mr de Valera into the Dail to govern and to send Mr Cosgrave in along with him to prevent his doing it.
    "You could not run a fried fish shop successfully that way, much less a nation. The Russians have found that out and acted on it. So have the Italians. And they are the only nations in Europe who are not in a miserable state of paralysis and bankruptcy. Ireland had better study the Russian plan and the Italian plan, and mix in a little of her own brains, and then try again after shutting up the Dail except for a fortnight every year to ventilate grievances, and making platform rhetoric a capital crime."
    As he prepared to depart for one of his long tramps over the famous and lovely Hills of Malvern I shot at Mr Shaw a question of infinitely less importance. 'It is suggested,' I said, 'that you are interested in the foundation of an Irish Academy, and that you will be one of its members. Do you really believe in such things?'
    "Man alive," and he laughed gaily, "it exists already; and I am a member. Mr Yeats and I elected one another. I see the Irish press is almost as far behind the times as the English."
    Then he stalked off for his morning walk in the hills; only to be accosted by a group of amateur photographers and autograph hunters before he had taken a hundred strides.

 0801  Letter lauding him as a satirist

  9/4/32 To the Editor of The New York Times: I wish to take exception to the statement of Dr Joseph J Reilly, Professor of English at Hunter College, as quoted in The Times. After impaling Galsworthy for that to which he does not aspire - a sense of humor - he disregards all other great literary figures of today and appears to assume that if Galsworthy has no such quality then no one else could possibly possess it. Either Dr Reilly has not been quoted sufficiently or he is sadly in need of reading the works of Bernard Shaw. The professor bemoans the lack of a great satirist during the lifetime of one whom it may well take another century to equal. Has any one in all history so closely approached being a combination of a Moliere and a Voltaire as Shaw?
Hume Dow

0800  Takes out more life ins

    8/27/32 Bernard Shaw, at the age of 76, is rated as a first-class life insurance risk. The dramatist has just taken out a new policy for £10,000 [about $34,000 at current rates]. According to The Insurance Mail he was accepted as a first-class risk, in spite of his age. The usual friends' references were not required on his application.

0799  Int on 76th birthday

   7/27/32 When congratulated by a reporter today on his seventy-sixth birthday, Bernard Shaw said:  "How would you like people to ask how it feels to be 76?"
    The reporter answered: 'I don't expect to live that long.'
    "That's all very well," replied Shaw, "but you never can tell - the worst may happen."
    Shaw is here (Malvern) on vacation. "I am concealing the fact I am 76 as much as possible," he said. "It is wrong to say I am thoroughly fit. I am not. I am very much overworked and have been all my life.
    A great theater festival will be held here next week, culminating in the English premiere on Saturday of Shaw's latest play, Too True To Be Good, already seen in the United States.

0798  Broadcasts rules for success

   7/12/32 Bernard Shaw gave his recipe for success yesterday in an international broadcast from London which was rebroadcast here by WABC and the Columbia Broadcasting System. "When in Rome do as the Romans do," quoted the dramatist as the surest road to success.
    Mr Shaw said his success was not the result of "any moral superiority on my part. I can write plays and you can't, that is all," he continued. "I can write anything. If I couldn't, I should probably be a tramp. As it is, I am so well off that everybody pretends I am much more respectable than I really am. The truth is there is no such thing as a great man or a great woman. People believe in them just as they used to believe in unicorns and dragons. The greatest man or woman is 99 per cent just like yourself; I may be insulting you by saying so because the so-called great people have often been, except for that 1 per cent, as to that 99 per cent of common humanity, downright bad lots. Even the best of them are apt to be a bit spoilt if that odd 1 per cent is made too much of during their lifetime.
    "Thoughtless people will tell you that children are a great responsibility. That is nonsense. Children are a great expense until they are able to support themselves, and parents should not have to bear that expense. But the notion that parents are responsible for the conduct of their children or for their character in future is rubbish and often very mischievous rubbish.
    "Our children come into the world, whether we like it or not, with characters which we have not made and cannot unmake. Some of their characteristics are survivals of savagery, so troublesome to us that they often infuriate us into clouting them at one end or smacking them at the other. If our women had any sense they would threaten the government with birth control and refuse to become mothers unless the education of their children were State-guaranteed and they themselves properly compensated for their pain and risk and trouble.
    "Your honest impulse is to tell your sons and daughters to speak the truth fearlessly, but if the best you can do for them after that is to start them in life as salesmen or shop assistants or in the great publicity industry of advertising or diplomacy, you are checked by the reflection that only as shameless liars can they hope to succeed.
    "I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy. At present the world is so dishonest that our bankrupt Bank of England is paying 14 shillings on the pound though an honestly organized country could easily pay 30.
    "You had really better give your children no advice at all, but go your own way and leave your children to go theirs and form their own conclusions. Let us hope that their conclusions will be wiser than ours."

0797  Excerpt from s

    6/19/32 Under capitalist society a man's experience is likely to be a thing he is worse for: it is sure to have been a melancholy and intimidating one. The whole aim of old men is to perpetuate tradition, and it is largely tradition that has landed this country in the position it is in today. You may disregard my experience in every way except one. Like you, I have been associated with young revolutionaries, and I have been a revolutionist myself. You have had that experience. That is the meaning of this club.
    My advantage, however, is that I have seen revolutionists become middle-aged and then old men. Among my old revolutionary friends is Mr Ramsay MacDonald. My recollection of Mr Ramsay MacDonald is of a fire-eating revolutionary Socialist. You may ask me, "Are you talking of the gentleman I heard on Empire Day, who did not seem to have an idea in his head which he might not have had in the seventeenth century?"
    I am facing it, but I am talking to young and ardent revolutionists. A certain proportion of you will be living in the year 1980, but many of you will not be revolutionists then. Some of you will not even be revolutionists in 1940.
    With the exception of capitalism, there is nothing so revolting as revolution. Unless you are well prepared for revolution and know what the change means - a certain amount of wreckage and the throwing away of old ideas - the effect of revolution is to make many revolutionists reactionary.

0796  Ed on Views toward Russia, in s at Oxford

6/13/32     In blossoming out as a great authority on Soviet Russia Mr Bernard Shaw snaps his fingers at inconsistency. When in Moscow he fell in love with all that he saw. If he were only a young man he would certainly go to live in Russia.
    However, when he was addressing a lot of young men at Oxford a few days ago, what did he tell them? They were a set of undergraduates who profess to call themselves Communists. But Mr Shaw warned them that they did not know what they were talking about or where they were headed. "Revolt," he said, "means the end of liberty." He went on to add: "No single breath of tyranny is missing in Russia. It is carried into effect on a gigantic scale."
    Later on in his address to the Oxford youths he remarked about the Russians: "I never heard people who bellowed so much about what was wrong." But they were safe so long as they could claim to be loyal Communists. "If you are not, look out for the back of your head."
    Perhaps Mr Shaw thought that the ardent students to whom he was speaking needed a little discouragement. That they might become discouraged about his own sincerity did not seem to occur to him.

0795  Returns from South Africa; comments on Irish and South African conditions

    4/5/32 Bernard Shaw's tongue was as sharp as ever when he landed today, bronzed and vigorous, from his South African trip and breezily discussed the Irish situation.
    "Ireland is living in the seventeenth century," he said. "The Irish don't realize that Dublin Castle no longer exists. The Irish are in just as strong a position as any one else in the British Empire, but they don't know it. The present condition of Ireland is due to Cosgrave's mistake. Cosgrave disarmed the steady-going population and left only gunmen, and life became intolerable. Cosgrave's Government tried to remedy this by giving military officers power to hang or shoot anybody in Ireland without a trial. That is the secret of his overthrow. What he should have done was to give all the steady-going population a revolver and twelve rounds of cartridge ball and let them dispose of the gunmen."
    South Africa, too, is "living in the seventeenth century," Mr Shaw asserted. They don't seem to know the Boer War is over," he said. "In fact, they are still prosecuting it with the greatest possible vigor. They are not shooting, but they are doing what they can to one another short of that. When an Africander Government gets in, no Englishman has a chance at any public job, and I suppose the reverse is the case whenever an English Government is in power. The South Africans are splendid. A humane government ought to send out a number of missionaries to teach them this is the twentieth century."

0794  Feature article on first night performances of his plays

    4/3/32 It is not to be expected that Bernard Shaw, the promising playwright whose latest work, Too True To Be Good, will be presented by the Theater Guild tomorrow night, will wait up for Tuesdays newspapers to read the verdict of the dramatic critics. Nor will he pace the rear of the Guild Theater while his newest characters are coming locally to life. Mr Shaw, of course, is not in New York. He has never been in New York. Indeed, his persistent refusal to visit America has become almost a career with him. But even if he were here the chances are he would indulge in none of the legitimate hysteria which is an author's first-night prerogative. There is a legend that he was found asleep in a box at the London premiere of Back to Methuselah.
    First nights are an old story to Mr Shaw. He has had more than thirty, if his one-act plays are to be included. It is almost forty years since the first one took place, and in forty years the novelty of almost anything is likely to show signs of wear and tear. However, if the records are to be believed, Mr Shaw was not awed even by the first rise of a curtain on his puppets.
    That first play, as any true Shavian knows, was Widowers' Houses, and it had its premiere at the Royalty Theater in London on the faraway night of Dec 9, 1892. It was a belated presentation even then, for it had been begun seven years before. It had been projected as a collaboration with William Archer, but before it was half finished that partnership had been dissolved.
    Archer had fancied himself as a "born constructor." Shaw had informed him that his dialogue was "incomparable." So the two put their heads together. Archer furnished the young Irishman with a plot. Six weeks later Shaw reported progress. He had, he said, written half the first act. But he had used up all the plot and wanted more. Archer read what had been written, saw that it wasn't his story at all, and withdrew from the partnership.
    The defection did not deter Mr Shaw. But one thing and another did, and though he managed to work his way through two acts he did not complete the play until J T Grein of the Independent Theater Society came to him with a plea for a play. Shaw added a third act and Widowers' Houses went into rehearsal.
    The new playwright did not see his first-night approach with any trepidation. As a matter of fact, shortly before the premiere there appeared an interview with him in The Star. There is every reason to believe that Mr Shaw himself wrote the interview and played both parts in it. And when he asked himself the nature of his play he was ready with the answer.
    "Sir," he said to his imaginary questioner, "it will be nothing less than didactic. Do you suppose I have gone to all this trouble to amuse the public? No; if they want that there is the Criterion for them, the Comedy, the Garrick, and so on. My object is to instruct them."
    Nor was he at all abashed by the first-night crowd.
    "The first-night performance was sufficiently exciting," he wrote later. "The Socialists and Independents applauded me furiously on principle; the ordinary playgoing first-nighters hooted me frantically on the same ground; I, being at that time in some practice as what is impolitely called a mob orator, made a speech before the curtain."
    Shaw himself describes the play as "a nine days wonder." It was more than that, however. It may not have achieved what is known as a "run," but it furnished editorial material for the newspapers for weeks and dinner-table conversation for all classes for months. Incidentally, it convinced his erstwhile collaborator, Mr Archer, that Shaw was not a playwright.
    "It is a pity," he wrote, "that Mr Shaw should labor under a delusion as to the true bent of his talent, and mistaking an amusing jeu d'esprit for a work of creative art, should perhaps be tempted to devote further time and energy to a form of production for which he has no special ability and some constitutional disabilities."
    But Mr Shaw had other ideas - he had, in fact, a great many other ideas, and most of them he made into plays. The first of his American first-nights found Richard Mansfield as Captain Bluntschli in Arms and the Man at the Herald Square Theater on Sept. 17, 1894. The play, as William Winter got around to observing in his biography of Mansfield, "did not attract much attention." Much more successful was Mr Mansfield as the dashing Dick Dudgeon of The Devil's Disciple, which rang up sixty-four performances at the Fifth Avenue Theater beginning Oct 4, 1897.
    But, take it on the word of old Shavians hereabout (and a combative camaraderies they are, too), the first really important Shaw premiere in New York was that of Candida, in 1903. Winchell Smith and the late Arnold Daly struck up a partnership, enlisted a company which included Dorothy Donnelly, Dodson Mitchell and Louise Cosser Hale (who had a typewriter, and so was assigned to play Prossy) and launched the first of two special matinees on a snowbound afternoon at the old Madison Square Theater. When critical acclaim rewarded them, the theater management demanded a share in the show, which was promptly refused on advice of council, (a theatrically inclined young lawyer named Helen Arthur now head of the Actor-Managers, Inc.). Candida, wrapped up in a truck, went on tour - the the Army and Navy Club, the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, the Carnegie Lyceum and, finally, to the Berkeley Lyceum. Alf Hayman, Charles Frohman's general manager, was in charge there, and it was Mr Hayman's uncharitable notion that some advance rent should be paid. Mr Smith promptly repaired to his former colleague in "Secret Service," William Gillette, and asked for a loan of $1,000.
    "Take it," said Mr Gillette, according to the best of Miss Arthur's memory, "and lose it and come back and play in my company."
    But all this time Mr Shaw was writing more plays and, possibly encouraged by a royalty fee of 10 per cent flat, he allowed them to drift Manhattanward - How He Lied To Her Husband, The Man of Destiny, Mrs Warren's Profession, (Police Take Action, &c.), John Bull's Other Island and You Never Can Tell. Man and Superman brought Robert Lorraine to the Hudson on Sept 5, 1905, and eye and ear witnesses are still living to inform you that the first-night audience was sharply divided into two faction, viz., those who considered (1) men and (2) women to be the pursuers. Forbes-Robertson and a spectacular setting fairly had the town by its tiaras in Caesar and Cleopatra at the New Amsterdam on Oct 30, 1906, shortly after James J Corbett, himself, had sparred his way into the dramatic limelight. Not in a Shaw play, to be sure, but in a drama adapted by Stanislaus Stange from Shaw's novel, Cashel Byron's Profession. The old champion was three years in retirement, but still light on his feet.
    "James J Corbett had a go at Bernard Shaw last evening [June 7, 1906]," said this newspaper's third man in the ring, "the scene of the mill being Daly's Theater, and the event being pulled off in three rounds. When the final bell rang, Mr Corbett came up smiling. Bu that time, however, Mr Shaw was down and out."
    In these latter years it has, of course, been the Theater Guild which has looked after Mr Shaw's American interests, including that 10 per cent. Its now ancient and fruitless custom of inviting him to attend the New York premiere of one of his plays began on the occasion of the world showing of Heartbreak House at the Garrick on Nov 10, 1920. H G Wells and G K Chesterton were coming over, it was pointed out, and why didn't he come, too? Mr Shaw refused to budge, but was perfectly happy to exchange cablegrams concerning the opening date. The Guild had hoped to begin its season with Heartbreak House, but Mr Shaw insisted that it be held until after the Presidential election, which just shows you how he keeps track of things. (He once cabled Miss Arthur not to produce a play of his at Maxine Elliott's Theater because the street in front of it was torn up, and she is still wondering how he knew about that.) The Guild repeated its plea by cable. Back came one word: "Inexorable."
    Another exchange of greetings took place over the production of Back to Methuselah, which also had its world premiere at the hands of the Guild in February and March, 1922. Although he later relented, Mr Shaw originally wanted the play presented in five sections - three evening performances and two matinees. He suggested also that the tickets be sold in batches of five on one sheet, with perforated divisions. "If people buy them that way they will not throw them away," he explained, apparently with good sense, and added "People may be bothered by the first two plays, but their bewilderment will not take the form of throwing their tickets into the fire, especially if you charge enough for them."
    Through a light misunderstanding, he was again pleasantly adamant (at cable rates) when the Guild prepared to put Saint Joan into rehearsal for a December, 1923, opening. The playwright had sent over what appeared to be the script a document so lengthy that his harried Yankee friends were moved to warn him that the commuters in the audience would either have to leave early or miss their trains. Mr Shaw cabled instruction to the effect that the railroads must change their schedules. The railroads had almost summoned their nerve to protest about this when it developed that the script that had been placed in rehearsal was intended only to be read. The acting version arrived in good time and proved of regulation length. But Mr Shaw was not one to let a discussion cool quickly. One of his letters instructed Lee Simonson not to make the scenery "fantastic." It added: "Simonson must also be limited to three cigarettes a day."
    The impression has somehow gone out that Too True To Be Good will be Mr Shaw's last first-night and the play his valedictory. That impression, however it started, is not shared by Mr Shaw, who ought to know. To tell all, as he frequently does, he is writing another play at this very moment.

    3/27/32 This big book, What I Really Wrote About the War, is filled to the brim with what Mr Shaw now writes about what he really wrote about the war. He has here reprinted much of what he published originally in various periodicals, generously interspersing these war-time documents with his present reactions toward them..
    Of so voluble a volume, it is not easy to offer an adequate account. Mr Shaw deals with the diplomacy before the war, the hard case of Belgium, patriotic propaganda, pacifism, the Russian revolution, Versailles, the Washington Conference and the League of Nations. Seldom has stagecraft concentrated so many spotlights on statesmanship. Happily, the "contents," also written by Mr Shaw, are entirely lucid. We read:
    "I proposed the Locarno agreement twelve years before Locarno - I suggest annual warsports on Salisbury Plain - I retire to Torquay for two months to study the situation - I point out that if soldiers were wise they would shoot their officers - I dish the Tageblatt - I appear at a courtmartial - I array myself in khaki - the Limitation Conference, why I shall not be there."
    Oscar Wilde dramatized the importance of being earnest. Mr Shaw has risen to the importance of being important.
    The book is written in fine style. True to his prototype, the Sousa of socialism gives us brief blasts of boost on the autobrass. There are the tarara-pompons on the kettledrums of a quasi-communism. There is the shrill saxophonetic shriek into space when sense has run a little short, but a page or two of the sentence has still to be finished.
    What wit there is, it is excellent. An immaculate Mephistopheles visits Geneva and attends the Assembly of the League of Nations. He describes the platform with curtains behind and proceeds to what he calls the "vamping episodes." We read:
    "When a young lady secretary has a new dress, or for any other reason feels that she is looking her best, she waits until the speaker - possibly a Chinese gentleman carefully plodding through a paper written in his best French - has reduced half the public galleries to listless distraction and the other half to stertorous slumber. Then she suddenly, but gracefully, snatches the curtains apart and stands revealed, a captivating manikin, while she pretends to look round with a pair of sparkling eyes for her principal on the bureau. The effect is electric; the audience wakes up and passes with a flash from listless desperation to tense fascination, to the great encouragement of the speaker, who, with his back to the vision beautiful, believes he has won over the meeting at last.
    Possible, the classical coincides at times with the cheap. We see "Asquith, the lucid lawyer, the man who could neither remember the past nor foresee the future, yet was always a Yorkshireman, with ancient English depths behind his mirrorlike lucidity in which something of lioncraft could lurk without troubling the surface of the mirror." As a mirror, the vignette, though none too carefully polished, does at least reflect.
    But just as Peter Pan seemed to be out-growing a literary adolescence, splash goes the paint brush of the perennial boy, and "history," we read, "will make no distinction between Mr Asquith and Metternich." It is not true. It is not even smart. It is simply crude. Anybody can write like that who puts that value on his writing.
    In offering us his book Mr Shaw asks the discerning question, "Does it matter?" His reply, in "one last word," is that "it does," and his particular request is that we duly "appreciate" what he calls "the moral shock," which he is administering. The book is to be received, then, as a king of electrified brickbat or as one of those clods of earth which, in Yellowstone Park, are thrown into the too quiescent geyser to wake it up. Will it or will it not arouse those vulcanoes of publicity which have no terrors for Mr Shaw?
    Our own morals are, we fear, sadly amiss. For never at any time have they been shocked by anything that Mr Shaw writes, does or is - least of all this book. A more harmless individual than the St Bernard of Bolshevism - bathing, like Gandhi, before the camera and, like Gandhi, abstaining from alcohol and tobacco - never satisfied Lady Astor as to his childlike innocence. Even the War Office, with its suspicion of enemies within our gates, was so convinced over the innocuous character of this exemplary model of the proprieties that, on inquiry during the war, a Lieutenant General replied 'that the case has been investigated and that nothing is known against this officer.' The question has never been whether Mr Shaw is shocking. The only question is whether, inadvertently, he may sometimes have appeared to be silly.
    Irresponsibilities are very jolly, as Mr Chesterton would say, when the mood is to be irresponsible. If Mr Shaw thinks that "the Monroe Doctrine is balderdash," so be it. But he must not be surprised at it, as an expert on balderdash, he acquires a reputation. We need balderdash. Like Billingsgate, it adds to the zest of life. But do not ask of balderdash more than balderdash can give. It is not a substitute for sagacity. The purpose of balderdash is to sell, and when it is sold, the purpose is served.
    Mere inconsistencies may be dismissed as the usual tricks of the trade. To be declaring one day for conscription and another day to be defending conscientious objectors kept the public on the guess. To denounce capitalist nations as pirates flying the Jolly Roger and to compete with Arnold Bennett himself as a beneficiary of capitalism in literature was to condone while exploiting the slighter insincerities of Church and State. In good old Bottomley more than this, for the time being, was forgiven.
    What alienated England from Shaw was a feeling not easy to put into words. Possibly the jacket of this book will explain things. Niagara - if we may quote again from Oscar Wilde - was once described as an inconspicuous background for Mrs Brown Potter. The awful landscape of battle, with its bombs and barbed wire, its tanks and its Zeppelins, at thought of which, on Armistice Day, whole nations stand silent - the grave of a Gladstone, a Roosevelt, an Asquith and a Rupert Brooke - are displayed as the inconspicuous background for a cynical smiling but well-advertised Shaw. Practiced as a pose, egotism may be pardonable. Perfected into paranoia, it is, at least pathetic. But exploited as publicity? For a twentieth century Shakespear, we ought, perhaps, to be grateful. But do we need a twentieth century Benvenuto Cellini?
    Possibly, the pseudo Shaw is not the real Shaw. Let us be grateful for the benefit of that doubt. But a nation fighting for its life does not want a ventriloquist. No voice is even tolerable unless it be authentic. "In all emergencies," Mr Shaw tells us, "the neighborly man must be above all things helpful." To be a neighbor, a man must remove his make-up and be himself.
    Take Mr Shaw's treatment of England's "contemptible little army." As he says, it was perfectly equipped and promptly dispatched. As he says, "England was, up to her engagements, by far the best prepared of all the belligerents." But what follows? The Germans, we are told, "were comparatively unprepared and incompetent" and were "not only hopelessly blockaded, but outwitted, out-prepared, out-generaled, out-fought, out-flown, out-gassed, out-tanked, out-tanked, out-bombed." Who would suppose from all this that the British preparation put into the field no more than 100,000 men, that the Germans immediately mobilized millions, that they fought a dozen nations for more than four years, that they knocked the Czardom into smithereens by successive blows of the mailed fist, that they bombed Britain for months, - we think, years - before Britain was able or willing to inflict reprisals in kind, and that the use of gas was due solely to German initiative?
    Did Shaw believe in his diagnosis? Did he really think that, in the diplomacy of the Liberal Government, which included Morley and, generally speaking, was supported by the Labor party under the leadership of MacDonald, Henderson and Snowden, "you see the old British lion, the lion of Blenheim, the lion of Trafalgar, the lion of Waterloo, making his last and most terrible and triumphant sprint"? The way Mr Shaw puts it is, "I had to deal with several moralities, writing in terms sometimes of one, sometimes of another." There is no assurance that the morality that he is addressing is the one that happens to respond to the truth.
    Along the front he was taken "joy-riding." That his description is graphic, brilliant, audacious, goes without saying. But how is it summed up? With rapture over so exciting a phrase, Mr Shaw describes his mood as "this diabolical phenomenon." We read:
    "I spent a week in the survey of all this ruin, with the booming and whizzing of its unresting progress continually in my ears. And I am bound to state plainly, as a simple fact to be exploited by devils or angels, according to its true nature, that I enjoyed myself enormously and continuously, in spite of exposures and temperatures that finally gave me my first taste of frostbite.
    Arras? It was not "bombarded worth a cent." Casualties? Why should the home folks worry? It took many a shell to kill a man, and this is the critic who tells us that Lord Grey "can go through the most sanguinary war as a principal agent without noticing anything worse than a deplorable contretemps." To Grey the war was no joy-ride. His suffering exceeded a first touch of frostbite. The battle for peace was not lost until it had cost Grey his eyes.
    Mr Shaw advocated a guarantee for Europe by England, France and Germany. He now dons the mantle of a prophet of Locarno. But it would not have been easy in 1913 to find anybody in London who did not want Germany and France to get together. With that end in view, Grey, during the various Balkan crises, worked overtime.
    A man, even Shaw, cannot be everything, and as a prophet it is no wonder that, as Carpentier discovered to his cost, the philosopher of the prize ring did not survive many rounds. Over the Washington conference Mr Shaw was even less reliable in his presciences. "With all the emphasis I am capable of" - as he puts it - he announced that Mr Lloyd George as Prime Minister had issued "in effect a declaration of war on America, to mature twenty years hence." Of course, it was arrant rubbish, but what of that? "The warning" had "publicity in London and America" and Mr Shaw "shewed no contrition." Gayly, he informs the universe - otherwise Henry Arthur Jones - that he is welcome to decorate me with all the flowers of political invective he can lay his pen to without shaking my regard for him in the least." We have been told that sable-haired collies, if their pedigree is adequate, will do anything for attention. Through a fortuitous concatenation of ancestors Mr Shaw's pedigree has been traced to MacDuff.

    3/19/32 Edward Gordon Craig, the son of Ellen Terry, makes one more attack on Bernard Shaw in his book, "Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self," published today by Dutton. He charges that Shaw betrayed Ellen Terry by publishing their correspondence and pictures, the playwright as a mercenary journalist preying on the sympathies of his friends to advance his own reputation.
    "The affair was now no longer in Mr Shaw's strong, manly hands," he writes of the final publication of the correspondence. "He had allowed himself to fool himself. He had, it now appears, been for many years a victim of somnambulism - he walked in his sleep - and one day in this same sleep he had carried E. T.'s letters, or copies of them, over to Edith Craig's flat, or to the lawyers, and in his sleep had agreed to let them have them, in fact, left the letters with her or them. The letters were sold to an American gentleman.
    "So far as I know," he continues later, "a man who holds in his hands letters from a woman, as Shaw held my mother's, does not part with them or show them to any one. I won't discuss why - it's simply not done, it's an old and everlasting courtesy observed by all."
    He considers that Shaw's preface to the letters was a "pack of deliberate lies, purposely invented to damage my mother, Nelly Terry; my father, myself, my family, Irving and a few more."

3/6/32 Here is a picture of a typical day with Bernard Shaw in London. It is of special interest in view of the new Shaw play which was recently produced in Boston. The interview took place just before Mr Shaw sailed for South America.
    "I am the upstart son of a downstart," said Bernard Shaw. The remark was provoked by the report that Shakespear's Macbeth was to have a revival.
    All the world thinks of Shaw as an Irishman and puts his irrepressibility down to his supposedly Hibernian temperament, but it appears he is really of Scottish ancestry. He is, in fact, descended from a famous noble, no other than the redoubtable Macduff, Thane - which means Earl - of Fife, who killed Macbeth and was the adversary who, in Shakespear's play, Macbeth tells to "lay on!"
    Bernard Shaw, dyed-in-the-wool Socialist, with a 'belted earl' as one ancestor! And of all earls for a thorough-going pacifist like GBS to be descended from, too, a fiery old war-horse like Macduff!
    Probably all that the average person knows about Macduff is that he was the fellow who accounted for Macbeth, after the latter, according to Shakespear, had Macduff's wife and all his children murdered "at one fell swoop." As a fact Macbeth did no such thing. If he had there would have been no Bernard Shaw. But that is a detail.
    Actually the historians themselves know little about Macduff. They know so little, in fact, that the learned Dictionary of National Biography speaks of him as 'that half-mythical figure.' It seems to be assured, however, that he was one of the greatest and richest Scottish nobles of the ninth century, possessing large estates and several castles.
    Shakespear seems to have invented the circumstance of Macduff's being the man "of no woman born" who, according to the witches, would be the only person capable of killing Macbeth, just as he did the episode of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane. It was not, as a matter of record, at Dunsinane but in a battle fought at Lumphanan, in Aberdeenshire, in August, 1057, between Macbeth's army and one raised by Macduff and Malcolm Canmore (the latter the son of King Duncan, whom Macbeth had murdered), that Macduff slew Macbeth.
    After that he was more of a personage than ever; for Malcolm rewarded Macduff for his share in restoring him to the throne by conferring several privileges upon his comrade in arms. One privilege was that Macduff and his successors should have the right of placing the king on his throne on coronation day; another that they should lead the van in battle when the royal standard was displayed.
    That is really about all that is known of Macduff, and so we come to Bernard Shaw. He traces his ancestry back to Macduff through the Thane of Fife's third son, whose name, Shaigh, he said, "became civilized into Shaw."
    "When Macduff died," Mr Shaw remarked, "it was all very well for his eldest son, who got the earldom and all the property, but the unfortunate Shaigh, brought up with the most expensive tastes, was left with a bawbee or two, and all that he could do was to sponge on his relatives.
    "Younger sons of nobles produce races of downstarts," GBS added, "each successive generation getting poorer and poorer unless they become upstarts by marrying money.
    "I, a direct descendant of Shaigh, might be as poor as the rest but for the accidental possession of a gift for playwriting which leads people to keep positively shoving money on me that has been laboriously earned by actors and others. Thus I am the upstart son of a downstart."
    From Macduff to Bernard Shaw is a far cry indeed. What would the scrapping old Thane of Fife have thought of his brainy and infinitely more renowned descendant's pacifism? One wonders. And of his teetotalism, vegetarianism, socialism and other "isms"? Yet there is a parallel between the two, for just as Macduff fought people who he disliked with a claymore, so Mr Shaw, all his life, has been fighting things of which he disapproves with plays, pamphlets, prefaces and platform denunciations.
    And if you think of Mr Shaw as essentially more Scottish than Irish a lot of things about him become more readily understandable. His extreme austerity, for instance, is definitely more a Scottish than an Irish trait, and so is his keen business instinct. His physiognomy and famous beard and eyebrows are those of a Scot; likewise his gaunt frame.
    Mr Shaw describes himself as a "typical Irishman," it is true, but he is careful to explain what he what he means by that.
    "My extraction," he said, "is the extraction of most Englishmen - that is, I have no trace in me of the commercially imported North Spanish strain that passes for aboriginal Irish. I am a genuinely typical Irishman of the Danish, Norman, Cromwellian and (of course) Scottish invasion."
    Bernard Shaw learned of his descent from Macduff through a member of the family with the unmistakably Scottish name of Alexander Mackintosh Shaw, who, said GBS. "instead of taking his pedigree for granted in the usual Shaw manner, hunted it up and published 100 copies privately in 1877.
    "Somebody sent me a copy," he added. "I skipped hastily to the chapter about the Irish Shaws to make sure that they were my people, and there they were, duly traced to the third son of that immortalized, yet unborn, Thane of Fife who, invulnerable to normally accouched swordsmen, laid on and slew Macbeth. It was as good as being descended from Shakespear, whom I had been unconsciously resolved to reincarnate from my cradle."
    The Shaws - previously Shaighs - came to Ireland toward the end of the seventeenth century by a round-about route from Hampshire, England. They were country gentlemen of sorts at Sandpits, Kilkenny, and one of them married a granddaughter of Oliver Cromwell. Another of them, Robert Shaw of Sandpits, was Bernard Shaw' great-great-grandfather. He was born in 1696 and died in 1758.
    There was always an officer or a clergyman among these eighteenth-century Shaws, and in the beginning of the nineteenth even business men were tolerated in the family. One of them, a fifth son, by the way, came to Dublin and founded the Royal Bank, long known as "Shaw's Bank," in that city. He became Sir Robert Shaw, Baronet, of Bushey Park.
    Bernard Shaw's paternal grandfather, first cousin to the Sir Robert of his day, was a Dublin stock broker who had married a curate's daughter. Having already had thirteen children, he celebrated, on New Year's Eve, 1817, the arrival of one more. The was GBS's father, George Carr Shaw, another younger son!
    "If you would know what real poverty is," Shaw wrote recently, "ask the younger son of a younger son of a younger son. To understand his plight you must start at the top without the income of the top, and curse your stars that you were not lucky enough to start at the bottom."
    However, GBS himself was not a younger but an only son, and he has overcome the family handicap and is as much of a nabob in his way as Macduff was in his. As one result, a lot of people write to him in the hope of getting money from him, and still more people, most of them strangers, write to ask him to do them favors of other kinds.
    It is doubtful if any literary celebrity in the world has as large and as diversified a correspondence. Every morning letters reach Mr Shaw from literally the world over. Some are written in Chinese, some in Hindustani and others in Russian, French, and German, for Mr Shaw's reputation knows no international boundaries.
    "If I had a large office and about thirty clerks," he once remarked, "I might possibly be able to deal with my correspondence. And if I had an income of about $150,000,000 I might perhaps be able to advance all the money that is demanded.
    "A great many people, having written once, write a second time to tell me that I might have had the common courtesy to reply to their nice letters. They do not seem to realize that writing is my profession and that if I wrote to them all my own work would be impossible. As it is, I could have written about twenty additional plays in the time I have spent in writing to correspondents. If these people had existed in Shakespear's time his literary output would have been much reduced.
    "People do not think what it costs me to write letters. I am asked questions which would require an elaborate reply, which would be worth $1,500 for the first serial rights. But they expect to get replies for nothing, forgetting that I have to live."
    Some of his correspondents obviously have queer ideas about him. One of them, resident in one of the smaller European countries, would appear to imagine that he has attained to far loftier state than Macduff ever did. For when writing recently this individual addressed his letter to "G Bernard Shaw, Esq., Buckingham Palace, London"!
    It was not GBS who mentioned this episode, by the way. Another recent correspondent addressed his missive: "G. Bernard Shaw, Esq., England or anywhere there."
    A heavy percentage of the strangers who write to Mr Shaw do so to ask for his autograph, which he seldom gives. Others, having written books, have the nerve to ask him to be good enough to contribute prefaces to them.
    Probably Macduff would have had as many of these people as possible put to the sword. Shaw administers a quietus to a lot of them by means of postcards which he has had specially printed. The autograph fiends, for instance, receive instead of GBS's signature a card that reads, characteristically:
    "It may interest collectors of autographs to know that Mr Bernard Shaw does not regard unsportsmanlike requests by strangers to forge his own signature for the benefit as legitimate collecting. He signs enough genuine documents every day to give collectors ample material for the proper exercise of their peculiar industry. His secretary has instruction to return all albums and refuse all applications which ignore this distinction."
    The truth is that GBS deals with his correspondence, heavy as it is, fairly comfortably. For if he has not a large office he has one that is up to the minute in the way of equipment, and if he does not command the services of about thirty clerks he possesses a highly efficient private secretary - Miss Blanche Patch - who has served him in this capacity for eleven years and has a short way with time-wasters.
    Mr Shaw is in London three days of the week only, spending the rest of his time at this country house at Ayot St Lawrence, a small village in Hertfordshire. He comes to London on Thursday morning and goes back to the country again Saturday afternoon. His home here is in a suite in Whitehall Court, a block of luxury flats on the Thames Embankment that is probably twice as big as the ancestral castle of the Thanes of Fife, and, oh, how different!
    Mr Shaw's "office," where I talked with him, is a lofty room overlooking the busy Embankment. From the big windows at the far end of it one gets a superb view of London's river and bridges, and of the "Surrey side," the comparatively new County Hall, home of London's civic Parliament, being immediately opposite.
    Keeping track of all Mr Shaw's "rights" in addition to dealing with his correspondence naturally entails a lot of work and GBS's office is an eminently businesslike place.
    On the left of the entrance doorway, facing the window, is the big, flat-topped desk, kept immaculately tidy, that Mr Shaw himself uses, and on the right a smaller desk used by Miss Patch and a table for her hard-worked typewriter. There are half a dozen big filing cabinets (how exciting it would be to have a look inside them!), a telephone, naturally, and the newest edition of the encyclopedia to which Mr Shaw contributed, in a special table bookcase.
    There are other books on all sides, their catholicity emphasizing the diversity of Mr Shaw's reading. Hundreds of them,  including various editions, notably the American one, of his plays, fill a large bookcase against the wall on the left of the entrance.
    Among these Shavian volumes are several that might be by the late Edgar Wallace instead, since they bear on the backs what look like the prints of a bloodstained thumb. These, it seems, are the volumes of his plays that Shaw always uses in rehearsing. He has marked them in this way with red ink so that he will know they are the ones containing his stage notes.
    Apart from the array of books, about the only things that distinguish Mr Shaw's office from an ordinary commercial one are the pictures that adorn the wall and the few ornaments - one of them a miniature giraffe - observable here and there.
    Over the mantelpiece are a number of framed prints, reproductions of sketches by Albert Durer. But the most interesting is a portrait in oils, obviously old, that hangs at the extreme end of the right-hand wall. Its subject is the great-great-grandfather of GBS, Robert Shaw of Sandpits, showing him in a red military or hunting coat. It is by Thomas Hudson, a master of the great Reynolds.

    It is in these surroundings that Mr Shaw, when in London, works. Having had his before-breakfast swim in the Royal Automobile Club's pool, which he never misses, even now when he is 76, and afterward his not only meatless but eggless first meal of the day, he comes into his office between 9 and 9:30 and works steadily until lunch, usually having to devote the greater part of this time to his correspondence.
    Mr Shaw never dictates, it seems, but writes all the letters that he signs personally, as he writes all his plays, in Pitman shorthand, which he learned in his early days as a newspaper writer. Afterward, these letters are transcribed and typed out by Miss Patch. If a question asked by some one who has written to him chances to interest GBS he may answer it, if only on one of his famous post-cards, and I believe that a good many of the as yet unsuccessful dramatists who write to him to ask his advice get it. The replies to the rest of his correspondents are left to his secretary.
    The remainder of Mr Shaw's day, when he is in London, is generally filled with engagement. Unless he goes to the theater or a movie, he is generally in bed by 11:30.
    Just at the end of the interview Mr Shaw made a characteristically Shavian utterance. In a reminiscent mood he had been talking of his early days as a journalist, of his first two editors, Edmund Yates and the late Frank Harris - whose biography of Shaw has recently been published - and of his early acquaintance with George Moore.
    He quoted with great relish a saying of Moore's: "Shaw is the funny man in the English boarding house."
    "But probably the best epigram ever made about me," he added, was one of Oscar Wilde's, which, by the way, has often been misquoted.
    "'Shaw hasn't any enemy in the world,' said Oscar, 'and none of his friends like him.'
    "We had no respect for one another in those days," GBS declared, "and were amazed when we all turned out to be great men. Always be polite to young nobodies: you never know how they will turn out. If you must kick somebody, kick the old."

2/20/32 Bernard Shaw appeared more angry than hurt today as a result of an automobile accident Wednesday in which he and his wife were severely shaken up and bruised. They are here on a vacation trip. When he was called to the telephone today at his hotel the playwright expressed annoyance that the news of the accident had leaked out and refused to discuss it. It was understood that the accident was not the reason why he had canceled sailing reservations for England and that both he and his wife were completely recovered, but were prolonging their stay indefinitely.
    Mr Shaw informed everybody at breakfast today that he never felt better in his life. He has spent his mornings working and his afternoons motoring about the country.

0789  He and wife hurt when auto goes into ditch

2/19/32 Bruised and badly shaken, Bernard Shaw and his wife were taken from the wreckage of an automobile which, with the playwright at the wheel, had crashed into a ditch at Knysna, on the south coast of Cape Province, today. As a result of their injuries their passages to England on the liner Arundel Castle have been canceled. They had proposed to join the ship at Mossel Bay Sunday on the conclusion of their motor tour. They are now confined to a hotel at Knysna on doctor's orders.

    Mr Shaw, who is 75, obtained a driving license on his arrival in South Africa and part of his Winter vacation there was spent in motoring from Cape Town to Durban. While in South Africa he also had his first airplane flight. He is said to be suffering chiefly from shock, but his wife sustained a considerable injury to one of her wrists.

0788  Arrives in Cape Town; on crisis as beginning of end of capitalism

1/12/32 There is no crisis in Europe, Bernard Shaw said today when he arrived on a holiday trip. There is "only a muddle" which may mark the beginning of the end of the capitalist system, he added. "But the capitalist system will last long enough for me," he said, "and that's all I'm worrying about."

0787  Feature article on fame; por

1/10/32  Shaw's vogue is something of a mystery. He has achieved it despite certain handicaps which, to other intellectuals, are fatal. His has been the narrow sphere of a theater attended, comparatively speaking, by a select handful, and of books read only by some of the few who read books. For a thousand who are familiar with Chaplin's derby hat and cane, not one could quote a line from John Bull's Other Island or Arms and the Man. That Shaw should be a popular sensation is thus a tour de force very creditable to his stage management. What has been the method employed?
    There was an Irish regiment in which, as Mike complained, every one was out of step but himself. Shaw is the Beatrice Lillie of the chorus - the accomplished acrobat of the different, the apostle of the unexpected. He studies with care what most people are saying. He then says the opposite.
    Anybody who wants to be contradicted knows where to go. At the circus, it is Shaw in his booth - the Cagliostro of Communism - whose Mephistophelean machine, merely by the turning of the usual handle, is made to administer a mild and harmless shock to prettily shrieking sophomoreans in colleges where all this is supposed to be literature. Many people have tried such stunts. In the great speculation on space Shaw has had the cynical sincerity so to value himself as to be a complete success.

0786  Ed on fruit-growers in Cal asking to have name of play, Apple Cart, changed to Orange Box

1/1/32     Competition between rival fruit-growers of California and Oregon leads to curious attempts at all kinds of publicity. In their eagerness to miss no opportunity for attracting attention to themselves and suppressing their competitors, the orange-growers did not overlook the approach of The Apple Cart to the California theaters.
    The director of the play received a call from a delegation of orange-growers, who requested him to change the name to "The Orange Box" while it played in their State. He was first bewildered, then amused, and finally insisted that he could not change the name, and didn't see that it advertised the Oregon apple anyhow.
    The orange-growers refused to accept no for an answer. They found out that author's name and address and cable him at some length their request. Not until they received Mr Shaw's one-word cable - easily guessed - in reply did they give up their efforts.