Bernard Shaw's Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect

Shaw, Freud, Simmel

Stephen Watt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319715124
• eBook ISBN: 9783319715131
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This book traces the effects of materiality - including money and its opposite, poverty - on the psychical lives of George Bernard Shaw and his characters. While this study focuses on the protagonists of the five novels Shaw wrote in the late 1870s and early 1880s, it also explores how materialism, feeling, and emotion are linked throughout his entire canon. At the same time, it demonstrates how Shaw's conceptions of human subjectivity parallel those of two of his contemporaries, Sigmund Freud and Georg Simmel. In particular, this book explores how theories of so-called 'marginal economics' influence fin de siècle thought about human psychology and the sociology of the modern metropolis, particularly London.

© The Author(s) 2018

Stephen WattBernard Shaw’s Fiction, Material Psychology, and AffectBernard Shaw and His Contemporarieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71513-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: On Money, Psychology, and Affect in Bernard Shaw’s Writing

Stephen Watt¹

(1)

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA

“I knew I was useless, worthless, penniless, and that until I had qualified myself to do something, and proved it by doing it, all this business of calling on people who might perhaps do something for me, and dining out without money to pay for a cab, was silly.” (I, xxx)

—Bernard Shaw, “Preface” to Immaturity

End Abstract

The project of recovering a “material psychology” from Bernard Shaw’s writing—and of deploying related theoretical insights in assessing the nature of affect in his novels and thought more generally—necessitates articulations between four discourses that are often considered separately and are more than sufficiently complicated in their own right: economics, psychology, affect theory, and, perhaps surprisingly, performance studies. In addition, when juxtaposed to each other and pressed into the service of critical exegesis, these discourses might lead to even greater confusion. For these reasons, I want to take a moment, first, to outline the premises of this undertaking and then, second, to deploy Shaw’s 1905 story “The Theatre of the Future” as a primer for the readings that follow. As the title Bernard Shaw’s Novels, Material Psychology, and Affect indicates, my focus throughout, however much it might stray, is primarily on the five novels that Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883, not long after his arrival in London in the spring of 1876. However, if Nature abhors a vacuum so, too, do Shavians. So, before engaging Shaw’s novels, this chapter and the one that follows consider intellectual work at the fin de siècle as a context within which they were written, paying particular attention to the relationships between materialism and subjectivity in the so-called “marginal” economics to which Shaw was exposed in the 1880s and in the magnum opuses of two of Shaw’s contemporaries: Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money (1900) and Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).¹ Implicit in my argument is the conviction that Shaw contributed to an extant discourse on the affective dimensions of capital and exchange—which, in turn, through the process of “surrogation” inform notions of value and the myriad performances inherent to both social life and identity²—and that by foregrounding his insights we might better understand the relationship between subjectivity and materialism in Shaw’s writing. This investigation includes, therefore, an examination of his ambivalence about perhaps the most vexed, yet semiotically resonant of all material objects—money—a topic that Shaw seemed never to tire of discussing, as several of his last plays amply demonstrate. In much of what follows, however, Shaw the accomplished playwright and public figure yields center stage to a younger, more conflicted writer, although the celebrated older man hovers backstage, emerging on occasion to seize the spotlight of our attention.

A critical genealogy of the subjectivity of this more conflicted Shaw might begin with two conjoined matters: his views of money and the psychical effects of poverty, particularly on human subjects with familial backgrounds like his.³ Both issues inform Frank Harris’s Bernard Shaw: An Unauthorised Biography Based on Firsthand Information (1931), which in many respects, given Shaw’s participation in funneling information to Harris as he was preparing the book and correcting its proofs afterHarris’s death in August, 1931, might at the very least be retitled an “authorized” biography.⁴ In any case, Harris establishes the relationship between poverty and intense feeling almost from the beginning, as its early chapters, much like several in Shaw’s later Sixteen Self Sketches (1949), concern Shaw’s boyhood in Dublin and the etiology of his “fierce hatred of poverty.” I am less interested in origins, though, than in Harris’s intimation that terms like “hatred” and “poverty” fail to capture the complexity of the matter. For although as a child Shaw did not suffer the privation of hunger, Harris observes, he could not be spared the “wounds and limitations of chronic impecuniosity and the senseless falsehood of pretending to a superior social rank with less than half the income needed to make the pretence [sic] good.”⁵

Harris’s phrase “chronic impecuniosity” conveys more than the term “poverty” ever could, I think, as this condition afflicted both the adolescent and older Shaw in ways that transcend material hardship. In this formulation, Harris connects materiality with a compulsory role-playing that exacerbated Shaw’s pain every time he was required to participate in the mummeries that constituted genteel interaction. Shaw writes about his discomfiture in letters of the 1870s and 1880s, a period he recalls in the 1921 Preface to his first novel Immaturity (1879/1930) complete with memories of feeling “useless,” “worthless,” and “penniless.” As the following pages attempt to delineate, a causal relationship emerges in Shaw’s writing between these very adjectives: that is, one often feels worthless or useless precisely because one is penniless (and an opposite feeling of elation at times attends a character’s financial success). Shaw’s Preface to Immaturity is replete with similar, if less devastating, recollections of being “painfully shy” and of feeling “afraid to accept invitations” (I, xxx). However, the matter is more convoluted than this, as Shaw admits that underlying his reticence to accept offers of introduction or social invitations was not only the conviction that they might lead to “nothing,” but also the “unspoken fear that they might lead to something I did not want” (xxx). These negative feelings rank among the most persistent consequences of his “chronic impecuniosity,” inflecting both his characters’ psychical lives and Shaw’s as well. When invited to pay social visits on Sunday evenings in London, for example, he suffered “agonies of shyness” that led him to arrive as late as possible because he knew that interactions tantamount to “torturing” himself awaited (I, xlv). Such intense pains amount, in my view, to more self-defining “perennial wounds,” a trope borrowed from Michel Foucault’s characterization of the transformative work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and, as I hope to add, Bernard Shaw.⁶ Also, if Nietzsche’s claim in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is accurate that “setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences … preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they constituted thinking as such,”⁷ then one might also urge its constitutive importance to human subjectivity and feeling as well or, more modestly, to Shaw’s subjectivity and that of many of his characters, particularly the protagonists of his novels.

One means of binding such wounds—including humiliation (Harris’s term) and the continual “dread” of social interactions (Shaw’s self-description)⁸—would seem obvious: the acquisition of money. Unfortunately, as biographers from Harris and St. John Ervine to Michael Holroyd emphasize, Shaw’s father, like his maternal grandfather, possessed little knowledge of how to earn or raise any.⁹ Not so with Shaw, however, as has been described by biographers and critics alike—and by Shaw himself. While on holiday in 1895, for example, he received a request from American editor Benjamin Tucker to review Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892), which by that time had created an international sensation. Tucker added a further enticement for Shaw to undertake the assignment by asking him to “ascertain the highest price that has ever been paid to any man … for a magazine article” and promising to pay him that amount, an offer Shaw puckishly described as evidence of “really great editing” on Tucker’s part (MCE, 286). In his biography Harris, noting Shaw’s reluctance to accept payment for public speaking or for appearing on radio broadcasts, similarly recalls that, some 20 years after Shaw eviscerated Nordau’s screed against modernity in his “open letter” to Tucker’s magazine Liberty, William Randolph Hearst paid him “over a thousand pounds for an article.”¹⁰ But this sum might be deemed so much small beer, as substantial as it is. For in 1919 and after considerable epistolary haggling between Shaw and Hearst’s New York American over his fee for a series of articles, Hearst apologized for the misunderstanding and made certain that the unhappy essayist received £2800 or the equivalent of $12,500 for his labors.¹¹ In addition, even though Shaw privileged his writing for the theatre as essentially different from his “journalistic” work, one of his greatest American admirers, playwright Elmer Rice, was incredulous at Shaw’s response to his request for permission for New York’s University Settlement to stage a limited number of performances of The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet (1909):

I have never ceased to marvel at the amount of time and energy expended, by a world famous dramatist, on the licensing of a production to an obscure amateur group.¹²

More generally, Rice was amazed at how “preoccupied” writers like Shaw were with the “merchandising of their wares,” a preoccupation to which Declan Kiberd alludes in The Irish Writer and the World (2005). Unlike European modernists, Kiberd notes, prominent writers associated with the so-called Irish Revival “did not proclaim the need for eternal antagonism between bohemian and bourgeois.” He identifies Shaw in particular, who “wrote mainly for money and earned lots,” as providing the most compelling evidence for his thesis, as do the entrepreneurial endeavors of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde.¹³

There exists, on the most literal level, ample justification for Kiberd’s aspersion of Shaw’s motives for writing. From his earliest years in London, Shaw insisted on being paid for his work, and he was quick to reiterate his stance when the situation demanded it. In September 1879, after receiving a letter from G.R. Sims, editor of One and All, accepting an article but not including any payment for it, Shaw responded by asking if he could expect to be remunerated for sending any “further contributions” to the periodical (CL1, 21). He needed the money, as he confided in a letter the same month to Arnold White, manager and secretary of the Edison Telephone Company of London: “My family are in difficulties” (CL1, 23). Two years later, after failing to find a publisher for Immaturity, he inquired of Remington and Company about the cost of printing the novel at his own expense. This plan, however, was soon beaten into “airy thinness,” much like the gold in John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” Learning that the required fee would be £95, a sum far in excess of his meager savings, a discouraged Shaw addressed his own valedictory letter to the publisher that concluded, “Let me add that if it will not pay, I had rather it remained in MS” (CL1: 43). Later, of course, Shaw engaged in more nuanced, even bumptious, disagreements with publishers over contracts and payments. In a 1909 letter to Constable and Company that begins bluntly with “When are you going to send me my money,” Shaw observed that “with complete security” he might have invested the funds he is owed (over £1600 by his estimation) at 4%, thus making Constable’s dilatory behavior more egregious and his financial loss greater; even worse, he had not been compensated for his own out-of-pocket expenses (CL2, 844). As his complaint confirms, Shaw’s acumen in financial matters was evolving, as Gustavo A. Rodríguez Martín underscores when citing Shaw’s 1932 correspondence with his financial advisor, Stanley Clench, concerning the falling value of British currency, the establishment of a £10,000 annuity payable to his wife, and his desire to avoid “double taxation.”¹⁴ Some decades earlier, however, Shaw’s mother and sister, Lucy, who had immigrated to London before him, needed him to earn a living; and Shaw struggled to do just that. The investment potential of surplus or, what Anna Kornbluh terms, “fictitious capital,” the declining value of the pound, and the taxation of annuities seemed far from his mind.¹⁵

At this point, one might regard Shaw’s early years of penury and frustration in London as unremarkable; after all, it might be argued, generations of Irish and other immigrants have suffered the same set of grinding deprivations—and many still do. Millions of desperate people have fled and, sadly, continue to flee their home countries, as Shaw did, hoping to escape the “failure,” “poverty,” and “obscurity” that awaited young men in Dublin only to experience more virulent strains of each in their new home (I, xxxvi). Yet, unlike many immigrants unable to speak the language of their new home or woefully ill-suited for the challenges of a modern economy, Shaw was entirely capable of assimilation, even if this capacity occasioned awkward, even painful social engagements. More seriously, as Anthony Roche observes in discussing Shaw and Oscar Wilde’s early years in London, as immigrants they both depended on others’ “continuing goodwill” and, in the last analysis, never occupied “a position of stability or security.”¹⁶ What makes Shaw’s story more unique—and what adds complexity and texture to the etiology of “chronic impecuniosity”—is that his successful acquisition of money was often not an entirely happy experience either. This is not merely my opinion, but Shaw’s as well. In his 1914 lecture for the Fabian Society “The Idolatry of Money and How to End It,” for example, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: On Money, Psychology, and Affect in Bernard Shaw’s Writing
• 2. The Materialist Dream Theatre: Affect and Value, Freud and Simmel
• 3. “UNASHAMED”: Negative Affect, Money, and Performance in Immaturity and The Irrational Knot
• 4. Entr’acte at the Theatre: Marriage, Money, and Feeling in Love Among the Artists
• 5. Cashel Byron’s Blush—And Others
• 6. The Antinomies of An Unsocial Socialist
• 7. Postscript: Embodied Shaws
• Back Matter