The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl (26 page)

‘I thought that was obvious,’ Shaw said. ‘You must, of course, issue a manifesto – or, as I suppose Voltaire is about to say, a godifesto.’

‘I suppose I was,’ Voltaire agreed. ‘Or a deifesto at the least.’

‘But how can I know that anyone will believe it?’ God asked.

‘You cant,’ Shaw replied. ‘You are about to turn
professional
author, and you must take your chance, as professional authors always do.’

‘I would recommend you’, Gibbon said, ‘not to read the reviews. Those that dispraise you will disturb you by
condemning
you for things you in fact never said. Those that praise you will disturb you even more, by praising you for things you in fact never said and, moreover, would never dream of saying.’

‘But there must’, God protested, ‘
be
some outcome.’

‘No storyteller worth his salt’, Shaw said sternly, ‘knows the outcome while he is at work. Did I not give you fair
warning
of that by affirming that when I was writing a play I never invented a plot but let the play shape itself, which it always did even when up to the last moment I did not foresee the way out?
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Did I not even add that I often did not see what the play was driving at until some time after I finished it, and that even then I might be wrong? Did I not demonstrate the same thing in practice by writing my tale about the adventures of the Black Girl in her search for God and then adding a note in which, the story being written, I proceeded to speculate on what it meant?’

‘Have
I
not warned you’, Voltaire asked, leaning towards God, ‘more recently and in a way that should have come more personally home to you, that not all fictions are
autobiographical
? What you call the outcome may be beyond your
comprehension
or may seem irrelevant. Shaw liked to give his outcomes an exact ironic point (though, if I may, as a fellow-dramatist, make a technical observation, he was very bad at curtain lines); but even he admits that the point of his points remains open enough to be speculated on. My own irony was often more
surrealist
.
Both ironies are justified by the designs they occur in, and both make the same ultimate point or non-point. We do not know whether we belong to a severely determined universe, in which only art is free to be surrealist and random, or whether the universe is random, pointless and absurd and the art we create is the only ordered and designed element in it.’

‘If you did not take those warnings’, the psychoanalyst said, turning in his turn to God, ‘were you not warned by one of the few bad blunders ever made by Freud? Freud naïvely assumed
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  not only that all fictions are autobiographical but that they are all wish-fulfilment fantasies, which led him to suppose that an author writes a novel merely in order to fulfil his own desires through the hero. What Freud failed to notice is that the author’s loyalty is transferred from his hero or his own ego to the work of art itself, and that the wish the author is truly
striving
to fulfil is that the book shall be a good one.’

‘To make it so’, Gibbon said, ‘the author must accomplish what the design requires – which may cost the hero, and indeed the author, dear.’

‘The author’, Shaw said, ‘is a mere instrument in the grip of Creative Evolution, and may find himself starting a movement to which in his own little person he is intensely opposed.
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It is Creative Evolution that dictates the design.’

‘You,’ the psychoanalyst said to Shaw, ‘are externalising a force you dare not locate in yourself. It was because you were frightened of psychology that you had to invent meta-biology.’

‘You were afraid of psychology’, Voltaire added to Shaw, ‘because of what you termed your delicacy. And it was the same thing that made you afraid of art. Even the most intellectual elements in art, namely the design and the ideas, are sensuous: if the artist gets them right, their rightness is a matter of pleasure, not external logic. You were so deep a puritan that you could not admit you wrote art for art’s sake
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but had to pretend it was for Lamarckianism’s sake. However, for art’s sake I can’t
be sorry, since the products of your pretence were works of art.’

‘They were also, for the most part,’ Shaw replied calmly, ‘dramas; and to externalise an inner psychological force is merely a commonplace of dramatic technique. As I pointed out in my Preface
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to
Saint
Joan,
Saint Joan, like Socrates before her, described as the external experience of hearing voices what less dramatic people would call the inner experience of having thoughts. Indeed, in the Epilogue to the play itself I brought the dead Joan back to life in a dream dreamt by the Dauphin. It was a useful dramatic convention, and it aptly illustrated the fact that the dead Joan has remained alive in the thoughts of the living right up to modern times:
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but in using it I did not imply that the dead really express themselves through the dreams of the living – any more than the appearance, in a comparable episode in
Man
and
Superman,
of not merely several dead persons but the very devil himself implies that I believe in personal immortality or in the literal existence of the devil and all his works.’

‘I suppose’, Gibbon remarked musingly, ‘that in a dialogue of the dead (a literary convention much in vogue in my day, thanks to the classical and sceptical influence of Lucian, who had, by the way, no more belief in an afterlife than Shaw or I), the epilogue would be transacted among the living.’

(‘That reminds me,’ God said, looking round and scanning the oleanders in an unfocussed way, ‘I keep having the feeling that somehow Erasmus ought to be here. I’m blessed if I could say why he should be: yet I wonder why he’s not.’

‘Ignorance, Sir, pure ignorance’, boomed the shade of Dr Johnson, who chanced at that moment to cross the oleander avenue, accompanied still by Boswell.)

‘If you are thinking of including epilogues in your
professional
career,’ Shaw said to God, ‘I should counsel you, from my own experience,
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to forearm yourself to resist the advice of well-meaning persons who will assure you that your work would be excellent if you would only cut out the epilogue.’

‘I trust’, Voltaire remarked to Shaw, ‘that I shall not be
mistaken for a well-meaning person. But if you are thinking of
Saint
Joan,
my advice to you would be to keep the epilogue and cut out the play. It is your only wholly bad one – which is no doubt why it is your most famous one. Though you agreed when we all savaged poor God’s amateurishly static concepts of character and drama, you yourself saddled
Saint
Joan
with a purely static construction. Your play is nothing but a
succession
of tableaux illustrating, you suppose, medieval life. It would pass for a village pageant whose producer was severely under the influence of the pre-Raphaelites. Indeed, it is to your visual nullity that I ascribe the whole disaster. I surmise that, when you turned critic of painting, you read Ruskin, in the hope no doubt of scraping some knowledge of the subject from a writer you could make something of because, although his subject was the visual arts, his greatest talent for the English language. It was from Ruskin’s bigoted Protestantism that your own bigoted Protestantism borrowed the notion that anything you approved of in Catholicism could be labelled
Protestantism-in
-advance-of-its-time. This idea of Ruskin’s is virtually the sole idea in
Saint
Joan.
By the time you were writing, its mild
paradox
was unlikely to give offence anywhere except in your native island.
Saint
Joan
became your most acceptable play in the eyes of people who devote themselves to not being offended. Its pageant-form and unnecessarily large cast made it an ideal choice for putting on as the school play; and in addition you endowed Joan with just that static type of “character” which invites schoolmasters to set examination questions asking for it to be described. In fact, of course, Joan’s “character”
consists
chiefly of the spurious rustic dialect you put, not very
consistently
, into her mouth. Had history permitted you to make her an
Irish
peasant, you would not have been able to make such a sentimental fool of yourself.’

‘I confess that I too’, God said very gently, ‘have sometimes thought that in that play you were a little over-kind to the religious point of view. But perhaps I cannot judge, because my self-interest is concerned.’

‘Your Joan was such a plaster pre-Raphaelite saint’, Voltaire said, ‘that all right-thinking people declared that you’d given up joking and had written a great play at last. They meant that you’d temporarily given up disturbing them. You came back to
your senses only with the Epilogue. It was the very point where you might have sunk yet further over your head in
sentimentality
. You might have implied that killing rebels doesn’t greatly matter, since the soul is immortal and here’s the poor girl’s ghost to prove it and send the audience home tearfully happy. Instead, you were bold and offensive enough to admit that, if people
could
resurrect Joan, they wouldn’t.’

‘It was on almost the same point’, the psychoanalyst said, ‘that you anticipated or coincided with Freud’s theory of the ambivalence of emotions
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in your dialogue of the dead in Man and Superman.
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There you cause your dead Don Juan to
remark
: “You may remember that on earth – though of course we never confessed it – the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.”’

‘Indeed,’ Gibbon put in, ‘you went on from there virtually to anticipate Freud’s theory that the way people state a fact about their unconscious is to deny its truth.
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For when your Doña Anna answers Don Juan’s remark with a horrified “
Monster
! Never, never”, your Don Juan observes placidly: “I see you recognise the feeling.”’

‘In fine,’ said Voltaire, ‘your dialogues of the dead are often the liveliest parts of your plays. Certainly that is true of
Saint
Joan,
where the pageant scenes are so immobile that the actors might as well be dead. It is only in the Epilogue that your play touches tragedy, because it is only in the Epilogue, where she is already dead, that your heroine truly dies.’

‘When you speak of the pageant-like form of
Saint
Joan
’, Shaw replied, ‘you are merely echoing my title-page, which calls it “a chronicle play”. However, I do not on the whole
dispute
your verdict. Indeed, I would wager that my best play,
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Heartbreak
House,
is seldom given in a school production. But in the matter of examinations and the like, you must allow me a little credit. While I was alive and it was in my power, I refused to be quoted in textbooks and did all I could to prevent the
association
in the infant mind of my name and work with school lessons.’
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Several of the mouths round the table opened to comment in response. But God managed, without forfeiting an air of polite tentativeness, to say first:

‘Fascinated as I am by this literary discussion, and instructive as it no doubt indirectly is for me, I wonder if—’

‘Of course!’ cried Voltaire. ‘How selfish of us to chat on while you are suffering injustice and while the manifesto that is to put matters right has yet to be drafted. Gentlemen: order, please. Something must be done.’

No sooner had Voltaire uttered that plea than Shaw, without seeming to exert the smallest effort towards doing so, took
command
of the assembly.

‘First’, he began, ‘I must give fair warning to everyone present that, in the course of my extensive career as public speaker, committee member and (the obsolete ecclesiastical name by which borough councillors were still called in my day) vestryman, I quickly learned that committees of agitators are always unanimously resolved that Something Must Be Done. It is then that the person who has a plan for something which actually might be done carries the day, even if nobody agrees with his plan. I must also warn you that I early learned the first rule of those who would acquire the committee habit: Never Resign.
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Having said that, I propose that we now help God to draft his manifesto, the wording of which I will take down as we decide on it.’

God obligingly caused a notebook and a pencil to appear on the table where they would be convenient to Shaw’s hand.

‘Could you please’, Shaw asked him, ‘make the pages lined, as I intend to write in shorthand.’

‘Do you’, Gibbon enquired of Shaw, ‘employ the system devised by Sir Isaac Pitman?’

‘Yes, but not’, Shaw replied, ‘in all its advanced elaborations. I am not given to recording other people’s thoughts verbatim and have therefore never needed to work up any great speed. In my life, my shorthand had to be decipherable by my
secretary
, not myself. I used only the simple outlines which nobody could misread, and took my time about writing them.’
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‘My posthumous discovery of Pitman’, Gibbon said, ‘was to me what his discovery of Freud was to Voltaire. In my case, too, the joy was mixed with a regret occasioned by the consideration of how much more swiftly could I have accomplished the bodily labour of writing my
Decline
and
Fall
had I known Pitman and had I been able to employ, as you did, a secretary who could read my outlines back. Pitman is not of course to be compared to Freud, because Pitman’s is an invention, not a discovery; an arbitrary system, not one that claims to be true. Yet as an
arbitrary
system it displays the very highest degree of internal logic, flexibility and economy of means. I place it in the first rank of those systems which are neither discoveries of truth nor artistic creations but which yet incarnate almost the whole resources of human ingenuity. Indeed, I rate it with chess and Aristotle’s logic.’