Memories of The Great and The Good Read Free Page B

photo was unusual enough to be unique and he hoped it would satisfy me. If it didn’t, please to let him know. The tone of the postcard was that of an uncle to a favorite nephew. I was enchanted by it and by the evident cordial good nature of the man himself.
    But to most people on the outside who never met him and inferred his private character from his writing, he was a riddle. A young Scottish professor, being invited to lecture on Shaw, replied that she would have to confine her remarks to the plays, for which she had “a great curiosity and respect. As for the man’s character, I give up: he is an enigma.” What baffled everybody was the inexplicable contradiction between the human being you could meet and see and hear and the public character who was at once a shrewd capitalist, a dedicated Communist, and a defiant admirer of both Hitler and Stalin. This gentle, seemingly reasonable man would certainly hesitate to bruise a gnat but he professed to accept the necessity of liquidating (i.e. murdering) whole regions of peasants for the sake of a long-term political program. Yet the same man could feel excessive guilt for offending a nonentity: a young aspiring writer in the suburbs sent Shaw, evidently for comment, the manuscript of a children’s book and its accompanying illustrations. Shaw lost the lot. He subsequently wrote a flock of apologetic letters to the forlorn young man, gave him a part in
The Doctor’s Dilemma
and sent him a pair of new boots, a cardigan, an autographed copy of
Man and Superman
, a book on Karl Marx and, for no explained reason, the sum of fifteen pounds, ten shillings.
    To the complaint of a London critic that a “wrinkled” Eleanora Duse was appearing in London in a role much too young for her, Shaw retorted: “Her wrinkles are the credentials of her humanity.” After unloosing this lance of chivalry and good sense, he was then ready to release a fatuous manifesto proclaiming that vaccination killed more children than it protected.
    But the central, and most bewildering, contradiction of his private and public character was that between his personal generosity, courtliness even to the humblest people (his optician remarked to a neighbor—”Oh, that Mr. Shaw! A nice old gentleman, never any trouble at all”), and his lifelong oscillation between maintaining that Stalin’s twilight signatures on orders to massacre, torture, exile or “liquidate” were a Tory invention or that they were measures necessary to prevent the Soviet Utopia from sinking into the “debauchery” of democracy.
    At the end, I see him leaving Broadcasting House on a late spring morning, a fedora shading his crinkled eyes and white beard, his hands deep in a top coat, marching with his wide tread down Upper Regent Street, occasionally looking over his shoulder for his bus, then deciding the day was balmy enough for walking all the way home. He might pause in one of the leafy London squares to sit on a bench and eat his delicious mid-morning lifesaver of a parsley sandwich. Then on down the Strand to the river and up to his apartment in the Adelphi and reunion with his only friend, wife, companion: the ever-virginal (by mutual agreement in the marriage contract) Charlotte Payne-Townshend. And there, after much meditation, and a lifetime of feeling “the joy in being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one,” he would sit down and write his will and leave his entire fortune to the mighty purpose of—Simplified Spelling.

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John Nance Garner:
The Frontiersman
(1967)

    On a warm April night in southern Florida, in 1951, two United States senators and a man from Missouri were asleep as holiday guests in the house of a wealthy American statesman, in Hobe Sound, an exclusive strip of land on the ocean, fenced in from the plebs by towering Australian pines and highly cultivated bits of real estate with an asking price of about a