The American Scene; Chicago & G.B.S

Good morning. This is Howard Vincent, viewing the arts for the Illinois Institute of Technology on the American Scene. The subject that was announced for the day, the Shaw Society, is perhaps familiar to some of you who have been following cultural movements in Chicago in the past two or three years. The other day, we had Arthur Netacot on the program and many of you will recall talking about Annie Bezzent, who is a very close friend of Shaw's. I was thinking at that time there would be fun to have Shaw himself, and obviously the person to have, to talk about Shaw, is a president of the Shaw Society. And those of you who have asked questions of why a Shaw Society in Shaw's sort of dead, then you say, wait, of course he isn't dead, my fair lady is still very much around. And the Shaw Society has obviously a lot of reasons for being. So I've asked Mr. Elmer Gertz to come around and talk about the Shaw Society and other contingent matters, which I think of considerable interest in which Chicago may have considerable pride. Mr. Gertz is

a distinguished lawyer who's a record in the law field, is itself a subject for a fascinating program. He is a Civil War buff of great distinction, having written on the Civil War and being one of the charter founder members of the Civil War round table, which is so famous here in Chicago. In other words, Mr. Gertz has had nine lives, but we're going to ask him to concentrate upon the one life of Shaw this time. And we might as well start right off with this bust of Shaw here. There is the man himself, isn't it? Yes, but much milder sort of creature than we imagine him to have been. Oh, yes. That's why I have this on display. It's by a British sculptor named Block. It's by far the mildest portraiture of a man who delighted and picturing himself as a modern Mephistopheles. You don't really have a raised eyebrow. No, no, you don't get the kind of a frontry that's so characteristic of the public

personality and the writings of Shaw. You mean to say Shaw was ever like this? Well, in repose and in reality he was. Shaw created an image of himself that wasn't quite true to the facts. He actually was a courtly old Irish gentleman who liked to flirt with the ladies and who liked company and who was really very mild in his character and in his basic beliefs. But Sparter Shaw is hovering over here. He will strike you, Deb. Oh, well, he knew that in order to put across his message and achieve the kind of fame that he always sought, he had to create a public character that would affront everyone. And certainly during his long life he did succeed in alienating everyone and yet remaining the great figure of the literature and the life of at least two generations. Well, now I take it this man is so important. Oh, yes, that's why the Shaw Society has survived for four years. Four years. It was

created on July 26th, four years ago on the centenary of Bernichard, which you will remember was observed here and it's been going great guns since then. This coming year I suppose will be more alive than ever. That was the founding which appeared and was written up in life and... Oh, yes, it was the world celebration of the centenary. People from all over the world came here and we had a very great civic commemoration of a man who affronted City Hall and affronted the susceptibilities of all and yet he was honored. Very church and in Chicago too. And in Chicago. This must, this must disturb his sense of irony. Yes, Shaw always had a particular feeling for Chicago. His biographer and friend, Hescus Pearson once wrote to me that Chicago is America with the lid off and anything with the lid off and tree. Oh, great job. Excellent, that's a very good point. Yes, of course.

Well, now the Shaw Society was fond of, is this just to be a cult organization or are you doing anything? Oh, we're doing something very substantial. I think we represent the best of the theater in Chicago. And now the best of journalism in Chicago, of course, a strong spirit. Well, let me say why. Chicago has been a sort of dramatic desert for many years. You have practically nothing shown here and when it does come here, it's second best rather and best. We have had a series of readings for four years now. Those readings have been by professionals of the stage radio and television who have a particular fondness for Shaw. Each season we put on from six to ten Shaw plays. And in addition to that, we have a monthly publication, which we call the Shaw Society newsletter. Here are some issues of it. And in it, we touch upon Shaw and we

touch upon literature and life in Chicago generally. My own contribution outside of editing it in a sort of fashion has been to write an article each month on the biographers of Shaw. We're going to have about a dozen or so of the many biographers of Shaw. And then we hope to put all of the articles in a pamphlet. Oh, good. Good. And this will be sponsored by the Shaw Society. By the Shaw Society. This coming season we're going to have some of the very best of the Shaw plays put on. We're going to put on St. Joan. Oh, yes. We'll go ahead and name the others now. We're going to put on the millionaires, perhaps Miss Alliance. We're going to put on Mrs. Warren's profession, which at one time raised eyebrows and more in London and New York and elsewhere. The man of destiny, showing up a bank of posnet and several other Shaw plays. That you don't ordinarily see, right? That's right. Of course, St. Joan, you can see everything.

Yes. We may do in addition to St. Joan, or perhaps instead of it, a production which will call all of these St. Joan's in which will take Shaw's St. Joan and Lillian Helmons and Frank Cares's and several others and do the best scenes of each of them to have a sort of composite portrait of St. Joan. That's a curious idea, but I still would regret not being able to see the whole of St. Joan. Oh, yes. Oh, you've seen it a number of times. It's a magnificent play. I think that is perhaps the best or second best of all of Shaw's plays. My own favorite is Heartbreak House, which I think is one of the great classics of literature. And certainly in that same group of classics, you must play St. Joan. I might say Heartbreak House from New York right now, isn't it? It would have been there. It would have been there. Not too good a production. Oh, too bad. The difficulty with many productions of Shaw is

that they seek to improve on Shaw. They seek, and that always represents a failure because Shaw had a real sense of the stage and of life. And I think except for the lengths of some of his productions, you can't improve on him. All the world was the stage for Shaw himself, and he knew the stage. Yes, there certainly no doubt about it. The stage of Shaw is really the stage of life in the basic and in the real sense. Did you see the London performance of Heartbreak House about six or seven years ago? I think it was, and I saw it. It was a very fine performance. They had, I think they had Dame Civil Thorn Dykenas among others. I've seen several performances of Shaw's Heartbreak House, but I think the best performance I've seen is our own, if I can be a monitor, enough to say. It had the spirit of Shaw. Well, now how much do you do in one of these performances? You don't have a great big fear to do a walk around it. No, here's what we do. We have a stage. We don't have scenery except in the sketchiest fashion. We don't have costumes.

We don't try to act. Each participant has the text of the play in his hands, and we go through that text sometimes cut down because of the necessities of the situation, and yet we have all of the characters come to life. A good illustration of that was Caesar and Cleopatra. We did it as our last performance one year. A few weeks later, one of the summer theaters did it, and laid an egg. It was a horrible production there, and yet everyone who saw our production said it brought Shaw's play to life. You could realize the kind of character he was depicting both in Caesar and in Cleopatra and in the others. Well, it was a different. You were getting at the heart of the thing. We were getting at the heart of it. We didn't have any of the impedimenta of the stage. If you're having a second rate production, it's better to dispense with all of the scenery. Your scenery will never be

good. Your directional will never be perfect. You might just as well concentrate your energies and your thinking. Remember in Balls? Balls, I said, for a great play, you needed no scene. You only needed four walls in a great human passion. Of course, with a little Shaw, you don't get a great human passion, you get a passion for ideas. Well, I agree with Shaw in that respect. Shaw said the greatest of passions was thought. I think thought makes a passion out of ideas. Remember what another poet? Was it Louise Bogins? The mind is an enchanting thing. And to see a mind operate the way Shaw's operates is enchanting. Shaw believed that there was more passion and thinking than in sex and then in many of the other matters that we think about as part of the passion of life. Well, he was a great thinker. I mean, a great thinker in the sense that it was alive. It was alive. And he was an artist basically. He became great because his art ran away with his propaganda. He thought he was setting forth the theater of ideas, the theater of propaganda. But basically, he created

characters. He created situations. He gave a vitality to the stage, which he was losing at the end of the 19th century. Well, now in these performances, Hard Break House or St. Joan, which would be rather ambitious, of course. How big a room do you do it in? We've been doing the plays until now, at least, in the Bernard Shaw room at Hotel Sherman. Low Solomon and I persuaded Pat Hoi, who was in the present of the Sherman, that the Sherman Hotel ought to have a Shaw room. And it agreed. And that's a room with perfect acoustics. It's the perfect surrounding for Shaw. And we have the perfect audience. Several hundred people each month sit in to watch and listen to these performances. And I suppose it's a highly critical audience thing. They show Shaw well. Surely. And we had a good test of the comparative values of Shaw and some of his contemporaries. Last season, we thought we'd do others besides Shaw. And whenever we'd use one of the others, we found

our audience highly critical. The vehicle did not hold the audience as much as Shaw. Now, I think I can explain that though. What you have in Shaw is a man of the greatest verbal, purely verbal. Without, as you say, scenery doesn't add or do very much. The greatest verbal dexterity, the words have great brilliance and can stand alone. Whereas those others, they're depending upon actors, their gestures, they are depending upon scenery, they're depending on other things in the purely verbal matters. And Shaw had real skill in how he phrased things. He put speeches into his character that had their ultimate form. They weren't prosy. You didn't feel somebody was just trying to fill up an evening with talk. It's what the character would have said had he been a skillful Shaw. That's right. And some of his characters are Shaw. One reason I like Heartbreak House is that Captain Shadows over in Heartbreak House is to sort of prevision of Shaw in his old age.

Shaw was in the 60s when he wrote it. And this is the kind of man he became in his 80s and 90s, except that Captain Shotover had a lot of a rum in him and Shaw never had any rum in him. It was an anticipation of World War 1 wasn't it? But it happened to fit the coming of the end of the world now. Surely. It's just as true of this atomic age as of World War 1. In fact, truer. Shaw had understanding of the kind of instruments of destruction that we were building. Not simply instruments of destruction in a sense of bombs, but in the sense of ideas and in the kind of life we were leading. He thought we had an explosive situation in poverty, in ignorance, in our failure to realize the best in us. And that we were heading for destruction unless we took thought and tried to build a different sort of world. Now, and again, come back to this

performance. We are going through apparently a performance of Heartbreak House or St. John. You have this in the room holding about 300 people. Oh, more than that. We've had as many as a thousand people at our performances. Curious enough, the largest attendance was when, in the fashion of Shaw, we sponsored a meeting of the beatnick poets, Alan Ginn, Gregor Korsho and several others. We had a tremendous turnout, particularly of college students. But we also had the Middle Western first performance of Dear Liar, which is based upon the correspondence of Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Camel. We had six or seven hundred for that. And we've had many performances with more than five hundred. Now, who are the actors you have? The members of the Shaw Society directly? That's right. Who are actors? They're members of the Shaw Society. We've had people like Gordon Gould, who not only is a first -rate actor,

but a special feature writer for the Chicago Tribune. We've had Alan Fishburn. We've had Charles Francisco, Muriel Montsell, Geraldine K, and Beverly Younger, and many others who have acted in the various theaters in Chicago and in the labor of love in their part. That's right. We give them a nominal compensation, say, $25 a reading. Why is this? Because actors' equity or something? No, no, just because we wanted to. But some of our actors, like Gordon Gould, have insisted upon returning the money to us. Gordon says that he ought to pay to act in our readings. He enjoys him so much. And I think that's the feeling of all of us. This is the way the pros are, isn't it? Often times. That's right. And that's the excitement about the Shaw Society. There's Lois Solomon, there's Gordon Gould, there are many others who devote an enormous amount of time to our group, Lin Asker, who's our membership secretary, and who isn't connected with the arts, spends hours and hours continuously trying

to put some order into our fairies. We tend to be anarchists, but she insists upon record -keeping, and she insists upon trying to make this a paying organization financially. Whether or not she'll succeed, I don't know. Now, you do have a fiscal sign of your being here in the Shaw Newsletter. Well, this comes out often once a month. Once a month. Well, that must be quite a job to get out of here. Oh, yes. We have a publication that has an editor, I'm nominally the editor. Our copy girl, Lois Solomon, really edits it. But she insists upon describing yourself as copy girl. And she has a lively sense of humor. Incidentally, Lois was the one who dragged me into the Shaw Centennial, and once I got into it, I became as excited as she was. I had promised to spend a little time with the Centennial. Instead, I found myself devoting many, many hours in the midst of a very busy, professional schedule. And I haven't regretted it, frankly. No. Well, what's the line of the newsletter? The

newsletter, first of all, announces each play in a literary fashion. It has these articles that I've mentioned on the biographers of Shaw. And has other articles dealing not necessarily with Shaw, but with the drama, with literature, and with life, in general, in Chicago, and elsewhere. Oh, it doesn't, yes. It ranges farther than just... Yes, we've had reviews of almost everything that's come to town, sometimes critical, and sometimes simply funny. We've had lunches for people of the stage, and we've reported those lunches. We've had a sort of psychratic discussion with various people like Hal Holbrooke, who, as you know, is the great impersonator of Mark Twain. Hal Holbrooke told us that the high point of his stay in Chicago was his meeting with us. Well, I think it might be. It's just a lively... I've been getting his newsletter for over the last six or eight months, and every time it comes across my desk, I open it up and read it with the greatest of pleasure. It's something

stirring in the town with its going. But the... One of the things you are doing, you say, is the biographer's show. You're doing that by yourself. Yes, I'm doing that by myself. I've been interested in Shaw since childhood. I think I know the literature's show up pretty well, and I have had the privilege. It's really a privilege to inflict upon others. My views are the various biographer's show. You're an enthusiast, that's it. An enthusiast clutches another person, and it's good to have a lot of people who are willing to watch. They read it, because now and then some of them take the time to write to us that they've enjoyed the series. Well, surely they must have. Do you have a good Shaw collection? I have a fairly good one myself, but it isn't the best. The best, of course, is Archibald Henderson's in Chapel Hill, and there are others with great Shaw collections. They're Shaw collections in Texas, for example, and the great ones in the world, isn't Texas? At Ren Library in the... Yes, there are very great collections all over. I myself

assembled on a temporary basis, perhaps the greatest Shaw collection ever seen. That was the exhibits that we assembled for the centenary. I had everyone under the sun, including Jean, Tony, and Archibald Henderson, and others, sand all of their Shaw material to us, and we had it on display in a Bernard Shaw room, a hotel chair. Did you put out a catalog of that? No, but we microfilmmed everything, and probably wasn't violation of copyright laws. Not if you hang onto it privately. We're holding onto it privately, and all of the things, including a book which Shaw suppressed. There was a book that came out over a half -century ago, which contained a lot of Shaw letters in it, and Shaw, for bad, its publication, in fact, insisted upon the books being destroyed. Well, we had one of the rare copies of it, and in the interest of posterity, we microfilmed every page of that book. And incidentally, it's a curiosity that I am present at the Shaw side of

Chicago, because Shaw suppressed my book on Frank Harris in London at the request of the widow of Frank Harris. She was very much distressed by the book I wrote. Frank Harris, a study in black and white. That's right. A .I. Tobin of Brooklyn and I did that book together, and it was published in this country, and everyone who read it seems to have reviewed it, and it was expected to be a very good seller in London. In fact, after the plates were destroyed, the publisher wrote to me, too bad, he said, this would have been a best seller here. The author's society in London was willing to support me in a suit, but in England, you know, you have to put up the actual costs by way of deposit, and that was the end of the suit. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that I learned for the first time that Shaw had been responsible for the suppression of the book. Well, you should break your statue or something. Oh, no, no. It amused me, because he did it out of

kindness to the widow of Harris. Nelly Harris, who was a very beautiful and very remarkable woman, who was too much devoted to the memory of her husband. Now, is she still alive? She died recently, very recently. When was your book published, what year? It was published in 1931. I find it difficult to believe that 29 years ago it was published. Now, a lot of our viewers may not know about Frank Harris. This is related to the Shaw Society. It's not nothing alien to the Shaw Society, certainly. Frank Harris, who is such an important figure, not only connection with Shaw, but with others. Tell us just a little something about Frank Harris. Well, he was the editor of the Saturday Review in London, which was beyond question the greatest such publication in London. That was the publication for which Bernard Shaw wrote his criticisms of the theater, which are generally regarded as the greatest writings in the drama that have ever been published. Shaw was so grateful to

Harris for that opportunity that thereafter he became one of the great admirers of Harris. Shaw has written more about Harris and almost any other writer throughout his writings. You will find essays by Shaw on Harris. He wrote the post -cript to Harris's book on Shaw. He wrote a chapter for Harris's contemporary portraits. Didn't you even correct the biography? Oh, yes. Actually, there is no telling what part of the book is. Harris's, what part is Frank Sculley's, and what part is Bernard Shaw's. I would say that principal author is probably Harris as corrected by Shaw. Shaw had the proofs destroyed so that for all time nobody can say was complete honesty and knowledge. Just who contributed what? Oh, what a pity. There is no manuscript of it. No. As a matter of fact, I think a book ought to be

written on the relations of Shaw and Harris. I would like one day to do it, but I doubt if my professional career will permit it. At any rate, somebody ought to do it. What about Sculley doing it? No. Sculley is a journalist. He isn't a real scholar. There is Dan Lawrence who is a real Shaw scholar and who is editing the Shaw letters for the estate and who is doing other writings on Shaw. He is better equipped to do it than anyone and I have told him so. As a matter of fact, in an article of mine on Frank Harris versus Shaw, I made that suggestion. I hope it's taken up because there's a great book in it. Now, the letters of Shaw, the Shaw Society will have nothing to do with that directly, but these are being done in England. England and the United Reputations as a letter writer. I think there is nobody in all literature who has written finer letters than Shaw. No, wait a minute. All right. You question that and I

don't like to support it. All right, Voltaire. They're like. They're alike. Yeah, let me tell you. I don't tell you the kind of thing that Shaw was capable of doing. Shaw was perhaps an atheist or an agnostic and yet he wrote magnificent letters to an abyss in England. Those letters have been published. One would think that a profoundly religious man had written those letters and yet there's no hypocrisy in them. Shaw had a basically religious orientation and it comes out in those very beautiful letters and he wrote to young people. He wrote to people everywhere in the world. I myself was privileged to hear from him and he put as much effort into his letter writing as into his plays. Just countless hours. He would not use the words, Carol. The word's Carol. Oh, no. The greatest discrimination. Well, I'm not questioning Mr. Gertz. I'm not questioning the greatness of Shaw as a letter writer. He must have been a great letter writer. The few that you've seen, or the few,

the many that you've seen published already, but there are some magnificent letter writers otherwise. Voltaire keeps Byron when he was at his best. Well, of course, Keats and Byron live very short periods. Shaw lived for almost a century. He was a part of everything. He knew everyone and corresponded with all. And in his letters, he put the kind of excitement that some people, like Harris put into their lives. Yes, he did. There's a kind of ferment in his letters. The excitement he put in those wonderful prefaces to the play. That's right. The prefaces, of course, are very little connection with the plays. No, very little. But they are as great as the plays. Some people believe that the prefaces ought to be performed rather than the place. Yes, I've heard that and there's something to it. I know that I remember buying St. John and then reading a preface and I was so enchanted with that, I didn't get at the at the play for about a month and I came to it at different worlds. I think the greatest study of the Gospels

is by Shaw. His preface to Andrew Cleans and the Lion is a real study of Jesus. I don't, I prefer it to any study of Jesus that I've ever read and it's not anything that would have fanned even the most religious person and it was complete sincerity. He deals with the man. He doesn't suppress his views but he tells what what Jesus has meant to sociology, what he's meant to the ordinary life of the average man and women and to people who have extraordinary gifts. Jesus is a part of the mental equipment and the emotional equipment of all and Shaw has been honest enough to say so. That's without regard to the historicity of Jesus or any other controversial question. Well, we are agreeing that Shaw is a giant. There can be no argument about that and a society organized in memory and to not in a slay -wish way but in a highly intelligent way which I'm sure Shaw would appreciate to carry on.

It's not really a study of Shaw or the interesting Shaw but in contingent matters. It's an admirable thing to have and I'm glad that Chicago has it. You have some big plans for the future for the century. Oh yes. First of all, we're going to make sure that we continue as something other than an antiquarian society. Yes. The old -style browning society of old ladies isn't our panel. We're going to present to the community what it needs in the theater, in letters and in life so that we'll be a part of the community. Well, we're very grateful you Mr. Gertz, President of the Shaw Society for coming in and talking to us about George Bernard Shaw and the society. Thank you.