George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara (#ClassicsClub)

Wendy Hiller as Major Barbara from the 1941 movie poster

Major Barbara is a play by George Bernard Shaw first performed in London in 1905. It centers around the Undershaft family.

Lady Britomart Undershaft: (The matriarch of the family) 

"You know how poor my father is: he has barely seven thousand a year now; and, really, if he were not the Earl of Stevenage, he would have to give up society."

Stephen Undershaft: (The son) 

"He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That clearly points to a political career."

Sarah Undershaft: (The older daughter) 

"I dare say it's very wicked of papa to make cannons, but I don't think I shall cut him on that account."

Charles Lomax: (Sarah's fiancé, and the comic relief)

"Oh, I say."

Barbara Undershaft: (The younger daughter)

"Really, Barbara, you go on as if religion were a pleasant subject. Do have some sense of propriety."

Adolphus Cusins: (Barbara's fiancé, and a Professor of Greek)

"Cusins is a very nice fellow, certainly; nobody would ever guess he was born in Australia..."

Andrew Undershaft: (The father, estranged from the family at the start)

"UNASHAMED."

The first act takes place as Lady Britomart is explaining to Stephen and her other children that, because they need money, she has invited their father to the house again and they're going to have to be nice to him. That's even though he makes munitions and sells them to all comers. (Their latest offering is a new 'aerial battleship'.)

Undershaft Industries has a tradition where the current Undershaft adopts an impoverished foundling and leaves the business to the adoptee. Obviously none of the Undershaft children are foundlings, and despite what their mother might say, not really impoverished either. Lady Britomart is determined, though, that the tradition can end.

Barbara, the most spirited of the Undershaft children, has recently joined the Salvation Army and for her diligence and zeal has been promoted to Major. She's determined to make people better, morally. She's especially put off by her father's manner of making money. He challenges her to come see his factory, and she agrees if he comes to her Salvation Army outpost.

The second act is at the Salvation Army camp. We see Barbara attempting save the wretched poor of the neighborhood, but can they be saved? In any case saving will certainly require money, which her father rather impishly offers. (And is refused.)

The final act is at the Undershaft Industries factory, which is set up as a model town on liberal principles rather like David Dale's New Lanark:

 

 

Who is it that actually wants and gets the factory in the end? 

 

I find this one of Shaw's sprightliest plays, but it is perhaps a bit one-sided in its arguments even for Shaw. But there's plenty of good banter in it. So...some quotes! [If my choice of quotes leans a little heavy on Greek as a subject, well, it's true I was a Classics major back in the day...]

-Don't call me Biddy. I don't call you Andy.

-I will not call my wife Britomart. It is not good sense.

-Can a sane man translate Euripides?

-No.

-I know the difference between right and wrong.

-At twenty-four, too!

-Pooh, professor. Let us call things by their proper names. I am a millionaire, you are a poet, Barbara is a savior of souls.

-Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek, and none of them know anything else.

-After all nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman.

-You can not have power for good without having power for evil, too.

And that's the last of the books from my first Classics Club list. Yay! Only six and a half years into a five-year challenge...

 

Time for a new list?

Ali and Nino (#europe, #WITMonth)

"...and Nino Kipriani was still the most beautiful girl in the world."

Ali and Nino are in their late teens and finishing their schooling in Baku just before World War I. Baku (now in Azerbaijan) was then part of the Russian Empire. Ali attends an elite Russian-run school for non-Russians; he's good at languages, bad at most other subjects, but good enough at math that he can help Nino with her homework.

"Ali Khan, a train goes from the town X to the town Y, doing 50 miles an hour..."

Ali is a Shiite Muslim, and Nino is Georgian Orthodox and they're in love.

His relatives are all in Persia; hers in Georgia, but family differences are the least of the impediments to their love. His father is happy with the marriage; hers only insists that she finish school first. 

Ali doesn't drink--until he goes off to Tiflis to meet Nino's cousins. Oh, my head! Accommodating their own  different world views is the greater challenge.

The first half of the novel is light and charming and funny. It doesn't get to stay that way: world events intervene. A servant reports the news:

"Nothing special, little master. The neighbour's women have quarrelled, a donkey bolted, it ran into the well, and there it still is. The czar has deigned to declare war on several European monarchs."

It may have all seemed very far off at first, but Baku saw the armies of Tsarist Russia, the Sunni Ottoman Empire, the English, the soldiers of the briefly independent Azerbaijan, and finally the return of Russian soldiers, now Soviet.

Highly recommended.

The novel crisscrosses the Caucasus with scenes set in Georgia, Dagestan, and Iran, but is mainly in Baku: "This wonderful town, the gate of Europe." 

I learned about the novel from Major Yammerton's blog who also read it for this year's European Reading Challenge. His thoughts are here.

The novel first came out in German, in Austria, in 1937. A difficult time and it didn't have much opportunity to make an impact at first. Kurban Said is a pseudonym, and now nobody is quite sure who he or she was. Likely enough, it was more than one person working together. The candidates: Yusif Vazir Chamanziminli was an Azerbaijani statesman and author killed by Stalin's minions in 1943. Lev Nussimbaum was born a Jew in Kiev, but lived much of his younger years in Baku and converted to Islam, writing sometimes as Essad Bey. And then there's Baroness Elfriede Ehrenfels, in whose name the copyright was registered. Nussimbaum and Ehrenfels were known to be friends. There are other, less probable candidates as well.

And if one of the people hiding behind the pseudonym Kurban Said is Ehrenfels, this also counts for:

The novel was translated into English by Jenia Gramm in 1970.