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?

Alex Ross' Wagnerism

 "The philosopher is not free to dispense with Wagner."

-Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner 

Wagnerism is the history of the reception of Richard Wagner and his music, and of the uses made of Wagner's music after his death. And, well, some of those uses weren't very nice. 

When the book was good, I thought it was very good, but it wasn't at all times. It's more encyclopedic than analytic, at times even gossipy. Did you know that Virginia Woolf went to a benefit costume ball as a Valkyrie in 1909? Me neither. Not sure that tells me much about Woolf, though it might say something about how ubiquitous Wagner was.

Years ago I read Ross' The Rest Is Noise, his history of twentieth century classical music, around when it came out in paperback. I really liked it, even though most of it went over my head. (And I'm pretty tall.) I don't know that much about serious music. A diminished seventh, you say--is that music, baseball, or planetary science? I wouldn't know one if it bit me on the ear. Still, sometimes I like a book that's too hard for me, it leaves me wanting to know more.

Because Wagnerism addresses Wagner's presence in literature and film--and politics--more than in music, this book worked differently for me. 

Ross' organization is a mix of chronological and by topic. The first figure Ross covers is Nietzsche, an early Wagner disciple, at least until he wasn't, and the most prominent. Ross gives himself 60 or so pages on Nietzsche, and is lucid and helpful. Nietzsche and Wagner is a topic on which books could be written--and have, with more than one of them by Nietzsche himself. Subsequent chapters are on French Wagnerians (Baudelaire was an early booster), British, American, Austrian, Russian, black (W.E.B. DuBois was a fan), gay, Jewish, feminist. Right-wing, but also left-wing. Well, everyone actually was listening to Wagner for a while.

When Ross gives himself space he's at his best. This includes his writing about Nietzsche and Baudelaire. There was interesting stuff on Joyce. Wagner is important to Thomas Mann, (less so to Heinrich) and Thomas Mann's attitude toward Wagner changes over the years. I was particularly interested in Ross' take on Mann's Joseph saga, which he reads as a direct challenge to Wagner's Ring Cycle: both tetralogies, both investigations of myth, but Mann dealt with Old Testament--that is, Jewish--subjects, which Wagner himself wouldn't touch. There was some good stuff there.

On the other hand Ross speculates that Wagner is behind Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Mann's Doctor Faustus. But how can that be when *everyone* knows that Leverkühn is Nietzsche + Schönberg? 😉  There needed to be either more or less to that argument.

Ross is at his tip-top best on Willa Cather. He devotes an entire chapter to her, largely on The Song of the Lark, and she shows up in some of those other categories listed above as well. Very well worth reading if you care about Cather.

Wagner in World War II is the emotional heart of the book. Ross is at some pains to remind us that lots of people who did not like Naziism, were never going to like it, still liked Wagner. 

Wagner's politics were complicated and probably not well-thought-out. He got himself in serious trouble supporting the anti-monarchical revolutions of 1848 and it took him years to get out of that trouble. He was pretty seriously pacifist. He meant his anti-Semitism though, publishing a vile article first anonymously, and later doubling down by re-publishing it under his own name. One of the main reasons Nietzsche, not exactly known for his compassion, broke with Wagner was his abhorrence of Wagner's anti-Semitism.

Hitler's Wagner--and Hitler really did love Wagner--was not all of Wagner. But how big a chunk of the total Wagner was Hitler's Wagner? The jury's still out on that, even I would say, in Ross' mind.

There was trivia and some of the trivia was fun. I did not know that Laughing Cow cheese (La Vache Qui Rit) is actually a pun on the Valkyries of Wagner; some Frenchman in World War I making fun of the German propensity for Wagnerian code names. (The Siegfried Line, anyone?) Thomas Mann and Willa Cather played records and drank champagne at the Knopf's in 1943. What's Opera, Doc? makes an appearance, as well as other cartoons of the era. Though, for that matter, I read Broom Hilda at GoComics this morning; and Now I'm Very Angry Broom Hilda did not get a mention...are the cartoonist Russell Myers' backdrops influenced by Wagnerian set design? Think of those remote, fantastical geological outposts. (Though, of course, they have more to do with the Coconino County backdrops of Herriman's Krazy Kat.) Some of Ross' arguments/speculations are about on that level...

"Perhaps [George Bernard] Shaw hung back from direct engagement with Wagner because he wished to avoid placing himself in competition with the Meister." [439]

Is this that same Shaw who cheerfully bashed on Shakespeare?

"Cy Twombly listened intermittently to Wagner while working on his ten-painting cycle Fifty Days at Iliam..." [631]

I listen to Wagner intermittently, too, though in my case, the inters are pretty danged mittent. Are my posts therefore Wagnerian? Well, maybe they go on too long...

Ross ends with a brief history of his own listening to Wagner. He was not initially a fan, it seems, but then in his twenties got excited about Wagner. But wondered, should he?

Anyway, good when it was good, and very good when it was very good, as we say in the Department of Tautology. If anything in the subject interests you, it's quite readable and often astute. It didn't blow me away like his first book, though.

It's one of those pan-European books that might do for a lot of countries, but I'll stick to the basics and count it for Germany:

I'm a good girl, I am

"I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play, both on stage and screen, all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that great art can never be anything else."

What with the movie versions (especially My Fair Lady), Pygmalion is too well known in one form or another to need any summary from me. You know what happens: Liza learns "English."

What I will say is how good a read I found it. (Not so dry a subject as all that.) I'm usually a little doubtful about reading plays--all dialog and no description make them harder for me to sink into--but I didn't find that a problem with Pygmalion at all. Of course, Shaw's stage directions are so very extensive, it is practically a novel, albeit a bit dialog-heavy by most novel standards. I've never seen a stage version, but the set descriptions, with the amount of the furniture specified for numerous sets, would seem to make it rather a challenge to put on, at least adhering to Shaw's intentions. It may be more like what he wanted as a movie anyway. (Though he's supposed to have hated Hollywood, and disdained the Oscar he got for his screenplay.)

I will also say, Shaw clearly has some opinions about apostrophes, but I couldn't figure out what they were. "Dont," "havnt," "lets," but "he'd" and "I'm." I could not figure out what his rule is. I almost accused my version of being badly proofread, but it's probably not true. I'm sure the information is available somewhere, but it wasn't evident to me.

Some quotes:

"Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you havnt any future to think of."

"Oh, if only I'd known what a dreadful thing it is to be clean I'd never have come..."

and for you #Dewithon19 readers:

"Sentimental rhetoric! That's the Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity and dishonesty."

I'd also say, Oh, George. Never explain. The afterword tells us who Liza Doolittle marries and everything that happens afterwards. But the play proper ends with the question of who Liza marries (if anyone) up in the air. (As does My Fair Lady, though as for that, does anyone really doubt Audrey Hepburn's about to marry Rex Harrison as Henry Higgins?) Shaw's afterword (from 1942) was mostly a disappointment.

But, on the whole, what an incredible hoot.

This is so very London a play with the opening scene in Covent Garden and much discussion of the Cockney accent, but Shaw was born in Dublin, so it will be my contribution to #ReadingIrelandMonth2019. I had higher hopes for doing a bit more Irish this month, but it didn't happen. It's also a book off my Classics Club list: