Preface, to Dad

Preface, to Dad

Almost as presumptuous as writing a hundredth anniversary sequel to Major Barbara is writing a preface to introduce it, but after more than two years working on the play I might as well see this Shavian game to its conclusion. Besides, since my play is a birthday present to you, you might like to know why I wrote it and what it’s got to do with you. Although we’ve never seen Major Barbara together, I remember you mentioning it as a play you had liked, and when I came to read it in my college years I thought of you. It wasn’t a happy first encounter, if I remember correctly, and when I teach the play to my students now I vicariously relive the struggle between amusement and distaste that Shaw’s supremely provocative play set off in me at their age. A play that argued persuasively, however wittily, for a utopia based on money and gunpowder was bound to do that in the wake of Vietnam, and even more now. Added to this, of course, was an irony Shaw would have appreciated, that the money which sent me to college to read his play came from your work for a major military contractor, so any repugnance I might have felt toward the play was already undermined by the circumstances of my reading it.

I warmed to other Shaw plays, but not to Major Barbara. When I finally saw it a few years later, I was just as put off, particularly by the corniness of the production -- Union Jack bunting, tinny marching band music, broad mugging and phony accents a la Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. By coating the proceedings in quaint nostalgia, the production encouraged a smug acceptance of the Undershaft dogma and indeed seemed pitched to an audience already in agreement. Though you didn’t see that particular production, I must admit I thought I saw you in that audience.

Of course, a great deal of corporate “conscience money” goes to the non-profit regional theaters where Major Barbara remains a staple. These theaters may not be out to massage the egos and consciences of rich, powerful patrons, but they’re not out to bite the hand that feeds them, either. There may be producers out there who hope the play will challenge or discomfit its audience, but it’s the play’s entertainment value that keeps it on the boards. And it is damnably entertaining, as robust as its heroine, full of assured comic scenes, its rogue’s gallery of characters as vivid as any in Dickens, its repartee as exciting as a Wimbledon tennis match, studded with brash, instantly memorable quips and aphorisms. Not even the notoriously discursive third act dampens our enjoyment, since Undershaft, who dominates it, is second only to Falstaff as a plum comic role for the type of mature, pardonably hammy character actor with the blustery expansiveness to fill such outsized characters.

All this may be part of a subversive strategy -- seduce them with laughter and they’ll be sitting ducks for the message -- but in practice it may make the play go down too easily or, conversely, render it unpalatable to those offended by what they take to be its message. I was of the latter group, and it was years before I was able to return to the play and see that it wasn’t so simple. It hadn’t been my fault, really; Shaw allows Undershaft to go on at such length and so convincingly, and makes his other characters so oddly ineffectual when talking back -- more on this later -- that it’s easy to mistake his voice for the play’s and for Shaw’s. Eighty years later Wallace Shawn used the same gambit in his similarly disturbing Aunt Dan and Lemon, which is literally about the ideological seductiveness of callous individualism, but Aunt Dan’s voice, though she goes on as much as Undershaft, runs directly counter to the current of the play. If I listened more closely, might Major Barbara have another, quieter perhaps but also more insistent voice? And if I had been offended for the wrong reasons, had at least some of those who admired the play done so for the wrong reasons as well?

Again I thought of you, and of anyone who (I hypothesized) found in the play a vindication of their own greed, callousness or war profiteering. Lumping you in with these imaginary beings was very unfair to you, though, since I had never even asked you why you liked the play. I ask myself now, and agreement with Undershaft is only one possible answer, and hardly the most compelling. The sheer musicality of Shaw’s language must have appealed to the singer and composer in you. Your sense of humor and Shaw’s are also wonderfully compatible (they could only be more so if Shaw were given to puns). Above all, Major Barbara is a play about family and, though his sardonic mockery is a peculiarly condescending form of tough love, perhaps you identified most with Undershaft the caring patriarch. Amidst all the fierce proselytism for the millionaire’s religion and the Armorer’s Creed, it’s easy to overlook Undershaft’s other, perhaps primary motive: he wants his family back. The familial harmony at the final curtain, and not the Hegelian dialectic of power and idealism, is where I see you most clearly in the play.

Granted, it’s harmony on Undershaft’s terms, forged in the fires of his ideology and bought with the utopian vision of his idyllic company town, a town built on the twin pillars of blood and fire. All the comforts and luxuries of the life it offers the Undershafts and their employees come at the expense of war, death and destruction -- as did everything I grew up with. But the play I found on rereading was more complex than the militant capitalist tract I had always taken it to be. If Shaw hopes to convert his public to some form of the Gospel of Undershaft, Adolphus Cusins’s version of said gospel will, it is implied, amount to either a reformation or a heresy, depending on one’s point of view. He will write his motto in Greek, so that Undershaft can’t read it. He persists in declaring his intention to arm “the common man” in the teeth of Undershaft’s warning that he will not be able to choose his clients. Nobody “wins” the debate in Act III. Sure, Undershaft gets what he wants, his future son in law as apprentice and his beloved daughter back in his fold and ready to win converts to his religion. But Barbara and Cusins also get what they want, once they realize they want it, and they’ve got their own plans for what to do with it.

The breaking down of Cusins’ resistance is an easily misunderstood element of the plot. The apparent action -- Undershaft wearing Cusins down until he has no arguments left -- is only the outward manifestation of an inner struggle with the fate that has pointed its finger at Cusins at the breakfast table. It is his own purpose that Cusins resists and then embraces, and his future father in law is only a means to that purpose. This may be the key to Cusins’ frankly poor performance in the play’s culminating debate. There are far better answers to Undershaft’s slippery arguments than what Cusins comes up with. I once had a composition class read scenes from the play after studying types of logical fallacies, and they had no trouble pinpointing the many equivocations, straw man arguments and red herrings with which Undershaft barrages Cusins. Is Cusins so thick that he doesn’t notice them? So intimidated that he can’t find the words to fight back? Or so bent on inheriting the Undershaft firm that he lets them go by with the weakest of protests? If Cusins were to argue too convincingly against Undershaft’s views, he might forfeit his very goal. Does he hold himself back, or does some invisible hand, the higher power which has its grip on him? At any rate, Undershaft is convinced his protégé will give in to the higher power and surrender any ambitions of his own. The play is silent as to who is right, though surely nobody who hears Cusins’ true voice beneath Undershaft’s rhetorical artillery can be rooting for Cusins’ failure. Barbara certainly isn’t.

Barbara’s progress through the valley of death to the moment where she goes “straight up to the skies” is the most problematic element of the play’s vision. Her agonizing loss of faith at the end of the second act, and her exhilarating spiritual rebirth at the end of the third, illustrate a strange, utilitarian idea of religious faith in which beliefs can be “scrapped” and replaced at will and according to need. When she allows her faith to collapse on seeing that the Salvation Army belongs to her father, she confuses religious organizations with faith, which belongs to nobody but the believer. When she becomes a convert to the Undershaft gospel, she assumes that faith, which by definition should require no empirical proof of its basis, can be based on “facts” as coldly rational as the law of supply and demand. Whether or not Shaw himself was party to this fallacy, in dramatic terms it’s a potentially tragic choice for Barbara, who must now define salvation in purely earthly terms and may have to adjust her faith to newly emerging “facts” more appalling than any she can imagine in 1906.

Will Barbara’s new faith hold up to the wear and tear of the twentieth century? Will Cusins succeed in arming the common people against the “intellectual oligarchy”? These are the two main questions that emerged as I started work on my sequel, along with a much broader question: is Shaw’s play still relevant? Reading reviews of productions from all over the world, I find the same answer over and over: yes, yes, more than ever, yes! After all, war, greed, poverty and longing for salvation are still with us, right? Well, when haven’t they been? Are these basic thematic concerns by themselves sufficient to bring Major Barbara alive and kicking into the twenty-first century? Or are we too dazzled by Shaw’s showmanship and wit to notice, or want to notice, that his treatment of these concerns might be fallacious, myopic, ingenuous, even irresponsible? At the conclusion of Major Barbara the power to be generated through the raising of Hell to Heaven in Perivale St. Andrews will presumably be “steered”, consciously or otherwise, toward positive ends. But the Undershaft disappearing rampart gun and the Undershaft aerial battleship have given way to land mines, napalm, hydrogen bombs and box cutters, and anyone who sees a higher purpose in their use is a danger to us all. A century of war has made it impossible for all but the most deluded to embrace Barbara’s faith.

The Christian Right, in the person of Helena, figures prominently in my second act. It is they who in our day and age most energetically embrace and disseminate Undershaft’s gospel, or something uncomfortably close to it. Barbara needn’t have converted; the fundamentalist belief in the Rapture offers visions of heavenly salvation that are perfectly compatible with earthly warmongering and profiteering. The fulfillment of this belief requires an apocalyptic war in the Middle East, and a prominent element within the current U.S. administration seems to be working dedicatedly toward that end. Shaw would no doubt see this self-righteous faith-based hegemony as a mad perversion of Undershaft’s gospel, directly opposed to Cusins’ hopes of social justice, and would be appalled by it -- as I hope you are.

I apologize for bringing up politics. You and Mom met over “I Like Ike” buttons and you’re a lifelong Republican except for, if I remember, voting for LBJ in ‘64 when Goldwater’s “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” speech raised fears of nuclear annihilation. Goldwater looks pretty mild now, compared with the ideologues (religious, neo-liberal or both) who have hijacked your party. If anything, the twentieth century should have driven home to us the damage that can be done by ideologues of all stripes: left, right, communist, fascist, nationalist, racist, colonialist, Islamist, millennialist or what have you. Any of these ideologies is dangerous, particularly when fueled by money and backed with an enormous arsenal. Shaw ended his play with the fervent hope that power would find its way into the right hands, but the Catch-22 is that the powerful always believe their hands are the right ones, ascribing their grip on power to the Will of God, Historical Inevitability or the Law of the Market, and do everything they can to keep it out of the hands of others. Cusins’ belief that he or his distant progeny could change this may have seemed reasonable in 1905, but it makes the hyper-optimistic ending of Major Barbara seem desperate now; one of my students even called it tragic. Whether or not Undershaft “wins” within the context of Shaw’s play, he’s sitting pretty today.

Ultimately it’s Shaw’s unswerving faith in human intelligence and rationality that distances him from us. It’s a melancholy distancing, tinged by a wistful yearning for Shaw’s faith in times that have taught us, rightly or wrongly, to be skeptical, even cynical. Melancholy as well because anyone who reads, views, acts in, produces or studies Shaw’s plays with any regularity comes to feel as much affection for him as anyone can feel for someone they’ve never met. His spectral company has been delightful, if humbling and sometimes maddening, over the last several years as I’ve thought about his play and written mine.

All that remains is to wish a very happy birthday to Major Barbara, and to you, Dad.

Madrid, July 2005

to UNDERMINED excerpt

All Contents © 2008 by Cary Barney. All Rights Reserved.

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