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On the face of it, how could two plays be more dissimilar than An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes? (Both are in repertory at the Shaw Festival allround it is 2008 season; I review the former in this post and the latter in this post) In one play, a police detective explores the life and untimely death of a young woman in an English industrial town; the other deals with greed and infighting in an Alabama family. Yet these plays – a British mystery classic and a classic American drama – were cut from the same cloth. They have parallel plots, parallel themes, even parallel characters. Two capitalist families In The Little Foxes, Lillian Hellman gives us the Hubbards, a family of Alabama cotton merchants that has money, but no social position. In An Inspector Calls, written only six years later, J. B. Priestley gives us the Hubbards’ English counterparts, the Birlings, a family of makers in an English industrial town. The Birlings have money, but no social position. Two unholy business alliances Each play begins with a dinner party. In The Little Foxes, the Hubbards are toasting a proposed business confederation with an industrialist from Chicago. The new collaborators count on avoiding the labor agitation that plagues northern industry by building a cotton mill in the Hubbards’ southern town. In An Inspector Calls, the Birlings are also celebrating a business alliance, the engagement of their daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, the son of their important business competitor. Arthur Birling and Croft suppose the marriage confederation to lead to business understandings that will yield higher prices and suppression of labor agitation. Two lead characters motivated by social ambition In The Little Foxes, Regina Hubbard intends to leverage her new business kinship into a prominent social position in Chicago society. Similarly, An Inspector Calls finds Arthur Birling angling for a knighthood. With a title and his new connection with the socially superior Crofts, he hopes to vault into the upper echelons of English society. Two sons Each family has a dissolute son in his early twenties. Leo Hubbard works in his uncle Horace’s bank and embezzles. Eric Birling works in his father’s office, drinks, and embezzles. Both young men patronize prostitutes. Two daughters Each family has a daughter in her late teens. The Hubbards plan to marry Alexandra off to her wastrel cousin Leo to keep all the cash in the family. Alexandra is the only fellow member of the family with a moral or social sense of right and wrong (her aunt Birdie has strong humane instincts, but she is a victim of the Hubbards, not decently a family member). The Birlings plan to marry Sheila Birling off to the son of a challenger to consolidate their financial and social standing. Sheila is the only one of the Birlings with much of a conscience; she sees that her father’s factory workers “aren’t cheap labour – they’re people.” Two indictments Each of these two plays indicts a capitalist family on multiple counts of crimes both personal and social. By the end of The Little Foxes, we recognise that the Hubbards strike their women, instruct their sons to steal, hunt for sport while the poor go hungry, beat their horses, keep mistresses, blackmail one another, cheat black folk, charge usury, corrupt public officials, and beat down attempts by working people to organize. (I complain regarding Lillian Hellman’s use of the Hubbards as whipping boys for American capitalism in my earlier post.) Initially, the Birlings seem far less dreadful. We learn, nonetheless (as do the characters themselves), that they are guilty of the same sorts of crimes. Arthur Birling has discharged and blackballed a factory employee for having the temerity to ask for two shillings more per week (think Oliver Twist) and attempting to coordinate a strike. Sheila Birling gets the same unfortunate girl discharged from a occupation as a shopgirl for looking at her the wrong way. Crofts, the future son-in-law, finds the girl unemployed and hungry, makes her his mistress, then abandons her. Then the Birlings’ wastrel son meets her, now a prostitute, uses her, and gets her pregnant. At the end of her rope, the girl seeks charity from a private help society controlled by Mrs. Birling, who turns her away. Two soap boxes Each playwright divides the world neatly into those who take and those who are taken from. In The Little Foxes: Addie: “Well, there are persons who eat the world and eat all the persons on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. In An Inspector Calls: Birling: “If you don’t come down sharply on numerous of these people, they’d soon be asking for the earth.” The Inspector: “They might. But after all it’s better to ask for the world than to take it.”
Putting out somebody’s talking points In an splendid essay in the program for the Shaw Festival’s production of An Inspector Calls, Professor John Baxendale softpedals the play’s political implications. Far from implicitly condoning violent Soviet-style revolution, he says, Priestley was not even advancing his political party’s radical legislative agenda. The essay maintains that Priestley sought merely to foster sensations of mutual obligation among his countrymen. “The play is not with regards to social reform [says Professor Baxendale], better health care or full employment, indispensable even though these things are, but when it comes to a imaginativeness of how life could be dissimilar if we know the truth that we are all members of one another.” Indeed, at firstborn blush that seems to be what the Inspector is saying (and he speaks with Priestley’s voice) in his grand, melodramatic speech: “One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their hopes and fears, their suffering, and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other.” But warm fuzzy communal sensations and private charity were not what either J. B. Priestley or Lillian Hellman were about. Nor was the social gospel of “love thy neighbor”; not one thing could have been further from Priestley’s mind than the Christian communalism of the second chapter of Acts. His message, instead, was that if Britain and America refused to receive socialism, bloody times were ahead, and mercy could not be expected. And so Priestley ended the Inspector’s grand lecture with precisely such a grim warning: “We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.” Professor Baxendale asserts that the Inspector’s “fire and blood” language refers to the two world wars, rather than to revolutionary violence, but this is not a reasonable reading. Priestley made no try in this play to camouflage his wonderment for Soviet socialism. In explaining the methods of the Inspector to her family, Priestley has Sheila Birling allude to Vladimir Lenin’s famous brag when it comes to capitalist rope when she says, “No, he’s giving us rope – so that we’ll hang ourselves.” One may almost believe that these two extraordinarily gifted dramatists, Hellman and Priestley, were working from a list of Marxist “talking points” for their plays: * Portray all capitalists as instinctive monopolists and foes of coordinated labor * Caricature capitalists as keeping extreme, selfish, individualist points of view * Portray them as more than willing to pimp their own daughters for gain * Portray their sons as thieves and as sexually ravenous * Portray private charitable originations (like Mrs. Birling’s) as corrupt and degrading * Portray private ownership of land as unjust * Show the world as disunited into “us” (the worker class) versus “them” (the capitalist class) Little wonder that An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes turned out to be practically the same play! Priestley purchased into the party line that capitalists are on the wrong side of history and that Soviet-style socialism represented the best hope for mankind. Early in An Inspector Calls, set in 1912, Arthur Birling complacently tells his family how nicely the world is shaping up. There’s no war coming, he says, just “a few scaremongers here making a fuss when it comes to nothing.” Look at the new aeroplanes, look at the automobiles, “bigger and rapidly and without delay all the time,” look at the big new ocean liner set to sail the next week, the Titanic. In thirty years, Birling assures his family, labor difficultnesses will be a thing of the past, and the world will have forgotten “all these ludicrous little war scares.” Writing in 1945, Priestley expected his audience to smile sadly at Birling’s absurd prophecies. How short-sighted Birling and the capitalists were, we are to think. And not only that: Birling was predicting “peace and successfulness and rapid progress everyplace – except of course in Russia, which will always be behindhand, naturally.” Wrong when it comes to the Titanic, faulty regarding Russia! But Priestley was worse than a poor prophet; he failed to see what was before his eyes. Like so a heap of other fellow travelers, Priestley believed that the outstanding socialist experiment in the U.S.S.R. had already succeeded; in fact, the blood of millions in eastern Europe had been shed only to sustain a brutal Soviet regime in which the old bosses had plainly been substituted by new bosses. In his preface to Mrs. Warren’s Profession (also share of the Shaw Festival’s 2008 season, but not scheduled to open till early July), Shaw was forthright in regards to what he intended to accomplish in his plays: “I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective means of moral propagandism in the world . . . .” In An Inspector Calls, J. B. Priestley proved himself Shaw’s staunch disciple. |
Kindle vs. Nook (updated 1/2/2011)