Notes

An Inspector Calls and Old-fashioned Propaganda at the Shaw Festival
On the facial skin of it, how could two plays become more different than An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes? (Both come in repertory at the Shaw Festival throughout its 2008 season; I review the former in this article and the latter in this article) In a single play, a police detective explores the life span and untimely death of a woman within an English industrial town; another deals with greed and infighting in an Alabama family.

Yet these plays - a British mystery classic and a vintage American drama - were cut from the same cloth. They have parallel plots, parallel themes, even parallel characters.

Two capitalist families

In THE TINY Foxes, Lillian Hellman gives us the Hubbards, a family group of Alabama cotton merchants which has money, but no social position.

WITHIN AN Inspector Calls, written only six years later, J. B. Priestley gives us the Hubbards' English counterparts, the Birlings, a family of manufacturers in an English industrial town. The Birlings have money, but no social position.

Two unholy business alliances

Each play begins with a social gathering. In THE TINY Foxes, the Hubbards are toasting a proposed business alliance having an industrialist from Chicago. The brand new partners count on preventing the labor agitation that plagues northern industry because they build a cotton mill in the Hubbards' southern town.

In An Inspector Calls, the Birlings may also be celebrating a business alliance, the engagement of their daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, the son of these principal business competitor. Arthur Birling and Croft expect the marriage alliance to lead to business understandings which will yield higher prices and suppression of labor agitation.

Two lead characters motivated by social ambition

In THE TINY Foxes, Regina Hubbard intends to leverage her new business relationship right 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 reference to the socially superior Crofts, he hopes to vault into the upper echelons of English society.

Two sons

Each family includes 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 teenagers patronize prostitutes.

Two daughters

Each family has a daughter in her late teens. The Hubbards intend to marry Alexandra off to her wastrel cousin Leo to keep all the profit the family. Alexandra may be the only relation with a moral or social conscience (her aunt Birdie has strong humane instincts, but she is a victim of the Hubbards, not properly a family member).

The Birlings intend to marry Sheila Birling off to the son of a competitor to consolidate their financial and social standing. more info may be the only 1 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 realize that the Hubbards strike their women, teach 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 about 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, however (as do the characters themselves), that they are guilty of exactly the same types 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 trying to organize a strike. Sheila Birling gets the same unfortunate girl discharged from a job as a shopgirl for looking at her the wrong manner. Crofts, the near 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. By the end of her rope, the girl seeks charity from the private aid society controlled by Mrs. Birling, who turns her away.

Two soap boxes

Each playwright divides the planet neatly into those that take and those who are taken from. In THE TINY Foxes:

Addie: "Well, you can find people who eat the earth and eat all of the people onto it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then you can find people who stand around watching them eat it.

In An Inspector Calls:

Birling: "If you don't come down sharply on a few of these people, they'd soon be requesting the earth."

The Inspector: "They could. But in the end it's better to ask for the planet earth than to go on it."

Putting out somebody's talking points

In an excellent essay in this 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 had not been even promoting his political party's radical legislative agenda. The essay maintains that Priestley sought merely to foster feelings of mutual responsibility among his countrymen.

"The play isn't about social reform [says Professor Baxendale], better health care or full employment, important though these exact things are, but about a vision of how life could possibly be different if we acknowledge the truth that we are all members of one another."

Indeed, initially blush that appears 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 you can find untold thousands and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, making use of their hopes and fears, their suffering, and potential for happiness, all intertwined with this lives, with what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We are members of 1 body. We are in charge of each other."

But warm fuzzy communal feelings and private charity weren't what either J. B. Priestley or Lillian Hellman were about. Nor was the social gospel of "love thy neighbor"; nothing could have been further from Priestley's mind than the Christian communalism of the next chapter of Acts.

His message, instead, was that if Britain and America refused to simply accept socialism, bloody times were ahead, and mercy cannot be expected. Therefore Priestley ended the Inspector's grand lecture with exactly such a grim warning:

"We are responsible for one another. And I let you know that enough time will soon come when, if men won't learn that lesson, they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish."

Professor Baxendale asserts that the Inspector's "fire and blood" language identifies the two world wars, rather than to revolutionary violence, but this is not a good reading. Priestley made no attempt in this play to disguise his admiration for Soviet socialism. In explaining the methods of the Inspector to her family, Priestley has Sheila Birling allude to Vladimir Lenin's famous boast about capitalist rope when she says, "No, he's giving us rope - so that we'll hang ourselves."

One can almost believe that both of these extraordinarily talented dramatists, Hellman and Priestley, were working from the list of Marxist "talking points" for his or her plays:

* Portray all capitalists as instinctive monopolists and enemies of organized labor

* Caricature capitalists as holding extreme, selfish, individualist points of view

* Portray them as ready to pimp their very own daughters for gain

* Portray their sons as thieves and as sexually ravenous

* Portray private charitable institutions (like Mrs. Birling's) as corrupt and degrading

* Portray private ownership of land as unjust

* Show the world as split into "us" (the worker class) versus "them" (the capitalist class)

Little wonder an Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes turned out to be practically exactly the same play!

Priestley bought into the party line that capitalists are on the incorrect side of history and that Soviet-style socialism represented the best expect mankind. Early in An Inspector Calls, occur 1912, Arthur Birling complacently tells his family how nicely the planet is shaping up. There is no war coming, he says, just "several scaremongers here making a fuss about nothing." Consider the new aeroplanes, look at the automobiles, "bigger and faster on a regular basis," look at the huge new ocean liner set to sail the next week, the Titanic. In thirty years, Birling assures his family, labor troubles will be a thing of the past, and the world will have forgotten "all these silly little war scares."

Writing in 1945, Priestley expected his audience to smile sadly at Birling's foolish prophecies. How short-sighted Birling and the capitalists were, we have been to think. And not only that: Birling was predicting "peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere - except needless to say in Russia, that will always be behindhand, naturally." Wrong about the Titanic, wrong about Russia!

But Priestley was worse than a poor prophet; he failed to see that which was before his eyes. Like so a great many other fellow travelers, Priestley believed that the great 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 merely been replaced by new bosses.

In his preface to Mrs. Warren's Profession (also part of the Shaw Festival's 2008 season, however, not scheduled to open till early July), Shaw was forthright in what he intended to accomplish in his plays: "I'm convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the very best method of moral propagandism in the world . . . ." In An Inspector Calls, J. B. Priestley proved himself Shaw's staunch disciple.
My Website: https://www.its-everyones-world.com/hepatitis-a-information/