Notes

An Inspector Calls and Old-fashioned Propaganda at the Shaw Festival
On the face of it, how could two plays be more different than An Inspector Calls and The Little Foxes? (Both are in repertory at the Shaw Festival throughout its 2008 season; I review the former in this post and the latter in this post) In a single play, a police detective explores the life and untimely death of a 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 vintage American drama - were cut from the same cloth. They will 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 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 group 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 Little Foxes, the Hubbards are toasting a proposed business alliance with an industrialist from Chicago. The new partners count on preventing the labor agitation that plagues northern industry by building a cotton mill in the Hubbards' southern town.

WITHIN AN Inspector Calls, the Birlings may also be celebrating a small business alliance, the engagement of these daughter Sheila to Gerald Croft, the son of these principal business competitor. Arthur Birling and Croft expect the marriage alliance to result in business understandings that may 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 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 connection with the socially superior Crofts, he hopes to vault in to 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 help keep all the money in 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 member of family).

The Birlings plan to marry Sheila Birling off to the son of a competitor to consolidate their financial and social standing. Sheila may be the only one of the Birlings with much of a conscience; she sees that her father's factory employees "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 TINY Foxes, we know 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 employees to arrange. (I complain about Lillian Hellman's usage of the Hubbards as whipping boys for American capitalism in my own earlier post.)

Initially, the Birlings seem far less dreadful. We learn, however (as do the characters themselves), they are guilty of exactly the same sorts of crimes. Arthur Birling has discharged and blackballed a factory employee for having the temerity to require two shillings more weekly (think Oliver Twist) and attempting to organize a strike. Sheila Birling gets the same unfortunate girl discharged from the job as a shopgirl for looking at her the wrong way. 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. At the end of her rope, the lady seeks charity from a 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 that 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 individuals who stand around watching them eat it.

WITHIN AN Inspector Calls:

Birling: "Unless you come down sharply on some of these people, they'd soon be requesting the earth."

The Inspector: "They could. But after all it's better to ask for the planet earth than to take it."

Putting out somebody's talking points

In an excellent essay in the program for the Shaw Festival's production of An Inspector Calls, Professor John Baxendale softpedals the play's political implications. Definately not 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 things are, but in regards to a vision of how life could be different if we acknowledge the fact we all have been members of 1 another."

Indeed, initially blush that appears to be what the Inspector says (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 quit with us, with their hopes and fears, their suffering, and potential for happiness, all intertwined with our lives, using what we think and say and do. We don't live alone. We have been members of 1 body. We are in charge of each other."

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

Additional info , instead, was that if Britain and America refused to accept socialism, bloody times were ahead, and mercy cannot be expected. Therefore Priestley ended the Inspector's grand lecture with exactly this type of grim warning:

"We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the 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 refers to the two world wars, instead of to revolutionary violence, but this is simply 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 - in order that we'll hang ourselves."

One can almost believe that these two extraordinarily talented dramatists, Hellman and Priestley, were working from the set of Marxist "talking points" because of their 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 willing to pimp their own daughters for gain

* Portray their sons as thieves so when 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 divided into "us" (the worker class) versus "them" (the capitalist class)

Little wonder that An Inspector Calls and THE TINY Foxes ended up being practically exactly the same play!

Priestley bought in to the party line that capitalists are on the incorrect side of history and that Soviet-style socialism represented the very best hope for mankind. Early within an Inspector Calls, occur 1912, Arthur Birling complacently tells his family how nicely the world is shaping up. There's no war coming, he says, just "several scaremongers here making a fuss about nothing." Look at the new aeroplanes, consider the automobiles, "bigger and faster all the time," consider the huge new ocean liner set to sail the next week, the Titanic. In thirty years, Birling assures his family, labor troubles is 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 are to think. And not just that: Birling was predicting "peace and prosperity and rapid progress everywhere - except needless to say in Russia, that may always be behindhand, naturally." Wrong about the Titanic, wrong about Russia!

But Priestley was worse when compared to a poor prophet; he didn't see what was before his eyes. Like so 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 have been shed and then 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 the main Shaw Festival's 2008 season, but not scheduled to open till early July), Shaw was forthright in what he designed to accomplish in his plays: "I'm convinced that artwork is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most efficient means of moral propagandism on earth . . . ." In An Inspector Calls, J. B. Priestley proved himself Shaw's staunch disciple.
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