Brother Bernardo

Devilish old George Bernard Shaw loved to kick a cloven hoof in the face of convention, complacency and the church. Many of his contemporaries considered him one of the world's leading atheists. Now, in the 100th anniversary of his birth, old G.B.S. is taking on a different look. Magazines on both sides of the Atlantic are currently carrying a touching correspondence between Shaw and the abbess of a Roman Catholic convent of cloistered contemplative nuns.* The letters reveal the warmth behind the mocker, the loneliness of the wit who was condemned to see every side of every question.

Dame Laurentia McLachlan, who died three years ago, was introduced to Shaw in 1924 by a mutual friend after she had expressed admiration of his play, St. Joan. G.B.S. and his wife called upon her at the Benedictine abbey of Stanbrook, and she wrote afterwards: "It seems that the life here, and therefore the Church does attract him. God give me grace to help this poor wanderer ..." Later Shaw sent her a copy of St. Joan inscribed "To Sister Laurentia from Brother Bernard," and a rich friendship was under way.

Square Root of Minus x. Their subject was always Christianity--a subject on which Shaw managed to maintain his Shavian air of omniscience while still showing an un-Shavian tenderness and humility. "I am quite aware," he wrote, "that Catholicism has produced much more audacious philosophic speculation than Protestantism. What is more, there is no Rationalism so rationalistic as Catholic Rationalism. When the monk [quoted by Dame Laurentia] said that Protestantism destroys the brain I think he meant that Protestantism leads men to break through the limits of reason, just as the mathematicians did when finding they could get no further with possible quantities, they assumed impossible ones like the square root of minus x. I exhausted rationalism when I got to the end of my second novel at the age of 24, and should have come to a dead stop if I had not proceeded to purely mystical assumptions. . . When we are next touring in your neighborhood I shall again shake your bars and look longingly at the freedom on the other side of them."

From the Holy Land he brought back two pebbles, "one to be thrown blindfold among the others in Stanbrook garden so that there may always be a stone from Bethlehem there, though nobody will know which it is and be tempted to steal it, and the other for your own self." The second stone he had mounted on a silver model of a medieval reliquary, surmounted by a figure of the child Jesus. When it was suggested that it bear some kind of inscription, he wrote: "Why can it not be a secret between us and Our Lady and the little boy? What the devil--saving your cloth--could we put on it? . . . Our fingerprints are on it, and Heaven knows whose footprints may be on the stone. Isn't that enough?"

Again and again Shaw asked for the nuns' prayers. "Nobody can tell what influence these prayers have. If the ether is full of these impulses of goodwill to me so much the better for me: it would be shockingly unscientific to doubt it. So let the sisters give me all the prayers they can spare; and don't forget me in yours."

"Hallo, Mary!" Publication of Shaw's iconoclastic parable, The Black Girl in Search of God, temporarily broke the friendship between the nun and the old man, though he insisted to her that it was directly inspired by God and wrote on the flyleaf of the proof sheets he sent her: "An Inspiration which came in response to the prayers of the nuns of Stanbrook Abbey and in particular to the prayers of his dear Sister Laurentia for Bernard Shaw." They argued bitterly over it by mail. "You are the most unreasonable woman I ever knew . . ." wrote Shaw. "You think you are a better Catholic than I, but my view of the Bible is the view of the Fathers of the Church; and yours is that of a Belfast Protestant to whom the Bible is a fetish . . . But you must go on praying for me, however surprising the results may be."

One of the surprising results was his suggestion, in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, that "the Godhead must contain the Mother as well as the Father." Dame Laurentia was outraged at the thought of deifying Mary, and took him to task. "You want me, as if it were a sort of penance, to say a lot of Hail Maries," he flashed back. "But I am always saying Hail, Mary! on my travels ... I say it in my own natural and sincere way when She turns up in the temples and tombs of Egypt and among the gods of Hindustan--Hallo, Mary! For you really cannot get away from Her . . . She favours Brother Bernardo with special revelations and smiles at his delighted 'Hallo, Mary!' When I write a play like The Simpleton and have to deal with divinity in it She jogs my elbow at the right moment and whispers 'Now Brother B. don't forget me.' And I don't."

Toward the close of his long life, the sharp old man paused happily each birthday among the scrap baskets full of congratulations to thank his cloistered friend for her good wishes. "If I try to sneak into paradise behind you they will be too glad to see you to notice me," he wrote once. His 94th and last birthday marked the end of these exchanges: "God must be tired of all these prayers for this fellow Shaw whom He doesn't half like. He has promised His servant Laurentia that He will do His best for him, and we had better leave it at that."

* In the U.S., the Atlantic; in England, the Cornhill. The letters are excerpts from a book, In a Great Tradition, to be published by John Murray.

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