Brigid Brophy

The most charming fact I have stumbled on in intellectual history is that Freud and Shaw were shocked by one another. Freud’s wounded romanticism speaks in his reference (in Group Psychology, 1921) to ‘Bernard Shaw’s malicious aphorism to the effect that being in love means greatly exaggerating the difference between one woman and another.’ If I am right in supposing that what he had in mind is one of the speeches Undershaft addresses to Cusins at the climax of Major Barbara, ‘Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another,’ then Freud has performed a little secondary elaboration. In substance it is fair. The ‘being in love’ is extrapolated from the dramatic context, where Cusins is indeed in love. But in giving the words the formal and impersonal turn of an aphorism Freud suppresses the dramatic characterisation, including that of Undershaft as the Prince of Darkness, and attributes to Shaw himself both the supposed aphorism and its supposed taint of the ‘malicious’.

My fellow members of the Left often seem to have met an entirely different middle class from the one I was brought up in. Left-wing chat about education accepts without challenge the thesis that book learning comes easily to middle-class children because they come from homes conversant with books. Chat (which is rarer) about arts policy accepts that ‘standards’ and ‘quality’ are bourgeois conventions which the middle class has contrived to impose on public patronage of the arts, thereby getting itself, at the taxpayers’ expense, a bonanza of the kinds of art which it happens to enjoy. This gives me a surreal feeling that I must be the only member of the Labour Party who has hacked through the pampas grass in the front garden, penetrated the mock-half-timbered facade and set actual foot in any of the thousands of middle-class homes where no kinds of art are enjoyed, where the most bookish book to be accorded houseroom is the AA Members’ Handbook and where an invitation to partake in the bourgeois bonanza by passing a publicly subsidised evening at a Shakespeare play or a Bartok opera would elicit bafflement, fear or derision.