The story of Joan of Arc is well known. A village girl from the town of Domrémy in Lorraine, she was directed by her “voices”— those of Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret, and Saint Michael, whom she heard speak to her “in the church bells”—to go to Orleans in soldier’s attire, raise the English siege of the city, and crown the Dauphin in the cathedral of Rheims. It is one of the most extraordinary facts in history that she did all these things. She was eighteen when she crowned the Dauphin as the king of France, but she was captured soon afterward by the English at Compiègne, tried by a French court of the Inquisition, convicted of being a heretic and a witch, and burned alive at the stake on May 30, 1431, when she was still only nineteen.
Her spirit lived on and helped the French to drive the English from France, which they did in a few years. In 1456, her trial was declared invalid and her memory officially purged of any taint or stain. It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that serious ecclesiastical attention was paid to the question whether she was a saint. The long process of canonization came to an end on May 16, 1920, when she was declared Sainte Jeanne d’Arc, her saint’s day being May 30. For centuries before this she had been revered by the common people of France as their patron saint and savior.
Shaw was well aware that the danger in writing a play about Joan was to sentimentalize her story, as Mark Twain, for example, had done only a few years before. The facts, Shaw knew, would speak for themselves if fairly presented. And a fair presentation demanded that Joan receive a fair trial; anything else would be a dramatic travesty (as well as a travesty of historical fact). The high point of the play is of course the trial, when Joan, who never really understands the charges against her, condemns herself over and over in her insistence on the truth of her voices as against the truth of the Church. She is crushed, as Shaw says, “between those mighty forces, the Church and the Law,” and suffers death because, for her, there is no alternative. She emerges, at the end, as a Shavian hero of reason and clear sightedness. And Shaw concludes, in a stage Epilogue, that mankind will continue to kill its best men and women as long as the qualities that differentiate them, and for which they are therefore killed, are not shared by all.
The play is luminous and beautiful, and the part of Joan is one of the most magnificent for an actress in world drama. It is a long play—three and a half hours—but few playgoers have ever complained. It is also didactic, about which audiences have not complained, either. Shaw was well aware of this, too; I am reminded of something he said in the preface to Pygmalion, which is also didactic. “I wish to boast,” he wrote, “that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home.”
It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
Whether or not that is true, Shaw was always didactic, always trying to teach us something. What he was trying to teach us was usually valuable; more important, he was a great playwright. One learns and enjoys at the same time.
chapter thirteen
Entre Deux Guerres
Entre deux guerres—the French phrase literally means “between two wars,” but it meant more than that at the time. World War I ended on November 11, 1918, when the guns were silenced on the Western Front. World War II, the second stage, began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, a country that the so-called Allies had agreed to protect. But in fact the war had never really stopped during those twenty-one short years of uneasy peace. Beginning as early as 1925, Germany had begun to rearm, as had France. England failed to take the threat seriously, and Americans of America First said there was no threat at all, a claim that President Roosevelt could not accept. They seemed to be proven right when no general hostilities broke out for six months, until, that is, Germany, in a lightning stroke, attacked France and forced her to her knees. Then most people realized that the big war was definitely on again, a fact that every American recognized when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
W.H. Auden, in his poem titled “September 1, 1939,” began by saying he was “…uncertain and afraid, As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade.” We were all afraid—myself included, since I was thirteen in 1939 and eighteen in 1944. E.B. White once wrote that “the worst thing that can happen to a man is to have a son twenty years before a world war.” That’s what happened to my father, and his hair turned white almost overnight. I survived the war and so did he. But I recall vividly the almost weekly advertisements in the New Yorker of an organization called “The Society for the Prevention of World War Two.” The photographs depicted the horrors of World War I and the text pleaded for political action as the threat of a new universal holocaust became more and more clear.
Despite that, many of the authors represented in this chapter, all but one of whom were born a few years before 1900, seemed to be able to concentrate on their own business, not that of the world. In many cases this business was fantasy or escapism. And why not? If the world was intent on destroying itself, as it almost did, wouldn’t it be sensible to have a little fun? The past and the future were both terrifying to think about, but somewhere, somehow, “there’s a helluva good universe next door,” as E.E. Cummings said in one of his poems, adding: “Let’s go!”
EUGEN HERRIGEL
1884–1955
Zen in the Art of Archery
Eugen Herrigel was born in Germany in 1884. A philosopher, he went to Japan during the 1930s to teach Western philosophy at the University of Tokyo and while there devoted himself to the study of Zen Buddhism. He did so by becoming a student of the Zen art of archery, which is the subject of his small book Zen in the Art of Archery.
Herrigel had long been interested, he tells us, in mysticism, and particularly in the type of mysticism that is associated with the East and Buddhism. And he supposed that it would not be so very difficult for him, who had studied and come to understand the philosophy of Kant and of Hegel, to study and comprehend the philosophy of Zen. But this, he discovered, would not be so.
Herrigel was fortunate to be accepted as a pupil by the great Master Kenzo Awa, who was regarded as perhaps the leading teacher of the art of archery in Japan. The lessons began with a description of the bow and the arrow, a description couched in strange and mystical phrases and sentences that Herrigel thought he understood but did not. The Master then stood, drew the bow, and released the arrow. It flew toward the target. He then asked Herrigel to do the same.
It looked easy. Obviously it was easy for the Master. But it was not easy for Herrigel, as he soon realized. In fact it was impossible. He could not draw the bow, in the accepted and traditional manner, without suffering pain and distress in the muscles of his arms and back. The position seemed strained and awkward. When he was finally able to release the arrow it never went where he expected or wanted it to.