LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Smuts and Shaw 'Sis,--I9 his article on Shaw Mr. St. John Ervine writes: "Lady Chatterley's Lover, if he had read it, would have horrified him." I don't know positively that Shaw ever did read Lady Chatterley's Lover or what, in his deep heart, he thought or would have thought about it. But when he was at the Cape, in the early 'thirties, I invited him and General Smuts to meet one another at lunch, saying to myself: " Here will be historic talk." Each tried conscientiously to produce it. Smuts told a story about his guerrilla work in the Boer War, which did not interest Shaw. Shaw, to enliven us, brought the conversation round to D. H. Lawrence (I don't remember how) and then said: " Every school- girl of sixteen should read Lady Chatterley's Lover." As Smuts seldom read novels and had never read Lawrence or heard of Lady Chatterley's Lover, he saw no reason why every schoolgirl of sixteen should not read Lady Chatterley's Lover, and, in his eager, polite way, he said: " Of course, of course." So nothing was provoked there.
Then Shaw tried another subject. He said that for a country to go off the gold standard was simple robbery. South Africa, committed too long to the gold standard, was at the time pining away, and Smuts (though I don't know whether Shaw had been in the country long enough to notice it) was going from platform to platform passionately preaching " Off gold." Here was no nonsense about novels, lovers and schoolgirls ; Smuts gripped his lips thinly and tightly together and made no response. After that the lunch soon ended.
Shaw was one of the first people I ever met in England. I knew almost Nobody, but he asked me to his flat in the Adelphi ; came in shyly ; told me about his investments and Sir Horace Plunkett ; told me another time that his best work was Man and Superman; that he began to fade in his sixties ; had a renewal in his seventies ; " but what can you expect (he said) from the eighties ? "—Yours faithfully,
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