I am afraid you will find London a drearily slow place to make a beginning in. Every opening is an accident; and waiting for accidents is rather discouraging.
Shaw to Rhoda Halkett (14 August 1894)
‘Unoccupied’: this was the word Shaw used to describe his first summer in London. He gave everyone to understand that ‘on no account will I enter an office again’. But by September, he was submitting to a crammer’s course for admission to the Civil Service. His mother and Lucy breathed out with relief – then in with alarm as, less than two months later, he gave up this ‘tutelage of a grinder’ and accepted the occupation of Lee’s amanuensis.
Lee’s credit with the Shaws had fallen dramatically since they came to London. It appears that, having grown so infatuated that ‘he wanted to marry her’, Lee was bullying Lucy into acting as the principal singer in a musical society he had started called the Troubadours. Lucy intensely disliked working under Lee’s direction, and had written to her brother telling him of a huge rumpus. George, at his most paternal, replied: ‘As to Lee, I would decline to listen to him. We all know what his tirades are worth, and I think his coming to Victoria Grove and launching out at you as he did, simply outrageous.’ Matters between the pair deteriorated and, before George arrived in London, Lucy wrote to explain that ‘Lee and I are bitter enemies now; we are frostily civil to each other’s faces, and horribly abusive behind backs’.
Lee was no writer, ‘and when he was offered an appointment as musical critic to a paper called The Hornet... in consideration of his praising the neighbourhood in the newspapers, I had the job of writing the criticisms and the articles,’ Shaw explained. ‘It was to some extent on my account that he undertook such pretences of authorship.’
Shaw provided The Hornet with careful criticism and careful jokes that do not carry the generosity of the mature G.B.S. The concert hall becomes a blackboard on which he scrupulously chalks up his remarks. If his writing is a little priggish, it still achieves wonderful confidence for someone aged twenty-one. Carl Rosa’s first violin is accused of having played flat ‘from beginning to end’; Herr Behrens is spotted frequently substituting ‘semiquaver passages for the triplets’ and betraying his ignorance of English by selecting the middle of a phrase as a suitable opportunity to take breath. Shaw castigates the timidity of other music critics twice or three times his age who ‘can only judge one performance by reference to another’.
Although there is only a hint of G.B.S. in these apprentice buzzings, some Shavian notes are starting to sound towards the end of his Hornet life. Signor Rota is complimented as ‘a master of the art of shouting’; and Madame Goddard is recorded as fascinating her hearers ‘with a strikingly unpleasant imitation of a bagpipes’. In place of military drum and cymbals, Shaw advises the management of Her Majesty’s ‘to employ a stage carpenter to bang the orchestra door at a pre-arranged signal’. And after a performance of Donizetti’s Lucia he deplored the Master of Ravenswood’s habit of flinging his cloak and hat on the ground as ‘ridiculous in the first act, impolite in the second, and only justified by the prospect of suicide in the third’.
Shaw would hand Lee these criticisms and Lee would hand him the fees, ‘contenting himself with the consciousness of doing generously by a young and forlorn literary adventurer, and with the honor and glory accruing from the reputed authorship of my articles’. In later years G.B.S. exaggerated the ‘vulgarities, follies, and ineptitudes’ of these pieces for The Hornet. ‘I did not know even enough to understand that what was torturing me was the guilt and shame which attend ignorance and incompetence.’ But his shame proceeded less from their demerits than from the deception of ghost writing. He had arrived in London determined never to act on second-hand principles or submit to external circumstances. But in his first encounter he found himself in a conspiracy that formed part of the polite fraud he was attempting to demolish. It felt like a step back into cowardice.
By May 1877 the editor of The Hornet believed he had uncovered the truth. ‘I have frequently rec’d “copy” palpably not your style,’ he complained to Lee, ‘but that in composition, idea and writing of a Lady.’ By September, all was over. ‘I must tell you candidly that our agreement is not being kept by you,’ the editor told Lee. ‘I stipulated for your production and not that of a Substitute. I can’t insert the class of writing I have rec’d the last 2 weeks... Please send word to your man to send no more copy.’ Shaw’s last sting was delivered on 26 September 1877 when Lee was in Scotland. Two years later he reviewed the episode that had made him so miserable: ‘I threw up my studies, and set to work to reform the musical profession. At the end of a year my friend [Lee] was one of the most unpopular men in London, the paper was getting into difficulties, and complications were arising from the proprietor’s doubts as to a critic who was not only very severe, but capable of being in two places at the same time.’
*
Lee’s faltering career, Shaw believed, ‘disguised as it was by a few years of fashionable success, was due wholly to the social conditions which compelled him to be a humbug or to starve’. In order to keep going, he advertised himself as being able to make fashionable ladies sing like Patti in twelve lessons. To Bessie, Lee had been ‘the sole apostle of The Method: the only true and perfect method of singing: the method that had made her a singer and preserved the purity of her voice in defiance of time’. She knew that the Method required two years of patient practice. The ‘moment she found that he had abandoned “the method”,’ Shaw wrote, ‘...she gave him up’.
Shaw gave as the particular cause for breaking with Lee, a sexual sentimentality which, ripening in London, had turned towards Lucy. ‘My sister, to whom this new attitude was as odious as it was surprising, immediately dropped him completely... He came no more to our house; and as far as I can recollect neither my mother nor my sister ever saw him again.’
To G.B.S., this sexual sentimentality and the economic perversion of his musical talent were symptoms of the same disease. He invented a new Lee, an English Hyde who emerged from the Irish Jekyll. Lee was, he tells us, ‘no longer the same man’. He was unrecognizable. ‘G. J. Lee, with the black whiskers and the clean shaven resolute lip and chin, became Vandeleur Lee, whiskerless, but with a waxed and pointed moustache and an obsequious attitude.’ So the Dublin genius collapses into a London humbug. Lee is the victim of a pantomime with Capitalism its bad fairy.
Lucy quickly escaped. She turned professional in 1879 and five years later joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company. For her mother, now nearing fifty, it was less easy. Though she ‘despised’ Lee, it is impossible to know in what measure her contempt was emotional, financial or moral. Her son makes it exclusively a matter of musical principle. But the language he uses carries other suggestions. ‘The result was almost a worse disillusion than her marriage... that Lee should be unfaithful! unfaithful to the Method!... with all the virtue gone out of him: this was the end of all things; and she never forgave it.’
A symbol of Lee’s days of vanity in London was his smart Park Lane house. Number 13 Park Lane lay at the less fashionable end of a street ‘sacred to peers and millionaires’. It was half a house (part of number 14) and, because of a murder committed there two years before Lee moved in, less expensive than Shaw imagined. Here, Lee organized a few charity concerts and performances of amateur opera, and it was at one of these that the Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, making some sketches of the Shaws and what G.B.S. was to describe as their ‘damaged Svengali’, conceived his idea for Trilby. When, in 1895, du Maurier’s novel was adapted for the stage, Shaw was to write:
‘Svengali is not a villain, but only a poor egotistical wretch who provokes people to pull his nose... Imagine, above all, Svengali taken seriously at his own foolish valuation, blazed upon with limelights, spreading himself intolerably over the whole play with nothing fresh to add to the first five minutes of him – Svengali defying heaven, declaring that henceforth he is his own God, and then tumbling down in a paroxysm of heart disease (the blasphemer rebuked, you see), and having to be revived by draughts of brandy... surely even the public would just as soon – nay, rather – have the original Svengali, the luckless artist-cad (a very deplorable type of cad, whom Mr du Maurier has hit off to the life).’
Shaw was to try his own hand at creating such a figure in The Doctor’s Dilemma.
By the time Shaw finished with The Hornet, his mother had left Park Lane and, appropriating ‘the Method’ (much as Eliza Doolittle threatens to make off with Professor Higgins’s speech methods), set herself up as a private singing teacher. But Shaw ‘remained on friendly terms’ with Lee, playing the piano at some of his rehearsals and saving him the cost of a professional accompanist. Once or twice he even sang. Those smart people who had taken Lee up on his arrival in London had moved on to newer sensations, and his later recruits were less exalted. Shaw, who had begun by playing Mozart, ended by rehearsing the Solicitor in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience.
Lee continued living with ‘the young lady who had rescued him from entire loneliness’, renting his rooms to bachelors and the music chamber for dubious supper parties. He kept in touch with Shaw, offering him odd jobs as répétiteur for the occasional lady who wished ‘to try over her songs’ and asking him to draw up a Prospectus on ‘How to Cure Clergyman’s Sore Throat’. On the evening of 27 November 1886, while putting his arm through the sleeve of his nightshirt, he dropped dead.
On the morning of the inquest, three days later, one of Lee’s musical group told Lucy the news and she passed it on to her brother. Next day, 1 December, he called at 13 Park Lane to verify the report. ‘Heard from servant,’ he noted in his diary, ‘that he was found dead of heart disease on Sunday morning. Went back home to tell Mother...’ At the inquest on 30 November the jury returned a verdict of death by natural causes. Shaw, who had not gone to this inquest, adds that it ‘revealed the fact that his brain was diseased and had been so for a long time’. Neither the newspaper reports nor the death certificate (‘Angina Pectoris. Found dead on floor’) corroborate this statement which nevertheless enabled Shaw to comfort himself that the mischief converting Lee from Jekyll to Hyde had begun its work years before. ‘I was glad to learn that his decay was pathological as well as ecological,’ he concluded, ‘and that the old efficient and honest Lee had been real after all.’
What inexpensive pleasure can be greater than that of strolling through London of an evening, and reconstructing it in imagination?... you make Notting Hill low and exalt Maida-vale by carting the one to the other... you extend the embankment from Blackfriars to the Tower as an eligible nocturnal promenade... you build an underground London in the bowels of the metropolis, and an overhead London piercing the fog curtain above on viaducts, with another and another atop of these, until you have piled up, six cities deep, to Alpine altitudes with a different climate at each level... For purposes of transit you will devise a system of pneumatic tubes, through which passengers, previously treated by experienced dentists with nitrous oxide, can be blown from Kensington to Mile-end in a breath... What a London that would be!
‘Ideal London’, Pall Mall Gazette (5 October 1886)
Having escaped from Dublin, Shaw expected to find things ordered differently in London. Oscar Wilde who, though he had visited London before, came to live there two years later, was to inhale an air ‘full of the heavy odour of roses... the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delectable perfume of the pink flowering thorn’. The parks and gardens, squares and palisades sprouted their green between the seasoned brick and wedding-cake stucco of the West End where Wilde sauntered. But Wilde had come from respectable Merrion Square via Oxford to Mayfair and did not see the ill-smelling London Shaw was getting to know – a London of primitive streets with clinging red mud, miserably treated animals, and a sullen population storming the pubs at nightfall. Below the prim pattern of bourgeois life that Wilde was so delightfully to shock lay a vast reservoir of squalor and brutality. Drury Lane, the charming ambience of Pygmalion, was a derelict area until 1900, the territory of men and women in tatters, who crawled the streets like animals.
‘Shelley... described Hell as “a city much like London”. Dickens, who knew London, depicted it as full of strange monsters, Merdles, Veneerings, Finches of the Grove, Barnacles, Marshalseas indigenous to the Borough but cropping up sporadically among the monuments of Rome and Venice: all dreadfully answering to things that we know to be there, and yet cannot believe in without confusion and terror. How pleasant it is to shrink back to the genial Thackeray, who knew comparatively nothing about London, but just saw the fun of the little sets of ideas current in Russell and Bryanston-squares, Pall-mall, Fleet-street, and the art academies in Newman-street.’
The economics of London were to turn Shaw into a socialist. No new planning, he believed, could be achieved without a change of attitude in the country. ‘The problem, unfortunately, is not one of realignment and patent dwellings,’ he wrote in 1886:
‘It is one of the development of individual greed into civic spirit; of the extension of the laissez-faire principle to public as well as private enterprise; of bringing all the citizens to a common date in civilization instead of maintaining a savage class, a mediaeval class, a renaissance class, and an Augustan class, with a few nineteenth-century superior persons to fix high-water mark... we must be content with the... periodical washing of the Albert Memorial... until London belongs to, and is governed by, the people who use it.’
*
Number 13 Victoria Grove stood on the east side of a cul-de-sac off the Brompton Road. The houses were semi-detached, with tiny gardens, and they occupied, along with those in a number of parallel groves, a countrified area, still with plenty of orchard and market garden, between Fulham and Putney. Here, for two years after The Hornet, Shaw did little but write short stories, literary reviews, articles, essays. It was ‘mere brute practice with the pen... as a laborer digs or a carpenter planes’.
By February 1878 he was at work on a profane Passion Play in blank verse ‘with the mother of the hero represented as a termagant’. Judas and Jesus in this play represent two sides of Shaw. Judas is
a man unblinded
And trained to shun the snare of self delusion
who sees in his corrupt surroundings a ‘beastly world’. Jesus, who looks towards an invisible future, embodies hope. In the combination of the two, Shaw argues, the observer and the man of imagination, we reach reality. Judas’s advice to the young Jesus is the lesson Shaw himself was endeavouring to master:
Then must thou
Learn to stand absolutely by thyself,
Leaning on nothing, satisfied that thou
Can’st nothing know, responsible to nothing,
Fearing no power and being within thyself
A little independent universe.
After forty-nine pages – 1,260 lines – the play breaks off in the second scene of Act II. Across one abandoned passage he wrote: ‘Vile Stuff.’ Fifty-five years later, in his Preface to On the Rocks, he explained that a modern Passion Play was impossible because ‘the trial of a dumb prisoner, at which the judge who puts the crucial question to him remains unanswered, cannot be dramatized unless the judge is to be the hero of the play... If ever there was a full dress debate for the forensic championship to be looked forward to with excited confidence by the disciples of the challenged expert it was his trial of Christ. Yet their champion put up no fight.’
Also finished in February 1878 was My Dear Dorothea, a didactic pamphlet modelled on George Augustus Sala’s squib Lady Chesterfield’s Letters to Her Daughter, which Shaw had read the previous year. He subtitled his work: ‘A Practical System of Moral Education for Females Embodied in a Letter to a Young Person of that Sex’. Much of the advice (including a warning against taking advice) would later become familiar furniture of Shavian philosophy: never be peevishly self-sacrificing; arm yourself with politeness which is a mark of superiority over unpleasant people; cultivate hypocrisy with others for kindness’ sake, but never with yourself; read anything except what bores you; leave religion alone until you’ve grown up; get into mischief, but do not look for pity. Finally: ‘Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody.’
The most closely autobiographical passages refer to Dorothea’s mother:
‘If your mother is always kind to you, love her more than you love anything except your doll... If you had indeed such a mother, my dear Dorothea, you would not need my advice at all. But I must not forget how seldom little girls have such guardians; and I will therefore take it for granted that your mother... thinks of you only as a troublesome and inquisitive little creature...
For such a parent, you must be particularly careful not to form any warm affection. Be very friendly with her, because you are in the same house as she, and it is unpleasant to live with one whom you dislike. If you have any griefs, do not tell her of them. Keep them to yourself if possible... You will soon be sent to school, and so get rid of her.’
Shaw’s advice was a prescription against suffering. ‘It is a most illuminating and sorrowful self-portrait,’ Stevie Smith was to write, ‘...because it shows that Shaw was as proud as the devil and put pride in the place of love. And why should a bright creature of such mercurial wits and fighting frenzies so limit himself if not for fear?... every now and then the heart limps in, but he is ashamed of it and begins to bluster.’
In March 1879 he began a novel called, ‘with merciless fitness’, Immaturity. ‘As I could not afford a typewriter nor a secretary, I had to write directly and legibly for the printer with my own hand.’ Five novels and part of a sixth he got through in this way. His handwriting, neat and spindly, sloping slightly backwards, is that of the chief cashier of Uniacke Townshend. He condemned himself to a daily reckoning of five pages – and so scrupulously that if his fifth page ended in the middle of a sentence he did not finish it until the next day. ‘I have drudged year after year until I have very little patience left for anything but work,’ says one of the characters, ‘...it is the holding on day after day only a hair’s breadth from failure.’
Immaturity was his ‘first attempt at a big book’. The character of Robert Smith is Shaw himself at twenty with ‘the culture that is given by loneliness and literature’. Unable to make contact with other people, Smith polishes his isolation to a virtue. His infatuation with a ballet dancer, releasing energy to be used for work, illustrates Shaw’s susceptibility to women and his determination not to let them occupy his mind. Mlle Bernadina de Sangallo, as she is called in this first draft, takes her dreamlike existence from Ermina Pertoldi, a dancer whom Shaw used to see at the Alhambra and who filled his night thoughts.
Like Smith, Shaw sometimes ‘relapsed into that painful yearning which men cherish gloomily at eighteen, and systematically stave off as a nuisance... in later years’. Work, with which Shaw began to stave off this nuisance, becomes the hero of Immaturity. ‘What is there to live for but work?’ asks Cyril Scott, an artist modelled on the landscape painter Cyril Lawson. ‘Everything else ends in disappointment. It’s the only thing that you never get tired of, and that always comes to good.’
Shaw allows another worthy end: marriage. ‘There is no gratification which a woman can afford you, that will not be sweeter when that woman is not your wife, except the possession of boys and girls to continue the record when you are in your coffin. Therefore marry the woman who will bring you the finest children, and who will be the best mother to them; and you will never find out that you might have done better elsewhere.’
Since hereditary factors are incalculable, Shaw places his bet on sexual instinct. In the debate he sets up between common sense and romance, it is common sense that is seen to lack courage, and romance, arguing against ‘the folly of prudent marriages’, that triumphs. ‘The chief objection to fictitious romance,’ he writes elsewhere in Immaturity, ‘is that it is seldom so romantic as the truth.’
Smith is repeatedly accused, as Shaw was to be, of matter-of-factness. ‘You are really very matter-of-fact, Mr Smith. You rub the gloss off everything.’ It is this artificial gloss, reflected by the fashionable poet Hawkshaw (a sort of Shaw gone wrong who owes something to Oscar Wilde) that he dislikes. ‘Matter-of-fact people are a great nuisance,’ Smith concedes, ‘and always will be, so long as they are in the minority.’ The implication is that the days of Hawkshaw are numbered. He has not strength enough to resist the applause of a society that is, below its glossy surface, uncaring and uncomprehending. It is society that is the villain of the novel.
In this ‘book of a raw youth’, there is the outline of a Shaw who existed before his conversion into the fantastic personality of G.B.S. Like Hawkshaw, he was to take on a public gloss. But whereas Hawkshaw acquired his gloss from the caressing of society, the brilliant Shavian creature that emerged and flew away from the chrysalis of Smith wanted to outshine society and lead us to another place ruled over by ‘one of my most successful fictions’. Like the ‘Vandeleur Lee’ who developed from G. J. Lee, ‘G.B.S.’ was a manufactured identity: not a victim of capitalist society – a weapon to be used against it.
*
Shaw finished Immaturity on 28 September 1879 and completed his revisions six weeks later. It was now a question, in the words of his father, of ‘thrusting it down the throats of some of the publishers and so getting it into the hands of the mob’. On 7 November Shaw called on Hurst & Blackett and the following day sent them the manuscript. Next week they declined it.
Of his disappointment he showed nothing. At Victoria Grove he was reproached with laziness – his father in Dublin adding to the chorus and, to George’s exasperation, obtaining a testimonial from Uniacke Townshend. Now and then he had gone half-heartedly out to look for work – for example, after an introduction by the poet Richard Hengist Horne, to the Imperial Bank at South Kensington. ‘Your son must not talk about religion or give his views thereon,’ Horne warned Mrs Shaw, ‘& he must make up his mind to work & do what he is told – if not there is no use his calling.’ In such circumstances it was not difficult to avoid employment. But as the pressure from his family tightened he was driven to more elaborate means of escape, and eventually these failed him. From his cousin Mrs Cashel Hoey he had received an introduction to the manager of the Edison Telephone Company, Arnold White, to whom on 5 October 1879, while still revising Immaturity, he wrote the sort of devastatingly honest letter he could usually rely on to extricate himself:
‘In the last two years I have not filled any post, nor have I been doing anything specially calculated to qualify me for a business one...
My only reason for seeking commercial employment is a pecuniary one. I know how to wait for success in literature, but I do not know how to live on air in the interim. My family are in difficulties... However, I should be loth to press you for a place in which I might not be the right man.’
Arnold White, who liked Shaw, was not put off by this letter and offered him employment in the Way-Leave Department of the Edison Telephone Company. Shaw began working there on 14 November, immediately following the rejection of Immaturity. After six weeks he had earned two shillings and sixpence, and forfeited by way of expenses two guineas, having agreed to be paid on a commission basis. His job was to persuade people in the East End of London to allow insulators, poles and derricks to bristle about their roofs and gardens. ‘I liked the exploration involved,’ he remembered, ‘but my shyness made the business of calling on strangers frightfully uncongenial... the impatient rebuffs I had to endure [were]... ridiculously painful to me.’
The truth appeared to be that he could not afford regular employment: ‘I am under an absolute necessity to discontinue my services forthwith,’ he told the head of his department. As a result of this threatened resignation he was given a basic wage of £48 (equivalent to £2,080 in 1997) a year and, two months later, promoted at a salary of £80, to be head of the department and ‘organize the work of more thick-skinned adventurers instead of doing it myself’. He was now stationed in one of the basement offices of a building in Queen Victoria Street, loud with Americans who all adored Mr Edison, execrated his rival Mr Bell, worked with a terrible energy out of all proportion to the results achieved, and dreamed emotionally of telephone transmitters patented to their own formula.
Shaw waited patiently for his novel to rescue him. But Immaturity was rejected by every British and American publisher to whom he sent it. Sampson Low begged to be spared the pleasure of reading it. ‘No,’ wrote George Meredith for Chapman & Hall; ‘unattractive’, decided John Morley at Macmillan. Immaturity was ‘a museum specimen of the Victorian novel,’ Shaw later decided, which had been written at the wrong time.
‘The Education Act of 1871 was producing readers who had never before bought books... and publishers were finding that these people wanted not George Eliot and the excessively literary novice Bernard Shaw, but such crude tales of impossible adventures published in penny numbers only for schoolboys. The success of Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde fairy tale, forced this change on the attention of the publishers; and I, as a belated intellectual, went under completely... Had I understood this situation at the time I should have been a happier novice instead of an apparently hopeless failure.’
The progress of the world depends on the people who refuse to accept facts and insist on the satisfaction of their instincts.
Back to Methuselah
Something was wrong with the Edison telephone: it ‘bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion,’ Shaw wrote. ‘This was not what the British stockbroker wanted...’ On 5 June 1880 the Company amalgamated with the Bell Telephone Company and gave its employees one month’s notice. Shaw, turning down an invitation to apply for a job with the new United Telephone Company of London, re-entered the literary world.
Immaturity was to lie ‘dumb and forgotten’ for fifty years; the Passion Play and My Dear Dorothea remained unpublished during Shaw’s life. Of more than a dozen other stories and articles he had written in 1879 on ‘subjects ranging from orchestral conducting to oakum picking’ most were rejected, some were lost. The two that were eventually published earned him fifteen shillings. In the summer of 1880 he approached John Morley, the new editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, enclosing some examples of his work and asking whether he might make a music or theatre critic. ‘I cannot hesitate to say,’ Morley answered, ‘that in my opinion you would do well to get out of journalism.’ Describing this period later on, G.B.S. wrote:
‘I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father’s old age: I hung on to his coat tails... People wondered at my heartlessness... My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers: therefore take off your hat to her, and blush.’
Despite the failure of Immaturity, a career in novels seemed the only one open to him. Everyone wrote novels in the 1880s. Drama, economics, philosophy were unsaleable. He began to teach himself shorthand; he studied harmony and counterpoint; he persuaded his mother to train his voice by ‘the Method’ until he could sing ‘as well as a man without twopennorth of physical endowment can be made to sing’; he persisted in playing the piano; he read greedily and, worst of all, he wrote.
He started on his second novel that summer, marching through it at the rate of a thousand words each day. ‘The only test of competence is acceptance for publication,’ he later wrote: ‘friendly opinions are of no use.’ But every opinion seemed unfriendly. His father was constantly fretting at him to find ‘something to do to earn some money. It is much wanted by all of us.’ Mrs Shaw unsuccessfully sought interviews for him; and Lucy, having failed to get their mother to turn George out of the house, had persuaded McNulty (as the only person likely to have influence) to write imploring him to take a job. Though sweet on Lucy, McNulty felt uneasy over this commission which put an end to their correspondence for nine months.
Shaw deafened himself to everything, wrote steadily, using some of his experiences at the Edison Telephone Company and some retaliatory observations of Lucy, and finished the novel which he called The Irrational Knot on 1 December 1880.
The inventor-engineer hero of this book, Ned Conolly, is not a self-portrait in the sense that Smith had been, but he embodies much that Shaw had learnt to admire since coming to London, and expresses many of his newest ideas. As a workman, a man of talent and integrity, Conolly opposes the perpetual falsehood of London society. ‘You seem to see everything reversed,’ one character tells him; and another, a clergyman, describes his opinions as being ‘exactly upside down’. In sympathy with this upside-down view, Shaw inverts the conventional plot of the Victorian novel by having his heroine marry Conolly near the start and lose him at the end of the book.
Conolly is one of Nature’s gentlemen, recognizing excellence by achievement, never by rank. The story throws up almost every situation that could shock society, from illegitimacy and alcoholic marriages to adultery and death. Aiming his attack on the ‘villainous institution’ of marriage, Shaw later described The Irrational Knot as having been ‘an early attempt... to write A Doll’s House in English’. In a deceitfully conducted world, it is the half-dead who flourish: men like tailors’ dummies, and women like dolls to be gaped at in glass cages. Conolly will not accept such fashionable deception even if it means giving up a woman who sexually attracts him.
Shaw spent a fortnight revising the 641 ‘prodigiously long’ pages of the novel. On 15 December 1880 he sent the manuscript to Macmillan whose reader reported that it was ‘a novel of the most disagreeable kind... There is nothing conventional either about the structure or the style... the thought of the book is all wrong; the whole idea of it is odd, perverse and crude... So far as your publication is concerned, it is out of the question. There is too much of adultery and the like matters.’
‘The better I wrote,’ Shaw concluded, ‘the less chance I had.’ As an extreme measure, Shaw eventually sent The Irrational Knot to an American publisher ‘who refused it on the ground of its immorality’. British publishers took a more sophisticated line. Smith Elder regretted that a book ‘possessing considerable literary merit’ was ‘too conversational’; William Heinemann not only declined to publish it but advised the author not to submit it to anyone else: ‘the hero is a machine like working man without any attractive qualities – an absolutely impossible person too.’ Shaw agreed, in his fashion. Reviewing his novels himself in 1892 – a need arising ‘through the extreme difficulty of finding anyone else who has read them’ – he wrote of The Irrational Knot: ‘This was really an extraordinary book for a youth of twenty-four to write; but, from the point of view of the people who think that an author has nothing better to do than to amuse them, it was a failure...’
What people call health – appetite, weight, beefiness – is a mistake. Fragility is the only endurable condition.
Shaw to Charlotte Payne-Townshend (4 April 1898)
On 23 December 1880, a week after The Irrational Knot had been sent to Macmillan, the Shaws moved out of Victoria Grove to an unfurnished apartment on the second floor of 37 Fitzroy Street.
The advantage for George was its proximity to the British Museum. He had recently started to use the Reading Room, and now began going there regularly. Here, in what Gissing called ‘the Valley of the Shadow of Books’, he found a home. It became his club, his university, a refuge, and the centre of his life. He felt closer to strangers in this place than to his own family. He worked here daily for some eight years, applying for more than three hundred books each year, advancing through the Encyclopaedia Britannica, medical and municipal statistics for future articles, writing lectures and letters to the press, adding to his musical knowledge and completing his long literary apprenticeship. ‘My debt to that great institution... is inestimable.’
It was partly as a result of his reading that in January 1881 he became a vegetarian. Shelley had first ‘opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet,’ he recorded.
Never again may blood of bird or beast
Stain with its venomous stream a human feast!
While investigating the art of eating out cheaply, Shaw came across a number of the inexpensive vegetarian restaurants that had recently opened. During his first five years in London he had grown ‘tired of beef and mutton, the steam and grease, the waiter looking as though he had been caught in a shower of gravy and not properly dried, the beer, the prevailing redness of nose, and the reek of the slaughter-house that convicted us all of being beasts of prey. I fled to the purer air of the vegetarian restaurant.’
Shaw hoped that vegetarian food might relieve the severe headaches that had started to attack him each month. In one sense, vegetarianism came easily to him. A symptom of his neglect in Ireland had been the poor diet; the only food he had liked was the stoneground bread which his mother had occasionally buttered for him. To reject all this – the evidence of his own rejection – was no hardship. ‘I am no gourmet,’ he wrote: ‘eating is not a pleasure to me, only a troublesome necessity, like dressing or undressing.’ He looked forward to a time when people would subsist on an ecstatic diet of air and water. This was Shaw’s ambrosia, and the food of his gods.
‘If I were to eat it [meat], my evacuations would stink; and I should give myself up for dead,’ he wrote in the last year of his life. Too little, he felt, was made of the fact that a frightened animal, terrified by smelling blood and seeing other animals killed in the slaughterhouse, stank. The flesh of such an animal, Shaw suggested, was tainted with poison and to eat it involved abusing the adaptiveness of the digestive system.
The sense of being a living grave for murdered animals filled him with repugnance. Part of this horror arose from the kinship he felt for animals – a fellow-feeling reinforced by the argument of Darwin and other naturalists establishing man’s connection with animals. After which the practice of meat-eating became ‘cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted’.
Having found from his experiments in the side-street restaurants round Bloomsbury that he could make a financial saving from putting his principles into practice, he went on to recommend vegetarianism as a means of world economy. ‘My objection to meat is that it costs too much,’ he wrote many years later, ‘and involves the slavery of men and women to edible animals that is undesirable.’ His campaign was to be an example of his dialectical skill.
Abstinence from dead bodies did not necessarily produce longevity, he argued, but affected the quality of living. He reminded those Englishmen in whom the superstition persisted that ‘by eating a beefsteak he can acquire the strength and courage of the bull’, that the bull (like an elephant) was vegetarian. He was sensitive to a need for scotching the popular myth that vegetarians were effeminate. Abstention from meat eating ‘seems to produce a peculiar ferocity,’ he noted. ‘...And it is the worst form of ferocity: that is, virtuous indignation.’ All his life he promoted vegetarians as the most pugnacious of people: ‘Hitler, they say, was a vegetarian; and I can well believe it.’
G.B.S. had an air of knowing what was best for people. He calculated that, when the unappetizing truth was coated with Shavian sauce, it would go down a treat. So we often get from him fewer statements of truth than statements designed to hoodwink us into the truth. In private he could write: ‘I am a vegetarian purely on humanitarian and mystical grounds; and I have never killed a flea or a mouse vindictively or without remorse.’ This was the essential Shaw. But G.B.S. became the most unsentimental of vegetarians. ‘He has no objection to the slaughter of animals as such,’ his printed card on Vegetarian Diet reads. ‘He knows that if we do not kill animals they will kill us... But he urges humane killing and does not enjoy it as a sport.’
From the nitrogenous point of view, and in line with Swift’s modest proposal for the Irish, he saw no objection to a diet of tender babies, carefully selected, cleanly killed and gently roasted. Eaten with sugar, or a little beer, such a dish would, he estimated, leave nothing to be desired in the way of carbon, but: ‘I prefer bread and butter.’ If eating people was wrong, so was eating pigs. Bringing millions of disagreeable animals into existence expressly to kill, scorch and ingest their bodies was a monstrous practice which made our children callous to butchery and bloodshed.
Shaw needed courage to insist on his new diet in these early years. Usually it was wiser not to tell anyone he was vegetarian; otherwise he would be confronted with alarming quantities of breadcrumb preparations. At home he ate those vegetables the others took with their fish or meat. Some mornings a housemaid deposited among his books and papers a bowl of glue-like porridge and this often remained there for days while Shaw occasionally spooned a sticky mouthful or two. When travelling, he liked to carry lunch with him, diving his hands into his pockets and coming up with a fistful of almonds and raisins. He enjoyed advising vegetarians to avoid as much as possible all vegetables – particularly asparagus which gave one’s urine a disagreeable smell – but it was impossible in England to do without potatoes and brussels sprouts. The vegetarian foods, with names ending in -ose, which were variously disguised forms of oil cake, revolted him; but he liked cheese and fruit, tolerated omelettes for many years, and developed an increasingly sweet tooth for chocolate biscuits, fruit cake, honey, even heaped spoonfuls of sugar.
He drank water, soda water, barley water, an innocent beverage named Instant Postum, ginger beer, milk, cocoa, and ‘I dont refuse chocolate in the afternoon when I can get it’. But no tea, ‘however mediocre’, very little coffee and never alcohol. He had been watching the effect of alcohol with the eye of an expert. ‘My father drank too much. I have worked too much.’ It was probably as much a weakness in his character, he later acknowledged, as a strength that compelled him to be such a strenuous teetotaller. But that was not the point. Reviewing his first nine years in London – ‘years of unbroken failure and rebuff, with crises of broken boots and desperate clothes... penniless, loveless, and hard as nails’ – he concluded that ‘I am quite certain that if I had drunk as much as a single glass of beer a day... my powers of endurance would have been enormously diminished’.
Characteristically, he was to ridicule prohibition, assert that ‘tea does more harm in the world than beer’, buy shares in a municipal public house and eventually advocate the Russian method of piping vodka (‘a comparatively mild poison’) into society under efficient government control.
Shaw’s attitude to drink recalls Dr Johnson’s dictum that ‘Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.’ In his copy of Bunyan’s The Life and Death of Mr Badman, Shaw wrote: ‘Living is so painful for the poor that it cannot be endured without an anaesthetic.’ He saw drunkenness as a symptom of the malignant disease called poverty. To his mind alcohol was a trick, a depressant in the disguise of a stimulant, falsely associated (like corpse-eating) with virility. Drink seldom propelled us into melodramatic ruin and madness; it was a chloroform that lowered our self-criticism and self-respect.
Shaw needed self-respect to withstand the low esteem in which he was held among publishers and at home. Perhaps the new diet he shared with saints and sages would help to change him into a different person. ‘The odd thing about being a vegetarian is, not that the things that happen to other people don’t happen to me – they all do – but that they happen differently: pain is different, pleasure different, fever different, cold different, even love different.’
Think of my circumstances and prospects getting worse and worse until they culminated in smallpox next year (81) when I forced ‘Love Among the Artists’ out of myself.
Shaw to Charlotte Payne-Townshend (1 April 1898)
Each day he read at the British Museum and as an extra form of language tuition sang in French three nights a week with a basso profundo called Richard Deck in his single room off the Camden Road. He felt peculiarly fond of Deck and, following his death in the autumn of 1882, remembered him as ‘a remarkable man, offering me advice concerning pronunciation, directing my attention to the aim of gymnastics... and introducing me to the ideas of Proudhon’.
On 19 May he started a new novel. He had been at work on this for about a week when he began to feel ill. In the belief that he was spending too much time indoors, he prescribed for himself a number of rides round London on the top of omnibuses. A few days later he discovered he had smallpox.
Smallpox was then one of the most dreaded diseases in Western Europe partly because ‘the bad cases were so disfiguring, and partly because the increase of population produced by the industrial revolution, and the insanitary conditions in which the new proletariat lived, had made it much commoner and more virulent’. In 1853 Parliament had made compulsory the vaccination of every child in Britain within three months of birth. Sonny had been vaccinated in infancy and the vaccination had taken well. This form of vaccination (which in 1898 was to be banned) meant the injection of cowpox matter from the pustule of a diseased cow or the diseased substance from the inflamed arm of a recently vaccinated person. Shaw makes little reference to his illness except to say that he emerged from it a convinced anti-vaccinationist.
Once, when his mother had been seriously ill in Dublin, Shaw recounts, Lee had taken ‘her case in hand unhesitatingly and at the end of a week or so gave my trembling father leave to call in a leading Dublin doctor, who simply said “My work is done” and took his hat’. From this Shaw learnt a lesson he continued to apply. Lee’s prescription had been fresh air, extreme cleanliness and a good diet, and these became for him the ingredients of political good health: ‘it is now as plain as the sun in the heavens,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘that pathogenic microbes are products of the zymotic diseases; and that these diseases are products of ugliness, dirt and stink offending every aesthetic instinct... that dirt and squalor and ugliness are products of poverty; and that... zymotic diseases can be abolished by abolishing poverty, the practical problem being one of economic distribution.’
‘You have been vaccinated in your infancy,’ a friend wrote, ‘so ought if the doctors are to be believed, to have nothing to fear.’ But were they to be believed? Or were they to be feared? It was less his helplessness as a smallpox patient that Shaw hated than the unpleasantness of the disease itself into which, he felt, he had been medically tricked.
Shaw externalized Evil. In his world there were no evil men and women except the insane; but there were evil circumstances which he could identify, attack and eliminate. Vaccination let the enemy in and allowed evil to circulate within the body. The method of inoculating children with casual dirt moistened with an undefined pathogenic substance obtained from calves impressed Shaw as being morally insane. His sense of contamination became part of his socialist dogma and a warning against substituting faith in an experimental prophylaxis for a full-scale sanitation programme ensuring good conditions of public health.
After three weeks confined to his room in Fitzroy Street, he went down to recuperate at Leyton in Essex with his uncle Walter Gurly who, having married an English widow during one of his trips to the United States, was living a life of precarious respectability as a country physician near Epping Forest.
Shaw was left with a scar on his right cheek. Whether the disfigurement was slight or he merely made light of it, he felt extremely sensitive. ‘I was sorry to hear of your illness,’ Aileen Bell wrote to him, ‘and the idea of your telling Mrs Horne not to describe your personal appearance – as if I should like you the less...’
‘I have a rather remarkable chin and would like to let the public see it; but I never had time to shave.’ This joke, and several others on similar lines, covered up the initial motive for the beard which was to hide his sensitivity. It became exactly the right beard – a good red socialist affair and vastly conspicuous. Few people who had their attention arrested by this irrepressible flag waving at the head of the Shavian talking-machine, would have known that G.B.S. was publicly concealing something.
Shaw represented himself as the passive partner to his beard: he simply followed it wherever it went. So bewitched had he been with the figure of Mephistopheles that ‘when Nature completed my countenance in 1880 or thereabouts... I found myself equipped with the upgrowing moustaches and eyebrows, and the sarcastic nostrils of the operatic fiend whose airs (by Gounod) I had sung as a child, and whose attitudes I had affected in my boyhood’. There could be few better examples of G.B.S.’s beard doing the talking.
‘Like a Victorian matron I experimented with my brushes and comb.’ The face that he designed for himself was startling. ‘It is the face of an outlaw,’ wrote one woman; ‘it is full of protest: wild and determined, a very brigand of a face.’ Another woman, observing him among the socialists at William Morris’s converted coach-house in Hammersmith, noted:
‘His face came out very distinctly in the unshaded light of the stable-room, and as he listened it seemed to me to be lit up not only by that outside light but also, and in a particular way, by some inner lamp, as if Morris’s words had lighted a candle of great and incandescent power within him. Shaw’s face that night burned itself in on me; I have never seen any face like it since... His pale skin, his hair that the light above it turned to gold, and his strong, gleaming teeth, made a picture that no one, I think, could ever forget.’
His taut body seemed wound up with energy, and his movements were rapid. He walked with long springy strides on the front of his feet. When seated he seemed to relax all over, huddling and stretching, sticking out his long legs then pulling them up to his chest as if embracing himself. In this position he chattered and swayed with laughter. Then he stood up, thin, erect, well-pleased with himself it appeared, the head upraised, body tilted back, beard pointed. The impression of this figure, combative and audacious, was often invaded by comedy. It was his comic spirit that, for all the Satanic twirls and flourishes, encouraged a friend to describe his face as an ‘unskilfully poached egg’, and enabled Shaw himself to write: ‘My own beard is so like a tuft of blanched grass that pet animals have nibbled at it.’
The private face shows itself in the novel, Love Among the Artists, he forced out of himself while at Leyton. Love among artists is different from love among other people, for artists love their work more than they love other people. Shaw’s novel plots social against artistic values. ‘I am in a worldly sense an unfortunate man,’ says Owen Jack, the hero-composer of the book, ‘though in my real life, heaven knows, a most happy and fortunate one.’ Jack defines worldly success as ‘the compensation of the man who has no genius’. Some men, he says, ‘begin by aiming high, and they have to wait till the world comes up to their level’. With such obiter dicta Shaw, giving a backward look at Lee’s failure, kept his confidence afloat.
Jack (who Shaw asks us to believe was based partly on Beethoven but who reflects something of Richard Deck and something of Vandeleur Lee), and the pianist Aurelie Szczymplica, are the two geniuses of Love Among the Artists, and they inhabit the classless world of music in which Shaw felt happiest.
Since marriage ‘kills the heart and keeps it dead’, it is better, Jack concludes, to ‘starve the heart than overfeed it. Better still to feed it on fine food, like music.’ Another character, Mrs Herbert, who owes something to Shaw’s mother, wonders if there is ‘any use in caring for one’s children? I really dont believe there is.’ The effect of such a mother on her children is described by her son (the blissfully unhappy husband of Aurelie Szczymplica) in a speech that reflects Shaw’s feelings about himself and Lucinda Elizabeth:
‘Can you understand that a mother and a son may be so different in their dispositions that neither can sympathize with the other? It is my great misfortune to be such a son... She is a clever woman, impatient of sentiment, and fond in her own way. My father, like myself, was too diffident to push himself arrogantly through the world; and she despised him for it, thinking him a fool. When she saw that I was like him, she concluded that I, too, was a fool, and that she must arrange my life for me in some easy, lucrative, genteel, brainless conventional way... She did not know how much her indifference tortured me, because she had no idea of any keener sensitiveness than her own... She taught me to do without her consideration; and I learned the lesson.’
Shaw came to believe that Love Among the Artists marked ‘a crisis in my progress as a thinker’. He had ‘come to the end of my Rationalism and Materialism’. This conversion has an air of paradox. The discovery of knowledge did not emerge at the end of reasoning and as a result of it, but occurred by instalments in the form of fiction, hypotheses or jokes – after which we set about finding reasons for it.
‘A man has his beliefs: his arguments are only his excuses for them. Granted that we both want to get to Waterloo Station: the question whether we shall drive across Westminster Bridge or Waterloo, or whether we shall walk across the Hungerford foot bridge, is a matter for our logic; but the destination is dogmatic. The province of reason is the discovery of the means to fulfil our wills; but our wills are beyond reason: we all will to live... we only see what we look at: our attention to our temperamental convictions produces complete oversight as to all the facts that tell against us.’
Shaw had returned to 37 Fitzroy Street in October and finished Love Among the Artists on 10 January 1882. ‘I have a much higher opinion of this work than is as yet generally entertained,’ he admitted. The eminent publisher’s reader, Edward Garnett, in a report for Fisher Unwin, advised against publishing the book if they could ‘get something else from the author’. Love Among the Artists, he wrote, deserved publication, but would probably fall flat with the general reader. ‘The literary art is sound, the people in it are real people, and the fresh unconventionality is pleasing after the ordinary work of the common novelist: but all the same – few people would understand it, & few papers would praise it.’ Garnett contrasted the novel with W. B. Yeats’s first book of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin, ‘which with certain faults shows a sense of colour & softness that betrays the artistic mind,’ he concluded. ‘There is a little genius in Yeats: there is an individuality of mind in Shaw’s work, but neither are likely to command much attention.’
While at Leyton, Shaw had finally taught himself Pitman’s Shorthand. This, ‘probably the worst system of shorthand ever invented’, suited him best, he decided, because Greg’s was known only in America and Sweet’s Current Shorthand had been made ‘illegible by anyone except himself’. Pitman himself was everything a man should be – a teetotaller and vegetarian, a radical well-whiskered man of business.
Shorthand enabled Shaw to intensify his programme of self-education at the British Museum and to write at a speed that kept pace with his thoughts. It also raised the family’s hopes of his employment. While Love Among the Artists was being returned to him by the London publishers, Shaw proposed himself for the job of preparing the work of another unpublished novelist, Ethel Southam, who had advertised for a copyist. From Shaw she received many hundreds of words of advice about punctuation, the use of prepositions, and avoidance of adjectives – after which the partnership collapsed and G.B.S. was deprived of the amusement of pointing to a ghost-written collaboration as his first book.
Pressed again by his family, he read the advertisement columns and applied for employment as secretary to the Smoke Abatement Institute and as secretary to the Thames Subway Committee. He was careful not to conceal his politics (‘those of an atheistic radical’), his lack of university education, mathematical and linguistic inabilities (‘no German whatsoever’), and experience as secretary or shorthand clerk (‘I can write longhand rapidly – in fact more rapidly than I can yet write shorthand’).
On 12 April 1882 he began his fourth novel.
Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man in a thousand have I found; but a woman among all these have I not found.
Ecclesiastes vii.28
In a notebook he kept during his first six or seven years in London, Shaw copied down this passage. He described himself at this period as ‘a complete outsider’. During his convalescence from smallpox, he had even thought of emigrating to the United States where his friend Chichester Bell was going. The bleakness of these years grew so unbearable that he afterwards translated it into a hatred of his novels.
Though the place was full of culture, London society contrived to get along on an intellectual diet of sport, party politics, fashion and travel. It seemed as if a mighty harvest had left the soil sterile. In Dublin the professions had formed the aristocracy, and without any great income and no experience of horses or guns, one could enjoy the best company without the taint of social inferiority. In London there were different rules and far greater importance was attached to money. ‘The real superiority of the English to the Irish,’ Shaw was to write, ‘lies in the fact that an Englishman will do anything for money and an Irishman will do nothing for it.’ But this was a later discovery to which, since for the time being he had no money, ‘I had to blind myself’. There were times when he longed for people to blind themselves to him. He was a scarecrow catapulting himself along the streets with a professional habit of cheerfulness, but in broken boots, a tall hat so limp he wore it back to front to avoid doubling the brim when raising it, cuffs whose margins had been refined with his mother’s scissors, trousers whose holes were hidden by a tailed coat fading from black to green. He was an example of poverty. ‘It is my practice to make a suit of clothes last me six years,’ he explained. ‘The result is that my clothes acquire individuality, and become characteristic of me. The sleeves and legs cease to be mere tailor-made tubes; they take human shape with knees and elbows recognizably mine. When my friends catch sight of one of my suits hanging on a nail, they pull out their penknives and rush forward, exclaiming, “Good Heavens! he has done it at last.”’
His plight was so glaring that people hinted they were good for loans. But he never borrowed, having no reason for believing he could repay them. He was conscious of the charm of his conversation if it never led to a request for five shillings. ‘When you borrow money, you sell a friend,’ he wrote.
He went to the National Gallery on its free days and, when he had a shilling in his pocket, to the theatre. Almost the only social gatherings in which he was included had been Lee’s soirées musicales. But by the 1880s, largely through his sister Lucy, he also began to receive invitations to the ‘At Homes’ of Lady Wilde and of Elizabeth Lawson, mother of the landscape painter Cecil Lawson on whom he had modelled the artist Cyril Scott in Immaturity. They were the sort of engagements that make a man long for death. To equip himself for such ordeals he sought out from the catalogue at the British Museum volumes on polite behaviour.
He liked the Lawsons, and the artistic atmosphere of their house in Cheyne Walk was congenial, but he had not mastered the art of pleasing, could not dance, spoke hesitantly though usually to disagree, and occasionally made a jarring exhibition of himself. ‘I sometimes walked up and down the Embankment for twenty minutes or more before venturing to knock at the door,’ he remembered. ‘...The worst of it was that when I appeared in the Lawsons’ drawingroom I did not appeal to the good-nature of the company as a pardonably and even becomingly bashful novice. I had not then tuned the Shavian note to any sort of harmony.’
He saw very little of anyone with whom he did not work. Politics was to provide him with new colleagues. Otherwise he had few companionships. Among these were the writer and adventurer Richard Hengist Horne and his wife Sophie; a person of mild exterior, Edwin Habgood, from the Edison Telephone Company; James Lecky, an exchequer clerk from Ireland interested in phonetics, keyboard temperament and Gaelic, who was also a big noise in the English Spelling Reform Association (signing himself ‘jeemz leki’), who was to introduce him to the philologists Alexander John Ellis and Henry Sweet; and J. Kingston Barton, a doctor with whom Shaw passed many of his Saturday evenings. On Sundays he saw the Beattys.
Pakenham Beatty – Irish playboy, amateur pugilist, minor poet – was a moustachioed perpetual boy of a man. Born in Brazil, he had spent part of his childhood in Dalkey, been educated somewhere between Harrow and Bonn, and got to know Shaw as a fellow-exile in London. He belonged to a breed of troubadour-entertainers that was to include Frank Harris and Gabriel Pascal, for whom Shaw had a special fondness. Beatty enabled him to enter a life very different from his own. He was not ‘sensible’ about money. He spent it in the Irish manner, generously, spontaneously, without thought, until everything was gone and he was left with nothing but the settled habit of spending. His source of money was a small inheritance that, before it ran dry, allowed him to flirt with fine art. At the end of 1878, he published a volume of verse entitled To My Lady and Other Poems. One of his ladies, Edith Dowling, married him early the following year and became known as ‘Ida’ Beatty. They had two daughters and a son christened Pakenham William Albert Hengist Mazzini Beatty whom Shaw nicknamed ‘Bismarck’.
In this company Shaw became a figure of attention and authority. He had no money but he spent all his advice on them, nuggets of information laboriously quarried out at the British Museum about the children’s books, boots, careers, clothing, diet, education, illnesses, pianos and so on; and later, when he was earning money, he gave it to them in sums ranging between £10 and £200 and underwrote a good part of the children’s schooling. ‘Old grandfather Shaw’, as Ida Beatty called him, was a father and a friend to them all.
Shaw made his appearance among them as a practical man, a part invested by his imagination with much glamour. He judged them to be hopeless, in which condition they needed him. But he also had need of them, since, for all their hopelessness, they had something almost entirely lacking in the Shaws: an atmosphere of family affection. Pakenham Beatty was extravagantly fond of his two sisters-in-law and even went on to shower his attentions jointly on Shaw’s sister Lucy and a friend of their mother, Jane Patterson. But Shaw refused to be shocked. One afternoon he came across his friend recovering from delirium tremens and surrounded by whispering relatives who, having bullied him into making a will, were assembled as if for a funeral. ‘I dispersed them with roars of laughter and inquiries after pink snakes &c, an exhibition of bad taste which at last converted the poor devil’s wandering apprehensive look into a settled grin... Tomorrow he goes to a retreat at Rickmansworth, to be reformed.’
Shaw was a rock in this Bohemian whirlpool, splashed, invigorated and unchanged. The Beattys added to his education outside the British Museum. He loved Beatty for his bad verses (‘something too awful’) and for presenting such an atrocious advertisement for the romantic life. He re-christened him ‘Paquito’, a name that would serve as an alias for the eponymous hero of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. ‘My plays are full of your jokes,’ he told him.
Paquito’s letters to Shaw were mostly in high-flown and facetious verse. His non-poetic intervals were devoured by the ambition to be an amateur light-weight champion. ‘I am about to take boxing lessons from the scientific Ned Donnelly, a very amiable though powerful person in appearance... If you wish,’ he invited Shaw, ‘these lessons which I learn from Donnelly I will teach unto you.’ Shaw couldn’t resist. The comedy of all this was serious business for Shaw. He did his initial training at the British Museum, battling with Pierce Egan’s Boxiana and other expositions. Paquito had presented him with a copy of Donnelly’s Self-Defence (‘the best book of its kind ever published’) and ‘insisted on my accompanying him to all the boxing exhibitions’. In consequence Shaw was to gain among his political acquaintances the reputation as ‘a tall man with a straight left’ whose knowledge of pugilism might prove valuable if it came to revolution.
There were times when Shaw himself seemed to accept such fantasies. He showed up at a school-of-arms in Panton Street called the London Athletic Club where he obtained tuition from Ned Donnelly himself who, as Professor of Boxing, had instructed the most brilliant light-weight of his day, Jack Burke, on whom Shaw based the hero of the novel he was writing. A month after finishing this book, on 17 March 1883, he entered the Queensberry Amateur Boxing Championships on the turf at Lillie Bridge. At a weight of ten stone (140 lbs) he applied to take part in both Middle and Heavyweight Classes, and was given a place for both categories in the programme, but not in the ring. It was the climax of his prize-fighting career, a paper apotheosis, after which he found he ‘had exhausted the comedy of the subject’.
Shaw’s long affair with boxing was to worry some of his admirers. How could this champion of the vegetable world involve himself in brute pugilism? ‘Paradoxing is a useful rhyme to boxing,’ he once thanked a journalist. ‘I will make a note of it.’ He saw at once the great publicity in pugilism. Newspapers, he believed, were ‘fearfully mischievous’, yet they were creators of public opinion. So what could be more natural than to marry one such brute profession to another? Since the public were more interested in sport than serious politics, Shaw was to spread his political views through the sports pages as he would the music and art columns. Under his treatment boxing was to become an allegory of capitalism, the prize-ring a place where he could exhibit Shavian theories on distribution of income and award a points decision to socialism.
Shaw’s knowledge of boxing formed part of an armoury that, by the end of the 1880s, was to make him, in Max Beerbohm’s opinion, ‘the most brilliant and remarkable journalist in London’. Unlike bicycling, it didn’t get you anywhere, and it was not as pleasant as swimming which, with its cleansing effect and the sensation of rendering the body weightless, almost non-existent, became ‘the only exercise I have ever taken for its own sake’. But his shadow boxing, even before it was converted into words, was the essence of Shavianism.
For almost six years he visited the Beattys most Sundays, sparred several platonic rounds with Paquito the poet, then sat at the feet of his wife Ida, practising French. This was the first of numerous triangular relationships in which he re-created his mesmeric but chaste version of Vandeleur Lee with Lucinda and George Carr Shaw, and kept those ghosts at peace. ‘Dont talk to me of romances: I was sent into the world expressly to dance on them with thick boots – to shatter, stab, and murder them,’ he challenged Ida. ‘I defy you to be romantic about me... and if you attempt it, I will go straight to Paquito; tell him you are being drawn into the whirlpool of fascination which has engulfed all the brunettes I know.’ This was shadow boxing from which Shaw emerged very much in control of a situation that did not really exist. He could not exclude dreams of more orthodox affairs, but ‘all these foolish fancies only want daylight and fresh air to scatter them,’ he instructed Ida, as if the fancies had been hers and not his.
Shaw made himself attractive to women by informing them he was attractive – then warning them against this damnable attractiveness. He converted the neglected Sonny into a besieged G.B.S., who would have fainted with surprise ‘if a woman came up to me in the street and said “I DONT adore you”’.
Being in love with Shaw could be a bewildering business. ‘You are very contradictory,’ Aileen Bell complained. ‘...What am I to do?’ He teased and tested; he loved you and he loved you not. He achieved an air of confidence by taking away your own confidence. ‘When we did fight in the old days,’ Aileen Bell wrote to him, ‘I used to go upstairs afterwards, & stamp about my room & abuse you, saying “I hate George Shaw”.’ His talent was to disconcert. He charmed you, then made you too angry for words and (since the affair was one of words) impotent. On paper, where he held absolute authority, he was promiscuous. He attributed to others the romantic daydreams he suppressed in himself, and encircled them in fantastical webs of jealousies and misunderstandings.
Shaw’s relations with women during his first four or five years in London are cryptically recorded in his diary notebooks. At the end of 1876, he noted: ‘Inauguration during the year of the Terpsichore episode. Also La Carbonaja.’ Terpsichore was his codename for Ermina Pertoldi, the ballerina of the Alhambra Theatre and a character in Immaturity. La Carbonaja was the daughter of a London hostess who gave him a medal of the Virgin Mary, hoping to convert him to Catholicism. The following year La Carbonaja is ‘in the ascendant’ and in 1879 ‘La C flickers until 11th [January] When the star of Leonora gains the ascendant (Terpsichore evaporated)... Made the acquaintance of the Lawson family on 5th [January], and met Leonora on the 11th.’ From ‘Leonora’ he preserved a pressed flower together with an odd note: ‘These flowers were plucked from the garden of a millionaire by one of his would-be brides as a memento of a sweet prelude to a “might have been”.’
Unable to come to terms with women except in make-believe, Shaw conducted his most successful affairs from the galleries of theatres or his gymnasium in the British Museum, and worked himself eventually to sleep at night. Confusion began when this make-believe came in contact with the actual world. Between 1878 and 1894 he kept a correspondence in play with Elinor Huddart, author of My Heart and I and other novels that would have won her notoriety ‘if I could have persuaded her to... use the same pen name, instead of changing it for every book’. She had been impressed by his kindness and good sense. ‘How you manage to pick my work to pieces from end to end,’ she wrote to him on 16 September 1878, ‘and yet never hurt me (and I am rather easily hurt) I cannot conceive.’ One reason she was not hurt was that Shaw had invented an Elinor of his own, possessed by his spirit and made into a new creature. ‘You are the only man friend I have ever made,’ she told him. ‘...I am content to be your friend and no man’s wife.’ For someone who appeared so frivolous it was astonishing how persistent he could be. He beat down on her like a sun, warming her, blistering her, trying to blow a new climate round her and imbue her with fresh life as a writer. But ‘I can put forth no new leaves,’ she objected. ‘I am not a beech tree... Leave my ashes in peace, they can do you no good.’ But he would not leave her. He wanted to pour his will-power into women so that their achievements became the children of the union.
In his exertions to work his will vicariously through women his flirtations became those of a schoolmaster. ‘I beg of you,’ Aileen Bell once wrote to him, ‘not to lecture quite so much.’ However much he did lecture, urge, flatter, coax, he could not make the worlds of fantasy and actuality coalesce.
Shaw’s love eliminated many things to which women were accustomed. In his plays he was to create a stereotype, Woman-the-Huntress, whom he sent into battle against the Victorian Woman-on-a-pedestal. Debarred by his childhood from forming close emotional attachments, he gave his allegiance to ideas – but saw women as vehicles for those ideas. Shaw took the body away from women and addressed their minds. His own mind was astonishingly fast, but emotionally he was lame. The result was that women found themselves continually out of step with him. When Shaw looked at a woman, he appeared to turn his back on her and raise a mirror. It was a disconcerting stare, positive, remote, and appearing so bold while actually in retreat.
*
Sonny had wanted love; G.B.S. soared wittily above it; and Shaw was pulled between the two. The tug-of-war moved critically backwards and forwards over his first serious girl friend, Alice Lockett. In February 1882 he returned to Leyton and, while recuperating from scarlet fever, was introduced to her. She was twenty-three and robustly good-looking. He fell violently in love – which is to say, he was strongly attracted to her. After his convalescence he managed to return to Leyton by the uncharacteristic means of getting temporary employment there, earning six guineas in as many days counting votes during the election of Poor Law guardians. He saw her, walked in the moonlight, talked, flirted. By 17 April, he felt able to report to Elinor Huddart that ‘Alice thinks I am in love with her’. The honeymoon was almost over and the contest between them ready to begin.
Alice and her sister Jane had been conventionally brought up and educated at a Victorian ladies’ college. In 1879 their father had died and the next year their elder brother also died. Their mother suffered a paralytic stroke, and her two daughters, transferred to the care of their grandmother, prepared to take up professions. Jane, who was experimenting with a novel called Yeast (exorbitantly condemned by Shaw), studied for a career in education; Alice, who enrolled in a nursing course at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, was taking singing lessons from Mrs Shaw.
The affair was carried on between the railway station and piano stool (‘Oh the infinite mischief that a woman may do by stooping forward to turn over a sheet of music!’). Alice felt she had been relegated in the social order by her family misfortunes, and nursed dreams of a dramatic ascent up the ladder of society; Shaw was determined to kick that ladder away. Alice sensed a power in Shaw, but one which he was often misusing. In place of manly leadership, he presented her with exhibitions of clever indecisiveness. Qµarrelling between them was inevitable. ‘I hate people to hesitate,’ she chided him.
In one of his early notebooks Shaw had jotted down his observations on the typical society woman. ‘Clever, frivolous, vain, egocentric,’ he wrote. ‘Pretty & knows it. Sits silent and affects the scornful. Also a morbid sensitiveness and a consequent pleasure in inflicting hurts on others. Effect of this type of egotist in making others seem intolerably egotistical...’
It was to save Alice from becoming this woman that Shaw exerted all his powers. He re-created her as a figure from his novels and she became someone through whom he attacked the London society that had lured Lee and Lucinda away from him and, when he followed, rejected him.
Shaw divided Alice into two people. Miss Lockett had been stiffened by the starch of society and was full of protective scorn and attempted sarcasm. Towards men she bore herself tyrannically, having no notion that any interest of men in women might exist apart from a desire to marry. But sometimes Miss Lockett forgot to be offended, scornful, pretentious – and Alice emerged. Alice was the child in her, sympathetic, unspoilt, spontaneously generous, someone capable of considering her own instinctive judgement a safer guide than the formulated rules of society. Alice was capable too of Shavian improvement; the proud and foolish Miss Lockett had gone too far down the hackneyed road of her own dignity to be brought back. Between these two beings Shaw enacted a perpetual drama. Miss Lockett ‘is the dragon that preys upon Alice,’ he told her, ‘and I will rescue Alice from her’.
Shaw dramatized in Miss Alice Lockett a division he knew to exist within himself. In one corner there was G.B.S., ‘resolved... to walk with the ears of his conscience strained on the alert, to do everything as perfectly as it could be done, and – oh – monstrous! – to improve all those with whom he came in contact’. In the opposite corner stood Sonny, the Irish contender, who was not afraid to become ‘as a little child again and was not ashamed to fall in love with Alice’.
But the voice that lectured Miss Lockett on the importance of becoming Alice was that of G.B.S., not Sonny who could seldom ‘snatch a few moments from his withering power’. G.B.S. worked day and night; he was seldom out of love with his work – in which condition he accused Alice of taking advantage ‘of the weakest side of my character’, and warned her to believe nothing that Sonny whispered to her.
The crisis in Shaw was real. Before a caress with Alice had time to cool, he longed to return to his ascetic life, to his books, his developing socialism. But then the memory of her beauty could prevent him going to bed in peace, and gave him a thrill that could last ‘through a political meeting and four hours of private debate on dry questions of economy’. Shaw’s appeals to Alice were often the means by which he tried to offend her so as to save himself from falling in love. But sometimes he did not have the heart to succeed – and then Sonny would whisper things that G.B.S. would have to shatter with his laughter.
Shaw had hit on the device of pretending to be what he was – but with a comic exaggeration that prompted disbelief. He pretended to be ‘in love’ with Alice and she, congratulating herself on not being taken in, accused him of insincerity. Sometimes it seemed as if she were only speaking the lines he had prepared for her. It was oddly unreal. ‘We are too cautious, too calculating, too selfish, too heartless, to venture head over heels in love,’ he wrote to her. ‘And yet there is something – ’ Both tried to limit their vulnerability to the other. But Alice did not understand where her power lay – she never realized into what extraordinary suspense her beauty put him. In attempting to hurt him with deliberate cruelty, she merely became the stubborn and timid Miss Lockett of his hostile imagination, squaring up to her impregnable enemy G.B.S.
‘George Shaw, I consider you an object to be pitied – but the truth is I might just as well speak to a stone. Nothing affects you... Now your book has failed – for which I am truly sorry for your sake, although it is perhaps better for other people. I suppose you mean to begin another and be another year dependent on your mother. Why on earth don’t you work?’
Alice had been in the marriage market since leaving school and looked on ‘love-making’ as the most serious business in life. It was because Shaw believed that Sonny was incapable of inspiring love in women that he invented G.B.S. Alice tried to understand him – but he took care that she should not. In serious moments he could make her see with his eyes, flattering her (‘Must I eternally flatter flatter flatter flatter flatter?’) by his apparent conviction – which she shared – that she was capable of a higher life. But his political dreams had no meaning for her so ‘it is my small troubles that I go to you with,’ he told her.
Alice Lockett’s challenge to Shaw had been to make him feel his loneliness most painfully. At moments his self-command wavered. ‘Write to me,’ he asked her, ‘and I will make love to you – to relieve the enormous solitude which I carry about with me. I do not like myself, and sometimes I do not like you; but there are moments when our two unfortunate souls seem to cling to the same spar in a gleam of sunshine, free of the other wreckage for a moment.’
Miss Lockett’s social ambitions would not allow her to be stranded in this way; she wanted to travel first class. As for Shaw, it was Sonny who was left senseless and G.B.S. who appeared ‘too strong for you. I snap your chains like Samson.’
On two occasions they returned each other’s letters; several times they decided never to see each other. The affair lasted until 1885 when all love had gone out of it and they drifted apart. In 1890 Alice married a former house-surgeon at St Mary’s, William Salisbury Sharpe. Obliged during the Great War to borrow some money from Shaw, she lived on to witness the halo of world renown encircle G.B.S. But in many criticisms of his books and plays she would have been able to read of an absent quality – and to have recognized in this absence the departure of Sonny over which she had helplessly watched.
It was lonely to be myself; but not to be myself was death in life.
Cashel Byron’s Profession
On 22 April 1882, ten days after starting his fourth novel, Shaw moved with his mother to 36 Osnaburgh Street, on the east side of Regent’s Park. This was an improvement on the insalubrious rooms in Fitzroy Street where he had often been ill.
They saw little of Lucy. From the Carl Rosa Opera Company she transferred to a D’Oyly Carte group and in 1884 went off with them on tour.
Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw continued methodically to give private tuition in singing. In 1885 she suddenly struck a new vein of work as music instructor at Clapham High School, and the following year became choir-mistress and teacher of class singing at the North London Collegiate School for Ladies where she remained until her retirement in 1906.
Shaw went his own way – to the British Museum – and finished his fourth novel on 6 February 1883. Cashel Byron’s Profession, as he called it, is a fairy-tale about power. Its hero, Cashel Byron, a prize-fighter as clever with his fists as Shaw was with words, embodies Shaw’s fantasy about action. To him is given the first Shavian speech (which goes the distance of three thousand words) on the superiority of ‘executive power’ over ‘good example’. It is a dialectic on the philosophy of winning, and a hymn to skill and science over incoherent strength.
Taking a profession that society officially repudiated, Shaw uses it as a metaphor for the way people unofficially live their lives – a formula he was to try again in Mrs Warren’s Profession and Major Barbara (which he thought of calling ‘Andrew Undershaft’s Profession’). His make-believe leads the hero and heroine from love at first sight through all supposed social barriers to marriage in the last chapter. The Lady is Cashel’s prize – in a way that Ida Beatty or any of the other women with whose husbands G.B.S. sparred would never be Shaw’s. In the book, romance won by a knock-out and ‘my self-respect took alarm’.
‘The lower I go, the better I seem to please,’ Shaw wrote hopefully to the publisher Richard Bentley. But though in later years Cashel Byron’s Profession was so much enjoyed by R. L. Stevenson, W. E. Henley and others that Shaw marvelled at his escape from becoming a popular novelist, it was turned down by the London publishing houses. ‘It flies too decidedly in the face of people’s prejudices to make it likely that it will be a popular book,’ advised the reader for Macmillan. ‘...well and brightly written, but the subject is not likely to commend itself to any considerable public.’
Reviewing the book himself, Shaw pointed out that one of the fights in the novel was a restaging of the wrestling match in As You Like It, and hints at the effort he made to write a book as the public liked it. His reaction to what he called his ‘shilling shocker’ became studded with the glittering contradictions which formed part of his insulation against failure. In 1886, following at least seven rejections, he recommended it as ‘one of the cleverest books I know’. But in 1888, when welcoming another publisher’s rejection of it, he burst out: ‘I hate the book from my soul.’ He hated the conditions in which he had written it and the London publishers for whom he had written it: he hated the person who had written it; he hated failure. He had sailed as near compromise as he dared – too near and to no effect. Next time (for he was not ready to give up) there should be no compromise.
He called his fifth novel The Heartless Man – later changing the title to An Unsocial Socialist. As with the two previous novels he drafted most of it in shorthand at the British Museum, and then transcribed it in longhand. The plot revolves round Sidney Trefusis, the heartless socialist of both titles. At the beginning of the book, Trefusis shocks everyone by running away from his newly married wife. By accepted standards it has been a brilliant match, full of money and romance. But accepted standards have made women into a class of person fit only for the company of children and flowers. With a man like Trefusis they can have no connection, except sex. Unfortunately the sexual attraction between them was so strong, Trefusis gravely complains to his wife Henrietta, that ‘When you are with me I can do nothing but make love to you. You bewitch me.’
As Shaw’s mouthpiece for Socialism, Trefusis recognizes the natural inequality of human beings but condemns England’s social inequality for exploiting it. This artificial inequality will vanish, he claims, once ‘England is made the property of its inhabitants collectively’. The choice is ‘Socialism or Smash’.
Most people preferred Smash because it looked safer. To open their eyes, British socialists needed to study feminism, for it was women who, by giving Socialism respectability, could make it grow. Shaw’s women are sympathetically drawn but, as custodians of Society’s standards, they embellish the capitalist philosophy of Smash. Trefusis’s aim, whether through sermonizing or seduction, is to head them off from this course. It is the old struggle to release natural vitality from an unnatural system of morality. The most attractive of these girls, for whose socialist souls he wrestles, is Gertrude Lindsay, Shaw’s portrait of Alice Lockett. It is a hostile portrait, done in the colours of revenge, of a discontented girl who counts ‘the proposals of marriage she received as a Red Indian counts the scalps he takes’, and who treats her dog (a St Bernard) with more kindness than ‘any human being’.
It is not Gertrude who becomes Trefusis’s second wife, but Agatha Wylie – a Shavian Becky Sharp who was inspired by a glimpse of ‘a young lady with an attractive and arresting expression, bold, vivid, and very clever, working at one of the desks’ in the British Museum Reading Room. She is a symbol of the future.
By separating his socialist hero into two people, Shaw reflected the division he felt existed in his own character. Some of the most entertaining pages of the novel are those where Trefusis, reluctant heir to a fortune, takes on the role of a talkative labourer – a Dickensian character called Smilash (a compound of the words smile and eyelash). In this partnership, Shaw the comedian and Shaw the reformer are brought together for the same ends. The character of Smilash appeals to the ‘vagabond impulse’ in Trefusis, and the actor in Shaw. ‘I am just mad enough to be a mountebank,’ Trefusis explains. ‘If I were a little madder, I should perhaps really believe myself Smilash instead of merely acting him.’
Trefusis is the great man who had lain asleep in Smith, the tentative hero of Immaturity, and who wakes up by the light of Marxist economics. Shaw’s novels had been experiments to find a political framework in which to develop his thought and personality. Conolly, the engineer of The Irrational Knot, had been ‘a monster of the mind’ embodying rationalism; Owen Jack, the composer from Love Among the Artists, was ‘a monster of the body’ representing unconscious instinct; in Cashel Byron’s Profession Shaw had toyed with a romantic fusion of mind and body in the marriage of his prize-fighter and educated lady. In An Unsocial Socialist the union takes place not between two people but within one. Trefusis is Shaw’s first socialist hero and Don Juan figure in whom he attempts to reconcile his sexual and political attitudes. The novel foreshadows Man and Superman, with Trefusis a prototype of Tanner.
It was an extraordinary book to have produced in the early 1880s – ‘the first English novel written under the influence of Karl Marx with a hero whose character and opinions forecast those of Lenin,’ Shaw later declared. He finished his revisions on 15 December 1883. ‘We are afraid that the subscribers to the circulating libraries are not much interested in Socialism,’ wrote Smith Elder & Co. David Douglas of Edinburgh and Chatto & Windus in London excused themselves from looking at it. For Macmillan, John Morley (not realizing that he had previously advised the author to give up writing) reported that ‘the author knows how to write; he is pointed, rapid, forcible, sometimes witty, often powerful and occasionally eloquent’. But, Morley concluded, the socialistic irony would not be attractive to many readers and ‘they would not know whether the writer was serious or was laughing at them’. In refusing the book, Macmillan wrote that they would be glad to look at anything else he might write ‘of a more substantial kind’ – a request that, Shaw replied, ‘takes my breath away’. In his correspondence with Macmillan, he came as near making an exasperated appeal for sympathy as he could.
‘All my readers, as far as I know them, like the book; but they tell me that although they relish it they dont think the general public would. Which is the more discouraging, as this tendency of each man to consider himself unique is one of the main themes of the novel. Surely out of thirty millions of copyright persons (so to speak) there must be a few thousand who would keep me in bread and cheese for the sake of my story-telling, if you would only let me get at them.’
His new political friends were to give Shaw his chance of getting at the public. An Unsocial Socialist, he claimed, ‘finished me with the publishers’. Instead of adding it to the pile of rejects, Shaw sent it off to J. L. Joynes, one of the editors of To-Day, a new ‘Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism’. Joynes recommended the serialization of the novel to his fellow-editor, the philosopher E. Belfort Bax, who replied: ‘Go on and prosper with Shaw...’
An Unsocial Socialist appeared in serial form between March and December 1884. Shaw was not paid, but for the first time he had an audience. ‘William Morris spotted it and made my acquaintance on account of it. That took me into print and started me.’ Between April 1885 and March 1886 Cashel Byron’s Profession was also serialized, due largely to the enthusiasm of the magazine’s printer, H. H. Champion, a clever, epileptic man who was later to become Shaw’s dramatic agent in Australia. Champion stereotyped the pages from To-Day and published them in a misshapen ‘Modern Press’ edition of 2,500 copies in March 1886. This was Shaw’s first published book, costing a shilling and carrying a royalty of one penny a copy. Two of his other novels, The Irrational Knot (April 1885–February 1887) and Love Among the Artists (November 1887–December 1888), were to be published serially in Annie Besant’s Our Corner.
Shaw’s political interests soon devoured his ambitions as a novelist. In 1887 he abandoned an attempt at a sixth novel because ‘I could not stand the form: it is too clumsy and unreal. Sometimes I write dialogues; and these are working up to a certain end.’ His disenchantment with the novel is apparent in An Unsocial Socialist. In the appendix to this book, which takes the form of a letter to the author from Trefusis, Shaw writes: ‘I cannot help feeling that, in presenting the facts in the guise of fiction, you have, in spite of yourself, shewn them in a false light. Actions described in novels are judged by a romantic system of morals as fictitious as the actions themselves.’ This opinion he shared with Defoe who, in Serious Reflections, had described the ‘supplying of a story by invention’ as ‘a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, at which by degrees, a habit of lying enters in’. Like Defoe, Shaw resolved to make his fiction as much like fact as possible.
Now that it was too late, publishers were urging him to go on. His books would reach a good circulation, Swan Sonnenschein encouraged him, providing he ‘stick to novels, or go in for plays (which are even more suited to you, in my opinion)...’ Shaw acknowledged that he might ‘descend as low as that one day’, but five failures had been ‘enough to satisfy my appetite for enterprise in fiction’.
Since he could not marry his story-telling to his socialism, Shaw relinquished story-telling. From his socialist philosophy he was to harvest optimism, while the novels, representing his first nine years in London, remained like dead fruit on the bough. Over fifty years later he wrote that his ‘failure to find a publisher for any of them was for me a hardening process from which I have never quite recovered’. Although they carry many ideas that were to be developed in his plays, these novels seemed to Shaw to have been written by someone else – someone with his roots in Ireland who once dreamed of a grand literary conquest in London. That Shaw was almost dead.
*
One final tie with his past was cut when on 19 April 1885 George Carr Shaw died. They had had little communication over the last five years. ‘I have nothing else to say that you would care about,’ his father had written on 2 September 1880; and again, on 4 December 1882: ‘I have nothing else particular to say.’ Of his son’s published works he read only An Unsocial Socialist, liked it, but warned him: ‘dont get yourself into Holloway Jail.’ Though he often asked for letters, ‘whether you have anything to say or not’, he seldom heard from George who he felt did not ‘have anything sentimental left in you’. Years later, Shaw wrote: ‘When I recall certain occasions on which I was inconsiderate to him I understood how Dr Johnson stood in the rain in Lichfield to expiate the same remorse.’ But he had never fought his father, so all the battles of his adult life would seem bloodless.
George Carr Shaw died suddenly of congestion of the lungs while recovering from pneumonia in a bed-and-breakfast lodging house in Leeson Park Avenue. ‘I hastened there, and was ushered upstairs into a bedroom,’ McNulty recorded. ‘...He had died in his sleep: and his lips wore a smile.’ He had not been wanted, dead or alive, and he was not missed. Lucy was in Ireland at the time, but she did not go to the funeral. When the news reached Shaw, he sent a note, with two staves of music headed ‘Grave’, to his friend Kingston Barton:
‘Telegram just received to say that the governor has left the universe on rather particular business and set me up as
An Orphan.’
From the insurance on his father’s life, Shaw was able to buy that summer his first new clothes for years – an all-wool Jaeger suit, a black coat, vest, collar, cravat and pants, all for £11 1s. ‘In short, I had become, for better for worse, a different man.’