People think of me as a theatrical man, but I am really proud of having served six years as a municipal councillor.
New York Times (24 March 1933)
Fabian progress through the north of England after the success of Fabian Essays had been helped by an elderly supporter, Henry Hunt Hutchinson. Crusty and querulous, exuberantly describing his marriage as a penal servitude, he reminded Shaw of Samuel Butler. ‘I liked the man,’ he decided. But ‘Old Hutch’ did not much like Shaw. He would alternate with his cheques to the Fabians cantankerous letters complaining of Shaw’s rudeness. The Fabian executive, banking the cheques and applauding Old Hutch’s public spirit, would deplore his advancing age and infirmity. What would happen, they wondered, to Fabian finances when he died?
In the summer of 1894 they had their answer when Old Hutch shot himself. The Webbs were staying in the Surrey hills, with Shaw and Wallas, when Sidney received a letter informing him that he had been appointed one of Hutchinson’s trustees. Old Hutch had been a solicitor and had made a will that was almost certainly invalid. To his wife he bequeathed £100; his two sons and two daughters received smaller bequests; and Fabianism was to benefit, over a period of ten years, by almost £10,000. This money had been left to trustees (of whom Sidney became first Chairman), to be used for ‘the propaganda and other purposes’ of the Fabian Society ‘and its Socialism’, and for promoting Fabian goals ‘in any way’ that the trustees thought ‘advisable’. At breakfast the next morning, the Webbs told Shaw and Wallas of their decision to found in London a School of Economics and Political Science, similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, where experts could be specially trained for the purpose of reforming society. Shaw, who believed that Hutchinson had ‘left his money for Red propaganda by Red vans’, would have preferred using it to enliven Fabian campaigns. Yet it was he who acted as Webb’s spokesman and cleverly avoided antagonizing Olivier and Bland, both of whom objected to Webb’s plans.
Sidney had to placate the Hutchinson family and the Fabian executive. He had to win support both from the London County Council and from businessmen by representing his school as an institution with commercial courses, though dedicated (despite its socialist propaganda) to disinterested research. Knowing that disinterested research inevitably led to socialist conclusions, Sidney detected no discrepancy in this – especially since small amounts of the Hutchinson money were to be segregated for the promotion of Fabian lectures and an increase in the secretary’s salary. But it was too paradoxical for Shaw. Always scrupulous in financial affairs, he warned Beatrice that Sidney was antagonizing the Fabian executive by what looked like a plan to bribe them in return for permission ‘to commit an atrocious malversation of the rest of the bequest’.
As Webb had once frowned on Shaw’s individualism, so Shaw now worried over Webb’s idealism, fearing that his love for this new invention could cause a break-up in the Fabian family. Nevertheless, for reasons of unity, Shaw reluctantly supported his friend’s dream of a centre for sociological research.
So, by means of a suspect will, at variance with anything Old Hutch could have envisaged, and amid a good deal of Fabian grumbling, one of Webb’s lasting achievements was begun. ‘It is honestly scientific,’ Beatrice pronounced after the school had opened in the summer of 1895. And Shaw later admitted that ‘Sidney Webb performed miracles with his money which I should never have done’.
*
The London School of Economics became another instrument for long-term permeation (particularly valuable since Lord Salisbury’s Tory Government was elected), and for the introduction of collectivism by educationists rather than political partisans. Before their marriage, Beatrice had revealed her doubts as to whether Sidney was ‘a really big man’ like Chamberlain, but assured him that he might be capable of doing ‘first-rate work on the London County Council’. After their marriage she supported his refusal to go into Parliament, partly because she believed that ‘the finest part of his mind and character’ would be unemployed in the House of Commons, and partly because she recognized in a parliamentary career the ‘enemy of domesticity’. They had moved at the end of 1893 to an austere ten-room house at 41 Grosvenor Road on the Embankment. It was a short distance from Spring Gardens, where the London County Council held its meetings, and from Adelphi Terrace, where in 1896 the London School of Economics moved. After his meetings and lectures Sidney would return in the evening to Beatrice’s simple meat suppers with cigarettes.
At first sight Shaw’s maverick figure does not find a part in the undramatic plans Webb had made for revolution through research. He had refused in 1889 to stand for the London County Council in Deptford – the seat Webb was to win from the Tories three years later. But his experiences in the theatre over the next eight years made him see that it was no longer a grand choice between Parliament and the West End, but a means of combining a limited commitment to municipal politics with a limited success in provincial theatres. Early in 1894 he had refused an invitation to put himself up as the parliamentary candidate for Chelsea; but he stood in the School Board elections at the end of that year for the St Pancras Vestry – and was handsomely defeated. Then, letting his name go forward as a Progressive candidate at an uncontested election in May 1897, he was appointed to the Vestry Committee of Ward 7 of St Pancras, together with an architect, barrister, builder and tea-dealer.
London local government in the 1890s was an ‘archaic patchwork’ of vestries. The St Pancras Vestry, stretching from Islington to Marylebone and from Holborn to Hampstead and Hornsey, contained almost two hundred thousand inhabitants. Their culture ‘may be inferred from the fact that there was not a single bookshop in the entire borough,’ Shaw recorded. But it clustered with ‘houses of ill-fame’, especially in the side streets off Tottenham Court Road (one of which was named Warren Street). And there were slums often owned by landlords like Sartorius and managed by rent-collectors such as Lickcheese.
On behalf of their constituents the vestrymen looked after an elastic range of matters from manure receptacles (maintenance of), horns (blowing of), graves (purchase of) and noxious literature (sale of), to the management of ice cream notices, street cries, the sampling of milk-in-transit and all business involving public baths, lighting, tramways. The strength of local government was planted, Shaw believed, in its independence from Parliament. The St Pancras Vestry had a Chairman and 116 vestrymen. They did not operate under the party system. ‘Every member can vote as he thinks best without the slightest risk of throwing his party out of power and bringing on a General Election,’ Shaw explained. ‘If a motion is defeated, nobody resigns: if it is carried, nobody’s position is changed.’ Reviewing his six years as a vestryman and borough councillor at the age of eighty, he recalled that ‘I never had to vote on any question otherwise than on its specific merits...
‘in Parliament I should have been a back row chorus man, allowed to amuse the House with a speech occasionally... [the] perversion of parliament has produced all the modern dictatorships... The little socialism we have is gas and water Socialism. And it is by extension of Gas & Water Socialism that industry will be socialized.’
Shaw’s first meeting took place at the Vestry Hall, Pancras Road, on 26 May 1897. He was soon joined by a young Methodist minister named Ensor Walters;
‘the vestry, as far as it knew anything about me, classed me as a Socialist and therefore an atheist, sure to differ with the Methodist minister on every question. What actually happened was that he and I immediately formed a party two strong all to ourselves. And we troubled ourselves about no other party... He was out to make a little corner for the Kingdom of God in St Pancras; and nothing could have suited me better.’
Shaw served on the Health Committee of which Ensor Walters became Chairman, on the Officers Committee and the Committee for Electricity and Public Lighting. These were three of ten sub-committees which met separately and ‘set forth their conclusions as to what the Council ought to do in their departments in a series of resolutions. When the whole Council meets, these strings of resolutions are brought up as the reports of the Committees, and are confirmed or rejected or amended by the general vote.’
This system impressed Shaw as being so sensible that he wondered why parliamentary business should not be conducted on similar lines. He discovered local government, however, to be undermined by two factors: the inadequacy of the men who were elected and the paralysing poverty of the municipalities. His fellow-vestrymen were well-intentioned people but ‘absurdly unequal to the magnitude of our task.
‘Our ablest leaders were a greengrocer and a bootmaker, both of them much more capable than most members of Parliament; for it needs considerable character and ability to succeed as a shopkeeper, especially as a publican, whereas persons with unearned money enough can easily get into Parliament without having ever succeeded in anything. I found them excellent company, and liked and respected them for their personal qualities... but in the effective lump we were as ignorantly helpless politically as the mob of ratepayers who elected us, and who would never have elected me had they had the faintest suspicion of my ultimate political views.’
By their policy of under-rating, these men had by 1900 put the St Pancras Vestry in debt to the bank by £17,000. It was this insolvency that weakened the local authority. A weak vestry, Shaw argued, was at the mercy of its officials and of parliamentary rule. ‘He saw in municipal government a valuable decentralizing balance and counter-check to Parliamentary government,’ wrote H. M. Geduld. ‘It existed to ensure that local necessities were not sacrificed to national interests... Unfortunately, Parliamentary government frequently forces its inefficient decisions upon weak municipalities.’
The vestrymen deliberately kept the rates down because they themselves, and the people who had voted for them, could not afford a rating figure that would ensure municipal solvency. Shaw strove unsuccessfully to alter the rating system so as to relieve ordinary ratepayers and arrest reckless overdrawing on the bank. ‘There is only one remedy,’ he wrote, ‘and that is to take the burden off the shoulders of the men who do the work & conduct the business of London, & throw it on to those who take enormous sums in rent and interest out of our business to squander in idleness.’ He proposed to do this by the taxation of ground values (‘or, as I want it, taxation of unearned incomes’), with a rating exemption limit and a series of abatement limits as in the case of income tax.
The London Government Act of 1899 replaced the forty-two vestries with twenty-eight Metropolitan Boroughs each with a Mayor and Council. Wards 7 and 8 of the old Vestry were amalgamated into the Southern Division of the new St Pancras Borough and ten candidates stood for the six available seats at the election on 1 November 1900. For Shaw (who with 704 votes came second only to a clergyman, beating a bootmaker, removal contractor and store proprietor), this was the one successfully contested political election of his career. He campaigned hard, armed himself against failure (‘the relief will be enormous’), and described his success as ‘a sentence of hard labor’.
He had opposed the London Government Act in that it disqualified women, who had been part of the vestries, from sitting on the Borough Councils, and he attempted to give publicity to the need for women on public bodies, but The Times declined to publish a letter he wrote that threw off ‘the customary polite assumption that women are angels’.
‘English decency is a... string of taboos. You must not mention this: you must not appear conscious of that... everything that must not be mentioned in public is mentioned in private as a naughty joke. One day, at a meeting of the Health Committee of the Borough Council of which I was a member, a doctor rose to bring a case before the Committee. It was the case of a woman. The gravity of the case depended on the fact that the woman was pregnant. No sooner had the doctor mentioned this than the whole Committee burst into a roar of laughter, as if the speaker had made a scandalous but irresistible joke. And please bear in mind that we were not schoolboys. We were grave, mostly elderly men, fathers of families... There is only one absolutely certain and final preventive for such indecency, and that is the presence of women. If there were no other argument for giving women the vote, I would support it myself on no other ground than that men will not behave themselves when women are not present.’
In the Borough of St Pancras women had two unmentionable grievances: first, there were few public lavatories for them; secondly, where these had been provided they necessarily consisted not of urinals but separate closets, entrance to which traditionally cost one penny – ‘an absolutely prohibitive charge for a poor woman’. The grotesque struggle for free lavatories raged for years, and with particular heat round a site in Camden High Road. Some councillors objected that persons who so far ‘forgot their sex’ did not deserve a lavatory; one suggested that the water supply would be used by flower girls to wash the violets that he occasionally purchased for his buttonhole. The site was also assailed as a terror to traffic and a feature so gross as to contaminate the value of all property in the neighbourhood.
It is not easy to chronicle Shaw’s work as a vestryman and borough councillor. Fearing that his own proposals might not be listened to seriously, he often filtered them through other councillors. Nevertheless, a pattern to his municipal work can be picked out. He voted in favour of more free time for workers employed by the Council (every other Sunday off instead of every third Sunday for lavatory attendants) and for trams against underground railways in the interests of shopkeepers; and he introduced a motion to raise the salaries of the Council’s clerical staff by means of promotion through independent tests of their qualifications. After St Pancras became a metropolitan borough, the Chairman of the Vestry was translated into a Mayor. The Vestry Chairman had been unpaid, and the first Mayor of St Pancras, Alderman Barnes, proposed continuing this magnanimous tradition. Shaw objected, warning the Council against making a new precedent:
‘It was, of course, very handsome of Mr Barnes to say he would not accept any salary, but at the same time a definite sum of money ought to be placed at his disposal... He [Shaw] moved that this question of the paying of the Mayor be adjourned for further consideration, because it would not be a proper or democratic thing to pass a resolution that might prevent a poor man accepting the office of Mayor.’
Shaw’s motion was defeated, but when in 1903 the Council appointed as their second mayor W. H. Matthews, a greengrocer (and the model for Bill Collins in Getting Married), the matter of a salary was again discussed, £200 a year being proposed. Shaw made a strong speech, emphasizing that ‘it was quite legal to pay the Mayor, and no other method would place every man there on a footing of absolute equality.
‘But 200 pounds a year was a ridiculous sum; he would multiply it by five. There was no sounder democratic principle than that a man should be paid for public services. At present in that Council when they wanted a man to be Mayor they had first to find out if he could afford it.’
But he was again outvoted and the office of Mayor continued unsalaried.
Shaw annoyed his fellow-councillors by a persistent campaign against badges of office, regalia and robes that converted the St Pancras aldermen into ‘animated pillar boxes’. Were not such grandiose uniforms an obvious misuse of public money? Even on issues he supported Shaw looked carefully at expenditure. When the Mayor proposed spending £40 to send a delegation of councillors rambling into the countryside to report on the public installation of a crematorium in St Pancras, Shaw intervened to say that he
‘sometimes spent his week-ends near Woking, and if they would lend him a councillor for the purposes of cremation (much laughter) he would bring up a report of all that happened (laughter) without cost to anyone (laughter)’.
Shaw’s advocacy of cremation was part of a campaign for public hygiene he pursued on the Health Committee. He urged that ‘if earth-to-earth burial was to be continued, the depth below the surface ought not to be more than a couple of inches, and the coffin of the flimsiest material it was possible to have’. As a member of this committee he visited work-houses, hospitals, sweatshops and the homes of the poor, and saw the destitution and disease. Many of the tenements were lice-ridden; there were epidemics of smallpox, and occasional cases of typhoid fever, and even bubonic plague. Houses were disinfected with sulphur candles, on the fumes of which pathogenic bacilli actually multiplied. On asking the Medical Officer of Health why ratepayers’ money was spent on a useless fumigant, Shaw was told that, though the real disinfectants were soap, water and sunshine, no stripper or cleaner would dare enter an infected house unless it was filled with the superstitious stink of sulphur.
Shaw accepted sulphur but not vaccination which, he believed, was seen as a cheap prophylactic and employed as an alternative to a decent housing programme. During the spread of smallpox in 1901 Shaw battled with the medical advisers in St Pancras, who were urging on the Council a compulsory vaccination scheme. But he found limited support from the Borough Medical Officer, Dr Sykes. The difference was one of private practice versus socialized medicine. The Council paid half a crown for each revaccination. ‘No doubt the doctors were honestly convinced that vaccination is harmless and prevents smallpox; but the half-crown had more to do with that honest conviction than an unbiased scientific study of the subject.’
Dr Sykes’s position was dependent on the good health of the district – it was what Shaw called ‘the position that one wants Socialism to place all doctors in’. He could be dismissed only by the Local Government Board which judged his efficiency by the health statistics.
‘Dr Sykes’s income did not get larger when the district got sick. The private practitioners’ did... you could see the private practitioners getting new ties and new hats. When the death-rate went up they always looked better off and happier. That was not the case with the medical officer of health: he looked more worried: it was a bad time for him.’
What he heard passed in Council convinced Shaw that medical opinion was often little more than a conspiracy to exploit public credulity. Over two years, in a series of what were called ‘curious pathological effusions’ to The Times, the British Medical Journal, the Saturday Review and Vaccination Inquirer, he pressed for an independent re-examination of statistics, and for a socialized health service as a replacement to the money motive in medicine.
Shaw treated the press as a democratic instrument through which he poured information and advice to the public and from which he hoped to get instructions formed by that advice. The principles by which he tried to reach a workmanlike relationship with voters are revealed by some remarks he made to vestrymen and borough councillors. ‘Never do anything for the public that the public would do for themselves,’ he told them. And: ‘Give the public not what they want but what they ought to want and dont.’ It was the responsibility of councillors and Members of Parliament to persuade the public to want what was best in the long term.
What Shaw wanted was to command political action without the horror of submerging himself in political life. The need to earn money from his other work made it impossible for him to attend all meetings. Of the possible 321 council and sub-committee meetings he was eligible to attend between November 1900 and September 1903, he turned up at 192.
In public, Shaw’s attitude to his municipal duties was one of undisguised optimism – which is to say, disguised pessimism: ‘I love the reality of the Vestry,’ he told Ellen Terry, ‘...after the silly visionary fashion-ridden theatres.’ But that had been at the start of his vestry duties. An almanac Shaw kept in the early spring of 1898 shows under what strain this municipal work, with its hours of talk (no less fashion-ridden than the theatre) ‘about our dignity & respectability’, was beginning to place him. ‘Vestry beyond all endurance,’ he recorded on 30 March.
Shaw was to use his experience in local politics as raw material for his plays. Of Man and Superman he wrote: ‘The mornings I gave to it were followed by afternoons & evenings spent in the committee rooms of a London Borough Council, fighting questions of drainage, paving, lighting, rates, clerk’s salaries.’ Such occupation, he maintained, had enabled him to create realistic dramas so unrecognized in the fashionable London theatre that critics believed them to be fantastical – in fact not plays at all. But what are the picturesque tramps of the Sierra Nevada doing at the opening of ‘Don Juan in Hell’ but holding a St Pancras Vestry meeting? Who are the municipal characters in Getting Married but the aldermen and borough councillors with whom Shaw had sat those long unventilated hours? And where do the conflicting opinions of the medical specialists in The Doctor’s Dilemma come from but the Health Sub-Committee? All this he took from St Pancras; and if he gave back no dramatic triumphs of municipal legislation, he presented it with a theatre of entertainment.
After half a dozen years, Shaw concluded that the theatre, after all, was a vehicle for social and cultural change better suited to his abilities. Shortly before his fiftieth year, he ‘faded out of vestrydom having,’ he wrote, ‘more important work’.
In a speech supporting Alderman Matthews as Mayor of St Pancras, Shaw gave an oblique notice of his retirement from local politics, in the parentheses of which we may hear that ‘universal laughter’ drowning Tanner’s words at the end of Man and Superman.
‘Councillor G. Bernard Shaw was glad, speaking from the Progressive part of the chamber, to support the nomination of Alderman Matthews, although it was difficult for them to realize the extent of his (the speaker’s) self-sacrifice in taking that course (laughter)... He regarded him as a respectable gentleman (laughter), with little to say and with no political opinions whatever (much laughter). He never was more astonished than when Mr Matthews was out of the chair, because then he found him an active politician with a great deal to say for himself (laughter). In the chair he was most admirable and orderly, out of it he was the most disorderly man he had ever met (laughter). His (the speaker’s) self-sacrifice he told them was very great, because he wanted to be the man for Mayor (laughter). He had looked forward to the time very fondly when he would find his life crowned by becoming Mayor of St Pancras (laughter). He had carefully calculated the number of years it would take him to get it, and came to the conclusion that when all the Aldermen of the present Council, all the chairmen of the old Vestry, and some of the more prominent Councillors, had their turn, that the number of years would be 22 (laughter). That was the prospect before him (laughter), and thus it would come to pass that in the year 1924 an old man, with white hair, dim of sight, and hard of hearing, would be elected Mayor of St Pancras and would pass up the Council chamber to the chair amid encouraging cries of ‘Good old Shaw!’ and sympathetic murmurs of ‘Poor old chap!’ (laughter). Having said that, he had now to say that nobody supported the nomination of Alderman Matthews more heartily than himself (applause)... He (the speaker) had spent the greater part of the preceding day with Sir James Hoyle, the Lord Mayor of Manchester, who like their out-going Mayor, Councillor Barnes, had become a distinguished public man in connection with education. They had a technical school in connection with the City Council of Manchester... on the school was spent 30,000 pounds a year out of the rates. The population was not more than twice as large as St Pancras, where they had not the courage to make sufficient rates to cover their liabilities. As time went on he hoped their ideals would expand, and instead of trying to resist the County Council they should enter into competition with it, and try as far as they could to take this part of London off their hands. In the name of the Progressives he supported the nomination from that intellectual part of the Council chamber (laughter and applause).’
His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity – delight in being the candle to the moths – with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity. And he is mistaken if he thinks that it does not affect his artistic work. His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationships... all these defects come largely from the flippant and worthless self-complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women... Whether I like him, admire him or despise him most I do not know.
The Diary of Beatrice Webb (8 May 1897)
If Shaw could settle down to marriage as she and Sidney had done, Beatrice Webb felt certain she would come to like him better. Already, almost in spite of himself, she was beginning to see ‘a sort of affectionateness’ beneath his layer of vanity. He was so extraordinarily good-natured, spending days over Sidney’s and her Industrial Democracy and Problems of Modern Industry. His method, which turned everything inside out to see whether the other side wouldn’t do as well, was genuinely interesting. ‘If only he would concentrate his really brilliant intellect on some consecutive thought.’
Shaw was seeing a good deal of the Webbs in the mid-1890s. But this was different from his previous triangular relationships. He could not flirt with Beatrice and retain his friendship with Sidney; and so he could not flirt. He felt painfully excluded watching them petting each other as if, he noted, they were still honeymooning. ‘I – I, George Bernard Shaw – have actually suffered from something which in anyone else I should call unhappiness.’ His body ached for ‘a moment of really sacred intimacy’. He was physically attracted to Beatrice and sensed that she found him attractive, in much the same hostile way as Judith Anderson in The Devil’s Disciple is unconsciously drawn to Dick Dudgeon. Feeling her embarrassment, her antipathy, he also felt the strain of all that was unspoken between them rising to ‘a perfectly devilish intensity’.
What he was witnessing in the Webbs’ marriage was the merging of passion into a shared obsession for work. That was a marriage he could understand. But could he ever make such a partnership for himself? Beatrice decided to find out.
Bertha Newcombe looked a good candidate. That she was Fabian was essential; that she was ‘lady-like’ no disadvantage; and that she was ‘not wholly inartistic’ an unlooked-for bonus. She was in her thirties and, despite her aquiline features, thin lips and a figure that put Beatrice in mind of a wizened child, not perhaps lacking absolutely in all attraction. At least she was quite smartly turned out, petite and dark, with neat, heavily fringed black hair. And she was devoted to Shaw.
He had sat to Bertha for his portrait as early as 1892. She had painted him as the platform spellbinder, full-length, hand-on-hip, his mouth slightly open as if uttering one of his formidable ripostes, his red-gold hair and Irish blue eyes adding to the impression of easy confidence – ‘a powerful picture,’ Beatrice decided, ‘in which the love of the woman had given genius to the artist’.
She had painted him as a spellbinder, then fallen under his spell. Later, while he was writing The Man of Destiny, lying in a field with his fountain pen and a notebook, she painted him again: A Snake in the Grass. He had not deceived her, but he had bewitched her. He was so easy, delightful; almost intimate, though not quite. Not understanding him, she complained that he did not understand her, and doubted whether he had the gift of sympathetic penetration into any woman’s nature.
He seems to have liked her, but was protected from deeper involvement by her obvious obsession with him. It was an obsession he helped to rouse. He had told her of his adoration for Ellen Terry and introduced her to Janet Achurch – ‘the wonderful woman who absorbed Shaw’s leisure to an extent of which I was only half-conscious’. He also joked about Beatrice Webb’s zeal to see him married. Though he felt the power and pleasure of love, he was determined never to repeat his experiences with Jenny Patterson.
Bertha sensed the latent passion that Jenny Patterson had aroused in him, but she could not reach it herself. Her love awoke his apprehensions. ‘The sight of a woman deeply in love with him annoyed him,’ Bertha commented.
‘Unfortunately on my side there was a deep feeling most injudiciously displayed... I realize how exasperating it must have been to him. He had decided I think on a line of honourable conduct – honourable to his thinking. He kept strictly to the letter of it while allowing himself every opportunity of transgressing the spirit. Frequent talking, talking, talking of the pros and cons of marriage, even to my prospects of money or the want of it, his dislike of the sexual relation & so on, would create an atmosphere of love-making without any need for caresses and endearments.’
What she did not see was that his talk was a method of testing her strength. Everyone was recommending him to marry Bertha. But were they really well-matched? If he married it must be to someone whose love was threaded with shared interests. Bertha and he could never be useful partners like the Webbs. ‘She ought to marry someone else,’ he told Janet.
‘She is only wasting her affections on me. I give her nothing; and I do not even take everything – in fact I dont take anything, which makes her most miserable... she would like to tie me like a pet dog to the leg of her easel & have me always to make love to her when she is tired of painting... I wish somebody could come along & marry her before she worries herself into a state of brokenheartedness.’
Shaw’s campaign to steer Bertha away from ‘this lunacy of hers’ employed every means except one: he could not absent himself from her infelicity. ‘Heavens! I had forgotten you – totally forgotten you,’ he reminded her. He would not let her alone. In desperation she wrote to Beatrice who, on Shaw’s instructions, had stopped inviting them together to the Fabian countryside. For five years Bertha had been loyally devoted to Shaw. She had endured rumours of flirtations, largely because she knew that Beatrice was counselling him to marry her. Now she was dismayed to hear that Beatrice was encouraging him to marry someone else. Why?
Beatrice came to the dark wainscoted studio in Cheyne Walk to give her answer. So long as there had seemed a chance of marriage she had welcomed her as Shaw’s prospective wife. But now she realized he would never marry her she had backed out of the affair. As Beatrice proceeded with her explanation, Bertha’s small face seemed to shrink; and, remembering perhaps her own pain over Chamberlain, Beatrice suddenly raged against Shaw. ‘You are well out of it, Miss Newcombe,’ she said. ‘...You know my opinion of him – as a friend and a colleague, as a critic and literary worker, there are few men for whom I have so warm a liking – but in his relations with women he is vulgar – if not worse.’
‘It is so horribly lonely,’ Bertha answered. ‘I daresay it is more peaceful than being kept on the rack – but it is like the peace of death.’
Partly because of the inconclusive nature of their romance, Bertha was never at peace over Shaw. She remained at Cheyne Walk and never married. By 1909, having taken the post of Honorary Secretary of the Civic and Dramatic Guild, she found herself responsible for the private production of his Press Cuttings. They met; he read her this ‘ghastly absurdity’, then went home to write her a letter.
‘I expected to find a broken hearted, prematurely aged woman: I found an exceedingly smart lady, not an hour older, noting with a triumphant gleam in her eye my white hairs and lined face. When I think that I allowed those brutal letters to hurt me – ME – Bernard Shaw!! Are you not ashamed?’
But Shaw’s teasing, even when intended to be supportive, never amused Bertha. The following month they were quarrelling and she was calling him a ‘villain’.
‘It is far better that I should again efface myself for another 11 years. Possibly we may all die before then... Do you still continue to think of yourself as an idol for adoring women? That idol was shattered for me years ago – – – Inadvertently when you mention the care that has been taken of you, you touch upon the lasting grievance.’
And her grievance did last. A World War came and went. Bertha was approaching sixty, approaching seventy; and still it lasted. ‘B[ertha] wont accept the situation,’ Shaw protested to Charrington, who had taken the part of go-between, ‘...[it] is beyond human patience.’ He tried to present himself as unappealing, but could not resist the paradoxical flourish, the shattering joke – then would recover himself, too late. ‘I am still the same writing speaking machine you know of old,’ he assured her in 1922.
‘I am in my 66th year; my hair is white, and I am as heartless a brute as ever... women adore me more, and are less ashamed of it than when you painted The Snake in the Grass. Hearts can be heard breaking in all directions like china in the hands of a clumsy housemaid... You have my books – the best of me.’
It was not enough, the shattered idol and the broken china. From such debris it had once seemed possible to piece together something valuable. But their correspondence, reviving past expectations, tormented Bertha with these ruined images, and much of it she destroyed. ‘Your memories terrify me,’ Shaw wrote to her in 1925. ‘Thank God there will be no letters.’
That was their future.
So Beatrice Webb rose to go. ‘Come and see me,’ she told Bertha, ‘ – someday.’ There seemed nothing else to say. She kissed her on the forehead and escaped downstairs. ‘I doubt,’ she confided in her diary, ‘whether Bernard Shaw could be induced to marry.’
*
But it was Beatrice who had inadvertently put an end to Shaw’s interest in Bertha. At a luncheon party in the early autumn of 1895 she and Sidney had met an Irish lady named Charlotte Payne-Townshend, ‘a large graceful woman with masses of chocolate brown hair,’ Beatrice later described her. ‘She dresses well, in flowing white evening robes she approaches beauty. At moments she is plain.
‘By temperament she is an anarchist, feeling any regulation or rule intolerable, a tendency which has been exaggerated by her irresponsible wealth. She is romantic but thinks herself cynical. She is a Socialist and a Radical, not because she understands the Collectivist standpoint, but because she is by nature a rebel... She is fond of men and impatient of most women, bitterly resents her enforced celibacy but thinks she could not tolerate the matter-of-fact side of marriage. Sweet tempered, sympathetic and genuinely anxious to increase the world’s enjoyment and diminish the world’s pain.’
Beatrice interested Charlotte in the London School of Economics, and was rewarded with a subscription of £1,000 for the library and the endowment of a woman’s scholarship. Charlotte also agreed, at a rent and service charge of £300 a year, to take rooms on the two upper floors above the School when, in October 1896, it moved to 10 Adelphi Terrace. Beatrice soon began to absorb her ‘into our little set of comrades’, nominating her for the Fabian Society, with a note to the secretary that the amount of her cheque testified to the degree of her convictions.
Shaw was introduced to her on 29 January 1896. She noted the event without comment; and he did not go two months later to her At Home at LSE. But he was apparently ‘prepared to take my part’ in a plan Beatrice had formed to marry Charlotte off to Graham Wallas. In the late summer of 1896 the Webbs rented a Spartan rectory at the village of Stratford St Andrew in Suffolk; and Wallas and Charlotte were invited. Shaw was there as a matter of course. Everything seemed in train for a satisfactory Fabian match.
But Wallas, who left early, arrived four days late; and in those four days the pantomime ostrich spread before Charlotte his most brilliant plumage. They were constant companions, pedaling round the country all day, sitting up late at night talking. ‘They are, I gather from him, on very confidential terms,’ Beatrice noted in her diary, ‘and have “explained” their relative positions... I am somewhat uneasy.’
*
‘I had a perfectly hellish childhood and youth...’ There was much in what Charlotte said about herself to interest Shaw. She was six months younger than he and her family came from County Cork; at least her father’s did. Horace Townsend had been ‘a marvel of patience’. Charlotte, who ‘was always attracted to men of action’, longed for him to assert himself. It was astonishing how his gentleness provoked everyone – especially his wife, a domineering English lady fretted by social ambitions. She got hold of him, hyphenated and then aspirated his name, dug him up from Rosscarbery. If only he had quelled her. But she ‘could not bear opposition; if it was offered she either became quite violent or she cried.’
Early in February 1885 Horace decided to die. There was nothing much wrong with him and he was comparatively young. But his patience had given out, and for a polite man there was nothing else to do.
His wife was incredulous, but Charlotte understood. She understood that her mother had killed him – not legally, of course, but in fact. By everything she now did she sought to avenge his death. Her mother had one ambition left: to see her two daughters brilliantly married. Charlotte refused to give her mother that satisfaction. ‘Even in my earliest years I had determined I would never marry.’
Mother and daughter were determined women. In a furious dance they struggled across Europe, always in ‘the best circles’ and seldom anywhere for more than a week. Inevitably Charlotte blundered into offers of marriage. J. S. Black proposed in ‘as few words as I can’ in a note from his club; Count Sponnek declared himself in South Kensington and, being rebuffed, rushed off in an emotional state to St Petersburg; Finch Hutton sent her the skin of a bear shot in Wyoming and twelve dressed beaver skins: but ‘I cannot marry you,’ Charlotte replied; Herbert Oakley, a barrister, died before completing his case; the wife of Arthur Smith-Barry also died, leaving Arthur Smith-Barry wondering whether Charlotte would take her place. She didn’t. And there were others. Majors and Generals and Major-Generals. Mrs Payne-Townshend watched them all, her hopes pumping up and down. The hatred between the two women was by now ‘almost a tangible thing’. For the first time in her life Mrs Payne-Townshend was not going to get her own way. She felt ill. A doctor was called but he could find nothing wrong with her except ‘nerves’. A few days later she died. ‘It is really awful to think how glad I was,’ Charlotte admitted.
She was thirty-four and at last free. For the first time in her life she allowed herself to fall in love. Dr Axel Munthe, hypnotist and story-teller, caught her in the immense web of his vanity and left her there. Extricating herself had been painful, and it was then that she had flown into the Webbs’ parlour.
Graham Wallas arrived, bored Charlotte, then left. Shaw and she resumed their companionship.
‘If the walls of this simple-minded rectory could only describe the games they have witnessed, the parson would move, horror-stricken, to another house,’ he wrote to Janet Achurch.
‘We have made many bicycling expeditions together à deux. Also, instead of going to bed at ten, we go out and stroll about among the trees for a while. She, being also Irish, does not succumb to my arts as the unsuspecting and literal Englishwoman does; but we get on together all the better, repairing bicycles, talking philosophy and religion and Shaw table talk, or, when we are in a mischievous or sentimental humor, philandering shamelessly and outrageously. Such is life at Stratford St Andrew.’
The loneliness and irritation Shaw had felt at watching the Webbs caressing each other evaporated. Falling out of love with actresses, he was suddenly able to make them an audience for his own romantic play-acting opposite this ‘Irish lady with the light green eyes and the million of money’. ‘I am going to refresh my heart by falling in love with her,’ he announced to Ellen Terry, ‘...but, mind, only with her, not with the million; so someone else must marry her if she can stand him after me.’ It was play-acting. What else could it be? They were genuinely fond of each other, but Charlotte was no slave to romance and ‘she doesnt really love me’. Kissing in the evening among the trees was very pleasant, but ‘She knows the value of her unencumbered independence, having suffered a good deal from family bonds & conventionality before the death of her mother & the marriage of her sister left her free,’ Shaw confided to Ellen Terry. ‘The idea of tying herself up again by a marriage before she knows anything – before she has exploited her freedom & money power to the utmost – seems to her intellect to be unbearably foolish.’
He liked her honesty; he liked her involvement with the political side of his life; and he liked her independence. ‘You don’t love me the least bit in the world,’ he informed her. ‘But I am all the more grateful.’
Watching them uneasily over these weeks at Stratford St Andrew, Beatrice reached a different conclusion. ‘These warmhearted unmarried women of a certain age are audacious and almost childishly reckless of consequences.’
*
On 17 September, Shaw and Charlotte, Sidney and Beatrice, ascended their machines and wheeled off back to London, which they reached in pouring rain four days later. Shaw was immediately engulfed in business. There was time for only the most tantalizing note to Charlotte who missed him and rather miserably told him so. ‘You look as if you had returned to your old amusement of eating your heart,’ he reproved her, remembering Axel Munthe. ‘...you must get something to do: I have a mind to go upstairs & shake you, only then I should lose my train.’
He was determined that she must remain strong. ‘Don’t fall in love: be your own, not mine or anyone else’s.
‘From the moment that you can’t do without me, you’re lost, like Bertha. Never fear: if we want one another we shall find it out. All I know is that you made the autumn very happy, and that I shall always be fond of you for that. About the future... let us do what lies to our hands & wait for events. My dearest!’
Fearing that she was falling in love with him, Charlotte suddenly left for Ireland. Shaw felt nonplussed: he was unused to people taking his advice. The kick of his disappointment took him aback. She had surpassed his expectations. He began by welcoming her journey (‘I had rather you were well a thousand miles away than ill in my wretched arms’), then complained of her removal (‘oh for ten minutes peace in the moonlight at Stratford!... keep me deep in your heart... I wish I were with you among those hills’). But his eloquence and even his teasing seemed to lose itself in her absence.
On the day before Charlotte’s return from Ireland, he sent her an exactly truthful letter. ‘I will contrive to see you somehow, at all hazards,’ he wrote: ‘I must; and that “must” which “rather alarms” you, TERRIFIES me.
‘If it were possible to run away – if it would do any good – I’d do it; so mortally afraid am I that my trifling & lying and ingrained treachery and levity with women are going to make you miserable when my whole sane desire is to make you hap – I mean strong and self possessed and tranquil. However, we must talk about it... let’s meet, meet, meet, meet, meet: bless me! how I should like to see you again for pure liking; for there is something between us...’
He saw her the night she returned. For hours beforehand he had felt curiously agitated. Then they were together and ‘I really was happy... I am satisfied, satisfied, satisfied deep in my heart.’ He had found with Charlotte a real friendliness mixed with some sexual interest. But that sexual interest put a faint shadow over his happiness. ‘I wish there was nothing to look forward to,’ he wrote to her later that night, ‘nothing to covet, nothing to gain.’ What he actually feared was that there was something to lose. Charlotte, he had told Ellen Terry, ‘knows that what she lacks is physical experience, and that without it she will be in ten years time an old maid’. But he could not stay away from Adelphi Terrace. He came – ‘and now, dear Ellen,’ he confided, ‘she sleeps like a child, and her arms will be plump, and she is a free woman, and it has not cost her half a farthing, and she has fancied herself in love, and known secretly that she was only taking a prescription, and been relieved to find the lover at last laughing at her & reading her thoughts and confessing himself a mere bottle of nerve medicine, and riding gaily off.
Often before Shaw had implored women to use him. ‘All my love affairs end tragically because the women can’t use me.’ Charlotte had used him and ‘in the blackest depths’ he felt robbed of ‘that most blessed of things – unsatisfied desire’. From this desire he conceived the make-believe of his plays. Now, he told Charlotte, ‘I have squandered on you all the material out of which my illusions are made’. Once again Charlotte had confounded his expectations. Prim and socially self-effacing, she could take off her inhibitions once she selected a man for intimacy. It was one of those ‘volcanic tendencies’ Beatrice had detected in her.
Charlotte had an apprehension of sexual intercourse, deriving from what Shaw later described as ‘a morbid horror of maternity’. She was in her fortieth year and ‘there was never any question of breeding’. Over the next eighteen months they seem to have found together a habit of careful sexual experience, reducing for her the risk of conception and preserving for him his subliminal illusions. To such muted sexuality Shaw could give assent. ‘ALL CLEAR NOW YES A THOUSAND TIMES,’ he had cabled Charlotte in October. That autumn too he started to terminate his relationship with Bertha Newcombe; blow away Ellen Terry’s daydreams of becoming his mother-in-law; renounce retrospectively ‘spiritual intercourse’ with Florence Farr; and tell Janet Achurch that her maternity had made her ‘stark raving mad’. Then, turning back to Charlotte he resumed his intrepid doubles entendres: ‘Cold much worse – fatal consummation highly probable. Shall see you tonight... What an exacting woman you are! Is this freedom?’
*
Charlotte soon made herself almost indispensable to Shaw. She learnt to read his shorthand and to type, took dictation and helped him prepare his plays for the press. Her flat above the London School of Economics became ‘very convenient for me’ – more convenient than Fitzroy Square. There was no question of turning up there at any time in the casual way he had dropped in on Jenny Patterson, Janet Achurch, Florence Farr and others. He would invite her to theatres and picture galleries; and she invited him to lunch or dinner, seeing to it that her cook became expert in vegetarian dishes. There were interruptions: his migraines, her neuralgia; his work, her journeys. And there was a momentary crisis when she threatened to buy a poodle – which drew from him the panicky suggestion that she ‘have (or hire) a baby’ instead. In a spirit of compromise she attended lectures at the School of Medicine for Women.
Between April and June 1897 Charlotte shared with Sidney and Beatrice the expenses of a pretty cottage called Lotus on the North Downs, near Dorking. Shaw went down as frequently as he could. But he had less time than at Stratford the previous year – ‘tired and careworn’ he described himself. But the Webbs were in excellent working form. The sun streamed through the dancing leaves and they revelled, almost childlike with excitement, in the economic characteristics of Trade Unionism; while Charlotte sat upstairs miserably typewriting Plays Unpleasant, and the playwright himself strode the garden forming his Dramatic Opinions. Beatrice watched with concern. It was obvious that Charlotte was deeply attached to Shaw, but ‘I see no sign on his side of the growth of any genuine and steadfast affection,’ she noted.
Though she found everything ‘very interesting’, Charlotte could take only a modest part in what Shaw called ‘our eternal political shop’. On Sundays they enlisted a stream of visitors – young radicals, mostly: William Pember Reeves and his wife Maud; Bertrand and Alys Russell; Herbert Samuel; Charles Trevelyan; Graham Wallas – and Charlotte sometimes felt excluded. She hung on, but her face showed at times ‘a blank haggard look’. Beatrice felt that Shaw must share her own irritation at Charlotte’s lack of purpose. ‘If she would set to – and do even the smallest and least considerable task of intellectual work – I believe she could retain his interest and perhaps develop his feeling for her.’
Charlotte struggled to make an occupation out of Shaw’s work. On Sundays in London she had made her way to the dock gates and street corners to hear him speak. But these experiences mortified her. She hated the roughness of the crowds. ‘It appears that my demagogic denunciations of the idle rich – my demands for taxation of unearned incomes – lacerate her conscience; for she has great possessions. What am I to do: she won’t stay away; and I can’t talk Primrose League. Was there ever such a situation?’
Although the author of The Philanderer believed it was better for ‘two people who do not mean to devote themselves to a regular domestic, nursery career to maintain a clandestine connection than to run the risks of marriage’, Charlotte was surprised to find that his advice to women was to ‘insist on marriage, and refuse to compromise themselves with any man on cheaper terms’. He considered the status of a married woman as ‘almost indispensable under existing circumstances to a woman’s fullest possible freedom.
‘In short, I prescribed marriage for women, and refused it for myself. I upset her ideas in many directions; for she was prepared for conventional unconventionality, but not for a criticism of it as severe as its own criticism of conventionality.’
Within this argument seems to lie the biological politics that were to vitalize Man and Superman. In fact the philosophy of this play was one of the ‘illusions’ that Shaw substituted for actual experience. For Charlotte did not want marriage in order to have children; she was beginning to want it as a partnership that, though different from the Webbs’, would be no less satisfactory. At that level Shaw had little to say. Eventually she began to run out of patience with him.
Charlotte had surprised Shaw before by taking his advice. Now, she attempted to do so again. If it was her job to marry, he would not object to her making the proposal. This it seems is what she attempted to do in the second week of July 1897. Shaw described the scene as ‘a sort of earthquake’. He received the golden moment, he told Ellen Terry, ‘with shuddering horror & wildly asked the fare to Australia’. This description, given a fortnight after the event, is a good example of the replacement of ‘Shaw Limited’ by ‘G.B.S.’. Pain, regret, tenderness are dissolved in the triumphant playing of a Shavian scherzo. ‘I have an iron ring round my chest, which tightens and grips my heart when I remember that you are perhaps still tormented,’ he wrote to her the day after the proposal.
‘Loosen it, oh ever dear to me, by a word to say that you slept well and have never been better than today. Or else lend me my fare to Australia, to Siberia, to the mountains of the moon, to any place where I can torment nobody but myself. I am sorry – not vainly sorry; for I have done a good morning’s work, but painfully, wistfully, affectionately sorry that you were hurt; but if you had seen my mind you would not have been hurt... Write me something happy, but only a few words, and don’t sit down to think over them.’
She was rich, he was poor. Marriage for property, he had written, was prostitution; to marry her would be the act of an adventurer. This financial scruple had the advantage of being kindly; it was not a personal rejection. Yet it was a prevarication, and did not protect Charlotte from being ‘inexpressibly taken aback’. It was absurd for him to turn his back on a richer woman simply because people might regard him as a fortune-hunter.
Politically, Shaw had put his faith in the power of words to inspire action. But in his personal life he employed words to avoid taking action. His letters to Ellen Terry and others had developed into an oblique device for this avoidance. He talked himself out of emotional danger. Advancing to the front of the stage he put his case mockingly to the audience:
‘I will put an end to it all by marrying. Do you know a reasonably healthy woman of about sixty, accustomed to plain vegetarian cookery, and able to read & write enough to forward letters when her husband is away, but otherwise uneducated? Must be plain featured, and of an easy, unjealous temperament. No relatives, if possible. Must not be a lady. One who has never been in a theatre preferred. Separate rooms.’
Such a monologue, though it floods the auditorium with amusement, does not advance the event-plot of the play. And does it convince? At least one member of his audience with a shrewd knowledge of such performances thought not. ‘Well,’ Ellen Terry responded, ‘you two will marry.’
*
Superficially the rupture between Shaw and Charlotte healed quickly. But added pressure was now being placed on him to marry. Webb had uncharacteristically given him a talking to; and then, at the end of July, Graham Wallas unexpectedly announced his own engagement to a high-principled short-story writer, Ada Radford. With this ‘desertion’ Shaw was to become the only unmarried member of the Fabian Old Gang.
That August he had arranged to stay at Argoed with Charlotte and the Webbs. He was more deeply exhausted than ever – too tired to fix up the hammocks Charlotte had brought, too tired to draw rein from writing even for a day. The days flew past, ‘like the telegraph poles on a railway journey’, and he worked on. But ‘I am in the most disagreeable humor possible,’ he complained to Florence Farr. His ‘victory’ over Charlotte had disappointed him. They lived an irreproachable life, the writing machine and the typist, in the bosom of the Webb family. It was apparently everything he had wanted. Yet a dialogue began to develop between G.B.S. and Shaw Limited in his correspondence.
‘I am fond of women (one in a thousand, say); but I am in earnest about quite other things. To most women one man and one lifetime make a world. I require whole populations and historical epochs to engage my interests seriously... love is only diversion and recreation to me.’
Shaw Limited sees G.B.S. as a bragging emotional bankrupt playing timidly with the serious things of life and dealing seriously with the plays. His appeal to the audience carries a far-off echo of Sonny’s voice:
‘It is not the small things that women miss in me, but the big things. My pockets are always full of the small change of love-making; but it is magic money, not real money.’
For his mother’s elopement with Vandeleur Lee, G.B.S. had substituted an economic for the emotional necessity; and he had used a financial argument to trick himself out of marrying Charlotte. So now Shaw Limited brings a money metaphor to expose the unreality of G.B.S. If only Charlotte had had the confidence to tear up that ridiculous Shavian balance sheet. Instead, unknown to Shaw, she had committed herself to him on the very terms by which he had rejected her, making a will that (barring a bequest to a cousin) left him her entire fortune.
But after their return to London at the end of August, Charlotte’s behaviour changed. Suddenly she seemed less anxious to be with Shaw. Early in October she absconded to Leicester to visit her sister, Mary Cholmondeley who, Shaw knew, disliked him. ‘Where am I to spend my evenings?’ he complained. Charlotte returned, but suddenly veered off again back to her sister. ‘It is most inconvenient having Adelphi Terrace shut up,’ he pointed out. ‘I have nowhere to go, nobody to talk to.’ When Charlotte returned again, she was curiously unavailable. When he called one afternoon he was told by the maid that Charlotte was out. She always seemed to be ‘out’. But three days later, on his way to dine at the Metropole, he suddenly found ‘to my astonishment my legs walked off with me through the railway arches to Adelphi Terrace’, where he saw the lights on in Charlotte’s bedroom, signalling (he assumed) her unhappiness; but hardly had he written triumphantly to tell her so than she had disappeared to Paris. ‘I miss you in lots of ways,’ he wrote. ‘...I wish you could stay in Paris & that I could get there in quarter of an hour. I feel that you are much better & brighter there; but it is damnably inconvenient to have you out of my reach.’
Charlotte came back early in November – but not to London. Instead she went straight to Hertfordshire to stay with some rich Fabian friends, Robert and ‘Lion’ Phillimore. This was too much for Shaw who pursued her on his bicycle and, travelling back at night, took one of his formidable tosses down a hill. He put the accident to instant use in an article for the Saturday Review, ‘On Pleasure Bent’. All the same, Charlotte did not return at once.
When she did get back to London, he was almost cumbersomely tactful. ‘I shall not intrude on my secretary tomorrow. If she desires to resume her duties, doubtless she will come to me.’ A week later the tone was brisker: ‘Secretary required tomorrow, not later than eleven.’ But, for Charlotte, typing and shorthand had been a means to an end that seemed to be fading. She was not amused by his evasive joking. ‘Charlotte can not only resist jokes, but dislikes them,’ Shaw later explained to Pinero. ‘Hence she was not seduced, as you would have been, by my humorous aberrations.’ He made ready for Charlotte’s arrival next morning to continue her secretarial work. He swept the hearth and made the fire; he laid out Charlotte’s shawl and footwarmer; and then he waited – and she did not come. She had gone to Dieppe! ‘What do you mean by this inconceivable conduct?’ he demanded. ‘Do you forsake all your duties... Must I also go back to writing my own articles, and wasting half hours between the sentences with long trains of reflection? Not a word: not a sign!... Are there no stamps? has the post been abolished? have all the channel steamers foundered?’
He was genuinely put out. So, after making fun of himself, he turned on Charlotte and accused her of everything she would most dislike. ‘Go, then, ungrateful wretch,’ he wrote, ‘have your heart’s desire:
‘find a Master – one who will spend your money, and rule in your house, and order your servants about, and forbid you to ride in hansoms because it’s unladylike, and remind you that the honor of his name is in your keeping, and... consummate his marriage in the church lest the housemaid should regard his proceedings as clandestine. Protect yourself for ever from freedom, independence, love, unfettered communion with the choice spirits of your day... But at least tell me when youre not coming; and say whether I am to get a new secretary or not.
G.B.S.’
This letter points to one of Charlotte’s hidden attractions for Shaw: she was a member of the same family as the ‘terribly respectable’ land agents, Uniacke Townshend, that had employed him as an office boy twenty-five years ago in Dublin. His attitude seems divided: the socialist responding ironically, the Irishman romantically to this fact. He knew that, though the Irish might grudgingly admit him to be (in Edith Somerville’s words) ‘distinctly somebody in a literary way’, it was assumed that socially ‘he can’t be a gentleman’. Marriage to Charlotte would shock some of those who had looked down on the office boy and who (if he ever returned to Ireland) would have to open their doors to him. Such things would of course never influence him; but it was pleasant to speculate on them.
Though he repeatedly insisted on the independence of women, Shaw continued to make them dependent on him. He excited interest: then ran. But Charlotte, who had money and the habit of travel, ran first and ran further. She was emotionally dependent but financially independent. Such manoeuvres gave Shaw the appearance of pursuing her.
The New Year bristled with good intentions. Charlotte was particularly attentive, rubbing vaseline on his bicycle wounds and encouraging him to use Adelphi Terrace as office and convalescent station. Shaw struggled to be reasonable.
That March 1898, the Webbs planned to be off on a tour round America and the Antipodes, ‘seeing Anglo-Saxon democracy’, and they invited Charlotte to go with them. ‘If she does,’ Shaw told Ellen Terry, ‘she will be away for about a year, just time enough for a new love affair.’ Perhaps because she felt the danger of this herself, Charlotte did not take up the Webbs’ invitation, but accepted instead an offer from Lion Phillimore to go for seven weeks to Rome. ‘Charlotte deserts me at 11,’ Shaw noted in his almanac. He felt ‘quite desperate’ and put it down to ‘lack of exercise’. His friend Wallas was away with his new wife; Sydney Olivier had decided to go to the United States; his audience of actresses had dispersed and he was alone.
By the way, would you advise me to get married?
Shaw to Henry Arthur Jones (20 May 1898)
‘Sisterless men are always afraid of women,’ Shaw was to write; yet his own fears proceeded from the women in his family. He had seen their contempt for men – for his father and himself, even for Vandeleur Lee once his usefulness was exhausted.
On 25 November 1886 his sister Lucy had brought home a young man called Harry Butterfield to meet her mother. The purpose of this introduction was to announce her engagement – to Harry’s brother, Charles, who may have been unavailable that evening because he was having an affair with another woman.
Besides his couple of ‘wives’, Charles had two names. As ‘Cecil Burt’ he travelled with a band of wanderers called ‘Leslie’s No. 1’, performing as a cherubic tenor. ‘He sang with difficulty,’ Shaw remembered. He and Lucy Shaw sang together in Alfred Cellier’s popular comedy-opera Dorothy, which had opened in London late in 1886. Shaw missed the first night; he also missed their wedding (‘did not get to the church until the ceremony was over’) and the small wedding party at Fitzroy Square a year later. But (as Corno di Bassetto) he caught up with them at Morton’s Theatre, Greenwich, in the autumn of 1889 for the 789th performance of Dorothy’s provincial tour. His brother-in-law, Shaw observed, ‘originally, I have no doubt, a fine young man... was evidently counting the days until death should release him from the part’.
Into the description of Dorothy he poured his long-standing resentment at having to submit to Lucy’s alleged superiority. He knew her mind was commonplace, her talent little more than a trick of facility, her attractions superficial. It had been Lucy whom Bessie had taken with her to London; and Lucy whom Lee had favoured; and Lucy who had been welcome at some of the London salons where George felt so gauche; and again Lucy whom people thought so lovable and entertaining. Great things had been expected of her; great things by the age of thirty-six had led to Dorothy at Morton’s Theatre, Greenwich.
‘She will apparently spend her life in artistic self-murder by induced Dorothitis without a pang of remorse, provided she be praised and paid regularly. Dorothy herself, a beauteous young lady of distinguished mien, with an immense variety of accents ranging from the finest Tunbridge Wells English (for genteel comedy) to the broadest Irish (for repartee and low comedy), sang without the slightest effort and without the slightest point, and was all the more desperately vapid because she suggested artistic gifts wasting in complacent abeyance.’
The impulse behind what Lucy called this ‘typically fraternal – Irish fraternal – act’ was part of the Shaw family feeling from which Lucy wanted to escape. ‘She was more popular outside the family than inside it,’ her cousin Judy Gillmore explained, ‘and... she preferred people who would look up to her to those who would stand up to her.’ Like her brother, Lucy had largely substituted theatre for home life; like him too she tried to replace her own family with another. Shaw had made use of the Fabians; Lucy used her husband’s relatives. It was these relatives she had married. That was the significance of announcing her engagement in the presence of her future brother-in-law. Both George and Lucy, having grown up in a matriarchal family, instinctively cast about for a mother elsewhere.
Charles Butterfield was not an immediately attractive man. But he had an exceptional mother who knitted Lucy into the pattern of the Butterfield family with its comforting social world in the suburbs of Denmark Hill. But after Mrs Butterfield died, Lucy had drifted back to Fitzroy Square. ‘LOVE,’ she wrote, ‘...is dead sea fruit, whether it is parental, fraternal or marital, and anyone who sacrifices their all on its altar plays a game that is lost before it is begun... it’s a damnable world.’ She seemed little more now than a figure of derision to her mother. Much of the money Shaw squeezed out from journalism went towards the maintenance of this unhappy household, which included Bessie’s hunchback sister, Kate Gurly (whose ‘state of unparalleled inclination’ preceded her final plunge into Roman Catholicism), and from time to time her brother Walter Gurly, who would arrive at Fitzroy Square paralytically drunk, threatening to leave his nephew his heavily mortgaged Carlow property.
From this ‘damnable world’, with planchette and ouija, Shaw’s mother had ridden away to parlay with the dead. She found them more congenial company than the living. First there was her favourite child Yuppy; and even her husband and her father seemed faintly less intolerable since their deaths. But on the whole she preferred chatting with people she had never known, the more remote the better, eventually settling for intercourse with a sage who had visited the earth in 6000 BC.
Bessie’s spiritualism was an embarrassment to her son: ‘[I] held my tongue because I did not like to say anything that could worry my mother.’ In his diary he had privately dismissed spiritualism as a ‘paltry fraud’. At a session of spirit-rapping and table-turning with Belfort Bax and H. W. Massingham, he had cheated from the first and ‘caused the spirits to rap out long stories, lift the table into the air, and finally drink tumblers of whisky and water, to the complete bewilderment of Bax... I have not laughed so much for years.’ He released some of this laughter anonymously into the Pall Mall Gazette.
‘Every Englishman believes that he is entitled to a ghost after death to compensate him for the loss of his body, and to enable him to haunt anybody that may have murdered or otherwise ill-used him in the days when he was solid.’
Bessie’s wishful writings appeared like a non-malignant growth in an otherwise healthy body. But the escapist illusions of spiritualism raised in his mind the whole question of the morality of fiction. ‘A person who describes events that never happened and persons that never existed is generally classed as a liar – possibly a genial and entertaining liar,’ he wrote. ‘And what is the business of a novelist if not to describe events that never happened and to repeat conversations that never took place.’ To such an uncomfortable conclusion had his failure as a novelist driven him; and his comparative failure as a dramatist was persuading him to look on his plays too as methods of extending his self-deception.
‘When we are young our inordinate fondness for theatrical and novel-writing leads us to simulate and describe emotions which we do not feel. Later, when the struggle for existence becomes too serious for such follies, real emotions come to us in battalions; but we take as much trouble to conceal them as we formerly did to affect them... [and] Life comes to mean finance.’
He had kept up the appearance of a realist; but who could say whether he too had not been misled by illusions? Asking himself why his mother had chosen to practise such an apparently senseless activity as spirit writings, he added another question: ‘Why was I doing essentially the same as a playwright?’ And answered: ‘I do not know. We both got some satisfaction from it or we would not have done it.’
Lucy had made a brief escape from Fitzroy Square to the United States in 1897, playing in Villiers Stanford’s Shamus O’Brien. This, the last small success of her career, merged with the first large success of her brother. The Devil’s Disciple had opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 4 October 1897, running to full houses for sixty-four performances until, early in 1898, Richard Mansfield took it off on a popular Mid-West tour. From this production of The Devil’s Disciple Shaw earned £2,000 (equivalent to over £100,000 in 1997) and came to be recognized ‘as a possible winner in the box office gamble’. It was a turning point of his career. For more than twenty years he had lived from hand to mouth. By the time Charlotte was preparing to return from Rome, he was suddenly in easy circumstances and ‘with every reason to believe that things would improve’.
One result of this affluence had been his decision to give up drama criticism. Another result was his decision to write plays again. He chose Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April, on which to compose a Puritan prelude to Antony and Cleopatra. ‘Snatch up my note book & make a start at last on “Caesar & Cleopatra”,’ he wrote. ‘Lifelike scene in the courtyard of the palace at Alexandria among the bodyguard of Cleopatra. Screamingly amusing... [it] is going to save my life.’
Something was needed to save his life, for he was now in his own words ‘a fearful wreck’.
*
During Charlotte’s absence Shaw had struggled to maintain his self-sufficiency, working until ‘I got into a sort of superhuman trance’. He had engaged Henry Salt’s wife, Kate, to do his typing and dictation. Now that he was alone, he claimed to be ‘no longer unhappy, and no longer happy: I am myself.’ Mrs Salt would arrive, carrying a brown paper parcel containing a three-legged stool, some bananas and biscuits. ‘We achieve a phenomenal performance with the arrears of correspondence,’ Shaw wrote to Charlotte. ‘...Your memory is totally obliterated... This is indeed a secretary.’ But it was ‘frightful not to be able to kiss your secretary’.
The longer Charlotte remained in Italy, the more unstable Shaw grew. He felt he was growing old and breaking up. ‘I want a woman & a sound sleep,’ he exclaimed. ‘...Oh Charlotte, Charlotte: is this a time to be gadding about in Rome!’
He dared not trust his feelings. He missed her; but felt relieved that she was gone, as if a crisis had receded. So there must be two Charlottes, as there had been two Alice Locketts. In her absence, he could plant her neatly in his fantasy world. ‘You count that I have lost only one Charlotte,’ he wrote to her; ‘but I have lost two; and one of the losses is a prodigious relief.
‘...the terrible Charlotte, the lier-in-wait, the soul hypochondriac, always watching and dragging me into bondage, always planning nice, sensible, comfortable, selfish destruction for me, wincing at every accent of freedom in my voice, so that at last I get the trick of hiding myself from her, hating me & longing for me with the absorbing passion of the spider for the fly. Now that she is gone, I realize for the first time the infernal tyranny of the past year, which left me the licence of the rebel, not the freedom of the man who stands alone. I will have no more of it... That’s the Charlotte I want to see married... yet I have her in my dreamland, and sometimes doubt whether the other devil ever had anything to do with her.’
This letter shows the extent to which Shaw had been unable to absorb Charlotte into his private mythology. So solid, yet elusive, she occupied his dreamland but threatened him with everyday experience. His letter seems deliberately hurtful, as if he is provoking her to break it off. But she would not.
To marry, or not to marry: that was the question: and he answered it differently each hour. ‘I probably will marry the lady,’ he told the Pakenham Beattys that April. But to the mathematician and biologist Karl Pearson he maintained that he was ‘as firmly set against such a step as ever I was in my most inveterate youth and bachelordom’. Walking through the park, bicycling into the country: doing anything that awakened him from the oblivion of his work-addiction, exacerbated the dilemma. Charlotte still lingered in Rome, but her companion Lion Phillimore had returned in April and she and her husband invited Shaw to their home for Easter. Once there they started to bully him for his stupidity in not marrying Charlotte. One of the chief delights of married life, they told him, was the avoidance of the pre-nuptial obligation to be constantly paying amorous attentions to one another. Against such a Shavian device, ‘I was totally incapable of self-defence’.
The length of Charlotte’s Italian visit and the infrequency of her letters to him was not due, as Shaw suggested, to ‘some Italian doctor’. Though Dr Axel Munthe was then in Rome, Charlotte had avoided seeing him. She was busy, in Fabian fashion, with a study of the municipal services of the city and could not return to London until she had properly collated her notes. Shaw, who had so often complained about her incapacity for work, could not now complain over the reason for her extended absence. It was as if everyone had learnt the Shavian game, and was playing it against him.
In the middle of April, while lacing one of his shoes too tightly, Shaw pinched his left instep. A week later, when riding his bicycle to see the Beattys, the foot expanded ‘to the size of a leg of mutton’. He felt confident of curing it ‘with hot water’, and had just succeeded when, under stress of theatre reviewing in the evenings and vestry meetings during the day, the foot swelled up ‘to the size of a church bell’. Some of his friends suggested ‘vegetarian gout’. Walking soon became so excruciating that ‘I now simply hop,’ he wrote to Charlotte, ‘my left foot being no longer of any use’. On 23 April he called in Dr Salisbury Sharpe, Alice Lockett’s husband, who told him that his two toe joints had slipped over each other and become inflamed. ‘My medical skill is completely vindicated: I have been doing exactly the right thing,’ Shaw congratulated himself after the doctor had left. The hot water treatments continued and these were of great benefit to Caesar and Cleopatra. ‘Finished whole scene of Cleopatra,’ he noted in the almanac he was keeping each day and sending to Charlotte, ‘...quintessence of everything that has most revolted the chivalrous critics Ha! Ha! Julius Caesar as the psychological woman tamer.’
Shaw, as woman tamer, had been letting Charlotte have almost daily reports on his foot with the result that she came ‘back from Italy to nurse me’. She left Rome at the end of April. She was due to arrive in London on the evening of 1 May. Shaw limped down Tottenham Court Road, descended at Charing Cross, and went on slowly to Adelphi Terrace. ‘With a long gasp of relief, I lay my two-months burden down & ring the bell.’ Martha, the parlourmaid, answered the door. Charlotte was not there! He could do nothing but leave her a note of protest and hobble all the way back to Fitzroy Square. ‘Wretch, devil, fiend !... Satan’s own daughter would have telegraphed.’
Travelling from Naples by sea, Charlotte arrived later that night and replied next day on the back of Shaw’s note:
‘Yes, I might have telegraphed: it was horrid of me. I am a wreck, mental and physical. Such a journey as it was! I don’t believe I shall ever get over it.
My dear – and your foot? Shall I go up to you or will you come here and when? Only tell me what you would prefer. Of course I am quite free.
Charlotte’
*
‘Come when it is most convenient to you... the sooner the better (for the first moment at least).’
She went at once to Fitzroy Square and was appalled. His room was a shipwreck. Correspondence and miscellaneous manuscripts, agitated by his perpetually open window, lay fluttering among the solid debris of cutlery, saucepans, apples, cups of trembling cocoa, plates of half-finished hardening porridge and a drifting surface of smuts and dust. Charlotte could only squeeze in sideways. Unshoe’d, his mobility had ‘contracted itself to within hopping distance of my chair’. He could no longer look after himself and no one else there had any interest in him. For over twenty years mother and son had lived under the same roof in London, seldom communicating, and in such conditions that Charlotte’s horror turned at once to a hatred of his mother and sister.
Something needed to be done. Charlotte demanded back the post as his secretary – and he refused. Kate Salt, he said, was looking after his secretarial needs very well; she was excellent at dictation and eminently bullyable. He did not want to bully Charlotte. He wanted her to bully him. He did not want a replacement for Mrs Salt but for Mrs Shaw. Charlotte retired to consider how best she might deal with his predicament. His foot looked terrible, and he appeared haggard with strain. Ellen Terry had sent them tickets for a new play at the Lyceum on 5 May, and he ‘nearly killed myself’ getting in a review on time.
The day after the Lyceum Charlotte suddenly took the initiative, calling at Fitzroy Square and taking Shaw back to Adelphi Terrace for a long talk. There is little record of what they said to each other. Three days later he underwent an operation on his left foot. An anaesthetist arrived at Fitzroy Square at half-past eight in the evening together with nurse Alice Lockett and her physician husband. After coming round from the chloroform, Shaw was told by Dr Sharpe that an abscess had formed on his foot. An attempt had been made to scrape the necrosed bone clean, but until it healed he would be on crutches.
He made this the subject of his penultimate article, ‘G.B.S. Vivisected’, for the Saturday Review. ‘A few weeks ago one of my feet, which had borne me without complaining for forty years, struck work,’ he wrote.
‘The foot got into such a condition that it literally had to be looked into... My doctor’s investigation of my interior has disclosed the fact that for many years I have been converting the entire stock of my energy extractable from my food (which I regret to say he disparages) into pure genius. Expecting to find bone and tissue, he has been almost wholly disappointed... He has therefore put it bluntly to me that I am already almost an angel and that it rests with myself to complete the process summarily by writing any more articles before I have recovered... It is also essential, in order to keep up the sympathy which rages at my bedside, to make the very worst of my exhausted condition.’
This notice of his operation in the theatre pages of the Saturday Review was part of the relentless Shavianizing of these strange weeks. Having planted his injured foot in the middle of Frank Harris’s paper, he made it the ludicrous substitute for a broken heart. There was nothing pedestrian about Shaw’s foot. It was part of the theatrical traffic in what reads like the scenario for a miracle play, helping prepare the public for the extraordinary happening of his marriage.
‘For the first time in my life I tasted the bliss of having no morals to restrain me from lying, and no sense of reality to restrain me from romancing. I overflowed with what people call “heart”. I acted and lied in the most touchingly sympathetic fashion... I carefully composed effective little ravings, and repeated them, and then started again and let my voice die away, without an atom of shame. I called everybody by their Christian names...
At last they quietly extinguished the lights, and stole out of the chamber of the sweet invalid who was now sleeping like a child, but who, noticing that the last person to leave the room was a lady, softly breathed that lady’s name in his dreams. Then the effect of the anaesthetic passed away more and more; and in less than an hour I was an honest taxpayer again, with my heart perfectly well in hand. And now comes the great question, Was that a gain or a loss?’
This question invites us to see his marriage to Charlotte (which he refers to elsewhere as ‘the second operation he has undergone lately’) being performed under ether. The starting point was the reversal of a cliché: that marriage is a fate worse than death. ‘I found myself without the slightest objection to death, and stranger still, with the smallest objection to marriage.’ Nevertheless ‘death did not come; but... Marriage did,’ he told the economist Philip Wicksteed. The following year, in a letter to another of his correspondents, Richard Mansfield’s wife Beatrice, he presented the story epigrammatically. ‘I proposed to make her [Charlotte] my widow.’ The Shavian paradox appears with the fact that the union produces not a mother of children but the father of plays.
Some eighteen years later Shaw was still insisting that he had considered the situation, ‘from the point of view of a dying man’. In fact he had considered it as a method of prolonging active life. Work was his life; as he lived so he must write. But if he persisted working and writing in Fitzroy Square, ‘nailed by one foot to the floor like a doomed Strasburg goose’, he would become an invalid – that was Charlotte’s verdict, and there can be little doubt that she put it to him strongly that day at Adelphi Terrace. The moment for a decision had come; she took it and he acceded. It was agreed between them that he was starved, if not of red meat, then of fresh air and rest. Charlotte proposed renting a house in the country, hiring two nurses and a staff of servants, and superintending his recovery however long that might take.
Charlotte’s sister, Mary Cholmondeley – or ‘Mrs Chumly’ as Shaw liked to write her name (‘I forget the full spelling’) – refused to meet her future brother-in-law and, ‘as a last kindness to me’, requested Charlotte to secure her money. Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw seemed less interested in their news, making no comment beyond saying that it would be difficult to call Miss Payne-Townshend ‘Charlotte’ since she looked more like a ‘Carlotta’ – the mockingly glamorous name by which Lucinda and Lucy Shaw were always to know her.
Charlotte had spoken that day in Adelphi Terrace of Shaw’s health and they must have spoken too of her money. The success of Mansfield’s American production of The Devil’s Disciple had removed Shaw’s financial scruple against marriage. ‘It did not make me as rich as my wife; but it placed me beyond all suspicion of being a fortune hunter or a parasite.’ In 1896 he had earned £589 5s. 1d. (equivalent to £31,000 in 1997); in 1897 his income had risen to £1098 4s. 0d. of which £674 8s. 3d. had come from the opening weeks of The Devil’s Disciple. One of the financial matters they seem to have discussed was a marriage settlement to enable ‘my mother, if I died, to end her days without having to beg from my widow or from anyone else’. In fact Shaw safeguarded Lucinda, who was now in her sixty-ninth year, by means of an annuity and a private understanding with Charlotte that, if he were unable to meet the payments, she would make them without revealing herself as the source. In May 1899 Charlotte’s solicitors drew up a settlement that guaranteed the income from two trust funds (administered by Sidney Webb and a clerk in the Bank of England and founder of the Stage Society, Frederick Whelen) to Shaw himself – these funds reverting to Charlotte in the event of his predeceasing her. Two years later, on 1 July 1901, Shaw was to make a will, appointing Charlotte as his sole executrix and trustee, bequeathing her his literary manuscripts and copyrights and all the estate not otherwise disposed of. Among his specific bequests was an annuity of £600 to be paid to Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, and, in the event of her death, an alternative annuity of £300 for his sister Lucy.
Between themselves they agreed to share basic expenses, but to keep their unequal incomes mainly apart. ‘Her property is a separate property,’ Shaw later notified the Special Commissioners of Income Tax, to whom he refused to file a joint income-tax return. ‘She keeps a separate banking account at a separate bank.’
Besides health and money what else was there – except the crucial question of a marriage proposal? This was slipped into the agenda by Shaw as an item of social etiquette and accepted by Charlotte ‘without comment’. It has the air of ‘any other business’.
By presenting his marriage contract as a document of social intercourse, Shaw underlined the fact that it was not primarily a sexual arrangement he had entered into with Charlotte. Only with this proposal, he told Beatrice Webb, had the relation between them ‘completely lost its inevitable preliminary character of a love affair’. Now, as patient and nurse, they were nearer to being parent and child, and with the possibility of beginning a new life.
Shaw continued to screen their feelings behind a rattling extravaganza. ‘My disabled condition has driven Miss Payne Townshend into the most humiliating experiences,’ he exulted in a letter to Graham Wallas. ‘I sent in for the man next door to marry us; but he said he only did births and deaths.
‘Miss Payne Townshend then found a place in Henrietta Street, where she had to explain to a boy that she wanted to get married. The boy sent the news up a tube through which shrieks of merriment were exchanged... Miss Payne Townshend then had to suffer the final humiliation of buying a ring... at last she succeeded, and returned with the symbol of slavery... of such portentous weight and thickness, that it is impossible for anyone but a professional pianist to wear it; so my mother has presented her with my grandfather’s wedding ring for general use.’
He had asked Graham Wallas to act as one of the witnesses and, following a refusal from Kate Salt (‘who violently objects to the whole proceeding’), invited as his second witness her husband Henry Salt, ‘CAN YOU MEET US AT FIFTEEN HENRIETTA STREET COVENT GARDEN AT ELEVEN THIRTY TOMORROW WEDNESDAY TO WITNESS A CONTRACT.’
Shaw arrived on crutches and in an old jacket with armpits patched with leather that the crutches had badly frayed, and was taken by the registrar for ‘the inevitable beggar who completes all wedding processions. ‘Wallas, who is considerably over six feet high, seemed to him the hero of the occasion, and he was proceeding to marry him calmly to my betrothed, when Wallas, thinking the formula rather strong for a mere witness, hesitated at the last moment and left the prize to me.’
They were married in the afternoon of 1 June 1898. A week before Shaw had written that if ‘ever I get married, it will have to be done very secretly’. In fact the newspapers pounced on the event ‘as eagerly as the death of Gladstone’ – largely because of a report in The Star drafted by G.B.S. himself.
‘As a lady and gentleman were out driving in Henrietta-st., Covent-garden yesterday, a heavy shower drove them to take shelter in the office of the Superintendent Registrar there, and in the confusion of the moment he married them. The lady was an Irish lady named Miss Payne-Townshend, and the gentleman was George Bernard Shaw.
...Startling as was the liberty undertaken by the Henrietta-st. official, it turns out well. Miss Payne-Townshend is... deeply interested in the London School of Economics, and that is the common ground on which the brilliant couple met. Years of married bliss to them.’
With these Shavian flourishes, G.B.S. started on the ‘terrible adventure’ that was to turn him into ‘a respectable married man’.