Shaw to Stanley W. Bull (6 July 1926)
Adelphi Terrace was scheduled for demolition. While G.B.S. and Charlotte were in Stresa during the summer of 1927, the servants moved their belongings to a service flat in 4 Whitehall Court. This was a wonderfully turreted old building, with pavilion roofs and loggias, facing the Thames at Westminster between Charing Cross Bridge and Old Scotland Yard. Number 130 was a corner flat with five rooms and a surrounding balcony overlooking the Embankment and the river.
They moved in early that October. Shaw was determined not to like the place, but gradually Charlotte rearranged the furniture, positioned her Chinese pottery around it, and settled in the Dolmetsch clavichord, the Rodin bust, the Sartorio watercolour landscapes, the print of William Morris and other treasures. G.B.S. organized his study – a dozen filing cabinets, hundreds of books, a big flat-topped desk for himself opposite a smaller one for Blanche Patch, and between them a typing table. They were in business again.
‘G.B.S. was not fond of Whitehall Court,’ observed St John Ervine who was a neighbour there for the first year and a half, ‘but Charlotte loved it.’ There was positively nothing to do in the way of housekeeping, except to study the menu which was discreetly slipped under the door each morning from the restaurant downstairs. In the eight-storey block there were some 150 service flats as well as a selection of clubs – the Junior Army and Navy, Golfers & Lady Golfers and, with its separate entrance at the end of the building, the National Liberal Club. The ceilings were high, the floors of marble and the walls panelled. It was a world apart, a temple to the rich. The residents included tea-merchants, oil magnates and diplomats from around the world, as well as retired officers, the editor of Punch and various commuters to the House of Lords.
G.B.S. was always going in and out. The young bookshop assistant in the foyer would watch him striding across the hall. He was often followed, she noticed, by two women of contrasting appearance. The first, slightly behind him loaded with a bundle of papers and looking firmly ahead, was tall and austere; the second, who was older and more solid, wearing a squashy hat and carrying a travelling rug, smiled and nodded as she passed. One morning when G.B.S. was hurrying out alone, this young girl held the door open for him. ‘Never hold open any door for a man,’ he said to her. ‘It embarrasses him and belittles you.’ He seemed to think this all the more important as she had only one arm. After this introduction, he would sometimes come over and chat to her at the bookstall. He was interested in how ‘she spent her time, where she had her lunch and how much it cost and other everyday details of daily life’. She took on jobs for him – selecting books for a journey, or ringing his bell when she saw newspaper reporters going up so that he could nip down the back stairs. Occasionally she went up and had tea in the flat and was surprised to find that the dumpier of the two ladies (whom she had guessed must be a housekeeper) was Shaw’s wife, ‘a very homey, comfortable person’ who told her she was ‘undernourished’ and presented her with a tin of biscuits each month.
*
‘I have seen very little of anyone who has not worked with me,’ Shaw wrote early in 1928. ‘Except with my wife I have no companionships: only occasional contacts, intense but brief. I spring to intimacy in a moment, and forget in half an hour.’ One vital new companion for Charlotte and workmate for G.B.S. was Lady Astor. In 1927, Nancy Astor invited them to spend Christmas with her at Cliveden and they were snowed up there for eighteen days. It was for both of them a surreal expanse of time. ‘We both agree that all that has occurred during the last 3 weeks is a wonderful & impossible dream,’ Charlotte wrote to Lady Astor. ‘...I feel as if I had known you and your husband all my life.’
Nancy Astor had acquired a taste for English country life in Virginia where it was assiduously imitated. She had apparently been attracted to her first husband, Robert Shaw, by his spectacular polo: he had an uncanny knack of tumbling off his one-eyed pony without damaging himself. Was he intoxicated? The teetotal Nancy left him several times, beginning on the second night of their marriage. Sex had come as a shock to her: it was so rude.
After the final break-up of her marriage and the death of her mother, Nancy had come to England, a politer country. Here in 1906 she married Waldorf Astor, a perfect gentleman of German origin who had a bad heart and plenty of excellent racehorses. She was to enter the history books as the first woman Member of Parliament to take her seat, though she achieved little in the House of Commons except a series of vivid interruptions.
‘Charlotte is very fond of you,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy. ‘So am I. I don’t know why.’ Nancy’s devastating personality guarded a rather frail character but admitted others to her protection. She was supported by a wilful belief in Christian Science and, unlike Beatrice Webb, was never derisive about Charlotte’s mystical wanderings. She did not dream of flirting with G.B.S. The liberties she took with him were spectacularly safe – and rather tickled Charlotte. Once, approaching his shed at Ayot, she pulled open the door and seeing G.B.S. at work on a manuscript barked out: ‘Come out of there, you old fool. You’ve written enough nonsense in your life!’
The tone they took with each other was part of what Nancy Astor’s biographer, Christopher Sykes, called the ‘freemasonry’ of famous people. Nancy was a mixture of combustible qualities – a ‘volcano’, Shaw called her. He did not really expect to convert her to socialism. Occasionally he might try to permeate a Private Member’s Bill or influence an amendment to some clause in a Government Bill, but what he chiefly wanted was to demonstrate how people of absolutely different ideological commitments could strike up a lasting friendship. Flourishing in the limelight rather than in sunlight, Nancy seemed like a Shavian creation. At Cliveden, a vast nineteenth-century Italianate mansion overlooking the Thames, she created a fantasy kingdom that surrendered to reality only under extreme pressure – such as the Great War, when it was converted into a hospital and convalescent home.
Nancy invited G.B.S. to this amphitheatre in Berkshire as a new star, and provided him with a new audience. ‘I “peacock” here (Charlotte’s expression) amid week end crowds of visitors,’ he wrote to Molly Tompkins near the end of his first visit. ‘The mutual liking of the Shaws and Astors grows apace,’ Beatrice Webb noted disapprovingly in her diary.
Shaw brought such celebrities as Lawrence of Arabia to Cliveden and performed before people who belonged neither to his Fabian nor to his theatre worlds. He would hold reading parties for his new political comedies there, going through the supporting guest list with Nancy. ‘What about Balfour?... what about Mosley & his Cynthia (to represent the Labor Party)?’
Cliveden appeared an ideal place for the presentation of Shaw’s extravaganzas. It also became renowned as the headquarters of a secret conspiracy to make a second Western accord with Hitler. Shaw himself was contemptuous of this theory. He conspired with no one, treated his own opinions as unique, and was not secretive about them. ‘Never has a more senseless fable got into the headlines,’ he wrote. The fable had floated up from a series of articles by Claud Cockburn in his paper, The Week, recreating Cliveden as a castle of plot and machination. Shaw resented his own theatre being converted into a branch of the Foreign Office, and ridiculed ‘the silly notion that big historic changes can be effected by the country-house clique of a wicked British aristocracy’. In the wake of these rumours, Nancy Astor was referred to in the House of Commons as ‘the honourable member for Berlin’, and treacherous scandals were passed among the newspapers. Shaw went to her defence in the American magazine Liberty, pointing out that, far from being German fifth column agents, the Astors ‘have become the representation of America in England; and any attack on them is in effect an attack on America’.
This defence of his friend – taken up after an uncharacteristic appeal from Nancy – was read by Beatrice Webb with a wry smile. ‘Alas! poor Shaw, you have succumbed to Charlotte,’ she had written in her diary. Arnold Bennett had observed that Charlotte ‘plays the role of the super-celebrity’s wife with much tact’. But this tact did not impress Beatrice. She disapproved of the Cliveden Set as she had disapproved of ‘the Souls’ before the First World War. Both were aspects of a world she had renounced in order to be a socialist. ‘What troubles us is that this new intimacy will widen the estrangement of G.B.S. from the Labour Movement,’ she wrote, ‘build higher the barrier between him and the young intellectuals who are working out the better way of life for the bulk of the people – and dishearten and discourage his old admirers.’
Democracy, Shaw believed, meant the trial and error of political experiment through representatives of opposing ideologies exchanging thoughts independently of party political whips. Cliveden, where a ‘vociferous Marxist Communist’ such as himself could meet Colonel Lindberg (the friend of Hitler’s chief-of-staff), a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal Lord Lothian, and Charlie Chaplin, was fundamentally more democratic than Parliament. Shaw did not flatter himself that he had influenced Chamberlain’s appeasement policy; he had no special knowledge of Lord Halifax’s visit to Goering and Hitler late in 1937. But he believed that, if denied war, both Hitler and Mussolini would fall: ‘Twopence worth of manners may make all the difference.’
What discouraged young intellectual socialists and disheartened old Fabian admirers was Shaw’s championing of Mussolini in the 1920s. People ‘are so tired of indiscipline and muddle and Parliamentary deadlock,’ Shaw wrote, ‘that they feel the need of a strenuous tyranny, and think Mussolini the right sort of tyrant’. Certainly Mussolini’s remarkable coup de théâtre could not have been brought off without popular support.
‘All dictators begin as reformers and are encouraged by all sensible people until they find that their subjects do not understand their reforms and respond to nothing but military glory,’ Shaw was to write. ‘I applauded both Hitler and Musso while they were in their reform phase, just as Churchill did.’ On the road to dictatorship, with the official title Il Duce, Mussolini had begun a campaign of beating up his opponents. The murder in June 1924 of Giacomo Matteoti, Secretary-General of Italy’s Socialist Party, led to a reign of oppression lasting until his fall from power nineteen years later. Shaw had picked up some bits and pieces of information about Mussolini from one of the neighbours at Stresa, Carlo Emanuele Basile, a novelist who had become Federal Secretary of the province of Novara in 1925, and would be condemned in 1945 to thirty years’ imprisonment for war crimes. Shaw learnt that Mussolini was accepted as the only competent leader available. He was a ‘Big Simpleton’, in Shaw’s view, and initially a man of the people.
Some people assumed that Shaw was unaware of the assassination of Matteoti and other atrocities. ‘I knew about them,’ he replied. Acknowledging that the dictatorship of Il Duce had been established with ‘all the usual villainies’, he assured the Austrian socialist politician Friedrich Adler that such brutalities ‘which accompany the eternal struggle of government with anarchy... disgust me as much as they disgust you’. But he considered these savageries so customary in history as to be hardly worth remarking. ‘The only question for us is whether he [Mussolini] is doing his job well enough to induce the Italian nation to accept him faute de mieux,’ he wrote. ‘They do accept him, some of them faute de mieux, several of them with enthusiasm.’ Shaw placed himself in the first category: ‘I have no “enthusiasm for Mussolini”,’ he insisted; ‘but I back every ruler until he goes wrong.’
But Mussolini had gone wrong in the early 1920s, the historian Gaetano Salvemini argued, and Shaw had put himself in the wrong by openly accepting fascist Italy. Shaw replied that what he was accepting were facts: he would have preferred the Italian workers and liberals not to have been ‘so hopelessly incompetent that Italy gave Mussolini carte blanche to extirpate them’. Italian exiles had the right to cry ‘Tyranny! Murder!’ British citizens, with no such locus standi, must insist on a practical foreign policy.
Shaw handled Mussolini as a theatrical director might, removing him in his imagination from Italy and making him perform before a crowd of anxious British onlookers. His Mussolini was the actor-scoundrel Britain would deserve if it continued to neutralize socialism with the procrastinations of sham democracy.
What made socialists indignant was the lack of moral perspective in someone who had asserted that progress depends on changing moral sensibility. The social critic who once challenged rule by historical precedent now appeared to slot fascist Italy into an inevitably recurring historical pattern going back to Caesar and Antony. Where was the sense of proportion in giving precedence to diplomatic courtliness over physical barbarity, to train times over terror? ‘What G.B.S. has lost is any sympathy with the underdog,’ Beatrice Webb was to comment after reading the ‘Preface on Bosses’ he wrote for The Millionairess. ‘...He feels the frustration of old age and resents it.’
As a product of this frustration and resentment, Mussolini became a figure of make-believe whom G.B.S. could command to conquer old enemies. When Mussolini invades Abyssinia, Shaw goes with him – and invades Ireland, imposing on her all Mussolini’s hypothetical improvements (‘policed and water-supplied roads for a savage or waste country’). So, satisfying many urges, Mussolini appears on picture postcards on which Sonny draws bubbles and balloons, while G.B.S. is simultaneously extolling Il Duce as an emblem of national efficiency. ‘He is still obsessed about Mussolini,’ Beatrice Webb wrote, ‘and his obsession takes queer forms.’
What takes place in a theatre is not always a simple matter of you please me and I’ll pay you.
Malvern Festival Book (1935)
Sitting alone in Whitehall Court, his typewriter on his knees ‘like a sailor with his lass’, Shaw would sometimes wonder whether he had finally shot his bolt. At least his migraines had gone after The Intelligent Woman’s Guide: ‘I transferred them to my readers.’ While still at work on this book he had got a notion of a play which went on germinating in his mind. ‘I slept very well last night; and the morning was all sunshine,’ he wrote to his printer William Maxwell on 5 November 1928. ‘Consequently I began a new play.’ He wrote it with extraordinary ease and swiftness. The subject matter and stimulus had been provided by Granville-Barker’s long-maturing tragicomedy His Majesty. In less than eight weeks he had a complete play ‘in the rough’ – just in time for it to be read to Nancy Astor’s guests at Cliveden over the New Year. ‘The name of the play is The Apple Cart,’ he wrote, ‘and it is as unlike St Joan as it possibly can be.’
*
Shortly after mounting the British première of Back to Methuselah, Barry Jackson had announced that he was closing the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in Station Road. This ultimatum, which paradoxically saved the theatre, was a measure of his discouragement. ‘The condition of the English Theatre has moved steadily downward, and today it may be said to have touched its lowest level on record,’ wrote the stage-director William Poel in 1920. ‘...The public has for so long seen theatrical amusements carried on as an industry, instead of an art, that... the plays of Shaw, Galsworthy, Barker, Masefield, with those of all men who respect themselves and their calling, are put on one side as being impossible compositions, written by those who do not understand the needs of the public, meaning those who are not with the Stock Exchange financiers.’ Shaftesbury Avenue had been taken over by Threadneedle Street, driving the majority of Shaw’s London productions in the 1920s to a drill hall out in Hampstead converted by Norman Macdermot into the Everyman Theatre; while his touring rights in thirteen plays were leased to the Macdona Players led by Esmé Percy ‘with whom I never meddle’.
Barry Jackson shared Shaw’s dislike of the West End which had contaminated so much of the repertory movement in London. He wanted to found a pastoral theatre, similar to the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester. It was while walking with Shaw one day near Jackson’s home at Blackhill that the idea came to him of fulfilling this dream in Malvern. The place had everything to recommend it. Malvern was a spa town built on terraces along a steep range of hills, and it had a newly reconstructed theatre. In the socialist England of Shaw’s dreams, Barry Jackson would have found himself manager of a national theatre. But without public endowment there was nothing for it but to leave London and make a fresh start in the country where rents were comparatively low. While London’s West End had become one of the most depressing growths of capitalism, Jackson’s private enterprise impressed Shaw. So he made a pact. If Jackson went ahead with his scheme for a festival at Malvern, he would write a new play for it.
And Barry Jackson had gone ahead, assembling a company of more than sixty players who rehearsed for seven weeks at Lillian Baylis’s Old Vic before the Malvern Festival opened. The pattern was to present a different play each evening for one week and then to repeat this programme over a second week. Visitors were encouraged to stay a whole week, enjoying the extra-theatrical enjoyments of morning lectures and concerts in the Winter Garden, donkey rides up the hills, gondoliering and night bathing in the pools. Afterwards the productions would transfer to Birmingham and only after that would the more successful ones advance into London.
Jackson realized that this venture needed a dramatic patron and he dedicated the festival to Shaw. ‘We gather here, among the hills, to perform an act of homage to our greatest living dramatist,’ Jackson wrote, ‘to be amused and quickened by his humour and wisdom.’ Six thousand people were to visit the Bernard Shaw Exhibition over the fortnight, and the cycle of plays included Back to Methuselah, Caesar and Cleopatra and Heartbreak House, as well as what Shaw called, in his flyleaf dedication to Jackson, ‘the play which owes its existence entirely to you’.
Having laid the foundation stone of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford the previous month, Shaw arrived in Malvern on 18 August 1929. No other dramatist could have shifted the attention of the newspapers to a small town in the west of England on a sweltering Sunday afternoon in August. It was not even a world première (that had taken place, using Floryan Sobieniowski’s translation, two months previously, at Warsaw’s Teatr Polski). Nevertheless the first British production was treated as an international event. A special Sunday train was hired to carry down from London more than sixty drama critics who were delivered to the theatre doors in plain vans. Cedric Hardwicke was starring as a future King of England with Edith Evans as his mistress, and G.B.S. was able to assure everyone that, like the exciting new films beginning to fill the cinemas, his play was ‘One hundred percent talking’.
*
The two acts of The Apple Cart are introduced by an overture and interrupted by an interlude. It is a burlesque of parliamentary government in the form of opéra bouffe. ‘This music is a music of ideas... in which moralities are used as the motifs,’ wrote Edmund Wilson. The chief role, taken by the King of England, is played against a children’s chorus of uniformed Cabinet Ministers led by the head boy or Prime Minister. Initially there are two secretaries, or walking gentlemen, who begin a Mozartian overture which, Shaw told the playwright Alfred Sutro, had been part of a false start. ‘I began with a notion of two great parties: the Ritualists and the Quakers, with the King balancing them one against the other and finally defeating a combination of them. But I discarded this, as there wasn’t room for it.’ What he retained was a duet that presents a mocking celebration of the ritualism that cherishes the philistine status quo, and this prepares us for an investigation into the appearance and reality of democratic power.
The Interlude, which precedes the second act and takes place in Orinthia’s boudoir, is another exploration of power based on appearance. Shaw himself described this scene as ‘a brief but intense sex interlude’ and certainly it was intended to offer the audience an erotic interest absent elsewhere in the play. ‘Orinthia, the proud, the aristocratic, the goddesslike, the woman of lofty enchantments and “strangely innocent relations”’ had been modelled on Stella Campbell: ‘the magnificence of the picture is due to you,’ he was to tell her. But Stella in her middle sixties no longer felt magnificent.
Nothing seemed to have gone right since her beloved son’s death in the war; her marriage to George Cornwallis-West had come unstuck, the roles she could take in the theatre were diminishing and, having paid her son’s and her husband’s debts, money was running out. But she refused to part with Shaw’s ‘lovely letters’ (those letters over the publication of which she had behaved so badly), despite his advice to put them on the market before their price tumbled. A better solution, it seemed to her, would be to play a role in his new play.
‘I wonder if you will come and read the new play to me,’ she invited him on 12 February 1929, ‘as you half promised you would.’
‘I can’t read plays to a starving woman,’ he prevaricated – and offered instead to pay her telephone and electrical bills.
‘Come and read your play to me,’ she ordered him. ‘...You cannot dare to make my poverty an excuse!’
But he had another excuse. ‘I have just been smitten with a frightful and probably infectious cold... and I will not risk giving it to you this week, nor next.’
‘I wonder if you are ever coming to read your play to me,’ she tried again on 26 March.
This time he confessed to being ‘too shy to read you the only scene in that play that would interest you. Its scandalous climax is a reminiscence of Kensington Square.’
‘I know why you feel shy,’ she responded. Her friend Edith Lyttelton had by now told her something about the scene and how Shaw had explained that Stella could not play Orinthia because ‘no one could play themselves’. It was obvious to her that ‘the scene isn’t true, though it may amuse you to fancy it so’. He readily agreed with her: it was fiction, not fact – in short, a play. Still she pressed him and still he resisted.
Eventually Stella happened to encounter Edith Evans who ‘gazed eagerly at me saying she was playing me in The Apple Cart at Malvern and in Birmingham and London’. ‘You should have sent me your play to read,’ she wrote to Shaw on 8 July. ‘You are out of tune with friendship and simple courtesy.’
He had put off this dreadful confrontation for five months – too long, he now realized. On 11 July he went to her flat in Pont Street. Though they had kept in correspondence they had not met for the best part of fifteen years. He was conscious of no longer being her ‘brilliant adorable Irish lad’ but a white-haired pink-cheeked skeletal figure on the eve of his seventy-third birthday. She had expanded from his ‘blessedest darling’ gypsy child into a woman of ‘magnificent bulk... the chins luxuriant too... [and] noxious little dogs yapping at her heels’.
They still had their famous voices – hers more throaty than ever, his lilting Irish tones like the shivering of a wind across a lake – and with these voices they set out to repeat their Pygmalion duet in Edith Lyttelton’s drawing-room before the war. He began the Interlude, and she listened until he came to the passage where Orinthia offers to give King Magnus ‘beautiful, wonderful children’ in order to win him from his wife and make herself Queen, and adds: ‘have you ever seen a lovelier boy than my Basil?’ Shaw then delivered the King’s reply: ‘Basil is a very good-looking young man, but he has the morals of a tramp.’ This was too much for Stella. It was true that her pampered son had dissipated his life in gambling and affairs, but she loved him and felt she would never forgive Shaw. He registered the depth of Stella’s mortification and conceded: ‘I will let him go as a beautiful child... as he suffered for other people’s sins, the balance of justice is struck.’
Stella also felt sensitive over references to her marriages. ‘Not another word on the subject shall ever fall from my lips,’ Shaw lied. The struggle between them went on into August. ‘How troublesome you are!’ he complained. His piecemeal revisions were no cure for the soreness in Stella’s heart. ‘Tear it up,’ she commanded him. ‘...Please do as I say – you will feel strangely relieved.’ But he would not.
Shaw knew that her real objection sprang from the corrupted picture of their romance. ‘My love for you was the love of a child who feels safe,’ she wrote to him. Shaw echoes this sentiment when he makes King Magnus tell Orinthia that they were ‘two children at play’. But there is nothing childlike in Orinthia and nothing ‘innocent’ about her relations with Magnus. She is a tyrant of the emotions who exploits the King’s susceptibility to her beauty. ‘Heaven is offering you a rose; and you cling to a cabbage,’ she tells him. The cabbage is Magnus’s wife, Queen Jemima.
The previous year Granville-Barker had published His Majesty, a play in which the Queen, who is a snob and a political idiot, irresponsibly precipitates a crisis which can only be resolved by the abdication of the King. Shaw reverses the situation. Though described as ‘romantically beautiful, and beautifully dressed’, Orinthia is without charm, except perhaps the charm of a precocious child. Stella Campbell did not know how unhappily his recollections of her had been disturbed by Molly Tompkins, who also, like Orinthia, had used her sexual powers to keep him from returning to Charlotte. King Magnus, who stands for ‘conscience and virtue’ in his dealings with the Cabinet, admits to Orinthia that with her he has no conscience – which is, in effect, what Shaw said to Stella about his writing of The Apple Cart: ‘I am an artist and as such utterly unscrupulous when I find my model – or rather when she finds me.’ This is the attitude of Louis Dubedat in The Doctor’s Dilemma.
Stella’s complaint was that conscienceless art led to falsification. It took away her talent and occupation, and robbed her of wit and sensitivity. By casting Orinthia as the King’s platonic mistress, Shaw also negated her sexuality. ‘I ran away from you at Sandwich because I wanted to remain Queen of the Kingdom of my Heart,’ Stella explained, ‘ – but I suppose you mustn’t humble the King in your play like that.’ ‘Yes: you were right, Sandwich and all,’ Shaw confirmed. In the fantasy of the play, it is the King who struggles free of Orinthia. ‘You are so abominably strong that I cannot break loose without hurting you,’ he says.
Orinthia’s bedroom is no fairyland. It is a battlefield for sexual politics. And it is this theme, ending with its skirmish on the floor and reaching back beyond Stella to Shaw’s memories of Jenny Patterson, that connects the structurally intrusive Interlude to the rest of the play.
Orinthia is one of three queens in The Apple Cart. ‘Everyone knows that I am the real queen,’ she announces. ‘...I am one of Nature’s queens.’ By Nature’s queens she means those who are naturally endowed with physical superiority, and by real she means the reality of appearance. What she offers the King is a pop-star dictatorship of the masses by beautiful people. But Shaw turns aside this temptation: ‘you must be content to be my queen in fairyland,’ he has King Magnus reply.
Magnus’s conventional Queen is Jemima who rules over a domestic kingdom. She is what Orinthia calls a ‘common housekeeper wife’ who brings up ‘common healthy jolly lumps of children’. She treats her husband as ‘a good little boy’ and imposes her own household priorities. ‘You do not always know what is good for you,’ she tells him.
The third Queen of the play is Amanda, ‘a merry lady in uniform like the men’ and Postmistress-General in the Cabinet. She can mimic people and sing funny songs, ‘and that – with all respect, sir – makes me the real queen of England,’ she tells the King. Amanda is a performer from the music-hall stage whose songs and mimicry cover all their targets with ridicule: even Breakages Ltd, the capitalist conglomerate that governs the country, is powerless against her. She is truly a democratic Queen in the sense that she answers the public’s demand to have everything trivialized and turned into a sport – ‘And thats how England is governed by yours truly,’ she concludes.
But there are limits to Amanda’s queenly power: she can stop anything; she can start nothing. If the country were governed responsibly, then its Queen would be Lysistrata, the Powermistress-General. She is a thinker – ‘a grave lady in academic clothes’ – who combines Beatrice Webb’s devotion to public service with Lady Astor’s assertive patriotism. Lysistrata is the ‘studious’ King’s one supporter in the Cabinet, his intellectual equal who in their first-act duet responds to his long oratorio on the condition of England by letting herself go with an impassioned denunciation of capitalism.
The England to which Shaw points his audiences is one that manufactures chocolate creams, Christmas crackers and tourist trophies, and that exports golf-clubs and polo ponies. Hardship and poverty have largely been abolished by sending capital abroad to places where they still exist so that Englishmen can live in comfort on the imported profits of their investments in cheap labour. The country is little more than a staging post for the movement of foreign capital: the heart has gone out of politics and into money-making. Less than seven per cent of the electoral register bother to vote. In such a country politics has deteriorated to Shaw’s kindergarten Cabinet of squabbling nonentities. Presiding over this nursery school is Proteus, Shaw’s cartoon version of Ramsay MacDonald. The job has brought him ‘to the verge of a nervous breakdown’. At one moment he dashes from the room in a fit of contrived rage, knowing that the King will follow him and that they can settle their business in private. These were the exaggerated manoeuvres of Ramsay MacDonald who, according to Sidney Webb, ‘always had neuritis’ when things got difficult.
Shaw denied having ‘packed the cards by making the King a wise man and the minister a fool’. Both, he wrote in his Preface, ‘play with equal skill; and the King wins, not by greater astuteness, but because he has the ace of trumps in his hand and knows when to play it’. But it is G.B.S. who has slipped him this winning card.
For Proteus the fight is between royalty and democracy, and his aim is to come out on top. For Magnus the enemy is plutocracy. ‘I stand for the great abstractions,’ he declares: ‘for conscience and virtue; for the eternal against the expedient; for the evolutionary appetite against the dog’s gluttony; for intellectual integrity, for humanity, for the rescue of industry from commercialism and of science from professionalism.’ This is the voice of the Shavian realist raised against the arch-idealist Proteus.
Some people assumed that King Magnus was a veiled portrait of King George V. ‘I have a lot in common with the present monarch,’ Shaw conceded, ‘we are both human beings and we were both christened George, and I dare say he dislikes the name as much as I do.’ Shaw’s King is very like Granville-Barker’s King in His Majesty; both are parts for an actor-manager. Shaw pointed to several historical precedents, but when cross-examined by his biographer Hesketh Pearson, he admitted, ‘The real King Magnus is sitting within a few feet of you.’ King Magnus belongs to the Shavian family tree of strong beneficent rulers. He is Caesar transported through history from Caesar and Cleopatra; he is Napoleon from The Man of Destiny. He combines the heroism of William Morris with the calculation of Sidney Webb: he is Shaw’s fantasy of himself.
There are no Hitlers, Mussolinis, Stalins or Mosleys in The Apple Cart, for this is a play about the dangers of powerlessness. We are shown the conditions that favour the popular promotion of dictators. For the time being, power rests with Breakages Ltd which distributes accumulating wealth with capitalism’s whimsical injustice. In Shaw’s analysis, such inequality leads to a moral degeneration that can be cleared away only by revolution. ‘I dread revolution,’ says Magnus. All the Cabinet, except the women, laugh at him, but it is this dread that brings the extravaganza to a halt. ‘I look on myself as a man with a political future,’ Magnus informs Proteus as he contemplates forming a government in the House of Commons. But the King remains in his melancholy predicament as Shaw’s fantasy peters out. ‘This is a farce that younger men must finish,’ Magnus tells Lysistrata. And the implication is that these younger men may have to finish it with violence.
*
‘I imagine that Shaw has made the sensation of his life,’ W. B. Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory. The Conservative press enthusiastically hailed The Apple Cart. ‘The wonder is that GBS and Charlotte have not been invited to Sandringham,’ Beatrice Webb drily observed. It appeared to some as if he had executed a political volte-face. ‘All the tyrants in Europe will delight in the play,’ warned H. W. Nevinson.
For the first time in his theatrical career Shaw had refused to give an even distribution of argument to both sides of a conflict. His Cabinet of clowns ‘stand up like ninepins for his dialectical bowling,’ complained Ivor Brown in the Manchester Guardian in 1929. ‘...to idealize your unelected monarch is a pitiful approach to political philosophy.’ The same objections were to be made fifty years later in the Guardian by the theatre critic Michael Billington, who found the play indefensible in theory – ‘a snobbish endorsement of the inherent good breeding of royalty as against the bad manners of democracy’ – and aggravating in performance – there was ‘something dramatically unsatisfying about a play in which a clever king is allowed to run intellectual rings round... a collection of harebrained boobies’.
Though G.B.S. was a great figure in the eyes of the general public, he no longer excited young intellectuals, who were turning to the new work of Eliot and Joyce, Pound and Proust, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. Like Magnus, G.B.S. was ‘old fashioned’. The modern literary periodicals of the 1920s and 1930s – T. S. Eliot’s Criterion and F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny – had little interest in him. Yet it was by literary critics, rather than critics of the theatre, that The Apple Cart was later to be re-evaluated. In the judgement of Edmund Wilson, ‘the fact that Shaw is here working exclusively with economic and political materials has caused its art to be insufficiently appreciated.’ The contemporary view that Shaw was ‘contemptuous as ever of shape and form’ has given way to an understanding of what Margery Morgan calls the play’s ‘deliberately dislocated structure’ and ‘meticulous patterning of detail’ influenced by cinematic technique.
The Apple Cart was to be the last of Shaw’s plays to win a regular place in the standard repertory. Desmond MacCarthy ascribed the immediate success to its topicality in the late 1920s: it was about things that people happened then to be discussing. But over twenty years later Thomas Mann was to describe it as a ‘stunningly clairvoyant political satire’. ‘It is perhaps unfortunate that circumstances have not made the play date more,’ complained a Times reviewer in 1965. For sixty years it retained an acute contemporaneity. ‘The Apple Cart delivers an exasperated uppercut to the trade unions and forecasts the economic rebellion of the Third World,’ commented Irving Wardle in The Times after a revival in 1977. ‘...The crisis he is writing about is still our crisis.’ Revivals of the play were to come round each decade and ‘each time it is rediscovered as a play for today,’ added Irving Wardle in 1986.
Beatrice Webb, who had dismissed The Apple Cart in 1929 as frivolous and annoying, was to write in her diary on 6 September 1940: ‘GBS’s brilliant satirical play, The Apple Cart, his last popular success, seems today an amusing forecast.’
*
The success of The Apple Cart was a good omen for the Malvern Festival. On reaching London the play ran for 258 performances which exceeded the first London productions of Saint Joan and Pygmalion and everything else of Shaw’s except Fanny’s First Play.
‘I always avoid places where my plays are being performed,’ he had told Sobieniowski. But for Barry Jackson’s Malvern he made an exception. He liked the vertical green hills, the quiet light, the air that ‘would raise the dead’ – though not the waters, ‘one glass of which destroys my digestion for a week’. Over the 1930s he was to be seen almost every summer striding along the terraces and up the hills with his companions labouring after him. He was constantly on view. ‘I have... created a general impression that I was born there,’ he wrote in the 1937 Malvern Festival Book. ‘In course of time visitors will be shewn for sixpence the room in which my first cries were heard.’
Charlotte enjoyed the hydro and sanatorium, but this was no holiday. ‘GBS sails along & is charming to everyone, & they worship in crowds,’ she told Nancy Astor, ‘ – but I have to plan & arrange & entertain & contrive meals & eliminate the worst undesirables! Oh!!... It is such a little place – and no refuge!’ Nevertheless, ‘it really is wonderful to hear the plays one after the other – these big things set off one another like the pictures at a one-man show which never look so well separated.’ She felt comfortable, too, at the Malvern Hotel, with its automatic lift and suites of bed-and-sitting-rooms on every floor, each with a private bathroom. At the sound of the gong the elderly guests would rise up, like a corps de ballet, and rustle through to dinner. When Shaw strode in ‘he was always clasping a travel book,’ Beverley Nichols noticed. ‘Mrs Shaw, in her turn, clutched a volume of economics.’
The atmosphere of the festival was that of an extended and overflowing country-house party. There were folk dances in the Assembly Rooms, people playing on the bowling greens, garden parties at the girls’ school which Barry Jackson rented each summer, boating on the lake, Billy Gammon’s syncopated band, starlight suppers and ‘the scent and sounds from a thousand gardens’. G.B.S. would take the cast for drives around the hills and sometimes on to Droitwich, where he ducked into the brine baths, motoring back with the salt still in his beard. He read his plays to the actors before rehearsals in the town’s Gas Office. In the auditorium itself, the actors could see his illuminated pen flashing as he made notes. He was determined to make the Malvern experiment another chapter in the reform of the English theatre. By 1931 its scope was broadened by the inclusion of works from other dramatists; in 1934 it was prolonged into a four-week occasion; between 1929 and 1939 it established itself as the major off-season theatrical event in England and an international showcase for playwrights. Sixty-five plays by forty British and foreign playwrights (evenly distributed between the past and the present) were produced over that period. They included world premières of Geneva (1938) and ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’ (1939) and the first English productions of Too True to be Good (1932), and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935).
In 1936 Shaw celebrated his eightieth birthday at Malvern accepting ‘nothing over sixpence’ from the cast. (‘I gave him a coat-hanger from Woolworth’s,’ Wendy Hiller remembered.) He continued visiting Malvern until the following year which was the last time Barry Jackson directed the Festival.
Malvern was the forerunner of an age of festivals that was to flourish fifty years later and carry on the dramatic out-of-London development that Shaw and Barry Jackson had sought. G.B.S. had never wanted the festival to be a memorial to himself. ‘Malvern must look to its present and future, not dream of its past. I am only one of Ibsen’s Ghosts.’
*
‘One of the choicest attractions’ of Malvern was Edward Elgar. During rehearsals of The Apple Cart Shaw had invited him over from his home near Worcester, and later they discussed setting one of Shaw’s plays to music, ‘but I think we agreed to my view that he could do nothing with a play except what his Falstaff did with Shakespeare’s,’ Shaw told the composer Rutland Boughton.
Opening the Bernard Shaw Exhibition in the Malvern public library, Elgar told his audience that G.B.S. really knew more about music than he did. Shaw retaliated by admitting that ‘although I am rather a conceited man I am quite sincerely and genuinely humble in the presence of Sir Edward Elgar. I recognize a greater art than my own and a greater man than I can ever hope to be.’ Not to be outdone, Elgar informed the press that Shaw was ‘a most remarkable man; he was the best friend to any artist, the kindest and possibly the dearest fellow on earth’.
These statements were more than reciprocal civilities for the public. ‘The history of original music, broken off by the death of Purcell, begins again with Sir Edward Elgar,’ Shaw had written in the Morning Post in 1911. After a century of imitation Handel, Mendelssohn and Spohr, Elgar’s music had come as a new voice giving out a sound ‘as characteristically English as a country house and stable are characteristically English’. All this had been written before they met in 1919 at a lunch given by Lalla Vandervelde, wife of the Belgian socialist leader.
A few days later Elgar invited the Shaws to Severn House, his home in Hampstead, to hear three of his chamber works including the Piano Quintet. ‘The Quintet knocked me over at once,’ Shaw wrote the next day. ‘...There are some piano embroideries on a pedal point that didn’t sound like a piano or anything else in the world, but quite beautiful... they require a touch which is peculiar to yourself.’ It was this peculiarity that Shaw sought to define and celebrate. ‘Elgar’s Cockaigne overture combines every classic quality of a concert overture with every lyric and dramatic quality of the overture to Die Meistersinger,’ he wrote at the end of that year. ‘...You may hear all sorts of footsteps in it, and it may tell you all sorts of stories; but it is classical music as Beethoven’s Les Adieux sonata is classical music: it tells you no story external to itself and yourself.’
Shaw’s tribute delighted Elgar’s wife, hitherto suspicious of what she thought of as Shaw’s atheism. Her death three months later seems to have redoubled Shaw’s championing of Elgar’s work. In the summer of 1922, following a meagrely attended performance of The Apostles by the Leeds Choral Union, he erupted in the Daily News:
‘The Apostles is one of the glories of British music: indeed it is unique as a British work... The occasion was infinitely more important than the Derby, than Goodwood, than the Cup Finals, than the Carpentier fights, than any of the occasions on which the official leaders of society are photographed and cinematographed laboriously shaking hands... I apologize to posterity for living in a country where the capacity and tastes of schoolboys and sporting costermongers are the measure of metropolitan culture.’
Elgar and Shaw had both initially been ‘discovered’ in Germany, and were now beginning to go out of fashion in Britain, the audiences for Elgar’s oratorios disappearing in the 1920s as they were to disappear in the 1930s for Shaw’s extravaganzas. Their friendship ripened in old age when, after the Malvern Festivals began, they saw each other regularly. Elgar, who could talk about every unmusical subject on earth, ‘from pigs to Elizabethan literature’, gave the impression of not knowing ‘a fugue from a fandango’. And yet, Shaw wrote, ‘Music was his religion and his intellect and almost his everything.’ Elgar prided himself, however, on being a considerable playgoer. It was true that he had never stuck out Romeo and Juliet to the end, but he would travel almost anywhere to see the comedian Jack Hulbert perform, and he came to relish the Shavian productions at Malvern. As Master of the King’s Musick, he was a martyr to conventionality, insisting that Shaw and Charlotte were correctly dressed for these occasions and for his own musical performances at Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester. ‘The Protestant Three Choirs were the centre of his musical activities, especially Worcester,’ Shaw later remembered: ‘to hear The Music Makers conducted there by him was a wonderful experience.’ In 1930 Elgar dedicated his Severn Suite to Shaw who was ‘hugely flattered and touched’. After hearing the piece ‘only eight times’ at the Crystal Palace Band Competition in September that year, he wrote to Elgar, ‘Nobody could have guessed from looking at the score and thinking of the thing as a toccata for brass band how beautiful and serious the work is as abstract music.’
‘G.B.S.’s politics are, to me, appalling, but he is the kindest-hearted, gentlest man I have met... to young people he is kind,’ Elgar had written in 1921 to Sidney Colvin. But by the late 1920s, when they campaigned together against a restrictive new Music Copyright Bill, Elgar was beginning to look at Shaw’s politics as a vehicle of Shavian generosity, and the Shavian merging of art with sociology as the basis of his comradeship with all artists. Elgar had opened himself up to a Shavian political education by rather nervously enquiring what ‘capital’ was. By way of explanation, Shaw replied that Elgar’s products were infinitely consumable without limitation or deterioration. He then proposed an Elgarian Financial Symphony: ‘Allegro: Impending Disaster. Lento mesto: Stony Broke. Scherzo: Light Heart and Empty Pocket. Allo con brio: Clouds Clearing.’
Whenever Elgar needed the clouds to clear, the Shaws shone down on him. ‘Don’t let yourself think dark thoughts,’ Charlotte urged him. And G.B.S., who made him a present of £1,000 early in the 1930s (equivalent to £27,000 in 1997), persuaded the BBC to commission a Third Symphony for another £1,000. ‘He [Elgar] does not know that I am meddling in his affairs and yours in this manner,’ he wrote to John Reith, Director General of the BBC, ‘...but I do know that he has still a lot of stuff in him that could be released if he could sit down to it without risking his livelihood.’
The Third Symphony was never finished because of the collapse in Elgar’s health. Shaw recommended an American osteopath whose ‘resemblance to an ophicleide would please you’, though Charlotte preferred a Chinese acupuncturist from San Francisco. Alternatively, there was homoeopathy in the person of Raphael Roche, an unregistered practitioner from a well-known Jewish family of musicians (including Mendelssohn and Moscheles) who had healed a hydrocele of Shaw’s, using what appeared to be a grain of powdered sugar. In ‘the depths of pain’ Elgar seems to have felt that the Shaws were trying to cure him with laughter. In 1933 he entered a nursing home and, resisting an impulse to rush down and rescue him from the ‘damn doctors’, Shaw was left trusting to Elgar’s mighty Life Force.
‘Having friends like you,’ Charlotte had written in 1932, ‘is the one thing in life worth having when one arrives at the age of GBS & myself.’ The following year Elgar returned the compliment: ‘the world seems a cold place to me when you are both away.’
Shaw described Elgar’s death from cancer on 23 February 1934 as ‘world-shaking’ and far too early. But there was still the music. At the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival in the summer of 1934, he and Charlotte heard The Kingdom. ‘I cannot tell you how we all miss Edward Elgar,’ Charlotte wrote afterwards to Nancy Astor. ‘We loved him... & when another man got up into the Conductor’s Chair it was hard to bear.’
I am honored and famous and rich, which is very good fun for the other people. But as I have to do all the hard work, and suffer an ever increasing multitude of fools gladly, it does not feel any better than being reviled, infamous, and poor, as I used to be.
Shaw to Frank Harris (7 April 1927)
Shaw’s travels abroad at the end of the 1920s became a sequence of flights and explorations. In the summer of 1928 Charlotte arranged a holiday on the French Riviera. They crawled into Cap d’Antibes at the crest of a heatwave, ‘hotter than I have ever imagined any infernal regions,’ Charlotte objected, and then dragged themselves off on excursions to Menton, Monte Carlo, and the mountainous hinterland of Haute Provence; and every day they plunged into the Mediterranean – ‘even I can swim, swim, swim – & never tire,’ Charlotte discovered. ‘You feel you cant sink in this sea. And when you get out you can lie – nuda veritas – on the rocks & bake. G.B.S. loves it – & that is why we stay.’
He loved it and hated it: ‘one never knows whether the morning will find us smiling in a paradise,’ he wrote to Blanche Patch, ‘or groaning in a purgatory.’ Lady Rhondda came, a feminist and the proprietress of Time and Tide (for which Shaw wrote regularly in the 1920s and 1930s); and so did Troubetzkoy, devastated by the death of his Swedish wife. There were the Mosleys too, Oswald fresh from an International Congress in Brussels, Cynthia an Atalanta who ‘queens it with the best’ on the beaches, and both of them comically nervous of being photographed by the press. It was ‘Dear Mr Mosley,’ Charlotte told Nancy Astor, who abetted her plot to carry G.B.S. off to Geneva, ‘a decent, proper town’, for twelve days early in September.
But the most significant meeting that summer was with Frank Harris, now living in Nice. In England before the war he had been declared bankrupt and sent on a libel charge to Brixton gaol. During the war he had emigrated to the United States where he published a series of anti-British articles that unfortunately tipped Germany as the victor. His decline was accelerated by an erratic biography of Oscar Wilde that brought him nothing but trouble, and a series of apocryphal ‘Contemporary Portraits’ first published in his new American magazine, Pearsons, which, after threatening to fold each month, eventually did so.
‘Your most interesting book will be your autobiography,’ Shaw had predicted in 1915. After the war, Harris set about retrieving his bank balance by moving to France and acting on Shaw’s advice. ‘I am going to see if a man can tell truth naked and unashamed about himself and his amorous adventures in the world,’ he wrote. The first volume of his notorious My Life and Loves had been burnt by customs officials; the second volume brought him to court on a charge of corrupting public morals. ‘Il faut souffrir pour être Casanova,’ Shaw reminded him.
G.B.S. was the one writer in England who remained loyal to Harris. He did not admire him, did not regard him as a fugleman for free speech, as he regarded Freud, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and even Radclyffe Hall; he did not even like him. But he felt some kinship with Harris’s sense of exile. The more Harris was cold-shouldered, the more G.B.S. assisted him – in his fashion. Instead of handing him money, he provided him with words. ‘For God’s sake give me deathless words,’ Harris had appealed from the United States. Shaw responded with a fascinating account of his meetings with Wilde, which Harris was able to use in a cheap reissue of his biography. Then, when Harris sent over for correction a ‘Contemporary Portrait’ of Shaw, G.B.S. fired back a brilliant pastiche of Harris entitled ‘How Frank Ought to Have Done It’. ‘You are the first person I think in my journey through the world,’ Harris wrote, ‘who has shown any wish to surpass me in generosity.’
To be thus surpassed troubled Harris who knew himself to be twice the man Shaw was and could not frankly conceal this knowledge. And yet ‘you have made more out of your worst play than I have made out of all my books put together’. How was this possible? They had, for example, both written plays about St Joan and yet for some reason theatres round the world persisted in staging Shaw’s Saint Joan and never his own Joan la Romée.
‘I have no one I can turn to except you,’ Harris admitted. What he wanted from Shaw, he hardly knew. There was a limit to what he could raise from publishing or selling Shaw’s correspondence: ‘Letters are unsatisfactory,’ he concluded. He wanted Shaw’s help with publishers. ‘I could surely do an Edition of Shakespeare better than any living man,’ he hazarded, ‘...you could get me this Shakespeare commission at once.’ But such scholarly hack work ‘would not keep you in bootlaces,’ Shaw calculated. Harris also wanted to mine Shaw’s good will and find some rich new vein. Shakespeare had failed him; Wilde had failed him; and in old age he was beginning to fail himself.
They met at Harris’s villa in Nice in the second week of August 1928. Shaw came alone because Charlotte, he happily explained, could not be seen lunching with a pornographer. For Harris their day together was in the nature of a reconnaissance. A little later he took off for New York. ‘Your vogue in America is extraordinary, almost incredible,’ he reported. ‘The New York Times declares that you are the greatest Englishman since Shakespeare, and this is the opinion one hears on all sides.’ To this reputation Harris now proposed hitching his wagon by getting himself appointed Shaw’s biographer. ‘Abstain from such a desperate enterprise,’ Shaw hastily replied. ‘...I wont have you write my life on any terms: Nellie [Harris’s wife] would do it far better.’
But Harris needed an old-age pension, and by 1929 was forced to accept the fact that only for a book about G.B.S., written with Shaw’s co-operation, would any publisher give him a decent advance on royalties. Shaw’s refusal was a desperate blow. All this exaggerated success, he protested, had gone to Shaw’s head. Such insults delighted G.B.S. who wanted to know to what other part of his body success should have travelled. ‘You are honoured and famous and rich – I lie here crippled and condemned and poor,’ Harris pleaded. Shaw seemed briskly unaffected. Nevertheless the ‘dreaded biography’ began to encircle him. ‘The truth is I have a horror of biographers,’ he wrote. ‘...Every man has a blind side; and I should catch you just on it... my heart is never in the right – meaning the expected – place.
‘Besides, it is premature. Only two of the ladies are dead.
‘Think no more of it. And forgive me.’
But Harris could not afford to be forgiving. As he began to give ground, Shaw divided the problem between Charlotte’s interests and those of Nellie Harris. To put his Life into the hands of a writer whose own memoirs had been burnt by Charlotte, page by page ‘so that not a comma should escape the flames’, was surely too rich a paradox. She would never permit it. But Nellie’s interests were a different matter and Charlotte had no answer when Shaw echoed Charles II’s deathbed appeal: ‘Let not poor Nellie starve.’
For G.B.S. himself there were further considerations. Archibald Henderson was proposing to put together another biography for the 1930s. Then there was the tragic case of Demetrius O’Bolger.
*
Demetrius O’Bolger ‘is an Irishman: a professor of literature at an American university,’ Shaw had told Harris. His study of Shaw’s own plays had begun in 1912 as a thesis for the Graduate Department of the University of Pennsylvania. ‘I determined to run out the thread of his home surroundings,’ O’Bolger wrote. ‘...I thought I saw not a few reticences... and I determined to penetrate them and systematize the results if Mr Shaw were willing to give me the necessary information.’
And Shaw was willing. O’Bolger would send him a sheet of paper with a question typed at the top, and G.B.S. would fill up the rest of the page with an answer sometimes extending to five or six hundred words. His help swelled into a positive obstacle. Often and often O’Bolger believed he had completed his book. He completed it, for example, in February 1916, only to receive a little later that month, twenty-nine closely typewritten pages from Shaw, describing the circumstances of his youth and the household in which he grew up. ‘The death of my mother set me free to tell O’B. more than I could allow Henderson to publish in her lifetime,’ Shaw revealed to Harris, who was then struggling with his ‘Contemporary Portrait’ of G.B.S. Never had Shaw been so forthcoming – but ‘I do not send you the stuff for publication as it stands,’ he ominously added to O’Bolger.
O’Bolger had celebrated the end of the Great War by completing his book for the third time. Receiving an offer a few months after Armistice Day from Harpers to publish a revised text, he sat down to make a fourth draft, working ‘till the nerves of my neck and the back of my head could no longer stand the strain’. Harpers seemed delighted: but Shaw was not delighted. Having examined the contract, he declared that he would treat direct quotation as an infringement of copyright ‘and hand the stuff over to Frank Harris’, whereupon Harpers cancelled their contract. Shaw had ‘delivered a sound blow for principle’s sake,’ O’Bolger observed. ‘He had saved me from being fleeced by saving me from being published.’ In a frantic begging-and-abusing letter, O’Bolger appealed to G.B.S. to change his mind. ‘Dont be scared,’ Shaw responded. ‘...Do not lose your head and try to drown your rescuer.’
Shaw felt a need after his mother died to gain control of his formative years, but he did not wish to see all he had spilled out immediately given away in print. So when O’Bolger sent him the yet-again-completed manuscript, he hung on to it, and it was still in his possession in the early 1920s. ‘I somehow cannot make up my mind to send that blasted MS of yours back without another look at it.’ O’Bolger, he informed Harris, ‘was the son of an Irish inspector of police; and he proceeded to investigate the case precisely as his father would have done’. He also wrote like a policeman. This ‘explains everything,’ Shaw informed O’Bolger, ‘...your treatment of my mother and father as suspicious characters in custody, your rejection of all my statements as unsupported by evidence and coming from a tainted source &c &c.’ ‘I am not qualified to advise you medically,’ he went on, before advancing a diagnosis. His biographer was suffering from a Resentment Complex. He listed the symptoms. ‘You have the resentment of the poor man against the rich man, of the Irish Catholic against the Irish Protestant...
‘You have, in particular, achieved a portrait of a most horrible woman whom you allege was my mother, with a sordid husband, and a disingenuous son, forming the sort of Irish interior which you most hate and despise as typifying every social injustice from which you and your people ever suffered.’
What this letter affirms is Shaw’s genuine distress. O’Bolger’s ‘interior’ had turned the Shavian paradoxes inside out and come up with an ugly picture of those Dublin years that Shaw himself had told Ellen Terry were ‘frightful in realities’. The ‘worst of it was,’ Shaw added in a letter to Harris, ‘that I could not deny that the information I had given him bore his construction’.
So they reached deadlock until O’Bolger submitted to the process of exhaustive Shavian editing that Archibald Henderson had accepted. ‘Unfortunately this involved practically rewriting his book for him,’ Shaw pointed out; ‘and for that it was impossible for me to find time.’ So the manuscript remained suspended. ‘You will certainly be the death of me,’ Shaw cried out one of his most lethal paradoxes. In the summer of 1923, O’Bolger suddenly died. ‘The situation was a painful one for me,’ Shaw commented, ‘...a great worry for him; and now it has helped to worry him into his grave... A tragic business.’
Had there ever been such a cautionary tale for a biographer? ‘The unfortunate author died of disappointment,’ Shaw told Harris, ‘aided by pernicious anaemia, cursing me for ruining him.’
*
O’Bolger had made no startling discoveries about Shaw’s early years in Ireland, but his enquiries had pressed on a bruise, disturbed G.B.S., and made him deftly rearrange some of the facts. ‘And now you want me to start again,’ he exclaimed to Harris. ‘I had rather die misunderstood.’ Feeling like a ‘dog returning to his vomit’, he began early in 1930 a succession of autobiographical letters to Harris.
Meanwhile there was no stopping Henderson from preparing an expanded version of his biography called, to Shaw’s disgust, Playboy and Prophet. The market was saturated, he protested. Yet Henderson was not to be deterred. The best compromise Shaw could negotiate was a delay until 1932, plus an agreement that he should vet the text.
G.B.S.’s hand had been somewhat weakened in these negotiations by his involvement with Harris. Harris had posted a letter to the Times Literary Supplement soliciting ‘quips, inscriptions, autographs’. He also hired an editor by the name of Frank Scully, later an authority on flying saucers. According to Scully, it was Scully who actually wrote the book; certainly it is dedicated to him. At the beginning of May, the two Franks had cobbled together over 100,000 words, a good fifteen per cent of which were by G.B.S. ‘If you publish a word of mine I’ll have the law on you,’ Shaw threatened. Harris was panic-stricken. The lesson of O’Bolger had meant nothing to him – indeed, he had received an advance on royalties for the guarantee of Shaw’s words rather than his own. So Shaw was obliged to relent, if only because Nellie and Frank ‘were in rather desperate circumstances,’ he explained to Henderson. However, he cautioned Harris that ‘if there is one expression in this book of yours that cannot be read aloud at a confirmation class, you are lost for ever. Your life and loves are just being forgotten,’ he went on. ‘...This book is your chance of recovering your tall hat... So brush up your frock coat; buy a new tie; and remember that your life now depends on your being Francis Harris, Esquire.’
In this way the subject put himself in charge of his biographer’s reputation. Frank, the ruffian, must be removed. ‘Bury him,’ Shaw commanded in April 1931. ‘If you dont the parish will.’ Four months later, Frank Harris was buried in the British Cemetery at Caucade. Shaw sent the widow Nellie a cheque: and Nellie Harris arranged for G.B.S. to be sent the galley-proofs.
‘I have had to do many odd jobs in my time; but this one is quite the oddest,’ he wrote in a postscript to the book, where he gives the impression of having corrected the finished proof sheets. In a letter to Nellie he comes nearer to explaining what he had actually done: ‘Frank knew hardly more about my life history than I knew about yours; and the mixture of his guesses with the few things I told him produced the wildest results.
‘I have had to fill in the prosaic facts in Frank’s best style, and fit them to his comments as best I could; for I have most scrupulously preserved all his sallies at my expense... You may, however, depend on it that the book is not any the worse for my doctoring.’
Shaw made certain that the galley-proofs of Harris’s book were destroyed since he did not want his shadowing of Harris’s style to be detected. It had amused him, under the camouflage of Harris’s reputation for mendacity, to insert several authentic passages and, as part of this strange collaboration, occasionally to slip the correcting pen over to Sonny:
‘All through, from his very earliest childhood, he had lived a fictitious life through the exercise of his incessant imagination... It was a secret life: its avowal would have made him ridiculous. It had one oddity. The fictitious Shaw was not a man of family. He had no relatives. He was not only a bastard, like Dunois or Falconbridge, who at least knew who their parents were: he was also a foundling.’
‘Ought Mr Shaw to Have Done It?’ demanded the reviewers. It was a pity, they judged, that he had allowed himself to be bullied by such a pugilist-of-letters. What they could not observe, since it was invisible, was the extent of Shaw’s vicarious presentation of himself which by the 1930s was becoming part of his dramatic production.
Harris’s book sold well, which was bad news for Henderson whose first biography had been outshone by Chesterton and whose second biography appeared shortly in the wake of Harris. But the proofs of Playboy and Prophet were preserved, and they exhibit the cascading quantities of concealed rewriting done by G.B.S. in the persona of this friendly American mathematician who, without interest in politics or talent for writing, continued loyally to keep the pot boiling. Shaw, however, could not bring himself to write an endorsement. ‘DAMN Bernard Shaw,’ he wrote to Henderson, ‘and his tedious doings and sayings!’
*
‘For seven weeks I have been hiding within a day’s ride... I shall have left when this reaches you,’ Shaw wrote to Molly Tompkins before moving on to Geneva; ‘...you should not drive me away to horrible hell-paradises like the Riviera by refusing to behave yourself tactfully.’
Searching for a paradise without hell, Shaw turned to the Adriatic in 1929, putting down on the island of Brioni off the Istrian peninsula. ‘A settled melancholy, peculiar to the place perhaps, devours us,’ he wrote to Blanche Patch: and this, Charlotte sharply added, suited them very well.
From here they sailed to Dubrovnik, then continued overland by way of Boka Kotorska to Cetinje, the capital of Montenegro, before going on to Split. The Royal Yugoslav Government, anxious to use his visit as an advertisement for tourism and an endorsement of its political regime, had greeted him with a two-hour press conference at Dubrovnik. ‘There are good reasons for me to be careful about my political statements,’ Shaw announced. He was angered by some of the misreporting of these statements and refused to meet the press a second time in Split.
The Shaws left Split on 27 May and sailed for Venice. Travelling back on the Orient Express he saw Molly’s Isola from the train window, and hurtled on to London where, a fortnight later, he finished a 10,000-word Preface to his love letters with Ellen Terry.
Ellen had died the previous summer. For the last fourteen years of her life, since she played Lady Cicely Waynflete in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, they had not often corresponded. ‘I wonder shall I ever act in a Play of yours again!’ she had written to him in 1910, and then, more than two years later: ‘I suppose an old woman would not attract as a centre piece in a play, and that you never could write such a thing for – me?’ Her enquiries filled him with dismay. ‘It’s as if Queen Alexandra came to me and asked me to get her a place as cook-housekeeper,’ he wrote in a letter he was to exclude from their published correspondence.
Ellen was losing her eyesight, her memory for words, her stage confidence. ‘Can you enlarge my prospect?’ she had appealed to Shaw. ‘...I must work.’ When very young she had enlarged her prospect by escaping from an imprisoning marriage to G. F. Watts and eloping with William Godwin, ‘the greatest aesthete of them all,’ as Max Beerbohm called him. But having given birth to two illegitimate children, she found out what it was like to be a fallen and forgotten woman in nineteenth-century England. The partnership with Henry Irving had restored her reputation and the public happily identified her with the virtuous and sentimental roles Irving handed down to her. Shaw had then tried to enlarge their prospects together. But she had not wanted to risk public obloquy again.
In the late nineteenth century every Victorian gentleman who came to the Lyceum had fallen in love with Ellen Terry, and no wife had objected because she was regarded not as a notorious seductress like Mrs Patrick Campbell, but as the ideal embodiment of motherhood. Shaw knew how ironically this image fitted someone who, unleashing a power denied to her in the theatre, had given her children such a difficult and divisive upbringing. In the early twentieth century, following Irving’s death, ‘Our Lady of the Lyceum’ had faded into ‘Our Lady of Sighs’, fiercely fought over by her son, the legendary theatre designer Gordon Craig, and by her lesbian daughter Edy Craig.
Edy Craig had read Shaw’s letters when looking through the boxes of her mother’s papers. At her request, Shaw sent her Ellen’s letters, and she felt that both sides of the correspondence should be published. Shaw agreed to draft ‘an explanation for posterity’ that could be used as a preface whenever the letters were published. ‘The rest lies practically with the executors,’ he concluded.
Gordon Craig was not an executor. But Edy Craig was, and unknown to both men she had sold Shaw’s letters to a publisher for £3,000 (equivalent to £82,000 in 1997). On learning this, Shaw wrote to Gordon Craig saying that it was ‘no longer possible to pretend that we are under any pecuniary pressure to publish the letters’. He proposed sending Ellen’s letters ‘to the British Museum (say) with a copy of the preface to be placed with them when they are put into the catalogue at some future date’. In the meantime he forwarded Gordon Craig a proof copy, marked ‘Very Private’, of his ‘Preface to be attached to the Correspondence of Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw should it ever be published’, with the request that he read it carefully because ‘Edy tells me that you are at work on a memoir of Irving with incidental references to me’.
Gordon Craig had little intention of referring to G.B.S., whose part in Irving’s career he believed to have been negligible. Irving was his hero, and he had now inherited the feud between ‘my master’, as he called him, and this ‘literary gangster’, as G.B.S. called himself. As he took the field under the banner of Shaw’s old adversary, the faded colours once more unfurled, the dusty echoes stirred, and the ancient jousting was rejoined. But now it was Irving’s champion and not G.B.S. who was banished from the arena of the commercial theatre. ‘You were trying to make a picture frame of the proscenium to replace actors by figures, and drive the dramatic poet from the theatre,’ Shaw accused Craig. ‘And as I was doing precisely the reverse, and the Zeitgeist carried me to success, you felt that I was the arch enemy. So I was... the enemy who does not reciprocate your dislike – if you really dislike him.’ But Gordon Craig really did dislike the man who had set out ‘to damage my mother, Nelly Terry, my father, myself, my family, Irving, and a few more’.
Shaw also sent a copy of his preface to Edy Craig whose desire to see the correspondence quickly published – with the preface attached – was revitalized. Calculating that it would advance this end, she sold the copyright in her mother’s letters for another £3,000 to the same publisher who had bought Shaw’s side of their correspondence, and who promised that if he could not induce Shaw to allow the publication of his own letters he would publish Ellen Terry’s alone. Since Edy Craig had now amassed £6,000 (equivalent to £164,000 in 1997) for the Ellen Terry Estate without the printing of a word, there seemed no need to publish Shaw’s letters ‘until we have all passed into history,’ he confided to Gordon Craig ‘ – or out of it’.
But by the summer of 1930 Shaw had swung round to Edy’s opinion. He had been largely excluded from Craig’s book on Irving and now he was threatened with complete exclusion from Ellen Terry’s published correspondence. He was passing out of history. Reading through both sides of their exchange for the first time, he saw that ‘the moral of the whole correspondence’ would be the ‘justice done to the great woman E.T. sacrificed to the egotistical man H.I.’. Such a moral suited his own retrospective designs as well as the current feminist plans of Edy Craig and her lesbian lover ‘Christopher St John’ (with whom Shaw was silently to co-edit the volume). It also had the tactical advantage of forcing Gordon Craig to campaign simultaneously on two fronts.
Shaw’s negotiations over the Ellen Terry correspondence were at once devious and honourable. He took care to omit all hurtful reference to living people, especially Gordon Craig himself; he gave all his own profits to the Ellen Terry Estate for the Memorial Museum that Edy was creating; and he agreed to the publication initially of a limited edition only, on the condition that Gordon Craig himself gave his consent – ‘and he, swearing that he would ne’er consent, consented’.
Gordon Craig’s consent took the form of a brief letter to Shaw in which he promised ‘not to stand in the way’ of the publication: ‘you may rest assured that having said this I shall stick to it; and when the book containing my Mother’s and your letters is published you can rely on me not to write about it in the papers or to give interviews.’ Shaw was immediately generous in victory: ‘I took it, and take it, that your consent to the publication is like mine, a very reluctant submission to circumstances over which we have no control.’ Trying to align himself with both brother and sister, however, Shaw was caught between the fell incensed points of these mighty opposites. In his letter to Gordon Craig, he conceded, ‘As to your complete liberty to write about those letters, about the Lyceum, about E.T. and G.B.S., you must continue to exercise that in all respects as before.’ But when Gordon Craig did exercise this liberty in his book Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self the year after Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw. A Correspondence was published, Shaw made devastating use of his earlier letter of consent.
Craig had given his consent to publication without seeing all the letters and his attitude changed after reading them through as a whole. The only honourable course, he now felt, was for Shaw and Edy to have destroyed everything, posthumously releasing his mother from this awful entanglement. After the publication of A Correspondence, he concentrated his anti-Shavian abuse in a curious pamphlet fitting into the back cover-pocket of Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self. ‘Frankly, readers will suffer no irreparable loss if they leave it there,’ commented The Times.
In Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self Gordon Craig evokes the golden mother of his country childhood in place of the mortifyingly powerful woman who had looked on him as a weak little boy. ‘What makes this book of his so tragically moving,’ Shaw acknowledged, ‘ – for if you disregard the rubbish about me, which is neither here nor there, it is a poignant human document – is his desperate denial of the big woman he ran away from and his assertion of the “little mother” he loved.’ A Correspondence had revealed the Ellen Terry her son resented, ‘an impetuous, overwhelming, absorbing personality,’ Shaw remembered, ‘[who] could sweep a thousand people away in a big theatre; so you can imagine what she could do with a sensitive boy in a small house.’
Gordon Craig, however, had rightly observed that in regard to Ellen Terry, ‘we are all of us just children – and the naughtiest is often preferable to the good’. To one side of the battle over Irving’s reputation raged a more intimate and childlike contest: a strange variation of sibling rivalry between the lost son, militant daughter, and claimant child from the theatre. In the marsupial annexe to his book, which is dedicated to Henry Irving and entitled ‘A Plea for G.B.S.’, Gordon Craig wrote as naughtily as he could, calling Shaw ‘a very large, malicious, poke-nose old woman... with an idle and vindictive tongue quite fussily spreading falsehoods’. The ‘falsehoods’ were Shaw’s claims to legitimacy with Ellen in a theatre world that had taken Craig’s mother away and given her to everyone. He was an ‘old woman’ because he aligned himself with Edy’s circle of feminists who had appropriated Ellen after her retirement from the theatre.
After the Shaw-Ellen Terry correspondence appeared in the autumn of 1931, everyone wanted their Shavian letters published. ‘We have never had a correspondence in that sense,’ Shaw explained to Frank Harris. Only one body of correspondence had suggested something more romantic. ‘There is absolutely no comparison between Shaw’s letters to Ellen Terry and his letters to me,’ Mrs Patrick Campbell told American journalists when she arrived in New York that fall. ‘I shall write my own preface to the edition, not Mr Shaw... I do not intend to give him the opportunity to say the last word. I don’t trust him enough.’
Publication of the Shaw-Ellen Terry correspondence prompted Stella to mount one last campaign. His letters to her had been valued at £10,000 but (aside from the odd misdemeanour) she had behaved herself ‘like a gentleman’ and guarded them for nineteen years. Now times were hard, ‘almost unbearable’, she wanted this correspondence published for reasons of self-esteem as much as money. ‘What objection can there be? Letters written so long ago, and all three of us on the verge of the grave!’ But while Charlotte lived, Shaw could not agree. ‘At all events for me you are an insoluble problem,’ he admitted to Stella; ‘...there is no use making myself unhappy about it.’
In 1937, suddenly coming upon all Stella’s correspondence, Shaw parcelled it up in six registered envelopes and sent it to her in New York. He made no copies, ‘as I should certainly die of angina pectoris during the operation’. ‘There’s a clutch at my heart,’ Stella rejoined, ‘...the desire to feel a child again will tempt me to read them.’ Still nothing could be published while he and Charlotte remained alive, but ‘as you are nine years younger than we are,’ Shaw calculated, ‘your chances of surviving both of us are fairly good’.
But it was Stella who died first, in April 1940. ‘AND IT IS MY DESIRE,’ she had written in her will, ‘...that the Bernard Shaw letters and poems which are now in the custody of the Westminster Bank be published in their proper sequence and not cut or altered in any way, that they should be published in an independent volume to be entitled “The Love Letters of Bernard Shaw to Mrs Patrick Campbell” so all who may read them will realize that the friendship was “L’amitié amoureuse”.’
Nothing more could happen until Charlotte’s death three and a half years later. In his new will Shaw gave authority for Stella Beech ‘daughter of the late eminent actress professionally known as Mrs Patrick Campbell to print and publish after my death all or any of the letters written by me to the said eminent actress and in the event of Mrs Beech’s death before publication to give such authority (which is a permission and not an assignment of copyright) to Mrs Patrick Campbell’s grandson Patrick Beech’. The proceeds of this correspondence he reserved ‘as far as possible’ for the secondary education of Stella Campbell’s grandchildren.
There was another pause until Shaw died. Two years afterwards, their leftover letters finally appeared. Against her mother’s wishes Mrs Beech cut a few passages and published the volume more prosaically as Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence. G.B.S. had placed himself in loco parentis to Stella’s family and made this the only volume of his correspondence to be removed from the control of his executors. ‘You would not come out of it with a halo like Ellen’s,’ Shaw had warned Stella. But Stella would hold her own in Their Correspondence. ‘Like a cushion, she baffles the incisive blade of Shavian argument,’ commented The Times reviewer.
There was to be one more ironic revolution in this ‘Comedy of Letters’ when Jerome Kilty lifted it off the page and transferred it into the theatre. ‘Dear Liar catches with remarkable theatrical assurance the spirit of the correspondence,’ a critic in The Times wrote of the adaptation. ‘...it brings out rather surprisingly how sweetly reasonable the actress who was the terror of Tree, Alexander and other actor-managers proved to be in her letters to Joey.’
To its end the relationship had pulled Shaw painfully between comedy and tragedy without ever reconciling the two. ‘I can laugh with the comedian,’ he had written to her; ‘but with the tragedian – oh my heart!...
‘Oh, Stella, Stella, Stella, Stella, Stella!’
Them and their Academy of Letters – all in all, and in spite of all.
Sean O’Casey to James Joyce (30 May 1939)
‘The Works of Bernard Shaw’, which G.B.S. had been preparing intermittently since 1921, began to appear in two editions early in the 1930s. Twenty-one volumes of the Limited Collected Edition were published in 1930, starting on his seventy-fourth birthday with the five novels, embellished with Forewords and Postscripts, at the head of which he delivered the first printing of Immaturity, slightly revised after its fifty-year wait, and given a long autobiographical Preface. Thirty-two plays and playlets, many with emendations, followed in eleven volumes; and to these he added Major Critical Essays (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, The Perfect Wagnerite and The Sanity of Art), The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and various compilations ranging from What I Really Wrote about the War to the more distant Short Stories, Scraps and Shavings. ‘We are unearthing all sorts of forgotten masterpieces!’ Charlotte exclaimed. It involved what Shaw called ‘appalling grave digging’. He went on digging up dramatic, literary, musical and political essays as well as critical pieces on education and medicine; and he added half a dozen new plays in the 1930s, bringing the total number of volumes to thirty-three. Nevertheless, he told Otto Kyllmann at Constable, ‘I have conceived an extraordinary hatred to this particular edition, blast it!’ and he later allowed it to be overtaken by what became known as Constable’s ‘Standard Edition’ of his works, a cheaper set eventually rising to thirty-seven volumes uniformly bound in Venetian fadeless sail cloth. ‘To the Standard Edition,’ he wrote to Kyllmann, ‘there is no limit but the grave.’
*
Rather unexpectedly, recognition was coming from Ireland. G.B.S. had never felt easy with Irish writers. ‘We put each other out frightfully,’ he wrote, recalling his meetings with Oscar Wilde; ‘and this odd difficulty persisted between us to the very last.’ Though Sonny and Oscar were born within two years and a couple of Irish miles of each other, no social contacts had been practicable in Victorian Dublin between families of such divergent histories. It was Charlotte’s family that had lived opposite the Wildes in Merrion Square; while Shaw’s father came to Sir William Wilde, ‘Surgeon-Oculist in Ordinary to the Queen in Ireland’, only as a patient. According to G.B.S., Sir William ‘operated on my father to correct a squint, and overdid the corrections so much that my father squinted the other way all the rest of his life’.
In later years G.B.S. was seldom able to see Oscar Wilde as others saw him. He appeared to have two people in view: Oscar, the boyish romantic, chivalrously sympathetic to those less well-placed than himself and scrupulously well-mannered to others, such as Shaw, who were potentially his equals; and then Wilde, the arrogant Dublin snob encircled by acolytes. Shaw had met Oscar at one of Lady Wilde’s richly eccentric homes in London to which he sometimes went in the ‘desperate days’ between 1879 and 1885. ‘Lady Wilde was nice to me,’ he remembered. Oscar too had come up and spoken ‘with an evident intention of being specially kind to me’. Lady Wilde’s position, ‘literary, social and patriotic, is unique and unassailable,’ Shaw was to write in 1888 when reviewing her Ancient Legends of Ireland for the Pall Mall Gazette.
‘She has no difficulty in writing about leprechauns, phoukas and banshees, simply as an Irishwoman telling Irish stories, impelled by the same tradition-instinct, and with a nursery knowledge at first hand of all the characteristic moods of the Irish imagination. Probably no living writer could produce a better book of its kind.’
This was partly because, Shaw manages to imply, the book belonged to a literature and sociology that were now dead. He had cut loose from this culture when throwing himself out of Ireland and into socialism, and he seems to have attributed what he saw as Wilde’s false start as an apostle of art to the artificial prolongation of this dying tradition in the cult of aestheticism. Both Wilde, the complete dandy, and Shaw, the rational dress reformer, were showmen. The lilac puffs and frills, black silk stockings and tailored coats of braided velvet which made up Wilde’s aesthetic presentation of himself were a ‘coming out’ of the superior cashmere combinations and other experimental underwear in which Shaw paradoxically showed off. Whenever these two noticeable figures met, they treated each other with elaborate courtesy, conscious that the British press resented their aberrations from ready-made Victorian behaviour. ‘As far as I can ascertain, I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will,’ Shaw wrote in his Saturday Review notice of An Ideal Husband. ‘...In a certain sense Mr Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre...
‘All the literary dignity of the play, all the imperturbable good sense and good manners with which Mr Wilde makes his wit pleasant to his comparatively stupid audience, cannot quite overcome the fact that Ireland is of all countries the most foreign to England, and that to the Irishman... there is nothing in the world quite so exquisitely comic as an Englishman’s seriousness.’
Wilde, too, made a point of treating Shaw’s early work with true Irish seriousness. ‘I like your superb confidence in the dramatic value of the mere facts of life,’ he wrote after reading Widowers’ Houses, ‘...and your preface is a masterpiece – a real masterpiece of trenchant writing and caustic wit and dramatic instinct.’ He let it be known that Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism had led him to write The Soul of Man under Socialism; and he supported Shaw’s campaign against the ‘ridiculous institution’ of stage censorship. ‘England is the land of intellectual fogs but you have done much to clear the air,’ he wrote to Shaw in 1893: ‘we are both Celtic, and I like to think that we are friends.’ But on another occasion, he was reported to have said: ‘Shaw is an excellent man. He has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him’; while Shaw wrote that Wilde ‘was incapable of friendship, though not of the most touching kindness on occasion’.
They were compatriots rather than friends. Their diffidence with each other masked what was probably an apprehension of their respective powers. Wilde was the one man in London capable of making the young Shaw sound comparatively dull. ‘I had not to talk myself,’ Shaw acknowledged, ‘but to listen to a man telling me stories better than I could have told them.’ But Wilde appears to have been nervous of Shaw’s combative spirit and that ‘caustic wit’ which could pierce his own protective charm.
Their ways parted once Wilde’s social aggrandizement seemed to implicate him in the very hypocrisies of Victorian society his absurdist wit had mocked. In Shaw’s view, success brought out the snob in Wilde. This was one explanation for his reaction against The Importance of Being Earnest – Wilde’s ‘first really heartless play’. He wanted to believe that Wilde’s talent for puncturing morals and manners fitted him for a place in ‘a large public life’ as a fellow socialist. Instead, Wilde appeared to succumb to flattery. His unconventionality was the very pedantry of convention, Shaw was to write; ‘never was there a man less an outlaw than he.’
In fact, as his trial, imprisonment and exile showed, Wilde formed no more solid social foundations in England than G.B.S. Remembering that Wilde had been the only writer in London to sign his memorial in the late 1880s asking for the reprieve of the Chicago anarchists, Shaw drafted a petition seeking a remission of Wilde’s prison sentence, but finding that his signature would stand almost alone he gave up the idea, concluding that the support would ‘do Oscar more harm than good’.
He was able, however, to find a more sophisticated way of defending Wilde. His major critical essay, ‘The Sanity of Art’, had been aimed at Max Nordau’s thesis Degeneration, which included as part of its ‘Ego-Mania’ section a hostile analysis of Wilde in the chapter ‘Decadents and Aesthetes’. Shaw’s response, originally entitled ‘A Degenerate’s View of Nordau’, may be read as an intellectual rehabilitation of Wilde written during his second trial and published shortly after his sentence. In the happy days of the hugely successful A Woman of No Importance, which coincided with the shaky beginnings of Widowers’ Houses, Wilde had paid Shaw the compliment of ranking their works together; in the days of Wilde’s disgrace Shaw returned the compliment by ranking himself as a fellow ‘degenerate’. He also went on favourably mentioning Wilde in his theatre reviews while Wilde was in prison; and six months after he was released, Shaw proposed his name – though that name was still taboo – as one of the ‘Immortals’ for an Academy of Letters. During the final period of Wilde’s disgrace, they continued to send each other signed copies of their books, all works, as Oscar liked to say, of ‘the great Celtic School’ uniting socialism with aesthetics.
The great Celtic School had been held in place by its opposition to Victorian sexual and political ethics but, as the solid ground of Victorianism crumbled, it was to break up into two Hibernian tributaries. Shaw had rallied to Wilde in his misfortune, but switched off this support when he came to realize how tragedy was transforming him into a posthumous legend. Wilde’s genius was for comedy, he declared, ‘no other Irishman has yet produced as masterful a comedy as De Profundis’. By the 1930s Wilde was once again the more popular dramatist. ‘My licence for the performance of my play Pygmalion... did not include an authorisation to advertise it as “the brilliant comedy by Oscar Wilde”,’ Shaw wrote in 1938 to the Grand Theatre in Wolverhampton. The manager of the theatre was disinclined to offer an apology, however, claiming that this substitution accounted for the play having attracted three times as much money as it did when billed as being written by Shaw. ‘Beg him to continue the attribution, which was a most happy thought,’ Shaw responded. ‘I am not grumbling; I am rejoicing.’
Shaw’s grumbles with Wilde arose less from personal rivalry than from their competing ideologies. By the 1920s and 1930s, Wilde’s aesthetic creed had developed into the cult of personal relationships and artistic significance practised by the Bloomsbury Group, and would later lead to the ‘flower power’ of the 1960s and a branch of modernism in the 1990s. Shaw’s economic opposition to Victorianism concurrently developed its programme of reforms towards the creation of a Welfare State which by the 1990s seemed no longer viable. He wanted egalitarian socialism to be accepted as the mainstream of twentieth-century culture in Britain. By giving his imprimatur to Frank Harris’s inaccurate account of Wilde’s life and by engaging for over a dozen years in a chastening correspondence with Alfred Douglas, Shaw sought to diminish the influence of a man whose memory was becoming an inspiration for the ‘Artist Idolatry’ he had attacked in the Preface to Misalliance, and whose ethics, with those of Beardsley, he had spotlighted in The Doctor’s Dilemma.
Wilde was ‘an original moralist’ and it was his moral force that Shaw held in suspicion. This suspicion gave currency to the view of G.B.S. as a ‘certain notorious and clever, but cold-blooded Socialist’ whom W. B. Yeats depicts anonymously in an essay on Wilde.
Like Wilde, Yeats valued Shaw’s fighting qualities. His ‘detonating impartiality’ had made him ‘the most formidable man in modern letters’ and was often used to ‘hit my enemies’. Referring to his ballads on Roger Casement, Yeats was to tell Dorothy Wellesley in 1936: ‘I am fighting in those ballads for what I have been fighting all my life, it is our Irish fight though it has nothing to do with this or that country. Bernard Shaw fights with the same object.’
Many years before, talking about G.B.S. as he walked back home in the evening with Florence Farr, the actress they both loved, Yeats had sometimes wondered ‘whether the cock crowed for my blame or for my praise’. Finally he resolved the contradiction in a burst of Shavian-like humour: ‘When a man is so outrageously in the wrong as Shaw he is indispensable.’ He had accused Shaw of constructing plays like buildings ‘made by science in an architect’s office, and erected by joyless hands’; then he saw Misalliance, was delighted by the extravagant ‘girl acrobat who read her Bible while tossing her balls in the air’, and decided that her creator was ‘irreverent, headlong, fantastic’.
But people lose their ‘peace, their fineness in politics,’ Yeats said, so it was no surprise to him that, fighting the political barbarians, Shaw had become something of a barbarian himself. Yeats responded to the mystical vein in Shaw, without believing it would ever quieten the ‘Shaw who writes letters to the papers and gives interviews’ and who had written The Apple Cart. ‘He is haunted by the mystery he flouts,’ Yeats wrote to George Russell. ‘He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.’
Shaw had not liked Yeats’s allegorical plays which seemed to float, full of ‘treading-on-air’ roles, within the twilight Ireland of Lady Wilde’s legends. He hardly had the patience to tease out Yeats’s dense and studied symbolisms. He had felt ‘quite touched’ by Cathleen ni Houlihan, ‘but Ireland meant something then that cut no ice outside the island of saints’. He had described The Land of Heart’s Desire as ‘an exquisite curtain raiser’, but it had raised the curtain on Arms and the Man, a brisk modern comedy that Yeats likened to the hard-edged world of Epstein’s Rock Drill and the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis.
After they stayed as fellow-guests of Lady Gregory in the summer of 1910, Shaw had discovered ‘what a penetrating critic and good talker’ Yeats was, ‘for he played none of his Bunthorne games, and saw no green elephants, at Coole’. He had also noticed the shrewdness with which Yeats handled the Abbey Theatre Company. ‘The Abbey Players were enormously interesting, both technically and poetically,’ he later wrote, ‘and brought me into closer relations with him.’
In Chancery Lane one black night, Shaw remembered, ‘into a circle of light under an arc lamp there suddenly stepped, walking towards me, Yeats with his wing of raven black hair swinging across his forehead and Maud Gonne, dazzlingly beautiful in white silk, both of them in evening dress. The pair were quite beyond description. I was invisible in the dark as they passed on; and of course I did not intrude.’
This was the only time Shaw saw Maud Gonne. He had not intruded on Yeats’s Irish Movement, though somewhere else he was campaigning in the same war. He did not invade that pool of light, though from his courtly dance with Ellen Terry to his troubadour’s pursuit of Stella Campbell he circled hypnotically round it, while Yeats, despite ‘that girl standing there’, had stepped into the shadows of politics as an Irish senator.
Between the poet of the emotions who believed that ‘we begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy’ and the playwright of the intellect who thought that ‘all genuinely intellectual work is humorous’ there had once seemed to be no sympathetic meeting ground. But as Shaw’s thought dissolved more into the surreal, he came to accept Yeats’s visionary energies as being valuable for Ireland; and as Yeats moved ‘closer to the common world’ he understood the complementary value of the artist as politician.
On the Great Wheel of lunar phases round which Yeats charts the twenty-eight categories of human nature and the evolution of the soul through these categories, he places Shaw alongside Wells in phase 21 where writers are ‘great public men and they exist after death as historical monuments, for they are without meaning apart from time and circumstance’. Yeats positioned himself at phase 17, an ideal phase except that the world was at phase 22 of its historical cycle and he was consequently fated to be one of its ‘tragic minority’. So when seeking a vehicle of contemporary time and circumstance, he turned to the man whose moon almost exactly coincided with the age.
The Irish Academy of Letters was Yeats’s version of Wilde’s politesse about the ‘great Celtic School’. It was to be an organization with the character of the Académie Française, bringing together those who had done creative work in Ireland, from the Celtic poet to the Cork realist, the Gaelic modernist and Big House novelist. He knew that the proposal would chiefly recommend itself to G.B.S. as a strengthening of forces against the censorship of the Catholic Church in Ireland; and indeed Shaw’s participation was partly in acknowledgement of the help Yeats had given him in defeating British censorship at the Abbey with The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet.
At the Academy’s inaugural meeting in September 1932 Shaw was, in his absence, unanimously elected President, and Yeats became Vice-President. Twenty founding members accepted nomination plus eleven associates whose work was classified as ‘less Irish’. Among the academicians was Shaw’s future biographer, St John Ervine; among the associates Yeats’s biographer, Joseph Hone. Most of the names were suggested by Yeats, though Shaw proposed T. E. Lawrence and Eugene O’Neill as associate members.
One nominee who refused the invitation was Sean O’Casey. Yeats had been O’Casey’s spiritual father in Ireland when he was happy to be enveloped by ‘the great glory of the Abbey’. But after the Abbey’s rejection of The Silver Tassie in 1928 he turned to Shaw as his new protector and made Yeats his enemy. Shaw, who wished to support O’Casey and his family without antagonizing Yeats, urged conciliation. But O’Casey needed enemies as much as he needed heroes. The influences of Yeats and Shaw mingled uneasily in his plays. He could find no rapprochement between the Green Flag and the Red. Turning down the invitation to the Irish Academy was, he confessed, one of the hardest refusals of his life.
Another Irish exile, James Joyce, also refused the symbolic gesture, though warmly thanking Yeats through whom he also conveyed ‘my thanks to Mr Shaw whom I have never met’. When reading parts of Ulysses in the Little Review, Shaw had been shudderingly reminded of his Dublin adolescence. ‘I missed neither the realism of the book nor its poetry,’ he later stated. Though admitting ‘I could not write the words Mr Joyce uses’, he acknowledged ‘Joyce’s literary power, which is of classic quality’, adding, ‘If Mr Joyce should ever desire a testimonial as the author of a literary masterpiece from me, it shall be given with all possible emphasis and with sincere enthusiasm.’
Shaw had received a prospectus for the Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses from Sylvia Beach who, believing he would relish the revolutionary aspect of the work, accepted Joyce’s bet of a silk handkerchief to a box of cigars that Shaw’s name would not be on the list of subscribers. But, though praising Joyce’s ‘literary genius’, Shaw had gone on to explain that ‘I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and that if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen’.
After that it was the turn of Ezra Pound to bully him into a subscription. ‘I take care of the pence,’ Shaw answered, ‘because the Pounds will not take care of themselves.’ Though this helped to earn him Pound’s condemnation as a ‘ninth-rate coward’, it delighted Joyce himself. Having eyed their ‘letter fight over me’ through his cigar smoke, he thought he spied how matters stood. Echoing Shaw, he cautioned Pound that if he thought G.B.S. had not ‘subscribed anonymously for a copy of the revolting record through a bookseller you little know my countrymen’. And Pound had conceded: ‘Dear old Shaw has amused us.’
By 1920 Joyce’s library contained thirteen volumes of Shaw, comprising seventeen works. In Zurich during the war he had become involved with the English Players’ Company’s presentation of The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (for which he wrote a darkly amusing programme note) and some unauthorized performances of the still-censored Mrs Warren’s Profession. Shaw raised legal objections to this production, but although it was without benefit of royalties, Joyce may have thought he was engaged in defeating censorship as Yeats had done with The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet.
Joyce’s review of that play at the Abbey had been a ‘shewing-up’ of G.B.S. as a writer incapable of the ‘noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwrighting’. In Joyce’s eyes, Shaw was more preacher than literary artist. This was the obverse of Shaw’s view of Joyce as a literary artist in danger of dwindling into a limited edition belletrist. ‘I shall not do anything that may encourage him to be a coterie author,’ he had warned Pound: ‘Irish talent, when it is serious, belongs to the big world.’
That the world would venerate a linguistic experimenter like Joyce as well as a supernatural speculator like Yeats said something to Shaw of literature’s removal from the streets into the universities. He did not keep up with Joyce’s later work any more than with Yeats’s. ‘I have tried to read Finnegan but found it would take more time to decipher than it seemed worth,’ he wrote in 1948. ‘...I might have persevered when I was 20; but at 93 time is precious and the days pass like flights of arrows.’
‘Allow me to offer my felicitations to you on the honour you have received and to express my satisfaction that the award of the Nobel Prize for literature has gone once more to a distinguished fellow townsman,’ Joyce wrote in 1926. This was the only letter of congratulation Shaw kept. Had he persisted with Finnegans Wake, he would have found within its overlapping contexts many Shavian echoes and allusions from ‘Sainte Andrée’s Undershift’ to the injunction ‘Plays be honest!’ and the disarming ‘Candidately’. Even Blanche Patch takes a bow in Finnegans Wake.
Wilde’s great Celtic School found a symbol but never a centre in Yeats’s Academy. Like Shaw, Yeats had thought in terms of synthesis. But the Celtic School depended on antitheses. It was a school of truancy, thriving on a pressure that drove people outwards, and on the tension and reproach of exiles ‘too conscious of intellectual power to belong to party,’ as Yeats wrote when describing Wilde and Shaw together. Joyce, whose imagination was lit up by a reference Shaw made to Wilde’s gigantism, also coupled them in the Wildeshawshow of Finnegans Wake as brother opposites, like Sterne and Swift, of the same generation. From such half-admiring antipathies did the Celtic-Hibernian School gain its positive capability.
This is the way with us ageing men. In the decay of our minds the later acquisitions go first.
H.G. Wells’s obituary of Shaw, Daily Express (3 November 1950)
‘And now I have come from the burial of Thomas Hardy’s ashes in the Abbey...’ Charlotte wrote to T. E. Lawrence. Hardy had died aged eighty-seven on the evening of Wednesday 11 January 1928. ‘He and I were on very friendly terms,’ G.B.S. was reported as saying. ‘...I always liked his poetry better than his prose.’ Two days after his death, Shaw received an invitation to act as one of the pallbearers at Westminster Abbey. ‘I desire to be buried in Stinsford Churchyard,’ Hardy had written in his will; but according to Shaw he ‘knew that he must ultimately come to the Abbey and he was quite reconciled to it’. As an extreme compromise his body was dismembered and the heart buried at Stinsford while the ashes were being laid to rest in the Abbey. Many people were horrified by this mutilation. But G.B.S. reassured Florence Hardy that, since her husband belonged to the nation as well as to himself, she had had no choice in the matter. ‘Everything that could be done has been done to meet national sentiment,’ he wrote in the Daily News. ‘Wessex has the heart, the nation has his ashes.’
It was snowing hard on the day of the funeral, but sprawling crowds had assembled and lots were being drawn for tickets of admission to Poets’ Corner. Shaw felt uncharacteristically nervous. Barrie, Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, A. E. Housman and Kipling were the other writers acting as pallbearers; there were Masters of two colleges that had made Hardy an Honorary Fellow, Queen’s College, Oxford, and Magdalene College, Cambridge; as well as the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. A young biographer who had journeyed down from Cambridge for the funeral observed that, in startling contrast to the weight and texture of the other pallbearers, Shaw seemed an ethereal presence. ‘I have never seen so transparent a complexion; a pallor, very slightly tinged with the freshest rose – such as any girl or child alone normally has... His hair alone, still a glinting gilt, wire-like tangle of reddish threads, was material.’
Shaw attributed his success, despite almost falling over Kipling, to having posed for Troubetzkoy in a sublime attitude: ‘I was in full practice,’ he told Henry Salt. The clergy, full of worldly pomp and disdain, led the procession; and at the end, erect and calm, came Florence ‘so completely swathed in crape that her face was invisible’. As the chords of the organ music swelled and burst out and the procession passed back, she hung on Sydney Cockerell’s arm, Charlotte observed, and appeared ‘completely broken’.
It was ‘a fine show,’ G.B.S. admitted, ‘...but I didn’t feel solemn a bit,’ he afterwards wrote to Florence Hardy.
‘If you only knew how I wanted at the end to swoop on you; tear off all that villainous crape (you should have been like the lilies of the field); and make you come off, with him, to see a Charlie Chaplin film! But of course we wouldn’t have dared. I had to be content with nudging Cockerell disrespectfully as I passed him.’
In fact he had behaved with sensitivity, informing the press that Hardy ‘had no enemies, at least that I know of’, but in a letter to Florence Hardy revealing his awareness that her married life had not been easy. ‘It is inconceivable that Thomas Hardy’s widow should be unhappy or unblest. Only, don’t marry another genius...’
*
‘I cannot sympathize about his death,’ Shaw remarked on hearing that the actor Robert Loraine had died, ‘because I am going to die myself shortly.’ He took the same line when James Barrie died eighteen months later in 1937. Far from being, as the public imagined, a genuine Peter Pan (like G. K. Chesterton) he had struck Shaw as having been born a thousand years old (like Max Beerbohm). He was one of the few people whom Shaw admitted to have been unhappy. ‘Certainly he regretted that he had no children. Perhaps he ought to have had children...’ But what was terrifying to Shaw was the way he had killed the child in himself. ‘He gave you the impression that for all his playfulness he had hell in his soul.’
During the 1920s and 1930s the deaths of Fabian comrades, colleagues in the theatre and those who had influenced his early intellectual life were regularly announced in the newspapers, often with some tribute from Shaw. He and Charlotte were abroad when, in the early summer of 1935, they heard the news that T. E. Lawrence had been killed. Charlotte felt profoundly thankful to be away: the publicity would have been awful. Some of the evidence at the inquest had been contradictory and there were rumours of murder and suicide. The facts, as the Shaws understood them, were that he had been racing home from Bovington Camp on his Brough Superior ‘Boanerges’, a motorcycle with the same name as the bull-roarer in The Apple Cart that the Shaws had given him. He had swerved to avoid some boys on bicycles, gone into a skid, and been thrown over the handlebars. He was forty-six; but perhaps, Charlotte speculated, it was for the best. ‘He always dreaded pain and the idea of death (as a sort of sign of defeat!) and now, you see, he had got off without knowing anything about it.’
Worst of all had been the news in May 1927 that H. G. Wells’s wife Jane was dying of cancer. Jane ‘is valiant & has been the gayest & pluckiest person I have ever known,’ Charlotte wrote to Wells. A few days later they motored over to Little Easton. Jane lay exhausted on a sofa in the drawing-room while H.G. darted anxiously in and out. He was desperate to do anything that might make these last months easier for her, for he knew she was doomed. ‘The doctors and the nurse, having committed themselves to the opinion that Jane is a goner, are naturally creating an atmosphere calculated to produce that effect even on a perfectly healthy woman,’ Shaw protested in a letter to Beatrice Webb. ‘...I am trying to make her defy science and have a turn at all the empiricisms as aids to curing herself. Charlotte was rather distressed...’
They visited Jane again that summer and saw her getting weaker. It was, as Charlotte said, ‘beyond words’ and Shaw agreed. ‘There it is,’ he had written with a tone of finality. But he could not leave it there. He advised Wells to take a gamble on anything from homoeopathy to osteopathy, and encouraged his old friend to ‘grasp the horror of your own scientific education’. All this was meant to help Wells ‘watch and wait with an undarkened mind’. But, though it probably had something of this effect on G.B.S., it can only have pushed Wells himself nearer the end of his tether. ‘Charlotte says I can do no good by worrying you, as you will only be made more miserable,’ G.B.S. ended his letter that August. ‘But I do not regard you as a miserable person... it would be very jolly to hear that Jane is all right. Send us a bulletin, however brief.’
But no bulletin came. ‘Please H.G. dont be angry with him,’ Charlotte wrote privately that September. ‘You know he is like that – he must sometimes let himself go in this aggravating way – & he means it all so more than well!... Do – do – write a line – to me, even, & say you ar’nt angry.’ So, within four weeks of his wife’s death, Wells was obliged to comfort Charlotte over her husband. ‘Your charming letter brought peace to me & a great deal of thankfulness,’ Charlotte replied. ‘...Perhaps now it will not be so very long before we meet.’
They met the following month for Jane’s cremation at Golders Green. ‘I haven’t been so upset for a long time,’ Charlotte wrote. The service was ‘hideous – terrible and frightful’. Wells, dressed in a bottle-blue overcoat, came and sat with her and G.B.S. instead of with his family, and the organ started on an appalling dirge. At any second, Charlotte feared, G.B.S. might stride over and murder the organist in his loft. Wells, his handkerchief darting in and out of his pocket, ‘began to cry like a child – tried to hide it at first and then let go’.
The funeral speech had been prepared by Wells and was delivered by T. E. Page, a classical scholar noted for his oratory. ‘This oration was either not well done,’ observed Arnold Bennett, ‘or too well done.’ Virginia Woolf, who had been looking forward to the outing (‘What fun! How I love ceremonies’) thought the presentation somewhat nondescript. To Charlotte it sounded like grief curdled by guilt. ‘He drowned us in a sea of misery and as we were gasping began a panegyric of Jane which made her appear as a delicate, flower-like, gentle being, surrounding itself with beauty and philanthropy and love,’ she wrote. ‘...Then there came a place where the address said “she never resented a slight; she never gave voice to a harsh judgement”. At that point the audience, all more or less acquainted with many details of H.G.’s private life, thrilled, like corn under a wet north wind – and H.G. – H.G. positively howled.’
At the end of the service the pale grey coffin with ‘tassels like bell pulls’ was ‘shoved through the door into the furnace’. The chapel emptied. G.B.S. trotted out into the garden and encouraged Wells to take his boys into the furnace room. ‘I saw my mother burnt there. You’ll be glad if you go.’ Wells did go, taking his two sons, and watched the quivering flames.
Charlotte remained in the chapel: ‘I took a little time to get quiet.’ When she came out into the yard most of the congregation was still there. ‘Number of really A.1 people present, very small,’ noted Arnold Bennett who saw only one man in full mourning and observed that G.B.S. who had no overcoat was wearing an amber handkerchief. The great world was no longer interested in Wells. ‘It was desperate to see what a dowdy shabby imperfect lot we looked,’ Virginia Woolf remarked.
Charlotte felt Wells had got his due. ‘I am an old woman and there is one thing I seem, at least, to have learned,’ she wrote grimly. ‘The way of transgressors is hard.’ Looking ‘stately and calm, and remote’, Virginia Woolf disengaged the tiny sobbing figure of Lydia Lopokova from Charlotte’s arms while G.B.S. consoled her. ‘You mustnt cry,’ he said. ‘Jane is well – Jane is splendid.’ Then he began firing off ‘jokes to everyone, and finally – putting H.G. into his car – he actually got a sort of grin out of him’. Wells had no wish to grin and resented being made to betray his grief in this way.
The occasion had a macabre postscript. In 1945 the New Statesman asked Shaw to draft an obituary of Wells and this was published when Wells died in the summer of 1946. It was an even-handed recollection of a spoilt man of genius, temperamental yet ‘without malice’. Wells had also been asked at approximately the same time to write an obituary of Shaw for the Daily Express. His obituary was published over four years after his own death and came, St John Ervine remembered, like ‘a piercing scream from the grave’. Shaw was an example of the ‘mental and moral consequences of prolonged virginity’ on a nervously active person. ‘As a rule prolonged virginity means no real ascetic purity,’ Wells had argued. ‘...A furtive sexual system grows up detached from the general activities.’ Needing to distance himself from reality, G.B.S. had grown forever out of adjustment to his environment. A secondary, vindictive personality took control whose method of self-assertion was ‘to inflict pain’.
This was the danger of G.B.S.’s fantasies. Charlotte, ‘that most lovable of women’, had tried to prevent such vanities, and that was ‘more and more her role as life went on,’ Wells continued. ‘She had married this perplexing being in a passion of admiration... and she found she had launched that incalculable, lop-sided enfant terrible, a man of genius, upon the world.’
*
‘We were very good friends... On paper he died in despair; but I cannot believe that his gaiety ever deserted him,’ Shaw was to write of Wells in 1946 to Gene Tunney. Tunney, the world heavyweight boxing champion, was more than forty years younger than Shaw, and famously unmarked, a scholar of the ring. Americans were puzzled on being told that he had been found, shortly before his first contest with Jack Dempsey, poring over Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. They laughed openly at his contention that he would beat Dempsey by virtue of his superior mental training, and they never really forgave him for twice out-pointing their All-American Hero.
Tunney’s career was a Shavian romance. ‘Reputations cannot frighten him: personalities cannot hypnotize him,’ Shaw wrote: ‘he does not need to be a brilliant boxer like Carpentier or a terror like Dempsey; he wins by mental and moral superiority, combined with plenty of strength... You might say that he wins because he has the good sense to win.’
Here was Shaw’s fantasy of action made real, Cashel Byron come to life. They met in December 1928. Earlier that year Tunney had retired as undefeated heavyweight champion, after which he delivered a course of lectures on Shakespeare at Yale, accompanied Thornton Wilder on a walking trip round Europe and married a young gentlewoman from Greenwich, Connecticut. ‘My great work now is to live quietly and simply,’ he announced to the world, ‘for this manner of living brings me most happiness.’ His pursuit of culture led him, by the end of this year, to ‘an extremely pleasant’ luncheon at Whitehall Court.
He spoke of his travels over many countries and it was then that he introduced the Shaws to Brioni in the Adriatic, where they all met up the following year. Tunney was ‘so handsome & gentle & babyish that it refreshes one to look at him,’ Charlotte wrote from Brioni to Nancy Astor. ‘He takes G.B.S. for long walks (his boast is that you can walk 8 miles on the Island without repeating yourself!) & gazes at him, like a large dog at its master.’
On Brioni the Shaws passed many days at the Tunneys’ villa. Charlotte had long suspected G.B.S. of taking advantage of her siestas to press secretly ahead with his work. The knowledge that he was being actively prevented from working by Gene Tunney came as a tremendous relief to her as she ascended to her bedroom. ‘Mr Tunney is a most wonderful help,’ she reported to Blanche Patch. ‘He takes Mr Shaw off to the polo ground, or the golf course, or sailing, or something, and so keeps him from writing, which is splendid.’
When asked why he cultivated Tunney’s friendship, G.B.S. was to reply: ‘To plant my feet on solid ground.’ Yet it was as airy a fantasy in its fashion as his island romance with Molly Tompkins – a magical relationship that enabled them to swap roles, G.B.S. being admitted as a champion boxing analyst in exchange for adopting Tunney as a very perfect literary scholar. Tunney met all manner of artists and writers at the Shaws’ home, and they had to strain every nerve to match his sensitivity. ‘Mr Tunney took me by the arm and led me to the windows and compelled my attention to the beauties of the sunset,’ remembered Max Beerbohm.
By the early 1930s Tunney had ‘got into the book-writing field myself’ with his memoirs of the ring, A Man Must Fight. Shaw refused to contribute a Preface, explaining that ‘when you want a publisher for your next book on the strength of this one they will all declare that your first book does not count as it was the Shaw preface that sold it’. Besides, Tunney was far more famous than any writer or artist. ‘You may remember that at Brioni, when I was talking to Richard Strauss, nobody troubled about us until you joined us,’ Shaw wrote to him; ‘and then the cameras came with a rush.’
By the late 1930s, after Tunney had been retired for ten years, a change came over their relationship. G.B.S. was now the more famous of the two, and Tunney’s confidence took a dive: ‘I began to feel that I had no right to intrude on his time.’ But out of the blue a letter was to arrive from G.B.S. at the end of 1946. ‘I feel I must give you a hail to shew that I have not forgotten our old happy contacts.’ He had now passed his ninetieth birthday and ‘have only some scraps of wit left,’ he wrote.
Tunney being once more the stronger of the two, their friendship was resumed. ‘I am not worth the journey,’ Shaw warned him in 1948, but Tunney came to Ayot and noticed how eager G.B.S. was to keep up-to-date and learn all there was to know about the new heavyweight wonder of the world, Joe Louis, who was reported as being anxious to exchange a few verbal rounds with him and the other champion of Britain, Winston Churchill.
That summer, in his last letter to Tunney, Shaw signed off: ‘I hold you in affectionate remembrance.’ Afterwards Tunney wrote to Stanbrook Abbey that Shaw had been ‘the saintliest man I have ever known’.
The Prioress of Stanbrook Abbey, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, was another island of confidence in a doubting world. She had been officially received into the Order of St Benedict on the same day in 1884 that Shaw was enrolled in the Fabian Society. The Bishop had sheared off the long fair hair of the seventeen-year-old girl. Then the great enclosure door swung open in answer to the novice’s importunate knocking, and presently closed behind her. For almost seventy years behind high walls and bolted doors, she was to follow the exacting codes of the enclosed Benedictine discipline, devoting each day to prayer, scholarship and the ceremonial worship of God.
The Abbey of Stanbrook was a Victorian Gothic pile not far from Malvern. By the 1920s it had become a place of pilgrimage for many exotic travellers. One of these was Sydney Cockerell, the astringent antiquarian who had been a friend of Shaw’s since his days as William Morris’s secretary at Hammersmith. Cockerell first met Dame Laurentia in 1907, the year before he was appointed Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. His curiosity was soon pricked by this nun with the beautiful voice in her ‘rather nice cage’ and he felt somewhat in awe of her great reputation as an authority on plainsong and liturgical ritual. The double grille through which they communicated seemed to simplify human relationships.
‘Some I have to keep apart, others I wish to bring together,’ Cockerell wrote to her. ‘There are several I should very much like you to meet.’ From the first, Shaw had been one of those Cockerell wanted her to meet. ‘I wonder whether G.B.S’s fame has got as far as Stanbrook,’ he enquired in 1907.
‘I have never heard of Mr Bernard Shaw,’ Dame Laurentia replied.
But seventeen years later she gave Cockerell an opening. ‘I hear Bernard Shaw has written a play about St Joan,’ she wrote. ‘I will lend you Shaw’s play to read,’ he offered. ‘...Joan is not yet published and mine is a very special copy.’
He sent her his special copy; she thought it ‘a wonderful play’ and on returning it wrote: ‘Joan herself is beautifully portrayed.’ But on a number of theological matters Shaw had gone astray and ‘I should like to make some alterations’. Cockerell was sufficiently encouraged to show this letter to the Shaws themselves. Nine days later, on 24 April 1924, Dame Laurentia received a note from Charlotte enclosing two visiting cards: ‘Our friend Sydney Cockerell has urged us very strongly to call upon you. We feel a little diffident about doing so, and hope you will not think us intrusive.’
After this formal opening came an impetuous rush as Charlotte and G.B.S. hurtled up to the Abbey. Cockerell was as eager as a marriage-broker to find out how the hour between them had passed. He pressed Charlotte, who eventually revealed that ‘We like her very much.’ From Dame Laurentia he learnt that the Shaws were ‘charming’. All this was frustrating for Cockerell, a ‘born intriguer and puller of strings’, but an enticing relationship began to shimmer before him.
It had the air of a flirtation. That was how Charlotte saw it: a chaste flirtation. She seldom accompanied him on his jaunts to Stanbrook, preferring to take the opportunity while he was at these tête-à-têtes of ‘tidying his writing table’. Sometimes she turned up all sorts of naughtinesses there. ‘He went off this morning with Sydney Cockerell – who is as bad as himself – to flirt with an “enclosed” nun at Stanbrook Abbey,’ she wrote in the summer of 1929 to Nancy Astor.
‘It was an immense treat to see you and Shaw together,’ Cockerell wrote deferentially to Dame Laurentia following this visit. ‘...I think the encounter was a mutual tonic.’ He was impressed by Shaw’s manners. ‘I never saw him so abashed by anyone but William Morris.’
Dame Laurentia agreed that ‘Brother Bernard’ was a ‘delicious’ tonic. She called him Brother Bernard ever since he had given her a copy of Saint Joan with the inscription: ‘To Sister Laurentia from Brother Bernard.’ He had taken the trouble to answer her objections to the play, explaining that in ‘heathen literature like mine’, it was necessary to present Joan’s visions in such a way as to make them completely independent of the iconography attached to her religion.
This letter, Dame Laurentia acknowledged, ‘pleases me greatly in spite of its heresies’. ‘I am delighted to learn that my St Joan is yours also,’ he replied. She had not meant to go quite so far as that. Yet this elusive and complex man continued to impress her with his ‘absolute sincerity and simplicity’. As Cockerell noticed, they complemented each other in various ways. ‘I was greatly interested to meet such a famous man,’ Dame Laurentia owned. She felt a special softness for famous people: they were a delightful disturbance in her seclusion. For Shaw Dame Laurentia was an enclosed nun without an enclosed mind whose private world he could approach, ‘shake your bars and look longingly at the freedom at the other side of them’. Her place in his life was closer to that of the retiring humanist Henry Salt than of William Morris. ‘My pastime has been writing sermons in plays, sermons preaching what Salt practised,’ Shaw wrote; and in much the same tone, he confided to Dame Laurentia: ‘you have lived the religious life: I have only talked and written about it.’
This attitude, Cockerell believed, accounted for Shaw’s ‘good behaviour’ and seemed to admit ‘that he was in the presence of a being superior to himself’. It came as no surprise to Dame Laurentia. Not being in possession of the true creed, Shaw was ‘very much to be pitied’. And very much to be prayed for too. ‘You expose yourself to the danger of being prayed for very earnestly,’ she warned him. But he welcomed this current of goodwill (‘it would be shockingly unscientific to doubt it’). He never felt any the worse for these prayers.
Though Laurentia was equally available to the poor and unknown, these rich and celebrated visitors to Stanbrook could be of special benefit. ‘Do you remember when you gave me one of your plays, you advised me to sell it?’ she reminded Shaw. ‘I have been tempted to take your advice, for I am in great need of money – just £5,000 would be a fortune to me – but I know that a seller would advertise the owner’s name & I should not be able to endure that.’ She valued Shaw’s generosity and would sometimes tuck in a discreet financial reminder with her prayerful inveigling of his soul. ‘I am more glad than ever not to have a millionairess in my monastic family,’ she told him after he sent her his play The Millionairess, ‘useful as her cash would be.’
Shaw valued Dame Laurentia for some of the same overpowering qualities she shared with the heroine of that play. He saw her as a natural authoritarian. ‘You would boss the establishment if you were only the scullery maid,’ he told her. He relied on this strength; she was more a Mother Superior to him than a Sister. The centre of their relationship for her was the opportunity it offered for making a convert of G.B.S. to the divine doctrine of Catholicism. But catholicity for him meant comprehensiveness and a universality of interests. The essence of their relationship lay in the unchangeableness of their positions and the complementary views and uses they could offer each other.
Shaw was an eye-witness of the world providing visual confirmation for Dame Laurentia of what she already knew. The most dramatic use of his eye came on a journey he made with Charlotte in March 1931 to the Holy Land. She had asked him to ‘bring me back some little trifle from Calvary’. But there was no credible Calvary, he discovered. Rosaries and testaments bound in ‘the wood of the Cross’, together with all sorts of sham relics, were thrust at him; the only genuine souvenirs of Gethsemane he found to send her were some olive leaves, with which she was well pleased. Then, from the threshold of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, he picked up a pebble, a chip of the limestone rock ‘which certainly existed when the feet of Jesus pattered about on it and the feet of Mary pursued him... In fact I picked up two little stones: one to be thrown blindfold among the others in Stanbrook garden so that there may always be a stone from Bethlehem there, though nobody will know which it is and be tempted to steal it, and the other for your own self.’
This second stone, which he presented to Dame Laurentia later that year, was set in a silver medieval-style reliquary designed by Paul Cooper. Cockerell, who had recommended the work of Paul Cooper, suggested adding an inscription explaining its purpose. But Shaw refused: ‘If we could explain its purpose we could explain the universe,’ he appealed to Dame Laurentia, ‘...our finger prints are on it, and Heaven knows whose footprints may be on the stone. Isn’t that enough?’
Besides, he had sent her letters enabling her to bring alive what she had imagined of the Holy Land:
‘a region in which the miraculous is no longer miraculous but gigantically normal... with strange new constellations all over the sky and the old ones all topsy turvy, but with the stars soft and large and down quite close overhead in the sky... a hilly country, with patches of cultivation wrested from the omnipresent stones, which you instantly recognize with a strange emotion which intensifies when you see... a woman with an infant in her arms... It gives you the feeling that here Christ lived and grew up, and that here Mary bore him and reared him, and that there is no land on earth quite like it.’
‘You have made me feel that I have seen the Holy Land through your eyes,’ Dame Laurentia answered, ‘and have revealed a great deal more than I should have seen with my own. I... continue to view the world from my cell at Stanbrook.’
*
These long-distance friendships with a heavyweight boxer and an enclosed nun were characteristic of someone who ran lines of communication between different disciplines. ‘Nowadays a Catholic who is ignorant of Einstein is as incomplete as a thirteenth-century Dominican ignorant of Aristotle,’ Shaw wrote. Science meant two things to Shaw. It was the algebraic hocus-pocus that had befuddled him at school and hypnotized so many adults. He viewed the priests of that science as an élite corps of idealists who had strengthened the philistines’ citadel with inflexible axioms, giving it a brilliant technological façade. Shaw classed these renegade scientists with clairvoyants, diviners, hand readers and slate writers – all ‘marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment’.
The Shaw who believed in scientific advancement as a benefit to society was the author of The Irrational Knot whose hero had been an electrical engineer. This same Shaw was a life member of the Royal Astronomical Society and, in his nineties, would register his belief in the necessity of space travel by joining the British Interplanetary Society. ‘The whole world has to be reorganized, has to be reset,’ he stated during a speech early in 1920. ‘That has to be done by thinkers, and men of science in the very best sense, and has to be done in the interests of humanity.’
This statement was made four months after The Times carried two articles on the verification of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. ‘Enough has been done to overthrow the certainty of ages,’ Times readers were told, ‘and to require a new philosophy of the universe, a philosophy that will sweep away nearly all that has hitherto been accepted as the axiomatic basis of physical thought.’
This was immensely exciting to Shaw. In Back to Methuselah, which was completed in May 1920, he made the scientist Pygmalion speak of children in the future possessing an innate ‘sense of space time and quantity’ and of knowing by instinct many things that the greatest physicists of the twentieth century ‘could hardly arrive at by forty years of strenuous study’. For the first time in this play Shaw ‘used mathematical speculation to characterize advanced intelligence,’ observed the critic Desmond McRory. McRory argues that Shaw began writing futuristic plays after the Great War out of ‘despair over the failure of his contemporaries and a desire to deal with a time distant enough to be hopeful’.
Shaw and Einstein first met at a dinner party early in June 1921 when Einstein was visiting London. In the nine years that passed before their second meeting in the autumn of 1930, their knowledge of each other had been advanced by Shaw’s mathematical biographer Archibald Henderson. In 1923 Henderson had gone to the Institute of Physics at the University of Berlin to work with Einstein on relativity and atomic theory, and to instruct him on Shavian drama and politics in the evenings. On his return he resumed his schooling of Shaw on the latest advances in physics. By 1925 Shaw was speaking of Einstein as the great destroyer of scientific infallibility: ‘he has upset the velocity of light, upset the ether, upset gravitation, and generally lit... a fire among the gods of the physicists.’
Shaw and Einstein’s second meeting, in October 1930, took place at a public dinner at the Savoy Hotel. Shaw’s speech proposing Einstein’s health, and Einstein’s reply, were recorded by the BBC and broadcast to the United States. It was a singular moment for G.B.S. He could say exactly what he felt since his feelings, the polite occasion, and his ideological commitment to progress came naturally together. ‘Suppose that I had to rise here tonight to propose the toast of Napoleon,’ he said: ‘undoubtedly I could say many flattering things about Napoleon, but the one thing which I should not be able to say about him would be... that perhaps it would have been better for the human race if he had never been born!’
Shaw classed Einstein as belonging to a different order of great men whose ‘hands are unstained by the blood of any human being on earth’. He explained, too, the affinity he felt for this man who had recently spoken of his need for solitude. ‘...My friend Mr Wells has spoken to us sometimes of the secret places of the heart. There are also the lonely places of the mind... our little solitude gives us something of a key to his solitude... his great and august solitude.
‘...I rejoice at the new universe to which he has introduced us. I rejoice in the fact that he has destroyed all the old sermons, all the old absolutes, all the old cut and dried conceptions, even of time and space, which were so discouraging... I want to get further and further. I always want more and more problems, and our visitor has raised endless and wonderful problems and has begun solving them.’
Shaw’s toast was a salute to the ultimate realist of the twentieth century. In the plays and books of Shaw’s last twenty years, Einstein was to become a symbol of human possibility. ‘You are the only sort of man in whose existence I can see much hope for this deplorable world,’ Shaw wrote to him.
In his reply at the Savoy, Einstein described what he believed Shaw’s achievement to have been as a dramatist. ‘From your box of tricks you have taken countless puppets which, whilst resembling men, are not of flesh and bone, but consist entirely of spirit, wit, and grace...
‘You make these gracious puppets dance in a little world guarded by the Graces who allow no resentment to enter in. Whoever has glanced into this little world, sees the world of our reality in a new light; he sees your puppets blending into real people... you have been able, as no other contemporary, to effect in us a liberation, and to take from us something of the heaviness of life.’