History always repeats itself and yet never repeats itself.
Shaw to C. H. Norman (22 April 1940)
A young boy on holiday at Frinton-on-Sea saw them walking along the parade the day war was declared. They were arm in arm: he measuring his springy pace to hers and looking grave: she very slow and in tears. After the shocks of Shaw’s illnesses this news of a second world war in Charlotte’s lifetime produced a sort of nervous breakdown. She retreated miserably to her bed, while Frinton filled up with evacuee children carrying gas masks and paddling like ducks in the sea (‘they are having the time of their lives’). G.B.S. strove to lift everyone’s spirits with displays of bravado. ‘“War is Over”, Shaw Says,’ announced the New York Journal-American in the first week of October; and the following week the Daily Worker carried more Shavian optimism across its front page: ‘Cease Fire, Turn up the Lights.’
All over the country false alarms were carrying their single note of warning through the air. ‘I absolutely refused to budge,’ Shaw wrote to Blanche Patch; ‘...there are no safe places in Frinton and the beds are very comfortable, besides being respectable places to die in.’
It seemed that everyone had reluctantly acquiesced to this war. Public libraries and schools were commandeered, petrol was rationed, mortgage rates raised. All were exhorted to make sacrifices – the Daily Telegraph gave up its book reviews. A National Service Bill came into force conscripting men between eighteen and forty-one. Up and down the streets paraded army officers, their boots and belts aggressively polished. The King opened Parliament wearing a splendid naval uniform.
Shaw studied the papers and listened to the news bulletins on the wireless which were becoming a focal point of the day in every home. Unlike the last war, everything was unnaturally dark and quiet. ‘The psychology of September 1939 was terribly different from that of August 1914,’ wrote Leonard Woolf. During the 1930s one political crisis had piled upon another until people now waited for the catastrophe with feelings of helplessness. ‘Yet the catastrophe we braced ourself to face did not happen,’ recorded Cecil Beaton in his diary. On 10 December Sir Henry Channon, a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Foreign Office, noted that ‘the war is 100 days old, and a damned bore it is...’ As these months of what Churchill called the ‘pretended war’ lengthened into 1940, London began to fill with ‘pathetic couples having last flings together’, crowds of bony youths, airmen on leave, debutantes, tarts, all jostling to the jazz bands of the night-clubs, gazing at the tableaux vivants at the Windmill Theatre.
Could the war itself have been a false alarm? ‘There is still half a chance of a negotiation,’ Shaw wrote to Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman. He saw Neville Chamberlain as having been bullied by British Imperialists, without the ghost of a mandate from the people, into challenging Hitler with an unconvincing ultimatum when Britain was unprepared for war. He described the British guarantee to Poland as ‘thoughtless’ because it had nerved the Polish army to put up a desperate resistance to the German invasion, leading to the loss of many thousands of lives on both sides – while Britain, without ‘a soldier within hundreds of miles of her frontiers nor a sailor in the Baltic’, could not use her bombers for fear of starting a series of retaliatory raids.
When, early in October, Hitler extended peace feelers to Britain and France, Shaw responded with an article ‘Uncommon Sense about the War’ in the New Statesman. This proposed setting up truce negotiations (accompanied by a suspension of hostilities) to which Britain would go ‘with quite as big a bundle of demands as Herr Hitler’ to find out whether another world war was truly unavoidable. That much was owed to those who had known the heartbreak of the last war.
There was little enthusiasm for war in the country. ‘Everyone I speak to seems utterly bewildered and downcast,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary. Harold Nicolson, then a National Labour Member of Parliament, shared this apprehension. Like Leonard and Virginia Woolf, he privately supplied himself and his wife Vita Sackville-West with the means of committing suicide, but kept up a brave face in public. ‘I would rather go down fighting and suffering than creep out after a month or two at the cost of losing our pride.’
G.B.S. felt no such pride. ‘I am an Irishman and you an Englishman,’ he reminded Maynard Keynes.‘...bear with me. I am sometimes useful.’ On this occasion, however, Keynes was convinced that Shaw’s uncommon sense might do harm ‘both to the chances of success in peace and the prospects of success in war’, and he recommended that his article for the New Statesman be forwarded to the Censor. When Kingsley Martin consulted the Foreign Office, he found to his surprise that Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was ‘strongly in favour of publication’. The Cabinet, some of whom wanted to ‘cease fighting Hitler and join Germany against Stalin’, was evidently curious to see what this debate between ‘responsible writers’ would reveal about public opinion. The correspondence columns of the New Statesman prolonged the debate for two months. Shaw still hoped that the defence of freedom might be left to the German people themselves. Surely they must wake up soon from the spell of Hitler’s eloquence. Keynes, too, though he quarrelled with Shaw’s mischievous tone and tactics, did not yet ‘rule out the ideal peace. It may fall within our grasp’, he wrote in the New Statesman, ‘in ways we cannot yet foresee. And then we could indeed cease fire...’
*
...and turn up the lights. At the beginning of the war the Home Secretary had decided to close all ‘places of amusement’ – art galleries, cinemas, concert halls, museums, theatres. Only churches and public houses were exempt. Shaw, who believed that the arts and learned professions must be defended against any presumption that they were ‘an immoral luxury’, advised the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art to follow the example of the Windmill Theatre and stay open every day, backing up his advice with a cheque for £1,000 (equivalent to £27,000 in 1997). In letters to The Times and Daily Telegraph he recalled that during the Great War the theatres had been overflowing with soldiers on leave desperately needing recreation after their miseries in the trenches. ‘Are there to be no theatres for them this time?’ he asked. ‘We have hundreds of thousands of evacuated children to be kept out of mischief and traffic dangers. Are there to be no pictures for them?’
These war years, which began and ended with productions of Saint Joan, were to witness an extraordinary refuelling of Shaw’s popularity. At the end of 1939 the curtain went up on Major Barbara at the Westminster Theatre, and the following summer The Devil’s Disciple, with Robert Donat appearing as Dick Dudgeon, came in after a successful tour to the Piccadilly Theatre. During 1942 The Doctor’s Dilemma, with Vivien Leigh playing Jennifer Dubedat and John Gielgud replacing Cyril Cusack as Louis Dubedat, ran for 474 performances at the Haymarket Theatre. Outstanding among the four London revivals the next year was a luxurious production of Heartbreak House at the Cambridge Theatre, with costumes by Cecil Beaton and starring Edith Evans and Deborah Kerr, which ran for 236 performances. But the topmost year was 1944 when no fewer than nine of Shaw’s plays were put on in London, including the Old Vic Company’s production of Arms and the Man with Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Sybil Thorndike and Margaret Leighton – all players lured back to the stage after making their names on the screen. ‘The London stage is transformed out of knowledge,’ wrote the theatrical manager Ashley Dukes. ‘...We laugh at the Balkans with a good conscience, and the shafts of wit aimed at heroism fall lightly at the feet of the returning warriors.’
‘Another “success” would ruin me,’ Shaw cried out. On incomes of over £30,000, after the deduction of income tax at ten shillings in the pound, every two pounds of gross income yielded one pound of net income, on which nineteen shillings of surtax was payable – giving the Shavian total of one pound and nineteen shillings taxation on one pound of net income. Nevertheless he let his reputation boom, with occasional reminders to the press that he was paying handsomely for everyone’s fun. A touring Bernard Shaw Company took seven of his plays round the country in 1942 and 1943; and half a dozen of them were also regularly performed by the Travelling Repertory Theatre which went to villages and munitions factories, mining towns and blitzed towns, and established ‘Plays in the Parks’ in support of the Lord Mayor’s War Relief Fund. ‘They were a delight to do because they filled the theatre with laughter,’ remembered Basil Langton, actor-manager of the Travelling Repertory Theatre, ‘required little scenery or lighting, and provided wonderful acting parts for every member of the company.’ It was his illuminating unconventionality, Beatrice Webb believed, that had relit this interest in his work. Revivals of his comedies, romances, fables, fantasias were appearing everywhere to meet the needs of a new public educated by the wireless. But ‘I have written nothing for the stage since Charles,’ Shaw told Beatrice in 1941, ‘and will perhaps not write for it again.’
*
Meanwhile he poured forth journalism – over 250 broadsides, contributions to symposiums, answers to questionnaires. In his fashion he sought to fill the role Carlyle had occupied in the nineteenth century as keeper of the public conscience. But the world was larger, more uncertain, fragmented. ‘One has to gather any major news nowadays by means of hints and allusions,’ wrote George Orwell in 1940. Shaw used these hints and allusions as best he could, resenting his exclusion from more central sources of information. ‘It was indeed a wonder to note how carefully the old man watched the news and kept up with events,’ observed the Labour Member of Parliament Emrys Hughes.
One of the new war posters warned the populace that ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’. But the most careless talk of all, to Shaw’s mind, came from Cabinet Ministers. Britain needed a speaker who was the mouthpiece of a nation, giving precise replies to Hitler and Stalin, because, as Sir Henry Channon was to write from the Ministry of Information in March 1940, ‘we are being defeated all along the diplomatic line’. Shaw recommended a different set of guidelines on ‘how to talk intelligently about the war’ and disentangle the mesh of enemy-impregnated words – appeasement, communism, fascism, Hitlerism and National Socialism. ‘We must not let Adolf give Socialism a bad name,’ he rallied Beatrice Webb. In the Shavian dictionary appeasement on a grand scale was to be read as our war aim (rather than a defeatist term carrying ‘accidental associations with unpopular bygones at Munich’); and he defined Hitlerism as a government founded on the idolatry of one person laying claim to the world on behalf of Germans as the Chosen Race. Such personal autocracy had no special connection with either fascism (which was the imposition of State-assisted privatization), or democracy (government in the interests of everybody and not a privileged class) or communism. ‘If you are a Communist then the word requires a new definition,’ Lord Alfred Douglas was to press him. But Shaw’s definition was catholic, noncombatant, free from party political commitment, and unaffected by the abuse of power or the fall of empires. ‘Communism has a hundred doors; and they do not all open and close at the same moment,’ he wrote. ‘Everywhere already we have communism in roads, bridges, street lighting, water supply, police protection, military, naval and air services... Civilization could not exist for a fortnight except on a basis of Communism.’
During 1941 he began a campaign to outlaw the reciprocal bombing of cities, calling on Britain to initiate this agreement with the German Government, since no military advantage could be won by a method of warfare that stiffened the resistance of the attacked and gratified passions among the attackers ‘which civilised nations should not gratify’. Both sides were depending for victory on famine by blockade, he characteristically added, so any reduction in the number of civilian mouths to feed would be a tactical gain.
More serious, from the Government’s view, was Shaw’s conciliatory policy towards the Soviet Union. He represented Stalin’s invasion of Finland as inevitable once the Finnish Government had allowed the country to be used by the United States and Western Allies. ‘No Power can tolerate a frontier from which a town such as Leningrad could be shelled.’ He asked his readers to imagine what England would do if threatened from the West. ‘Ireland is the British Finland,’ he wrote. ‘Rather than allow Ireland to be occupied or invaded or even threatened by a foreign Power... England would be strategically obliged to reoccupy Ireland... That is exactly the Russo-Finnish situation.’
By the early summer of 1940, when the war had settled into its routine and Churchill’s Cabinet replaced Chamberlain’s, Shaw was invited to broadcast on the Overseas Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Though he believed he could get the better of William Joyce – the notorious ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ who broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain – ‘I should scare the wits out of the official home front,’ he warned. ‘Better let this sleeping dog lie.’ But the BBC persisted. It wanted someone whose vivacity and insight would stir foreign listeners as J. B. Priestley’s broadcasts had inspired audiences in Britain. At the beginning of June Shaw sent in his script. He portrayed the British as ‘champion fighters for humanity’ and gave, as the Big Idea that ‘we must risk our lives for’, the need to defeat anti-Semitism. A year before Germany invaded Soviet Russia and eighteen months before the United States came into the war, he inserted one passage that sounded peculiarly Shavian in its prophetic unorthodoxy. ‘The friendship of Russia is vitally important to us just now. Russia and America may soon have the fate of the world in their hands; that is why I am always so civil to Russia.’
The Ministry of Information immediately vetoed this broadcast. ‘Shaw’s main theme is that the only thing Hitler has done wrong is to persecute the Jews,’ explained Harold Nicolson, then Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Information and later to be appointed a Governor of the BBC. ‘As the Minister [Duff Cooper] remarks, millions of Americans and some other people [believe] that this is the only thing he has done right.’ The Controller of Overseas Programmes, Sir Stephen Tallents, tried to reverse this decision. ‘The value, especially in America, of a broadcast talk by Shaw endorsing the war against Germany and Italy would be very high,’ he explained. ‘...Australia, too, urged me some months ago to secure a talk by him.’ In an attempt to free Shaw from a total ban at the microphone, Tallents informed the Ministry of Information that Shaw had ‘responded with entire good temper and generosity’ to the cancellation of his talk, and had been ‘willing to alter the text at any points which had been felt to give difficulty’. But Duff Cooper was adamant: ‘I won’t have that man on the air.’
‘I shall have to confine myself to articles in The Daily Worker,’ Shaw wrote. But when, at the beginning of 1941, this English Communist Party newspaper was banned for twenty months, another wartime outlet closed. Not wishing to embarrass Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman, he gave much of his war journalism to Forward, a socialist weekly edited in Glasgow by Keir Hardie’s son-in-law Emrys Hughes. Here he warned the public against any government alliance with the Axis to destroy Russian Socialism because one day we would have to sit down with Stalin – and preferably Roosevelt also – to settle the ceasefire.
*
By 1939 Shaw gave Gabriel Pascal the go-ahead to film Major Barbara. The invasion of Holland and Belgium had put a stop to Pascal’s plans for European financing, and Shaw agreed to let his syndicate use £12,774 of his royalties from the Pygmalion film until it could raise in Britain the full £125,000 (equivalent to over £3 million in 1997) Pascal reckoned was needed.
The sixteen new film sequences Shaw supplied to help modernize his play were almost his only dramatic writing during these war years. One reason for making this film was Wendy Hiller’s desire to play the title role. Shaw vetoed Pascal’s choice of Leslie Howard for Cusins (‘quite out of the question’) and suggested ‘a young actor named [Alec] Guinness’ who had recently come to lunch at Whitehall Court. But eventually the part went to Rex Harrison, and Undershaft was played by Robert Morley.
‘My film future depends on you,’ Shaw appealed to Pascal. ‘Ought I have your life insured?’ But wars were little deterrent to Pascal. Towards the end of the 1930s Time magazine had placed him, along with Hitler and the Pope, among the ten most famous men in the world. With Shaw’s help he had become a naturalized British subject, bought a large Tudor house in Buckinghamshire and, so G.B.S. hoped, ‘shifted the artistic center of gravity of the film industry from Hollywood to Middlesex’.
On 26 May 1940, as the British prepared to evacuate Dunkirk, the location shooting of Major Barbara began on the Dartington Hall Estate in South Devon, later moving to Tower Bridge for some Salvation Army scenes and round Sheffield for distant views of Undershaft’s factory. Three weeks after the shooting started at Denham Studio on 17 June, the Nazi bombing of Britain began. Pascal was to count 125 bombs that fell in the vicinity of Denham while they were making the picture. Technical equipment was destroyed, transportation often made impossible by land mines and railway disruptions, and when they did get to London to take exterior shots they would find everything in rubble the next day before their shooting was completed. Everyone agreed with Wendy Hiller that ‘without Pascal’s courage and almost demoniac energy the film would never have beaten all the difficulties of wartime production’.
The cast and crew bedded down ‘as close to the studio as possible: dressing rooms, pubs, the homes of friends’. Whenever air-raid warnings interrupted a scene they would go to ground in a concrete shelter under the sound studio. Here Robert Morley filled the dim light with fantastic tales of Pascal’s adventures culminating in a luxurious private shelter nearby, lined by tiger skins and crowded with ‘lovvly vimmen’, where they imagined him to be taking his ease.
In fact Pascal never went to a shelter but would hold his infatuated scenario editor, Marjorie Deans, on the lawn in extended discussion of the script as the bombers raced overhead. ‘Pascal bullied everyone,’ Robert Morley remembered. Each morning his shouts of ‘You are ruining my picture – you are crucifying me!’ would greet the actors and at the end of the day the empty sets still rang to his cries. During the course of the film he sacked almost everyone and then, with a kiss and a grin, made it up again.
What ruined Pascal, in the opinion of Alexander Korda, was his mania to be a director. For he was determined to direct as well as produce Major Barbara. ‘I was sadly missing the helpful direction of “Puffin” Asquith which I had on Pygmalion,’ wrote Wendy Hiller. ‘Pascal was no director.’ He had, however, two directorial assistants: Harold French who rehearsed the actors with their lines; and David Lean, who was in charge of the shooting. When Pascal ordered impossible camera angles, Lean and the crew would turn over the camera with no film in it to keep him happy and these were referred to as ‘Gaby’s takes’.
On his eighty-fourth birthday G.B.S. was invited to the Albert Hall to watch the shooting of the Salvation Army revival meeting. ‘Everyone wanted to be in that,’ wrote the theatre historian Joe Mitchenson who was one of 500 extras assembled for the scene. Getting over-excited Shaw plunged into the sound equipment, spreading silent but expensive chaos, and played with the camera mounted on a trolley with a boom. Raising himself into its chair he began pulling handles and pressing buttons, lifting and swivelling and tilting himself until he almost crashed to the floor. After that he sheepishly climbed down and tried to behave better. But when the large band began to play, he darted down the main aisle and dived in among the chorus, voice uplifted, arms flailing. Next day he sent Pascal his ‘apologies for interfering on Friday. I tried to keep quiet; but suddenly felt twenty years younger, and couldn’t.’
Originally scheduled for ten weeks, the film eventually took six months to shoot, while the costs rose to almost £300,000 (equivalent to £7 million in 1997). Flushed with modified triumph, Pascal accompanied Katharine Hepburn to the grand opening in Nassau on 20 March 1941 ‘under the aegis of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’. But Major Barbara was not to be the film of his or Shaw’s dreams. ‘They cut the last third of the film all to pieces,’ he told Gilbert Murray. ‘I saw the finished film once only – I wept with disappointment,’ wrote Wendy Hiller. But Gilbert Murray was ‘moved and thrilled’ by parts of it, Beatrice Webb found its ‘expression of the brutal power of mass murder in modern war’ dramatically topical, and the general public relished the performance by Robert Newton as the ‘rough customer’ Bill Walker, the burlesque playing of Robert Morley’s Undershaft and Wendy Hiller’s achievement in catching Barbara’s idealism yet making it so humorously attractive. Seldom had a film sought such sustained intellectual engagement with its audience. The final vision of Perivale St Andrews looked forward to the socialist-inspired plans for post-war reconstruction. ‘The house was packed... and you could not have had a more responsive audience,’ H. G. Wells wrote. ‘They laughed at all the right places. Mostly young people in uniform they were... We shall rise again sooner than Marx did and for a better reason.’
Some of the best acting came from G.B.S. in a three-minute ‘visual prologue’ made for American audiences. By now reluctantly convinced that the only way of gaining peace was simply to defeat Hitler and Mussolini, and that ‘a single handed victory would not be so good for us as an Anglo-American one’, Shaw recorded a preface that was seen by many Americans as a rallying call for them to come and fight. The British argument was simple, he told one United States correspondent: ‘there is a very dangerous madman loose in Europe who must, we think, be captured and disabled. If we are right, he is as dangerous to you as to us; so we ask you to join the hunt.’
Made a few days after the exchange of US destroyers for the lease of naval bases in Newfoundland and the Caribbean, Shaw’s prologue announces his own contribution to the deal: ‘I am sending you my old plays, just as you are sending us your old destroyers.’ The Battle of Britain had reached its peak the previous month and one hundred and three German planes were shot down over London three days after Shaw made his recording. ‘I am within forty minutes’ drive of the center of London, and at any moment a bomb may crash through this roof and blow me to atoms,’ he told the United States. An air-raid warning sounded while he was speaking and Pascal charged forwards – then stopped as G.B.S. imperturbably went on (‘We’ll keep it in the picture’) against the grunting of the enemy planes. For this was a valedictory to which he had summoned his unseen audiences. When he was a little boy, he continued, the Dublin newspapers reported how America had abolished black slavery. When he grew up ‘I determined to devote my life as far as I could to the abolition of white slavery’ – the sort of slavery to economic dictatorship that had erupted in this war.
Then he lifted one hand, trembling slightly, to his forehead and held it there in a salute. ‘When my mere bodily stuff is gone, I should like to imagine that you are still working with me... at that particular job... farewell!’
Think of us always as we were.
Shaw to Lillah McCarthy (24 October 1942)
After Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain ‘[we] are snapping our fingers at Hitler and his threat of invasion,’ Shaw notified Trebitsch. They carried on normally: from Wednesday noon to Saturday afternoon at Whitehall Court then at Ayot from Saturday afternoon to Wednesday morning, sleeping through the all-night air-raids in both places. ‘My wife does not give a damn for bombs,’ G.B.S. wrote to Alfred Douglas, ‘but dreads shelters and prefers death to getting up and dressing.’
So it was business as usual until, one Saturday afternoon early in September 1940, arriving at Ayot a day before the German Blitzkrieg opened on London, Charlotte fell heavily on the gravel. For the rest of that month she was unable to walk and could go upstairs only backwards, with G.B.S. precariously at the helm. ‘I have accidents,’ she wrote to Nancy Astor, ‘ – but they seem to do me good.’ This accident, G.B.S. added, had given them ‘an excuse for skulking down here instead of coming up to town for half the week in our regular routine’.
By the time Charlotte recovered it seemed foolish to go back to London at all. Ayot had a small squeaky siren that importantly echoed all the alarms from the capital thirty miles away, and they could see the flashes in the sky and hear the thunder of the guns, like far-off celebrations. Stray raiders would occasionally float overhead and release a bomb near enough to shiver the house, and Charlotte ‘is infuriated by the big bangs, which she takes as personal insults,’ Shaw told Nancy Astor. In London one bomb destroyed almost 90,000 unbound sets of sheets of his collected edition (‘plus their dustwrappers,’ his bibliographer notes) and threw up enough insurance money for him to pay off his supertax. Another bomb whistled past Blanche Patch’s bedroom ceiling, spilling her onto the floor and shattering a house nearby. Feeling rather ‘out of sorts’, she hurried down to join Shaw and Charlotte at Ayot.
In the middle of November came a ‘full dress bombardment’ with high-explosives crashing onto the roads and fields around them and the rattle of shrapnel on the roof. Shaw seemed chiefly worried by the effect all this was beginning to have on Charlotte. ‘All through the war his nerve remained steady,’ Miss Patch conceded, ‘and often in the late evening when we heard the wail of the Alert siren, and the planes were droning overhead, he would sit down at the piano and play and sing the old Italian operas... Charlotte liked to lie in her room upstairs and listen to him.’
The mingling of these arias with the noise of the siren was peculiarly trying for Miss Patch. The fact was that of the three of them she alone wasn’t going deaf (‘a great point in her favor at the telephone,’ Shaw admitted). But at least the old man wasn’t under her feet so much as in Whitehall Court. After breakfast he would stalk down to his ‘toolshed’ at the end of the garden. Here he arranged himself with all the innocent technology of his work deployed around him – a thermometer and paste pot, some paper clips and scissors, red ink, alarm clock and portable Remington typewriter (‘Could that typewriter type a play?’ he had asked the demonstrator when buying it. ‘Of course it could,’ she indignantly replied. ‘It could type anything’). But he only used two fingers and of course he couldn’t touch-type like Miss Patch. ‘He loved his red ink, paste pot and paper clips,’ she observed; ‘...the alarm clock was set each day to remind him when it was time for lunch. He never took any notice of it.’
His principal work during the war was Everybody’s Political What’s What? ‘I find myself in a world in which everyone knows the XYZ of politics, philosophy, religion, science and art, and nobody knows the ABC of them,’ he wrote to Upton Sinclair. He wanted to survey the natural laws governing political action and itemize those subjects which every member of a responsible democracy should understand before voting or becoming eligible for public work. Like much of his later political writings, Everybody’s Political What’s What? was to enquire after egalitarianism in the future while turning away from contemporary heartbreak and helplessness.
He would work at this book until lunch – to which he was summoned by the clanging of a loud handbell from the house. Then he slept for an hour in the early afternoon and would afterwards ‘go about the lanes and woods with a secateur and a little saw and clear up overgrown paths’ until the blackout came down. In spite of the world’s miseries, these spring and summer months were ‘altogether wonderful’, and he did not find his old age or this ‘cottage life’ unhappy – at least not unbearably so as his youth had been. ‘G.B.S. is like a lion,’ Charlotte wrote to Nancy Astor. ‘...he has taken to lopping & pruning trees. I wish you could see him when he comes in from the woods – dripping & smiling.’
Nancy Astor had offered the Shaws a home at Cliveden but ‘it must remain a lovely dream for us,’ Charlotte thought – ‘I wish it could come true, but it cant.’ By August however she felt so much better that they decided to go for three weeks’ holiday there. Both of them were nervous: ‘we are like people coming out of a dark cellar,’ Charlotte warned Nancy. And Shaw wrote: ‘If I attempt to talk my teeth fall out... you must hide me in a corner.’ What he had never accepted was that people might value him without all his self-dramatizing. ‘He is older but he is incredible for eighty-five,’ wrote Nancy Astor’s thirty-year-old niece Joyce Grenfell who was also staying at Cliveden. ‘...When he isn’t putting on his act... then he is a charmer and what he has to say is worth hearing... Mrs Shaw is very deaf, which means that conversation takes time and must be executed fortissimo.’
They returned to Ayot, ‘our little prison’. Shaw had hoped to finish Everybody’s Political What’s What? by the end of 1941, but the book hung fire. ‘I am too old to know whether I can still write or not,’ he confessed to Wells. He tried to start another play but themes and stories eluded him: ‘I seem to have dried up at last: I am absolutely barren.’
He had found some pleasure however in preparing a Graduates’ Keepsake & Counsellor for Diploma Students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. A land mine had exploded at the RADA building in Gower Street in 1941 completely destroying the students’ theatre that backed on to Malet Street. Shaw had immediately gone up to see the extent of the damage, picking his way through the splintered door, past the blown out windows to the debris of the Principal’s office. Workmen were roughly shuttering up the windows with wooden boards and through a slit between these planks the actor Laurence Irving saw a shaft of sunlight through scintillating dust pierce the gloom and focus on G.B.S. huddled in a chair. ‘The cocksure mobile features of the old champion of the RADA were pinched and aged; the challenging and mocking eyes were lustreless and evasive in undisguised dejection.’
After his eightieth birthday G.B.S. had finally given up platform speaking and five years later he retired from all committee work, including the Council of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English and the RADA Council. He could now work on his political textbook with fewer diversions and, whenever this became troublesome, he would renew his experiments (like the experiments of a literary alchemist) to discover an alphabet capable of spelling the English language.
One day was like another at Ayot. Miss Patch knitted for the soldiers, made soft dolls for the Red Cross and typed up Shaw’s shorthand for the printer. But each day grew shorter and ‘the darkness is hard to bear’. Charlotte longed to be back in Whitehall Court, but Shaw feared the effect of more bombing on her – his newspaper campaign against reprisal raids on cities was largely prompted by this fear. Perhaps ‘a bomb could be the easiest way to end,’ she had speculated in a letter to Beatrice Webb.
This was a gruelling winter for Charlotte. The rheumatic attacks grew more severe, and she seemed to be shrinking into infirmity. ‘Her spine has collapsed to such an extent that she cannot stand without hurting herself unbearably by a one-sided stoop,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy Astor in April 1942. When summing up their condition – ‘very old and muddled... always late or wrong or both’ – G.B.S. liked to add their ages together. By the spring of 1942 they were one hundred and seventy. While she was ‘bowed and crippled, furrowed and wrinkled’, he still stood strikingly erect yet was so insubstantial he appeared like Coleridge’s ‘a man all light, a seraph man’. In his prime his weight had been almost eleven stone; by 1941 it was barely nine stone. ‘I am losing weight so fast that I shall presently have totally disappeared,’ he wrote to Beatrice Webb. ‘I look when stripped like a native in a famine picture, an imperfectly concealed skeleton.’
There were still moments when he felt nearly ‘equal to anything’. And Charlotte, fitted with a reinforced corset designed by her osteopath, was ‘getting through’. Could the two of them visit Cliveden again? Shaw explained the predicament to Nancy. ‘A change would be good for her [Charlotte] one way, and in another possibly kill her.’ Nancy urged them on and that July they decided to risk it, G.B.S. having first made arrangements for their cremation in case ‘we die on your hands’.
While at Cliveden they were both medically examined by the Canadian military staff billeted there. ‘I was passed sound in wind and limb,’ Shaw wrote to Beatrice Webb. But after four years of torment Charlotte was found to have been suffering from osteitis deformans or Paget’s disease. This inexorable breaking down of the bone structure had probably been caused by an accident in her youth and ‘the prognosis was terrible,’ Shaw told Wells, ‘ending with double pneumonia’.
They returned to Ayot, and dug in for another winter. The weeks flew past ‘like Hurricanes and Spitfires’ to the cries of the siren, the distant crackle of gunfire and bumping rhythm of the air-raids. Shaw’s almost transparent figure flickered between his workshed and the wireless. He could not quell his beating spirit of enquiry. ‘The war is interesting all the same, diabolical, senseless, useless as it now seems,’ he wrote to Sidney Webb. ‘...I am rather curious to see how it will end.’ But for Charlotte, horribly hunchbacked, unable to walk without help, unable to reach the garden, her body held in an armoured corset, there was nothing to desire except an easeful death. As the disease progressed her bones felt as if they were cracking and splintering whenever she moved or breathed too deeply. ‘The difficulty with which she crawls about is heartbreaking,’ Shaw wrote.
They were approaching their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. Many onlookers of the Shavian phenomenon imagined Charlotte to be a prisoner of wedlock. Accompanying her husband to his first nights, publishing Selected Passages from his works, nursing him through illnesses, keeping obscurely in the background, she seemed to have given up her life to his career. ‘He [Shaw] is too clever to be really in love with Lottie, who is nearly clever but not quite,’ Charlotte’s cousin Edith Somerville had written. ‘However it may be better than it seems.’
And it had been better, this childless partnership of a middle-aged couple. They had arranged their lives like characters from a previous century. Charlotte ‘had decided views on etiquette,’ noticed one of their neighbours, Captain Ames, and she led a life ‘rather like that of a Queen Consort,’ Lady Rhondda thought. ‘...she had a number of the attributes of a Queen.’
‘My wife is a woman of strong mentality,’ Shaw answered one questioner, ‘and expresses strong opinions to me twelve or thirteen times a day.’ Many of her strongest opinions, such as her view that they should not have children, had been expressions of her anxieties. ‘Sometimes I have been sorry that I was not more insistent on the point,’ Shaw later conceded.
Not everyone thought her charming. Sean O’Casey was disgusted by the sight of her leaning determinedly forward, covering a huge pile of food in thick sauce and swallowing it down with sluggish energy – Johnsonian eating habits that some saw as a compensatory substitute for sex. Others ridiculed her quest, in the wake of her guru James Porter Mills, to locate the Great Architect in the works of Ouspensky and others. When Mills died in the 1920s, his teaching had been taken up by Charlotte’s friend, the former actress Lena Ashwell. ‘I am working to achieve a wireless set which will respond to the music of the spheres,’ she wrote in Shotover style, pursuing Mills’s merging of Eastern religions with Western technology. Such mystical tunings-in seemed eventually to invade Shaw’s own work as he progressed from the Pygmalion romance between an East End flower girl and a West End gentleman to the surreal marriage of East and West in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles.
Charlotte had always admired the egalitarian vision of her husband’s socialism. But it was as ‘a dreamer of wonderful dreams’ that he had become a great man to her. Perhaps something of her own intuitions quietly permeated those dreams. In any event ‘something quite indestructible’ had grown up between them. ‘Finally a marriage consolidates itself until the two lose all sense of separateness, and the married life becomes one life,’ they wrote to a friend, echoing the works of Pra and Prola at the end of The Simpleton.
Blanche Patch had one day come across G.B.S. sitting with his arms round Charlotte singing an impromptu version of ‘O Mr Porter’ – and quietly stole away. Barry Jackson, calling round unexpectedly, found them sitting side by side on a sofa looking through a large picture book – themselves the picture of a happy marriage. To Lawrence Langner, Charlotte appeared like ‘a kindly mother whose grown son was distinguishing himself before an appreciative audience’. Her family, which had starred Granville Barker and T. E. Lawrence as sons apparent, was mostly played by the servants at Ayot. They saw his tenderness, her solicitude. Each morning he would go to her bedroom for a talk before breakfast, and she would insist on arranging the pillows for his siesta between their lunch and tea together. In the late afternoon, when he liked to stride outdoors after air and exercise, she would wait anxiously for him until he presented himself ‘to show that nothing has happened to me’. In the evenings he sometimes played for her the songs his mother had sung in Dublin; and they would read together books she had chosen, such as Gerald Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time. Heard’s attempt to combine science and religion ‘lighted up the whole pile of little personal discoveries,’ she wrote, ‘and made them glow with new lights’.
Shaw’s anxieties rose to the surface as financial problems. Charlotte’s anxieties were generally exercised over her servants at Ayot. It was as if she felt that human life could not be sustained without a housekeeper and cook, gardener and two maids. ‘There is not much joy in life for her,’ Shaw admitted to Sidney Webb. Beatrice, too, was finding prolonged living a painful experience. ‘You can’t cure old age,’ she had reflected when considering Charlotte’s condition as well as her own. But of course there was a cure. Once Sidney was dead she could easily kill herself. ‘It will suit the public interest,’ she reasoned. But on 30 April 1943, after a few days in a coma, it was Beatrice who died. ‘I used to take it as a matter of course that if Beatrice died you would come and live with us,’ Shaw wrote to Sidney; ‘for I never counted on our living to this ridiculous age and being incapable of taking care of ourselves or anyone else.’
Shaw kept Beatrice’s death secret from Charlotte. Such protection was not difficult. Her handwriting had grown so illegible she seldom wrote to anyone these days. ‘Like an old witch’, she seemed to have shrunk to half her size, yet was still not reconciled to her condition and would not stay in bed. She longed to escape her ‘little prison’ at Ayot and, after much hesitation, Shaw agreed to move her back in the summer of 1943 to Whitehall Court. If this plan worked, he could give the staff at Ayot a holiday and engage a professional nurse in London. The doctors had warned him that the journey would be risky. She was driven up on his eighty-seventh birthday. It was ‘quite an adventure,’ he told Wells; ‘but it came off successfully and she is happier here.’
In the past Shaw’s trick for distracting Charlotte from her illnesses had been to fall ill himself. ‘If Charlotte were dying, I know an infallible way to restore her to health,’ he had told St John Ervine. ‘I should simply go to bed and say I was dying.’ But now her condition was complicated by distressing hallucinations, and his sustained health became vital to whatever peace of mind she could grasp. He consulted friends for the names of new doctors and psychotherapists who might banish the spectres which filled her imagination and added to her terrors. ‘She saw crowds of strangers in the room, and kept asking me to remonstrate with the managers and housekeeper here for allowing them to come up and intrude,’ he wrote to Almroth Wright. ‘She also spoke to me of imaginary kittens and little dogs in my lap. She was, however, perfectly reasonable on every point except the actual existence of these phantoms.’
The cumulative strain of these weeks in London grew terrible. Then, helping her to get up from dinner on the evening of Friday 10 September, Shaw noticed what seemed an extraordinary change coming over Charlotte. She appeared calmer and did not complain as usual when he took her through to the drawing-room. A miracle was rising before his eyes. He thought he saw the furrows and wrinkles on her forehead smooth away. She smiled easily at him and he heard her speaking again with her happiest voice. She seemed to look forty years younger, like the woman he had known at the time of their marriage when his own life seemed to be fading. He told her she was beautiful and that the illness was leaving her. ‘She talked to me insistently and joyously, and, though it was almost all unintelligible, she heard and understood what I said to her, and was delighted by my assurances that she was getting well, that all our troubles were over.’
He settled her in for the night earlier than usual. Next morning he was woken by the nurse with the news that Charlotte had been found lying at the foot of her bed clutching her alarm clock and with her face bleeding. He helped to get her back into bed and immediately engaged a night nurse. In spite of this fall, she was still smiling and happy; and the mysterious process by which she appeared to be discarding her years went on: ‘I had never known her so young.’ He realized she was dying, and kept with her every minute while she went on ‘babbling to me like a happy child,’ he wrote to Mrs Higgs. ‘...you may be sure I said everything to please her.’
Again he settled her in early for the night and slept well himself. At a quarter past eight on Sunday morning the night nurse came to his bedroom and told him he had been a widower for almost six hours. He went to her room and looking down at the body, saw that Charlotte’s face was that of a young girl – like the portrait painted of her by Sartorio in Rome before he had known her. ‘I have never seen anything so beautiful.’
She appeared so very much alive that he could not stop himself from going into her room again and again that day, and the next day, continuing to speak softly to her. ‘Once, I thought that her eyes opened slightly while I was talking to her’ and he took out his microscope glass and held it to her lips. ‘I could not believe she was dead.’
All sorts of associations – an echo from Cordelia at the end of King Lear, a reversal of Wilde’s ending for The Picture of Dorian Gray – mingled in this strange experience. He felt the need to tell everyone about her marvellous rejuvenation. ‘It was a blessedly happy ending,’ he wrote to Granville-Barker, breaking almost twenty years of silence. ‘...You will not, I know, mind my writing this to you.’ It was like a fairy story in which two fears magically cancel each other and finally allow Shaw’s search for love to be fulfilled. ‘I did not know I could be so moved,’ he wrote to Wells. This vivid trance lasted nearly two days. Then the jaw dropped open and she was gone.
‘No flowers; no black clothes; no service,’ she had requested. Shaw arranged for a private cremation as he had for his mother and his sister. There was cheerful weather for the cremation. Nancy Astor and Blanche Patch accompanied him to Golders Green. The ceremony lasted only a few minutes. Handel, the composer Charlotte loved most, provided the music: ‘But Thou didst not leave His soul in hell’ from Messiah for the committal: ‘Ombra ma fù’ from Serse for the voluntary. ‘Who could ask for more?’ At the end ‘Shaw lifted up his arms and softly sang the words as if to Charlotte whose coffin was just in front of him,’ Blanche Patch noticed. Then, as the anthem neared its close, the coffin moved out and Shaw continued standing there, still singing, his arms outstretched.
I still regard myself as Charlotte’s property. I really could not ask her to mix our ashes with those of a third party.
Shaw to Nancy Astor (11 August 1944)
Shaw kept the news of Charlotte’s death out of the newspapers until after her cremation. Once the news broke he was overwhelmed with letters and had to acknowledge them collectively in a notice to The Times assuring everyone that ‘a very happy ending to a very long life has left him awaiting his own turn in perfect serenity’.
He took care to barricade himself against the possibility of grief. ‘I do not grieve,’ he insisted; ‘but then neither do I forget.’ Yet the armour that had shone so brightly for so long was suddenly pierced. ‘He missed her far more than he had ever imagined he could miss anybody,’ observed St John Ervine.
He fought this enemy, grief, with every Shavian contrivance. As a widower he was free to return to his bachelor life, eat when he was hungry, dress as he fancied, work without consulting anyone but himself and ‘go to bed when I like’ – which usually meant after midnight. His mother had never gone to bed before midnight ‘and I won’t either’. People thought he was lonely: but he was simply indulging the talent for solitude. As he had replaced emotion with money as his mother’s motive for leaving him in Dublin, so now he covered his emotional deprivation with obsessional talk of death duties. Charlotte’s death had been a great loss, he agreed, a great financial loss.
The method by which he strove to reverse his feelings, outwit them, transmute them into something else – at any rate keep them under control – sounded oddly callous. He would boast that his health was improving markedly since Charlotte’s death ‘set me free’. Even so he could not always prevent himself from crying even in the street. Over the next two or three years he ‘seemed extraordinarily “caved in”,’ a local bookseller near Ayot noticed. ‘...He looked very sad. I did not think he was capable of such emotional feeling, but he showed it quite obviously.’
*
There is a rumour that after forty years of marriage a widower must be in want of a second attachment. On several occasions Shaw had protested that he was not naturally a marrying man. But was he not protesting a little too much? People were already reflecting on the possibility of a sequel. Such a possibility played on the minds of both Lady Astor and Miss Patch as they drove back from Golders Green.
Indeed Lady Astor was hardly out of the crematorium before, to Miss Patch’s disgust, she invited G.B.S. to Cliveden. Miss Patch knew her game. Standing with G.B.S. over Charlotte’s body only three days before, Miss Patch had asked him whether he wished to invite anyone else to Golders Green ‘and his reply was that he and I would go together’. Why then had Lady Astor ‘insisted on coming with us’ if she wasn’t trying to supplant Miss Patch as G.B.S.’s closest female friend? Lady Astor was ‘invariably kind to me,’ she admitted, but these acts of kindness – proposals that she must be looked after by a nurse or given a new suit of clothes – were curiously condescending. She did not see herself needing charity. Her needs were more ambitious. When G.B.S. presented her with certain likenesses of himself – in short, his Max Beerbohm caricatures – or handed her Charlotte’s £100 fur coat, it was surely obvious that these were not charitable provisions but tokens of a special attachment. She had been with him now for quarter of a century, sharing what he most prized: his work. And it was his work, she was pleased to note, that he cited when fending off Lady Astor’s advances. ‘I am full of unfinished jobs, some of them unbegun; and I must take my own advice and not attempt to combine them with visits to Cliveden.’
Even in her tweed suit, sweater and pearls, Miss Patch barely cast a shadow. Her Picasso-esque features, framed by a face ‘like two profiles stuck together’, were formidable. ‘Piercing blue eyes,’ one dismayed visitor noted, ‘a nose like a knife blade, lipless mouth.’
Towards the end of 1943 Shaw left Whitehall Court and settled himself at Ayot. Miss Patch stayed uneasily in London while Lady Astor gave notice of whirlwind swoops on G.B.S. ‘Don’t come down here yet,’ he pleaded at the beginning of 1944. But Lady Astor believed that Charlotte had implicitly bequeathed her this duty. So she persisted, dealing out offers of excursions to Cornwall and holidays at Sandwich. ‘I shall never see these places again,’ Shaw answered. ‘The garden and plantation here are my world now’.
Though she sometimes got through his defences, Lady Astor found the encircling routine at Ayot difficult to penetrate. ‘If I am uprooted I shall probably die immediately,’ he threatened her. ‘That is how I feel about it.’ Besides there had been enough changes at Ayot in the year following Charlotte’s death.
Early in June 1944 sinister robot planes began flying over the south of England. These were the Germans’ mysterious new secret weapons, pilot-less rockets nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’ that suddenly cut out, descended silently and hit the ground with shattering explosions. One of these ‘buzzer bombs’, as Blanche Patch called them, fell near Charing Cross and had blown in the study windows of Shaw’s flat, broken the grandfather clock in the hall and covered everything with debris. As the bombardment went on, she began to feel ‘decidedly shaky’. Over 200,000 houses, mostly in the London area, had been made uninhabitable by the end of the month. ‘The pilotless bombs have driven everyone out of London, including Blanche, who has returned to Ayot,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy Astor.
Two months after Miss Patch arrived at Ayot, Henry and Clara Higgs, the gardener and housekeeper who had been with Shaw forty-two years, gave in their notice. They had put off going as long as they could. Higgs could not bear to leave his garden until he had seen it through one more summer; it had been a matter of pride to him that Shaw felt so attached to this garden – he liked to find out things about it, such as whether the large red poppies’ seeds were poisonous. ‘We must get a packet and send them off to Hitler,’ he said after being told they were.
Higgs’s place in the garden was to be taken in 1946 by his pupil Fred Drury. As a lad of nineteen, Drury had come to work as assistant gardener in 1934, then been called up six years later, and eventually returned to Ayot after the war, not wishing ‘to work for anyone else’. Mrs Higgs’s place in the kitchen was immediately filled by Alice Laden, a capable, grey-haired, pink-complexioned widow who had nursed Charlotte through her last weeks at Whitehall Court.
‘I want you to come and look after me till I die,’ Shaw told her. It was a tall order but Mrs Laden had felt lonely after losing her husband in the war – and besides, she reckoned that she knew how to handle G.B.S. ‘I could sense his moods,’ she said. ‘...I had a way with him.’ Shaw had sent his Rolls to fetch her and her cat Bunch and waited with Mrs Higgs who had volunteered to stay on for a fortnight to train her. But after two devastating days, Mrs Higgs fled, driven out with her husband ‘before a terrible New Woman, of a species unknown to them, from the house where they had been supreme indoors and out... [to] fend for themselves in a world in which they are museum pieces’.
When the day came to shake hands and say goodbye, Higgs could see the old man was upset. ‘They went away in a handsome cab, beautifully dressed, with the dog on its lead, greatly excited,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy Astor. ‘I kissed her goodbye, and waved after them until the car disappeared round the corner... when I went to the shelter to write, I found that my pen wobbled a little in my hand.’
Shaw made no secret of finding Mrs Laden a good-looking woman and she was soon speaking of him as ‘a vur-r-r-ee good man’. Before long whispers began to breeze through the village that he was allowing her the intimacy of trimming his beard and buying his elastic braces (‘without them my dignity would disappear altogether,’ he apologized to Blanche Patch). Where would it end? ‘I shall probably have to marry Mrs Laden,’ he confided to Nancy Astor.
Both Lady Astor and Miss Patch felt qualms over this new regime. Since Higgs had left there was no other man on the premises – only Mrs Laden, Miss Patch and the Irish parlourmaid Margaret Cashin. It was a delicate situation. But before many weeks passed Mrs Laden had calmed Lady Astor’s and Miss Patch’s turbulent suspicions. They were particularly thankful that she knew her place. She never allowed G.B.S. into the kitchen. ‘Your job is to write plays and mine is to keep house,’ she instructed him. ‘...You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.’ Some people were terrified of G.B.S. but she didn’t appear frightened of him at all – indeed he seemed a little afraid of her. If he wanted anything he had to ask her for it through the kitchen hatch or leave a note for her on the hall table. ‘I am a rank Tory and I heartily disagree with all Socialist views,’ she told him. He seemed delighted. Her strong Aberdonian accent was wonderfully effective when discouraging callers on the telephone and at the front door. ‘If I didn’t have Mrs Laden I’d have an Alsatian watchdog,’ Shaw told visitors. In the village she was referred to as ‘the Dragon’ and, accepting this as a compliment, bought herself a brooch in the form of a green dragon telling G.B.S. he was ‘St George to my Dragon’.
In these days of food rationing Mrs Laden’s job was not easy. Shaw never allowed her to buy black market goods and he wanted the calories in each dish to be calculated – though she often found him eating sweets, or with a chunk of iced cake in his hand, between meals. ‘Sugar I stole,’ he had written of his childhood. When he was past ninety, Mrs Laden would come across him in the evening spooning sugar into his mouth from a bowl. For the most part he lived off soups, eggs, milk, honey, cheese, fruit, cream, biscuits and lemon juice. Mrs Laden’s husband had been a vegetarian and she had gone through a course of training in vegetarian cookery. Even Miss Patch melted somewhat at the new fare. ‘After Mrs Higgs’s two or three dishes over and over again, Mrs Laden’s meals are the masterpieces of a beribboned chef,’ Shaw told Nancy Astor.
As his secretary Miss Patch sometimes opened proposals of marriage from complete strangers, and G.B.S. would forward one or two of them to Nancy Astor with a note: ‘You see, I am still in demand.’ Would he really be silly enough to marry again? ‘Second marriages are the quietest and happiest,’ he wrote and Miss Patch agreed. Hadn’t Lloyd George married his secretary Frances Stevenson in 1943? But Miss Patch worried that her employer might suddenly attach himself to the wrong person while Lady Astor felt convinced that any second marriage would be disastrous. There was no telling, they agreed, where his vanity might lead him. According to Shavian economics he was growing increasingly attractive to women as his life-expectancy shortened. ‘I am rather a catch now,’ he explained to Molly Tompkins, ‘having only a few years at most to live (quite probably a few days).’
Old flames such as Molly caused Miss Patch and Lady Astor most apprehension. Having gone to Rome, Molly had like Sweetie in Too True to be Good led the life of a flamboyant aristocrat until, tired and lonely, she suddenly attempted to kill herself. Shaw had been apprised of her story by Cecil Lewis who still saw her occasionally in Italy. The Wall Street crash forced Molly to give up the palazzo on the Isolino San Giovanni and during the 1930s Shaw paid for the education in England of her son Peter. ‘You may send me Peter’s bills until I am broke,’ he wrote to the headmaster of Ferndale, a private school in Surrey.
Molly had meanwhile turned to playwriting and sent Shaw a melodrama in which, as at the end of Tosca, the heroine leaps from a parapet and is drowned in the lake – only to be revived by G.B.S. who changed the plot into a farce like Jitta’s Atonement. When Laurence mislaid this tragicomedy, Molly took up another career, arriving in London for a one-woman exhibition of her paintings at the Leicester Galleries. ‘How terrifying!’ Shaw greeted her. ‘What on earth am I to do with you?’ He bought one of her pictures, ‘The Road to Stresa’ which he still called The Road to Baveno. ‘I found him his old self,’ Molly wrote, ‘if anything more dear and charming than ever.’ After divorcing Laurence, she rented a studio in Chelsea at the end of 1937. ‘You mustn’t come near us,’ Shaw commanded her. ‘Why are you so terrified?’ she asked, and he replied that he did not want her to see him at eighty-two ‘and shatter your memories’. So leaving him her love and ‘many more things’ she did ‘not know how to say but will always have with me’, she took off for Rome again and eventually sailed into New York as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Now surely, like the love-goddess Maya who was conceived from her and came to life on the Unexpected Isles, she must vanish. And so she did until Shaw summoned her up after Charlotte’s death. ‘Let me have a line occasionally. We can write more freely now that Charlotte can never read our letters.’ So she wrote to him freely, proposing a last adventure. She would cross the Atlantic and come to him. They would make up for lost time. ‘I am too old for such shocks,’ he was to answer her. She was an atom bomb exploding in a havoc of romantic ridicule. ‘I am ashamed of you for being afraid,’ she replied. Besides, she only wanted a short visit. ‘You must cast me off like a laddered stocking,’ he pleaded. But she seemed unable to do this. ‘When I can’t write to you I am always a little lost.’ So they continued playing on each other’s emotions, conjuring up their phantom island and the endless road to Baveno. ‘Have you not yet discovered that the only roads that remain beautiful are those that never led anywhere?’ he had once asked her. ‘For you never come to the end of them.’
*
Early in 1945 Blanche Patch decided to brave the bombs and move into a private apartment at the Onslow Court Hotel, a respectable address in Queen’s Gate soon to be made notorious by John Haig’s acid bath murders.
There were several reasons for her retreat. Very few people were privileged to be intimate with G.B.S. or could understand how such intimacy was enhanced by a judicious distance. She was also better placed to drop in for ‘a chit-chat’ with Shaw’s solicitor and accountant. All the same, Miss Patch felt ‘down in the dumps’. It was strange, she reflected, ‘how indifferent he is to what makes me suffer’.
Putting aside their jealousies, Miss Patch, Mrs Laden and Lady Astor were beginning to form a wary alliance against three mysterious men Shaw had recently imported into his life to cope with the extra work created by ‘Charlotte’s death and the near prospect of my own’.
The first of these new men was John Wardrop, a twenty-year-old Scottish journalist who had arrived on 17 December 1939 at Whitehall Court from Edinburgh, crumpled, unshaven, ‘like the hero in fiction... with something around a shilling in my pocket and a picture in my heart’. Wardrop had no friends in London, and no plans other than that of attaching himself to G.B.S. He wanted to interview him, write articles about him, become his friend. He introduced himself to Gabriel Pascal, Hesketh Pearson and J. Arthur Rank as Shaw’s prospective literary agent and sought to make his attachment indefinably closer after tracking down Erica Cotterill, then living under an assumed name in a North Devon farmhouse. ‘Be kind to her,’ Shaw advised: ‘she is a nonpareil.’
Wardrop was difficult to employ, being ‘too good for one level and not schooled enough for the other’. He dreamed of editing Shaw’s correspondence, advising on the productions of his plays, representing him on the sets of his films. By 1942 however he was working less exaltedly as Shaw’s editorial assistant and proof-reader on Everybody’s Political What’s What?
While waiting for his Shavian future to flower, Wardrop had begun living with Eleanor O’Connell, a capable woman fifteen years older than himself, at a house in Park Village West next to the one occupied by Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw during her last years. G.B.S. had gone round to their house after Charlotte’s death and invited them to visit Whitehall Court. To Miss Patch’s annoyance he showed them round Charlotte’s bedroom and gave Wardrop a key to the apartment so that he could work there in the evenings cataloguing Charlotte’s books. Desiring more, Wardrop gained Shaw’s permission to carry off various papers from the study files ‘for greater safety’. This was almost the last straw for Miss Patch. ‘We had some really good rows over the Wardrops when Charlotte died,’ she told Hesketh Pearson.
Wardrop sought the posthumous appointment as Shaw’s official biographer. He saw the original ‘shilling in my pocket’ spinning into a magical fortune. ‘You are to have my house and everything in it, including my Rolls Royce car, which you are already driving in your dreams,’ Shaw was to tell him. ‘...happy as the dream is, I must wake you up.’
Then, just as Miss Patch felt she had checked Wardrop’s trespass into her territory, Shaw ‘inflicts the Jew on me,’ she complained.
The Jew was Dr Fritz Loewenstein. He too had been circling round G.B.S. before Charlotte’s death, soliciting his help as early as 1936 in the compilation of a bibliography. Unfortunately Shaw was ‘a man who had no understanding of or respect for the responsibilities of scholarship’. Loewenstein had left Germany in 1933 with little more than a doctorate from the University of Würzburg for a thesis on Japanese prints and after the declaration of war was briefly interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. ‘I am a Jewish refugee,’ he wrote to Shaw in 1942, ‘...and I am 41 years of age. I am married and have three children. I am as poor as a church mouse and make at present my living as a motor mechanic-trainee.’ From his home in north-west London he set out to create a Shaw Society, backdating its foundation to Shaw’s eighty-fifth birthday. By means of lectures and exhibitions, bulletins and publications such as Loewenstein’s own bibliography, this Shaw Society was to work ‘for the creation of a new Civilisation based on Shavian principles’.
Loewenstein’s invention appalled Shaw. ‘Do not, I beg you, let me see your handwriting, much less yourself,’ he advised Loewenstein early in 1943. ‘...Occupy yourself with your Society as much as you please, but not with G. Bernard Shaw.’
The Shaw Society became the power base for all Loewenstein’s throbbing plans. By the beginning of 1944 Shaw was calling him ‘a man to be avoided beyond any other fellow creature’. But Loewenstein was not easy to discourage. He weathered a storm of Shavian abuse and still trudged onwards. By the summer of 1944 he had advanced as far as Harpenden, three miles west of Ayot St Lawrence, where his wife was obliged to manage a lodging house in lieu of rent. Buoyed up with the title of ‘official bibliographer and remembrancer’, Loewenstein put himself entirely at Shaw’s disposal.
‘I’ve now reached the stage when I can only sit back and smile at the Shaw–Wardrop–Loewenstein struggles,’ Miss Patch had written that summer. But there was bitterness in her smile. Everything was happening very differently from what she had imagined.
Loewenstein was an altogether different ‘hero in fiction’ from Wardrop – a Wellsian, almost Chaplinesque figure, middle-aged, bowler-hatted, with a homely moustache and forceful expression. While Wardrop was assuming ‘not only the position of my literary agent but of my son and heir,’ Shaw noted, Loewenstein ‘is resolved to be the oldest and dearest friend I have in the world’. His own job specifications were more modest. He looked for a superior ‘errand boy’ in Wardrop and a ‘first rate office boy’ in Loewenstein. Whenever Wardrop was given some menial task he looked ‘amazed’ and became ‘infuriated’. But no task was too menial for Loewenstein who ‘positively likes sorting papers and doing things that would drive you mad,’ Shaw told Blanche Patch.
By the end of 1944 Wardrop accidentally secured an advantage after Loewenstein’s wife hurried her family back to London. ‘I am freed from the daily visits of Loewenstein, the Jew,’ Miss Patch exulted. But no sooner had she herself returned to London than Loewenstein reappeared in Hertfordshire. Released from his wife and family he was free for five days a week to walk the two and a half miles to Ayot from his room near the Wheathampstead rubbish dump. Shaw hoped that Loewenstein could ‘come to a co-operative understanding with W[ardrop]’. But in the second week of February 1945, reacting to information given by Miss Patch, Wardrop ‘burst in on me,’ Shaw wrote from Ayot, ‘with a suit case, frantic about Loewenstein, and announcing that he had come to sleep here and live with me to protect his property (ME) against the Jew’. Shaw packed him back to London and drafted a note intended to resolve the crisis. Wardrop had ‘proved impossible,’ he decided. ‘...The slightest encouragement turned his head... A rebuff prostrated him to the verge of suicide.’ Loewenstein had ‘captured the tidying-up job by sheer fitness for it’.
As Shaw approached his nineties this ‘scramble for the rights to be regarded as the only friend of an old celebrity who had no friends’ was providing what one visitor to Ayot was to call ‘a fantastic ending... almost as sardonic as the last days of Swift’. These friends jostled round, taking measurements, calculating odds, advancing terms while G.B.S. looked on quizzically at his own obsequies.
The three women had now largely combined their operations. Mrs Laden reported what she saw at Ayot to Miss Patch who embellished the news for Lady Astor who then blazed her way down to Ayot and confronted G.B.S. with her accusations. Loewenstein, who was now being employed to prepare the Shaw archive for posthumous presentation to the British Museum and London School of Economics, as well as to take on various daily chores sorting out priceless ‘old rubbish’, hastened to prostrate himself before Lady Astor. ‘My Lady... Future Shaw-Historians (including the present writer) will be most grateful for your Ladyship’s intercession. I beg to remain, your Ladyship’s obedient servant, F. E. Loewenstein.’
Lady Astor did not relish this falsification of her motives. After twenty-five years in the House of Commons, she had recently been pressured into announcing her retirement from politics. But she was finding this ‘one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life’. At the age of sixty-six she was still teeming with energy. Yet she was without occupation. Seeking to regain a sense of ‘positive authority’, she entered aggressively into the domestic politics of Ayot. ‘I don’t like the company you are keeping,’ she warned Shaw. ‘...Charlotte would rise in her grave. Mercifully I am not in my grave... I must take active steps.’
Besides seeking cover from Lady Astor’s heavy artillery, Loewenstein also had to dodge the crossfire from Mrs Laden who, being a war widow, ‘has a particular antipathy to Germans,’ noticed Miss Patch whose own antipathy favoured the Jews. When Mrs Laden spotted Loewenstein roaming from room to room, peering into drawers, rustling wastepaper baskets, ferreting for relics in the store cupboards, when she caught him listening at the telephone or hovering behind her in the hall so as to butt in after she opened the door to visitors, her ire was kindled and she breathed out her dragon’s flames. ‘I dont know when I gave a man such a dressing down,’ she wrote to Miss Patch. ‘...I will not have it when I am in charge of Mr Shaw’s house.’
This was a valuable letter and Miss Patch made several copies of it. She had taken advice from Shaw’s solicitor, and ‘I dont think there is anything to be done about ousting the German as long as GBS is pleased with him,’ she concluded. ‘My one hope is that he will one day get such a drenching on his walk from Wheathampstead... that he will pass out.’
But then, late in 1945, Miss Patch was provoked into uncharacteristically dramatic action after the third of Shaw’s ‘peculiar friends’, Stephen Winsten, stepped forward. Winsten was to fashion a career out of being Shaw’s neighbour at Ayot. He was like a man ‘who comes out one morning to find a meteorite in his back garden,’ Brian Inglis wrote, ‘and who turns out to be good at organising coach trips for the public to see it’. In their imaginations the Winstens lived through famous people, soliciting politenesses which, in the abundant retelling, swelled into exotic compliments. Shaw enjoyed playing with their cat Fuzzia (a tortoiseshell rival to Mrs Laden’s bright orange cat Bunch), sitting for Clare Winsten (who was a sculptress and painter) and chatting to her husband (who had been imprisoned as a youthful pacifist in the Great War). Now that Apsley Cherry-Garrard had left Larmar Park, the Winstens were ‘the only people in the village I can talk to or can talk to me’.
Of ‘GBS’s triplets – War, Win and Loew’, it was really quite difficult for the three women to agree which ‘parasite’ was the most dislikeable. Mrs Laden ‘detested’ Wardrop, but Miss Patch generally remained loyal to ‘the non-stop smoking German Jew’ Loewenstein as the most poisonous of them all, though when Lady Astor described him as ‘a sweet, little spring lamb’ in comparison to the ‘Polish Jew’ Winsten, she could not help laughing and spreading the amusement from her hide-out at the Onslow Court Hotel.
Stephen Winsten was set on being Shaw’s Boswell, and since ‘many people had been pressing me to share my unique experience with them’, he brought out what his publishers were to call three ‘outstanding examples of Boswellian art’. After the first of these, Days With Bernard Shaw, was presented to G.B.S., ‘he blushed like an adolescent; he loved it,’ Winsten recorded. ‘Whenever I called on him I would find the book beside him.’ Alerted by Loewenstein to many concealed breaches of copyright, Shaw eventually picked it up and looked inside. ‘In hardly any passage in the book as far as I have had time to examine it,’ he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘had Mr Winsten’s art not improved on bare fact and occurrence by adding the charm of his own style to the haphazard crudity of nature.’ Winsten admitted to being ‘mightily amused’ by his friend’s letter. Shaw had been ‘eager to help,’ he explained, and had written it to provoke sales – indeed he even offered to draft ‘a crushing answer’, but afterwards ‘he was most apologetic’.
Unlike Loewenstein, who deferentially referred to Shaw as ‘the Master’, the Winstens traded in superiority, especially Clare who described Lady Astor as ‘an American chorus girl... grossly ignorant of how to speak to an English lady and a distinguished artist’. Shaw too was something of a disappointment to her. It was true that he extravagantly praised her work, came to use her drawings rather than Topolski’s to illustrate his books, paid for her statue of St Joan in his garden, contributed £2,000 for the education of her son at university and provided a job as theatre designer for one of her daughters. But she could not abide his lack of generosity – for it could only have been meanness that prevented Shaw from purchasing her portrait of him. ‘I will not buy the portrait quite simply because I dont want it,’ he had told her.
Shaw’s Trust Fund of £2,000 for Christopher Winsten’s education came on top of a grant-in-aid for another £2,000 to John Wardrop: while Miss Patch’s salary had remained static over twelve years. The injustice overwhelmed her. ‘I have seen the wicked in great power,’ she burst out to Shaw, quoting Psalm 34 Verse 35, ‘and spreading like a great bay tree.’
After financing his old Fabian colleague Hubert Bland’s son through Cambridge and the medical profession, Shaw had got in the habit ‘of spending some of my spare money in that way,’ he explained. There had been school fees for the son of his friend Frederick Evans, the bookseller and photographer; and then Peter Tompkins and now Christopher Winsten. ‘They were all more or less Pygmalion experiments,’ he told Miss Patch. Admittedly the case of John Wardrop was rather different. ‘He was willing to matriculate and qualify for the bar... The result remains to be seen. Meanwhile he is offstage.’
But Blanche Patch was not appeased. She kept her grievance hot. ‘While lacking all the things required from a secretary,’ she wrote, ‘he [Loewenstein] possesses the racial knack of knowing how to extract money. In the past 18 months he has had about £745 from you in addition to his percentages, payments from newspapers for news of you and subscriptions from members of the Shaw Society.’ During this time she had been issuing licences, checking royalties, vetting United States plays in production, all of which had ‘grown to such an extent that it might be said I am expected to manage a play-leasing bureau... It is a feeling of resentment that you should look on me simply as a shorthand-typist.’
‘My dear Blanche,’ Shaw replied. ‘You have given me a jolt at last.’ In all their years together she had never seen anything in his socialism. Yet what more vivid illustration could there be of the curse of property, the absurd distortion of worth based on pay differentials and the disabling effects of inheritance than this unhappy scramble swirling round him since Charlotte’s death? He had stopped raising Blanche Patch’s salary, ‘which has nothing to do with your merits,’ he explained, once she ‘had enough for comfortably ladylike life, with a pension that would leave you rather more after my death’. Recently he had analysed her financial position with an accountant to ensure it was fair and generous. ‘For emergencies and luxuries you always could depend on me for a grant-in-aid... If you are pressed for money you have only to suggest a grant. Will that satisfy you? If not, what will?’
But how could it satisfy her? She could not say why it did not, nor what would make all the difference in the world. ‘Dear, long-suffering G.B.S.,’ she answered. ‘I dont really want more money having quite enough for my modest needs – and, anyhow, you have always been generous in paying for things that dont come under my normal duties.’ Money was a shorthand for something that could never be spelt out. She knew that G.B.S. would pay her salary or pension whether she continued working for him or not. She also knew that he gave those jobs which had plagued her to Loewenstein so as to ‘leave you free as possible’. But free for what?
Hardly had Shaw recovered from Miss Patch’s earthquake than Mrs Laden dropped a bomb on him over breakfast one summer morning by handing in her notice. For two years she had been living at Ayot like someone in solitary confinement. ‘You have only to lift your little finger,’ Shaw said, ‘and I would double your salary.’ But she told him off pretty smartly for that. ‘When I want a rise I will ask for it.’ She also refused his offer of a television set. But when Lady Astor gave her tickets for the Covent Garden ballet she became herself again, ‘utterly repudiating the possibility of leaving me on any terms’. She needed occasional treats in London (spinning up in the Rolls), and also a motor scooter to take her to the shops and cinemas beyond Ayot – then she found out that her salary had been doubled after all.
Money seemed to mean different things for each of them. ‘Money is power. Money is security. Money is freedom,’ declares the heroine of The Millionairess. For Shaw the love of good economy was the root of all virtue. Equality of income was equality of truth. In a bad economy money was theft and made barren our lives. His parents had married for money; Miss Patch’s fellow-resident at the Onslow Court Hotel was shortly to be murdered for money. Money was simply exchange value for some, and for others the freedom not to exchange what they valued. ‘Are you fond of money?’ the young doctor Harry Trench asks Blanche Sartorius in Widowers’ Houses. Around Ayot the women seemed less acutely fond of it than the men – other people’s money meant almost more to Miss Patch than her own.
It was a relief to Miss Patch and Mrs Laden when in 1949 the Winstens decided to live in Oxford. Shaw was to miss their company in the last year of his life but, as Clare Winsten made quite plain, it was really his own fault. He could have bought their bungalow for them or another place in the village. But all he did was to write on their behalf to the landlord, Lord Brocket. It was simply not enough. Indeed it was less than he had done for Loewenstein, she believed, and he was a mere employee rather than a fellow-artist.
Loewenstein’s empire expanded through a proliferation of Shaw Societies round the world. His bibliography expanded too over numberless cards of dense, semi-illegible notes which, in their swelling shopping-bag, would eventually achieve the status of a master-parody of scholarship. But it was as an assistant secretary rather than the flower of scholarship that Loewenstein strengthened his position at Ayot. In 1946 Shaw printed a card announcing that since he had ‘no time for any except the most urgent private correspondence’, he must ‘refer you to the Founder of the Shaw Society, Dr F. E. Loewenstein’ who is ‘better informed on many points than Mr Shaw himself, and will be pleased to be of assistance’.
Loewenstein’s pamphlets and papers, thickened with pedantic superfluities, added a little to the salary Shaw gave him but were principally investments in the future. He looked for pre-eminence in the posthumous phase of Shaw’s copyright kingdom where he would be crowned Curator of Shaw’s Corner and reign there as his representative on earth. To this end he sought a privileged place in wills Shaw made in the late 1940s. But all G.B.S. finally guaranteed him was an introduction to the Public Trustee (who as the sole executor would appoint the tenant at Ayot), the naming of him as his bibliographer and a recommendation that he be employed or consulted whenever this might prove ‘desirable’.
Fearing that too much was left uncertain in this legacy, Loewenstein at last pressed Shaw to borrow money so that he could buy a house in St Albans. G.B.S. refused to do this, but in 1949 guaranteed him a bank overdraft of £3,500 (equivalent to £67,000 in 1997) on the strength of which Loewenstein bought the house and renamed it ‘Torca Cottage’. In the event of Shaw’s death, he had balanced his risks between foreclosure at the bank and expulsion from Ayot. But still the risk was great and he attempted to add tenure to the prospect of tenancy by drafting a document guaranteeing him £500 a year for several years after Shaw’s death. This document Shaw apparently tore up, while raising Loewenstein’s salary to £500 a year for three years. ‘He will have to take an overdose if he goes on pursuing you,’ volunteered Lady Astor.
Lady Astor now looked on Ayot as her new constituency. ‘Keep off, Keep off, Keep off, Keep off,’ Shaw cautioned her. But whenever she was fuelled with fresh evidence of Loewenstein’s ‘disgraceful behaviour’, she would take off for another devastating raid. All the village heard the rumours of her tirades. ‘If you will not let me manage my work and my housekeeping in my own way you must not come at all,’ Shaw eventually retaliated. This letter brought Lady Astor down again at once, and almost weeping she showed Mrs Laden what G.B.S. had sent her.
‘You need looking after far more than I do; and nobody knew this better than Charlotte, except perhaps your unfortunate secretaries. You must upset your own household, not mine... As the keeper of a mental patient you are DISCHARGED.’
Though he had signed off ‘Quite unchanged nevertheless G.B.S.’ this marked the final battle in Nancy Astor’s blazing campaign.
Miss Patch campaigned more discreetly. Realizing that Loewenstein’s long-term aim was to be appointed Custodian of the Shavian shrine, she set about sabotaging his chances with those who might advise the Public Trustee after Shaw’s death. What she wanted was recognition as the First Lady in Shaw’s life at the end. Instead she was to be granted another sort of privilege when, in his ninety-third year, G.B.S. gave her the use of his letters (and Charlotte’s too if she wanted them) for a volume commemorating their thirty years together. Through the dry leaves of this ghosted memoir, she would finally come to share his life.
Films, you know, are a strange business. You can get in, but you can’t get out.
Shaw to S. N. Behrman
For over two years following his film of Major Barbara, Pascal would regularly ‘go see Bernashaw’. He liked to motor across from his rambling Tudor house at Chalfont St Peter and extravagantly ‘talk cast’. He fancied Marlene Dietrich in The Millionairess, or perhaps Greer Garson ‘my nearly wife’ in Candida; he also dreamed of fixing up Clark Gable and Gary Grant together in The Devil’s Disciple, and actually persuaded Ginger Rogers to appear in Arms and the Man – provided a few dance numbers were added and the action moved from Bulgaria into Canada. ‘Do not argue with her,’ Shaw responded; ‘just throw her out of the window and tell her not to come back.’ The favourite of all Pascal’s schemes was a Saint Joan for which he had signed up Greta Garbo. Unfortunately the idea took a fantastic turn after he tried to raise money from General de Gaulle: ‘instead of Garbo,’ Pascal reported to Shaw, ‘de Gaulle wanted to play the Saint himself.’ If the heroine had been the Blessed Virgin, commented G.B.S., ‘they would probably have suggested Miss Mae West’.
‘We never met,’ regretted Mae West, ‘but I would have been happy to entertain the gentleman.’
The speed with which absolutely nothing happened was often breathtaking. By the autumn of 1943 an agreement for three Shaw films had been signed with Arthur Rank. ‘We make Caesar and Cleopatra,’ Pascal announced. This sounded like the perfect vehicle for a superspectacle to top Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments. Rank assumed total responsibility for the cost, gambling on drawing in large audiences from a war-weary public after Hitler had finally been defeated. At the eleventh hour Pascal was in his seventh heaven. ‘But I pity poor Rank,’ Shaw told him. ‘The film will cost a million.’
‘John Gielgud is Caesar. Vivien Leigh is Cleopatra,’ Pascal declared as he stepped off a boat at New York. ‘Wonderful, no?’ John Gielgud certainly thought it wasn’t wonderful. ‘I do not like filming, and should be terrified of risking giving an indifferent performance... So I must reluctantly say no to the film, and hope that you will let me do the play some time not so far distant.’ What this meant was that Gielgud had no confidence in Pascal as a director. Six months later, in what critics were to call ‘an utterly negative and phantom Caesar’, Pascal cast Claude Rains who had taken the lead in The Invisible Man and Phantom of the Opera.
His other choice, Vivien Leigh, was best known to film audiences as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind, but had recently filled the Haymarket Theatre for over a year in a revival of The Doctor’s Dilemma. She longed to play Shaw’s Cleopatra but was bound by an exclusive contract with David O. Selznick, until Pascal leased her with £50,000 of Rank’s money.
The shooting began on 12 June 1944, six days after D-Day. On 29 June Shaw visited the set at Denham Studios. Never had there been so splendiferous a sight as Pascal’s Egypt. The interior of the Memphis Palace with its pseudo-granite columns each weighing two tons, its carvings of men with wings, hawks’ heads, black marble cats, was to cover 28,000 square feet; while the palace steps and quayside were immense exterior sets constructed for the thousands of extras he had hired. All their costumes, the hieroglyphs and statues were copied from originals – even the formation of the stars behind the mighty Sphinx was designed by an astronomer. It was impossible not to be impressed. ‘When I look back on my work as a young man with my colleagues in the theatre, it seems to me we were like children playing with wretched makeshift toys,’ Shaw said. ‘Here you have the whole world to play with!’
Pascal had indeed created a wonderful toyshop for G.B.S. to play in. Placing a Roman helmet on his head, he posed for photographs. Then, as he left the studios accompanied by Miss Patch, a voice called out from the ranks ‘Hail Caesar!’ And all the soldiers stood to attention as the old man and his secretary passed by.
From the start exotic jealousies blossomed on the imported sand and choked the production. Most dramatic was Vivien Leigh’s unexpected pregnancy. ‘Everyone is very, very cross & keeps asking me how I suppose they are going to make me look like the 16 year old Cleopatra,’ she wrote in mid-August. ‘...I think it is a very good thing really because they’ll just have to hurry up with the film.’
Yet everything conspired towards delay. No sooner had Pascal rearranged the schedules to shoot Vivien Leigh’s scenes first, than she suffered a miscarriage after running up and down the palace beating a slave. Blaming him for not employing a double, she tried to get Pascal replaced. Amid the jungle of intrigues, his accent grew more heavily impenetrable. ‘I was surrounded by saboteurs,’ he later grumbled.
There was also the war. Four days after filming began the Germans launched their V2 rocket attacks. ‘I am having the same gay start on the picture as I had with Major Barbara during the blitz,’ Pascal wrote to Shaw. One flying bomb exploding in a field nearby damaged the Pharos set, another destroyed the dressmaking workrooms and a third almost killed some members of the production unit. Senior centurions changed from their armour into civilian suits and went off for Home Guard drill. Teenage girls were suddenly collected by their mothers from the palace pool and taken to work in factories in the north of England. Supply depots closed; telephone lines came down: and then there was the weather. For weeks, and then months, the cast waited on the gigantic location-sets of ancient Alexandria for the sun to shine. ‘We had to clear away great slushes of snow,’ Stanley Holloway remembered, ‘and even then our breath was coming out in clouds...’
Exploiting Rank’s belief that British films had been handicapped by ‘a faintly claustrophobic indoor quality’, Pascal persuaded him to move the location to Egypt itself. The enormous papier-mâché Sphinx was divided into sections, crated and sent down to the docks with all the other properties and costumes, and reassembled in the desert. As the British army reached the Rhine, Pascal came to Cairo. At Beni Ussef he waited for a tremendous sandstorm to subside so that he could produce a more filmic flurry of sand with the miraculous use of two aero-engines operated by the Royal Air Force. Two hundred and fifty horses had been placed at his disposal by the Egyptian Government which also supplied him with over 1,000 troops. Ephemerally dressed in the costumes brought out from England, they were charmed by the papier-mâché shields which, coated with a delicious sauce of fish glue, were quickly consumed, leaving the army defenceless.
Shaw continued to advise on all things: Caesar’s smile, Cleopatra’s accent, Britannus’s eyebrows. ‘In Heaven’s name, no Egyptian music,’ he appealed. Listening to the BBC’s Third Programme he had kept his knowledge of twentieth-century music up-to-date, admiring Prokofiev and Sibelius, and praising Debussy, Schönberg, Scriabin and Stravinsky. ‘Radio music has changed the world in England,’ he was to write. Among British composers he was ‘very much struck’ by the originality of Benjamin Britten who ‘had the forgotten quality of elegance’. The score for Pygmalion had been written by Arthur Honegger, that for Major Barbara by William Walton whom Shaw advised to add ‘the effect of a single trombone sounding G flat quite quietly after the others have stopped. Undershaft pretending to play it. It ought to have the effect of a question mark.’ But neither Walton nor Britten nor even Prokofiev were available for Caesar and Cleopatra. ‘Write your Blissfullest,’ Shaw urged. But Arthur Bliss took one look at Pascal and withdrew. Eventually Pascal contracted Georges Auric, a member of Les Six, who had written scores for René Clair’s A nous la Liberté, Jean Cocteau’s L’Eternel Retour and most recently Michael Balcon’s Dead of the Night. Shaw came to a recording session by the National Symphony Orchestra. When the Roman soldiers raised their swords and Caesar’s galley sailed from Egypt at the end, Auric’s music, he said, ‘is almost Handelian’.
The end of the film coincided with Japan’s formal capitulation and the end of the Second World War. During these fifteen months Pascal, still looking very much himself, would go regularly to Ayot.
‘Have you killed Ftatateeta yet?’ G.B.S. asked one day.
‘Killed her yesterday,’ said Pascal, with satisfaction.
‘How did you manage her death-scream?’
‘Like this,’ said Pascal and began to scream at the top of his voice.
‘Too high,’ said Shaw. ‘Lower. Like this.’
Then he too started to scream in a deeper register, and the two of them stood in the garden counter-screaming.
On 13 December 1945, exactly ten years after the signing of the Pygmalion agreement, Caesar and Cleopatra had its première at the Odeon, Marble Arch. Queen Mary attended, and there was the most chaotic traffic jam since VJ Day – so impenetrable that Pascal arrived too late to be presented. It was ‘a good picture, in my opinion,’ said Blanche Patch. But many critics disagreed, and although the American notices were more favourable when it was shown in the United States the following year, Caesar and Cleopatra was to gain legendary fame as ‘the biggest financial failure in the history of British cinema’. The Rank Organization had estimated a budget of £550,000, but when the shooting went on for nine months longer than expected costs rose to £1.5 million (equivalent to around £31 million in 1997).
‘It is a triumph of technicolour and statuary, and makes quite an enjoyable illustrated chapter of Roman history,’ Shaw concluded; ‘but as drama it is nothing.’ Unlike Antony and Cleopatra, it was never intended to be a love story; and unlike Henry V, also being made at Denham and starring Vivien Leigh’s husband Laurence Olivier, it was not a patriotic adventure story. It was the ‘educational history film’ Shaw had once hoped to make with Good King Charles. But Caesar’s education of Cleopatra and the development of his character vanish innocuously in a ‘poor imitation of Cecil B. de Mille’. Shaw hated Hollywood with a sincere hatred, and Pascal had offered up the sincerest form of flattery.
Whenever Pascal began speaking of new productions – The Doctor’s Dilemma for Alexander Korda, The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet for Mary Pickford – his face would glow translucently, his smile crack open and all past tribulations fall away. He raced around Europe trying to raise money, find studios, sell his dreams. But the film world had lost confidence in him – what could be more ludicrous than his idea of a Pygmalion musical by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe?
Their adventures had been fun, but Shaw was too old for any more. He urged Pascal to find ‘new friendships and new interests and activities’, and to ‘live in your generation, not in mine’. Yet this was now curiously difficult. ‘Somehow, whenever I try to be unfaithful to you and do any other picture than yours,’ Pascal explained, ‘I have no luck.’ His marriage was failing; he was suffering from cancer; and it seemed there was ‘an invisible conspiracy against me’. Each week he returned to Ayot. ‘If you will not take care of your interests and think of your prospects when I am dead, I must do it for you,’ Shaw wrote on 3 July 1950. ‘Don’t force me to break with you for your own sake.’
Had Charlotte still been living it might have ended differently. ‘She liked me and sold all my ideas to him,’ Pascal remembered. Without Charlotte, G.B.S. had withdrawn into deeper isolation. ‘I have in me the makings of a first rate hermit,’ he acknowledged.
‘Don’t leave me in a vacuum,’ Pascal had pleaded. But though Shaw refused to give the English language rights of his films to anyone else, ‘I do not want to see you,’ he wrote. ‘I do not want to see ANYBODY... Keep away, Gabriel. Keep away EVERYBODY.’
Only in dreams my prime returns.
Epigraph to Buoyant Billions
In Everybody’s Political What’s What? Shaw tried to provide a basis for post-war social reconstruction. He had received his political education in the last two decades of the nineteenth century when government intervention, though setting limits to individual liberties, had brought great improvement to most people’s lives. The problems of poverty and unemployment, homelessness, education and health would not be met, he believed, by a trickling down of money from the riches of privatization and profit-taking, but by investment in public services and leadership that encouraged pursuit of the common good. ‘Parliament kills everyone except careerists,’ he wrote. Politics for Shaw was simply the complicated business of ‘organizing human society so as to secure the utmost possible welfare for everybody through a just sharing of the burden of service and the benefit of leisure’.
Everybody’s Political What’s What? is a ragged patchwork of autobiography, sociology, history and political economy, a rambling narrative of almost 200,000 words that repeats ideas that he had given better elsewhere and then repeats itself. The book had kept Shaw company over the war years, helping to guard his solitude. He moves across its pages like a solitary wanderer through the abstract scenery of economics from the false prosperity of laissez-faire to the imaginary riches of Social Credit.
Yet this summary of a life’s teaching was a prodigious achievement for a man who at the time of its publication was in his eighty-ninth year. When he warns us that in a commercialized world everything is bought and sold; reminds us that no State may be accounted civilized that has poor people among its citizens; instructs us that democracy must find a use for every person and not put him off with a dole: when he attacks fundamentalists as the enemies of religion and advises us to canonize our modern literature, we can feel again a prophet of change conjuring his powers of transcendental reasonableness. His book is most eloquent as simple rhetoric:
‘Socialism is not charity nor loving-kindness, nor sympathy with the poor, nor popular philanthropy... but the economist’s hatred of waste and disorder, the aesthete’s hatred of ugliness and dirt, the lawyer’s hatred of injustice, the doctor’s hatred of disease, the saint’s hatred of the seven deadly sins.’
It was not as the adherent to a party line that Shaw had permeated the minds of more than one generation, but as a dreamer whose dream ‘burned like a poem,’ Edmund Wilson remembered, ‘...stirring new intellectual appetites, exciting our sense of moral issues, sharpening the focus of our sight on the social relations of our world’. Within a year the book had sold 85,000 hardback copies in Britain. ‘When it is finished I shall be finished too,’ he had predicted in a letter to Lillah McCarthy. Yet in the prefaces he would add to Geneva and Good King Charles during 1945, and then in the articles and letters he issued from his garden shed at a production rate of almost seventy a year over the next five years, he precipitated G.B.S. into the atomic age.
‘Do not tell me that war profits nobody: I know better,’ he had written in Everybody’s Political What’s What? ‘...I have never written a line to start a war... I feel the losses on both sides... I loathe war.’ He welcomed the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, ‘but I don’t intend to celebrate at all,’ he told the New York Journal-American. ‘The war won’t be over on VE-Day.’ On 6 August 1945 the United States exploded an atom bomb on Hiroshima. ‘The war came to an end when the first atomic bomb was dropped,’ Shaw stated in the News Chronicle. ‘It is very doubtful if we have the right ever to drop another.’ Another was dropped on Nagasaki three days later for experimental purposes, and even before Japan formally surrendered, G.B.S. had started Shavianizing the bomb.
It had had ‘its momentary success,’ he wrote, and now we could see that the institution of world war was reduced to absurdity. ‘The wars that threaten us in the future are not those of London or Berlin or Washington or Tokyo,’ he believed. ‘They are civil wars... to say nothing of wars of religion... fundamentalists and atheists, Moslems and Hindus, Shintos and Buddhists.’ He tried to move the debate from atomic warfare to atomic welfare. ‘Atomic disintegration will some day make heat cheaper than can coal-burning,’ he predicted. But, like the sorcerer’s apprentice, ‘we may still practise our magic without knowing how to stop it, thus fulfilling the prophecy of Prospero’. Occasionally G.B.S. warmed his frail spirit in this atomic conflagration which would ‘end all our difficulties’.
Ever since a war crimes commission had been set up late in 1943, he had declared his opposition to putting the civil and military leaders of Nazi Germany on trial for crimes against humanity. For after the raining down of 200,000 tons of bombs on German cities and the dropping of a second atom bomb on Japan, where could we find the spotless men and women to act as judges? When the verdicts and sentences of the first Nuremberg tribunals were announced in the autumn of 1946, he gave his reaction to the press.
‘We are all self righteous enough to enjoy reading denunciations of the condemned men as... hideous freaks of German nature who deserve all they suffered and are about to suffer, and a bit more... Instead of a row of countenances stamped from birth as murderous villains for exhibition in wax effigy in a chamber of horrors, what confront me are nothing but perfectly commonplace middle-class gentlemen who differ in no respects from any common jury or row of pewholders in the nearest church... it is as clear as daylight that if they had been left in their natural places they would have been no worse than an equal number of Bayswater ratepayers... Disfranchise them by all means. Disqualify them for the posts and powers they proved so tragically unfit for. I should let them loose as nobodies... I believe they will be quite harmless and negligible. Why make martyrs of them?’
In the opinion of Mrs Laden, Shaw ‘could not bring himself to believe in the German concentration camps like Dachau and Belsen’. When he branded Hitler a ‘rascal’ or described the camps as if there were bad cases of overcrowding, his vocabulary became disablingly inadequate. ‘It is sometimes better not to think at all than to think intensely and think wrong,’ he wrote in the Preface to Geneva. Some thinkers were convinced that the hanging of war criminals was a final solution to war crimes. ‘Ought we not rather to hang ourselves’? Shaw enquired. We were all potential criminals, he believed, and the solution lay in renewing ourselves through another morality.
Shaw had supported William Beveridge’s report on social insurance, which led to the welfare state, as a modest instalment of socialism, and had prophesied Churchill’s defeat at the general election of 1945. The red-hot socialist who once delighted William Morris with his cascading oratory, who, thin as a whipping post, had marched with Annie Besant to Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday, made speeches at street corners with Keir Hardie, met Engels and known Eleanor Marx was a legend to many younger socialists in the late 1940s. But he was also an ubiquitous nuisance. He, who accused Churchill of being ‘a century out of date’, was himself ‘an obsolete Old Pioneer’ in the words of a future Labour Party leader Michael Foot. ‘One of the foremost educators of the past,’ Foot wrote, he had become a ‘blind seer’ confusing his disciples just when many of his ‘early dreams have started to be translated into fact’.
The last political initiative of his life was the Coupled Vote. Nearly twenty years after women had been granted the vote, the British people were ‘misrepresented at Westminster’ by 24 women and 616 men. Shaw’s remedy was to make the electoral unit ‘not a man or a woman but a man and a woman’. He called it the Coupled Vote. Having placed this democratic reform in the Manchester Guardian and his extended Preface to Good King Charles, Shaw handed over his plan to Lady Rhondda’s Six Point Group. ‘It is the right organ for it,’ he wrote, ‘...for I want it to come from the Women’s organizations and not from a man.’ At the end of 1948 the campaign was launched under the headline ‘Revolutionary Political Idea’ on the front page of Wife and Citizen. But the Six Point Group quickly ran out of money and the Coupled Vote receded into the history of Shavian might-have-beens.
*
A week after his eighty-ninth birthday, Shaw began writing plays again. His playwriting was an elixir, he sometimes felt, similar in its exotic effects to his mother’s spirit communications on the ouija board. In any event, it gave him ‘moments of inexplicable happiness’ and he was taken ‘out of the realm of logic into that of magic and miracle’.
Buoyant Billions was a play he had started while sailing to Honolulu in February 1936, briefly picked up again in August 1937, now retrieved and would continue to revise until the middle of July 1947. In a short preface he asked readers to forgive a ‘trivial comedy which is the best I can do in my dotage... At least it will not rub into you the miseries and sins of the recent wars, nor even of the next one.’ On the contrary, it is a romance spun around the theme of avoiding warfare. After his educational history play celebrating the use of good manners he had characteristically come up with ‘A Comedy of No Manners’. But the manners he was dispensing with were verbal conventions that confused meaning and confined people to their social compartments. The characters in Buoyant Billions ‘are simply frank, which is the extremity of no manners,’ Shaw explained.
In the first act a father and son confront each other. ‘We resist changes until the changes break us,’ says the son. But Mr Smith does not resist his son. He pays his fare to go round the world investigating the beneficial use of atomic fusion. By the second act Junius Smith has reached the Panama Canal, on the tropical shore of which he comes across a young woman, ‘Babzy’ Buoyant, who charms the Punch-and-Judy-like snakes and alligators with her saxophone. They argue, but are so irresistibly attracted to each other that Babzy runs off into the third act and the safety of her father’s Belgrave Square house in London. Junius pursues her and they both turn up in its curious drawing-room in time to contribute to a symphonic discourse on death and its duties which is being conducted by the family solicitor. Shaw manipulates everyone’s views to illustrate his belief that ‘differences of creed must be tolerated, analysed, discussed, and as far as possible reconciled’. In the short fourth act, the billionaire Old Bill Buoyant gives his blessing to the marriage of Babzy and Junius, and this human fusion quickens their faculties in the surprise and wonder of a happy ending.
‘My fans must not expect from me more than a few crumbs dropped from the literary loaves I distributed in my prime,’ Shaw wrote in the preface to his next play Farfetched Fables, ‘plus a few speculations, as to what may happen in the next million light years...’
This ‘batch of childish fables’, written between July and August 1948, is a post-atomic fantasy in five conversation pieces and one monologue. Here the young man does not pursue the attractive young woman who is refusing to bring children into the modern world, but goes off to invent a peculiarly lethal gas. Having sold his terrible invention he retires to a safe place, the Isle of Wight, where unfortunately the first gas bomb is exploded. From here, we see the dark ages return and human beings change into a breed of super-gorillas. Time moves on bringing with it the discovery that humans need not after all eat grass but can live on air and water. They evolve into a race of supermen, superwomen and superhermaphrodites, and eventually thought struggles free from the body. In the sixth and final fable a schoolroom of sixth-form children, throw-backs to the twentieth century, are visited by a disembodied mind. Impelled by intellectual curiosity it has used the power of evolution, ‘which can go backwards as well as forwards’, to appear before them as a feathered youth named Raphael and experience what is called the word made flesh. The lesson for audiences as well as sixth-formers is that regardless of consequences the pursuit of knowledge and power will go on into the infinity of time.
Farfetched Fables is a toy version of Back to Methuselah and ‘suitable only for little groups of amateurs,’ he wrote. For its first presentation he handed the play to the Shaw Society which, led by Ellen Pollock, directed by Esmé Percy and with futuristic designs by Feliks Topolski, gave it thirty performances at the Watergate Theatre in the autumn of 1950. It was to be posthumously published in Shaw’s standard edition together with Buoyant Billions and Shakes versus Shav, a ten-minute play for puppets which he wrote during four January days in 1949.
Puppets had some Shavian advantages over human material. They could preserve an unvarying facial expression and sustain treatment impossible for mere living actors. ‘When I first saw them in my boyhood,’ Shaw wrote, ‘nothing delighted me more than when all the puppets went up in a balloon and presently dropped from the skies with an appalling crash on the floor.’ He gave his own puppets some glorious acrobatics – Shakes and Shav sparring and knocking each other down, while their champions Rob Roy and Macbeth dance and spin until Rob Roy cuts off Macbeth’s head with a claymore and Macbeth marches off, head under arm, to the tune of the British Grenadiers. This marks the culmination of what the critic Sally Peters was to call ‘Shaw’s unending duel with the ghost of Shakespeare’. In this playlet the ‘real Shakespeare’ is someone who ‘might have been myself’.
Shakes is the darker face of Shav, a vengeful protagonist who introduces himself with excerpts from the soliloquies of his villainous Richard III and Macbeth. Their intertextual battle has Macbeth quoting Macduff from whose third son, Shaw had told his biographers Hesketh Pearson and Archibald Henderson, ‘I am supposed to be descended’. It is a duel between the contradictory impulses Shaw had struggled all his life to reconcile. But Shaw is also one of Shakespeare’s heirs and so after their jousting comes a plea for peace. A light appears between them, the stage directions tell us. Then the candle is puffed out and darkness embraces them both.
Shakes versus Shav had been commissioned by England’s ‘chief puppet master’ Waldo Lanchester who sent G.B.S. ‘figures of two puppets, Shakespeare & myself, with a request that I should supply one of my famous dramas for them’. It was then performed at Lanchester’s Malvern Marionette Theatre during the 1949 Malvern Festival.
*
Nowhere were Shaw’s plays more enthusiastically welcomed than in German-speaking countries where most theatres had been closed down by Goebbels in 1944 as part of the ‘total war’ effort. Between 1945 and 1970 in the Soviet and Allied sectors of Berlin there were to be forty-nine productions of twenty-four of his plays – more than Chekhov or Ibsen, Gorki or Strindberg, Pirandello or Eugene O’Neill.
All this should have benefited Trebitsch. During the war he had appealed desperately for money from the luxurious Dolder Hotel in Zurich. But Shaw’s replies were often delayed or misdirected since Trebitsch could not bring himself to reveal where he and his wife were living. In his seventies Trebitsch did not know how to live otherwise than as a rich man. ‘I have not forgotten you and Tina in the least; you are very much in my mind at times,’ Shaw wrote in 1945. But he was anxious to avoid seeing them after the war. It was too late. He was too old. ‘We must make up our minds not to meet again,’ he urged.
But Trebitsch had already made up his mind to fly over and pay his condolences over Charlotte’s death. He remembered Charlotte vividly: her devotion to ‘long walks’, her exploits as a ‘brilliant cyclist’, how she ‘loved sport and enjoyed riding’ like her sister who was ‘one of the best-known women riders to hounds in the British Isles’. Trebitsch gloried in these memories and was eager to bring G.B.S. the comfort of them.
Shaw looked forward to his visit with dread. But Trebitsch knew his duty. He came in the spring of 1946 and was in excellent spirits. It was six years since they had last met. ‘You dont know what it is to be 90,’ Shaw had warned him and it was true that Trebitsch, who was not quite eighty, did not know. He was surprised to see his old friend failing in a strange way. ‘He was impatient, was afraid of falling asleep when he leaned back in his chair, and... of showing this understandable weakness even in front of a familiar visitor as I was.’ Other failings such as his inability to ‘walk more than a mile, very unsteadily and leaning on a stick’ were not without their advantages.
On no account, Shaw insisted, could Trebitsch afford another sentimental journey to England. Trebitsch however had some important business to discuss: a scheme for aiding G.B.S. with his income tax by taking over the burden of his income. ‘I shall not see you starve if I can help it,’ G.B.S. assured him. With this small encouragement Trebitsch was back again in the Dorchester Hotel in the spring of 1947 and hurrying down all smiles to Ayot St Lawrence. It was a lesson to Shaw of how unwise he had been to offer any encouragement at all. He would never do so again. ‘I am no longer the Shaw you knew,’ he had cautioned. But like the ageing Falstaff, Trebitsch was ever-confident of some special favours from his old companion. He simply could not believe Shaw’s ‘heartless’ words and responded to them like a rejected lover with spells of recovery in expensive spas. Exasperation rose in G.B.S. What else could he do except run out a string of terrible blowings-up and dressings-down? ‘Damn it, man, do you imagine that I am a pretty girl of 17 and you a blithering idiot of 18... Can you not bear the thought of my having any friend in the world except yourself? Pull yourself together... I dont want to shake hands with you nor to contemplate your wrinkles.’
This bombardment halted Trebitsch at the Dorchester Hotel during his annual pilgrimage to England in the spring of 1948. He still sweated to see his friend for one last farewell, or perhaps two, or better still three. ‘What do you suppose I care about last meetings at my age?’ Shaw had demanded. ‘I never see anyone now without being conscious that it is probably our last meeting... When the cat leaves the room it may never see me alive again.’
For Trebitsch, however, Shaw was still ‘the last, greatest and strangest hero of my life’. He could not wait another year. In the early autumn of 1948 he slipped back into England and down to Ayot for what was to be their final meeting, leaving ‘after a farewell that was kept light and airy’.
But their old business relationship had been broken up by the war and when Shaw advised Trebitsch not to ‘speak or write to anyone over 40’ he was trying to break his translator’s dependence on royalties that must further diminish ‘after my death, which is imminent’. But like Gabriel Pascal and Molly Tompkins, Trebitsch was lost without G.B.S. Shaw had been like a father to them all and they could not detach themselves. Trebitsch felt ‘alone upon this earth, except for the one man whom I still had: Bernard Shaw’.
‘If imaginary riches make you happy, by all means imagine them; but they will never materialize,’ Shaw wrote after the production of Buoyant Billions which he had made Trebitsch translate as Zu Viel Geld (‘Too Much Money’). It was a sad ending to almost fifty years of a relationship which Trebitsch counted as ‘the greatest event of my life’.
Well, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye – all of you.
BBC television talk by Shaw on his ninetieth birthday
‘Mr Bernard Shaw becomes a nonagenarian to-day,’ announced The Times on 26 July 1946. He was threatened by a bristling programme of celebrations. ‘I am doing what I can to escape,’ he pleaded. ‘...If I can survive it I can survive anything.’ Congratulations and gifts converged on him from all around the world. There were tributes from Churchill and de Valera, salutations from the Labour Party and Trades Union Congress, sweets from local schoolchildren, greetings from anyone who had seen a play or read a preface. For a fortnight huge numbers of these messages and gifts went on avalanching into Ayot where Shaw desperately marshalled Loewenstein and Winsten to destroy the happy returns as if they were high explosives.
A policeman had been stationed outside his house earlier that month to repulse enthusiasts. ‘I am fighting off all photographers and news-reelers,’ Shaw insisted. But a few wriggled through his defences. ‘I hope I shall interview you again on your 100th birthday,’ said a young journalist. ‘I don’t see why not,’ Shaw answered; ‘you look healthy enough to me.’
‘Mr Shaw is so vast a subject,’ concluded The Times, ‘that none will envy the ultimate biographer.’ He had been asked by Oxford University Press to choose the five hundredth title in their World’s Classics series from among his own work and he chose his masterpiece of wishful thinking, Back to Methuselah, using the chance to revise the play and its preface and attach a postscript. Besides this new volume and the million Penguin paperbacks, there was also a symposium, G.B.S. 90, in the bookshops, compiled by Stephen Winsten and containing memories from old friends such as H. G. Wells and Sidney Webb, Gilbert Murray and Max Beerbohm, together with surveys of his plays and music criticism, examinations of his ideas on phonetics, economics and education by C. E. M. Joad, J. D. Bernal and others, and statements of literary goodwill from J. B. Priestley, Maynard Keynes, Aldous Huxley.
On stage the Arts Theatre was playing Don Juan in Hell; on radio the BBC produced The Man of Destiny and later broadcast a Shaw Festival for its new Third Programme; in the evening Shaw appeared on television complaining that his popularity ‘shews that I am getting old and feeble and nobody is afraid of me any longer’.
At the prompting of the Irish Trade Unionist James Larkin, he had been offered the Honorary Freedom of Dublin and replied in his letter of acceptance: ‘Dublin alone has the right to affirm that in spite of my incessantly controversial past and present I have not disgraced her.’ A little later in the year he accepted the Honorary Freedom of the Borough of St Pancras on whose vestry and borough council he had worked, and used the occasion to argue for the virtues of a local government system independent of central party political control.
‘I need no publicity: I have already much more than my fair share of it,’ Shaw wrote to the Liberal peer Lord Samuel a few days later. Public attention had once been his compensation for meagre family affection. Now it had expanded, he sometimes felt, into a substitute for political achievement. He would have traded all this publicity for an Act of Parliament legalizing the Coupled Vote, and he took more pleasure from legislation in the Dáil to municipalize his Carlow estate than anything else that happened that year.
‘I wish you were not too far off to be within my reach,’ he had written earlier in the year to Sidney Webb. Their old colleague Sydney Olivier had died within a few months of Beatrice and Charlotte, leaving Webb and Shaw the last two Fabian musketeers. ‘So let us hold on as long as we can,’ G.B.S. exhorted his friend. ‘Everywhere I gained something,’ Webb had written of their peripatetic work together. On 13 October 1947, in his eighty-ninth year, he died at Passfield Corner. ‘I hope we have been a pair of decent useful chaps as men go,’ G.B.S. wrote to him in his last letter; ‘but we have had too short a lifetime to qualify for real high politics.’
In 1949 Shaw brought out a revised and expanded version of the autobiographical miscellany Shaw Gives Himself Away which the Gregynog Press had published in a limited edition ten years earlier. ‘I have changed the title to SIXTEEN SELF SKETCHES,’ he wrote to his American publisher, ‘because a title must be easy to speak, easy to spell, and unmistakeable to pronounce.’ The new title gives helpful evidence of Shaw’s innumeracy since, as Brigid Brophy first noticed, the book contains seventeen self sketches. In his ninety-fifth year he completed what was to be the last of his ephemeral works for publication. Bernard Shaw’s Rhyming Picture Guide to Ayot is a series of doggerel verses accompanying some endearingly awful photographs of the village.
Actors and authors liked coming down to see him occasionally in the belief that G.B.S. occasionally liked seeing them. ‘Especially actresses,’ the actress Lilli Palmer added. But when she asked him after an hour if he would like her to ‘stay a little longer, Mr Shaw,’ he answered truthfully: ‘No. I’m always glad when people go.’ ‘Keep the old skeleton out of sight and touch as much as you can,’ he wrote to the American showgirl Frances Day who wanted to see him. ‘...Only in dreams is he young. Do not disturb them.’
Burlesques were less disturbing to him than gallantries. In his young nineties he performed a garden pantomime with Danny Kaye and, his eyes sparkling, sang a duet from Aladdin with Gertrude Lawrence.
‘Come, little girl, for a sail with me
Round and round the moon.
No one to see us behind the Clouds
Oh, what a place to spoon.’
‘My voice is no penny whistle now!’ he remarked to Kingsley Martin after bursting out with an aria from Verdi outside his house. ‘I had not expected the strong Irish brogue,’ wrote James Lees-Milne. ‘This peasant origin makes him all the more impressive... When he smiles his face softens and becomes engaging.’ To a journalist from the Palestine Post he looked like ‘a very old and rather dangerous bird...
‘Shaw is shockingly thin now. The famous beard has shortened... His skin is like parchment. The whole figure seems more like an echo of itself... [But] you see the eyes of a youth. Blue, radiating, quick and alert, they are the real Bernard Shaw... the great firebrand... who has gradually become an object of admiration and love, first in the world and then in his country.’
Many of his visitors felt like invaders in the separate world he inhabited. He ‘looked more alone than any man I have ever seen,’ wrote the American drama critic John Mason Brown. ‘I can always tell myself stories,’ he explained, ‘and so am never lonely.’
Occasionally he would listen to other people’s stories. Not long after Charlotte’s death he had received the first instalment of a remarkable story-in-letters by Margaret Wheeler, a thirty-five-year-old housewife from Workington in Cumberland. ‘I wanted an intelligent man to discuss things with,’ she later explained, ‘so I deliberately picked him up.’ Her only chance, she reckoned, was to choose something close to his heart. So she wrote to him about phonetic alphabets. It was a sprat to catch a whale. ‘I should like to give you my thanks now, anyway,’ she ended her letter, ‘for the enjoyment of reading and the stimulus of thought you have given to me many and many a time.’
‘Not at all a bad beginning this of yours... Keep at it,’ Shaw answered. He was referring to her alphabet. But in her next letter she began unburdening herself of an obsession. ‘My problem is concerned with my little daughter, whom I believe to have been swopped by accident in the Nottingham nursing home where she was born, for another child born at the same time... I have been endeavouring to persuade the other parents to join with me in scientific tests... and they have refused... on the grounds that they are fond of the child they have and don’t wish to give her up.’
Margaret Wheeler was a strong-willed, independent-minded, working-class woman, full of energy and argument, and ‘in the grip of a passion to know about things’. In short, she was a species of genuine Shavian. ‘Altogether a very difficult case,’ he summed up, ‘for which there is no harmless solution possible.’ But she was determined to find a solution. He warned her ‘not to prove your case legally and publicly’, reminded her that ‘unsuitable arrangements sometimes last longest’, suggested the possibility of a ‘reciprocal adoption’ only if both sets of parents agreed it was best for the children, and counselled her to be ‘content with the establishment of a private understanding between the two families’.
It was all sensible advice though ‘my letters will not help you,’ he promised. But they were soon doing her ‘no end of good’ and she felt justified in having appealed to him. ‘I am serene in my confidence that you will not do anything against the interests of the two children whose future you have helped me to consider,’ she assured him.
She did not want his money. She did not want to marry him – with five children and a husband she was sufficiently married already. ‘I am perfectly happy just writing to you,’ she told him. ‘I cannot go on writing for ever,’ he protested, ‘and really should not indulge in this correspondence at all.’ Yet he was interested by her curious situation. Orphans, foundlings, outcasts, changelings had always fascinated him. ‘The serial keeps up its interest,’ he admitted. ‘I am still interested,’ he added two years later.
This was partly because Margaret Wheeler was a natural writer. He recommended her to take it up professionally. ‘I don’t care a damn about seeing myself in print,’ she replied. ‘...I like having you around to practise on.’ Writing to Shaw was like talking to someone over a garden wall. ‘I should never have written to you in the first instance had I not felt completely safe with you.’
They exchanged photographs. He let her know she was ‘an attractively intelligent woman... able to get round bank managers, solicitors, literary celebrities... You are what experienced men call a dangerous woman... I have been a dangerous man myself.’ But looking at his photograph she could not see that he was dangerous at all. ‘I’m not in the least frightened,’ she boasted. She laughed so much at what he wrote and was so immensely bucked up that she ‘felt like charging everybody else sixpence to look at me’.
So they both kept up their teasing and scolding, covering every subject from marriage and food rationing to hospital procedures and the control of floods. Over six years this correspondence unfolded into the story of a woman’s life isolated and over-burdened with housework in post-war northern England. Writing to Shaw she could put the awful problem of the jactitated children to the back of her mind and relieve for a time ‘the very strong feeling I carry around with me of being utterly completely and absolutely alone’.
‘As long as I live I must write,’ Shaw had said. His letters to ‘Dear Mrs Wheeler, not to say Margaret or Maggie or Meg’ became part of this process of living, lightening a little the solitude of these last years.
*
These last years were framed by two controversial wills. The net value of Charlotte’s estate amounted to £150,976 13s. 9d. (equivalent to £3.25 million in 1997) out of which £49,702 9s. 5d. was to be paid in death duties. Apart from a number of small annuities for the servants, there was also a legacy of £1,000 to Sidney Webb and £20,000 to Charlotte’s niece. By selling some of his own investments Shaw had paid these legacies almost immediately. He was appointed joint executor with the National Provincial Bank and given a life interest in Charlotte’s estate. But since this would simply have raised his own supertax, he relinquished his role as beneficiary and strengthened Charlotte’s residuary estate.
After Shaw’s death, Charlotte’s money was to be left in trust to an Irish bank for the development of Irish culture. The National City Bank was directed to use the residual £94,000 to make grants to institutions having as their objects ‘the bringing of the masterpieces of fine art within the reach of the Irish people’, the teaching of ‘self control, elocution, oratory, and deportment, the arts of personal contact, of social intercourse’, and the establishment of a ‘Chair or Readership’ at an Irish university to give instruction in those subjects.
What incensed potential beneficiaries were the reasons Charlotte advanced for these charitable endeavours. She had observed how ‘the most highly instructed and capable persons’ were derided by reason of ‘their awkward manners... by vulgarities of speech and other defects as easily corrigible by teaching and training as simple illiteracy’, and how the lack of this teaching and training ‘produces not only much social friction but grave pathological results’.
The will had been partly worded by Sidney Webb, but the blame was loaded on to G.B.S. People lamented that the good intentions of a sweetly nurtured, gently connected Irish lady should have been interfered with by a ‘counterfeit Irishman’ with a ‘bad temper’. G.B.S. was pictured as a wizard changing her gift into an insult. The New Yorker concluded: ‘anybody who thinks the Irish can be taught self-control is a crazy optimist, and anybody who thinks they need to be taught elocution is just plain crazy.’
Shaw’s last will, which he completed shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday, has connections with Charlotte’s over its disposal of papers, its complementary annuities to servants (with a clause respecting inflation) and a charitable trust challenging England to mind its language. It is an extraordinarily public-spirited document giving works of art by Augustus John, Rodin, Strobl, Sargent, Troubetskoy to public galleries and theatres in Britain, Ireland and the United States, his furniture to the National Trust, papers of sociological interest to the British Library of Political Science at the London School of Economics, and an enormous collection of literary papers to the British Museum ‘where all the would-be biographers can find it and do their worst or their best’.
The most original feature of this will was its disposal of his royalties over the then posthumous fifty-year copyright period. During the first twenty-one years following his death, he directed that these earnings should be used for the creation and promotion of a new phonetic alphabet containing at least forty letters ‘one symbol for each sound’. Over the following twenty-nine years his copyright income was to be shared equally by three residuary legatees: the National Gallery of Ireland ‘to which I owe much of the only real education I ever got as a boy in Eire’; the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (on whose Council he had served thirty years and on which he forced the admission of women) representing the theatre where he had derived his livelihood; and the British Museum ‘in acknowledgement of the incalculable value to me of my daily resort to the Reading Room of that Institution at the beginning of my career’.
By appointing the Public Trustee as his executor and making him responsible for challenging English orthography, Shaw hoped to give his proposal additional authority. He knew that people ‘just laugh at spelling reformers as silly cranks’. So he attempted to exhibit a phonetic alphabet as native good sense while making traditional spelling sound foreign and absurd. ‘Let people spell as they speak without any nonsense about bad or good or right or wrong spelling and speech,’ he urged. He would wrinkle his face into the most terrible shapes when pronouncing the word ‘though’ with six letters instead of two. But when an enthusiastic convert suggested that ‘ghoti’ would have been a reasonable way to spell ‘fish’ under the old system (gh as in ‘tough’, o as in ‘women’ and ti as in ‘nation’) the subject seemed almost engulfed in the ridicule from which Shaw was determined to preserve it.
‘The fact that English is spelt conventionally and not phonetically makes the art of recording speech almost impossible,’ he had complained in his notes to Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. When he came to Pygmalion, a romance advertising the science of phonetics, he abandoned his attempt to represent Eliza Doolittle’s broad cockney with transliterated ‘nu speling’ which looked illiterate and was ‘unintelligible outside London’. ‘It cannot be done with our alphabet,’ he stated in 1936.
This failure was one of the ‘everyday workshop grievances’ with which he ventilated his alphabetical campaign. From his years policing pronunciation for the British Broadcasting Corporation he knew that his battles with the ‘mob of spelling cranks’ would be hard and long. ‘The only danger I can foresee in the establishment of an English alphabet is the danger of civil war,’ he wrote. But after forty years he had concluded that ‘no British Government will ever be stirred to action in the matter until the economies of a phonetically spelt scientific and scholarly Pidgin are calculated and stated in terms of time, labour and money’. Providing this economic argument was Shaw’s unique contribution to the spelling reform debate. If he could demonstrate a large financial saving, large enough perhaps to pay for a third world war, what government could resist?
Between Charlotte’s death and his own he returned to this windmill and charged with heroic persistence. ‘I am a citizen desirous of bequeathing my property to the public for public good,’ he announced in a public letter which was printed in 1944 as a leaflet and sent to twenty-two government departments as well as to colleges, trusts, societies and ‘all other stones I could think of to turn’.
There was gathering interest after the war in adult literacy, initial teaching alphabets for children and the reform of language. This interest was to reach its conclusion in 1975 with the Bullock Report, A Language for Life. But already by the late 1940s it seemed that a change in English lettering was more likely than changes in coinage, the measurements of weights or distances or temperatures. Shaw’s circular unleashed an extraordinary response.
Unharnessed languages rushed in at him from everywhere and he beat them off with blue printed postcards, statements for debates in Parliament, letters to Tit-Bits and The Times, and an ultimate brochure launched at all members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, at the entire Dáil and sixty Irish senators. But still they came at him, the champions of Basic English and Simplified Spelling, knights of Interglossa and Esperanto, Novial and Volapük, ancient lords of Visible Speech, irascible young linguists, strange panoptic conjugators, calligraphers, mathematical symbolists, firers of pistics, shorthanders, Pidgin fanciers. ‘It is clear that if I wait for a solution before making my will I shall die intestate as far as the alphabet is concerned,’ he told the educationist James Pitman.
That a man of letters might want to improve his implements so as to lessen the disparity in speed between written and spoken language, between thought and its communication on to paper, is not unreasonable. Shaw took many sensible precautions. He defined a limited experiment to place a new alphabet into free competition with the old (as Arabic numerals had competed successfully with Roman numerals), ‘until one of the two proves the fitter to survive’. Neither was he deaf to the many regional accents in Britain, nor did he claim that one was better or any ideal: he simply relied on what was generally intelligible. He never contemplated designing the new alphabet himself or appropriating the reform personally. Yet in spite of all this surrounding sense, the scheme remains illusory.
This was partly because he omitted from his will the familiar virtues of alphabetical reform such as its educational benefits for infants and the environmental saving of trees. He believed that a good phonetic script would make English easier for foreigners and improve its chances of emerging by natural selection from international Babel to become the lingua franca of the world: ‘the language with the best spelling and the least grammar will win,’ he predicted. But this too is omitted from the will. He argued that any operation for rescuing the handicapped language should be led by economists. He put his trust in James Pitman, who was not only a Member of Parliament but also the grandson of the inventor of the phonographic system of shorthand. ‘You are, I should say, by far the best equipped adventurer in the field,’ he wrote to Pitman. ‘...You have no enemies and a great phonetic name.’
Under the eccentric rationality of Shaw’s proposals, the American writer Jacques Barzun was to detect a symbolic motive. ‘His expressed purpose was not his real purpose,’ Barzun wrote; ‘he did not want to save ink and paper, help the child and favor the foreigner. What did he want to do? Simply to get rid of the past, to give a part of mankind a fresh start by isolating it from its own history and from the ancestral bad habits of the other nations.’
In old age a peculiar passion enters his crusade and ties it to his family name. ‘All round me I hear the corruption of our language,’ he writes, ‘produced by the absurd device of spelling the first sound in my name with the two letters sh.’ This impurity weighs on him like a defect in the blood. In the will his desire is expressed as an equation involving labour, cost and time: the mental labour to which he had been so ecstatically if regretfully addicted; the cost into which he had transferred much emotional profit and loss; and the time that was running out. ‘Saving time is of no significance,’ protested Hesketh Pearson. But at ninety it may be. Shaw calculated that phonetic spelling would ‘add years’ to a writer’s life.
He had shed a good deal that belonged to his past before he came to sign his will. He gave the surviving holographs of his novels to the National Library of Ireland. Then there was his property. ‘I own the freehold of a ten roomed house in the village of Ayot St Lawrence in Herts,’ he had written to the secretary of the National Trust shortly after Charlotte’s death. ‘...Has such a trifle any use or interest for the National Trust?’ A member of the Trust, James Lees-Milne, came down one dismal day in early 1944, glanced at the exterior of this ‘ugly, dark red-brick villa’, glanced through its ‘far from beautiful’ rooms with their pinched fireplaces, flaking walls, and decided that the National Trust was positively interested. Shaw transferred many of his possessions from Whitehall Court to add zest to what he called ‘the birthplace’. The rooms brimmed with memorabilia and mementoes. Here is the Bechstein piano on which he played to Charlotte; the weighing-scales that registered his decreasing weight; his fountain pen, gold propelling pencil, mittens, cameras, steel-rimmed spectacles and the typewriter that could type plays. Here are the colour-coded postcards on Capital Punishment, Vegetarian Diet, Temperance and the Forty-Letter British Alfabet. Here too is a Staffordshire figure of Shakespeare picked up cheap at the seaside, an ancient exercise bicycle bought in France, a filing cabinet with its drawers marked ‘Ayot’, ‘Russia’, ‘Keys and Contraptions’, together with his admission card to the Reading Room of the British Museum for 1880 and his membership of the Cyclist Touring Club renewed in 1950. There are his books, the framed parchment scrolls of his honorary freedoms of Dublin and St Pancras; his Hollywood Oscar and Nobel Prize for Literature as well as a medal from the Irish Academy of Letters and the master key to the Malvern Festival. In the meagre writing-hut stand a wicker chair, narrow bed, flap table, telephone, thermometer, toothbrush. Everywhere, from the brass door-knocker inwards, are images of G.B.S., and pictures of those he knew: the Sartorio portrait of Charlotte; photographs of the two heralds of his career, William Morris and Sidney Webb; his special friends and loves, Archer and Barker, Ellen and Stella; his sparring partners Chesterton and Wells; fellow-playwrights and compatriots, Ibsen and Barrie, Sean O’Casey, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory; and others he admired such as Lenin, Gene Tunney, Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, Einstein and Uncle Joe Stalin.
Early in 1949, he notified the managing director of Whitehall Court that he wanted to be transferred to a smaller flat in the building. He had last come up to Whitehall Court at the end of 1946 ‘and it is unlikely that I shall ever see London again,’ he wrote. ‘...all I need is a study for Miss Patch to work in, a lavatory, and perhaps a bedroom... in an emergency.’ He finally gave up number 130 Whitehall Court in May 1949 and became the absentee tenant of number 116, a two-roomed furnished flat downstairs which at ten guineas a month was half the cost.
He was impatient to sell ‘every stick and stone’ not needed at Ayot. There were 1,100 books at Whitehall Court and he was determined to make them ‘more saleable by every trick in my power’. Into eight of the more valuable volumes he inserted reminiscences. The Cranwell Edition of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom went for £460, a facsimile set of four folios of Shakespeare’s plays for £163. Apsley Cherry-Garrard bought the Ashendene Press edition of Dante’s Tutte le Opere for £115, and Gertrude Lawrence snapped up Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (illustrated by Beardsley) for only £58. Except for Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (which went for £125), the authors’ presentation copies fetched tiny prices: £7 10s. 0d. for Yeats’s Trembling of the Veil, £6 10s. 0d. for Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own; £6 for O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. ‘I am out for money: HARD,’ Shaw told Sydney Cockerell; ‘for the rest of the year my name is Harpagon.’ His books raised £2,649 15s. 0d. (equivalent to £50,000 in 1997), which he used to offset the Capital Levy which the Labour Government introduced in 1948 to avoid national bankruptcy.
*
In the New Statesman in May 1950, Shaw published a defence of the ‘Play of Ideas’, responding to Terence Rattigan and making a final analysis of his own dramaturgy.
‘Wherever there is a queue waiting for the doors of a theatre to open you may see some vagabond artist trying to entertain it in one way or another... I myself have done the same on Clapham Common, and collected sixteen shillings in my hat at the end for the Socialist cause. I have stopped on the Thames Embankment; set my back to the river wall; and had a crowd listening to me in no time... I, the roofless pavement orator, ended in the largest halls in the country with overcrowds that filled two streets... it illustrates the development of the theatre from the pavement to the tribune and the cathedral, and the promotion of its outcasts to palaces...
I was going back atavistically to Aristotle, to the tribune stage, to the circus, to the didactic Mysteries, to the word music of Shakespear, to the forms of my idol Mozart, and to the stage business of the great players whom I had actually seen acting, from Barry Sullivan, Salvini, and Ristori to Coquelin and Chaliapin... I know my business both historically and by practice.’
In one July week that year, Shaw wrote five small scenes of a ‘little comedy’, calling it Why She Would Not. The reason why the good-looking Serafina White will not marry the improving young man is that ‘I am afraid of you,’ she tells him. He is incredulous: ‘I coerce nobody,’ he protests: ‘I only point out the way.’ The play is a Christian allegory. In the first scene the man appears as a chivalrous ‘newcomer’, in the second he is revealed as ‘a carpenter of sorts’, in the third he acts an apparently ‘unemployable walking gentleman’, in the fourth he becomes ‘a very smart city man’ dealing in real estate, and in the fifth he is finally ‘a wonder’, admired but alone. Shaw’s hero is like a miniature of Los in Blake’s Symbolic poems: the voice of eternal prophecy, the spectre of reasoning, the creator of alphabets, divorced from the Female Principle and hammering out the future in his creator’s shade. His Shavian name is Henry Bossborn, a good surname to adopt for a writer once unsure of his legitimacy who had won natural authority through the power of language. His solitude is the solitude G.B.S. had regained seven years after Charlotte’s death.
Shaw’s nature was rooted in solitude, but it was ringed with crowds of people, as if he lived in the eye of a perpetual storm. The Times, which now recorded his birthdays in its Court Circular, described his ninety-fourth birthday, three days after he completed Why She Would Not, as restful.
‘Restful!!! Restful, with the telephone and the door bell ringing all day! With the postmen staggering under bushels of letters and telegrams! With immense birthday cakes... falling on me like millstones! With the lane blocked by cameramen, televisors, photographers, newsreelers, interviewers, all refusing to take No for an answer. And I with a hard day’s work to finish in time for the village post. Heaven forgive The Times. I cannot.’
Mrs Laden would have refused ‘the King of England’ had he driven up without an appointment. But she could not stop people climbing the trees and peering down, or prevent photographers breaking through the hedges and setting up their cameras on the lawn, or silence the persistent telephone calls. ‘I don’t want to speak to anybody,’ Shaw cried out, ‘alive or dead.’
He had always been fastidious and could not bear people detecting signs of his infirmities – the egg stain on his tie, the weak bladder. But nothing was hidden from Mrs Laden. She had noticed pools in the lavatory and observed how the old man would empty the chamber pot under his bed each morning. Suspecting he was suffering from renal trouble or perhaps a failure of the prostate gland, she collected a specimen of his urine, saw that it contained blood, and sent to the doctor. He advised immediate treatment. But she knew it was hopeless. He did not want to speak about such things.
Apart from these secrets, he was not unhappy. ‘Life is worth my while: if it were not I should end it.’ Death did not frighten him. ‘I sleep well, always in the hope that I may not wake again.’
By the beginning of September he was busy making bonfires in the garden. One of the neighbours rang up to complain about the smoke and Mrs Laden roared ‘with the ferocity of a lioness’ down the telephone. ‘Your phone call to Mrs Laden reached her in a moment when a terrible misfortune had just overtaken her,’ Shaw wrote to pacify him. ‘Our pet cat had died in the night; and she was overwhelmed with grief. Forgive her if she vented any of it on you.’
The death of Bunch, her orange cat, at last persuaded Mrs Laden to go on holiday up to Scotland. ‘It was the first holiday I’d taken for years,’ she remembered. ‘I was entitled to at least two weeks a year, but I usually felt that something would happen to him if I wasn’t there.’ Margaret Cashin Smith, the recently married Irish parlourmaid, bicycled back to look after him. Everything was prepared. All seemed well. Mrs Laden coached G.B.S. on the things he must not do in her absence, and left at the end of the week.
‘I can hardly walk through my garden without a tumble or two,’ Shaw had written in his preface to Buoyant Billions. On Sunday 10 September, once it had stopped raining in the late afternoon, he walked in the garden with his secateurs. ‘Pruning with the secateurs was his chief interest,’ the gardener Fred Drury had reckoned. But this time, while cutting a projecting branch, he slipped, fell on the path, and began blowing the whistle he carried for emergencies. ‘I ran out into the garden and found him on the ground,’ the Irish parlourmaid remembered. ‘I had him sitting on my knees for fifteen minutes. “Put me down and go and fetch someone,” he said, but I wouldn’t put him on the wet grass and blew and blew at the whistle till my husband, who happened to be near, came and helped Mr Shaw into the house.’
His doctor arrived and sent for a radiologist who was driven to the house by Shaw’s chauffeur Fred Day. A portable X-ray machine revealed that Shaw’s left thigh was fractured, and his leg was put in a splint. The doctor sedated him for the night and later arranged for an ambulance to take him next morning to the Luton and Dunstable Hospital. He also telephoned Mrs Laden who flew back the following day.
‘He was in great pain, but most stoical,’ said one of the doctors at the hospital. At 5.15 on the Monday afternoon, he was operated on, the surgeon joining the broken surfaces of the neck of his thigh bone.
As soon as the newspapers heard of the accident ‘all hell broke loose’. So many telephone calls came in from all parts of the world that the hospital had to employ an extra switchboard operator. The corridors and waiting-room seethed with reporters. Photographers offered the management £1,000 (equivalent to £18,500 in 1997) for a picture of Shaw in bed surrounded with the flowers sent by Winston Churchill, and when this did not succeed they put ladders against the outside wall in an attempt to climb into his room. Mrs Laden, arriving with fruit and pyjamas and an electrically heated bed-warmer, felt quite scared as they all pressed round her.
The hospital management set aside its boardroom for regular bulletins. Journalists filled the local accommodation and ‘a few of the reporters were found room in a jail cell at the police station’. Their stories were remorselessly cheerful. They quoted the hospital staff as being ‘amazed’ at Shaw’s ‘grand colour’, his ‘lively and talkative’ behaviour and other signs of his rapid recovery: ‘G.B.S. Gets Out of Bed – and Stands,’ miraculously announced one newspaper. When two nurses did lift him for a few seconds he cautioned them to tell no one or else ‘they will say I’ve walked a mile’.
It quickly became apparent to surgeons and doctors at the hospital that Shaw was suffering from long-standing kidney and bladder trouble. They took temporary measures to relieve the condition and then, on 21 September, operated on him again. Though his fractured thigh was mending well, he was described as being only ‘fairly satisfactory in the circumstances’ and his doctor remembered that shortly after this second operation he became ‘quite unmanageable’. He now had a silver catheter attached to his bladder which had to be cleaned each week and which he was told he must use for the rest of his life. He pestered Mrs Laden to let him come home. Eleanor O’Connell, who visited the hospital on 2 October, observed that he looked ‘so fragile and strangely enough not a bit peaceful’, and also that his voice was ‘hoarse and tremulous’. She had to lean her elbows on the bed and put her head on the pillow next to his head. She asked him how he was.
‘Everyone asks me that, and its so silly when all I want is to die, but this damned vitality of mine won’t let me.’
She asked him whether he was looking forward to dying.
‘Oh so much, so much (tremulously like a child) if only I could die... I’m in HELL (loudly) here, they wash me all the time... when I’m asleep they wake me, and when I’m awake they ask why I’m not asleep. Each time they pounce on me they tell me it will be just the same as last time and then I find they have added a new torture... (beating feebly against his thigh). Ah if only I could walk I would get up at once and go.’
According to the orthopaedic surgeon, Shaw ‘might have lived till a hundred’ had he stayed in hospital, allowed them to feed him up with butcher’s meat, and enjoyed another visit or two to the operating theatre. In his preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma he had written: ‘in surgery all operations are recorded as successful if the patient can be got out of the hospital or nursing home alive.’ The last hospital bulletin recorded his ‘satisfactory progress’. And it was true that he was still alive, though such a shadow of G.B.S. he seemed a ghost. ‘He died in effect the day he fell in his garden,’ said the village postmistress Jisbella Lyth. ‘...He died in his garden, like my husband, just as he had always told me he wanted to do.’
After twenty-four days in hospital, the ambulance drove him back to Ayot where, hidden from the crowd behind a white canvas screen held by his gardener and chauffeur, he was carried into the dining-room which Mrs Laden had fitted up as a bedroom.
Two nurses looked after him day and night. ‘He is very well, thank you,’ Mrs Laden brusquely informed a journalist from the Manchester Guardian. But in fact she could see that he was not at all himself. His face had fallen in, he was pale and quiet, a vacant thing, ghastly. Everyone saw it. ‘It was pitiful to see him the last time I cut his hair,’ said the man who had been his regular barber for almost twenty years. ‘...he couldn’t have had less flesh on him. Formerly he enjoyed having his hair cut, but that last time he was completely miserable. I don’t know how I got through it. He was a changed man – just like a child. I hope I never have an experience like that again.’
Passing his room one morning Mrs Laden heard him ask the nurse not to prolong his life as he was a very old man. So she went in at once to upbraid him.
‘You’re much more than an old man, you are a national institution.’
‘What’s the good of trying to repair an ancient monument?’ he asked.
Then she burst out: ‘I wish it was I that was dying and not you.’
In the kitchen she set to preparing some ‘vur-r-r-ee special’ soups with something secretly added to buck him up. But he did not want to eat or drink. He wanted to make what haste he could and be gone. ‘His mental worry about his kidney trouble killed him as much as the illness itself,’ Mrs Laden could tell.
Blanche Patch went on with her secretarial work as best she might, coming down and reading some of his post to him, holding his wrist as she got a signature out of him. One of the first signatures he wrote on getting back to Ayot was on a large cheque to be divided among the hospital telephonists, porters and nurses whose duties had been so stretched by their newsworthy patient. ‘I don’t think I shall ever write anything more,’ he said.
They had placed his narrow bed facing a long window so that he could see the lawn. Wearing a light saffron nightgown with wide sleeves he looked ‘a Blake-like figure,’ thought Esmé Percy visiting him there. ‘He took my hand and pressed it against his heart... He just said, “Good luck, good-bye,” and then a brief but heart-rending pause, and “Now get along with you”.’
Visitors came to cheer him on, then to make their farewells. Loewenstein hovered near the bedroom and eventually took up his vigil in the next room. Nancy Astor came and went bringing many flowers. ‘I don’t want visitors. They tire me too much,’ Shaw had said to Eleanor O’Connell. But a few people, mostly women, were briefly welcome. Sean O’Casey’s beautiful wife Eileen came to see him and stroked his aching head. It was wonderful, he told her. She felt he was ‘back again as a small child wanting a mother’s comfort’. He asked her to kiss him.
For much of the last week he slept. Then his temperature rose rapidly, and in the early hours of 1 November, shortly before going into a coma, he spoke his last words: ‘I am going to die.’
Mrs Laden asked the rector of Ayot to read the twenty-third Psalm over him as he lay on his bed, and the rector agreed for ‘the man was surely no atheist’. Shaw had summed up his religious beliefs the week before when speaking to his one-time secretary, Judy Musters: ‘I believe in life everlasting; but not for the individual.’ For twenty-six hours he remained unconscious. Then, early on 2 November, Mrs Laden walked out through the morning mist and told the reporters waiting with their blinding flash bulbs at the gate that, shortly before five o’clock, G.B.S. had died.
*
‘Life goes on as usual at Shaw’s Corner,’ the Daily Herald reported that morning. Outside Fred Drury was brushing up the dead leaves. The windows of the house stood open. Inside the nurses began packing and Lady Astor arrived. So did Pascal, flying in from New York with a suitcase full of vitamins, then bursting into tears, and stating that he would film the life of G.B.S. ‘I shall write it myself,’ he declared before driving off. Death suited G.B.S. He hadn’t appeared so well for a long time. ‘When he was dead he looked wonderful... with a sort of whimsical smile on his face,’ said Mrs Laden. Lady Astor went out later that morning and invited some twenty reporters into the house. ‘I think you ought to see him, he looks so lovely.’ At noon the rector conducted a short service at the bedside and seven women from the village came to pay their last respects. In the afternoon Shaw’s body was driven to the Chapel of Rest at Welwyn. On Lady Astor’s instructions a death mask was made.
Next day an outpouring of memories and obituaries began on the wireless, the television sets, and in the newspapers. The Indian Cabinet adjourned; theatre audiences in Australia rose for two minutes’ silence; the Swedish National Theatre delivered a statement to the British Ambassador in praise of Shaw’s creative life; and on Broadway and in Times Square the lights were briefly blacked out. ‘There was a singular sense of loss,’ recorded St John Ervine. Shaw himself would have preferred to be remembered ‘as Sonny than as the ghastly old skeleton of a celebrity I now am’. But there was hardly anyone alive who knew him as Sonny – certainly not the presidents and prime ministers whose fine opinions were being blazed round the world. On the other hand it was strange that such a dry, unsentimental phenomenon as G.B.S. could have touched ordinary people unless something of Sonny had lived on. ‘I sobbed my socks off,’ said the housewife from Workington. ‘It was a great loss to me,’ said the village postmistress at Ayot.
Shaw had wanted the funeral service at Golders Green to be private, but some 500 people haphazardly gathered in the Garden of Remembrance. ‘We’ll never see his like again,’ platitudinized a cockney woman. ‘Madam, we must never underrate posterity,’ an Irishman corrected her. A representative of the women’s movement who unfurled a green, purple and white striped flag proclaiming G.B.S. ‘one of our best friends during our fight for the vote’ was hustled off by police.
The music was relayed to those outside: the hymn at the beginning of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel overture, the Libera me from Verdi’s Requiem, extracts from Elgar’s The Music Makers and the Nimrod section from his Enigma Variations. Sydney Cockerell read the final passage of Mr Valiant for Truth from The Pilgrim’s Progress. So he passed over.
Charlotte had directed in her will that her ashes ‘shall be taken to Ireland and scattered on Irish ground’, but after the war started Shaw proposed that their ashes be mixed inseparably and distributed round the garden at Ayot. ‘It pleased her, and she agreed.’
Charlotte’s ashes had been waiting in a bronze casket at the Golders Green columbarium, and his were placed in a smaller casket which fitted on top of hers in the niche. Early in the morning of 23 November, the two caskets were taken down to Ayot. The Public Trustee emptied his ashes into hers at the dining-room sideboard, and stirred them together. Then, with his two deputies, Charlotte’s executor from the bank, the local doctor, a news agency reporter representing the public, and Mrs Laden, he went into the garden. The doctor shook the aluminium sprinkler and a grey cloud drifted into the air and was carried to the ground by the falling rain. He led them past the flower beds, emptying the ashes along the path and round the revolving hut at the end – where G.B.S. had recently paraded with a famous actress and, waving her goodbye, asked:
‘Well, did I give a good performance?’
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