MICHAEL HOLROYD begins at the end: with the death of Bernard Shaw at the age of ninety-four. In primadonna style he had been making his farewells for a decade. An American newspaper offered him a million dollars for a genuine last word but presumably it did not pay for his ‘There is nothing more to be said.’ His nurse told reporters that he had happily willed himself to die. A photographer who might have come from The Doctor’s Dilemma snapped his corpse. ‘He preserved the same puckish expression he had borne throughout life. His beard still stuck out at the same perkily truculent angle.’
Eric Bentley, who wrote the first Shaw biography in which the subject did not collaborate, read all the obituaries and said they made him sick. ‘It was praise of Shaw, but what praise, and from whom…! Such mourning for Shaw was a mockery of Shaw…’
The truth was and is that Shaw has never been properly understood. The world was tickled by ‘GBS the irresponsible clown’ and there was always copy in the perverse statements of his dotage. In an introduction to the one-volume collection of his plays that a popular newspaper put out in the thirties as an inducement to taking out a year’s subscription, Shaw made reference to the fabulous bandersnatch that the publicists had made of him and presented himself as a ‘classic writer of comedies’ who extracted the bad teeth of British society with ‘plenty of laughing gas’. This was a fair statement.
He was a great dramatist and a remarkable critic. Many of his quirks were attributed to his Irishry. He told G.K. Chesterton: ‘I am a typical Irishman; my family come from Yorkshire.’ But much of Shaw’s idiosyncratic quality seems to derive from a rejection of country and family. Like Joyce, he flew against those nets.
In John Bull’s Other Island, he throws a bright set of stage lights on the vices of the Irish – the watery romanticism, shiftlessness, self-important vindictiveness and a life-denying poetic imagination, fuelled by potcheen. No Irishman could do anything if he stayed in Ireland, except blow people and pigs to pieces and then laugh like a horse about it. His lifelong loathing of alcohol was a reaction against a drunken father and drunken uncles and his other abstinences – from tobacco, meat, unclean textiles and sub-Moore amorous sloppiness – can be seen as a revulsion from Irish squalor. Mr Holroyd’s secondary title affirms that love was what Shaw was after, during his first forty-two years, but the nature of that love needs careful and idiosyncratic definition.
By any definition, he lived in a loveless Dublin household. His mother did not seem to know what even ordinary Irish love was: it was certainly not a commodity lavished on his father. Her son followed her in opting for the emotions stimulated by art. She became a singer and when her teacher, the remarkable Vandeleur Lee, sought a better fortune than Dublin could provide by taking his talents to London, she went with him.
The young Shaw learned the love of music from Lee. That love had much to do with the Dublin adoration of the singing voice. Joyce learned it too. Shaw pretended to have read Joyce’s Ulysses, praising it for what he considered its exemplary exhibition of Dublin squalor, but he never seems to have noticed that Joyce’s contribution to English prose consisted in making it approximate structurally and sonically to music. This was strange, because Shaw’s own achievement in the medium did much the same thing. It is important, as Michael Holroyd makes clear, to take Shaw seriously when he speaks of the operatic foundation of his plays (not just Man and Superman) and the swing of his prose is overwhelmingly an auditory experience.
From Mr Holroyd’s account of the early life of Sonny, as the boy Shaw was called (Joyce, incidentally, was known as Sunny Jim), it is evident that his peculiar genius was neither genetically transmitted nor nurtured in the home. School did nothing for him either: he was a lonely boy who read books. When he followed his mother to London, he disclosed a talent that nobody at first wanted. It was a talent founded on a passion for sound, whether musical or rhetorical, and a reformist zeal which, only in his late thirties, fused into the capacity to forge highly entertaining works of theatrical didacticism. Before he was a playwright who thought he had failed, he was a novelist who knew he had; he then became a brilliant and controversial critic of music and drama. He was not, of course, ever a rich one – journalism is not an enriching trade – and, up to early middle age, he never had much money.
He was, ironically, becoming moderately prosperous by his own efforts when he married the Irish millionaire Charlotte Payne-Townshend. He never courted money and he seemed eager to give much of it away. His passions were idealistic rather than commercial – the reform of British society and of British artistic taste, as well as the implantation of a certain very un-Irish logicality into British heads made thick by beer, beef, pudding and respectability. The youth who had never been properly taught became a great teacher.
You could talk of Bernard Shaw and GBS, but you could never fill out the G to George, his father’s detestable name. The reformist anger was native to Shaw. The diverting eccentricities – most of which were the end-results of relentless logic – and the consistent long-term optimism were manifested by an invention called GBS. This, as might have been pointed out in passing, is the first inversion of the opening chord of Das Rheingold in German nomenclature. Wagner was a master Shaw acknowledged, along with Ibsen and Samuel Butler.
He needed those mentors, for he could himself originate very few ideas. His task was to disseminate and make acceptable, through wit and paradox, the revolutionary notions that were coming mostly out of Europe. He no more invented the Life Force or the Übermensch (though the translation to Superman was his) than he invented vegetarianism or rational clothing. As the great self-taught orator of the Fabian Society he relied on the plodding but necessary researches of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who would discuss public sanitation at a performance of Tristan.
If he invented nothing except himself, he at least had the capacity to fuse passions which looked disparate into a holistic philosophy that can be called Shavianism. Behind all life was the élan vital which owed something to both Butler and Bergson, and, if this was at work in the biosphere, it ought also to apply to politics: hence the Fabianism. The Life Force knew what it was doing; but it was slow and had to be helped – strenuously.
Michael Holroyd’s first volume of the tripartite life is a record of almost incredibly hard work. It was work on behalf of humanity. The monster egoist was a farcical mask. Shaw was one of the great altruists of all time.
The persistent image of bloated self-regard was always false. Shaw was overweening only to teach salutary lessons through shock. When he said that he despised Shakespeare, this was meant as a cat-o’-nine-tails for the thoughtless bardolators. It is the great virtue of Mr Holroyd’s biography that it uncovers the serious man, the doubter, the sufferer, unafraid to look absurd since absurdity was a door to self-understanding and a tool of the Life Force. And if GBS was heartless, Bernard Shaw raged at the wrongs and fatuities of the world.
W.B. Yeats, having seen Arms and the Man, had a nightmare in which GBS appeared as a sewing machine, shining and rattling but smiling perpetually. Too many have seen this coldly mechanical side of Shaw, believing the man to be bloodless (not enough beefsteaks) and even sexually impotent. Mr Holroyd gives us what facts he can about the erotic life, which was tolerably intense. Shaw was something of a sex-object, despite the gangling thinness, the pallor and the red beard (grown to hide a small pox scar), the anaphrodisiacal jaeger woollens. Jenny Patterson fell heavily and he apparently satisfied her not inconsiderable appetites. She grew operatically jealous when she espied the flirtatious and philandering side of him (this was undoubtedly an Irish endowment: compare Thomas Moore).
Before the advent of active sex, Shaw had wet dreams like other frustrated males. Given the chance to copulate, he did not much care for condoms. (‘French letters 5/-… extraordinarily revolted me’). He recognised the Life Force at work in the Female: its end was less sexual gratification than the duty of breeding the Superman.
His own fertility was never in doubt: he seems to have been responsible for at least one pregnancy, though that miscarried. The handsome women of the Fabian Society are set before us like an intellectual harem; their broodingly intense photographs decorate the text. Shaw eventually preferred actresses – Florence Farr, Ellen Terry, in the next volume Mrs Patrick Campbell – but romance in powerful love letters, not French ones, was more satisfying, and more hygienic, than the rank sweat of an enseamed bed. Sex was irrelevant to the human personality. His marriage to Charlotte was not intended to have much sex in it. He knew the power of it and what it was after: now let us get on with some work.
It is only later that Shaw the dramaturge emerges. Having, as a drama critic, told the public what it needed and lectured the great actor-managers on their duty to art, he set out to provide examples of what the new drama ought to be like.
His early plays failed not because the public failed to understand them: they understood them only too well and did not care for the schoolmasterly nagging at the wrongs of British society – slum landlordism, prostitution, the folly of war, above all the hypocrisy of the middle class which happened to be the playgoing pubic. He swore to abandon the theatre but, to the eventual glory of the stage, did not. The Devil’s Disciple did well in the United States and permits this volume to close with a more than philosophical optimism as well as Shaw seeming to get married in a fit of absent-mindedness – that, of course, is GBS talking. We end the book with the knowledge that it is worthwhile going on living until we have read Volumes II and III. I think that Mr Holroyd’s totally revealed achievement may well complete the trio, or conceivably the quartet, of great twentieth-century literary biographies. Richard Ellmann’s lives of Joyce and Wilde are undoubted masterpieces, and so may be Leon Edel’s one-volume redaction of his Henry James biography. James was half-Irish; the others were, like Dedalus, all too Irish. There is a lesson here somewhere. In Back to Methuselah it is prophesied that, with the extinction of the Irish race, also the Jewish, the world will become so dull that the rest of humanity will commit suicide. Two races seem to have taught the world everything worth knowing (Shakespeare, as Mrs O’Flaherty asserts, was born in Cork). Get an Irish genius out of Ireland and he will coruscate to such an extent that he will raise grave problems for his biographer.
Mr Holroyd cannot be as witty as Shaw, but he gives us qualities as valuable as wit – chiefly unobtrusive elegance and extreme factuality. I am puzzled by one thing and disappointed at another. I should have liked more (since I have mentioned James) of Shaw at the first night of Guy Domville. I cannot understand how Robert Browning could have been present at the Shelley Society’s production of the banned Cenci in 1891, since he had been dead two years. Perhaps this supposition of posthumous life is an aspect of the Shavian infection, since Shaw refuses to die.
Though the world got him wrong the world could not ignore him. He appeared in a Disney cartoon and on the first record sleeve of the songs from My Fair Lady. Instantly recognisable in dress, features and brogue, he was a living presence in my youth. As a boy at Malvern I asked for his autograph and he said: ‘You could never afford it.’ In my old age he is still there, beard wagging, pronouncing nonsense in which the ore of wisdom is embedded.
Guardian, 16 September 1988
Review of Bernard Shaw (volume 1) by Michael Holroyd
(London: Chatto & Windus 1988)