Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  ‘I know as much about drink as anybody outside a hospital of inebriates,’ G.B.S. later wrote. His knowledge had come largely from his father and some uncles. Two of his uncles were unknown to him, having emigrated to the Antipodes and ‘like Mr Micawber, made history there’. A third, Robert, was blinded in his youth and ‘never had an opportunity of drinking’. Uncle Henry was the rich man of the family, able to afford two wives and fifteen children. But he invested his money in a collapsing coal mine and before his death became mentally unstable.

  The other three brothers, including Shaw’s father, were alcoholics. Uncle Barney (William Bernard) and Uncle Fred (Richard Frederick) both died in the family mental retreat, Dr Eustace’s in the north of Dublin. The youngest, Uncle Fred, didn’t drink until he married a girl named Waters. His drinking bouts then grew excessive but he gave up alcohol altogether once his wife left him to live in London. He was reputed to be ungenerous (he worked in the Valuation Office) and, in retirement, ‘harmlessly dotty’.

  Uncle Barney was an inordinate smoker as well as a drunkard. He lived a largely fuddled life until he was past fifty. Then, relinquishing alcohol and tobacco simultaneously, he passed the next ten years of his life as a teetotaller, playing an obsolete wind instrument called an ophicleide. Towards the end of this period, renouncing the ophicleide, he married a lady of great piety, and fell completely silent. He was carried off to the family asylum where, ‘impatient for heaven’, he discovered an absolutely original method of committing suicide. It was irresistibly amusing and no human being had yet thought of it, involving as it did an empty carpet bag. However, in the act of placing this bag on his head, Uncle Barney jammed the mechanism of his heart in a paroxysm of laughter – which the merest recollection of his suicidal technique never failed to provoke among the Shaws – and the result was that he died a second before he succeeded in killing himself. The coroner’s court described his death as being ‘from natural causes’.

  ‘Drink is the biggest skeleton in the family cupboard,’ G.B.S. told one of his cousins. But he did not leave this skeleton in its cupboard. He had a choice of making the Shaw drunkenness into ‘either a family tragedy or a family joke’, and he chose the joke. So, in the bookshop window of his works, we may see a cabaret of Shavian aunts and uncles with a chorus of inebriate cousins, and at the centre, a wonderfully hopeless chap, second cousin to a baronet, George Carr Shaw, G.B.S.’s father.

  2

  An Irish Marriage

  Fortunately I have a heart of stone: else my relations would have broken it long ago.

  Shaw to Rachel Mahaffy (6 June 1939)

  The story of George Carr Shaw’s life was simple. He would tell you it had evolved as the retribution for an injury he had once done a cat. He had found this cat, brought it home with him, fed it. But next day he had let his dog chase it and kill it. In his imagination this cat now had its revenge, seeing to it that he would have neither luck nor money. He was unsuccessful because of this cat; unskilled, unsober, and unserious too.

  Between the ages of twenty-three and thirty he had been a clerk at a Dublin ironworks, but in 1845 he lost this job. By means of family influence he landed up with a perfectly superfluous post at the Four Courts, a job without duties or responsibilities. Unfortunately, it was one of the first of such positions to be abolished in the legal reforms of the early 1850s, for which ‘outrage’ George Shaw received a pension of £44 a year. There were opportunities in Dublin for a wholesale corn-merchant (retail trade was impossible for a Shaw). But George Shaw needed capital. Until now he had walked by himself, a gentleman who was no gentleman, and all places were alike to him. He was in his thirty-eighth year and had recently come in contact with a twenty-one-year-old girl, Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, called ‘Bessie’. She was short, thin-lipped, with the jaw of a prize-fighter and a head like a football; but she had an attractive inheritance. George Carr Shaw felt drawn to her. ‘It was at this moment,’ G.B.S. records, ‘that some devil, perhaps commissioned by the Life Force to bring me into the world, prompted my father to propose marriage to Miss Bessie Gurly.’

  *

  The master-spirit among Bessie’s forebears had been her maternal grandfather, a country gentleman of imposing presence whose origin was so obscure that he was understood to have had no legal parents. But he lived en grand seigneur on his property of over two thousand acres in Kilkenny and at a place called Whitechurch to the south of Dublin. Each week he would drive in to a little pawnshop in Winetavern Street, one of the poorest quarters of the city. The name on the door was Cullen, an employee, under cover of whose identity John Whitcroft made his money.

  The squire-pawnbroker wanted respectability by blood. On 29 December 1829 his daughter Lucinda married a ginger-whiskered squire from Carlow named Walter Bagnall Gurly, who was then living nearby at Rathfarnham. ‘He was a wiry, tight, smallish handknit open-air man,’ G.B.S. remembered, able to make his own boats and to ride the most ungovernable horses; an ingenious carpenter, dead shot, indefatigable fisherman: in short, ‘able to do anything except manage his affairs, keep his estate from slipping through his fingers’.

  In ten years of marriage they had one daughter and a son. Then, on 14 January 1839, Mrs Gurly died. Bessie was nine. She was placed under the care of her great-aunt, Ellen Whitcroft, a terrible hump-backed lady. This spidery creature taught her how to dress correctly, to sit motionless and straight; how to breathe, pronounce French, convey orders to servants. She was schooled in harmony and counterpoint, playing the piano ‘with various coins of the realm on the backs of my hands, also with my hair which I wore in two long plaits down my back, tied to the back of my chair, also with a square of pasteboard hung on my neck by a string pretty much as pictures are hung... in order to prevent me looking at my hands’.

  By a programme of constraints and browbeatings, she was ‘educated up to the highest standard of Irish “carriage ladies”’. She never said anything coarse, loved flowers more than human beings and walked through the streets seeing nobody. Her aunt intended a great destiny for her – something that because of her deformity she had never achieved herself: marriage into the nobility. With these superior expectations, Bessie was floated into Dublin Society where she encountered the sinking George Carr Shaw.

  Secretly Bessie detested her aunt and everything that, masquerading as education and religion, had made her childhood miserable. It was now that George Carr Shaw drifted forward to make his bid for Aunt Ellen’s property by proposing marriage to her niece.

  He was not a romantic figure. Almost twice her age, he had a weak mouth, one squinting eye and a number of epileptic ways. ‘If any unpleasant reflection occurred to him, he, if in a room, rubbed his hands rapidly together and ground his teeth. If in a street, he took a short run.’ He was an unconvivial man, with little interest in women. Drink and money were his world.

  But Bessie, who had fallen out with her father, overlooked the squinting eyes, the grinding teeth, and took stock only of George Carr Shaw’s social position and the prospects such a proposal offered of a better life. Yet this was to be a marriage of two blind people, each treating the other as guide dog. ‘Money in marriage is the first and, frequently, the only passion,’ wrote St John Ervine of nineteenth-century Irish marriages. G.B.S.’s parents married for money and were to live impecuniously ever after.

  Aunt Ellen had tolerated George Carr Shaw as Bessie’s chaperon because of his well-connected harmlessness. To be with Shaw was an alibi for almost anything; never before had he been known to take an initiative. So now Aunt Ellen declared the marriage impossible. Then, when none of her objections prevailed, she revealed that Shaw was a known drunkard – in any event it was notorious in the family. Bessie knew how to deal with this. She went round to Shaw and asked him; and he confessed that all his life he had been a bigoted teetotaller. But he did not tell her that he was a teetotaller who drank.

  So the marriage went ahead. Aunt Ellen had one more card to play: she disinherited her niece. This was un
deniably a serious blow to Shaw. Needing money to take advantage of a business opportunity from his brother Henry, he sold his pension for £500 and used this capital to buy a partnership in a corn-merchant business with his brother’s ex-partner, George Clibborn. It was a start – to be supported after his marriage by his wife’s own money and whatever could be regained of Aunt Ellen’s inheritance. It could have been worse.

  This was a good summer for Walter Bagnall Gurly. On 25 May 1852 he married his second wife who, two months before, had given birth to their first daughter; and twenty-three days later, at the same church, St Peter’s in Aungier Street, he attended the wedding of his daughter and George Carr Shaw. As a wedding gift, Aunt Ellen had sent the couple a bundle of IOUs signed by Gurly – which he seized and burnt. Better still was the marriage settlement he had insisted on their signing a few hours before the ceremony. Bessie’s personal assets were listed as ‘one thousand two hundred and fifty-six pounds Nine shillings and two pence Government three and a quarter per cent Stock’. All this, together with income to be derived from her father’s first marriage settlement and from the will of her pawnbroker grandfather, was transferred by deed to two trustees. The effect of this was to ensure that the inheritance would remain Gurly-money, never the Shaw-money it would otherwise have become. So George Carr Shaw had gained a wife and lost a fortune.

  When they drove off after the wedding, George Carr Shaw turned to kiss his bride. She felt so disgusted that she was still protesting more than thirty years later. ‘The rebuff must have opened his eyes a little too late,’ their son judged, ‘to her want of any really mately feeling for him.’

  3

  Devil of a Childhood

  William Morris used to say that it is very difficult to judge who are the best people to take charge of children, but it is certain that the parents are the very worst.

  Shaw to Nancy Astor (21 August 1943)

  They had chosen Liverpool for their honeymoon, and here their first child was conceived. It was nearly the end of their marriage. Years later, Mrs Shaw told her son that, opening her husband’s wardrobe, she had ‘found it full of empty bottles’. The truth had tumbled out. ‘I leave you to imagine,’ wrote G.B.S., ‘the hell into which my mother descended when she found out what shabby-genteel poverty with a drunken husband is like.’

  They returned to Dublin and moved into ‘an awful little kennel with “primitive sanitary arrangements”’, 3 Upper Synge Street – a road of eleven small squat houses which runs round the corner from Harrington Street. Here their three children were born: Lucinda Frances, called Lucy, on 26 March 1853, Elinor Agnes, nicknamed ‘Yuppy’, two years later; and, on 26 July 1856, their son George Bernard, ‘fifty years too soon’, he calculated.

  It was a difficult delivery, a vaginal breech birth that was carried out at Upper Synge Street by Dr John Ringland, Master of the Combe Lying-in Hospital, who had been called in by Bessie’s general practitioner.

  In his nursery days he was called Bob; by the time he had grown into his holland tunic and knickerbockers he had become ‘Sonny’; it was not until he was reborn the child of his own writings in England that he developed the plumage of ‘G.B.S.’

  We first see Bob at the age of one. ‘The young beggar is getting quite outrageous,’ his father writes proudly to Bessie who was staying with her family. ‘I left him this morning roaring and tearing like a bull.’ He could eat his hat, vomit up currants, annoy his teeth and make a jigsaw of unread newspapers. But his chief accomplishment was to go off on marvellous walking expeditions from Papa to Nurse (who was threatening a breakdown) and back again. From his bed he plunged head-first onto the floor; and from the kitchen table he cascaded through a pane of glass without ‘even a pane in his head’.

  Once domesticated, this bull of a boy soon became the sedate Sonny. The most affectionate sound in Synge Street was his father’s jokes. From their talks, Sonny was let in on the secret of how his father had saved the life of Uncle Robert – ‘and, to tell you the truth, I was never so sorry for anything in my life afterwards’. It became a game between them, almost an intimacy, that the son should provoke his father to such exhibitions.

  In a letter to his wife, George Carr Shaw had written of ‘a Mill which Clibborn & I are thinking of taking at Dolphin’s Barn... Wont it be great fun and grandeur to find yourself when you come back the wife of a dusty Miller, so be prepared to have the very life ground out of you...’ Bessie was not amused: he never did anything positive. ‘You are out for once in your life,’ he told her. ‘We have taken the Mill.’

  Dolphin’s Barn Mill was on the country side of the canal. Sonny, who sometimes walked there with his father and sisters before breakfast, used to play under the waterwheel by the millpond and in the big field adjoining the building. ‘The field had one tree in it, at the foot of which I buried our dead dog. It was quite wild. I never saw a human soul in it.’ On the front of Rutland Avenue was a Clibborn & Shaw warehouse, one corner of which had been made into a shop where corn, wheat, flour and locust beans were surreptitiously retailed to the villagers. But they did not prosper. Once, when the firm was almost ruined by the bankruptcy of a debtor, Clibborn wept openly in their office, while Shaw retreated to a corner of the warehouse and cried with laughter at the colossal mischief of it all.

  It was this sense of mischief that Sonny loved, and that G.B.S. believed he inherited. But planted in so many of Papa’s comedies were seeds of disaster. When pretending to fling his son into the canal, he almost succeeded: and a suspicion began to crawl into Sonny’s mind. He went to his mother and whispered his awful discovery, ‘Mama: I think Papa’s drunk.’ ‘When is he ever anything else?’ Bessie retorted with disgust.

  *

  Though he transferred the responsibility for his desolate childhood to his father, the central character in this scene had been his mother. Bessie was a grievously disappointed woman. She believed, and persuaded her son to believe, that ‘everybody had disappointed her, or betrayed her, or tyrannized over her’. From this time onwards Sonny began to see his father through his mother’s eyes, as a man to imitate, but in reverse. It suited George Carr Shaw’s temperament to play along. When he caught Sonny pretending to smoke a toy pipe, he entreated him with dreadful earnestness never to follow his example. In this special Shavian sense, George Carr Shaw became a model father.

  Of his mother, G.B.S. once admitted, ‘I knew very little about her.’ This was partly because she did not concern herself with him. Her own childhood had been made miserable by bullying, but Bessie never bullied; she made her son miserable by neglect. ‘She was simply not a wife or mother at all.’ Needing her attention, he found with dismay that he could do nothing to interest her. In her eyes he was an inferior little male animal tainted with all the potential weaknesses of her husband.

  In his books and letters, G.B.S. places his mother on a carpet of filial loyalty, and he invites every potential biographer to pull it from beneath her feet. His American biographer, Archibald Henderson, scrupulously overlooking this invitation, received in red ink a brusque rebuff: ‘This sympathy with the mother is utterly false. Damn your American sentimentality!’

  In a rare moment of emotion, G.B.S. wrote to Ellen Terry of his ‘devil of a childhood, Ellen, rich only in dreams, frightful & loveless in realities’. But looking directly at such bleakness was too painful. Usually he put on the spectacles of paradox. This paradox became his ‘criticism of life’, the technique by which he turned lack of love inside out and, attracting from the world some of the attention he had been denied by his mother, conjured optimism out of deprivation.

  The fact that neither of his parents cared for him was, he perceived, of enormous advantage. What else could have taught him the value of self-sufficiency? He was spared, too, by their unconcealed disappointment in each other, from lingering illusions about the family. It was remarkable how these paradoxical privileges began to multiply once he became skilled at the game. From his observations he soon deduced the wond
erful impersonality of sex, and the kindness and good sense of distancing yourself from people you loved.

  ‘The fact that I am still alive at 78½ I probably owe largely to her [Bessie’s] complete neglect of me during infancy,’ G.B.S. confided to Marie Stopes. ‘...It used to be a common saying among Dublin doctors in my youth that most women killed their first child by their maternal care... motherhood is not every woman’s vocation.’ G.B.S. believed that his mother preferred her daughters, in particular the red-haired Yuppy, who wilted under her slight attentions. As a child she developed a goitre; only the fortunate absence of medical aid enabled nature to perform a cure. Then at the age of twenty-one, assisted by a sanatorium of doctors, she died of tuberculosis. It could be no accident either that Lucy, Bessie’s second favourite, was to die next following a long period of anorexic ill-health, seven years after her mother’s death. She ‘suffered far more by the process than I did,’ G.B.S. wrote of their upbringing, ‘for she... was not immune, as I and my mother were, from conventional vanities’.

  There was no feuding at Synge Street. The house was small, but so far as possible they treated one another like furniture. ‘As children,’ G.B.S. explained, ‘we had to find our own way in a household where there was no hate nor love.’ Sonny’s own way led him to the conclusion that nature had intended an element of antipathy as a defence against incest. Happily his family had been well dosed with this preventative.

  G.B.S. believed that he had inherited from his parents qualities that they had found incompatible but which, in expiation, he must reconcile within himself. Only by marrying opposites, through paradox or a dialectical process of synthesis, did he feel that he could fulfil his moral obligation to optimism and a better future. In place of the warring of envy and class, he was to substitute a Hegelian policy of inclusiveness. But to include everything in his sights he was obliged to fly his balloon of words into a stratosphere of hypothesis where, in all its thin remoteness, his vision became complete.