Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  *

  Shaw finished Immaturity on 28 September 1879 and completed his revisions six weeks later. It was now a question, in the words of his father, of ‘thrusting it down the throats of some of the publishers and so getting it into the hands of the mob’. On 7 November Shaw called on Hurst & Blackett and the following day sent them the manuscript. Next week they declined it.

  Of his disappointment he showed nothing. At Victoria Grove he was reproached with laziness – his father in Dublin adding to the chorus and, to George’s exasperation, obtaining a testimonial from Uniacke Townshend. Now and then he had gone half-heartedly out to look for work – for example, after an introduction by the poet Richard Hengist Horne, to the Imperial Bank at South Kensington. ‘Your son must not talk about religion or give his views thereon,’ Horne warned Mrs Shaw, ‘& he must make up his mind to work & do what he is told – if not there is no use his calling.’ In such circumstances it was not difficult to avoid employment. But as the pressure from his family tightened he was driven to more elaborate means of escape, and eventually these failed him. From his cousin Mrs Cashel Hoey he had received an introduction to the manager of the Edison Telephone Company, Arnold White, to whom on 5 October 1879, while still revising Immaturity, he wrote the sort of devastatingly honest letter he could usually rely on to extricate himself:

  ‘In the last two years I have not filled any post, nor have I been doing anything specially calculated to qualify me for a business one...

  My only reason for seeking commercial employment is a pecuniary one. I know how to wait for success in literature, but I do not know how to live on air in the interim. My family are in difficulties... However, I should be loth to press you for a place in which I might not be the right man.’

  Arnold White, who liked Shaw, was not put off by this letter and offered him employment in the Way-Leave Department of the Edison Telephone Company. Shaw began working there on 14 November, immediately following the rejection of Immaturity. After six weeks he had earned two shillings and sixpence, and forfeited by way of expenses two guineas, having agreed to be paid on a commission basis. His job was to persuade people in the East End of London to allow insulators, poles and derricks to bristle about their roofs and gardens. ‘I liked the exploration involved,’ he remembered, ‘but my shyness made the business of calling on strangers frightfully uncongenial... the impatient rebuffs I had to endure [were]... ridiculously painful to me.’

  The truth appeared to be that he could not afford regular employment: ‘I am under an absolute necessity to discontinue my services forthwith,’ he told the head of his department. As a result of this threatened resignation he was given a basic wage of £48 (equivalent to £2,080 in 1997) a year and, two months later, promoted at a salary of £80, to be head of the department and ‘organize the work of more thick-skinned adventurers instead of doing it myself’. He was now stationed in one of the basement offices of a building in Queen Victoria Street, loud with Americans who all adored Mr Edison, execrated his rival Mr Bell, worked with a terrible energy out of all proportion to the results achieved, and dreamed emotionally of telephone transmitters patented to their own formula.

  Shaw waited patiently for his novel to rescue him. But Immaturity was rejected by every British and American publisher to whom he sent it. Sampson Low begged to be spared the pleasure of reading it. ‘No,’ wrote George Meredith for Chapman & Hall; ‘unattractive’, decided John Morley at Macmillan. Immaturity was ‘a museum specimen of the Victorian novel,’ Shaw later decided, which had been written at the wrong time.

  ‘The Education Act of 1871 was producing readers who had never before bought books... and publishers were finding that these people wanted not George Eliot and the excessively literary novice Bernard Shaw, but such crude tales of impossible adventures published in penny numbers only for schoolboys. The success of Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde fairy tale, forced this change on the attention of the publishers; and I, as a belated intellectual, went under completely... Had I understood this situation at the time I should have been a happier novice instead of an apparently hopeless failure.’

  3

  Some Further Experiments

  The progress of the world depends on the people who refuse to accept facts and insist on the satisfaction of their instincts.

  Back to Methuselah

  Something was wrong with the Edison telephone: it ‘bellowed your most private communications all over the house instead of whispering them with some sort of discretion,’ Shaw wrote. ‘This was not what the British stockbroker wanted...’ On 5 June 1880 the Company amalgamated with the Bell Telephone Company and gave its employees one month’s notice. Shaw, turning down an invitation to apply for a job with the new United Telephone Company of London, re-entered the literary world.

  Immaturity was to lie ‘dumb and forgotten’ for fifty years; the Passion Play and My Dear Dorothea remained unpublished during Shaw’s life. Of more than a dozen other stories and articles he had written in 1879 on ‘subjects ranging from orchestral conducting to oakum picking’ most were rejected, some were lost. The two that were eventually published earned him fifteen shillings. In the summer of 1880 he approached John Morley, the new editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, enclosing some examples of his work and asking whether he might make a music or theatre critic. ‘I cannot hesitate to say,’ Morley answered, ‘that in my opinion you would do well to get out of journalism.’ Describing this period later on, G.B.S. wrote:

  ‘I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father’s old age: I hung on to his coat tails... People wondered at my heartlessness... My mother worked for my living instead of preaching that it was my duty to work for hers: therefore take off your hat to her, and blush.’

  Despite the failure of Immaturity, a career in novels seemed the only one open to him. Everyone wrote novels in the 1880s. Drama, economics, philosophy were unsaleable. He began to teach himself shorthand; he studied harmony and counterpoint; he persuaded his mother to train his voice by ‘the Method’ until he could sing ‘as well as a man without twopennorth of physical endowment can be made to sing’; he persisted in playing the piano; he read greedily and, worst of all, he wrote.

  He started on his second novel that summer, marching through it at the rate of a thousand words each day. ‘The only test of competence is acceptance for publication,’ he later wrote: ‘friendly opinions are of no use.’ But every opinion seemed unfriendly. His father was constantly fretting at him to find ‘something to do to earn some money. It is much wanted by all of us.’ Mrs Shaw unsuccessfully sought interviews for him; and Lucy, having failed to get their mother to turn George out of the house, had persuaded McNulty (as the only person likely to have influence) to write imploring him to take a job. Though sweet on Lucy, McNulty felt uneasy over this commission which put an end to their correspondence for nine months.

  Shaw deafened himself to everything, wrote steadily, using some of his experiences at the Edison Telephone Company and some retaliatory observations of Lucy, and finished the novel which he called The Irrational Knot on 1 December 1880.

  The inventor-engineer hero of this book, Ned Conolly, is not a self-portrait in the sense that Smith had been, but he embodies much that Shaw had learnt to admire since coming to London, and expresses many of his newest ideas. As a workman, a man of talent and integrity, Conolly opposes the perpetual falsehood of London society. ‘You seem to see everything reversed,’ one character tells him; and another, a clergyman, describes his opinions as being ‘exactly upside down’. In sympathy with this upside-down view, Shaw inverts the conventional plot of the Victorian novel by having his heroine marry Conolly near the start and lose him at the end of the book.

  Conolly is one of Nature’s gentlemen, recognizing excellence by achievement, never by rank. The story throws up almost every situation that could shock society, from illegitimacy and alcoholic marriages to adultery and death. Aiming his atta
ck on the ‘villainous institution’ of marriage, Shaw later described The Irrational Knot as having been ‘an early attempt... to write A Doll’s House in English’. In a deceitfully conducted world, it is the half-dead who flourish: men like tailors’ dummies, and women like dolls to be gaped at in glass cages. Conolly will not accept such fashionable deception even if it means giving up a woman who sexually attracts him.

  Shaw spent a fortnight revising the 641 ‘prodigiously long’ pages of the novel. On 15 December 1880 he sent the manuscript to Macmillan whose reader reported that it was ‘a novel of the most disagreeable kind... There is nothing conventional either about the structure or the style... the thought of the book is all wrong; the whole idea of it is odd, perverse and crude... So far as your publication is concerned, it is out of the question. There is too much of adultery and the like matters.’

  ‘The better I wrote,’ Shaw concluded, ‘the less chance I had.’ As an extreme measure, Shaw eventually sent The Irrational Knot to an American publisher ‘who refused it on the ground of its immorality’. British publishers took a more sophisticated line. Smith Elder regretted that a book ‘possessing considerable literary merit’ was ‘too conversational’; William Heinemann not only declined to publish it but advised the author not to submit it to anyone else: ‘the hero is a machine like working man without any attractive qualities – an absolutely impossible person too.’ Shaw agreed, in his fashion. Reviewing his novels himself in 1892 – a need arising ‘through the extreme difficulty of finding anyone else who has read them’ – he wrote of The Irrational Knot: ‘This was really an extraordinary book for a youth of twenty-four to write; but, from the point of view of the people who think that an author has nothing better to do than to amuse them, it was a failure...’

  4

  Respectable Habits

  What people call health – appetite, weight, beefiness – is a mistake. Fragility is the only endurable condition.

  Shaw to Charlotte Payne-Townshend (4 April 1898)

  On 23 December 1880, a week after The Irrational Knot had been sent to Macmillan, the Shaws moved out of Victoria Grove to an unfurnished apartment on the second floor of 37 Fitzroy Street.

  The advantage for George was its proximity to the British Museum. He had recently started to use the Reading Room, and now began going there regularly. Here, in what Gissing called ‘the Valley of the Shadow of Books’, he found a home. It became his club, his university, a refuge, and the centre of his life. He felt closer to strangers in this place than to his own family. He worked here daily for some eight years, applying for more than three hundred books each year, advancing through the Encyclopaedia Britannica, medical and municipal statistics for future articles, writing lectures and letters to the press, adding to his musical knowledge and completing his long literary apprenticeship. ‘My debt to that great institution... is inestimable.’

  It was partly as a result of his reading that in January 1881 he became a vegetarian. Shelley had first ‘opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet,’ he recorded.

  Never again may blood of bird or beast

  Stain with its venomous stream a human feast!

  While investigating the art of eating out cheaply, Shaw came across a number of the inexpensive vegetarian restaurants that had recently opened. During his first five years in London he had grown ‘tired of beef and mutton, the steam and grease, the waiter looking as though he had been caught in a shower of gravy and not properly dried, the beer, the prevailing redness of nose, and the reek of the slaughter-house that convicted us all of being beasts of prey. I fled to the purer air of the vegetarian restaurant.’

  Shaw hoped that vegetarian food might relieve the severe headaches that had started to attack him each month. In one sense, vegetarianism came easily to him. A symptom of his neglect in Ireland had been the poor diet; the only food he had liked was the stoneground bread which his mother had occasionally buttered for him. To reject all this – the evidence of his own rejection – was no hardship. ‘I am no gourmet,’ he wrote: ‘eating is not a pleasure to me, only a troublesome necessity, like dressing or undressing.’ He looked forward to a time when people would subsist on an ecstatic diet of air and water. This was Shaw’s ambrosia, and the food of his gods.

  ‘If I were to eat it [meat], my evacuations would stink; and I should give myself up for dead,’ he wrote in the last year of his life. Too little, he felt, was made of the fact that a frightened animal, terrified by smelling blood and seeing other animals killed in the slaughterhouse, stank. The flesh of such an animal, Shaw suggested, was tainted with poison and to eat it involved abusing the adaptiveness of the digestive system.

  The sense of being a living grave for murdered animals filled him with repugnance. Part of this horror arose from the kinship he felt for animals – a fellow-feeling reinforced by the argument of Darwin and other naturalists establishing man’s connection with animals. After which the practice of meat-eating became ‘cannibalism with its heroic dish omitted’.

  Having found from his experiments in the side-street restaurants round Bloomsbury that he could make a financial saving from putting his principles into practice, he went on to recommend vegetarianism as a means of world economy. ‘My objection to meat is that it costs too much,’ he wrote many years later, ‘and involves the slavery of men and women to edible animals that is undesirable.’ His campaign was to be an example of his dialectical skill.

  Abstinence from dead bodies did not necessarily produce longevity, he argued, but affected the quality of living. He reminded those Englishmen in whom the superstition persisted that ‘by eating a beefsteak he can acquire the strength and courage of the bull’, that the bull (like an elephant) was vegetarian. He was sensitive to a need for scotching the popular myth that vegetarians were effeminate. Abstention from meat eating ‘seems to produce a peculiar ferocity,’ he noted. ‘...And it is the worst form of ferocity: that is, virtuous indignation.’ All his life he promoted vegetarians as the most pugnacious of people: ‘Hitler, they say, was a vegetarian; and I can well believe it.’

  G.B.S. had an air of knowing what was best for people. He calculated that, when the unappetizing truth was coated with Shavian sauce, it would go down a treat. So we often get from him fewer statements of truth than statements designed to hoodwink us into the truth. In private he could write: ‘I am a vegetarian purely on humanitarian and mystical grounds; and I have never killed a flea or a mouse vindictively or without remorse.’ This was the essential Shaw. But G.B.S. became the most unsentimental of vegetarians. ‘He has no objection to the slaughter of animals as such,’ his printed card on Vegetarian Diet reads. ‘He knows that if we do not kill animals they will kill us... But he urges humane killing and does not enjoy it as a sport.’

  From the nitrogenous point of view, and in line with Swift’s modest proposal for the Irish, he saw no objection to a diet of tender babies, carefully selected, cleanly killed and gently roasted. Eaten with sugar, or a little beer, such a dish would, he estimated, leave nothing to be desired in the way of carbon, but: ‘I prefer bread and butter.’ If eating people was wrong, so was eating pigs. Bringing millions of disagreeable animals into existence expressly to kill, scorch and ingest their bodies was a monstrous practice which made our children callous to butchery and bloodshed.

  Shaw needed courage to insist on his new diet in these early years. Usually it was wiser not to tell anyone he was vegetarian; otherwise he would be confronted with alarming quantities of breadcrumb preparations. At home he ate those vegetables the others took with their fish or meat. Some mornings a housemaid deposited among his books and papers a bowl of glue-like porridge and this often remained there for days while Shaw occasionally spooned a sticky mouthful or two. When travelling, he liked to carry lunch with him, diving his hands into his pockets and coming up with a fistful of almonds and raisins. He enjoyed advising vegetarians to avoid as much as possible all vegetables – particularly asparagus which gave one’s urine a disagreeable smell
– but it was impossible in England to do without potatoes and brussels sprouts. The vegetarian foods, with names ending in -ose, which were variously disguised forms of oil cake, revolted him; but he liked cheese and fruit, tolerated omelettes for many years, and developed an increasingly sweet tooth for chocolate biscuits, fruit cake, honey, even heaped spoonfuls of sugar.

  He drank water, soda water, barley water, an innocent beverage named Instant Postum, ginger beer, milk, cocoa, and ‘I dont refuse chocolate in the afternoon when I can get it’. But no tea, ‘however mediocre’, very little coffee and never alcohol. He had been watching the effect of alcohol with the eye of an expert. ‘My father drank too much. I have worked too much.’ It was probably as much a weakness in his character, he later acknowledged, as a strength that compelled him to be such a strenuous teetotaller. But that was not the point. Reviewing his first nine years in London – ‘years of unbroken failure and rebuff, with crises of broken boots and desperate clothes... penniless, loveless, and hard as nails’ – he concluded that ‘I am quite certain that if I had drunk as much as a single glass of beer a day... my powers of endurance would have been enormously diminished’.

  Characteristically, he was to ridicule prohibition, assert that ‘tea does more harm in the world than beer’, buy shares in a municipal public house and eventually advocate the Russian method of piping vodka (‘a comparatively mild poison’) into society under efficient government control.