Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  In this company Shaw became a figure of attention and authority. He had no money but he spent all his advice on them, nuggets of information laboriously quarried out at the British Museum about the children’s books, boots, careers, clothing, diet, education, illnesses, pianos and so on; and later, when he was earning money, he gave it to them in sums ranging between £10 and £200 and underwrote a good part of the children’s schooling. ‘Old grandfather Shaw’, as Ida Beatty called him, was a father and a friend to them all.

  Shaw made his appearance among them as a practical man, a part invested by his imagination with much glamour. He judged them to be hopeless, in which condition they needed him. But he also had need of them, since, for all their hopelessness, they had something almost entirely lacking in the Shaws: an atmosphere of family affection. Pakenham Beatty was extravagantly fond of his two sisters-in-law and even went on to shower his attentions jointly on Shaw’s sister Lucy and a friend of their mother, Jane Patterson. But Shaw refused to be shocked. One afternoon he came across his friend recovering from delirium tremens and surrounded by whispering relatives who, having bullied him into making a will, were assembled as if for a funeral. ‘I dispersed them with roars of laughter and inquiries after pink snakes &c, an exhibition of bad taste which at last converted the poor devil’s wandering apprehensive look into a settled grin... Tomorrow he goes to a retreat at Rickmansworth, to be reformed.’

  Shaw was a rock in this Bohemian whirlpool, splashed, invigorated and unchanged. The Beattys added to his education outside the British Museum. He loved Beatty for his bad verses (‘something too awful’) and for presenting such an atrocious advertisement for the romantic life. He re-christened him ‘Paquito’, a name that would serve as an alias for the eponymous hero of Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. ‘My plays are full of your jokes,’ he told him.

  Paquito’s letters to Shaw were mostly in high-flown and facetious verse. His non-poetic intervals were devoured by the ambition to be an amateur light-weight champion. ‘I am about to take boxing lessons from the scientific Ned Donnelly, a very amiable though powerful person in appearance... If you wish,’ he invited Shaw, ‘these lessons which I learn from Donnelly I will teach unto you.’ Shaw couldn’t resist. The comedy of all this was serious business for Shaw. He did his initial training at the British Museum, battling with Pierce Egan’s Boxiana and other expositions. Paquito had presented him with a copy of Donnelly’s Self-Defence (‘the best book of its kind ever published’) and ‘insisted on my accompanying him to all the boxing exhibitions’. In consequence Shaw was to gain among his political acquaintances the reputation as ‘a tall man with a straight left’ whose knowledge of pugilism might prove valuable if it came to revolution.

  There were times when Shaw himself seemed to accept such fantasies. He showed up at a school-of-arms in Panton Street called the London Athletic Club where he obtained tuition from Ned Donnelly himself who, as Professor of Boxing, had instructed the most brilliant light-weight of his day, Jack Burke, on whom Shaw based the hero of the novel he was writing. A month after finishing this book, on 17 March 1883, he entered the Queensberry Amateur Boxing Championships on the turf at Lillie Bridge. At a weight of ten stone (140 lbs) he applied to take part in both Middle and Heavyweight Classes, and was given a place for both categories in the programme, but not in the ring. It was the climax of his prize-fighting career, a paper apotheosis, after which he found he ‘had exhausted the comedy of the subject’.

  Shaw’s long affair with boxing was to worry some of his admirers. How could this champion of the vegetable world involve himself in brute pugilism? ‘Paradoxing is a useful rhyme to boxing,’ he once thanked a journalist. ‘I will make a note of it.’ He saw at once the great publicity in pugilism. Newspapers, he believed, were ‘fearfully mischievous’, yet they were creators of public opinion. So what could be more natural than to marry one such brute profession to another? Since the public were more interested in sport than serious politics, Shaw was to spread his political views through the sports pages as he would the music and art columns. Under his treatment boxing was to become an allegory of capitalism, the prize-ring a place where he could exhibit Shavian theories on distribution of income and award a points decision to socialism.

  Shaw’s knowledge of boxing formed part of an armoury that, by the end of the 1880s, was to make him, in Max Beerbohm’s opinion, ‘the most brilliant and remarkable journalist in London’. Unlike bicycling, it didn’t get you anywhere, and it was not as pleasant as swimming which, with its cleansing effect and the sensation of rendering the body weightless, almost non-existent, became ‘the only exercise I have ever taken for its own sake’. But his shadow boxing, even before it was converted into words, was the essence of Shavianism.

  For almost six years he visited the Beattys most Sundays, sparred several platonic rounds with Paquito the poet, then sat at the feet of his wife Ida, practising French. This was the first of numerous triangular relationships in which he re-created his mesmeric but chaste version of Vandeleur Lee with Lucinda and George Carr Shaw, and kept those ghosts at peace. ‘Dont talk to me of romances: I was sent into the world expressly to dance on them with thick boots – to shatter, stab, and murder them,’ he challenged Ida. ‘I defy you to be romantic about me... and if you attempt it, I will go straight to Paquito; tell him you are being drawn into the whirlpool of fascination which has engulfed all the brunettes I know.’ This was shadow boxing from which Shaw emerged very much in control of a situation that did not really exist. He could not exclude dreams of more orthodox affairs, but ‘all these foolish fancies only want daylight and fresh air to scatter them,’ he instructed Ida, as if the fancies had been hers and not his.

  Shaw made himself attractive to women by informing them he was attractive – then warning them against this damnable attractiveness. He converted the neglected Sonny into a besieged G.B.S., who would have fainted with surprise ‘if a woman came up to me in the street and said “I DONT adore you”’.

  Being in love with Shaw could be a bewildering business. ‘You are very contradictory,’ Aileen Bell complained. ‘...What am I to do?’ He teased and tested; he loved you and he loved you not. He achieved an air of confidence by taking away your own confidence. ‘When we did fight in the old days,’ Aileen Bell wrote to him, ‘I used to go upstairs afterwards, & stamp about my room & abuse you, saying “I hate George Shaw”.’ His talent was to disconcert. He charmed you, then made you too angry for words and (since the affair was one of words) impotent. On paper, where he held absolute authority, he was promiscuous. He attributed to others the romantic daydreams he suppressed in himself, and encircled them in fantastical webs of jealousies and misunderstandings.

  Shaw’s relations with women during his first four or five years in London are cryptically recorded in his diary notebooks. At the end of 1876, he noted: ‘Inauguration during the year of the Terpsichore episode. Also La Carbonaja.’ Terpsichore was his codename for Ermina Pertoldi, the ballerina of the Alhambra Theatre and a character in Immaturity. La Carbonaja was the daughter of a London hostess who gave him a medal of the Virgin Mary, hoping to convert him to Catholicism. The following year La Carbonaja is ‘in the ascendant’ and in 1879 ‘La C flickers until 11th [January] When the star of Leonora gains the ascendant (Terpsichore evaporated)... Made the acquaintance of the Lawson family on 5th [January], and met Leonora on the 11th.’ From ‘Leonora’ he preserved a pressed flower together with an odd note: ‘These flowers were plucked from the garden of a millionaire by one of his would-be brides as a memento of a sweet prelude to a “might have been”.’

  Unable to come to terms with women except in make-believe, Shaw conducted his most successful affairs from the galleries of theatres or his gymnasium in the British Museum, and worked himself eventually to sleep at night. Confusion began when this make-believe came in contact with the actual world. Between 1878 and 1894 he kept a correspondence in play with Elinor Huddart, author of My Heart and I and other novels that wo
uld have won her notoriety ‘if I could have persuaded her to... use the same pen name, instead of changing it for every book’. She had been impressed by his kindness and good sense. ‘How you manage to pick my work to pieces from end to end,’ she wrote to him on 16 September 1878, ‘and yet never hurt me (and I am rather easily hurt) I cannot conceive.’ One reason she was not hurt was that Shaw had invented an Elinor of his own, possessed by his spirit and made into a new creature. ‘You are the only man friend I have ever made,’ she told him. ‘...I am content to be your friend and no man’s wife.’ For someone who appeared so frivolous it was astonishing how persistent he could be. He beat down on her like a sun, warming her, blistering her, trying to blow a new climate round her and imbue her with fresh life as a writer. But ‘I can put forth no new leaves,’ she objected. ‘I am not a beech tree... Leave my ashes in peace, they can do you no good.’ But he would not leave her. He wanted to pour his will-power into women so that their achievements became the children of the union.

  In his exertions to work his will vicariously through women his flirtations became those of a schoolmaster. ‘I beg of you,’ Aileen Bell once wrote to him, ‘not to lecture quite so much.’ However much he did lecture, urge, flatter, coax, he could not make the worlds of fantasy and actuality coalesce.

  Shaw’s love eliminated many things to which women were accustomed. In his plays he was to create a stereotype, Woman-the-Huntress, whom he sent into battle against the Victorian Woman-on-a-pedestal. Debarred by his childhood from forming close emotional attachments, he gave his allegiance to ideas – but saw women as vehicles for those ideas. Shaw took the body away from women and addressed their minds. His own mind was astonishingly fast, but emotionally he was lame. The result was that women found themselves continually out of step with him. When Shaw looked at a woman, he appeared to turn his back on her and raise a mirror. It was a disconcerting stare, positive, remote, and appearing so bold while actually in retreat.

  *

  Sonny had wanted love; G.B.S. soared wittily above it; and Shaw was pulled between the two. The tug-of-war moved critically backwards and forwards over his first serious girl friend, Alice Lockett. In February 1882 he returned to Leyton and, while recuperating from scarlet fever, was introduced to her. She was twenty-three and robustly good-looking. He fell violently in love – which is to say, he was strongly attracted to her. After his convalescence he managed to return to Leyton by the uncharacteristic means of getting temporary employment there, earning six guineas in as many days counting votes during the election of Poor Law guardians. He saw her, walked in the moonlight, talked, flirted. By 17 April, he felt able to report to Elinor Huddart that ‘Alice thinks I am in love with her’. The honeymoon was almost over and the contest between them ready to begin.

  Alice and her sister Jane had been conventionally brought up and educated at a Victorian ladies’ college. In 1879 their father had died and the next year their elder brother also died. Their mother suffered a paralytic stroke, and her two daughters, transferred to the care of their grandmother, prepared to take up professions. Jane, who was experimenting with a novel called Yeast (exorbitantly condemned by Shaw), studied for a career in education; Alice, who enrolled in a nursing course at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, was taking singing lessons from Mrs Shaw.

  The affair was carried on between the railway station and piano stool (‘Oh the infinite mischief that a woman may do by stooping forward to turn over a sheet of music!’). Alice felt she had been relegated in the social order by her family misfortunes, and nursed dreams of a dramatic ascent up the ladder of society; Shaw was determined to kick that ladder away. Alice sensed a power in Shaw, but one which he was often misusing. In place of manly leadership, he presented her with exhibitions of clever indecisiveness. Qµarrelling between them was inevitable. ‘I hate people to hesitate,’ she chided him.

  In one of his early notebooks Shaw had jotted down his observations on the typical society woman. ‘Clever, frivolous, vain, egocentric,’ he wrote. ‘Pretty & knows it. Sits silent and affects the scornful. Also a morbid sensitiveness and a consequent pleasure in inflicting hurts on others. Effect of this type of egotist in making others seem intolerably egotistical...’

  It was to save Alice from becoming this woman that Shaw exerted all his powers. He re-created her as a figure from his novels and she became someone through whom he attacked the London society that had lured Lee and Lucinda away from him and, when he followed, rejected him.

  Shaw divided Alice into two people. Miss Lockett had been stiffened by the starch of society and was full of protective scorn and attempted sarcasm. Towards men she bore herself tyrannically, having no notion that any interest of men in women might exist apart from a desire to marry. But sometimes Miss Lockett forgot to be offended, scornful, pretentious – and Alice emerged. Alice was the child in her, sympathetic, unspoilt, spontaneously generous, someone capable of considering her own instinctive judgement a safer guide than the formulated rules of society. Alice was capable too of Shavian improvement; the proud and foolish Miss Lockett had gone too far down the hackneyed road of her own dignity to be brought back. Between these two beings Shaw enacted a perpetual drama. Miss Lockett ‘is the dragon that preys upon Alice,’ he told her, ‘and I will rescue Alice from her’.

  Shaw dramatized in Miss Alice Lockett a division he knew to exist within himself. In one corner there was G.B.S., ‘resolved... to walk with the ears of his conscience strained on the alert, to do everything as perfectly as it could be done, and – oh – monstrous! – to improve all those with whom he came in contact’. In the opposite corner stood Sonny, the Irish contender, who was not afraid to become ‘as a little child again and was not ashamed to fall in love with Alice’.

  But the voice that lectured Miss Lockett on the importance of becoming Alice was that of G.B.S., not Sonny who could seldom ‘snatch a few moments from his withering power’. G.B.S. worked day and night; he was seldom out of love with his work – in which condition he accused Alice of taking advantage ‘of the weakest side of my character’, and warned her to believe nothing that Sonny whispered to her.

  The crisis in Shaw was real. Before a caress with Alice had time to cool, he longed to return to his ascetic life, to his books, his developing socialism. But then the memory of her beauty could prevent him going to bed in peace, and gave him a thrill that could last ‘through a political meeting and four hours of private debate on dry questions of economy’. Shaw’s appeals to Alice were often the means by which he tried to offend her so as to save himself from falling in love. But sometimes he did not have the heart to succeed – and then Sonny would whisper things that G.B.S. would have to shatter with his laughter.

  Shaw had hit on the device of pretending to be what he was – but with a comic exaggeration that prompted disbelief. He pretended to be ‘in love’ with Alice and she, congratulating herself on not being taken in, accused him of insincerity. Sometimes it seemed as if she were only speaking the lines he had prepared for her. It was oddly unreal. ‘We are too cautious, too calculating, too selfish, too heartless, to venture head over heels in love,’ he wrote to her. ‘And yet there is something – ’ Both tried to limit their vulnerability to the other. But Alice did not understand where her power lay – she never realized into what extraordinary suspense her beauty put him. In attempting to hurt him with deliberate cruelty, she merely became the stubborn and timid Miss Lockett of his hostile imagination, squaring up to her impregnable enemy G.B.S.

  ‘George Shaw, I consider you an object to be pitied – but the truth is I might just as well speak to a stone. Nothing affects you... Now your book has failed – for which I am truly sorry for your sake, although it is perhaps better for other people. I suppose you mean to begin another and be another year dependent on your mother. Why on earth don’t you work?’

  Alice had been in the marriage market since leaving school and looked on ‘love-making’ as the most serious business in life. It was because Shaw beli
eved that Sonny was incapable of inspiring love in women that he invented G.B.S. Alice tried to understand him – but he took care that she should not. In serious moments he could make her see with his eyes, flattering her (‘Must I eternally flatter flatter flatter flatter flatter?’) by his apparent conviction – which she shared – that she was capable of a higher life. But his political dreams had no meaning for her so ‘it is my small troubles that I go to you with,’ he told her.

  Alice Lockett’s challenge to Shaw had been to make him feel his loneliness most painfully. At moments his self-command wavered. ‘Write to me,’ he asked her, ‘and I will make love to you – to relieve the enormous solitude which I carry about with me. I do not like myself, and sometimes I do not like you; but there are moments when our two unfortunate souls seem to cling to the same spar in a gleam of sunshine, free of the other wreckage for a moment.’

  Miss Lockett’s social ambitions would not allow her to be stranded in this way; she wanted to travel first class. As for Shaw, it was Sonny who was left senseless and G.B.S. who appeared ‘too strong for you. I snap your chains like Samson.’