Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  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 wonderful 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.

  He writes of a strangeness ‘which made me all my life a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it... I was at home only in the realm of my imagination, and at my ease only with the mighty dead.’ It is this voice from the living dead that, despite the marvellous cadence, chilled his audience. In the lost childhood of Sonny the philosophy of G.B.S. was conceived. ‘What else can I do?’ he had asked. He strove to bring the world into harmony with his lonely nature, but the world reacted subconsciously to what was suppressed as well as to what he proclaimed. He could see everything but touch little. For what he had done was replace the first loveless reality with a dream. ‘I very seldom dream of my mother,’ he told Gilbert Murray;

  ‘but when I do, she is my wife as well as my mother. When this first occurred to me (well on in my life), what surprised me when I awoke was that the notion of incest had not entered into the dream: I had taken it as a matter of course that the maternal function included the wifely one; and so did she. What is more, the sexual relation acquired all the innocence of the filial one, and the filial one all the completeness of the sexual one... if circumstances tricked me into marrying my mother before I knew she was my mother, I should be fonder of her than I could ever be of a mother who was not my wife, or a wife who was not my mother.’

  Only in his imagination was such completeness possible.

  Most of the time Sonny and his sisters were abandoned to the servants – ‘and such servants, Good God!’ The exception was ‘my excellent Nurse Williams’ who left while Sonny was still very young. But what could you expect on £8 a year? ‘I had my meals in the kitchen,’ G.B.S. recalled, ‘mostly of stewed beef, which I loathed, badly cooked potatoes, sound or diseased as the case might be, and much too much tea out of brown delft teapots left to “draw” on the hob until it was pure tannin. Sugar I stole... I hated the servants and liked my mother because, on one or two rare and delightful occasions when she buttered my bread for me, she buttered it thickly instead of merely wiping a knife on it... I could idolize her to the utmost pitch of my imagination and had no sordid or disillusioning contacts with her. It was a privilege to be taken for a walk or a visit with her...’

  Occasionally Bessie would take him to see Aunt Ellen, hoping that the old lady would feel sufficiently attracted to leave him her property. Sonny seemed mesmerized by this strange little hump-backed lady with her pretty face and magical deformity. One Sunday morning Papa announced that she was dead, and Sonny ran off to the solitude of the garden to cry, terrified that his grief would last for ever. When he ‘discovered that it lasted on
ly an hour,’ wrote G.B.S., ‘and then passed completely away’, he had his first taste of realism.

  Shaw was unable to tolerate feelings of sadness. ‘People who cry and grieve never remember,’ he wrote. ‘I never grieve and never forget.’ Sadness was a poison to his system and before absorption it had to be converted into something else. His attitude to death was the most extreme example of this manufacture of cheerfulness. Papa, he saw, ‘found something in a funeral, or even in a death, which tickled his sense of humor.

  ‘...the sorest bereavement does not cause men to forget wholly that time is money. Hence, though we used to proceed slowly and sadly enough through the streets or terraces at the early stages of our progress, when we got into the open a change came over the spirit in which the coachmen drove. Encouraging words were addressed to the horses; whips were flicked; a jerk all along the line warned us to slip our arms through the broad elbow-straps of the mourning-coaches, which were balanced on longitudinal poles by enormous and totally unelastic springs; and then the funeral began in earnest. Many a clinking run have I had through that bit of country at the heels of some deceased uncle who had himself many a time enjoyed the same sport. But in the immediate neighbourhood of the cemetery the houses recommenced; and at that point our grief returned upon us with overwhelming force: we were able barely to crawl along to the great iron gates where a demoniacal black pony was waiting with a sort of primitive gun-carriage and a pall to convey our burden up the avenue to the mortuary chapel, looking as if he might be expected at every step to snort fire, spread a pair of gigantic bat’s wings, and vanish, coffin and all, in thunder and brimstone.’

  In this way, Sonny began to laugh pain out of existence. Detachment from the fear of death was a step towards Shavian invulnerability in life. His death-anxiety was transferred into a fear of poverty (which, with a little courage and thought, we could eliminate), and any sediment of apprehension absorbed into a hygienic campaign against earth burial. Freed from escapist fables of personal immortality, death became an intensely democratic process. We began to die when more people wished us dead than wished us alive. Many a colleague, on the death of a wife, son or mother, was to find himself in receipt of Shaw’s feeling congratulations. ‘Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant,’ he instructed Edith Lyttelton after the death of her husband. ‘...Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing – a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.’

  4

  The Magician Appears

  I am an Irishman without a birth certificate.

  Shaw to Denis Johnston (1 April 1938)

  Sometime after her marriage Bessie was raised up into a new world of ‘imagination, idealization, the charm of music, the charm of lovely seas’ by a mysterious intruder, called Lee, one of the originals of George du Maurier’s Svengali. He was a ‘mesmeric conductor and daringly original teacher of singing,’ G.B.S. records. It was the extraordinary effect he produced on Bessie that impressed her son. Sonny watched him closely.

  There was something gypsy-like about his appearance. His face ‘was framed with pirate-black whiskers’ and he wore his luxuriant black hair long. He had a deformed foot and limped with peculiar elegance. But it was the confidence with which he asserted his heterodox opinions that Sonny noticed more than anything else. He noticed too the way his mother listened, the way she came alive under Lee’s spell.

  Sonny did not like Lee, but he could not help admiring him. He was, it seems, about six years old when his mother introduced this stranger into Synge Street. But, ‘as his notion of play was to decorate my face with moustaches and whiskers in burnt cork in spite of the most furious resistance I could put up, our encounter was not a success; and the defensive attitude in which it left me lasted, though without the least bitterness, until the decay of his energies and the growth of mine put us on more than equal terms’.

  G.B.S. never knew when Lee and his mother met. Lee claimed to have been born in Kilrush, County Clare, the natural son of Colonel Crofton Moore Vandeleur, MP. When he was a boy he had fallen down a flight of stairs. His wound was badly dressed, and though he wore his lameness ‘as if it were a quality instead of a defect’, he was left with a lifelong animosity towards orthodox medical science. He had never been to school and had ‘nothing good to say of any academic institution’. Instead he provided himself with the title ‘Professor of Music’ and went on to pioneer a revolutionary discipline of voice training which he called ‘the Method’. He was more than a singing teacher: he was a philosopher of voice. Music, he would tell Sonny, was his religion.

  But there were some facts of Lee’s career that Sonny never heard. He had been born in 1830, the elder of two sons of Robert Lee, coalman, and his wife Eliza. At the age of eight he was living at 4 Caroline Row in Dublin and attending the Christian Brothers’ O’Connell School nearby. In the school records his name is given as George Lee, and his brother’s as William. This was a Catholic school, and it was here he took violin lessons and instruction in singing. On 9 January 1843, Robert Lee died. By 1851, the family was living at 2 Portobello Place. Less than two years later they had moved to 16 Harrington Street. Between 1851 and 1853 the family must have found some money – possibly from Colonel Vandeleur on the coming of age of George and William. The rateable value of 2 Portobello Place had been £5 10s., that of 16 Harrington Street was £34. It was in 1852 also that Lee founded his Amateur Musical Society, taking some sort of professional rooms for a year or two at 11 Harrington Street on the opposite side of the road. From nowhere in the published writings or letters of G.B.S. can it be inferred that Lee started his musical society and set up as singing teacher within a few months of Bessie’s marriage to George Carr Shaw; nor is it clear that 2 Portobello Place was about two hundred yards from the Shaws in Synge Street, that 16 Harrington Street was some one hundred and twenty-five paces distant, and that two houses only separate Sonny’s future birthplace from Lee’s professional chambers.

  Sonny sometimes speculated as to whether he might have been Lee’s natural son; and G.B.S. was aware of other people’s speculations. ‘About G.B.S.’s parentage,’ wrote Beatrice Webb in her diary for 12 May 1911. ‘The photograph published in the Henderson Biography makes it quite clear to me that he was the child of G. J. V. Lee – that vain, witty and distinguished musical genius who lived with them. The expression on Lee’s face is quite amazingly like G.B.S. when I first knew him.’

  That Shaw may have had an unconscious wish to be the son of the remarkable George Lee and not of the miserable George Carr Shaw is possible. His campaign to demonstrate that he was George Carr Shaw’s son was conducted primarily in defence of his mother. He was to model himself on Lee because of the extraordinary effect Lee had produced on Bessie and, in a number of three-cornered relationships, he was to play out the presumed asexuality of their liaison by refusing to compromise his own chastity. The themes of consanguinity and illegitimacy recur obsessively in his plays, but it is the emotional independence of the woman that is stressed. Eliza’s parting from Professor Higgins in Pygmalion to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill is Shaw’s restatement of Bessie’s economic attachment to Lee who is seen as a means to her self-sufficiency. In logic, Sonny should have been Lee’s son. But as Shaw demonstrated in his most deliberately pleasant play, You Never Can Tell, remarkable children were frequently born to incompatible parents.

  But G.B.S. had to be certain. So he obliterated the ambiguous Christian name he shared with George Lee and George Shaw, using only the initial G. ‘Professionally I drop the George,’ he told an editor. ‘Personally I dislike it.’ ‘Don’t George me,’ he would growl at people who made this mistake. He would remain George only to his family.

  By finding a use for the knowledge of harmony and counterpoint hammered into her in her youth, Lee gave Bessie ‘a Cause and a Creed to live for’. She became the chorus leader and general factotum of his musical soc
iety.

  Lee’s life had changed in those years. On 6 March 1860 his mother died, and two years later, on 7 May 1862, his brother William also died, aged twenty-seven, and was buried near Robert and Eliza Lee in the Roman Catholic Glasnevin Cemetery. His death brought Lee ‘to the verge of suicide’. Since life outside music seemed to offer little to either Lee or Bessie, they became wedded to ‘the Method’.

  In his Preface to London Music G.B.S. touches on a peculiar aspect of this story. ‘Lee soon found his way into our house, first by giving my mother lessons there, and then by using our drawing-room for rehearsals.’ He presents Lee as a man apart, ‘too excessively unlike us, too completely a phenomenon, to rouse any primitive feelings in us’. Because he was a cripple ‘marriage and gallantry were tacitly ruled out of his possibilities, by himself, I fancy, as much as by other people. There was simply no room in his life for anything of the sort.’ What little we know about Lee contradicts this view of the man. His Byronic limp was a focus of romantic interest; at least two women in his musical society, and possibly Sonny’s sister Yuppy, fell in love with him. Later in life he made advances to Lucy Shaw and ended his days running a sort of night-club in London where he carried on an affair with his housekeeper. G.B.S. does not conceal this. But he presents it as a late-flowering sentimentalism that bloomed when, having been seduced by the capitalist atmosphere of ‘overfed, monied London’, he proved unfaithful to ‘the Method’ and had been dropped by Bessie.

  To disinfect the relationship from all sexual implication, he built Bessie into ‘one of those women who could act as matron of a cavalry barracks from eighteen to forty and emerge without a stain on her character’. ‘To the closest observation’ she was ‘so sexless’ that it was a wonder how she could have conceived three children. He could only guess that George Carr Shaw, when drunk, had forced himself on her and that to this operation he owed his existence. ‘I was just something that had happened to them,’ he bleakly concluded. Such a beginning, which explained his mother’s neglect, was preferable to having the Lee-Bessie association ‘unpleasantly misunderstood’. George Carr Shaw ‘was Papa in the fullest sense always,’ he wrote, ‘and the dynamic Lee got none of the affection Papa inspired’. His arguments reflect the urgent need Shaw felt to make his case, in the light of what was to happen next between Lee and his mother.