5
Ménage à Trois
We must reform society before we can reform ourselves... personal righteousness is impossible in an unrighteous environment.
Shaw to H. G. Wells (17 May 1917)
Two experiences, both visual, dominate Sonny’s early years. The first was his sight of the Dublin slums. ‘I saw it and smelt it and loathed it.’ His nurse would take him to the squalid tenements of her friends, or lead him off to a public house and (it is suggested) add to her £8 a year by picking up soldiers at the barracks. Shaw’s lifelong hatred of poverty was born of these lonely days of slumming.
On being asked, at the age of seventy-five, to name the happiest hour of his life, Shaw was to answer: ‘When my mother told me we were going to live on Dalkey Hill.’ In 1864, two years after his brother’s death, Lee moved from Harrington Street to 1 Hatch Street. He proposed a new arrangement: to lease a cottage on Dalkey Hill, nine miles south of Dublin, and to share it with the Shaws. Torca Cottage, into which they all moved in 1866, had four reasonably-sized rooms, a back room for Sonny, and a kitchen and pantry into which they squeezed the servant’s bed. The front garden overlooked Killiney Bay, and the back garden Dublin Bay.
‘I owe more than I can express to the natural beauty of that enchanting situation commanding the two great bays between Howth and Bray Head,’ Shaw remembered towards the end of his life, ‘and its canopied skies such as I have never seen elsewhere in the world.’ In the miserable Synge Street house, opposite a big field blotted out by hoardings and behind ‘the bare dark walls, much too high... too high to be climbed over’, Sonny had felt a prisoner. At Torca he became ‘a prince in a world of my own imagination’. His playground was Killiney Hill, a wonderland of goat-paths and gorse slopes down which he would run to the sandy shore and into the sea. But the beauty of Dalkey, taking him out ‘of this time and this world’, delayed his development. ‘With a little more courage & a little more energy I could have done much more; and I lacked these because in my boyhood I lived on my imagination instead of on my work.’
The work of G.B.S. was a product not so much of his happy memories of Dalkey but of his visits to the Dublin slums which, ‘with their shocking vital statistics and the perpetual gabble of its inhabitants’, reflected the unhappiness Sonny seldom escaped. ‘An Irishman has two eyes,’ Shaw told G. K. Chesterton. One was for poetry, the other for reality. As Sonny grew into an adult the Dalkey eye closed. This is why, at his most serious, G.B.S. always seems to be winking.
After a year at Dalkey, Lee and the Shaws agreed to extend the ménage à trois to Hatch Street, while they continued to occupy Torca Cottage for summer holidays. ‘The arrangement was economical,’ G.B.S. explained, ‘for we could not afford to live in a fashionable house, and Lee could not afford to give lessons in an unfashionable one.’ Lee paid the rent for all of them – the rateable value being £35 – in addition to the costs at Dalkey. The amalgamation gave the Shaws a well-appointed three-storeyed house. ‘Being a corner house it had no garden,’ Shaw remembered; ‘but it had two areas and a leads. It had eight rooms besides the spacious basement and pantry accommodation as against five in Synge St.’ The hall door was in one street and the windows (with one exception) were in another. The exception, a window over the hall door and near the roof, was Sonny’s bedroom where, his friend Edward McNulty remembered, ‘there was barely room for anything but his bed’.
Like his mother Sonny was dazzled by Lee and adopted many of his startling ideas – sleeping with the windows open, eating brown bread instead of white and parading his disdain for doctors, lawyers, academics, clergymen. Lee filled the house with music and banished family prayers. In the Synge Street days, George Carr Shaw, as sole head of the household, had sent his children to Sunday School where genteel Protestants aged five to twelve, well-soaped and best-dressed, mouthed religious texts and were rewarded with inscribed cards. After this they would be marched to the Molyneux Church in Upper Leeson Street to fidget interminably round the altar rails. ‘To sit motionless and speechless in your best suit in a dark stuffy church on a morning that is fine outside the building, with your young limbs aching with unnatural quiet... is enough to lead any sensitive youth to resolve that when he grows up and can do as he likes, the first use he will make of his liberty will be to stay away from church.’
Such respectable habits had been largely ridiculed by Bessie’s dissolute brother Walter Gurly, a ship’s surgeon who visited them between transatlantic voyages. ‘He was a most exhilarating person,’ G.B.S. remembered, ‘...always in high spirits, and full of a humor that was barbarous in its blasphemous indecency, but Shakespearian in the elaboration and fantasy of its literary expression... He was full of the Bible, which became in his hands a masterpiece of comic literature; and he quoted the sayings of Jesus as models of facetious repartee.’
G.B.S. uses the entertaining figure of Uncle Walter as a comet, shimmering across the skies, to distract our attention from a more significant feature in the religious firmament of the Shaws. There was nothing in Walter Gurly’s irreverent jokes that quarrelled with the tradition of Protestant gentry. Irish Protestantism, Shaw explains, ‘was not then a religion: it was a side in political faction, a class prejudice, a conviction that Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons who will go to hell when they die and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession of Protestant ladies and gentlemen’.
It is evident from what he wrote that G.B.S. knew that Lee was a Catholic. But he prevaricated. To Stephen Winsten he proclaimed that ‘music was the only religion he [Lee] ever professed’; to Frank Harris he wrote: ‘The Method was my mother’s religion. It was the bond between her and Lee. A bond of sex could not have lasted a year’; to Demetrius O’Bolger he revealed that Lee was ‘sceptical’ about religion, and added, ‘the religion of our house was the religion of singing the right way’. By such means he directed his biographers where he wanted. For although he claimed to be ‘in intense reaction against the Shaw snobbery’, his own snob-tragedy was to be G.B.S.’s disappointment with Sonny for having felt ashamed among his school friends at sharing a house with someone no Shaw should rightly know.
The only person for whom there seemed no special advantages at Hatch Street was George Carr Shaw. He became ‘full of self-reproaches and humiliations when he was not full of secret jokes, and was either biting his moustache and whispering deep-drawn Damns, or shaking with paroxysms of laughter’. In a private note, written for a medical friend in 1879, Shaw described the pattern of his father’s drinking:
‘In society he drank porter, champagne, whisky, anything he could get, sometimes swallowing stout enough to make him sick... Although he was never sober, he was seldom utterly drunk. He made efforts to reform himself, and on one occasion succeeded in abstaining for sixteen months; but these efforts always ended in a relapse. On one or two occasions he disappeared for a few days and returned with his watch broken, clothes damaged and every symptom of uncontrolled excess; but ordinarily he came home in the evening fuddled, eat [sic] his dinner, had a nap, and then kept going out for drams until he went to bed. He never drank or kept drink in the house... I have seen him when drunk, seize a small article on the mantelpiece and dash it upon the hearthstone, or kick a newspaper into the air; but though he was very irritable, he never used the slightest violence to any person... his timidity probably made forbearance habitual to him.’
After his father was dead, G.B.S. eliminated much of this sordidness by giving to his published descriptions of it a hilarious Shavian gloss.
‘A boy who has seen “the governor”, with an imperfectly wrapped-up goose under one arm and a ham in the same condition under the other (both purchased under heaven knows what delusion of festivity), butting at the garden wall of our Dalkey Cottage in the belief that he was pushing open the gate, and transforming his tall hat to a concertina in the process, and who, instead of being overwhelmed with shame and anxiety at the spectacle, has been so disabled by merriment (uproariously sh
ared by the maternal uncle) that he has hardly been able to rush to the rescue of the hat and pilot its wearer to safety, is clearly not a boy who will make tragedies of trifles instead of making trifles of tragedies.’
After two or three years at Hatch Street, George Carr Shaw was felled on the doorstep by a fit. Shortly afterwards he became so rigid a teetotaller that those who knew him found it ‘difficult to realize what he formerly was’.
In a letter to a prospective biographer, G.B.S. wrote: ‘You ask whether my father liked Lee. He certainly did not, and would not have tolerated the arrangement if he could have afforded a decent house without it, or if he could have asserted himself against my mother, who probably never consulted him in the matter. There was never any quarrelling in the house: my mother went her own way, which happened to be the musical way of Lee, just as Lee went his; and my father could only look on helplessly.’
It was this impotence that appears to have driven George Carr Shaw to greater drinking excesses. ‘When his children had grown too big for him to play with, and the suspense as to whether he would come home drunk or sober never ceased,’ G.B.S. told a cousin, ‘he got practically no comfortable society from them. His relatives did not want to see him; and my mother did not want to see his relatives: she was interested only in people who could sing, and they were mostly Catholics, not proper company for the Protestant caste of Shaw.’
Before his marriage, and during its early years, George Carr Shaw had been on visiting terms with his smart Protestant relatives. By the 1860s their doors were shut to him and his family. ‘My immediate family and the Shaw clan,’ G.B.S. recalled, ‘...were barely on speaking terms when we met which we did only accidentally, never intentionally.’ Social conditions, which had helped to drive his father to drink, would also one day pervert Lee, and both men disappointed his mother. So Society became the dragon against which the fabulous G.B.S. would lead his campaign of lifelong knight-errantry.
6
The Shame of Education
If I had not returned to the house, I don’t think they would, any of them, have missed me.
Preface to London Music (1937)
At Synge Street Sonny and his sisters had been provided with a day governess. Caroline Hill was an impoverished gentlewoman who puzzled the children by her attempts to teach them the alphabet and mathematical tables. She would punish her pupils when their laughter grew too outrageous by ‘little strokes with her fingers that would not have discomposed a fly’.
At the beginning of the summer term of 1865, when he was almost ten, Sonny was sent to his first school, the Wesleyan Connexional, less than half a mile away at 79 St Stephen’s Green. He hated this school. ‘I have not a good word to say for it,’ he wrote. ‘...A more futile boy prison could not be imagined. I was a day-boy: what a boarder’s life was like I shudder to conjecture.’ The chief reason for his dislike of school appears to have been that it took him further away from his mother. This, he came to believe, had been its real purpose – that of ‘preventing my being a nuisance to my mother at home for at least half the day’.
The Wesleyan Connexional School occupied an old private house next door to the mansion of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness. Its big schoolroom stood at the end of a yard at the rear where the stables had been and which by the 1860s served as a playground. It was the cheapest of those Dublin schools patronized by Protestants. The sanitation was primitive and the lessons meagre. ‘In the large classes,’ Shaw recalled, ‘the utmost examination possible in the lessons meant one question for each boy in alphabetical order, or at most two. If you could answer the questions or do the sums, or construe the few lines that fell to your lot, you passed unscathed: if not, or if you talked in class or misbehaved, you were marked in your judgement book for caning by the headmaster.’
The headmaster when Sonny first went there was Robert Cook, a young Methodist minister who would prepare boys for flogging with spasms of weeping. He was eventually succeeded by a man named Parker who conducted his classes with a ferocious cane in hand.
‘When Parker appeared armed with a long lithe chestnut colored oriental cane, which had evidently cost much more than a penny, and slashed our hand with it mercilessly, he established an unprecedented terrorism. He was young (really too young), darkly handsome: apparently a perfect Murdstone. But he soon found that he was carrying his youthful terroristic logic too far... he had what no schoolmaster should allow himself to indulge: a dislike of stupid boys as such.’
To his biographers, G.B.S. represented Sonny at school as ‘rampant, voluble, impudent... a most obstreperous player of rough games... [who] avoided his school tasks... and was soon given up as incorrigible’. That was how he had felt: it was not how he appeared to others. He was remembered as a quiet boy and on two occasions was awarded good conduct certificates. The other boys liked him for his comic stories about a character called Lobjort borrowed from Household Words, but otherwise his remote personality, designed to protect him from unhappiness at home, did not make him popular. His command of long words gave him an air of maturity that appealed more to adults than to children. He seemed unfitted for boy society. ‘I think my treatment as an adult at home (like the Micawbers’ treatment of David Copperfield) made school very difficult for me.’
The roll books at Wesley show that after only three months in 1865 he was taken away and did not return there until August 1867. After another three months he left again, then came back in February 1868 for nine months. During one or more of these intervals he attended a preparatory school at 23–24 Sandycove Road, Glasthule, near Dalkey.
‘My parents,’ Shaw wrote, ‘...acted as if... I would come out as an educated gentleman if I wore the usual clothes, ate the usual food, and went to the same school or other every day.’ But by the end of 1868 he had fallen so far behind that he was withdrawn altogether from the Wesleyan Connexional.
It was Lee, rather than Sonny’s parents, who took the initiative. He had got to know the drawing-master at the Central Model Boys’ School in Marlborough Street, Joseph Smeeth, who persuaded him that the teaching there was better than at any other of the cheaper genteel schools in Dublin. By the beginning of February 1869, Sonny was sent to Marlborough Street, where he remained a little over seven months. He was to focus on this school almost all the unhappiness of his boyhood. The Central Model Boys’ School, he wrote, was ‘undenominational and classless in theory but in fact Roman Catholic... It was an enormous place, with huge unscaleable railings and gates on which for me might well have been inscribed “All hope abandon, ye who enter here”; for that the son of a Protestant merchant-gentleman and feudal downstart should pass those bars or associate in any way with its hosts of lower middle class Catholic children, sons of petty shopkeepers and tradesmen, was inconceivable from the Shaw point of view... I lost caste outside it and became a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman would speak or play.’
The enrolment books of the Central Model show that Sonny’s form contained eight members of the Established Protestant Church, only five Roman Catholics and one ‘Other Denomination’. Fathers’ occupations included a hotel porter, two carpenters, a farmer, butcher, solicitor, bricklayer, shopkeeper, hatter, sergeant and gaol warder. It was, in fact as well as theoretically, what Shaw denied it to have been: a non-sectarian experimental school for persons of modest means. What Shaw did, many years afterwards, was to transfer to this place the ‘shame and wounded snobbery’ arising from his Catholic-infested home at Hatch Street.
When Sonny asked to be taken away from school, George Carr Shaw, relishing perhaps the defeat of Lee’s programme, supported him. Sonny left the Central Model on 11 September 1869 and was transferred to the last of his boy prisons. The Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School was a large building with broad staircases and stately rooms on the corner of Aungier and Whitefriars Streets, sponsored by the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. Sonny remained here almost two years and became joint head boy. Bu
t his repugnance for all schools was implacable.
*
Sonny made one friend at the Dublin Commercial School. Matthew Edward McNulty, later to become a novelist, bank manager and playwright, was ‘a corpulent youth with curly black hair’. His first sight of Sonny, at the age of thirteen, was of ‘a tallish, slender youngster with straw-colored hair, light greyish-blue eyes, a skin like that of a baby and lips like those of a beautiful girl. There was a faint smile over his face as he listened to his companions and looked around the strange class room... We were, in fact, friends at first glance.’
McNulty was the only person with whom Sonny could share his dreams and ideas. When apart they entered into a tremendous correspondence, full of drawings and dramas.
Sonny dreamed of being a great man, probably a great artist like Michelangelo. He borrowed Duchesne’s outlines of the Old Masters, bought the Bohn translation of Vasari, prowled for hours through Dublin’s deserted National Gallery dragging McNulty with him – two schoolboys, one short and dark, the other tall and fair, going from picture to picture, full of argument, until they knew every work there. They also enrolled together for late afternoon courses at the Royal Dublin Society’s School of Art and passed examinations in perspective, practical geometry and freehand drawing. But Sonny was not satisfied and, taking McNulty back to his room in Hatch Street, he announced a bolder plan. ‘I was to be his naked model,’ McNulty remembered, ‘and, in return, he was to be mine... but I was adamant and Shaw’s long-cherished dream of an inexpensive model was rudely shattered. I was very sorry for him at the time but I would have been more sorry for myself if I had had another attack of bronchitis.’
Augustus John Page 92
