Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Shaw’s attitude to drink recalls Dr Johnson’s dictum that ‘Life is a pill which none of us can bear to swallow without gilding.’ In his copy of Bunyan’s The Life and Death of Mr Badman, Shaw wrote: ‘Living is so painful for the poor that it cannot be endured without an anaesthetic.’ He saw drunkenness as a symptom of the malignant disease called poverty. To his mind alcohol was a trick, a depressant in the disguise of a stimulant, falsely associated (like corpse-eating) with virility. Drink seldom propelled us into melodramatic ruin and madness; it was a chloroform that lowered our self-criticism and self-respect.

  Shaw needed self-respect to withstand the low esteem in which he was held among publishers and at home. Perhaps the new diet he shared with saints and sages would help to change him into a different person. ‘The odd thing about being a vegetarian is, not that the things that happen to other people don’t happen to me – they all do – but that they happen differently: pain is different, pleasure different, fever different, cold different, even love different.’

  5

  On Growing a Beard

  Think of my circumstances and prospects getting worse and worse until they culminated in smallpox next year (81) when I forced ‘Love Among the Artists’ out of myself.

  Shaw to Charlotte Payne-Townshend (1 April 1898)

  Each day he read at the British Museum and as an extra form of language tuition sang in French three nights a week with a basso profundo called Richard Deck in his single room off the Camden Road. He felt peculiarly fond of Deck and, following his death in the autumn of 1882, remembered him as ‘a remarkable man, offering me advice concerning pronunciation, directing my attention to the aim of gymnastics... and introducing me to the ideas of Proudhon’.

  On 19 May he started a new novel. He had been at work on this for about a week when he began to feel ill. In the belief that he was spending too much time indoors, he prescribed for himself a number of rides round London on the top of omnibuses. A few days later he discovered he had smallpox.

  Smallpox was then one of the most dreaded diseases in Western Europe partly because ‘the bad cases were so disfiguring, and partly because the increase of population produced by the industrial revolution, and the insanitary conditions in which the new proletariat lived, had made it much commoner and more virulent’. In 1853 Parliament had made compulsory the vaccination of every child in Britain within three months of birth. Sonny had been vaccinated in infancy and the vaccination had taken well. This form of vaccination (which in 1898 was to be banned) meant the injection of cowpox matter from the pustule of a diseased cow or the diseased substance from the inflamed arm of a recently vaccinated person. Shaw makes little reference to his illness except to say that he emerged from it a convinced anti-vaccinationist.

  Once, when his mother had been seriously ill in Dublin, Shaw recounts, Lee had taken ‘her case in hand unhesitatingly and at the end of a week or so gave my trembling father leave to call in a leading Dublin doctor, who simply said “My work is done” and took his hat’. From this Shaw learnt a lesson he continued to apply. Lee’s prescription had been fresh air, extreme cleanliness and a good diet, and these became for him the ingredients of political good health: ‘it is now as plain as the sun in the heavens,’ he wrote towards the end of his life, ‘that pathogenic microbes are products of the zymotic diseases; and that these diseases are products of ugliness, dirt and stink offending every aesthetic instinct... that dirt and squalor and ugliness are products of poverty; and that... zymotic diseases can be abolished by abolishing poverty, the practical problem being one of economic distribution.’

  ‘You have been vaccinated in your infancy,’ a friend wrote, ‘so ought if the doctors are to be believed, to have nothing to fear.’ But were they to be believed? Or were they to be feared? It was less his helplessness as a smallpox patient that Shaw hated than the unpleasantness of the disease itself into which, he felt, he had been medically tricked.

  Shaw externalized Evil. In his world there were no evil men and women except the insane; but there were evil circumstances which he could identify, attack and eliminate. Vaccination let the enemy in and allowed evil to circulate within the body. The method of inoculating children with casual dirt moistened with an undefined pathogenic substance obtained from calves impressed Shaw as being morally insane. His sense of contamination became part of his socialist dogma and a warning against substituting faith in an experimental prophylaxis for a full-scale sanitation programme ensuring good conditions of public health.

  After three weeks confined to his room in Fitzroy Street, he went down to recuperate at Leyton in Essex with his uncle Walter Gurly who, having married an English widow during one of his trips to the United States, was living a life of precarious respectability as a country physician near Epping Forest.

  Shaw was left with a scar on his right cheek. Whether the disfigurement was slight or he merely made light of it, he felt extremely sensitive. ‘I was sorry to hear of your illness,’ Aileen Bell wrote to him, ‘and the idea of your telling Mrs Horne not to describe your personal appearance – as if I should like you the less...’

  ‘I have a rather remarkable chin and would like to let the public see it; but I never had time to shave.’ This joke, and several others on similar lines, covered up the initial motive for the beard which was to hide his sensitivity. It became exactly the right beard – a good red socialist affair and vastly conspicuous. Few people who had their attention arrested by this irrepressible flag waving at the head of the Shavian talking-machine, would have known that G.B.S. was publicly concealing something.

  Shaw represented himself as the passive partner to his beard: he simply followed it wherever it went. So bewitched had he been with the figure of Mephistopheles that ‘when Nature completed my countenance in 1880 or thereabouts... I found myself equipped with the upgrowing moustaches and eyebrows, and the sarcastic nostrils of the operatic fiend whose airs (by Gounod) I had sung as a child, and whose attitudes I had affected in my boyhood’. There could be few better examples of G.B.S.’s beard doing the talking.

  ‘Like a Victorian matron I experimented with my brushes and comb.’ The face that he designed for himself was startling. ‘It is the face of an outlaw,’ wrote one woman; ‘it is full of protest: wild and determined, a very brigand of a face.’ Another woman, observing him among the socialists at William Morris’s converted coach-house in Hammersmith, noted:

  ‘His face came out very distinctly in the unshaded light of the stable-room, and as he listened it seemed to me to be lit up not only by that outside light but also, and in a particular way, by some inner lamp, as if Morris’s words had lighted a candle of great and incandescent power within him. Shaw’s face that night burned itself in on me; I have never seen any face like it since... His pale skin, his hair that the light above it turned to gold, and his strong, gleaming teeth, made a picture that no one, I think, could ever forget.’

  His taut body seemed wound up with energy, and his movements were rapid. He walked with long springy strides on the front of his feet. When seated he seemed to relax all over, huddling and stretching, sticking out his long legs then pulling them up to his chest as if embracing himself. In this position he chattered and swayed with laughter. Then he stood up, thin, erect, well-pleased with himself it appeared, the head upraised, body tilted back, beard pointed. The impression of this figure, combative and audacious, was often invaded by comedy. It was his comic spirit that, for all the Satanic twirls and flourishes, encouraged a friend to describe his face as an ‘unskilfully poached egg’, and enabled Shaw himself to write: ‘My own beard is so like a tuft of blanched grass that pet animals have nibbled at it.’

  The private face shows itself in the novel, Love Among the Artists, he forced out of himself while at Leyton. Love among artists is different from love among other people, for artists love their work more than they love other people. Shaw’s novel plots social against artistic values. ‘I am in a worldly sense an unfortunate man,’ says Owen Jack,
the hero-composer of the book, ‘though in my real life, heaven knows, a most happy and fortunate one.’ Jack defines worldly success as ‘the compensation of the man who has no genius’. Some men, he says, ‘begin by aiming high, and they have to wait till the world comes up to their level’. With such obiter dicta Shaw, giving a backward look at Lee’s failure, kept his confidence afloat.

  Jack (who Shaw asks us to believe was based partly on Beethoven but who reflects something of Richard Deck and something of Vandeleur Lee), and the pianist Aurelie Szczymplica, are the two geniuses of Love Among the Artists, and they inhabit the classless world of music in which Shaw felt happiest.

  Since marriage ‘kills the heart and keeps it dead’, it is better, Jack concludes, to ‘starve the heart than overfeed it. Better still to feed it on fine food, like music.’ Another character, Mrs Herbert, who owes something to Shaw’s mother, wonders if there is ‘any use in caring for one’s children? I really dont believe there is.’ The effect of such a mother on her children is described by her son (the blissfully unhappy husband of Aurelie Szczymplica) in a speech that reflects Shaw’s feelings about himself and Lucinda Elizabeth:

  ‘Can you understand that a mother and a son may be so different in their dispositions that neither can sympathize with the other? It is my great misfortune to be such a son... She is a clever woman, impatient of sentiment, and fond in her own way. My father, like myself, was too diffident to push himself arrogantly through the world; and she despised him for it, thinking him a fool. When she saw that I was like him, she concluded that I, too, was a fool, and that she must arrange my life for me in some easy, lucrative, genteel, brainless conventional way... She did not know how much her indifference tortured me, because she had no idea of any keener sensitiveness than her own... She taught me to do without her consideration; and I learned the lesson.’

  Shaw came to believe that Love Among the Artists marked ‘a crisis in my progress as a thinker’. He had ‘come to the end of my Rationalism and Materialism’. This conversion has an air of paradox. The discovery of knowledge did not emerge at the end of reasoning and as a result of it, but occurred by instalments in the form of fiction, hypotheses or jokes – after which we set about finding reasons for it.

  ‘A man has his beliefs: his arguments are only his excuses for them. Granted that we both want to get to Waterloo Station: the question whether we shall drive across Westminster Bridge or Waterloo, or whether we shall walk across the Hungerford foot bridge, is a matter for our logic; but the destination is dogmatic. The province of reason is the discovery of the means to fulfil our wills; but our wills are beyond reason: we all will to live... we only see what we look at: our attention to our temperamental convictions produces complete oversight as to all the facts that tell against us.’

  Shaw had returned to 37 Fitzroy Street in October and finished Love Among the Artists on 10 January 1882. ‘I have a much higher opinion of this work than is as yet generally entertained,’ he admitted. The eminent publisher’s reader, Edward Garnett, in a report for Fisher Unwin, advised against publishing the book if they could ‘get something else from the author’. Love Among the Artists, he wrote, deserved publication, but would probably fall flat with the general reader. ‘The literary art is sound, the people in it are real people, and the fresh unconventionality is pleasing after the ordinary work of the common novelist: but all the same – few people would understand it, & few papers would praise it.’ Garnett contrasted the novel with W. B. Yeats’s first book of verse, The Wanderings of Oisin, ‘which with certain faults shows a sense of colour & softness that betrays the artistic mind,’ he concluded. ‘There is a little genius in Yeats: there is an individuality of mind in Shaw’s work, but neither are likely to command much attention.’

  While at Leyton, Shaw had finally taught himself Pitman’s Shorthand. This, ‘probably the worst system of shorthand ever invented’, suited him best, he decided, because Greg’s was known only in America and Sweet’s Current Shorthand had been made ‘illegible by anyone except himself’. Pitman himself was everything a man should be – a teetotaller and vegetarian, a radical well-whiskered man of business.

  Shorthand enabled Shaw to intensify his programme of self-education at the British Museum and to write at a speed that kept pace with his thoughts. It also raised the family’s hopes of his employment. While Love Among the Artists was being returned to him by the London publishers, Shaw proposed himself for the job of preparing the work of another unpublished novelist, Ethel Southam, who had advertised for a copyist. From Shaw she received many hundreds of words of advice about punctuation, the use of prepositions, and avoidance of adjectives – after which the partnership collapsed and G.B.S. was deprived of the amusement of pointing to a ghost-written collaboration as his first book.

  Pressed again by his family, he read the advertisement columns and applied for employment as secretary to the Smoke Abatement Institute and as secretary to the Thames Subway Committee. He was careful not to conceal his politics (‘those of an atheistic radical’), his lack of university education, mathematical and linguistic inabilities (‘no German whatsoever’), and experience as secretary or shorthand clerk (‘I can write longhand rapidly – in fact more rapidly than I can yet write shorthand’).

  On 12 April 1882 he began his fourth novel.

  6

  Courting Miss Lockett

  Which yet my soul seeketh, but I find not: one man in a thousand have I found; but a woman among all these have I not found.

  Ecclesiastes vii.28

  In a notebook he kept during his first six or seven years in London, Shaw copied down this passage. He described himself at this period as ‘a complete outsider’. During his convalescence from smallpox, he had even thought of emigrating to the United States where his friend Chichester Bell was going. The bleakness of these years grew so unbearable that he afterwards translated it into a hatred of his novels.

  Though the place was full of culture, London society contrived to get along on an intellectual diet of sport, party politics, fashion and travel. It seemed as if a mighty harvest had left the soil sterile. In Dublin the professions had formed the aristocracy, and without any great income and no experience of horses or guns, one could enjoy the best company without the taint of social inferiority. In London there were different rules and far greater importance was attached to money. ‘The real superiority of the English to the Irish,’ Shaw was to write, ‘lies in the fact that an Englishman will do anything for money and an Irishman will do nothing for it.’ But this was a later discovery to which, since for the time being he had no money, ‘I had to blind myself’. There were times when he longed for people to blind themselves to him. He was a scarecrow catapulting himself along the streets with a professional habit of cheerfulness, but in broken boots, a tall hat so limp he wore it back to front to avoid doubling the brim when raising it, cuffs whose margins had been refined with his mother’s scissors, trousers whose holes were hidden by a tailed coat fading from black to green. He was an example of poverty. ‘It is my practice to make a suit of clothes last me six years,’ he explained. ‘The result is that my clothes acquire individuality, and become characteristic of me. The sleeves and legs cease to be mere tailor-made tubes; they take human shape with knees and elbows recognizably mine. When my friends catch sight of one of my suits hanging on a nail, they pull out their penknives and rush forward, exclaiming, “Good Heavens! he has done it at last.”’

  His plight was so glaring that people hinted they were good for loans. But he never borrowed, having no reason for believing he could repay them. He was conscious of the charm of his conversation if it never led to a request for five shillings. ‘When you borrow money, you sell a friend,’ he wrote.

  He went to the National Gallery on its free days and, when he had a shilling in his pocket, to the theatre. Almost the only social gatherings in which he was included had been Lee’s soirées musicales. But by the 1880s, largely through his sister Lucy, he also began to receiv
e invitations to the ‘At Homes’ of Lady Wilde and of Elizabeth Lawson, mother of the landscape painter Cecil Lawson on whom he had modelled the artist Cyril Scott in Immaturity. They were the sort of engagements that make a man long for death. To equip himself for such ordeals he sought out from the catalogue at the British Museum volumes on polite behaviour.

  He liked the Lawsons, and the artistic atmosphere of their house in Cheyne Walk was congenial, but he had not mastered the art of pleasing, could not dance, spoke hesitantly though usually to disagree, and occasionally made a jarring exhibition of himself. ‘I sometimes walked up and down the Embankment for twenty minutes or more before venturing to knock at the door,’ he remembered. ‘...The worst of it was that when I appeared in the Lawsons’ drawingroom I did not appeal to the good-nature of the company as a pardonably and even becomingly bashful novice. I had not then tuned the Shavian note to any sort of harmony.’

  He saw very little of anyone with whom he did not work. Politics was to provide him with new colleagues. Otherwise he had few companionships. Among these were the writer and adventurer Richard Hengist Horne and his wife Sophie; a person of mild exterior, Edwin Habgood, from the Edison Telephone Company; James Lecky, an exchequer clerk from Ireland interested in phonetics, keyboard temperament and Gaelic, who was also a big noise in the English Spelling Reform Association (signing himself ‘jeemz leki’), who was to introduce him to the philologists Alexander John Ellis and Henry Sweet; and J. Kingston Barton, a doctor with whom Shaw passed many of his Saturday evenings. On Sundays he saw the Beattys.

  Pakenham Beatty – Irish playboy, amateur pugilist, minor poet – was a moustachioed perpetual boy of a man. Born in Brazil, he had spent part of his childhood in Dalkey, been educated somewhere between Harrow and Bonn, and got to know Shaw as a fellow-exile in London. He belonged to a breed of troubadour-entertainers that was to include Frank Harris and Gabriel Pascal, for whom Shaw had a special fondness. Beatty enabled him to enter a life very different from his own. He was not ‘sensible’ about money. He spent it in the Irish manner, generously, spontaneously, without thought, until everything was gone and he was left with nothing but the settled habit of spending. His source of money was a small inheritance that, before it ran dry, allowed him to flirt with fine art. At the end of 1878, he published a volume of verse entitled To My Lady and Other Poems. One of his ladies, Edith Dowling, married him early the following year and became known as ‘Ida’ Beatty. They had two daughters and a son christened Pakenham William Albert Hengist Mazzini Beatty whom Shaw nicknamed ‘Bismarck’.