Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Meeting Grace some years after her marriage, he records: ‘She looked extraordinarily youthful; she has children; her marriage is obviously as happy as it is possible for a marriage to be; her husband no more grudges her her adorations than he grudges her a motor car.’ In casting himself as a piece of extra-marital machinery, Shaw re-creates what he hoped were the circumstances of his own Dublin household.

  One family to have benefited from Shaw’s interference had been the Beattys. Among others by now were the Avelings and the Blands. At the head of all three families was a husband notorious for his illicit love-affairs. Shaw, who was to place Edward Aveling on the stage as Louis Dubedat in The Doctor’s Dilemma, described him as the man who ‘seduced every woman he met and borrowed from every man’, and yet would have ‘gone to the stake bravely rather than admit that Marx was not infallible or that God existed’. As his interest in politics deepened he turned his attention to Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, Eleanor. Shaw used to see this clever dark-haired girl at the British Museum, working for eighteen pence an hour as a literary hack. In June 1884 she decided to go and live with Aveling on the understanding that they would marry if his wife died. For Shaw, who regarded himself as unattractive, here was a revelation. ‘Though no woman seemed able to resist him,’ he wrote of Aveling, ‘he was short, with the face and eyes of a lizard, and no physical charm except a voice like a euphonium.’ Like Wilkes, he was only a quarter of an hour behind the handsomest man in Europe. Shaw seemed determined to pursue this mystery. Aveling worked on the staff of the Dramatic Review and Shaw often called at his home, but his diary reveals that it was Eleanor (or ‘Mrs Aveling’) he came to see. She was not sure what to make of him. ‘If you are mad,’ she wrote, ‘there is marvellous method in your madness & penetration that sanity wd gambol from... oh, most amiable and sympathetic of cynics.’ She would appeal to him to save her ‘from a long day and evening of tête-à-tête with myself’, and he responded.

  17 February Called on the Avelings... Talked with Mrs A between 17 and 18 (A went out shortly after I came in).

  28 February Mrs Aveling asked me to call in the afternoon and have a chat. Went at 17 and stayed until 20 nearly. Aveling absent at Crystal Palace concert. Urged her to go on the stage. Chatted about this, death, sex, and a lot of things.

  28 March Went to Mrs Aveling and discussed Love Among the Artists with her.

  14 April Called on the Avelings – A[veling] at Ventnor: Eleanor at home: stayed with her from 17 to 19.45.

  20 June After meeting on musical pitch called on Mrs Aveling. Aveling came in later on. Went home and played all the evening.

  24 August Rumour of split between the Avelings mentioned by [J.M.] Robertson.

  Shaw recoiled at the news that the Avelings might separate. His instinct whispered retreat. The Avelings’ later history exposed everything he most feared about sexual passion. In 1897, following the death of his wife, Aveling secretly married Eva Frye, and following an anonymous letter telling her of this marriage, Eleanor poisoned herself. ‘My last word to you,’ she wrote in her suicide note, ‘is the same as I have said during all these long, sad years – love.’ But Shaw could not endure the agony of such love. In his tight little note on her death, he referred to ‘the news of Eleanor Marx’s suicide in consequence of Aveling having spent all her money’.

  As he began easing out of the Avelings’ home, so he started to infiltrate the marriage of the Blands. Hubert Bland had been a founder of the Fabian Society, and its first treasurer. He was a man of Norman exterior, imperialist instincts, and huge physical strength, though to Shaw he seemed ‘an affectionate, imaginative sort of person’. Like Hyndman, he wore Tory clothes and ‘never was seen without an irreproachable frock coat, tall hat, and a single eyeglass which infuriated everybody’.

  ‘Hubert was not a restful husband,’ Shaw conceded. He had married his wife, Edith Nesbit, in 1880, when she was twenty-one and seven months pregnant, and subsequently had children by two other women. The first of these women Edith befriended; the second, Alice Hoatson, already was her friend and a part of the Bland household, where her daughter Rosamund was brought up by Edith as her own child. The Blands’ home was a disorganized ménage and the conglomeration of parties, charades, music and children formed a refreshing contrast to sterner Fabian entertainments. Shaw would slip on boxing-gloves and dance round the short-sighted Bland who was incapable of deliberately hurting anyone. ‘I was taller by a couple of inches and with longer reach,’ Shaw calculated. And Edith watched.

  According to Edward Pease, Edith was acknowledged as ‘the most attractive and vivacious woman of our circle’, though burdened with spectacular fainting fits and, at supreme moments of Fabian drama, the habit of calling sensationally for glasses of water. She abstained from corsets (a false method of ‘girding the loins’), rolled her cigarettes which she smoked from a long holder, and looked every inch an advanced woman. ‘On the other hand,’ Shaw believed, ‘she is excessively conventional; and her ideas are not a woman’s ideas, but the ideas which men have foisted, in their own interest, on women.’

  She was soon confiding her ideas to Shaw. Sometimes she would invite him to tea, but more often she met him at the British Museum, and they would go for long striding walks. By the summer of 1886 these meetings had grown longer and more intricate. ‘On the whole the day was devoted to Mrs Bland,’ Shaw wrote on 26 June 1886. ‘We dined together, had tea together, and I went out to Lee with her and played and sang there until Bland came in from his volunteer work. A memorable evening!’

  Edith, who was to become famous as a writer of stories for children, appealed to Shaw partly because she retained so much of the child in her. In the 1880s she wrote poetry. ‘The faults of the poems are so directly and intimately the faults of the woman,’ Shaw wrote in a review of her Lays and Legends (1886), ‘...there is too much of the luxury of unreal grief, of getting into the vein by imagining churchyards and jiltings and the like.’ Shaw composed music for some of these verses, among which were love poems to himself.

  She called him ‘the grossest flatterer (of men women and children impartially) I ever met’. He ‘repeats everything he hears, and does not always stick to the truth, and is very plain... and yet is one of the most fascinating men I ever met’. She would pursue him to his lair in the British Museum, and he would hurry her out to pretty scenes on the river and in the park; give her tea in the Wheatsheaf; see her on to buses and trains. On their way to Baker Street Station one day, they called in at Shaw’s home. From then on it became a struggle for her to get into his house, and for him to keep her walking in the open air. If, on their way to some bus stop or railway station, he needed to leave his books at home, she accompanied him inside and beckoned him upstairs; at other times he went on grimly walking through all weathers, hour after hour, till she dropped exhausted and veered off home. It was an exercising business.

  It became increasingly difficult to detect in Bland the overflowing gratitude Shaw claimed such husbands lavished on him. He hoped, by everything short of a sexual relationship, to give Edith compensation for her husband’s infidelities. But she protested to him: ‘You had no right to write the Preface if you were not going to write the book.’ He had made her determined to bring matters to a climax. On 11 May 1887, finding him hunched over More’s Utopia in the Reading Room, she marched him out to tea at the Austrian Café and insisted on leading him off to his home. Believing his mother to be there, he agreed. His mother was out. There followed ‘an unpleasant scene caused by my telling her that I wished her to go, as I was afraid that a visit to me alone would compromise her’. She went: but the friendship survived and the marriage endured. For Shaw, in his fashion, was a true friend of this marriage, rather than the ally of one partner. In 1914, when Bland was dying and felt troubled as to whether there would be enough money for the education of one of his sons, he told his daughter: ‘If there is not enough, ask Shaw’ – and indeed it was Shaw who paid for John Bland to go to Cambridge.r />
  ‘I was, in fact, a born philanderer,’ he later told Frank Harris. In his play The Philanderer he was to portray himself in the part of Leonard Charteris, whom he described as ‘the real Don Juan’. With married women and Fabian girls, Shaw philandered. But Mrs Jane Patterson was to make a Don Juan out of him.

  *

  ‘Jenny’ Patterson was a particular friend of Shaw’s mother – indeed she was closer in age to Mrs Shaw than to her son and may have known the family in Ireland where she had been married to a well-to-do country gentleman. After his death, she moved to London and by 1885 was living in Brompton Square. Coming home from the British Museum, Shaw would find the two women together. Sometimes he joined them singing, sometimes he escorted Mrs Patterson to her bus home; but there seems to have been no romantic interest on his part until after his father’s death on 19 April 1885. Almost at once their relationship changed. On 20 April, finding Mrs Patterson at home when he returned, he ‘wasted all the evening’ with her – the first entry of this sort in his diary. Seven days later occurs a note of his visiting her alone in Brompton Square: ‘Went to Richter concert in the evening, but instead of waiting for the symphony went on to Mrs Patterson. Found her alone, and chatted until past midnight.’ Up to the time he was twenty-nine, he told Ellen Terry, ‘I was too shabby for any woman to tolerate me... Then I got a job to do & bought a suit of clothes with the proceeds. A lady immediately invited me to tea, threw her arms round me, and said she adored me... Never having regarded myself as an attractive man, I was surprised; but I kept up appearances successfully.’

  The clothes with which Shaw tells his story, while fashioning an outline of the truth, also conceal something. At the beginning of his 1885 diary he had written: ‘Took to the woollen clothing system, and gave up using sheets in bed.’ He had been persuaded to ‘rational dress’ by a friend of William Morris, Andreas Scheu, an advocate of Dr Gustave Jaeger’s sanatory system. Jaeger expected to regenerate the world by wool. He claimed to have tried out his wool-theories on himself and to have been restored by them from a sick creature – ‘fat and scant of breath’ with haemorrhoids and tendencies to indigestion – to a man who everywhere inspired affection. Shaw, who recognized in Jaeger another Vandeleur Lee, was enthusiastically converted.

  He ordered his first Jaeger outfit on 19 June 1885 – ‘the first new garments I have had for years’. They were ‘paid for out of the insurance on my father’s life,’ he noted in his diary. The reddish-brown Jaeger suit was to become part of his physical personality – ‘as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur,’ G. K. Chesterton observed. The uniform was finished off with correct knee-breeches and stockings after a formula devised by Dr Jaeger to replace the insalubrious tubes of trousers. This was the Shavian equivalent to Oscar Wilde’s aesthetic costumes.

  Many of Jaeger’s most faithful ‘Woolleners’, as they were called, came from among the Fabians who paid fastidious attention to diet and clothes, eating vegetables and wearing animals. Shaw advertised his brown combination as being ‘the plumes and tunic of Don Juan’ and so irresistible to women that almost anyone could knit himself into popularity. In fact it seems to have been less a matter of women regarding him so favourably in wool as of the woollen Shaw looking at women more confidently.

  On 30 June, he ‘got clothes from Jaeger’s and put them on’. Next day he caught a cold but by 4 July was sufficiently recovered to call on Mrs Patterson and stayed with her till one o’clock. ‘Vein of conversation decidedly gallant,’ he logged in his diary. Over the next three weeks he visited her constantly. She provoked him, taunted him, half-defying and half-inviting him to advance, and he seemed spellbound. ‘Supper, music and curious conversation,’ he noted on 10 July after another evening in Brompton Square, ‘and a declaration of passion. Left at 3. Virgo intacta still.’ But only just. For these evenings were unlike his visits into other people’s love lives. There he had been Vandeleur Lee, the chaste wizard; here, dressed in the clothes from his father’s life insurance and with his mother’s closest friend, he could re-enact and improve on the romance of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth. On 18 July he bought some contraceptives (‘French letters 5/–’) which, on examination, ‘extraordinarily revolted me’ – so much that in the evening at Jenny’s there were ‘forced caresses’ instead of love-making. Much of this must have been known to Lucinda Shaw. She and Jenny had spent most of 25 July together. In the evening, Shaw came across them walking along the Brompton Road ‘looking for a bus, but they were all full,’ he noted. ‘So, on the corner of Montpelier St. Mother went on by herself, and I returned to the Square with JP, and stayed there until 3 o’clock on my 29th birthday which I celebrated by a new experience. Was watched by an old woman next door, whose evil interpretation of the lateness of my departure greatly alarmed us.’

  He had been starved of sex. ‘I was an absolute novice,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘I did not take the initiative in the matter.’ During his ’teens and twenties he was ‘perfectly continent except for the involuntary incontinences of dreamland’. All these years he exercised his imagination in daydreams about women, but not until Jenny Patterson broke through his celibacy did he know the power of sex. Sometimes he resented this power she had over him. ‘The spell of your happiness has been potent.’ But when the spell evaporated, he was filled with mortification. Love un-Shavianized him, robbed him of his authority and the hard discipline of work through which he was trying to re-create himself. In retrospect his embraces with Jenny became part of a wrestling match between her possessiveness and his independence. His diary entries over the next weeks indicate the ambivalence of his feelings.

  27 July No work done. Went to Museum and wrote a letter to JP...

  3 August Wrote full circumstantial account of affair with JP to E. McN[ulty]... Spent the evening with Sidney Webb at Colonial Office. He told me about his love affair and disappointment. Wrote a rather fierce letter to JP on my return.

  4 August Did nothing practically. Called on Eleanor Aveling in the afternoon. Resolved to begin new Pilgrim’s Progress at once... Wrote JP in reply to her answer to yesterday’s explosion.

  5 August Wrote the beginning of Pilgrim’s Progress... to JP to eat and make love until 1.20.

  10 August... JP came. To dinner at 16 then to Jaeger’s where I ordered a knitted woollen suit. Mother and JP at Jaeger’s too. After tea went home with JP & stayed until five minutes before midnight.’

  He saw her every week, ending the day with her at Brompton Square and walking back home in the early hours. There would be intervals when she went out of town, usually to her cottage in Broadstairs, but when she returned, the entries in Shaw’s diary would start up again: ‘Called on JP’; ‘Went to JP in the evening’; ‘JP here when I came home. Walked to Brompton Square with her.’ He turned up whenever he could not stay away – she hardly knew when it might be. Sometimes he came when she would have preferred him not to: ‘You will not believe me I know,’ she was to write to him, ‘but it is absolutely true that often my body has been an unwilling minister to you.’ At other times he would arrive so late that she was asleep and he would stand in the square looking up at the unlit windows.

  In the shorthand diaries where he listed his expenditure on food and travel, he also noted in code the number of times he and Jenny made love: once on the 2 and 10 August; twice on 16 and 22 August – and so on. ‘Sexual experience seemed a natural appetite,’ G.B.S. wrote forty years later, ‘and its satisfaction a completion of human experience necessary for fully qualified authorship.’ The author learned about the demands and excitements of loving; and the wiles of self-protection. ‘Only by intercourse with men and women,’ he reasoned, could we learn humanity. ‘This involves an active life, not a contemplative one... you must... give and receive hate, love, and friendship with all sorts of people before you can acquire the sense of humanity.’

  ‘I wanted to love,’ he wrote, ‘but not to be appropriated.’ He wanted Jenny to take the edge off his lust so that he
was unassailable in his Fabian flirtations and with those wives into whose marriages he had introduced himself as the favourite son. Whenever he felt restless, he looked to her to settle him; but ‘I was never duped by sex as a basis for permanent relations, nor dreamt of marriage in connection with it,’ he insisted. ‘I put everything else before it, and never refused or broke an engagement to speak on Socialism to pass a gallant evening.’ But once the Fabian meetings were over, he would find himself, like a sleepwalker, back at her house. ‘Went to JP’s,’ he wrote in his diary on 9 January 1886. ‘Revulsion.’ But three days later he was there making love to her again. ‘Went to JP in the evening and there met T. Tighe Hopkins. He was bent on seduction, and we tried which should outstay the other. Eventually he had to go for his train... To bed late.’

  ‘What a fascinating & charming lady your friend Mrs Patterson is!’ May Morris told Shaw. ‘I wonder why you professed to be reluctant to introduce me to her.’ He was reluctant – but not to talk about her. ‘Are you not a rather disloyal friend?’ May questioned him. ‘I confess I should hate to be scoffed at behind my back as you profess to scoff at Mrs Patterson.’ But Shaw admitted to betraying everybody’s confidences in the most exaggerated way. It was a sample, he explained, of Irish tact. Everyone branded him a mischief-maker but thought no worse of the people gossiped over.

  Shaw’s natural tendency to put Jenny Patterson in a compartment was strengthened by her jealousy. She accuses him of having ‘kissed & mauled about’ other women. She assails him with her need for reassurance. ‘Are you thinking of me? Wanting me?... I wish you were here now! Goodnight my darling love – when shall I see you?’ Then came apologies for her ‘awful’ rages – ‘You know how hard it is to master oneself and it is doubly hard for one like myself who has never been educated or controlled – in fact a savage.’ She woos him back to Brompton Square with fresh grapes, honey, cocoa, brown bread, strawberries and the promise that they could both be fast asleep by 2 a.m. ‘You are absolutely free to do as you please,’ she instructs him. But not for long. ‘You will run many dangers from my abandoned sex. You will be hardly safe without me... don’t fall in love with anyone but me...’