Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Early in 1886 Shaw made an effort to end their relationship. ‘Do you wish never to see me again?’ she asks him, and adds, with truth: ‘I could never make you see me if you did not want to... You have done me no harm. Nor have I harmed you.’ But Shaw felt he had harmed her; he had used her body and only he knew what he felt when he did so. His urge to make a confession to McNulty and to start a ‘new Pilgrim’s Progress’ were symptoms of his dissatisfaction. ‘Be happy,’ he had written to her in the first week of their affair, ‘for I have not the fortitude enough to bear your misfortunes.’ ‘Let me be happy,’ she wrote back to him. ‘I love you.’ But the currency of their love was different, and there could be no exchange between them that seemed fair. He could not make her happy for long. ‘When a woman does what I have done & expects either consideration or love from her lover she is a fool. I am one for I believed in you & loved you. I alas love you too much now... You are the one man in all the world to me & this I feel I know after nearly ten months of intimacy.’ This letter was written on 8 May and preceded a ‘violent scene’ between them at Brompton Square the following day. When Shaw got home that night he wrote to tell her that ‘our future intercourse must be platonic’. In this letter, which made Jenny ‘unutterably unhappy’, Shaw tried to explain his own guilt: ‘I see plainly that I have played a very poor part for some time past... I have sacrificed you and am so far the better for it – but you are the worse... I had nothing to lose – but I had something to gain and therein lies the rascality of it.’

  Jenny was unhappy, but by no means ‘unutterably’ so. In page after page over the next two days she went through her fears and regrets: ‘You make me suffer tortures. Have pity on me. I have some little right to ask it of you. I write in despair... oh my love, my love, be good to me... do not abandon me... I said leave me but you would not. The parting then would have been less hard for me... You tell me to take other lovers as if I took them as easily as a new pair of gloves... I deeply deplore Sunday’s work – but I am the sufferer. I couldn’t help it. My grief is for your loss to me.’

  She feared to open his letters, writing to ask whether they were unkind – and not daring to open the answers. He filled the backs of her envelopes with notes for political speeches. But what he wrote to her was not unkind. ‘I do not mean to abandon or desert you – I will not change – but in one thing [sex]. All shall be as before – but that.’ Knowing she still had some physical influence over him, Jenny decided to go and see him. ‘JP called here in the morning distracted about my letter,’ Shaw jotted in his diary on 13 May. ‘There was a scene and much pathetic petting and kissing, after which she went away comparatively happy’, and Shaw, with intense relief, settled down to the economic study of Jevonian curves of indifference. A few days later she wrote to him accepting ‘all you offer. It will be for you to prove that it [sex] was not “the” one thing that brought you here, that nothing is altered betwixt us really except the thing you hold so cheap.’ But, she added, ‘I do know that you are outraging nature.’

  He continued visiting her, but less often; and he left earlier. This had been one of the difficulties between them: whether he should stay the night and neglect his work, or return home at night and neglect her. Fearing that they would drift apart she promised to be ‘as good as I possibly can if you will come, not even try to kiss you – unless you wish it’. So he began seeing more of her, sometimes walking her to the door of her house, sometimes going in. Seven Sundays after their platonic intercourse had begun they made love – twice – and things were calmer. ‘My Friend & Lover,’ she wrote to him at the end of July 1886, ‘I am content that there are no barriers betwixt us – that you have taken me back. I will try to make you content with me.’ But over the next eighteen months they made each other deeply discontented. When she went off to her cottage at Broadstairs, he felt ‘much indisposed for her society’; when she returned to London he found himself ‘much out of humour with her and things in general’. On 16 December, their relationship exploded in a quarrel that lasted till one o’clock in the morning.

  ‘I am so happy when I am with you. Be as platonic as you will,’ she had written to him. ‘...I can care for you without any sensuality.’ What he apparently wanted was a platonic experiment with full sexual intercourse. The uncertainty of her position swept Jenny into a variety of distracted moods. She would demand that he ‘sacrifice something or someone for me’; plead with him: ‘Where are you?... its a million years since I have been in your arms’; cross-examine him: ‘Have you been faithful? Absolutely faithful??’ The thought of his unfaithfulness made her ill. ‘I am consumed by all sorts of fancies about you.’ During platonic intervals, Shaw would drop in on her to change his clothes, plunge into a bath or dash off letters to other women. Once, after she caught him writing to Annie Besant, she followed the two of them next day in the street and was soon plastering him with reproaches. ‘You belong to me,’ she insisted.

  *

  At the beginning of his diary for 1886 Shaw recorded that ‘my work at the Fabian brought me much into contact with Mrs Besant, and towards the end of the year this intimacy became of a very close and personal sort, without, however, going further than a friendship’.

  Annie Besant was nine years older than Shaw. Though separated from her husband she was still legally tied to him and, better still, ‘had absolutely no sex appeal’. Like Shaw, she had endured a loveless childhood, but at the age of twenty propelled herself into a painful marriage with a clergyman, Frank Besant, by whom she had two children, and from which she emerged with a fascination for celibacy and a devotion to atheism. Expelled from their home, she set out on an extraordinary pilgrimage, moving from one cause to another, each embodied by a man. The first had been the great secularist saint, Charles Bradlaugh, with whom she had ‘fought all England in the cause of liberty of conscience’. Then she veered towards the insidious Aveling, but he had left her for Eleanor Marx. She had then persuaded a dependable young Scottish secularist, John Mackinnon Robertson, to take Aveling’s place on Bradlaugh’s National Reformer as well as her own new journal Our Corner.

  She and Shaw met formally in January 1885 at the Dialectical Society near Oxford Circus where Shaw was to deliver a socialist address. It was rumoured that Annie, as the most redoubtable champion of individualist free-thought, had come down to ‘destroy me,’ Shaw recalled, ‘and that from the moment she rose to speak my cause was lost’. Public meetings were the elixir of life to her. From the platform her voice, low and thrilling, seemed neither that of a woman nor of a man, but godlike and of irresistible authority. To Shaw’s mind she was the greatest orator in England. Everyone waited for her that night to lead the opposition against Shaw, but she did not rise and the opposition was taken up by another member. ‘After he had finished, Annie Besant, to the amazement of the meeting, got up and utterly demolished him,’ Shaw remembered. ‘...At the end she asked me to nominate her to the Fabian Society and invited me to dine with her.’ She was, he concluded, ‘a woman of swift decisions’. And she was an ‘incorrigible benefactress’. She arranged the serialization of The Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists in Our Corner; and it was she who launched him there as an art critic. But she found, as Archer had previously done, that Shaw was extremely difficult to help. He had ‘a perfect genius for “aggravating” her’. When he declared, after her death, that she had had no sex appeal, he meant that she was without a sense of humour. ‘Comedy was not her clue to life,’ he admitted:

  ‘...no truth came to her first as a joke. Injustice, waste, and the defeat of noble aspirations did not revolt her by way of irony and paradox: they stirred her to direct and powerful indignation and to active resistance... the apparently heartless levity with which I spoke and acted in matters which seemed deeply serious... must have made it very hard for her to work with me at times.’

  At the beginning of his diary for 1887 he noted that their intimacy had reached ‘a point at which it threatened to become a vulgar intrigue, chi
efly through my fault. But I roused myself in time and avoided this.’ Such Shavian rousing was signalled from his side by the despatch of his photograph, and from hers by the composition of a number of fevered poems which, her sympathetic biographer Arthur H. Nethercot comments, ‘perhaps fortunately, have not survived’. They orchestrated their incompatibilities over a series of piano duets on Monday nights. ‘Shaw always came in, sat down at the piano, and plunged ahead,’ Nethercot records, ‘but Mrs Besant whenever possible practised for hours to perfect her parts in advance. The neighbourhood resounded with their efforts to keep in time.’

  Annie Besant seemed to borrow everything from other people, adding nothing except the wonder of her voice. Beatrice Webb, who disliked her, nevertheless felt that she was ‘the most wonderful woman of her century’. To Shaw also she was wonderful, but as someone on stage. ‘Like all great public speakers she was a born actress,’ he wrote. He tried to make her a good Fabian. ‘I ought to have done much more for her,’ he concluded, ‘and she much less for me, than we did.’ Annie, too, had hoped for more. In August 1887 she wrote in the National Reformer: ‘Life had nothing fairer for its favourites than friendship kissed into the passion of love.’ Shaw’s love had two qualities – extreme levity and extreme tenacity. In December 1887 she presented him with a contract setting forth the terms on which they were to live together. When he refused to sign it (‘I had rather be legally married to you ten times over,’ he cautiously fulminated) she produced a casket in which she kept all his letters and handed it to him. Next day, 24 December, he returned her side of the correspondence, and on reaching home found that Jenny Patterson had been to his room ‘and had read my letters to Mrs B. which I had incautiously left on my table’. Some of these letters mentioning herself she had taken with her. ‘I make no excuse for taking the letters,’ she wrote.

  ‘You have taken advantage of... my belief & trust in you... I am ill & numb... & [my] loneliness is almost unbearable. I try to think what it is I have done to deserve this evil... I have a thousand memories of you that I can’t forget... I feel ashamed beyond telling when I try to imagine what she must think of me. You have humbled me in the dust.’

  On the morning of Christmas Day, Shaw was woken by a hammering at the door. It was Jenny Patterson, bristling with letters. They argued about it all, and then ‘I at last got those she had taken and destroyed them’. The following evening they passed together, and so far mended matters that a few days later they saw in the New Year by making love.

  Jenny still engaged his body as Annie Besant faded to a luminous voice in his memory. She flung herself violently into street socialism and then surrendered to the masculine charm of Madame Blavatsky, ‘one of the most accomplished impostors in history’. ‘Gone to Theosophy,’ Pease noted on his Fabian list, and crossed out her name.

  As for Shaw: ‘Reading over my letters before destroying them rather disgusted me with the trifling of the last 2 years with women.’

  4

  Introducing Sidney Webb

  The Fabian lecturers are famous throughout the world. Their women are beautiful; their men brave. Their executive council challenges the universe for quality... Say to the horseleech, ‘I have joined the Fabian,’ and he will drop off as though you have overwhelmed him with salt.

  Shaw to Pakenham Beatty (27 May 1887)

  ‘Whatever Society I joined,’ Shaw wrote, ‘I was immediately placed on the executive committee.’ The Fabians had elected him to their executive on 2 January 1885, and Hyndman came to accept that he was lost for ever to the Social Democratic Federation. In selecting a political partner for himself, Shaw was guided by the need to discover someone as unlike Hyndman as possible, someone vividly unheroic and unfrockcoated, who would never play at soldiers in the street. He had already spotted the man: a crushingly plain clerk from the Colonial Office, his bulky head set on a dumpy body, graceless in movement, and as a public speaker inaudible. According to his future wife, he looked something between a London tradesman and a German professor. ‘This was the ablest man in England,’ Shaw decided: ‘Sidney Webb. Quite the wisest thing I ever did was to force my friendship on him and to keep it.’

  He had first met Webb in October 1880 at the Zetetical Society. ‘He knew all about the subject of debate,’ Shaw recalled; ‘knew more than the lecturer; knew more than anybody present; had read everything that had ever been written; and remembered all the facts that bore on the subject. He used notes, read them, ticked them off one by one, threw them away, and finished with a coolness and clearness that seemed to me miraculous.’ Though Webb was to laugh away this recollection, he acknowledged fifty years later that their meeting led to a friendship ‘which has been most fruitful to me. I look back on it with wonder at the advantage, and indeed, the beauty of [it]... Apart from marriage, it has certainly been the biggest thing in my life.’ And Shaw, in his ninetieth year, wrote in a letter to Webb that ‘I never met a man who combined your extraordinary ability with your unique simplicity and integrity of character... you knew everything that I didn’t know and I knew everything that you didn’t know. We had everything to learn from one another and brains enough to do it.’

  Webb was indefatigably packed with information. But in Shaw’s opinion, his simplicity of character was a political disadvantage. He was not mean, he had no envy, he was never a Party man. He had little humour, was impatient with people less clever than himself, and incapable of dramatizing himself or his subject. ‘I did all that for him,’ Shaw told Kingsley Martin, and in a letter to Lady Londonderry he explained: ‘All I could do for Webb was to beat the big drum in front of his booth, as he would not master that useful instrument himself.’ The description he gave of Webb as one who ‘never posed, never acted... and was never in danger of becoming a humbug and a living fiction, not to say a living lie’, points to the disgust felt by the fastidious Shaw at the gyrations G.B.S. went through to gain public attention. He produced a fountain of sparkling illustrations to make the dullest subject entertaining. And people listened. For the first time Webb’s arguments began to command an audience. Shaw had become his loudspeaker. From the other side of a Fabian screen that hid his physical defects, Webb planned to get his ideas implanted in the smart, the powerful, rich and successful figures of the world. People who felt chilled by Webb’s programme of national efficiency adored Shaw’s jokes, his acting, and gift for addressing two boys, a woman and a baby in the rain as if they were the greatest demonstration in the world. And behind him, invisible to the public, Webb was whispering the researched facts. But who had really ‘permeated’ the other was more difficult to know.

  According to Webb, the Fabians always expressed Shaw’s ‘political views and work’. According to Shaw, Webb was ‘the real inventor of Fabian Socialism’. Each was a wonder to the other. Writing in the third person for his biographer Archibald Henderson, Shaw declared that ‘they valued and even over-valued one another’. But in overvaluing each other they overlooked one quality, essential in politics, that neither of them possessed: the ability to take action. Neither of them wanted to go directly into national politics, and it was this side-stepping that gave the Fabians their peculiar obliqueness.

  Webb, the man of numbers, gave the Fabians their policy; Shaw, the man of letters, their tactics; and the two of them created the Fabian legend. From Webb came the distinguished Fabian tradition of research and education. In Shaw, they had a propagandist of brilliance. Everything he touched was given a bewilderingly cheerful coherence. Under their joint management, the Fabian Society became a club, a debating chamber, an ideas factory for the Labour movement in Britain, a focus for sociological research and literary-political propaganda. In place of the old revolutionary notion of attracting recruits until they were numerous enough to defeat capitalism at the barricades, the Fabians substituted the novelty that socialists should join other groups and permeate them with socialist ideas. They took socialism off the streets and sat it down in the drawing-room. They made it respectable by deal
ing it out as a series of parliamentary measures designed to merge political radicalism with economic collectivism. Shaw offered revolution without tears – you would hardly know it had happened. ‘A party informed at all points by men of gentle habits and trained reasoning powers may achieve a complete Revolution without a single act of violence,’ he stated.

  Fabianism came to mean ‘permeation’. In the political vocabulary it was the Fabians who patented the word. This policy gradually gave the Society its identity. Shaw and Webb believed in argument on paper. Other leading Fabians were also men of paper, for example Graham Wallas, a schoolmaster and political scientist who eventually lost his capacity for agreeable companionship in the grind of public service. A more attractive figure was Sydney Olivier. ‘He was handsome and strongly sexed,’ wrote Shaw, ‘looking like a Spanish grandee... I believe he could have carried a cottage piano upstairs; but it would have cracked in his grip.’ Shaw recognized in Olivier the powerful man needed by the Fabians.

  Olivier joined the Fabians with Webb in May 1885, and Wallas enrolled the following year. They became known among Fabians as ‘the Three Musketeers’, with Shaw taking the role of d’Artagnan. This small group directed the affairs of the Society. The ‘fifth wheel’ on the Musketeers’ coach was Annie Besant: ‘a sort of expeditionary force,’ in Shaw’s words, ‘always to the front when there was trouble and danger... founding branches for us throughout the country, dashing into the great strikes and free-speech agitations of that time... generally leaving the routine to us and taking the fighting on herself.’