Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  But when he listens to other music it is with acute attentiveness. Whenever possible before a performance he studied the score and would expose cuts, interpolations and other textual deviations, as well as derivations from the work of other composers. His descriptions of performers have an exactness that enables us to differentiate one from another precisely: the exuberant hammer-play of Paderewski, the cool muscular strength of another musical gymnast, Slivinski, a prodigiously rapid pianist of the Leschetizky school, and the hugely energetic Rubinstein, a player of marvellous manual dexterity limited by his narrowness of intellectual sympathy. Among violinists he discriminates so finely between the judgement of Reményi, the sensitive hand of Sarasate, Joachim’s peculiarly thoughtful style and the self-assertiveness of Ysaÿe that we can almost hear their playing. He analyses the varying styles of the conductors from Richard Wagner and Richter to Henschel’s London Symphony Orchestra, Charles Hallé’s Manchester concerts, and the Saturday concerts led by August Manns at the Crystal Palace. He brings in reports from music halls and from amateur events in the country such as the brass band of shoemakers playing on a racecourse at Northampton – the sort of place where the music of the country was kept alive. He argues that public opera houses are as essential to people as public museums and public galleries, and a powerful competition to public houses. He wants to transform this brainless country ‘where you cannot have even a cheap piano provided for the children to march to in a Board School without some mean millionaire or other crying out that the rates will ruin him’. Among his targets for criticism are charity concerts that promoted bad music for well-meaning ends, as if a good orchestra was not as ‘important to a town as a good hospital’.

  The critic who amused stockbrokers in the 1880s and 1890s was to become one of our best guides to the history of music performed in England during the late nineteenth century. He had perfected the Shavian note – assertive, audacious, fantastic, expertly wrapped round with the illusion of intimacy – until he became his own description of the confident journalist-critic: ‘magnificently endowed with the superb quality which we dishonor by the ignoble name of Cheek – a quality which has enabled men from time immemorial to fly without wings, and to live sumptuously without incomes’.

  ‘The critic who is modest is lost,’ Shaw wrote. But he also knew the damage that could be done to those who, to gain the popular ear, force ‘vulgarity upon a talent that is naturally quiet and sympathetic’.

  5

  Exits and Entrances

  Very few people in the world have ever had a love affair.

  ‘Beethoven’s “Unsterbliche Geliebte”’, The World (1 November 1893)

  Florence Farr was ‘an amiable woman, with semicircular eyebrows’ whom Shaw describes in his portrait of Grace Tranfield from The Philanderer: ‘slight of build, delicate of feature, and sensitive in expression... but her well closed mouth, proudly set brows, firm chin, and elegant carriage shew plenty of determination and self-respect’. She was four years younger than Shaw and unlike any woman he had met. She seemed to resemble some of the New Women he had optimistically invented in his novels. It was partly her feminism that had brought her to William Morris’s house in Hammersmith where she was learning embroidery with May through whom, in about 1890, she met Shaw.

  He had seen her act in John Todhunter’s A Sicilian Idyll, remarking on her ‘striking and appropriate good looks’. Then, on 4 October 1890, he ‘had a long talk’ with her at the private view of an Arts and Crafts exhibition, after which they went ‘gadding about’ to plays and recitals together, to the Pine Apple and Orange Grove restaurants and, for long teas, to ABC shops where he ‘chatted and chatted’ and she ‘laughed and laughed’. He would turn up out of the night at her lodgings in 123 Dalling Road, only half a mile from May Morris, play a little, sing a little, and take her for walks round Ravenscourt Park. ‘First really intimate conversation,’ Shaw recorded after an evening with her on 15 November. As the daughter of a sanitary reformer who had tried to persuade his countrymen that England was dying of dirt, her Shavian provenance was impeccable. She had been schooled in Shakespeare and tap-dancing, then married a handsome actor, Edward Emery, who spent much of his time resting. Florence was not an observant woman: it was almost four years later, in 1888, that she noticed that Edward was no longer there. He had gone to America, leaving her an independent married woman.

  Like Jenny Patterson Florence took the initiative over Shaw. ‘As she was clever, goodnatured, and very goodlooking, all her men friends fell in love with her,’ he recalled. Before the end of the year they had become lovers. Shaw made no secret of his love for Florence. ‘Went over to FE in the evening,’ he wrote in his diary on 30 December 1890: and added uncharacteristically, ‘ – a happy evening.’ He told his friends he was in love with her; he told Florence herself she was ‘my other self – no, not my other self, but my very self’, and ‘the happiest of all my great happinesses, the deepest and restfullest of all my tranquillities, the very inmost of all my loves’.

  Whenever he felt incapable of further work and craved for exercise, he would leap away from his desk and usually find himself six miles off at Florence’s lodgings, where he ‘let time slip and lost my train back’. One night he arrived to ‘find the place in darkness’. He ‘wandered about disappointed for a time’, then returned to Fitzroy Square, put down the feelings released in him by her absence, and sent them to her as a letter: ‘I have fallen in with my boyhood’s mistress, Solitude, and wandered aimlessly with her once more... reminding me of the days when disappointment seemed my inevitable & constant lot.’

  Florence promised him a future he had believed to be impossible. ‘Women tend to regard love as a fusion of body, spirit and mind,’ he later told one of his biographers. ‘It has never been so with me.’ Yet for a time, perhaps a year, it seemed as if it could be so. Florence had, according to W. B. Yeats, ‘three great gifts, a tranquil beauty... an incomparable sense of rhythm and a beautiful voice’. For Shaw, her attractiveness lay partly in her beauty and partly in her attitude. Though unpuritanical she was fastidious, ‘claimed 14 lovers’, but retained her independence. ‘When a man begins to make love to me,’ she admitted, ‘I instantly see it as a stage performance.’

  Almost before they knew themselves that they were in love, Jenny Patterson knew it. Towards the end of 1890 she had gone abroad, and for almost four months Shaw and Florence saw each other freely. But then, on 27 April 1891, Shaw ‘went in to JP’s. Fearful scene about FE, this being our first meeting since her return from the East. Did not get home until about 3.’ These scenes grew fiercer, but each time she won a battle she won less. ‘Not for forty thousand such relations will I forgo one forty thousandth part of my relation with you,’ Shaw promised Florence. ‘...The silly triumph with which she [Jenny Patterson] takes, with the air of a conqueror, that which I have torn out of my own entrails for her, almost brings the lightning down on her... Damnation! triple damnation! You must give me back my peace.’

  Once Jenny Patterson too had given him peace, but it had been a peace of the body only, as she well understood: ‘Any other woman would have brough[t] you the sleep I did.’ After the Annie Besant rumpus, she expected their sexual relationship to go on as before: and to some extent it had. Shaw was neglectful, long-suffering, and passionate by turns. ‘You are beginning again the old games,’ she had warned him in January 1888. But the next month she wrote: ‘Be as ardent as you were last week, it is your place to be so – I adore to be made love to like that. It takes my breath away...’

  Yet she could not conceal from herself that his feelings for her were not what they had been ‘when I was dear Mrs Patterson & worth seeing... oh les beaux jours’. Her expectations of him seemed to fade. ‘How my lover is becoming less my lover every month... just thinking of me as a sucking baby does of its mar when it is hungry!’ she had complained on 20 October 1888. ‘Adieu most disappointing of men.’ She could say goodbye, she could not leave him; and the next month sh
e is begging him to ‘write me again so that I may have something to live on until I see you’.

  But their relationship had become stale to Shaw. He tried not to hurt her – ‘You are gentle and good nearly always to me,’ she allowed – but increasingly recoiled from the physical centre of their liaison. Nevertheless, though he flirted with Fabian girls and other men’s wives he had made love only to Mrs Patterson and perhaps May Morris until he fell in love with Florence. His love affair with Jenny Patterson had separated sex from other interests. She repeatedly writes of it as if it were a commodity like some bargain at a shop. ‘My boy you got all for nothing – it was not to be bought at any price.’ Sex was everything she had to bargain with, and through it she gave her whole self. She loved him in a way he could not love her. Hers is a small world and her feeling for him so fills it that there is no place for interests or enthusiasms beyond her infatuation. ‘You are my love, my life & all the world to me,’ she writes.

  This love was Shaw’s small private hell. Jenny may have been going through the change of life. She weeps, rages, flings a book at his head, provokes quarrels over imaginary offences, breaks off their relationship, arranges a luxurious reconciliation. In his chapter called ‘The Womanly Woman’ from The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Shaw was obviously using his experiences with Jenny Patterson when he describes ‘the infatuation of passionate sexual desire’.

  ‘Everyone who becomes the object of that infatuation shrinks from it instinctively. Love loses its charm when it is not free... it becomes valueless and even abhorrent, like the caresses of a maniac. The desire to give inspires no affection unless there is also the power to withhold; and the successful wooer, in both sexes alike, is the one who can stand out for honorable conditions, and, failing them, go without.’

  Only with his New Woman could he achieve these honourable conditions. Shaw never explained that Florence was infertile. This may help to account for her list of lovers, and why Shaw entered his name on it so prominently. By implication it may also elucidate a mysterious passage from a letter he wrote in 1930 to Frank Harris and later published in Sixteen Self Sketches: ‘If you have any doubts as to my normal virility, dismiss them from your mind. I was not impotent; I was not sterile; I was not homosexual; and I was extremely susceptible, though not promiscuously.’ How then did he know that he was not sterile? The evidence, though meagre, suggests that in the first half of 1886 Jenny Patterson may have had a miscarriage. She had gone to see Shaw’s medical friend Kingston Barton early in February. ‘I have seen “the” Barton,’ she told him and followed this with an enigmatic row of dots. On 10 May, in the first of her desperate pleas to him not to abandon her, she writes of having to hide her predicament from ‘Lucy’s sharp eyes’ and play at being her ‘old self’ to Shaw’s mother: ‘I dread being ill it will all come out I fear then.’ But it is clear from Shaw’s diary that his mother and sister knew of Mrs Patterson’s attachment to him. So there must have been something more to come out. During the spring Jenny Patterson had complained of illness, and her letter of 11 May contains a definite allusion to pregnancy. ‘You cant help wronging me. I trusted you entirely. Had there been results I should have had to bear that also alone.’ So by the second week of May two things were established: that there was now no pregnancy and that they would henceforward experiment with a platonic relationship. The fear of pregnancy and the revulsion caused by a miscarriage could only have been extra brakes to Shaw enjoying sexual intercourse with other women until he met one who was herself sterile. It would also deepen the sexual guilt with which, despite all his freethinking morality, Jenny Patterson had encircled him.

  With Florence there was no tyranny or guilt; and from his gratitude arose a dazzling overestimation of ‘the magnetic Miss Farr’. There were times when she could make him feel ‘more deeply moved than I could have imagined’. But she also brought him something deeper than the ‘revulsion’ he had noted against Jenny Patterson’s name, and this, as he put in his diary, was ‘Disillusion’.

  After her husband’s disappearance Florence had turned simultaneously towards two writers: W. B. Yeats and Shaw.

  Great minds have sought you – lacking someone else

  You have been second always...

  Ezra Pound assured her:

  You are a person of some interest, one comes to you

  And takes strange gain away:

  Trophies fished up: some curious suggestion;

  Fact that leads nowhere: and a tale or two,

  Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else

  That might prove useful and yet never proves...

  No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,

  Nothing that’s quite your own.

  Yet this is you.

  Both Shaw and Yeats fashioned castles in the air with Florence, their amiable Princess, waving airily from them. While Shaw beckoned her towards a bright future, Yeats serenaded her back to the magical past. To Yeats she could ‘tell everything’; from Shaw she heard everything. Like him she had sent herself to school in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and absorbed a fine store of facts that led nowhere. ‘It is impossible to mention anything she does not know,’ Shaw exclaimed in astonishment. He felt a tremendous challenge to discover some purpose within the debris of her knowledge. She had flirted professionally with the stage before her marriage, and was now preparing to float back to it by way of Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea. But Shaw ‘delivered to her so powerful a discourse on Rosmersholm that she presently told me that she was resolved to create Rebecca or die’.

  Shaw’s fascination with the stage had been intensifying during his fifteen years in London. He had taken part in the copyright performances of one or two plays, acted in various amateur theatricals produced by the Socialist League and a ‘3rd rate comedy’ with May Morris. He had been able to express his feelings for May more accurately on the stage than in real life: ‘I do not love her – I have too much sense for such follies; but I hate and envy the detestable villain who plays her lover with all my soul.’

  The stage appealed to Shaw as a place where actions were governed by words. His interest in Florence rapidly concentrated on her acting. ‘I have an extraordinary desire to make the most of you – to make effective & visible all your artistic potentialities,’ he told her. During February 1891 they went through Rosmersholm and from Shaw’s diary come whispers of their excitement.

  6 February Went over Rosmersholm (first few scenes) with FE. Found it hard to leave...

  11 February... to FE’s. She gave up her intention of going out to dinner and I stayed all the evening. We were playing, singing, trying on Rosmersholm dresses, going over the part etc.

  The success of Rosmersholm was moderate and Shaw redoubled his efforts to make Florence’s originality blaze forth. He became her tutor, calling round at Dalling Road to ‘work on her dramatic elocution’ and prepare her during the summer of 1892 for playing Beatrice in The Cenci. The scenes where Owen Jack coaches Madge Brailsford for the stage in Love Among the Artists had invaded life and were to return to fiction in Pygmalion (later Shaw was to advise Florence to study phonetics with Beerbohm Tree, the first Professor Higgins, at his school of drama). The name Doolittle irresistibly suggests Florence. She did not lack intelligence or feeling or beauty; she did not lack voice. But there seemed a ‘frightful vacuity’ at the centre of her life. Shaw strove to plant in this void the seeds of a vigorous and improving energy. She needed will-power, and it was his role to supply this power vicariously from the batteries of his own will.

  During rehearsals at the Bedford Park Club on 30 June, Florence fainted but stood up bravely at the opening a fortnight later when ‘the white robe and striking beauty of Beatrice’ were favourably noticed by the anonymous critic of the Daily Chronicle, G. Bernard Shaw. But there were still Himalayas to cross before she could pass as an important leading lady. Behind the beating of Shaw’s optimism emerges a bathos whenever he insists too much on the success of their collaboration
: ‘She actually realized greater possibilities than she had (what a sentence!).’

  At the same time he had prudently invested his hopes in another actress. ‘Interesting young woman,’ he observed on 16 June 1889, after sitting next to Janet Achurch at a dinner in the Novelty Theatre celebrating the English première of A Doll’s House. Shaw’s mother, who accompanied him to this production, had also been struck by Janet, remarking with conviction: ‘That one’s a divìl.’ But Shaw found himself ‘suddenly magnetized, irradiated, transported, fired, rejuvenated, bewitched’, and sat up till 2 a.m. the following night writing to his ‘wild and glorious young woman’.

  Janet was married to another actor, Charles Charrington Martin. Together they had played in a company managed by F. R. Benson, a splendidly incomprehensible actor whose mission to spread Shakespeare through the country was aided by the widespread belief that he was related to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  There was no conventional prettiness to Janet. She was Amazonian. Shaw could never think of her noble outline ‘without imagining myself lost at sea in the night, and turning for refuge toward a distant lighthouse, which, somehow, is you’. Others contemplating her voluptuous appearance thought of Helen and Guinevere and ‘those Northern beauties who strangled the souls and bodies of heroes in the meshes of their golden tresses’.

  She and Charles Charrington had signed an agreement to tour Australia and New Zealand for two years. It was with money borrowed in advance of their salary that they had financed one week’s performance of A Doll’s House at the Novelty Theatre.

  That Janet was to leave for the other side of the world in less than three weeks stirred Shaw’s feeling magnificently. He saw A Doll’s House five times, and sent her two of his novels. On the morning of 5 July he went to Charing Cross to see them both off on their Australian tour. He had pledged himself to work in Janet’s absence but would find himself wasting time with a long letter to her. She sent him her photograph and asked for his news. He replied, telling her of all the ‘nibblings at Ibsen’ in London and of his own Quintessence. William Archer’s criticism was gaining wonderfully in its recklessness, he added, while ‘I am getting middle-aged and uninteresting. Political drudgery has swamped my literary career altogether. Still, as all the follies of love and ambition fall off from me, my soul burns with a brighter flame.’ Then there was the music criticism: Corno di Bassetto of The Star was dead – long live (on five pounds a week) G.B.S. of The World! ‘Since I began to write for the World, revising my work with great labor and going to great numbers of performances, I have become more and more a slave to art, and can by no means be satisfied with intellectual interest,’ he divulged.