Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘...Consequently, my last word tonight shall be said to you, with whom I have no ignoble or unlovely associations... I see you quite distinctly – on the stage of the Novelty... Take courage then; for if you can cast these magic spells on a man thousands of miles away, after years – centuries – of absence, what can you not do to those only separated from you by a row of footlights, with Ibsen to help you?’

  The music, his preoccupation with Ibsen and the spell exercised on his imagination by Janet Achurch and Florence Farr, were combining to move him towards the theatre. But when ‘the fearsome Charringtons’, as Henry James called them, returned to England early in 1892 and revived A Doll’s House at the Avenue Theatre, something had changed. Janet exploded into fortissimo and tightened her lower lip ‘like an India rubber band’. But ‘my admiration is in nowise abated,’ G.B.S. reassured her. Admiration was the form Shaw’s love for Janet was now taking. ‘I am actually less enamoured than before,’ he wrote, ‘because my admiration elbows out the commoner sentiment. I speak as a critic, not merely as a miserable two legged man.’

  To move his emotions on to the stage was a new experiment for Shaw. But in 1893, turning down an opportunity of producing Rosmersholm, Janet and Charrington mounted their own season of plays in London: Richard Voss’s Alexandra; Brandon Thomas’s Clever Alice; and Scribe and Legouvé’s Adrienne Lecouvreur. Shaw was appalled. ‘Those old stalking horses are no use: the better you do them the more hopeless do they appear,’ he reprimanded them.

  Part of the trouble had to be Charrington. As Helmer in A Doll’s House his failure had been complete. But he was more dangerous off the stage where, in addition to being Janet’s husband, he played the more serious role – one obviously intended for Shaw – of her business manager. A man with a considerable knowledge of pawnbrokers, he developed a talent for converting other people’s investments into thin air. Shaw, who often insisted that he was ‘not fit to be trusted with money’, handed him a good deal of his own over the years.

  Charrington’s debt-collecting was obviously an ‘incurable neurosis’; Janet’s neurosis took Shaw longer to identify. On their long way back from Australia she had fallen ill, getting through her parts only with the help of morphia which the doctors had prescribed after she nearly died in childbirth. Previously she had had a tendency to alcoholism; now she added an addiction to morphia. As her condition became clear to Shaw, a method of driving out her disabling addiction by means of a more ingenious drug, distilled upon the stage, began to form in his mind.

  The Charringtons appealed to his instinct for turning failure into success. Janet’s happy prior attachment obliged Shaw to direct almost all his emotional energy towards her stage life. ‘I had to be sensible about Janet,’ he explained.

  ‘I have two sorts of feeling for you... one is an ordinary man-and-woman hankering after you... you are very handsome and clever, and rich in a fine sort of passionate ardor which I enjoy, in an entirely selfish way, like any other man. But I have another feeling for you. As an artist and trained critic, I have a very strong sense of artistic faculty and its value. I have as you know, a high opinion of your power as an actress; and just as I want to have my own powers in action and to preserve them from waste or coarsening, so I have sympathetically a strong desire to see your powers in action... This is the side on which you may find me useful.’

  Charrington’s impracticalities opened the way for Shaw’s most romantic role – that of the expert businessman, crackling with exasperated energy. ‘Mind you do exactly what I tell you,’ he instructed Charrington. But the Charringtons, while valuing his financial help, tested his instinct for success to its limits. ‘Why were you ever born?’ he burst out. ‘Why did you get married?’ And, echoing his mother: ‘Oh Charles and Janet, what a devil of a pair you are!’

  The Charringtons did not rest at dissipating Janet’s genius: they conspired to tip the frailer talent of Florence Farr over the precipice, having persuaded her to play the Princess in their production of Adrienne Lecouvreur. ‘The unspeakable absurdity of that performance is only surpassed by the unparalleled blastedness of the play,’ Shaw admonished.

  At the same time Shaw felt committed to Florence and still hoped to produce from that commitment a miraculous transformation. His loyalty to her was intensified by his final break with Jenny Patterson. Between the spring of 1891 and of 1893 the scenes with Jenny had grown worse until both of them looked like caricatures of themselves – he stonily refusing to ‘sentimentalize’ while Jenny, pretending to open none of his letters to her, scrutinized as many of other people’s letters to him as she could put her hands on. In the intervals of remorse they behaved with studied kindness to each other. They got on best while she was away in Australia, Egypt and Ireland – and Shaw could spend more evenings with Florence. ‘We read a lot of Walt Whitman and were very happy,’ he noted simply in his diary on 26 January 1893. But when Jenny came back all her jealousy revived. She besieged him in his room so that he had to make his way out by physical force, take up asylum in the British Museum and telegraph his mother to clear the house before he returned. But ‘the scene upset me,’ he admitted.

  Jenny’s hounding of him at Fitzroy Square had probably been an inducement for Shaw to go and stay with the Sparlings, so near to Florence’s lodgings. Nevertheless her emotional influence over him was waning. Something spectacular was needed.

  Something spectacular happened on 4 February 1893. ‘In the evening,’ Shaw wrote in his diary:

  ‘I went to FE; and JP burst in on us very late in the evening. There was a most shocking scene, JP being violent and using atrocious language. At last I sent FE out of the room, having to restrain JP by force from attacking her. I was two hours getting her out of the house and I did not get her home to Brompton Square until near 1, nor could I get away myself until 3. I was horribly tired and shocked and upset; but I kept patience and did not behave badly nor ungently. Did not get to bed until 4; and had but a disturbed night of it. I made JP write a letter to me expressing her regret and promising not to annoy FE again. This was sent to FE to reassure her.’

  Next day he wrote letters to both Florence (which he got May Morris to deliver) and to Jenny. There was an embattled pause. Then on 22 February ‘Got a letter from JP, which I burnt at the first glance. Wrote to tell her so, feeling the uselessness of doing anything else.’ It was the end. Jenny never forgave him; and he never forgot her – he even remembered her in his will by leaving her one hundred pounds, though she successfully avoided this by dying first.

  They corresponded once more – in The Star about the case of a police constable condemned to be hanged for the murder of his mistress. This tragedy ‘will recur tomorrow or the next day with some other pair,’ Shaw predicted. ‘We shall never be rid of these butcheries until we make up our minds as to what a woman’s claims exactly are upon a man who, having formerly loved her, now wishes to get free from her society. If we find that she has some claims, let us enforce them and protect the man from any molestation that goes beyond them.’ In a letter signed E four days later, Jenny Patterson replied: ‘I know too well the feeling when a girl knows she is no more loved by the one she has given her all to, but is only a thing to be cast aside like a toy which has been tired of.’ Shaw concluded the correspondence by describing this as showing precisely the ‘unreason that has got the woman killed and the man hanged. At the bottom of all the unreason, however, will be found the old theory that an act of sexual intercourse gives the parties a lifelong claim on one another for better or worse.’

  FIVE

  1

  The Courtship of the Webbs

  In politics, all facts are selected facts... To put it another way, the very honestest man has an unfair mind.

  ‘Why a Labor Year Book?’, The Labour Party Year Book (1916)

  While Shaw had been leaping up the mountains at Oberammergau, in the heather down below Webb had not after all been writing on municipal death duties, but pouring out love letters to a wo
man called Beatrice Potter. ‘I do not see how I can go on without you,’ he implored. Shaw, he added, ‘does not suspect my feeling for you’. Later on G.B.S. would claim to have sleuthed out the facts from Webb’s complexion (‘Sidney used to come out in spots when he fell in love’).

  Beatrice was then in her early thirties. Handsome, with huge black eyes, sweeping brown hair tortured into a knot at the back of her head, a wide rather sensuous mouth, she had what was known as a ‘beautiful carriage’. Her origins, Beatrice admitted, ‘lie in my sensual nature’. But she had sought to quell this nature, feeling it wicked to crave from men the love and attention she had missed as a child. ‘My childhood was not on the whole a happy one,’ she wrote. She was scrupulously ignored by her mother who had wanted a son instead of her eighth daughter, and who considered her ‘the only one of my children who is below the average in intelligence’. As she grew up, Beatrice turned to the informal warmth of the servants’ quarters, curling up among the sheets and tablecloths in the laundry or sitting on the ironing board and confiding to the maids her intention of becoming a nun. ‘I must pour my poor crooked thoughts into somebody’s heart,’ she wrote, aged fifteen at the beginning of her diary, ‘even if it be my own.’

  To one man she did give her heart – Joseph Chamberlain. He was ‘intensely attractive to me,’ she confessed, yet she could not overlook his ‘personal ambition and desire to dominate’. Sexual passion and the attraction of power divided her – it seemed impossible to reconcile her sensual with her intellectual needs. ‘I don’t know how it will end,’ she wrote. ‘Certainly not in my happiness.’ Chamberlain’s rejection drove her into suicidal depression. ‘If Death comes it will be welcome,’ she wrote. ‘...It is curious this feeling of life being ended.’

  Another life came to her through social work which moved her emotional energies into politics. She brooded over statistics, went on a study of Sweating in the tailoring trade, kept company with trade unionists. ‘At last I am a Socialist,’ she exulted in January 1890.

  That month she had met Sidney Webb – ‘a London retail tradesman,’ as she described him, ‘with the aims of a Napoleon’. Though she liked to claim that she was without a sense of beauty, she had an almost voluptuous appreciation of ugliness. ‘His tiny tadpole body, unhealthy skin, lack of manner, Cockney pronunciation, poverty, are all against him,’ she noted. He strutted round the room with an expression of inexhaustible conceit. But despite his ‘bad habits’ she liked him. Beneath the bourgeois black coat, inside the bulky head, lurked an improbable monster of romance who wanted to marry a beauty and to see his ideas command the lives of Cabinet Ministers such as Joseph Chamberlain. ‘You have it in your hands to make me, in the noblest sense, great,’ he informed her. And Beatrice responded. ‘One grasp of the hand,’ she recorded, ‘and we were soon in a warm discussion on some question of Economics.’ He wooed her with charts and equations. As he lay in bed at night, a vision of her face flashed before him ‘in the guise of a co-worker... between the lines of the despatches’. She had devised a concordat to hoist their ‘camaraderie’ from ‘the predominance of lower feeling’ to the pinnacles of high-mindedness. ‘The agony is unendurable,’ he assured her. She urged him to consider his clothes, and the string to his pince-nez. ‘Take care of your voice pronunciation,’ she commanded: ‘it is the chief instrument of influence.’ Her heart seemed imprisoned by its past attachment to Chamberlain. ‘I am not capable of loving,’ she insisted.

  The courtship grew so desperate as to bewilder them both. ‘The question is,’ Beatrice urgently demanded, ‘what is the present position?’ Whatever it was, suddenly it changed and she began to brood on matrimony. One day, after Sidney had finally given up all hope, she failed to withdraw her hand from his. ‘I am still a little in a dream,’ he owned.

  Marriage, they were agreed, was the waste-paper basket of the emotions. Optimistically he sent her his full-length portrait, but: ‘No dear,’ she chided him, ‘I do not even look at your photograph. It is too hideous... it is the head only that I am marrying.’ ‘You have made a splendid beginning,’ he responded. Their engagement was cemented, in Sidney’s phrase, over the death of Beatrice’s father, and on 23 July 1892, in ‘a prosaic, almost sordid ceremony’, they were married at St Pancras vestry hall, spending their honeymoon in Dublin investigating Irish trade unionism. ‘We are very very happy – far too happy to be reasonable.’

  ‘If all marriages were as happy,’ Shaw concluded, ‘England, and indeed the civilized world, would be a Fabian paradise.’

  *

  Beatrice initially disliked Shaw. ‘We embarrass each other frightfully when we are alone together,’ he observed, ‘without some subject of keen and immediate interest to discuss.’ His philanderings riled her. ‘His stupid gallantries bar out from him the friendship of women who are either too sensible, too puritanical or too much “otherwise engaged” to care to bandy personal flatteries with him,’ she noted contemptuously in her diary. ‘One large section of women, comprising some, at any rate, of the finest types, remains hidden from him.’ ‘Nothing annoyed her so much,’ Shaw recognized, ‘as being suspected of any sensual attachment to me.’ Nor could he resist playing on this until she found a way of neutralizing him. ‘You cannot fall in love with a sprite: and Shaw is a sprite in such matters, not a real person,’ she explained. And Shaw himself agreed: ‘It is certainly true.’

  They came to understand each other well because of the Fabian ‘dry goods’ they shared. ‘We are committed for life to Socialism,’ Shaw acknowledged. It was after her that Shaw created Vivie Warren in Mrs Warren’s Profession – an ‘attractive... sensible... self-possessed’ woman in whom William Archer (not knowing Beatrice) could see nothing ‘but a Shaw in petticoats’. It was Shaw’s ‘most serious play,’ Beatrice decided.

  Each summer the Webbs would take a house in the country for three months – first an enlarged Jacobean mansion called Argoed, at Penallt in the Wye Valley; subsequently a rectory in Suffolk or a farm in Surrey – and here they would invite Sidney’s friends on the Fabian executive. ‘The Fabian old gang can only afford a country house for a holiday,’ Shaw bluntly put it, ‘because one of us has a wife with a thousand a year.’ They passed their mornings, each in separate rooms, writing; stopped for a ravenous plain meal (‘we do not have butter for Sidney’s breakfast’); strode off on crushing walks during the afternoon and spent the evenings arguing violently over politics. By the mid-1890s they had changed from walkers into bicyclists.

  ‘My new toy is my bicycle,’ Shaw proclaimed in 1895. That spring, to the convulsions of the coastguards, he started learning to ride this new hobby horse with the Webbs on Beachy Head: ‘I will do twenty yards and a destructive fall against any professional in England,’ he told Janet Achurch. ‘My God, the stiffness, the blisters, the bruises, the pains in every twisted muscle, the crashes against the chalk road that I have endured – and at my age [39] too. But I shall come like gold from the furnace: I will not be beaten by that hellish machine.’ Beatrice, who scudded into a wasps’ nest but managed to cure herself with whisky, calculated that ‘One’s “byke” is a great addition to the pleasure of life.’ And Shaw, lying exhausted in a deep ditch near Argoed, the moonlight filtering onto him through the revolving spokes of the wheels and the laced thorn twigs of a briar, reflected: ‘Bicycling’s a capital thing for a literary man.’ On wheels, the Fabians appeared to become schoolboys and girls again. Beatrice (until Sidney had one smash too many) rigorously prescribed it during the long Fabian summer afternoons; and Shaw hygienically explained: ‘Unless I seize every opportunity of bicycling off into the country, if only for a couple of hours, I get beaten by the evil atmosphere in which I have to pass so much of my time.’

  For a dozen years, until 1908 when he took dangerously to cars, the bicycle was a prime article of Shavian equipment. Its effect was enormous, he reasoned, since the bicyclist could extend a day’s travel from the pedestrian’s few miles to the region of a hundred miles. So,
by increasing the efficiency of existence, the bicycle which was popularly attacked as the terror of horses and a temptation to women, became a symbol of modernity. As such it was wheeled by way of metaphor and analogy into many Shavian arguments.

  By 1896 he had enrolled as the 621st member of the Cyclist Touring Club whose Annual General Meeting he considerably lengthened by a plea against improving the tone of the Club’s Gazette (where fiction, he thought, should be found only among the advertisements). To actresses, parents, schoolboys, he poured out information about the varieties of crack machines. ‘Do not expect to improve with practice,’ he recommended. ‘You wont. The change from hopeless failure to complete success is instantaneous and miraculous.’ One miracle was staying alive, though ‘if you keep on bicycling long enough,’ he promised, ‘you will break your leg’.

  For someone physically timid, Shaw’s experiments by bicycle were extraordinary. He would raise his feet to the handlebars and simply toboggan down the steep places. Many of his falls, from which he would prance away crying ‘I am not hurt’, with black eyes, violet lips and a red face, acted as trials for his optimism. The surgery afterwards was an education in itself. Each toss he took was a point scored for one or more of his fads. After one appalling smash (hills, clouds and farmhouses tumbling around drunkenly), he wrote: ‘Still I am not thoroughly convinced yet that I was not killed. Anybody but a vegetarian would have been. Nobody but a teetotaller would have faced a bicycle again for six months.’ After four years of intrepid pedalling, he could claim: ‘If I had taken to the ring I should, on the whole, have suffered less than I have, physically.’