Ellen Terry was over nine years older than Shaw and had been brought up ‘healthy, happy and wise – theatre-wise at any rate’. At the age of sixteen she had abruptly left the theatre to marry the middle-aged painter G. F. Watts. The marriage had failed and she returned to the stage but absconded again two years later to live with the man she loved, the architect Edward William Godwin, by whom she had two children, Gordon and Edy Craig. The need for money had taken her back into the theatre after six years; and in 1877, largely to give her children legal status, she married Charles Wardell, ‘a manly bulldog sort of man’, who had walked in from soldiering on to the boards. Making him her leading man, she had scored a huge success with New Men and Old Acres at the Court Theatre in 1878. Shaw, who was in the stalls, dismissed the play as ‘piffling’. But Ellen Terry had enthralled him: ‘I was completely conquered.’
The public too was conquered and granted her a place, as its popular darling, set apart from Victorian standards of morality. For her emotional life had become increasingly unconventional. Before the end of 1878 she had joined Henry Irving at the Lyceum; then her marriage to Wardell began to deteriorate and in 1881 they separated. ‘I should have died had I lived one more month with him,’ she later told Shaw.
With Irving, Ellen Terry had tried to unite ‘the great happiness of occupation’ with the great excitement of romance – ‘I doted on his looks,’ she said. She helped to manage the Lyceum cast as if they were a family of children, acting as Irving’s hostess at public banquets, touring with him, and leaving the theatre with him at night. But though he bought a house and made it ready, they never lived together: and eventually the house was sold. ‘We were terribly in love for awhile,’ she said. ‘Then, later on, when it didn’t matter so much to me, he wanted us to go on, and so I did, because I was very very fond of him and he said he needed me.’
In one of his early notices for the Saturday Review, Shaw wrote indignantly of Ellen Terry as ‘a born actress of real women’s parts condemned to figure as a mere artist’s model in costume plays which, from the woman’s point of view, are foolish flatteries written by gentlemen for gentlemen’. She ‘OUGHT to have played in the Lady from the Sea,’ he claimed, though at the same time acknowledging that she ‘was never called an advanced woman’ – perhaps forgetting that he had himself described her in the Saturday Review as ‘the only real New Woman’. In their Correspondence, while parading his feminist credentials (‘no male writer born in the nineteenth century outside Norway and Sweden did more to knock Woman off her pedestal and plant her on the solid earth than I’), he called her ‘goddesslike’ and raised her onto a stage pedestal, explaining: ‘I was steeped in the tendency against which I was reacting.’
In Shaw’s mind such contradictions reflected two Ellen Terrys, one inside the other. His Ellen of the ‘ultra-modern talent’ was waiting to be released from Henry Irving’s leading actress. For almost twenty years she had lain locked in the ancient dungeons of the Lyceum Theatre, guarded by an ogre called ‘His Immensity’. Up to this castle, in the year 1895, Shaw pranced in his Ibsenite armour, and flung over the battlements a strange challenge: The Man of Destiny.
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They had sent each other a few letters haphazardly, but it was not until near the end of 1895, when he revealed his ‘beautiful little one act play for Napoleon and a strange lady’, that their flirtatious correspondence really opened. She demanded to be given the play (‘Lord, how attractively tingling it sounds’), and on 28 November he despatched it to her.
‘I really do love Ellen,’ he was to write. He loved her for helping to move his romantic feelings from a bruising world on to the stage, from the body to the page. She gave him love without physical life and therefore without threat of death. They acted love. She drew his imagination out into ‘a thousand wild stories and extravagances and adorations’ while he sat solitary at his desk ‘blarneying audacities’. They protected each other and were safe – but: ‘Only the second rate are safe.’
In The Man of Destiny Shaw had written of ‘one universal passion: fear’. It was this fear that confined them to an island of enchantment where there was no pain or regret and no growing old. They knew about such things and, when the atmosphere of charm lifted a little, could spy them far off; then go back to their play-acting together.
‘Let those who may complain that it was all on paper,’ Shaw later cautioned, ‘remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.’ Like soldiers, these strong and rather beautiful words guarded his frightened soul, concealing the truth that we may not put more courage, virtue, love into our words than we practise in our life. It was for this reason that he could not write for Ellen ‘one of my great plays’, but offered her instead this trifle, The Man of Destiny, ‘a perfectly idiotic play’ that itself revolved around a piece of paper, a supposed love letter.
The Man of Destiny was a token, plucked from his involvement with Janet Achurch and handed over to Ellen Terry as a symbol of his new engagement. ‘If I make money out of my new play I will produce Candida at my own expense,’ he told her, ‘and you & Janet shall play it on alternate nights.’ When turning down Candida, Richard Mansfield had taken the trouble to instruct Shaw that the stage was for romance. ‘You’ll have to write a play that a man can play and about a woman that heroes fought for and a bit of ribbon that a knight tied to his lance.’ The Man of Destiny, which Shaw began less than a month after receiving Mansfield’s letter, is this bit of ribbon – ‘a harlequinade,’ he told Janet Achurch, ‘in which Napoleon and a strange lady play harlequin & columbine’.
The contest between Napoleon and the Strange Lady – a tactical duel between the man of action and a woman of words – was to be parodied by a duel of actor-manager versus playwright. ‘Just read your play. Delicious,’ Ellen telegraphed. She loved Shaw’s shrewdly inserted description of herself as the Strange Lady:
‘...extraordinarily graceful, with a delicately intelligent, apprehensive, questioning face: perception in the brow, sensitiveness in the nostrils, character in the chin: all keen, refined, and original... very feminine, but by no means weak: the lithe tender figure is hung on a strong frame...
She enters with the self-possession of a woman accustomed to the privileges of rank and beauty.’
The Strange Lady had Ellen’s appearance; but did she have her character? In the play she succeeds in persuading the twenty-seven-year-old general to let her burn unread a letter that might compromise Josephine and the Director Barras. Ellen Terry’s task, to persuade Irving to read and produce The Man of Destiny at the Lyceum with the two of them in its star roles, was hardly less daunting.
She began well. Irving read it and, despite the difficulty of fitting a one-act play into the Lyceum bill, positively did not turn it down. ‘H.I. quite loves it,’ Ellen translated, ‘and will do it finely.’ But Shaw was suspicious. A production at the Lyceum ‘would of course be quite the best thing that could happen to it’. But did he dare hope for this? ‘As long as I remain a dramatic critic,’ he asked Ellen to tell Irving, ‘I can neither sell plays nor take advances. I must depend altogether on royalties and percentages on actual performances. Otherwise, you see, I should simply be bribed right and left.’ This followed his familiar tactic of moving to high moral ground from which to cross swords. He was fighting two battles: first to get his ‘opera bouffe’ produced; and secondly to win Ellen’s allegiance from Irving. Behind these battles lay the warfare he was conducting against the late Victorian theatre.
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Shaw had first seen Irving on stage at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, in The Two Roses, and ‘at once picked him out as the actor for me’. Irving seemed ‘born to play ultra-modern parts’ – that is to bring to life ‘the Shavian drama incipient in me’. Then he saw Ellen Terry in the first glory of her talent and beauty – and ‘there I had my leading couple’.
Beside Sonny’s hero, the splendid Barry Sullivan, Irving seemed a meagre pres
ence with spindly legs, a shambling dance for a walk and ‘a voice made resonant in his nose which became a whinny when he tried to rant’. Yet he had triumphed over these limitations to become the unchallengeable leader of the British stage.
Ever since arriving in London, Shaw had been studying Irving’s performances. Between April and July 1879, he had seen him as Hamlet, as Claude Melnotte in Lady of Lyons, as Cardinal Richelieu and Charles I. ‘Richelieu had been incessantly excruciating: Hamlet had only moments of violent ineptitude separated by lengths of dullness,’ Shaw reported.
‘...Before Claude Melnotte had moved his wrist and chin twice, I saw that he had mastered the rhetorical style at last. His virtuosity of execution soon became extraordinary. His Charles I, for instance, became a miracle of the most elaborate class of this sort of acting. It was a hard-earned and well-deserved triumph; and by it his destiny was accomplished.’
A man of two destinies, Irving had harnessed his new style of acting to no new dramatist of talent. He had returned to the much older rhetorical art that, while not itself false, was given over to acting versions that were falsifications of old plays, particularly spurious Shakespeare. Had he persisted in producing studies of modern life and character, ‘we should have had the ablest manager of the day driven by life-or-death necessity to extract from contemporary literature the proper food for the modern side of his talent, and thus to create a new drama instead of galvanizing an old one and cutting himself off from all contact with the dramatic vitality of his time’.
By the 1890s the ‘great possibilities’ of Ellen Terry, that Shaw accused Irving of sacrificing, seemed little more than a gallant Shavian hypothesis. The symbolic choice with which Shaw apparently presented Irving – either Sardou’s Napoleon, ‘the jealous husband of a thousand fashionable dramas’, or his own ‘baby comediatta’ – was never a real one. Shaw claimed to bear Irving ‘an ancient grudge which I never quite forgave him... So I was never really fair to him... for, scrupulously judicial as my criticisms were... you can smell a certain grudge in them.’ His real grudge lay against Irving’s power based partly on something that Shaw himself lacked: money. Money was freedom of action and the power to limit other people’s freedom. Money was a substitute for generosity, even for affection. Money was false romance.
‘It was part of H.I.’s mixture of policy with sardonic humor to buy everybody. He liked to see them selling themselves, and bought them partly to gratify that taste. He knew he was being robbed; but would not sack the robbers because it put them in his power and at his command. He tried to buy me, and believed I had come to sell myself. But he did not always buy the right people.’
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What Shaw interpreted as Irving’s attempt to ‘buy me in the market like a rabbit’, took place between the summer of 1896 and late spring the following year. For over seven months The Man of Destiny had lain at the Lyceum: and nothing had happened. Yet Ellen Terry refused to let up and in the first week of July 1896 Irving wilted, indicating that he would ‘agree to produce The Man of Destiny next year, or forfeit rights, if that must be an imperative condition,’ Ellen reported to Shaw. ‘He wants the play very much (and so do I want him to have it), and he would like to buy it.’
Shaw communicated the following week with Irving, regretting that his play was ‘so trivial an affair; but when I wrote it I had no idea it would be so fortunate’. Even now he felt it could be little more than ‘a fancy of Miss T’s’, in which case ‘a performance or two on some special occasion’ would meet the case. ‘I should of course be delighted to license any such without any question of terms.’
Irving countered this with his standard payment of £50 (equivalent to £2,700 in 1997) for a year’s exclusive option – a proposal Shaw politely described as ‘reasonable’ but which, he repeated, ‘raises a lot of difficulties for me... it is impossible for a critic to take money except for actual performances without placing both himself and the manager in a false position.’ He therefore suggested that a few performances be given in 1897 without any guarantee as to fees, adding as an apparent ‘concession’ that ‘If you produce a play by Ibsen... then I will not only consent to a postponement of “The Man of Destiny” but will hand over the rights for all the world to you absolutely to do as you like with until your retirement without fee or condition of any kind.’
With Ellen Terry looking on laughing, there was nothing much Irving could do but (with the deletion of Ibsen) appear to accept the Shavian counter-proposal. Shaw had won a paper victory.
Irving could not have taken kindly to being lectured de haut en has on financial ethics. Yet he could not afford to look mean, so he grandly did nothing for a further two months. Then, with Shaw in the audience, he announced from the stage that the Lyceum would be producing Sardou’s Napoleon show, Madame Sans-Gêne, in the spring of 1897. This, the actor’s riposte to the writer, was a wonderful provocation to Shaw, who sent an over-polite enquiry as to whether he was ‘for the first time’ free to submit The Man of Destiny elsewhere. Irving’s response was to invite him to the Lyceum.
So, at half-past twelve on 26 September 1896, the two men met in Irving’s office. There was no one with a more imposing presence than Irving; no one bolder with words than Shaw. Both had been provoked. That morning the Saturday Review published Shaw’s ferocious analysis of Irving’s Cymbeline. ‘In the true republic of art Sir Henry Irving would ere this have expiated his acting versions on the scaffold,’ Shaw had written.
‘He does not merely cut plays; he disembowels them... This curious want of connoisseurship in literature would disable Sir Henry Irving seriously if he were an interpretative actor. But it is, happily, the fault of a great quality – the creative quality... The truth is that he has never in his life conceived or interpreted the characters of any author except himself.’
Like royalty, Irving rose above Shaw’s journalism, knew nothing about it, extinguished it. Though Shaw was able to hold to his principle of not accepting money, Irving was magnanimous here too. He tolerated Shaw’s eccentricities. Fifty pounds was nothing to him. Of course he would stage The Man of Destiny – notwithstanding Sardou’s play – sometime. The man whom Shaw had that day accused in public of having no literary judgement was pleased to think highly of The Man of Destiny. So the interview, which Shaw was never to describe, ended with what seemed an uneasy truce; and a stage victory for Irving.
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The two men had met, but the man and the woman, even after a year of letter writing, had not. Ellen came to the door where Shaw and Irving were talking, heard their voices, and skedaddled. ‘I think I’d rather never meet you – in the flesh,’ she had written to him, and he had replied: ‘Very well, you shant meet me in the flesh if you’d rather not. There is something deeply touching in that.’ It was lack of confidence that kept them apart. She felt old. Her body ached, sometimes even disgusted her. She could regain her attractiveness only through an illusion. ‘They love me, you know!’ she wrote. ‘Not for what I am, but for what they imagine I am... I never feel like myself when I am acting, but some one else, so nice, and so young and so happy, and always in-the-air, light, and bodyless.’ She felt he understood. And he confirmed this understanding: ‘Our brains evidently work in the same way.’ For he too felt better bodyless. In body he was ‘a disagreeably cruel looking middle aged Irishman with a red beard’ who, in the Saturday Review, turned into a magic Shaw. So they sent out their imaginary selves to meet each other, she so schoolgirlish, he so cocksure. He entertained her, made her ‘fly out laughing’, and sometimes strengthened her stage confidence. ‘You have become a habit with me,’ she acknowledged. She gave him ‘that lost feeling of unfulfilment’. He thought he had found someone like himself, vulnerable yet determined to be self-sufficient: ‘you are a fully self-possessed woman and therefore not really the slave of love.’ Each enabled the other to keep these illusions, and each was aware of this conspiracy. ‘I, too, fear to break the spell,’ he wrote, ‘remorses, presentiments, all sorts of ten
dernesses wring my heart at the thought of materialising this beautiful friendship of ours by a meeting.’ It was the same for her: ‘I love you more every minute,’ she owned. ‘I cant help it, and I guessed it would be like that! And so we wont meet.’
What he called ‘silly longings... waves of tenderness’ almost broke the spell. He slipped the words ‘I love you’ into one of his letters, and she admitted not being able to ‘cure’ herself of him. Sometimes, in bed at night, she felt the need ‘to touch you, to put my hand on your arm’. Then he too would grow impatient at the row of footlights separating them and want to hold her in his arms: ‘Don’t let us break the spell, do let us break the spell – don’t, do, don’t, do, don’t, do, don’t –’ And the spell did not break.
In place of their bodies they put their work. ‘I must attach myself to you somehow,’ he had written: ‘Let me therefore do it as a matter of business.’ And she agreed: ‘I’m not going to write any more ’cept on business.’ His business was to make her ‘the greatest actress in the world’.
Much of his correspondence is an attempt to undermine Ellen’s faith in Irving. ‘Has he ever loved you for the millionth fraction of a moment?’ he wondered. Such questions worried Ellen. She had always been in awe of Irving – his beauty, his distinction – but felt frustrated in the patriarchy of the Lyceum. Irving was so crafty. ‘I wish he were more ingenuous and more direct,’ she confided in her diary. ‘...I think it is not quite right in him that he does not care for anybody much.’ But to Shaw she wrote: ‘I wish you were friends – that you knew each other... I think everything of him (is that “love”?). He can do everything – except be fond of people... but that’s his great misfortune... Love him & be sorry for him.’
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Bernard Shaw Page 29
