So they laid the preparations for a second chapter of their love, in another place than the Lyceum. For he had promised her: ‘Nevertheless you shall play for me yet; but not with him, not with him, not with him.’
4
Candida Refinished
Here am I, the god who has been happy, among people who say ‘I want to be happy just once’. The result, though, is alarming – desiring nothing further, I have become a sublime monster, to whose disembodied heart the consummation of ordinary lives is a mere anti-climax.
Shaw to Janet Achurch (29 January 1896)
Four months after her return from New York, Janet Achurch stepped onto the stage of the Metropole in Camberwell in the revival of Wilkie Collins’s The New Magdalen. It was a fashionably sentimental drama of the sort that had once provoked Shaw’s ‘unpleasant plays’. But he was in the mood to be generous. Describing her as ‘the only tragic actress of genius we now possess,’ he wrote that ‘Miss Achurch [has] taken this innocent old figment of Wilkie Collins’s benevolent and chivalrous imagination, and played into it a grim truth that it was never meant to bear... so that the curious atmosphere of reluctance and remonstrance from which Calvé use to wring the applause of the huge audiences at Covent Garden when the curtain fell on her Carmen, arose more than once when Miss Achurch disturbed and appalled us.’
Shaw had designed his notice so as to help re-establish Janet’s career. While she was abroad he had kept her name before the public by linking it to Ellen Terry’s. Ellen and Janet held twin attractions for him. Under their spell he was like a child playing at mothers-and-fathers. About business affairs they needed a stream of fatherly advice; and while he handed them this advice they encircled him with such powerful maternal appeal that, by 1896, he was imagining them performing on alternate nights in Candida which he described as ‘THE Mother Play’.
Janet had talent but, as Ellen Terry noticed, she would ‘overdo it’. She had barely grasped her words from the prompter than she fell ill. On 10 November Shaw’s medical friend Kingston Barton diagnosed typhoid fever. Her illness ‘occupied me a good deal during the last two months of the year [1895],’ Shaw noted in his diary, ‘partly because of its bearing on all possible plans for the production of Candida, and partly because I have come into relations of intimate friendship with the Charringtons’.
He was under tremendous strain. The money he earned from his journalism was absorbed by his family, but whatever small change he could squeeze out he handed over to Charrington; and whatever time he could scratch together, often from his hours of sleep, he spent with Janet at Onslow Square. The atmosphere in the house was appalling. But Shaw, though suffering from terrible headaches, refused to admit pessimism – even when Charrington, rousing himself with a bout of hostility, objected to his closeness to Janet in her bedroom. A nurse was installed, but Janet grew worse until, her death appearing possible, Shaw was denied her room altogether.
But Janet did not die: and with her recovery Shaw’s hopes took off again. Perhaps she might play his Strange Lady. From her illness had come health; but after her convalescence she began to slip back into ‘your brandy and soda self, your fabling, pretending, promising, company promoting, heavy eyelidded, morphia injecting self,’ he admonished her.
With Shaw’s help, Charrington had succeeded J. T. Grein as managing director of the Independent Theatre. It was a calculated gamble, aimed at helping Charrington’s chances of achieving a stage career separate from his wife, whom Shaw had once more exhorted to ‘live out your own life in your own way, and leave him [Charrington] to do the same’. This was Shaw’s way of forbidding Janet’s bedroom to her husband. But his confidence in Janet was diminishing as his interest, denied access to Elizabeth Robins, mounted in Ellen Terry. The plot of Candida was being enacted in his own life. In a letter he wrote to Janet while Charrington was away in April 1896 can be heard again the accents of Marchbanks at the end of the play. ‘The step up to the plains of heaven was made on your bosom, I know; and it was a higher step than those I had previously taken on other bosoms,’ he warned her.
‘But he who mounts does not take the stairs with him... I have left the lower stairs behind me and must in turn leave you unless you too mount along with me.’
What Shaw had achieved for himself through will-power, he wanted to achieve for Janet vicariously. He wanted to become her guide and the source of her power; he wanted to replace her ordinary husband-and-wife liaison with Charrington by a motherly communion with himself.
Janet gave Shaw her answer the following month by revealing that she had been faithless to his principles ‘to the extent of making “Candida” impossible until after next February [1897], when she expects to become once more a mother’. Watching Janet, seeing her beauty (her eyes like moons in a wet fog), Shaw understood what physical joy she took in her pregnancy. It was for her, as it had been for Ellen Terry, a voluptuous confinement. But Ellen was not pregnant and never would be again; while Janet’s pregnancy moved the plot of their lives back from the stage into life. In short: she could not act in ‘THE Mother Play’ because she was to be a mother. ‘I daren’t be devoted now,’ he told her in a moment of rare pathos. ‘The appeal of your present experience to my sympathy is too strong to be indulged. So don’t be angry with Shaw, Limited.’
*
Late in 1896 Janet seems to have had a miscarriage. ‘Poor Janet,’ Ellen Terry commiserated to Shaw. ‘But tell her to wait. One gets everything if one will only wait, and she can. She is young and clever.’ Early the next year, 1897, in her home town of Manchester, she enjoyed a ‘glorious rampage’, playing Cleopatra opposite Louis Calvert’s ‘inexcusably fat’ Antony. But Shaw could not share her enjoyment. She had abandoned the experimental drama for which members of the Independent paid their subscriptions and replaced it with a thirty-year-old acting version of Shakespeare that might be seen any evening at the Lyceum. For the first time Janet was made an object for the hilarious sarcasm Irving knew so well:
‘She is determined that Cleopatra shall have rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and that she shall have music wherever she goes... The lacerating discord of her waitings is in my tormented ears as I write, reconciling me to the grave... I am a broken man... I begin to have hopes of a great metropolitan vogue for that lady now, since she has at last done something that is thoroughly wrong from beginning to end.’
What did he do to these women? He had laughed at Archer’s susceptibility to Elizabeth Robins and its effect on his criticism in The World, but what of his own Saturday Review writings on Janet?
That May, Janet put on The Doll’s House again, enabling Shaw to compare her performance with the one that had so hypnotized him eight years before. She had lost, he thought, her naturalness – a loss comparable to that of Alice in Miss Lockett, and matching the disappearance of Sonny within G.B.S. Their story was ending with a curious reversal. ‘At last I am beginning to understand anti-Ibsenism,’ Shaw told his Saturday Review readers:
‘I no longer dwell on the awakening of the woman, which was once the central point of the drama. Why should I? The play solves that problem just as it is being solved in real life. The woman’s eyes are opened; and instantly her doll’s dress is thrown off and her husband left staring at her, helpless, bound thenceforth either to do without her (an alternative which makes short work of his independence) or else treat her as a human being like himself, fully recognizing that he is not a creature of one superior species, Man, living with a creature of another and inferior species, Woman, but that Mankind is male and female... We see a fellow-creature blindly wrecking his happiness and losing his “love-life”, and are touched dramatically.’
The sympathy he feels for Helmer reflects a new sympathy for Janet’s husband, and his rising fear of being imprisoned himself within a secure and happy marriage. The Independent Theatre’s next production, The Wild Duck, did not feature Janet, and gave him the opportunity to declare that it had been Charrington who struck the decisive blow
for Ibsen in England.
‘Mr Charrington, like Mr Kendal and Mr Bancroft, has a wife; and the difference made by Miss Janet Achurch’s acting has always been more obvious than that made by her husband’s management to a public which has lost all tradition of what stage management really is, apart from lavish expenditure on scenery and furniture... Now, however, we have him at last with Miss Janet Achurch out of the bill. The result is conclusive... there is not a moment of bewilderment during the development... The dialogue, which in any other hands would have been cut to ribbons, is given without the slightest regard to the clock... That is a real triumph of management. It may be said that it is a triumph of Ibsen’s genius; but of what use is Ibsen’s genius if the manager has not the genius to believe in it.’
Shaw still believed that Janet and Charrington ought to part – but now it was for his sake more than hers. During 1897 Shaw used his Saturday Review column to persuade his readers that Charrington was ‘the only stage-manager of genius the new movement has produced... [an] adventurer who explores the new territory at his own risk and is superseded by commercial enterprise the moment he is seen to pick up anything’. Here was a handsome apology to Charrington, transformed in Shaw’s public imagination from the friend of pawnbrokers, who only cared for ‘a pipe, a glass of whisky, a caress from a respectable woman’, into a dedicated man-of-the-theatre crippled by obsessive love for his wife.
So when, having achieved success nowhere else, Shaw finally consented in the summer of 1897 to let the Independent Theatre produce Candida, it was into the ‘capable hands’ of Charrington, not to Janet, that he gave it. Ellen would not act for him: but why should her daughter, Edy Craig, not play Prossy in the production? ‘Would she go, do you think?’ Shaw asked Ellen. ‘...she might pick up something from Charrington; and Janet would keep her in gossip for a twelve-month to come.’ So Shaw proposed; Ellen consented; and Edy was signed up for £20 a week.
Ellen felt tantalized by Shaw’s friendship with her daughter. She had sent him a picture of both her children; Shaw had responded with one of himself – but with his eyes averted. So the photograph had not looked at her. But some evenings when Ellen was at the Lyceum, he would call at her home in Barkston Gardens and read his latest play to Edy and her friend Sally Fairchild. By the time Ellen returned, he was gone. They still had not met. He was, it seemed, ‘the vainest flirt’. ‘He’d coquet with a piece of string,’ Sally Fairchild volunteered. But they had seen the dreadful fatigue behind his teasing.
‘Oh, I’d love to have a baby every year,’ Ellen had written to Shaw. Of course it was a fantasy: all men were babies to her. But to her own children she was not a good mother, spoiling her son, dominating her daughter. She had rejected Edy’s suitors, and she welcomed this tour. Her daughter’s watching eyes, that cool voice, unsettled her.
Candida was first presented to the public for one performance on 30 July 1897 in Aberdeen. The Aberdeen Daily Journal called it a ‘risky business’, though the drunken scene had been ‘much appreciated’. ‘I don’t think we’ll be much troubled with Mr Shaw’s comedy,’ predicted the Northern Figaro. ‘I am sorry for Miss Achurch, she had such an uncongenial part to play, she certainly did her best with it, but I don’t think she will ever say that “Candida” is her favourite part.’
When the Charringtons’ tour reached Eastbourne, Ellen went to see it. ‘It comes out on the stage even better than when one reads it. It is absorbingly interesting every second... Even the audience understood it all.’ As for Janet, Ellen would write to her ‘about one or two trifling things in her acting, suggestions which she may care, or not care, to try over’.
But ‘I daren’t face it,’ Shaw told Janet. He was out of love with the theatre, with theatrical people, and with Janet. She had tried to borrow money from Ellen Terry and, worse still, from Edy. She had even tried to take advantage of a new friend of Shaw’s, a ‘public spirited Irish Lady’ called Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Once he had retreated before the ‘moral vacuity’ of Florence Farr; now he backed away from Janet, accusing her of being ‘a moral void – a vacuum’.
Eventually he saw his ‘unhappy play’ when the Charringtons did a London performance for the Stage Society in the summer of 1900. Edy ‘pulled off the typist successfully,’ he assured Ellen. But Janet, he decided, ‘wasnt the right woman for it at all’.
She still had power to charm him. Calling round one evening at the end of 1897 he had found her as adorable as ever. But soon she grew loud and, after dinner, fuddled – reminding Shaw of his father. He knew then what he must do. He must walk out into the night.
‘I held up a mirror in which Janet was beautiful as long as I could, in private and in print: now I’ve held it up with Janet inarticulate and rowdy. Avoid me now as you would the devil... it’s sufficient that I loved you when I was young. Now I can do nothing but harm unless I say farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell, farewell.’
5
A First Play for Puritans
My reputation as a dramatist grows with every play of mine that is not performed.
‘The Man of Destiny’, Daily Mail (15 May 1897)
Between the end of 1895 and the beginning of 1897 Shaw gave the West End stage two more chances of discovering him. You Never Can Tell was a farce, and The Devil’s Disciple a melodrama. Both were conventional as to form but extraordinary in style. ‘When I got to the end,’ wrote George Alexander, returning the text of You Never Can Tell, ‘I had no more idea what you meant by it than a tom-cat.’
In his Preface to Plays Pleasant Shaw described You Never Can Tell as an attempt to answer the many requests of managers in search of fashionable comedies for West End theatres. ‘I had no difficulty in complying,’ he explained,
‘as I have always cast my plays in the ordinary practical comedy form in use at all the theatres; and far from taking an unsympathetic view of the popular preference for fun, fashionable dresses, a little music, and even an exhibition of eating and drinking by people with an expensive air, attended by an if-possible-comic waiter, I was more than willing to shew that the drama can humanize these things as easily as they, in the wrong hands, can dehumanize the drama.’
You Never Can Tell has all the extravagant materials of farce: lost parents, antiphonal twins, outrageous coincidences, transparent disguises and the crowning emblem of a comic waiter. With dentistry as his metaphor, Shaw used laughing gas (specifically identified in the original manuscript version) to ‘pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow’, and refill theatrical comedy with new material.
In his Preface to The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet he was to liken the nation’s morals to its teeth (‘the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them’), and he once wrote to a dentist comparing their professions. ‘I spend my life cutting out carious material from people’s minds and replacing it with such gold as I possess. It is a painful process and you hear them screaming all through the press. I cannot give anaesthetics, but I do it as amusingly as I can.’
You Never Can Tell was his attempt to write for, without succumbing to, the theatre of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. He had criticized Wilde’s comedy for the Saturday Review at the end of February 1895 and begun his first attempt at You Never Can Tell some four months later.
‘I cannot say that I greatly cared for The Importance of Being Earnest. It amused me, of course; but unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening... though I laugh as much as anybody at a farcical comedy, I am out of spirits before the end of the second act, and out of temper before the end of the third, my miserable mechanical laughter intensifying these symptoms at every outburst.’
This reaction is so singular that some critics have attributed it to envy. But The Importance of Being Earnest seems to have pressed on a concealed bruise that unsettled Shaw.
One morning, before Sonny’s first birthday, his father had gone down to the railway station to see his wife as sh
e went through on the train. But ‘there you were with your head stuck down into a Book and of course you did not pretend to see me,’ he complained. ‘...there is a queer feel over me today, I did not mind it yesterday but I feel so forlorn, forsaken, alone.’ Wilde’s comedy, involving the identity of a handbagged baby in the cloakroom at Victoria Station, seemed to stir in Shaw the same ‘queer feel’ experienced by his father, against which G.B.S. had hardened his adult mind. There are echoes in You Never Can Tell of The Importance of Being Earnest. The recommendation of Valentine, the five-shilling dentist, to his patients, the young Clandons, to acquire ‘a father alive or dead’ for social respectability, is close to Lady Bracknell’s recommendation to Jack Worthing to ‘produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over’.
Both plays use the theatrical device of the chance reunion of a separated family. The long-lost father in You Never Can Tell appears to have stepped out of a standard Victorian farce. But his drinking and outbursts of temper are seen as deriving from marriage to a woman who did not love him; and he has most to gain from the affectionate pantomime atmosphere Shaw works up at the end. This dance from grimness into gaiety represents the humanity Shaw found lacking in Wilde’s play.
The autobiographical interest in You Never Can Tell is never literal, but is part of the reshaping of facts Shaw made while hammering out his philosophy of optimism. In the first version the play was set not in Devon but the Isle of Wight, where he had gone with Lucy and his mother after his sister Agnes had died there. The cast included improved versions of his father and mother, Lucy, Agnes (‘Yuppy’) and himself: they are Fergus Crampton, the abandoned father with ‘an atrociously obstinate ill-tempered grasping mouth, and a dogmatic voice’; his wife, now calling herself Mrs Clandon who rules out ‘all attempt at sex attraction’; and the three children she has brought up by herself: Gloria, ‘the incarnation of haughty high-mindedness’, and the twins, a ‘darling little creature’, Dolly, who is spoilt by her mother, and the ‘handsome man in miniature’, Philip, whose self-consciousness would be ‘insufferable in a less prepossessing youth’. All of them are transferred from their Shaw family background into the landscape of Shakespearian romantic comedy, while the imposing Finch McComas, who twenty years before fired the imagination of Mrs Clandon, occupies the place of Vandeleur Lee, but is now made an agent for the reunion of the family.
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