Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Charlotte had an apprehension of sexual intercourse, deriving from what Shaw later described as ‘a morbid horror of maternity’. She was in her fortieth year and ‘there was never any question of breeding’. Over the next eighteen months they seem to have found together a habit of careful sexual experience, reducing for her the risk of conception and preserving for him his subliminal illusions. To such muted sexuality Shaw could give assent. ‘ALL CLEAR NOW YES A THOUSAND TIMES,’ he had cabled Charlotte in October. That autumn too he started to terminate his relationship with Bertha Newcombe; blow away Ellen Terry’s daydreams of becoming his mother-in-law; renounce retrospectively ‘spiritual intercourse’ with Florence Farr; and tell Janet Achurch that her maternity had made her ‘stark raving mad’. Then, turning back to Charlotte he resumed his intrepid doubles entendres: ‘Cold much worse – fatal consummation highly probable. Shall see you tonight... What an exacting woman you are! Is this freedom?’

  *

  Charlotte soon made herself almost indispensable to Shaw. She learnt to read his shorthand and to type, took dictation and helped him prepare his plays for the press. Her flat above the London School of Economics became ‘very convenient for me’ – more convenient than Fitzroy Square. There was no question of turning up there at any time in the casual way he had dropped in on Jenny Patterson, Janet Achurch, Florence Farr and others. He would invite her to theatres and picture galleries; and she invited him to lunch or dinner, seeing to it that her cook became expert in vegetarian dishes. There were interruptions: his migraines, her neuralgia; his work, her journeys. And there was a momentary crisis when she threatened to buy a poodle – which drew from him the panicky suggestion that she ‘have (or hire) a baby’ instead. In a spirit of compromise she attended lectures at the School of Medicine for Women.

  Between April and June 1897 Charlotte shared with Sidney and Beatrice the expenses of a pretty cottage called Lotus on the North Downs, near Dorking. Shaw went down as frequently as he could. But he had less time than at Stratford the previous year – ‘tired and careworn’ he described himself. But the Webbs were in excellent working form. The sun streamed through the dancing leaves and they revelled, almost childlike with excitement, in the economic characteristics of Trade Unionism; while Charlotte sat upstairs miserably typewriting Plays Unpleasant, and the playwright himself strode the garden forming his Dramatic Opinions. Beatrice watched with concern. It was obvious that Charlotte was deeply attached to Shaw, but ‘I see no sign on his side of the growth of any genuine and steadfast affection,’ she noted.

  Though she found everything ‘very interesting’, Charlotte could take only a modest part in what Shaw called ‘our eternal political shop’. On Sundays they enlisted a stream of visitors – young radicals, mostly: William Pember Reeves and his wife Maud; Bertrand and Alys Russell; Herbert Samuel; Charles Trevelyan; Graham Wallas – and Charlotte sometimes felt excluded. She hung on, but her face showed at times ‘a blank haggard look’. Beatrice felt that Shaw must share her own irritation at Charlotte’s lack of purpose. ‘If she would set to – and do even the smallest and least considerable task of intellectual work – I believe she could retain his interest and perhaps develop his feeling for her.’

  Charlotte struggled to make an occupation out of Shaw’s work. On Sundays in London she had made her way to the dock gates and street corners to hear him speak. But these experiences mortified her. She hated the roughness of the crowds. ‘It appears that my demagogic denunciations of the idle rich – my demands for taxation of unearned incomes – lacerate her conscience; for she has great possessions. What am I to do: she won’t stay away; and I can’t talk Primrose League. Was there ever such a situation?’

  Although the author of The Philanderer believed it was better for ‘two people who do not mean to devote themselves to a regular domestic, nursery career to maintain a clandestine connection than to run the risks of marriage’, Charlotte was surprised to find that his advice to women was to ‘insist on marriage, and refuse to compromise themselves with any man on cheaper terms’. He considered the status of a married woman as ‘almost indispensable under existing circumstances to a woman’s fullest possible freedom.

  ‘In short, I prescribed marriage for women, and refused it for myself. I upset her ideas in many directions; for she was prepared for conventional unconventionality, but not for a criticism of it as severe as its own criticism of conventionality.’

  Within this argument seems to lie the biological politics that were to vitalize Man and Superman. In fact the philosophy of this play was one of the ‘illusions’ that Shaw substituted for actual experience. For Charlotte did not want marriage in order to have children; she was beginning to want it as a partnership that, though different from the Webbs’, would be no less satisfactory. At that level Shaw had little to say. Eventually she began to run out of patience with him.

  Charlotte had surprised Shaw before by taking his advice. Now, she attempted to do so again. If it was her job to marry, he would not object to her making the proposal. This it seems is what she attempted to do in the second week of July 1897. Shaw described the scene as ‘a sort of earthquake’. He received the golden moment, he told Ellen Terry, ‘with shuddering horror & wildly asked the fare to Australia’. This description, given a fortnight after the event, is a good example of the replacement of ‘Shaw Limited’ by ‘G.B.S.’. Pain, regret, tenderness are dissolved in the triumphant playing of a Shavian scherzo. ‘I have an iron ring round my chest, which tightens and grips my heart when I remember that you are perhaps still tormented,’ he wrote to her the day after the proposal.

  ‘Loosen it, oh ever dear to me, by a word to say that you slept well and have never been better than today. Or else lend me my fare to Australia, to Siberia, to the mountains of the moon, to any place where I can torment nobody but myself. I am sorry – not vainly sorry; for I have done a good morning’s work, but painfully, wistfully, affectionately sorry that you were hurt; but if you had seen my mind you would not have been hurt... Write me something happy, but only a few words, and don’t sit down to think over them.’

  She was rich, he was poor. Marriage for property, he had written, was prostitution; to marry her would be the act of an adventurer. This financial scruple had the advantage of being kindly; it was not a personal rejection. Yet it was a prevarication, and did not protect Charlotte from being ‘inexpressibly taken aback’. It was absurd for him to turn his back on a richer woman simply because people might regard him as a fortune-hunter.

  Politically, Shaw had put his faith in the power of words to inspire action. But in his personal life he employed words to avoid taking action. His letters to Ellen Terry and others had developed into an oblique device for this avoidance. He talked himself out of emotional danger. Advancing to the front of the stage he put his case mockingly to the audience:

  ‘I will put an end to it all by marrying. Do you know a reasonably healthy woman of about sixty, accustomed to plain vegetarian cookery, and able to read & write enough to forward letters when her husband is away, but otherwise uneducated? Must be plain featured, and of an easy, unjealous temperament. No relatives, if possible. Must not be a lady. One who has never been in a theatre preferred. Separate rooms.’

  Such a monologue, though it floods the auditorium with amusement, does not advance the event-plot of the play. And does it convince? At least one member of his audience with a shrewd knowledge of such performances thought not. ‘Well,’ Ellen Terry responded, ‘you two will marry.’

  *

  Superficially the rupture between Shaw and Charlotte healed quickly. But added pressure was now being placed on him to marry. Webb had uncharacteristically given him a talking to; and then, at the end of July, Graham Wallas unexpectedly announced his own engagement to a high-principled short-story writer, Ada Radford. With this ‘desertion’ Shaw was to become the only unmarried member of the Fabian Old Gang.

  That August he had arranged to stay at Argoed with Charlotte and the Webbs. He
was more deeply exhausted than ever – too tired to fix up the hammocks Charlotte had brought, too tired to draw rein from writing even for a day. The days flew past, ‘like the telegraph poles on a railway journey’, and he worked on. But ‘I am in the most disagreeable humor possible,’ he complained to Florence Farr. His ‘victory’ over Charlotte had disappointed him. They lived an irreproachable life, the writing machine and the typist, in the bosom of the Webb family. It was apparently everything he had wanted. Yet a dialogue began to develop between G.B.S. and Shaw Limited in his correspondence.

  ‘I am fond of women (one in a thousand, say); but I am in earnest about quite other things. To most women one man and one lifetime make a world. I require whole populations and historical epochs to engage my interests seriously... love is only diversion and recreation to me.’

  Shaw Limited sees G.B.S. as a bragging emotional bankrupt playing timidly with the serious things of life and dealing seriously with the plays. His appeal to the audience carries a far-off echo of Sonny’s voice:

  ‘It is not the small things that women miss in me, but the big things. My pockets are always full of the small change of love-making; but it is magic money, not real money.’

  For his mother’s elopement with Vandeleur Lee, G.B.S. had substituted an economic for the emotional necessity; and he had used a financial argument to trick himself out of marrying Charlotte. So now Shaw Limited brings a money metaphor to expose the unreality of G.B.S. If only Charlotte had had the confidence to tear up that ridiculous Shavian balance sheet. Instead, unknown to Shaw, she had committed herself to him on the very terms by which he had rejected her, making a will that (barring a bequest to a cousin) left him her entire fortune.

  But after their return to London at the end of August, Charlotte’s behaviour changed. Suddenly she seemed less anxious to be with Shaw. Early in October she absconded to Leicester to visit her sister, Mary Cholmondeley who, Shaw knew, disliked him. ‘Where am I to spend my evenings?’ he complained. Charlotte returned, but suddenly veered off again back to her sister. ‘It is most inconvenient having Adelphi Terrace shut up,’ he pointed out. ‘I have nowhere to go, nobody to talk to.’ When Charlotte returned again, she was curiously unavailable. When he called one afternoon he was told by the maid that Charlotte was out. She always seemed to be ‘out’. But three days later, on his way to dine at the Metropole, he suddenly found ‘to my astonishment my legs walked off with me through the railway arches to Adelphi Terrace’, where he saw the lights on in Charlotte’s bedroom, signalling (he assumed) her unhappiness; but hardly had he written triumphantly to tell her so than she had disappeared to Paris. ‘I miss you in lots of ways,’ he wrote. ‘...I wish you could stay in Paris & that I could get there in quarter of an hour. I feel that you are much better & brighter there; but it is damnably inconvenient to have you out of my reach.’

  Charlotte came back early in November – but not to London. Instead she went straight to Hertfordshire to stay with some rich Fabian friends, Robert and ‘Lion’ Phillimore. This was too much for Shaw who pursued her on his bicycle and, travelling back at night, took one of his formidable tosses down a hill. He put the accident to instant use in an article for the Saturday Review, ‘On Pleasure Bent’. All the same, Charlotte did not return at once.

  When she did get back to London, he was almost cumbersomely tactful. ‘I shall not intrude on my secretary tomorrow. If she desires to resume her duties, doubtless she will come to me.’ A week later the tone was brisker: ‘Secretary required tomorrow, not later than eleven.’ But, for Charlotte, typing and shorthand had been a means to an end that seemed to be fading. She was not amused by his evasive joking. ‘Charlotte can not only resist jokes, but dislikes them,’ Shaw later explained to Pinero. ‘Hence she was not seduced, as you would have been, by my humorous aberrations.’ He made ready for Charlotte’s arrival next morning to continue her secretarial work. He swept the hearth and made the fire; he laid out Charlotte’s shawl and footwarmer; and then he waited – and she did not come. She had gone to Dieppe! ‘What do you mean by this inconceivable conduct?’ he demanded. ‘Do you forsake all your duties... Must I also go back to writing my own articles, and wasting half hours between the sentences with long trains of reflection? Not a word: not a sign!... Are there no stamps? has the post been abolished? have all the channel steamers foundered?’

  He was genuinely put out. So, after making fun of himself, he turned on Charlotte and accused her of everything she would most dislike. ‘Go, then, ungrateful wretch,’ he wrote, ‘have your heart’s desire:

  ‘find a Master – one who will spend your money, and rule in your house, and order your servants about, and forbid you to ride in hansoms because it’s unladylike, and remind you that the honor of his name is in your keeping, and... consummate his marriage in the church lest the housemaid should regard his proceedings as clandestine. Protect yourself for ever from freedom, independence, love, unfettered communion with the choice spirits of your day... But at least tell me when youre not coming; and say whether I am to get a new secretary or not.

  G.B.S.’

  This letter points to one of Charlotte’s hidden attractions for Shaw: she was a member of the same family as the ‘terribly respectable’ land agents, Uniacke Townshend, that had employed him as an office boy twenty-five years ago in Dublin. His attitude seems divided: the socialist responding ironically, the Irishman romantically to this fact. He knew that, though the Irish might grudgingly admit him to be (in Edith Somerville’s words) ‘distinctly somebody in a literary way’, it was assumed that socially ‘he can’t be a gentleman’. Marriage to Charlotte would shock some of those who had looked down on the office boy and who (if he ever returned to Ireland) would have to open their doors to him. Such things would of course never influence him; but it was pleasant to speculate on them.

  Though he repeatedly insisted on the independence of women, Shaw continued to make them dependent on him. He excited interest: then ran. But Charlotte, who had money and the habit of travel, ran first and ran further. She was emotionally dependent but financially independent. Such manoeuvres gave Shaw the appearance of pursuing her.

  The New Year bristled with good intentions. Charlotte was particularly attentive, rubbing vaseline on his bicycle wounds and encouraging him to use Adelphi Terrace as office and convalescent station. Shaw struggled to be reasonable.

  That March 1898, the Webbs planned to be off on a tour round America and the Antipodes, ‘seeing Anglo-Saxon democracy’, and they invited Charlotte to go with them. ‘If she does,’ Shaw told Ellen Terry, ‘she will be away for about a year, just time enough for a new love affair.’ Perhaps because she felt the danger of this herself, Charlotte did not take up the Webbs’ invitation, but accepted instead an offer from Lion Phillimore to go for seven weeks to Rome. ‘Charlotte deserts me at 11,’ Shaw noted in his almanac. He felt ‘quite desperate’ and put it down to ‘lack of exercise’. His friend Wallas was away with his new wife; Sydney Olivier had decided to go to the United States; his audience of actresses had dispersed and he was alone.

  3

  A Terrible Adventure

  By the way, would you advise me to get married?

  Shaw to Henry Arthur Jones (20 May 1898)

  ‘Sisterless men are always afraid of women,’ Shaw was to write; yet his own fears proceeded from the women in his family. He had seen their contempt for men – for his father and himself, even for Vandeleur Lee once his usefulness was exhausted.

  On 25 November 1886 his sister Lucy had brought home a young man called Harry Butterfield to meet her mother. The purpose of this introduction was to announce her engagement – to Harry’s brother, Charles, who may have been unavailable that evening because he was having an affair with another woman.

  Besides his couple of ‘wives’, Charles had two names. As ‘Cecil Burt’ he travelled with a band of wanderers called ‘Leslie’s No. 1’, performing as a cherubic tenor. ‘He sang with difficulty,’ Shaw remembered. He and Lucy Sha
w sang together in Alfred Cellier’s popular comedy-opera Dorothy, which had opened in London late in 1886. Shaw missed the first night; he also missed their wedding (‘did not get to the church until the ceremony was over’) and the small wedding party at Fitzroy Square a year later. But (as Corno di Bassetto) he caught up with them at Morton’s Theatre, Greenwich, in the autumn of 1889 for the 789th performance of Dorothy’s provincial tour. His brother-in-law, Shaw observed, ‘originally, I have no doubt, a fine young man... was evidently counting the days until death should release him from the part’.

  Into the description of Dorothy he poured his long-standing resentment at having to submit to Lucy’s alleged superiority. He knew her mind was commonplace, her talent little more than a trick of facility, her attractions superficial. It had been Lucy whom Bessie had taken with her to London; and Lucy whom Lee had favoured; and Lucy who had been welcome at some of the London salons where George felt so gauche; and again Lucy whom people thought so lovable and entertaining. Great things had been expected of her; great things by the age of thirty-six had led to Dorothy at Morton’s Theatre, Greenwich.

  ‘She will apparently spend her life in artistic self-murder by induced Dorothitis without a pang of remorse, provided she be praised and paid regularly. Dorothy herself, a beauteous young lady of distinguished mien, with an immense variety of accents ranging from the finest Tunbridge Wells English (for genteel comedy) to the broadest Irish (for repartee and low comedy), sang without the slightest effort and without the slightest point, and was all the more desperately vapid because she suggested artistic gifts wasting in complacent abeyance.’

  The impulse behind what Lucy called this ‘typically fraternal – Irish fraternal – act’ was part of the Shaw family feeling from which Lucy wanted to escape. ‘She was more popular outside the family than inside it,’ her cousin Judy Gillmore explained, ‘and... she preferred people who would look up to her to those who would stand up to her.’ Like her brother, Lucy had largely substituted theatre for home life; like him too she tried to replace her own family with another. Shaw had made use of the Fabians; Lucy used her husband’s relatives. It was these relatives she had married. That was the significance of announcing her engagement in the presence of her future brother-in-law. Both George and Lucy, having grown up in a matriarchal family, instinctively cast about for a mother elsewhere.