Between themselves they agreed to share basic expenses, but to keep their unequal incomes mainly apart. ‘Her property is a separate property,’ Shaw later notified the Special Commissioners of Income Tax, to whom he refused to file a joint income-tax return. ‘She keeps a separate banking account at a separate bank.’
Besides health and money what else was there – except the crucial question of a marriage proposal? This was slipped into the agenda by Shaw as an item of social etiquette and accepted by Charlotte ‘without comment’. It has the air of ‘any other business’.
By presenting his marriage contract as a document of social intercourse, Shaw underlined the fact that it was not primarily a sexual arrangement he had entered into with Charlotte. Only with this proposal, he told Beatrice Webb, had the relation between them ‘completely lost its inevitable preliminary character of a love affair’. Now, as patient and nurse, they were nearer to being parent and child, and with the possibility of beginning a new life.
Shaw continued to screen their feelings behind a rattling extravaganza. ‘My disabled condition has driven Miss Payne Townshend into the most humiliating experiences,’ he exulted in a letter to Graham Wallas. ‘I sent in for the man next door to marry us; but he said he only did births and deaths.
‘Miss Payne Townshend then found a place in Henrietta Street, where she had to explain to a boy that she wanted to get married. The boy sent the news up a tube through which shrieks of merriment were exchanged... Miss Payne Townshend then had to suffer the final humiliation of buying a ring... at last she succeeded, and returned with the symbol of slavery... of such portentous weight and thickness, that it is impossible for anyone but a professional pianist to wear it; so my mother has presented her with my grandfather’s wedding ring for general use.’
He had asked Graham Wallas to act as one of the witnesses and, following a refusal from Kate Salt (‘who violently objects to the whole proceeding’), invited as his second witness her husband Henry Salt, ‘CAN YOU MEET US AT FIFTEEN HENRIETTA STREET COVENT GARDEN AT ELEVEN THIRTY TOMORROW WEDNESDAY TO WITNESS A CONTRACT.’
Shaw arrived on crutches and in an old jacket with armpits patched with leather that the crutches had badly frayed, and was taken by the registrar for ‘the inevitable beggar who completes all wedding processions. ‘Wallas, who is considerably over six feet high, seemed to him the hero of the occasion, and he was proceeding to marry him calmly to my betrothed, when Wallas, thinking the formula rather strong for a mere witness, hesitated at the last moment and left the prize to me.’
They were married in the afternoon of 1 June 1898. A week before Shaw had written that if ‘ever I get married, it will have to be done very secretly’. In fact the newspapers pounced on the event ‘as eagerly as the death of Gladstone’ – largely because of a report in The Star drafted by G.B.S. himself.
‘As a lady and gentleman were out driving in Henrietta-st., Covent-garden yesterday, a heavy shower drove them to take shelter in the office of the Superintendent Registrar there, and in the confusion of the moment he married them. The lady was an Irish lady named Miss Payne-Townshend, and the gentleman was George Bernard Shaw.
...Startling as was the liberty undertaken by the Henrietta-st. official, it turns out well. Miss Payne-Townshend is... deeply interested in the London School of Economics, and that is the common ground on which the brilliant couple met. Years of married bliss to them.’
With these Shavian flourishes, G.B.S. started on the ‘terrible adventure’ that was to turn him into ‘a respectable married man’.
EIGHT
1
The Happy Accidents of Marriage
Every busy man should go to bed for a year when he is forty.
Shaw to Hesketh Pearson (25 October 1918)
The adventure began between Haslemere and Hindhead. After reconnoitring several places in Surrey, Charlotte had taken Pitfold, a rather ‘small, stuffy house’ on the south slope of Hindhead. The air was so fine that ‘our troubles seemed to be over,’ Shaw told Beatrice Webb. Charlotte and Shaw had different ideas about air. It was a convalescent substance, soporific, supportive – that was Charlotte’s opinion. But on Shaw it appeared to act as an intoxicant. Air went to his head. He had emerged from the London smoke into the ventilation of the country on 10 June 1898 and, despite his invalidism, set fiercely to work on his metaphysical study of the Ring cycle, The Perfect Wagnerite. Then, on the morning of 17 June, hurrying downstairs on his crutches, he fell into the hall, breaking his left arm and making ‘a hopeless mess of the Wagner book’. Charlotte rushed forward with some butter pats, fastened them into splints and called the doctor.
This was the first of several accidents over the next eighteen months that were to keep Shaw largely convalescent. On 27 July an illustrious surgeon named Anthony Bowlby, attended by three doctors, came down to perform a double operation. He dug out most of the bad bone from the instep, charged Shaw 60 guineas and instructed him he would be healed in three weeks. Then he went away: but – he had forgot the arm. ‘I am so unspeakably tickled by this triumph over the profession that I cannot resist the temptation to impart it to you,’ Shaw wrote the next day to his vegetarian friend Henry Salt. Charlotte added a postscript: ‘He is doing very well – but must be kept absolutely quiet.’
Shaw was discovering that his wife had a genius for worrying. Her mind ran largely on sickness and travel, diagnosing one, prescribing the other. Shaw represents these smashes as keeping her ‘in a state of exhausting devotion’. His prolonged disablement seemed to emphasize certain elements in their marriage. He felt ‘as helpless as a baby’. Sex was postponed until its absence became part of the habit of their lives. But having scarcely possessed him sexually, Charlotte felt peculiarly insecure.
She dreaded having to act an effusive friendship with his theatrical friends, and wanted to assert her predominance over his past. After a visit in the spring of 1900, Beatrice Webb noted that ‘Charlotte Shaw did not want to have us. Perhaps this is a morbid impression. But it is clear that now that she is happily married we must not presume on her impulsive hospitality and kindly acquiescence in our proposals.’
Work was another subject about which Shaw and Charlotte could not agree. She took dictation and prepared copy for his typist (Ethel Dickens, a granddaughter of the novelist). But, as she later admitted to Nancy Astor, ‘I don’t really like work.’ G.B.S. liked nothing better – especially the sort of ‘creative work,’ Charlotte complained, ‘that pulls him to pieces’. Unfortunately ‘it is the only occupation he really cares for’.
Shaw’s illnesses gave Charlotte an occupation that seemed to unite his needs with her wishes. He did not underrate what she had done: she ‘brought me back to life,’ he told Beatrice Mansfield. But it was dismaying for her to see how tenuously her husband was attached to life. ‘She has an instinctive sense that there is a certain way in which I do not care for myself,’ Shaw wrote to Sidney Webb, ‘and that it follows that I do not care, in that way, for anybody else either; and she is quite right.’ He was going through a change of life, he believed, a little death. Whether it actually killed him, or helped to fortify him for another forty years, ‘I do not greatly care,’ he told Sidney Webb; ‘I am satisfied that, on the whole, I have used myself economically and fired my whole broadside.’
The independence he had fixed upon before marriage had been shattered by his accidents. His income during the first year of marriage came to only £473 and by 1902 it had shrunk to £90 (equivalent to £24,000 and £4,400 in 1997). He lived almost entirely from Charlotte’s money. To safeguard himself from going ‘soft with domesticity and luxury’, he began to separate his work from the experience of his life. These early years of his marriage were marked by a burst of creativity. ‘I no longer sleep: I dream, dream, dream,’ he told Charrington. Once he had confided to Ellen Terry that his childhood had been ‘rich only in dreams, frightful and loveless in realities’. Now he began to manufacture from his dreams another world locked deep in hims
elf and fortified against the encircling love and invalidism of his marriage. This was another reason for Charlotte’s opposition to his work: it gave him a legitimate escape from her loving custody. She always knew where he was, but not what he was thinking. As his existence grew more comfortable, his work became oddly anarchical. ‘He still writes,’ Beatrice Webb noted after a visit to Hindhead, ‘but his work seems to be getting unreal: he leads a hothouse life, he cannot walk or get among his equals.’
After six months, Shaw’s foot was no better – indeed it seemed to Charlotte decidedly worse. At the beginning of November, they went up to London to consult Bowlby, the specialist who that previous summer had predicted a three weeks’ cure. He examined the foot and recommended a further period of disuse – about three weeks. To Charlotte’s horror, Shaw decided that he would prefer to have his toe amputated than to endure a longer spell of inactivity. At the end of the month he returned to Bowlby and demanded an immediate removal of the whole bone and toe. To his surprise, Bowlby observed that if it were his toe, he would stick to it. ‘He declares that my health is improving visibly; that I am pulling up from a breakdown... So I am waiting.’
While Shaw waited and worked, Charlotte acted, moving them both from Pitfold to Blen-Cathra, a larger house with ‘lofty, airy rooms,’ she told Beatrice Webb, on the main Portsmouth-London road between Hindhead and Haslemere. ‘This place beats Pitfold all to fits,’ Shaw told Henry Arthur Jones. ‘I am a new man since I came here.’ A week later, on 9 December, he completed Caesar and Cleopatra.
Shaw’s health improved throughout 1899. By 23 March he reported himself in a doubly accurate phrase as being ‘fed up’ to eleven stone, a gain of five pounds. On 12 April he announced that ‘the vegetables have triumphed over their traducers’, an X-ray having shown a ‘perfectly mended solid bone’. He began in May and completed in July Captain Brassbound’s Conversion – after which Charlotte insisted on an unmitigated holiday.
In the middle of August they arrived at a rented house in Ruan Minor. ‘I am down here, wallowing in the sea twice a day,’ Shaw wrote, ‘swimming being the only exercise I ever take for its own sake.’ Not liking him to float off too far, Charlotte allowed Shaw to teach her to swim ‘with nothing between her and death but a firm grip of my neck’. His publisher Grant Richards came down and Shaw, with his recently broken arm and sprained ankle, swam him out to sea and brought him back in terror of drowning.
So beneficial was the sea air that Charlotte felt justified in having ordered a recuperative cruise round the Mediterranean in an Orient steamer, the SS Lusitania. ‘Anything better calculated to destroy me, body & soul, than a Mediterranean cruise on a pleasure steamer in October & Sept (the sirocco months) it would be hard to devise,’ Shaw told Beatrice Mansfield. Like Lady Cicely in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, Charlotte was in her element coping with these pleasures. She tackled the rigorous sightseeing, digested the rich food, paid their bills and calculated the gratuities in complicated currencies. Trapped on this ‘floating pleasure machine’ as it moved through a sickly sea, the band striking up perpetual polkas and skirt dances, Shaw came to feel that every condition of a healthy life was being violated. He was at the plutocratic centre of capitalism. ‘It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog’s life,’ he cried. Passing through the Greek archipelago he was violently sick; in the overwhelming damp heat between Crete and Malta he sat at sunset in his overcoat, shivering, with the mercury as high as seventy-five Fahrenheit. ‘I wake up in the morning like one in prison,’ he wrote, ‘realizing where I am with a pang.’
They arrived back in London at the end of October. At the time of their marriage they had agreed to retain their separate addresses in town, and Shaw openly speculated as to whether he would ‘revert to my old state of mind & my bachelor existence’. Now, at the beginning of November 1899, he moved some of his belongings at 29 Fitzroy Square into Charlotte’s double-decker apartment at the south corner of Adelphi Terrace. It seemed a pleasant place to live, overlooking the river and Embankment Gardens and, except for the occasional hooting of the boats, undisturbed. Shaw slept in a converted box-room off Charlotte’s bedroom. ‘The dining-room and large drawing-room were on the second floor, with the bedrooms, a study for G.B.S., and the kitchen on the third floor. There was no bathroom; the maids took cans of hot water into the bedrooms and filled a hip bath.’ On the staircase Shaw installed a huge wicker gate with a bell-push on the gatepost, marking the Shavian frontier and reinforced by a hedge of pointed steel spikes attached to the balustrade, making the place, he claimed, look like a private madhouse. He worked in a small plain oblong room, above the river, his desk planted near the window which, summer and winter, remained open. There was a little Bechstein piano; an etching by Whistler, drawings by Sargent and Rothenstein, stuck like stamps on the flowered Morris paper which covered the ceiling as well as the walls, giving the impression of an inside-out box. The drawing-room mantelpiece had been designed by the Adam brothers: over the fireplace was cut the sixteenth-century inscription Thay say. Quhat say thay? Lat Thame say – the morality of which Shaw reckoned to be ‘very questionable’. He was to live here almost thirty years ‘before I realised how uncomfortable I was’. For £150 a year he leased Fitzroy Street for his mother who was joined there by her half-sister Arabella Gillmore and her half-niece Georgina (‘Judy’) Gillmore.
Shaw’s foot was now completely mended following treatment of the sinus by pipe water in place of idoform gauze, and he was ‘diabolically busy’. The new century seemed full of promise and activity. He had two new plays on his hands, a preface to write and text to revise for his second collection; he was beginning to involve himself with the newly formed Stage Society (‘a sort of Sunday night Independent Theatre’) which had chosen You Never Can Tell for its opening performance. The Boer War had started, forcing the Fabian Society ‘to a new birth pang with a foreign policy’ and Shaw to act as midwife with a manifesto, speeches and letters. The honeymoon was over. ‘I spent eighteen months on crutches, unable to put my foot to the ground,’ he summed up. Within that period he had produced The Perfect Wagnerite, Caesar and Cleopatra and Captain Brassbound’s Conversion: and, though he had not married for happiness, ‘I cannot remember that I was in the least less happy than at other times’.
2
On Heroines and Hero-Worship
Charlotte and Shaw have settled down into the most devoted married couple, she gentle and refined with happiness added thereto, and he showing no sign of breaking loose from her dominion... It is interesting to watch his fitful struggles.
The Diary of Beatrice Webb (30 October 1899)
When William Archer first noticed Shaw in the Reading Room of the British Museum, he had observed how the young Dubliner was balancing Deville’s French translation of Das Kapital against the orchestral score of Tristan und Isolde. Shavianizing Marx had been a matter of pulling politics off the barricades and into the tract. But Shaw also wanted to pull Wagner out of his antiquated heavens and place him in the contemporary socialist scene. The Perfect Wagnerite is an extraordinarily lucid exposition that uses Wagner as he had previously used Ibsen to work out his own philosophical position.
During the seven years that separated The Quintessence of Ibsenism from The Perfect Wagnerite, Shaw had begun to revise his political philosophy. In the earlier work he had divided human beings into three classes: philistines, idealists and those realists on whom progress depended. In the sequel he again makes a threefold division, representing the Wagnerian dwarfs, giants and gods as ‘dramatizations of the three main orders of men: to wit, the instinctive, predatory, lustful, greedy people; the patient, toiling, stupid, respectful, money-worshipping people; and the intellectual, moral, talented people who devise and administer States and Churches’.
This change (subdividing the philistines into dwarfs and giants) reflects a shift towards a deeper pessimism arising from his greater experience of national and local politics. He had begun to feel that progress by instalme
nts through the permeation tactics of the Fabians was too slow. A more romantic figure than that of the civil servant and political researcher was needed to fire the imagination of the philistine. The quietist should dress himself in a loud coat – a magical garment, its pockets rattling with the fool’s gold of those idealistic illusions Shaw had derided in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. For most people had to be paid in such coin. Change the appearance of things and you were a long way to changing the reality. Acknowledging this, Shaw appears to accommodate a fourth class of human being into his philosophy: ‘History shews us,’ he writes, ‘only one order higher than the highest of these: namely, the order of Heros.’
Bernard Shaw Page 38
