Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Ayot was a remote twelfth-century village where ‘the last thing of real importance that happened was, perhaps, the Flood’. It had two churches, one shop, no omnibus or train service and, even by the 1930s, no gas or water supply, no delivery of newspapers and no electricity – the Rectory itself making use of a private generating plant. The house, which had been built in 1902, was a plain dark-red building standing in a sloping two-acre plot with scraps of kitchen-garden, orchard, lawn and a belt of conifers. Besides the dining-room, study and a small drawing-room, there were eight bedrooms.

  Shaw and Charlotte moved in at the beginning of November 1906, with a married couple, Henry and Clara Higgs, to look after them. Higgs took over the garden, with an odd-job man to help him; and Charlotte engaged two maids to assist Mrs Higgs indoors. The Higgses, who had already been with them at Adelphi Terrace, were to remain in their service for some forty years. ‘Mrs Shaw looked upon my wife almost as a daughter,’ Higgs reckoned; ‘they were like a father and mother to us.’ Shaw recognized their value to him with an inscription in one of his books: ‘To Harry and Clara Higgs, who have had a very important part in my life’s work, as without their friendly services I should not have had time to write my books and plays nor had any comfort in my daily life.’

  The Rectory was a fairly comfortable, fairly dismal house. Charlotte filled it with stiff armchairs, bureaux, beds: lodging-house objects with hardly a good piece among them. They had grown tired of house-hunting and this was one of the few houses about which they were agreed: neither of them liked it. Every day at Ayot felt like a Sunday. Once they had settled in, they were free to move out and around.

  *

  They had kept their maisonette in Adelphi Terrace, went regularly between London and Hertfordshire, and erratically everywhere else. At the end of March 1907, Charlotte carried Shaw off to France and they whirled through town after town for twelve days of hectic relaxation. ‘I shall go to Beauvais probably tomorrow or next day,’ Shaw wrote from Rouen, ‘and shall either do the cathedral in ten minutes & hurry on Lord knows where, or stay there a day or two.’ But, he owned, ‘the cessation of writing & talking has done me a lot of good’.

  To lighten the load of correspondence he had devised in 1906 a series of five stereotyped postcard messages. Over the next years the range of these cards greatly expanded. He attempted to give them a series of coloured codes, though eventually running out of colours. His views on capital punishment, on temperance, and the forty-letter British ‘alfabet’ were to be relayed in tones of green, orange-brown and blue. Neat piles of these coloured cards lay on his desk and, as he read through his mail each day he was able to cap many letters with an appropriate card. Snap! Politely and with force, they spelled out his reasons for being unable to read and report on unpublished manuscripts, give spoken interviews, inscribe books that were not his personal gifts, or comply with requests from strangers for his signature (with or without a photograph); why he could not receive visitors, acknowledge gifts, encourage people to celebrate his birthdays, respond to appeals founded on the notion that he was a multi-millionaire, open bazaars, speak at public dinners, write prefaces, read or write letters. In short: why he could not do so many of the things he spent his life doing.

  ‘The only way to avoid giving offence by refusing is to refuse everybody by rule.’ But Shaw consistently disobeyed his rule – even his authoritative refusals to provide autographs were sometimes signed. The cards were a method of saving time. He invested many hours in drafting variant texts. But always there was an ample margin that he could fill with commentary, outwitting the purpose of a printed message.

  In 1907 he engaged Georgina Gillmore, daughter of his mother’s half-sister Arabella, as his secretary. Charlotte and Shaw were fond of ‘Judy’. She was eighteen and lived with Lucinda Shaw in Fitzroy Square when she started work for G.B.S. He sent her to secretarial college and she worked for him until her marriage in 1912.

  Even with her help, Shaw complained that only ‘the fear of my wife’ was keeping him from a breakdown. Throughout the year, more than fifty of his articles, statements, interviews and letters appeared in the newspapers. There was Shaw on disarmament in the Evening Standard, on polygamy in The Times and on diet in the Daily Mail. His most common subjects were marriage, censorship and women’s suffrage. But readers of the Daily Graphic could pick up what he had to say on ‘the imperfections of phrenologists’; and Clarion subscribers could learn about ‘the Gentle Art of Unpleasantness’, a social exercise in three parts. He fired off a piece on Delacroix to the Saturday Review; composed a famous essay on Belloc and Chesterton for the New Age; and published a review of A. R. Orage’s book on Nietzsche in Fabian News. The variety seemed infinite, the quantity endless.

  In July 1907 the Shaws and the Webbs went off to a large house in Llanbedr, a village on the Welsh coast between Barmouth and Harlech, where the first Fabian Summer School took place. The event was underwritten by Charlotte who saw it as a method of ventilating their studies with fresh air and a holiday atmosphere.

  The Fabian Summer Schools, which later came to be seen as a foundation of the intellectual wing of the Labour Party, were originally designed to get country members to meet metropolitan Fabians, and grey-haired socialists to mingle with the Fabian nursery. Occasional romances glimmered, but the exhilarations were generally those of a ‘joyous monastery’. The day would begin with Swedish Drill led by Mary Hankinson, a much-loved muscular games mistress and leading Fabian cricketer, who was to be a prototype for Shaw’s St Joan. Breakfast, an experimental meal, was followed by a venture into co-operative washing-up. Cold baths were free (hot baths cost sixpence); rooms were set aside in which to practise silence, and no smoking was permitted (except, literally, in the smoking-room). There were courses of lectures available on the National Debt and the Modern Novel. Additional fixtures included swimming and tugs-of-war (Vegetarians versus Meat-eaters); and people were allowed to bring bicycles and eventually tennis balls – though never dogs or children. Highly organized games were discouraged, but there was always some tonic recreation such as country dances with the aid of Cecil J. Sharp’s The Country Dance Book (3 vols.). Lights went out and doors were bolted at 11 p.m., and Fabians were requested ‘to refrain from loud talk and noises’ in the dormitories.

  ‘The Fabian School is sleeping five in a room, and apparently enjoying it,’ Shaw wrote to Granville Barker. G.B.S. was the chief attraction. He lectured on marriage, education and foreign politics; gave readings from his plays; and chatted with everyone. Thirty-nine Fabians camped in the old schoolhouse down the road from the Shaws, who had been joined in their house by Charlotte’s sister and Robert Loraine. After one day’s hike Shaw failed to return. Dressed in convenient drill-costumes and equipped with lanterns, a party of almost a hundred Fabians streamed across the mountains and valleys: and he was discovered asleep in a hotel.

  More alarming were his exploits at sea. Each morning he swam and one morning, after a storm, almost drowned. Pressing him later as to what thoughts had come to mind during what might have been his last few moments alive, Loraine was told that he had been almost completely preoccupied by the business inconveniences of his death. How would Charlotte understand the arrangements with his translators? How would she cope with his lateness for lunch? ‘Then my foot struck a stone, and instead of saying “Thank God!” I said, “Damn!”’

  It was against this terrible capacity for endangering himself, and his instinctive ‘Damn!’ rather than ‘Thank God!’ on reaching safety, that Charlotte had to be so fiercely on guard. Increasingly, as Arnold Bennett noticed, she looked ‘like the mother of a large family’. For Christmas she tucked Shaw up again in her sister and brother-in-law’s house, where it was pretty well impossible for him to get into scrapes. And she kept him under her supervision and out of the country for three summer months of 1908 while the drains at Ayot were being replaced. First they went to Stockholm. To help preserve its exclusiveness, he promised to ‘perpetrate t
he notion that Sweden is a frightful place, where bears wander through the streets and people live on cod liver oil’. He then descended to Bayreuth where he heard Richter conduct Wagner’s Ring as well as ‘the most perfectly managed performance [of Parsifal] I ever saw (and I had seen six before)’. Finally, Charlotte escorted him round the railway hotels of Ireland, from Galway to Dublin, where he was to present the Municipal Art Gallery with one of his Rodin busts.

  The visit marked a change from their previous tours of Ireland when they had stayed with the ‘Brandons and Castletowns and Kingstons & other Irish peers in their castles’. These families regarded G.B.S. as a jumped-up Dublin office boy. ‘Charlotte seems perfectly happy and delighted with her cad,’ reported Edith Somerville, ‘for cad he is in spite of his talent.’ For Charlotte’s sake Shaw made himself ‘very agreeable and quite affable,’ as Edith Somerville admitted, but this affability cost him a good deal in patience and energy, and after 1907 (when he declined to accompany Charlotte to Castle Haven) they stayed at hotels or with more recent friends such as Lady Gregory.

  Their motor tour of Europe had been an ambitious excursion. ‘I was crushed, I am now exasperated,’ Shaw cried out in a letter to Granville Barker, ‘...another day’s motoring will murder me.’ But the next day’s motoring near Rothenburg had almost murdered Charlotte, the motor having ‘backjumped,’ Shaw explained, ‘& sent Charlotte like a rocket to the roof of the car (a limousine, unluckily)’. Her symptoms (a bad throat) made her uncertain whether or not her neck was broken. ‘She leans to the belief that it is,’ observed Shaw who had the advantage, while she recuperated, of remaining four days in the same place. Pathetically he signalled his friends for business letters, and confided to Granville Barker how fed up he was with ‘the cat and dog life I lead with poor Charlotte... Another month of it would end in a divorce.’

  Their most curious holiday episode had been an encounter with Strindberg. ‘I thought it my duty to pay my respects to a great man whom I considered one of the great dramatists of Europe,’ Shaw afterwards remembered. ‘People told me it was not of the slightest use. He is absolutely mad, they said, he won’t see anybody, he never takes walks except in the middle of the night when there is nobody about, he attacks all his friends with the greatest fury. You will only be wasting your time.’ Nevertheless, ‘I achieved the impossible,’ Shaw wrote to Archer. Strindberg was ‘quite a pleasant looking person,’ Shaw recalled, ‘with the most beautiful sapphire blue eyes I have ever seen. He was beyond expression shy.’ Shaw had prepared some conversational material in French, but Strindberg took the wind out of his sails ‘by addressing me in German’. Their exchange developed by way of some embarrassed silences, a ‘pale smile or two’ from Strindberg and an undercurrent of polite French from Charlotte.

  Strindberg had arranged for them to see that morning a special performance of Miss Julie at his Intimate Theatre, having summoned August Falck and Manda Björling back from their holiday in the archipelago to play the two protagonists. The absence of an audience and the presence of Strindberg had been unsettling – this astonishingly being ‘the first time Strindberg had accepted to see the play in the 20 years of its existence,’ Anthony Swerling records, ‘so much did he shy from the theatre’. Though Strindberg had proudly shown the Shaws round his theatre beforehand, shortly afterwards, in a celebrated spasm of gloom, he consulted his watch and, noting it was almost half-past one, remarked in German that at two o’clock he was going to be sick. ‘On this strong hint the party broke up.’

  How much did they comprehend each other, the author of Married which Strindberg called ‘the reverse side of my fearful attraction towards the other sex’; and the author of Getting Married, a tentative ‘conversation’ with feminist implications dramatizing the economic relations of marriage? Shaw was to describe what he had seen at the Intimate Theatre as one of Strindberg’s ‘chamber plays’. With the emotional intimacy of chamber music he had never felt easy. But generally he knew where Strindberg stood. ‘I was born too soon to be greatly influenced by him as a playwright, but,’ he was to write ‘he is among the greatest of the great.’ In the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans he had described him as ‘the only genuinely Shakespearean modern dramatist’, a resolute tragi-comedian, logical and faithful, who gave us the choice either of dismissing as absurd his way of judging conduct or else, by accepting it, concluding that ‘it is cowardly to continue living’.

  The suffering men and women inflict on each other in the name of love never appears in Shaw’s work as it does in Strindberg’s. Greatness ‘implies a degree of human tragedy, of suffering and sacrifice,’ wrote Thomas Mann. ‘The knotted muscles of Tolstoy bearing up the full burden of morality, Atlas-like; Strindberg, who was in hell; the martyr’s death Nietzsche died on the cross of thought; it is these that inspire us with the reverence of tragedy; but in Shaw there was nothing of all this. Was he beyond such things, or were they beyond him?’

  Shaw’s tragedy lay in the need to suppress such things; Strindberg’s in the need to re-enact them. But Shaw felt the force of that re-enactment. He tried to persuade Beerbohm Tree to put on Lycko Pers Resa at His Majesty’s (the play closest to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt), but without success. Almost none of Strindberg’s plays had been translated into English before Shaw’s sister Lucy, with Maurice Elvey, produced a version of Miss Julie that was first presented in London by the Adelphi Play Society in 1912. That year, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter circulated a letter eliciting opinions of Strindberg’s role in European culture to be published in the event of his death from cancer. ‘Strindberg is a very great dramatist: he and Ibsen have made Sweden and Norway the dramatic centre of the world,’ Shaw replied. ‘...Time may wear him out; but Death will not succeed in murdering him.’ Strindberg died a fortnight later.

  3

  Getting Married and Staying Married

  This multiplicity of motives is, I like to think, typical of our times. And if others have done this before me, then I congratulate myself in not being alone in my belief in these ‘paradoxes’ (the word always used to describe new discoveries).

  Strindberg, Preface to Miss Julie

  ‘On the question of technique, I have, by way of experiment, eliminated all intervals,’ wrote Strindberg in his Preface to Miss Julie. For Getting Married Shaw used a similar experiment. ‘The customary division into acts and scenes has been disused,’ he wrote, ‘and a return made to unity of time and place as observed in the ancient Greek drama.’

  By directing critics to the play’s Aristotelian rules, Shaw swept their attention past an embarrassing parallel. For years in the Saturday Review he had made fun of the plays of Victorien Sardou, full of a ‘bewildering profusion of everything that has no business in a play’. Getting Married is in places an ingenious adaptation of Sardou’s Divorçons. The parallels are ‘not only in the overall fusion of Farce with a genuine discussion of marriage and divorce,’ observed the critic Martin Meisel, ‘but in particulars and details’. Sardou’s plan of playwriting, Shaw had written, ‘is first to invent the action of his piece, and then to carefully keep it off the stage and have it announced merely by letters and telegrams’.

  The Shavian play structure too moved the action off stage, and reversed the relationship between dialogue and incident. Getting Married progresses by means of a series of conversations: duologues and trios that form and dissolve one into another. It is as if a conventional well-made play were being performed backstage, and we witness the performers discussing its event-plot during the intervals. ‘It is the wedding day of the bishop’s daughter,’ he wrote. ‘The situation is expounded in the old stage fashion by that old stage figure the comic greengrocer, hired for the occasion as butler.

  ‘The fun grows fast and furious as the guests arrive, invited and uninvited, with the most distracting malaproposity. Two are missing: the bridegroom and the bride. They have each received anonymously a pamphlet entitled “Do you know what you are going to do? By one who has Done It,” setting
forth all the anomalies and injustices and dangers of marriage under the existing British law. They refuse to get up and dress until they have read this inopportune document to the last word. When at last they appear they flatly refuse to face the horrors of the marriage law. Thereupon the whole company plunges into a discussion of marriage, and presently sits as a committee to draw up a form of private contract, as in the later days of ancient Rome, to supersede the legal ceremony. They are utterly unable to agree on a single article of it.’

  Though Shaw claimed a classical provenance for Getting Married, it actually represented ‘a new dramaturgy’ as Eric Bentley wrote, ‘and not, as its critics thought, a mere pamphlet in dialogue form’. Like The Doctor’s Dilemma, it stages an institution. ‘The play is about marriage as an institution and about nothing else.’ His method of treating it was one that he had first attempted, and been persuaded to abandon, fifteen years before in the original last act of The Philanderer. It had been the celebrated divorcée Lady Colin Campbell who opened Shaw’s eyes to ‘the fact that I have started on quite a new trail and must reserve this act for the beginning of a new play’. With Getting Married Shaw finally started out on that trail.

  The Philanderer had been one of Shaw’s most directly autobiographical plays; with Getting Married he had grown more oblique. Nevertheless there is an autobiographical undercurrent. The scene in which the whole company sits as a committee ineffectually attempting to draft an English Partnership Deed comes from Shaw’s memory of the contract Annie Besant presented to him over their piano duets.