Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  More complex in derivation are the characters of Mrs George Collins and St John Hotchkiss. Mrs George, as she is called, is a mayoress, a coal merchant’s wife and also ‘Incognita Appassionata’, the mysterious writer of love letters to the Bishop of Chelsea: altogether ‘a wonderful interesting’ woman, her brother-in-law the greengrocer tells everyone. The others believe she is ‘too good to be true’ until her appearance, described in Shaw’s stage directions at the moment of her entrance as a ‘triumphant, pampered, wilful, intensely alive woman... But her beauty is wrecked, like an ageless landscape ravaged by long and fierce war... The whole face is a battle-field of the passions, quite deplorable until she speaks, when an alert sense of fun rejuvenates her in a moment, and makes her company irresistible.’

  She represents three women in one. Her age is approximately Charlotte’s, but Shaw adds the qualities of two other women covered by Mrs Collins’s other names. As ‘Incognita Appassionata’ she embodies the sexual passion that had been excluded from his marriage. For more than two years Shaw had been receiving a series of extraordinary letters from ‘Poste Restante, Godalming’, signed ‘Miss Charmer’. He replied saying that love was an infinite mystery ‘like everything else’; and that she had better ‘marry and have children: then you will not ask from works of art what you can get only from life.’ The result was that the girl, who revealed herself as Erica Cotterill, a cousin of Rupert Brooke’s and daughter of a respectable Fabian schoolmaster, Charles Clement Cotterill, transferred her infatuation from the plays to the playwright whose unorthodox theories of sexual intercourse outside marriage for the procreation of babies she urgently wanted them to put into practice together. She challenged Shaw to confront all he had turned his back on: which he obliquely attempts to do by transferring them to Mrs Collins’s correspondence with the Bishop.

  Then as ‘Mrs George’ Shaw summons up a third woman: the figure of his mother who appeared in his dreams as ‘my wife as well as my mother’. These dreams elevated his affection for Charlotte and intensified his feelings for his mother since, Shaw explained to Gilbert Murray, there was ‘the addition of the filial feeling and the redemption of the sexual feeling from “sin” and strain’.

  Shaw’s practice of obscuring the self-portraits of his plays by giving the characters a superficial resemblance to other people – Marchbanks to De Quincey, Tanner to H. M. Hyndman, Professor Higgins to Henry Sweet – extends to St John Hotchkiss who is ostensibly modelled on his fellow-playwright St John Hankin. But when the ‘St John’ falls away and he confesses to Mrs George that ‘my own pet name in the bosom of my family is Sonny’ the pretence becomes transparent. In Hotchkiss we may see something of the reaction that Shaw produced on his contemporaries: ‘He talks about himself with energetic gaiety. He talks to other people with a sweet forbearance (implying a kindly consideration for their stupidity) which infuriates those whom he does not succeed in amusing.’

  When Hotchkiss meets Mrs George on stage he recognizes her as the coal merchant’s wife with whom (‘when I was a young fool’) he had fallen in love. ‘I felt in her presence an extraordinary sensation of unrest, of emotion, of unsatisfied need,’ he remembers. It is not fanciful to feel in this ‘unsatisfied need’ Shaw’s own response to his mother when in Dublin. In Getting Married Shaw makes Hotchkiss run away abroad in place of his mother leaving for England. And now that they meet again, Hotchkiss again falls in love. The relationship is essentially that of an adopted son. ‘I want to talk to him like a mother,’ says Mrs George who tells Hotchkiss that ‘Sonny is just the name I wanted for you’.

  So Shaw provides another scenario for the Dublin ménage à trois, now that his mother, merged with the figure of Charlotte, has returned to him in his dreams. His sense of the incompleteness of his marriage pervades this play. It was an incompleteness for which Charlotte was to compensate with mystical hoverings comparable to Mrs George’s Blakean ‘inspirations’; and from which Shaw escaped by taking on the authority of the Bishop who wants to ‘make divorce reasonable and decent’. From the abnormality of his own marriage he argues with the tolerant voice of the greengrocer Collins that ‘theres almost as many different sorts of marriages as theres different sorts of people’.

  The cast of characters has been assembled to illustrate this observation. At one level they are the stereotypes of the Victorian theatre: crusty old general, thundering priest, dashing philanderer and so on. But there is another level where they are shown, wearing their official costumes, as representatives of the Church, the Army and the Landed Gentry. Finally Shaw removes their masks to reveal them as ourselves and the people we know. He wants to show us the varieties of human nature that must share the earth. The individual temperaments range from the enemies of marriage to the personification of domesticity; from the woman who loves children but not men, to the woman who wants lovers but is not interested in babies. From the interweaving of all these public and private voices Shaw conducts his symposium and arrives at the conclusion that marriage as a legal institution must be reformed as part of the general transformation of our society.

  *

  ‘It will improve by keeping,’ Shaw had told Granville Barker. But Vedrenne needed a new play and Shaw was persuaded to place the action of Getting Married on 12 May 1908, the day of its first performance at the Hay-market. Five days before the opening he published in the Daily Telegraph the most extreme of his self-drafted interviews. ‘There will be nothing but talk, talk, talk, talk, talk – Shaw talk,’ he promised.

  ‘...Shaw in a bishop’s apron will argue with Shaw in a general’s uniform. Shaw in an alderman’s gown will argue with Shaw dressed as a beadle. Shaw dressed as a bridegroom will be wedded to Shaw in petticoats. The whole thing will be hideous, indescribable – an eternity of brain-racking dulness. And yet they will have to sit it out... they will suffer – suffer horribly... I am not a vindictive man... We shall not be altogether merciless. The curtains will be dropped casually from time to time to allow of first-aid to the really bad cases in the seats allotted to the Press.’

  Getting Married was greeted with what Shaw called a ‘torrent of denunciation’. Desmond MacCarthy was to question how we could take seriously characters who are presented to us merely as knockabout figures of farce: why should we be attentive to their opinions or moved by the absurdity of their passions? The ‘scenes between Hotchkiss and Mrs George seem to me deplorable,’ MacCarthy was to write; ‘too funny to be serious, and too serious to be funny’. Lord Alfred Douglas, under the heading ‘For Shame, Mr Shaw’ in The Academy, called for the censor to put a stop to such insidiously feminine work making ‘serious inroads on the British home’. Shaw challenged anyone to name a play that was not all talk, and enquired whether they had expected ballet. ‘The cast finds out more every time of what it is all about; and so, consequently, does the audience.’

  Yet he was uncertain about Getting Married. ‘Poor people!’ exclaims the Bishop. ‘It’s so hard to know the right place to laugh, isnt it?’ Max Beerbohm and Desmond MacCarthy judged that he had orchestrated the laughter in the wrong place. And J. T. Grein believed that the play traded on Shaw’s peculiar weakness: ‘His loquacity is literally torrential.’ In the play he makes Reginald Bridgenorth impatiently exclaim: ‘It’s no good talking all over the shop like this. We shall be here all day.’ In a work aiming to preserve all the unities of time and place, this spasm of impatience articulated a genuine qualm which he submerged in a battle with the critics.

  4

  Slave of the Automobile

  I am a slave of that car and of you too. I dream of the accursed thing at night.

  Man and Superman

  ‘I shall take to motoring presently,’ Shaw threatened in the summer of 1908. He had already studied at the National Motor Academy and subjected himself to lessons from a professor of driving, H. E. M. Studdy, from whom Charlotte also took tuition. By the end of 1908 the household at Ayot St Lawrence stood ready to receive the Shaws’ first automobile, a 28-30 hp
Lorraine-Dietrich. ‘It is a double cabriolet, with detachable hind part,’ reported The Autocar. ‘...The lines of the car are uncommon and graceful.’ They became a little more uncommon after the first day when Charlotte, attended by Mr Studdy, crashed it mildly into a local obstruction, scattering the splashboards and other impedimenta; and Mr Studdy, accompanied by Charlotte, knocked off the paddle-box against the gate on their way back.

  Since Charlotte’s career as motorist was brief and Shaw was rather too fond of reading in the car, a trained chauffeur, Albert James Kilsby from Notting Hill, was employed. In Kilsby’s opinion the De Dietrich was ‘a proper bugger’ to start. But the car was also, Shaw reckoned, awkward to stop, the accelerator pedal being placed on the left with the brake to the right of it. He never lost the habit of treading on the right pedal to arrest a vehicle.

  The two men, dividing the fun-and-labour of it, would swap driver and passenger positions fairly evenly. After three weeks, it was reported that G.B.S. was seriously disabled. ‘Say I’m dead,’ he cabled the Daily Mail. He was extraordinarily chivalrous to the injured, especially when the fault was theirs. He was also shockingly reckless at the wheel, sometimes (when Charlotte was not travelling) giving lifts to tramps, and presenting them with money. The De Dietrich was a car for all seasons and subjects: a philosophical vehicle. He reported on its capacity to penetrate Swiss avalanches and its place in the future of Ireland; on its moral claims versus the road dog, its tax-generating properties, and the lessons it gave (such as ‘How to Narrow a Road by Widening It’) in Shavian engineering. Of the detachable wheels, movable hood and electric klaxon horn, its cork and brass, the invisible locks and variable speed dynamo, Shaw grew pedantically fond. For a man entering his mid-fifties this was more appropriate than the bicycle. He still used the train for long political journeys, but for serious holiday-making the car was essential.

  They took it first to Algeria and Tunisia for five spring weeks: Kilsby and Shaw jostling up front; Charlotte and her sister Mrs Cholmondeley occupying the back. Among the luggage they had room for the Koran, but no spare parts. ‘Now I come to think of it, it’s a wonder we got anywhere,’ Shaw remarked. At Biskra he rode for two hours on a camel and ‘my seat on this most difficult of mounts was admitted to be superb’. Next day he was stiffly back in the driver’s seat and, careering a hundred miles north into Constantine, achieved a dramatic change of climate (something inconceivable on a camel): ‘rain in colossal blobs instead of drops; and a wind against which I had to hold the car straight by main force’. Kilsby’s time was much filled with repairing burst tyres and then veering melodramatically away from wonderful seas with islands rising out of mirror-like waters and other mirages in which he could not bring himself to disbelieve.

  For the summers of 1909 and 1910 they accompanied the car on holidays to Ireland, parking at an extraordinary turreted hotel, the Great Southern, by the woods of Parknasilla on the Kerry coast. It was a place of long sea views and intricate walks between ferns and fuchsias, rock and rhododendron, to burnt-out castles, and along the various fingers of land that pointed south-west into the Atlantic. Sometimes they would try out the Irish roads with an expedition to Lady Gregory at Coole or, on Shaw’s fifty-fourth birthday, an exploration of the Giant’s Causeway where ‘I sat under my umbrella in my aquascutum, like a putrid mushroom,’ he told Barker, ‘whilst a drenched mariner rowed me round the cliffs and told me lies about them’. Further out to sea he was rowed by ten men in an open boat and landed on the legendary Skelligs. ‘At the top amazing beehives of flat rubble stones, each overlapping the one below until the circles meet in a dome – cells, oratories, churches, and outside them cemeteries, wells, crosses, all clustering like shells on a prodigious rock pinnacle... An incredible, impossible mad place.’

  Upon this cathedral of the sea, the man who generally seemed a stranger on the planet felt at home. Standing in the graveyards at the Skellig summit, he recalled the summers of his early years when Sonny roamed over the rocks and goat-paths of Dalkey, and gazed across the blue waters to Howth Head; or had lain on the grassy top of the hill above the bay – then raced down to the shore known as White Rock and plunged into the waves. Sonny had been a product of Dalkey’s outlook: there was little place for him in the bustling world where G.B.S. moved. But he breathed again in the magic climate of this island. ‘I tell you the thing does not belong to any world that you and I have ever lived and worked in,’ Shaw wrote next day to Frederick Jackson, a political journalist and solicitor: ‘it is part of our dream world.’

  They rowed him back in the dark, without a compass, the moon invisible in the mists: two and a half Atlantic hours. Then he drove to Parknasilla, to Charlotte, and the world he lived in.

  During April 1910, in more orthodox style, the car had taken them for a spin in France, Shaw having undertaken to write reports for the Royal Automobile Club. In the first five and a half days they whizzed along 660 miles, going for all they were worth despite Shaw’s view that, owing to the lethally cambered roads, it was unsafe to pass anything without first slowing to a halt. ‘I am already twice the man I was when I left,’ he reported to Barker. Charlotte felt less cheery. ‘G.B.S. does not allow us one moment of peace – we are harried from place to place!’

  From their cards Barker could feel a struggle developing between Shaw and Charlotte. ‘I drive half the day,’ Shaw exulted; ‘lie deliciously awake half the night; and am visibly waning towards my grave.’ At each shattering explosion of the exhaust, his spirits soared. His plan appears to have been to cure Charlotte for ever of their compulsory holidays. ‘Charlotte positively loathes me, and is, as usual pathetically unable to dissimulate,’ he told Barker at the end of the month.

  Back in England, Charlotte diverted some of her loathing from her husband to his car. Their next holiday abroad would be, not yet apart, but separated from his roving machine. As for Shaw, he reported to the Royal Automobile Club that motoring in France was rather like driving along the roof of St Pancras Station.

  5

  A Treatise on Biography

  People like to back a winner... However, nothing succeeds like failure... Even nonsense is sometimes suggestive.

  Shaw to Ensor Walters (1 November 1903), to Trebitsch (20 July 1903), to Lady Gregory (16 April 1920)

  ‘The villagers all thought he was a rum one – a very rum one,’ remembered his neighbour Mrs Reeves. Sitting bolt upright in his car, he would career very fast (over 20 miles per hour) through the village, leaving behind him a wake of grumbling. But Edith Reeves never heard of him knocking anyone down. Living so near, she had got to know the Shaws quite well. They would put the mown grass over the wall as fodder for the Reeves’s livestock, and give them cabbages and other vegetables from the garden. And Mr Reeves sold the Shaws raspberries and cherries.

  Mr and Mrs Reeves named one of their sons Bernard. Shaw and Charlotte took great interest in the small Reeveses. During Mrs Reeves’s confinements, while Mr Reeves was out with his sandwiches working in the fields, they would send cooked meals in to her – chicken or fish with fresh vegetables from their garden. Charlotte confided that she would have liked children of her own: and Mrs Reeves was given to understand that it was on account of her asthma that she had none.

  Shaw’s fondness for animals was notorious. Mr and Mrs Reeves would feel quite uncomfortable loading their squealing pigs into the cart for market – though Shaw never said anything. He had a pigeon-cote and several hives of bees in the garden; and there was an erratic little white dog, Kim, which would streak in and out of the house, sometimes barking, sometimes rolling on its back. Shaw never bought a dog, though ‘I always own a dog in the country’. He was glad there had been a dog in his home in Dublin since this put him on easy terms with what was often a pleasant extension of human society. ‘I have no lies to tell about dogs,’ he declared. He had a fellow feeling for them, as well as for cats: any species of animal in fact. But he did not claim to like all dogs and cats.

  The Sh
aws were good neighbours but they minded their business; and, since they were often away, the villagers regarded them as ‘characters’ rather than native people. They attached little importance to Shaw’s literary fame.

  *

  This fame, though it stopped short at Ayot, had been spreading round the world with the publication of several books about him. Eighteen critical and biographical volumes appeared before the war. The most brilliant of them was by G. K. Chesterton; the most persistent of his biographers was Archibald Henderson.

  Henderson was twenty-five and an Instructor in Mathematics at the University of North Carolina when, early in 1903, he had been ‘electrified’ by a performance of You Never Can Tell in Chicago. He spent the next year studying Shaw’s writings and then sent Shaw a letter threatening to write his life: ‘it never occurred to me,’ he afterwards admitted, ‘that perhaps I was wholly unfitted for the job.’ Shaw added Henderson’s name to an extensive card index marked ‘Disciples’ and wrote a postcard asking him to ‘send me your photograph!’ Henderson put himself to a good deal of bother over this, all of which amounted to placing himself in line for a kindly Shavian joke: ‘You look like the man who can do the job.’

  ‘I began making notes,’ Henderson noted. For the next fifty years he continued making notes that Shaw orchestrated into a semi-Shavian melody. Henderson’s first book on Shaw (His Life and Works) appeared in 1911. By 1932, in his blockbuster Playboy and Prophet, he reported having published ‘the eighth book of mine devoted, in part or in whole, to interpretation of your life, character and significance’. He reached his apotheosis six years after Shaw’s death and seven years before his own in Man of the Century, when the century only had forty-four declining years to run. Of Henderson it may literally be said that no man could have done more. But why had G.B.S. encouraged him to do so much?