Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Charlotte sailed on 12 April, and Shaw spent part of the time ‘motoring about the country’. As if to punish G.B.S. Charlotte clung to her coughs and colds. G.B.S. sent her every two or three days a narrative-through-letters of his motoring tour round England. ‘I feel fearfully incomplete, though I rather like the novelty of being a bachelor too,’ he told her the day before he set out.

  The motor party consisted of co-drivers Kilsby and G.B.S., and passengers Judy Gillmore (who was shortly to get married to a naval officer and give up her job as Shaw’s secretary) and Granville Barker who was to catch up with them later. They advanced, sometimes bounding forwards at the rate of a hundred miles per day, by way of Cambridge, Peterborough and Lincoln, to York, where they stopped to wait for Barker.

  Shaw and Barker together were like two schoolboys, endlessly and idiotically quoting Shakespeare, while Judy had developed into a fast and indefatigable walker. ‘She flies up hills, leaving us gasping and trudging after in our elderly manner.’ At Windermere they went by motor boat down the lake and were caught in the tempest and uproar of the hydro-aeroplanes which ‘nearly blew us into the lake’. Then Barker suspended himself from a nail to calculate his weight and ‘fell with an appalling bang on his back on the stones’.

  They pressed on as far north as Carlisle where Judy went down with an overwhelming cold; Barker limped off home exhausted; Kilsby was left with his ‘pet bag of scrap iron’ doctoring the car; and Shaw was struck down by a vigorous lumbago which he sent off to Rome to compete with Charlotte’s influenza. ‘Lumbago is a fearful thing. Possibly it is appendicitis. Possibly spinal paralysis.’

  The perils of road-journeying grew extreme when at a fork in the road Kilsby found himself steering while his employer reversed, and the car toppled over a bank: ‘she slid down gracefully like the elephant on the chute at the Hippodrome – backwards – without the slightest shock, except one of surprise to Kilsby...’ But nothing deterred Shaw. Producing a map, he pointed to a road which looked all that a road should be, but which soon ascended so steeply that the car again refused. Shaw and Judy jumped out and began searching for stones to arrest the descent, but the monster rolled backwards over Judy’s finger and she fainted. ‘Kilsby got his shoulders under her like a fireman; I heaped her up on him,’ Shaw recounted to Charlotte, ‘and he carried her up the hill to an open place where we laid her down and laid our by no means clean handkerchiefs, dipped in mountain water mud, on her forehead... This is a shocking country for motoring.’

  Proceeding more cautiously they came to Blackpool, which was in festivity. Princess Louise had opened a new promenade and everything was illuminated, ‘a triumph of crimson and gold fire’. This was Blackpool’s first taste of royalty. Thousands of dancers moved to the tempo of band music over acres of parquet floor. ‘The sentimental solemnity of the waltzing is beyond description,’ Shaw exulted. ‘The two-steps are more joyous; and the lancers approach, by comparison, delirium... Kilsby says he will bring Mrs Kilsby here for their next holiday.’

  To heighten Judy’s morale Shaw introduced her to a socialist hairdresser. ‘Judy is all right,’ he predicted. But shortly afterwards she admitted that she wanted to return to London. Since her naval officer was soon to be landing there ‘I did not dissuade her,’ Shaw wrote, and reluctantly put her on the train back.

  So now there were two. They raced on to Edstaston where ‘Mrs Chum’ and her husband, the Colonel, put Shaw to work chopping down gorse, adding cramp to his other ailments. But: ‘the place is looking delightful, all leaves & blossoms, and soft summer airs,’ he informed Charlotte.

  Charlotte returned on 22 May and Shaw met her at Southampton. Now that they were together, what had their separation shown? Charlotte could hardly have envied Judy’s predicament which might so easily have been her own. G.B.S. had endured the same headaches, cramps, accidents, lumbagos as ever. Nevertheless, the difference had been Judy. ‘The chief fun of the tour is her enjoyment of it,’ he had explained to Charlotte. ‘I never realized how very staid she is as secretary in Adelphi Terrace until I saw her gambolling like a rabbit or a lamb in the open.’

  By early June two ingredients had been added to Shaw’s career: a new woman and a new play. The new woman was Ann M. Elder. Approved of by Charlotte – she put G.B.S. in mind of ‘a very attractive bullfinch’ – Ann took Judy’s place as his secretary and was to work with him for seven years before marrying.

  The new play was Pygmalion. Shaw took it round that month to read to George Alexander. The professor of phonetics appealed to him so well that he told Shaw he could settle his own terms and name any actress he liked for the flower girl – except the actress for whom Shaw had written it, Mrs Patrick Campbell. ‘I’d rather die,’ he appealed to Shaw. But Shaw had set his heart on her. Eliza Doolittle was as good a fit for Stella Campbell as Lady Cicely had been for Ellen Terry: ‘for I am a good ladies’ tailor, whatever my shortcomings may be’.

  5

  Dearest Liar

  I badly need some sort of humanizing... I have loved – and have survived it... I shall never quite get over it.

  Shaw to Mrs Patrick Campbell (20 March 1913, 8 February 1914, 23 October 1912)

  He had been ‘violently in love’ with Mrs Patrick Campbell from the start: and fearfully on his guard. Her sexual power was more compelling than Ellen Terry’s charm, and when he used it as a warning to Janet Achurch he had been warning himself.

  He had seen her in many plays. ‘It is impossible not to feel that those haunting eyes are brooding on a momentous past, and the parted lips anticipating a thrilling imminent future... Mrs Patrick Campbell is a wonderful woman.’ She had been ‘wonderful’ as Juliet, though unable to act the part; and a disquietingly mad Ophelia; and he had been delighted by her also as the heroine of ‘the celestial bed’ in Nelson’s Enchantress. ‘You will tell me, no doubt, that Mrs Patrick Campbell cannot act,’ he lectured his Saturday Review readers. ‘Who said she could? – who wants her to act?... Go and see her move, stand, speak, look, kneel – go and breathe the magic atmosphere that is created by the grace of all these deeds.’ She would cast an extraordinary glamour round such plays as The Second Mrs Tanqueray or The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith. ‘Clearly there must be a great tragedy somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood,’ Shaw concluded. ‘...But Mr Pinero has hardly anything to do with it.’

  Shaw was envious of Pinero. He wanted Mrs Pat for his own play-world. He had written his Cleopatra for her, but she only read the copyright performance. She was better formed for the mature Cleopatra of Shakespeare’s world than Shaw’s marvellous child. Caesar and Cleopatra had been a dramatization of their relationship thus far as critic and actress. The dazzled Caesar who retains his full self-possession is G.B.S., sworn critic of the Saturday Review, who names Mrs Pat as Circe, and states his intention of making ‘the best attempt I can to be Ulysses’. He believed that he had the antidote to romance; that he could, like Ulysses, drink from the cup unharmed – and without harming others. He wanted to re-enact the Greek legend, with no descent to Hades before sailing on escorted by favourable winds. He wanted to serenade his Circe, through his acts on stage – to direct her, fill her with his words.

  As early as September 1897 everything ‘has been driven clean out of my head by a play I want to write... in which he [Forbes-Robertson] shall be a west end gentleman and she an east end dona in an apron and three orange and red ostrich feathers’. Fifteen years later he wrote this play. The liaison between Forbes-Robertson and his ‘rapscallionly flower girl’ as Shaw had called her was long over, and Mrs Pat had returned briefly to the St James’s. Sir George Alexander would have made as good a West End gentleman as Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson: but what mattered to Shaw was that Mrs Pat should become the cockney flower girl: a Galatea to his Pygmalion.

  But would she stand for such a vulgar role? Not daring to offer it to her directly, he formed a stratagem. This involved Mrs Pat’s close friend Edith Lyttelton at whose house he arranged to read his play o
n 26 June 1912, when Mrs Pat was expected to be present. She came: heard Shaw’s amazingly awful cries of ‘Nah-ow’ and even ‘Ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-ow-ow!’; recognized his clever mimicry of her own voice: and realized that this part of Eliza Doolittle was meant for her. She might have interrupted. She could have left. But Shaw read with spellbinding power and she listened.

  Next day she wrote to thank him for ‘thinking I can be your pretty slut’ and inviting him to come and discuss the business proposals for Pygmalion. ‘I wonder if I could please you,’ she wrote. ‘...We said so little yesterday. I mustn’t lose time – my days are numbered surely.’

  He went at once to her house in Kensington Square. It was now her turn to put forth spells. Shaw scorned the danger. But taking his hand she touched his fingers against her bosom and ‘I fell head over heels in love with her,’ he confessed to Granville Barker, ‘ – violently and exquisitely in love – before I knew that I was thinking about anything but business.’ They were together for an hour. He walked on air all afternoon and the next day ‘as if my next birthday were my twentieth,’ he told Ellen Terry. His beard was going white, he was on the verge of fifty-six but ‘I have not yet grown up’. She was forty-seven and still beautiful. ‘Is there no age limit?’ he wondered. He was determined, however, that his infatuation should last no longer than a day, or perhaps two, and by the end of the month declared that G.B.S. was himself again. ‘I did not believe that I had that left in me,’ he acknowledged in a letter to Mrs Pat – or Stella as he was to call her. ‘I am all right now, down on earth again with all my cymbals and side drums and blaring vulgarities in full blast; but it would be meanly cowardly to pretend that you are not a very wonderful lady, or that the spell did not work most enchantingly on me for fully 12 hours.’

  Shaw’s recovery was signalled by a frightful migraine and pages of ‘horrid’ business practicalities about producing Pygmalion ‘behind which my poor timid little soul hides’. Yet his feelings kept interrupting his professional literary manner. ‘I wish I could fall in love without telling everybody,’ he wrote. He told Lillah and Barker; he told Barrie, Edith Lyttelton, Ellen Terry, Lady Gregory... and he told Charlotte. ‘I must now go and read this to Charlotte,’ he concluded one of his letters to Stella. ‘My love affairs are her unfailing amusement: all their tenderness recoils finally on herself.’

  *

  Charlotte had already experienced enough recoil over the business of Erica Cotterill. G.B.S. had encouraged that young girl disgracefully, she sometimes thought. They had actually been forced to threaten her with the police. But Shaw felt Charlotte’s accusations were unjust. Was it his fault that, having received his advice to ‘join some Socialist Society’, Erica had become a Fabian and followed him devotedly back from his lectures to Adelphi Terrace? Could he seriously be blamed for not having foreseen that, after accepting tickets to his plays, she would write a play herself in which the heroine declares her passion to have ‘some gorgeous thing to live for and love with every atom of my whole soul’, and that she would point to G.B.S. as this ‘gorgeous thing’ and hand the play to Charlotte? Had he acted wrongly by informing Erica that her letters (which he scrupulously showed his wife) were illegible, simply because she was to go off, employ a printer, and begin publishing her correspondence to him as a series of ‘accounts’ totalling a quarter of a million words, dedicated to Shaw ‘whom I love’? And where was the harm in inviting her to lunch and introducing her to some friends – unless it had lain in her decision to camp in the woods nearby and come racing up to Ayot on her motor-bicycle under the trance-like conviction that Charlotte’s house belonged to her? No: he had done no wrong.

  Yet her exasperating naïveté touched him at times with its loneliness and oddity so that, after almost seven agonizing years, he was still locked in correspondence with her in the summer of 1912. Her hypnotic style, undivided, ecstatic, insistent, was as unstoppable as his own. She wrote in one key identified by Shaw as E flat minor. This was a letter missing from the Alpha and Omega of his own prose. Her pages were emotional orgasms: she lived upon the page as if it were her body. Reluctantly he counselled her to adopt literature as a profession. Shaw would have to guide her.

  He sent for her: bullied her with his high-speed opinions. But: ‘I didnt want to be scolded,’ she wrote, ‘I wanted to be loved, and perhaps I nearly cried.’ Then something happened. He pulled away, and laughed. ‘What would have come if you had not held me back and I had knelt down to you?’ she wanted to know. ‘Would you have laughed then?... would you have felt nothing... and what would have come if you had felt it?... were you hidden deep from your conscious mind afraid of feeling it?’

  He sent her away: and started his correspondence course. ‘Now listen to me.’ She was an adult not a baby; strong not weak; and exquisite. But everything was made impossible by her nymphomania. He pointed to his wife, and the iron laws of domestic honour. Then he explained about seducers and socialist orators; and then about divine sparks and ultimate goals. And after the explanations poured forth the advice. She should marry; she should marry as quickly as possible. Marriage was an acquired taste, but if she chose someone by the same rule as (for example) she might choose a horse, someone of the right size, shape, complexion and (in the horsedealer’s sense) without vices, she could become fond of him – after which she could put her energy into work. Then after the advice came the education. ‘When an adult woman and an adult man caress one another, the result is entirely different from the result of your kissing your mother.’ The person to whom she behaved in that perfectly happy way would lose all power of doing anything but the thing that would result in her having a baby. ‘People who do these natural things are socially impossible.’

  But Erica was socially impossible and the woman least fitted in the world to be Eliza Doolittle to his Henry Higgins. ‘You hardly yet know how to behave yourself at all,’ he complained. He identified Erica with Sonny. He had been ‘just as shy & sensitive as you are’. So now he tried to give this ‘terrified child’ all the parental help he had missed himself. But no amount of Shavian coaching could change her. For she had her own insights: ‘youre a child all the while acting that youre a man,’ she countered. ‘Why do you act – what use is it – it deceives no deep parts...

  ‘in all the whole stream of people that have come out of you theres not one that moves me first and last for itself – you watch and study and get behind and master things in them... and then you suddenly do a thing – you suddenly use them... consciously youre using them to expose some evil or falsehood or whatever its chosen to be called... cant you feel that everything of any kind that comes from you, work speeches plays letters... comes at its root from a pose or attitude of some kind.’

  Erica would not smarten up her writing, or learn her biology, or master the simplest obligations of society. She wanted the creative fire to leap into activity within their bodies. The strain was too much. ‘I would not stand it from Cleopatra herself.’

  But, in Stella Campbell, he had become involved with a modern Cleopatra, and to Charlotte’s mind there was no telling what he would not stand. Over the Erica Cotterill affair, she had interceded by sending a letter (drafted by G.B.S.) forbidding the girl her house and her husband. To separate him from Mrs Pat she reintroduced their motoring holidays with her sister and Kilsby on the Continent. This time Shaw could not refuse, and they started on 27 July.

  *

  ‘All I ask is to have my own way in everything,’ Shaw had reasoned with Stella, ‘and to see my Liza as often as possible.’ Charlotte’s tactics in removing G.B.S. were somewhat nullified when Stella’s taxi had ‘a blinding bang’ with another vehicle and she decided to recover in France, leaving three days after the Shaws. For part of August they were tantalizingly close. ‘I have only to push on to Tresenda,’ Shaw wrote from Bad Kissingen, ‘turn to the right, skirt Lake Como, hurry through Milan, dash through the Little St Bernard (being myself the Great St Bernard), make through Albertville to Chambery, and then
be in your arms in an hour. But back I must turn for all that, leaving your arms empty.’

  No one had their way that summer. The waters at Aix and the air of Chamonix were of little benefit to Stella who arrived back in London feeling less well than when she set out. Meanwhile, the tonics in Bad Kissingen proved poisonous to G.B.S. – one mouthful and he made a dash for the Alps, and at fall of evening on 6 August, ruptured the car. This was largely Stella’s fault since, instead of minding the road Shaw had filled his head with a thousand letters he wanted to write her with ‘millions of additional verses’.

  They returned to Bad Kissingen and deposited the two women for three further weeks of voluptuous cures. Charlotte ‘gasps in rarefied air whilst her sister wallows in mud,’ Shaw notified Stella. ‘...Charlotte wants to get thin; and her sister wants to get plump; so they have both agreed to be asthmatic and have treatments.’