But Stella had not been pleased by Shaw’s efforts to strike some balance between the two women ‘I was born to love’. That April, after they had all returned to London, she began to exploit what she saw as the limitation of Charlotte’s marriage to G.B.S.: its childlessness. Stella knew that Shaw felt a reverence before the fact of childbirth. ‘A sort of pang goes through me from the base of my heart down to my very entrails,’ he had written to Sylvia Brooke, Ranee of Sarawak, when she was pregnant with her first child. ‘...you are going to be torn to pieces and come to life again with a terrible contempt for fragile male things that would be broken by such creative miracles.’
Shaw had denied himself a share in this miracle, and been joined by Charlotte in a conspiracy of denial they called their marriage. Stella, who had ‘suffered her suffering’ and given birth to a son and daughter while her husband was alive, now informed Shaw that ‘I could have 6 more children’ when all he apparently wanted to create with her was a new play. Sometimes Stella could be merciless over his ‘being addicted to work and neglecting your hearts love’.
Shaw had warned her that only on paper was he brave. Sometimes she felt pinned to his sheets of paper like a Painted Lady. She seemed to exist only in the make-believe of his mind. ‘I think you are mad,’ she told him. ‘I think I am pretending to be what it amuses you to think I am.’ He had been generous with offers of money, but she had no status in his life – all that belonged to Charlotte; and she had no future.
In the second week of June, Stella summoned Shaw to her house and told him that she was thinking of marrying George Cornwallis-West. He had touched her with his helplessness and dependence when Shaw had merely been amusing: besides he was prepared to divorce his wife and Shaw was not.
In the train travelling back to Ayot that night Shaw wrote that Stella’s marriage to ‘the other George’ would cut him off for ever from what was still young in his humanity. ‘I say he is young and I am old; so let him wait until I am tired of you,’ he wrote. ‘...It is impossible that I should not tire soon: nothing so wonderful could last... I will hurry through my dream as fast as I can; only let me have my dream out.’
It was a relief to Shaw to leave the country at the end of the month and spend a few days in Germany with Granville Barker. Though there were still delightful moments with Stella – making up verses for her (though he was lost for any rhyme to her name except umbrella), or teaching her to jump from the ground on to a bench in Richmond Park as part of her convalescence – he had felt ‘all torn to bits’ behaving so artificially with Charlotte. She had accidentally come upon a list of meetings mischievously entered by Stella in Shaw’s pocket diary and there were dreadful scenes. Another time Charlotte had caught him speaking to her on the telephone and flared up into an appalling rage. Seeing someone suffer like this gave Shaw ‘a sort of angina pectoris,’ he told Stella. ‘...It hurts me miserably... I must, it seems, murder myself or else murder her.’
To help her resist these lacerating scenes Charlotte had taken up with a spiritual healer. James Porter Mills was a bad-tempered old man who had travelled the world perfecting what he called the ‘Teaching’. His personality had a profound effect on Charlotte. She felt a compulsion to apply his principles, whatever they might be, to the painful upheaval of her emotions. The result was that, in the middle of some terrible quarrels with G.B.S., she would convulsively recover her balance, smile dizzily, and be changed back into ‘the happy consort of an easygoing man’. But damage had been done, and in the priority she gave to Dr Mills’s ‘Teaching’ over Fabianism and the Life Force, Charlotte was being unfaithful to G.B.S. in the only way open to her.
‘This is a terrific romance,’ remarked J. M. Barrie, ‘and at last Shaw can blush.’ Living opposite G.B.S. in Adelphi Terrace, Barrie witnessed Mrs Pat courting them both for plays. That summer she decided to appear in Barrie’s The Adored One which was to open in September – and Shaw was grateful. To go into rehearsals now with Stella in Pygmalion would ‘probably kill me,’ he had calculated. It was as much as he could do to go round to her house on his return from Germany. But she shut the door in his face. He had thought that he could only experience the suffering of others, never his own. But now he felt it, and he was shocked. A little later that July, he found to his astonishment that he was crying. Everything except his adoration of Stella seemed tedious. ‘This clown misses Joey,’ she relented. But she must be alone to study the Barrie play. ‘I will hide in the sands somewhere.’
‘When I am solitary you are always with me,’ he answered. ‘When you are solitary by the sea, where shall I be?’ She did not want him with her. ‘Its getting difficult not to love you more than I ought to love you,’ she reassured him. ‘...But by the sea I must be alone – you know.’
He did not want to know. On the afternoon of 8 August he took Charlotte to Liverpool Street Station to catch the boat train for Marseilles. He intended to join her at the end of the month for a six-week tour of France. On leaving the station he went straight down to the Kent coast where he knew Stella had borrowed the theatrical producer Nigel Playfair’s cottage at Ramsgate. But she was not there. Answering the door late that night, the Playfairs’ housekeeper informed him that Mrs Campbell, her maid, chauffeur and dog, had gone to the Guildford Hotel on Sandwich Bay. Shaw walked off into the dark, an exhausted figure in his Norfolk jacket, making his way back across the sands.
Stella was not pleased to see him next morning. He had made his entrance in the wrong scene. The Guildford Hotel was far from being the private tomb of love they had created in her London bedroom. She intended to marry George Cornwallis-West and Shaw’s presence could be compromising. ‘Please will you go back to London today,’ she wrote to him, ‘ – or go wherever you like but dont stay here – If you wont go I must... Please dont make me despise you.’
But Shaw would not go. He had come so far and there would never be another chance like this, with Charlotte out of the country – a chance to spend some days with Stella and perhaps one or two nights. After reading the note he searched the hotel and went looking for her in the darkness along the sands. Eventually he found her and they ordered a nightcap. Tired herself, Stella noticed with irritation how sleepy he was. They arranged to meet next morning before breakfast for a bathe in the sea – though not before eight o’clock, she insisted. But by half-past seven she was speeding along the coast, with her chauffeur, maid and dog, towards Littlestone-on-Sea. At eight o’clock punctually Shaw knocked at her bedroom door. ‘Come & bathe,’ he called. A cheerful chambermaid answered, telling him that they had gone – and he pretended to have muddled the dates. She had left him a note: ‘Goodbye. I am still tired – you were more fit for a journey than I – .’
He returned to his room and tried to write away his distress. ‘I am deeply, deeply, deeply wounded... I cannot bring you peace, or rest, or even fun.’ The world was horribly changed. He looked up at her room where he had imagined happiness, and there was nothing. ‘I shall die of thirst after all.’ The truth was inescapable. Of his fifty-seven years ‘I have suffered 20 and worked 37’. ‘Then I had a moment’s happiness: I almost condescended to romance. I risked the breaking of deep roots and sanctified ties...’ and now, on that desolate strand, ‘what have I shrunk into?’
He kept mailing letters to Stella wherever she was: again that night (‘Sandwich. Darkness’) then next morning (‘Another day that might have been a day!’) and after he returned to London (‘back from the land of broken promise’). It seemed to him that she had been gratuitously cruel, and he turned all the blame on her. She used her sex appeal irresponsibly, furtively, without care. He felt the need of some monstrous retribution. ‘I have not said enough vile things to you.’
But Shaw’s rhetoric was not hurtful for, as Stella understood, ‘you have no claws’. Nevertheless she needed to defend her action, and her retaliation was more piercing than anything he had written to her. ‘No daughters to relieve your cravings – no babies to stop your satirical cha
tterings, why should I pay for all your shortcomings,’ she demanded. ‘...You lost me because you never found me – I who have nothing but my little lamp and flame – you would blow it out with your bellows of self.’ Yet the depth of his feelings startled her, and she felt his suffering as he had felt Charlotte’s. ‘You are trying to break my heart with your letters,’ she appealed. ‘...What other thing was there for me to do? I had to behave like a man.’
Because they were ‘useless, these letters; the wound will not heal’, she agreed to see him once they were both back in London. He occupied himself as best he could, swimming at the Royal Automobile Club, visiting the zoo and stroking a lion as part of the preparation for Granville Barker’s production of Androcles. He was to join Charlotte in France in the second week of September and he welcomed this. For the romance with Stella had confirmed all his beliefs about love. It was a hideous business: ‘the quantity of Love that an ordinary person can stand without serious damage,’ he measured, ‘is about 10 minutes in 50 years.’
THIRTEEN
1
Concerning Fame and Anonymity
I am a Mr Jorkins on the New Statesman; Clifford Sharp is Mr Spenlow.
Shaw to St John Ervine (1912)
Beatrice Webb was one of those who had viewed this emotional business between G.B.S. and his ‘somewhat elderly witch’ with distaste. Charlotte had told her all about it: and the two women shook their heads.
Beatrice, in her fashion, felt caught up in the wreckage of this affair. During the summer of 1912, she had begun appealing to G.B.S. to help her and Sidney launch a new Fabian weekly journal. But he had displayed little enthusiasm. Unless they established in the mind of the railway traveller, he told them, a certainty that he would be amused and interested by their paper for the next hour of his journey they would never capture the sixpenny public.
It was as bait for this public that Beatrice wanted Shaw’s name as a regular contributor. Yet he was reluctant to give up the time and energy. He would hand over some money, but ‘I wont write’. He believed they were too old. ‘Unless you can find a team of young lions... and give them their heads, the job cannot be done,’ he answered Beatrice. ‘...I should not serve you by attempting to lag superfluous on the stage I once adorned.’
But Beatrice persisted. The New Statesman, as it came to be called, was to be a platform for the reformist middle class, and her and Sidney’s last venture before their retirement. There was need for a well-informed pugnacious journal voicing Fabianism in the contemporary political debate – one that featured G.B.S., instead of leaving him to permeate their opponents.
So Shaw was persuaded. He became one of the New Statesman’s original proprietors and directors, put up (with a cheque for £1,000, equivalent to £43,000 in 1997) one fifth of its capital, purchased approximately 2,400 shares and sent out a series of letters soliciting subscribers. And Beatrice was pleased.
Almost everything, Shaw told Beatrice, would depend on the tact and dash of their editor. The Webbs had chosen Clifford Sharp whom Sidney thought a ‘weak, timid and slow’ man, but Beatrice believed to be ‘a good man of business’. His credentials were faultless. He was a steadfast member of the Fabian executive, had married H. G. Wells’s ex-love Rosamund Bland, and had helped the Webbs’ anti-Poor Law campaign as editor of the Crusade. But no one really liked him. He was like ‘an old, mangy, surly, slightly dangerous dog,’ wrote Leonard Woolf. Imperialist by temperament, Sharp did not share many of the radical preoccupations of socialism such as removal of the House of Lords, and introduction of proportional representation; he was not pro-birth-control or anti-vivisection. But he was a thoroughgoing collectivist: and that was what mattered most to the Webbs.
‘The first number has been a huge success,’ Shaw reported following its publication on 12 April 1913. Not wishing to find himself presiding over a raucous weekly symposium, Sharp relied on the anonymity of his contributions to help him achieve a single tone and unity of style throughout the paper. ‘It is not usual for a journal to communicate to the public the names of those of its staff who contribute unsigned articles,’ he wrote in the first number.
‘We feel, however, that, in view of the promises which have been made, and which have possibly induced many persons to subscribe to The New Statesman, we owe it to our readers to explain that Mr Bernard Shaw and Mr Sidney Webb will as a rule write editorially in our columns, and that the present issue includes, in fact, more than one contribution from each of these gentlemen.’
Shaw’s unsigned contributions on feminism and income tax, the performance of motor cars, the ethics of prize-fighting and the duties of the poet laureate were too surreal to blend into the mood of didactic common sense that Sharp wanted to establish. The two of them, it was said, saw eye to eye on nothing except Ireland and Death Duties – ‘we did not even agree about the Income Tax,’ Sharp added. He therefore proposed that G.B.S. should be treated as an exception to the rule of anonymity and be allowed to sign his contributions. But Shaw refused. ‘I have had enough of being the funny man and the privileged lunatic of a weekly paper.’ As a result ‘the New Statesman is in fact the one weekly in which Shaw’s name never appears,’ Beatrice complained in her diary that summer, ‘and it is Shaw’s name that draws... He will not cooperate on terms of equality.’
But he had agreed to co-operate on terms of equal anonymity. Collectivism did not mean to him a regimentation of opinion, but the release of differing individual talents for a generally harmonious purpose. Sharp reminded him somewhat of his father. He was a moral teetotaller who drank: a man of late hours and cloudy scandals. Though it was impossible for Shaw to trust him, ‘I never felt inclined to resent in the least the good-humoured contempt which he never concealed,’ Sharp told Beatrice. ‘I think he is much the most generous and sweetest-tempered person I ever came across.’ Sharp met the difficulties with courage and ingenuity. ‘I am very favorably impressed by his standing up to me,’ Shaw admitted.
The differences between the two men were to be exacerbated by the war, during which, Sharp wrote, the New Statesman represented Shaw’s views ‘in scarcely a single particular’. He needed fortitude against Shaw’s magnanimous and subversive tactics. Their battle was for authority. Sharp believed that authority belonged to him as editor: but Shaw needed this authority for his iconoclastic opinions. ‘The time has come for me to be old and savage,’ he asserted. He used everything except his money and his position as proprietor in their struggle. His weapons were words.
Beatrice, though she and Sidney were themselves to sever their relationship with Sharp later on (‘your turn will come,’ Shaw predicted), tended to support the editor. ‘The New Statesman enjoys the distinction of being the only paper in the world that refuses to print anything by me,’ Shaw was to write in the autumn of 1916, ‘...and I am compelled, as I have been more or less all my life, to depend for publicity on the more extreme Conservative organs of opinion.’
*
Beatrice had wished for closer intellectual intimacy with Shaw through the New Statesman. But his ‘big brain’, she became convinced, had been spoilt by Mrs Patrick Campbell. ‘He is the fly and the lady the spider.’
Shaw had been unusually subdued during the autumn of 1913 as he flew round France on what Stella called his ‘honeymoon’ with Charlotte. ‘I am horribly unhappy every morning,’ he wrote to her, ‘...you have wakened the latent tragedy in me.’ On his return he tried to keep hidden from their friends the memory of Stella that ‘tears me all to pieces’. Now that the affair had ended, Beatrice began to feel more sympathetic towards him. Instead of hanging around Mrs Pat’s bedroom he ‘has attended every one of our six public lectures, and taken the chair twice,’ she approved. It was not wholly displeasing to Beatrice that Shaw’s recent plays, of which she did not think much, had been unsuccessful. The Music-Cure was presented for just seven performances at the Little Theatre; Great Catherine ran for thirty performances at the Vaudeville and had not been very well reviewed. More sur
prisingly, Barker’s production of Androcles and the Lion, with shimmering Post-Impressionist designs by Albert Rothenstein, had come off after fifty-two performances at the St James’s Theatre. The play had puzzled people. ‘An English audience has not as a rule sufficient emotional mobility to follow a method which alternates laughter with pathos, philosophy with fun, in such rapid succession,’ explained Desmond MacCarthy in the New Statesman.
Everyone had loved the lion, a delicious beast with the most alluring howls and pussycat antics, and ‘the one character in the whole range of Shavian drama,’ commented A. B. Walkley warmly, ‘who never talks’. But it was the lion’s evening rather than the playwright’s. The Manchester Guardian’s critic reported that the words ‘vulgarity’, ‘blasphemy’, ‘childish’ were to be heard at the end of the performance, and predicted that ‘Mr Shaw’s new play will scandalise... the most characteristic part of the English public [which]... cannot understand being passionately in earnest about a thing and in the same breath making fun of it.’ And so it proved.
For Christmas and the New Year he went to Devon and Cornwall for a fortnight’s tour with the Webbs. The scenery had ‘an almost Irish charm’. Each day they would set off walking over ten or thirteen miles of researched country, with the car panting in attendance to take them, when exhausted, to the most luxurious hotel in the neighbourhood. ‘Our old friend and brilliant comrade is a benevolent and entertaining companion,’ Beatrice allowed. But he was ‘getting rapidly old physically, and somewhat dictatorial and impatient intellectually, and he suffers from restlessness,’ she observed. ‘We talked more intimately than we have done for many years.’
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