Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Shaw’s life was changing – everything was changing – from comedy to tragedy. From Cornwall he wrote to Charlotte: ‘I miss you, as you would be happy here, and I like to be with you when you are happy.’ From Devon he wrote to Stella, reminding her of their love a year ago: ‘I believe we were both well then, and have been ill ever since.’ He could not conceal these divisions from the sharp eyes of Beatrice. ‘He is still fond of Charlotte and grateful to her,’ she noted, ‘but he quite obviously finds his new friend, with her professional genius and more intimate personal appeal, better company.’

  Stella had taken little notice of Joey’s letters this winter. ‘I ought to have written,’ she acknowledged. Barrie’s The Adored One had not been a success. She began to look differently at Shaw. ‘Be quite serious in your friendship for me,’ she appealed. Though not knowing whether Shaw still wanted her to play Eliza, she had recently approached Beerbohm Tree about Pygmalion. Having already heard from George Alexander that this play was ‘a winner’, Tree asked Shaw to come to His Majesty’s and read it to him. The reading took place high up in the dome of the theatre, and before the end of the third act Tree had made up his mind to stage it. Rehearsals were to begin in February 1914. Tree’s ‘admiration for you and the play is ENORMOUS,’ Stella wrote to Shaw. ‘I’ll be tame as a mouse and oh so obedient – and I wonder if you’ll get what you want out of me...’

  2

  The History of Pygmalion

  Ibsen was compelled to acquiesce in a happy ending for A Doll’s House in Berlin, because he could not help himself, just as I have never been able to stop the silly and vulgar gag with which Eliza in Pygmalion, both here and abroad, gets the last word and implies that she is going to marry Pygmalion.

  Shaw to William Archer (19 April 1919)

  Pygmalion marks the climax of Shaw’s career as a writer of comedies. It is a return in feeling and form to the period of his Plays Pleasant, an integration of Faustian legend and Cinderella fairy-tale, a comedy of manners and a parable of socialism. Written so near to his mother’s death and to the flowering of his romance with Stella, the play weaves together a variety of Shavian themes and obsessions, imaginatively rephrasing the relationship between his mother and Vandeleur Lee, and casting Mrs Pat as the emotional replacement for Mrs Shaw. Its vitality and charm endeared Pygmalion to audiences, with whom it has remained Shaw’s most popular ‘romance’. ‘There must be something radically wrong with the play if it pleases everybody,’ he protested, ‘but at the moment I cannot find what it is.’

  He enjoyed describing Pygmalion as an experiment to demonstrate how the science of phonetics could pull apart an antiquated British class system. ‘The reformer we need most today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast,’ he was to write in his Preface. This was Shaw’s gesture towards removing the power for change from fighting men who were threatening to alter the world by warfare, and handing it to men of words whom he promoted as ‘among the most important people in England at present’. In this context, the character of Henry Higgins (who appears as a comic version of Sherlock Holmes in Act I) takes his life from the revolutionary phonetician and philologist Henry Sweet, who had died while the play was being written. Writing to Robert Bridges in 1910 about the need for a phonetic institute, he had described Sweet as the man ‘I had most hopes of’. It was Bridges who, the following year, retained Shaw to speak at the Phonetic Conference on spelling reform at University College, London. ‘It is perfectly easy to find a speaker whose speech will be accepted in every part of the English speaking world as valid 18-carat oral currency,’ he wrote to Sweet afterwards, ‘NOT that the pronunciation represented is the standard pronunciation or ideal pronunciation, or correct pronunciation, or in any way binding on any human being or morally superior to Hackney cockney or Idaho american, but solely that if a man pronounces in that way he will be eligible as far as speech is concerned for the post of Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor at Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury, Emperor, President, or Toast Master at the Mansion House.’

  It was this experiment that Shaw transferred to Higgins’s laboratory in Wimpole Street, with its phonograph, laryngoscope, tuning-forks and organ pipes. This is a live experiment we are shown on stage, and as with all such laboratory work it is necessary for the Frankenstein doctor to behave as if his creation were insentient. ‘She’s incapable of understanding anything,’ Higgins assures his fellow-scientist Colonel Pickering. ‘Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?’ When Pickering asks: ‘Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?’, Higgins cheerily replies: ‘Oh no, I dont think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about. Have you, Eliza?’

  Shaw conducts a second social experiment through Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle, an elderly dustman of Dickensian vitality. Doolittle is any one of us. When asked by Higgins whether he is an honest man or rogue, he answers: ‘A little of both, Henry, like the rest of us.’ Being his name, he does as little as possible – some bribery here or there, a little blackmail, more drinking, an occasional change of mistress: and he provides positively no education at all for his illegitimate daughter ‘except to give her a lick of the strap now and again’. Yet he has the quick wits and superficial charm of the capitalist entrepreneur. He is society’s free man – free of responsibilities and conscience. ‘Have you no morals, man?’ demands Pickering. ‘Cant afford them, Governor,’ Doolittle answers. Undeserving poverty is his line: ‘and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it,’ he adds. His disquisition on middle-class morality is intended by Shaw to have the same subversive effect as Falstaff’s discourse on honour.

  Yet this is the man whom Shaw chooses as the first recipient of what he calculates to be a reasonable income-for-all. As the result of Higgins’s joking reference to Doolittle as the most original moralist in England in a letter to an American philanthropist, the undeserving dustman is left £3,000. In Act II he had made his entrance with ‘a professional flavour of dust about him’. In Act V when his name is announced and Pickering queries, ‘Do you mean the dustman?’, the parlourmaid answers: ‘Dustman! Oh no, sir: a gentleman.’ He is splendidly dressed as if for a fashionable wedding. Shaw’s point is not that a gentleman is merely a dustman with money in the same way as a flower girl with phonetic training can be passed off as a duchess: it is that moral reformation depends upon the reform of our economic system. As Eric Bentley writes: ‘He was giving the idea of the gentleman an economic basis.’ It is this that Doolittle dreaded and derided, and now finds himself dragged into. ‘It’s making a gentleman of me that I object to,’ he protests. ‘...I have to live for others and not for myself: thats middle class morality.’

  Under Higgins’s tutelage Eliza becomes a doll of ‘remarkable distinction... speaking with pedantic correctness of pronunciation and great beauty of tone’, which Mrs Higgins tells her son is ‘a triumph of your art and of her dressmaker’s’. This dummy figure replaces the ‘draggle tailed guttersnipe’ whose life Higgins acknowledges to have been real, warm and violent. The classical Pygmalion had prayed to Aphrodite to make his ideal statue come alive so that he could marry her. Shaw’s flower girl, whom Higgins has manufactured into a replica duchess by the beginning of Act IV, is transformed into an independent woman whom Higgins refuses to marry. However, the transformation scene, in which Higgins lays his hands on Eliza like a sculptor’s creative act, is a struggle the implications of which are sexual:

  ‘Eliza tries to control herself... she is on the point of screaming... He comes to her... He pulls her up... LIZA [breathless]... She crisps her fingers frantically. HIGGINS [looking at her in cool wonder]... LIZA [gives a suffocated scream of fury, and instinctively darts her nails at his face]!! HIGGINS [catching her wrists... He throws her roughly into the easy chair] LIZA [crushed by superior strength and weight]. HIGGINS [thundering] Those slippers LIZA [with bitter submission] Those slippers’

  These stage directions contain many sado-masochistic undertones. But Hi
ggins himself resists every innuendo. This was important to Shaw. For, remembering Sweet’s genius for ‘making everything impossible’, he turned his mind to another ‘genius’ as a model for Higgins, the author of The Voice, Vandeleur Lee. Higgins’s asexual association with Eliza is consequently authorized by Shaw’s faith in his mother’s ‘innocence’, and written as an endorsement of his own legitimacy. The platonic arrangement depends on the professional circumstances of their relationship. ‘You see, she’ll be a pupil,’ Higgins explains to Pickering, ‘and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred.’ Higgins’s voice tuition of Eliza takes the place of the singing lessons Lee had given Bessie (Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw) and to reinforce this substitution Shaw provides Higgins’s pupil with the same name as Lee’s pupil:

  HIGGINS Whats your name?

  THE FLOWER GIRL Liza Doolittle

  HIGGINS [declaiming gravely] Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess, They went to the wood to get a bird’s nes’.

  ‘I’ve never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps,’ Higgins tells Pickering. He explains the reason to his mother who has regretted his inability to fall in love with any woman under forty-five. ‘My idea of a lovable woman is somebody as like you as possible,’ he tells her. ‘I shall never get into the way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be changed.’

  In his final act, Shaw was rewriting the legend of Svengali and his pupil Trilby. When Svengali dies of a heart attack, Trilby’s voice is silenced, she cannot sing at her concert, and she follows Svengali into death. In Shaw’s version Eliza’s true voice is heard once she emerges from Higgins’s bullying presence and walks out to a separate life. But other forces were at work in the final act obliging Higgins himself to speak increasingly with the voice of G.B.S., the public figure that had developed from Vandeleur Lee; while Eliza comes to represent the emotions that Stella Campbell was introducing into his life. Higgins’s description of Eliza as a ‘consort battleship’ has something of the armoured impregnability Shaw attributed to his mother (‘one of those women who could act as matron of a cavalry barracks from eighteen to forty and emerge without a stain on her character’). But no one else in the play regards Eliza in this light. Mrs Higgins calls her ‘naturally rather affectionate’; Doolittle admits she is ‘very tender-hearted’; and Eliza herself demands: ‘Every girl has a right to be loved.’

  What Higgins wants is less clear. He claims he has created an ideal wife – ‘a consort for a king’ – yet he must resist her emotional appeal: ‘I wont stop for you... I can do without anybody.’ The purpose of Higgins’s experiment has been ‘filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul’. It is half successful, half a failure. The class gulf is filled at the garden party, dinner party and reception: the gulf between Eliza and Higgins remains. Eliza has changed, but Higgins admits ‘I cant change my nature.’ He seems ‘cold, unfeeling, selfish’ to Eliza. ‘I only want to be natural,’ she says. But can Higgins be natural? Where will things lead if she accepts his invitation to go back to him ‘for the fun of it’?

  The original ending of the play is carefully ambiguous, reflecting Shaw’s uncertainties over his romance with Stella. He could not marry her: she could not remain for ever his pupil as an actress learning from his theatrical direction. But might they become lovers? The question is left open to our imagination:

  MRS HIGGINS I’m afraid youve spoilt that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and gloves.

  HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, dont bother. She’ll buy em all right enough. Good-bye. They kiss. Mrs Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.

  This, as Eric Bentley argues, ‘is the true naturalistic ending’. But Shaw’s subsequent attempts to clear up its ambiguity have blurred the outline of its elegant structure. The faint poignancy of the ending lies in the half-emergent realization that there is to be no satisfactory marriage for this Cinderella; while a feminist reading tells us that Higgins cannot be approved of as a husband. But the public wanted the Miltonic bachelor to be transformed into the beautiful lady’s husband. ‘This is unbearable,’ Shaw cried out. Once his love affair with Stella had ended, he could not bear to speculate on what might have happened when ‘I almost condescended to romance’. ‘Eliza married Freddy [Eynsford-Hill],’ he told Trebitsch; ‘and the notion of her marrying Higgins is disgusting.’ In other words Eliza married a double-barrelled nonentity like George Cornwallis-West, and Higgins’s agonizing boredom with the Eynsford-Hill family reflects Shaw’s own impatience with the smart visitors who sometimes crowded him out of Stella’s house.

  The history of Pygmalion was to develop into a struggle over this ending. For the play’s first publication in book form in 1916, Shaw added a sequel recounting ‘what Eliza did’. Her decision not to marry Higgins, he explained, was well-considered. The differences between them of age and income, when added to Higgins’s mother-fixation and exclusive passion for phonetics, was too wide a gulf to bridge. He told the story of Eliza and Freddy, Mr and Mrs Eynsford-Hill, as invitingly as he could: but the public went on preferring its own version. Shaw made his final version of the end on 19 August 1939:

  MRS HIGGINS I’m afraid youve spoilt that girl, Henry. I should be uneasy about you and her if she were less fond of Colonel Pickering.

  HIGGINS Pickering! Nonsense: she’s going to marry Freddy. Ha ha! Freddy! Freddy!! Ha ha ha ha ha!!!!! [He roars with laughter as the play ends]

  But by now this laughter sounded as hollow as Higgins’s prediction, and even Shaw’s printers had begun to query his intentions.

  The English-language film of Pygmalion gave Shaw an extra opportunity to remove ‘virtually every suggestion of Higgins’s possible romantic interest in Liza’. His screenplay even omits the word ‘consort’ and leaves Higgins calling Eliza a ‘battleship’. But the producer of the film hired other screenwriters who added a ‘sugar-sweet ending’ which Shaw found out for the first time at a press show two days before its première.

  But one battle he apparently did win. ‘Hamon, my French translator, says that it is announced that Lehar is making an operetta of Pygmalion,’ he notified Trebitsch in the summer of 1921. ‘...Can you warn him that he cannot touch Pygmalion without infringing my copyright, and that I have no intention of allowing the history of The Chocolate Soldier to be repeated.’ For almost thirty more years he made the same reply to all composers. ‘I absolutely forbid any such outrage,’ he wrote when in his ninety-second year. Pygmalion was good enough ‘with its own verbal music’.

  *

  Pygmalion, which was first published in book form in Germany, Hungary and Sweden (plus an unauthorized edition in the United States), received its theatrical début at the Hofburg Theater in Vienna on 16 October 1913, and was played a fortnight later at the Lessingtheater in Berlin. The Times on 17 October 1913 reported that the opening night in Vienna ‘met with an excellent reception from the audience, which among a number of distinguished personages included the Archduke Francis Ferdinand’.

  Shaw described this première as a compliment paid to him by German and Austrian culture ‘which I value very much’. Pygmalion had been performed in a beautiful theatre splendidly subsidized and free of rent. ‘I am handsomely paid for my work,’ he reported. ‘In London, with an equally popular play, the ground landlord leaves less than nothing for me and for the management... Meanwhile, huge endowments are proposed for football, pedestrian races, and throwing the hammer.’

  However, there was a small cloud floating over this foreign production.

  The central situation of the play also appears in Shaw’s novel Love Among the Artists where the Welsh Beethoven, Owen Jack, gives elocution lessons to Madge Brailsford. But an alert German critic pointed out the extraordinary resemblance of Shaw’s story to the adventures of Smollett’s hero with a sixteen-year-old beggar girl in Chapter 87 of his novel Per
egrine Pickle – and the British press immediately took this up as the reason why Shaw had produced his play out of the country. It showed ‘an amusing ignorance of English culture,’ Shaw countered. ‘The one place where I should have been absolutely safe from detection is London.’ He had read Peregrine Pickle in his youth and not cared for it and he did not realize that ‘Smollett had got hold of my plot’. Later he was to speculate on the likelihood of this incident having ‘got lodged in my memory without my being conscious of it and stayed there until I needed it’. None of this affected the morality of his position. ‘If I find in a book anything I can make use of, I take it gratefully,’ he stated. ‘...In short, my literary morals are those of Molière and Handel.’ Shakespeare too had taken his goods where he could find them. ‘Do not scorn to be derivative,’ Shaw urged his friends, ‘...the great thing is to be able to derive – to see your chance and be able to take it... Read Goldsmith on originality.’

  There was a rumour that the actor playing Higgins in Berlin had introduced a ‘horrible gag’ suggesting that he and Eliza shared the same bedroom. In London, where Shaw was producing the play himself, such travesties would not be permitted. But when he turned up for rehearsals in the second week of February he found His Majesty’s a madhouse.

  Famous for his absent-mindedness, Tree was the despair of playwrights. He greeted Shaw warmly, but with obvious surprise. It was as if he believed himself to be the author of Pygmalion. His head hummed with plans. For he had experience of collaborating with other dramatists – for example, Shakespeare into whose Richard II he introduced a very effective pet dog, and whose Twelfth Night he had improved by the addition of four miniature copycat Malvolios. His performances were hugely entertaining to his fans, but they relied on a good deal of improvisation especially when he was not quick enough to reach the stage furniture in time and pluck from its niches the pieces of paper on which he had written out his more troublesome lines. He loved to disguise himself with beards, uniforms, vine leaves, ear-trumpets. In this respect, Professor Higgins was a disappointment. It seemed he was required to do little more than dress and speak normally: and this bewildered him. In vain did he plead with Shaw to let him take large quantities of snuff, to vault onto the piano from time to time, to indicate an addiction to port by walking with a limp and a stick.