Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Barker’s decree was made absolute in the late spring of 1917; Helen’s in the summer of 1918. On 21 June that year G.B.S. and Helen met for the first time: and detested each other. ‘The guilty pair are not yet married,’ Shaw reported to Lillah. ‘...When it happens I will let you know as soon as I know myself.’ They were married on 31 July, but let Shaw know nothing. ‘I surmise that you are married; but it is only a surmise,’ he wrote to Barker on 26 August. ‘It is desirable that your friends should be in a position to make a positive affirmation on the subject. An affectation of ecstasy so continuous as to make you forget all such worldly considerations is ridiculous at your age.’

  Shaw was not to know that they had both altered their ages, Helen reducing hers by almost eight years, on the marriage certificate. They wanted to free their lives from the sort of considerations he was emphasizing, and start again. Charlotte disapproved of Barker’s divorce as setting a precedent for G.B.S., and she blamed Helen for introducing such unpleasantness into all their lives. Shaw tried to take the long-term view and, during a visit to them near the end of 1918, read out part of his new play Back to Methuselah. But ‘it has never seemed quite so tedious before,’ he apologized afterwards to Barker; ‘...it was rather hard on Helen to have such a depressing beginning of my playreading.’

  It was the end rather than a beginning. ‘Virtually we never met again,’ Shaw wrote. After her marriage in 1920 to the botanist Frederick Keeble, Lillah pretty well left the stage. ‘You must begin a new career as a new woman,’ Shaw was to tell her. And she responded: ‘Life begins again. I find new delights every day & am re-born.’

  But it seemed to Shaw that Barker’s seclusion was a genuine loss to the theatre: and then there was the personal loss. ‘I could not intrude when I was not welcome.’ He was prepared to keep out of their way ‘for six months or six years’ if necessary. But after six years, ‘the devil entered into me’. Though he had not seen them during this time, he had picked up various reports. They had bought a Jacobean mansion in Devon called Netherton Hall (renamed by Shaw Nethermost Hell). Here, his name newly hyphenated, his socialism cast off, and attended by fifteen servants (including a liveried footman) Granville-Barker completed his perfectionist work on the sociology of the stage, The Exemplary Theatre, and an unperformed play called The Secret Life. ‘We shall have to keep on insulting him for his sterility,’ Shaw commanded St John Ervine, ‘or he will be dead before he gets another play on to the stage.’ He tried to stir him up by likening him to Swinburne at Putney; by spurring William Archer on to ‘tell him to do something thoroughly vulgar: he needs contact with earth’; and by inventing a Barker Relief Expedition consisting of Lawrence of Arabia, Thomas Hardy and J. M. Barrie.

  In May 1925 Shaw was asked to give a vote of thanks after Granville-Barker’s address on the theatre at King’s College in the Strand. ‘I praised Barker’s speech to the skies and said that his retirement from the stage to become a professor was inexcusable,’ Shaw told Hesketh Pearson. Barker was now placed in a very ticklish position. Lord Balfour, who was in the chair, rose to the rescue with a clever closing speech during which Shaw suddenly began to feel in great pain – ‘as if my backbone had turned into a red-hot poker’ was how he described it to Lady Rhondda. He was determined to sit it out. Somehow he reached home on foot. ‘I really thought I was done for.’ Charlotte removed him to Ayot where he lay helpless on his bed until one day, a month later, with a great effort of will he decided to walk down the road – and instantly the pain vanished. Later on he related this experience to Lady Colefax who revealed that Helen Granville-Barker had been sitting exactly behind him, not three feet away, leaning forward with her eyes glued to his backbone. ‘I have never seen such hate in any eyes before.’

  This story enabled Shaw to cast Helen as a witch who had placed her spell on Granville-Barker so that ‘he ceased to be the independent human being we had all known’. This was less disconcerting to him than the belief that they were both perfectly happy. In his position ‘I should regard myself as a damned soul,’ Shaw remarked to Archer. But Barker had been retreating into his ‘natural Henry Jamesism’ before he met Helen. She re-created him as a fairy-tale Prince. Every syllable Shaw uttered threatened to dissolve this fantasy. All communication with him was therefore shut down until early in the 1930s when Lillah McCarthy invited Shaw to contribute a Preface to her memoirs. He arranged for the publisher to send Granville-Barker this Preface (which contained a celebration of Lillah’s historic stage collaboration with Barker, as well as biographical sidelights on their marriage and divorce). As a result Barker suddenly turned up at Ayot demanding that the book be withdrawn. Barker wished to forget Lillah whose very name disturbed Helen. ‘Let it alone,’ he had written to Shaw. Rather to his dismay, Lillah’s book was to appear without any reference to him: his past had been obliterated. Twenty minutes after leaving Ayot he returned to take an effusive farewell of Charlotte: and this was the last time they saw him.

  Shaw could not quench his pleasure on learning of Helen’s fury when, Frederick Keeble being knighted, Lillah became Lady Keeble. Helen wanted a glittering knighthood for her husband, but had she not cut him off from all commerce with the theatre might he not have been given one? Or so G.B.S. believed. ‘Cannot you persuade Mr Granville-Barker to stay here and produce Shakespeare,’ Raymond Mortimer was to ask Helen years later during one of her last visits to London. To his horrified embarrassment the old lady burst into tears. ‘Everyone blames me,’ she answered, ‘but it is not my fault: it is Harley’s.’

  Shaw blamed Helen. When Barker died in 1946 the shock ‘made me realize how I had still cherished a hope that our old intimate relation might revive’. In a letter to the Times Literary Supplement enclosing an old photograph of his friend he had taken in the days of their intimacy, he was to quote Swinburne:

  Marriage and death and division

  Make Barren our lives.

  *

  This was a good epitaph for a war whose survivors would always be avenging their wounds. Many people have died ‘in simple horror, mercifully without quite knowing it,’ Shaw wrote to Henry Salt whose wife Kate died early in 1919. Janet Achurch had also died. ‘So that adventure is over,’ Shaw wrote to Charles Charrington, ‘...Now Janet is again the Janet of 1889, and immortal. Better that than half dead, like me.’

  Another casualty was Shaw’s sister Lucy. She had never wholly recovered from the death of her mother. Suffering from a ‘nervous irritation’ she was looked after by Eva Schneider, the daughter of the German family she had lodged with in Gotha. Shaw helped to arrange Eva’s exemption from deportation through repeated applications to the Home Office establishing her as his sister’s permanent nurse-companion. Financially he was conscientious over Lucy’s needs, though otherwise ‘I am forced to neglect her as I am forced to neglect everything else’. He had seen most of her when he was seeing most of Stella. They had used Lucy’s home as one of their meeting places, enabling Lucy to boast that ‘among my most frequent visitors is Mrs Patrick Campbell’. Shaw complimented Stella on having ‘brought out the nice side of Lucy that I haven’t seen since she was a girl’.

  Lucy’s tuberculosis was no longer active but her apprehension over the Zeppelin raids seemed to be killing her. ‘She is in bed, fearfully ill,’ Shaw notified Stella. ‘...[Her] address for the moment is 2 Grove Park, Camberwell Grove... Later, the Crematorium, Golders Green.’ Kept alive by the devotion of Eva, she somehow pulled through and in the Easter of 1917 the two of them moved to Sussex Lodge, a pretty house on Champion Hill in south-east London. Lucy had reckoned that, being close to an anti-aircraft battery ‘we shall always know when the Zepps are on the way’ and this would be a comfort. She had not realized that they were also near a bombing exercise ground and within sound of the gun testing at Woolwich Arsenal. Amid the continuous din, ‘we didn’t know whether a raid was on or not’. The booming of the big defence gun in the next field ‘which seemed to blow the house away every time it went off, the
noise of exploding bombs and the terrifying sight of a Zeppelin descending through the sky in flames was too much for her. ‘I could not stand the strain.’

  Shaw then rented a house at Okehampton in Devon where Lucy and Eva travelled in the summer of 1917. Despite eating almost nothing and going nowhere she had become ‘a very expensive person,’ she remarked wryly – ‘my brother indulges me in any extravagance I express the least wish for’. Shaw kept on Sussex Lodge with a caretaker and, a few weeks after the Armistice, Lucy returned in an ambulance to London. She was slowly starving herself to death. Eva did what she could to persuade her, spoonful by spoonful, to keep alive; and Mrs Pat sent all sorts of delicacies from Fortnum & Mason.

  After Lillah’s wedding on Saturday 27 March Shaw went round in the late afternoon and sat by Lucy’s bed. ‘I am dying,’ she told him. ‘Oh no,’ he replied conventionally: ‘you will be all right presently.’ He took her hand and they were silent. ‘There was no sound except from somebody playing the piano in the nearest house (it was a fine evening and all the windows were open), until there was a faint flutter in her throat. She was still holding my hand. Then her thumb straightened. She was dead.’

  The doctor informed him that she had been suffering from shell-shock and become anorexic. ‘My body to be cremated if possible and the ashes scattered,’ she had noted in her will. ‘No funeral, no flowers, no mourning.’ Shaw arranged for a private cremation, like their mother’s, at Golders Green. But finding the church crowded with people, he made up ‘a sort of funeral service’ of his own.

  Fear no more the lightning-flash

  Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone.

  Remembering the Zeppelins and awful guns that had made her want to die, Shaw ended the service with the dirge from Cymbeline. Lucy burnt with a steady white light, like a wax candle.

  FOURTEEN

  1

  Some Hints on the Peace

  It is to be impressed on all officers and men that a state of war exists during the armistice.

  The Times (21 November 1918)

  The Cabinet had already decided on a quick post-war general election. A few days after the Armistice, Lloyd George dissolved Parliament and announced 14 December 1918 as polling day. It was a degrading election, exploiting people’s hatred of the Germans and their delirious gratitude for peace, to grab a renewed mandate for the old coalition of Tories and Liberals. To cries of ‘Vote for the Man who won the War’, and ‘Make Britain a fit country for Heroes to live in’, the electioneering was hurried through before the heroes themselves had a chance of getting their opinions known, or the opposition (silenced so long by the Defence of the Realm Act) make itself effectively heard. ‘I feel physically sick when I read the frenzied appeals of the Coalition leaders... to hang the Kaiser, ruin and humiliate the German people, even to deprive Germany of her art treasures and libraries,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary. ‘The one outstanding virtue of the Labour Party... is its high sense of international morality.’

  Shaw, now in his sixty-third year, dropped almost all his engagements to go campaigning. He toured the country, speaking every day to enormous crowds of working people at Liverpool and Manchester, Birmingham and Wakefield, Leicester and Wolverhampton. He spoke in support of Ramsay MacDonald, who had preferred to resign his leadership of the Labour Party rather than endorse Grey’s foreign policy. He warned the electorate against making it a Jingo versus Pacifist contest: voters must look for the solid brickwork under all that political whitewash. He gave them facts; he gave them figures: more than 50,000 German children had died in 1917 alone, the civilian mortality rate had increased by thirty-seven per cent – and ‘these are only the deaths’. He was to call for the raising of the Allied blockade of Germany which Lord Balfour had declared ‘cannot cause the death of a single civilian’ but which later caused 763,000 persons to die of malnutrition, ‘a polite name for starvation’. Did they want more revenge? ‘When we break a German’s leg with a bullet and then take him prisoner,’ he explained, ‘we immediately set to work to mend his leg, to the astonishment of our idiots, who cannot understand why we do not proceed to break his other leg.’

  Britain was vibrating with exultation over the most magnificent military triumph in her long record of victories. It was enormously important, Shaw insisted, that she should check the evil that could easily fester after the guns had stopped, and ‘set the world an example of consideration for vanquished enemies’. Surely we wanted to prosper by restoring trade with our best customer?

  Shaw’s series of campaign speeches that winter was ‘my greatest platform success’. But on 14 December, Lloyd George’s coalition careered back to Parliament with 516 seats – a huge majority of 340 over the other parties. Most of the Labour candidates Shaw had championed – including Ramsay MacDonald – lost their seats because of their opposition to the war. However, with sixty-two seats over the twenty-seven of Asquith’s Liberals, Labour now sat in the House of Commons as the official Opposition.

  Shaw ended the war as he had begun it: with a brochure. Ten thousand copies of Peace Conference Hints were published on 12 March 1919. Partly an admonition to Britain against exploiting her self-righteousness at the Versailles Peace Conference, and in part a collection of ‘hints’ to nerve President Woodrow Wilson against the wiles of Clemenceau and Lloyd George, the pamphlet represents a continuation of Shaw’s election campaign and the summation of his political writings about the war. It is a story retold and completed.

  When asking for a mandate for his peace offensive against Germany, Lloyd George had demanded: ‘Is no one responsible? Is no one to be called to account? Is there to be no punishment? Surely that is neither God’s justice nor man’s?’ Shaw’s answer invoked another justice and brought the matter before a different court of morality. He believed that by fixing the guilt of history collectively or individually on others, Lloyd George was making a classic evasion of the human spirit. Through this duplicity of mind Britain risked restarting the mechanism that would bring the same tragedies back into people’s lives.

  Peace Conference Hints is a Bunyanesque tract on the moral consequences of the war. He surveys botched-up British diplomacy between 1906 and 1914 to strengthen his case for the international acceptance of new rules of conduct in war and peace. He grinds out a history lesson to sharpen a moral point. ‘The moral cleaning-up after the war,’ he states, ‘is far more important than the material restorations.’ The Versailles Peace Conference must be made a nucleus for the League of Nations. Like an illuminated picture, the League of Nations that appears in Shaw’s missal is a ‘very vigorous organization of resistance to evil’, protected by an international police force but making conquests through the power of conscience. ‘Principle is the motive power in the engine,’ Shaw explains: ‘its working qualities are integrity and energy, conviction and courage, with reason and lucidity to shew them the way.’ This technology for human progress is shown being forced upon us not only by the inevitable march of civilization but by our fear of Armageddon. For the next war, if permitted to occur, ‘will be no “sport of kings”’.

  Having raised up his Architecture of Nations, Shaw tries to set up as its mystical prophet from the New World, President Woodrow Wilson. With the rusty accoutrements of his fourteen points, he resembles a benighted Quixote of the Peace. The week after Wilson was to lay his patched-up rag of a treaty before the United States Senate, Shaw was declaring that he had known all along the Versailles Conference would come to nothing and that ‘in spite of anything that could be urged by the wisest and most powerful statesmen, the victorious side would skin the other alive... I had no illusions on that subject when I backed Wilson for all I was worth; and therefore I am not disillusioned nor disgusted now.’

  He may have had no illusions; he did have hopes. Woodrow Wilson’s godlike procession through Europe before the conference had stirred people’s goodwill. ‘Nothing like this had ever been seen before,’ records one witness. ‘The full-throated acclamation of Londoners,
Parisians and Romans was not the normal cordiality which crowds accord to a visiting monarch. The ovation surged from the depth of the wounded contrite universal heart to a deliverer, the shaper of a new world.’

  Some echoes of these aspirations, like distant trumpets, sound through Shaw’s pamphlet. For if the war had not gained new moral territory for human beings, then it had been a defeat for everyone. The possibility of defeat is in his text. Pessimism and optimism are cross-stitched into the narrative, and in his subsequent reaction to the incompetent document Woodrow Wilson took away from Versailles may be glimpsed the extent of Shaw’s hopes. ‘The treaty of Versailles, which was perhaps the greatest disaster of the war for all the belligerents, and indeed for civilization in general,’ he wrote, ‘left nothing to be done in foreign affairs but face the question of the next war pending the consolidation of the League of Nations.’

  Like Bunyan, Shaw had urged the peacemakers to climb the hill Difficulty. But they had fallen into the pit Destruction. At the end of that year another work of moral tension and stylistic force, Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was published. After a succession of dreadful weeks at Versailles, Keynes had quitted ‘the scene of night-mare’ and written up his account of ‘the devastation of Europe’. ‘A great sensation has been made here by Professor Keynes of Cambridge, who was at Versailles as economic expert, and resigned that position and came home as a protest against the peace terms,’ Shaw reported to Siegfried Trebitsch. ‘He has now published a book in which he demonstrates that the indemnity demanded from Germany is an economic impossibility.’ Keynes’s demonstration was Shaw’s vindication.