Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Shaw played his part rather well: ‘I was not seriously alarmed, and presently sailed for Madeira.’ Actually Archer had got through his operation and was recovering by the time Shaw and Charlotte sailed. They arrived at Reid’s Palace Hotel on 30 December, and saw as they entered the hall a news bulletin announcing Archer’s death three days earlier. Now it was G.B.S.’s turn to break the code – but too late. Each morning after breakfast he would work frantically, emptily, then plunge into the Gulf Stream. In the afternoons, while others played roulette and tennis, he sat miserably in the glorious sunshine. ‘This is one of those unnaturally lovely hells of places where you bathe amid innumerable blossoms in midwinter,’ he wrote bitterly to William Rothenstein.

  He had never been able to regard a death caused by an operation as natural death. ‘My rage may have been unjust to the surgeons; but it carried me over my first sense of bereavement.’ Later he overcame this anger with a whimsical piece of therapy on the dance floor, which would surely have impressed Archer as quintessentially Shavian. Having heard that the wife of the hotel proprietor Max Rinder had been successfully operated on for cancer, he joined her as a dancing partner and together they learnt the tango. A photograph of them, correctly positioned, still hangs in the hotel. They are preparing to put their best foot forward under the watchful instruction of Max Rinder, ‘the only man who taught me anything,’ the caption reads. But the lesson was symbolically Archer’s. By recognizing the practice of modern operative surgery to be ‘often more successful than its reasoning’, Shaw was taking a step towards Archer’s view that, outside the theoretical world of his own construction, a real world existed with which he should move in rhythm.

  ‘All good wishes for 1925 – Ever yours, W.A.’ These had been Archer’s last words to him. But when Shaw returned on 16 February 1925 to London, ‘it seemed to me that the place had entered on a new age in which I was lagging superfluous’.

  *

  To some extent life continued as it had before the war. The Shaws often stayed with the Webbs at Passfield Corner and with Charlotte’s sister and brother-in-law at Edstaston; and Lady Gregory, the ‘charwoman of the Abbey’, sometimes came and stayed with them at Ayot. In London, Charlotte continued to give her lunches for old friends and new acquaintances. ‘You can imagine how excited I was to be invited [to lunch] and how disappointed to find an old old gentleman and a cushiony wife,’ wrote E. M. Forster in 1926. ‘Shaw was pleasant and amusing, but I felt all the time that he’d forgotten what people are like... She wanted to talk mysticism, and denounced “atheists” with the accents of a rural dean. I came away with the hump.’

  With the Trebitsches and the Hamons, Shaw maintained his literary-business relationships and replaced other translators as they fell away in exhaustion with still more exaggerated figures, such as the impoverished Polish adventurer Floryan Sobieniowski, who had been the lover and blackmailer of Katherine Mansfield. He remained in friendly communication with G. K. Chesterton and Gilbert Murray and continued to see Barrie, Arnold Bennett and Galsworthy. But he could not forget those who had died. ‘I still feel that when he went he took a piece of me with him.’ Archer’s death had also closed Shaw’s best means of access to Granville-Barker. He had written to G.B.S. after seeing Saint Joan, and they were both to compose obituaries of Archer, after which there followed years of silence. No single person could understudy Harley, though Barry Jackson, Lawrence Langner and T. E. Lawrence between them filled part of the vacuum.

  While G.B.S. acted as editor of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Charlotte volunteered to be its proofreader. ‘I devoured the book from cover to cover as soon as I got hold of it,’ she told Lawrence. ‘I could not stop. I drove G.B.S. almost mad by insisting upon reading him special bits when he was deep in something else.’ It was an extraordinary experience, sending her back on a wave of excitement to her twenties when, ‘reaching out for something that was beyond her understanding’, she had become absorbed in Eastern religions. From the pages of his book, Charlotte had an impression of Lawrence as ‘an Immense Personality soaring in the blue (of the Arabian skies)’, and he became ‘the strangest contact of my life’. She sent him honey and chocolates and marrons glacés, nectarines and peaches; records, particularly of Elgar’s music, to play on the gramophone G.B.S. had given him. Usually ‘a very grudging taker’, Lawrence defended himself by giving her his manuscripts. But he accepted a motor-bicycle (from Charlotte and G.B.S. together) which he called Boanerges (a name he transferred from one bike to another), and would roar up in his goggles, gauntlets and peaked cap to arrive without warning at Ayot – Charlotte’s Arabian Knight. Sometimes he stayed a weekend in what became known as ‘the Lawrence room’. At other times the quietude induced such a terrifying reluctance ever to leave that, after an hour or two, he would have to jump on his machine and hurtle back to barracks or on to another of his sanctuaries – to Max Gate to see Thomas and Florence Hardy, or to Alderney Manor and Fryern Court to visit Augustus and Dorelia John. Charlotte, seeing his gleams of happiness, felt that ‘Ayot is justified – it lifts its head’.

  They grew closer when apart. After Lawrence went to India, they started up a ‘tennis game’ of correspondence. ‘I want to tell you something about myself,’ she wrote. She told him what she had once begun to tell G.B.S. about her parents and childhood, and after ‘a fearful lot of cogitation’ she told him about the ‘teachings’ and ‘treatments’, meditations and healings of her religion which were ‘such a help’. Lawrence responded by confiding some of his secrets – the emotional disturbances with his mother and his sexual trauma at Deraa. He sent her poems, his private anthology Minorities, and the unexpurgated text of The Mint. ‘It is a wonderful book... that no one but yourself could achieve,’ she replied, ‘...[it] has stirred me to the very depths of my being.’

  To no other woman could Lawrence write quite so frankly. It was their solitariness that seemed to have brought them together. Lawrence felt curiously untaxed by their relationship. By unburdening his emotions to this anonymous wife of the celebrated G.B.S., he was also secretly communicating with posterity. Over thirteen years they were to exchange some six hundred letters in which Charlotte revealed to him things ‘I have never told a soul’. She had never met anyone like him, though she had met all sorts of people, being now ‘an old woman, old enough at any rate to be your mother’. This image, however, suddenly chilled Lawrence. ‘Let me acquit you of all suspicion of “mothering me”. With you I have no feeling or suspicion of that at all.’ His mother’s inquisitorial letters ‘always make me want to blow my brains out’ – no trust ‘ever existed between my mother and myself’. At Ayot he was on neutral ground. ‘I do not wish to feel at home,’ he warned her. ‘...Homes are ties, and with you I am quite free, somehow.’

  They were not disloyal to G.B.S. Lawrence felt grateful for all his help as literary agent and editor, and curious over what G.B.S. might try to make of him in future plays. He was determined to evade a Shavian takeover, though his letters to Charlotte teem with praise of her husband’s strength, confidence and mastery. ‘He has given himself out to his generation year by year, without reserve or grudge.’ When Lawrence compares his own career, the advantages all seem to be with Shaw. Yet it was strange how sympathetically Lawrence came out of comparisons so heavily weighted against himself (‘he’s great and I’m worthless... G.B.S. has brought forth twenty books; and I’m in a mess over one’). ‘G.B.S. has become too famous any longer to be really great,’ he suggests. ‘His reputation is dwarfing him. However,’ he adds with apparent tact, ‘that will pass.’

  The tone of these letters was perfectly judged. Charlotte was proud of her husband and his achievements, but hated the publicity that rose around their lives. Fame had been an emollient for G.B.S., but it ‘has closed his pores’. And it was true, Charlotte agreed, that G.B.S. was not ‘interested in anything but his work’. In Lawrence she saw again the suffering and loneliness that had been exposed in her husband at the time of his physical
breakdown and their marriage. Now, feeling sometimes stranded in this marriage, she gazed towards Lawrence and formed a half-undisclosed friendship that counterbalanced her husband’s letter-writing relationships with women. ‘Marriage is not natural – but unnatural and disastrous,’ she wrote to Lawrence. ‘...The idea [of having children] was physically repulsive to me in the highest degree.’ Yet these revelations, which she felt unable to disclose to another soul, could have appeared in Man and Superman or Getting Married. Her lack of reticence, however, did surprise Shaw. ‘I realize that there were many parts of her character that even I did not know,’ he later owned to Hesketh Pearson, ‘for she poured out her soul to Lawrence.’ Perhaps he had once known them, and forgotten.

  Lawrence had approached the Shaws’ marriage like an undercover agent. Charlotte and G.B.S. ‘mix like bacon and eggs into a quintessential dream,’ he eulogized. He was at his best in their company ‘for they loved and comprehended him,’ Osbert Sitwell observed; ‘and there was, I noticed, a sort of audacity of mischief about his attitude and conversation when they were present, that was enchanting’. But the strange self-immolation that Lawrence sought in order ‘to keep sane’ reminded Shaw painfully of his own early obscurity. Their relationship became a teasing tug-of-war between Shavian possessiveness and assertion and Lawrentian waywardness and ambiguity. ‘You and I,’ Shaw told Lawrence, ‘are worse than characters: we are character-actors.’ ‘You have read too much of yourself into me,’ Lawrence warned, and ‘Your advice would sink my ship.’ But this was how G.B.S. went into operation. His friendship was a form of patronage. He ushered him into the Cliveden Set, introduced him to Elgar, and helped to elect him a Fellow of the Irish Academy of Letters which actually pleased Lawrence ‘because it is a gesture on my part that I am Irish’.

  Lawrence ‘always had one eye on the limelight,’ Charlotte admitted. Perhaps that was why she sometimes suspected that she had been used as a messenger service between him and G.B.S. But as a vehicle for Shaw’s theories, he proved ‘a most troublesome chap’: a man of marvellous dual abilities who failed to unite literature with action, believing he could ‘never quit myself of the consequences of my past actions till I am dead’.

  Another candidate for this romantic synthesis was a neighbour of the Shaws at Ayot. Apsley Cherry-Garrard had been one of the youngest members of Scott’s last expedition to the Antarctic. Cherry, as he was known, won golden opinions from Scott for his pluck and popularity, especially on the ‘weirdest bird-nesting expedition there has been or will ever be’, gathering the eggs of the Emperor Penguin at Cape Crozier. Their zoological jaunt was a wonderful example to G.B.S. of the evolutionary appetite.

  Cherry was approximately the same age as Lawrence and some thirty years younger than G.B.S. His exploration of the Antarctic, with its awful outcome (he was one of the team that had found Scott dead in his tent on the Great Ice Barrier), marked the rest of his life, as the Arab campaign had marked Lawrence’s. This legendary exploit, while he was still in his early twenties, had been the apotheosis of his career. ‘Nature would be merciful if she would end us at a climax and not in the decline,’ Lawrence wrote. It was the same for Cherry-Garrard.

  Cherry became a great favourite of the Shaws. When Charlotte told Lawrence in December 1922 that ‘both G.B.S. and I have lots of experience about books and we would both like to put it at your service’, the joint experience she had in mind was over Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World. After the Shaws’ editorial advice and textual emendations, the book had been published by Constable earlier that month. This account of the journey was originally commissioned by the Captain Scott Antarctic Fund, but finding himself becoming critical of his leader, Cherry had withdrawn from his official commitment and produced an independent narrative on which, Shaw believed, ‘the expedition will be finally judged’. Several passages were drafted or rewritten by G.B.S.

  Shaw’s presentation of Cherry took no account of the Lawrence-like agonies of self-doubt that had prompted his writing of the book. ‘Lawrence had never escaped himself nor his nerves which drove his muscles,’ Cherry was to write. ‘He knew that he had shot his bolt.’ His own readjustment was complicated by the death of his father, a rival spirit who had spurred him with initiative. He had travelled to the end of the earth to find a separate identity his father could admire, and made Scott a temporary replacement for his father. He had worshipped Scott but, after his father’s death, came to resent his influence. To reconcile these feelings of worship and resentment he divided Scott in two. ‘He considers Scott a schizophrenic,’ Shaw later told Lord Kennet, ‘two different persons.’

  Like Seven Pillars, The Worst Journey was partly the open-air theatre of boyish adventure in which G.B.S. retrospectively took part and, with great delight, almost took command. The two books attracted him strongly. ‘Why should not sand have the same appeal as snow?’ he demanded after Lawrence had demurred over the public interest in his own work. Cherry-Garrard had described his life-and-death experiences so effectively ‘that the reader forgets how comfortable he is in his armchair, and remembers the tale with a shiver as if he had been through it himself’. Lawrence too possessed this power of re-creating action. He ‘made you see the start of Feisal’s motley legions as plainly as he saw it himself’, and gave you a sense of the ‘track underfoot, the mountains ahead and around, the vicissitudes of the weather, the night, the dawn, the sunset and the meridian [that] never leaves you for a moment’.

  Shaw stole into these heroic landscapes but took care to conceal his literary stage management of them. ‘It would be fatal to make any suggestion of collaboration on my part,’ he advised Cherry-Garrard. ‘...As my experience on the ice dates from the great frost of 1878 (or thereabouts) when I skated on the Serpentine, my intrusion into the Antarctic Circle would be extraordinarily ridiculous.’

  There was another reason for attempting secrecy. He risked losing the sympathy of Scott’s widow Kathleen, ‘a very special friend’. She had recently married Hilton Young who came to believe that Shaw denigrated Scott because Cherry-Garrard, ‘an egotistical man, with a grievance against his leader’, had worked his way into Charlotte’s esteem and ‘flattered Shaw by letting him rewrite [his] book, more or less’. Shaw wrote as gently as possible to Kathleen explaining that ‘bringing a hero to life always involves exhibiting his faults as well as his qualities’.

  In his imagination the appalling conditions of the Antarctic became a metaphor for the moral climate of Britain between the wars, and Cherry-Garrard’s survival a triumph of human will over social adversity. The idealized adolescence of both Lawrence and Cherry-Garrard touched his own parent-damaged emotions. Over twenty years later he reported Cherry as having ‘recovered his health rather miraculously’ and escaped his pessimistic destiny. But Beatrice Webb, who met him in the 1930s, left a grimmer picture. ‘He is at war with all his neighbours; he has closed footpaths, dismissed tenants, and cannot keep servants. Years ago he was personally attractive, a rather distinguished youth with artistic and intellectual gifts, today he is drab and desolate, looks as if he were drinking and drugging as well as hating. I should not be surprised to hear that a revolver shot had solved his problem.’

  *

  ‘On the very threshold of seventy I have fallen through with a crash into ninety,’ Shaw told Kathleen Scott. As his vigour declined, so his need for vicarious exploits through younger men-of-action-and-letters intensified. Feeling as if ‘I have left half of me behind’, he replaced the missing half with a team of athletic candidates.

  One of these was Cecil Lewis, a wartime flying ace with the Military Cross whose war memoirs, Sagittarius Rising, showed him also to be ‘a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet,’ Shaw reckoned. Lewis submitted some of his early writings to G.B.S. and came to count him ‘one of the great influences of my life’. As a founding member of the British Broadcasting Corporation, he arranged for Shaw to give a reading of O’Flaherty, V.C. (which was broadcast live on 20
November 1924) and fired his interest in radio technology. Before long, G.B.S. had bought a Burndept four-valve set with loudspeaker and was issuing the BBC with advice.

  The ‘invisible play’ was a phenomenon that fascinated him, and he quickly recognized the unstoppable power of radio. It would enable those who could not bear the degradation of public speaking to address their fellow-countrymen in solitude and out of sight, ‘using no art except that of giving each syllable its value’.

  He asked no fees for his radio talks, regarding them as an extension of his political speaking in the 1880s and 1890s. The vast size and variety of his new audience delighted him, and he celebrated it grandiloquently. ‘Your Majesties, your Royal Highnesses, your Excellencies, your Graces and Reverences, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, fellow citizens of all degrees,’ he began a talk in the BBC series ‘Points of View’ on 14 October 1929; ‘I am going to talk to you about Democracy...’

  Cecil Lewis records that Shaw had ‘impeccable verve and artistry’ as a broadcaster, and he made it his business to see that G.B.S. was given a modern platform. For years Shaw watched over his career ‘with parental care and I grew to idolize him,’ Lewis was to write, ‘for, in those days when I was part of the spearhead of the exploding mass media which were changing the whole shape of society and in touch with many of the leading figures of the day, he was the only man among them who appeared to have any social conscience or any practical suggestions to offer to combat the Dragon’s Teeth which I felt were everywhere being sown among us’.

  To push his political ideas into renewed life Shaw needed to make contact with younger men and women. By his contemporaries he was celebrated for his past, and usually for his literary rather than his political past. At a ‘Complimentary Dinner’ for his seventieth birthday he declared that he did not care a snap of the fingers for this literary success in comparison with his pioneering work as one of the Fabian founders of the Labour Party – but the BBC refused to broadcast the speech, ‘Socialism at Seventy’, on the grounds that it was politically controversial (it was printed in full by the New York Times – and pirated throughout the country).