Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘I always avoid places where my plays are being performed,’ he had told Sobieniowski. But for Barry Jackson’s Malvern he made an exception. He liked the vertical green hills, the quiet light, the air that ‘would raise the dead’ – though not the waters, ‘one glass of which destroys my digestion for a week’. Over the 1930s he was to be seen almost every summer striding along the terraces and up the hills with his companions labouring after him. He was constantly on view. ‘I have... created a general impression that I was born there,’ he wrote in the 1937 Malvern Festival Book. ‘In course of time visitors will be shewn for sixpence the room in which my first cries were heard.’

  Charlotte enjoyed the hydro and sanatorium, but this was no holiday. ‘GBS sails along & is charming to everyone, & they worship in crowds,’ she told Nancy Astor, ‘ – but I have to plan & arrange & entertain & contrive meals & eliminate the worst undesirables! Oh!!... It is such a little place – and no refuge!’ Nevertheless, ‘it really is wonderful to hear the plays one after the other – these big things set off one another like the pictures at a one-man show which never look so well separated.’ She felt comfortable, too, at the Malvern Hotel, with its automatic lift and suites of bed-and-sitting-rooms on every floor, each with a private bathroom. At the sound of the gong the elderly guests would rise up, like a corps de ballet, and rustle through to dinner. When Shaw strode in ‘he was always clasping a travel book,’ Beverley Nichols noticed. ‘Mrs Shaw, in her turn, clutched a volume of economics.’

  The atmosphere of the festival was that of an extended and overflowing country-house party. There were folk dances in the Assembly Rooms, people playing on the bowling greens, garden parties at the girls’ school which Barry Jackson rented each summer, boating on the lake, Billy Gammon’s syncopated band, starlight suppers and ‘the scent and sounds from a thousand gardens’. G.B.S. would take the cast for drives around the hills and sometimes on to Droitwich, where he ducked into the brine baths, motoring back with the salt still in his beard. He read his plays to the actors before rehearsals in the town’s Gas Office. In the auditorium itself, the actors could see his illuminated pen flashing as he made notes. He was determined to make the Malvern experiment another chapter in the reform of the English theatre. By 1931 its scope was broadened by the inclusion of works from other dramatists; in 1934 it was prolonged into a four-week occasion; between 1929 and 1939 it established itself as the major off-season theatrical event in England and an international showcase for playwrights. Sixty-five plays by forty British and foreign playwrights (evenly distributed between the past and the present) were produced over that period. They included world premières of Geneva (1938) and ‘In Good King Charles’s Golden Days’ (1939) and the first English productions of Too True to be Good (1932), and The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles (1935).

  In 1936 Shaw celebrated his eightieth birthday at Malvern accepting ‘nothing over sixpence’ from the cast. (‘I gave him a coat-hanger from Woolworth’s,’ Wendy Hiller remembered.) He continued visiting Malvern until the following year which was the last time Barry Jackson directed the Festival.

  Malvern was the forerunner of an age of festivals that was to flourish fifty years later and carry on the dramatic out-of-London development that Shaw and Barry Jackson had sought. G.B.S. had never wanted the festival to be a memorial to himself. ‘Malvern must look to its present and future, not dream of its past. I am only one of Ibsen’s Ghosts.’

  *

  ‘One of the choicest attractions’ of Malvern was Edward Elgar. During rehearsals of The Apple Cart Shaw had invited him over from his home near Worcester, and later they discussed setting one of Shaw’s plays to music, ‘but I think we agreed to my view that he could do nothing with a play except what his Falstaff did with Shakespeare’s,’ Shaw told the composer Rutland Boughton.

  Opening the Bernard Shaw Exhibition in the Malvern public library, Elgar told his audience that G.B.S. really knew more about music than he did. Shaw retaliated by admitting that ‘although I am rather a conceited man I am quite sincerely and genuinely humble in the presence of Sir Edward Elgar. I recognize a greater art than my own and a greater man than I can ever hope to be.’ Not to be outdone, Elgar informed the press that Shaw was ‘a most remarkable man; he was the best friend to any artist, the kindest and possibly the dearest fellow on earth’.

  These statements were more than reciprocal civilities for the public. ‘The history of original music, broken off by the death of Purcell, begins again with Sir Edward Elgar,’ Shaw had written in the Morning Post in 1911. After a century of imitation Handel, Mendelssohn and Spohr, Elgar’s music had come as a new voice giving out a sound ‘as characteristically English as a country house and stable are characteristically English’. All this had been written before they met in 1919 at a lunch given by Lalla Vandervelde, wife of the Belgian socialist leader.

  A few days later Elgar invited the Shaws to Severn House, his home in Hampstead, to hear three of his chamber works including the Piano Quintet. ‘The Quintet knocked me over at once,’ Shaw wrote the next day. ‘...There are some piano embroideries on a pedal point that didn’t sound like a piano or anything else in the world, but quite beautiful... they require a touch which is peculiar to yourself.’ It was this peculiarity that Shaw sought to define and celebrate. ‘Elgar’s Cockaigne overture combines every classic quality of a concert overture with every lyric and dramatic quality of the overture to Die Meistersinger,’ he wrote at the end of that year. ‘...You may hear all sorts of footsteps in it, and it may tell you all sorts of stories; but it is classical music as Beethoven’s Les Adieux sonata is classical music: it tells you no story external to itself and yourself.’

  Shaw’s tribute delighted Elgar’s wife, hitherto suspicious of what she thought of as Shaw’s atheism. Her death three months later seems to have redoubled Shaw’s championing of Elgar’s work. In the summer of 1922, following a meagrely attended performance of The Apostles by the Leeds Choral Union, he erupted in the Daily News:

  ‘The Apostles is one of the glories of British music: indeed it is unique as a British work... The occasion was infinitely more important than the Derby, than Goodwood, than the Cup Finals, than the Carpentier fights, than any of the occasions on which the official leaders of society are photographed and cinematographed laboriously shaking hands... I apologize to posterity for living in a country where the capacity and tastes of schoolboys and sporting costermongers are the measure of metropolitan culture.’

  Elgar and Shaw had both initially been ‘discovered’ in Germany, and were now beginning to go out of fashion in Britain, the audiences for Elgar’s oratorios disappearing in the 1920s as they were to disappear in the 1930s for Shaw’s extravaganzas. Their friendship ripened in old age when, after the Malvern Festivals began, they saw each other regularly. Elgar, who could talk about every unmusical subject on earth, ‘from pigs to Elizabethan literature’, gave the impression of not knowing ‘a fugue from a fandango’. And yet, Shaw wrote, ‘Music was his religion and his intellect and almost his everything.’ Elgar prided himself, however, on being a considerable playgoer. It was true that he had never stuck out Romeo and Juliet to the end, but he would travel almost anywhere to see the comedian Jack Hulbert perform, and he came to relish the Shavian productions at Malvern. As Master of the King’s Musick, he was a martyr to conventionality, insisting that Shaw and Charlotte were correctly dressed for these occasions and for his own musical performances at Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester. ‘The Protestant Three Choirs were the centre of his musical activities, especially Worcester,’ Shaw later remembered: ‘to hear The Music Makers conducted there by him was a wonderful experience.’ In 1930 Elgar dedicated his Severn Suite to Shaw who was ‘hugely flattered and touched’. After hearing the piece ‘only eight times’ at the Crystal Palace Band Competition in September that year, he wrote to Elgar, ‘Nobody could have guessed from looking at the score and thinking of the thing as a toccata for brass band how beautiful and serious the work
is as abstract music.’

  ‘G.B.S.’s politics are, to me, appalling, but he is the kindest-hearted, gentlest man I have met... to young people he is kind,’ Elgar had written in 1921 to Sidney Colvin. But by the late 1920s, when they campaigned together against a restrictive new Music Copyright Bill, Elgar was beginning to look at Shaw’s politics as a vehicle of Shavian generosity, and the Shavian merging of art with sociology as the basis of his comradeship with all artists. Elgar had opened himself up to a Shavian political education by rather nervously enquiring what ‘capital’ was. By way of explanation, Shaw replied that Elgar’s products were infinitely consumable without limitation or deterioration. He then proposed an Elgarian Financial Symphony: ‘Allegro: Impending Disaster. Lento mesto: Stony Broke. Scherzo: Light Heart and Empty Pocket. Allo con brio: Clouds Clearing.’

  Whenever Elgar needed the clouds to clear, the Shaws shone down on him. ‘Don’t let yourself think dark thoughts,’ Charlotte urged him. And G.B.S., who made him a present of £1,000 early in the 1930s (equivalent to £27,000 in 1997), persuaded the BBC to commission a Third Symphony for another £1,000. ‘He [Elgar] does not know that I am meddling in his affairs and yours in this manner,’ he wrote to John Reith, Director General of the BBC, ‘...but I do know that he has still a lot of stuff in him that could be released if he could sit down to it without risking his livelihood.’

  The Third Symphony was never finished because of the collapse in Elgar’s health. Shaw recommended an American osteopath whose ‘resemblance to an ophicleide would please you’, though Charlotte preferred a Chinese acupuncturist from San Francisco. Alternatively, there was homoeopathy in the person of Raphael Roche, an unregistered practitioner from a well-known Jewish family of musicians (including Mendelssohn and Moscheles) who had healed a hydrocele of Shaw’s, using what appeared to be a grain of powdered sugar. In ‘the depths of pain’ Elgar seems to have felt that the Shaws were trying to cure him with laughter. In 1933 he entered a nursing home and, resisting an impulse to rush down and rescue him from the ‘damn doctors’, Shaw was left trusting to Elgar’s mighty Life Force.

  ‘Having friends like you,’ Charlotte had written in 1932, ‘is the one thing in life worth having when one arrives at the age of GBS & myself.’ The following year Elgar returned the compliment: ‘the world seems a cold place to me when you are both away.’

  Shaw described Elgar’s death from cancer on 23 February 1934 as ‘world-shaking’ and far too early. But there was still the music. At the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival in the summer of 1934, he and Charlotte heard The Kingdom. ‘I cannot tell you how we all miss Edward Elgar,’ Charlotte wrote afterwards to Nancy Astor. ‘We loved him... & when another man got up into the Conductor’s Chair it was hard to bear.’

  3

  Author of Himself

  I am honored and famous and rich, which is very good fun for the other people. But as I have to do all the hard work, and suffer an ever increasing multitude of fools gladly, it does not feel any better than being reviled, infamous, and poor, as I used to be.

  Shaw to Frank Harris (7 April 1927)

  Shaw’s travels abroad at the end of the 1920s became a sequence of flights and explorations. In the summer of 1928 Charlotte arranged a holiday on the French Riviera. They crawled into Cap d’Antibes at the crest of a heatwave, ‘hotter than I have ever imagined any infernal regions,’ Charlotte objected, and then dragged themselves off on excursions to Menton, Monte Carlo, and the mountainous hinterland of Haute Provence; and every day they plunged into the Mediterranean – ‘even I can swim, swim, swim – & never tire,’ Charlotte discovered. ‘You feel you cant sink in this sea. And when you get out you can lie – nuda veritas – on the rocks & bake. G.B.S. loves it – & that is why we stay.’

  He loved it and hated it: ‘one never knows whether the morning will find us smiling in a paradise,’ he wrote to Blanche Patch, ‘or groaning in a purgatory.’ Lady Rhondda came, a feminist and the proprietress of Time and Tide (for which Shaw wrote regularly in the 1920s and 1930s); and so did Troubetzkoy, devastated by the death of his Swedish wife. There were the Mosleys too, Oswald fresh from an International Congress in Brussels, Cynthia an Atalanta who ‘queens it with the best’ on the beaches, and both of them comically nervous of being photographed by the press. It was ‘Dear Mr Mosley,’ Charlotte told Nancy Astor, who abetted her plot to carry G.B.S. off to Geneva, ‘a decent, proper town’, for twelve days early in September.

  But the most significant meeting that summer was with Frank Harris, now living in Nice. In England before the war he had been declared bankrupt and sent on a libel charge to Brixton gaol. During the war he had emigrated to the United States where he published a series of anti-British articles that unfortunately tipped Germany as the victor. His decline was accelerated by an erratic biography of Oscar Wilde that brought him nothing but trouble, and a series of apocryphal ‘Contemporary Portraits’ first published in his new American magazine, Pearsons, which, after threatening to fold each month, eventually did so.

  ‘Your most interesting book will be your autobiography,’ Shaw had predicted in 1915. After the war, Harris set about retrieving his bank balance by moving to France and acting on Shaw’s advice. ‘I am going to see if a man can tell truth naked and unashamed about himself and his amorous adventures in the world,’ he wrote. The first volume of his notorious My Life and Loves had been burnt by customs officials; the second volume brought him to court on a charge of corrupting public morals. ‘Il faut souffrir pour être Casanova,’ Shaw reminded him.

  G.B.S. was the one writer in England who remained loyal to Harris. He did not admire him, did not regard him as a fugleman for free speech, as he regarded Freud, Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and even Radclyffe Hall; he did not even like him. But he felt some kinship with Harris’s sense of exile. The more Harris was cold-shouldered, the more G.B.S. assisted him – in his fashion. Instead of handing him money, he provided him with words. ‘For God’s sake give me deathless words,’ Harris had appealed from the United States. Shaw responded with a fascinating account of his meetings with Wilde, which Harris was able to use in a cheap reissue of his biography. Then, when Harris sent over for correction a ‘Contemporary Portrait’ of Shaw, G.B.S. fired back a brilliant pastiche of Harris entitled ‘How Frank Ought to Have Done It’. ‘You are the first person I think in my journey through the world,’ Harris wrote, ‘who has shown any wish to surpass me in generosity.’

  To be thus surpassed troubled Harris who knew himself to be twice the man Shaw was and could not frankly conceal this knowledge. And yet ‘you have made more out of your worst play than I have made out of all my books put together’. How was this possible? They had, for example, both written plays about St Joan and yet for some reason theatres round the world persisted in staging Shaw’s Saint Joan and never his own Joan la Romée.

  ‘I have no one I can turn to except you,’ Harris admitted. What he wanted from Shaw, he hardly knew. There was a limit to what he could raise from publishing or selling Shaw’s correspondence: ‘Letters are unsatisfactory,’ he concluded. He wanted Shaw’s help with publishers. ‘I could surely do an Edition of Shakespeare better than any living man,’ he hazarded, ‘...you could get me this Shakespeare commission at once.’ But such scholarly hack work ‘would not keep you in bootlaces,’ Shaw calculated. Harris also wanted to mine Shaw’s good will and find some rich new vein. Shakespeare had failed him; Wilde had failed him; and in old age he was beginning to fail himself.

  They met at Harris’s villa in Nice in the second week of August 1928. Shaw came alone because Charlotte, he happily explained, could not be seen lunching with a pornographer. For Harris their day together was in the nature of a reconnaissance. A little later he took off for New York. ‘Your vogue in America is extraordinary, almost incredible,’ he reported. ‘The New York Times declares that you are the greatest Englishman since Shakespeare, and this is the opinion one hears on all sides.’ To this reputation Harris now proposed hitching his wagon
by getting himself appointed Shaw’s biographer. ‘Abstain from such a desperate enterprise,’ Shaw hastily replied. ‘...I wont have you write my life on any terms: Nellie [Harris’s wife] would do it far better.’

  But Harris needed an old-age pension, and by 1929 was forced to accept the fact that only for a book about G.B.S., written with Shaw’s co-operation, would any publisher give him a decent advance on royalties. Shaw’s refusal was a desperate blow. All this exaggerated success, he protested, had gone to Shaw’s head. Such insults delighted G.B.S. who wanted to know to what other part of his body success should have travelled. ‘You are honoured and famous and rich – I lie here crippled and condemned and poor,’ Harris pleaded. Shaw seemed briskly unaffected. Nevertheless the ‘dreaded biography’ began to encircle him. ‘The truth is I have a horror of biographers,’ he wrote. ‘...Every man has a blind side; and I should catch you just on it... my heart is never in the right – meaning the expected – place.

  ‘Besides, it is premature. Only two of the ladies are dead.

  ‘Think no more of it. And forgive me.’

  But Harris could not afford to be forgiving. As he began to give ground, Shaw divided the problem between Charlotte’s interests and those of Nellie Harris. To put his Life into the hands of a writer whose own memoirs had been burnt by Charlotte, page by page ‘so that not a comma should escape the flames’, was surely too rich a paradox. She would never permit it. But Nellie’s interests were a different matter and Charlotte had no answer when Shaw echoed Charles II’s deathbed appeal: ‘Let not poor Nellie starve.’

  For G.B.S. himself there were further considerations. Archibald Henderson was proposing to put together another biography for the 1930s. Then there was the tragic case of Demetrius O’Bolger.