Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  In Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self Gordon Craig evokes the golden mother of his country childhood in place of the mortifyingly powerful woman who had looked on him as a weak little boy. ‘What makes this book of his so tragically moving,’ Shaw acknowledged, ‘ – for if you disregard the rubbish about me, which is neither here nor there, it is a poignant human document – is his desperate denial of the big woman he ran away from and his assertion of the “little mother” he loved.’ A Correspondence had revealed the Ellen Terry her son resented, ‘an impetuous, overwhelming, absorbing personality,’ Shaw remembered, ‘[who] could sweep a thousand people away in a big theatre; so you can imagine what she could do with a sensitive boy in a small house.’

  Gordon Craig, however, had rightly observed that in regard to Ellen Terry, ‘we are all of us just children – and the naughtiest is often preferable to the good’. To one side of the battle over Irving’s reputation raged a more intimate and childlike contest: a strange variation of sibling rivalry between the lost son, militant daughter, and claimant child from the theatre. In the marsupial annexe to his book, which is dedicated to Henry Irving and entitled ‘A Plea for G.B.S.’, Gordon Craig wrote as naughtily as he could, calling Shaw ‘a very large, malicious, poke-nose old woman... with an idle and vindictive tongue quite fussily spreading falsehoods’. The ‘falsehoods’ were Shaw’s claims to legitimacy with Ellen in a theatre world that had taken Craig’s mother away and given her to everyone. He was an ‘old woman’ because he aligned himself with Edy’s circle of feminists who had appropriated Ellen after her retirement from the theatre.

  After the Shaw-Ellen Terry correspondence appeared in the autumn of 1931, everyone wanted their Shavian letters published. ‘We have never had a correspondence in that sense,’ Shaw explained to Frank Harris. Only one body of correspondence had suggested something more romantic. ‘There is absolutely no comparison between Shaw’s letters to Ellen Terry and his letters to me,’ Mrs Patrick Campbell told American journalists when she arrived in New York that fall. ‘I shall write my own preface to the edition, not Mr Shaw... I do not intend to give him the opportunity to say the last word. I don’t trust him enough.’

  Publication of the Shaw-Ellen Terry correspondence prompted Stella to mount one last campaign. His letters to her had been valued at £10,000 but (aside from the odd misdemeanour) she had behaved herself ‘like a gentleman’ and guarded them for nineteen years. Now times were hard, ‘almost unbearable’, she wanted this correspondence published for reasons of self-esteem as much as money. ‘What objection can there be? Letters written so long ago, and all three of us on the verge of the grave!’ But while Charlotte lived, Shaw could not agree. ‘At all events for me you are an insoluble problem,’ he admitted to Stella; ‘...there is no use making myself unhappy about it.’

  In 1937, suddenly coming upon all Stella’s correspondence, Shaw parcelled it up in six registered envelopes and sent it to her in New York. He made no copies, ‘as I should certainly die of angina pectoris during the operation’. ‘There’s a clutch at my heart,’ Stella rejoined, ‘...the desire to feel a child again will tempt me to read them.’ Still nothing could be published while he and Charlotte remained alive, but ‘as you are nine years younger than we are,’ Shaw calculated, ‘your chances of surviving both of us are fairly good’.

  But it was Stella who died first, in April 1940. ‘AND IT IS MY DESIRE,’ she had written in her will, ‘...that the Bernard Shaw letters and poems which are now in the custody of the Westminster Bank be published in their proper sequence and not cut or altered in any way, that they should be published in an independent volume to be entitled “The Love Letters of Bernard Shaw to Mrs Patrick Campbell” so all who may read them will realize that the friendship was “L’amitié amoureuse”.’

  Nothing more could happen until Charlotte’s death three and a half years later. In his new will Shaw gave authority for Stella Beech ‘daughter of the late eminent actress professionally known as Mrs Patrick Campbell to print and publish after my death all or any of the letters written by me to the said eminent actress and in the event of Mrs Beech’s death before publication to give such authority (which is a permission and not an assignment of copyright) to Mrs Patrick Campbell’s grandson Patrick Beech’. The proceeds of this correspondence he reserved ‘as far as possible’ for the secondary education of Stella Campbell’s grandchildren.

  There was another pause until Shaw died. Two years afterwards, their leftover letters finally appeared. Against her mother’s wishes Mrs Beech cut a few passages and published the volume more prosaically as Bernard Shaw and Mrs Patrick Campbell: Their Correspondence. G.B.S. had placed himself in loco parentis to Stella’s family and made this the only volume of his correspondence to be removed from the control of his executors. ‘You would not come out of it with a halo like Ellen’s,’ Shaw had warned Stella. But Stella would hold her own in Their Correspondence. ‘Like a cushion, she baffles the incisive blade of Shavian argument,’ commented The Times reviewer.

  There was to be one more ironic revolution in this ‘Comedy of Letters’ when Jerome Kilty lifted it off the page and transferred it into the theatre. ‘Dear Liar catches with remarkable theatrical assurance the spirit of the correspondence,’ a critic in The Times wrote of the adaptation. ‘...it brings out rather surprisingly how sweetly reasonable the actress who was the terror of Tree, Alexander and other actor-managers proved to be in her letters to Joey.’

  To its end the relationship had pulled Shaw painfully between comedy and tragedy without ever reconciling the two. ‘I can laugh with the comedian,’ he had written to her; ‘but with the tragedian – oh my heart!...

  ‘Oh, Stella, Stella, Stella, Stella, Stella!’

  4

  The Celtic-Hibernian School

  Them and their Academy of Letters – all in all, and in spite of all.

  Sean O’Casey to James Joyce (30 May 1939)

  ‘The Works of Bernard Shaw’, which G.B.S. had been preparing intermittently since 1921, began to appear in two editions early in the 1930s. Twenty-one volumes of the Limited Collected Edition were published in 1930, starting on his seventy-fourth birthday with the five novels, embellished with Forewords and Postscripts, at the head of which he delivered the first printing of Immaturity, slightly revised after its fifty-year wait, and given a long autobiographical Preface. Thirty-two plays and playlets, many with emendations, followed in eleven volumes; and to these he added Major Critical Essays (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, The Perfect Wagnerite and The Sanity of Art), The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and various compilations ranging from What I Really Wrote about the War to the more distant Short Stories, Scraps and Shavings. ‘We are unearthing all sorts of forgotten masterpieces!’ Charlotte exclaimed. It involved what Shaw called ‘appalling grave digging’. He went on digging up dramatic, literary, musical and political essays as well as critical pieces on education and medicine; and he added half a dozen new plays in the 1930s, bringing the total number of volumes to thirty-three. Nevertheless, he told Otto Kyllmann at Constable, ‘I have conceived an extraordinary hatred to this particular edition, blast it!’ and he later allowed it to be overtaken by what became known as Constable’s ‘Standard Edition’ of his works, a cheaper set eventually rising to thirty-seven volumes uniformly bound in Venetian fadeless sail cloth. ‘To the Standard Edition,’ he wrote to Kyllmann, ‘there is no limit but the grave.’

  *

  Rather unexpectedly, recognition was coming from Ireland. G.B.S. had never felt easy with Irish writers. ‘We put each other out frightfully,’ he wrote, recalling his meetings with Oscar Wilde; ‘and this odd difficulty persisted between us to the very last.’ Though Sonny and Oscar were born within two years and a couple of Irish miles of each other, no social contacts had been practicable in Victorian Dublin between families of such divergent histories. It was Charlotte’s family that had lived opposite the Wildes in Merrion Square; while Shaw’s father came to Sir William Wilde, ‘Surgeon-O
culist in Ordinary to the Queen in Ireland’, only as a patient. According to G.B.S., Sir William ‘operated on my father to correct a squint, and overdid the corrections so much that my father squinted the other way all the rest of his life’.

  In later years G.B.S. was seldom able to see Oscar Wilde as others saw him. He appeared to have two people in view: Oscar, the boyish romantic, chivalrously sympathetic to those less well-placed than himself and scrupulously well-mannered to others, such as Shaw, who were potentially his equals; and then Wilde, the arrogant Dublin snob encircled by acolytes. Shaw had met Oscar at one of Lady Wilde’s richly eccentric homes in London to which he sometimes went in the ‘desperate days’ between 1879 and 1885. ‘Lady Wilde was nice to me,’ he remembered. Oscar too had come up and spoken ‘with an evident intention of being specially kind to me’. Lady Wilde’s position, ‘literary, social and patriotic, is unique and unassailable,’ Shaw was to write in 1888 when reviewing her Ancient Legends of Ireland for the Pall Mall Gazette.

  ‘She has no difficulty in writing about leprechauns, phoukas and banshees, simply as an Irishwoman telling Irish stories, impelled by the same tradition-instinct, and with a nursery knowledge at first hand of all the characteristic moods of the Irish imagination. Probably no living writer could produce a better book of its kind.’

  This was partly because, Shaw manages to imply, the book belonged to a literature and sociology that were now dead. He had cut loose from this culture when throwing himself out of Ireland and into socialism, and he seems to have attributed what he saw as Wilde’s false start as an apostle of art to the artificial prolongation of this dying tradition in the cult of aestheticism. Both Wilde, the complete dandy, and Shaw, the rational dress reformer, were showmen. The lilac puffs and frills, black silk stockings and tailored coats of braided velvet which made up Wilde’s aesthetic presentation of himself were a ‘coming out’ of the superior cashmere combinations and other experimental underwear in which Shaw paradoxically showed off. Whenever these two noticeable figures met, they treated each other with elaborate courtesy, conscious that the British press resented their aberrations from ready-made Victorian behaviour. ‘As far as I can ascertain, I am the only person in London who cannot sit down and write an Oscar Wilde play at will,’ Shaw wrote in his Saturday Review notice of An Ideal Husband. ‘...In a certain sense Mr Wilde is to me our only thorough playwright. He plays with everything: with wit, with philosophy, with drama, with actors and audience, with the whole theatre...

  ‘All the literary dignity of the play, all the imperturbable good sense and good manners with which Mr Wilde makes his wit pleasant to his comparatively stupid audience, cannot quite overcome the fact that Ireland is of all countries the most foreign to England, and that to the Irishman... there is nothing in the world quite so exquisitely comic as an Englishman’s seriousness.’

  Wilde, too, made a point of treating Shaw’s early work with true Irish seriousness. ‘I like your superb confidence in the dramatic value of the mere facts of life,’ he wrote after reading Widowers’ Houses, ‘...and your preface is a masterpiece – a real masterpiece of trenchant writing and caustic wit and dramatic instinct.’ He let it be known that Shaw’s Quintessence of Ibsenism had led him to write The Soul of Man under Socialism; and he supported Shaw’s campaign against the ‘ridiculous institution’ of stage censorship. ‘England is the land of intellectual fogs but you have done much to clear the air,’ he wrote to Shaw in 1893: ‘we are both Celtic, and I like to think that we are friends.’ But on another occasion, he was reported to have said: ‘Shaw is an excellent man. He has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him’; while Shaw wrote that Wilde ‘was incapable of friendship, though not of the most touching kindness on occasion’.

  They were compatriots rather than friends. Their diffidence with each other masked what was probably an apprehension of their respective powers. Wilde was the one man in London capable of making the young Shaw sound comparatively dull. ‘I had not to talk myself,’ Shaw acknowledged, ‘but to listen to a man telling me stories better than I could have told them.’ But Wilde appears to have been nervous of Shaw’s combative spirit and that ‘caustic wit’ which could pierce his own protective charm.

  Their ways parted once Wilde’s social aggrandizement seemed to implicate him in the very hypocrisies of Victorian society his absurdist wit had mocked. In Shaw’s view, success brought out the snob in Wilde. This was one explanation for his reaction against The Importance of Being Earnest – Wilde’s ‘first really heartless play’. He wanted to believe that Wilde’s talent for puncturing morals and manners fitted him for a place in ‘a large public life’ as a fellow socialist. Instead, Wilde appeared to succumb to flattery. His unconventionality was the very pedantry of convention, Shaw was to write; ‘never was there a man less an outlaw than he.’

  In fact, as his trial, imprisonment and exile showed, Wilde formed no more solid social foundations in England than G.B.S. Remembering that Wilde had been the only writer in London to sign his memorial in the late 1880s asking for the reprieve of the Chicago anarchists, Shaw drafted a petition seeking a remission of Wilde’s prison sentence, but finding that his signature would stand almost alone he gave up the idea, concluding that the support would ‘do Oscar more harm than good’.

  He was able, however, to find a more sophisticated way of defending Wilde. His major critical essay, ‘The Sanity of Art’, had been aimed at Max Nordau’s thesis Degeneration, which included as part of its ‘Ego-Mania’ section a hostile analysis of Wilde in the chapter ‘Decadents and Aesthetes’. Shaw’s response, originally entitled ‘A Degenerate’s View of Nordau’, may be read as an intellectual rehabilitation of Wilde written during his second trial and published shortly after his sentence. In the happy days of the hugely successful A Woman of No Importance, which coincided with the shaky beginnings of Widowers’ Houses, Wilde had paid Shaw the compliment of ranking their works together; in the days of Wilde’s disgrace Shaw returned the compliment by ranking himself as a fellow ‘degenerate’. He also went on favourably mentioning Wilde in his theatre reviews while Wilde was in prison; and six months after he was released, Shaw proposed his name – though that name was still taboo – as one of the ‘Immortals’ for an Academy of Letters. During the final period of Wilde’s disgrace, they continued to send each other signed copies of their books, all works, as Oscar liked to say, of ‘the great Celtic School’ uniting socialism with aesthetics.

  The great Celtic School had been held in place by its opposition to Victorian sexual and political ethics but, as the solid ground of Victorianism crumbled, it was to break up into two Hibernian tributaries. Shaw had rallied to Wilde in his misfortune, but switched off this support when he came to realize how tragedy was transforming him into a posthumous legend. Wilde’s genius was for comedy, he declared, ‘no other Irishman has yet produced as masterful a comedy as De Profundis’. By the 1930s Wilde was once again the more popular dramatist. ‘My licence for the performance of my play Pygmalion... did not include an authorisation to advertise it as “the brilliant comedy by Oscar Wilde”,’ Shaw wrote in 1938 to the Grand Theatre in Wolverhampton. The manager of the theatre was disinclined to offer an apology, however, claiming that this substitution accounted for the play having attracted three times as much money as it did when billed as being written by Shaw. ‘Beg him to continue the attribution, which was a most happy thought,’ Shaw responded. ‘I am not grumbling; I am rejoicing.’

  Shaw’s grumbles with Wilde arose less from personal rivalry than from their competing ideologies. By the 1920s and 1930s, Wilde’s aesthetic creed had developed into the cult of personal relationships and artistic significance practised by the Bloomsbury Group, and would later lead to the ‘flower power’ of the 1960s and a branch of modernism in the 1990s. Shaw’s economic opposition to Victorianism concurrently developed its programme of reforms towards the creation of a Welfare State which by the 1990s seemed no longer viable. He wanted egalitarian soci
alism to be accepted as the mainstream of twentieth-century culture in Britain. By giving his imprimatur to Frank Harris’s inaccurate account of Wilde’s life and by engaging for over a dozen years in a chastening correspondence with Alfred Douglas, Shaw sought to diminish the influence of a man whose memory was becoming an inspiration for the ‘Artist Idolatry’ he had attacked in the Preface to Misalliance, and whose ethics, with those of Beardsley, he had spotlighted in The Doctor’s Dilemma.

  Wilde was ‘an original moralist’ and it was his moral force that Shaw held in suspicion. This suspicion gave currency to the view of G.B.S. as a ‘certain notorious and clever, but cold-blooded Socialist’ whom W. B. Yeats depicts anonymously in an essay on Wilde.

  Like Wilde, Yeats valued Shaw’s fighting qualities. His ‘detonating impartiality’ had made him ‘the most formidable man in modern letters’ and was often used to ‘hit my enemies’. Referring to his ballads on Roger Casement, Yeats was to tell Dorothy Wellesley in 1936: ‘I am fighting in those ballads for what I have been fighting all my life, it is our Irish fight though it has nothing to do with this or that country. Bernard Shaw fights with the same object.’

  Many years before, talking about G.B.S. as he walked back home in the evening with Florence Farr, the actress they both loved, Yeats had sometimes wondered ‘whether the cock crowed for my blame or for my praise’. Finally he resolved the contradiction in a burst of Shavian-like humour: ‘When a man is so outrageously in the wrong as Shaw he is indispensable.’ He had accused Shaw of constructing plays like buildings ‘made by science in an architect’s office, and erected by joyless hands’; then he saw Misalliance, was delighted by the extravagant ‘girl acrobat who read her Bible while tossing her balls in the air’, and decided that her creator was ‘irreverent, headlong, fantastic’.