Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  The mingling of these arias with the noise of the siren was peculiarly trying for Miss Patch. The fact was that of the three of them she alone wasn’t going deaf (‘a great point in her favor at the telephone,’ Shaw admitted). But at least the old man wasn’t under her feet so much as in Whitehall Court. After breakfast he would stalk down to his ‘toolshed’ at the end of the garden. Here he arranged himself with all the innocent technology of his work deployed around him – a thermometer and paste pot, some paper clips and scissors, red ink, alarm clock and portable Remington typewriter (‘Could that typewriter type a play?’ he had asked the demonstrator when buying it. ‘Of course it could,’ she indignantly replied. ‘It could type anything’). But he only used two fingers and of course he couldn’t touch-type like Miss Patch. ‘He loved his red ink, paste pot and paper clips,’ she observed; ‘...the alarm clock was set each day to remind him when it was time for lunch. He never took any notice of it.’

  His principal work during the war was Everybody’s Political What’s What? ‘I find myself in a world in which everyone knows the XYZ of politics, philosophy, religion, science and art, and nobody knows the ABC of them,’ he wrote to Upton Sinclair. He wanted to survey the natural laws governing political action and itemize those subjects which every member of a responsible democracy should understand before voting or becoming eligible for public work. Like much of his later political writings, Everybody’s Political What’s What? was to enquire after egalitarianism in the future while turning away from contemporary heartbreak and helplessness.

  He would work at this book until lunch – to which he was summoned by the clanging of a loud handbell from the house. Then he slept for an hour in the early afternoon and would afterwards ‘go about the lanes and woods with a secateur and a little saw and clear up overgrown paths’ until the blackout came down. In spite of the world’s miseries, these spring and summer months were ‘altogether wonderful’, and he did not find his old age or this ‘cottage life’ unhappy – at least not unbearably so as his youth had been. ‘G.B.S. is like a lion,’ Charlotte wrote to Nancy Astor. ‘...he has taken to lopping & pruning trees. I wish you could see him when he comes in from the woods – dripping & smiling.’

  Nancy Astor had offered the Shaws a home at Cliveden but ‘it must remain a lovely dream for us,’ Charlotte thought – ‘I wish it could come true, but it cant.’ By August however she felt so much better that they decided to go for three weeks’ holiday there. Both of them were nervous: ‘we are like people coming out of a dark cellar,’ Charlotte warned Nancy. And Shaw wrote: ‘If I attempt to talk my teeth fall out... you must hide me in a corner.’ What he had never accepted was that people might value him without all his self-dramatizing. ‘He is older but he is incredible for eighty-five,’ wrote Nancy Astor’s thirty-year-old niece Joyce Grenfell who was also staying at Cliveden. ‘...When he isn’t putting on his act... then he is a charmer and what he has to say is worth hearing... Mrs Shaw is very deaf, which means that conversation takes time and must be executed fortissimo.’

  They returned to Ayot, ‘our little prison’. Shaw had hoped to finish Everybody’s Political What’s What? by the end of 1941, but the book hung fire. ‘I am too old to know whether I can still write or not,’ he confessed to Wells. He tried to start another play but themes and stories eluded him: ‘I seem to have dried up at last: I am absolutely barren.’

  He had found some pleasure however in preparing a Graduates’ Keepsake & Counsellor for Diploma Students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. A land mine had exploded at the RADA building in Gower Street in 1941 completely destroying the students’ theatre that backed on to Malet Street. Shaw had immediately gone up to see the extent of the damage, picking his way through the splintered door, past the blown out windows to the debris of the Principal’s office. Workmen were roughly shuttering up the windows with wooden boards and through a slit between these planks the actor Laurence Irving saw a shaft of sunlight through scintillating dust pierce the gloom and focus on G.B.S. huddled in a chair. ‘The cocksure mobile features of the old champion of the RADA were pinched and aged; the challenging and mocking eyes were lustreless and evasive in undisguised dejection.’

  After his eightieth birthday G.B.S. had finally given up platform speaking and five years later he retired from all committee work, including the Council of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English and the RADA Council. He could now work on his political textbook with fewer diversions and, whenever this became troublesome, he would renew his experiments (like the experiments of a literary alchemist) to discover an alphabet capable of spelling the English language.

  One day was like another at Ayot. Miss Patch knitted for the soldiers, made soft dolls for the Red Cross and typed up Shaw’s shorthand for the printer. But each day grew shorter and ‘the darkness is hard to bear’. Charlotte longed to be back in Whitehall Court, but Shaw feared the effect of more bombing on her – his newspaper campaign against reprisal raids on cities was largely prompted by this fear. Perhaps ‘a bomb could be the easiest way to end,’ she had speculated in a letter to Beatrice Webb.

  This was a gruelling winter for Charlotte. The rheumatic attacks grew more severe, and she seemed to be shrinking into infirmity. ‘Her spine has collapsed to such an extent that she cannot stand without hurting herself unbearably by a one-sided stoop,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy Astor in April 1942. When summing up their condition – ‘very old and muddled... always late or wrong or both’ – G.B.S. liked to add their ages together. By the spring of 1942 they were one hundred and seventy. While she was ‘bowed and crippled, furrowed and wrinkled’, he still stood strikingly erect yet was so insubstantial he appeared like Coleridge’s ‘a man all light, a seraph man’. In his prime his weight had been almost eleven stone; by 1941 it was barely nine stone. ‘I am losing weight so fast that I shall presently have totally disappeared,’ he wrote to Beatrice Webb. ‘I look when stripped like a native in a famine picture, an imperfectly concealed skeleton.’

  There were still moments when he felt nearly ‘equal to anything’. And Charlotte, fitted with a reinforced corset designed by her osteopath, was ‘getting through’. Could the two of them visit Cliveden again? Shaw explained the predicament to Nancy. ‘A change would be good for her [Charlotte] one way, and in another possibly kill her.’ Nancy urged them on and that July they decided to risk it, G.B.S. having first made arrangements for their cremation in case ‘we die on your hands’.

  While at Cliveden they were both medically examined by the Canadian military staff billeted there. ‘I was passed sound in wind and limb,’ Shaw wrote to Beatrice Webb. But after four years of torment Charlotte was found to have been suffering from osteitis deformans or Paget’s disease. This inexorable breaking down of the bone structure had probably been caused by an accident in her youth and ‘the prognosis was terrible,’ Shaw told Wells, ‘ending with double pneumonia’.

  They returned to Ayot, and dug in for another winter. The weeks flew past ‘like Hurricanes and Spitfires’ to the cries of the siren, the distant crackle of gunfire and bumping rhythm of the air-raids. Shaw’s almost transparent figure flickered between his workshed and the wireless. He could not quell his beating spirit of enquiry. ‘The war is interesting all the same, diabolical, senseless, useless as it now seems,’ he wrote to Sidney Webb. ‘...I am rather curious to see how it will end.’ But for Charlotte, horribly hunchbacked, unable to walk without help, unable to reach the garden, her body held in an armoured corset, there was nothing to desire except an easeful death. As the disease progressed her bones felt as if they were cracking and splintering whenever she moved or breathed too deeply. ‘The difficulty with which she crawls about is heartbreaking,’ Shaw wrote.

  They were approaching their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. Many onlookers of the Shavian phenomenon imagined Charlotte to be a prisoner of wedlock. Accompanying her husband to his first nights, publishing Selected Passages
from his works, nursing him through illnesses, keeping obscurely in the background, she seemed to have given up her life to his career. ‘He [Shaw] is too clever to be really in love with Lottie, who is nearly clever but not quite,’ Charlotte’s cousin Edith Somerville had written. ‘However it may be better than it seems.’

  And it had been better, this childless partnership of a middle-aged couple. They had arranged their lives like characters from a previous century. Charlotte ‘had decided views on etiquette,’ noticed one of their neighbours, Captain Ames, and she led a life ‘rather like that of a Queen Consort,’ Lady Rhondda thought. ‘...she had a number of the attributes of a Queen.’

  ‘My wife is a woman of strong mentality,’ Shaw answered one questioner, ‘and expresses strong opinions to me twelve or thirteen times a day.’ Many of her strongest opinions, such as her view that they should not have children, had been expressions of her anxieties. ‘Sometimes I have been sorry that I was not more insistent on the point,’ Shaw later conceded.

  Not everyone thought her charming. Sean O’Casey was disgusted by the sight of her leaning determinedly forward, covering a huge pile of food in thick sauce and swallowing it down with sluggish energy – Johnsonian eating habits that some saw as a compensatory substitute for sex. Others ridiculed her quest, in the wake of her guru James Porter Mills, to locate the Great Architect in the works of Ouspensky and others. When Mills died in the 1920s, his teaching had been taken up by Charlotte’s friend, the former actress Lena Ashwell. ‘I am working to achieve a wireless set which will respond to the music of the spheres,’ she wrote in Shotover style, pursuing Mills’s merging of Eastern religions with Western technology. Such mystical tunings-in seemed eventually to invade Shaw’s own work as he progressed from the Pygmalion romance between an East End flower girl and a West End gentleman to the surreal marriage of East and West in The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles.

  Charlotte had always admired the egalitarian vision of her husband’s socialism. But it was as ‘a dreamer of wonderful dreams’ that he had become a great man to her. Perhaps something of her own intuitions quietly permeated those dreams. In any event ‘something quite indestructible’ had grown up between them. ‘Finally a marriage consolidates itself until the two lose all sense of separateness, and the married life becomes one life,’ they wrote to a friend, echoing the works of Pra and Prola at the end of The Simpleton.

  Blanche Patch had one day come across G.B.S. sitting with his arms round Charlotte singing an impromptu version of ‘O Mr Porter’ – and quietly stole away. Barry Jackson, calling round unexpectedly, found them sitting side by side on a sofa looking through a large picture book – themselves the picture of a happy marriage. To Lawrence Langner, Charlotte appeared like ‘a kindly mother whose grown son was distinguishing himself before an appreciative audience’. Her family, which had starred Granville Barker and T. E. Lawrence as sons apparent, was mostly played by the servants at Ayot. They saw his tenderness, her solicitude. Each morning he would go to her bedroom for a talk before breakfast, and she would insist on arranging the pillows for his siesta between their lunch and tea together. In the late afternoon, when he liked to stride outdoors after air and exercise, she would wait anxiously for him until he presented himself ‘to show that nothing has happened to me’. In the evenings he sometimes played for her the songs his mother had sung in Dublin; and they would read together books she had chosen, such as Gerald Heard’s Pain, Sex and Time. Heard’s attempt to combine science and religion ‘lighted up the whole pile of little personal discoveries,’ she wrote, ‘and made them glow with new lights’.

  Shaw’s anxieties rose to the surface as financial problems. Charlotte’s anxieties were generally exercised over her servants at Ayot. It was as if she felt that human life could not be sustained without a housekeeper and cook, gardener and two maids. ‘There is not much joy in life for her,’ Shaw admitted to Sidney Webb. Beatrice, too, was finding prolonged living a painful experience. ‘You can’t cure old age,’ she had reflected when considering Charlotte’s condition as well as her own. But of course there was a cure. Once Sidney was dead she could easily kill herself. ‘It will suit the public interest,’ she reasoned. But on 30 April 1943, after a few days in a coma, it was Beatrice who died. ‘I used to take it as a matter of course that if Beatrice died you would come and live with us,’ Shaw wrote to Sidney; ‘for I never counted on our living to this ridiculous age and being incapable of taking care of ourselves or anyone else.’

  Shaw kept Beatrice’s death secret from Charlotte. Such protection was not difficult. Her handwriting had grown so illegible she seldom wrote to anyone these days. ‘Like an old witch’, she seemed to have shrunk to half her size, yet was still not reconciled to her condition and would not stay in bed. She longed to escape her ‘little prison’ at Ayot and, after much hesitation, Shaw agreed to move her back in the summer of 1943 to Whitehall Court. If this plan worked, he could give the staff at Ayot a holiday and engage a professional nurse in London. The doctors had warned him that the journey would be risky. She was driven up on his eighty-seventh birthday. It was ‘quite an adventure,’ he told Wells; ‘but it came off successfully and she is happier here.’

  In the past Shaw’s trick for distracting Charlotte from her illnesses had been to fall ill himself. ‘If Charlotte were dying, I know an infallible way to restore her to health,’ he had told St John Ervine. ‘I should simply go to bed and say I was dying.’ But now her condition was complicated by distressing hallucinations, and his sustained health became vital to whatever peace of mind she could grasp. He consulted friends for the names of new doctors and psychotherapists who might banish the spectres which filled her imagination and added to her terrors. ‘She saw crowds of strangers in the room, and kept asking me to remonstrate with the managers and housekeeper here for allowing them to come up and intrude,’ he wrote to Almroth Wright. ‘She also spoke to me of imaginary kittens and little dogs in my lap. She was, however, perfectly reasonable on every point except the actual existence of these phantoms.’

  The cumulative strain of these weeks in London grew terrible. Then, helping her to get up from dinner on the evening of Friday 10 September, Shaw noticed what seemed an extraordinary change coming over Charlotte. She appeared calmer and did not complain as usual when he took her through to the drawing-room. A miracle was rising before his eyes. He thought he saw the furrows and wrinkles on her forehead smooth away. She smiled easily at him and he heard her speaking again with her happiest voice. She seemed to look forty years younger, like the woman he had known at the time of their marriage when his own life seemed to be fading. He told her she was beautiful and that the illness was leaving her. ‘She talked to me insistently and joyously, and, though it was almost all unintelligible, she heard and understood what I said to her, and was delighted by my assurances that she was getting well, that all our troubles were over.’

  He settled her in for the night earlier than usual. Next morning he was woken by the nurse with the news that Charlotte had been found lying at the foot of her bed clutching her alarm clock and with her face bleeding. He helped to get her back into bed and immediately engaged a night nurse. In spite of this fall, she was still smiling and happy; and the mysterious process by which she appeared to be discarding her years went on: ‘I had never known her so young.’ He realized she was dying, and kept with her every minute while she went on ‘babbling to me like a happy child,’ he wrote to Mrs Higgs. ‘...you may be sure I said everything to please her.’

  Again he settled her in early for the night and slept well himself. At a quarter past eight on Sunday morning the night nurse came to his bedroom and told him he had been a widower for almost six hours. He went to her room and looking down at the body, saw that Charlotte’s face was that of a young girl – like the portrait painted of her by Sartorio in Rome before he had known her. ‘I have never seen anything so beautiful.’

  She appeared so very much alive that he could not stop himself from going
into her room again and again that day, and the next day, continuing to speak softly to her. ‘Once, I thought that her eyes opened slightly while I was talking to her’ and he took out his microscope glass and held it to her lips. ‘I could not believe she was dead.’

  All sorts of associations – an echo from Cordelia at the end of King Lear, a reversal of Wilde’s ending for The Picture of Dorian Gray – mingled in this strange experience. He felt the need to tell everyone about her marvellous rejuvenation. ‘It was a blessedly happy ending,’ he wrote to Granville-Barker, breaking almost twenty years of silence. ‘...You will not, I know, mind my writing this to you.’ It was like a fairy story in which two fears magically cancel each other and finally allow Shaw’s search for love to be fulfilled. ‘I did not know I could be so moved,’ he wrote to Wells. This vivid trance lasted nearly two days. Then the jaw dropped open and she was gone.

  ‘No flowers; no black clothes; no service,’ she had requested. Shaw arranged for a private cremation as he had for his mother and his sister. There was cheerful weather for the cremation. Nancy Astor and Blanche Patch accompanied him to Golders Green. The ceremony lasted only a few minutes. Handel, the composer Charlotte loved most, provided the music: ‘But Thou didst not leave His soul in hell’ from Messiah for the committal: ‘Ombra ma fù’ from Serse for the voluntary. ‘Who could ask for more?’ At the end ‘Shaw lifted up his arms and softly sang the words as if to Charlotte whose coffin was just in front of him,’ Blanche Patch noticed. Then, as the anthem neared its close, the coffin moved out and Shaw continued standing there, still singing, his arms outstretched.