Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  3

  Some Late Appearances

  I still regard myself as Charlotte’s property. I really could not ask her to mix our ashes with those of a third party.

  Shaw to Nancy Astor (11 August 1944)

  Shaw kept the news of Charlotte’s death out of the newspapers until after her cremation. Once the news broke he was overwhelmed with letters and had to acknowledge them collectively in a notice to The Times assuring everyone that ‘a very happy ending to a very long life has left him awaiting his own turn in perfect serenity’.

  He took care to barricade himself against the possibility of grief. ‘I do not grieve,’ he insisted; ‘but then neither do I forget.’ Yet the armour that had shone so brightly for so long was suddenly pierced. ‘He missed her far more than he had ever imagined he could miss anybody,’ observed St John Ervine.

  He fought this enemy, grief, with every Shavian contrivance. As a widower he was free to return to his bachelor life, eat when he was hungry, dress as he fancied, work without consulting anyone but himself and ‘go to bed when I like’ – which usually meant after midnight. His mother had never gone to bed before midnight ‘and I won’t either’. People thought he was lonely: but he was simply indulging the talent for solitude. As he had replaced emotion with money as his mother’s motive for leaving him in Dublin, so now he covered his emotional deprivation with obsessional talk of death duties. Charlotte’s death had been a great loss, he agreed, a great financial loss.

  The method by which he strove to reverse his feelings, outwit them, transmute them into something else – at any rate keep them under control – sounded oddly callous. He would boast that his health was improving markedly since Charlotte’s death ‘set me free’. Even so he could not always prevent himself from crying even in the street. Over the next two or three years he ‘seemed extraordinarily “caved in”,’ a local bookseller near Ayot noticed. ‘...He looked very sad. I did not think he was capable of such emotional feeling, but he showed it quite obviously.’

  *

  There is a rumour that after forty years of marriage a widower must be in want of a second attachment. On several occasions Shaw had protested that he was not naturally a marrying man. But was he not protesting a little too much? People were already reflecting on the possibility of a sequel. Such a possibility played on the minds of both Lady Astor and Miss Patch as they drove back from Golders Green.

  Indeed Lady Astor was hardly out of the crematorium before, to Miss Patch’s disgust, she invited G.B.S. to Cliveden. Miss Patch knew her game. Standing with G.B.S. over Charlotte’s body only three days before, Miss Patch had asked him whether he wished to invite anyone else to Golders Green ‘and his reply was that he and I would go together’. Why then had Lady Astor ‘insisted on coming with us’ if she wasn’t trying to supplant Miss Patch as G.B.S.’s closest female friend? Lady Astor was ‘invariably kind to me,’ she admitted, but these acts of kindness – proposals that she must be looked after by a nurse or given a new suit of clothes – were curiously condescending. She did not see herself needing charity. Her needs were more ambitious. When G.B.S. presented her with certain likenesses of himself – in short, his Max Beerbohm caricatures – or handed her Charlotte’s £100 fur coat, it was surely obvious that these were not charitable provisions but tokens of a special attachment. She had been with him now for quarter of a century, sharing what he most prized: his work. And it was his work, she was pleased to note, that he cited when fending off Lady Astor’s advances. ‘I am full of unfinished jobs, some of them unbegun; and I must take my own advice and not attempt to combine them with visits to Cliveden.’

  Even in her tweed suit, sweater and pearls, Miss Patch barely cast a shadow. Her Picasso-esque features, framed by a face ‘like two profiles stuck together’, were formidable. ‘Piercing blue eyes,’ one dismayed visitor noted, ‘a nose like a knife blade, lipless mouth.’

  Towards the end of 1943 Shaw left Whitehall Court and settled himself at Ayot. Miss Patch stayed uneasily in London while Lady Astor gave notice of whirlwind swoops on G.B.S. ‘Don’t come down here yet,’ he pleaded at the beginning of 1944. But Lady Astor believed that Charlotte had implicitly bequeathed her this duty. So she persisted, dealing out offers of excursions to Cornwall and holidays at Sandwich. ‘I shall never see these places again,’ Shaw answered. ‘The garden and plantation here are my world now’.

  Though she sometimes got through his defences, Lady Astor found the encircling routine at Ayot difficult to penetrate. ‘If I am uprooted I shall probably die immediately,’ he threatened her. ‘That is how I feel about it.’ Besides there had been enough changes at Ayot in the year following Charlotte’s death.

  Early in June 1944 sinister robot planes began flying over the south of England. These were the Germans’ mysterious new secret weapons, pilot-less rockets nicknamed ‘doodlebugs’ that suddenly cut out, descended silently and hit the ground with shattering explosions. One of these ‘buzzer bombs’, as Blanche Patch called them, fell near Charing Cross and had blown in the study windows of Shaw’s flat, broken the grandfather clock in the hall and covered everything with debris. As the bombardment went on, she began to feel ‘decidedly shaky’. Over 200,000 houses, mostly in the London area, had been made uninhabitable by the end of the month. ‘The pilotless bombs have driven everyone out of London, including Blanche, who has returned to Ayot,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy Astor.

  Two months after Miss Patch arrived at Ayot, Henry and Clara Higgs, the gardener and housekeeper who had been with Shaw forty-two years, gave in their notice. They had put off going as long as they could. Higgs could not bear to leave his garden until he had seen it through one more summer; it had been a matter of pride to him that Shaw felt so attached to this garden – he liked to find out things about it, such as whether the large red poppies’ seeds were poisonous. ‘We must get a packet and send them off to Hitler,’ he said after being told they were.

  Higgs’s place in the garden was to be taken in 1946 by his pupil Fred Drury. As a lad of nineteen, Drury had come to work as assistant gardener in 1934, then been called up six years later, and eventually returned to Ayot after the war, not wishing ‘to work for anyone else’. Mrs Higgs’s place in the kitchen was immediately filled by Alice Laden, a capable, grey-haired, pink-complexioned widow who had nursed Charlotte through her last weeks at Whitehall Court.

  ‘I want you to come and look after me till I die,’ Shaw told her. It was a tall order but Mrs Laden had felt lonely after losing her husband in the war – and besides, she reckoned that she knew how to handle G.B.S. ‘I could sense his moods,’ she said. ‘...I had a way with him.’ Shaw had sent his Rolls to fetch her and her cat Bunch and waited with Mrs Higgs who had volunteered to stay on for a fortnight to train her. But after two devastating days, Mrs Higgs fled, driven out with her husband ‘before a terrible New Woman, of a species unknown to them, from the house where they had been supreme indoors and out... [to] fend for themselves in a world in which they are museum pieces’.

  When the day came to shake hands and say goodbye, Higgs could see the old man was upset. ‘They went away in a handsome cab, beautifully dressed, with the dog on its lead, greatly excited,’ Shaw wrote to Nancy Astor. ‘I kissed her goodbye, and waved after them until the car disappeared round the corner... when I went to the shelter to write, I found that my pen wobbled a little in my hand.’

  Shaw made no secret of finding Mrs Laden a good-looking woman and she was soon speaking of him as ‘a vur-r-r-ee good man’. Before long whispers began to breeze through the village that he was allowing her the intimacy of trimming his beard and buying his elastic braces (‘without them my dignity would disappear altogether,’ he apologized to Blanche Patch). Where would it end? ‘I shall probably have to marry Mrs Laden,’ he confided to Nancy Astor.

  Both Lady Astor and Miss Patch felt qualms over this new regime. Since Higgs had left there was no other man on the premises – only Mrs Laden, Miss Patch and the Irish parlourmaid Margaret
Cashin. It was a delicate situation. But before many weeks passed Mrs Laden had calmed Lady Astor’s and Miss Patch’s turbulent suspicions. They were particularly thankful that she knew her place. She never allowed G.B.S. into the kitchen. ‘Your job is to write plays and mine is to keep house,’ she instructed him. ‘...You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.’ Some people were terrified of G.B.S. but she didn’t appear frightened of him at all – indeed he seemed a little afraid of her. If he wanted anything he had to ask her for it through the kitchen hatch or leave a note for her on the hall table. ‘I am a rank Tory and I heartily disagree with all Socialist views,’ she told him. He seemed delighted. Her strong Aberdonian accent was wonderfully effective when discouraging callers on the telephone and at the front door. ‘If I didn’t have Mrs Laden I’d have an Alsatian watchdog,’ Shaw told visitors. In the village she was referred to as ‘the Dragon’ and, accepting this as a compliment, bought herself a brooch in the form of a green dragon telling G.B.S. he was ‘St George to my Dragon’.

  In these days of food rationing Mrs Laden’s job was not easy. Shaw never allowed her to buy black market goods and he wanted the calories in each dish to be calculated – though she often found him eating sweets, or with a chunk of iced cake in his hand, between meals. ‘Sugar I stole,’ he had written of his childhood. When he was past ninety, Mrs Laden would come across him in the evening spooning sugar into his mouth from a bowl. For the most part he lived off soups, eggs, milk, honey, cheese, fruit, cream, biscuits and lemon juice. Mrs Laden’s husband had been a vegetarian and she had gone through a course of training in vegetarian cookery. Even Miss Patch melted somewhat at the new fare. ‘After Mrs Higgs’s two or three dishes over and over again, Mrs Laden’s meals are the masterpieces of a beribboned chef,’ Shaw told Nancy Astor.

  As his secretary Miss Patch sometimes opened proposals of marriage from complete strangers, and G.B.S. would forward one or two of them to Nancy Astor with a note: ‘You see, I am still in demand.’ Would he really be silly enough to marry again? ‘Second marriages are the quietest and happiest,’ he wrote and Miss Patch agreed. Hadn’t Lloyd George married his secretary Frances Stevenson in 1943? But Miss Patch worried that her employer might suddenly attach himself to the wrong person while Lady Astor felt convinced that any second marriage would be disastrous. There was no telling, they agreed, where his vanity might lead him. According to Shavian economics he was growing increasingly attractive to women as his life-expectancy shortened. ‘I am rather a catch now,’ he explained to Molly Tompkins, ‘having only a few years at most to live (quite probably a few days).’

  Old flames such as Molly caused Miss Patch and Lady Astor most apprehension. Having gone to Rome, Molly had like Sweetie in Too True to be Good led the life of a flamboyant aristocrat until, tired and lonely, she suddenly attempted to kill herself. Shaw had been apprised of her story by Cecil Lewis who still saw her occasionally in Italy. The Wall Street crash forced Molly to give up the palazzo on the Isolino San Giovanni and during the 1930s Shaw paid for the education in England of her son Peter. ‘You may send me Peter’s bills until I am broke,’ he wrote to the headmaster of Ferndale, a private school in Surrey.

  Molly had meanwhile turned to playwriting and sent Shaw a melodrama in which, as at the end of Tosca, the heroine leaps from a parapet and is drowned in the lake – only to be revived by G.B.S. who changed the plot into a farce like Jitta’s Atonement. When Laurence mislaid this tragicomedy, Molly took up another career, arriving in London for a one-woman exhibition of her paintings at the Leicester Galleries. ‘How terrifying!’ Shaw greeted her. ‘What on earth am I to do with you?’ He bought one of her pictures, ‘The Road to Stresa’ which he still called The Road to Baveno. ‘I found him his old self,’ Molly wrote, ‘if anything more dear and charming than ever.’ After divorcing Laurence, she rented a studio in Chelsea at the end of 1937. ‘You mustn’t come near us,’ Shaw commanded her. ‘Why are you so terrified?’ she asked, and he replied that he did not want her to see him at eighty-two ‘and shatter your memories’. So leaving him her love and ‘many more things’ she did ‘not know how to say but will always have with me’, she took off for Rome again and eventually sailed into New York as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

  Now surely, like the love-goddess Maya who was conceived from her and came to life on the Unexpected Isles, she must vanish. And so she did until Shaw summoned her up after Charlotte’s death. ‘Let me have a line occasionally. We can write more freely now that Charlotte can never read our letters.’ So she wrote to him freely, proposing a last adventure. She would cross the Atlantic and come to him. They would make up for lost time. ‘I am too old for such shocks,’ he was to answer her. She was an atom bomb exploding in a havoc of romantic ridicule. ‘I am ashamed of you for being afraid,’ she replied. Besides, she only wanted a short visit. ‘You must cast me off like a laddered stocking,’ he pleaded. But she seemed unable to do this. ‘When I can’t write to you I am always a little lost.’ So they continued playing on each other’s emotions, conjuring up their phantom island and the endless road to Baveno. ‘Have you not yet discovered that the only roads that remain beautiful are those that never led anywhere?’ he had once asked her. ‘For you never come to the end of them.’

  *

  Early in 1945 Blanche Patch decided to brave the bombs and move into a private apartment at the Onslow Court Hotel, a respectable address in Queen’s Gate soon to be made notorious by John Haig’s acid bath murders.

  There were several reasons for her retreat. Very few people were privileged to be intimate with G.B.S. or could understand how such intimacy was enhanced by a judicious distance. She was also better placed to drop in for ‘a chit-chat’ with Shaw’s solicitor and accountant. All the same, Miss Patch felt ‘down in the dumps’. It was strange, she reflected, ‘how indifferent he is to what makes me suffer’.

  Putting aside their jealousies, Miss Patch, Mrs Laden and Lady Astor were beginning to form a wary alliance against three mysterious men Shaw had recently imported into his life to cope with the extra work created by ‘Charlotte’s death and the near prospect of my own’.

  The first of these new men was John Wardrop, a twenty-year-old Scottish journalist who had arrived on 17 December 1939 at Whitehall Court from Edinburgh, crumpled, unshaven, ‘like the hero in fiction... with something around a shilling in my pocket and a picture in my heart’. Wardrop had no friends in London, and no plans other than that of attaching himself to G.B.S. He wanted to interview him, write articles about him, become his friend. He introduced himself to Gabriel Pascal, Hesketh Pearson and J. Arthur Rank as Shaw’s prospective literary agent and sought to make his attachment indefinably closer after tracking down Erica Cotterill, then living under an assumed name in a North Devon farmhouse. ‘Be kind to her,’ Shaw advised: ‘she is a nonpareil.’

  Wardrop was difficult to employ, being ‘too good for one level and not schooled enough for the other’. He dreamed of editing Shaw’s correspondence, advising on the productions of his plays, representing him on the sets of his films. By 1942 however he was working less exaltedly as Shaw’s editorial assistant and proof-reader on Everybody’s Political What’s What?

  While waiting for his Shavian future to flower, Wardrop had begun living with Eleanor O’Connell, a capable woman fifteen years older than himself, at a house in Park Village West next to the one occupied by Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw during her last years. G.B.S. had gone round to their house after Charlotte’s death and invited them to visit Whitehall Court. To Miss Patch’s annoyance he showed them round Charlotte’s bedroom and gave Wardrop a key to the apartment so that he could work there in the evenings cataloguing Charlotte’s books. Desiring more, Wardrop gained Shaw’s permission to carry off various papers from the study files ‘for greater safety’. This was almost the last straw for Miss Patch. ‘We had some really good rows over the Wardrops when Charlotte died,’ she told Hesketh Pearson.

  Wardrop sought the posthumous appointme
nt as Shaw’s official biographer. He saw the original ‘shilling in my pocket’ spinning into a magical fortune. ‘You are to have my house and everything in it, including my Rolls Royce car, which you are already driving in your dreams,’ Shaw was to tell him. ‘...happy as the dream is, I must wake you up.’

  Then, just as Miss Patch felt she had checked Wardrop’s trespass into her territory, Shaw ‘inflicts the Jew on me,’ she complained.

  The Jew was Dr Fritz Loewenstein. He too had been circling round G.B.S. before Charlotte’s death, soliciting his help as early as 1936 in the compilation of a bibliography. Unfortunately Shaw was ‘a man who had no understanding of or respect for the responsibilities of scholarship’. Loewenstein had left Germany in 1933 with little more than a doctorate from the University of Würzburg for a thesis on Japanese prints and after the declaration of war was briefly interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. ‘I am a Jewish refugee,’ he wrote to Shaw in 1942, ‘...and I am 41 years of age. I am married and have three children. I am as poor as a church mouse and make at present my living as a motor mechanic-trainee.’ From his home in north-west London he set out to create a Shaw Society, backdating its foundation to Shaw’s eighty-fifth birthday. By means of lectures and exhibitions, bulletins and publications such as Loewenstein’s own bibliography, this Shaw Society was to work ‘for the creation of a new Civilisation based on Shavian principles’.

  Loewenstein’s invention appalled Shaw. ‘Do not, I beg you, let me see your handwriting, much less yourself,’ he advised Loewenstein early in 1943. ‘...Occupy yourself with your Society as much as you please, but not with G. Bernard Shaw.’

  The Shaw Society became the power base for all Loewenstein’s throbbing plans. By the beginning of 1944 Shaw was calling him ‘a man to be avoided beyond any other fellow creature’. But Loewenstein was not easy to discourage. He weathered a storm of Shavian abuse and still trudged onwards. By the summer of 1944 he had advanced as far as Harpenden, three miles west of Ayot St Lawrence, where his wife was obliged to manage a lodging house in lieu of rent. Buoyed up with the title of ‘official bibliographer and remembrancer’, Loewenstein put himself entirely at Shaw’s disposal.