Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘I’ve now reached the stage when I can only sit back and smile at the Shaw–Wardrop–Loewenstein struggles,’ Miss Patch had written that summer. But there was bitterness in her smile. Everything was happening very differently from what she had imagined.

  Loewenstein was an altogether different ‘hero in fiction’ from Wardrop – a Wellsian, almost Chaplinesque figure, middle-aged, bowler-hatted, with a homely moustache and forceful expression. While Wardrop was assuming ‘not only the position of my literary agent but of my son and heir,’ Shaw noted, Loewenstein ‘is resolved to be the oldest and dearest friend I have in the world’. His own job specifications were more modest. He looked for a superior ‘errand boy’ in Wardrop and a ‘first rate office boy’ in Loewenstein. Whenever Wardrop was given some menial task he looked ‘amazed’ and became ‘infuriated’. But no task was too menial for Loewenstein who ‘positively likes sorting papers and doing things that would drive you mad,’ Shaw told Blanche Patch.

  By the end of 1944 Wardrop accidentally secured an advantage after Loewenstein’s wife hurried her family back to London. ‘I am freed from the daily visits of Loewenstein, the Jew,’ Miss Patch exulted. But no sooner had she herself returned to London than Loewenstein reappeared in Hertfordshire. Released from his wife and family he was free for five days a week to walk the two and a half miles to Ayot from his room near the Wheathampstead rubbish dump. Shaw hoped that Loewenstein could ‘come to a co-operative understanding with W[ardrop]’. But in the second week of February 1945, reacting to information given by Miss Patch, Wardrop ‘burst in on me,’ Shaw wrote from Ayot, ‘with a suit case, frantic about Loewenstein, and announcing that he had come to sleep here and live with me to protect his property (ME) against the Jew’. Shaw packed him back to London and drafted a note intended to resolve the crisis. Wardrop had ‘proved impossible,’ he decided. ‘...The slightest encouragement turned his head... A rebuff prostrated him to the verge of suicide.’ Loewenstein had ‘captured the tidying-up job by sheer fitness for it’.

  As Shaw approached his nineties this ‘scramble for the rights to be regarded as the only friend of an old celebrity who had no friends’ was providing what one visitor to Ayot was to call ‘a fantastic ending... almost as sardonic as the last days of Swift’. These friends jostled round, taking measurements, calculating odds, advancing terms while G.B.S. looked on quizzically at his own obsequies.

  The three women had now largely combined their operations. Mrs Laden reported what she saw at Ayot to Miss Patch who embellished the news for Lady Astor who then blazed her way down to Ayot and confronted G.B.S. with her accusations. Loewenstein, who was now being employed to prepare the Shaw archive for posthumous presentation to the British Museum and London School of Economics, as well as to take on various daily chores sorting out priceless ‘old rubbish’, hastened to prostrate himself before Lady Astor. ‘My Lady... Future Shaw-Historians (including the present writer) will be most grateful for your Ladyship’s intercession. I beg to remain, your Ladyship’s obedient servant, F. E. Loewenstein.’

  Lady Astor did not relish this falsification of her motives. After twenty-five years in the House of Commons, she had recently been pressured into announcing her retirement from politics. But she was finding this ‘one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life’. At the age of sixty-six she was still teeming with energy. Yet she was without occupation. Seeking to regain a sense of ‘positive authority’, she entered aggressively into the domestic politics of Ayot. ‘I don’t like the company you are keeping,’ she warned Shaw. ‘...Charlotte would rise in her grave. Mercifully I am not in my grave... I must take active steps.’

  Besides seeking cover from Lady Astor’s heavy artillery, Loewenstein also had to dodge the crossfire from Mrs Laden who, being a war widow, ‘has a particular antipathy to Germans,’ noticed Miss Patch whose own antipathy favoured the Jews. When Mrs Laden spotted Loewenstein roaming from room to room, peering into drawers, rustling wastepaper baskets, ferreting for relics in the store cupboards, when she caught him listening at the telephone or hovering behind her in the hall so as to butt in after she opened the door to visitors, her ire was kindled and she breathed out her dragon’s flames. ‘I dont know when I gave a man such a dressing down,’ she wrote to Miss Patch. ‘...I will not have it when I am in charge of Mr Shaw’s house.’

  This was a valuable letter and Miss Patch made several copies of it. She had taken advice from Shaw’s solicitor, and ‘I dont think there is anything to be done about ousting the German as long as GBS is pleased with him,’ she concluded. ‘My one hope is that he will one day get such a drenching on his walk from Wheathampstead... that he will pass out.’

  But then, late in 1945, Miss Patch was provoked into uncharacteristically dramatic action after the third of Shaw’s ‘peculiar friends’, Stephen Winsten, stepped forward. Winsten was to fashion a career out of being Shaw’s neighbour at Ayot. He was like a man ‘who comes out one morning to find a meteorite in his back garden,’ Brian Inglis wrote, ‘and who turns out to be good at organising coach trips for the public to see it’. In their imaginations the Winstens lived through famous people, soliciting politenesses which, in the abundant retelling, swelled into exotic compliments. Shaw enjoyed playing with their cat Fuzzia (a tortoiseshell rival to Mrs Laden’s bright orange cat Bunch), sitting for Clare Winsten (who was a sculptress and painter) and chatting to her husband (who had been imprisoned as a youthful pacifist in the Great War). Now that Apsley Cherry-Garrard had left Larmar Park, the Winstens were ‘the only people in the village I can talk to or can talk to me’.

  Of ‘GBS’s triplets – War, Win and Loew’, it was really quite difficult for the three women to agree which ‘parasite’ was the most dislikeable. Mrs Laden ‘detested’ Wardrop, but Miss Patch generally remained loyal to ‘the non-stop smoking German Jew’ Loewenstein as the most poisonous of them all, though when Lady Astor described him as ‘a sweet, little spring lamb’ in comparison to the ‘Polish Jew’ Winsten, she could not help laughing and spreading the amusement from her hide-out at the Onslow Court Hotel.

  Stephen Winsten was set on being Shaw’s Boswell, and since ‘many people had been pressing me to share my unique experience with them’, he brought out what his publishers were to call three ‘outstanding examples of Boswellian art’. After the first of these, Days With Bernard Shaw, was presented to G.B.S., ‘he blushed like an adolescent; he loved it,’ Winsten recorded. ‘Whenever I called on him I would find the book beside him.’ Alerted by Loewenstein to many concealed breaches of copyright, Shaw eventually picked it up and looked inside. ‘In hardly any passage in the book as far as I have had time to examine it,’ he wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘had Mr Winsten’s art not improved on bare fact and occurrence by adding the charm of his own style to the haphazard crudity of nature.’ Winsten admitted to being ‘mightily amused’ by his friend’s letter. Shaw had been ‘eager to help,’ he explained, and had written it to provoke sales – indeed he even offered to draft ‘a crushing answer’, but afterwards ‘he was most apologetic’.

  Unlike Loewenstein, who deferentially referred to Shaw as ‘the Master’, the Winstens traded in superiority, especially Clare who described Lady Astor as ‘an American chorus girl... grossly ignorant of how to speak to an English lady and a distinguished artist’. Shaw too was something of a disappointment to her. It was true that he extravagantly praised her work, came to use her drawings rather than Topolski’s to illustrate his books, paid for her statue of St Joan in his garden, contributed £2,000 for the education of her son at university and provided a job as theatre designer for one of her daughters. But she could not abide his lack of generosity – for it could only have been meanness that prevented Shaw from purchasing her portrait of him. ‘I will not buy the portrait quite simply because I dont want it,’ he had told her.

  Shaw’s Trust Fund of £2,000 for Christopher Winsten’s education came on top of a grant-in-aid for another £2,000 to John Wardrop: while
Miss Patch’s salary had remained static over twelve years. The injustice overwhelmed her. ‘I have seen the wicked in great power,’ she burst out to Shaw, quoting Psalm 34 Verse 35, ‘and spreading like a great bay tree.’

  After financing his old Fabian colleague Hubert Bland’s son through Cambridge and the medical profession, Shaw had got in the habit ‘of spending some of my spare money in that way,’ he explained. There had been school fees for the son of his friend Frederick Evans, the bookseller and photographer; and then Peter Tompkins and now Christopher Winsten. ‘They were all more or less Pygmalion experiments,’ he told Miss Patch. Admittedly the case of John Wardrop was rather different. ‘He was willing to matriculate and qualify for the bar... The result remains to be seen. Meanwhile he is offstage.’

  But Blanche Patch was not appeased. She kept her grievance hot. ‘While lacking all the things required from a secretary,’ she wrote, ‘he [Loewenstein] possesses the racial knack of knowing how to extract money. In the past 18 months he has had about £745 from you in addition to his percentages, payments from newspapers for news of you and subscriptions from members of the Shaw Society.’ During this time she had been issuing licences, checking royalties, vetting United States plays in production, all of which had ‘grown to such an extent that it might be said I am expected to manage a play-leasing bureau... It is a feeling of resentment that you should look on me simply as a shorthand-typist.’

  ‘My dear Blanche,’ Shaw replied. ‘You have given me a jolt at last.’ In all their years together she had never seen anything in his socialism. Yet what more vivid illustration could there be of the curse of property, the absurd distortion of worth based on pay differentials and the disabling effects of inheritance than this unhappy scramble swirling round him since Charlotte’s death? He had stopped raising Blanche Patch’s salary, ‘which has nothing to do with your merits,’ he explained, once she ‘had enough for comfortably ladylike life, with a pension that would leave you rather more after my death’. Recently he had analysed her financial position with an accountant to ensure it was fair and generous. ‘For emergencies and luxuries you always could depend on me for a grant-in-aid... If you are pressed for money you have only to suggest a grant. Will that satisfy you? If not, what will?’

  But how could it satisfy her? She could not say why it did not, nor what would make all the difference in the world. ‘Dear, long-suffering G.B.S.,’ she answered. ‘I dont really want more money having quite enough for my modest needs – and, anyhow, you have always been generous in paying for things that dont come under my normal duties.’ Money was a shorthand for something that could never be spelt out. She knew that G.B.S. would pay her salary or pension whether she continued working for him or not. She also knew that he gave those jobs which had plagued her to Loewenstein so as to ‘leave you free as possible’. But free for what?

  Hardly had Shaw recovered from Miss Patch’s earthquake than Mrs Laden dropped a bomb on him over breakfast one summer morning by handing in her notice. For two years she had been living at Ayot like someone in solitary confinement. ‘You have only to lift your little finger,’ Shaw said, ‘and I would double your salary.’ But she told him off pretty smartly for that. ‘When I want a rise I will ask for it.’ She also refused his offer of a television set. But when Lady Astor gave her tickets for the Covent Garden ballet she became herself again, ‘utterly repudiating the possibility of leaving me on any terms’. She needed occasional treats in London (spinning up in the Rolls), and also a motor scooter to take her to the shops and cinemas beyond Ayot – then she found out that her salary had been doubled after all.

  Money seemed to mean different things for each of them. ‘Money is power. Money is security. Money is freedom,’ declares the heroine of The Millionairess. For Shaw the love of good economy was the root of all virtue. Equality of income was equality of truth. In a bad economy money was theft and made barren our lives. His parents had married for money; Miss Patch’s fellow-resident at the Onslow Court Hotel was shortly to be murdered for money. Money was simply exchange value for some, and for others the freedom not to exchange what they valued. ‘Are you fond of money?’ the young doctor Harry Trench asks Blanche Sartorius in Widowers’ Houses. Around Ayot the women seemed less acutely fond of it than the men – other people’s money meant almost more to Miss Patch than her own.

  It was a relief to Miss Patch and Mrs Laden when in 1949 the Winstens decided to live in Oxford. Shaw was to miss their company in the last year of his life but, as Clare Winsten made quite plain, it was really his own fault. He could have bought their bungalow for them or another place in the village. But all he did was to write on their behalf to the landlord, Lord Brocket. It was simply not enough. Indeed it was less than he had done for Loewenstein, she believed, and he was a mere employee rather than a fellow-artist.

  Loewenstein’s empire expanded through a proliferation of Shaw Societies round the world. His bibliography expanded too over numberless cards of dense, semi-illegible notes which, in their swelling shopping-bag, would eventually achieve the status of a master-parody of scholarship. But it was as an assistant secretary rather than the flower of scholarship that Loewenstein strengthened his position at Ayot. In 1946 Shaw printed a card announcing that since he had ‘no time for any except the most urgent private correspondence’, he must ‘refer you to the Founder of the Shaw Society, Dr F. E. Loewenstein’ who is ‘better informed on many points than Mr Shaw himself, and will be pleased to be of assistance’.

  Loewenstein’s pamphlets and papers, thickened with pedantic superfluities, added a little to the salary Shaw gave him but were principally investments in the future. He looked for pre-eminence in the posthumous phase of Shaw’s copyright kingdom where he would be crowned Curator of Shaw’s Corner and reign there as his representative on earth. To this end he sought a privileged place in wills Shaw made in the late 1940s. But all G.B.S. finally guaranteed him was an introduction to the Public Trustee (who as the sole executor would appoint the tenant at Ayot), the naming of him as his bibliographer and a recommendation that he be employed or consulted whenever this might prove ‘desirable’.

  Fearing that too much was left uncertain in this legacy, Loewenstein at last pressed Shaw to borrow money so that he could buy a house in St Albans. G.B.S. refused to do this, but in 1949 guaranteed him a bank overdraft of £3,500 (equivalent to £67,000 in 1997) on the strength of which Loewenstein bought the house and renamed it ‘Torca Cottage’. In the event of Shaw’s death, he had balanced his risks between foreclosure at the bank and expulsion from Ayot. But still the risk was great and he attempted to add tenure to the prospect of tenancy by drafting a document guaranteeing him £500 a year for several years after Shaw’s death. This document Shaw apparently tore up, while raising Loewenstein’s salary to £500 a year for three years. ‘He will have to take an overdose if he goes on pursuing you,’ volunteered Lady Astor.

  Lady Astor now looked on Ayot as her new constituency. ‘Keep off, Keep off, Keep off, Keep off,’ Shaw cautioned her. But whenever she was fuelled with fresh evidence of Loewenstein’s ‘disgraceful behaviour’, she would take off for another devastating raid. All the village heard the rumours of her tirades. ‘If you will not let me manage my work and my housekeeping in my own way you must not come at all,’ Shaw eventually retaliated. This letter brought Lady Astor down again at once, and almost weeping she showed Mrs Laden what G.B.S. had sent her.

  ‘You need looking after far more than I do; and nobody knew this better than Charlotte, except perhaps your unfortunate secretaries. You must upset your own household, not mine... As the keeper of a mental patient you are DISCHARGED.’

  Though he had signed off ‘Quite unchanged nevertheless G.B.S.’ this marked the final battle in Nancy Astor’s blazing campaign.

  Miss Patch campaigned more discreetly. Realizing that Loewenstein’s long-term aim was to be appointed Custodian of the Shavian shrine, she set about sabotaging his chances with those who might advise the Public Tru
stee after Shaw’s death. What she wanted was recognition as the First Lady in Shaw’s life at the end. Instead she was to be granted another sort of privilege when, in his ninety-third year, G.B.S. gave her the use of his letters (and Charlotte’s too if she wanted them) for a volume commemorating their thirty years together. Through the dry leaves of this ghosted memoir, she would finally come to share his life.

  4

  Fatal Attachments

  Films, you know, are a strange business. You can get in, but you can’t get out.

  Shaw to S. N. Behrman

  For over two years following his film of Major Barbara, Pascal would regularly ‘go see Bernashaw’. He liked to motor across from his rambling Tudor house at Chalfont St Peter and extravagantly ‘talk cast’. He fancied Marlene Dietrich in The Millionairess, or perhaps Greer Garson ‘my nearly wife’ in Candida; he also dreamed of fixing up Clark Gable and Gary Grant together in The Devil’s Disciple, and actually persuaded Ginger Rogers to appear in Arms and the Man – provided a few dance numbers were added and the action moved from Bulgaria into Canada. ‘Do not argue with her,’ Shaw responded; ‘just throw her out of the window and tell her not to come back.’ The favourite of all Pascal’s schemes was a Saint Joan for which he had signed up Greta Garbo. Unfortunately the idea took a fantastic turn after he tried to raise money from General de Gaulle: ‘instead of Garbo,’ Pascal reported to Shaw, ‘de Gaulle wanted to play the Saint himself.’ If the heroine had been the Blessed Virgin, commented G.B.S., ‘they would probably have suggested Miss Mae West’.