Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘Not at all a bad beginning this of yours... Keep at it,’ Shaw answered. He was referring to her alphabet. But in her next letter she began unburdening herself of an obsession. ‘My problem is concerned with my little daughter, whom I believe to have been swopped by accident in the Nottingham nursing home where she was born, for another child born at the same time... I have been endeavouring to persuade the other parents to join with me in scientific tests... and they have refused... on the grounds that they are fond of the child they have and don’t wish to give her up.’

  Margaret Wheeler was a strong-willed, independent-minded, working-class woman, full of energy and argument, and ‘in the grip of a passion to know about things’. In short, she was a species of genuine Shavian. ‘Altogether a very difficult case,’ he summed up, ‘for which there is no harmless solution possible.’ But she was determined to find a solution. He warned her ‘not to prove your case legally and publicly’, reminded her that ‘unsuitable arrangements sometimes last longest’, suggested the possibility of a ‘reciprocal adoption’ only if both sets of parents agreed it was best for the children, and counselled her to be ‘content with the establishment of a private understanding between the two families’.

  It was all sensible advice though ‘my letters will not help you,’ he promised. But they were soon doing her ‘no end of good’ and she felt justified in having appealed to him. ‘I am serene in my confidence that you will not do anything against the interests of the two children whose future you have helped me to consider,’ she assured him.

  She did not want his money. She did not want to marry him – with five children and a husband she was sufficiently married already. ‘I am perfectly happy just writing to you,’ she told him. ‘I cannot go on writing for ever,’ he protested, ‘and really should not indulge in this correspondence at all.’ Yet he was interested by her curious situation. Orphans, foundlings, outcasts, changelings had always fascinated him. ‘The serial keeps up its interest,’ he admitted. ‘I am still interested,’ he added two years later.

  This was partly because Margaret Wheeler was a natural writer. He recommended her to take it up professionally. ‘I don’t care a damn about seeing myself in print,’ she replied. ‘...I like having you around to practise on.’ Writing to Shaw was like talking to someone over a garden wall. ‘I should never have written to you in the first instance had I not felt completely safe with you.’

  They exchanged photographs. He let her know she was ‘an attractively intelligent woman... able to get round bank managers, solicitors, literary celebrities... You are what experienced men call a dangerous woman... I have been a dangerous man myself.’ But looking at his photograph she could not see that he was dangerous at all. ‘I’m not in the least frightened,’ she boasted. She laughed so much at what he wrote and was so immensely bucked up that she ‘felt like charging everybody else sixpence to look at me’.

  So they both kept up their teasing and scolding, covering every subject from marriage and food rationing to hospital procedures and the control of floods. Over six years this correspondence unfolded into the story of a woman’s life isolated and over-burdened with housework in post-war northern England. Writing to Shaw she could put the awful problem of the jactitated children to the back of her mind and relieve for a time ‘the very strong feeling I carry around with me of being utterly completely and absolutely alone’.

  ‘As long as I live I must write,’ Shaw had said. His letters to ‘Dear Mrs Wheeler, not to say Margaret or Maggie or Meg’ became part of this process of living, lightening a little the solitude of these last years.

  *

  These last years were framed by two controversial wills. The net value of Charlotte’s estate amounted to £150,976 13s. 9d. (equivalent to £3.25 million in 1997) out of which £49,702 9s. 5d. was to be paid in death duties. Apart from a number of small annuities for the servants, there was also a legacy of £1,000 to Sidney Webb and £20,000 to Charlotte’s niece. By selling some of his own investments Shaw had paid these legacies almost immediately. He was appointed joint executor with the National Provincial Bank and given a life interest in Charlotte’s estate. But since this would simply have raised his own supertax, he relinquished his role as beneficiary and strengthened Charlotte’s residuary estate.

  After Shaw’s death, Charlotte’s money was to be left in trust to an Irish bank for the development of Irish culture. The National City Bank was directed to use the residual £94,000 to make grants to institutions having as their objects ‘the bringing of the masterpieces of fine art within the reach of the Irish people’, the teaching of ‘self control, elocution, oratory, and deportment, the arts of personal contact, of social intercourse’, and the establishment of a ‘Chair or Readership’ at an Irish university to give instruction in those subjects.

  What incensed potential beneficiaries were the reasons Charlotte advanced for these charitable endeavours. She had observed how ‘the most highly instructed and capable persons’ were derided by reason of ‘their awkward manners... by vulgarities of speech and other defects as easily corrigible by teaching and training as simple illiteracy’, and how the lack of this teaching and training ‘produces not only much social friction but grave pathological results’.

  The will had been partly worded by Sidney Webb, but the blame was loaded on to G.B.S. People lamented that the good intentions of a sweetly nurtured, gently connected Irish lady should have been interfered with by a ‘counterfeit Irishman’ with a ‘bad temper’. G.B.S. was pictured as a wizard changing her gift into an insult. The New Yorker concluded: ‘anybody who thinks the Irish can be taught self-control is a crazy optimist, and anybody who thinks they need to be taught elocution is just plain crazy.’

  Shaw’s last will, which he completed shortly before his ninety-fourth birthday, has connections with Charlotte’s over its disposal of papers, its complementary annuities to servants (with a clause respecting inflation) and a charitable trust challenging England to mind its language. It is an extraordinarily public-spirited document giving works of art by Augustus John, Rodin, Strobl, Sargent, Troubetskoy to public galleries and theatres in Britain, Ireland and the United States, his furniture to the National Trust, papers of sociological interest to the British Library of Political Science at the London School of Economics, and an enormous collection of literary papers to the British Museum ‘where all the would-be biographers can find it and do their worst or their best’.

  The most original feature of this will was its disposal of his royalties over the then posthumous fifty-year copyright period. During the first twenty-one years following his death, he directed that these earnings should be used for the creation and promotion of a new phonetic alphabet containing at least forty letters ‘one symbol for each sound’. Over the following twenty-nine years his copyright income was to be shared equally by three residuary legatees: the National Gallery of Ireland ‘to which I owe much of the only real education I ever got as a boy in Eire’; the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (on whose Council he had served thirty years and on which he forced the admission of women) representing the theatre where he had derived his livelihood; and the British Museum ‘in acknowledgement of the incalculable value to me of my daily resort to the Reading Room of that Institution at the beginning of my career’.

  By appointing the Public Trustee as his executor and making him responsible for challenging English orthography, Shaw hoped to give his proposal additional authority. He knew that people ‘just laugh at spelling reformers as silly cranks’. So he attempted to exhibit a phonetic alphabet as native good sense while making traditional spelling sound foreign and absurd. ‘Let people spell as they speak without any nonsense about bad or good or right or wrong spelling and speech,’ he urged. He would wrinkle his face into the most terrible shapes when pronouncing the word ‘though’ with six letters instead of two. But when an enthusiastic convert suggested that ‘ghoti’ would have been a reasonable way to spell ‘fish’ under the old system (gh as in ‘toug
h’, o as in ‘women’ and ti as in ‘nation’) the subject seemed almost engulfed in the ridicule from which Shaw was determined to preserve it.

  ‘The fact that English is spelt conventionally and not phonetically makes the art of recording speech almost impossible,’ he had complained in his notes to Captain Brassbound’s Conversion. When he came to Pygmalion, a romance advertising the science of phonetics, he abandoned his attempt to represent Eliza Doolittle’s broad cockney with transliterated ‘nu speling’ which looked illiterate and was ‘unintelligible outside London’. ‘It cannot be done with our alphabet,’ he stated in 1936.

  This failure was one of the ‘everyday workshop grievances’ with which he ventilated his alphabetical campaign. From his years policing pronunciation for the British Broadcasting Corporation he knew that his battles with the ‘mob of spelling cranks’ would be hard and long. ‘The only danger I can foresee in the establishment of an English alphabet is the danger of civil war,’ he wrote. But after forty years he had concluded that ‘no British Government will ever be stirred to action in the matter until the economies of a phonetically spelt scientific and scholarly Pidgin are calculated and stated in terms of time, labour and money’. Providing this economic argument was Shaw’s unique contribution to the spelling reform debate. If he could demonstrate a large financial saving, large enough perhaps to pay for a third world war, what government could resist?

  Between Charlotte’s death and his own he returned to this windmill and charged with heroic persistence. ‘I am a citizen desirous of bequeathing my property to the public for public good,’ he announced in a public letter which was printed in 1944 as a leaflet and sent to twenty-two government departments as well as to colleges, trusts, societies and ‘all other stones I could think of to turn’.

  There was gathering interest after the war in adult literacy, initial teaching alphabets for children and the reform of language. This interest was to reach its conclusion in 1975 with the Bullock Report, A Language for Life. But already by the late 1940s it seemed that a change in English lettering was more likely than changes in coinage, the measurements of weights or distances or temperatures. Shaw’s circular unleashed an extraordinary response.

  Unharnessed languages rushed in at him from everywhere and he beat them off with blue printed postcards, statements for debates in Parliament, letters to Tit-Bits and The Times, and an ultimate brochure launched at all members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, at the entire Dáil and sixty Irish senators. But still they came at him, the champions of Basic English and Simplified Spelling, knights of Interglossa and Esperanto, Novial and Volapük, ancient lords of Visible Speech, irascible young linguists, strange panoptic conjugators, calligraphers, mathematical symbolists, firers of pistics, shorthanders, Pidgin fanciers. ‘It is clear that if I wait for a solution before making my will I shall die intestate as far as the alphabet is concerned,’ he told the educationist James Pitman.

  That a man of letters might want to improve his implements so as to lessen the disparity in speed between written and spoken language, between thought and its communication on to paper, is not unreasonable. Shaw took many sensible precautions. He defined a limited experiment to place a new alphabet into free competition with the old (as Arabic numerals had competed successfully with Roman numerals), ‘until one of the two proves the fitter to survive’. Neither was he deaf to the many regional accents in Britain, nor did he claim that one was better or any ideal: he simply relied on what was generally intelligible. He never contemplated designing the new alphabet himself or appropriating the reform personally. Yet in spite of all this surrounding sense, the scheme remains illusory.

  This was partly because he omitted from his will the familiar virtues of alphabetical reform such as its educational benefits for infants and the environmental saving of trees. He believed that a good phonetic script would make English easier for foreigners and improve its chances of emerging by natural selection from international Babel to become the lingua franca of the world: ‘the language with the best spelling and the least grammar will win,’ he predicted. But this too is omitted from the will. He argued that any operation for rescuing the handicapped language should be led by economists. He put his trust in James Pitman, who was not only a Member of Parliament but also the grandson of the inventor of the phonographic system of shorthand. ‘You are, I should say, by far the best equipped adventurer in the field,’ he wrote to Pitman. ‘...You have no enemies and a great phonetic name.’

  Under the eccentric rationality of Shaw’s proposals, the American writer Jacques Barzun was to detect a symbolic motive. ‘His expressed purpose was not his real purpose,’ Barzun wrote; ‘he did not want to save ink and paper, help the child and favor the foreigner. What did he want to do? Simply to get rid of the past, to give a part of mankind a fresh start by isolating it from its own history and from the ancestral bad habits of the other nations.’

  In old age a peculiar passion enters his crusade and ties it to his family name. ‘All round me I hear the corruption of our language,’ he writes, ‘produced by the absurd device of spelling the first sound in my name with the two letters sh.’ This impurity weighs on him like a defect in the blood. In the will his desire is expressed as an equation involving labour, cost and time: the mental labour to which he had been so ecstatically if regretfully addicted; the cost into which he had transferred much emotional profit and loss; and the time that was running out. ‘Saving time is of no significance,’ protested Hesketh Pearson. But at ninety it may be. Shaw calculated that phonetic spelling would ‘add years’ to a writer’s life.

  He had shed a good deal that belonged to his past before he came to sign his will. He gave the surviving holographs of his novels to the National Library of Ireland. Then there was his property. ‘I own the freehold of a ten roomed house in the village of Ayot St Lawrence in Herts,’ he had written to the secretary of the National Trust shortly after Charlotte’s death. ‘...Has such a trifle any use or interest for the National Trust?’ A member of the Trust, James Lees-Milne, came down one dismal day in early 1944, glanced at the exterior of this ‘ugly, dark red-brick villa’, glanced through its ‘far from beautiful’ rooms with their pinched fireplaces, flaking walls, and decided that the National Trust was positively interested. Shaw transferred many of his possessions from Whitehall Court to add zest to what he called ‘the birthplace’. The rooms brimmed with memorabilia and mementoes. Here is the Bechstein piano on which he played to Charlotte; the weighing-scales that registered his decreasing weight; his fountain pen, gold propelling pencil, mittens, cameras, steel-rimmed spectacles and the typewriter that could type plays. Here are the colour-coded postcards on Capital Punishment, Vegetarian Diet, Temperance and the Forty-Letter British Alfabet. Here too is a Staffordshire figure of Shakespeare picked up cheap at the seaside, an ancient exercise bicycle bought in France, a filing cabinet with its drawers marked ‘Ayot’, ‘Russia’, ‘Keys and Contraptions’, together with his admission card to the Reading Room of the British Museum for 1880 and his membership of the Cyclist Touring Club renewed in 1950. There are his books, the framed parchment scrolls of his honorary freedoms of Dublin and St Pancras; his Hollywood Oscar and Nobel Prize for Literature as well as a medal from the Irish Academy of Letters and the master key to the Malvern Festival. In the meagre writing-hut stand a wicker chair, narrow bed, flap table, telephone, thermometer, toothbrush. Everywhere, from the brass door-knocker inwards, are images of G.B.S., and pictures of those he knew: the Sartorio portrait of Charlotte; photographs of the two heralds of his career, William Morris and Sidney Webb; his special friends and loves, Archer and Barker, Ellen and Stella; his sparring partners Chesterton and Wells; fellow-playwrights and compatriots, Ibsen and Barrie, Sean O’Casey, W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory; and others he admired such as Lenin, Gene Tunney, Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, Einstein and Uncle Joe Stalin.

  Early in 1949, he notified the managing director of Whitehall Court that he wanted to be transferre
d to a smaller flat in the building. He had last come up to Whitehall Court at the end of 1946 ‘and it is unlikely that I shall ever see London again,’ he wrote. ‘...all I need is a study for Miss Patch to work in, a lavatory, and perhaps a bedroom... in an emergency.’ He finally gave up number 130 Whitehall Court in May 1949 and became the absentee tenant of number 116, a two-roomed furnished flat downstairs which at ten guineas a month was half the cost.

  He was impatient to sell ‘every stick and stone’ not needed at Ayot. There were 1,100 books at Whitehall Court and he was determined to make them ‘more saleable by every trick in my power’. Into eight of the more valuable volumes he inserted reminiscences. The Cranwell Edition of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom went for £460, a facsimile set of four folios of Shakespeare’s plays for £163. Apsley Cherry-Garrard bought the Ashendene Press edition of Dante’s Tutte le Opere for £115, and Gertrude Lawrence snapped up Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (illustrated by Beardsley) for only £58. Except for Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (which went for £125), the authors’ presentation copies fetched tiny prices: £7 10s. 0d. for Yeats’s Trembling of the Veil, £6 10s. 0d. for Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own; £6 for O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. ‘I am out for money: HARD,’ Shaw told Sydney Cockerell; ‘for the rest of the year my name is Harpagon.’ His books raised £2,649 15s. 0d. (equivalent to £50,000 in 1997), which he used to offset the Capital Levy which the Labour Government introduced in 1948 to avoid national bankruptcy.