Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  *

  In the New Statesman in May 1950, Shaw published a defence of the ‘Play of Ideas’, responding to Terence Rattigan and making a final analysis of his own dramaturgy.

  ‘Wherever there is a queue waiting for the doors of a theatre to open you may see some vagabond artist trying to entertain it in one way or another... I myself have done the same on Clapham Common, and collected sixteen shillings in my hat at the end for the Socialist cause. I have stopped on the Thames Embankment; set my back to the river wall; and had a crowd listening to me in no time... I, the roofless pavement orator, ended in the largest halls in the country with overcrowds that filled two streets... it illustrates the development of the theatre from the pavement to the tribune and the cathedral, and the promotion of its outcasts to palaces...

  I was going back atavistically to Aristotle, to the tribune stage, to the circus, to the didactic Mysteries, to the word music of Shakespear, to the forms of my idol Mozart, and to the stage business of the great players whom I had actually seen acting, from Barry Sullivan, Salvini, and Ristori to Coquelin and Chaliapin... I know my business both historically and by practice.’

  In one July week that year, Shaw wrote five small scenes of a ‘little comedy’, calling it Why She Would Not. The reason why the good-looking Serafina White will not marry the improving young man is that ‘I am afraid of you,’ she tells him. He is incredulous: ‘I coerce nobody,’ he protests: ‘I only point out the way.’ The play is a Christian allegory. In the first scene the man appears as a chivalrous ‘newcomer’, in the second he is revealed as ‘a carpenter of sorts’, in the third he acts an apparently ‘unemployable walking gentleman’, in the fourth he becomes ‘a very smart city man’ dealing in real estate, and in the fifth he is finally ‘a wonder’, admired but alone. Shaw’s hero is like a miniature of Los in Blake’s Symbolic poems: the voice of eternal prophecy, the spectre of reasoning, the creator of alphabets, divorced from the Female Principle and hammering out the future in his creator’s shade. His Shavian name is Henry Bossborn, a good surname to adopt for a writer once unsure of his legitimacy who had won natural authority through the power of language. His solitude is the solitude G.B.S. had regained seven years after Charlotte’s death.

  Shaw’s nature was rooted in solitude, but it was ringed with crowds of people, as if he lived in the eye of a perpetual storm. The Times, which now recorded his birthdays in its Court Circular, described his ninety-fourth birthday, three days after he completed Why She Would Not, as restful.

  ‘Restful!!! Restful, with the telephone and the door bell ringing all day! With the postmen staggering under bushels of letters and telegrams! With immense birthday cakes... falling on me like millstones! With the lane blocked by cameramen, televisors, photographers, newsreelers, interviewers, all refusing to take No for an answer. And I with a hard day’s work to finish in time for the village post. Heaven forgive The Times. I cannot.’

  Mrs Laden would have refused ‘the King of England’ had he driven up without an appointment. But she could not stop people climbing the trees and peering down, or prevent photographers breaking through the hedges and setting up their cameras on the lawn, or silence the persistent telephone calls. ‘I don’t want to speak to anybody,’ Shaw cried out, ‘alive or dead.’

  He had always been fastidious and could not bear people detecting signs of his infirmities – the egg stain on his tie, the weak bladder. But nothing was hidden from Mrs Laden. She had noticed pools in the lavatory and observed how the old man would empty the chamber pot under his bed each morning. Suspecting he was suffering from renal trouble or perhaps a failure of the prostate gland, she collected a specimen of his urine, saw that it contained blood, and sent to the doctor. He advised immediate treatment. But she knew it was hopeless. He did not want to speak about such things.

  Apart from these secrets, he was not unhappy. ‘Life is worth my while: if it were not I should end it.’ Death did not frighten him. ‘I sleep well, always in the hope that I may not wake again.’

  By the beginning of September he was busy making bonfires in the garden. One of the neighbours rang up to complain about the smoke and Mrs Laden roared ‘with the ferocity of a lioness’ down the telephone. ‘Your phone call to Mrs Laden reached her in a moment when a terrible misfortune had just overtaken her,’ Shaw wrote to pacify him. ‘Our pet cat had died in the night; and she was overwhelmed with grief. Forgive her if she vented any of it on you.’

  The death of Bunch, her orange cat, at last persuaded Mrs Laden to go on holiday up to Scotland. ‘It was the first holiday I’d taken for years,’ she remembered. ‘I was entitled to at least two weeks a year, but I usually felt that something would happen to him if I wasn’t there.’ Margaret Cashin Smith, the recently married Irish parlourmaid, bicycled back to look after him. Everything was prepared. All seemed well. Mrs Laden coached G.B.S. on the things he must not do in her absence, and left at the end of the week.

  ‘I can hardly walk through my garden without a tumble or two,’ Shaw had written in his preface to Buoyant Billions. On Sunday 10 September, once it had stopped raining in the late afternoon, he walked in the garden with his secateurs. ‘Pruning with the secateurs was his chief interest,’ the gardener Fred Drury had reckoned. But this time, while cutting a projecting branch, he slipped, fell on the path, and began blowing the whistle he carried for emergencies. ‘I ran out into the garden and found him on the ground,’ the Irish parlourmaid remembered. ‘I had him sitting on my knees for fifteen minutes. “Put me down and go and fetch someone,” he said, but I wouldn’t put him on the wet grass and blew and blew at the whistle till my husband, who happened to be near, came and helped Mr Shaw into the house.’

  His doctor arrived and sent for a radiologist who was driven to the house by Shaw’s chauffeur Fred Day. A portable X-ray machine revealed that Shaw’s left thigh was fractured, and his leg was put in a splint. The doctor sedated him for the night and later arranged for an ambulance to take him next morning to the Luton and Dunstable Hospital. He also telephoned Mrs Laden who flew back the following day.

  ‘He was in great pain, but most stoical,’ said one of the doctors at the hospital. At 5.15 on the Monday afternoon, he was operated on, the surgeon joining the broken surfaces of the neck of his thigh bone.

  As soon as the newspapers heard of the accident ‘all hell broke loose’. So many telephone calls came in from all parts of the world that the hospital had to employ an extra switchboard operator. The corridors and waiting-room seethed with reporters. Photographers offered the management £1,000 (equivalent to £18,500 in 1997) for a picture of Shaw in bed surrounded with the flowers sent by Winston Churchill, and when this did not succeed they put ladders against the outside wall in an attempt to climb into his room. Mrs Laden, arriving with fruit and pyjamas and an electrically heated bed-warmer, felt quite scared as they all pressed round her.

  The hospital management set aside its boardroom for regular bulletins. Journalists filled the local accommodation and ‘a few of the reporters were found room in a jail cell at the police station’. Their stories were remorselessly cheerful. They quoted the hospital staff as being ‘amazed’ at Shaw’s ‘grand colour’, his ‘lively and talkative’ behaviour and other signs of his rapid recovery: ‘G.B.S. Gets Out of Bed – and Stands,’ miraculously announced one newspaper. When two nurses did lift him for a few seconds he cautioned them to tell no one or else ‘they will say I’ve walked a mile’.

  It quickly became apparent to surgeons and doctors at the hospital that Shaw was suffering from long-standing kidney and bladder trouble. They took temporary measures to relieve the condition and then, on 21 September, operated on him again. Though his fractured thigh was mending well, he was described as being only ‘fairly satisfactory in the circumstances’ and his doctor remembered that shortly after this second operation he became ‘quite unmanageable’. He now had a silver catheter attached to his bladder which had to be cleaned each week and which he was told he must use f
or the rest of his life. He pestered Mrs Laden to let him come home. Eleanor O’Connell, who visited the hospital on 2 October, observed that he looked ‘so fragile and strangely enough not a bit peaceful’, and also that his voice was ‘hoarse and tremulous’. She had to lean her elbows on the bed and put her head on the pillow next to his head. She asked him how he was.

  ‘Everyone asks me that, and its so silly when all I want is to die, but this damned vitality of mine won’t let me.’

  She asked him whether he was looking forward to dying.

  ‘Oh so much, so much (tremulously like a child) if only I could die... I’m in HELL (loudly) here, they wash me all the time... when I’m asleep they wake me, and when I’m awake they ask why I’m not asleep. Each time they pounce on me they tell me it will be just the same as last time and then I find they have added a new torture... (beating feebly against his thigh). Ah if only I could walk I would get up at once and go.’

  According to the orthopaedic surgeon, Shaw ‘might have lived till a hundred’ had he stayed in hospital, allowed them to feed him up with butcher’s meat, and enjoyed another visit or two to the operating theatre. In his preface to The Doctor’s Dilemma he had written: ‘in surgery all operations are recorded as successful if the patient can be got out of the hospital or nursing home alive.’ The last hospital bulletin recorded his ‘satisfactory progress’. And it was true that he was still alive, though such a shadow of G.B.S. he seemed a ghost. ‘He died in effect the day he fell in his garden,’ said the village postmistress Jisbella Lyth. ‘...He died in his garden, like my husband, just as he had always told me he wanted to do.’

  After twenty-four days in hospital, the ambulance drove him back to Ayot where, hidden from the crowd behind a white canvas screen held by his gardener and chauffeur, he was carried into the dining-room which Mrs Laden had fitted up as a bedroom.

  Two nurses looked after him day and night. ‘He is very well, thank you,’ Mrs Laden brusquely informed a journalist from the Manchester Guardian. But in fact she could see that he was not at all himself. His face had fallen in, he was pale and quiet, a vacant thing, ghastly. Everyone saw it. ‘It was pitiful to see him the last time I cut his hair,’ said the man who had been his regular barber for almost twenty years. ‘...he couldn’t have had less flesh on him. Formerly he enjoyed having his hair cut, but that last time he was completely miserable. I don’t know how I got through it. He was a changed man – just like a child. I hope I never have an experience like that again.’

  Passing his room one morning Mrs Laden heard him ask the nurse not to prolong his life as he was a very old man. So she went in at once to upbraid him.

  ‘You’re much more than an old man, you are a national institution.’

  ‘What’s the good of trying to repair an ancient monument?’ he asked.

  Then she burst out: ‘I wish it was I that was dying and not you.’

  In the kitchen she set to preparing some ‘vur-r-r-ee special’ soups with something secretly added to buck him up. But he did not want to eat or drink. He wanted to make what haste he could and be gone. ‘His mental worry about his kidney trouble killed him as much as the illness itself,’ Mrs Laden could tell.

  Blanche Patch went on with her secretarial work as best she might, coming down and reading some of his post to him, holding his wrist as she got a signature out of him. One of the first signatures he wrote on getting back to Ayot was on a large cheque to be divided among the hospital telephonists, porters and nurses whose duties had been so stretched by their newsworthy patient. ‘I don’t think I shall ever write anything more,’ he said.

  They had placed his narrow bed facing a long window so that he could see the lawn. Wearing a light saffron nightgown with wide sleeves he looked ‘a Blake-like figure,’ thought Esmé Percy visiting him there. ‘He took my hand and pressed it against his heart... He just said, “Good luck, good-bye,” and then a brief but heart-rending pause, and “Now get along with you”.’

  Visitors came to cheer him on, then to make their farewells. Loewenstein hovered near the bedroom and eventually took up his vigil in the next room. Nancy Astor came and went bringing many flowers. ‘I don’t want visitors. They tire me too much,’ Shaw had said to Eleanor O’Connell. But a few people, mostly women, were briefly welcome. Sean O’Casey’s beautiful wife Eileen came to see him and stroked his aching head. It was wonderful, he told her. She felt he was ‘back again as a small child wanting a mother’s comfort’. He asked her to kiss him.

  For much of the last week he slept. Then his temperature rose rapidly, and in the early hours of 1 November, shortly before going into a coma, he spoke his last words: ‘I am going to die.’

  Mrs Laden asked the rector of Ayot to read the twenty-third Psalm over him as he lay on his bed, and the rector agreed for ‘the man was surely no atheist’. Shaw had summed up his religious beliefs the week before when speaking to his one-time secretary, Judy Musters: ‘I believe in life everlasting; but not for the individual.’ For twenty-six hours he remained unconscious. Then, early on 2 November, Mrs Laden walked out through the morning mist and told the reporters waiting with their blinding flash bulbs at the gate that, shortly before five o’clock, G.B.S. had died.

  *

  ‘Life goes on as usual at Shaw’s Corner,’ the Daily Herald reported that morning. Outside Fred Drury was brushing up the dead leaves. The windows of the house stood open. Inside the nurses began packing and Lady Astor arrived. So did Pascal, flying in from New York with a suitcase full of vitamins, then bursting into tears, and stating that he would film the life of G.B.S. ‘I shall write it myself,’ he declared before driving off. Death suited G.B.S. He hadn’t appeared so well for a long time. ‘When he was dead he looked wonderful... with a sort of whimsical smile on his face,’ said Mrs Laden. Lady Astor went out later that morning and invited some twenty reporters into the house. ‘I think you ought to see him, he looks so lovely.’ At noon the rector conducted a short service at the bedside and seven women from the village came to pay their last respects. In the afternoon Shaw’s body was driven to the Chapel of Rest at Welwyn. On Lady Astor’s instructions a death mask was made.

  Next day an outpouring of memories and obituaries began on the wireless, the television sets, and in the newspapers. The Indian Cabinet adjourned; theatre audiences in Australia rose for two minutes’ silence; the Swedish National Theatre delivered a statement to the British Ambassador in praise of Shaw’s creative life; and on Broadway and in Times Square the lights were briefly blacked out. ‘There was a singular sense of loss,’ recorded St John Ervine. Shaw himself would have preferred to be remembered ‘as Sonny than as the ghastly old skeleton of a celebrity I now am’. But there was hardly anyone alive who knew him as Sonny – certainly not the presidents and prime ministers whose fine opinions were being blazed round the world. On the other hand it was strange that such a dry, unsentimental phenomenon as G.B.S. could have touched ordinary people unless something of Sonny had lived on. ‘I sobbed my socks off,’ said the housewife from Workington. ‘It was a great loss to me,’ said the village postmistress at Ayot.

  Shaw had wanted the funeral service at Golders Green to be private, but some 500 people haphazardly gathered in the Garden of Remembrance. ‘We’ll never see his like again,’ platitudinized a cockney woman. ‘Madam, we must never underrate posterity,’ an Irishman corrected her. A representative of the women’s movement who unfurled a green, purple and white striped flag proclaiming G.B.S. ‘one of our best friends during our fight for the vote’ was hustled off by police.

  The music was relayed to those outside: the hymn at the beginning of Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel overture, the Libera me from Verdi’s Requiem, extracts from Elgar’s The Music Makers and the Nimrod section from his Enigma Variations. Sydney Cockerell read the final passage of Mr Valiant for Truth from The Pilgrim’s Progress. So he passed over.

  Charlotte had directed in her will that her ashes ‘shall be taken to Ireland and scattered on Irish
ground’, but after the war started Shaw proposed that their ashes be mixed inseparably and distributed round the garden at Ayot. ‘It pleased her, and she agreed.’

  Charlotte’s ashes had been waiting in a bronze casket at the Golders Green columbarium, and his were placed in a smaller casket which fitted on top of hers in the niche. Early in the morning of 23 November, the two caskets were taken down to Ayot. The Public Trustee emptied his ashes into hers at the dining-room sideboard, and stirred them together. Then, with his two deputies, Charlotte’s executor from the bank, the local doctor, a news agency reporter representing the public, and Mrs Laden, he went into the garden. The doctor shook the aluminium sprinkler and a grey cloud drifted into the air and was carried to the ground by the falling rain. He led them past the flower beds, emptying the ashes along the path and round the revolving hut at the end – where G.B.S. had recently paraded with a famous actress and, waving her goodbye, asked:

  ‘Well, did I give a good performance?’

  ~

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  Michael Holroyd’s highly acclaimed Lytton Strachey is coming in ebook in spring 2015!

  For more information, click one of the links below:

  Acknowledgements

  Appendix

  Index

  ~

  Michael Holroyd

  More books by Michael Holroyd

  An invitation from the publisher

  Acknowledgements

  The many people and institutions that helped me to prepare the original four volumes of my Shaw biography are comprehensively listed in those volumes, and I take this opportunity to renew my thanks to them all. I have continued reading The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies in the United States and The Shavian in Britain, as well as new publications about G.B.S. and his contemporaries, and to keep an eye out for Shaw manuscript material coming up at auction, so as to make necessary adjustments to my text in this abridgement. I owe special thanks to Sarah Johnson who transcribed my increasingly illegible marginalia on to immaculate discs; to my editor Alison Samuel who has continued walking in my steps and issuing corrections when I put a foot wrong; and to Howard Davies who queried anything queryable in this revised narrative.