Start Reading
About Bernard Shaw
About Michael Holroyd
Reviews
Also by this Author
Table of Contents
www.headofzeus.com
Cover
Welcome Page
Preface
Chapter One
1. Fermenting Genealogy
2. An Irish Marriage
3. Devil of a Childhood
4. The Magician Appears
5. Ménage à Trois
6. The Shame of Education
7. Music in Dublin
8. Marking Time
Chapter Two
1. The Ghosting of Vandeleur Lee
2. Experiments with the Novel
3. Some Further Experiments
4. Respectable Habits
5. On Growing a Beard
6. Courting Miss Lockett
7. Death and a Renewal
Chapter Three
1. In Search of a Family
2. Heroes and Friends
3. The Prospective Lover
4. Introducing Sidney Webb
Chapter Four
1. The Perfect Ibsenite
2. A Crust for the Critics
3. Mystical Betrothal
4. Corno di Bassetto
5. Exits and Entrances
Chapter Five
1. The Courtship of the Webbs
2. Plays Unpleasant
3. Arms and the Man
4. The Playwright and the Actress
5. Candidamania
Chapter Six
1. Living with the Saturday
2. Some Dramatic Opinions
3. Tilting with Henry Irving
4. Candida Refinished
5. A First Play for Puritans
Chapter Seven
1. St Pancras Vestryman
2. Courtship Dances
3. A Terrible Adventure
Chapter Eight
1. The Happy Accidents of Marriage
2. On Heroines and Hero-Worship
3. Boer War Manoeuvres
Chapter Nine
1. Some Unexpected Characters
2. Home Life and Holidays
3. Shakes versus Shav
4. Man and Superman
5. John Bull’s Other Island
6. Granville Barker Comes to Court
7. Curtain Up on Major Barbara
Chapter Ten
1. Fabian Bedfellows
2. Wells Joins the Cast
3. A Revolution at the Court
4. Concerning The Doctor’s Dilemma
5. Invasion of the West End
Chapter Eleven
1. Sitting to Rodin
2. A Cat and Dog Life
3. Getting Married and Staying Married
4. Slave of the Automobile
5. A Treatise on Biography
6. Shewing up the Censorship
Chapter Twelve
1. The Gods and Misalliance
2. Further Particulars on Mr Wells
3. Skits and Farces
4. On the Sub-text of Success
5. Dearest Liar
Chapter Thirteen
1. Concerning Fame and Anonymity
2. The History of Pygmalion
3. What He Did in the Great War
4. Touring the Trenches
5. The Recruiting Officer
6. Anglo-Irish Politics
7. Casualties of War
Chapter Fourteen
1. Some Hints on the Peace
2. Shaw’s Heartbreak
3. Miss Cross Patch Comes to Stay
4. Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman
5. Home Rule for England
6. Free Will in Translation
Chapter Fifteen
1. Collaborating with a Saint
2. The End and a Beginning
3. An Idle Romance
4. Intelligent Women and the Body Politic
Chapter Sixteen
1. Striking an Attitude
2. Upsetting The Apple Cart
3. Author of Himself
4. The Celtic-Hibernian School
5. The Boxer and the Nun
Chapter Seventeen
1. Elopement to Russia
2. A Pilgrim’s Progress
3. Missionary Travels
4. Prefaces to Death
Chapter Eighteen
1. The Demands of the Political Theatre
2. Undergoing a Sea Change
3. Spontaneous Resurrection
4. Paperback and Celluloid
5. Three Plays for Historians
6. Trebitsch über Alles
Chapter Nineteen
1. Uncommon Sense and Careless Talk
2. Wife and Widower
3. Some Late Appearances
4. Fatal Attachments
5. The Story Continues
6. A Very Late Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Appendix
Index
About Bernard Shaw
Reviews
About Michael Holroyd
Also by this Author
Great Lives: Literary Lives
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
In the late 1960s the Shaw Estate decided to commission a new biography of G.B.S. Previous biographies had been ‘partial’, usually written by friends of Shaw, and the time had come for ‘an assessment of the man in his period’. Shaw’s executor, the Public Trustee, had recently relinquished his control of the publication and production arrangements for Shaw’s works and set up an independent Committee of Management composed of nominees from the Estate’s three residuary legatees (the British Museum and Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin). Its first chairman, Sir John Wolfenden, director and principal librarian of the British Museum, took advice as to who should write Shaw’s life from an eminent biographer and incunabulist at the museum, and my name came up. So the Society of Authors (which acted as agent for the Shaw Estate) was asked to sound me out.
I was then thirty-four, had published a biography of Lytton Strachey the previous year and already agreed to write a biography of Augustus John. But this invitation surprised me. I was more accustomed to appeals from people wanting me not to write about their friends and members of their family. Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was becoming respectable. The feeling was not altogether comfortable. In fact, I was terrified. To my eyes G.B.S. appeared as a gigantic phenomenon with whom I felt little intimacy. At the same time he presented a challenge I really ought to accept. Nevertheless I hesitated. I had heard that Shaw used to write ten letters every day of his adult life and that correspondents kept his letters. I knew he had composed over fifty plays, that his collected works extended over almost forty volumes (and were well exceeded by his uncollected writings), and that there were libraries of books about his work and huge deposits of unpublished papers around the world. I suspected that with his shorthand and his secretaries G.B.S. could actually write in a day more words than I could read in a day. Since he lived into his mid-nineties, writing vigorously almost to the end, this was an alarming speculation. I therefore prevaricated, replying that while I would in principle be delighted to write Shaw’s Life, I could not in practice begin until I had finished Augustus John.
To my surprise the Society of Authors was undeterred by this delay. I did not begin my research until early in 1975 when I went to Dublin. I lived in Rathmines, strategically placed between a convent and a barracks, and a mile or so from Shaw’s birthplace in Synge Street. Intermittently I worked at the National Library of Ireland (to which Shaw had donated the manuscripts of his novels) and I visited Dalkey where he had passed his happiest hours while growing up. I also met a number of writers – John O’Donovan, Monk Gibbon, Vivian Merrier, Arland Ussher, Terence de Vere White – who encouraged me. Yet, however hard I try, I cannot account for my time in Ireland very coherently. The atmosphere was thick with goodwill. There was almost no one who, even when they had no information at all, would not be prepared to volunteer something over a jar or two. People I had never heard of came to advise me that they knew nothing, and then stayed on awhile. Many wrote letters to the same effect: some hopefully in verse; others more prosaically enclosing business cards. And everyone pressed in on me so warmly that I was moved to reply with such politeness that my replies elicited answers to which I felt bound to respond. One lady (whom I had never met) eventually enquired whether we had ever had an affair, the crucial part of which had escaped her. I was swimming in the wake of the great Shaw legend, swimming and almost drowning.
The writing of my book, which took me all over the world, must have tested the patience of the Shaw Estate to its utmost. But the extra time I was obliged to spend with Shaw helped to give me that sense of intimacy I had found lacking at the beginning of my research and which I believe is an essential ingredient for the writing of biography. Between Shaw’s work and his life, I found, moved an unexpected current of passion which I sought to navigate. I felt eventually as if I were breaking a Shavian code, the alpha and omega of his dramatic style (so assertive yet so reticent), and was picking up subtle themes that, to gain an immediate public, he orchestrated for trumpet and big drum.
Many people had come to think of the legendary G.B.S. as having only ink in his veins. I began to dismantle this literary superman and replace him with a more recognizable if still uncommon human being. I wanted to demythologize him without reducing him. Behind the public phenomenon was hidden a private individual, intermittently glimpsed, who gave G.B.S. his concealed humanity. He covered up his vulnerability with dazzling panache; I have tried to uncover it and show the need he had while alive for such brilliant covering. He became the saint of the lonely and a fugleman for those who were out of step with their times. He gave them a heartening message. For every disadvantage, in Shavian terms, becomes a potential asset in disguise. The art of life therefore is the art of heroic paradox.
The paradox continues into our own times. G.B.S. is in his element by virtue of still being heroically out of step. I had already noticed, with respect to my previous biographies, how quickly a prevailing mood could change and how unpredictable these changes sometimes were. In the 1960s I had been assailed by a good deal of homophobic mail after my Lytton Strachey was published; but when a rewritten version of that book came out twenty-five years later I received no hate mail at all. On the other hand Augustus John, generally seen in the mid-1970s as an adventurous heterosexual character who might have emerged from the pages of Fielding’s Tom Jones, attracted much greater puritan censoriousness twenty years later, mostly from men who, though responding to the rise of feminism, put me in mind of Dr Johnson’s attack on Tom Jones.
By the end of the 1980s most people expected there would soon be a Labour Government in Britain. But the country did not embrace change as the United States appeared to be trying to do by turning from the Republicans to the Democrats. Instead it was preparing to dig in against the rest of Europe over what was to be a radically retrogressive period. We returned to past battlefields. Many of the political campaigns in which Shaw took part, and which had been manifestly won, were being fought out again a hundred years later, and with opposite results. The break-up of the Soviet Union, the ‘end of communism’ and of ‘history’, the spread of privatization across the world and the rise of nationalism, the fear in Britain of the very word ‘socialist’ (as frightening as ‘liberal’ in the United States) were to make Shaw’s beliefs deeply unfashionable. While Oscar Wilde’s once-faded aestheticism was being revitalized and revived by modernists, Shaw’s persistent progressiveness had become dated. Yet being thoroughly out of fashion, wilfully marching in an alternative direction, was a Shavian speciality – and perhaps a useful one. Many pages which I wrote as a contribution to social history now appear to me, as I reread them, to have gained a peculiar relevance to our contemporary politics.
‘Trust your genius rather than your industry,’ Shaw advised his biographer St John Ervine. In preparing this abridgement, which was planned and contracted for over ten years ago, I have done away with all signs of industry by following the example of Leon Edel’s abridged Life of Henry James and eliminating reference notes. I have also trusted to my instinct while reducing ninety-four years of Shaw’s hectic life, and more than fifteen years of my own work, into a form that a general reader can get through in a matter of weeks or days. I have weeded out errors I detected in earlier versions, and occasionally added a passage founded on recent Shaw scholarship. What I have aimed at is something equivalent in biographical narrative to the ‘revolver shooting’ of Shaw’s own dramatic dialogue where ‘every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion’. Undoubtedly this technique reveals a rather different G.B.S. from the one conveyed by my original armada of volumes. It is for readers rather than myself to say what the difference is. All I can say is that it emerges from this synthesis, rather than being premeditated or imposed.
When infiltrating the work of his biographers with concealed autobiography, Shaw sacrificed something of his own life so that these ‘partial’ biographies might act as endorsements to his political ideas. Treating the Gospels as early examples of biography, he noted in the Preface to Androcles and the Lion how St Matthew (‘like most biographers’) tended to ‘identify the opinions and prejudices of his hero with his own’, while St John used biography as a record of the ‘fulfilment of ancient Jewish prophecies’. Since Shaw’s death, biographical technique has grown more ingenious and the range of subject matter has expanded so that biography embraces most human experience, insofar as it is recoverable, and accepts it as fit for publication. So far as I am aware, I do not specifically identify my opinions with Shaw’s, nor have I used his life to record the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of socialist predictions. My deepest involvement is with biography itself and its never-ending love-affair with human nature, and my aim has been to come a little nearer a biographical ideal described by Hugh Kingsmill as ‘the complete sympathy of complete detachment’.
Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish.
‘Ireland Eternal and External’, New Statesman (30 October 1948)
Bernard Shaw died on 2 November 1950. For almost a decade interviewers had been recording his emphatic farewells. All were rehearsing for the time when G.B.S. could no longer have the last word, and when it arrived actors appeared nostalgically on new-fangled television sets; writers spoke without interruption on the wireless; statesmen round the world uttered their prepared addresses in newspapers.
The critic Eric Bentley bought several of these papers, but ‘what I was reading made me sick’, he wrote. ‘...Such mourning for Shaw was a mockery of Shaw... Grasping the first occasion when Shaw was powerless to come back at them, the bourgeoisie brayed and Broadway dimmed its lights.’ To Bentley’s mind it was the final acceptance of Shaw at the expense of all Shaw stood for.
Shaw had asked that his ashes should be mixed inseparably with those of his wife, which had been kept at Golders Green Crematorium, and then scattered in their garden. In the Dáil a proposal was made to convey them back to Ireland and place them beside Swift’s at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. For having lived his first twenty years in Ireland, Shaw felt ‘a foreigner in every other country’. But it was only outside Ireland that he was recognized as Irish. As the Taoiseach John Costello said, ‘Bernard Shaw never forgot his Irish birth.’ Yet he had set out in his writings to give himself a new birth: a re-creation. He claimed to be as indigenous as the half-American Winston Churchill or a half-Spaniard such as Éamon de Valera, both excellent examples of cross-breeding. ‘I am a typical Irishman; my family come from Yorkshire,’ he assured G. K. Chesterton who, typically English, confirmed that ‘scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made the remark’.
*
The Shaws made no secret of being aristocrats. No Shaw could form a social acquaintance with a Roman Catholic or tradesman. They lifted up their powerful Wellingtonian noses and spoke of themselves, however querulously, in a collective spirit (as people mentioning the Bourbons or Habsburgs) using the third person: ‘the Shaws’.
The family had come from Scotland, then moved to England. In 1689 Captain William Shaw slipped from Hampshire into Ireland to fight in the Battle of the Boyne. He was rewarded with a large grant of land in Kilkenny. There, as landed gentry, the Shaws hunted, shot and fished.
Most successful was Robert Shaw, who entered the Irish Parliament, founded the Royal Bank and in 1821 was made a baronet. His cousin Bernard (grandfather of G.B.S.) also seemed set for success. On 1 April 1802, aged thirty, he married the daughter of a clergyman, Frances Carr, who over the next twenty-three years gave birth to fifteen children. As High Sheriff of Kilkenny, Bernard spent much of his time in the country and neglected his Dublin business, with the result that his partner absconded with his money. Bernard woke up to find himself penniless, collapsed, and died in his sleep. His widow had to apply for help to Sir Robert. The banker-baronet was a wealthy man. ‘Unlike the typical Shaw, he was plumpish and had the appearance somewhat of a truculent bear disturbed out of a doze.’ He was hopelessly in love with Frances who, though disdaining his offers of marriage, accepted rent free ‘a quaint cottage, with Gothically pointed windows’ at Terenure. From here she launched her sons and daughters on the world ‘in an unshaken and unshakeable consciousness of their own aristocracy’.
Like most large families, these Shaws were not exclusively teetotallers. We see them through the eyes of G.B.S. Of his four aunts, Cecilia (Aunt Sis), the eldest, was a temperate maiden lady. She had been pronounced dead when a child and placed in a coffin; but, climbing out, lived on into her nineties, ‘a big, rather imposing woman, with the family pride written all over her’. Aunt Frances, a gently nurtured lady, drank secretly over many years before, submitting to it openly, she passed away. Charlotte Jane (‘Aunt Shah’) married an irreproachable man connected with a cemetery. Aunt Emily, exceeding in nothing but snuff, married a scholastic clergyman, William George Carroll, who, but for his temper (it was said), would have been a bishop.
‘I know as much about drink as anybody outside a hospital of inebriates,’ G.B.S. later wrote. His knowledge had come largely from his father and some uncles. Two of his uncles were unknown to him, having emigrated to the Antipodes and ‘like Mr Micawber, made history there’. A third, Robert, was blinded in his youth and ‘never had an opportunity of drinking’. Uncle Henry was the rich man of the family, able to afford two wives and fifteen children. But he invested his money in a collapsing coal mine and before his death became mentally unstable.
The other three brothers, including Shaw’s father, were alcoholics. Uncle Barney (William Bernard) and Uncle Fred (Richard Frederick) both died in the family mental retreat, Dr Eustace’s in the north of Dublin. The youngest, Uncle Fred, didn’t drink until he married a girl named Waters. His drinking bouts then grew excessive but he gave up alcohol altogether once his wife left him to live in London. He was reputed to be ungenerous (he worked in the Valuation Office) and, in retirement, ‘harmlessly dotty’.
Uncle Barney was an inordinate smoker as well as a drunkard. He lived a largely fuddled life until he was past fifty. Then, relinquishing alcohol and tobacco simultaneously, he passed the next ten years of his life as a teetotaller, playing an obsolete wind instrument called an ophicleide. Towards the end of this period, renouncing the ophicleide, he married a lady of great piety, and fell completely silent. He was carried off to the family asylum where, ‘impatient for heaven’, he discovered an absolutely original method of committing suicide. It was irresistibly amusing and no human being had yet thought of it, involving as it did an empty carpet bag. However, in the act of placing this bag on his head, Uncle Barney jammed the mechanism of his heart in a paroxysm of laughter – which the merest recollection of his suicidal technique never failed to provoke among the Shaws – and the result was that he died a second before he succeeded in killing himself. The coroner’s court described his death as being ‘from natural causes’.
‘Drink is the biggest skeleton in the family cupboard,’ G.B.S. told one of his cousins. But he did not leave this skeleton in its cupboard. He had a choice of making the Shaw drunkenness into ‘either a family tragedy or a family joke’, and he chose the joke. So, in the bookshop window of his works, we may see a cabaret of Shavian aunts and uncles with a chorus of inebriate cousins, and at the centre, a wonderfully hopeless chap, second cousin to a baronet, George Carr Shaw, G.B.S.’s father.
Fortunately I have a heart of stone: else my relations would have broken it long ago.
Shaw to Rachel Mahaffy (6 June 1939)
The story of George Carr Shaw’s life was simple. He would tell you it had evolved as the retribution for an injury he had once done a cat. He had found this cat, brought it home with him, fed it. But next day he had let his dog chase it and kill it. In his imagination this cat now had its revenge, seeing to it that he would have neither luck nor money. He was unsuccessful because of this cat; unskilled, unsober, and unserious too.
Between the ages of twenty-three and thirty he had been a clerk at a Dublin ironworks, but in 1845 he lost this job. By means of family influence he landed up with a perfectly superfluous post at the Four Courts, a job without duties or responsibilities. Unfortunately, it was one of the first of such positions to be abolished in the legal reforms of the early 1850s, for which ‘outrage’ George Shaw received a pension of £44 a year. There were opportunities in Dublin for a wholesale corn-merchant (retail trade was impossible for a Shaw). But George Shaw needed capital. Until now he had walked by himself, a gentleman who was no gentleman, and all places were alike to him. He was in his thirty-eighth year and had recently come in contact with a twenty-one-year-old girl, Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, called ‘Bessie’. She was short, thin-lipped, with the jaw of a prize-fighter and a head like a football; but she had an attractive inheritance. George Carr Shaw felt drawn to her. ‘It was at this moment,’ G.B.S. records, ‘that some devil, perhaps commissioned by the Life Force to bring me into the world, prompted my father to propose marriage to Miss Bessie Gurly.’
*
The master-spirit among Bessie’s forebears had been her maternal grandfather, a country gentleman of imposing presence whose origin was so obscure that he was understood to have had no legal parents. But he lived en grand seigneur on his property of over two thousand acres in Kilkenny and at a place called Whitechurch to the south of Dublin. Each week he would drive in to a little pawnshop in Winetavern Street, one of the poorest quarters of the city. The name on the door was Cullen, an employee, under cover of whose identity John Whitcroft made his money.
The squire-pawnbroker wanted respectability by blood. On 29 December 1829 his daughter Lucinda married a ginger-whiskered squire from Carlow named Walter Bagnall Gurly, who was then living nearby at Rathfarnham. ‘He was a wiry, tight, smallish handknit open-air man,’ G.B.S. remembered, able to make his own boats and to ride the most ungovernable horses; an ingenious carpenter, dead shot, indefatigable fisherman: in short, ‘able to do anything except manage his affairs, keep his estate from slipping through his fingers’.
In ten years of marriage they had one daughter and a son. Then, on 14 January 1839, Mrs Gurly died. Bessie was nine. She was placed under the care of her great-aunt, Ellen Whitcroft, a terrible hump-backed lady. This spidery creature taught her how to dress correctly, to sit motionless and straight; how to breathe, pronounce French, convey orders to servants. She was schooled in harmony and counterpoint, playing the piano ‘with various coins of the realm on the backs of my hands, also with my hair which I wore in two long plaits down my back, tied to the back of my chair, also with a square of pasteboard hung on my neck by a string pretty much as pictures are hung... in order to prevent me looking at my hands’.
By a programme of constraints and browbeatings, she was ‘educated up to the highest standard of Irish “carriage ladies”’. She never said anything coarse, loved flowers more than human beings and walked through the streets seeing nobody. Her aunt intended a great destiny for her – something that because of her deformity she had never achieved herself: marriage into the nobility. With these superior expectations, Bessie was floated into Dublin Society where she encountered the sinking George Carr Shaw.
Secretly Bessie detested her aunt and everything that, masquerading as education and religion, had made her childhood miserable. It was now that George Carr Shaw drifted forward to make his bid for Aunt Ellen’s property by proposing marriage to her niece.
He was not a romantic figure. Almost twice her age, he had a weak mouth, one squinting eye and a number of epileptic ways. ‘If any unpleasant reflection occurred to him, he, if in a room, rubbed his hands rapidly together and ground his teeth. If in a street, he took a short run.’ He was an unconvivial man, with little interest in women. Drink and money were his world.
But Bessie, who had fallen out with her father, overlooked the squinting eyes, the grinding teeth, and took stock only of George Carr Shaw’s social position and the prospects such a proposal offered of a better life. Yet this was to be a marriage of two blind people, each treating the other as guide dog. ‘Money in marriage is the first and, frequently, the only passion,’ wrote St John Ervine of nineteenth-century Irish marriages. G.B.S.’s parents married for money and were to live impecuniously ever after.
Aunt Ellen had tolerated George Carr Shaw as Bessie’s chaperon because of his well-connected harmlessness. To be with Shaw was an alibi for almost anything; never before had he been known to take an initiative. So now Aunt Ellen declared the marriage impossible. Then, when none of her objections prevailed, she revealed that Shaw was a known drunkard – in any event it was notorious in the family. Bessie knew how to deal with this. She went round to Shaw and asked him; and he confessed that all his life he had been a bigoted teetotaller. But he did not tell her that he was a teetotaller who drank.
So the marriage went ahead. Aunt Ellen had one more card to play: she disinherited her niece. This was undeniably a serious blow to Shaw. Needing money to take advantage of a business opportunity from his brother Henry, he sold his pension for £500 and used this capital to buy a partnership in a corn-merchant business with his brother’s ex-partner, George Clibborn. It was a start – to be supported after his marriage by his wife’s own money and whatever could be regained of Aunt Ellen’s inheritance. It could have been worse.
This was a good summer for Walter Bagnall Gurly. On 25 May 1852 he married his second wife who, two months before, had given birth to their first daughter; and twenty-three days later, at the same church, St Peter’s in Aungier Street, he attended the wedding of his daughter and George Carr Shaw. As a wedding gift, Aunt Ellen had sent the couple a bundle of IOUs signed by Gurly – which he seized and burnt. Better still was the marriage settlement he had insisted on their signing a few hours before the ceremony. Bessie’s personal assets were listed as ‘one thousand two hundred and fifty-six pounds Nine shillings and two pence Government three and a quarter per cent Stock’. All this, together with income to be derived from her father’s first marriage settlement and from the will of her pawnbroker grandfather, was transferred by deed to two trustees. The effect of this was to ensure that the inheritance would remain Gurly-money, never the Shaw-money it would otherwise have become. So George Carr Shaw had gained a wife and lost a fortune.
When they drove off after the wedding, George Carr Shaw turned to kiss his bride. She felt so disgusted that she was still protesting more than thirty years later. ‘The rebuff must have opened his eyes a little too late,’ their son judged, ‘to her want of any really mately feeling for him.’
William Morris used to say that it is very difficult to judge who are the best people to take charge of children, but it is certain that the parents are the very worst.
Shaw to Nancy Astor (21 August 1943)
They had chosen Liverpool for their honeymoon, and here their first child was conceived. It was nearly the end of their marriage. Years later, Mrs Shaw told her son that, opening her husband’s wardrobe, she had ‘found it full of empty bottles’. The truth had tumbled out. ‘I leave you to imagine,’ wrote G.B.S., ‘the hell into which my mother descended when she found out what shabby-genteel poverty with a drunken husband is like.’
They returned to Dublin and moved into ‘an awful little kennel with “primitive sanitary arrangements”’, 3 Upper Synge Street – a road of eleven small squat houses which runs round the corner from Harrington Street. Here their three children were born: Lucinda Frances, called Lucy, on 26 March 1853, Elinor Agnes, nicknamed ‘Yuppy’, two years later; and, on 26 July 1856, their son George Bernard, ‘fifty years too soon’, he calculated.
It was a difficult delivery, a vaginal breech birth that was carried out at Upper Synge Street by Dr John Ringland, Master of the Combe Lying-in Hospital, who had been called in by Bessie’s general practitioner.
In his nursery days he was called Bob; by the time he had grown into his holland tunic and knickerbockers he had become ‘Sonny’; it was not until he was reborn the child of his own writings in England that he developed the plumage of ‘G.B.S.’
We first see Bob at the age of one. ‘The young beggar is getting quite outrageous,’ his father writes proudly to Bessie who was staying with her family. ‘I left him this morning roaring and tearing like a bull.’ He could eat his hat, vomit up currants, annoy his teeth and make a jigsaw of unread newspapers. But his chief accomplishment was to go off on marvellous walking expeditions from Papa to Nurse (who was threatening a breakdown) and back again. From his bed he plunged head-first onto the floor; and from the kitchen table he cascaded through a pane of glass without ‘even a pane in his head’.
Once domesticated, this bull of a boy soon became the sedate Sonny. The most affectionate sound in Synge Street was his father’s jokes. From their talks, Sonny was let in on the secret of how his father had saved the life of Uncle Robert – ‘and, to tell you the truth, I was never so sorry for anything in my life afterwards’. It became a game between them, almost an intimacy, that the son should provoke his father to such exhibitions.
In a letter to his wife, George Carr Shaw had written of ‘a Mill which Clibborn & I are thinking of taking at Dolphin’s Barn... Wont it be great fun and grandeur to find yourself when you come back the wife of a dusty Miller, so be prepared to have the very life ground out of you...’ Bessie was not amused: he never did anything positive. ‘You are out for once in your life,’ he told her. ‘We have taken the Mill.’
Dolphin’s Barn Mill was on the country side of the canal. Sonny, who sometimes walked there with his father and sisters before breakfast, used to play under the waterwheel by the millpond and in the big field adjoining the building. ‘The field had one tree in it, at the foot of which I buried our dead dog. It was quite wild. I never saw a human soul in it.’ On the front of Rutland Avenue was a Clibborn & Shaw warehouse, one corner of which had been made into a shop where corn, wheat, flour and locust beans were surreptitiously retailed to the villagers. But they did not prosper. Once, when the firm was almost ruined by the bankruptcy of a debtor, Clibborn wept openly in their office, while Shaw retreated to a corner of the warehouse and cried with laughter at the colossal mischief of it all.
It was this sense of mischief that Sonny loved, and that G.B.S. believed he inherited. But planted in so many of Papa’s comedies were seeds of disaster. When pretending to fling his son into the canal, he almost succeeded: and a suspicion began to crawl into Sonny’s mind. He went to his mother and whispered his awful discovery, ‘Mama: I think Papa’s drunk.’ ‘When is he ever anything else?’ Bessie retorted with disgust.
*
Though he transferred the responsibility for his desolate childhood to his father, the central character in this scene had been his mother. Bessie was a grievously disappointed woman. She believed, and persuaded her son to believe, that ‘everybody had disappointed her, or betrayed her, or tyrannized over her’. From this time onwards Sonny began to see his father through his mother’s eyes, as a man to imitate, but in reverse. It suited George Carr Shaw’s temperament to play along. When he caught Sonny pretending to smoke a toy pipe, he entreated him with dreadful earnestness never to follow his example. In this special Shavian sense, George Carr Shaw became a model father.
Of his mother, G.B.S. once admitted, ‘I knew very little about her.’ This was partly because she did not concern herself with him. Her own childhood had been made miserable by bullying, but Bessie never bullied; she made her son miserable by neglect. ‘She was simply not a wife or mother at all.’ Needing her attention, he found with dismay that he could do nothing to interest her. In her eyes he was an inferior little male animal tainted with all the potential weaknesses of her husband.
In his books and letters, G.B.S. places his mother on a carpet of filial loyalty, and he invites every potential biographer to pull it from beneath her feet. His American biographer, Archibald Henderson, scrupulously overlooking this invitation, received in red ink a brusque rebuff: ‘This sympathy with the mother is utterly false. Damn your American sentimentality!’
In a rare moment of emotion, G.B.S. wrote to Ellen Terry of his ‘devil of a childhood, Ellen, rich only in dreams, frightful & loveless in realities’. But looking directly at such bleakness was too painful. Usually he put on the spectacles of paradox. This paradox became his ‘criticism of life’, the technique by which he turned lack of love inside out and, attracting from the world some of the attention he had been denied by his mother, conjured optimism out of deprivation.
The fact that neither of his parents cared for him was, he perceived, of enormous advantage. What else could have taught him the value of self-sufficiency? He was spared, too, by their unconcealed disappointment in each other, from lingering illusions about the family. It was remarkable how these paradoxical privileges began to multiply once he became skilled at the game. From his observations he soon deduced the wonderful impersonality of sex, and the kindness and good sense of distancing yourself from people you loved.
‘The fact that I am still alive at 78½ I probably owe largely to her [Bessie’s] complete neglect of me during infancy,’ G.B.S. confided to Marie Stopes. ‘...It used to be a common saying among Dublin doctors in my youth that most women killed their first child by their maternal care... motherhood is not every woman’s vocation.’ G.B.S. believed that his mother preferred her daughters, in particular the red-haired Yuppy, who wilted under her slight attentions. As a child she developed a goitre; only the fortunate absence of medical aid enabled nature to perform a cure. Then at the age of twenty-one, assisted by a sanatorium of doctors, she died of tuberculosis. It could be no accident either that Lucy, Bessie’s second favourite, was to die next following a long period of anorexic ill-health, seven years after her mother’s death. She ‘suffered far more by the process than I did,’ G.B.S. wrote of their upbringing, ‘for she... was not immune, as I and my mother were, from conventional vanities’.
There was no feuding at Synge Street. The house was small, but so far as possible they treated one another like furniture. ‘As children,’ G.B.S. explained, ‘we had to find our own way in a household where there was no hate nor love.’ Sonny’s own way led him to the conclusion that nature had intended an element of antipathy as a defence against incest. Happily his family had been well dosed with this preventative.
G.B.S. believed that he had inherited from his parents qualities that they had found incompatible but which, in expiation, he must reconcile within himself. Only by marrying opposites, through paradox or a dialectical process of synthesis, did he feel that he could fulfil his moral obligation to optimism and a better future. In place of the warring of envy and class, he was to substitute a Hegelian policy of inclusiveness. But to include everything in his sights he was obliged to fly his balloon of words into a stratosphere of hypothesis where, in all its thin remoteness, his vision became complete.
He writes of a strangeness ‘which made me all my life a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it... I was at home only in the realm of my imagination, and at my ease only with the mighty dead.’ It is this voice from the living dead that, despite the marvellous cadence, chilled his audience. In the lost childhood of Sonny the philosophy of G.B.S. was conceived. ‘What else can I do?’ he had asked. He strove to bring the world into harmony with his lonely nature, but the world reacted subconsciously to what was suppressed as well as to what he proclaimed. He could see everything but touch little. For what he had done was replace the first loveless reality with a dream. ‘I very seldom dream of my mother,’ he told Gilbert Murray;
‘but when I do, she is my wife as well as my mother. When this first occurred to me (well on in my life), what surprised me when I awoke was that the notion of incest had not entered into the dream: I had taken it as a matter of course that the maternal function included the wifely one; and so did she. What is more, the sexual relation acquired all the innocence of the filial one, and the filial one all the completeness of the sexual one... if circumstances tricked me into marrying my mother before I knew she was my mother, I should be fonder of her than I could ever be of a mother who was not my wife, or a wife who was not my mother.’
Only in his imagination was such completeness possible.
Most of the time Sonny and his sisters were abandoned to the servants – ‘and such servants, Good God!’ The exception was ‘my excellent Nurse Williams’ who left while Sonny was still very young. But what could you expect on £8 a year? ‘I had my meals in the kitchen,’ G.B.S. recalled, ‘mostly of stewed beef, which I loathed, badly cooked potatoes, sound or diseased as the case might be, and much too much tea out of brown delft teapots left to “draw” on the hob until it was pure tannin. Sugar I stole... I hated the servants and liked my mother because, on one or two rare and delightful occasions when she buttered my bread for me, she buttered it thickly instead of merely wiping a knife on it... I could idolize her to the utmost pitch of my imagination and had no sordid or disillusioning contacts with her. It was a privilege to be taken for a walk or a visit with her...’
Occasionally Bessie would take him to see Aunt Ellen, hoping that the old lady would feel sufficiently attracted to leave him her property. Sonny seemed mesmerized by this strange little hump-backed lady with her pretty face and magical deformity. One Sunday morning Papa announced that she was dead, and Sonny ran off to the solitude of the garden to cry, terrified that his grief would last for ever. When he ‘discovered that it lasted only an hour,’ wrote G.B.S., ‘and then passed completely away’, he had his first taste of realism.
Shaw was unable to tolerate feelings of sadness. ‘People who cry and grieve never remember,’ he wrote. ‘I never grieve and never forget.’ Sadness was a poison to his system and before absorption it had to be converted into something else. His attitude to death was the most extreme example of this manufacture of cheerfulness. Papa, he saw, ‘found something in a funeral, or even in a death, which tickled his sense of humor.
‘...the sorest bereavement does not cause men to forget wholly that time is money. Hence, though we used to proceed slowly and sadly enough through the streets or terraces at the early stages of our progress, when we got into the open a change came over the spirit in which the coachmen drove. Encouraging words were addressed to the horses; whips were flicked; a jerk all along the line warned us to slip our arms through the broad elbow-straps of the mourning-coaches, which were balanced on longitudinal poles by enormous and totally unelastic springs; and then the funeral began in earnest. Many a clinking run have I had through that bit of country at the heels of some deceased uncle who had himself many a time enjoyed the same sport. But in the immediate neighbourhood of the cemetery the houses recommenced; and at that point our grief returned upon us with overwhelming force: we were able barely to crawl along to the great iron gates where a demoniacal black pony was waiting with a sort of primitive gun-carriage and a pall to convey our burden up the avenue to the mortuary chapel, looking as if he might be expected at every step to snort fire, spread a pair of gigantic bat’s wings, and vanish, coffin and all, in thunder and brimstone.’
In this way, Sonny began to laugh pain out of existence. Detachment from the fear of death was a step towards Shavian invulnerability in life. His death-anxiety was transferred into a fear of poverty (which, with a little courage and thought, we could eliminate), and any sediment of apprehension absorbed into a hygienic campaign against earth burial. Freed from escapist fables of personal immortality, death became an intensely democratic process. We began to die when more people wished us dead than wished us alive. Many a colleague, on the death of a wife, son or mother, was to find himself in receipt of Shaw’s feeling congratulations. ‘Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant,’ he instructed Edith Lyttelton after the death of her husband. ‘...Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing – a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.’
I am an Irishman without a birth certificate.
Shaw to Denis Johnston (1 April 1938)
Sometime after her marriage Bessie was raised up into a new world of ‘imagination, idealization, the charm of music, the charm of lovely seas’ by a mysterious intruder, called Lee, one of the originals of George du Maurier’s Svengali. He was a ‘mesmeric conductor and daringly original teacher of singing,’ G.B.S. records. It was the extraordinary effect he produced on Bessie that impressed her son. Sonny watched him closely.
There was something gypsy-like about his appearance. His face ‘was framed with pirate-black whiskers’ and he wore his luxuriant black hair long. He had a deformed foot and limped with peculiar elegance. But it was the confidence with which he asserted his heterodox opinions that Sonny noticed more than anything else. He noticed too the way his mother listened, the way she came alive under Lee’s spell.
Sonny did not like Lee, but he could not help admiring him. He was, it seems, about six years old when his mother introduced this stranger into Synge Street. But, ‘as his notion of play was to decorate my face with moustaches and whiskers in burnt cork in spite of the most furious resistance I could put up, our encounter was not a success; and the defensive attitude in which it left me lasted, though without the least bitterness, until the decay of his energies and the growth of mine put us on more than equal terms’.
G.B.S. never knew when Lee and his mother met. Lee claimed to have been born in Kilrush, County Clare, the natural son of Colonel Crofton Moore Vandeleur, MP. When he was a boy he had fallen down a flight of stairs. His wound was badly dressed, and though he wore his lameness ‘as if it were a quality instead of a defect’, he was left with a lifelong animosity towards orthodox medical science. He had never been to school and had ‘nothing good to say of any academic institution’. Instead he provided himself with the title ‘Professor of Music’ and went on to pioneer a revolutionary discipline of voice training which he called ‘the Method’. He was more than a singing teacher: he was a philosopher of voice. Music, he would tell Sonny, was his religion.
But there were some facts of Lee’s career that Sonny never heard. He had been born in 1830, the elder of two sons of Robert Lee, coalman, and his wife Eliza. At the age of eight he was living at 4 Caroline Row in Dublin and attending the Christian Brothers’ O’Connell School nearby. In the school records his name is given as George Lee, and his brother’s as William. This was a Catholic school, and it was here he took violin lessons and instruction in singing. On 9 January 1843, Robert Lee died. By 1851, the family was living at 2 Portobello Place. Less than two years later they had moved to 16 Harrington Street. Between 1851 and 1853 the family must have found some money – possibly from Colonel Vandeleur on the coming of age of George and William. The rateable value of 2 Portobello Place had been £5 10s., that of 16 Harrington Street was £34. It was in 1852 also that Lee founded his Amateur Musical Society, taking some sort of professional rooms for a year or two at 11 Harrington Street on the opposite side of the road. From nowhere in the published writings or letters of G.B.S. can it be inferred that Lee started his musical society and set up as singing teacher within a few months of Bessie’s marriage to George Carr Shaw; nor is it clear that 2 Portobello Place was about two hundred yards from the Shaws in Synge Street, that 16 Harrington Street was some one hundred and twenty-five paces distant, and that two houses only separate Sonny’s future birthplace from Lee’s professional chambers.
Sonny sometimes speculated as to whether he might have been Lee’s natural son; and G.B.S. was aware of other people’s speculations. ‘About G.B.S.’s parentage,’ wrote Beatrice Webb in her diary for 12 May 1911. ‘The photograph published in the Henderson Biography makes it quite clear to me that he was the child of G. J. V. Lee – that vain, witty and distinguished musical genius who lived with them. The expression on Lee’s face is quite amazingly like G.B.S. when I first knew him.’
That Shaw may have had an unconscious wish to be the son of the remarkable George Lee and not of the miserable George Carr Shaw is possible. His campaign to demonstrate that he was George Carr Shaw’s son was conducted primarily in defence of his mother. He was to model himself on Lee because of the extraordinary effect Lee had produced on Bessie and, in a number of three-cornered relationships, he was to play out the presumed asexuality of their liaison by refusing to compromise his own chastity. The themes of consanguinity and illegitimacy recur obsessively in his plays, but it is the emotional independence of the woman that is stressed. Eliza’s parting from Professor Higgins in Pygmalion to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill is Shaw’s restatement of Bessie’s economic attachment to Lee who is seen as a means to her self-sufficiency. In logic, Sonny should have been Lee’s son. But as Shaw demonstrated in his most deliberately pleasant play, You Never Can Tell, remarkable children were frequently born to incompatible parents.
But G.B.S. had to be certain. So he obliterated the ambiguous Christian name he shared with George Lee and George Shaw, using only the initial G. ‘Professionally I drop the George,’ he told an editor. ‘Personally I dislike it.’ ‘Don’t George me,’ he would growl at people who made this mistake. He would remain George only to his family.
By finding a use for the knowledge of harmony and counterpoint hammered into her in her youth, Lee gave Bessie ‘a Cause and a Creed to live for’. She became the chorus leader and general factotum of his musical society.
Lee’s life had changed in those years. On 6 March 1860 his mother died, and two years later, on 7 May 1862, his brother William also died, aged twenty-seven, and was buried near Robert and Eliza Lee in the Roman Catholic Glasnevin Cemetery. His death brought Lee ‘to the verge of suicide’. Since life outside music seemed to offer little to either Lee or Bessie, they became wedded to ‘the Method’.
In his Preface to London Music G.B.S. touches on a peculiar aspect of this story. ‘Lee soon found his way into our house, first by giving my mother lessons there, and then by using our drawing-room for rehearsals.’ He presents Lee as a man apart, ‘too excessively unlike us, too completely a phenomenon, to rouse any primitive feelings in us’. Because he was a cripple ‘marriage and gallantry were tacitly ruled out of his possibilities, by himself, I fancy, as much as by other people. There was simply no room in his life for anything of the sort.’ What little we know about Lee contradicts this view of the man. His Byronic limp was a focus of romantic interest; at least two women in his musical society, and possibly Sonny’s sister Yuppy, fell in love with him. Later in life he made advances to Lucy Shaw and ended his days running a sort of night-club in London where he carried on an affair with his housekeeper. G.B.S. does not conceal this. But he presents it as a late-flowering sentimentalism that bloomed when, having been seduced by the capitalist atmosphere of ‘overfed, monied London’, he proved unfaithful to ‘the Method’ and had been dropped by Bessie.
To disinfect the relationship from all sexual implication, he built Bessie into ‘one of those women who could act as matron of a cavalry barracks from eighteen to forty and emerge without a stain on her character’. ‘To the closest observation’ she was ‘so sexless’‘’’‘’‘’‘’