Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  Looking out from Shaw’s imprisonment in this castle, we may catch a splendid view of popular late Victorian fiction. What journeys its characters make! Their route lay encumbered by avalanches, attacks of consumption, unmuzzled dogs, ghosts, lunatics, Chinese executions, runaway trains, fire engines, daggers and gunpowder. Outside towers a background of crag and fortress, cloud and sea, with green walls of pine and a mountain torrent. Within, aged hounds lie stretched on the carpet, curtains are continually tweaked aside by jewelled fingers and ropes of roses adorn the staircases ascending to the boudoirs. These strongholds, which in the last chapter are all burnt to matchwood, are inhabited by a throng of murderers, bigamists, coquettes and so on. Nearly everything takes place at night (to the cry of owls, nightingales and cat-birds), except for a little cockfighting perhaps and the regular afternoon calls which usually carry on the business of the second volume. There are a few old people past love-making, but they have all had prehistoric turns at it and each carries a sorrow to the grave. The villains, who break out under stress into uncouth scraps of French, are consumed by earthquakes or engulfed in shipwrecks carrying many innocuous travellers down with them. The hero is easily recognized by his faculty for alighting on haystacks when flung from continental expresses, for inheriting fortunes, and for tracking diamond smugglers to their doom. A composite photograph of the heroines at Mudie’s would have shown golden tresses, a pair of blue eyes occasionally changing under degrees of emotion to green or hazel, and a plain white dress with a flower at the throat. For three volumes intransigent relatives and designing reprobates block her way to the altar, only to be arbitrarily removed in the last pages by violent Acts of God or the Devil, the sympathetic reader breathing more and more freely as the slaughter proceeds.

  With such caricatures of the love he had once longed for himself, Shaw spent many hours, months, years of his time, first as a book reviewer and subsequently as a theatre critic. In this world of reviewing he needed to fasten his talent to a stimulating purpose: the creation, by use of irresistible ridicule, of a revolution in the habits of the book-reading, theatre-going public in Britain. The bookshop or theatre should no longer be an oubliette with its trap-door sealed against reality. ‘Whilst the slums exist and the sewers are out of order, it is better to force them on the attention even of the polite classes than to engage in the manufacture of eau-de-cologne for sprinkling purposes.’

  Shaw’s voice in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette was one of exasperated geniality, below which moved a current of resentment at being obliged to spend his time reading trivial books brought out by publishers who had rejected all his own novels. It was particularly galling to see that the other Irishmen on the paper were given major writers to review: George Moore wrote on Huysmans and Zola; Oscar Wilde on Dostoevsky, William Morris, Tolstoy and Turgenev. Occasionally Shaw was allowed a minor work by an interesting writer: J. M. Barrie’s Better Dead; Wilkie Collins’s The Evil Genius; and A Mere Accident by George Moore, whose ‘commendable reticence’ in evading the realities of a rape ‘might have been taken further, even to the point of not writing the book’.

  Shaw’s long sojourn in this world of reviewing later enlivened his picture of hell in Man and Superman. He used the stock-in-trade of the novelist and playwright as a block against which to sharpen his prose style. ‘A true original style is never achieved for its own sake,’ he wrote. ‘Effectiveness of assertion is the Alpha and Omega of style. He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him.’ What he gave up in texture, he gained in pace and authority. His writing is luminous with conviction and humour. He seldom weeds out the clichés: when in love, his heart is as ‘hard as nails’; his longer plays are inevitably ‘cut to the bone’. ‘The more familiar the word, the better,’ he told his translator, Sobieniowski. Elsewhere he announced: ‘I also am a journalist, proud of it, deliberately cutting out of my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing that is not journalism will live long as literature, or be of any use whilst it does live.’ This was part of a cleansing exercise against his long immersion in pretentious literature.

  It was a bright smiling instrument, his typewriter, a marvellously efficient machine for turning all the difficulties and despairs of life into an argument – not a bad-tempered argument, but an exchange of point and counterpoint that beats down relentlessly until the rough places are made plane. In his diaries, where Shaw is unprotected by the brilliant shell of this style, we see him several times accidentally coming close to some dreadful event and feeling the shock waves: ‘In Wigmore [Street] we saw a young rough beating a girl and I disturbed myself for the rest of the evening by flying at him.’ ‘Was much upset by having to interfere in an altercation between a young couple and a private watchman who was apparently trying to blackmail them.’ Though he attacked the substitution of literature for life, his own battery of words, eliminating suffering, was in some sense a replacement for action. ‘A writer,’ he advised Norman Clark, ‘must have a gift of intimacy, which is dangerous and offensive without good manners or tact.’ Shaw had outrageously good manners, but in place of intimacy he gives us a whirling informality. The effect of his prose is like alcohol upon the nerves: we are exhilarated, intoxicated, breathless and, before the end, exhausted – and still the talkative spirit, the ascending wit, drive on. For it is a style that is always in top gear: emphatic, industrious, omniscient, studded with surprises, and better-trained for shorter distances than discursiveness.

  Shaw’s columns in the Pall Mall Gazette, though without a byline, were soon making his name notorious in the trade. Two or three times an exceptional book fell his way: the Rural Rides of William Cobbett (‘probably more dangerous to corrupt Governments than any single man known to English history, excepting only Jonathan Swift’); A Handbook of the History of Philosophy by Belfort Bax, and Samuel Butler’s Luck or Cunning, both of which (as he indicates in his Preface to Major Barbara) influenced his thought. But for the most part, he was kept to heart-throb fiction. He seemed to fill his reviews from a magic well that never ran dry or lost its sparkle provided he pumped hard enough. But he chafed against the restriction. In the summer of 1887 he sent Stead a long letter in which he tried to palm a socialist programme on to him. Stead read it, kept it, and did nothing: its campaign for social reform was too bleak for him. Besides, as an instrument of persuasion, there was a quality in Shaw’s letter that was to mar so much of his dazzling propaganda: it was too knowing – everything it said was correct and calculated to be flattering to Stead, but the calculations showed. To act on Shaw’s advice so often meant parading one’s inferiority to him. His tact was like a brilliant varnish: one saw straight through it.

  However much he wrote, since he could not get what he wanted, he still searched for opportunities elsewhere. Letters editors of To-Day, Justice, The Echo, St James’s Gazette, Truth, were harried with correspondence from George Bunnerd, Shendar Bwra, A. Donis, Redbarn Wash, G. B. S. Larking, Amelia Mackintosh, Horatia Ribbonson and the Reverend C. W. Stiggins Jnr, as well as from the ‘milkman’, an ‘English mistress’, ‘Inveterate Gambler’ and ‘A Novelist’. Under one name or another, or no name at all, he was everywhere, pleading for the retention of the split infinitive and the abolition of Christmas, protesting against the Russian use of Siberian exile for dissidents and the prosecution of Henry Vizetelly for publishing an English translation of Zola’s La Terre. As G. Bernard Shaw he wrote of Jack the Ripper as an ‘independent genius’ who by ‘private enterprise’ had succeeded where socialism failed in getting the press to take some sympathetic interest in the conditions of London’s East End.

  The power Shaw felt within him seemed everywhere to be blocked. In the summer of 1888, he accepted a proposal from H. W. Massingham, deputy editor of The Star, that he cover occasional musical events which ‘Musigena’, the paper’s regular music critic E. Belfort Bax, could not
attend. Towards Massingham Shaw felt lifelong gratitude and respect – he was ‘the perfect master journalist,’ he wrote. When Bax went on holiday in August, Shaw acted as his substitute; after which he carried on as the anonymous second-string critic until, Bax resigning in February 1889, Shaw took his place at two guineas per week.

  Later that year, ‘I did a thing that has been in my mind for some time,’ he noted in his diary, ‘ – wrote to Edmund Yates asking him to give the art-criticship of The World to Lady Colin Campbell, as it is no longer worth my while to do so much work for so little satisfaction, not to mention money.’ Yates replied admitting that Shaw had been ‘cavalierly treated’, but concluding: ‘I have no idea of loosening my hold on you.’

  But Shaw had made up his mind to give himself the sack as a reviewer of pictures for The World. Preparing to bow out of the galleries, he told his readers on 23 October 1889: ‘I cannot guarantee my very favourable impression of the Hanover Gallery, as I only saw it by gaslight. This was the fault of Sarasate, who played the Ancient Mariner with me. He fixed me with his violin on my way to Bond Street, and though, like the wedding guest, I tried my best, I could not choose but to hear.’

  3

  Mystical Betrothal

  The pleasure of the senses I can sympathise with and share; but the substitution of sensuous ecstasy for intellectual activity and honesty is the very devil.

  Preface to Three Plays for Puritans

  Money was one measurement of success. In 1885, his first full year in journalism, Shaw had earned £112. At the end of each year he would note in his diary what he had made from contributions to papers: £150 in 1888; £197 6s. 10d. in 1889; £252 13s. 2d. in 1890; £281 16s. 10d. for 1891. Much of this money he would hand to his mother, ‘asking her for a pound when my pockets were empty’. Ten years later he was earning almost £800 (equivalent to £43,000 in 1997). He trained hard, buying coloured spectacles, a pair of dumb-bells and a pendulum alarm clock. He took regular cold baths; he went on spectacular walks. At night he opened his windows so wide that cats and birds sailed through, interrupting his sleep. He dieted, logged his weight, kept himself at about ten stone ten pounds. To his shelves he added volumes on algebra, Danish and German; on his desk he stood a modern typewriter bought from H. W. Massingham for £13 and, ‘as our rent was reduced and our earnings rather enlarged, we got a new piano on the hire system, and began to live a very little more freely’.

  Behind this programme of self-improvement lay a history of backsliding. He sleeps through the alarm clock, or if it wakes him, takes a nap in the British Museum. Despite his diet, he cannot resist a heap of cherries, a few overripe bananas, some indiscreet mushrooms, and sweetmeats from a machine, to which are attributed fits of indigestion, plagues of gumboils and terrific nightmares. However icy his baths he breaks out in sweats and spells of influenza. He increases his walks, but trips and falls; he starts off again, but ends up lame; he bellows out songs ‘rather violently’ at the piano, ‘for the sake of my lungs’, and loses his voice; he covers page after page and sees them all swoop and vanish under the wheels of a train. Despite the grimmest of attempts, he learns no languages, no algebra. His letters to the press are returned, his private correspondence placed in the wrong envelopes. He develops a tendency of ‘clean forgetting’ to turn up at rallies where he is principal speaker and at meetings where he is chairman; of arriving at theatres without his tickets, mistaking matinées for evening performances, and presenting himself at the Steinway Hall instead of the Princes Hall and vice versa; he believes it to be Thursday when it isn’t; he calls on people who by arrangement are calling on him and attends At Homes where everyone is abroad. He recklessly gives away money to drunkards and minor poets, crossing-sweepers and ‘Street Arabs’. Outdoors he watches a squirrel playing in a tree and a huge spider making a web, indoors he dawdles over the piano harmonizing the Marseillaise – all when he should have been forming a committee for the municipalization of land. Suddenly unable ‘to face more political cackle’, he rushes off from an important conference to a performance of Cymbeline – ‘and enjoyed it much more than I should have enjoyed the meeting’.

  More unShavian still are the adventures with his typewriter. Within a month he has mastered the brute and declares himself ‘much pleased’ with it. Yet his expertise is oddly hypothetical, having come to him (as with bicycling and photography) by way of accidents. Despite everything, the machine won’t ‘settle’. At last ‘to my great annoyance’ he is obliged to ask for professional advice, but when he tries to put this advice into practice the typewriter breaks down altogether and he is ‘furious over it’.

  The diaries become strewn with Johnsonian lamentations over ‘my inveterate laziness and procrastination’. ‘Not up till 10 (curse this laziness),’ he writes and chides himself for doing nothing except utter good resolutions. ‘Very tired and greatly disposed to curse my fate,’ he notes. For Shaw to be off his work has all the pathos of a domestic animal not eating. He loses strength; he loses authority over himself. ‘For weeks now I have been going to bed at 2 and not getting up until 11,’ he admits. Often he starts towards his desk, only to find himself seated at the piano. ‘Restless and full of work in the morning,’ he writes for 9 October 1889; ‘but only sat down at the piano after all and played Parsifal with a very deep sense of it all.’ He is disgusted with this waste of time but goes on playing and singing nonetheless. When he shakes off this idleness and works strictly to timetable, he is overcome by fits of giddiness. Even his mother notices how his hands shake and his nerves are stretched. Is his diet insufficiently austere? he wonders. Perhaps his teeth are at fault. Finally, he admits: ‘Am driving myself too hard,’ and tries, unsuccessfully, to take it easy by means of more exercise.

  Anything in the style of a holiday unnerved him. Early in 1888, he experimented with a Sunday on the Surrey Hills.

  ‘The uneven, ankle-twisting roads; the dusty hedges; the ditch with its dead dogs, rank weeds, and swarms of poisonous flies; the groups of children torturing something; the dull, toil-broken, prematurely old agricultural laborer; the savage tramp; the manure heaps with their horrible odor; the chain of mile-stones from inn to inn, from cemetery to cemetery... From the village street into the railway station is a leap across five centuries from the brutalizing torpor of Nature’s tyranny over Man into the order and alertness of Man’s organized dominion over Nature.’

  The following year he went on his first trip to the Continent: a week in April to the Netherlands, reporting on an opera for The Star. ‘My worst forebodings have been realized,’ he assured William Archer. Antwerp was ‘exactly like Limerick, only duller’; and, like the Liffey in Dublin, the ‘smell of the canal disgusted me with the Hague’. On the way back he sat on deck all night and was ingloriously sick. ‘Nature conspires with you in vain to palm off the Continent on me as a success,’ he wrote to Archer.

  Three months later The Star’s music critic was sick en route for Bayreuth. ‘Carried out my program successfully,’ he noted in his diary – four articles on Wagner, and such vigorous sight-seeing through Germany that he split his mackintosh ‘like a trick coat in a farce’. Returning from a six-day ordeal in Paris the following spring, Shaw’s admission of having been ‘Very sick crossing... thoroughly wet and cold’ was turned by the music critic into a plea for the Channel Tunnel, but for the want of which The Star ‘would be as great a musical power in Europe as it is in England’.

  In August 1890 he attempted a summer holiday with Sidney Webb, the one man whose dislike of all holidaymaking exceeded his own. Their destination was the Passion Play at Oberammergau where, in a downpour of rain, Shaw bounded up the mountainside leaving Webb, seated among trees at its base, apparently ‘writing an article on municipal death duties...’

  Though he gradually grew bolder, he quickly regretted it. From Italy, where he went on a tour organized by the Art Workers’ Guild in the autumn of 1891, he wrote complaining to William Morris of ‘the fearful solitude created by these
27 men, most of whom have taken up art as the last refuge of general incompetence’. This was an untypical rebuke from Shaw, indicating the extent of his irritation at having to travel as a devout Catholic in order to obtain vegetarian meals. ‘On reflection,’ he added, ‘I doubt if this remark will bear examination: I suppose it is in the nature of such an expedition that we should all appear fools to one another.’

  If there was anything Shaw learnt, it was how travel narrowed the mind. His one weapon, language, broke in his hand and he concluded that the only country you could learn about by going abroad was your own. He also came to recognize how much closer you could feel to those whom you had left behind. There was an increasing number of people for him to feel close to in this way: for example, Grace Gilchrist. ‘I have no doubt Miss Gilchrist fell in love with you,’ another Fabian, Marjorie Davidson, assured him.

  It seemed impossible for a young man and woman to have a friendship in Victorian Britain that was not tainted by assumptions of marriage. Shaw’s attentions to Grace Gilchrist were much whispered over. He singled her out for long talks; he addressed letters to her and noted each sighting in his diary; he wrote music to Browning’s ‘I go to find my soul’ for her. But by 1888 they were joined, not in marriage, but in a bond of misunderstanding. On Easter Day, Grace’s friend the novelist Emma Brooke called on Shaw and ‘heaped abuse on me’. It was like a plot from one of his novels: Shaw embodying the new morality; Grace, struggling unhappily through socialism to escape the marriage market; and Miss Brooke valuing her friend’s happiness above Shaw’s principles. ‘Write no more letters,’ Emma Brooke instructed him after he had tried to explain himself. ‘In letters we do not seem able to touch any point of mutual comprehension.’ Eventually she infuriated Shaw by returning his letters unopened. But by then, he had come to realize that there was ‘Great Gossip about Grace Gilchrist’ and even her family had counted on their marriage. It was exasperating.