Shaw had been pressing Florence to get herself divorced from the ever-absent Edward Emery; and eventually in 1894 she agreed. The procedure, which involved an accusation of adultery, was unpleasant but by February the following year the decree was made absolute. Shaw used the technicality of her freedom to chide Janet Achurch: ‘There will be a mail in tomorrow, I suppose: and if I hear nothing then, F.F. shall be Mrs Bernard Shaw at the earliest date thereafter permitted by statute.’ But to Florence, as to May Morris, he said nothing. Two days after this divorce, it was not Shaw but Yeats who travelled to Dalling Road. He came bearing esoteric apparatus and escorted by a mediumistic chemist’s assistant. Together they drew the curtains and unwrapped their miracles. It was a relief to turn from the hectic Shavian vocabulary to the less demanding presence of Yeats. Florence’s consonants withered, her phonetics fell away and the athletic articulation drilled into her by Shaw sighed to a stop. Yeats provided for her a single twanging instrument. She plucked interesting discords, meditated on colours, muttered verse invocations that intensified ‘ordinary twaddling,’ Shaw protested, ‘into a nerve destroying crooning like the maunderings of an idiot-banshee’.
It was now Yeats’s turn to see Florence as a ‘great success’. Her tranquillity dazzled him. She was a fairy child and would make his poetry a garden for magical thought, and the Chanted Word. ‘Cats do the same thing when they are serenading one another,’ advised Shaw; and even Yeats spoke of her giving ‘the worst performance on the psaltery I have ever heard’ – adding: ‘There are times when she makes me despair of the whole thing.’
In time Florence dismissed both her Irish champions as ‘half-baked’. ‘And now you think to undo the work of all these years by a phrase & a shilling’s work of exoteric Egyptology,’ Shaw had railed at her.
‘Now a great horror & weariness comes on me. I cannot help anyone except by taking help from them; and you cannot help me. You have brains and imagination – the means of deceiving yourself, without faith, honor, heart, holiness – the means of saving yourself. I have the greatest regard for you; but now to be with you is to be in hell: you make me frightfully unhappy... Forgive me; but you have driven me to utter desperation.’
What had gone wrong? When he called on her he found ‘her windows were dark [and] I did not go in’. He began sleeping badly – and waking late. In November 1894 they ceased being lovers. Fabian and Occult forces had pulled them apart. They were still friends. Strolling pleasantly through Richmond Park in the spring of 1895, they chatted about bicycling and literature, but kept what they really cared for to themselves. She lured him with a casual reference to the quarter of a million pounds that Annie Horniman might give her for another theatrical enterprise; but her heart was not in it, and he was not seriously tempted. Their excitement in each other’s company had evaporated, leaving vacancy. His sense of loss was painful. He had so little heart, he told another actress, ‘that when it kindles for ten minutes once a year I hasten to cry out what I feel, lest I should die without having once done anything to save life from emptiness’.
They continued to see or correspond with each other, amiably but with longer intervals almost until 1912, when Florence travelled to Ceylon and, at the request of Sir Pannamballam Ramanathan, was appointed the first principal at his College for Girls. There she died in 1917; and thirty years later, after reading her story in the Ceylon Daily News, Shaw (then in his nineties) confessed himself astonished. ‘I thought that Yeats and I knew her through and through, as far as there was anything to know,’ he wrote. ‘I now see that we did not know her at all.’ To Yeats she had appeared to move ‘upwards out of life’ to her ‘unnoticed end’. But Shaw suspected that Pannamballam Ramanathan had ‘opened her mind and developed the real woman. I should have said that she was the last woman on earth to become the authoritative head of a college, or to break her way out of the little cliques in which she figured in London, and find a spiritual home in philosophic India. I was wrong. I was the wrong man for her, and I am deeply glad that she found the right one after I had passed out of her life.’
5
Candidamania
It is only the people who have the courage and independence to let themselves go without scruple who discover what a terrifically powerful instinct chastity is.
Shaw to Barbara Low (17 September 1917)
In leaving Jenny Patterson for Florence, Shaw had renounced a love that was exclusively sexual; in turning from Florence to Janet Achurch in the mid-1890s he was replacing sex and planting his words in the woman he loved so that she could bring his plays to life. Florence had been sterile – but sterile on the stage. ‘I renounce spiritual intercourse with you,’ he told her. But it was sexual intercourse he was renouncing and spiritual intercourse with Janet he was taking up. ‘I have become a sort of sublime monster,’ he wrote to Janet early in 1896.
‘...Do you know who will buy for twopence a body for which I no longer have any use? I have made tolerable love with it in my time; but now I have found nobler instruments – the imagination of a poet, the heart of a child, all discovered through the necessity – the not-to-be denied inmost necessity – of making my way to an innocent love for Janet.’
*
There had been a moment when, quailing before the challenge of Janet with her interfering husband, her heavy drinking, her drugs, Shaw turned to ‘a destroying angel in a bonnet’, the Ibsen actress Elizabeth Robins. Elizabeth was an enigma. For two years she had been married to an American actor, George Parks, who one midnight (wearing a suit of stage armour) had stepped into the Charles River in Boston, and drowned. Dressed in black, Elizabeth had sailed to England. Wonderfully impressed by Janet Achurch in A Doll’s House, she had gone in 1891 with her chaperon to see William Archer about a translation of Hedda Gabler. Her performance as Hedda that April at the Vaudeville Theatre was described by Archer, reviewing it in The World, as ‘the finest piece of modern tragedy within my recollection. Sarah Bernhardt could not have done it better.’ The anti-Ibsenites had been equally re-assured. ‘It was like a visit to the Morgue,’ declared Clement Scott in the Daily Telegraph. Shaw, who saw the production two or three times, assured Elizabeth Robins that ‘you may safely accept all the compliments you get about the play and the part. I never had a more tremendous sensation in a theatre.’
In the battle over Ibsen, Shaw knew where his loyalties lay. But Elizabeth was Archer’s protégée and therefore a rival to Shaw’s Janet. Both Archer and Shaw were attracted to Elizabeth. She was a hardworking actress, ambitious and businesslike; and, now in her late twenties, she was dramatically beautiful, with hypnotic blue eyes, chestnut hair and an erotic southern American voice. But she seemed nervous of men and fearful of male sexuality. She was to make an exception of Archer for whom she became the love of a lifetime. But Shaw’s flattery-and-effrontery alarmed her. He implied that Archer was not unaware of her sex appeal; he begged her not to mind his Irish suggestiveness; he boasted that her ‘lustrous eyes’ would never turn his head; he even called informally at her apartment, before her production of The Master Builder in 1893, for the purpose of interviewing her – and she was obliged to threaten him with a revolver.
Shaw promised to play no more pranks on her. But he suspected that she and Archer were lovers, and he could not resist interfering. Both of them were used to suppressing their sexual instincts, and they sealed their relationship from him. Someone who had dramatized his own love affairs in The Philanderer might play havoc with their lives.
Elizabeth had glorified the brother-and-sister relationship, and Shaw dreamed of supplanting a wife with a mother. Both wanted to free one sex from the power of the other. But the only way Shaw could overcome his vulnerability to women who interested him was to envelop their bodies with his words, and then fall in love with his own verbal clothing. What attracted him to Elizabeth was that, like his mother, she was at best indifferent to him. It was difficult for an actress to make a successful career in the theatre, but she did not believe Shaw
would ever succeed as a playwright and when he offered to write a leading part ‘especially designed for you & all the other parts about six lines long’, she heard only the voice of the seducer. Her apprehensions were confirmed when he sent her Mrs Warren’s Profession, a play about prostitution. ‘It was black ingratitude to try and let you in for this villainous play which is quite unworthy of you,’ Shaw admitted. Yet, granted that she could not endure him, could they not for stage purposes use each other? ‘What has frightened you?’ he asked. What had frightened him? This fear was what they shared, and it prevented them from becoming what Ibsen would have called an ‘episode’ in each other’s lives.
*
While Shaw was still involving himself with Florence and hazardously experimenting with Elizabeth Robins, the Charringtons had been sinking. A quintuple bill they presented at Terry’s Theatre in 1893 including, besides plays by J. M. Barrie, Conan Doyle and Thomas Hardy, a farce by Lady Colin Campbell, had prompted some critical acclaim; and closed after a week. ‘Then smash!’ Charrington explained; cheaper lodgings, unsuccessful scripts, smaller parts, shifty deals.
Unlike Nora in A Doll’s House (after whom she had christened her daughter), Janet could not slam the door on her husband – though he would ruin her if she continued to trust in him. But from the practical consequences of his own advice Shaw instinctively shrank. He was obsessively replaying the old triangular liaison. Until the autumn of 1894 he could find no way of dissolving his sexual attraction for Janet into his admiration for her talent. Then, on 2 October, following another visit to Italy with the Art Workers’ Guild, he began Candida, his ‘modern pre-Raphaelite play’. ‘Titian’s Virgin of the Assumption in the Accademia in Venice, and Correggio’s in the dome of the cathedral in Parma,’ he afterwards remembered, ‘boiled down into Cockney Candida.’
It was to be their play, his and Janet’s. It was to be their salvation. Candida derived from his mother who was to be replaced by Janet. ‘I have been no saint myself – have hunted after one form of happiness occasionally,’ he confided. ‘Janet recreates me with an emotion which lifts me high out of that.’ Candida had been conceived as a spiritual orgasm. Janet would re-create herself by playing the ‘clean dry, strong and straight heroine’, the ‘true Virgin Mother’ Candida, and feel no further need for the stimulants prescribed by Charrington.
The Reverend James Mavor Morell, the cocksure Christian Socialist clergyman, is Shaw’s pre-Raphaelite; his Raphaelite is Marchbanks, the shy, aristocratic, unconvincing poet. Shaw claimed to have based Marchbanks on De Quincey, though Shelley and Yeats were also to be mentioned as models. ‘I certainly never thought of myself as a model,’ he objected. Nevertheless, Marchbanks was the vehicle for Shavian beliefs and a silhouette of the almost twenty-year-old Sonny. The rivalry between Marchbanks and Morell over Morell’s wife Candida carries echoes from several of Shaw’s three-cornered affairs, in particular that of May Morris and Sparling, but was intended as an interpretation of the current drama between himself and the Charringtons. The writing and production of Candida was to be a spell, no less magical than the spells of Yeats and Florence Farr, through which Shaw would manifest his will. He had designed the play as A Doll’s House in reverse, showing the household doll to be the husband. In Candida herself he had written a part at which Janet would excel. Its success, he hoped, would nerve her to separate her interests from Charrington’s, emerging from domesticity as an independent actress of genius. That, at any rate, was the play he intended to write; what he actually wrote was something else. ‘Candida does not change, as Shaw believed Janet must,’ Margot Peters has written.
‘She is at the end of the play what she was at the beginning, the mother-sister-nurse-wife of her boy husband Morell, trapped by the very altruism that Shaw was trying to root out of Janet so that she could put herself and her art first. It is Eugene Marchbanks who experiences the metamorphosis from sensuality to spirituality and artistic dedication... he concludes that domesticity, security, and love are inferior ends compared with the sublime and lonely renunciation of the artist. Shaw thus washed his hands of Janet.’
The ‘pure’ (as her white name indicates) and patronizing Candida is not Janet: she was ‘entirely imagined’. But she shares with Janet a sexual charm that she can use to get her own way – and from which Marchbanks disengages himself. But his escape is not a sublimation of lust into admiration; it is rejection, an optimistic re-writing of Lucinda Shaw’s rejection of Sonny.
The crisis between Candida and Marchbanks comes early in the third act when Candida offers herself (‘Do you want anything more?’) to Marchbanks. We have been prepared for this and told how to interpret it in her conversation with Morell in the previous act – and the words and situation were as much as the Examiner of Plays would allow. The poker that Candida holds ‘upright in her hand... looking intently at the point of it’ until it ‘must have hypnotised me’, is converted from an obvious phallic image into an emblem of knightly chastity: ‘a flaming sword that turned every way, so that I couldnt go in; for I saw that that was really the gate of Hell’. The affinity between them is that of mother and son, and the weapon that guards them from Hell is the taboo of incest. It is because the Virgin Mother outlaws sex that she is Shaw’s ideal. Candida reduces all men to children by emotional castration. In providing other explanations Shaw falls into the error that he himself had defined so brilliantly in The Quintessence of Ibsenism. He idealizes. It is the minor characters who provide the corrective, in particular the secretary, ‘a brisk little woman of about 30’, Miss Proserpine Garnett, nicknamed Prossy. She, as her classical name suggests, represents amorousness unanswered. She is secretly – though it is an open secret – in love with Morell, and her only expression of love is to make herself his idolizing slave. Others, with whom she is not in love, she can see clearly.
Shaw romanticized Marchbanks’s chastity. He has not blown away illusions but transferred them from people to work. Candida was a prophecy rather than a catalyst in Janet Achurch’s life; and that prophecy was to find its proof in the negotiations over the play’s production.
*
Candida is the most tightly constructed and economical of Shaw’s plays. Driven on by the Charringtons’ debts, he finished writing it on 7 December 1894, and before the end of the year had tried it out on two leading actor-managers. Wiping his eyes at the end of the final scene, Charles Wyndham, the most accomplished performer of light comedy parts at the Criterion Theatre, told him that, dear God, it would be a quarter of a century before the London stage was ready for such matter. Shaw also took it to George Alexander, whose St James’s Theatre, as the most fashionable playhouse in London, specialized in dramas featuring peers of the realm. One of the handsomest men in England, who had recently caused a sensation with Mrs Patrick Campbell in Pinero’s The Second Mrs Tanqueray, Alexander offered to play the eighteen-year-old aristocratic Marchbanks if Shaw, to combine an easier disguise with a larger claim for sympathy, would render the poet blind.
By reserving the part of Candida for Janet, Shaw had created an extra obstacle for the London actor-managers. But he would not be moved on this, and in February 1895 he decided instead to try the play in the United States.
There were good reasons for his decision. Arms and the Man had been taken the previous year to the United States by the actor-manager Richard Mansfield. Mansfield was an Englishman two years older than Shaw who had appeared on the London stage between 1877 and 1882 before emigrating to New York. He was a man who spoke plainly. He believed that life was for living, and plays were for playing; and he was seldom afraid to say so. He had slipped one evening into the Avenue Theatre to see Arms and the Man and decided to put it on. Shaw was summoned to see him at the Langham Hotel and an invigorating antipathy sprang up between them. Each knew better than the other about everything; but each valued the other as a property. A contract, drafted by Shaw, was signed on 9 June 1894 and, some three months later, Arms and the Man opened at the Herald Square Theatre
in New York where, after sixteen performances, it ‘produced reputation, discussion, advertisement’, and put Shaw ‘to the inconvenience of having a bank account’. By retaining the play in his repertory for the rest of the season and sending it on tour, Mansfield gave Shaw a new theatrical experience: ‘It was not an absolute failure.’
It was to Mansfield, on 22 February 1895, that Shaw sent a tantalizing letter about Candida. ‘Now let me ask you whether you can play a boy of eighteen – a strange creature – a poet – a bundle of nerves – a genius – and a rattling good part,’ he wrote.
Shaw challenged him to sail over to London, play the poet for half a dozen matinées opposite Janet’s Candida, and, having set all London buzzing, ‘disappear in a flash of blue fire’. There was need for haste. Already Janet was growing obstreperous; she had made a drunken scene when he took her to the theatre, had brazenly dyed her hair a heartbreaking yellow and was smoking cigarettes. Shaw warned her that ‘you will grow fatter; and your flesh instead of being braced and healthy will be slack and open to chills; and you will have heavy sensual eyelids and swimming eyes instead of a clear, open, divine brow’. There was nothing for it, until Janet was reborn in Candida, but to wag his finger in this way. His lectures offended her and were a terror to himself lest they ended their relationship.
It was Richard Mansfield who, barely in time, thundered to their rescue. He had been intrigued by Shaw’s description of Candida (‘I still play youths of 18. The only trouble is I look too young for the part’). In the first week of March he cabled his acceptance to Shaw.
‘WILL PLAY CANDIDA WILL ENGAGE JANET WILL COME TO LONDON CONTRACT JANET NOT LESS THAN THREE SEASONS... ALL MUST COME NEW YORK QUICK – MANSFIELD’
Shaw had promised the Charringtons that he would get his plays performed; and now ‘it is all settled and our fortunes are made’. The next ten days were hectic. Despite a swirling Fabian programme of lectures and articles on other people’s plays, Shaw finished his minutely detailed plan of the stage action (‘the full score of Candida and the band parts’), arranged for the prompt copies to be typed and corrected, and had everything ready for the boat on Saturday 16 March. At the station, Janet was so overcome as to take an affectionate farewell of Mansfield’s brother Felix (who was travelling with her) under the impression he was her husband Charrington; and Shaw tottered back shakily to his bed like an exhausted dog.
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