Charles Butterfield was not an immediately attractive man. But he had an exceptional mother who knitted Lucy into the pattern of the Butterfield family with its comforting social world in the suburbs of Denmark Hill. But after Mrs Butterfield died, Lucy had drifted back to Fitzroy Square. ‘LOVE,’ she wrote, ‘...is dead sea fruit, whether it is parental, fraternal or marital, and anyone who sacrifices their all on its altar plays a game that is lost before it is begun... it’s a damnable world.’ She seemed little more now than a figure of derision to her mother. Much of the money Shaw squeezed out from journalism went towards the maintenance of this unhappy household, which included Bessie’s hunchback sister, Kate Gurly (whose ‘state of unparalleled inclination’ preceded her final plunge into Roman Catholicism), and from time to time her brother Walter Gurly, who would arrive at Fitzroy Square paralytically drunk, threatening to leave his nephew his heavily mortgaged Carlow property.
From this ‘damnable world’, with planchette and ouija, Shaw’s mother had ridden away to parlay with the dead. She found them more congenial company than the living. First there was her favourite child Yuppy; and even her husband and her father seemed faintly less intolerable since their deaths. But on the whole she preferred chatting with people she had never known, the more remote the better, eventually settling for intercourse with a sage who had visited the earth in 6000 BC.
Bessie’s spiritualism was an embarrassment to her son: ‘[I] held my tongue because I did not like to say anything that could worry my mother.’ In his diary he had privately dismissed spiritualism as a ‘paltry fraud’. At a session of spirit-rapping and table-turning with Belfort Bax and H. W. Massingham, he had cheated from the first and ‘caused the spirits to rap out long stories, lift the table into the air, and finally drink tumblers of whisky and water, to the complete bewilderment of Bax... I have not laughed so much for years.’ He released some of this laughter anonymously into the Pall Mall Gazette.
‘Every Englishman believes that he is entitled to a ghost after death to compensate him for the loss of his body, and to enable him to haunt anybody that may have murdered or otherwise ill-used him in the days when he was solid.’
Bessie’s wishful writings appeared like a non-malignant growth in an otherwise healthy body. But the escapist illusions of spiritualism raised in his mind the whole question of the morality of fiction. ‘A person who describes events that never happened and persons that never existed is generally classed as a liar – possibly a genial and entertaining liar,’ he wrote. ‘And what is the business of a novelist if not to describe events that never happened and to repeat conversations that never took place.’ To such an uncomfortable conclusion had his failure as a novelist driven him; and his comparative failure as a dramatist was persuading him to look on his plays too as methods of extending his self-deception.
‘When we are young our inordinate fondness for theatrical and novel-writing leads us to simulate and describe emotions which we do not feel. Later, when the struggle for existence becomes too serious for such follies, real emotions come to us in battalions; but we take as much trouble to conceal them as we formerly did to affect them... [and] Life comes to mean finance.’
He had kept up the appearance of a realist; but who could say whether he too had not been misled by illusions? Asking himself why his mother had chosen to practise such an apparently senseless activity as spirit writings, he added another question: ‘Why was I doing essentially the same as a playwright?’ And answered: ‘I do not know. We both got some satisfaction from it or we would not have done it.’
Lucy had made a brief escape from Fitzroy Square to the United States in 1897, playing in Villiers Stanford’s Shamus O’Brien. This, the last small success of her career, merged with the first large success of her brother. The Devil’s Disciple had opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 4 October 1897, running to full houses for sixty-four performances until, early in 1898, Richard Mansfield took it off on a popular Mid-West tour. From this production of The Devil’s Disciple Shaw earned £2,000 (equivalent to over £100,000 in 1997) and came to be recognized ‘as a possible winner in the box office gamble’. It was a turning point of his career. For more than twenty years he had lived from hand to mouth. By the time Charlotte was preparing to return from Rome, he was suddenly in easy circumstances and ‘with every reason to believe that things would improve’.
One result of this affluence had been his decision to give up drama criticism. Another result was his decision to write plays again. He chose Shakespeare’s birthday, 23 April, on which to compose a Puritan prelude to Antony and Cleopatra. ‘Snatch up my note book & make a start at last on “Caesar & Cleopatra”,’ he wrote. ‘Lifelike scene in the courtyard of the palace at Alexandria among the bodyguard of Cleopatra. Screamingly amusing... [it] is going to save my life.’
Something was needed to save his life, for he was now in his own words ‘a fearful wreck’.
*
During Charlotte’s absence Shaw had struggled to maintain his self-sufficiency, working until ‘I got into a sort of superhuman trance’. He had engaged Henry Salt’s wife, Kate, to do his typing and dictation. Now that he was alone, he claimed to be ‘no longer unhappy, and no longer happy: I am myself.’ Mrs Salt would arrive, carrying a brown paper parcel containing a three-legged stool, some bananas and biscuits. ‘We achieve a phenomenal performance with the arrears of correspondence,’ Shaw wrote to Charlotte. ‘...Your memory is totally obliterated... This is indeed a secretary.’ But it was ‘frightful not to be able to kiss your secretary’.
The longer Charlotte remained in Italy, the more unstable Shaw grew. He felt he was growing old and breaking up. ‘I want a woman & a sound sleep,’ he exclaimed. ‘...Oh Charlotte, Charlotte: is this a time to be gadding about in Rome!’
He dared not trust his feelings. He missed her; but felt relieved that she was gone, as if a crisis had receded. So there must be two Charlottes, as there had been two Alice Locketts. In her absence, he could plant her neatly in his fantasy world. ‘You count that I have lost only one Charlotte,’ he wrote to her; ‘but I have lost two; and one of the losses is a prodigious relief.
‘...the terrible Charlotte, the lier-in-wait, the soul hypochondriac, always watching and dragging me into bondage, always planning nice, sensible, comfortable, selfish destruction for me, wincing at every accent of freedom in my voice, so that at last I get the trick of hiding myself from her, hating me & longing for me with the absorbing passion of the spider for the fly. Now that she is gone, I realize for the first time the infernal tyranny of the past year, which left me the licence of the rebel, not the freedom of the man who stands alone. I will have no more of it... That’s the Charlotte I want to see married... yet I have her in my dreamland, and sometimes doubt whether the other devil ever had anything to do with her.’
This letter shows the extent to which Shaw had been unable to absorb Charlotte into his private mythology. So solid, yet elusive, she occupied his dreamland but threatened him with everyday experience. His letter seems deliberately hurtful, as if he is provoking her to break it off. But she would not.
To marry, or not to marry: that was the question: and he answered it differently each hour. ‘I probably will marry the lady,’ he told the Pakenham Beattys that April. But to the mathematician and biologist Karl Pearson he maintained that he was ‘as firmly set against such a step as ever I was in my most inveterate youth and bachelordom’. Walking through the park, bicycling into the country: doing anything that awakened him from the oblivion of his work-addiction, exacerbated the dilemma. Charlotte still lingered in Rome, but her companion Lion Phillimore had returned in April and she and her husband invited Shaw to their home for Easter. Once there they started to bully him for his stupidity in not marrying Charlotte. One of the chief delights of married life, they told him, was the avoidance of the pre-nuptial obligation to be constantly paying amorous attentions to one another. Against such a Shavian device, ‘I was totally incapable of self-defence’.
The length of Charlotte’s Italian visit and the infrequency of her letters to him was not due, as Shaw suggested, to ‘some Italian doctor’. Though Dr Axel Munthe was then in Rome, Charlotte had avoided seeing him. She was busy, in Fabian fashion, with a study of the municipal services of the city and could not return to London until she had properly collated her notes. Shaw, who had so often complained about her incapacity for work, could not now complain over the reason for her extended absence. It was as if everyone had learnt the Shavian game, and was playing it against him.
In the middle of April, while lacing one of his shoes too tightly, Shaw pinched his left instep. A week later, when riding his bicycle to see the Beattys, the foot expanded ‘to the size of a leg of mutton’. He felt confident of curing it ‘with hot water’, and had just succeeded when, under stress of theatre reviewing in the evenings and vestry meetings during the day, the foot swelled up ‘to the size of a church bell’. Some of his friends suggested ‘vegetarian gout’. Walking soon became so excruciating that ‘I now simply hop,’ he wrote to Charlotte, ‘my left foot being no longer of any use’. On 23 April he called in Dr Salisbury Sharpe, Alice Lockett’s husband, who told him that his two toe joints had slipped over each other and become inflamed. ‘My medical skill is completely vindicated: I have been doing exactly the right thing,’ Shaw congratulated himself after the doctor had left. The hot water treatments continued and these were of great benefit to Caesar and Cleopatra. ‘Finished whole scene of Cleopatra,’ he noted in the almanac he was keeping each day and sending to Charlotte, ‘...quintessence of everything that has most revolted the chivalrous critics Ha! Ha! Julius Caesar as the psychological woman tamer.’
Shaw, as woman tamer, had been letting Charlotte have almost daily reports on his foot with the result that she came ‘back from Italy to nurse me’. She left Rome at the end of April. She was due to arrive in London on the evening of 1 May. Shaw limped down Tottenham Court Road, descended at Charing Cross, and went on slowly to Adelphi Terrace. ‘With a long gasp of relief, I lay my two-months burden down & ring the bell.’ Martha, the parlourmaid, answered the door. Charlotte was not there! He could do nothing but leave her a note of protest and hobble all the way back to Fitzroy Square. ‘Wretch, devil, fiend !... Satan’s own daughter would have telegraphed.’
Travelling from Naples by sea, Charlotte arrived later that night and replied next day on the back of Shaw’s note:
‘Yes, I might have telegraphed: it was horrid of me. I am a wreck, mental and physical. Such a journey as it was! I don’t believe I shall ever get over it.
My dear – and your foot? Shall I go up to you or will you come here and when? Only tell me what you would prefer. Of course I am quite free.
Charlotte’
*
‘Come when it is most convenient to you... the sooner the better (for the first moment at least).’
She went at once to Fitzroy Square and was appalled. His room was a shipwreck. Correspondence and miscellaneous manuscripts, agitated by his perpetually open window, lay fluttering among the solid debris of cutlery, saucepans, apples, cups of trembling cocoa, plates of half-finished hardening porridge and a drifting surface of smuts and dust. Charlotte could only squeeze in sideways. Unshoe’d, his mobility had ‘contracted itself to within hopping distance of my chair’. He could no longer look after himself and no one else there had any interest in him. For over twenty years mother and son had lived under the same roof in London, seldom communicating, and in such conditions that Charlotte’s horror turned at once to a hatred of his mother and sister.
Something needed to be done. Charlotte demanded back the post as his secretary – and he refused. Kate Salt, he said, was looking after his secretarial needs very well; she was excellent at dictation and eminently bullyable. He did not want to bully Charlotte. He wanted her to bully him. He did not want a replacement for Mrs Salt but for Mrs Shaw. Charlotte retired to consider how best she might deal with his predicament. His foot looked terrible, and he appeared haggard with strain. Ellen Terry had sent them tickets for a new play at the Lyceum on 5 May, and he ‘nearly killed myself’ getting in a review on time.
The day after the Lyceum Charlotte suddenly took the initiative, calling at Fitzroy Square and taking Shaw back to Adelphi Terrace for a long talk. There is little record of what they said to each other. Three days later he underwent an operation on his left foot. An anaesthetist arrived at Fitzroy Square at half-past eight in the evening together with nurse Alice Lockett and her physician husband. After coming round from the chloroform, Shaw was told by Dr Sharpe that an abscess had formed on his foot. An attempt had been made to scrape the necrosed bone clean, but until it healed he would be on crutches.
He made this the subject of his penultimate article, ‘G.B.S. Vivisected’, for the Saturday Review. ‘A few weeks ago one of my feet, which had borne me without complaining for forty years, struck work,’ he wrote.
‘The foot got into such a condition that it literally had to be looked into... My doctor’s investigation of my interior has disclosed the fact that for many years I have been converting the entire stock of my energy extractable from my food (which I regret to say he disparages) into pure genius. Expecting to find bone and tissue, he has been almost wholly disappointed... He has therefore put it bluntly to me that I am already almost an angel and that it rests with myself to complete the process summarily by writing any more articles before I have recovered... It is also essential, in order to keep up the sympathy which rages at my bedside, to make the very worst of my exhausted condition.’
This notice of his operation in the theatre pages of the Saturday Review was part of the relentless Shavianizing of these strange weeks. Having planted his injured foot in the middle of Frank Harris’s paper, he made it the ludicrous substitute for a broken heart. There was nothing pedestrian about Shaw’s foot. It was part of the theatrical traffic in what reads like the scenario for a miracle play, helping prepare the public for the extraordinary happening of his marriage.
‘For the first time in my life I tasted the bliss of having no morals to restrain me from lying, and no sense of reality to restrain me from romancing. I overflowed with what people call “heart”. I acted and lied in the most touchingly sympathetic fashion... I carefully composed effective little ravings, and repeated them, and then started again and let my voice die away, without an atom of shame. I called everybody by their Christian names...
At last they quietly extinguished the lights, and stole out of the chamber of the sweet invalid who was now sleeping like a child, but who, noticing that the last person to leave the room was a lady, softly breathed that lady’s name in his dreams. Then the effect of the anaesthetic passed away more and more; and in less than an hour I was an honest taxpayer again, with my heart perfectly well in hand. And now comes the great question, Was that a gain or a loss?’
This question invites us to see his marriage to Charlotte (which he refers to elsewhere as ‘the second operation he has undergone lately’) being performed under ether. The starting point was the reversal of a cliché: that marriage is a fate worse than death. ‘I found myself without the slightest objection to death, and stranger still, with the smallest objection to marriage.’ Nevertheless ‘death did not come; but... Marriage did,’ he told the economist Philip Wicksteed. The following year, in a letter to another of his correspondents, Richard Mansfield’s wife Beatrice, he presented the story epigrammatically. ‘I proposed to make her [Charlotte] my widow.’ The Shavian paradox appears with the fact that the union produces not a mother of children but the father of plays.
Some eighteen years later Shaw was still insisting that he had considered the situation, ‘from the point of view of a dying man’. In fact he had considered it as a method of prolonging active life. Work was his life; as he lived so he must write. But if he persisted working and writing in Fitzroy Square, ‘nailed by one foot to the floor like a doomed Strasburg goose’, he would become an invalid – that was Ch
arlotte’s verdict, and there can be little doubt that she put it to him strongly that day at Adelphi Terrace. The moment for a decision had come; she took it and he acceded. It was agreed between them that he was starved, if not of red meat, then of fresh air and rest. Charlotte proposed renting a house in the country, hiring two nurses and a staff of servants, and superintending his recovery however long that might take.
Charlotte’s sister, Mary Cholmondeley – or ‘Mrs Chumly’ as Shaw liked to write her name (‘I forget the full spelling’) – refused to meet her future brother-in-law and, ‘as a last kindness to me’, requested Charlotte to secure her money. Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw seemed less interested in their news, making no comment beyond saying that it would be difficult to call Miss Payne-Townshend ‘Charlotte’ since she looked more like a ‘Carlotta’ – the mockingly glamorous name by which Lucinda and Lucy Shaw were always to know her.
Charlotte had spoken that day in Adelphi Terrace of Shaw’s health and they must have spoken too of her money. The success of Mansfield’s American production of The Devil’s Disciple had removed Shaw’s financial scruple against marriage. ‘It did not make me as rich as my wife; but it placed me beyond all suspicion of being a fortune hunter or a parasite.’ In 1896 he had earned £589 5s. 1d. (equivalent to £31,000 in 1997); in 1897 his income had risen to £1098 4s. 0d. of which £674 8s. 3d. had come from the opening weeks of The Devil’s Disciple. One of the financial matters they seem to have discussed was a marriage settlement to enable ‘my mother, if I died, to end her days without having to beg from my widow or from anyone else’. In fact Shaw safeguarded Lucinda, who was now in her sixty-ninth year, by means of an annuity and a private understanding with Charlotte that, if he were unable to meet the payments, she would make them without revealing herself as the source. In May 1899 Charlotte’s solicitors drew up a settlement that guaranteed the income from two trust funds (administered by Sidney Webb and a clerk in the Bank of England and founder of the Stage Society, Frederick Whelen) to Shaw himself – these funds reverting to Charlotte in the event of his predeceasing her. Two years later, on 1 July 1901, Shaw was to make a will, appointing Charlotte as his sole executrix and trustee, bequeathing her his literary manuscripts and copyrights and all the estate not otherwise disposed of. Among his specific bequests was an annuity of £600 to be paid to Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw, and, in the event of her death, an alternative annuity of £300 for his sister Lucy.
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