In Shaw’s opinion, the job of producing plays was ruining Barker’s acting. But Shaw minimized Barker’s distaste for public performance. ‘I do believe my present loathing for the theatre is loathing for the audience,’ he was to write a decade later. ‘I have never loved them.’ He wished to retire and write for a more refined theatre – the National Theatre of his imagination. Shaw’s advice seemed partly to assist the first step in this retreat. ‘The next thing you have to do is to finish the play [Waste] & produce it,’ he had urged in the summer of 1906; ‘then publish it with Ann Leete & Voysey in a single volume.’
But Barker needed money to write at his ease and produce his plays fastidiously. By 1907 two possibilities lay open to him. ‘There is to be a new theatre in America financed by 23 millionaires; and I have been asked whether Barker will go over and manage it,’ Shaw announced to Lillah. This Millionaire’s Theatre, between 62nd and 63rd Streets on Central Park West, was being built to run on the repertory principles described in Barker and Archer’s blueprint, and it offered Barker an opportunity to cut free from Vedrenne and join a more intellectual partnership with Archer. ‘America looks rather real at moments,’ he wrote to Archer, ‘and it would be a correct sequel to the blue book if we went together.’
But the Millionaire’s Theatre was still under construction and other arrangements had to be made for the coming season of 1907–8. Shaw believed that repertory meant playing in London for advertisement and then playing on tour for money. Vedrenne wanted to capitalize on their success at the Court by advancing straight into the West End of London. Perhaps because touring was such a helter-skelter business, Barker mainly supported Vedrenne and together they leased the Savoy Theatre in the Strand. Shaw did not intend to join their partnership: ‘I shall act simply as usurer,’ he told them. To enable the Savoy season to open he put up £2,000 (equivalent to £94,500 in 1997) at five per cent interest – to which was added £1,000 each from Vedrenne and Barker who were both to draw salaries of £1,000 a year. ‘My own salary – another thousand – ’ added Shaw, ‘is to be taken out in moral superiority.’
The Savoy was twice the size of the Court and had become celebrated for its Gilbert and Sullivan productions. But the audiences from the Court never took to the Savoy where the management actually played the National Anthem and made them stand up. In his excitement Vedrenne appeared to Shaw to have thrown aside all his prudence; while Barker, his hopes focused on New York, would have been content with Restoration comedy. Shaw complained of his reluctance ‘to tackle anything but easy plays and easy people – easy, that is, to his temperament’. He also objected to the many revivals of his own plays, which were losing their sparkle. ‘The thing to aim at now,’ he insisted to Barker, ‘is a season without a single Shaw evening bill.’ He wanted Galsworthy’s new play Joy and Barker’s Waste to take up the running. But Galsworthy’s sentimental work was a disappointment; Barker’s Waste was banned by the Censor; and even the weakly cast production of Gilbert Murray’s version of Euripides’ Medea appeared lustreless. The Savoy season, which closed on 14 March 1908, had turned out a failure.
Immediately afterwards Barker took off with Archer for New York. But they found the New Theatre, ‘with an enormous, gaping, cavernous proscenium’, to be ‘fit only for old-fashioned, nineteenth century spectacle’. They returned in disappointment to London.
In the spring of 1908 Vedrenne leased another theatre, the Haymarket, to present Shaw’s new ‘dramatic masterpiece’ Getting Married. This was to be followed in the summer with The Chinese Lantern by Laurence Housman whose Prunella (in collaboration with Barker) had been one of the Court’s non-Shavian successes, and a new play called Nan by John Masefield whose Campden Wonder Shaw felt had been seriously underrated at the Court.
‘The Vedrenne and Barker enterprise then is as much alive as ever?’ Shaw made a Daily Telegraph reporter ask him in May 1908 – to which he answered: ‘it seems to be immortal.’ In fact Barker and Vedrenne longed to be free of each other, but (being so heavily in debt to him) could not come to any arrangement without Shaw’s consent. And Shaw, reluctant to announce their separation, succeeded in delaying it until early in 1911. Barker had by then written The Madras House, directed a season of plays at the Duke of York’s Theatre with the American producer Charles Frohman and begun a theatrical partnership with his wife. Vedrenne was starting on a new partnership, ‘Vedrenne and [Dennis] Eadie’, at the Royalty Theatre. To reunite them was no longer possible. Shaw, who had advanced £5,250 to them over the years and arranged for Barker to be repaid his loans first, agreed to accept £484 3s. 10d. (plus some assets from the sale of scenery) as a final settlement.
It had been ‘worth the cost a hundred times over,’ he declared; ‘but the cost fell on us, and the benefit went to the nation’. In 1909 he had joined the Organizing Committee of the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre, and converted his Vedrenne & Barker loss into an investment in the campaign. What could be done by private enterprise, he argued, had been exhaustively tried at the Court. ‘Messrs. Vedrenne & Barker were not rich men,’ he wrote. ‘They voluntarily forewent the opportunity of turning the enterprise into a lucrative commercial speculation and left themselves at the end with all their resources mortgaged. My own income falls very far short of the point at which the loss of sums of four figures becomes a matter of no importance... I had to stop.’
ELEVEN
1
Sitting to Rodin
Do you know Shaw’s writings? That’s the man who has quite a good way of coming to terms with life – of putting himself into harmony with it (which is no small achievement). He is proud of his work, like Wilde or Whistler but without their pretension, rather like a dog that is proud of its master.
Rainer Maria Rilke to Elizabeth von der Heydt (26 April 1906)
‘We are in the agonies of househunting,’ Shaw had appealed to Wells in April 1904. ‘Now is the time to produce an eligible residence, if you have one handy.’ Charlotte had grown more ingenious at braking her husband’s flow of work. Early in 1906 she encouraged him to sit for his portrait by Neville Lytton. It was an extraordinary picture, owing much to an observation by Granville Barker that the Velázquez portrait of Pope Innocent X in the Doria Palace at Rome was uncannily similar to G.B.S. Working in imitation of Velázquez, and placing his subject in papal vestments and throne, Neville Lytton achieved what Shaw was to call a ‘witty jibe at my poses’.
These poses multiplied over the last half of Shaw’s career – as busts, statuettes, medallions, stamps, portraits in oils, watercolours, crayon and needlework; as wooden marionettes, caricatures on posters and in papers, on film, as photographs (poised either naked or eccentrically tailored) on land, in cars, under parasols, at sea; and as likenesses rendered in stained glass, from a simple stick of shaving soap, as a brass door-knocker or waxwork tricyclist and, most extreme of all perhaps, in grisaille with hands held to ears on a Chinese famille rose vase decorated with dense peony, chrysanthemum, lily and vine...
People were aghast at Shaw’s Everest of vanity. But, admitting his addiction to public attention, he tried to employ it usefully. His commissioned portraits and busts may be seen as evidence of generous patronage. He was curious too about the public phenomenon he had manufactured to replace the unloved Sonny.
But Charlotte was not amused. Taking advantage of a visit to England by Rodin, she invited the French sculptor to visit her at Adelphi Terrace on the afternoon of Friday 1 March 1906. He came, they talked, and the consequence was that, as Shaw wrote to Trebitsch later that day, ‘my wife insists on dragging me to Paris for twelve days at Easter so that Rodin may make a bust of me!!!!!’
They stayed at the Hotel Palais d’Orsay, and after meeting Rodin on 16 April began the sittings at his private studio in Meudon. ‘He had, I believe, a serious friendship for us,’ Shaw was to write. They were at his house all day, most days, until they left France on 8 May. Talking to Rodin as he was preparing to begin, Charlotte complained that other a
rtists and photographers had automatically produced the sort of mephistophelean figure they assumed her husband to be, without taking the trouble to look at him. Rodin replied that he knew nothing of Shaw’s reputation: ‘but what is there I will give you.’
G.B.S. was determined to prove a champion sitter, putting immense vitality simply into standing still. ‘The portrait makes tremendous strides, thanks to the energy with which Shaw stands,’ wrote Rainer Maria Rilke, then Rodin’s secretary. ‘He stands like a thing which has the will to stand, over and above its natural capacity for it...
‘Shaw as a model surpasses description. He... has the power of getting his whole self, even to his legs and all the rest of him, into his bust, which will have to represent the whole Shaw, as it were, that Rodin has before him something quite unusually concentrated, which he absorbs into himself and into his work (you can imagine with what zest).’
Rodin’s studio seemed transformed into a theatre. Each day an audience assembled and sat in mesmerized silence as Shaw (‘ce modèle extraordinaire’) collected and concentrated himself and Rodin filled the place with ‘his raging activity, his gigantic movements’, and volleys of unintelligible sound. In the intervals Charlotte played about G.B.S. ‘like a spring wind about a goat’. In a letter to his wife, Rilke sent a beautifully exact description of the work’s development. ‘After rapidly cutting out the eyebrows so that something like a nose appeared, and marking the position of the mouth by an incision such as children make in a snowman, he began to make first four, then eight, then sixteen profiles, letting the model, who was standing quite close to him, turn every three minutes or so...
‘In the third sitting, he placed Shaw in a low child’s chair (all of which caused this ironical and mocking spirit, who is however by no means an unsympathetic personality, exquisite pleasure) and sliced the head off the bust with a wire – (Shaw, whom the bust already resembled very strikingly, watched this execution with indescribable delight.)’
What appealed to Shaw was Rodin’s monumental matter-of-factness. He never pretended to a knowledge of his plays (‘he knows absolutely nothing about books,’ Shaw commented, ‘ – thinks they are things to be read’), his eyes never twinkled, his hands did not gesticulate: he worked, and ‘like all great workmen who can express themselves in words, was very straight and simple’. Shaw’s words, according to Rodin, were less straight but even more simple: ‘M. Shaw ne parle pas très bien,’ he said; ‘mais il s’exprime avec une telle violence qu’il s’impose.’
These séances at Meudon became one of the features of Paris’s spring season. People as various as G. K. Chesterton and Gwen John were reported to have bulged or peeped in for a moment. From Vienna came Trebitsch to marvel and absorb the ‘lofty mind’ of Charlotte in ‘profound talk about God and the universe’.
To other acquaintances – including the young American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn – Shaw sent invitations for the unveiling of Rodin’s sculpture ‘Le Penseur’. Coburn had photographed Shaw two summers earlier, and in 1906 Shaw had written a preface to the catalogue for an exhibition of his work in which he compared Coburn’s photograph of Chesterton to Rodin’s statue of Balzac. The inauguration of ‘Le Penseur’ outside the Panthéon took place on the afternoon of 21 April. Next morning Shaw surprised Coburn with the suggestion that ‘after his bath I should photograph him nude in the pose of Le Penseur’ on the edge of his bath. With this parody of ‘Le Penseur’ he came close to sabotaging his purpose in going to Rodin for evidence of himself ‘just as I am, without one plea’. He wanted to feel cleansed of the revulsion that periodically rose up in him over his own notoriety. But this Shavian fame arose from so deep a need that he sentimentalized his humility towards Rodin when famously remarking: ‘at least I was sure of a place in the biographical dictionaries a thousand years hence as: “Shaw, Bernard: subject of a bust by Rodin: otherwise unknown”.’
They went to Ibsen’s Canard Sauvage and to the Grand Guignol with Trebitsch. The more blood-curdling these plays, Trebitsch observed, the more of an effort Shaw had to make ‘not to burst out laughing’. He particularly enjoyed the guillotine. Nothing, it seemed to Trebitsch, could frighten G.B.S., not even the evening newspaper predictions of a revolution in Paris on May Day which he looked forward to as ‘the next instalment of the horror-play we have just been seeing’. Shaw spent the afternoon of May Day with Charlotte on the Place de la République and afterwards sent a message to the Labour Leader commenting that the French Government wanted to win the General Election ‘by suppressing a revolution. Unluckily there is no revolution to suppress. The Government therefore sends the police and the dragoons to shove and charge the lazy and law abiding Parisians until they are goaded into revolt. No use: the people simply WON’T revolt.
‘But several respectable persons have been shoved and galloped over and even sabred. Surely it ought to be within the resources of modern democracy to find a remedy for this sort of official amateur revolution making. It is a clear interference with our business as scientific revolutionists.’
In a letter to Granville Barker he admitted there had been a little more activity, describing Charlotte as clinging to lamp-posts in order to see over people’s heads and growing ‘so furious when she saw a real crowd charged by real soldiers that she wanted to throw stones’. After being ‘pushed roughly hither and thither’ she was led back by Shaw (‘by dignified strategy which did not at any time go to the length of absolutely running away’) to their hotel ‘bursting into fresh spasms of rage all the way’. They had quitted the field without wounds and Shaw insisted that Charlotte had ‘rather enjoyed being part of a revolution’. ‘We finished up in the evening with a very stirring performance of Beethoven’s 9th symphony at the Opera,’ he told Trebitsch; ‘so the day was a pretty full one.’
On 8 May Shaw sat to Rodin for the last time, then he and Charlotte caught the four o’clock train back to London. She carried with her two pencil-and-wash sketches of herself inscribed by Rodin ‘Homage à sympathique Madame Charlotte Shaw’. From London she sent him chocolates and her photograph of him (none of Shaw’s had come out) and in October the curiously tame marble bust arrived at Adelphi Terrace; ‘maintenant je suis immortel,’ wrote Shaw in a letter to Rodin that was returned to him as insufficiently addressed.
Within six weeks of returning to London Shaw was turning his head to William Strang for a good tight portrait. The following year, 1907, began with a couple of quick sittings for a bust by Troubetzkoy and ended with a preliminary one for Epstein. Shaw was to use these busts (and others by Sava Botzaris, Kathleen Bruce, Joseph Coplans, Jo Davidson, Sigismund de Strobl and Clare Winsten) to pull faces at his ‘reputation’. Prince Troubetzkoy, being paternally Russian, ‘made me flatteringly like a Russian nobleman’; and in the hands of Jacob Epstein, an American expatriate, he later became ‘a Brooklyn navvy... my skin thickened, my hair coarsened, I put on five stone in weight, my physical strength trebled’. It followed that his plaster reputation lay in the imaginations of other people, not within himself.
Charlotte welcomed the respite from work these sittings and standings and posings obtained for him. But Epstein’s ungentlemanly bust (completed in 1934) was ‘like a blow in the face’ and she told everyone who mentioned it to her that if this object ‘came into our house she would walk out of it’. As Rodin had not understood his humour so Epstein had overlooked his Shavian veneer: and ‘without my veneer I am not Bernard Shaw’.
This veneer, he had sometimes argued, was his reputation. In these busts and portraits, Shaw often felt he recognized part of himself; but never could he find all parts combined. Perhaps there was no method, even in his own work, of allying the opposing forces within himself. At the age of fifty he had proposed ‘to furnish the world with an authentic portrait-bust of me before I had left the prime of life’. The nearest he came to this was perhaps Strobl’s work – Charlotte certainly thought so. But the search for comprehensive authenticity continued almost to the end of his life
. It was impossible, H. G. Wells complained, to move around Europe without being stared at by these Shavian images which seemed at the same time to mock and celebrate his rising success.
In the summer of 1906, as if in sympathy with this success, Shaw ascended from Wandsworth Gas Works in a balloon (a happening he would later re-compose for his play Misalliance). He rose and floated and descended over two and a half hours, without Charlotte’s knowledge yet in the company of her sister, Granville Barker and the aviator-actor Robert Loraine. Loraine was a combination of artist and man-of-action Shaw particularly admired. ‘I was never free from the impression when Shaw was speaking to me,’ Loraine had written in his diary, ‘that he might at any moment ascend to Heaven like Elisha on a chariot of fire.’ They were guided in their balloon by an aeronaut Percival Spencer (who was translated into Joey Percival in Misalliance) to a height of 9,000 feet. After forty minutes’ drifting ‘very pleasant and seraphic with nothing happening, except that Shaw would peer through a hole in the boarding at his feet which made him feel rather sick, we discussed landing,’ Loraine wrote. ‘...I thought the people would be rather interested to receive visitors from the air, and especially flattered when they discovered Shaw’s identity. “Don’t be so certain,” said Shaw. “They may think my works detestable.”’ In the event they bumped down in a field near Chobham and were met by a purple-faced landowner, unacquainted with Shaw’s oeuvre and waving a shooting-stick. ‘The welcome he gave us was a curt direction as to the quickest way off his property.’
2
A Cat and Dog Life
I was born to do odd jobs.
Shaw to Beatrice Webb (9 December 1910)
Their agonies of house-hunting ended when they came across the Rectory at Ayot St Lawrence, not far from Wheathampstead in Hertfordshire. The Rector, who could not afford to keep up the grounds, had no need of such a large house himself, and Charlotte decided to rent it. She did not plan to stay there long. They continued renting the place for fourteen years and shortly after the First World War bought it – following which it became known as ‘Shaw’s Corner’.
Bernard Shaw Page 50