Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  *

  Some 20,000 copies of Heartbreak House, Great Catherine, and Playlets of the War were published in North America and Britain during September 1919. In Britain the critical response was generally unfavourable. A. B. Walkley doubted whether the ‘fun’ of Heartbreak House ‘would stand the glare of the footlights’, and other critics shared this doubt. Eventually, in the summer of 1920, Shaw signed a contract with the newly incorporated Theatre Guild of New York, where his volume of war plays had been less condescendingly received. The world première took place at the Garrick Theater in New York on 10 November 1920. It was well reviewed, and the production ran for more than 100 performances over almost five months. In Vienna, where Trebitsch’s translation was staged later that November ‘with great respect for the intentions of the author’, Shaw’s loquaciousness seemed to weaken the power of the play. ‘The audience at first listened with great interest,’ one critic wrote; ‘...later, however, the interest lessened visibly, the signs of impatience were not wanting at the end.’

  Shaw was to learn something of this difficulty for himself a year later during rehearsals of the English production which he directed with the new leaseholder of the Court Theatre, the Irish playwright and manager J. B. Fagan. ‘I am rehearsing Heartbreak House at the Court Theatre,’ he wrote to Edward Elgar. ‘It was like old times rehearsing John Bull there.’ But there was a difference. ‘The book of the words has been so widely read and so much discussed,’ wrote the critic of the Westminster Gazette, ‘...that the real hush of expectation was absent.’ In the old times, publication of Shaw’s plays had sharpened the public’s demand for their performance; now it seemed to dull the curiosity of an audience that already knew about the eccentricities of Shotover and the climax of the bombing raid. It was retitled ‘Jawbreak House’ and the play which took place in ‘a private lunatic asylum with many patients and no keeper’ was classed as being ‘about the worst there ever was’. The only reputation to be significantly lifted was Chekhov’s. ‘Tchekov always has an atmosphere,’ commented the Sunday Times; ‘this play has only a smell.’

  Shaw blamed the lack of rehearsal time and immediately set about cutting it – exactly what he had forbidden the American and Austrian directors to do. ‘I never cut anything merely to save time,’ he told St John Ervine, ‘...[but] there are always lines which are dud lines with a given cast. Change the cast and you get other lines dud.’ This truth, however, obscured another truth: the play lacked the seventh degree of concentration. ‘As an entertainment pure and simple it is dull and incoherent... [with] all the author’s prolixities and perversities,’ reported James Agate in the Saturday Review, and yet ‘I found it quite definitely exhilarating and deeply moving, and it therefore ranks for me among the great testaments.’

  3

  Miss Cross Patch Comes to Stay

  You are becoming too famous.

  Shaw to Blanche Patch

  ‘Would you care to be my secretary?’ Shaw enquired of a forty-year-old clergyman’s daughter. Blanche Patch seemed perfect casting for the vacancy. In appearance she reminded Shaw of Harold Laski – and since he was a prominent socialist at the London School of Economics, this counted in her favour. It may even have influenced Charlotte on whom Miss Patch made a ‘pleasant impression’. She had been a nurse, a hand-loom weaver, a pharmacist’s assistant in Wales and was currently typing for a London optician. She was ‘not a university woman’, but came recommended by the Webbs. She knew pretty well nothing about the literary or political world.

  As a non-Shavian, Miss Patch was unaware of her advantages. Shaw’s ‘quick, witty, friendly way... [which] was new to me then’ increased her diffidence, and she wrote back declining his offer. Recognizing the uncertainty behind this refusal Shaw tried again. ‘I hardly like to steal you away from another man. Still, I will not take your first No for an answer; so will you let me have a second one, or a Yes, before I let loose a general announcement that the post is vacant?’

  This tactful renewal gave her confidence to do what she really wanted. She started work as Shaw’s secretary at the end of July 1920 and remained with him until his death. During this time he treated her like a typewriter. ‘Nothing that you could possibly write,’ he told Stella Campbell, ‘could produce the slightest effect on her.’ Certainly nothing that he wrote ever affected her. She was completely ‘Shaw-proof’.

  Ann Elder had observed that ‘my successor, Miss Blanche Patch, was older and more mature than I, but I’m not sure that her sense of humour was ever very strongly developed’. This lack of humour amused Shaw. ‘Patch is a born comedian,’ he insisted in a letter to Beatrice Webb, ‘and shews me photographs of herself as a Pierrot.’

  She had been nervous at first. ‘Does he throw things at you?’ she asked one of the maids. But what responsible employer would deliberately damage his office equipment? During her thirty years’ employment only twice could she remember him losing his temper – and then it was not with her. ‘Even-tempered he always was, and that made working for him easy; but never a word of praise came from him.’ He was less a father to her than a maintenance inspector.

  He never misused her, never spoilt her. ‘No man knows your value better than I do,’ he told her: and it was true she was wonderfully economic. ‘Will you think £3–10s per week too much?’ she had asked him and he immediately agreed to this, not telling her that it was ten shillings a week less than Ann Elder had been getting. Over the years, she was to witness him handing away many thousands of pounds, but such gifts were conferred ‘without human warmth,’ Miss Patch noted, and often to people she felt were undeserving. It struck her as odd too that he should be so spontaneous with strangers while remaining so cautious with herself. His scorn for capitalistic money-making affected her awkwardly. He had been paying Ann Elder more than union rates and would have paid her still more if she had asked. But by the time Blanche Patch took over he preferred to calculate his finances. These calculations, sometimes hampered by an elderly adding machine, seemed to her ‘finicky’. ‘The meaning to the ordinary worker of the increased cost of living never reached his conscious mind,’ she complained. She was not to know that he added a codicil to his will in the late 1920s leaving her an annuity of £260, which he raised to £365 in the late 1930s and to £500 in 1950 (equivalent to £9,300 in 1997). For a long time she puzzled over his financial aberrations until it suddenly occurred to her that he simply had no head for numbers. ‘He could never, for instance, remember how many brothers and sisters I had.’

  Shaw had warned her that the Adelphi Terrace apartment was protected by a fortified obstacle giving it ‘the appearance of a private madhouse’. When she had got through this barbed-wire gate, she ascended to the study, a long ‘horribly pokey room’ on the third floor overlooking the Water Gate arches upon Hungerford Bridge, with Shaw’s desk at one end and hers at the other. His shorthand, which was without contractions or grammalogues, had all the vowel signs written in and difficult words spelt out in longhand, so it was easy for her to transcribe. He wrote 1,500 words of prime work a morning on blocks of water-lined paper with a green tint to rest his eyes, and would give her his shorthand draft in batches. ‘I used to rest his manuscript on a stand, such as violinists have, placed behind my typewriter and raised to eye height,’ she wrote. Very occasionally she made an error – ‘the profiteers of the theatre’ instead of ‘the proprietors of the theatre’, which struck Shaw as an improvement, and ‘porter’ for ‘torture’, which for some reason made him laugh.

  Apart from swimming at the RAC, walking, motorcycling and motoring (with a little hedge-trimming and log-sawing in the country), Shaw did nothing but work, so far as Miss Patch could see. ‘His industry was terrific,’ she wrote. ‘I have always thought that he wrote too much.’ Privately she found Back to Methuselah ‘hard pedalling’ and On the Rocks ‘dull’, while Too True to be Good ‘bored me a bit’. The first two plays she worked on were Jitta’s Atonement, which was ‘slight’ and ‘rather dismal’, and S
aint Joan, which she acknowledged to be not his best. She was still less enthusiastic about his non-dramatic work. ‘He would be an uncommonly devoted Shavian who to-day would cheerfully set out again to read through The Intelligent Woman’s Guide, followed by Everybody’s Political What’s What not to say explore once more the Sahara of the novels,’ she wrote after Shaw’s death.

  Often she was obliged to put aside her 1,500 words of play-typing for the articles and long letters about Beethoven and Churchill, Walt Whitman and Santa Claus; on proposals for sex training and the question of rejuvenation by monkey glands, also whether dogs have an after-life and why he could not afford a peerage – all implacably typed out. Then there were the ‘pests’ and ‘busybodies’, who wanted autographs, prefaces, cheques, speeches, whom she would ‘fob-off with one of the printed cards from his coloured pack or a paragraph of careful explanation. ‘To most of them,’ she objected, ‘he was much too polite.’

  Miss Patch herself was not so polite. Some of those who had been enchanted by her name (‘it suggests a vivacious person in a play by Sheridan,’ proposed Charles Ricketts) were soon addressing her: ‘Dear Miss Cross Patch.’ She referred to ‘my pretended irascibility’ as a necessary component of ‘our firmness’. The only person who really exasperated her was G.B.S. himself. ‘Oh, go away and write another play!’ she would exclaim when he came pacing near her typewriter – ‘he created a considerable draught as he swung past me’. His formal manners were invariably courteous, she admitted, but he was a shy man who shrank from people: how envious he must be of the way she herself got on with everyone. ‘He always appeared to be astonished that I knew much more about the working classes than he did.’

  But what exasperated her most was the way he took her for granted. ‘I resented being looked on simply as a shorthand typist.’ Normally he behaved as if she wasn’t there at all. ‘I might be away for a week or so with influenza and he would receive me when I returned to work as if I had been there all the time.’

  Planted beneath the cool surface of their relationship was a perpetually unflowering seed of emotion. Although she never showed it openly, Charlotte was ‘jealous of the fact that I had to read and transcribe his shorthand,’ Miss Patch noticed. It didn’t surprise her. Phonetic shorthand was a form of intimacy that ‘a lonely type of person’ like Charlotte would have loved. Miss Patch could appreciate that. What she could not appreciate was Shaw’s behaviour when, from time to time, he passed on ‘certain of my duties’ to another woman – by which she meant his former secretary and relative, Judy Gillmore. That really put a spark in the gunpowder. Why G.B.S. should still feel so fond of Judy Miss Patch could never comprehend. Judy had made her bed with Harold Musters in 1912; and that should have been that. Then there was the matter of the big toe of her right foot. Miss Patch must have injured it in her school days, for it had stiffened over the years and by the time she settled down at Adelphi Terrace it had become an agony. News of her toe never failed to stimulate G.B.S. By way of experiment, he even sent her at his own expense to a ‘Scandinavian Naturpath’ who applied hot fomentations to almost every part of her body except the foot, bringing no relief whatever. Shaw was anxious that she avoid ‘the operation panacea’ but all the extra walking during the General Strike finally disabled her and she decided to go into St Thomas’s Hospital to have her toe joint removed. It was when she went down to Frinton for what she hoped would be a peaceful convalescence that Shaw exploded his surprise. He had engaged Judy Musters as locum tenens, ‘so you need not hurry back if your foot needs a little more rest’. She hurried back.

  But to do him justice, he seemed greatly relieved to have her back. ‘I am distracted and lost without you,’ he had appealed, and he had ‘footed’ the bill for her operation. So they settled down again until the next upheaval. Miss Patch realized that some people thought her attitude to G.B.S. was unfriendly; one of them (probably St John Ervine) was to send her an anonymous card marked JUDAS when she published her reminiscences of him. But Shaw himself understood the nature of their partnership. He cared for her as he did for his paste and scissors, which also contributed to the manuscripts and proofs of his life. And she looked after him as a matron of a nursing home might look after a long-term patient – with detachment and efficiency, occasionally telling him off when his foolishness went too far. ‘The faithful Patch,’ he once called her. She prized this tribute from one who had the tribute of the world.

  *

  ‘Travelling is still very troublesome,’ Shaw had written to Trebitsch in the summer of 1919. For more than six years following the war the Shaws did not travel outside the United Kingdom, though Charlotte regularly hustled G.B.S. over England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland on a series of purposeful holidays, theatrical tours and to Fabian Summer Schools. Kilsby, going off to make aeroplane engines at Woolwich, had taken a long farewell of them during the war, and in May 1919 Charlotte engaged Fred Day from Codicote as their new chauffeur. G.B.S. was still a fiery motorcyclist, and he egged on Day to ‘ginger up’ his two-stroke machine – after which it would hurtle away, bucking him off and sometimes landing on top of him. Before Day’s arrival he had taken hypothetical instruction from the local chemist, E. P. Downing, on how to steer this motorcycle round corners, but he could not bring himself to accept the theory that it was necessary to slow down and to lean over at an angle. The chemist was impressed by Shaw’s ‘outstanding deficiency in mechanical sense’ and had no more luck with his hints on reversing motor cars, Shaw once taking half an hour to turn the car round, and demolishing some flower beds while doing so.

  The village had grown proud of Shaw’s notorious road exploits. Local dogs, knowing him well, would play dead under his car while he anxiously crawled after them – when they would bounce out, barking triumphantly. In Fred Day’s opinion his employer was ‘rather reckless’ at the wheel, though ‘always very considerate’ afterwards. Whenever anything happened, such as a bump or a crash, he would leap out, offer to pay all expenses, scoop up the other driver and passengers and drive them trembling home.

  Fred Day stayed on for thirty-one adventurous years and owned that he ‘would do anything for Mr Shaw’. Once, during a storm, Shaw noticed Day give a small wave to a woman and child at a bus stop. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked. ‘My wife,’ Day answered. ‘Stop,’ Shaw commanded, ‘ – turn round. We must take them home.’ Day had schooled his family never to recognize him if they met him on duty since ‘in those days [1925] it was definitely not usual for the gentry to have anything to do with the staff socially. But Mr Shaw was different. He put his arm round her shoulders and helped her into the car. She was terrified.’ Later on, Shaw offered to pay for his daughter to train as a schoolteacher though admitting ‘I’d rather be a crossing-sweeper’.

  It was an interesting job being the Shaws’ chauffeur. You got to drive all sorts of machines – a Vauxhall or a Bianca with mechanical windscreen wipers, a straight-eight Lanchester with a harmonic balancer (which Mr Shaw spoke of as if he believed it to be a musical contraption), followed by a ‘run-about’ Lanchester ten, then a chocolate-coloured Rolls-Royce and finally a 25–30 m.p.h. Silver Wraith. Mr Shaw would ask Day’s advice on cars – such as the A.C. coupé they bought in 1923 – quiz him about helical pinions or differential gears and take him to the dealers. He liked to ride next to Day up front, and take the wheel until lunch, while Mrs Shaw preferred sitting at the back. Mr Shaw had the back seat specially upholstered for her, with the compartment sealed from draughts and fitted with a heater. Mrs Shaw designed the front seat for him, with a cushion at the head propping him bolt upright. In this manner, at various speeds, they travelled the country, very slow when Mrs Shaw was with them, very fast when she wasn’t and Mr Shaw was driving. His favourite trick, Day noticed, was to mistake the accelerator for the brake. Sometimes, when visiting their friends, his employers would travel by train and arrange for Day to follow with the bags. It seemed to him a funny sort of logic, using a Rolls-Royce for carrying luggage.
r />   4

  Tragedy of an Elderly Gentleman

  I am doing the best I can at my age.

  Preface to Back to Methuselah (1921)

  ‘Messrs Constable & Co have to announce the publication early in the forthcoming season of an important and even extraordinary work by Mr Bernard Shaw,’ wrote Shaw in a press release for his publishers in the spring of 1921. The book would, he promised, ‘interest biologists, religious leaders, and lovers of the marvellous in fiction as well as lovers of the theatre’. It was ‘his supreme exploit in dramatic literature’.

  He had begun this colossal affair, its 30,000-word Preface leading to a sequence of five plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah, more than seven months before the war was over, and completed it at the end of May two years later, though continuing to revise and prepare it for publication into the early months of 1921. Like Heartbreak House, it was struck out of him by the war; but where Heartbreak House exploits the forces of death, Back to Methuselah explores new powers of life. It is a vastly hopeful composition, and ‘the last work of any vigor I shall produce’.