Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  *

  Demetrius O’Bolger ‘is an Irishman: a professor of literature at an American university,’ Shaw had told Harris. His study of Shaw’s own plays had begun in 1912 as a thesis for the Graduate Department of the University of Pennsylvania. ‘I determined to run out the thread of his home surroundings,’ O’Bolger wrote. ‘...I thought I saw not a few reticences... and I determined to penetrate them and systematize the results if Mr Shaw were willing to give me the necessary information.’

  And Shaw was willing. O’Bolger would send him a sheet of paper with a question typed at the top, and G.B.S. would fill up the rest of the page with an answer sometimes extending to five or six hundred words. His help swelled into a positive obstacle. Often and often O’Bolger believed he had completed his book. He completed it, for example, in February 1916, only to receive a little later that month, twenty-nine closely typewritten pages from Shaw, describing the circumstances of his youth and the household in which he grew up. ‘The death of my mother set me free to tell O’B. more than I could allow Henderson to publish in her lifetime,’ Shaw revealed to Harris, who was then struggling with his ‘Contemporary Portrait’ of G.B.S. Never had Shaw been so forthcoming – but ‘I do not send you the stuff for publication as it stands,’ he ominously added to O’Bolger.

  O’Bolger had celebrated the end of the Great War by completing his book for the third time. Receiving an offer a few months after Armistice Day from Harpers to publish a revised text, he sat down to make a fourth draft, working ‘till the nerves of my neck and the back of my head could no longer stand the strain’. Harpers seemed delighted: but Shaw was not delighted. Having examined the contract, he declared that he would treat direct quotation as an infringement of copyright ‘and hand the stuff over to Frank Harris’, whereupon Harpers cancelled their contract. Shaw had ‘delivered a sound blow for principle’s sake,’ O’Bolger observed. ‘He had saved me from being fleeced by saving me from being published.’ In a frantic begging-and-abusing letter, O’Bolger appealed to G.B.S. to change his mind. ‘Dont be scared,’ Shaw responded. ‘...Do not lose your head and try to drown your rescuer.’

  Shaw felt a need after his mother died to gain control of his formative years, but he did not wish to see all he had spilled out immediately given away in print. So when O’Bolger sent him the yet-again-completed manuscript, he hung on to it, and it was still in his possession in the early 1920s. ‘I somehow cannot make up my mind to send that blasted MS of yours back without another look at it.’ O’Bolger, he informed Harris, ‘was the son of an Irish inspector of police; and he proceeded to investigate the case precisely as his father would have done’. He also wrote like a policeman. This ‘explains everything,’ Shaw informed O’Bolger, ‘...your treatment of my mother and father as suspicious characters in custody, your rejection of all my statements as unsupported by evidence and coming from a tainted source &c &c.’ ‘I am not qualified to advise you medically,’ he went on, before advancing a diagnosis. His biographer was suffering from a Resentment Complex. He listed the symptoms. ‘You have the resentment of the poor man against the rich man, of the Irish Catholic against the Irish Protestant...

  ‘You have, in particular, achieved a portrait of a most horrible woman whom you allege was my mother, with a sordid husband, and a disingenuous son, forming the sort of Irish interior which you most hate and despise as typifying every social injustice from which you and your people ever suffered.’

  What this letter affirms is Shaw’s genuine distress. O’Bolger’s ‘interior’ had turned the Shavian paradoxes inside out and come up with an ugly picture of those Dublin years that Shaw himself had told Ellen Terry were ‘frightful in realities’. The ‘worst of it was,’ Shaw added in a letter to Harris, ‘that I could not deny that the information I had given him bore his construction’.

  So they reached deadlock until O’Bolger submitted to the process of exhaustive Shavian editing that Archibald Henderson had accepted. ‘Unfortunately this involved practically rewriting his book for him,’ Shaw pointed out; ‘and for that it was impossible for me to find time.’ So the manuscript remained suspended. ‘You will certainly be the death of me,’ Shaw cried out one of his most lethal paradoxes. In the summer of 1923, O’Bolger suddenly died. ‘The situation was a painful one for me,’ Shaw commented, ‘...a great worry for him; and now it has helped to worry him into his grave... A tragic business.’

  Had there ever been such a cautionary tale for a biographer? ‘The unfortunate author died of disappointment,’ Shaw told Harris, ‘aided by pernicious anaemia, cursing me for ruining him.’

  *

  O’Bolger had made no startling discoveries about Shaw’s early years in Ireland, but his enquiries had pressed on a bruise, disturbed G.B.S., and made him deftly rearrange some of the facts. ‘And now you want me to start again,’ he exclaimed to Harris. ‘I had rather die misunderstood.’ Feeling like a ‘dog returning to his vomit’, he began early in 1930 a succession of autobiographical letters to Harris.

  Meanwhile there was no stopping Henderson from preparing an expanded version of his biography called, to Shaw’s disgust, Playboy and Prophet. The market was saturated, he protested. Yet Henderson was not to be deterred. The best compromise Shaw could negotiate was a delay until 1932, plus an agreement that he should vet the text.

  G.B.S.’s hand had been somewhat weakened in these negotiations by his involvement with Harris. Harris had posted a letter to the Times Literary Supplement soliciting ‘quips, inscriptions, autographs’. He also hired an editor by the name of Frank Scully, later an authority on flying saucers. According to Scully, it was Scully who actually wrote the book; certainly it is dedicated to him. At the beginning of May, the two Franks had cobbled together over 100,000 words, a good fifteen per cent of which were by G.B.S. ‘If you publish a word of mine I’ll have the law on you,’ Shaw threatened. Harris was panic-stricken. The lesson of O’Bolger had meant nothing to him – indeed, he had received an advance on royalties for the guarantee of Shaw’s words rather than his own. So Shaw was obliged to relent, if only because Nellie and Frank ‘were in rather desperate circumstances,’ he explained to Henderson. However, he cautioned Harris that ‘if there is one expression in this book of yours that cannot be read aloud at a confirmation class, you are lost for ever. Your life and loves are just being forgotten,’ he went on. ‘...This book is your chance of recovering your tall hat... So brush up your frock coat; buy a new tie; and remember that your life now depends on your being Francis Harris, Esquire.’

  In this way the subject put himself in charge of his biographer’s reputation. Frank, the ruffian, must be removed. ‘Bury him,’ Shaw commanded in April 1931. ‘If you dont the parish will.’ Four months later, Frank Harris was buried in the British Cemetery at Caucade. Shaw sent the widow Nellie a cheque: and Nellie Harris arranged for G.B.S. to be sent the galley-proofs.

  ‘I have had to do many odd jobs in my time; but this one is quite the oddest,’ he wrote in a postscript to the book, where he gives the impression of having corrected the finished proof sheets. In a letter to Nellie he comes nearer to explaining what he had actually done: ‘Frank knew hardly more about my life history than I knew about yours; and the mixture of his guesses with the few things I told him produced the wildest results.

  ‘I have had to fill in the prosaic facts in Frank’s best style, and fit them to his comments as best I could; for I have most scrupulously preserved all his sallies at my expense... You may, however, depend on it that the book is not any the worse for my doctoring.’

  Shaw made certain that the galley-proofs of Harris’s book were destroyed since he did not want his shadowing of Harris’s style to be detected. It had amused him, under the camouflage of Harris’s reputation for mendacity, to insert several authentic passages and, as part of this strange collaboration, occasionally to slip the correcting pen over to Sonny:

  ‘All through, from his very earliest childhood, he had lived a fictitious life through the exercise
of his incessant imagination... It was a secret life: its avowal would have made him ridiculous. It had one oddity. The fictitious Shaw was not a man of family. He had no relatives. He was not only a bastard, like Dunois or Falconbridge, who at least knew who their parents were: he was also a foundling.’

  ‘Ought Mr Shaw to Have Done It?’ demanded the reviewers. It was a pity, they judged, that he had allowed himself to be bullied by such a pugilist-of-letters. What they could not observe, since it was invisible, was the extent of Shaw’s vicarious presentation of himself which by the 1930s was becoming part of his dramatic production.

  Harris’s book sold well, which was bad news for Henderson whose first biography had been outshone by Chesterton and whose second biography appeared shortly in the wake of Harris. But the proofs of Playboy and Prophet were preserved, and they exhibit the cascading quantities of concealed rewriting done by G.B.S. in the persona of this friendly American mathematician who, without interest in politics or talent for writing, continued loyally to keep the pot boiling. Shaw, however, could not bring himself to write an endorsement. ‘DAMN Bernard Shaw,’ he wrote to Henderson, ‘and his tedious doings and sayings!’

  *

  ‘For seven weeks I have been hiding within a day’s ride... I shall have left when this reaches you,’ Shaw wrote to Molly Tompkins before moving on to Geneva; ‘...you should not drive me away to horrible hell-paradises like the Riviera by refusing to behave yourself tactfully.’

  Searching for a paradise without hell, Shaw turned to the Adriatic in 1929, putting down on the island of Brioni off the Istrian peninsula. ‘A settled melancholy, peculiar to the place perhaps, devours us,’ he wrote to Blanche Patch: and this, Charlotte sharply added, suited them very well.

  From here they sailed to Dubrovnik, then continued overland by way of Boka Kotorska to Cetinje, the capital of Montenegro, before going on to Split. The Royal Yugoslav Government, anxious to use his visit as an advertisement for tourism and an endorsement of its political regime, had greeted him with a two-hour press conference at Dubrovnik. ‘There are good reasons for me to be careful about my political statements,’ Shaw announced. He was angered by some of the misreporting of these statements and refused to meet the press a second time in Split.

  The Shaws left Split on 27 May and sailed for Venice. Travelling back on the Orient Express he saw Molly’s Isola from the train window, and hurtled on to London where, a fortnight later, he finished a 10,000-word Preface to his love letters with Ellen Terry.

  Ellen had died the previous summer. For the last fourteen years of her life, since she played Lady Cicely Waynflete in Captain Brassbound’s Conversion, they had not often corresponded. ‘I wonder shall I ever act in a Play of yours again!’ she had written to him in 1910, and then, more than two years later: ‘I suppose an old woman would not attract as a centre piece in a play, and that you never could write such a thing for – me?’ Her enquiries filled him with dismay. ‘It’s as if Queen Alexandra came to me and asked me to get her a place as cook-housekeeper,’ he wrote in a letter he was to exclude from their published correspondence.

  Ellen was losing her eyesight, her memory for words, her stage confidence. ‘Can you enlarge my prospect?’ she had appealed to Shaw. ‘...I must work.’ When very young she had enlarged her prospect by escaping from an imprisoning marriage to G. F. Watts and eloping with William Godwin, ‘the greatest aesthete of them all,’ as Max Beerbohm called him. But having given birth to two illegitimate children, she found out what it was like to be a fallen and forgotten woman in nineteenth-century England. The partnership with Henry Irving had restored her reputation and the public happily identified her with the virtuous and sentimental roles Irving handed down to her. Shaw had then tried to enlarge their prospects together. But she had not wanted to risk public obloquy again.

  In the late nineteenth century every Victorian gentleman who came to the Lyceum had fallen in love with Ellen Terry, and no wife had objected because she was regarded not as a notorious seductress like Mrs Patrick Campbell, but as the ideal embodiment of motherhood. Shaw knew how ironically this image fitted someone who, unleashing a power denied to her in the theatre, had given her children such a difficult and divisive upbringing. In the early twentieth century, following Irving’s death, ‘Our Lady of the Lyceum’ had faded into ‘Our Lady of Sighs’, fiercely fought over by her son, the legendary theatre designer Gordon Craig, and by her lesbian daughter Edy Craig.

  Edy Craig had read Shaw’s letters when looking through the boxes of her mother’s papers. At her request, Shaw sent her Ellen’s letters, and she felt that both sides of the correspondence should be published. Shaw agreed to draft ‘an explanation for posterity’ that could be used as a preface whenever the letters were published. ‘The rest lies practically with the executors,’ he concluded.

  Gordon Craig was not an executor. But Edy Craig was, and unknown to both men she had sold Shaw’s letters to a publisher for £3,000 (equivalent to £82,000 in 1997). On learning this, Shaw wrote to Gordon Craig saying that it was ‘no longer possible to pretend that we are under any pecuniary pressure to publish the letters’. He proposed sending Ellen’s letters ‘to the British Museum (say) with a copy of the preface to be placed with them when they are put into the catalogue at some future date’. In the meantime he forwarded Gordon Craig a proof copy, marked ‘Very Private’, of his ‘Preface to be attached to the Correspondence of Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw should it ever be published’, with the request that he read it carefully because ‘Edy tells me that you are at work on a memoir of Irving with incidental references to me’.

  Gordon Craig had little intention of referring to G.B.S., whose part in Irving’s career he believed to have been negligible. Irving was his hero, and he had now inherited the feud between ‘my master’, as he called him, and this ‘literary gangster’, as G.B.S. called himself. As he took the field under the banner of Shaw’s old adversary, the faded colours once more unfurled, the dusty echoes stirred, and the ancient jousting was rejoined. But now it was Irving’s champion and not G.B.S. who was banished from the arena of the commercial theatre. ‘You were trying to make a picture frame of the proscenium to replace actors by figures, and drive the dramatic poet from the theatre,’ Shaw accused Craig. ‘And as I was doing precisely the reverse, and the Zeitgeist carried me to success, you felt that I was the arch enemy. So I was... the enemy who does not reciprocate your dislike – if you really dislike him.’ But Gordon Craig really did dislike the man who had set out ‘to damage my mother, Nelly Terry, my father, myself, my family, Irving, and a few more’.

  Shaw also sent a copy of his preface to Edy Craig whose desire to see the correspondence quickly published – with the preface attached – was revitalized. Calculating that it would advance this end, she sold the copyright in her mother’s letters for another £3,000 to the same publisher who had bought Shaw’s side of their correspondence, and who promised that if he could not induce Shaw to allow the publication of his own letters he would publish Ellen Terry’s alone. Since Edy Craig had now amassed £6,000 (equivalent to £164,000 in 1997) for the Ellen Terry Estate without the printing of a word, there seemed no need to publish Shaw’s letters ‘until we have all passed into history,’ he confided to Gordon Craig ‘ – or out of it’.

  But by the summer of 1930 Shaw had swung round to Edy’s opinion. He had been largely excluded from Craig’s book on Irving and now he was threatened with complete exclusion from Ellen Terry’s published correspondence. He was passing out of history. Reading through both sides of their exchange for the first time, he saw that ‘the moral of the whole correspondence’ would be the ‘justice done to the great woman E.T. sacrificed to the egotistical man H.I.’. Such a moral suited his own retrospective designs as well as the current feminist plans of Edy Craig and her lesbian lover ‘Christopher St John’ (with whom Shaw was silently to co-edit the volume). It also had the tactical advantage of forcing Gordon Craig to campaign simultaneously on two fronts.


  Shaw’s negotiations over the Ellen Terry correspondence were at once devious and honourable. He took care to omit all hurtful reference to living people, especially Gordon Craig himself; he gave all his own profits to the Ellen Terry Estate for the Memorial Museum that Edy was creating; and he agreed to the publication initially of a limited edition only, on the condition that Gordon Craig himself gave his consent – ‘and he, swearing that he would ne’er consent, consented’.

  Gordon Craig’s consent took the form of a brief letter to Shaw in which he promised ‘not to stand in the way’ of the publication: ‘you may rest assured that having said this I shall stick to it; and when the book containing my Mother’s and your letters is published you can rely on me not to write about it in the papers or to give interviews.’ Shaw was immediately generous in victory: ‘I took it, and take it, that your consent to the publication is like mine, a very reluctant submission to circumstances over which we have no control.’ Trying to align himself with both brother and sister, however, Shaw was caught between the fell incensed points of these mighty opposites. In his letter to Gordon Craig, he conceded, ‘As to your complete liberty to write about those letters, about the Lyceum, about E.T. and G.B.S., you must continue to exercise that in all respects as before.’ But when Gordon Craig did exercise this liberty in his book Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self the year after Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw. A Correspondence was published, Shaw made devastating use of his earlier letter of consent.

  Craig had given his consent to publication without seeing all the letters and his attitude changed after reading them through as a whole. The only honourable course, he now felt, was for Shaw and Edy to have destroyed everything, posthumously releasing his mother from this awful entanglement. After the publication of A Correspondence, he concentrated his anti-Shavian abuse in a curious pamphlet fitting into the back cover-pocket of Ellen Terry and Her Secret Self. ‘Frankly, readers will suffer no irreparable loss if they leave it there,’ commented The Times.