Bernard Shaw

by Holroyd, Michael;

  But how well was he writing? ‘Give him a good situation, like Edward VIII’s abdication, or the coronation of George VI, and his literary response is brilliant and wise, witty and worthwhile,’ Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary. But she could not endure his late plays with all their slapstick and knockabout. Without this daily task of playwriting his life would be meaningless. ‘There is no remedy for the defects of old age,’ Beatrice concluded, ‘ – whether they take the form of continuous discomfort or poor quality of output – or both.’

  But sometimes G.B.S. seemed to have found a remedy. The actress Irene Hentschel saw him entering the Globe Theatre in London at the end of 1936 ‘with the vigour of a hurricane’. Virginia Woolf too marvelled at his wires, his spring. ‘What an efficient, adept, trained arch & darter!’ she exclaimed. ‘...And the hands flung out in gesture: he has the power to make the world his shape.’ Visiting him in Whitehall Court, the Irish writer John Stewart Collis noticed how ‘easy and ungrand’ his manner still was. But he had grown terribly thin, his body supporting a white-bearded head ‘like a long stem holding up a large flower’. Another Irish writer, the poet Brendan O’Byrne, watched him advancing along Pall Mall

  ‘one long leg placed

  Before the other as if he could – if he wished – so

  Bestride the earth, his stout ash walking-stick

  Striking the pavement before him as if

  To teach it a lesson.’

  Recently come over from Dublin and sleeping rough in the London streets, the young man

  ‘had a hat I remember, and that

  Is most important, for the whole point of this story is

  That I raised my hat to Bernard Shaw, and he

  Raised his hat to me.’

  In such ways, for as long as possible, G.B.S. kept in touch with his own youth. ‘But alas! we are old.’ Old age brought the Shaws renewed problems. G.B.S. reckoned that ‘the only way I can keep Charlotte up at present is by deciding that we are NOT going to do something’. Even so, she still fretted over his work and her own weakening ability to interrupt it. Each summer they would move to a country town hotel, usually by the sea, and declare themselves the better for it. ‘We sleep like anything...’

  When Beatrice had fallen ill earlier in the 1930s, Shaw arranged for £1,000 (equivalent to £29,000 in 1997) to be credited to Sidney’s account at the Soviet Bank in London. ‘We need, I think, have no scruple in accepting this most generous gift from my oldest friend,’ Sidney reassured Beatrice who was then in a nursing home. In Sidney’s letter to Shaw himself there is an unusual tremor of emotion. ‘I am overwhelmed... It comes most timely to remove our anxieties [and]... as an immense relief to me,’ he wrote. The Webbs and the Shaws continued their annual visits to each other’s houses through most of the 1930s. In the summer of 1937 the Shaws went to Passfield and G.B.S. helped the Webbs with the proofs of their revised edition of Soviet Communism while Sidney helped the Shaws to redraft their wills. ‘So continues the old unbroken comradeship in work, started forty-five years ago, between GBS and the Webbs,’ observed Beatrice.

  Though these were affectionate meetings, each one seemed to mark another stage on a downward journey. Early in the New Year, a few days after Beatrice’s eightieth birthday, Sidney had a stroke. ‘The inevitable has come,’ Beatrice wrote in her diary. ‘...So there he is lying in the bed... He will have care and love so long as I am strong enough to give it.’ ‘Sidney has given us rather a fright,’ Shaw wrote to her, ‘...we shouldnt do such things... we should arrange to die quietly in our beds of heart failure.’

  Though he was able to read and follow conversations, Sidney remained a semi-invalid at Passfield, partially paralysed and with his speech impaired. ‘I suppose it is best for you to be alone at Passfield with nobody to bother you, except your invalid,’ Shaw wrote to Beatrice; ‘but somehow it does not feel that way to us: the impulse to stand by is so strong that it needs an exercise of conscious reasoning to stifle it.’

  ‘I dare say it’s time for all us nineteenth century writers to clear out,’ he was reported as saying when he learnt of Maxim Gorki’s death. ‘You’d better prepare my obituary,’ he instructed the New York Times. In May 1938, he suddenly fainted under Charlotte’s eyes. Sidney managed to send him one of his first short letters since his own illness. ‘What a long life you and I have had, and done so much in it, with the aid of wifes!’ But Charlotte found it almost impossible to aid him. He lay on a sofa claiming that he was curing himself by prolonged relaxation. ‘I nearly went mad!’ Charlotte protested.

  He was diagnosed as suffering from pernicious anaemia. Until recently the treatment had been ‘swallowing pounds of raw liver’, as Gilbert Murray confirmed, ‘but I think perhaps death is preferable to that’. A new remedy consisted of fifteen monthly injections of liver extract which he allowed the doctors ‘to squirt’ into ‘my lumbar regions’. Almost at once the Daily Express reported ‘G.B.S. Takes Meat’. ‘I do not,’ he answered, and he went on to reassure the Vegetarian News that ‘My diet remains unchanged.’ But he was not entirely happy. The liver extract had apparently set up a rejuvenated supply of red corpuscles, but ‘my own view is that I am by nature a white-blooded man,’ he confided to Henry Salt.

  The weapons in Shaw’s armoury were still bright from the last century and he took out all the old and glittering arguments. But the battleground was changing and he found himself having to combat not only Charlotte’s anxieties and the doctors’ conventionalities, but also the new militancy of vegetarians themselves. They bombarded him with queries and complaints. ‘Poor G.B.S. just returned from death’s door,’ wrote Charlotte, ‘...forced to write letter after letter when he could hardly hold the pen.’

  He eventually replaced the liver injections with tiny grains, clean and tasteless, of a naturist’s concoction called Hepamalt. ‘Of this I have consumed tons to please the doctors and redden my blood counts, without as far as I can make out, producing any effect whatever,’ he told Kathleen Kennet several years later. ‘But the anaemia and all its symptoms are gone. The liver gets the credit, though I suspect I have cured myself. I believe in the Nature Cure.’

  By the end of January 1939 G.B.S. was calling for research into vegetable hormones and developing a theory of protein poisoning which he later added to a new Vegetarian Diet postcard. But this was not good enough for vegetarian fundamentalists. Shaw was stung by their hostility. ‘Liver extract you would take if you developed pernicious anaemia,’ he answered one subscriber to the American Vegetarian. ‘If you were diabetic you would take insulin. If you had edema you would take thyroid. You may think you wouldn’t; but you would if your diet failed to cure you. You would try any of the gland extracts, the mineral drugs, the so-called vaccines, if it were that or your death.’

  Shaw’s anger was partly political. He believed that his own arguments were more honest than the claims of disease-free longevity made by radical vegetarians, and he felt convinced he was the better public advocate for vegetarianism. But privately he was in sympathy with some of their views. Though he was to claim that ‘I had no more scruple about trying it [liver extract] than I have eggs and butter’, the truth was that he had felt ‘intense disgust’ at being filled with such ‘loathsome stuff’. He had made the unpleasant discovery that ‘modern hormones have been arrived at by thousands of experiments on dogs, and that many of them are extracted from unappetizing materials which,’ he wrote to Henry Salt, ‘I shall not nauseate you by particularizing’. He was greatly relieved when he could bring ‘this repulsive story’ to an end and replace the hormones with yeast. His response to militant vegetarians was to seek an official assurance early in the Second World War that, when rationing began, special provision would be made for them. It was a fighting diet. ‘Vegetarians are the most ferocious class we have; and any underfeeding of them would produce a reduction of our national fighting spirit out of all proportion to their numbers.’

  Charlotte was the reason why Shaw consented to live.
‘My most distressing complaint is Anorexia, or dislike of food,’ he told Henry Salt: ‘...if I were not a married man and could do as I pleased, [I] would not lift a finger to survive.’ This was how Beatrice felt about Sidney. If he died, ‘I would gladly sleep and rise no more,’ she had written. But since his illness she slept less, rose earlier, and felt a greater stimulus to keep going. Visiting the Shaws during G.B.S.’s illness she had found him a ‘white-skinned shadow’ with Charlotte ‘bending over him with motherly affection’. He was so delighted to see her that they ‘actually embraced, and for the first time I kissed GBS!’

  The war was to make travelling difficult, but in the early summer of 1940 Sidney prevailed on Beatrice to take him up to London for one last meeting with G.B.S. and Charlotte. ‘Of the four I think I am the most willing to sink into nothingness and GBS least so,’ Beatrice observed. If she felt resentment, it was quickly dissolved, as it always had been, by his admiration for Sidney and his wonderful kindness to them both. She felt more warmly now towards Charlotte too. Her stamina and loyalty were extraordinary. At lunch they spoke about politics which for fifty years had been the fabric of their friendship. ‘They were delightfully affectionate,’ Beatrice wrote. ‘Why have we lived so long,’ Shaw asked her. ‘One war was enough.’

  *

  As his life lengthened so the Lives continued to multiply around it. Frank Harris’s ‘unauthorized biography’ had been published in Britain in 1931, the year before Archibald Henderson’s authorized Playboy and Prophet came out in the United States. These books, largely ghosted by G.B.S. himself and supporting in different ways his commitment to socialism, represent the aspects of his personality and career he was prepared to make visible to the public. But the public was not wholly satisfied and by the mid-1930s St John Ervine was preparing to show them how Harris and Henderson should have done it.

  Shaw tried to head him off. He had known Ervine for twenty years and recognized him to be an aggressively independent man-of-letters. He was less likely to allow his book to be taken over and rewritten than Henderson had been; and he could not be humorously disparaged like Harris. ‘Dont,’ Shaw advised him. But Ervine was obstinate: ‘I began to write it.’ So Shaw was obliged to redouble his disparagement. He gave Ervine particulars as to why he was quite the wrong sort of chap. But as he began warming to this exposition of his friend’s shortcomings, so he started to dig out some of the essential material Ervine needed for his book. It took Shaw until 1942 to abort this biography; and it took St John Ervine until 1956 to resurrect it for publication with a Foreword revealing how G.B.S. had ‘hoped that I would one day finish what I had begun’.

  Shaw’s method of postponing this biography until after his death was peculiarly exasperating to Ervine. He made absolutely certain that the market was glutted by publishing at the Gregynog Press an autobiographical miscellany misleadingly entitled Shaw Gives Himself Away and then by helping into print another biography which he felt more confident of controlling: the celebrated Life by Hesketh Pearson.

  Pearson, like Ervine, had known Shaw for many years. Before taking up biography he had been an actor and created the part of Metellus in the first production of Androcles and the Lion. His Lives of Hazlitt, Labouchère, Tom Paine and Gilbert and Sullivan were establishing him as the most popular British biographer of the 1930s. But he cared little for Lenin and Marx, and hinted that he would rather die than read Das Kapital.

  Why then did Shaw prefer Pearson to Ervine? ‘You will understand the Irish side of me better than anybody who is not Irish,’ St John Ervine was later to quote Shaw as saying to him. But perhaps he did not want the Irish side of him ‘understood’: Demetrius O’Bolger’s ‘understanding’ of his Irish years was a daunting precedent. Shaw needed to dissolve his Irish past into international socialism. Pearson would cover his politics skimpily and let G.B.S. augment it with his own version. He was in the line of previous biographers: G. K. Chesterton had written a friendly Introduction to his Life of Sydney Smith; Frank Harris had been his youthful literary hero. So it was really the old game all over again and a good way, in the last decade of Shaw’s life, of forestalling any other game.

  He tested his biographer with the customary shot across the bows and when in 1938 Pearson sent him a proposal for his book, replied: ‘I shall dissuade you personally any time you like to see me.’ Pearson called at Whitehall Court that autumn and over a long conversation, he tells us, demolished Shaw’s innumerable objections. ‘So you may go ahead with my blessing,’ Shaw wrote to him at the beginning of December. ‘There is no one else in the field’ – which effectively disposed of St John Ervine.

  Shaw liked Pearson. He liked his lack of formal education, his cheerfulness, his robust opinions – all Shavian attributes. ‘It is far better to know nothing like me,’ Pearson told him, ‘than to know everything and get it all wrong like you.’ Here was a man with whom Shaw could work. ‘I find your company both restful and invigorating,’ he wrote.

  He was ‘increasingly generous with help and advice,’ Pearson remembered. But Charlotte felt uneasy. She thought Pearson was rather too assertively good-looking and suspected him of being a ‘cad’. G.B.S. however assured her she would be omitted from the book. ‘The biography is the usual thing,’ he notified Beatrice Webb. ‘...As he and I are old acquaintances since the days of Frank Harris I have promised to tell him anything he wants to know, and to recommend him to you, which I do accordingly, as anything is better than to leave biographers to their imagination and to press gossip.’

  With this breezy assistance Pearson sailed along fast. ‘My wife did most of the research work... and I took about a year to write it.’ At the end of 1939 he had pretty well completed it but before sending off his typescript to the publisher he enquired whether Shaw would care to glance at it.

  Over the next year Blanche Patch would come across chapters strewn all over the place as Shaw went to work altering, amplifying, editing and embellishing the biography. This revision of Pearson’s text ‘took me rather longer than writing the book myself,’ he told Beatrice Webb who noted in her diary: ‘G.B.S. insisted on correcting it – much to H.P.’s disgust.’

  At first the corrections were fairly light and made in pencil. But as Shaw grew more interested in his Life so he turned to ink, using (as with Archibald Henderson) red ink for unpublishable outbursts: ‘This is all poppycock... You jumping idiot.’ Pearson had derived his technique as a biographer from his earlier career on the stage. To some degree he acted his characters on the page. Shaw’s method of ghostwriting his Lives involved borrowing something of the character of his biographer. As Pearson’s ‘uninvited collaborator’, he was faced with an intriguing linguistic exercise of impersonating someone who was Pearsonifying him. He saw in Pearson’s stage career an opportunity to dramatize himself. He placed Charlotte out of bounds, revised the Fabian chapters heavily, and in two other areas suppressed or contradicted what Pearson had written.

  ‘I came to the conclusion that the one event in his personal life that had brought him regret almost amounting to sorrow was his estrangement from Granville Barker,’ Pearson recorded. ‘...This break in their friendship was his most keenly felt loss... it was the only important matter about which he asked me to be reticent.’

  But there was another important matter on which G.B.S. overrode Pearson. This was the chapter entitled ‘Retreat to Moscow’. In the original typescript Pearson had distanced himself from Shaw’s Stalinism, given an ironic description largely based on Nancy Astor’s evidence of their ‘Russian elopement’, and traced a vein of insensitivity to suffering in Shaw’s character. Here, momentarily, was a man who shifted the centre of gravity from the individual to the state, filled his emptiness with facts, and let collectivism come like a curtain between himself and reality. ‘He praised and upheld the Russian dictatorship, which suppressed free speech, murdered its political opponents, starved its recalcitrant peasants to death,’ Pearson wrote.

  To Shaw’s mind the danger of St
alin and the Russian Revolution to Britain was similar to the danger of Napoleon and the French Revolution at the beginning of the previous century. Reacting to bloodshed that had stained originally noble causes, the British became more insular, resistant to all experimentation and change. As Hazlitt and Shelley held to their vision of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, so Shaw clung to his belief in pure communism as the dayspring of a new era. Affecting less emotion than he felt, he treated Soviet atrocities as unnecessary boulders stopping the passage of fresh ideas in Britain, and simply rolled them away.

  Shaw condensed Pearson’s objections into a single paragraph and allowed a transitional passage ending with the sentence: ‘But we must make an effort to see what happened from his own angle.’ Then he eliminated the rest of Pearson’s account and substituted more than 4,000 words of his own, painting an exhilarating picture of the Soviet political landscape. ‘To Shaw it was better than he expected, and full of novelty and promise,’ he wrote.

  By the end he had given so much of what he called his ‘unique private history’ to the book that Pearson suggested that his contributions should be shown in the text between square brackets or by indentation. But Shaw was horrified at the thought of his collaboration being exposed. His reply to Pearson is a revealing description of his semi-autobiographical technique. ‘Not on your life, Hesketh,’ he wrote. ‘What I have written I have written in your character, not in my own.

  ‘As an autobiographer I should have written quite differently. There are things that you may quite properly say which would come less gracefully from me. I have carefully avoided altering your opinions except where you had not known the facts... But if a word is said to connect me with the authorship of the book or its first proposal or its commercial profits I shall be driven to the most desperate steps to disclaim it. It must appear as Harris’s book did... [and] I strongly advise you to do what I did in the Harris case. When the book is safely in print, take the copy and burn every scrap of it.’