Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Shaw would hand Lee these criticisms and Lee would hand him the fees, ‘contenting himself with the consciousness of doing generously by a young and forlorn literary adventurer, and with the honor and glory accruing from the reputed authorship of my articles’. In later years G.B.S. exaggerated the ‘vulgarities, follies, and ineptitudes’ of these pieces for The Hornet. ‘I did not know even enough to understand that what was torturing me was the guilt and shame which attend ignorance and incompetence.’ But his shame proceeded less from their demerits than from the deception of ghost writing. He had arrived in London determined never to act on second-hand principles or submit to external circumstances. But in his first encounter he found himself in a conspiracy that formed part of the polite fraud he was attempting to demolish. It felt like a step back into cowardice.

  By May 1877 the editor of The Hornet believed he had uncovered the truth. ‘I have frequently rec’d “copy” palpably not your style,’ he complained to Lee, ‘but that in composition, idea and writing of a Lady.’ By September, all was over. ‘I must tell you candidly that our agreement is not being kept by you,’ the editor told Lee. ‘I stipulated for your production and not that of a Substitute. I can’t insert the class of writing I have rec’d the last 2 weeks... Please send word to your man to send no more copy.’ Shaw’s last sting was delivered on 26 September 1877 when Lee was in Scotland. Two years later he reviewed the episode that had made him so miserable: ‘I threw up my studies, and set to work to reform the musical profession. At the end of a year my friend [Lee] was one of the most unpopular men in London, the paper was getting into difficulties, and complications were arising from the proprietor’s doubts as to a critic who was not only very severe, but capable of being in two places at the same time.’

  *

  Lee’s faltering career, Shaw believed, ‘disguised as it was by a few years of fashionable success, was due wholly to the social conditions which compelled him to be a humbug or to starve’. In order to keep going, he advertised himself as being able to make fashionable ladies sing like Patti in twelve lessons. To Bessie, Lee had been ‘the sole apostle of The Method: the only true and perfect method of singing: the method that had made her a singer and preserved the purity of her voice in defiance of time’. She knew that the Method required two years of patient practice. The ‘moment she found that he had abandoned “the method”,’ Shaw wrote, ‘...she gave him up’.

  Shaw gave as the particular cause for breaking with Lee, a sexual sentimentality which, ripening in London, had turned towards Lucy. ‘My sister, to whom this new attitude was as odious as it was surprising, immediately dropped him completely... He came no more to our house; and as far as I can recollect neither my mother nor my sister ever saw him again.’

  To G.B.S., this sexual sentimentality and the economic perversion of his musical talent were symptoms of the same disease. He invented a new Lee, an English Hyde who emerged from the Irish Jekyll. Lee was, he tells us, ‘no longer the same man’. He was unrecognizable. ‘G. J. Lee, with the black whiskers and the clean shaven resolute lip and chin, became Vandeleur Lee, whiskerless, but with a waxed and pointed moustache and an obsequious attitude.’ So the Dublin genius collapses into a London humbug. Lee is the victim of a pantomime with Capitalism its bad fairy.

  Lucy quickly escaped. She turned professional in 1879 and five years later joined the Carl Rosa Opera Company. For her mother, now nearing fifty, it was less easy. Though she ‘despised’ Lee, it is impossible to know in what measure her contempt was emotional, financial or moral. Her son makes it exclusively a matter of musical principle. But the language he uses carries other suggestions. ‘The result was almost a worse disillusion than her marriage... that Lee should be unfaithful! unfaithful to the Method!... with all the virtue gone out of him: this was the end of all things; and she never forgave it.’

  A symbol of Lee’s days of vanity in London was his smart Park Lane house. Number 13 Park Lane lay at the less fashionable end of a street ‘sacred to peers and millionaires’. It was half a house (part of number 14) and, because of a murder committed there two years before Lee moved in, less expensive than Shaw imagined. Here, Lee organized a few charity concerts and performances of amateur opera, and it was at one of these that the Punch cartoonist George du Maurier, making some sketches of the Shaws and what G.B.S. was to describe as their ‘damaged Svengali’, conceived his idea for Trilby. When, in 1895, du Maurier’s novel was adapted for the stage, Shaw was to write:

  ‘Svengali is not a villain, but only a poor egotistical wretch who provokes people to pull his nose... Imagine, above all, Svengali taken seriously at his own foolish valuation, blazed upon with limelights, spreading himself intolerably over the whole play with nothing fresh to add to the first five minutes of him – Svengali defying heaven, declaring that henceforth he is his own God, and then tumbling down in a paroxysm of heart disease (the blasphemer rebuked, you see), and having to be revived by draughts of brandy... surely even the public would just as soon – nay, rather – have the original Svengali, the luckless artist-cad (a very deplorable type of cad, whom Mr du Maurier has hit off to the life).’

  Shaw was to try his own hand at creating such a figure in The Doctor’s Dilemma.

  By the time Shaw finished with The Hornet, his mother had left Park Lane and, appropriating ‘the Method’ (much as Eliza Doolittle threatens to make off with Professor Higgins’s speech methods), set herself up as a private singing teacher. But Shaw ‘remained on friendly terms’ with Lee, playing the piano at some of his rehearsals and saving him the cost of a professional accompanist. Once or twice he even sang. Those smart people who had taken Lee up on his arrival in London had moved on to newer sensations, and his later recruits were less exalted. Shaw, who had begun by playing Mozart, ended by rehearsing the Solicitor in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience.

  Lee continued living with ‘the young lady who had rescued him from entire loneliness’, renting his rooms to bachelors and the music chamber for dubious supper parties. He kept in touch with Shaw, offering him odd jobs as répétiteur for the occasional lady who wished ‘to try over her songs’ and asking him to draw up a Prospectus on ‘How to Cure Clergyman’s Sore Throat’. On the evening of 27 November 1886, while putting his arm through the sleeve of his nightshirt, he dropped dead.

  On the morning of the inquest, three days later, one of Lee’s musical group told Lucy the news and she passed it on to her brother. Next day, 1 December, he called at 13 Park Lane to verify the report. ‘Heard from servant,’ he noted in his diary, ‘that he was found dead of heart disease on Sunday morning. Went back home to tell Mother...’ At the inquest on 30 November the jury returned a verdict of death by natural causes. Shaw, who had not gone to this inquest, adds that it ‘revealed the fact that his brain was diseased and had been so for a long time’. Neither the newspaper reports nor the death certificate (‘Angina Pectoris. Found dead on floor’) corroborate this statement which nevertheless enabled Shaw to comfort himself that the mischief converting Lee from Jekyll to Hyde had begun its work years before. ‘I was glad to learn that his decay was pathological as well as ecological,’ he concluded, ‘and that the old efficient and honest Lee had been real after all.’

  2

  Experiments with the Novel

  What inexpensive pleasure can be greater than that of strolling through London of an evening, and reconstructing it in imagination?... you make Notting Hill low and exalt Maida-vale by carting the one to the other... you extend the embankment from Blackfriars to the Tower as an eligible nocturnal promenade... you build an underground London in the bowels of the metropolis, and an overhead London piercing the fog curtain above on viaducts, with another and another atop of these, until you have piled up, six cities deep, to Alpine altitudes with a different climate at each level... For purposes of transit you will devise a system of pneumatic tubes, through which passengers, previously treated by experienced dentists with nitrous oxide, can be blown from Kensington to Mile-end in
a breath... What a London that would be!

  ‘Ideal London’, Pall Mall Gazette (5 October 1886)

  Having escaped from Dublin, Shaw expected to find things ordered differently in London. Oscar Wilde who, though he had visited London before, came to live there two years later, was to inhale an air ‘full of the heavy odour of roses... the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delectable perfume of the pink flowering thorn’. The parks and gardens, squares and palisades sprouted their green between the seasoned brick and wedding-cake stucco of the West End where Wilde sauntered. But Wilde had come from respectable Merrion Square via Oxford to Mayfair and did not see the ill-smelling London Shaw was getting to know – a London of primitive streets with clinging red mud, miserably treated animals, and a sullen population storming the pubs at nightfall. Below the prim pattern of bourgeois life that Wilde was so delightfully to shock lay a vast reservoir of squalor and brutality. Drury Lane, the charming ambience of Pygmalion, was a derelict area until 1900, the territory of men and women in tatters, who crawled the streets like animals.

  ‘Shelley... described Hell as “a city much like London”. Dickens, who knew London, depicted it as full of strange monsters, Merdles, Veneerings, Finches of the Grove, Barnacles, Marshalseas indigenous to the Borough but cropping up sporadically among the monuments of Rome and Venice: all dreadfully answering to things that we know to be there, and yet cannot believe in without confusion and terror. How pleasant it is to shrink back to the genial Thackeray, who knew comparatively nothing about London, but just saw the fun of the little sets of ideas current in Russell and Bryanston-squares, Pall-mall, Fleet-street, and the art academies in Newman-street.’

  The economics of London were to turn Shaw into a socialist. No new planning, he believed, could be achieved without a change of attitude in the country. ‘The problem, unfortunately, is not one of realignment and patent dwellings,’ he wrote in 1886:

  ‘It is one of the development of individual greed into civic spirit; of the extension of the laissez-faire principle to public as well as private enterprise; of bringing all the citizens to a common date in civilization instead of maintaining a savage class, a mediaeval class, a renaissance class, and an Augustan class, with a few nineteenth-century superior persons to fix high-water mark... we must be content with the... periodical washing of the Albert Memorial... until London belongs to, and is governed by, the people who use it.’

  *

  Number 13 Victoria Grove stood on the east side of a cul-de-sac off the Brompton Road. The houses were semi-detached, with tiny gardens, and they occupied, along with those in a number of parallel groves, a countrified area, still with plenty of orchard and market garden, between Fulham and Putney. Here, for two years after The Hornet, Shaw did little but write short stories, literary reviews, articles, essays. It was ‘mere brute practice with the pen... as a laborer digs or a carpenter planes’.

  By February 1878 he was at work on a profane Passion Play in blank verse ‘with the mother of the hero represented as a termagant’. Judas and Jesus in this play represent two sides of Shaw. Judas is

  a man unblinded

  And trained to shun the snare of self delusion

  who sees in his corrupt surroundings a ‘beastly world’. Jesus, who looks towards an invisible future, embodies hope. In the combination of the two, Shaw argues, the observer and the man of imagination, we reach reality. Judas’s advice to the young Jesus is the lesson Shaw himself was endeavouring to master:

  Then must thou

  Learn to stand absolutely by thyself,

  Leaning on nothing, satisfied that thou

  Can’st nothing know, responsible to nothing,

  Fearing no power and being within thyself

  A little independent universe.

  After forty-nine pages – 1,260 lines – the play breaks off in the second scene of Act II. Across one abandoned passage he wrote: ‘Vile Stuff.’ Fifty-five years later, in his Preface to On the Rocks, he explained that a modern Passion Play was impossible because ‘the trial of a dumb prisoner, at which the judge who puts the crucial question to him remains unanswered, cannot be dramatized unless the judge is to be the hero of the play... If ever there was a full dress debate for the forensic championship to be looked forward to with excited confidence by the disciples of the challenged expert it was his trial of Christ. Yet their champion put up no fight.’

  Also finished in February 1878 was My Dear Dorothea, a didactic pamphlet modelled on George Augustus Sala’s squib Lady Chesterfield’s Letters to Her Daughter, which Shaw had read the previous year. He subtitled his work: ‘A Practical System of Moral Education for Females Embodied in a Letter to a Young Person of that Sex’. Much of the advice (including a warning against taking advice) would later become familiar furniture of Shavian philosophy: never be peevishly self-sacrificing; arm yourself with politeness which is a mark of superiority over unpleasant people; cultivate hypocrisy with others for kindness’ sake, but never with yourself; read anything except what bores you; leave religion alone until you’ve grown up; get into mischief, but do not look for pity. Finally: ‘Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody.’

  The most closely autobiographical passages refer to Dorothea’s mother:

  ‘If your mother is always kind to you, love her more than you love anything except your doll... If you had indeed such a mother, my dear Dorothea, you would not need my advice at all. But I must not forget how seldom little girls have such guardians; and I will therefore take it for granted that your mother... thinks of you only as a troublesome and inquisitive little creature...

  For such a parent, you must be particularly careful not to form any warm affection. Be very friendly with her, because you are in the same house as she, and it is unpleasant to live with one whom you dislike. If you have any griefs, do not tell her of them. Keep them to yourself if possible... You will soon be sent to school, and so get rid of her.’

  Shaw’s advice was a prescription against suffering. ‘It is a most illuminating and sorrowful self-portrait,’ Stevie Smith was to write, ‘...because it shows that Shaw was as proud as the devil and put pride in the place of love. And why should a bright creature of such mercurial wits and fighting frenzies so limit himself if not for fear?... every now and then the heart limps in, but he is ashamed of it and begins to bluster.’

  In March 1879 he began a novel called, ‘with merciless fitness’, Immaturity. ‘As I could not afford a typewriter nor a secretary, I had to write directly and legibly for the printer with my own hand.’ Five novels and part of a sixth he got through in this way. His handwriting, neat and spindly, sloping slightly backwards, is that of the chief cashier of Uniacke Townshend. He condemned himself to a daily reckoning of five pages – and so scrupulously that if his fifth page ended in the middle of a sentence he did not finish it until the next day. ‘I have drudged year after year until I have very little patience left for anything but work,’ says one of the characters, ‘...it is the holding on day after day only a hair’s breadth from failure.’

  Immaturity was his ‘first attempt at a big book’. The character of Robert Smith is Shaw himself at twenty with ‘the culture that is given by loneliness and literature’. Unable to make contact with other people, Smith polishes his isolation to a virtue. His infatuation with a ballet dancer, releasing energy to be used for work, illustrates Shaw’s susceptibility to women and his determination not to let them occupy his mind. Mlle Bernadina de Sangallo, as she is called in this first draft, takes her dreamlike existence from Ermina Pertoldi, a dancer whom Shaw used to see at the Alhambra and who filled his night thoughts.

  Like Smith, Shaw sometimes ‘relapsed into that painful yearning which men cherish gloomily at eighteen, and systematically stave off as a nuisance... in later years’. Work, with which Shaw began to stave off this nuisance, becomes the hero of Immaturity. ‘What is there to live for but work?’ asks Cyril Scott, an artist modelled on the landscape painter Cyril Lawson. �
�Everything else ends in disappointment. It’s the only thing that you never get tired of, and that always comes to good.’

  Shaw allows another worthy end: marriage. ‘There is no gratification which a woman can afford you, that will not be sweeter when that woman is not your wife, except the possession of boys and girls to continue the record when you are in your coffin. Therefore marry the woman who will bring you the finest children, and who will be the best mother to them; and you will never find out that you might have done better elsewhere.’

  Since hereditary factors are incalculable, Shaw places his bet on sexual instinct. In the debate he sets up between common sense and romance, it is common sense that is seen to lack courage, and romance, arguing against ‘the folly of prudent marriages’, that triumphs. ‘The chief objection to fictitious romance,’ he writes elsewhere in Immaturity, ‘is that it is seldom so romantic as the truth.’

  Smith is repeatedly accused, as Shaw was to be, of matter-of-factness. ‘You are really very matter-of-fact, Mr Smith. You rub the gloss off everything.’ It is this artificial gloss, reflected by the fashionable poet Hawkshaw (a sort of Shaw gone wrong who owes something to Oscar Wilde) that he dislikes. ‘Matter-of-fact people are a great nuisance,’ Smith concedes, ‘and always will be, so long as they are in the minority.’ The implication is that the days of Hawkshaw are numbered. He has not strength enough to resist the applause of a society that is, below its glossy surface, uncaring and uncomprehending. It is society that is the villain of the novel.

  In this ‘book of a raw youth’, there is the outline of a Shaw who existed before his conversion into the fantastic personality of G.B.S. Like Hawkshaw, he was to take on a public gloss. But whereas Hawkshaw acquired his gloss from the caressing of society, the brilliant Shavian creature that emerged and flew away from the chrysalis of Smith wanted to outshine society and lead us to another place ruled over by ‘one of my most successful fictions’. Like the ‘Vandeleur Lee’ who developed from G. J. Lee, ‘G.B.S.’ was a manufactured identity: not a victim of capitalist society – a weapon to be used against it.