Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  On two occasions they returned each other’s letters; several times they decided never to see each other. The affair lasted until 1885 when all love had gone out of it and they drifted apart. In 1890 Alice married a former house-surgeon at St Mary’s, William Salisbury Sharpe. Obliged during the Great War to borrow some money from Shaw, she lived on to witness the halo of world renown encircle G.B.S. But in many criticisms of his books and plays she would have been able to read of an absent quality – and to have recognized in this absence the departure of Sonny over which she had helplessly watched.

  7

  Death and a Renewal

  It was lonely to be myself; but not to be myself was death in life.

  Cashel Byron’s Profession

  On 22 April 1882, ten days after starting his fourth novel, Shaw moved with his mother to 36 Osnaburgh Street, on the east side of Regent’s Park. This was an improvement on the insalubrious rooms in Fitzroy Street where he had often been ill.

  They saw little of Lucy. From the Carl Rosa Opera Company she transferred to a D’Oyly Carte group and in 1884 went off with them on tour.

  Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw continued methodically to give private tuition in singing. In 1885 she suddenly struck a new vein of work as music instructor at Clapham High School, and the following year became choir-mistress and teacher of class singing at the North London Collegiate School for Ladies where she remained until her retirement in 1906.

  Shaw went his own way – to the British Museum – and finished his fourth novel on 6 February 1883. Cashel Byron’s Profession, as he called it, is a fairy-tale about power. Its hero, Cashel Byron, a prize-fighter as clever with his fists as Shaw was with words, embodies Shaw’s fantasy about action. To him is given the first Shavian speech (which goes the distance of three thousand words) on the superiority of ‘executive power’ over ‘good example’. It is a dialectic on the philosophy of winning, and a hymn to skill and science over incoherent strength.

  Taking a profession that society officially repudiated, Shaw uses it as a metaphor for the way people unofficially live their lives – a formula he was to try again in Mrs Warren’s Profession and Major Barbara (which he thought of calling ‘Andrew Undershaft’s Profession’). His make-believe leads the hero and heroine from love at first sight through all supposed social barriers to marriage in the last chapter. The Lady is Cashel’s prize – in a way that Ida Beatty or any of the other women with whose husbands G.B.S. sparred would never be Shaw’s. In the book, romance won by a knock-out and ‘my self-respect took alarm’.

  ‘The lower I go, the better I seem to please,’ Shaw wrote hopefully to the publisher Richard Bentley. But though in later years Cashel Byron’s Profession was so much enjoyed by R. L. Stevenson, W. E. Henley and others that Shaw marvelled at his escape from becoming a popular novelist, it was turned down by the London publishing houses. ‘It flies too decidedly in the face of people’s prejudices to make it likely that it will be a popular book,’ advised the reader for Macmillan. ‘...well and brightly written, but the subject is not likely to commend itself to any considerable public.’

  Reviewing the book himself, Shaw pointed out that one of the fights in the novel was a restaging of the wrestling match in As You Like It, and hints at the effort he made to write a book as the public liked it. His reaction to what he called his ‘shilling shocker’ became studded with the glittering contradictions which formed part of his insulation against failure. In 1886, following at least seven rejections, he recommended it as ‘one of the cleverest books I know’. But in 1888, when welcoming another publisher’s rejection of it, he burst out: ‘I hate the book from my soul.’ He hated the conditions in which he had written it and the London publishers for whom he had written it: he hated the person who had written it; he hated failure. He had sailed as near compromise as he dared – too near and to no effect. Next time (for he was not ready to give up) there should be no compromise.

  He called his fifth novel The Heartless Man – later changing the title to An Unsocial Socialist. As with the two previous novels he drafted most of it in shorthand at the British Museum, and then transcribed it in longhand. The plot revolves round Sidney Trefusis, the heartless socialist of both titles. At the beginning of the book, Trefusis shocks everyone by running away from his newly married wife. By accepted standards it has been a brilliant match, full of money and romance. But accepted standards have made women into a class of person fit only for the company of children and flowers. With a man like Trefusis they can have no connection, except sex. Unfortunately the sexual attraction between them was so strong, Trefusis gravely complains to his wife Henrietta, that ‘When you are with me I can do nothing but make love to you. You bewitch me.’

  As Shaw’s mouthpiece for Socialism, Trefusis recognizes the natural inequality of human beings but condemns England’s social inequality for exploiting it. This artificial inequality will vanish, he claims, once ‘England is made the property of its inhabitants collectively’. The choice is ‘Socialism or Smash’.

  Most people preferred Smash because it looked safer. To open their eyes, British socialists needed to study feminism, for it was women who, by giving Socialism respectability, could make it grow. Shaw’s women are sympathetically drawn but, as custodians of Society’s standards, they embellish the capitalist philosophy of Smash. Trefusis’s aim, whether through sermonizing or seduction, is to head them off from this course. It is the old struggle to release natural vitality from an unnatural system of morality. The most attractive of these girls, for whose socialist souls he wrestles, is Gertrude Lindsay, Shaw’s portrait of Alice Lockett. It is a hostile portrait, done in the colours of revenge, of a discontented girl who counts ‘the proposals of marriage she received as a Red Indian counts the scalps he takes’, and who treats her dog (a St Bernard) with more kindness than ‘any human being’.

  It is not Gertrude who becomes Trefusis’s second wife, but Agatha Wylie – a Shavian Becky Sharp who was inspired by a glimpse of ‘a young lady with an attractive and arresting expression, bold, vivid, and very clever, working at one of the desks’ in the British Museum Reading Room. She is a symbol of the future.

  By separating his socialist hero into two people, Shaw reflected the division he felt existed in his own character. Some of the most entertaining pages of the novel are those where Trefusis, reluctant heir to a fortune, takes on the role of a talkative labourer – a Dickensian character called Smilash (a compound of the words smile and eyelash). In this partnership, Shaw the comedian and Shaw the reformer are brought together for the same ends. The character of Smilash appeals to the ‘vagabond impulse’ in Trefusis, and the actor in Shaw. ‘I am just mad enough to be a mountebank,’ Trefusis explains. ‘If I were a little madder, I should perhaps really believe myself Smilash instead of merely acting him.’

  Trefusis is the great man who had lain asleep in Smith, the tentative hero of Immaturity, and who wakes up by the light of Marxist economics. Shaw’s novels had been experiments to find a political framework in which to develop his thought and personality. Conolly, the engineer of The Irrational Knot, had been ‘a monster of the mind’ embodying rationalism; Owen Jack, the composer from Love Among the Artists, was ‘a monster of the body’ representing unconscious instinct; in Cashel Byron’s Profession Shaw had toyed with a romantic fusion of mind and body in the marriage of his prize-fighter and educated lady. In An Unsocial Socialist the union takes place not between two people but within one. Trefusis is Shaw’s first socialist hero and Don Juan figure in whom he attempts to reconcile his sexual and political attitudes. The novel foreshadows Man and Superman, with Trefusis a prototype of Tanner.

  It was an extraordinary book to have produced in the early 1880s – ‘the first English novel written under the influence of Karl Marx with a hero whose character and opinions forecast those of Lenin,’ Shaw later declared. He finished his revisions on 15 December 1883. ‘We are afraid that the subscribers to the circulating libraries are not much interested in Soci
alism,’ wrote Smith Elder & Co. David Douglas of Edinburgh and Chatto & Windus in London excused themselves from looking at it. For Macmillan, John Morley (not realizing that he had previously advised the author to give up writing) reported that ‘the author knows how to write; he is pointed, rapid, forcible, sometimes witty, often powerful and occasionally eloquent’. But, Morley concluded, the socialistic irony would not be attractive to many readers and ‘they would not know whether the writer was serious or was laughing at them’. In refusing the book, Macmillan wrote that they would be glad to look at anything else he might write ‘of a more substantial kind’ – a request that, Shaw replied, ‘takes my breath away’. In his correspondence with Macmillan, he came as near making an exasperated appeal for sympathy as he could.

  ‘All my readers, as far as I know them, like the book; but they tell me that although they relish it they dont think the general public would. Which is the more discouraging, as this tendency of each man to consider himself unique is one of the main themes of the novel. Surely out of thirty millions of copyright persons (so to speak) there must be a few thousand who would keep me in bread and cheese for the sake of my story-telling, if you would only let me get at them.’

  His new political friends were to give Shaw his chance of getting at the public. An Unsocial Socialist, he claimed, ‘finished me with the publishers’. Instead of adding it to the pile of rejects, Shaw sent it off to J. L. Joynes, one of the editors of To-Day, a new ‘Monthly Magazine of Scientific Socialism’. Joynes recommended the serialization of the novel to his fellow-editor, the philosopher E. Belfort Bax, who replied: ‘Go on and prosper with Shaw...’

  An Unsocial Socialist appeared in serial form between March and December 1884. Shaw was not paid, but for the first time he had an audience. ‘William Morris spotted it and made my acquaintance on account of it. That took me into print and started me.’ Between April 1885 and March 1886 Cashel Byron’s Profession was also serialized, due largely to the enthusiasm of the magazine’s printer, H. H. Champion, a clever, epileptic man who was later to become Shaw’s dramatic agent in Australia. Champion stereotyped the pages from To-Day and published them in a misshapen ‘Modern Press’ edition of 2,500 copies in March 1886. This was Shaw’s first published book, costing a shilling and carrying a royalty of one penny a copy. Two of his other novels, The Irrational Knot (April 1885–February 1887) and Love Among the Artists (November 1887–December 1888), were to be published serially in Annie Besant’s Our Corner.

  Shaw’s political interests soon devoured his ambitions as a novelist. In 1887 he abandoned an attempt at a sixth novel because ‘I could not stand the form: it is too clumsy and unreal. Sometimes I write dialogues; and these are working up to a certain end.’ His disenchantment with the novel is apparent in An Unsocial Socialist. In the appendix to this book, which takes the form of a letter to the author from Trefusis, Shaw writes: ‘I cannot help feeling that, in presenting the facts in the guise of fiction, you have, in spite of yourself, shewn them in a false light. Actions described in novels are judged by a romantic system of morals as fictitious as the actions themselves.’ This opinion he shared with Defoe who, in Serious Reflections, had described the ‘supplying of a story by invention’ as ‘a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart, at which by degrees, a habit of lying enters in’. Like Defoe, Shaw resolved to make his fiction as much like fact as possible.

  Now that it was too late, publishers were urging him to go on. His books would reach a good circulation, Swan Sonnenschein encouraged him, providing he ‘stick to novels, or go in for plays (which are even more suited to you, in my opinion)...’ Shaw acknowledged that he might ‘descend as low as that one day’, but five failures had been ‘enough to satisfy my appetite for enterprise in fiction’.

  Since he could not marry his story-telling to his socialism, Shaw relinquished story-telling. From his socialist philosophy he was to harvest optimism, while the novels, representing his first nine years in London, remained like dead fruit on the bough. Over fifty years later he wrote that his ‘failure to find a publisher for any of them was for me a hardening process from which I have never quite recovered’. Although they carry many ideas that were to be developed in his plays, these novels seemed to Shaw to have been written by someone else – someone with his roots in Ireland who once dreamed of a grand literary conquest in London. That Shaw was almost dead.

  *

  One final tie with his past was cut when on 19 April 1885 George Carr Shaw died. They had had little communication over the last five years. ‘I have nothing else to say that you would care about,’ his father had written on 2 September 1880; and again, on 4 December 1882: ‘I have nothing else particular to say.’ Of his son’s published works he read only An Unsocial Socialist, liked it, but warned him: ‘dont get yourself into Holloway Jail.’ Though he often asked for letters, ‘whether you have anything to say or not’, he seldom heard from George who he felt did not ‘have anything sentimental left in you’. Years later, Shaw wrote: ‘When I recall certain occasions on which I was inconsiderate to him I understood how Dr Johnson stood in the rain in Lichfield to expiate the same remorse.’ But he had never fought his father, so all the battles of his adult life would seem bloodless.

  George Carr Shaw died suddenly of congestion of the lungs while recovering from pneumonia in a bed-and-breakfast lodging house in Leeson Park Avenue. ‘I hastened there, and was ushered upstairs into a bedroom,’ McNulty recorded. ‘...He had died in his sleep: and his lips wore a smile.’ He had not been wanted, dead or alive, and he was not missed. Lucy was in Ireland at the time, but she did not go to the funeral. When the news reached Shaw, he sent a note, with two staves of music headed ‘Grave’, to his friend Kingston Barton:

  ‘Telegram just received to say that the governor has left the universe on rather particular business and set me up as

  An Orphan.’

  From the insurance on his father’s life, Shaw was able to buy that summer his first new clothes for years – an all-wool Jaeger suit, a black coat, vest, collar, cravat and pants, all for £11 1s. ‘In short, I had become, for better for worse, a different man.’

  THREE

  1

  In Search of a Family

  I was a man with some business in the world... my main business was Socialism.

  Shaw to Archibald Henderson (3 January 1905)

  The London in which Shaw had been living was like a City of Revelation. From anarchists and atheists; dress- and diet-reformers; from economists, feminists, philanthropists, was the socialist revival of the late nineteenth century to be drawn. This was the last age of the religious and political tract. One, by a clergyman of the Established Church, proved that Jehovah was a small red venomous snake; a second, by a German, replaced this snake with a fish; yet a third, by a Methodist professor, abolished both snake and fish, explaining that Jehovah was a widower. Such scholarly confusion was intensified by the crumbling of known structures. Science, like a great steam engine, having crashed through the infallibility of the Bible, was being garlanded with the dogmas and symbols of mythology and made the Idol of a new religion.

  A fresh urgency entered the progressive movement. New clubs and societies sprang up in London, catering for all talents and temperaments. Many working-class socialists joined the street parades of the Social Democratic Federation; anarchical socialists with a taste for sexual radicalism were attracted to the glamorous Socialist League; while the Fabian Society was filled by middle-class intellectuals who wanted to rewrite the economy and rearrange the social patterns of the country without a shot fired. All were agreed that there was a crisis in the land. Thirty per cent of the population of London – the richest city in the world – were living in poverty. Such was the magnitude of capitalism’s failure.

  Shaw felt relief at entering this turmoil. His personal need coincided with the need of the age. The ‘power to stand alone’, which Smith had acquired in Immaturity, ‘at the expense of much sorrowful solitude’, w
as no longer necessary. G.B.S. stood shoulder to shoulder.

  The man who, in 1885, could admit that ‘I hate all fraternity mongering just as heartily as any other variety of cant’ and go on to declare himself the ‘member of an individualist state, and therefore nobody’s comrade’, had decided at the beginning of 1887 that ‘it is time for us to abandon the principle of Individualism, and to substitute that of Socialism, on pain of national decay’. By 1891 he had reconciled his instinct with his practice by discovering that ‘the way to Communism lies through the most resolute and uncompromising Individualism’ – ‘pragmatic’ individualism, but not laissez-faire ‘economic’ individualism. So he could still reassure a friend: ‘Believe me, I always was, & am, an intense Individualist.’

  His first manoeuvres towards shedding his neglected self aimed at replacing his family with a community of his own choosing. ‘I haunted public meetings,’ he remembered, ‘like an officer afflicted with cowardice, who takes every opportunity of going under fire.’ Towards the end of 1880 he had joined the Zetetical Society, which met weekly in the rooms of the Women’s Protective & Provident League in Long Acre. Though ‘nervous & self-conscious to a heartbreaking degree... I could not hold my tongue. I started up and said something in the debate, and then felt that I had made such a fool of myself... I vowed I would... become a speaker or perish in the attempt... I suffered agonies that no one suspected... my heart used to beat as painfully as a recruit’s, going under fire for the first time. I could not use notes: when I looked at the paper in my hand I could not collect myself enough to decipher a word.’

  The Zetetical Society was a junior copy of the London Dialectical Society which Shaw joined in 1881, reading his first paper there (on the virtues of Capital Punishment over Life Imprisonment) early the following year. Women took an important part in the debates of both societies and helped to insist upon uncensored speech. From the practice of examining each speaker with questions at the conclusion of his paper (heckling was also part of the menu), Shaw began to sense his formidable debating powers.