Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  But ‘friendly’, in the Shavian vocabulary, is a dangerous word. What gives Widowers’ Houses its power is Shaw’s anger. He was writing here from personal experience, as the young man who had ‘collected slum rentals weekly with these hands’ in Dublin, and who in London was immersing himself in municipal politics. Shaw wanted to make his audience ‘thoroughly uncomfortable whilst entertaining them artistically’. This philistine audience retaliated through its idealist critics by calling the play ‘not a play’ and the playwright ‘no playwright’. He was, they allowed, a fine speaker and would have done well in comic opera or the Church. So began Shaw’s lifelong battle with the critics for whom he was (in the words of A. B. Walkley), ‘a detestable dramatist’, having started his career with ‘a singularly bad piece of work’.

  Widowers’ Houses contains the stereotype figures (heavy father, low comedian, femme fatale), but displaced by Shaw from their familiar roles. Lickcheese was to develop into Doolittle; the slum landlord Sartorius into the armaments manufacturer, Undershaft; Blanche Sartorius into Ann Whitefield. But they present themselves more crudely here, and without self-mockery or Shavian guile. In a sense this is Shaw’s most human play. Nowhere else is his dislike of the world as it exists more plainly felt. The perfect embodiment of this world is Blanche Sartorius, over whom the pact between aristocratic respectability and financial exploitation is made. ‘I see I have made a real lady of you, Blanche,’ says her father a little wistfully. She is an enslaving woman, a landlady of the emotions who betrays, more clearly than anywhere else in Shaw’s work, the results of Jenny Patterson’s rigorous devotion. Here, on paper, was his revenge; and given on the stage an ironic twist by the casting of Florence Farr in the part. The predatory Blanche, with her terrifying temper, prompted Oscar Wilde to congratulate Shaw: ‘I admire the horrible flesh and blood of your creatures.’

  Though Widowers’ Houses presents a socialist view of life, there is no socialist in it. Trench is an innocent Conservative who decides that he is not called upon to remake the world at his own expense. But his adaptability to facts becomes merely an acquiescence to corruption and his innocence is lost. To what extent socialism made compromise honourable was a question that was to be tested on Shaw with his next play.

  With the press-cuttings crammed into his bag, Shaw caught a train to join William Morris’s Christmas house party at Kelmscott Manor, in Oxfordshire. Over the holiday he began pondering his first Preface and dreaming of his second play. He would do such things... He would sail, all guns smoking, into the topical storm that was engulfing the New Woman; demolish the marriage and divorce laws, expose the evil of vivisection, violently assault modern doctors for reducing human beings to chemical machines. It was to be a grand cleaning-up operation. In his exhilaration he opened a wider window, cracked thicker ice, that winter.

  For Easter 1893 he went to Oxted to stay with the Salts. His travelling companion on the train was Sydney Olivier who, it seemed, was also writing a play – which was surprising in view of the dismay he had shown over Shaw’s writing of Widowers’ Houses. Olivier read part of his play to the Salts one day, and was generally ‘very full’ of it, Shaw observed. Here was the pacemaker he needed to get going. His diary entry for the next day, 29 March, reads: ‘After breakfast went up to the Common by Rickfield Rd and selected a spot on the West Heath, near the orphanage, where I lay down and got to work on the new play which I have resolved to call The Philanderer.’

  Much of the play was written on trains to and from his various lectures and speeches, and (sometimes under an umbrella) in Hyde Park and Regent’s Park, on the Embankment and on the top of Primrose Hill – whenever he could snatch an hour or two. Then he suddenly got stuck. On 23 May, he wrote in his diary: ‘After dinner I went out to Putney and walked by way of Roehampton to Richmond Park, where I tried to get to work on the third act of the play, but could not think of a subject for it.’

  The following day he went to William Archer’s house to hear the reading of Olivier’s play. Afterwards, on a bus to Shepherd’s Bush, ‘I hit on the third act of my new play.’ The idea he had hit on was the marriage and divorce question. He continued intermittently working on this act and discussing it with Janet Achurch.

  On the afternoon of 17 June he read a revised text to Lady Colin Campbell. What then happened changed the content of the play and the course Shaw’s work was to follow. Lady Colin Campbell, he explained, ‘pointed out to me that the third act at which I have been working ought to be put into the fire. This opened my eyes for the first time to the fact that I have started on quite a new trail and must reserve this act for the beginning of a new play.’ A few days later, on 22 June, ‘I went up to the top of Primrose Hill and there wrote a new scene for the beginning of the new third act of the play, as suggested by Lady Colin.’

  Lady Colin Campbell was a formidable woman. She rode, she swam, she wrote books on etiquette and was Shaw’s successor as art critic on The World. She was also Irish. But she was best known for having obtained, in a sensational series of court actions, a judicial separation from her husband, the youngest son of the eighth Duke of Argyll. She was a practical woman and a sensitive judge of public opinion. What she told Shaw was that no audience in the early 1890s would accept the last act as he had written it. He was in his thirty-seventh year. After that tiny taste of success with Widowers’ Houses, he hungered to have his play produced. But by substituting her suggestion for his original inspiration he was going against much that he claimed for himself as a dramatist. This may help to explain the revulsion that sometimes overtook him with this play.

  In the original third act there is one extra character, a comic butler called Spedding. It takes place at the house of Dr Paramore on his third wedding anniversary to Julia Craven (the character based on Jenny Patterson). Only a man with the name Paramore and the inventor of a non-existent illness, ‘Paramore’s Disease’, would marry Julia. But now he is a changed man, as tired of his wife as she is of him, and in love with Grace Tranfield (the character based on Florence Farr). He is – and this gives a nice symmetry to the play – in very much the same position as the philanderer Charteris in Act I: that is, on with the new love before he is off with the old, but with the additional complication of being married. It is this subject of marriage and divorce that occupies this act, during which they decide to go to South Dakota where the divorce laws have been better adapted to human nature.

  The plot is carried forward by means of conversation. It is, in fact, Shaw’s first discussion drama. There is an interweaving of ideas, an elegance of argument pushed to the point of comic exasperation, and a dissolving of action into talk – all innovations in the theatre that were not actually to reach the stage for more than another ten years.

  By the end of June, The Philanderer (with Lady Colin Campbell’s last act) was finished and early the following month Shaw had his chessmen out and was experimenting with the stage positions of his characters. As the second of what he was to call his ‘unpleasant’ plays, The Philanderer dealt with sex – with the power game of sex that was played in the society of the 1890s. Charteris, we are meant to understand, has had sexual intercourse with Julia Craven and Grace Tranfield. He is ‘making love’ to Grace on a sofa before Julia arrives early in Act I. In a letter to his Swedish translator, Shaw explained:

  ‘A philanderer is a man who is strongly attracted by women. He flirts with them, falls half in love with them, makes them fall in love with him, but will not commit himself to any permanent relation with them, and often retreats at the last moment if his suit is successful – loves them but loves himself more – is too cautious, too fastidious, ever to give himself away.’

  The Philanderer was an unlucky play. Shaw had wanted to include ‘everything that is supposed to be hopelessly undramatic, and make them the most amusing part of the piece,’ he told Charles Charrington. ‘It will be unspeakably improper: so I expect it will only see the light at the Independent Theatre. Grein is already after it eagerly.�
�� But Grein was unimpressed. ‘Shaw was probably much amused at our lack of appreciation, and took his manuscript away.’

  That Grein suspected him to have been ‘amused’ at this rejection shows how well Shaw could conceal his feelings. At the last moment he had compromised – and his compromise had led nowhere. He had told Archer that The Philanderer was to be ‘a step nearer to something’. It was true that ‘the ideas and atmosphere of it belonged to a new world as yet undiscovered at the West End Theatres’, but at the last moment he had taken a pace back.

  *

  After his failure with The Philanderer, Shaw returned to the vein he had worked in Widowers’ Houses, writing a problem play that was to reveal the corruption produced by compromising too readily with society. Once again the theme is one of social inheritance and the profit motive; once again he shadows his audience with guilt.

  ‘Do you think you are guiltless in the matter? Take care... The wages of prostitution are stitched into your button-holes and into your blouse, pasted into your matchboxes and your boxes of pins, stuffed into your mattress, mixed with the paint on your walls and stuck between the joints of your water-pipes... you will not cheat the Recording Angel into putting down your debts to the wrong account.’

  Writing in 1901 a Note for the end of Cashel Byron’s Profession, he was to explain that ‘the word prostitution should either not be used at all, or else applied impartially to all persons who do things for money that they would not do if they had other assured means of livelihood’. In his play, which he called Mrs Warren’s Profession, he used the same formula as in Cashel Byron’s Profession, that of taking ‘a profession which society officially repudiates as a metaphor for the way in which that larger society is really conducted’.

  Ever since the licensing of continental brothels in the 1870s and the subsequent discovery that British girls were being exported to Brussels and Vienna (where Mrs Warren conducted her business), ‘The Great Social Evil’, as the Victorians called prostitution, had begun to exceed slum-landlordism as the most controversial topic for the press. In 1885, W. T. Stead launched his sensational series, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ in the Pall Mall Gazette, his first article revealing how Mrs Armstrong had sold her daughter for £3. ‘I am quite willing to take as many quires of the paper as I can carry and sell them (for a penny) in any thoroughfare in London,’ Shaw wrote to Stead. On discovering that Stead had doctored his facts, Shaw felt that he had been betrayed: ‘he [Stead] was so stupendously ignorant that he never played the game.’ Stead’s game had been to force the Criminal Law Amendment Bill (the chief provision of which was to raise the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen) through Parliament.

  The immense press coverage gave Shaw an insight into the nineteenth century’s attitude towards its ‘unfortunates’. Victorian domestic virtues were represented by the middle-class family with its many children and dominating paterfamilias. The wife-and-mother, guardian of the hearth, who ran the household and bore the children, was a sexless being whose gentility (physicians were agreed) was outward proof of the absence of a female orgasm. For sexual satisfaction, the husband-and-father had to explore the lesser breeds, such as working-class women earning a shilling a day in the sweatshop, for whom prostitution could bring a vital addition to their income. London was honeycombed with houses of assignation illegally maintained through police bribery; but only on the Continent had the brothel become an established social institution. The more superior of these brothels were run as clubs and they offered businessmen, such as Mrs Warren’s Sir George Crofts, opportunities of forming profitable syndicates. These syndicates, which would purchase premises, secure licences and supply girls, provided investments similar to those made in the eighteenth century by city merchant houses in the slave trade.

  In representing prostitution as an economic phenomenon (‘Prostitution is not a question of sex: it is a question of money’) Shaw was writing from the point of view of women; but he also wrote as a socialist (‘Every increase in women’s wages produces a decrease in prostitution’) who prescribed as his remedy a living wage for women (‘a Minimum Wage law and... proper provision for the unemployed’); and finally he wrote as a man struggling to supplant the sex instinct in himself.

  It was Janet Achurch who fired the starting gun by telling Shaw the story of a play she was then writing called Mrs Daintree’s Daughter based on Maupassant’s Yvette. On 30 August 1893 he announced to Archer: ‘I have finished the first act of my new play, in which I have skilfully blended the plot of The Second Mrs Tanqueray with that of The Cenci. It will be just the thing for the I[ndependent] T[heatre].’

  Beatrice Webb suggested that he ‘should put on the stage a real modern lady of the governing class – not the sort of thing that theatrical and critical authorities imagine such a lady to be’. To which Shaw added: ‘I did so: and the result was Miss Vivie Warren.’ Reporting his progress on 4 September, he wrote to the woman he hoped would play Vivie, Janet Achurch:

  ‘The play progresses bravely; but it has left the original lines. I have made the daughter the heroine, and the mother a most deplorable old rip (saving your presence). The great scene will be the crushing of the mother by the daughter. I retain the old roué, but keep him restrained by a continual doubt as to whether the heroine may not be his daughter. The young lover’s father, an outrageous clergyman, is in the same perplexity, he also being an old flame of the mother’s. The lover is an agreeable young spark, wholly good-for-nothing. The girl is a quite original character. The mother, uncertain who the girl’s father is, keeps all the old men at bay by telling each one that he is the parent.’

  He continued working on it between visits to the Jaeger Wool Shop and the British Museum. He set out for walks with the play in his pocket, camping from time to time on wayside seats to write up the speeches. He called on his friends and, for purposes of revision and casting, delivered his lines. By the time he had finished all four acts on 2 November, he had tried it out on Archer, the Charringtons, Florence Farr, Sydney Olivier, the Salts, the Webbs and Mrs Theodore Wright, who being London’s first Mrs Alving in Ibsen’s Ghosts would, Shaw hoped, take the title role. He also read it to Lady Colin Campbell who, ironically, was going into collaboration with Janet Achurch over her version which, though licensed the following year, was never professionally performed. After all this preparation Mrs Warren’s Profession was ready for the Independent Theatre by the second week of December.

  Unlike Maupassant’s Yvette, Vivie Warren neither attempts to kill herself nor becomes a courtesan like her mother; unlike Pinero’s Mrs Tanqueray, Mrs Warren declines to step into the next room and commit suicide. She is ‘a counter-portrait to the general image of the romantic, sentimentally attractive courtesan of the stage’. The cast is largely made up of prostitutes like Mrs Warren herself, and their clients: Sir George Crofts the big-time client; the old vicar who has sold himself for his benefice and turned from rake into sanctimonious humbug; and his son Frank, the nearest to an authorial presence in the play, who almost sells himself in marriage to Vivie. Below the talking surface of the play move mysterious undercurrents of incest.

  This theme of incest (deriving from The Cenci as well as from Ibsen’s Ghosts and Rosmersholm), was muted after Shaw’s corrections to the first draft. Originally Frank and Vivie were established as half-brother and sister, and Vivie welcomes this fact as saving her from ‘the sort of relation my mother’s life had tainted for ever for me’. She returns to the moonlight illusion of being ‘babes in the wood... covered up with leaves’; but as the curtain descends at the end of Act III she ‘lifts her face & presses his lips on hers’. The confusing remnants from such incestuous moments suggest that Shaw felt all sex to be tainted for Vivie. ‘I am like you,’ Vivie tells her mother. But by focusing his play on the daughter and not (like Pinero and Maupassant) on the mother, Shaw seeks to convert sexual destiny into work destiny. ‘There’s no alternative,’ says Madame Obardi, the prostitute mother, to Yvette who is s
hown as unable to avoid her fate in the ‘world of gilded prostitution’. But for Vivie Warren there is an alternative: ‘my work is not your work,’ she tells her mother, ‘and my way is not your way.’ She gains integrity through sexual isolation – ‘away from it all – away from the sentiment of the tie I formed under the spell of that ghastly moonlight, away from the very air breathed by my mother and that man, away from the world they are part of’. These words of Vivie’s Shaw dropped from the published version: but they still lie between the lines and provide an uneasy sub-text to the play.

  Shaw’s case is that there are two ways of preventing the present from repeating the errors of the past: love and work. In love we forget, are reborn, speak like infants. Then the good moment goes, for the world is not lovable. But if what we call love also supplies the future generations, it is work that decides what sort of life those generations will follow. Instinct tells us whether we should love, and what work we should do; and will-power gives us the vitality to carry through this work.

  Shaw places his emphasis on the gospel of work and against the religion of love. When Frank sees Vivie with her arm round her mother’s waist, he is revolted: ‘Dont it make your flesh creep.’ But when he appeals to the love-instinct in Vivie (‘Come and be covered up with leaves again’) she gives a ‘cry of disgust’ and tells him: ‘You make my flesh creep.’ Is this because of the revelation that she is Frank’s half-sister as well as the revelation of how her mother’s money is made? That Frank’s father had gone through some sexual involvement with Vivie’s mother seems probable; but in such an atmosphere of consanguinity (like the atmosphere of Sonny’s home), uncertainty prevails. Arising from Shaw’s doubts about his parenthood and ambiguous feelings for his mother, incest is made to cover us all, like the leaves. Something of Mrs Shaw can been seen in Mrs Warren, and this may help to account for the uncertainty and aggression of the play. ‘I can’t stand anybody as Mrs Warren, because I can’t stand the play itself,’ he told Gertrude Kingston in 1925. ‘...Ugh!’