Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Shaw had been longing for someone to take no notice of him. All his sensible arguments had been taken from others. Richards had borrowed £700 (equivalent to £37,500 in 1997) from his uncle, Grant Allen, and another £700 from his bank, and was now presenting himself to various authors he admired: Wells, Bennett, Chesterton, Masefield, Housman. He was blatantly monocled, had a taste for Monte Carlo, and a charm that reconciled friends to his lack of scruples. Shaw’s threats of the Bankruptcy Court left him amiably unruffled. The struggle between them went on through the winter, Shaw resisting, Richards never tiring; and in the spring of 1897 Shaw suddenly succumbed. ‘I am being pressed to publish my plays,’ he wrote to Ellen Terry. ‘I think I will, and give up troubling the theatre.’ The decision in some ways reflected his disenchantment with the stage as a place on which to conduct his love affairs. Fifteen months earlier, in a letter to Janet Achurch, he had predicted that if he could not find beautiful women to play his roles, ‘then I will do what I am often tempted to do – publish my plays and appeal to the imaginations of those who are capable of reading them without wasting myself on trying to have them performed without utter profanation’. That time had now come.

  Richards and Shaw combined well. ‘You are the most incompetent publisher I ever heard of,’ Shaw told him. And Richards replied: ‘You are just about as businesslike a man as I have ever met in my short life.’ Shaw seemed to recognize in Richards the sort of ‘young villain’ that Sonny might have turned into had he remained in Ireland. He had ‘allowed himself to fall in Love with Literature’, which was tragic in a publisher.

  Shaw, Richards acknowledged, was ‘the born man of affairs’. In fact it was like an affair of love for Shaw; while for Richards it was an education. ‘Make yourself pleasant, no matter what provocation you may get,’ Shaw later recommended him, ‘and you will not only be doing what you do best usually, but you will be pursuing the only possible policy under the circumstances.’ This was roughly how their partnership worked. Shaw ordered him to ‘sit tight’ and ‘trust my judgment’; and Richards complied.

  So G.B.S. got to work. He issued injunctions on punctuation (which often indicates where the actor shall breathe), demanded narrow margins, made proposals on pagination, introduced experiments with the title page. He employed lower-case italics in square brackets for stage directions, abolished apostrophes from contracted words and substituted spaced letters for italic in underlined words. He selected a green binding and went in search of the blackest printing ink. He let it be known that a single misprint upset him more than the deaths of his father and his sister ‘with whom I was on excellent terms’. He threatened proof corrections on the scale of Balzac and Carlyle (‘you may charge me for all corrections over and above 95% of the total cost of production’), and prescribed the price and print run. In short, he enjoyed himself extravagantly.

  Shaw’s ideas on book design derived from William Morris. He looked at a page as a picture and at a book as an ornament that could be admired by a man who could not read a word of it, ‘as a XII century chalice or loving cup may be cherished by a heathen or a teetotaller’. By the end of August 1897, Shaw reported to Richards that he had sent three plays to the printer ‘transmogrified beyond recognition, made more thrilling than any novel’. In re-forming these plays for the press Shaw treated the pen and the viva vox as different instruments, the one producing a literary language for the eye, the other sounds mainly intelligible to the ear, and each needing separate scoring to blend into an unbroken narrative. To attract the novel-reading public he made it a rule with his stage directions never to mention the stage, proscenium or spectators; to discard all technical expressions and insert plenty of descriptive matter; to give sufficient guidance to the theatre management and information to the actor of what but not how to act – without spoiling anything for the reader.

  Shaw took a further step away from the stage with his Prefaces, which ‘have practically nothing to do with the plays’. The Shavian Preface was to be a treatise on the social problems with which the plays were connected. ‘Every play, every preface I wrote conveys a message,’ he told an interviewer. ‘I am the messenger boy of the new age.’

  By adding the publication of his plays to his Fabian activities and theatre reviewing, Shaw filled up each day with sixteen hours of work ‘that nobody should ever touch after lunch’. He felt exhausted even in the morning. ‘I get out of bed so tired that I am in despair until I have braced myself with tubbing,’ he told Ellen Terry. ‘When I sit down my back gets tired: when I jump up, I get giddy & have to catch hold of something to save myself from falling.’ The plays crept through the press with Shaw scanning every item in the proofs.

  He had decided to divide the plays into two books, ‘Pleasant’ and ‘Unpleasant’. He began the Unpleasant Plays (Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer and Mrs Warren’s Profession) with a Preface, ‘Mainly About Myself’, which he continued without further title at the beginning of the Pleasant Plays (Arms and the Man, Candida, The Man of Destiny and You Never Can Tell). Only The Devil’s Disciple was laid aside for another volume, Three Plays for Puritans.

  These first two books were to inaugurate a long series of Shaw’s plays in the same format, and change the fashion in play publishing. ‘I was as proud as Punch,’ declared Grant Richards. ‘The look and feel of it gave me intense pleasure. But it did not make me rich.’

  Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant were published in April 1898. Archer, in the Daily Chronicle, called Candida a work of genius, Mrs Warren’s Profession a masterpiece, Widowers’ Houses a crude ’prentice work, and The Philanderer ‘an outrage upon art and decency, for which even my indignation cannot find a printable term of contumely’. Henry Arthur Jones, whose plays Shaw had consistently overpraised in the Saturday Review, wrote that ‘much of them is not dramatic and would never be interesting in any circumstances to any possible audience’. But the most devastating response came from Shaw’s Saturday Review.

  ‘The men are all disputative machines, ingeniously constructed, and the women, who, almost without exception, belong to the strange cult of the fountain-pen, are, if anything, rather more self-conscious than the men... Mr Shaw is not, as the truly serious dramatist must be, one who loves to study and depict men and women for their own sake, with or without moral purpose. When Mr Shaw is not morally purposeful, he is fantastic and frivolous, and it is then that his plays are good... his serious characters are just so many skeletons, which do but dance and grin and rattle their bones. I can hardly wonder that Mr Shaw has so often hesitated about allowing this or that theatrical manager to produce one of his serious plays. To produce one of them really well would be almost impossible at any ordinary theatre.’

  This criticism had been composed by Max Beerbohm, and appeared in the same issue of the Saturday Review (21 May 1898) in which Shaw, writing his valedictory as the paper’s theatre critic, welcomed his successor ‘the incomparable Max’. It was a characteristic example of Frank Harris’s editing: lazy but provocative. His booming voice awed his staff, from whom he excited the loyalty due to a sea-rover, but by 1898 the ‘little old pirate ship’, Max Beerbohm wrote to Shaw, was already ‘going down into the waves, with you (Admiral of the Moral Fleet) suddenly perceived standing, in full uniform, with folded arms and steadfast eyes, on the bridge; and with me and other respectable people clinging to the rigging’.

  Harris was bought out of the Saturday Review six months after Shaw left. There had been a number of libel cases and rumours of blackmail – later put down by Shaw to Harris’s innocence of English business methods. But though Shaw was to take this mitigating stance, his description of Harris as ‘neither first-rate, nor second-rate, nor tenth-rate... just his horrible unique self’, indicates how much he disliked sharing his professional life with him. His work for the Saturday Review had seriously reduced his health and offered little ‘to the enormity of my unconscious ambition’. His valedictory shows at what exorbitant human cost he had overcome the poverty, obscurity,
ostracism and contempt that infected his Dublin years. ‘I have been the slave of the theatre,’ he wrote.

  ‘It has tethered me to the mile radius of foul and sooty air which has its centre in the Strand, as a goat is tethered in the little circle of cropped and trampled grass that makes the meadow ashamed. Every week it clamors for its tale of written words; so that I am like a man fighting a windmill: I have hardly time to stagger to my feet from the knock-down blow of one sail, when the next strikes me down... Do I receive any spontaneous recognition for the prodigies of skill and industry I lavish on an unworthy institution and a stupid public? Not a bit of it: half my time is spent in telling people what a clever man I am. It is no use merely doing clever things in England...

  Unfortunately, the building process has been a most painful one to me, because I am congenitally an extremely modest man. Shyness is the form my vanity and self-consciousness take by nature. It is humiliating, too, after making the most dazzling displays of professional ability, to have to tell people how capital it all is. Besides, they get so tired of it, that finally... they begin to detest it.

  ...I can never justify to myself the spending of four years on dramatic criticism. I have sworn an oath to endure no more of it. Never again will I cross the threshold of a theatre. The subject is exhausted; and so am I.’

  ‘Now the playwrights may sleep in peace,’ observed the actor-manager of the Criterion, Charles Wyndham, ‘and the actor may take his forty winks without anxiety.’

  SEVEN

  1

  St Pancras Vestryman

  People think of me as a theatrical man, but I am really proud of having served six years as a municipal councillor.

  New York Times (24 March 1933)

  Fabian progress through the north of England after the success of Fabian Essays had been helped by an elderly supporter, Henry Hunt Hutchinson. Crusty and querulous, exuberantly describing his marriage as a penal servitude, he reminded Shaw of Samuel Butler. ‘I liked the man,’ he decided. But ‘Old Hutch’ did not much like Shaw. He would alternate with his cheques to the Fabians cantankerous letters complaining of Shaw’s rudeness. The Fabian executive, banking the cheques and applauding Old Hutch’s public spirit, would deplore his advancing age and infirmity. What would happen, they wondered, to Fabian finances when he died?

  In the summer of 1894 they had their answer when Old Hutch shot himself. The Webbs were staying in the Surrey hills, with Shaw and Wallas, when Sidney received a letter informing him that he had been appointed one of Hutchinson’s trustees. Old Hutch had been a solicitor and had made a will that was almost certainly invalid. To his wife he bequeathed £100; his two sons and two daughters received smaller bequests; and Fabianism was to benefit, over a period of ten years, by almost £10,000. This money had been left to trustees (of whom Sidney became first Chairman), to be used for ‘the propaganda and other purposes’ of the Fabian Society ‘and its Socialism’, and for promoting Fabian goals ‘in any way’ that the trustees thought ‘advisable’. At breakfast the next morning, the Webbs told Shaw and Wallas of their decision to found in London a School of Economics and Political Science, similar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques, where experts could be specially trained for the purpose of reforming society. Shaw, who believed that Hutchinson had ‘left his money for Red propaganda by Red vans’, would have preferred using it to enliven Fabian campaigns. Yet it was he who acted as Webb’s spokesman and cleverly avoided antagonizing Olivier and Bland, both of whom objected to Webb’s plans.

  Sidney had to placate the Hutchinson family and the Fabian executive. He had to win support both from the London County Council and from businessmen by representing his school as an institution with commercial courses, though dedicated (despite its socialist propaganda) to disinterested research. Knowing that disinterested research inevitably led to socialist conclusions, Sidney detected no discrepancy in this – especially since small amounts of the Hutchinson money were to be segregated for the promotion of Fabian lectures and an increase in the secretary’s salary. But it was too paradoxical for Shaw. Always scrupulous in financial affairs, he warned Beatrice that Sidney was antagonizing the Fabian executive by what looked like a plan to bribe them in return for permission ‘to commit an atrocious malversation of the rest of the bequest’.

  As Webb had once frowned on Shaw’s individualism, so Shaw now worried over Webb’s idealism, fearing that his love for this new invention could cause a break-up in the Fabian family. Nevertheless, for reasons of unity, Shaw reluctantly supported his friend’s dream of a centre for sociological research.

  So, by means of a suspect will, at variance with anything Old Hutch could have envisaged, and amid a good deal of Fabian grumbling, one of Webb’s lasting achievements was begun. ‘It is honestly scientific,’ Beatrice pronounced after the school had opened in the summer of 1895. And Shaw later admitted that ‘Sidney Webb performed miracles with his money which I should never have done’.

  *

  The London School of Economics became another instrument for long-term permeation (particularly valuable since Lord Salisbury’s Tory Government was elected), and for the introduction of collectivism by educationists rather than political partisans. Before their marriage, Beatrice had revealed her doubts as to whether Sidney was ‘a really big man’ like Chamberlain, but assured him that he might be capable of doing ‘first-rate work on the London County Council’. After their marriage she supported his refusal to go into Parliament, partly because she believed that ‘the finest part of his mind and character’ would be unemployed in the House of Commons, and partly because she recognized in a parliamentary career the ‘enemy of domesticity’. They had moved at the end of 1893 to an austere ten-room house at 41 Grosvenor Road on the Embankment. It was a short distance from Spring Gardens, where the London County Council held its meetings, and from Adelphi Terrace, where in 1896 the London School of Economics moved. After his meetings and lectures Sidney would return in the evening to Beatrice’s simple meat suppers with cigarettes.

  At first sight Shaw’s maverick figure does not find a part in the undramatic plans Webb had made for revolution through research. He had refused in 1889 to stand for the London County Council in Deptford – the seat Webb was to win from the Tories three years later. But his experiences in the theatre over the next eight years made him see that it was no longer a grand choice between Parliament and the West End, but a means of combining a limited commitment to municipal politics with a limited success in provincial theatres. Early in 1894 he had refused an invitation to put himself up as the parliamentary candidate for Chelsea; but he stood in the School Board elections at the end of that year for the St Pancras Vestry – and was handsomely defeated. Then, letting his name go forward as a Progressive candidate at an uncontested election in May 1897, he was appointed to the Vestry Committee of Ward 7 of St Pancras, together with an architect, barrister, builder and tea-dealer.

  London local government in the 1890s was an ‘archaic patchwork’ of vestries. The St Pancras Vestry, stretching from Islington to Marylebone and from Holborn to Hampstead and Hornsey, contained almost two hundred thousand inhabitants. Their culture ‘may be inferred from the fact that there was not a single bookshop in the entire borough,’ Shaw recorded. But it clustered with ‘houses of ill-fame’, especially in the side streets off Tottenham Court Road (one of which was named Warren Street). And there were slums often owned by landlords like Sartorius and managed by rent-collectors such as Lickcheese.

  On behalf of their constituents the vestrymen looked after an elastic range of matters from manure receptacles (maintenance of), horns (blowing of), graves (purchase of) and noxious literature (sale of), to the management of ice cream notices, street cries, the sampling of milk-in-transit and all business involving public baths, lighting, tramways. The strength of local government was planted, Shaw believed, in its independence from Parliament. The St Pancras Vestry had a Chairman and 116 vestrymen. They d
id not operate under the party system. ‘Every member can vote as he thinks best without the slightest risk of throwing his party out of power and bringing on a General Election,’ Shaw explained. ‘If a motion is defeated, nobody resigns: if it is carried, nobody’s position is changed.’ Reviewing his six years as a vestryman and borough councillor at the age of eighty, he recalled that ‘I never had to vote on any question otherwise than on its specific merits...

  ‘in Parliament I should have been a back row chorus man, allowed to amuse the House with a speech occasionally... [the] perversion of parliament has produced all the modern dictatorships... The little socialism we have is gas and water Socialism. And it is by extension of Gas & Water Socialism that industry will be socialized.’

  Shaw’s first meeting took place at the Vestry Hall, Pancras Road, on 26 May 1897. He was soon joined by a young Methodist minister named Ensor Walters;

  ‘the vestry, as far as it knew anything about me, classed me as a Socialist and therefore an atheist, sure to differ with the Methodist minister on every question. What actually happened was that he and I immediately formed a party two strong all to ourselves. And we troubled ourselves about no other party... He was out to make a little corner for the Kingdom of God in St Pancras; and nothing could have suited me better.’

  Shaw served on the Health Committee of which Ensor Walters became Chairman, on the Officers Committee and the Committee for Electricity and Public Lighting. These were three of ten sub-committees which met separately and ‘set forth their conclusions as to what the Council ought to do in their departments in a series of resolutions. When the whole Council meets, these strings of resolutions are brought up as the reports of the Committees, and are confirmed or rejected or amended by the general vote.’

  This system impressed Shaw as being so sensible that he wondered why parliamentary business should not be conducted on similar lines. He discovered local government, however, to be undermined by two factors: the inadequacy of the men who were elected and the paralysing poverty of the municipalities. His fellow-vestrymen were well-intentioned people but ‘absurdly unequal to the magnitude of our task.