Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  He had sat to Bertha for his portrait as early as 1892. She had painted him as the platform spellbinder, full-length, hand-on-hip, his mouth slightly open as if uttering one of his formidable ripostes, his red-gold hair and Irish blue eyes adding to the impression of easy confidence – ‘a powerful picture,’ Beatrice decided, ‘in which the love of the woman had given genius to the artist’.

  She had painted him as a spellbinder, then fallen under his spell. Later, while he was writing The Man of Destiny, lying in a field with his fountain pen and a notebook, she painted him again: A Snake in the Grass. He had not deceived her, but he had bewitched her. He was so easy, delightful; almost intimate, though not quite. Not understanding him, she complained that he did not understand her, and doubted whether he had the gift of sympathetic penetration into any woman’s nature.

  He seems to have liked her, but was protected from deeper involvement by her obvious obsession with him. It was an obsession he helped to rouse. He had told her of his adoration for Ellen Terry and introduced her to Janet Achurch – ‘the wonderful woman who absorbed Shaw’s leisure to an extent of which I was only half-conscious’. He also joked about Beatrice Webb’s zeal to see him married. Though he felt the power and pleasure of love, he was determined never to repeat his experiences with Jenny Patterson.

  Bertha sensed the latent passion that Jenny Patterson had aroused in him, but she could not reach it herself. Her love awoke his apprehensions. ‘The sight of a woman deeply in love with him annoyed him,’ Bertha commented.

  ‘Unfortunately on my side there was a deep feeling most injudiciously displayed... I realize how exasperating it must have been to him. He had decided I think on a line of honourable conduct – honourable to his thinking. He kept strictly to the letter of it while allowing himself every opportunity of transgressing the spirit. Frequent talking, talking, talking of the pros and cons of marriage, even to my prospects of money or the want of it, his dislike of the sexual relation & so on, would create an atmosphere of love-making without any need for caresses and endearments.’

  What she did not see was that his talk was a method of testing her strength. Everyone was recommending him to marry Bertha. But were they really well-matched? If he married it must be to someone whose love was threaded with shared interests. Bertha and he could never be useful partners like the Webbs. ‘She ought to marry someone else,’ he told Janet.

  ‘She is only wasting her affections on me. I give her nothing; and I do not even take everything – in fact I dont take anything, which makes her most miserable... she would like to tie me like a pet dog to the leg of her easel & have me always to make love to her when she is tired of painting... I wish somebody could come along & marry her before she worries herself into a state of brokenheartedness.’

  Shaw’s campaign to steer Bertha away from ‘this lunacy of hers’ employed every means except one: he could not absent himself from her infelicity. ‘Heavens! I had forgotten you – totally forgotten you,’ he reminded her. He would not let her alone. In desperation she wrote to Beatrice who, on Shaw’s instructions, had stopped inviting them together to the Fabian countryside. For five years Bertha had been loyally devoted to Shaw. She had endured rumours of flirtations, largely because she knew that Beatrice was counselling him to marry her. Now she was dismayed to hear that Beatrice was encouraging him to marry someone else. Why?

  Beatrice came to the dark wainscoted studio in Cheyne Walk to give her answer. So long as there had seemed a chance of marriage she had welcomed her as Shaw’s prospective wife. But now she realized he would never marry her she had backed out of the affair. As Beatrice proceeded with her explanation, Bertha’s small face seemed to shrink; and, remembering perhaps her own pain over Chamberlain, Beatrice suddenly raged against Shaw. ‘You are well out of it, Miss Newcombe,’ she said. ‘...You know my opinion of him – as a friend and a colleague, as a critic and literary worker, there are few men for whom I have so warm a liking – but in his relations with women he is vulgar – if not worse.’

  ‘It is so horribly lonely,’ Bertha answered. ‘I daresay it is more peaceful than being kept on the rack – but it is like the peace of death.’

  Partly because of the inconclusive nature of their romance, Bertha was never at peace over Shaw. She remained at Cheyne Walk and never married. By 1909, having taken the post of Honorary Secretary of the Civic and Dramatic Guild, she found herself responsible for the private production of his Press Cuttings. They met; he read her this ‘ghastly absurdity’, then went home to write her a letter.

  ‘I expected to find a broken hearted, prematurely aged woman: I found an exceedingly smart lady, not an hour older, noting with a triumphant gleam in her eye my white hairs and lined face. When I think that I allowed those brutal letters to hurt me – ME – Bernard Shaw!! Are you not ashamed?’

  But Shaw’s teasing, even when intended to be supportive, never amused Bertha. The following month they were quarrelling and she was calling him a ‘villain’.

  ‘It is far better that I should again efface myself for another 11 years. Possibly we may all die before then... Do you still continue to think of yourself as an idol for adoring women? That idol was shattered for me years ago – – – Inadvertently when you mention the care that has been taken of you, you touch upon the lasting grievance.’

  And her grievance did last. A World War came and went. Bertha was approaching sixty, approaching seventy; and still it lasted. ‘B[ertha] wont accept the situation,’ Shaw protested to Charrington, who had taken the part of go-between, ‘...[it] is beyond human patience.’ He tried to present himself as unappealing, but could not resist the paradoxical flourish, the shattering joke – then would recover himself, too late. ‘I am still the same writing speaking machine you know of old,’ he assured her in 1922.

  ‘I am in my 66th year; my hair is white, and I am as heartless a brute as ever... women adore me more, and are less ashamed of it than when you painted The Snake in the Grass. Hearts can be heard breaking in all directions like china in the hands of a clumsy housemaid... You have my books – the best of me.’

  It was not enough, the shattered idol and the broken china. From such debris it had once seemed possible to piece together something valuable. But their correspondence, reviving past expectations, tormented Bertha with these ruined images, and much of it she destroyed. ‘Your memories terrify me,’ Shaw wrote to her in 1925. ‘Thank God there will be no letters.’

  That was their future.

  So Beatrice Webb rose to go. ‘Come and see me,’ she told Bertha, ‘ – someday.’ There seemed nothing else to say. She kissed her on the forehead and escaped downstairs. ‘I doubt,’ she confided in her diary, ‘whether Bernard Shaw could be induced to marry.’

  *

  But it was Beatrice who had inadvertently put an end to Shaw’s interest in Bertha. At a luncheon party in the early autumn of 1895 she and Sidney had met an Irish lady named Charlotte Payne-Townshend, ‘a large graceful woman with masses of chocolate brown hair,’ Beatrice later described her. ‘She dresses well, in flowing white evening robes she approaches beauty. At moments she is plain.

  ‘By temperament she is an anarchist, feeling any regulation or rule intolerable, a tendency which has been exaggerated by her irresponsible wealth. She is romantic but thinks herself cynical. She is a Socialist and a Radical, not because she understands the Collectivist standpoint, but because she is by nature a rebel... She is fond of men and impatient of most women, bitterly resents her enforced celibacy but thinks she could not tolerate the matter-of-fact side of marriage. Sweet tempered, sympathetic and genuinely anxious to increase the world’s enjoyment and diminish the world’s pain.’

  Beatrice interested Charlotte in the London School of Economics, and was rewarded with a subscription of £1,000 for the library and the endowment of a woman’s scholarship. Charlotte also agreed, at a rent and service charge of £300 a year, to take rooms on the two upper floors above the School when, in October 1896, it moved t
o 10 Adelphi Terrace. Beatrice soon began to absorb her ‘into our little set of comrades’, nominating her for the Fabian Society, with a note to the secretary that the amount of her cheque testified to the degree of her convictions.

  Shaw was introduced to her on 29 January 1896. She noted the event without comment; and he did not go two months later to her At Home at LSE. But he was apparently ‘prepared to take my part’ in a plan Beatrice had formed to marry Charlotte off to Graham Wallas. In the late summer of 1896 the Webbs rented a Spartan rectory at the village of Stratford St Andrew in Suffolk; and Wallas and Charlotte were invited. Shaw was there as a matter of course. Everything seemed in train for a satisfactory Fabian match.

  But Wallas, who left early, arrived four days late; and in those four days the pantomime ostrich spread before Charlotte his most brilliant plumage. They were constant companions, pedaling round the country all day, sitting up late at night talking. ‘They are, I gather from him, on very confidential terms,’ Beatrice noted in her diary, ‘and have “explained” their relative positions... I am somewhat uneasy.’

  *

  ‘I had a perfectly hellish childhood and youth...’ There was much in what Charlotte said about herself to interest Shaw. She was six months younger than he and her family came from County Cork; at least her father’s did. Horace Townsend had been ‘a marvel of patience’. Charlotte, who ‘was always attracted to men of action’, longed for him to assert himself. It was astonishing how his gentleness provoked everyone – especially his wife, a domineering English lady fretted by social ambitions. She got hold of him, hyphenated and then aspirated his name, dug him up from Rosscarbery. If only he had quelled her. But she ‘could not bear opposition; if it was offered she either became quite violent or she cried.’

  Early in February 1885 Horace decided to die. There was nothing much wrong with him and he was comparatively young. But his patience had given out, and for a polite man there was nothing else to do.

  His wife was incredulous, but Charlotte understood. She understood that her mother had killed him – not legally, of course, but in fact. By everything she now did she sought to avenge his death. Her mother had one ambition left: to see her two daughters brilliantly married. Charlotte refused to give her mother that satisfaction. ‘Even in my earliest years I had determined I would never marry.’

  Mother and daughter were determined women. In a furious dance they struggled across Europe, always in ‘the best circles’ and seldom anywhere for more than a week. Inevitably Charlotte blundered into offers of marriage. J. S. Black proposed in ‘as few words as I can’ in a note from his club; Count Sponnek declared himself in South Kensington and, being rebuffed, rushed off in an emotional state to St Petersburg; Finch Hutton sent her the skin of a bear shot in Wyoming and twelve dressed beaver skins: but ‘I cannot marry you,’ Charlotte replied; Herbert Oakley, a barrister, died before completing his case; the wife of Arthur Smith-Barry also died, leaving Arthur Smith-Barry wondering whether Charlotte would take her place. She didn’t. And there were others. Majors and Generals and Major-Generals. Mrs Payne-Townshend watched them all, her hopes pumping up and down. The hatred between the two women was by now ‘almost a tangible thing’. For the first time in her life Mrs Payne-Townshend was not going to get her own way. She felt ill. A doctor was called but he could find nothing wrong with her except ‘nerves’. A few days later she died. ‘It is really awful to think how glad I was,’ Charlotte admitted.

  She was thirty-four and at last free. For the first time in her life she allowed herself to fall in love. Dr Axel Munthe, hypnotist and story-teller, caught her in the immense web of his vanity and left her there. Extricating herself had been painful, and it was then that she had flown into the Webbs’ parlour.

  Graham Wallas arrived, bored Charlotte, then left. Shaw and she resumed their companionship.

  ‘If the walls of this simple-minded rectory could only describe the games they have witnessed, the parson would move, horror-stricken, to another house,’ he wrote to Janet Achurch.

  ‘We have made many bicycling expeditions together à deux. Also, instead of going to bed at ten, we go out and stroll about among the trees for a while. She, being also Irish, does not succumb to my arts as the unsuspecting and literal Englishwoman does; but we get on together all the better, repairing bicycles, talking philosophy and religion and Shaw table talk, or, when we are in a mischievous or sentimental humor, philandering shamelessly and outrageously. Such is life at Stratford St Andrew.’

  The loneliness and irritation Shaw had felt at watching the Webbs caressing each other evaporated. Falling out of love with actresses, he was suddenly able to make them an audience for his own romantic play-acting opposite this ‘Irish lady with the light green eyes and the million of money’. ‘I am going to refresh my heart by falling in love with her,’ he announced to Ellen Terry, ‘...but, mind, only with her, not with the million; so someone else must marry her if she can stand him after me.’ It was play-acting. What else could it be? They were genuinely fond of each other, but Charlotte was no slave to romance and ‘she doesnt really love me’. Kissing in the evening among the trees was very pleasant, but ‘She knows the value of her unencumbered independence, having suffered a good deal from family bonds & conventionality before the death of her mother & the marriage of her sister left her free,’ Shaw confided to Ellen Terry. ‘The idea of tying herself up again by a marriage before she knows anything – before she has exploited her freedom & money power to the utmost – seems to her intellect to be unbearably foolish.’

  He liked her honesty; he liked her involvement with the political side of his life; and he liked her independence. ‘You don’t love me the least bit in the world,’ he informed her. ‘But I am all the more grateful.’

  Watching them uneasily over these weeks at Stratford St Andrew, Beatrice reached a different conclusion. ‘These warmhearted unmarried women of a certain age are audacious and almost childishly reckless of consequences.’

  *

  On 17 September, Shaw and Charlotte, Sidney and Beatrice, ascended their machines and wheeled off back to London, which they reached in pouring rain four days later. Shaw was immediately engulfed in business. There was time for only the most tantalizing note to Charlotte who missed him and rather miserably told him so. ‘You look as if you had returned to your old amusement of eating your heart,’ he reproved her, remembering Axel Munthe. ‘...you must get something to do: I have a mind to go upstairs & shake you, only then I should lose my train.’

  He was determined that she must remain strong. ‘Don’t fall in love: be your own, not mine or anyone else’s.

  ‘From the moment that you can’t do without me, you’re lost, like Bertha. Never fear: if we want one another we shall find it out. All I know is that you made the autumn very happy, and that I shall always be fond of you for that. About the future... let us do what lies to our hands & wait for events. My dearest!’

  Fearing that she was falling in love with him, Charlotte suddenly left for Ireland. Shaw felt nonplussed: he was unused to people taking his advice. The kick of his disappointment took him aback. She had surpassed his expectations. He began by welcoming her journey (‘I had rather you were well a thousand miles away than ill in my wretched arms’), then complained of her removal (‘oh for ten minutes peace in the moonlight at Stratford!... keep me deep in your heart... I wish I were with you among those hills’). But his eloquence and even his teasing seemed to lose itself in her absence.

  On the day before Charlotte’s return from Ireland, he sent her an exactly truthful letter. ‘I will contrive to see you somehow, at all hazards,’ he wrote: ‘I must; and that “must” which “rather alarms” you, TERRIFIES me.

  ‘If it were possible to run away – if it would do any good – I’d do it; so mortally afraid am I that my trifling & lying and ingrained treachery and levity with women are going to make you miserable when my whole sane desire is to make you hap – I mean strong and self possessed and tranqui
l. However, we must talk about it... let’s meet, meet, meet, meet, meet: bless me! how I should like to see you again for pure liking; for there is something between us...’

  He saw her the night she returned. For hours beforehand he had felt curiously agitated. Then they were together and ‘I really was happy... I am satisfied, satisfied, satisfied deep in my heart.’ He had found with Charlotte a real friendliness mixed with some sexual interest. But that sexual interest put a faint shadow over his happiness. ‘I wish there was nothing to look forward to,’ he wrote to her later that night, ‘nothing to covet, nothing to gain.’ What he actually feared was that there was something to lose. Charlotte, he had told Ellen Terry, ‘knows that what she lacks is physical experience, and that without it she will be in ten years time an old maid’. But he could not stay away from Adelphi Terrace. He came – ‘and now, dear Ellen,’ he confided, ‘she sleeps like a child, and her arms will be plump, and she is a free woman, and it has not cost her half a farthing, and she has fancied herself in love, and known secretly that she was only taking a prescription, and been relieved to find the lover at last laughing at her & reading her thoughts and confessing himself a mere bottle of nerve medicine, and riding gaily off.

  Often before Shaw had implored women to use him. ‘All my love affairs end tragically because the women can’t use me.’ Charlotte had used him and ‘in the blackest depths’ he felt robbed of ‘that most blessed of things – unsatisfied desire’. From this desire he conceived the make-believe of his plays. Now, he told Charlotte, ‘I have squandered on you all the material out of which my illusions are made’. Once again Charlotte had confounded his expectations. Prim and socially self-effacing, she could take off her inhibitions once she selected a man for intimacy. It was one of those ‘volcanic tendencies’ Beatrice had detected in her.