Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  The two men then launched themselves across Europe until, ploughing through ruts of limestone mud, the car ‘seemed to get its teeth full of paving stones... and finally reduced us... to admit that our journey was over... Tomorrow we shall attach a couple of brewery horses to her and have her hauled to the railway station.’

  While the car was being put to rights at Luneville, Shaw and Kilsby waited twenty-seven kilometres off at Nancy where G.B.S. corrected the proofs of a new Prologue to Caesar and Cleopatra, and made final revisions to his study of marital infidelity, Overruled. ‘It has an air of being outrageous,’ he advised Charlotte; ‘but it really does drive in its moral, which is that four reasonably amiable people in a matrimonial difficulty find themselves with nothing to guide them but a morality which will not work.’

  His letters to Charlotte were regular, amusing, friendly, informative – he even asks her to send a rough proof of Pygmalion to Mrs Pat who ‘now says that her notion of bliss is to travel for a year and have a letter from me every week’. Shaw’s letters to Stella were of a kind that Charlotte had never received. ‘Stella, do not ever bully me: you don’t know how easily frightened I am,’ he wrote from Nancy. ‘...Let us take life as it comes, and love and hate and work without dramatizing it more than we can help.’ But it was impossible for Shaw not to dramatize it. He had been born with the instinct to show off which his mother, feeling no pride in his tricks, had stifled. His hunger for love fed on his imagination and found consummation in his dreams. ‘If you knew all the adventures we have had already in the imaginary world which is my real world,’ he told Stella, ‘you would blush to the remotest contours of your enchanting person.’ Stella fulfilled an important adolescent need in Shaw untended by the years of his marriage. ‘You are a figure from the dreams of my boyhood,’ he told her. Their relationship took him back to ‘the indescribable heartbreak of Ireland’ and reminded him of that ‘bewitching Calypso’ with the beautiful ‘black tresses’ with whom he had fallen in love shortly before leaving Dublin. ‘Once, in my calfish teens,’ he told Stella, ‘I fell in love with a lady of your complexion; and she, good woman, having a sister to provide for, set to work to marry me to the sister.’

  The Calypso whom he originally loved was married and, being taken care of in reality, able to inhabit his imagination freely. His retreat from the sister was in effect a flight from reality, with which his emotions could not cope. But Stella, alias Mrs Pat, seemed to represent both sisters and threatened to bring the real and his imaginary worlds into collision. His letters to Stella have none of the artistry of the Ellen Terry correspondence: Shaw’s relationship with Ellen had been on paper. But to Stella ‘I dont know why: I cant write. Writing is no use... It is past letter writing with me. There are things one cannot put on paper... All that paper love is nothing: the real thing is in the marrow of my bones and the roots of my nerves.’ The spoken not the written word was Stella’s art (‘I have always been an odious letter writer’). Their love affair therefore ‘was acted, not written’ and the correspondence incidental. But ‘I must break myself of this,’ he wrote.

  Stella ‘was the beauty of the moonlight,’ wrote Rebecca West, ‘as Ellen Terry was the beauty of the sunlight’. Like him, she was reckless yet fundamentally respectable. He was attracted by strong women, she to weak men. She had married Patrick Campbell when she was twenty and pregnant. It seemed romantic, but however handsome he looked Patrick Campbell was not a creature of romance. After his death she had not remarried, but recently, unknown to Shaw, involved herself with a well-connected, insolvent officer, ‘a bit short on brains’, called George Cornwallis-West, unhappily married to the famous American beauty Jennie Jerome, widow of Lord Randolph Churchill.

  Mrs Pat wanted to be loved and she wanted to act great roles; but she was impossible to live with and almost impossible to act with. The late Victorian and Edwardian theatre had very few good roles for actresses. She needed a playwright who believed in the equality of women and men in the theatre to write for her. But though Shaw’s child-play made her laugh, so that she nicknamed him Joey after Grimaldi the clown; and though she was attentive to the commercial undertones of what he wrote to her, she underrated the emotional fires she had lit up in him.

  But it was a delightful game and Stella played it beautifully. As for Shaw, he was feeling his part so deeply he sometimes forgot they were on stage. ‘Playing Romeo has given me an ill-divining soul,’ he told Edith Lyttelton: ‘I cannot foresee the happy ending.’

  *

  By the time they scrambled back to England, Shaw had made up his mind to sell the car. It was four years old, had covered 70,000 miles, and gave him lumbago. But being fond of it, he postponed the sale for another eleven years and added to his stable a brisk little motor-bicycle in green enamel. This machine which he rode ‘like a thunderbolt’ suited his new spirit of recklessness which seemed to gain in response to everyone else’s illness. Stella was confined to bed: Charlotte had fallen down; neither seemed able to recover from their continental cures.

  More serious still was his mother’s illness. While at Nancy he had heard from his sister Lucy that ‘the Mar’ had suffered a stroke. Over the next six months, she had two more strokes. She had continued into her seventies as a peppery music teacher at the North London Collegiate School for Girls; and she had continued living at 29 Fitzroy Square until the lease gave out, when Shaw bought for her the lease of 8 Park Village West, near Regent’s Park. In her retirement she became economically more dependent on G.B.S., as did Lucy. ‘I have now stock enough of my own to secure my mother & sister against all contingencies,’ Shaw told Beatrice Webb that summer. He wanted to revoke the marriage settlement which, should he die first (in a car or motor-bicycle accident perhaps), made his family dependent on his wife. It was inappropriate, especially since they disliked Charlotte. Not that Bessie and Lucy seemed troubled: they spared George their gratitude. However hard he worked he was still ‘a dreadful procrastinator’ to his mother and a ‘prosperous idler’ to his sister.

  Yet Lucy could not help associating herself with her brother’s success. She liked to claim that he stole his best witticisms from her. Fate (‘with her usual inscrutable workings and apparent lack of discrimination as to deserts’) had raised up the brother and ‘dealt her blows’ to the sister. It was difficult not to feel bitter. ‘The good things of this world which have poured into George’s lap in the last three or four years are rubbing the sharp edges and crisp individuality off his intellect,’ she cautioned a friend. ‘...My worst dread about him is that he may become commonplace – I could stand anything but that. I still wish for his own sake that he had not married.’ Such wishes derived from the sense of insult she felt after the break-up of her marriage. In her early forties she had got pneumonia, then pleurisy, ‘and the result is tuberculosis’. She had spent her convalescence in Jenny Patterson’s house. When the doctor broke the news to her that she might be going to die, her reaction had been ‘absolute relief, rest and even exaltation’.

  There seemed little to live for. She had lost her voice. For almost a decade she exiled herself in Germany while her husband, Charles Butterfield, carried on in London. Then, one October evening in 1908 shortly after returning to England, she had been stopped in the foyer of the Coronet Theatre, Notting Hill, and told by the manager, Eade Montefiore, that her husband had been living with an actress during Lucy’s years abroad. ‘Although I had taxed him with almost every failing a man could have, I never for one moment suspected him of infidelity.’

  Shaw advised divorce and paid the costs – £91 13s. 8d. (equivalent to £4,200 in 1997) – needed to prevent Charles Butterfield from contesting the action. ‘I can find money for you as soon as you want it,’ he told her early in 1910. She needed some money to pursue good health. She spent much time by the sea but kept coming back to her mother’s Park Village house.

  Mother and daughter had a patchy but strong relationship. Bessie was ‘a great old war horse’ and could never see wha
t Lucy was making such a fuss about. A disappointing career, a broken marriage, chronic ill-health, almost no money – these were hardly things to complain of. As for herself, Bessie put her trust in spiritualism. She preferred her friends when dead and would spend an hour each day chatting to them at the ouija board. They liked to tell her of the death of other friends: and she would hurry out for the wreaths. They told her, too, what she suspected: that the sort of success which had come to George ‘doesn’t count for anything up here’. Lucy too experimented with the planchette and received some extraordinary communications from Rajah Mahattan, Knight Oliphant, Master Bariole and other unknown exotics on the subject of the planet Mars which she sent, with disappointing results, to the Astronomer Royal. Bessie when ‘influenced’ filled the house with drawings though she could hardly hold a pencil at other times. G.B.S. didn’t trouble Bessie with his scepticism. But he had been somewhat useless to his mother, as men were. No wonder she had kept no ‘photo of my son as a boy or child,’ as she informed Archibald Henderson. ‘...Nor have I a single letter.’

  Now as she lay dying she shocked everyone, getting ‘ridiculously cured... by a Christian Scientist who broke into the house and meditated on her whilst she slept,’ Shaw reported. This cure did not prevent her death. Lucy was with her most of the time, and George (who came and went) provided two nurses. ‘I have been watching her trying to die for five weeks since the last seizure,’ Lucy wrote. ‘Her body and all her organs are so sound that she seems unable to get away... the strain has been terrible.’ Shaw too, in his fashion, felt the strain: ‘my mother is dying, they say, but wont die – makes nothing of strokes – throws them off as other women throw off sneezing fits,’ he wrote to Lady Gregory. Lucy had reported on 6 December that ‘it is a question of days or even hours now’, but Bessie held on for another ten weeks. On 19 February 1913 Lucy telegraphed George with the news: ‘All over.’

  To Lucy it seemed as if all was over for her too. ‘My mother’s exit has made an astonishing abyss in our little kingdom,’ she told a friend. ‘...consciously and subconsciously she guided and influenced everything I ever did. I feel as if the rock had vanished from under my house and I was tumbling about in the sand.’ When her mother’s body was taken from the house Lucy ‘completely broke to pieces’. George put her in the care of a chest specialist and he insisted that she stay in bed. ‘A halt had to be called if I did not want to follow Mama,’ Lucy wrote, ‘which I certainly did.’

  She was not well enough to go to the funeral service and cremation at Golders Green on 22 February. Four people turned up: the chaplain, the undertaker, Shaw and Barker – whose presence revived the rumour that he was Shaw’s natural son.

  The only person to whom Shaw could write about this day was Stella ‘who understands about one’s mother, and other things’. The words of the burial service had been altered a little for a cremation. ‘A door opened in the wall; and the violet coffin mysteriously passed out through it and vanished as it closed,’ he told her. ‘...I went behind the scenes at the end of the service and saw the real thing... it is wonderful.

  ‘I found there the violet coffin opposite another door, a real unmistakeable furnace door. When it lifted there was a plain chamber of cement and firebrick. No heat, no noise, no roaring draught. No flame. No fuel. It looked cool, clean, sunny, though no sun could get there. You would have walked in or put your hand in without misgiving. Then the violet coffin moved again and went in, feet first, And behold! The feet burst miraculously into streaming ribbons of garnet colored lovely flame, smokeless and eager, like pentecostal tongues, and as the whole coffin passed in it sprang into flame all over; and my mother became that beautiful fire.’

  They were told they should return in thirty minutes. ‘When we returned we looked down through an opening in the floor to a lower floor close below,’ Shaw wrote that night to Stella. ‘There we saw a roomy kitchen, with a big cement table and two cooks busy at it.

  ‘They had little tongs in their hands, and they were deftly and busily picking nails and scraps of coffin handles out of Mamma’s dainty little heap of ashes and samples of bone. Mamma herself being at the moment leaning over beside me, shaking with laughter. They swept her up into a sieve, and shook her out; so that there was a heap of dust and a heap of calcined bone scraps. And Mamma said in my ear, “Which of the two heaps is me, I wonder!”’

  For the first time she was behaving as her son commanded. The relief was enormous. He realized how little he had known her. They made dust of the bone scraps, then scattered the remains over a flower bed. The day had had some ‘wildly funny’ moments and been ‘a complete success’. He made a note to buy some shares in the cremation business. That afternoon he drove to Oxford and at Notting Hill Gate (the car being in ‘a merry mood’) ‘accomplished a most amazing skid, swivelling right round across the road one way and then back the other, but fortunately not hitting anything...’

  *

  His mother’s death seemed to promise him emergence from the long shadow of his Dublin childhood, as his sea holidays at Dalkey had once done. To Stella ‘I opened the grave of my childhood’. He expected a miraculous resurrection. Stella became everything he had once looked for in Lucinda Elizabeth Shaw and tried to replace with Alice Lockett, Jenny Patterson, Florence Farr, Janet Achurch and Charlotte too. She was his Virgin Mother and his Dark Lady, his playmate and working-partner, his magical friend. He had become a mass of wants that now rushed out towards her. He wanted to ‘have a woman’s love on the same terms as a child’s,’ he implored, ‘...to hear tones in a human voice that I have never heard before, to have it taken for granted that I am a child and want to be happy... and suddenly find myself in the arms of a mother – a young mother, and with a child in my own arms who is yet a woman: all this plunges me into the coldest terror as if I were suddenly in the air thousands of feet above the rocks or the sea... And yet I am happy, as madmen are...’

  Stella’s mysterious illness heightened their affair. She wrote saying that the doctor had forbidden her to see anyone except himself. He would go galloping up the stairs, three at a time, with beard flying, to ‘my most agitating heart’s darling’. He was ‘most frightfully in love with you’. Sitting by the bed, he was allowed to put his arms round her waist, and they would kiss and kiss.

  Sometimes, on account of her illness, she begged him to ‘be patient with me’, then she urged him on: ‘I think if you don’t come and see me rather soon there won’t be me to see.’ He went backwards and forwards. ‘I love you for ever and ever and ever, Stella,’ he wrote. Her deteriorating health made him desperately anxious. ‘I will get into the bed myself and we shall perish together scandalously.’

  Early in 1913 she had entered a nursing home in Hinde Street for an exploratory operation. Shaw continued to visit her whenever possible. At his most sympathetic, he charmed and flattered her, made her smile, made her forget the illness and the operation. ‘Himself living in dreams,’ she testified, ‘he made a dream-world for me.’ In return she let him play ‘in the nursery of my heart’ where he felt happy beyond reason – ‘I shall never be unhappy again.’ Had she been well perhaps she might not have let their fantasy-attachment go so far, but it was now too late, she acknowledged, ‘to do anything but accept you and love you’. He basked in this acceptance. ‘I have slipped out of the real world,’ he told her.

  But Stella never lost sight, as Shaw seemed to, of the traps in their relationship. Shaw wished to remain loyal to Charlotte while loving Stella. ‘I throw my desperate hands to heaven and ask why one cannot make one beloved woman happy without sacrificing another,’ he cried out. He recognized that Charlotte, with her sensitiveness, her susceptibility to worry, needed protection; and he had tried to explain this to Stella. Only that February Charlotte had said that she never knew where George spent his afternoons. Once she had given no thought to such things. Now she was full of doubts. So he told her what the rest of London already seemed to know: that he had been at Stella’s bedside
.

  Charlotte was devastated. Shaw had not continued reading to her his correspondence with Stella. His wish to protect her seemed no more to Charlotte, however, than the keeping of a guilty secret. No wonder she had felt so anxious, had lain gasping in bed with asthma and bronchitis. She refused to meet this ‘middleaged minx’ or leave calling cards on her – and this offended Mrs Pat’s sense of propriety. She began to grow hostile to what she called the ‘suffragette’ figure of Shaw’s wife.

  Early in March Stella left the nursing home and went to convalesce in Brighton. As she began to recover so the romance clouded. She resented this marriage-attachment of ‘Mr and Mrs Mouse’ and chided Shaw on his timidity. His advances could have led to love-making if – ‘if only you’d eat red steaks and drink beer your spirit would be meet, I mean meet to mate – no I dont mean that...’ But she did mean it. Since Shaw’s ‘Mother is dead & Charlotte is your wife I’ll be your grandmother,’ she mocked him.

  ‘Dearest Liar,’ Shaw addressed Stella, not wishing to believe some of the things she was saying to him. There was no need for him to warn her against falling in love with him as he had warned other women. He sensed that she could beat him at his own game ‘and revenge his earlier victims’. He knew the unhappiness he risked. But ‘I am still in love with Stella... Cannot help it,’ he found himself writing, ‘...my first defeat, and my first success.’

  Late in March Shaw and Charlotte left for two weeks in Ireland. It seemed a safe move: except that in this country of his childhood, ‘all the old longing for beauty and blessing get stirred up in me’ so that he switched his emotional focus back to ‘my girl, my beauty, my darling, barefooted, dusty petticoated, or my mother of angels, or a dozen lovely wild things...’

  They were staying not far from Dublin with Horace Plunkett, founder of the agricultural co-operative movement in Ireland, who ‘devoted his life to the service of his fellow-creatures collectively; and personally... disliked them all,’ G.B.S. later recalled. ‘...He remained a bachelor for the sake of Lady Fingal, and was unquestionably in love with her; yet I never felt convinced that he quite liked her.’ There seemed nothing for G.B.S. to do but ‘work, work, work’, and this now pleased Charlotte who suddenly got well and, he wrote to Stella, ‘changed from a fiend into a green-eyed mermaid, smiling & fascinating & dressing in diamonds & generally dispensing charm and childish happiness... Dont grudge her.’