But people lose their ‘peace, their fineness in politics,’ Yeats said, so it was no surprise to him that, fighting the political barbarians, Shaw had become something of a barbarian himself. Yeats responded to the mystical vein in Shaw, without believing it would ever quieten the ‘Shaw who writes letters to the papers and gives interviews’ and who had written The Apple Cart. ‘He is haunted by the mystery he flouts,’ Yeats wrote to George Russell. ‘He is an atheist who trembles in the haunted corridor.’
Shaw had not liked Yeats’s allegorical plays which seemed to float, full of ‘treading-on-air’ roles, within the twilight Ireland of Lady Wilde’s legends. He hardly had the patience to tease out Yeats’s dense and studied symbolisms. He had felt ‘quite touched’ by Cathleen ni Houlihan, ‘but Ireland meant something then that cut no ice outside the island of saints’. He had described The Land of Heart’s Desire as ‘an exquisite curtain raiser’, but it had raised the curtain on Arms and the Man, a brisk modern comedy that Yeats likened to the hard-edged world of Epstein’s Rock Drill and the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis.
After they stayed as fellow-guests of Lady Gregory in the summer of 1910, Shaw had discovered ‘what a penetrating critic and good talker’ Yeats was, ‘for he played none of his Bunthorne games, and saw no green elephants, at Coole’. He had also noticed the shrewdness with which Yeats handled the Abbey Theatre Company. ‘The Abbey Players were enormously interesting, both technically and poetically,’ he later wrote, ‘and brought me into closer relations with him.’
In Chancery Lane one black night, Shaw remembered, ‘into a circle of light under an arc lamp there suddenly stepped, walking towards me, Yeats with his wing of raven black hair swinging across his forehead and Maud Gonne, dazzlingly beautiful in white silk, both of them in evening dress. The pair were quite beyond description. I was invisible in the dark as they passed on; and of course I did not intrude.’
This was the only time Shaw saw Maud Gonne. He had not intruded on Yeats’s Irish Movement, though somewhere else he was campaigning in the same war. He did not invade that pool of light, though from his courtly dance with Ellen Terry to his troubadour’s pursuit of Stella Campbell he circled hypnotically round it, while Yeats, despite ‘that girl standing there’, had stepped into the shadows of politics as an Irish senator.
Between the poet of the emotions who believed that ‘we begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy’ and the playwright of the intellect who thought that ‘all genuinely intellectual work is humorous’ there had once seemed to be no sympathetic meeting ground. But as Shaw’s thought dissolved more into the surreal, he came to accept Yeats’s visionary energies as being valuable for Ireland; and as Yeats moved ‘closer to the common world’ he understood the complementary value of the artist as politician.
On the Great Wheel of lunar phases round which Yeats charts the twenty-eight categories of human nature and the evolution of the soul through these categories, he places Shaw alongside Wells in phase 21 where writers are ‘great public men and they exist after death as historical monuments, for they are without meaning apart from time and circumstance’. Yeats positioned himself at phase 17, an ideal phase except that the world was at phase 22 of its historical cycle and he was consequently fated to be one of its ‘tragic minority’. So when seeking a vehicle of contemporary time and circumstance, he turned to the man whose moon almost exactly coincided with the age.
The Irish Academy of Letters was Yeats’s version of Wilde’s politesse about the ‘great Celtic School’. It was to be an organization with the character of the Académie Française, bringing together those who had done creative work in Ireland, from the Celtic poet to the Cork realist, the Gaelic modernist and Big House novelist. He knew that the proposal would chiefly recommend itself to G.B.S. as a strengthening of forces against the censorship of the Catholic Church in Ireland; and indeed Shaw’s participation was partly in acknowledgement of the help Yeats had given him in defeating British censorship at the Abbey with The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet.
At the Academy’s inaugural meeting in September 1932 Shaw was, in his absence, unanimously elected President, and Yeats became Vice-President. Twenty founding members accepted nomination plus eleven associates whose work was classified as ‘less Irish’. Among the academicians was Shaw’s future biographer, St John Ervine; among the associates Yeats’s biographer, Joseph Hone. Most of the names were suggested by Yeats, though Shaw proposed T. E. Lawrence and Eugene O’Neill as associate members.
One nominee who refused the invitation was Sean O’Casey. Yeats had been O’Casey’s spiritual father in Ireland when he was happy to be enveloped by ‘the great glory of the Abbey’. But after the Abbey’s rejection of The Silver Tassie in 1928 he turned to Shaw as his new protector and made Yeats his enemy. Shaw, who wished to support O’Casey and his family without antagonizing Yeats, urged conciliation. But O’Casey needed enemies as much as he needed heroes. The influences of Yeats and Shaw mingled uneasily in his plays. He could find no rapprochement between the Green Flag and the Red. Turning down the invitation to the Irish Academy was, he confessed, one of the hardest refusals of his life.
Another Irish exile, James Joyce, also refused the symbolic gesture, though warmly thanking Yeats through whom he also conveyed ‘my thanks to Mr Shaw whom I have never met’. When reading parts of Ulysses in the Little Review, Shaw had been shudderingly reminded of his Dublin adolescence. ‘I missed neither the realism of the book nor its poetry,’ he later stated. Though admitting ‘I could not write the words Mr Joyce uses’, he acknowledged ‘Joyce’s literary power, which is of classic quality’, adding, ‘If Mr Joyce should ever desire a testimonial as the author of a literary masterpiece from me, it shall be given with all possible emphasis and with sincere enthusiasm.’
Shaw had received a prospectus for the Shakespeare and Company edition of Ulysses from Sylvia Beach who, believing he would relish the revolutionary aspect of the work, accepted Joyce’s bet of a silk handkerchief to a box of cigars that Shaw’s name would not be on the list of subscribers. But, though praising Joyce’s ‘literary genius’, Shaw had gone on to explain that ‘I am an elderly Irish gentleman, and that if you imagine that any Irishman, much less an elderly one, would pay 150 francs for a book, you little know my countrymen’.
After that it was the turn of Ezra Pound to bully him into a subscription. ‘I take care of the pence,’ Shaw answered, ‘because the Pounds will not take care of themselves.’ Though this helped to earn him Pound’s condemnation as a ‘ninth-rate coward’, it delighted Joyce himself. Having eyed their ‘letter fight over me’ through his cigar smoke, he thought he spied how matters stood. Echoing Shaw, he cautioned Pound that if he thought G.B.S. had not ‘subscribed anonymously for a copy of the revolting record through a bookseller you little know my countrymen’. And Pound had conceded: ‘Dear old Shaw has amused us.’
By 1920 Joyce’s library contained thirteen volumes of Shaw, comprising seventeen works. In Zurich during the war he had become involved with the English Players’ Company’s presentation of The Dark Lady of the Sonnets (for which he wrote a darkly amusing programme note) and some unauthorized performances of the still-censored Mrs Warren’s Profession. Shaw raised legal objections to this production, but although it was without benefit of royalties, Joyce may have thought he was engaged in defeating censorship as Yeats had done with The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet.
Joyce’s review of that play at the Abbey had been a ‘shewing-up’ of G.B.S. as a writer incapable of the ‘noble and bare style appropriate to modern playwrighting’. In Joyce’s eyes, Shaw was more preacher than literary artist. This was the obverse of Shaw’s view of Joyce as a literary artist in danger of dwindling into a limited edition belletrist. ‘I shall not do anything that may encourage him to be a coterie author,’ he had warned Pound: ‘Irish talent, when it is serious, belongs to the big world.’
That the world would venerate a linguistic experimenter like Joyce as well as a supernatura
l speculator like Yeats said something to Shaw of literature’s removal from the streets into the universities. He did not keep up with Joyce’s later work any more than with Yeats’s. ‘I have tried to read Finnegan but found it would take more time to decipher than it seemed worth,’ he wrote in 1948. ‘...I might have persevered when I was 20; but at 93 time is precious and the days pass like flights of arrows.’
‘Allow me to offer my felicitations to you on the honour you have received and to express my satisfaction that the award of the Nobel Prize for literature has gone once more to a distinguished fellow townsman,’ Joyce wrote in 1926. This was the only letter of congratulation Shaw kept. Had he persisted with Finnegans Wake, he would have found within its overlapping contexts many Shavian echoes and allusions from ‘Sainte Andrée’s Undershift’ to the injunction ‘Plays be honest!’ and the disarming ‘Candidately’. Even Blanche Patch takes a bow in Finnegans Wake.
Wilde’s great Celtic School found a symbol but never a centre in Yeats’s Academy. Like Shaw, Yeats had thought in terms of synthesis. But the Celtic School depended on antitheses. It was a school of truancy, thriving on a pressure that drove people outwards, and on the tension and reproach of exiles ‘too conscious of intellectual power to belong to party,’ as Yeats wrote when describing Wilde and Shaw together. Joyce, whose imagination was lit up by a reference Shaw made to Wilde’s gigantism, also coupled them in the Wildeshawshow of Finnegans Wake as brother opposites, like Sterne and Swift, of the same generation. From such half-admiring antipathies did the Celtic-Hibernian School gain its positive capability.
5
The Boxer and the Nun
This is the way with us ageing men. In the decay of our minds the later acquisitions go first.
H.G. Wells’s obituary of Shaw, Daily Express (3 November 1950)
‘And now I have come from the burial of Thomas Hardy’s ashes in the Abbey...’ Charlotte wrote to T. E. Lawrence. Hardy had died aged eighty-seven on the evening of Wednesday 11 January 1928. ‘He and I were on very friendly terms,’ G.B.S. was reported as saying. ‘...I always liked his poetry better than his prose.’ Two days after his death, Shaw received an invitation to act as one of the pallbearers at Westminster Abbey. ‘I desire to be buried in Stinsford Churchyard,’ Hardy had written in his will; but according to Shaw he ‘knew that he must ultimately come to the Abbey and he was quite reconciled to it’. As an extreme compromise his body was dismembered and the heart buried at Stinsford while the ashes were being laid to rest in the Abbey. Many people were horrified by this mutilation. But G.B.S. reassured Florence Hardy that, since her husband belonged to the nation as well as to himself, she had had no choice in the matter. ‘Everything that could be done has been done to meet national sentiment,’ he wrote in the Daily News. ‘Wessex has the heart, the nation has his ashes.’
It was snowing hard on the day of the funeral, but sprawling crowds had assembled and lots were being drawn for tickets of admission to Poets’ Corner. Shaw felt uncharacteristically nervous. Barrie, Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, A. E. Housman and Kipling were the other writers acting as pallbearers; there were Masters of two colleges that had made Hardy an Honorary Fellow, Queen’s College, Oxford, and Magdalene College, Cambridge; as well as the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald. A young biographer who had journeyed down from Cambridge for the funeral observed that, in startling contrast to the weight and texture of the other pallbearers, Shaw seemed an ethereal presence. ‘I have never seen so transparent a complexion; a pallor, very slightly tinged with the freshest rose – such as any girl or child alone normally has... His hair alone, still a glinting gilt, wire-like tangle of reddish threads, was material.’
Shaw attributed his success, despite almost falling over Kipling, to having posed for Troubetzkoy in a sublime attitude: ‘I was in full practice,’ he told Henry Salt. The clergy, full of worldly pomp and disdain, led the procession; and at the end, erect and calm, came Florence ‘so completely swathed in crape that her face was invisible’. As the chords of the organ music swelled and burst out and the procession passed back, she hung on Sydney Cockerell’s arm, Charlotte observed, and appeared ‘completely broken’.
It was ‘a fine show,’ G.B.S. admitted, ‘...but I didn’t feel solemn a bit,’ he afterwards wrote to Florence Hardy.
‘If you only knew how I wanted at the end to swoop on you; tear off all that villainous crape (you should have been like the lilies of the field); and make you come off, with him, to see a Charlie Chaplin film! But of course we wouldn’t have dared. I had to be content with nudging Cockerell disrespectfully as I passed him.’
In fact he had behaved with sensitivity, informing the press that Hardy ‘had no enemies, at least that I know of’, but in a letter to Florence Hardy revealing his awareness that her married life had not been easy. ‘It is inconceivable that Thomas Hardy’s widow should be unhappy or unblest. Only, don’t marry another genius...’
*
‘I cannot sympathize about his death,’ Shaw remarked on hearing that the actor Robert Loraine had died, ‘because I am going to die myself shortly.’ He took the same line when James Barrie died eighteen months later in 1937. Far from being, as the public imagined, a genuine Peter Pan (like G. K. Chesterton) he had struck Shaw as having been born a thousand years old (like Max Beerbohm). He was one of the few people whom Shaw admitted to have been unhappy. ‘Certainly he regretted that he had no children. Perhaps he ought to have had children...’ But what was terrifying to Shaw was the way he had killed the child in himself. ‘He gave you the impression that for all his playfulness he had hell in his soul.’
During the 1920s and 1930s the deaths of Fabian comrades, colleagues in the theatre and those who had influenced his early intellectual life were regularly announced in the newspapers, often with some tribute from Shaw. He and Charlotte were abroad when, in the early summer of 1935, they heard the news that T. E. Lawrence had been killed. Charlotte felt profoundly thankful to be away: the publicity would have been awful. Some of the evidence at the inquest had been contradictory and there were rumours of murder and suicide. The facts, as the Shaws understood them, were that he had been racing home from Bovington Camp on his Brough Superior ‘Boanerges’, a motorcycle with the same name as the bull-roarer in The Apple Cart that the Shaws had given him. He had swerved to avoid some boys on bicycles, gone into a skid, and been thrown over the handlebars. He was forty-six; but perhaps, Charlotte speculated, it was for the best. ‘He always dreaded pain and the idea of death (as a sort of sign of defeat!) and now, you see, he had got off without knowing anything about it.’
Worst of all had been the news in May 1927 that H. G. Wells’s wife Jane was dying of cancer. Jane ‘is valiant & has been the gayest & pluckiest person I have ever known,’ Charlotte wrote to Wells. A few days later they motored over to Little Easton. Jane lay exhausted on a sofa in the drawing-room while H.G. darted anxiously in and out. He was desperate to do anything that might make these last months easier for her, for he knew she was doomed. ‘The doctors and the nurse, having committed themselves to the opinion that Jane is a goner, are naturally creating an atmosphere calculated to produce that effect even on a perfectly healthy woman,’ Shaw protested in a letter to Beatrice Webb. ‘...I am trying to make her defy science and have a turn at all the empiricisms as aids to curing herself. Charlotte was rather distressed...’
They visited Jane again that summer and saw her getting weaker. It was, as Charlotte said, ‘beyond words’ and Shaw agreed. ‘There it is,’ he had written with a tone of finality. But he could not leave it there. He advised Wells to take a gamble on anything from homoeopathy to osteopathy, and encouraged his old friend to ‘grasp the horror of your own scientific education’. All this was meant to help Wells ‘watch and wait with an undarkened mind’. But, though it probably had something of this effect on G.B.S., it can only have pushed Wells himself nearer the end of his tether. ‘Charlotte says I can do no good by worrying
you, as you will only be made more miserable,’ G.B.S. ended his letter that August. ‘But I do not regard you as a miserable person... it would be very jolly to hear that Jane is all right. Send us a bulletin, however brief.’
But no bulletin came. ‘Please H.G. dont be angry with him,’ Charlotte wrote privately that September. ‘You know he is like that – he must sometimes let himself go in this aggravating way – & he means it all so more than well!... Do – do – write a line – to me, even, & say you ar’nt angry.’ So, within four weeks of his wife’s death, Wells was obliged to comfort Charlotte over her husband. ‘Your charming letter brought peace to me & a great deal of thankfulness,’ Charlotte replied. ‘...Perhaps now it will not be so very long before we meet.’
They met the following month for Jane’s cremation at Golders Green. ‘I haven’t been so upset for a long time,’ Charlotte wrote. The service was ‘hideous – terrible and frightful’. Wells, dressed in a bottle-blue overcoat, came and sat with her and G.B.S. instead of with his family, and the organ started on an appalling dirge. At any second, Charlotte feared, G.B.S. might stride over and murder the organist in his loft. Wells, his handkerchief darting in and out of his pocket, ‘began to cry like a child – tried to hide it at first and then let go’.
The funeral speech had been prepared by Wells and was delivered by T. E. Page, a classical scholar noted for his oratory. ‘This oration was either not well done,’ observed Arnold Bennett, ‘or too well done.’ Virginia Woolf, who had been looking forward to the outing (‘What fun! How I love ceremonies’) thought the presentation somewhat nondescript. To Charlotte it sounded like grief curdled by guilt. ‘He drowned us in a sea of misery and as we were gasping began a panegyric of Jane which made her appear as a delicate, flower-like, gentle being, surrounding itself with beauty and philanthropy and love,’ she wrote. ‘...Then there came a place where the address said “she never resented a slight; she never gave voice to a harsh judgement”. At that point the audience, all more or less acquainted with many details of H.G.’s private life, thrilled, like corn under a wet north wind – and H.G. – H.G. positively howled.’
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