At the end of the service the pale grey coffin with ‘tassels like bell pulls’ was ‘shoved through the door into the furnace’. The chapel emptied. G.B.S. trotted out into the garden and encouraged Wells to take his boys into the furnace room. ‘I saw my mother burnt there. You’ll be glad if you go.’ Wells did go, taking his two sons, and watched the quivering flames.
Charlotte remained in the chapel: ‘I took a little time to get quiet.’ When she came out into the yard most of the congregation was still there. ‘Number of really A.1 people present, very small,’ noted Arnold Bennett who saw only one man in full mourning and observed that G.B.S. who had no overcoat was wearing an amber handkerchief. The great world was no longer interested in Wells. ‘It was desperate to see what a dowdy shabby imperfect lot we looked,’ Virginia Woolf remarked.
Charlotte felt Wells had got his due. ‘I am an old woman and there is one thing I seem, at least, to have learned,’ she wrote grimly. ‘The way of transgressors is hard.’ Looking ‘stately and calm, and remote’, Virginia Woolf disengaged the tiny sobbing figure of Lydia Lopokova from Charlotte’s arms while G.B.S. consoled her. ‘You mustnt cry,’ he said. ‘Jane is well – Jane is splendid.’ Then he began firing off ‘jokes to everyone, and finally – putting H.G. into his car – he actually got a sort of grin out of him’. Wells had no wish to grin and resented being made to betray his grief in this way.
The occasion had a macabre postscript. In 1945 the New Statesman asked Shaw to draft an obituary of Wells and this was published when Wells died in the summer of 1946. It was an even-handed recollection of a spoilt man of genius, temperamental yet ‘without malice’. Wells had also been asked at approximately the same time to write an obituary of Shaw for the Daily Express. His obituary was published over four years after his own death and came, St John Ervine remembered, like ‘a piercing scream from the grave’. Shaw was an example of the ‘mental and moral consequences of prolonged virginity’ on a nervously active person. ‘As a rule prolonged virginity means no real ascetic purity,’ Wells had argued. ‘...A furtive sexual system grows up detached from the general activities.’ Needing to distance himself from reality, G.B.S. had grown forever out of adjustment to his environment. A secondary, vindictive personality took control whose method of self-assertion was ‘to inflict pain’.
This was the danger of G.B.S.’s fantasies. Charlotte, ‘that most lovable of women’, had tried to prevent such vanities, and that was ‘more and more her role as life went on,’ Wells continued. ‘She had married this perplexing being in a passion of admiration... and she found she had launched that incalculable, lop-sided enfant terrible, a man of genius, upon the world.’
*
‘We were very good friends... On paper he died in despair; but I cannot believe that his gaiety ever deserted him,’ Shaw was to write of Wells in 1946 to Gene Tunney. Tunney, the world heavyweight boxing champion, was more than forty years younger than Shaw, and famously unmarked, a scholar of the ring. Americans were puzzled on being told that he had been found, shortly before his first contest with Jack Dempsey, poring over Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh. They laughed openly at his contention that he would beat Dempsey by virtue of his superior mental training, and they never really forgave him for twice out-pointing their All-American Hero.
Tunney’s career was a Shavian romance. ‘Reputations cannot frighten him: personalities cannot hypnotize him,’ Shaw wrote: ‘he does not need to be a brilliant boxer like Carpentier or a terror like Dempsey; he wins by mental and moral superiority, combined with plenty of strength... You might say that he wins because he has the good sense to win.’
Here was Shaw’s fantasy of action made real, Cashel Byron come to life. They met in December 1928. Earlier that year Tunney had retired as undefeated heavyweight champion, after which he delivered a course of lectures on Shakespeare at Yale, accompanied Thornton Wilder on a walking trip round Europe and married a young gentlewoman from Greenwich, Connecticut. ‘My great work now is to live quietly and simply,’ he announced to the world, ‘for this manner of living brings me most happiness.’ His pursuit of culture led him, by the end of this year, to ‘an extremely pleasant’ luncheon at Whitehall Court.
He spoke of his travels over many countries and it was then that he introduced the Shaws to Brioni in the Adriatic, where they all met up the following year. Tunney was ‘so handsome & gentle & babyish that it refreshes one to look at him,’ Charlotte wrote from Brioni to Nancy Astor. ‘He takes G.B.S. for long walks (his boast is that you can walk 8 miles on the Island without repeating yourself!) & gazes at him, like a large dog at its master.’
On Brioni the Shaws passed many days at the Tunneys’ villa. Charlotte had long suspected G.B.S. of taking advantage of her siestas to press secretly ahead with his work. The knowledge that he was being actively prevented from working by Gene Tunney came as a tremendous relief to her as she ascended to her bedroom. ‘Mr Tunney is a most wonderful help,’ she reported to Blanche Patch. ‘He takes Mr Shaw off to the polo ground, or the golf course, or sailing, or something, and so keeps him from writing, which is splendid.’
When asked why he cultivated Tunney’s friendship, G.B.S. was to reply: ‘To plant my feet on solid ground.’ Yet it was as airy a fantasy in its fashion as his island romance with Molly Tompkins – a magical relationship that enabled them to swap roles, G.B.S. being admitted as a champion boxing analyst in exchange for adopting Tunney as a very perfect literary scholar. Tunney met all manner of artists and writers at the Shaws’ home, and they had to strain every nerve to match his sensitivity. ‘Mr Tunney took me by the arm and led me to the windows and compelled my attention to the beauties of the sunset,’ remembered Max Beerbohm.
By the early 1930s Tunney had ‘got into the book-writing field myself’ with his memoirs of the ring, A Man Must Fight. Shaw refused to contribute a Preface, explaining that ‘when you want a publisher for your next book on the strength of this one they will all declare that your first book does not count as it was the Shaw preface that sold it’. Besides, Tunney was far more famous than any writer or artist. ‘You may remember that at Brioni, when I was talking to Richard Strauss, nobody troubled about us until you joined us,’ Shaw wrote to him; ‘and then the cameras came with a rush.’
By the late 1930s, after Tunney had been retired for ten years, a change came over their relationship. G.B.S. was now the more famous of the two, and Tunney’s confidence took a dive: ‘I began to feel that I had no right to intrude on his time.’ But out of the blue a letter was to arrive from G.B.S. at the end of 1946. ‘I feel I must give you a hail to shew that I have not forgotten our old happy contacts.’ He had now passed his ninetieth birthday and ‘have only some scraps of wit left,’ he wrote.
Tunney being once more the stronger of the two, their friendship was resumed. ‘I am not worth the journey,’ Shaw warned him in 1948, but Tunney came to Ayot and noticed how eager G.B.S. was to keep up-to-date and learn all there was to know about the new heavyweight wonder of the world, Joe Louis, who was reported as being anxious to exchange a few verbal rounds with him and the other champion of Britain, Winston Churchill.
That summer, in his last letter to Tunney, Shaw signed off: ‘I hold you in affectionate remembrance.’ Afterwards Tunney wrote to Stanbrook Abbey that Shaw had been ‘the saintliest man I have ever known’.
The Prioress of Stanbrook Abbey, Dame Laurentia McLachlan, was another island of confidence in a doubting world. She had been officially received into the Order of St Benedict on the same day in 1884 that Shaw was enrolled in the Fabian Society. The Bishop had sheared off the long fair hair of the seventeen-year-old girl. Then the great enclosure door swung open in answer to the novice’s importunate knocking, and presently closed behind her. For almost seventy years behind high walls and bolted doors, she was to follow the exacting codes of the enclosed Benedictine discipline, devoting each day to prayer, scholarship and the ceremonial worship of God.
The Abbey of Stanbrook was a V
ictorian Gothic pile not far from Malvern. By the 1920s it had become a place of pilgrimage for many exotic travellers. One of these was Sydney Cockerell, the astringent antiquarian who had been a friend of Shaw’s since his days as William Morris’s secretary at Hammersmith. Cockerell first met Dame Laurentia in 1907, the year before he was appointed Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. His curiosity was soon pricked by this nun with the beautiful voice in her ‘rather nice cage’ and he felt somewhat in awe of her great reputation as an authority on plainsong and liturgical ritual. The double grille through which they communicated seemed to simplify human relationships.
‘Some I have to keep apart, others I wish to bring together,’ Cockerell wrote to her. ‘There are several I should very much like you to meet.’ From the first, Shaw had been one of those Cockerell wanted her to meet. ‘I wonder whether G.B.S’s fame has got as far as Stanbrook,’ he enquired in 1907.
‘I have never heard of Mr Bernard Shaw,’ Dame Laurentia replied.
But seventeen years later she gave Cockerell an opening. ‘I hear Bernard Shaw has written a play about St Joan,’ she wrote. ‘I will lend you Shaw’s play to read,’ he offered. ‘...Joan is not yet published and mine is a very special copy.’
He sent her his special copy; she thought it ‘a wonderful play’ and on returning it wrote: ‘Joan herself is beautifully portrayed.’ But on a number of theological matters Shaw had gone astray and ‘I should like to make some alterations’. Cockerell was sufficiently encouraged to show this letter to the Shaws themselves. Nine days later, on 24 April 1924, Dame Laurentia received a note from Charlotte enclosing two visiting cards: ‘Our friend Sydney Cockerell has urged us very strongly to call upon you. We feel a little diffident about doing so, and hope you will not think us intrusive.’
After this formal opening came an impetuous rush as Charlotte and G.B.S. hurtled up to the Abbey. Cockerell was as eager as a marriage-broker to find out how the hour between them had passed. He pressed Charlotte, who eventually revealed that ‘We like her very much.’ From Dame Laurentia he learnt that the Shaws were ‘charming’. All this was frustrating for Cockerell, a ‘born intriguer and puller of strings’, but an enticing relationship began to shimmer before him.
It had the air of a flirtation. That was how Charlotte saw it: a chaste flirtation. She seldom accompanied him on his jaunts to Stanbrook, preferring to take the opportunity while he was at these tête-à-têtes of ‘tidying his writing table’. Sometimes she turned up all sorts of naughtinesses there. ‘He went off this morning with Sydney Cockerell – who is as bad as himself – to flirt with an “enclosed” nun at Stanbrook Abbey,’ she wrote in the summer of 1929 to Nancy Astor.
‘It was an immense treat to see you and Shaw together,’ Cockerell wrote deferentially to Dame Laurentia following this visit. ‘...I think the encounter was a mutual tonic.’ He was impressed by Shaw’s manners. ‘I never saw him so abashed by anyone but William Morris.’
Dame Laurentia agreed that ‘Brother Bernard’ was a ‘delicious’ tonic. She called him Brother Bernard ever since he had given her a copy of Saint Joan with the inscription: ‘To Sister Laurentia from Brother Bernard.’ He had taken the trouble to answer her objections to the play, explaining that in ‘heathen literature like mine’, it was necessary to present Joan’s visions in such a way as to make them completely independent of the iconography attached to her religion.
This letter, Dame Laurentia acknowledged, ‘pleases me greatly in spite of its heresies’. ‘I am delighted to learn that my St Joan is yours also,’ he replied. She had not meant to go quite so far as that. Yet this elusive and complex man continued to impress her with his ‘absolute sincerity and simplicity’. As Cockerell noticed, they complemented each other in various ways. ‘I was greatly interested to meet such a famous man,’ Dame Laurentia owned. She felt a special softness for famous people: they were a delightful disturbance in her seclusion. For Shaw Dame Laurentia was an enclosed nun without an enclosed mind whose private world he could approach, ‘shake your bars and look longingly at the freedom at the other side of them’. Her place in his life was closer to that of the retiring humanist Henry Salt than of William Morris. ‘My pastime has been writing sermons in plays, sermons preaching what Salt practised,’ Shaw wrote; and in much the same tone, he confided to Dame Laurentia: ‘you have lived the religious life: I have only talked and written about it.’
This attitude, Cockerell believed, accounted for Shaw’s ‘good behaviour’ and seemed to admit ‘that he was in the presence of a being superior to himself’. It came as no surprise to Dame Laurentia. Not being in possession of the true creed, Shaw was ‘very much to be pitied’. And very much to be prayed for too. ‘You expose yourself to the danger of being prayed for very earnestly,’ she warned him. But he welcomed this current of goodwill (‘it would be shockingly unscientific to doubt it’). He never felt any the worse for these prayers.
Though Laurentia was equally available to the poor and unknown, these rich and celebrated visitors to Stanbrook could be of special benefit. ‘Do you remember when you gave me one of your plays, you advised me to sell it?’ she reminded Shaw. ‘I have been tempted to take your advice, for I am in great need of money – just £5,000 would be a fortune to me – but I know that a seller would advertise the owner’s name & I should not be able to endure that.’ She valued Shaw’s generosity and would sometimes tuck in a discreet financial reminder with her prayerful inveigling of his soul. ‘I am more glad than ever not to have a millionairess in my monastic family,’ she told him after he sent her his play The Millionairess, ‘useful as her cash would be.’
Shaw valued Dame Laurentia for some of the same overpowering qualities she shared with the heroine of that play. He saw her as a natural authoritarian. ‘You would boss the establishment if you were only the scullery maid,’ he told her. He relied on this strength; she was more a Mother Superior to him than a Sister. The centre of their relationship for her was the opportunity it offered for making a convert of G.B.S. to the divine doctrine of Catholicism. But catholicity for him meant comprehensiveness and a universality of interests. The essence of their relationship lay in the unchangeableness of their positions and the complementary views and uses they could offer each other.
Shaw was an eye-witness of the world providing visual confirmation for Dame Laurentia of what she already knew. The most dramatic use of his eye came on a journey he made with Charlotte in March 1931 to the Holy Land. She had asked him to ‘bring me back some little trifle from Calvary’. But there was no credible Calvary, he discovered. Rosaries and testaments bound in ‘the wood of the Cross’, together with all sorts of sham relics, were thrust at him; the only genuine souvenirs of Gethsemane he found to send her were some olive leaves, with which she was well pleased. Then, from the threshold of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, he picked up a pebble, a chip of the limestone rock ‘which certainly existed when the feet of Jesus pattered about on it and the feet of Mary pursued him... In fact I picked up two little stones: one to be thrown blindfold among the others in Stanbrook garden so that there may always be a stone from Bethlehem there, though nobody will know which it is and be tempted to steal it, and the other for your own self.’
This second stone, which he presented to Dame Laurentia later that year, was set in a silver medieval-style reliquary designed by Paul Cooper. Cockerell, who had recommended the work of Paul Cooper, suggested adding an inscription explaining its purpose. But Shaw refused: ‘If we could explain its purpose we could explain the universe,’ he appealed to Dame Laurentia, ‘...our finger prints are on it, and Heaven knows whose footprints may be on the stone. Isn’t that enough?’
Besides, he had sent her letters enabling her to bring alive what she had imagined of the Holy Land:
‘a region in which the miraculous is no longer miraculous but gigantically normal... with strange new constellations all over the sky and the old ones all topsy turvy, but with the stars soft and large and down qu
ite close overhead in the sky... a hilly country, with patches of cultivation wrested from the omnipresent stones, which you instantly recognize with a strange emotion which intensifies when you see... a woman with an infant in her arms... It gives you the feeling that here Christ lived and grew up, and that here Mary bore him and reared him, and that there is no land on earth quite like it.’
‘You have made me feel that I have seen the Holy Land through your eyes,’ Dame Laurentia answered, ‘and have revealed a great deal more than I should have seen with my own. I... continue to view the world from my cell at Stanbrook.’
*
These long-distance friendships with a heavyweight boxer and an enclosed nun were characteristic of someone who ran lines of communication between different disciplines. ‘Nowadays a Catholic who is ignorant of Einstein is as incomplete as a thirteenth-century Dominican ignorant of Aristotle,’ Shaw wrote. Science meant two things to Shaw. It was the algebraic hocus-pocus that had befuddled him at school and hypnotized so many adults. He viewed the priests of that science as an élite corps of idealists who had strengthened the philistines’ citadel with inflexible axioms, giving it a brilliant technological façade. Shaw classed these renegade scientists with clairvoyants, diviners, hand readers and slate writers – all ‘marvel mongers whose credulity would have dissolved the Middle Ages in a roar of sceptical merriment’.
The Shaw who believed in scientific advancement as a benefit to society was the author of The Irrational Knot whose hero had been an electrical engineer. This same Shaw was a life member of the Royal Astronomical Society and, in his nineties, would register his belief in the necessity of space travel by joining the British Interplanetary Society. ‘The whole world has to be reorganized, has to be reset,’ he stated during a speech early in 1920. ‘That has to be done by thinkers, and men of science in the very best sense, and has to be done in the interests of humanity.’
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