Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  Deeply displeased, she wrote to upbraid him. Her letter reached Shaw in Bangkok. He tried several times to reply from aboard the Empress of Britain but, fearing that his letters might wound her further, tore them up. ‘I innocently took [it] to be a valuable contribution to the purification of religion from horrible old Jewish superstitions,’ he pleaded on 29 June 1933 after returning to Whitehall Court. ‘...I am afraid of upsetting your faith, which is still entangled in those old stories.’

  This was additionally insulting to the Abbess. It was not her faith but her susceptibilities Shaw had upset. He had preferred his own wrong-headedness to the divinity of Christ; he had tried to analyse an experience that surpassed human understanding and reduced God to abstraction. ‘The only way to comfort me would be for you to withdraw the Black Girl from circulation,’ she answered.

  This was obviously impossible. Shaw had hoped she might readmit him to her grace, but her mind was not ‘unenclosed’ after all. She had no intimation of Christianity as a revolutionary political idea. He wished to conciliate her, but could not falsify his own hope and faith. ‘Laurentia: has it never occurred to you that I might possibly have a more exalted notion of divinity,’ he appealed.

  She did not answer. What was the point? Christ’s divinity was not negotiable. After more than nine years their friendship was at an end, and when Shaw went to the Malvern Festivals he did not visit her. ‘I never passed through Stanbrook without a really heartfelt pang because I might not call and see her as of old,’ he later confessed. Then, in the autumn of 1934, after returning from Malvern to Whitehall Court, he found, among the correspondence waiting for him, a card.

  IN MEMORY OF SEPT 6

  1884–1934

  DAME LAURENTIA MCLACHLAN

  ABBESS OF STANBROOK

  He wrote at once to ‘the Ladies of Stanbrook Abbey’ telling them that he had had ‘no suspicion that I should never see her again in this world’. He had not dared to show his face at the Abbey, he explained, until Dame Laurentia had forgiven him for his little book.

  ‘She has, I am sure, forgiven me now; but I wish she could tell me so. In the outside world from which you have escaped it is necessary to shock people violently to make them think seriously about religion; and my ways were too rough.’

  This letter of condolence was answered by Dame Laurentia herself. ‘My dear Brother Bernard, As you see, I am not dead,’ she wrote. The card had been a souvenir of her Golden Jubilee. She did not tell him that she had been advised to send it by her archbishop. ‘When next you are in the neighbourhood you must come and see me again... You have my daily prayers. I hope they will have nothing but good results in future.’

  It was a miracle, a friendship resurrected. ‘Laurentia! Alive!!’ Shaw exclaimed. ‘...I thought you were in heaven, happy and blessed. And you were only laughing at me. It is your revenge for that Black Girl.’ They were back on terms of equal superiority. What is implicit in his letter to her is made explicit in a letter he sent Sydney Cockerell ten days later. ‘But I felt as if a soul had been dragged back from felicity,’ he wrote. ‘Which is queer, as of course I dont believe anything of the sort.’

  ‘I am not sufficiently fond of myself to wish for immortality,’ he had told Virginia Woolf and Maynard Keynes. But he would have liked, he sometimes felt, to be dead. At least four times by the 1930s he had made positively his Last Will and Testament; and still he lived on. ‘It seems the most ridiculous thing in the world that I, 18 years older than Gilbert, should be heartlessly surviving him,’ he was to write to G. K. Chesterton’s widow. ‘...The trumpets are sounding for him.’

  No trumpets had sounded for Shaw’s fellow-playwright Pinero whose death on 23 November 1934 ‘passed almost unnoticed’. The following day, in the middle of a telephone conversation, Shaw himself suddenly dropped down dead...

  EIGHTEEN

  1

  The Demands of the Political Theatre

  Didnt you know that English politics wont bear thinking about?

  On the Rocks

  It had always been a relief to get back to Ayot. The staff there were fiercely loyal. The new young Irish parlourmaid, Margaret Cashin, often came upon Shaw slipping money into envelopes and he always paid for her trips back to Ireland. He was a thorough gentleman. When she married he lent her the Rolls-Royce. ‘It was grand.’

  Out of doors he still looked spry and active. Chopping wood, making bonfires, sawing logs, collecting acorns, eyeing the strawberries while patrolling up and down with his notebook, camera and secateurs, he appeared ‘like a magic gardener in a fairy story’. He would write in the garden too, stepping out from a veranda at the back of the house (‘my Riviera’) and hurrying past the flowers and trees to a small revolving hut, like a monk’s cell, with its desk and chair and bunk. Here, in what some visitors mistook for a toolshed, he was conveniently out of the staff’s way and the world’s reach.

  As for Mrs Shaw, she was ‘one of the best’, the assistant gardener Fred Drury reckoned. ‘She used to help him a lot with his work.’ The two gardeners often speculated over what was going on between Mr and Mrs Shaw as they watched them circumnavigating the lawn together. ‘They had a special route round the garden which was just about a mile, and they put one stone down every time they passed,’ Fred Drury observed. Henry Higgs noticed these stones too, and how they ‘used to take them off the window sill on the way back, one by one’.

  Such symmetry was particularly characteristic of Mr Shaw. He was a very tidy man. ‘He always put chairs back in place, and his pyjamas on his bed in his room, neatly folded,’ Margaret Cashin noted. ‘...[He] was very particular about his erectness and appearance – proud of his person and figure... He always changed for the evening meal regardless of whether anyone was coming to see him or not.’ Sometimes there were famous guests: heavyweight boxers, film actresses, war heroes, prime ministers – those sorts of person. But that didn’t bother the staff who saw one of their prime jobs as protecting Mr Shaw from the outside world: by which they meant the villagers.

  This became easier when, after his eightieth birthday, he more or less gave up driving. In recent years he had grown more reckless and Fred Day, his chauffeur, was often obliged to pull the wheel out of his hand crying ‘Brake, sir!’ and ‘That will do sir’. It was an anxious time. ‘I was fully occupied trying to keep him out of trouble,’ Day admitted. ‘I don’t know why on earth they let me have a driving licence at my age,’ Shaw complained one day after plunging into some hot water pipes at a garage.

  As a pedestrian he went on into his mid-eighties disappearing downhill and updale for walks of up to six miles. He was supremely noticeable as he sailed by in his knee breeches, wide-brimmed hat and Norfolk jacket. For wood-chopping, to the delight of local children, he appeared helmeted. A bright mackintosh sometimes illuminated him at night.

  He had some funny ideas too. When invited to present a prize at the village school for the best-conducted boy or girl, he suggested starting a rival prize for the worst-conducted boy or girl, ‘and we will watch their careers and then find out which really turns out best’. After returning from South Africa, he came up with a notion that all the villagers should dance to the hymns in church and add to their repertoire ‘O, You Must be a Lover of the Lord’: he actually gave a demonstration for them in the street.

  Then there was the rubbish dump a mile or so south of his house where the Wheathampstead refuse was deposited. His campaign to reclaim this acreage, which vented its poisonous gases through a layer of old trays, perambulators, bicycle wheels, umbrella frames and hovering flies, was sustained over ten years. In 1931 he informed the District Council that he had recently been cruising in the Mediterranean ‘where I was very strongly reminded of the dump by the fumes of the island volcano of Stromboli’. Eventually, in 1932, changes were made and four years later Shaw received an enormous green apple that had grown from a tree on the site. ‘I swallowed some of it before I was told what it was,’ he wrote. ‘I shall never be the same m
an again; but Mrs Shaw rather liked it.’

  This was the bitter taste of success – success delayed too long. Would it have tasted sweeter, could he have achieved more, had he been capable of campaigning differently? The trouble was he seemed so strange to ordinary people. He had ‘a funny way of expressing himself,’ a fellow-villager objected after hearing him lecture for the local Women’s Institute on ‘How to Quarrel Properly’. It didn’t sound like proper quarrelling at all. And he was so unpredictable. It was disconcerting for the chemist to be invited to ‘try out’ some of his bottles of medicine on himself so that his customers could witness how they worked; or for other villagers when greeting him in the street with a ‘How are you?’ to be answered: ‘At my age, Sir, you are either well or dead.’ You never knew where you were with such a person.

  He had been living at Ayot now some thirty years. He was invariably courteous, but ‘remote as a god’. And, like a god, he seemed made of mystifying contradictions. Why would someone rumoured to be an atheist contribute so generously to the cost of repairing the roof of the parish church, pay for the renovation of the organ, and keep up what he called his ‘pew-rent’ to the church’s funds? And why would someone who attacked standard education for children arrange at his own expense to put Vitaglass into the school’s windows? Finally, why did he keep so quiet about these things when he was well known to be a colossal publicity seeker?

  There were various answers. According to the apiarist, a diffident man who came to give a hand with the bees, he seemed ‘nervous and shy if anything’. To a local joker he appeared ‘the greatest leg-puller the world has ever known’. And it was obvious to the Conservative party agent that he was no more a socialist than the man in the moon. ‘Politics was not in his line,’ said the barber who cut his hair.

  But on one point there was general agreement: he had natural good manners. He ‘made you feel you were his equal,’ said the organist; he was ‘prepared to engage in conversation on my level,’ said the oculist; ‘he always put you completely at your ease,’ said the landowner. But few of them would really claim to know him. ‘If you ignored Mr Shaw he took more notice of you than if you didn’t,’ recalled Mrs Harding. And Mr Williams observed that he was easier with children and animals. ‘He always stopped and spoke to my little dog, Judy,’ said Mrs Hinton to whom he did not speak much. ‘He always talked to my children as an equal,’ said another villager. Each year he sent the headmistress of the school a cheque to be spent on sweets. She would pass the money over to the village shop and the children were allowed to get their sweets, without paying, to a maximum of one shilling each.

  ‘He never talked about his plays or anything like that,’ one villager gratefully remembered. This was a mercy because, though they all accepted him as a great playwright, practically no one had actually seen his plays. It was a wonder he continued writing them. At the rate he was going he would soon ruin what reputation he had left. But he gave no sign of stopping. It must have been the love of money-making, people thought, that kept him working. His hairdresser did not think much of him as a dramatist; and in the view of Jisbella Lyth, the village postmistress, some of his work ‘lacked suspense’.

  Mrs Lyth was a widow. She had started her career as a kennel-maid and, after some adventurous travelling, returned to England where in 1931 she and her husband took over the post office at Ayot. Almost immediately Mr Lyth had died of a heart attack in the garden. ‘Oh! What a glorious death to die,’ G.B.S. complimented her. ‘I hope I die like that in my garden underneath the stars.’ ‘Yes sir,’ Mrs Lyth replied, ‘but not at fifty-four, surely.’ On leaving, Shaw said: ‘I hope we shall have you here in Ayot for many years.’

  And they did. ‘Mr Shaw wrote personally to me for every batch of stamps he needed,’ Mrs Lyth recorded over twenty years later. ‘...I’ve sold almost all those letters... I believe he meant them to be a sort of legacy to me.’

  Shaw let his imagination play on this relationship. During January 1933, while steaming along between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, he wrote the first draft of a Comedietta for Two Voices in Three Conversations which he initially called The Red Sea. He had developed a habit of labelling his characters with sequences of letters, from A onwards for the males, and Z backwards for the females. He needed only two letters, A and Z, for this short play and when he completed the last draft that summer, changing its title to Village Wooing, he kept these letters in place of names.

  ‘I do not see myself as the Man,’ he told Lillah McCarthy: ‘he is intended as a posthumous portrait of Lytton Strachey.’ A represents the side of Shaw that most closely approximated to Strachey – a man of letters as opposed to a political writer. As for Z, she is not Charlotte but an approximation of Jisbella Lyth. ‘Many’s the time he’s helped me with my crossword puzzles,’ she said. Shaw’s alphabetical characters may derive in part from the lettering of these puzzles, but the effect is to give general application to their ordinariness. They are any one and every one of us.

  In the First Conversation on board the pleasure ship Empress of Patagonia, ‘a literary looking pale gentleman under forty in green spectacles, a limp black beard, and a tropical suit of white silk’ is crustily anxious not to be disturbed by Z, ‘a young woman, presentable but not aristocratic, who is bored with her book’. A is an isolated intellectual obliged for financial reasons to write the popular ‘Marco Polo’ series of guidebooks; Z, who insists on interrupting his work with her life story, is the daughter of a ‘man of letters’ – a postman – who is using the money she has won in a newspaper competition to see the world. The Second Conversation takes place in a village shop and post office on the Wiltshire Downs where Z is putting through telephone messages. A enters as a customer on a hiking holiday, but does not recognize Z. She describes their cruise as having destroyed her romantic illusions of the world (partly created by A’s books). But in half an hour it is A who has surprisingly been persuaded to give up the occupation of literary gentleman and buy the village shop. In the Third Conversation A has been the shop’s proprietor for three months and learnt more than he had over three years at Oxford. Z, who is working as his assistant, replies that he still has more to learn since the shop does not earn enough to keep three. The play ends with the Rector’s wife, telephoning for vegetables, being asked by Z to fetch the Rector as she wants to put up the marriage banns.

  Village Wooing is a celebration of change. The first conversation is ostensibly between an intellectual and a simpleton; the second is between a gentleman and a villager; and the third between an employer and employee. In all three scenes Shaw is demonstrating the need to break down these academic, class and economic barriers to change.

  He is also speculating on change within himself. What might have happened if ‘some habits [that] lie too deep to be changed’ could be changed after all and, unlike Professor Higgins, the ‘Complete Outsider’ at ease only with the mighty dead could ‘change my nature’ and feel at home with ordinary living people?

  *

  Village Wooing encapsulates many Shavian themes and obsessions from phonetics to the Life Force, and forms a miniature pendant to Man and Superman and Pygmalion. The other play he composed at this time, On the Rocks, is a political fable in The Apple Cart line and ‘a coda to Heartbreak House’.

  The time is ‘The Present’ – still the Depression. Shaw takes us to the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, and keeps us there throughout the two long acts of his play. Governing ‘within democratic limits’ the genial Prime Minister, Sir Arthur Chavender, presides over a dictatorship of democracy. ‘I cannot go faster than our voters will let me,’ he explains. The result is that the ‘country isn’t governed’, his wife points out: ‘it just slummocks along anyhow.’

  Sir Arthur Chavender is an empty cavernous man who epitomizes the change wrought in Ramsay MacDonald by parliamentary life, as well as the change Shaw feared had taken place in himself. ‘I make speeches,’ he says: ‘that is the business of a politician.’ In the Sha
vian analysis, orators had once been powerful because, in their inspired utterances, they caught the spirit of the times. But the frivolity of public opinion turned these men and women of words into the exploiters of people’s fears and prejudices.

  Sir Arthur is responding to the unemployment crisis by preparing a soothing oration about the sanctity of family life. Shaw accompanies the rhetorical composition of this speech with interruptions from the Prime Minister’s own family whose uncontrollable bickering (like the uncaring sounds from Sonny’s Dublin home) gives the lie to every melodious phrase.

  Sir Arthur is an emblem of the times. He has piloted not only England but himself on to the rocks. His wife, who sees that he will soon have a nervous breakdown, makes him promise to see a strange lady doctor who then mysteriously appears, in ghostly robes, near the end of the first act. This Lady Oracle, who was modelled by Shaw on the founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, and influenced by Lady Astor, is a ghost from the future, a healer as well as a messenger of death.

  In the unwritten interlude between the two acts, Sir Arthur passes three or four months at this lady’s sanatorium in the Welsh mountains. ‘It’s amazing,’ exclaims the Chief Commissioner of Police Sir Broadfoot Basham at the beginning of the second act. ‘I could have sworn that if there was a safe man in England that could be trusted to talk and say nothing, to thump the table and do nothing, Arthur Chavender was that man. Whats happened to him?’ What has happened is that he has been resurrected as a born-again Shavian. On the Rocks is Shaw’s version of Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, with Avalon (the Celtic Isle of the Blest) transposed into the Welsh sanatorium and the legendary Round Table remodelled as an imposing Cabinet table. Sir Arthur himself is a Once and Future Prime Minister and the second act his promised second coming in the hour of England’s need. To lift the country off the rocks he brings with him a programme of regeneration which gathers together many of the political remedies G.B.S. had been picking up and putting out during his world travels.