by John Updike
Only as he neared the age of thirty, with the help of his new friend William Archer, did Shaw find his niche as a journalistic critic—of music, of art, of novels, and finally, for Frank Harris’s Saturday Review, of the theatre. By the age of forty-one, he had come to sign himself as “G.B.S.” and to cut something of a figure in London; still, the available evidence for his self-proclaimed genius consisted in the main of four novels that had eventually been serialized in Socialist magazines, a great many superior and spirited columns in the back files of periodicals, a number of tracts and countless speeches for the Fabian Society, and a small and willful book on Ibsen. He did not seriously turn to playwriting until he was over thirty-five; his first drama, Widowers’ Houses, was begun as a collaboration with Archer, abandoned after two acts, completed by Shaw alone in 1892, and given two performances, at the first of which he was hissed. Five years later, he felt finished with the stage; of his eight plays, only one, Arms and the Man, was anything other than a complete financial failure, and most had not even been produced. Sir Henry Irving reneged on an agreement to star in The Man of Destiny, and Candida, conceived as a West End vehicle for Janet Achurch, was given instead an inglorious one-performance run in Aberdeen. In 1896 Shaw had met Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a plump Irish heiress six months younger than he. She possessed, Beatrice Webb wrote, “masses of chocolate brown hair,” and in “flowing white evening robes she approaches beauty.” Shaw, after two decades of mostly but not exclusively verbal philandering, married her. At the same time, his first volume of drama and prefaces, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, was published, and an American production of The Devil’s Disciple proved a success and earned the playwright over six hundred pounds. By his wedding day—June 1, 1898—Shaw had solid ground under him at last, and there he is left standing by Michael Holroyd’s scintillating and suspenseful biography.
Mr. Holroyd’s slightly pathetic subtitle derives from his premise that Shaw was unloved by his mother: “In her eyes he was an inferior little male animal tainted with all the potential weaknesses of her husband.” Shaw himself, in his assorted autobiographical writings, is the primary source for this alleged maternal coolness: “She did not hate anybody, nor love anybody,” and “We as children had to find our way in a household where there was neither hate nor love.” Even when her son was arguing Bessie Shaw’s case, he managed to sketch a bleak picture: “Poverty, ostracism, disgust, three children, a house rented at £30 a year or thereabouts, a drunken husband obviously incapable of improving the situation … it says a great deal for my mother’s humanity that she did not hate her children.” The biographer fastens firmly onto this initial deprivation as the clue to Shaw’s stubbornly buoyant character:
In a rare moment of emotion, G.B.S. wrote to Ellen Terry of his “devil of a childhood, Ellen, rich only in dreams, frightful & loveless in realities.” But looking directly at such bleakness was too painful. Usually he put on the spectacles of paradox. This paradox became his “criticism of life,” the technique by which he turned lack of love inside out and, by attracting from the world some of the attention he had been denied by his mother, conjured optimism out of deprivation.
If you like psychologizing biographers, you will like this and Mr. Holroyd’s other neat, brisk tracings of Shaw’s limitations and perversities to the primal deprivation. If you harbor reservations about the reduction of a personality—and such a fertile, captivating personality!—to diagrams of psychic wiring, you may find some of the analysis pat and even condescending. “In his relationships with women Shaw was seeking a second childhood in which he could receive all the attention and happiness he had been denied by his mother.” “He recoiled from searching for happiness in others because their rejection of him carried behind it the annihilating force of his mother’s initial rejection.” Even a rejecting mother, however, needs avenging: “In so far as they embodied these social conditions, both men [Shaw’s father and Vandeleur Lee] grievously disappointed his mother. So Society became the dragon against which the fabulous G.B.S., armoured with tracts and speeches, would lead his campaign of lifelong knight-errantry.” “As a polemicist he is marvellously convincing, but since he is fleeing from uncertainties his writings are studded with many brilliant evasions, and eventually, as doubt was beaten back, something human in Shaw diminished.”
From his very debut as a playwright, perceptive critics agreed there was something missing in the dazzling Shaw. William Archer in The World cited Widowers’ Houses as an example “of what can be done in art by sheer brainpower,” and Max Beerbohm reviewed Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant witheringly: “Mr Shaw is not, as the truly serious dramatist must be, one who loves to study and depict men and women for their own sake, with or without moral purpose.… Flesh and blood are quite invisible to Mr Shaw. He thinks that because he cannot see them they do not exist, and that he is to be accepted as a realist.” Even Shaw may have suspected something amiss within his imperturbable and magnanimous poise, his unstoppable energy and barrage of convictions. His title for his fifth novel, An Unsocial Socialist, was originally The Heartless Man. But should heartlessness be the biographer’s leitmotif?
American reviewers have been rather churlish in the face of Mr. Holroyd’s elegant feat—fifteen years in the making and not done yet—of research and synthesis. Just to have mastered the Shavian record, the copious oeuvre and the enormous posthumous harvest of letters and stray writings, warrants awed gratitude. But I have seen Mr. Holroyd faulted, in our American press, for not knowing enough about Irish class distinctions, English political movements, and the realities of the theatre, among other areas where his subject led him. Surely part of his achievement here, dealing with so heavily documented and quotably prolix a figure, is his compression; though not short, the book seems terse. Mr. Holroyd finds a few pages for everything, from a precise evocation of Shaw’s youthful shabbiness to a comical account of his headlong adventures with bicycles. Such a marshalling of data demands briskness, and this reader sometimes longed for a less peremptory pace, and a stroll around the corner to investigate at leisure. My own nagging reservation concerning Mr. Holroyd’s book is that he himself seems a bit too much in it, as a judgmental, sometimes tart, and rarely forgettable presence. The Shavian whirlwind has to compete with Holroydian breeziness. Shaw, writing to Frank Harris in 1930 about his relations with women, confided, “I was gallant in the old-fashioned Irish way, implying as a matter of course that I adored them; but there was nothing in it on my side.” Mr. Holroyd appends the remark, “More probably there was nothing in it on theirs.” Of Shaw’s beard, which was grown partly to hide a scar, he writes, “Few people who had their attention arrested by this flagwaving at the head of the Shavian talking-machine would have known that Shaw was publicly concealing something.” Holroyd is himself witty—he speaks of “Beatrice Webb’s cephalous passion for Sidney”—but tends to get solemn over Shaw’s little jokes, reminding us faithfully that the irony is a mask, a deceptive feint, as if the abrasive texture of flirtation in Shavian discourse, of droll hyperbole inviting contradiction, needs to be ground smooth. In the development of his you-can’t-fool-me psychological portrait, the biographer gives short shrift to the quotidian facts; our strongest sense of how Shaw lived, what the streets and people looked like and what practical concerns occupied his days, comes from Shaw himself, in the epistles and prose quoted—quoted without, by a curious quirk of scholarly procedure, any source attributions. Mr. Holroyd explains in a bibliographical afterword, “To get round this difficulty [ongoing Shavian scholarship and publication] I have decided to print my sources separately after the publication of the third volume of my biography.” So Shaw’s voice hovers disembodied in this book, pronouncing out of the blue, and seems friendlier than the slightly chilly expository atmosphere. In 1936, besieged by would-be biographers, the great man wrote one of them, St. John Ervine, “I am not really a good subject, because all the fun that is to be got out of me I have already extracted myself.” As long as Shaw was aliv
e, it was his amiable habit to improve biographies, such as those by Frank Harris and Hesketh Pearson, by writing large sections of them himself. From now on, alas, Shaw studies are on their own.
Mr. Holroyd makes good on his subtitle and tells us more about Shaw’s relations with women than we thought there was to know. That women interested Shaw no one could deny. The son of an independent woman and a cohabitant with her until past the age of forty, he created a raft of plummy, feisty female stage roles, and from Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1898) to The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928) concerned himself with feminist issues. The dramatist in him awakened, as it were, when Nora slammed the door at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. In his young manhood, Shaw teased, adored, upbraided, and excited women. Mr. Holroyd formulates it in a jiggle of metaphors: “Shaw took the body away from women and addressed their minds. His own mind was astonishingly fast, but emotionally he was lame. The result was that women found themselves continually out of step with him. When Shaw looked at a woman, he appeared to turn his back on her and raise a mirror. It was a disconcerting stare, positive, remote, and appearing so bold while actually in retreat.” Though he was an arresting figure of a man, and a frequenter of bohemian circles where “liberated women” were not uncommon, G.B.S. kept his virginity until his twenty-ninth birthday, when the widow Jenny Patterson, his mother’s friend and singing student, graciously relieved him of it. She was fifteen years older than he, and the journal entry in which he noted the signal event seems to peel his seductress delicately away from the figure of his mother: “So, on the corner of Montpelier St. Mother went on by herself, and I returned to the Square with JP, and stayed there until 3 o’clock on my 29th birthday which I celebrated by a new experience.” The Search for Love does not quote the droller descriptive sentence Shaw wrote to Frank Harris in 1930: “I escaped seduction until I was 29, when an enterprising widow, one of my mother’s pupils, appealed successfully to my curiosity.” In a letter to Harris four days later he characterizes “the heroine of my first adventure” as “sexually insatiable.” Shaw himself was not so easily sated, and noted many a three o’clock return in his Pepys-like diary, as his affair with Mrs. Patterson survived eight years of ups and downs. Forty years later, he reflected in tranquillity that “Sexual experience seemed a natural appetite, and its satisfaction a completion of human experience necessary for fully qualified authorship.” It is not said that the comfortably off widow wished to marry the young litterateur, but she was passionately possessive, and they broke up, finally, over the other named woman with whom he enjoyed humanizing sex, Florence Farr, a less-than-brilliant but considerably experienced actress married to an absent husband called Edward Emery. Shaw’s diary of February 4, 1893, describes a scene he transcribed straight into The Philanderer:
I went to FE; and JP burst in on us very late in the evening. There was a most shocking scene, JP being violent and using atrocious language. At last I sent FE out of the room, having to restrain JP by force from attacking her.… Did not get to bed until 4; and had but a disturbed night of it.
There were other conquests, too, Shaw boasted to Harris: “Some were prepared to buy friendship with pleasure, having made up their minds that men were made that way. Some were sexual geniuses, quite unbearable in any other capacity.” But in this pre-marital period much of Shaw’s sexual energy was diverted by his chronic attachment of himself, in the manner of Vandeleur Lee, to a married couple, playing piano duets and games of innuendo with the wife, and by his quasi-professional attempts to seduce a gifted actress away from her manager-consort and into one of his plays. He admired Ellen Terry, and wrote The Man of Destiny for her and Henry Irving, and at the same time ruthlessly undermined Irving, in his public reviews and private letters: “Is H. I. blind, is he deaf?… Has he ever loved you for the millionth fraction of a moment?” Or is it simply that “he is without exception absolutely the stupidest man I ever met?” Similarly, he wooed Janet Achurch under the nose of her husband, the actor and theatrical manager Charles Charrington, presenting himself with a predatory Platonism: “Do you know who will buy for twopence a body for which I no longer have any use? I have made tolerable love with it in my time; but now I have found nobler instruments—the imagination of a poet, the heart of a child, all discovered through the necessity—the not-to-be-denied inmost necessity—of making my way to an innocent love for Janet.” Even as his entanglements with Jenny Patterson and Florence Farr were coming to a boil, he deluged Janet Achurch with such stuff, trying to woo her away not only from the spendthrift Charrington, who had her on a steady diet of A Doll’s House, but from alcohol and drugs, on which she was also dependent. These curious courtships, aimed at a theatrical consummation with an actress shaped up by Shaw and starring in a Shaw play, show G.B.S. at his most wearyingly meddlesome—a word-machine that just won’t quit, and one that is trying to make words do everything. Irving’s last communication with Shaw, Shaw recalled in writing to Ellen Terry’s son, was “in his own not very literary style (like Queen Victoria’s) a sincere little letter, the gist of which was ‘For God’s sake, leave me alone!’ ” Mr. Holroyd adds in one of his saturnine asides, “How much more human this seemed than all those Shavian acrobatics.”
And yet Shaw’s inability to let the world alone, his wish to direct its every detail, from the distribution of wealth to the typeface and ink used in printed books, his endless hectoring and lecturing of actors, actresses, producers, professors, and politicians are aspects of his superhuman generosity and abundance of spirit. He was the last writer with a fused social and aesthetic program—the last artist in whom strong political views were more of a help than a hindrance. How noble, really, was his prodigious effort to make of the frivolous English stage an instrument of radical reform, and how invigorating his professed belief that the playwright’s business, like the politician’s, was “to strive incessantly with the public; to insist on earnest relations with it, and not merely voluptuous ones.” How fortifying, in the teeth of all the discouragements Shaw suffered before 1898, must have been his sense that reality was on his side: “My comedy will not be unactable when the time comes for it to be acted.… I have the instinct of an artist, and the impracticable is loathsome to me. But not only has the comedy to be made, but the actors, the manager, the theatre, the audience.” How beautiful this credo, in which the young Shaw speaks as a disciple of William Morris:
Art should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self-knowledge, self-control, precision of action, and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice and intellectual superficiality or vulgarity. The worthy artist or craftsman is he who serves the physical and moral senses by feeding them with pictures, musical compositions, pleasant houses and gardens, good clothes and fine implements, poems, fictions, essays and dramas which call the heightened senses and ennobled faculties into pleasurable activity. The great artist is he who goes a step beyond the demand, and, by supplying works of a higher beauty and a higher interest than have yet been perceived, succeeds after a brief struggle with its strangeness, in adding this fresh extension of sense to the heritage of the race.
Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1926–1950, the fourth and final massive volume of his letters masterfully edited by the American scholar Dan H. Laurence, takes us to the other end of Shaw’s long life. Between 1898 and 1926, the great work—Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah, and Saint Joan—was done; the world’s “brief struggle” with Shaw’s strangeness gave way, if not to universal approbation, then to inescapable celebrity. Has any writer, ever, been more famous than Shaw in his last decades? In New Zealand in 1934, he confided to a correspondent, “My reception was overwhelming. The dockers cheered us as we came down the gangway; the Governor General entertained us; the cities invited us to civic receptions; the universities invited me to give one of their annual orations; the
Maoris serenaded us with their native music, which turned out to be ‘Just a song at twilight’; my broadcasts were carte blanche without a hint of censorship: in short, I escaped by the skin of my teeth from dying of my vogue.” In India in 1933: “I have been hung with flowers in the temples and drenched with rosewater and dabbed with vermilion in the houses; and the ship is infested with pilgrims to my shrine.” In Moscow in 1931, he was met by a brass band, a military guard of honor, and thousands of Russians shouting, “Hail Shaw”; he asked for, and received, an interview with Stalin. His dying, like Tolstoy’s, was heavily attended by reporters, with Nancy Astor taking Sonya Tolstoy’s role as chief mourner. Only Shaw’s formidable reserves of crustiness prevented his ninetieth birthday from smothering him. “Dear Sister Laurentia,” he wrote his favorite nun, “For the past week I have had over 100 congratulations a day. But for two strong men who have worked hard tearing them up for me I should never have been 90.” To the two strong men, his instructions, reproduced in this volume in his shaky but ever-legible handwriting, were simple: “Throw away all the birthday ones. They make me sick.” He had spurned the Crown’s offer of a knighthood when he was seventy, and when sounded out about the Order of Merit at ninety, responded, “Deeply grateful as I am for the award of the highest distinction within the gift of the Commonwealth, yet the nature of my calling is such that the Order of Merit in it cannot be determined within the span of a single human life. Either I shall be remembered as long as Aristophanes and rank with Shakespear and Molière, or I shall be a forgotten clown before the end of the century.”