Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  Preface

  In the late 1960s the Shaw Estate decided to commission a new biography of G.B.S. Previous biographies had been ‘partial’, usually written by friends of Shaw, and the time had come for ‘an assessment of the man in his period’. Shaw’s executor, the Public Trustee, had recently relinquished his control of the publication and production arrangements for Shaw’s works and set up an independent Committee of Management composed of nominees from the Estate’s three residuary legatees (the British Museum and Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin). Its first chairman, Sir John Wolfenden, director and principal librarian of the British Museum, took advice as to who should write Shaw’s life from an eminent biographer and incunabulist at the museum, and my name came up. So the Society of Authors (which acted as agent for the Shaw Estate) was asked to sound me out.

  I was then thirty-four, had published a biography of Lytton Strachey the previous year and already agreed to write a biography of Augustus John. But this invitation surprised me. I was more accustomed to appeals from people wanting me not to write about their friends and members of their family. Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was becoming respectable. The feeling was not altogether comfortable. In fact, I was terrified. To my eyes G.B.S. appeared as a gigantic phenomenon with whom I felt little intimacy. At the same time he presented a challenge I really ought to accept. Nevertheless I hesitated. I had heard that Shaw used to write ten letters every day of his adult life and that correspondents kept his letters. I knew he had composed over fifty plays, that his collected works extended over almost forty volumes (and were well exceeded by his uncollected writings), and that there were libraries of books about his work and huge deposits of unpublished papers around the world. I suspected that with his shorthand and his secretaries G.B.S. could actually write in a day more words than I could read in a day. Since he lived into his mid-nineties, writing vigorously almost to the end, this was an alarming speculation. I therefore prevaricated, replying that while I would in principle be delighted to write Shaw’s Life, I could not in practice begin until I had finished Augustus John.

  To my surprise the Society of Authors was undeterred by this delay. I did not begin my research until early in 1975 when I went to Dublin. I lived in Rathmines, strategically placed between a convent and a barracks, and a mile or so from Shaw’s birthplace in Synge Street. Intermittently I worked at the National Library of Ireland (to which Shaw had donated the manuscripts of his novels) and I visited Dalkey where he had passed his happiest hours while growing up. I also met a number of writers – John O’Donovan, Monk Gibbon, Vivian Merrier, Arland Ussher, Terence de Vere White – who encouraged me. Yet, however hard I try, I cannot account for my time in Ireland very coherently. The atmosphere was thick with goodwill. There was almost no one who, even when they had no information at all, would not be prepared to volunteer something over a jar or two. People I had never heard of came to advise me that they knew nothing, and then stayed on awhile. Many wrote letters to the same effect: some hopefully in verse; others more prosaically enclosing business cards. And everyone pressed in on me so warmly that I was moved to reply with such politeness that my replies elicited answers to which I felt bound to respond. One lady (whom I had never met) eventually enquired whether we had ever had an affair, the crucial part of which had escaped her. I was swimming in the wake of the great Shaw legend, swimming and almost drowning.

  The writing of my book, which took me all over the world, must have tested the patience of the Shaw Estate to its utmost. But the extra time I was obliged to spend with Shaw helped to give me that sense of intimacy I had found lacking at the beginning of my research and which I believe is an essential ingredient for the writing of biography. Between Shaw’s work and his life, I found, moved an unexpected current of passion which I sought to navigate. I felt eventually as if I were breaking a Shavian code, the alpha and omega of his dramatic style (so assertive yet so reticent), and was picking up subtle themes that, to gain an immediate public, he orchestrated for trumpet and big drum.

  Many people had come to think of the legendary G.B.S. as having only ink in his veins. I began to dismantle this literary superman and replace him with a more recognizable if still uncommon human being. I wanted to demythologize him without reducing him. Behind the public phenomenon was hidden a private individual, intermittently glimpsed, who gave G.B.S. his concealed humanity. He covered up his vulnerability with dazzling panache; I have tried to uncover it and show the need he had while alive for such brilliant covering. He became the saint of the lonely and a fugleman for those who were out of step with their times. He gave them a heartening message. For every disadvantage, in Shavian terms, becomes a potential asset in disguise. The art of life therefore is the art of heroic paradox.

  The paradox continues into our own times. G.B.S. is in his element by virtue of still being heroically out of step. I had already noticed, with respect to my previous biographies, how quickly a prevailing mood could change and how unpredictable these changes sometimes were. In the 1960s I had been assailed by a good deal of homophobic mail after my Lytton Strachey was published; but when a rewritten version of that book came out twenty-five years later I received no hate mail at all. On the other hand Augustus John, generally seen in the mid-1970s as an adventurous heterosexual character who might have emerged from the pages of Fielding’s Tom Jones, attracted much greater puritan censoriousness twenty years later, mostly from men who, though responding to the rise of feminism, put me in mind of Dr Johnson’s attack on Tom Jones.

  By the end of the 1980s most people expected there would soon be a Labour Government in Britain. But the country did not embrace change as the United States appeared to be trying to do by turning from the Republicans to the Democrats. Instead it was preparing to dig in against the rest of Europe over what was to be a radically retrogressive period. We returned to past battlefields. Many of the political campaigns in which Shaw took part, and which had been manifestly won, were being fought out again a hundred years later, and with opposite results. The break-up of the Soviet Union, the ‘end of communism’ and of ‘history’, the spread of privatization across the world and the rise of nationalism, the fear in Britain of the very word ‘socialist’ (as frightening as ‘liberal’ in the United States) were to make Shaw’s beliefs deeply unfashionable. While Oscar Wilde’s once-faded aestheticism was being revitalized and revived by modernists, Shaw’s persistent progressiveness had become dated. Yet being thoroughly out of fashion, wilfully marching in an alternative direction, was a Shavian speciality – and perhaps a useful one. Many pages which I wrote as a contribution to social history now appear to me, as I reread them, to have gained a peculiar relevance to our contemporary politics.

  ‘Trust your genius rather than your industry,’ Shaw advised his biographer St John Ervine. In preparing this abridgement, which was planned and contracted for over ten years ago, I have done away with all signs of industry by following the example of Leon Edel’s abridged Life of Henry James and eliminating reference notes. I have also trusted to my instinct while reducing ninety-four years of Shaw’s hectic life, and more than fifteen years of my own work, into a form that a general reader can get through in a matter of weeks or days. I have weeded out errors I detected in earlier versions, and occasionally added a passage founded on recent Shaw scholarship. What I have aimed at is something equivalent in biographical narrative to the ‘revolver shooting’ of Shaw’s own dramatic dialogue where ‘every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion’. Undoubtedly this technique reveals a rather different G.B.S. from the one conveyed by my original armada of volumes. It is for readers rather than myself to say what the difference is. All I can say is that it emerges from this synthesis, rather than being premeditated or imposed.

  When infiltrating the work of his biographers with concealed autobiography, Shaw sacrificed something of his own life so that these ‘partial’ biographies might act as endorsements to his political
ideas. Treating the Gospels as early examples of biography, he noted in the Preface to Androcles and the Lion how St Matthew (‘like most biographers’) tended to ‘identify the opinions and prejudices of his hero with his own’, while St John used biography as a record of the ‘fulfilment of ancient Jewish prophecies’. Since Shaw’s death, biographical technique has grown more ingenious and the range of subject matter has expanded so that biography embraces most human experience, insofar as it is recoverable, and accepts it as fit for publication. So far as I am aware, I do not specifically identify my opinions with Shaw’s, nor have I used his life to record the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of socialist predictions. My deepest involvement is with biography itself and its never-ending love-affair with human nature, and my aim has been to come a little nearer a biographical ideal described by Hugh Kingsmill as ‘the complete sympathy of complete detachment’.

  1

  1

  Fermenting genealogy

  Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish.

  ‘Ireland Eternal and External’, New Statesman (30 October 1948)

  Bernard Shaw died on 2 November 1950. For almost a decade interviewers had been recording his emphatic farewells. All were rehearsing for the time when G.B.S. could no longer have the last word, and when it arrived actors appeared nostalgically on new-fangled television sets; writers spoke without interruption on the wireless; statesmen round the world uttered their prepared addresses in newspapers.

  The critic Eric Bentley bought several of these papers, but ‘what I was reading made me sick’, he wrote. ‘...Such mourning for Shaw was a mockery of Shaw... Grasping the first occasion when Shaw was powerless to come back at them, the bourgeoisie brayed and Broadway dimmed its lights.’ To Bentley’s mind it was the final acceptance of Shaw at the expense of all Shaw stood for.

  Shaw had asked that his ashes should be mixed inseparably with those of his wife, which had been kept at Golders Green Crematorium, and then scattered in their garden. In the Dáil a proposal was made to convey them back to Ireland and place them beside Swift’s at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. For having lived his first twenty years in Ireland, Shaw felt ‘a foreigner in every other country’. But it was only outside Ireland that he was recognized as Irish. As the Taoiseach John Costello said, ‘Bernard Shaw never forgot his Irish birth.’ Yet he had set out in his writings to give himself a new birth: a re-creation. He claimed to be as indigenous as the half-American Winston Churchill or a half-Spaniard such as Éamon de Valera, both excellent examples of cross-breeding. ‘I am a typical Irishman; my family come from Yorkshire,’ he assured G. K. Chesterton who, typically English, confirmed that ‘scarcely anyone but a typical Irishman could have made the remark’.

  *

  The Shaws made no secret of being aristocrats. No Shaw could form a social acquaintance with a Roman Catholic or tradesman. They lifted up their powerful Wellingtonian noses and spoke of themselves, however querulously, in a collective spirit (as people mentioning the Bourbons or Habsburgs) using the third person: ‘the Shaws’.

  The family had come from Scotland, then moved to England. In 1689 Captain William Shaw slipped from Hampshire into Ireland to fight in the Battle of the Boyne. He was rewarded with a large grant of land in Kilkenny. There, as landed gentry, the Shaws hunted, shot and fished.

  Most successful was Robert Shaw, who entered the Irish Parliament, founded the Royal Bank and in 1821 was made a baronet. His cousin Bernard (grandfather of G.B.S.) also seemed set for success. On 1 April 1802, aged thirty, he married the daughter of a clergyman, Frances Carr, who over the next twenty-three years gave birth to fifteen children. As High Sheriff of Kilkenny, Bernard spent much of his time in the country and neglected his Dublin business, with the result that his partner absconded with his money. Bernard woke up to find himself penniless, collapsed, and died in his sleep. His widow had to apply for help to Sir Robert. The banker-baronet was a wealthy man. ‘Unlike the typical Shaw, he was plumpish and had the appearance somewhat of a truculent bear disturbed out of a doze.’ He was hopelessly in love with Frances who, though disdaining his offers of marriage, accepted rent free ‘a quaint cottage, with Gothically pointed windows’ at Terenure. From here she launched her sons and daughters on the world ‘in an unshaken and unshakeable consciousness of their own aristocracy’.

  Like most large families, these Shaws were not exclusively teetotallers. We see them through the eyes of G.B.S. Of his four aunts, Cecilia (Aunt Sis), the eldest, was a temperate maiden lady. She had been pronounced dead when a child and placed in a coffin; but, climbing out, lived on into her nineties, ‘a big, rather imposing woman, with the family pride written all over her’. Aunt Frances, a gently nurtured lady, drank secretly over many years before, submitting to it openly, she passed away. Charlotte Jane (‘Aunt Shah’) married an irreproachable man connected with a cemetery. Aunt Emily, exceeding in nothing but snuff, married a scholastic clergyman, William George Carroll, who, but for his temper (it was said), would have been a bishop.

  ‘I know as much about drink as anybody outside a hospital of inebriates,’ G.B.S. later wrote. His knowledge had come largely from his father and some uncles. Two of his uncles were unknown to him, having emigrated to the Antipodes and ‘like Mr Micawber, made history there’. A third, Robert, was blinded in his youth and ‘never had an opportunity of drinking’. Uncle Henry was the rich man of the family, able to afford two wives and fifteen children. But he invested his money in a collapsing coal mine and before his death became mentally unstable.

  The other three brothers, including Shaw’s father, were alcoholics. Uncle Barney (William Bernard) and Uncle Fred (Richard Frederick) both died in the family mental retreat, Dr Eustace’s in the north of Dublin. The youngest, Uncle Fred, didn’t drink until he married a girl named Waters. His drinking bouts then grew excessive but he gave up alcohol altogether once his wife left him to live in London. He was reputed to be ungenerous (he worked in the Valuation Office) and, in retirement, ‘harmlessly dotty’.

  Uncle Barney was an inordinate smoker as well as a drunkard. He lived a largely fuddled life until he was past fifty. Then, relinquishing alcohol and tobacco simultaneously, he passed the next ten years of his life as a teetotaller, playing an obsolete wind instrument called an ophicleide. Towards the end of this period, renouncing the ophicleide, he married a lady of great piety, and fell completely silent. He was carried off to the family asylum where, ‘impatient for heaven’, he discovered an absolutely original method of committing suicide. It was irresistibly amusing and no human being had yet thought of it, involving as it did an empty carpet bag. However, in the act of placing this bag on his head, Uncle Barney jammed the mechanism of his heart in a paroxysm of laughter – which the merest recollection of his suicidal technique never failed to provoke among the Shaws – and the result was that he died a second before he succeeded in killing himself. The coroner’s court described his death as being ‘from natural causes’.

  ‘Drink is the biggest skeleton in the family cupboard,’ G.B.S. told one of his cousins. But he did not leave this skeleton in its cupboard. He had a choice of making the Shaw drunkenness into ‘either a family tragedy or a family joke’, and he chose the joke. So, in the bookshop window of his works, we may see a cabaret of Shavian aunts and uncles with a chorus of inebriate cousins, and at the centre, a wonderfully hopeless chap, second cousin to a baronet, George Carr Shaw, G.B.S.’s father.

  2

  An Irish Marriage

  Fortunately I have a heart of stone: else my relations would have broken it long ago.

  Shaw to Rachel Mahaffy (6 June 1939)

  The story of George Carr Shaw’s life was simple. He would tell you it had evolved as the retribution for an injury he had once done a cat. He had found this cat, brought it home with him, fed it. But next day he had let his dog chase it and kill it. In his imagination this cat now had its revenge, seeing to it that he would have neither luck nor
money. He was unsuccessful because of this cat; unskilled, unsober, and unserious too.

  Between the ages of twenty-three and thirty he had been a clerk at a Dublin ironworks, but in 1845 he lost this job. By means of family influence he landed up with a perfectly superfluous post at the Four Courts, a job without duties or responsibilities. Unfortunately, it was one of the first of such positions to be abolished in the legal reforms of the early 1850s, for which ‘outrage’ George Shaw received a pension of £44 a year. There were opportunities in Dublin for a wholesale corn-merchant (retail trade was impossible for a Shaw). But George Shaw needed capital. Until now he had walked by himself, a gentleman who was no gentleman, and all places were alike to him. He was in his thirty-eighth year and had recently come in contact with a twenty-one-year-old girl, Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly, called ‘Bessie’. She was short, thin-lipped, with the jaw of a prize-fighter and a head like a football; but she had an attractive inheritance. George Carr Shaw felt drawn to her. ‘It was at this moment,’ G.B.S. records, ‘that some devil, perhaps commissioned by the Life Force to bring me into the world, prompted my father to propose marriage to Miss Bessie Gurly.’

  *

  The master-spirit among Bessie’s forebears had been her maternal grandfather, a country gentleman of imposing presence whose origin was so obscure that he was understood to have had no legal parents. But he lived en grand seigneur on his property of over two thousand acres in Kilkenny and at a place called Whitechurch to the south of Dublin. Each week he would drive in to a little pawnshop in Winetavern Street, one of the poorest quarters of the city. The name on the door was Cullen, an employee, under cover of whose identity John Whitcroft made his money.