Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  The squire-pawnbroker wanted respectability by blood. On 29 December 1829 his daughter Lucinda married a ginger-whiskered squire from Carlow named Walter Bagnall Gurly, who was then living nearby at Rathfarnham. ‘He was a wiry, tight, smallish handknit open-air man,’ G.B.S. remembered, able to make his own boats and to ride the most ungovernable horses; an ingenious carpenter, dead shot, indefatigable fisherman: in short, ‘able to do anything except manage his affairs, keep his estate from slipping through his fingers’.

  In ten years of marriage they had one daughter and a son. Then, on 14 January 1839, Mrs Gurly died. Bessie was nine. She was placed under the care of her great-aunt, Ellen Whitcroft, a terrible hump-backed lady. This spidery creature taught her how to dress correctly, to sit motionless and straight; how to breathe, pronounce French, convey orders to servants. She was schooled in harmony and counterpoint, playing the piano ‘with various coins of the realm on the backs of my hands, also with my hair which I wore in two long plaits down my back, tied to the back of my chair, also with a square of pasteboard hung on my neck by a string pretty much as pictures are hung... in order to prevent me looking at my hands’.

  By a programme of constraints and browbeatings, she was ‘educated up to the highest standard of Irish “carriage ladies”’. She never said anything coarse, loved flowers more than human beings and walked through the streets seeing nobody. Her aunt intended a great destiny for her – something that because of her deformity she had never achieved herself: marriage into the nobility. With these superior expectations, Bessie was floated into Dublin Society where she encountered the sinking George Carr Shaw.

  Secretly Bessie detested her aunt and everything that, masquerading as education and religion, had made her childhood miserable. It was now that George Carr Shaw drifted forward to make his bid for Aunt Ellen’s property by proposing marriage to her niece.

  He was not a romantic figure. Almost twice her age, he had a weak mouth, one squinting eye and a number of epileptic ways. ‘If any unpleasant reflection occurred to him, he, if in a room, rubbed his hands rapidly together and ground his teeth. If in a street, he took a short run.’ He was an unconvivial man, with little interest in women. Drink and money were his world.

  But Bessie, who had fallen out with her father, overlooked the squinting eyes, the grinding teeth, and took stock only of George Carr Shaw’s social position and the prospects such a proposal offered of a better life. Yet this was to be a marriage of two blind people, each treating the other as guide dog. ‘Money in marriage is the first and, frequently, the only passion,’ wrote St John Ervine of nineteenth-century Irish marriages. G.B.S.’s parents married for money and were to live impecuniously ever after.

  Aunt Ellen had tolerated George Carr Shaw as Bessie’s chaperon because of his well-connected harmlessness. To be with Shaw was an alibi for almost anything; never before had he been known to take an initiative. So now Aunt Ellen declared the marriage impossible. Then, when none of her objections prevailed, she revealed that Shaw was a known drunkard – in any event it was notorious in the family. Bessie knew how to deal with this. She went round to Shaw and asked him; and he confessed that all his life he had been a bigoted teetotaller. But he did not tell her that he was a teetotaller who drank.

  So the marriage went ahead. Aunt Ellen had one more card to play: she disinherited her niece. This was undeniably a serious blow to Shaw. Needing money to take advantage of a business opportunity from his brother Henry, he sold his pension for £500 and used this capital to buy a partnership in a corn-merchant business with his brother’s ex-partner, George Clibborn. It was a start – to be supported after his marriage by his wife’s own money and whatever could be regained of Aunt Ellen’s inheritance. It could have been worse.

  This was a good summer for Walter Bagnall Gurly. On 25 May 1852 he married his second wife who, two months before, had given birth to their first daughter; and twenty-three days later, at the same church, St Peter’s in Aungier Street, he attended the wedding of his daughter and George Carr Shaw. As a wedding gift, Aunt Ellen had sent the couple a bundle of IOUs signed by Gurly – which he seized and burnt. Better still was the marriage settlement he had insisted on their signing a few hours before the ceremony. Bessie’s personal assets were listed as ‘one thousand two hundred and fifty-six pounds Nine shillings and two pence Government three and a quarter per cent Stock’. All this, together with income to be derived from her father’s first marriage settlement and from the will of her pawnbroker grandfather, was transferred by deed to two trustees. The effect of this was to ensure that the inheritance would remain Gurly-money, never the Shaw-money it would otherwise have become. So George Carr Shaw had gained a wife and lost a fortune.

  When they drove off after the wedding, George Carr Shaw turned to kiss his bride. She felt so disgusted that she was still protesting more than thirty years later. ‘The rebuff must have opened his eyes a little too late,’ their son judged, ‘to her want of any really mately feeling for him.’

  3

  Devil of a Childhood

  William Morris used to say that it is very difficult to judge who are the best people to take charge of children, but it is certain that the parents are the very worst.

  Shaw to Nancy Astor (21 August 1943)

  They had chosen Liverpool for their honeymoon, and here their first child was conceived. It was nearly the end of their marriage. Years later, Mrs Shaw told her son that, opening her husband’s wardrobe, she had ‘found it full of empty bottles’. The truth had tumbled out. ‘I leave you to imagine,’ wrote G.B.S., ‘the hell into which my mother descended when she found out what shabby-genteel poverty with a drunken husband is like.’

  They returned to Dublin and moved into ‘an awful little kennel with “primitive sanitary arrangements”’, 3 Upper Synge Street – a road of eleven small squat houses which runs round the corner from Harrington Street. Here their three children were born: Lucinda Frances, called Lucy, on 26 March 1853, Elinor Agnes, nicknamed ‘Yuppy’, two years later; and, on 26 July 1856, their son George Bernard, ‘fifty years too soon’, he calculated.

  It was a difficult delivery, a vaginal breech birth that was carried out at Upper Synge Street by Dr John Ringland, Master of the Combe Lying-in Hospital, who had been called in by Bessie’s general practitioner.

  In his nursery days he was called Bob; by the time he had grown into his holland tunic and knickerbockers he had become ‘Sonny’; it was not until he was reborn the child of his own writings in England that he developed the plumage of ‘G.B.S.’

  We first see Bob at the age of one. ‘The young beggar is getting quite outrageous,’ his father writes proudly to Bessie who was staying with her family. ‘I left him this morning roaring and tearing like a bull.’ He could eat his hat, vomit up currants, annoy his teeth and make a jigsaw of unread newspapers. But his chief accomplishment was to go off on marvellous walking expeditions from Papa to Nurse (who was threatening a breakdown) and back again. From his bed he plunged head-first onto the floor; and from the kitchen table he cascaded through a pane of glass without ‘even a pane in his head’.

  Once domesticated, this bull of a boy soon became the sedate Sonny. The most affectionate sound in Synge Street was his father’s jokes. From their talks, Sonny was let in on the secret of how his father had saved the life of Uncle Robert – ‘and, to tell you the truth, I was never so sorry for anything in my life afterwards’. It became a game between them, almost an intimacy, that the son should provoke his father to such exhibitions.

  In a letter to his wife, George Carr Shaw had written of ‘a Mill which Clibborn & I are thinking of taking at Dolphin’s Barn... Wont it be great fun and grandeur to find yourself when you come back the wife of a dusty Miller, so be prepared to have the very life ground out of you...’ Bessie was not amused: he never did anything positive. ‘You are out for once in your life,’ he told her. ‘We have taken the Mill.’

  Dolphin’s Barn Mill was on the country side of the can
al. Sonny, who sometimes walked there with his father and sisters before breakfast, used to play under the waterwheel by the millpond and in the big field adjoining the building. ‘The field had one tree in it, at the foot of which I buried our dead dog. It was quite wild. I never saw a human soul in it.’ On the front of Rutland Avenue was a Clibborn & Shaw warehouse, one corner of which had been made into a shop where corn, wheat, flour and locust beans were surreptitiously retailed to the villagers. But they did not prosper. Once, when the firm was almost ruined by the bankruptcy of a debtor, Clibborn wept openly in their office, while Shaw retreated to a corner of the warehouse and cried with laughter at the colossal mischief of it all.

  It was this sense of mischief that Sonny loved, and that G.B.S. believed he inherited. But planted in so many of Papa’s comedies were seeds of disaster. When pretending to fling his son into the canal, he almost succeeded: and a suspicion began to crawl into Sonny’s mind. He went to his mother and whispered his awful discovery, ‘Mama: I think Papa’s drunk.’ ‘When is he ever anything else?’ Bessie retorted with disgust.

  *

  Though he transferred the responsibility for his desolate childhood to his father, the central character in this scene had been his mother. Bessie was a grievously disappointed woman. She believed, and persuaded her son to believe, that ‘everybody had disappointed her, or betrayed her, or tyrannized over her’. From this time onwards Sonny began to see his father through his mother’s eyes, as a man to imitate, but in reverse. It suited George Carr Shaw’s temperament to play along. When he caught Sonny pretending to smoke a toy pipe, he entreated him with dreadful earnestness never to follow his example. In this special Shavian sense, George Carr Shaw became a model father.

  Of his mother, G.B.S. once admitted, ‘I knew very little about her.’ This was partly because she did not concern herself with him. Her own childhood had been made miserable by bullying, but Bessie never bullied; she made her son miserable by neglect. ‘She was simply not a wife or mother at all.’ Needing her attention, he found with dismay that he could do nothing to interest her. In her eyes he was an inferior little male animal tainted with all the potential weaknesses of her husband.

  In his books and letters, G.B.S. places his mother on a carpet of filial loyalty, and he invites every potential biographer to pull it from beneath her feet. His American biographer, Archibald Henderson, scrupulously overlooking this invitation, received in red ink a brusque rebuff: ‘This sympathy with the mother is utterly false. Damn your American sentimentality!’

  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, attracting from the world some of the attention he had been denied by his mother, conjured optimism out of deprivation.

  The fact that neither of his parents cared for him was, he perceived, of enormous advantage. What else could have taught him the value of self-sufficiency? He was spared, too, by their unconcealed disappointment in each other, from lingering illusions about the family. It was remarkable how these paradoxical privileges began to multiply once he became skilled at the game. From his observations he soon deduced the wonderful impersonality of sex, and the kindness and good sense of distancing yourself from people you loved.

  ‘The fact that I am still alive at 78½ I probably owe largely to her [Bessie’s] complete neglect of me during infancy,’ G.B.S. confided to Marie Stopes. ‘...It used to be a common saying among Dublin doctors in my youth that most women killed their first child by their maternal care... motherhood is not every woman’s vocation.’ G.B.S. believed that his mother preferred her daughters, in particular the red-haired Yuppy, who wilted under her slight attentions. As a child she developed a goitre; only the fortunate absence of medical aid enabled nature to perform a cure. Then at the age of twenty-one, assisted by a sanatorium of doctors, she died of tuberculosis. It could be no accident either that Lucy, Bessie’s second favourite, was to die next following a long period of anorexic ill-health, seven years after her mother’s death. She ‘suffered far more by the process than I did,’ G.B.S. wrote of their upbringing, ‘for she... was not immune, as I and my mother were, from conventional vanities’.

  There was no feuding at Synge Street. The house was small, but so far as possible they treated one another like furniture. ‘As children,’ G.B.S. explained, ‘we had to find our own way in a household where there was no hate nor love.’ Sonny’s own way led him to the conclusion that nature had intended an element of antipathy as a defence against incest. Happily his family had been well dosed with this preventative.

  G.B.S. believed that he had inherited from his parents qualities that they had found incompatible but which, in expiation, he must reconcile within himself. Only by marrying opposites, through paradox or a dialectical process of synthesis, did he feel that he could fulfil his moral obligation to optimism and a better future. In place of the warring of envy and class, he was to substitute a Hegelian policy of inclusiveness. But to include everything in his sights he was obliged to fly his balloon of words into a stratosphere of hypothesis where, in all its thin remoteness, his vision became complete.

  He writes of a strangeness ‘which made me all my life a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it... I was at home only in the realm of my imagination, and at my ease only with the mighty dead.’ It is this voice from the living dead that, despite the marvellous cadence, chilled his audience. In the lost childhood of Sonny the philosophy of G.B.S. was conceived. ‘What else can I do?’ he had asked. He strove to bring the world into harmony with his lonely nature, but the world reacted subconsciously to what was suppressed as well as to what he proclaimed. He could see everything but touch little. For what he had done was replace the first loveless reality with a dream. ‘I very seldom dream of my mother,’ he told Gilbert Murray;

  ‘but when I do, she is my wife as well as my mother. When this first occurred to me (well on in my life), what surprised me when I awoke was that the notion of incest had not entered into the dream: I had taken it as a matter of course that the maternal function included the wifely one; and so did she. What is more, the sexual relation acquired all the innocence of the filial one, and the filial one all the completeness of the sexual one... if circumstances tricked me into marrying my mother before I knew she was my mother, I should be fonder of her than I could ever be of a mother who was not my wife, or a wife who was not my mother.’

  Only in his imagination was such completeness possible.

  Most of the time Sonny and his sisters were abandoned to the servants – ‘and such servants, Good God!’ The exception was ‘my excellent Nurse Williams’ who left while Sonny was still very young. But what could you expect on £8 a year? ‘I had my meals in the kitchen,’ G.B.S. recalled, ‘mostly of stewed beef, which I loathed, badly cooked potatoes, sound or diseased as the case might be, and much too much tea out of brown delft teapots left to “draw” on the hob until it was pure tannin. Sugar I stole... I hated the servants and liked my mother because, on one or two rare and delightful occasions when she buttered my bread for me, she buttered it thickly instead of merely wiping a knife on it... I could idolize her to the utmost pitch of my imagination and had no sordid or disillusioning contacts with her. It was a privilege to be taken for a walk or a visit with her...’

  Occasionally Bessie would take him to see Aunt Ellen, hoping that the old lady would feel sufficiently attracted to leave him her property. Sonny seemed mesmerized by this strange little hump-backed lady with her pretty face and magical deformity. One Sunday morning Papa announced that she was dead, and Sonny ran off to the solitude of the garden to cry, terrified that his grief would last for ever. When he ‘discovered that it lasted only an hour,’ wrote G.B.S., ‘and then passed completely away’, he had h
is first taste of realism.

  Shaw was unable to tolerate feelings of sadness. ‘People who cry and grieve never remember,’ he wrote. ‘I never grieve and never forget.’ Sadness was a poison to his system and before absorption it had to be converted into something else. His attitude to death was the most extreme example of this manufacture of cheerfulness. Papa, he saw, ‘found something in a funeral, or even in a death, which tickled his sense of humor.

  ‘...the sorest bereavement does not cause men to forget wholly that time is money. Hence, though we used to proceed slowly and sadly enough through the streets or terraces at the early stages of our progress, when we got into the open a change came over the spirit in which the coachmen drove. Encouraging words were addressed to the horses; whips were flicked; a jerk all along the line warned us to slip our arms through the broad elbow-straps of the mourning-coaches, which were balanced on longitudinal poles by enormous and totally unelastic springs; and then the funeral began in earnest. Many a clinking run have I had through that bit of country at the heels of some deceased uncle who had himself many a time enjoyed the same sport. But in the immediate neighbourhood of the cemetery the houses recommenced; and at that point our grief returned upon us with overwhelming force: we were able barely to crawl along to the great iron gates where a demoniacal black pony was waiting with a sort of primitive gun-carriage and a pall to convey our burden up the avenue to the mortuary chapel, looking as if he might be expected at every step to snort fire, spread a pair of gigantic bat’s wings, and vanish, coffin and all, in thunder and brimstone.’

  In this way, Sonny began to laugh pain out of existence. Detachment from the fear of death was a step towards Shavian invulnerability in life. His death-anxiety was transferred into a fear of poverty (which, with a little courage and thought, we could eliminate), and any sediment of apprehension absorbed into a hygienic campaign against earth burial. Freed from escapist fables of personal immortality, death became an intensely democratic process. We began to die when more people wished us dead than wished us alive. Many a colleague, on the death of a wife, son or mother, was to find himself in receipt of Shaw’s feeling congratulations. ‘Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant,’ he instructed Edith Lyttelton after the death of her husband. ‘...Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing – a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.’