Basil Street Blues (38 page)

Go little book, go little tragedy,

Where God may send thy maker, ere he die,

The power to make a work of comedy…

And wheresoever thou be read, or sung,

I beg of God that thou be understood!

And now to close my story as I should.

~

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Appendix: Four Family Trees

Michael Holroyd

Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs

Biographies by Michael Holroyd

An invitation from the publisher

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Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian and charmer, Bernard Shaw was a controversial literary figure, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions.

This is Michael Holroyd’s essential biography of George Bernard Shaw for the general reader, with its pace and verve, its comedy, drama and politics, it shows a provocative and paradoxical figure sympathetically and movingly portrayed.

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’.

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’.