Judging Shaw E-Book

Fintan O'Toole

• Herausgeber: Royal Irish Academy
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 513

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

GBS was the first great brand – discover how he created this most modern of concepts. The fourth book in the Royal Irish Academy's award-winning 'Judging' series looks at the legacy of George Bernard Shaw, Nobel prizewinner for literature. George Bernard Shaw has left a vast legacy of theatrical, fictional, polemical, critical and philosophical writing. The first person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award, Shaw bridges the Victorian era and the contemporary culture of celebrity. The GBS brand came to be recognised globally as referring to an Irish provocateur with a red beard and startling opinions. He was a master of self-invention, a nobody who captured the zeitgeist and one of the first private individuals to understand fully how to generate—and how to use—global fame. The timing of Judging Shaw is fortuitous, as it will serve to reintroduce GBS to an Irish and international readership. The book is an interesting, informative, and well-written survey of Shaw/GBS and will be a welcome addition to the library of those who know Bernard Shaw perhaps only as the author of Pygmalion, his most popular and frequently performed play.

Leseprobe

Portrait of Shaw by Hazel Lavery, 1925.

Judging

SHAW

The radicalism of GBS

FINTAN O’TOOLE

Judging Shaw

First published 2017

by Prism Prism is an imprint of the Royal Irish Academy 19 Dawson Street Dublin 2 www.ria.ie

Text © 2017 Fintan O’Toole

ISBN 978-1-908997-15-9 (Hardback) ISBN 978-1-908997-16-6 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-908997-17-3 (epub) ISBN 978-1-908997-18-0 (mobi)

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The author and publisher are grateful to the following for permission to reproduce documents, photographs and illustrations in this book, or for their assistance in sourcing images: Abbey Theatre Archive, National University of Ireland, Galway; Associated Press Archives; British Library; Chaplin Picture Database, Paris; University of Glasgow; Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; London School of Economics; National Archives of Ireland; National Gallery of Ireland; National Library of Ireland; National Portrait Gallery, London; New York Public Library; School of History and Archives, University College Dublin; University of Guelph; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Wesley Bates; James O’Nolan; Mary Broderick, James Harte, Glenn Dunne and Berni Metcalfe at the National Library of Ireland; Eric Colleary and Reid Echols at the Harry Ransom Center; Barry Houlihan and Conor Dent at NUI Galway; Dave McKeon and Jeff Wilson at the Royal Irish Academy; Hazel Menton and Tom Quinlan at the National Archives of Ireland; Leah Benson and Andrew Moore at the National Gallery of Ireland; Anna Towlson at the London School of Economics; Celine Smith at the Victoria and Albert Museum; Sarah Poutch at UCD Archives; Ryan Kirkby at University of Guelph; Niki Russell at University of Glasgow; Arnold Lorenzo and Kate Guyonvarch at the Chaplin Picture Database, Paris; Thomas Lisanti at the New York Public Library.

During the production process some documents, photographs and illustrations have been retouched or tinted for aesthetic purposes. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the images reproduced and to ensure the accuracy of their captions. See Image credits.

Editor: Helena King Design and production: Fidelma Slattery Picture research: Barry Houlihan Index: Lisa Scholey

This publication has been supported by Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht.

Printed in Spain by Castuera

5 4 3 2 1

To my father Samuel O’Toole, Shavian, man and superman

‘G.B.S. was so big that we all have our private Shaws.’

NEW STATESMAN EDITORIAL, 11 NOVEMBER 1950

—

‘You are a strange puzzle—I thought once I understood you, and wrote your biography to ‘demonstrate’ you. But you yourself have proved stranger than all the myths.’

ARCHIBALD HENDERSON TO GBS, 6 MARCH 1911

Photo titled ‘Bernard Shaw on the steps with a newspaper in his hands’, undated.

Cartoon image of Shaw emerging from a pile of laurel and maple leaves, with a wreath of leaves on his head, undated.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Introduction

1. The invention of GBS

2. Revolt into style: GBS versus England

3. After the revolution: GBS versus Ireland

4. The thinking cap and the jester’s bells: Shaw’s theatre

5. GBS’s war on poverty

6. The death and resurrection of GBS

7. The lethal chamber: the dark side of GBS

8. The air we breathe: judging GBS

Endnotes

Image credits

Index

Acknowledgements

There are perhaps only two good rules for life: never invade Russia and never write a book about Bernard Shaw. Both terrains are vast and unconquerable.

I have never been tempted to break the first rule but Shaw has always been harder to resist. I may well have held out, however, were it not for a direct invitation from Ruth Hegarty and Pauric Dempsey at the Royal Irish Academy to contribute to the outstanding Judging series. The idea of attempting an overview of Shaw’s achievements and failures is presumptuous—how can one be Olympian about the ultimate Olympian? Yet it also proved irresistible. I am very grateful for the challenge.

The attraction was not just to GBS but to the brilliant publishing team at the RIA: Ruth Hegarty, Fidelma Slattery, Helena King and Niamh Mongey. Working with them again has been an utter delight.

I am also very grateful to Barry Houlihan for his terrific work in tracking down the images that make this book what it is, and to my agent Natasha Fairweather. I am especially indebted to the librarian and staff at the Firestone Library in Princeton University where much of the research was conducted, to Mary Broderick at the National Library of Ireland, and to Leonard and Ellen Milberg for their kindness and generosity.

Thanks too to Gabriel Byrne, James O’Nolan, Catriona Crowe and Nick Dunning, and to all the actors and directors over many years who have illuminated Shaw’s plays for me.

I owe a great deal to the anonymous readers who conducted the peer review of the manuscript with such diligence and insight—the remaining faults are my own, but they would otherwise be much more glaring.

My deepest gratitude, as ever, is to my wife Clare Connell for her patience and support, and to my Dad for bringing GBS into the house.

Chronology

1852

17 June

Marriage of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Gurly (‘Bessie’) at St Peter’s church, Aungier St, Dublin

1856

26 July

Birth of George Bernard Shaw at 3 Upper Synge St (later 3 Synge Street). The Shaws already have two daughters, Lucinda (Lucy) Frances and Elinor Agnes

1864

20 January

Shaw, aged 7, sees his first play, Tom Taylor’s

Plot and passion

, together with the pantomime

Puss in boots

, at the Theatre Royal

Unknown date:

George John (‘Vandaleur’) Lee begins using the Shaws’ house for rehearsals and music lessons

1865

Early May

Shaw begins attendance at Wesleyan Connexional School, St Stephen’s Green

1866

The Shaws and Lee spend most of the year at Torca Cottage, Dalkey, before moving together into 1 Hatch Street, probably in early 1867

1869

1 February

On Lee’s advice, Shaw is sent to Central Model Boy’s School in Marlborough St, mixing with Catholic fellow-pupils

11 September

Shaw leaves the Model School and later enrolls in the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School, on Aungier St, where he stays until October 1871

1870

Shaw sees

Hamlet

at the Theatre Royal, starring his idol Barry Sullivan, and a local Ophelia who reduces him to ‘paroxysms of laughter’

1871

1 November

Shaw begins work at ‘highly genteel’ estate agents Uniacke Townshend, 15 Molesworth St

1873

February June

Shaw becomes head cashier of Uniacke Townshend Lee sails to London, followed shortly by Bessie and Agnes Shaw—Lucy joins them later

1874

Shaw is living with his father in lodgings at 61 Harcourt St

1875

3 April

Shaw’s first publication, a letter to the London weekly

Public Opinion

, sceptical of the American revivalists Moody and Sankey

1876

1 April

Shaw sails from Dublin to join his mother and Lucy in London, Agnes having died of TB in March

November

Shaw begins ghost-writing Lee’s music reviews for

The Hornet

1878

Shaw begins his earliest experiment in drama, a profane passion play in blank verse. He also begins a novel,

The Legg papers

, soon abandoned

1879

22 February

Shaw’s unsigned essay

Opera in Italian

published in the

Saturday Musical Review

November

Shaw’s novel

Immaturity

rejected by two publishers; Shaw begins work for the Edison Telephone Company

1880

February

Shaw is promoted to head of the Way-Leave department at Edison—he resigns the job in July

December

Shaw finishes second novel

The irrational knot

1881

January

Shaw begins his experiments with vegetarianism

March

Rejection of

The irrational knot

May

Shaw begins third novel

Love among the artists

; contracts smallpox

1882

February

Rejection of

Love among the artists

September

Shaw hears the American economist Henry George speak on land nationalisation and begins study of radical economics

1883

February

Reads Karl Marx’s

Das kapital

in French translation Finishes fourth novel

Cashel Byron’s profession

May

Rejection of

Cashel Byron’s profession

July

Begins fifth novel

An unsocial socialist

1884

March– December

An unsocial socialist

, after rejection by book publishers, appears as a serial in socialist magazine

To-Day

16 May

Attends his first meeting of the recently formed Fabian Society

August– November

Works on a drama, later called

Widowers’ houses

October

Publishes first Fabian tract,

A manifesto

1885

8 February

Shaw’s first article as music critic of the

Dramatic Review

19 April

Shaw learns of the death of his father

30 June

Buys first Jaegar suit with insurance payment

26 July

Celebrates 29th birthday by losing his virginity to Jenny Patterson

1886

February

Cashel Byron’s profession

appears in book form

10 March

Shaw shocks meeting of the Shelley Society by declaring himself ‘like Shelley, a Socialist, Atheist and Vegetarian’

14 September

First mention of meeting Oscar Wilde in Shaw’s diaries

1887

September

Begins Fabian tract no. 6, urging taxation of unearned income, 8-hour working day, nationalisation of railways and votes for women

13 November

Shaw takes part in leftist ‘Bloody Sunday’ demonstration in Trafalgar Square, broken up by police and army

1888

12 February

Shaw meets W.B. Yeats for the first time—‘talked about Socialism a good deal’

June

Shaw begins his long career as an outdoor speaker, addressing a socialist meeting on Clapham Common

24 September

Congratulates Jack the Ripper for drawing attention to the poor of the East End

1889

15 February

First appearance of Shaw’s ‘Corno di Bassetto’ music criticism in

The Star

7 June

Sees Janet Achurch as Nora in Ibsen’s

A doll’s house

— falls in love with both actress and playwright

25 July

Visits Bayreuth Wagner festival for first time

31 August

Tells a correspondent of his aim to ‘incarnate the Zeitgeist’

December

Publication of

Fabian essays on socialism

, edited by Shaw, who contributes two essays—it becomes a best-seller

1890

28 May

The pen-name GBS appears for the first time on Shaw’s new music column for

The World

5 July

GBS lectures on ‘The quintessence of Ibsenism’ to Fabian Society—it will be published in 1891, identifying him as apostle of the new drama

1892

9 December

Widowers’ houses

given two performances by the Independent Theatre Society

1893

13–14 January

Shaw represents Fabians at founding conference of the Independent Labour Party

March– December

In a burst of playwrighting, drafts

The philanderer, Mrs Warren’s profession

and begins

Arms and the man

1894

21 April

Arms and the man

opens for 50 performances as part of Florence Farr’s new drama season. Shaw decides to give up music criticism and becomes a full-time playwright

7 December

Finishes

Candida

1895

5 January

GBS begins his role as drama critic of the

Saturday Review

; meets H.G. Wells for first time.

March

Present at Cafe Royale when Frank Harris warns Oscar Wilde to flee to France

1896

May

Completes

You never can tell

December

Completes

The Devil’s disciple

1897

October

The Devil’s disciple

opens in New York and then tours the mid-West, earning Shaw £2000—his first financial success

1898

1 June

Marries Charlotte Payne-Townshend in London registry office

August

Finishes

The perfect Wagnerite

1899

26 November

First production of

You never can tell

1900

27 February

Shaw is a delegate to the conference that creates the Labour Representation Committee, forerunner of the Labour Party

1 November

Elected to the new St Pancras Borough Council as a Progressive

1902

5 January

First (private) production of

Mrs Warren’s profession

12 May

First production of

Captain Brassbound’s conversion

June

Completes

Man and Superman

1903

25 February

Production in Vienna of Siegfried Trebitsch’s translation of

The Devil’s disciple

begins the Shaw wave in German-speaking world;

Arms and the man

follows in March

1904

5 March

Shaw defeated in election for London County Council; withdraws from electoral politics

26 May

Candida

inaugurates Shaw’s partnership with Harley Granville Barker at the Royal Court Theatre

1 November

John Bull’s other island

opens at Royal Court; Prime minister Herbert Asquith sees it five times

1905

6 July

Shaw returns to Ireland for first time since 1876. He and Charlotte stay until September but avoid Dublin

30 October

Cast of first production of

Mrs Warren’s profession

in New York arrested for ‘disorderly conduct’

28 December

First performance of

Major Barbara

1906

12 March

GBS urges women to ‘shoot, kill, maim destroy—until they are given the vote’

April–May

Shaw poses for Auguste Rodin in Paris

3 November

The Shaws move to Ayot St Lawrence, where they will live until their deaths

1908

7 September

Shaw visits Dublin for the first time since 1876

December

Joins organising committee for what will become the Royal Shakespeare Company

1909

25 August

The shewing-up of Blanco Posnet

is staged at the Abbey in Dublin in defiance of censorship; Shaw stays in Parknasilla, County Kerry

1910

January

Campaigns for Labour leader Keir Hardie in Wales

September

Visits Skellig Michael, ‘part of our dream world’

3 October

Delivers first lecture in Dublin,

The Poor Law and destitution in Ireland

1912

7 March

Begins

Pygmalion

26 June

Reads

Pygmalion

to Mrs Patrick Campbell, falls ‘violently and exquisitely in love’ with her

1913

19 February

Death of Bessie Shaw

August

Mrs Campbell avoids an assignation with GBS who calls her ‘vile’ and a ‘confidence trickster’

1 November

Joins James Connolly at public meeting in Albert Hall in support of locked-out Dublin workers; suggests workers should ‘arm themselves’

1914

11 April

Pygmalion

opens in London with Mrs Campbell as Eliza Doolittle

4 August

GBS to Trebitsch: ‘Imagine you and me at war with one another! Can there be anything more senseless?’

14 November

‘Common sense about the war’ published as special supplement to the

New Statesman

1915

11 June

First production of five-hour version of

Man and superman

26 October

GBS addresses capacity audience in London on ‘The illusions of war’; reports of his speech repressed in most newspapers

1 November

Shaw’s old friend, playwright Henry Arthur Jones denounces him as ‘an enemy within our walls’

1916

5 January

GBS attacks the introduction of conscription

4 March

Begins play that will become

Heartbreak House

10 May

Writes to London

Daily News

protesting Easter Rising executions

June(?)

Drafts suggested speech for Roger Casement to deliver at his treason trial

1 October

Witnesses crash of Zeppelin near Ayot

1917

1 January

Drafts republican manifesto, calling for all European monarchies to be scrapped

28 January

Departs for visit to front in France and Belgium at invitation of Field Marshal Haig

12 May

Finishes

Heartbreak House

1918

19 March

Begins writing

Back to Methuselah

December

Embarks on two-week speaking tour in support of Labour candidates in general election

1919

5 December

Arms and the man

brings Shaw back to the West End after a five-year absence

1920

September

Finishes

Back to Methuselah

10 November

Premiere of

Heartbreak House

in New York

1921

16 June

Sends an inscribed copy of

Back to Methuselah

to Lenin

1922

March

Declines to subscribe for James Joyce’s

Ulysses

19 August

Dines in Dublin with Michael Collins (who is killed three days later)

November

Undertakes electioneering tour for Labour candidates

1923

24 August

Finishes first draft of

Saint Joan

in Parknasilla

26 October

Unveils statue of Richard Brinsley Sheridan in Bath

1924

26 March

Saint Joan

opens in London

20 November

Shaw’s first radio broadcast, a live reading of

O’Flaherty V.C

.

1925

27 July

Mrs Warren’s profession

, written in 1893, is finally given its first public performance in Britain

21 October

Puts up bail for arrested Communist party leader Willie Gallacher

1926

August– October

Stays at Stresa in Italy; courted by leading Fascists

September (?)

First recording of Shaw’s voice in a filmed interview in Italy

12 November

Receives Nobel Prize for Literature; Shaw kept just one of innumerable letters of congratulation, that from James Joyce

1927

2 January

Shaw funds building for Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts

24 January

Publishes defence of Mussolini in

Daily News

23 November

Lectures on ‘Democracy as a delusion’

1928

11 January

Pallbearer at funeral of Thomas Hardy

1 June

The Intelligent woman’s guide to socialism and capitalism

is published in London and New York

1929

14 June

The apple cart

premieres at Teatr Polski in Warsaw

1930

28 October

Shaw’s testimonial speech to Albert Einstein (and Einstein’s reply) are broadcast live in Britain and the US

1931

25 February

Blames the rise of fascism and of Hitler on the ‘futility of liberal parliamentarism on the English model’

20 July

Begins visit to Soviet Union

29 July

Has a long interview with Stalin

1932

6 February

In Cape Town, warns white South Africans of consequences of ‘loafing based on slavery’

19 February

Begins novella

The adventures of the black girl in her search for god

14 September

Elected president of the Irish Academy of Letters

1933

13 February

Addresses students in Hong Kong University

17 February

Meets Soong Chingling in Shanghai

Early March

Meets with Japanese prime minister

4 June

Interview in which GBS claims some sympathy for Nazism while condemning its ‘pathological’ anti-Semitism

1936

4 April

Completion of first version of

Geneva

3 July

The Shaws register as citizens of the Irish Free State

24 November

Shaw’s work is effectively banned by the Nazis

1937

May

The influential Pelican paperback series begins with Shaw’s updated

The intelligent woman’s guide to socialism, capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism

Shaw permits the New Deal-era Federal Theater project in the US to stage his plays free so long as they charge no more than 50 cents for admission

1938

September

Shaw supports Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement with Hitler

22 November

Geneva

opens in London

1939

23 February

Wins Oscar for best adapted screenplay for film version of

Pygmalion

31 August

Geneva

is playing in Warsaw as Hitler invades Poland

1940

17 November

Criticises Éamon de Valera’s policy of not allowing Britain the use of Irish ports

1943

12 September

Charlotte Shaw dies, aged 86

1944

January

Gifts Ayot house to the National Trust

May

Offers his properties in Carlow for ‘the common welfare’

1945

13 August

Legal conveyance of Shaw’s properties to Carlow Urban District Council is completed

1946

10 February

Accepts honour of Freeman of Dublin

April

Donates manuscripts of his novels to the National Library of Ireland

26 July

To mark Shaw’s 90th birthday, Penguin publishes the ‘Shaw Million’, ten titles in editions of 100,000 each

1947

8 September

Signs contract with Irish Productions granting film rights to his plays; the project collapses for want of financial backing

1949

January

Writes the puppet play

Shakes versus Shav

, in four days

Easter

Replying to a letter from Jawaharlal Nehru, now prime minister of India, Shaw says ‘I am not English but Irish, and have lived through the long struggle for liberation from English rule…I am as much a foreigner in England as you were in Cambridge’

1950

29 April

Nehru visits Shaw at Ayot

23 July

Finishes his final play,

Why she would not

, three days before his 94th birthday

6 August

Last published interview, ‘G.B.S. on the A-bomb’, in

Reynolds News

10 September

Falls while pruning a tree, fracturing his femur

1 November

Lapses into a coma

2 November

Dies of renal failure; that evening all illuminated signs on Broadway and Times Square are dimmed in tribute

Caricature of Shaw by V.L. O’Connor, 1915.

‘As her actual condition was pure upstart, there were only two opinions about her. One was that she was miraculous: the other that she was unbearable.’ (Bernard Shaw, preface to Saint Joan)

– INTRODUCTION –

On 26 April 2016, the New York Times published its main editorial on attempts by the then presumptive Republican nominee for the presidency of the United States to soften his abrasive and uncouth image. It was headed ‘The Donald Trump Pygmalion project’.1 The ambition of Donald Trump’s newly appointed campaign manager, it suggested, would be ‘to turn this Eliza Doolittle into a candidate more acceptable to decent society, in time for the general election’. The paper’s editors did not feel the need to explain the references to Pygmalion or to Eliza Doolittle. Knowledge of at least one of Bernard Shaw’s plays could be taken for granted among the paper’s well-educated readers.

And yet those same readers might have found it hard to appreciate just how profoundly Shavian the world had once been. As the author of Pygmalion and perhaps a few other plays like Arms and the man and Heartbreak House Shaw’s place in the history of the theatre is general knowledge. His image—tall, thin, red-bearded, distinctively dressed, of puckish mien—would still be easy enough for most people to identify from a lineup of twentieth-century caricatures. A few older people may even occasionally season their conversations with a phrase that was once common: ‘As George Bernard Shaw said….’ (often applied whether he did or not).

But to the degree that Shaw is now thought of, it is as a figure from the past, an eminent Victorian or an Edwardian gadfly. His plays, when they appear on stage, generally come with stuffy drawing room furniture and gorgeous dresses, drawing audiences into an odd space somewhere between Downtown Abbey nostalgia on the one side and old political quarrels on the other. And, in an era when we do not like to be talked at, there are all those words. Shaw’s characters talk a lot and Shaw himself talked even more, emitting an endless stream of plays and prefaces, of interviews and interventions, of serious pamphlets and spiky letters to the press, of speeches and self-advertisements. Samuel Johnson said of Paradise Lost that no man ever wished it longer, and it is probably fair to say that no-one ever wished that Shaw had been just a little more loquacious.

I grew up, however, with a very different Shaw: the working-class hero. In our corporation house, battered second-hand copies of cheap Pelican editions of Shaw were always to hand. When we got free tickets to the Gate Theatre in Dublin, it was often to see a Shaw play—Fanny’s first play was my second-ever play. When we went to the National Gallery, Shaw’s devilish statue stood guard at the entrance and many of the best paintings had ‘Shaw Bequest’ on their frames—I thought he had personally given them to us. When we walked into town we would sometimes take a small detour up Synge Street just to pass the house where he was born, a house grander than ours certainly but modest enough to be within our ken.

And there was nothing dutiful about any of this. To my father, a self-educated bus conductor, Shaw was a pure delight. He was the big, sharp, shiny pin pricking the pretensions of church and state, of bosses and bishops. He was, moreover, an ally. Shaw was not, to men like my father, a guru to follow. He was a kind of older, smarter, intellectual big brother, a pathfinder who had opened the way to the rough but exhilarating terrain of thinking for yourself. The big thing about Shaw was that he had said the unsayable and somehow got away with it—implying that so, perhaps, might you.

The purpose of this short book is to try to restore at least a little of that admiration for what Shaw did and what he got away with. I would like to restore him, moreover, to the twenty-first century. This is an introduction to Shaw that aspires, with due modesty, to be also a reintroduction. I argue here that Shaw can be seen as a much more contemporary figure, one who has more in common with Bob Dylan and David Bowie than he has with William Gladstone or Anthony Trollope. (It seems somehow fitting that it was Dylan in 2016 who became the first artist to match Shaw’s hitherto unique feat of winning both an Oscar and a Nobel prize.) Like Dylan or Bowie, he was one of the great masters of self-invention, a nobody who captured the zeitgeist. Shaw was one of the first private individuals on the planet to understand fully how to generate—and how to use—global fame. He was among the first private citizens to grasp the possibilities of mass media and the age of mechanical reproduction for the creation of a different kind of power in the world. He was one of the first to understand that in this mass media age, performance is not just what happens on the stage, it is everywhere.

He did all of this, moreover, while showing everyone that he was doing it. The alter ego he created, the omniscient GBS, may have become in some respects a monster he could not control, but he never fully hid behind it. He was a magician who kept up a running explanation on his own tricks. He did it all, too, for a purpose. Shaw was not always right, sometimes hideously wrong and struggled to maintain his optimism about humanity. But his most important work is driven above all by a deep hatred for economic oppression and inequality. This, too, has contemporary meaning: much of our twenty-first-century politics could do with reintroducing itself to Shaw’s coruscating assaults on the self-serving nature of power and the corrupting influence of poverty, both on those who suffer it and those who benefit from it.

What follows, then is neither a biography of Shaw nor a critical study of his art. He has been superbly served by his modern biographers, notably in Michael Holroyd’s magisterial four-volume Bernard Shaw and A.M. Gibbs’s wonderfully lucid Bernard Shaw: a life, and I do not pretend to compete with them.2 Nor is this book at all a comprehensive account of Shaw’s vast legacy of theatrical, fictional, polemical, critical and philosophical writing. Some of his sixty plays do not feature here and neither do his extremely interesting early novels. This book is, rather, an invitation to reconsider Shaw as a figure who has something of great importance to give to the twenty-first century. We find ourselves in a time when provocation, showmanship, the contrary spirit, are divorced from serious thought, from a sense of common humanity and from a commitment to genuinely free thought. GBS brought them together, and in doing so he poses a challenge to our times as bracing as the one he set for his own.

Letter from the secretary of Minister for Education Richard Mulcahy to the director of the National Gallery, 25 January 1950, asking about the existence of a statue of Shaw ‘by Troubsky (?), which is stated to be in the cellars of the National Gallery’, and enquiring whether, if it exists, the statue might be suitable for public exhibition.

Costume design after Charles Ricketts for ‘Two ladies of the Court’, from the 1924 production of Saint Joan at the NewTheatre, London.

Set design for Act II of the April 1925 production of Fanny’s first play at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

Set from 1935 staging of Candida at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.

Cover of the Penguin edition of Pygmalion 1947.

Shaw at his typewriter in his writing hut at Shaw’s Corner, Ayot St Lawrence, 27 June 1946.

Shaw at Coole Park, Co. Galway, April 1915.

Shaw standing next to a sundial and holding a rubab (a Persian lute); photo taken at Blackdown Cottage, c. 1898.

‘I dont want to be bothered with children. I dont want to be a father; and I dont want to be a son…’ (The Dauphin, Saint Joan)

– THE INVENTION OF GBS –

In 1937, a middle-class woman in the industrial English town of Workington was convinced that she had the wrong child. Margaret Wheeler gave birth to a daughter in a nursing home in Nottingham on a morning when another woman also had a baby girl in the same home. Wheeler became uneasy when her baby was handed to her the following day, instinctively convinced that the child was not hers. After a year, she was even more certain that the nursing home had simply mixed up the two infants born on the same morning. She pointed to the ‘striking likeness of the little girl in the possession of the other parents to me and mine and upon the likeness of the little girl I have to the other father’.1 But what could she do? She tried to persuade the other parents to agree to blood tests, but they refused. By 1944, when her daughter was seven, she was in despair:

I have since done everything I can think of to constrain, compel, badger, pester and frighten the other people into having these new tests and into facing the issue and settling it with sensible regard to the interests of the kids as well as to our own feelings in the matter, with the sole result that for two months now they have been ‘thinking about it’. This means that if they possibly can they will wriggle out of it.2

All else having failed, she did the obvious thing. She wrote to Bernard Shaw. And she wrote to Fred Rylatt, the uncooperative man who was bringing up, as she believed, her own daughter as his, to warn him that ‘I have been corresponding lately with George Bernard Shaw…It is of course possible that if this affair goes to Court, you, and everyone else, will see his further comments—in the newspapers.’3

Shaw was then 87 and living a relatively isolated life in his home in the little village of Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire. But he was immensely famous. In 1937, Winston Churchill, though no admirer of Shaw’s politics (his first, unpublished ‘literary effusion’ was ‘a ferocious onslaught upon him’), described him as ‘the greatest living master of letters in the English-speaking world’.4 He had also spent 60 years constructing and sustaining an image of himself as one of the great minds of modern history. Vast as his estimate of his own importance may have been, it was widely shared. A Movietone News report on Shaw in 1926 is titled simply ‘The world’s outstanding literary genius’.5

He was a living immortal. On 23 March 1949, for example, Charles Poore wrote in the New York Times

The greatness of George Bernard Shaw has often been obscured by his own blinding and enthusiastic appreciation of it. The eternal question is: Can he be that good? The answer, however furiously or reluctantly or idolatrously given, must always be: Yes. For he is secure among the contemporary immortals, along with Einstein, Casals, Toscanini and Thomas Mann.6

At least two of those fellow immortals were happy to have him in their company. Albert Einstein said simply ‘Shaw is undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest figures both as a writer and as a man’.7 After Shaw’s death in 1950, Thomas Mann began his obituary tribute with the words ‘Les dieux s’en vont—The Gods pass’.8 Mann was reflecting a deep reverence for Shaw in Germany, where he all but dominated the stage: in 1932 alone, there were 56 productions of 13 different Shaw plays in 48 German towns and cities.9 Even the great young iconoclasts bowed down before him: the political and artistic revolutionary Bertolt Brecht wrote a 70th-birthday Ovation for Shaw in 1926.10

In his native Ireland, the fame of GBS was acknowledged, however grudgingly. When Myles na gCopaleen (Brian O’Nolan) published his great satirical novel, An béal bocht, in 1941, it carried opposite the title page a map of the world as seen by the benighted peasants of the miserable Corca Dorcha. Ireland is at its centre with two other islands equidistant on either side. One, a version of America, has long-horn cattle, money order offices and green hills. The island to the east is De Odar Saighd (The Other Side), a version of Britain. It has only three features marked on the map. Two are money order offices. The third is, simply, GBS.

It did not therefore seem at all crazy for a highly intelligent woman like Margaret Wheeler to look to GBS as a modern King Solomon, the great sage whose ruling could bring her justice. As she put it to Shaw, ‘I’m quite willing to admit that even if I can’t influence this obstinate Fred, maybe you can. He admires you enormously…’.11

Shaw was one of the most prodigious correspondents in history—by one estimate he wrote at least a quarter of a million letters and postcards. Even so, he could not possibly reply to all of those who peppered him with postal entreaties. In December 1914, Shaw explained to Mabel FitzGerald (mother of the future taoiseach Garret), who had briefly served as his secretary:

I cannot attempt to answer your letter properly. It is the only letter I have answered at all for years, except under pressure of absolute necessity…I can at least assure you that your letters will never be unwelcome, and that [his current secretary] the Scotch lady (Miss Elder) shall have instructions that they are to be privileged communications. She has a soulless way of putting letters from ladies into the waste paper basket when they run to more than thirty pages and are directed to my eternal salvation or breathe a hopeless admiration for my person under misapprehensions as to my age and the color of my hair.12

The weight of correspondence was such that Shaw had a series of colourcoded, pre-printed postcards with short replies on a range of subjects. Margaret Wheeler sneaked under this protective screen by initially writing to him, not about her lost daughter, but about what she knew to be a subject he could not resist—the reform of the alphabet. Over many decades, Shaw had established GBS as a brand and part of it was his insistence on his own orthography—no apostrophes, for example, and the adoption of simpler American spellings like ‘color’ and ‘favor’. (Myles na gCopaleen mocked Shaw’s obsession with reforming the alphabet by urging his readers in the Irish Times to ‘4stall worse 10dencies by adopting this notation invented by my B9 Excellency and dedic8ed to Mr Shaw’.13)

Wheeler, exploiting his interest in the reform of English orthography, ingeniously devised a new schema of symbols to represent the sounds of the English vocabulary. The effort paid off—Shaw replied to her and she in turn wrote again to him explaining her true purpose, setting in train a correspondence that continued until his death in 1950. Shaw sensibly advised her that, while it was indeed proper to try to establish the true identities of the two girls, this should be done

on the strict understanding that the two couples shall retain the children they have adopted and grown fond of and that these children shall never be psychologically wrecked by being told about the tests until they are at least forty, if at all.

Having made his Solomonic judgment, he could not resist a joke:

I am tempted to write a play on the Judgment of Solomon, in which he will discover that the woman who gave up the child to save its life was not its mother, and that the other one was and disliked it.14

Bernard Shaw can seem an old-fashioned figure, a Victorian or Edwardian dinosaur who somehow survived as a grand anachronism into the age of television. Yet he is one of the inventors of a phenomenon that could hardly be more contemporary. He is among the first private citizens in world history to create for themselves a personal brand with global resonance. GBS was an almost universal signifier. In 1908, when C. Hagberg Wright visited the world’s greatest living writer, Leo Tolstoy, on his 80th birthday, he found that the Russian sage had important questions for him:

Tolstoy asked me about Bernard Shaw whom he had recently been reading. He inquired as to his age, as to his brains, his views on life and thoughts, whether I knew him personally and if he was an Irishman and many other questions, some rather difficult to answer.15

By the 1920s, educated people in New York and Shanghai, in Leningrad and Durban, knew exactly what the three letters GBS meant. When those letters were pronounced, they brought to mind an image that had been projected by photographs and later by newsreels, by cartoons and cigarette cards: a tall, thin figure in unconventional clothing, a long face framed by a full beard, eyebrows arched in quizzical playfulness or mockery. People may have heard, through his extensive radio broadcasts, a distinctive voice, high-pitched but lullingly pleasant, with a lyrical Irish accent that seemed to have been preserved precisely for its distinctiveness, recalling Shaw’s directions for the sound of Nora Reilly’s voice in John Bull’s other island: ‘the caressing plaintive Irish melody of her speech’.16

Shaw was quite literally a brilliant poseur. When he posed for a bust by the great sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris in 1906, Rodin’s then secretary, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, raved about his uncanny ability to project himself. In a letter to William Rothenstein, he characterised Shaw as an extraordinary model, ‘qui pose avec la meme énergie et sincérité qui font sa gloire d’écrivain’.17 Rilke was struck by Shaw’s ability, merely in standing before the sculptor, to present ‘something quite unusually concentrated’.18 This power was trained on innumerable painters and photographers, one of whom, Alvin Coburn, called him simply ‘the perfect model’.19 The effort paid off: Shaw himself confessed in 1935 that ‘my friend H.G. Wells had complained vehemently that it is impossible to move about the world without coming up against some effigy of my too familiar beard and eyebrows’.20

A special word, Shavian, had been insinuated by GBS into the English language, carrying with it notions of paradox and contrariness, of humour used as a weapon, of a peculiar ability simultaneously to charm and to discomfit. Like almost everything else about him that came to seem natural, he had to work on it. Initially, he tried the awkward word ‘Shawian’, used, for example, in a letter to Reginald Golding Bright of 2 December 1894.21 It took him ten years to settle on ‘Shavian’. But, according to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, by 1920 ‘Shavian’ had established its place in the language: ‘Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of George Bernard Shaw (1856–) or his plays or other writings.’22

And this brand had been created, not by a global media industry, as Hollywood did for Charles Chaplin or Mary Pickford, but by one person on his own. GBS was the invention of a single, obscure impoverished Irishman. As a brand, it combined the images of Biblical prophet, artistic hero and political agitator into an icon of unfathomable genius. It transcended even the ferocious political divides of the twentieth century and Shaw’s avowed communism, enthralling figures as diverse as Churchill and his great nemesis Mohandas Gandhi. The English playwright John Osborne, born in 1929, recalled that his grandfather, a former London publican of decidedly conservative views, hoped to live to see the day

when one of two things would happen: one, I would be the Prime Minister of England; or, two, I would be the next George Bernard Shaw. His reverence for Shaw was almost as extreme as his hostility to Gandhi. As he disagreed grandiloquently with almost everything that Shaw ever uttered on any subject…this was confusing.23

Shaw’s immense fame was entirely deliberate. It is one of the great achievements of the history of advertising. As Bertolt Brecht wrote admiringly in 1926, GBS ‘knows that the tools of an honest man must always include boisterous self-advertising’.24 GBS would project an image of almost effortless brilliance, claiming to be the product merely of ‘the accident of a lucrative talent’.25 But accident had very little to do with it. With nothing but his own resources of energy, mind and personality, he forged an identity at once dazzlingly complex and easily recognisable, supple enough to be reliably unpredictable but fixed enough to be instantly familiar. It was a unique form of celebrity: a vast popularity that depended on a reputation for insisting on unpopular ideas and causes, for pleasing the public by provoking it to the point of distraction.

Shaw can be hard to place because he does fit into any straight line of development from the premodern to the modern to the postmodern— he can seem to span all three. Churchill, in 1929, called Shaw’s drama ‘the very acme of modernity’26 but in his embrace of hyper-celebrity he was certainly no Modernist. One of the tenets of literary Modernism was the separation of the artist from the work of art, the idea of the work as an entirely autonomous sphere. James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus (following Gustave Flaubert) puts it best in A portrait of the artist as a young man:

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.27

Perhaps no serious artist has ever been as far from this ideal as Shaw. He, or at least his creation GBS, was never behind or beyond his work—he was always insistently beside it, commenting, explicating, underlining. He was not indifferent—he set out to do nothing less than to instruct critics and audiences how to see his plays. And he did not do artistic invisibility. His propagation of an image was inextricable from his theatre. GBS was Shaw’s greatest character. He never affected the pose of careless creator—instead of paring his fingernails, he paraded himself as a flagrant propagandist with serious designs on his audiences, on society, on history.

But if, in this, Shaw is defiantly anti-Modernist, he is not merely pre- Modernist either. He is a creature—and in some measure a creator—of the age of mass media and global communications. ‘My currency’, he said accurately and matter-of-factly in 1924, ‘is as universal as that of Sherlock Holmes…or Mary Pickford…or Charlie Chaplin.’28 There are precedents for the figure of the writer as international celebrity: Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Mark Twain created models that Shaw undoubtedly followed. (A lucky visitor to the House of Commons in 1907 spotted GBS and Twain together observing proceedings, ‘sentient, alert, sublime as gods…Presently, like toy balloons, their cheeks puffed out with tight-lipped laughter. And then they exploded and sat there quaking with uncontrollable, silent merriment’.)29

But none of his predecessors created a brand that was as deliberate, as resonant, as widespread and as sustained as GBS. He shattered cultural boundaries in ways that still seem breathtakingly bold, confounding the apparently obvious differences between seriousness and showmanship, personality and politics, art and propaganda, the mainstream and the outré, the voice in the wilderness and the voice on the radio, moral purpose and charlatanism. It says something that he was, until Bob Dylan joined him in 2016, the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize (for Literature in 1925, awarded in 1926) and an Academy Award (for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1939 for Pygmalion). There are ways in which contemporary culture, with its deeply uncertain relationships between image and reality, art and celebrity, has still to catch up with Shaw.

In 1929, when Orson Welles, then just fourteen, mounted one of his first extravaganzas, a school production of Shaw’s Androcles and the lion, he wrote in a programme note:

A mystery surrounds the author of this delightful satire. Just what is Bernard Shaw, vegetarian, socialist, anti-vivisectionist and Irishman, really driving at?30

That he could list so easily the causes associated with GBS and yet still feel a sense of mystery indicates the power of the brand—it was at once utterly fixed and entirely elusive. It was a set of ideas (about politics, food, animal rights and Irishness) that were embodied in a contrary personality. That personality can be summed up as a fearlessness that inspired a kind of fear. Brecht caught it brilliantly:

It should be clear by now that Shaw is a terrorist. The Shavian terror is an unusual one, and he employs an unusual weapon— that of humour…The Shavian terror consists of Shaw’s insistence on the prerogative of every man to act decently, logically, and with a sense of humor, and on the obligation to act in this manner even in the face of opposition. He knows very well how much courage it takes to laugh about the ridiculous and how much seriousness it takes to discover the amusing.31

The GBS brand conferred on Shaw an astonishing immunity. We can get a sense of it from Shaw’s visit, on a supposedly private holiday, to Hong Kong and China in 1933. On his arrival in Hong Kong in February, the press already had a set of tropes with which to describe him: his eccentric clothes, his funny hat, his white beard, his ‘twinkling eye’, his provocative opinions. These fixed tropes meant that GBS could get away with anything, even things that would have got anyone else arrested. Pestered into giving an impromptu address to students at the university, he made straight for the most exposed nerve. China was already in the midst of a vicious civil war between the Kuomintang government and communist rebels. Shaw’s hosts were entirely on the Kuomintang side and their biggest fear was that students would be attracted to communism. So GBS urged the students:

If you read, read real books and steep yourself in revolutionary books. Go up to your neck in Communism, because if you are not a red revolutionist at 20, you will be at 50 a most impossible fossil. If you are a red revolutionist at 20, you have some chance of being up-to-date at 40. So I can only say, go ahead in the direction I have indicated.32

Only GBS could indulge with impunity in such a scandalous attempt to corrupt Hong Kong’s youth. The South China Morning Post, in an editorial, essentially conceded that this was only what might be expected from GBS and blamed those who had badgered him into speaking. Even this outrageous provocation, it said, did not take away from the fact that the visit of GBS was a momentous event in the city’s history:

In fairness, it must be said, however, that no criticism attaches to Mr Shaw. He was on holiday and with no desire to speak or to be interviewed…Having been pestered…he responded naturally and with Shavian malice aforethought, setting himself out to be deliberately outrageous, by way of reprisal and as though to teach us that stinging plants and insects are best left alone…There is only one Shaw, and that he should grace Hongkong (sic) but once in his lifetime is an historical event, to be appreciated in all humility. In comparison, what matters?…As we are, Shaw has come and Shaw has gone; and so back into our narrow beds creep and let no more be said.33

When Shaw, continuing his trip, stopped in Shanghai, the greatest Chinese writer of the time, Lu Xun, who met him at a lunch in the house of the radical ‘Madam Sun’—Soong Chingling, widow of Sun Yatsen, founder of the Chinese Republic—noted that the newspaper Dawanbao had expressed the hope that Japanese military activities in Manchuria would be suspended because of his visit. He wrote that all the Chinese intellectuals were desperate to see whatever Shaw said or did as an endorsement of their own views and actions. In his essay ‘Who is the Paradox?’ Lu Xun noted how the GBS persona had become a mirror in which all could see their own obsessions reflected:

He is not an encyclopaedia, yet they insist on treating him as one, questioning him about everything under the sun…everybody hopes for different things. The lame hope he will advocate using crutches, those with scabies hope he will praise hat-wearing, those who use rouge hope he will taunt sallow-faced matrons, and the writers of nationalist literature are counting on him to crush the Japanese troops. But what is the result? You can tell the result is not too satisfactory by the great number of people who are complaining. Herein, too, lies Shaw’s greatness.34

However extraordinary a creation GBS turned out to be, it began with a shabby human reality. The genesis of GBS lay in the childish moment when Shaw realised that his father was not as he seemed to the adoring eyes of a young son. He wrote to the actress Ellen Terry, with whom he was in love, on 11 June 1897, from the third-class carriage of a train after a meeting of the socialist Fabian Society:

The first moral lesson I can remember as a tiny child was the lesson of teetotalism, instilled by my father, a futile person. One night, when I was about as tall as his boots, he took me out for a walk. In the course of it I conceived a monstrous, incredible suspicion. When I got home, I stole to my mother & in an awestruck whisper said to her, ‘Mamma: I think Papa’s drunk.’ She turned away with impatient disgust & said ‘When is he ever anything else?’ I have never believed in anything since: then the scoffer began: then was sown the seed…Oh, a devil of a childhood, Ellen, rich only in dreams, frightful & loveless in realities.35

In this rare display of vulnerability, Shaw recalls a moment of psychological division. The realisation that his father was a drunk introduced him to reality in a way that permanently shaped his consciousness. His letter to Terry undoubtedly overstated the impact of a single incident, but it dramatised a larger truth. As he put it many years later:

It is a rhetorical exaggeration to say that I have never since believed in anything or anybody; but the wrench from my childish faith in my father as perfect and omniscient to the discovery that he was a hypocrite and a dipsomaniac was so sudden and violent that it must have left its mark on me.36

But this wrench also shoved him into ‘dreams’, the rich life of fantasy and invention into which he could escape. By becoming two people, Bernard Shaw and GBS, he would eventually be able to turn the disillusioning reality of not being able to believe anything again into a different kind of illusion of omniscience: the grand wizard of scepticism that the world could wonder at.

Shaw’s drunken Papa was George Carr Shaw, the ‘futile person’ of whom Michael Holroyd writes that he had a ‘genius for poverty’.37 His family had its Irish origins in a Captain William Shaw, who came from England with the army of William of Orange, fought at the Battle of the Boyne, and was rewarded with a good estate in Kilkenny. The clan had a strong foothold in the privileged Protestant Ascendancy and opportunities to move from landed wealth to commercial success. GBS’s granduncle Sir Robert Shaw founded a successful bank in Foster Place in Dublin, right next to the Bank of Ireland. GBS’s grandfather Bernard was High Sheriff of Kilkenny and a prosperous Dublin stockbroker. But the family’s misfortunes began when Bernard’s business partner absconded with £50,000 of his money, leaving them penniless. Bernard died shortly afterwards. It was GBS who invented the word ‘downstart’: ‘I was a downstart and the son of a downstart’.38 He grew up in that rich seedbed of literary talent, a family coming down in the world.

In later life, when he had the comfort of his own success, Shaw could turn the alcoholism and mental illness that blighted his father’s family into the material for conversational performance. Bertrand Russell recalled how Shaw as an old man would repeat the story of his father’s brother Barney, who, in the private mental home of Dr Eustace on the north side of Dublin, tried to kill himself by putting a carpet bag over his head, only to die of a heart attack in the process. (Another of GBS’s uncles, Fred (Richard Frederick) also died in Dr Eustace’s.) Whenever Shaw the raconteur

came to his uncle who committed suicide by putting his head in a carpetbag and then shutting it, a look of unutterable boredom used to appear on Mrs. Shaw’s face, and if one were sitting next her one had to take care not to listen to Shaw.39

GBS would even use his uncle Barney’s suicide as material for a joke in the music reviews that first established him as a figure in London cultural life. He did so in a way that raises, surreptitiously, the great fear that madness might be hereditary, while turning it into a musical squib. In The Star, on 8 March 1889 he told his readers that

I believe a taste for brass instruments is hereditary. My father destroyed his domestic peace by immoderate indulgence in the trombone; my uncle played the ophicleide—very nicely, I must admit—for years, and then perished by his own hand. Some day I shall buy a trombone myself.40

In his next column, on 16 March, GBS recounts the receipt of some verses (by Henry Salt) questioning the truth of his claims:

Of playing ophicleides, in sooth, You make us feel quite funky; But, tell us,—was it gospel truth, That death of poor old Nunky?

To this, GBS mock-objected, playing for laughs on his uncle’s suicide:

Nature must be dead in the man who can thus trifle with a family feeling. I regret now that I mentioned the matter. My statement was true; but I decline for two reasons, to satisfy the morbid curiosity of S. [Salt] The reasons are (1) the evidence at a coroner’s inquest does not come under the head of musical memoranda; and (2) the details are so grotesquely extraordinary—so absolutely without precedent in the records of self-destruction—that, often as I have told the story, it has never once been believed.41

Of his father George, Shaw recalled in 1879 that

In society he drank porter, champagne, whisky, anything he could get, sometimes swallowing stout enough to make him sick. Subsequently, when he had no opportunity of drinking except in taverns, he only took brandy…Although he was never sober, he was seldom utterly drunk.42

George Carr Shaw’s alcoholism may have been exaggerated by his son, but in GBS’s eyes it did not even have the compensation of conviviality. Dublin was tolerant of drinkers who were good company, which George wasn’t. In 1921, his son recalled that

If you asked him to a dinner or a party he was not quite sober when he arrived; and he was invariably scandalously drunk when he left. Now a convivial drunkard may be exhilarating in convivial company. Even a quarrelsome or boastful drunkard may be found entertaining by people who are not particular. But a miserable drunkard—and my father, in theory a teetotaler, was racked with shame and remorse even in his cups—is unbearable.43

Before they were material for GBS’s anecdotage, these torments were lived realities. Shaw’s relationship to his father’s family is strikingly similar to James Joyce’s. Both men had fathers who were downstarts, alcoholics, sometime petty officials (John Stanislaus Joyce a rate collector, George Carr Shaw the holder of a sinecure at the Four Courts, which was abolished during legal reforms of the early 1850s, leaving him with a pension of £44 a year, which he sold to fund his fitful business career as the operator of a watermill in Dolphin’s Barn and dealer in flour and cereals.) Both writers grew up with a consciousness of the ridiculousness of snobbish pretension. Joyce anatomised his father John in A portrait of the artist as a young man as ‘at present a praiser of his own past’.44 GBS later recalled that his family ‘talked of themselves as the Shaws, as who would say the Valois, the Bourbons, the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs or the Romanoffs…’.45

From the painful gap between reality and self-image, both writers would extract a sense of absurdity that their art could refine into pure comedy. For Shaw, laughter may have been a literal matter of survival: ‘It had to be either a family tragedy or a family joke and it was on the whole a healthy instinct that decided us to get what ribald fun was possible out of it, which, however, was very little indeed.’46 He could, though, remember, after 60 years, being ‘disabled’ with laughter as a boy at the sight of his drunken father coming home, presumably at Christmas:

an imperfectly wrapped-up goose under one arm and a ham in the same condition under the other butting at the garden wall in the belief that he was pushing open the gate, and transforming his tall hat to a concertina in the process… If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.47

There is an element of ruthlessness in that laughter that, even if it began in a child’s need to protect himself from pain and shame, would become a central aspect of the aesthetic of the great GBS. A boy who learns to laugh at his father’s disgrace can also learn to scoff at armies and prelates, at pomposities and moralities. He can eventually transform the tragedy into a joke. In Pygmalion, Eliza’s description of her father’s drinking, and of his relationship with her mother, exactly reverses George Carr Shaw’s miserable drinking and Bessie Shaw’s attitude to it:

When he was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence and tell him to go out and not come back until he’d drunk himself cheerful and loving-like. There’s lots of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. [Now quite at her ease] You see, it’s like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when he’s sober; and then it makes him lowspirited. A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy.48

If Shaw’s sense of humour was painfully indebted to his father, it was from his mother that he acquired the artistic sensibility that would give it a potent form. Lucida Elizabeth (Bessie) Gurly was also from classic downstart stock. Her antecedents too lay in the minor Protestant landed gentry and her father was a squire in Rathfarnham, south of Dublin. He, too, proved a disastrous manager of his business affairs. Bessie was largely raised by a great-aunt, who, in a decision of great significance for GBS, had her schooled in music and in particular in the piano at Logier’s Academy in Sackville Street. She was 21 when she married George Carr Shaw in June 1852, or, as GBS would be later put it, ‘got tragically caught’. They moved into a modest terrace house at 3 (now 33) Upper Synge Street. Three children followed in respectable Protestant order: Lucinda Frances (Lucy) in March 1853, Elinor Agnes (Yuppy) in July 1854 and, on 26 July 1856, George Bernard, known in his boyhood as Sonny.

‘I hate the Family’, GBS thundered in a lecture to the Fabian Society in 1886 when he was 30. ‘I loathe the Family. I entirely detest and abominate the Family as the quintessence of Tyranny, Sentimentality, Inefficiency, Hypocrisy, and Humbug.’ At a time when piety about the patriarchal family stood at the pinnacle of Victorian values, nothing could be more