Basil Street Blues (41 page)

Sonny sometimes speculated as to whether he might have been Lee’s natural son; and G.B.S. was aware of other people’s speculations. ‘About G.B.S.’s parentage,’ wrote Beatrice Webb in her diary for 12 May 1911. ‘The photograph published in the Henderson Biography makes it quite clear to me that he was the child of G. J. V. Lee – that vain, witty and distinguished musical genius who lived with them. The expression on Lee’s face is quite amazingly like G.B.S. when I first knew him.’

That Shaw may have had an unconscious wish to be the son of the remarkable George Lee and not of the miserable George Carr Shaw is possible. His campaign to demonstrate that he was George Carr Shaw’s son was conducted primarily in defence of his mother. He was to model himself on Lee because of the extraordinary effect Lee had produced on Bessie and, in a number of three-cornered relationships, he was to play out the presumed asexuality of their liaison by refusing to compromise his own chastity. The themes of consanguinity and illegitimacy recur obsessively in his plays, but it is the emotional independence of the woman that is stressed. Eliza’s parting from Professor Higgins in Pygmalion to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill is Shaw’s restatement of Bessie’s economic attachment to Lee who is seen as a means to her self-sufficiency. In logic,
Sonny should have been Lee’s son. But as Shaw demonstrated in his most deliberately pleasant play, You Never Can Tell, remarkable children were frequently born to incompatible parents.

But G.B.S. had to be certain. So he obliterated the ambiguous Christian name he shared with George Lee and George Shaw, using only the initial G. ‘Professionally I drop the George,’ he told an editor. ‘Personally I dislike it.’ ‘Don’t George me,’ he would growl at people who made this mistake. He would remain George only to his family.

By finding a use for the knowledge of harmony and counterpoint hammered into her in her youth, Lee gave Bessie ‘a Cause and a Creed to live for’. She became the chorus leader and general factotum of his musical society.

Lee’s life had changed in those years. On 6 March 1860 his mother died, and two years later, on 7 May 1862, his brother William also died, aged twenty-seven, and was buried near Robert and Eliza Lee in the Roman Catholic Glasnevin Cemetery. His death brought Lee ‘to the verge of suicide’. Since life outside music seemed to offer little to either Lee or Bessie, they became wedded to ‘the Method’.

In his Preface to London Music G.B.S. touches on a peculiar aspect of this story. ‘Lee soon found his way into our house, first by giving my mother lessons there, and then by using our drawing-room for rehearsals.’ He presents Lee as a man apart, ‘too excessively unlike us, too completely a phenomenon, to rouse any primitive feelings in us’. Because he was a cripple ‘marriage and gallantry were tacitly ruled out of his possibilities, by himself, I fancy, as much as by other people. There was simply no room in his life for anything of the sort.’ What little we know about Lee contradicts this view of the man. His Byronic limp was a focus of romantic interest; at least two women in his musical society, and possibly Sonny’s sister Yuppy, fell in love with him. Later in life he made advances to Lucy Shaw and ended his days running a sort of night-club in London where he carried on an affair with his housekeeper. G.B.S. does not conceal this. But he presents it as a late-flowering sentimentalism that bloomed when, having been seduced by the capitalist atmosphere of ‘overfed, monied London’, he proved unfaithful to ‘the Method’ and had been dropped by Bessie.

To disinfect the relationship from all sexual implication, he built Bessie into ‘one of those women who could act as matron of a cavalry barracks from eighteen to forty and emerge without a stain on her character’. ‘To the closest observation’ she was ‘so sexless’ that it was a wonder how she could have conceived three children. He could only guess that George Carr Shaw, when drunk, had forced himself on her and that to this operation he owed his existence. ‘I was just something that had
happened to them,’ he bleakly concluded. Such a beginning, which explained his mother’s neglect, was preferable to having the Lee-Bessie association ‘unpleasantly misunderstood’. George Carr Shaw ‘was Papa in the fullest sense always,’ he wrote, ‘and the dynamic Lee got none of the affection Papa inspired’. His arguments reflect the urgent need Shaw felt to make his case, in the light of what was to happen next between Lee and his mother.

We must reform society before we can reform ourselves... personal righteousness is impossible in an unrighteous environment.

Shaw to H. G. Wells (17 May 1917)

Two experiences, both visual, dominate Sonny’s early years. The first was his sight of the Dublin slums. ‘I saw it and smelt it and loathed it.’ His nurse would take him to the squalid tenements of her friends, or lead him off to a public house and (it is suggested) add to her £8 a year by picking up soldiers at the barracks. Shaw’s lifelong hatred of poverty was born of these lonely days of slumming.

On being asked, at the age of seventy-five, to name the happiest hour of his life, Shaw was to answer: ‘When my mother told me we were going to live on Dalkey Hill.’ In 1864, two years after his brother’s death, Lee moved from Harrington Street to 1 Hatch Street. He proposed a new arrangement: to lease a cottage on Dalkey Hill, nine miles south of Dublin, and to share it with the Shaws. Torca Cottage, into which they all moved in 1866, had four reasonably-sized rooms, a back room for Sonny, and a kitchen and pantry into which they squeezed the servant’s bed. The front garden overlooked Killiney Bay, and the back garden Dublin Bay.

‘I owe more than I can express to the natural beauty of that enchanting situation commanding the two great bays between Howth and Bray Head,’ Shaw remembered towards the end of his life, ‘and its canopied skies such as I have never seen elsewhere in the world.’ In the miserable Synge Street house, opposite a big field blotted out by hoardings and behind ‘the bare dark walls, much too high... too high to be climbed over’, Sonny had felt a prisoner. At Torca he became ‘a prince in a world of my own imagination’. His playground was Killiney Hill, a wonderland of goat-paths and gorse slopes down which he would run to the sandy shore
and into the sea. But the beauty of Dalkey, taking him out ‘of this time and this world’, delayed his development. ‘With a little more courage & a little more energy I could have done much more; and I lacked these because in my boyhood I lived on my imagination instead of on my work.’

The work of G.B.S. was a product not so much of his happy memories of Dalkey but of his visits to the Dublin slums which, ‘with their shocking vital statistics and the perpetual gabble of its inhabitants’, reflected the unhappiness Sonny seldom escaped. ‘An Irishman has two eyes,’ Shaw told G. K. Chesterton. One was for poetry, the other for reality. As Sonny grew into an adult the Dalkey eye closed. This is why, at his most serious, G.B.S. always seems to be winking.

After a year at Dalkey, Lee and the Shaws agreed to extend the ménage à trois to Hatch Street, while they continued to occupy Torca Cottage for summer holidays. ‘The arrangement was economical,’ G.B.S. explained, ‘for we could not afford to live in a fashionable house, and Lee could not afford to give lessons in an unfashionable one.’ Lee paid the rent for all of them – the rateable value being £35 – in addition to the costs at Dalkey. The amalgamation gave the Shaws a well-appointed three-storeyed house. ‘Being a corner house it had no garden,’ Shaw remembered; ‘but it had two areas and a leads. It had eight rooms besides the spacious basement and pantry accommodation as against five in Synge St.’ The hall door was in one street and the windows (with one exception) were in another. The exception, a window over the hall door and near the roof, was Sonny’s bedroom where, his friend Edward McNulty remembered, ‘there was barely room for anything but his bed’.

Like his mother Sonny was dazzled by Lee and adopted many of his startling ideas – sleeping with the windows open, eating brown bread instead of white and parading his disdain for doctors, lawyers, academics, clergymen. Lee filled the house with music and banished family prayers. In the Synge Street days, George Carr Shaw, as sole head of the household, had sent his children to Sunday School where genteel Protestants aged five to twelve, well-soaped and best-dressed, mouthed religious texts and were rewarded with inscribed cards. After this they would be marched to the Molyneux Church in Upper Leeson Street to fidget interminably round the altar rails. ‘To sit motionless and speechless in your best suit in a dark stuffy church on a morning that is fine outside the building, with your young limbs aching with unnatural quiet... is enough to lead any sensitive youth to resolve that when he grows up and can do as he likes, the first use he will make of his liberty will be to stay away from church.’

Such respectable habits had been largely ridiculed by Bessie’s dissolute brother Walter Gurly, a ship’s surgeon who visited them between transatlantic
voyages. ‘He was a most exhilarating person,’ G.B.S. remembered, ‘...always in high spirits, and full of a humor that was barbarous in its blasphemous indecency, but Shakespearian in the elaboration and fantasy of its literary expression... He was full of the Bible, which became in his hands a masterpiece of comic literature; and he quoted the sayings of Jesus as models of facetious repartee.’

G.B.S. uses the entertaining figure of Uncle Walter as a comet, shimmering across the skies, to distract our attention from a more significant feature in the religious firmament of the Shaws. There was nothing in Walter Gurly’s irreverent jokes that quarrelled with the tradition of Protestant gentry. Irish Protestantism, Shaw explains, ‘was not then a religion: it was a side in political faction, a class prejudice, a conviction that Roman Catholics are socially inferior persons who will go to hell when they die and leave Heaven in the exclusive possession of Protestant ladies and gentlemen’.

It is evident from what he wrote that G.B.S. knew that Lee was a Catholic. But he prevaricated. To Stephen Winsten he proclaimed that ‘music was the only religion he [Lee] ever professed’; to Frank Harris he wrote: ‘The Method was my mother’s religion. It was the bond between her and Lee. A bond of sex could not have lasted a year’; to Demetrius O’Bolger he revealed that Lee was ‘sceptical’ about religion, and added, ‘the religion of our house was the religion of singing the right way’. By such means he directed his biographers where he wanted. For although he claimed to be ‘in intense reaction against the Shaw snobbery’, his own snob-tragedy was to be G.B.S.’s disappointment with Sonny for having felt ashamed among his school friends at sharing a house with someone no Shaw should rightly know.

The only person for whom there seemed no special advantages at Hatch Street was George Carr Shaw. He became ‘full of self-reproaches and humiliations when he was not full of secret jokes, and was either biting his moustache and whispering deep-drawn Damns, or shaking with paroxysms of laughter’. In a private note, written for a medical friend in 1879, Shaw described the pattern of his father’s drinking:

‘In society he drank porter, champagne, whisky, anything he could get, sometimes swallowing stout enough to make him sick... Although he was never sober, he was seldom utterly drunk. He made efforts to reform himself, and on one occasion succeeded in abstaining for sixteen months; but these efforts always ended in a relapse. On one or two occasions he disappeared for a few days and returned with his watch broken, clothes damaged and every symptom of uncontrolled excess; but ordinarily he came home in the evening fuddled, eat [sic] his dinner, had a nap, and
then kept going out for drams until he went to bed. He never drank or kept drink in the house... I have seen him when drunk, seize a small article on the mantelpiece and dash it upon the hearthstone, or kick a newspaper into the air; but though he was very irritable, he never used the slightest violence to any person... his timidity probably made forbearance habitual to him.’

After his father was dead, G.B.S. eliminated much of this sordidness by giving to his published descriptions of it a hilarious Shavian gloss.

‘A boy who has seen “the governor”, with an imperfectly wrapped-up goose under one arm and a ham in the same condition under the other (both purchased under heaven knows what delusion of festivity), butting at the garden wall of our Dalkey Cottage in the belief that he was pushing open the gate, and transforming his tall hat to a concertina in the process, and who, instead of being overwhelmed with shame and anxiety at the spectacle, has been so disabled by merriment (uproariously shared by the maternal uncle) that he has hardly been able to rush to the rescue of the hat and pilot its wearer to safety, is clearly not a boy who will make tragedies of trifles instead of making trifles of tragedies.’

After two or three years at Hatch Street, George Carr Shaw was felled on the doorstep by a fit. Shortly afterwards he became so rigid a teetotaller that those who knew him found it ‘difficult to realize what he formerly was’.

In a letter to a prospective biographer, G.B.S. wrote: ‘You ask whether my father liked Lee. He certainly did not, and would not have tolerated the arrangement if he could have afforded a decent house without it, or if he could have asserted himself against my mother, who probably never consulted him in the matter. There was never any quarrelling in the house: my mother went her own way, which happened to be the musical way of Lee, just as Lee went his; and my father could only look on helplessly.’

It was this impotence that appears to have driven George Carr Shaw to greater drinking excesses. ‘When his children had grown too big for him to play with, and the suspense as to whether he would come home drunk or sober never ceased,’ G.B.S. told a cousin, ‘he got practically no comfortable society from them. His relatives did not want to see him; and my mother did not want to see his relatives: she was interested only in people who could sing, and they were mostly Catholics, not proper company for the Protestant caste of Shaw.’

Before his marriage, and during its early years, George Carr Shaw had
been on visiting terms with his smart Protestant relatives. By the 1860s their doors were shut to him and his family. ‘My immediate family and the Shaw clan,’ G.B.S. recalled, ‘...were barely on speaking terms when we met which we did only accidentally, never intentionally.’ Social conditions, which had helped to drive his father to drink, would also one day pervert Lee, and both men disappointed his mother. So Society became the dragon against which the fabulous G.B.S. would lead his campaign of lifelong knight-errantry.