Basil Street Blues (42 page)

If I had not returned to the house, I don’t think they would, any of them, have missed me.

Preface to London Music (1937)

At Synge Street Sonny and his sisters had been provided with a day governess. Caroline Hill was an impoverished gentlewoman who puzzled the children by her attempts to teach them the alphabet and mathematical tables. She would punish her pupils when their laughter grew too outrageous by ‘little strokes with her fingers that would not have discomposed a fly’.

At the beginning of the summer term of 1865, when he was almost ten, Sonny was sent to his first school, the Wesleyan Connexional, less than half a mile away at 79 St Stephen’s Green. He hated this school. ‘I have not a good word to say for it,’ he wrote. ‘...A more futile boy prison could not be imagined. I was a day-boy: what a boarder’s life was like I shudder to conjecture.’ The chief reason for his dislike of school appears to have been that it took him further away from his mother. This, he came to believe, had been its real purpose – that of ‘preventing my being a nuisance to my mother at home for at least half the day’.

The Wesleyan Connexional School occupied an old private house next door to the mansion of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness. Its big schoolroom stood at the end of a yard at the rear where the stables had been and which by the 1860s served as a playground. It was the cheapest of those Dublin schools patronized by Protestants. The sanitation was primitive and the lessons meagre. ‘In the large classes,’ Shaw recalled, ‘the utmost examination possible in the lessons meant one question for each boy in alphabetical order, or at most two. If you could answer the questions or
do the sums, or construe the few lines that fell to your lot, you passed unscathed: if not, or if you talked in class or misbehaved, you were marked in your judgement book for caning by the headmaster.’

The headmaster when Sonny first went there was Robert Cook, a young Methodist minister who would prepare boys for flogging with spasms of weeping. He was eventually succeeded by a man named Parker who conducted his classes with a ferocious cane in hand.

‘When Parker appeared armed with a long lithe chestnut colored oriental cane, which had evidently cost much more than a penny, and slashed our hand with it mercilessly, he established an unprecedented terrorism. He was young (really too young), darkly handsome: apparently a perfect Murdstone. But he soon found that he was carrying his youthful terroristic logic too far... he had what no schoolmaster should allow himself to indulge: a dislike of stupid boys as such.’

To his biographers, G.B.S. represented Sonny at school as ‘rampant, voluble, impudent... a most obstreperous player of rough games... [who] avoided his school tasks... and was soon given up as incorrigible’. That was how he had felt: it was not how he appeared to others. He was remembered as a quiet boy and on two occasions was awarded good conduct certificates. The other boys liked him for his comic stories about a character called Lobjort borrowed from Household Words, but otherwise his remote personality, designed to protect him from unhappiness at home, did not make him popular. His command of long words gave him an air of maturity that appealed more to adults than to children. He seemed unfitted for boy society. ‘I think my treatment as an adult at home (like the Micawbers’ treatment of David Copperfield) made school very difficult for me.’

The roll books at Wesley show that after only three months in 1865 he was taken away and did not return there until August 1867. After another three months he left again, then came back in February 1868 for nine months. During one or more of these intervals he attended a preparatory school at 23–24 Sandycove Road, Glasthule, near Dalkey.

‘My parents,’ Shaw wrote, ‘...acted as if... I would come out as an educated gentleman if I wore the usual clothes, ate the usual food, and went to the same school or other every day.’ But by the end of 1868 he had fallen so far behind that he was withdrawn altogether from the Wesleyan Connexional.

It was Lee, rather than Sonny’s parents, who took the initiative. He had got to know the drawing-master at the Central Model Boys’ School in Marlborough Street, Joseph Smeeth, who persuaded him that the
teaching there was better than at any other of the cheaper genteel schools in Dublin. By the beginning of February 1869, Sonny was sent to Marlborough Street, where he remained a little over seven months. He was to focus on this school almost all the unhappiness of his boyhood. The Central Model Boys’ School, he wrote, was ‘undenominational and classless in theory but in fact Roman Catholic... It was an enormous place, with huge unscaleable railings and gates on which for me might well have been inscribed “All hope abandon, ye who enter here”; for that the son of a Protestant merchant-gentleman and feudal downstart should pass those bars or associate in any way with its hosts of lower middle class Catholic children, sons of petty shopkeepers and tradesmen, was inconceivable from the Shaw point of view... I lost caste outside it and became a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman would speak or play.’

The enrolment books of the Central Model show that Sonny’s form contained eight members of the Established Protestant Church, only five Roman Catholics and one ‘Other Denomination’. Fathers’ occupations included a hotel porter, two carpenters, a farmer, butcher, solicitor, bricklayer, shopkeeper, hatter, sergeant and gaol warder. It was, in fact as well as theoretically, what Shaw denied it to have been: a non-sectarian experimental school for persons of modest means. What Shaw did, many years afterwards, was to transfer to this place the ‘shame and wounded snobbery’ arising from his Catholic-infested home at Hatch Street.

When Sonny asked to be taken away from school, George Carr Shaw, relishing perhaps the defeat of Lee’s programme, supported him. Sonny left the Central Model on 11 September 1869 and was transferred to the last of his boy prisons. The Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School was a large building with broad staircases and stately rooms on the corner of Aungier and Whitefriars Streets, sponsored by the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. Sonny remained here almost two years and became joint head boy. But his repugnance for all schools was implacable.

*

Sonny made one friend at the Dublin Commercial School. Matthew Edward McNulty, later to become a novelist, bank manager and playwright, was ‘a corpulent youth with curly black hair’. His first sight of Sonny, at the age of thirteen, was of ‘a tallish, slender youngster with straw-colored hair, light greyish-blue eyes, a skin like that of a baby and lips like those of a beautiful girl. There was a faint smile over his face as he listened to his companions and looked around the strange class room... We were, in fact, friends at first glance.’

McNulty was the only person with whom Sonny could share his dreams and ideas. When apart they entered into a tremendous correspondence, full of drawings and dramas.

Sonny dreamed of being a great man, probably a great artist like Michelangelo. He borrowed Duchesne’s outlines of the Old Masters, bought the Bohn translation of Vasari, prowled for hours through Dublin’s deserted National Gallery dragging McNulty with him – two schoolboys, one short and dark, the other tall and fair, going from picture to picture, full of argument, until they knew every work there. They also enrolled together for late afternoon courses at the Royal Dublin Society’s School of Art and passed examinations in perspective, practical geometry and freehand drawing. But Sonny was not satisfied and, taking McNulty back to his room in Hatch Street, he announced a bolder plan. ‘I was to be his naked model,’ McNulty remembered, ‘and, in return, he was to be mine... but I was adamant and Shaw’s long-cherished dream of an inexpensive model was rudely shattered. I was very sorry for him at the time but I would have been more sorry for myself if I had had another attack of bronchitis.’

Sonny eventually renounced the artist’s life because ‘I could not draw’. He had decided instead, he told McNulty, to found a new religion.

At an early age Sonny had tried to build a fanciful world in which to forget the miseries of the real one – ‘a sort of pale blue satin place,’ as Broadbent describes it at the end of John Bull’s Other Island. This dream of heaven presented itself as a small square apartment in which he was sitting with his ankles dangling, poorly dressed and filled with fears because

‘I knew that I should presently be brought up for judgment by the recording angel before some awful person in the next room; and I had good private reasons for anticipating that my career would not be found up to the mark... on the only occasion on which I ever dreamt myself in heaven, I was glad when I woke. I also dreamt once that I was in hell; but I remember nothing about that except that two of my uncles were there and that it did not hurt. In my waking hours I thought of heaven as a part of the sky where people were dressed in white, had golden harps, did not eat or drink or learn lessons, and were wholly preoccupied in being intensely good.’

When very young he had used the Lord’s Prayer as a spell against thunderstorms. But one evening on Torca Hill ‘I suddenly asked myself why I went on repeating my prayer every night when, as I put it, I did not believe in it. Being thus brought to book by my intellectual conscience
I felt obliged in common honesty to refrain from superstitious practices.’ By the third night, he tells us, his discomfiture vanished ‘as completely as if I had been born a heathen... this sacrifice of the grace of God, as I had been taught it, to intellectual integrity synchronized with the dawning of moral passion in me which I have described in the first act of Man and Superman.’

What Sonny had done was to transfer his religious energy from day-dreaming to his actual life. He had come to recognize that, as an unlovable boy, he could expect nothing from other people. His ‘moral passion’ was a means of producing, independently of other people, the self-respect he lacked. Though he might not make himself into the sort of person his mother loved, he could become the sort of person she was: insensible to public opinion and a Bohemian without Bohemian vices. Before this ‘I was such a ridiculously sensitive child,’ he wrote, ‘that almost any sort of rebuff that did not enrage me hurt my feelings and made me cry’. This new-found Stoicism reached its heretical peak in 1875 with a letter he wrote to Public Opinion attacking the Moody and Sankey revivalist meetings then being celebrated in Dublin. He ridiculed the vanity of their ‘awakenings’ which created ‘highly objectionable members of society’, and announced that he had given up religion.

He was by this time a committed Shelleyan. Shelley, who was to make Shaw into a momentary anarchist and lifetime vegetarian, cleared away the refuse of supernatural religions and prepared him for the planting of Creative Evolution. Sonny was a voluminous reader. Before he was ten he was saturated in Shakespeare and the Bible. But he had no access to a library and no money with which to buy books. Nobody at Hatch Street read. Lee, who made a habit of falling asleep at night over Tyndall on Sound, had been perplexed at hearing that Carlyle was an author and not Dublin’s Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Carlisle, and was puzzled by his failure to find, even in the large-print edition of Shakespeare, The School for Scandal. But his pupils often presented him with books – anything from Byron’s works to Lord Derby’s translation of Homer’s Iliad – and to these were added pirated editions of novels brought back from America by Walter Gurly.

Sonny read all of these. He relished The Arabian Nights, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Ancient Mariner, John Gilpin, and fled from his own life into the adventures of Scott and Dumas. ‘The falsifications of romance are absolutely necessary to enable people to bear or even to apprehend the terrors of life. Only the very strongest characters can look the facts of life in the face.’ But he was determined to become one of this band of ‘strongest characters’ and started choosing his books accordingly. ‘At twelve or thereabouts,’ he remembered, ‘I began to disapprove of highwaymen
on moral grounds and to read Macaulay, George Eliot, Shakespeare, Dickens and so on in the ordinary sophisticated attitude.’ He went through John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, studied Lewes’s Life of Goethe and every translation of Faust he could lay his hands on. ‘No child should be shielded from mischief and danger, either physical or moral, in the library or out of it. Such protection leaves them incapable of resistance when they are exposed, as they finally must be, to all the mischief and danger of the world.’

Shaw’s ingenious form of self-protection is best seen in his use of Dickens and Shakespeare. Beginning as a Dickensian disciple, he went on to convert Dickens, as the unconscious prophet of revolution, into an early attempt by the Life Force to produce an authentic Shavian. This sympathetic feeling sprang from the comparison he made between their early unhappiness, and the theatrical methods by which they later superimposed success upon unhappiness. Shaw wrote of his time at the Central Model School as being equivalent to ‘what the blacking warehouse was to Dickens’; and his description of Dickens’s outward life as ‘a feat of acting from beginning to end’ is a variation of his self-portrait: ‘the real Shaw is the actor, the imaginary Shaw the real one.’ By converting his schooldays into a Dickensian episode he gave them a sense of drama and a context in which they could be treated with humorous detachment. This was the power of comedy.

For a time he replaced his own life with the fictions of Dickens and Shakespeare. He knew some of Shakespeare’s plays by heart. ‘Hamlet and Falstaff were more alive to me than any living politician or even any relative.’ In the reading of Shakespeare there was all life except the actual presence of the body from which, as a vehicle of emotion, Sonny had become alienated. In separating the word-music from the meaning he was to become, like Ulysses, tied to the mast and listening to the sirens. For Shaw’s prejudice was optimism. To expose yourself to feel what wretches feel could lead to the ‘barren pessimism’ that Shakespeare himself might survive, but Shaw could not. Shakespeare’s celebration of the splendours and miseries of sexual love paralysed Shaw who described it as ‘folly gone mad erotically’, and used all his wit and critical intelligence to reduce it to ‘platitudinous fudge’. He could allow himself to respond to the passionate language only by insisting that it swept literature ‘to a plane on which sense is drowned in sound’. So Sonny listened and was comforted by these sounds that filled the place of his captivity.