Basil Street Blues (44 page)

‘My father’s business was not prospering: it was slowly dying. Then there was my eldest sister Lucy... She seemed to have a future as a prima donna; and this was about the only future that presented itself as an alternative to a relapse into squalid poverty, and the abandonment of the musical activity which had come to be my mother’s whole life.

There was only one solution possible, granting that my mother and father could be quite as happy apart as together, to say the least. Lee was soon able to report a success: all the West End clamoring for lessons at a guinea, and his house in Park Lane a fashionable musical centre. This was clearly the opening for Lucy. It did not take very long for my mother to make up her mind. She sold up Hatch St., after a reconnaissance in London; settled my father and myself in furnished lodgings; and took a
house for herself and her two daughters in Victoria Grove, Fulham Road... a couple of miles from Park Lane.’

As to George Carr Shaw: ‘I should think it was the happiest time of his life.’

When Lee arrived in London he put up in lodgings at Ebury Street where he remained a year. A mile away, at 13 Victoria Grove, Bessie and Agnes were presently joined by Lucy. Though Bessie continued to sing and work for Lee, who was in and out of Victoria Grove very much in the old fashion, it was probably important that they lived apart. According to McNulty, George Carr Shaw initiated court proceedings citing Lee ‘not as a criminal offender against the sacredness of Holy Matrimony but rather as an object of jealousy to the Petitioner’. Their ‘reconnaissance’, as Shaw calls it, lasted nine months during which time they were paying the rent for two separate premises in addition to the rent at Hatch Street which must partly invalidate the argument of ‘economic necessity’. It was not until the beginning of March 1874 that Bessie returned to Dublin to sell up the furniture in Hatch Street, raise what money she could, and move her husband and son into rooms at 61 Harcourt Street. Then for the last time she left Dublin with her two daughters and returned to London. Perhaps because of some out-of-court arrangement with George Carr Shaw who agreed to pay her one pound a week, she did not live at the same address as Lee. In April he was to cut his last connection with Ireland by selling the lease of Torca Cottage to a musical colleague, Julian Marshall, from whom he afterwards rented 13 Park Lane in London.

The departure of his mother and Lee was a tragedy for young George. From the pictures in the National Gallery, the hills and bays of Dalkey and Killiney, the music that filled Hatch Street he had woven ‘a sort of heaven which made the material squalor of my existence as nothing’. Shaw represents this daydream world as having been extinguished when he was ten, but the evidence suggests that, especially in his ambitions to be an artist or musician, they persisted until his mother finally left him at the age of sixteen. Instead of an artist, he was a clerk; he would enjoy no more summers at Torca; and ‘I heard no more music’.

But his mother had not sold the piano. So he bought a technical handbook and taught himself the alphabet of musical notation. He learnt the keyboard from a diagram; then he got out his mother’s vocal score of Don Giovanni and arranged his fingers on the notes of the first chord. This took ten minutes, ‘but when it sounded right at last, it was worth all the trouble it cost’. What he suffered, ‘what everybody in the house suffered, whilst I struggled on... will never be told’. But he acquired what he wanted: ‘the power to take a vocal score and learn its contents as
if I had heard it rehearsed by my mother and her colleagues’. From this practice and his reading of textbooks, he also mastered the technical knowledge he would need to become a music critic in London. It was a wonderful example of the advantages of deprivation.

His desk and cash box at the ‘highly exclusive gentlemanly estate office’ gave him ‘the habit of daily work’. For fifteen months, during which his salary was increased from £18 to £24, he filed and manufactured copies of the firm’s business letters, kept a postage account, bought penny rolls for the staff’s lunch and combined the duties of office with errand boy. In February 1873, after the cashier absconded, George was employed as a substitute. The work gave him no difficulty. ‘I, who never knew how much money I had of my own (except when the figure was zero), proved a model of accuracy as to the money of others.’ His salary doubled to £48. He bought himself a tailed coat, remodelled his sloped and straggled handwriting into an imitation of his predecessor’s compact script and ‘in short, I made good in spite of myself’.

He became accustomed to handling large sums of money, and to collecting weekly rents by tram each Tuesday, tiny sums from slum dwellers in Terenure – an experience he had not forgotten when he came to write Widowers’ Houses. But ‘my heart was not in the thing’. He was never uncivil, never happy. He felt orphaned. Thirty-five years later he poured out his bitterness through the nameless clerk in Misalliance who seeks to avenge his mother’s shame of bearing him out of wedlock:

‘I spend my days from nine to six – nine hours of daylight and fresh air – in a stuffy little den counting another man’s money... I enter and enter, and add and add, and take money and give change, and fill cheques and stamp receipts; and not a penny of that money is my own: not one of those transactions has the smallest interest for me... Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the very worst.’

Uniacke Townshend ‘was saturated with class feeling which I loathed’. The office was overstaffed with gentleman apprentices, mostly university men, who had paid large premiums for the privilege of learning a genteel profession and who were called Mister while George was plain Shaw. It was his involuntary feeling of inferiority among these colleagues that drove him to excel.

Art was the great solvent of bigotries and snobberies. George found he was most popular with the apprentices in his role as maestro di cappella. In his imagination he had become a Lee-like presence, replacing Townshend, and providing the young men there with operatic tuition as value
for their premiums. ‘I recall one occasion,’ he wrote, ‘when an apprentice, perched on the washstand with his face shewing above the screen... sang Ah, che la morte so passionately that he was unconscious of the sudden entry of the senior partner, Charles Uniacke Townshend, who stared stupended at the bleating countenance above the screen, and finally fled upstairs, completely beaten by the situation.’ This represented a victory for George over Townshend whom, McNulty recalled, he disliked ‘chiefly because he put an “H” in his name, flagrant evidence, in Shaw’s opinion, of middle class snobbery’. Townshend was ‘a pillar of the Church, of the Royal Dublin Society, and of everything else pillarable in Dublin’.

In his need for someone to look up to and learn from he had fastened at Harcourt Street on another Superman. Chichester Bell took the place of Lee in George’s life. He was a far more sophisticated man: physician, chemist, amateur boxer and accomplished pianist. Where other boys collected stamps or trailed girls, George lusted after information. With Bell, who was responsible for converting him to Wagner, George studied everything from physics to pathology, universal alphabets and ‘Visible Speech’, and completed his education in Ireland.

He saw almost no one else, for he was intensely shy. ‘I had no love affairs,’ he confessed to Frank Harris. Late in 1877 Shaw came across a letter he had written to Agnes, describing what he was to call ‘The Calypso Infatuation’, and referring to a girl he had met in 1871. He does not seem to have fallen in love with her until the beginning of May 1875 when he was almost nineteen. A retrospective diary note he made under the heading ‘The Lxxx [Love] Episode’, in which he records burning his letter to Agnes two days after finding it, ends with ‘The Catastrophe, or the indiscretion of No. 2’, and is dated at ‘about the beginning of August’. He celebrated this aborted romance with a hymn to stupidity. The ‘indiscretion of No. 2’ may have been her scheme to engage him to a sister after her own marriage to another man, for the poem tells that ‘she succumbed to the cruel old fashion’ and went to live with her husband not far from Torca Cottage. The poem ends with a tribute to the spell she had laid on him.

I thought her of women the rarest

With strange power to seduce and alarm

One beside whose black tresses the fairest

Seemed barren of charm...

Then farewell, oh bewitching Calypso

Thou didst shake my philosophy well

But believe me, the next time I trip so

No poem shall tell.

He felt most when he was rejected, because that was the only love he knew. But he recoiled from searching for happiness in others because their rejection of him carried behind it the annihilating force of his mother’s initial rejection.

Work became his mistress. He kept no other company. McNulty, who was employed by a bank, had been sent to Newry. ‘Shaw wrote to me every day. Otherwise I was absolutely alone.’ The written word was threaded into their friendship. At school some of their favourite reading had been a boys’ paper called Young Men of Great Britain. McNulty recalled that ‘it was meat and drink to us and almost as vital to our existence as the air. We awaited each weekly instalment with feverish impatience.’ Here Shaw sent a dramatic short story, involving piracy and highway robbery, that had as its main character a wicked baritone with a gun. He also wrote, in September 1868, asking a question, to which the answer was: ‘Write to Mr Lacey, theatrical publisher, Strand, London W. C.’ A neighbour remembered him sitting alone ‘absorbed in the construction of a toy theatre’. He had a play (perhaps part of Henry VI) for this theatre about the fifteenth-century Irish rebel Jack Cade, for which he would cut out scenes and characters bought at a shop opposite the Queen’s Theatre. Among his own early works was a gory verse drama, ‘Strawberrinos: or, the Haunted Winebin’, full of extravagant adventures in which our hero Strawberrinos is constantly bested by a Mephistophelean demon.

At the Theatre Royal in Dublin he had been used to seeing pantomimes, farces and melodramas involving villainous disguises and the convolutions of dense intrigue. In 1870 the great touring actor, Barry Sullivan, had arrived. George joined the crowds, emerging from the theatre with ‘all my front buttons down the middle of my back’. Of all the travelling stars, Sullivan seemed to him incomparably the grandest. A man of gigantic personality, he was the last in a dynasty of rhetorical and hyperbolical actors that had begun with Burbage.

‘His stage fights in Richard III and Macbeth appealed irresistibly to a boy spectator like myself: I remember one delightful evening when two inches of Macbeth’s sword, a special fighting sword carried in that scene only, broke off and whizzed over the heads of the cowering pit (there were no stalls then) to bury itself deep in the front of the dress circle after giving those who sat near its trajectory more of a thrill than they had bargained for. Barry Sullivan was a tall powerful man with a cultivated resonant voice: his stage walk was the perfection of grace and dignity; and his lightning swiftness of action, as when in the last scene of Hamlet he shot up the stage and stabbed the king four times before you could wink, all
provided a physical exhibition which attracted audiences quite independently of the play...’

This was not a spectacle to George, but an experience. He could feel his blood quickening during the performance, his mind beating, hurrying. This was vicarious living at its most vigorous, where ‘existence touches you delicately to the very heart, and where mysteriously thrilling people, secretly known to you in dreams of your childhood, enact a life in which terrors are as fascinating as delights; so that ghosts and death, agony and sin, became, like love and victory, phases of an unaccountable ecstasy’. He forgot loneliness in this palace of dreams. When he came to write plays himself, he instinctively went back to the grand manner and heroic stage business he had seen from the pit of the Theatre Royal.

In 1874 George spent his summer holidays at Newry with his friend McNulty. McNulty had developed what he called ‘a morbid condition of nerves’. He was so sensitive to the earth’s rotation that he could not trust himself to lie down on a sofa without falling off. ‘I fancied I could see the sap circulating in plants and trees,’ he wrote. George’s scepticism, though not always comfortable, helped to reduce this tension. On their second day the two of them had their photographs taken and they talked of the inevitability of fame. Every evening they would write something different – ‘a short story, a comedy, a tragedy, a burlesque and so forth,’ McNulty remembered, ‘and the real joy of the event lay in reading and forcefully criticizing each other’s work. This series we called: “The Newry Nights’ Entertainment”.’

The following year McNulty was transferred back to Dublin and the two of them saw a good deal of each other. McNulty would call round at Harcourt Street to stagger through duets on the grand piano. George, he observed, ‘took little or no notice of his father who still spent his evenings poring miserably over his account books’. Otherwise, his glasses low on his nose, his head tilted back, he browsed before a newspaper or smoked his one clay pipe a day, breaking it when he had finished and throwing the fragments in the grate: ‘a lonely, sad little man,’ McNulty concluded.

George had resolved never to allow the diffidence he shared with his father to cripple him. He looked to his father as a warning; otherwise, like Lee, he looked to London.

His opportunity came early in 1876. Agnes, suffering from consumption, had been taken down to Balmoral House, a sanatorium on the Isle of Wight. Though he was now getting £84 a year at Uniacke Townshend, George felt more than ever unsatisfied there. One of his colleagues, an old book-keeper, had confided that he ‘suffered so much from cold feet that his life was miserable,’ Shaw recorded. ‘I, full of the fantastic mischievousness
of youth, told him that if he would keep his feet in ice-cold water every morning when he got up for two or three minutes, he would be completely cured.’ Shortly afterwards the man died. To his horror George was then offered his job. Charles Townshend wanted to install a relative as cashier and boot George upstairs to make room for him. But George refused and had to be moved, with an increased salary, to the position of general clerk. On 29 February 1876 he gave a month’s notice. ‘My reason is, that I object to receive a salary for which I give no adequate value,’ he wrote. ‘Not having enough to do, it follows that the little I have is not well done. When I ceased to act as Cashier I anticipated this, and have since become satisfied that I was right.’