Authors: Michael Holroyd
Early in 1873 Lee fulfilled one of his major ambitions by conducting
the Dublin Musical Festival. ‘The crowds of persons who besieged each portion of the hall soon filled to its utmost capacity, every particle of available space obtainable... the large doors leading into the building at the end of the Hall had to be thrown open and numbers were content to obtain standing room in the outer galleries,’ reported the
Irish Times.
After congratulating Lee on his splendid results, the reviewer predicted that with patience he would surely ‘reap the rewards his energies and abilities deserve’.
Eager for these rewards, Lee prominently advertised two benefit concerts of ‘Amateur Italian Opera’ for himself and the leader of his orchestra, the violinist R. M. Levey, in late March or early April. But Robert Prescott Stewart was already at work; with his encouragement the debenture holders availed themselves of their right to one free ticket and crowded the theatre. On 5 April, Lee and Levey published a sarcastic announcement in the
Irish Times
in which they begged ‘to return their grateful thanks (?) to the many debenture holders who honoured their
BENEFIT
... by making use of their
FREE
admissions’.
The deciding battle was fought over the 1873 Exhibition the following month. In his opening concert, Lee, having assembled a combined chorus and orchestra of over five hundred, gave a performance of Mendelssohn’s
Athalie.
Three thousand or more people attended the Concert Hall and the
Irish Times
reported that ‘the five hundred voices blended most harmoniously’. Stewart was in the audience and next day in the
Daily Express
he published a scathing criticism of the performance, anonymously. Although Mr Lee had been ‘heartily applauded’ by his own chorus, Stewart concluded: ‘Indiscriminate praise is worthless, and e’er long, heartily despised, even by those who are the objects of it.’ In private Stewart was more outspoken. On page 50 of his copy of
The Annals of the Theatre Royal, Dublin,
he noted in the margin next to Lee’s name: ‘an impostor, who traded successfully on the vanity of amateur singers: he had a few aliases; now Mr Geo. Lee; again Mr Geo. J. Lee: and also J. Vandeleur Lee; at last he was Vandeleur Lee simply’. In a letter to Joseph Robinson, he admitted: ‘I did in my time one good work in Dublin. I unmasked one arrant impostor and drove him away.’
The details of this ‘unmasking’ are unknown. On 26 May Lee gave his last concert in Dublin. The attendance was disappointing. At the beginning of June, having abruptly cancelled another concert, he left Dublin for ever and his place as conductor of the New Philharmonic was taken by Sir Robert Prescott Stewart.
Lee had gone to London. A few days later, on 17 June, her twenty-first wedding anniversary, Bessie Shaw followed him, taking Agnes on the boat with her, and at Hatch Street ‘all musical activity ceased’.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; thats the essence of inhumanity.
The Devil’s Disciple
‘We did not realize, nor did she, that she was never coming back.’ But there was much that the young George must have realized, and the later Shaw misremembered. The only suggestion that he had known of Lee’s losing battle with Stewart is an acknowledgement in the 1935 Preface to
London Music
that ‘Lee became the enemy of every teacher of singing in Dublin; and they reciprocated heartily’. But he gave as the reason for Lee’s departure from Ireland his having reached the Dublin limit of excellence: ‘Dublin in those days seemed a hopeless place for an artist; for no success counted except a London success.’
In the Shavian version, therefore, ‘Lee did not depart suddenly from Dublin... there was nothing whatever sudden or unexpected about it.’ George obviously knew that his mother had left within a fortnight of Lee but in answer to one of his biographers Shaw wrote: ‘As to your question whether Lee’s move to London and my mother’s were simultaneous, they could not have been. Lee had to make his position in London before he could provide the musical setting for my mother and sister. But the break-up of the family was an economic necessity anyhow, because without Lee we could not afford to keep up the house.’ It was towards this ‘economic necessity’ Shaw pointed his biographers.
‘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.