Solving the Paradoxes of Shaw

Michael Holroyd grimaces when reminded that his biography of George Bernard Shaw has been 15 years in the making and he swears he will never write another life story.

“A life of Shaw, you might say, is a life sentence,” quipped Michael Holroyd. “I don’t think I could write about another bearded gentleman, or a bearded lady for that matter.”

Three Volumes of Shaw

Of course, he’s not quite done with Shaw. The first volume, “The Search for Love” (Random House: $24.95) was published this month and the second, “The Pursuit of Power,” is written for publication next fall. But of the third volume, “The Lure of Fantasy,” well, Holroyd said somewhat ruefully, “I’ve written the title.”

The Shaw estate invited Holroyd, who won international acclaim for his biographies of biographer-critic Lytton Strachey in 1968 and painter Augustus John in 1974, to write the authorized story of Shaw’s life. Holroyd accepted, “ignorant of the immense complexity and scope of the work involved.”

When he first set out to write his opus, a photograph was taken of him for the jacket flap, showing a youthful, dark-haired, relatively wrinkle-free man. Today, his hair is gray and his face lined. Holroyd believes that it is his publisher’s plan to put photographs of him on the jacket flap of each volume and one of Shaw during the period of time covered by each book.

“In this way you will be able to see how I am rapidly overtaking him so that at the end I will look much older than he did in his mid-90s,” Holroyd said, laughing lightly, seeming not the least bit bothered by the juxtaposition.

Not a Shavian

Holroyd found the initial task of re-creating Shaw’s life “terrifying” because he was not a Shavian. In fact, it is his wife, novelist Margaret Drabble, whose family was brought up on Shaw. It is she who considered “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism” a sort of bible and who acted in Shaw’s plays when she was younger.

Understanding Shaw’s paradox and wit was “like breaking a code” and Holroyd said it took two years until he realized how Shaw wrapped ideas in jokes. Holroyd then determined that Shaw’s paradoxes are the flash of synthesis between the very different qualities he believed he inherited from each of his parents. Holroyd maintains that these characteristics were so “incompatible that they drove them to live in different countries and Shaw believed he had to reconcile them in himself. That was the quest or the pilgrimage in his life.

“He inherited from his father something that was easy, perhaps rather cynical, unambitious, amiable and Irish in the sense of everything turned into a rather derisive but amiable joke,” Holroyd observed. “From his mother he inherited qualities of stoicism.”

Shaw’s father was an alcoholic, and Holroyd suggests that Shaw, though not a drinker, had the predilection for addiction. He just turned into his addiction to work.

Tedious Process

Once he deciphered the language, Holroyd found he could reassemble Shaw’s life, breaking down the old “superman” of a previous era and making Shaw a more ambiguous and modern figure. The process was tedious. There were times when Holroyd would take a sheaf of written pages, tear them in pieces and toss them away.

“They seemed all right, and some of the connections I’d made seemed rather good,” Holroyd remarked. “But I would suddenly realize I had to hold some things back. It was like a chess game. You have a brilliant opening and yet it doesn’t lead to any middle game or end game.”

Structure, therefore, became essential and Holroyd realized that in order to organize the material he had to step out of chronological boundaries to trace themes, namely Shaw’s search for the love he never got from his mother, which became the theme of the first volume of the biography. Using that initial lack of love as a starting point (and Shaw’s suspicion that he may have been illegitimate), Holroyd then examined how Shaw coped with that rejection.

“I found difficulty in that Shaw was not overly emotional,” Holroyd said. “He was witty. He had a marvelous style of authority and assertion, but I couldn’t find a human relation with him for a long time.”

While others may think Shaw’s life was a flight from love, Holroyd does not find it so. Instead, Shaw’s was a quest to find love, which, the author hopes to demonstrate in the third volume, he ultimately does discover in his marriage to Charlotte Payne-Townshend.

In the first volume, spanning the first 41 years of Shaw’s life and ending with his marriage, the playwright engages in several menage a trois relationships, seducing wives, but never disrupting the marriages. Holroyd’s hypothesis is that in this period of Shaw’s life, he was trying to reproduce his own family’s odd connubial arrangement.

Shaw’s mother apparently wasn’t in love with his father. Rather, she favored her engaging singing teacher, George Vandeleur Lee, who moved in with the Shaws until departing for London, when Shaw was 20 years old. His mother and sister, Lucy, quickly followed Lee and Shaw joined them three years later.

Three Personae

Another device Holroyd found critical to breaking the code was to split Shaw into three personae: “Sonny,” “G.B.S.” and “Shaw.” Holroyd said the decision to define these identities came one morning when he was trying to figure out how to organize the different selves.

“G.B.S. is his manufactured name. It’s as if he had in fact orphaned himself from his parents and became the child of his own writings,” Holroyd said. “He used this figure to get over the neglect he suffered.”

Holroyd freely acknowledges that his readers may not accept these distinctions, or may find them too psychoanalytical, but he hopes he has given them enough material to make their own determinations.

Holroyd was born in 1935 and educated at Eton but never attended university. Instead, his subjects have been his professors. It was in writing the Strachey book that he learned how to write biographies and realized that “a literary biography is an offer, or an invitation you give to your subject to write one more book and in collaboration.”

Holroyd’s three biographies look at different cultures that flourished during roughly the same 100-year period in British history. The first, the biography of Strachey covered the Bloomsbury period, an ethos in which personal relationships and an aesthetic sensibility were the formula for the good life. With Augustus John, Holroyd explored instinct, anarchy and the bohemian life as a way to combat the 20th-Century industrial era. The Shaw volumes cover the Fabian period, a time of doing away with private property and an attempt to bring equality of income to all people.

Unsettled Childhood

Holroyd’s interest in biography grew out of an unsettled childhood. His parents met on board a ship in the North Sea, but when they hit dry land, the relationship “went on the rocks.” Holroyd, their only child, was raised by his grandparents in Maidenhead, 30 miles south of London, and saw his parents on holidays.

“My parents often remarried, generously providing me with a new step-parent for the holiday, someone Hungarian or perhaps French,” Holroyd said with a wry smile. “This was extremely nice and exciting. On the one hand, things were too exciting and on the other hand they were too boring because it was impossible for me to invite friends to my grandparents.”

Consequently, Holroyd grew up with a low self-esteem, and like most lonely children, read constantly. He found that stepping out of his world and into other people’s lives through books was more engrossing than living his own.

“It may very well be that I feel some kinship or identity of that aspect of Shaw that was always subverting the public personality and which makes him an ambiguous personality,” Holroyd admitted. “What he suppressed in his life becomes a subtext to his plays. I think that might give some directors new clues as to how to direct Shaw.”

Holroyd did not spend every minute of the past 15 years on this project. He estimated that he spent one-third of his time doing reviews, lecturing, and writing articles as well as appearing on BBC programs.

Marriage to Drabble

His marriage to Drabble in 1982 was his first. “My parents did so much marrying, I’m sure it probably did have an effect,” Holroyd said. “They gave such an example of marriages that didn’t work, it discouraged me.”

He and Drabble do not collaborate, and they maintain separate workplaces 20 minutes apart. But they offer each other “a general support system,” particularly when either of them is having a rough time with a project.

Shaw once said that “When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication.” Holroyd believes that Shaw was speaking of writing biographies of people who are still alive. “When we are alive we need protection, we need prevarication,” Holroyd asserted. “We need sentimentality. The lies that we tell are part of the truth that we live. But when we are dead we can no longer be hurt personally, and by saying that this dead person can still be of use to the living world, you are actually paying that person a compliment.”