Mrs. Shaw's Profession

One green, grey weekend in 1896, George Bernard Shaw (see above) went down to Stratford St. Andrew in Suffolk to visit his good Fabian friends, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The other guest was an idealistic Irish girl named Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend: she came from County Cork; her father was a millionaire. After the holiday Shaw wrote his beloved correspondent, Actress Ellen Terry: "I am going to refresh my heart by falling in love with her. I love falling in love. . . ."

Getting Married. Soon he wrote again to Ellen Terry: "She doesn't really love me. The truth is, she is a clever woman. . . ." For a year Charlotte devoted herself to part-time secretarial work for Shaw, but, as Shaw wrote Ellen Terry: "The idea of tying herself up again by a marriage . . . before she has exploited her freedom and money power to the utmost seems to her . . . unbearably foolish."

In 1898 Shaw got necrosis of the bone, grunted about on crutches. Charlotte had a house in Surrey, proposed taking him there. Shaw's mother raised no objection; he was shocked. They argued until Shaw, timing it expertly, cried: "Go out and get a ring and license." Within a week they were married.

The Irrational Knot. While Vegetarian Shaw ate Brussels sprouts and raw carrots and harangued against those who eat "the dead carcasses of animals," Mrs. Shaw ate juicy steaks and commented on his "rabbit food." He liked Wagner; she liked Bach. He was no churchman; she and one of her close friends, Lady Astor, became Christian Scientists.

As a porpoise loves the prow of a ship, Shaw splashed happily in the public gaze. But Mrs. Shaw once told a reporter: "I am never interviewed, never photographed, and one of my special desires is that no newspaper should ever mention my name." She was the one woman in Britain, someone said, who put all her brains into remaining unknown. According to her own estimate, she spent "a third of my time looking after my husband. . . ."

Shaw was always digging slyly at his wife's wealth. One time he said: "I've no idea what her income is, but judging from the manner in which she lives, it is fairly considerable." In season, once a week, he brought her a bunch of her favorite lilies of the valley. Asked in 1931 to contribute to a symposium on marriage, Shaw replied: "No man dare tell the truth about marriage while his wife lives. Unless, that is, he hates her, like Strindberg, and I don't."

Love Among the Artists. Before publication, Mrs. Shaw was consulted on all her husband's works; she herself published a volume of his selected writing. The plays of Eugene Brieux she translated into English (Maternity, Woman on her Own, Damaged Goods); she fought long and successfully to have the unconventional plays staged in Britain.

The Shaws traveled. Around the world she dodged reporters, lost herself in crowds, collected clippings about her husband. Afterwards she told a reporter: "When I get really old I should like to live in New Zealand. It's a perfect country where the people have no art at all and therefore no artistic inhibitions."

Mrs. Shaw beamed through nose glasses, brushed her hair straight back, dressed in a modified Edwardian style, wore and advocated short skirts. An artist who recently sketched Shaw remembers her walking so softly that she "dreamed into the room, a small woman, all shades of grey, not beautiful but both composed and alive."

Heartbreak House. Last week, with George Bernard Shaw sitting by her bedside at their home in Whitehall Court, London, death came to Charlotte Shaw. Three days later she was cremated at Golder's Green crematorium, with Shaw, his secretary and Lady Astor the only attendants. At the funeral of Mrs. H. G. Wells, 16 years before, Shaw had told Wells to enter the furnace room. "It's beautiful," he said. "I saw my mother burnt there. You'll be glad if you go." Wells went and returned to say: "It was indeed very beautiful."

Said the London Times in its epitaph: ". . . Fellow guests in a Stratford hotel, watching with covert awe the two breakfasting together, all seem to have derived the same impression. It was the professional wit who listened and laughed. It was his wife who made the jokes. This was a true reflection of their life together. Mr. Shaw valued her criticism, knowing it sprang from a genuine love for the arts and a shrewd native wit. She, for her part, was a devoted Shavian. . . . She shirked none of her fancies from youth to old age, and she faced the last of them with anticipation rather than with dread."

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