Patchwork Shaw
Thirty Years with G. B. S. By Blanche Patch. (Gollancz. Its. 6d.) Miss PATCH became Bernard Shaw's secretary in 1920, and remained in his service until his death thirty years later. One of a large family, to whose unimportant history she devotes too many pages, she emerged from a Sussex rectory to become, successively, a Norland nurse, a handloom weaver, a dispenser and, finally, a secretary. She tells her readers that she takes no interest in politics, but why she should feel so satisfied with herself on this account is hard to understand. Politics vitally affect everybody, and to disclaim interest in them is nearly tantamount to disclaiming interest in existence. Shaw was sixty-four in 1920, and he had written the majority of his works, and was world-renowned, but he might have been nobody in particular, so far as Miss Patch was concerned, and far less interesting to her thah the doctor in Radnorshire for whom she had dispensed pills and potions. " I can honestly say," she states almost boastfully, " that when I started working for him I knew nothing of his writings or the literary and theatre world of which he was such an outstanding figure." She might have added with equal honesty that she was little better informed at the end of her thirty years' service than she had been at the beginning. The Scarlet Pimpernel probably pleased her more than Arms and the Man ; and the conversation of venerable women in her Kensington hotel was congenial to her in a way that Shaw's never was. One of the guests in that hotel was the late John Haigh, who had the habit of dissolving bodies in baths of acid, and once, as Miss Patch informs us, sought her aid in the solution of a crossword. puzzle. She was not, one might pardonably have imagined, likely to suit Shaw, who was deeply interested in, politics, but, in fact, she suited him admirably and was exceedingly of cieht at her exacting job. Shaw himself asserted that it was her ignorance of his world and her disinterest in his work which made her so useful to him. Their relations were as impersonal as those of an adding machine to• a dictaphone. This book makes abundantly plain the extraordinary fact that Miss Patch lived in close and continuous contact with a man of genius without ever achieving the slightest understanding of, or interest in, him or his work ; and its readers, as they perceive how eager she was to side with dullards against him, must sometimes feel that she disliked him: a failure in regard which will surely baffle and astonish his friends ? She harps on his extravagances of speech, betraying her total lack of any sense of humour on page after page, as if they were defects of character when they were only habits of comic utterance. How different he was from that blameless man, the Rector of Winchelsea, how unlike the doctor at PresteignI She records with delight adverse criticism of him by aged women in her hotel who found him inferior to the local curates. The stupidest complaint by such people won applause from Miss Patch, who " was all with " a venerable dame who had damned him for daring to discourse on the care of children when he himself had none. This aged woman shared the common delusion that the subject can use- fully be discussed only by parents: a delusion which is daily dispelled in the courts of law. But why should Miss Patch deny this right to Shaw when she claims it for herself ? He, too, had once been a child, and he must have learnt something from his experience. She is so certain of her superiority to him in this respect that she claims, on leaving school at the age of sixteen or thereabouts, to have been not only as " well educated as many of the present-day young women," which may well be true, for her education was not inter- rupted or disturbed by a world war, but to have been fully aware " how futile it was for Shaw or anyone else to generalise on the subject of children." Is no one ever to make a general remark because it cannot be exact ?
Shaw was already old when Miss Patch joined him, and her book, therefore, deals only with his declining years, although it was during these years that he wrote Saint Joan, Heartbreak House and Back to Methuselah. She seems never to have met or even to have heard of Granville-Barker, whose name nowhere appears in her pages. All her references to Shaw's most fertile period, therefore, are derived, and some of them are inaccurate. She must have misunderstood him when, she alleges, he told her that Mrs. Webb had *tied "to marry off Charlotte "—Mrs. Shaw—to Graham Wallas, and that this effort " had broken the friendship between Wallas and himself." Wallas was one of the witnesses at the wedding! if their friendship was ever impaired, it may have been during the split in the Fabian Society over the South African War when Wallas and Massingham were pro-Boers, but Webb and Shaw were not. Miss Patch "thinks" that the Webbs were Unitarians, but Sidney had no religious belief, nor was he interested in religion. Beatrice was accustomed to pray, but she habitually addressed the Almighty as if He were a Higher Grade Civil Servant whom she sought to influence in favour of the Minority Report on the Poor Law. The extent to which Miss Patch is capable of misunderstanding Shaw is apparent in her reference to his anger when he discovered that a postman to whom he had entrusted his letters had understamped them. He was not mean, she says unnecessarily, for there was no meanness in his nature, but "he was finicky." Has it never occurred to her that he was angry because his correspondents had to pay excess postage on his letters ? She charges him several times with " inclining to self-pity," a vice 'to which he, least of all men, was addicted, because, for example, he complained in his extreme old age that he could no longer write ten words without making a blunder! Miss Patch ought not to associate so assiduously with
idle women in Kensington hotels. ST. JOHN ERV1NE.
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