THE PLEASURE SEEKERS

George Bernard Shaw's stormy affair with the children's author Edith Nesbit is described in the first of two extracts from A Woman of Passion, The Life of E. Nesbit 1858-1924 by Julia Briggs REMEMBERED today for classic chil- dren's books such as The Railway Children and The Treasure Seekers, Edith Nesbit was better known in her early life for her poems, short stories and romantic novels. Her philandering husband Hubert Bland fathered one child by his mother's compan- ion, two by Edith and two by Edith's best friend Alice Hoatson, who moved in with the Blands as their housekeeper. Edith found consolation with a series of lovers, the first of whom came to her through a shared interest in socialism and the work of the Fabian Society.

The Society is getting rather large now and includes some very nice people, of whom Mr Stapelton is the nicest and a certain G. B. Shaw the most interesting. G.B.S. has a fund of dry Irish humour that is simply irresistible. He is a clever writer and speaker — is the grossest flatterer (of men, women and chil- dren impartially) I ever met, is horribly untrustworthy as he repeats everything he hears, and does not always stick to the truth, and is very plain like a long corpse with dead white face — sandy sleek hair, and a loathsome small straggly beard, and yet is one of the most fascinating men I have met. Everyone rather affects to despise him 'Oh it's only Shaw.' That sort of thing you know, but everyone admires him all the same. Miss Hoatson pretends to hate him, but my own impression is that she is over head and ears in love with him. The tone of Edith's letter to Ada Breakell is not entirely transparent or self-deceiving, even though it somewhat anticipates the heroine's diary entry in Edith's novel The Incomplete Amorist: Betty, having just met and fallen in love with the Amorist, records: 'I do not like him particularly. He is rather old, and not really good-looking.' Nor does the letter to Ada sound quite as naïve as its precise fictional equivalent: Daphne (of Daphne in Fitzroy Street) writes to her friend about the hero, a thinly disguised Shaw.

I think he ought to have a lesson. All the girls admire him frightfully, and he's not really good looking at all, only very black hair with a hooked nose and a white face and eyes like smoked topazes — or do I mean cairngorms: I wish he would fall in love with me. I'd soon put him in his place. It would be a real pleasure to do it. But he's not likely to. I believe he hates me, really. A thread of self-deception and a cage of conflicting emotions were to characterise Edith's relationship with Shaw from the outset. Her comment on her friend Alice Hoatson's response to him may reflect a tendency to identify her own feelings with Alice's, or it may include an element of wishful thinking, for Alice, at this moment, was beginning to be 'head over ears in love', not so much with G.B.S. as with Hubert Bland.

About a year earlier, the Fabian Minute Book recorded beside the entry for the meeting of 16 May 1884 a special visitor: written sideways in mauve ink in Shaw's own spidery handwriting is the comment, `This meeting was made memorable by the first appearance of Bernard Shaw.'

Shaw threw himself into the Fabian Society wholeheartedly and was respons- ible for bringing into it a clerk from the Colonial Office called Sidney Webb, an earnest, undistinguished-looking little man with a Louis-Napoleon moustache and beard. Edith wrote to Ada that he had a `face like a fat billy goat and a profusion of wild spots', but she admitted that he was `no fool': in fact Webb possessed an invigorating grasp of the importance of statistics, as well as the need for first-hand knowledge and observation rather than impassioned blather. With Webb came another Colonial Office clerk, the darkly handsome, formidably intelligent Sydney Olivier. Speaking of how hard-up and careless of convention the Fabians had been in those early days, Shaw recalled an evening spent with the Blands at Elswick Road, when Olivier arrived in an old velveteen smoking-jacket of a chocolate brown. Meeting them in the tiny hall, Edith had noticed that the sleeve of Oli- vier's jacket was hanging on by a thread, so she promptly stitched it back on for him.

Shaw's acquaintance with the Blands dated from the summer of 1884, when he first started to attend Fabian meetings regularly. No doubt Hubert kept a paternal eye on his promising new convert. He was elected to membership on 5 September, while Edith's friend Alice Hoatson was elected at the following meeting. By Christmas that year, Shaw had joined Charlotte Wilson, Bland, Edward Pease and Frederick Keddell on the executive committee. In 1885 Shaw began to keep a diary in shorthand, and that year turned out to be an annus mirabilis for him, in more ways than one. In April his father died, leaving him a small life insurance policy. He had been living in great poverty, but now he went to Jaeger's and bought himself some new clothes. Although he looked, in his beige all-wool suiting, like 'a forked radish in a worsted bifurcated stocking', it was from this moment that he dated his extraordinary success with women: 'As soon as I could afford to dress presentably, I became accustomed to women falling in love with me. I did not pursue women: I was pursued by them.'

So far Shaw had treated Mrs Bland much as he treated his other friends, enjoying her company, walking and talking with her as the opportunity arose, but in June 1886, according to the laconic diary entries, the pattern of their relationship changed.

The bare comings and goings of Edith's skirmish with Shaw are recorded in his diary. Since the few surviving letters are carefully guarded in tone, any evidence of their feelings is embedded in their writing: two, at least, of Edith's poems were written to Shaw, and nearly 25 years later, she turned the experience into a romantic novel, Daphne in Fitzroy Street. Shaw also wrote about their relationship, but in its immediate aftermath — a difference which may reflect the time it took each of them to get over it. Shaw, who was then working as a novelist and had not yet begun his career as a playwright, wrote two chapters of a novel about the Blands, and the ambiva- lent feelings that Edith aroused in him; and even within those two chapters, the view- point visibly shifts. He then laid the manu- script aside and totally forgot about it, turning from his struggles with it to write the revealingly titled short story 'Don Giovanni Explains'.

The relevant entries in Shaw's diary began on Saturday, 26 June 1886:

Mrs Bland at Museum. I did some German and read a little P[olitical] E[conomy] for my lecture; but on the whole the day was devoted to Mrs Bland. We dined together, had tea together and I went out to Lee with her, and played and sang there until Bland came from his volunteer work. A memorable evening!

A note beneath reckons up the cost of all this — Shaw was embarrassingly poor at the time: Dinner (Mrs Bland and I) 21- Tea (ditto) 1/2 Cab from Lincoln's Inn to Cannon St., 2/- Train to Lee 4d Extra fares 1st class 1/3 Train New Cross to London Bridge 3d Bus Man- sion House to Tottenham Court Rd. 3d.

What Shaw had meant by the phrase 'a memorable evening' is enlarged upon in a 4 Edith's passion for Shaw was intense. At one time she proposed leaving Hubert in order to run away with him small memorandum book in which he jotted down some notes for the year 1885. These included one on 'E. B.':

One of the women with whom the Fabian Society brought me into contact. On the 26th June 1886 I discovered that she had become passionately attached to me. As she was a married woman with children and her hus- band my friend and colleague, she had to live down her fancy. We remained very good friends,

The version characteristically plays down Shaw's own involvement, evident from his expenditure upon her, though ironically he had to borrow the money from Edith in order to spend it on her. On Monday 28, the diary records under ex- penses: 'Postal Orders sent to Mrs Bland for florin borrowed from her on Saturday (2/1).'

On Tuesday, 30 June, the Blands and Shaw met for tea at Annie Besant's house and Shaw later had supper with Hubert at a favourite vegetarian restaurant, the Wheatsheaf. He wrote to Edith next day. A week later (8 July) he walked back from the meeting with her, Annie Besant and a man called Tom Shore; he and Edith left the other two at Aldgate and took a cab to Ludgate Hill and a train from there to Blackheath Hill, then walked the rest of the way to Lee, 'near her house' (the Blands had been living at Cambridge Road, Lee, since the spring). Afterwards Shaw walked back to Bloomsbury. It looks as if they must have parted some time after one in the morning, for Shaw notes that he 'walked home arriving at 3.30 am after a walk of 2 hours'. Perhaps it was one of the three evenings a week that Bland still spent at his mother's. So far the impression is that Shaw was as responsive as Edith was encouraging. If Edith went to the Museum hoping to find him, he spent what little cash he had on taking her to lunch or tea, on a cab or a first class railway carriage. He had written to her, stayed out with her late at night and let himself in for a long walk home.

During July and August Shaw saw a great deal of Edith and he began to take her back with him to the lodgings he shared with his mother at Osnaburgh Street. The first occasion that he did so was on 22 July, when she had come to the Museum to meet Shaw's friend and her prospective editor, Robert Ellice Mack. Afterwards they walked back to Shaw's rooms together. More than 20 years later, this was how she recalled the occasion:

lEdith],' he said again, in that voice that might well have been the life's music of some one else, '[Edith], kiss me —' She could not speak; she could hardly breathe. His eyes still held hers. His face did not move, and yet their faces were drawing nearer together.

'Kiss me,' he said again. And he only needed to move his head forward a very, very little to take the lips she did not refuse. She drew back from that kiss and hid her eyes in his neck. His arms went round her shoulders. Almost at once he put her back into the embrace of the chair very gently, very definitely. Her eyes were closed.'

Memory and fiction both distort, and this passage has been moulded by both; but there is no reason to suppose that, in the telling, the tale was changed beyond all recognition.

On the morning after he first took Edith back to Osnaburgh Street, she called on him there so early that he and his mother were still having breakfast; 'she lost her head a little, and instead of calling on him in the regular way . . . she sent up to say that Mrs Brown wanted to see him. He thought it was a charwoman and could not make out what reason she found for the ruse.' On discovering his mistake, he arranged to meet her at Portland Road (now Great Portland Street) Station and they walked in Regent's Park for an hour. Ten days later, on 3 August, she came to the Museum again; Shaw had tea with her, and afterwards they returned to Osna- burgh Street, where they went upstairs to meet his mother. Then they took a bus to Charing Cross and a train into the country, to Chislehurst and walked all the way back to Lee together. The next day she did not reach the Museum until five, when they went for another walk in Regent's Park. Later in the month, on the 17th and 18th, the diary records 'Mrs Bland at the Museum', and on the latter, she went back to Shaw's rooms for tea. He walked with her to Cannon Street Station, and as the train was not yet due in, they walked down Dowgate Hill and sat for a few moments on the stalls beside the river. The diary comments laconically, 'pretty scene'. In all these walks, short or long, visits to Shaw's rooms for tea, sudden joyous glimpses of the river, there seem to be the elements of every love affair: the need to be together, to talk, to touch. For these two months, Shaw was clearly taking time from his writing to be with her, and enjoying her company — `she was very attractive. I was very fond of her and paid her all the attention I could.'

By September, when Edith had come to expect him to invite her back to his rooms, the characteristic second stage had set in, and he started to find excuses to put her off. If she now showed herself to be tiresome and demanding, he had given her good reason to think that he wanted her company and that she mattered to him. The tone of the diary entries begins to change. Though Shaw was still prepared to put himself out for her (on 10 September, he arrived late at Lee, missed the last train, and had to walk all the way back to town), a note of resentment has crept in: September 15: Finished review. Worked slowly and with difficulty. Mrs Bland came to the Museum in the afteroon and would not be denied coming here to tea. Drove her to London Bridge and walked back. . . . Cab to London Bridge 2/6.

Edith continued to haunt the Reading Room — she was there on the 3rd and 6th September, and again on the 13th and 15th, and three days after this, Shaw `began to compose a song to Mrs Bland's words'. Early in October, on a wet Thurs- day morning, he went for a long walk with Hubert, going westward from Lee to Bex- ley and Foots Cray, but the entry does not say whether they discussed matters more personal than Fabian politics. On the 18th, Edith wrote to ask Shaw whether he would review her forthcoming book of poems, Lays and Legends, for To-Day, the social- ist journal which had been serialising his novels. Through an act of Shavian patron- age, this was now edited by the team of `Fabian Bland', though in practice mainly by Hubert. 'Do you feel inclined to review my book of verses for To-Day? I want it reviewed of course — but equally can't do it myself as I mustn't do it favourably and won't do it otherwise.'

Shaw was now in full retreat. A week later, on 25 October, he and Edith spent a miserable evening together, an evening on which he deliberately avoided the privacy that he had previously sought out with her. As always when her company grated on him, he was particularly busy: Wrote a batch of reviews. Mrs Bland at Museum. She lunched at Wheatsheaf with me and Joynes. She asked me to meet her at Kings Cross in the evening and go for a walk. It rained. She insisted on going to Enfield. I insisted on going third class for the sake of company. There was no room in that class at Kings Cross, so we went second to Finsbury Park where we changed carriages. When we got to Enfield it was very wet. I got her some hot whisky to prevent her catching cold. We returned first class. Got out with her at Kings Cross Underground and saw her to Penton- ville where. she was staying. Got home just after one in the morning.

Although he continued to see Edith at the Museum and to talk to her, he was now obviously determined to limit the demands she made on him, and when she overstep- ped the bounds the outcome could only be a row. In March 1887, Shaw took rooms in Fitzroy Square, for the house at Osna- burgh Street was going to be pulled down. On 10 May,

Mrs Bland came to the Museum. We had tea at the Austrian Café. She insisted on coming to Fitzroy Square. My Mother was out, and she went away after the unpleasant scene caused by my telling her I wished her to go, as I was afraid that a visit to me alone would compromise her.

It says something for Shaw's equanimity that two days later he took Edith and her companion Alice Hoatson to the Wheat- sheaf for lunch, and that he and Edith then went on to an art gallery to look at a Millais painting.

Edith's passion for Shaw was intense. At one time she proposed leaving Hubert in order to run away with him, as he privately boasted to Doris Langley Moore [Nesbit's first biographer]; the obsession, fictionally portrayed in Daphne, affects her body as strongly as it does her inner state:

Anxiety, thwarted longing, the persistent consciousness of unspeakable disaster, in- duced in the girl continued physical nausea. She was driven to the craftiest expedients to hide from her friends how little she could eat, and how seldom. But she did hide it, hiding with it all the rest.

This degree of physical response seems more characteristic of a mature woman caught up in any unhappy love affair, than of a young girl falling in love for the first time, the- situation of the novel's heroine. There is, of course, no way of deciding how reliable Daphne is as an account of her relationship with Shaw nor how intimate they had been; yet it was after this that she began to have consummated love affairs with younger men. Her experience with Shaw seems to have caused her to abandon her inhibitions about being unfaithful and these inhibitions were effectively far stronger at that time for women.

Both of them possessed the enviable knack of staying on good terms with their old flames. Shaw was to remain a frequent visitor of the Blands for the next ten years or so, and even though they no longer met socially after his marriage (his wife, he explained, would have regarded Edith as 'a piece of his past'), he later helped her out financially from time to time. Hubert told those closest to him that if ever they needed help, they should turn to Shaw, and indeed it was Shaw who paid for his son John Bland to go to Cambridge, after Hubert's death. Whatever had taken place between G. B. S. and Edith did not pre- vent him from becoming the oldest and most dependable of their friends.

A Woman of Passion. The Life of E. Nesbit 1858-1924 by Julia Briggs (Century Hutchinson, f14.95) is published on 22 October. ©1987 Julia Briggs.