Books: Placid, Proper–and Pheasant

MRS. G.B.S., A PORTRAIT by Janet Dunbar. 303 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

She, at 41, was neither pretty nor witty, though unmistakably a virgin. He, at 42, was both wag and scalawag, who saw to it that his supposedly torrid love life was the talk of literary London. She was rich and a lady, and loathed the limelight. He was a Socialist and no gentleman, and feasted on celebrity. It seemed on all counts an improbable match; yet by Shavian standards it had a certain compelling illogic. As it turned out, the marriage of George Bernard Shaw and Charlotte Frances Payne-Townshend lasted 45 years and was, by any measure, a fairly successful one.

Shaw, who was on the brink of fame as a playwright when they married in 1898, had already forsworn meat and liquor; after their marriage, he claimed, he also gave up sex. He had remained a virgin until he was 29 and even thereafter, said one disenchanted lady, “seemed to have no wish for and even to fear passion.” Charlotte, for her part, had had a series of platonic love affairs, but invariably backed away when her suitors pressed too closely. She was deeply stirred by only three men in her life, and all three were extravagant egotists who demanded affection from women that they could not wholly reciprocate: Axel Munthe, the brilliant, posturing Swedish physician and author (The Story of San Michele), with whom

Charlotte had an unhappy, unconsummated affair in Rome; T. E. Lawrence, to whom she poured out her secrets when she was an old woman; and Shaw.

“Green-Eyed Millionairess.” They met at a Fabian Society gathering, and though Charlotte was well-bred and well-read, it was her wealth that seems to have piqued Shaw’s imagination. G.B.S., who always took pains to keep each of his old “enchantresses” informed of every new conquest, was soon taunting Ellen Terry with his “green-eyed Irish millionairess.” “I think I could prevail on her,” he wrote the actress, “and then I shall have ever so many hundreds a month for nothing. Would you ever in your secret soul forgive me?” Though he was bombarding Charlotte with passionate prose at the time, he described her to his actress friend with clinical objectivity as “a ladylike person at whom nobody would ever look twice. . . . Perfectly placid and proper and pleasant.”

Shaw could be even more malicious to “the terrible Charlotte” herself. In an unsolicited bit of analysis, he once wrote her that she was “the lier-in-wait, the soul hypochondriac, always watching and dragging me into bondage, hating me and longing for me with the absorbing passion of the spider for the fly.” There was neither close intellectual camaraderie nor sexual passion between them. But once they were married, Shaw grew to depend heavily on her protective, intelligent presence. A gifted hostess, Charlotte became as well an acute, sympathetic critic of her husband’s work and even helped suggest to him the themes of several successful plays. In scrapbook and ledger, she kept close tally of Shaw’s growing fame and fortune, and went so far as to answer the love letters he continued to receive from impassioned female admirers.

“Sweep Up Your Missus.” She was never “an appendage, this green-eyed one,” admitted Shaw. She dragged him, coldly protesting, on endless travels to far-off places, where he was invariably miserable. When they had been married a dozen years, G.B.S. had a rip-roaring affair—on paper, at least—with Mrs. Patrick Campbell, making scant attempt to hide his infatuation from Charlotte’s “sensitive person.” (For once, he spared his wife the embarrassment of handling his love letters.)

There is much about the Shaws’ relationship that will never be known, though English Authoress Janet Dunbar’s sympathetic biography tells a great deal about the little-appreciated Mrs. G.B.S. Perhaps to avoid the temptation to take Shaw too seriously, she does not mention what is surely one of the most intriguing epitaphs ever composed by a bereaved husband. Disapproving of “sympathies, regrets, condolences” after Charlotte’s death, G.B.S. told, instead, the story of an Indian prince’s favorite wife. “When banqueting with him,” wrote G.B.S., “she caught fire and was burned to ashes before she could be extinguished. The prince took in the situation at once. ‘Sweep up your missus,’ he said to his weeping staff, ‘and bring in the roast pheasant.’ ” Shaw, whose pheasant consisted of a $600,000 trust fund from his wife, went so far as to say that he could never have been married to anyone else. Who else, for that matter, could have stayed married for 45 years to G.B.S.?