I started my Life of Bernard Shaw where he started his life: in Dublin. During the mid-1970s I came and lived in Rathmines for almost two years. And since that time, I am glad to say, Shaw has often called me back . . .
The title of Shaw's first novel, Immaturity, has been generally taken as applying simply to Robert Smith, the central character in the book. Smith is a fledgling self-portrait, a pallid Stephen Dedalus. He has many of the qualities and attributes which we immediately recognise as belonging to the young Bernard Shaw. Smith has a taste for music, though only a "colorless baritone voice"; he is "proud of his cynicism", irreligious in the conventional sense and full of what characters in the novel consider "peculiar ideas". He plans, we are told, "an austere religion for the worship of Truth", and had "made an attempt to become a vegetarian", though as yet without success. In fact everything he does, or attempts to do, is unsuccessful. Worst of all is his job.
It offers no work to the cleverest man that the stupidest could not do as well, or perhaps better ? Here am I spending my life in making entries of which a thousand will never be referred to again, for every one that will ? we are a mean and servile pack of dogs ? If that abominable office and every book, carpet, clerk, and partner were consumed to ashes tonight, I would contemplate the ruins tomorrow morning with the liveliest satisfaction'. (pp. 49-50)
During the early chapters, Smith spends two-thirds of his waking existence recording transactions in large canvas-covered ledgers. Though he likes work, he feels the duties of a clerk are a "barren drudger" that numbs his faculties and wastes his intellect - wastes life itself. Yet he works conscientiously, despising his cowardice, loathing his servility. In his perceived success at this mediocre job lies the measure of his failure as a mature human being.
This picture of Smith accurately conveys Shaw's own dissatisfaction while working at the Dublin estate agents, Uniacke Townshend. Shaw quietly revised the text of Immaturity in the early 1920s so as to distance his alter-ego from his own unhappy years in Dublin, before publication in the 1930s. But Shaw's condemnation of clerking was originally written about 1880, and would be delivered again 30 years later, given a brilliant Shavian gloss, in his play Misalliance.
Immaturity is in places almost a transcript of Shaw's life during his last two or three years in Dublin and his first two or three years in London. The plays of his maturity, in which he had tuned his original "colorless baritone" to an extraordinary stylistic pitch, are fantastical re-creations. But readers of the novel may detect many of what would become familiar Shavian themes, obsessions, campaigns, beliefs, making their first experimental appearance in its pages: a hygienic plea for cremation in preference to earth burial; the wisdom of ignoring financial commonsense when marrying; the great romance of valuable work; and a characteristic reversion in which the final section of the book, "Flirtation", is preceded by "Courtship and Marriage". There are some prophetic moments too, like bars from an overture before the curtain rises: a hint of the sexual revulsion he was to feel with Jenny Patterson and a sense of the sexual excitement in his affaire with Stella Campbell.
And there are pages too which read like first drafts of ideas he was to develop in his plays: the cultural differences between Ireland and England, touched on by Lady Geraldine Porter and Miss Isabella Woodward in the novel, will be further explored in John Bull's Other Island; the fanciful construction of "Don Juan Lothario Smith" will reappear under another name in The Philanderer; the experiment with phonetic speech, which Shaw tries out on the Irish servant Cornelius Hamlet in the novel, is re-introduced at Covent Garden in Pygmalion; the type of promotion that depends on a wholesale delegation of work and that descends on Smith recurs and falls on Private Meek in Too True to be Good.
Immaturity is crammed with these undeveloped Shavian notions. We can recognise much of Shaw in Smith. What GBS was to conceal with his blinding paradoxes and dazzling conceits comes through the novel quite simply. We can feel Shaw's misery as a child in Dublin in the opening chapter, where he writes: "Smith finished his tea in very low spirits, and, had he been ten years younger, would have crept into bed and cried himself to sleep".
In his imagination Smith craves "for a female friend who would encourage him to persevere in the struggle for truth and human perfection during those moments when its exhilaration gave place to despair". Out of his loneliness he begins to fashion another self for the public - a player king who would become known in life as GBS. The solitary Smith walks the streets of London looking for a way of life, a method of integrating himself into society without losing his integrity. What he discovers is that he can banish loneliness in the magic world of the theatre. "He loved the humour of harlequinade" Shaw writes after Smith visits the Alhambra. But it is the prima ballerina who enchants him.
Shaw worked as a novel reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette during the 1890s. But his inability ever to use these farfetched devices on which to build an imaginative story points to one of the central reasons why he was to fail as a novelist. It is not the invention of plot that carries sentimentality into a novel, but its indulgent exploitation. This constant checking of himself, this fear of being the object of ridicule rather than master of it, stood in the way of his development as a novelist. That, it seems to me was artistic immaturity.
But there was another immaturity depicted in the novel: the immaturity of fashionable society in the late nineteenth century. Each of the characters is identified and described by his or her relationship to the conventions of late Victorian social morality. Smith himself is the complete outsider. He cannot mature because he can get no nourishment from his social context, but must remain an observer of what happens, the witness at a marriage, perhaps even a best man, but never the betrothed.
The complete insider is a made-up creature of stays and heels, with a corseted hourglass figure, Miss Isabella Woodward, a 24year-old daughter of the easy-going, Irish political employer whom Smith takes on after, in Shavian fashion, giving his original employers the sack.
Marriage, in so far as it represents a moral contract with society, is the vortex of Immaturity, and the characters' attitude to courtship and marriage forms the main narrative dynamic. The novel ends with Isabella's marriage to a gentleman who, having lately returned from India, does not enter the story. I like to imagine him as an Anglo-Indian version of Freddy Eynsford-Hill from Pygmalion. But Smith's relationship with Harriet Russell, a young dressmaker who lives in the same lodging house as he does and whom he coaches in French, does have romantic possibilities. She appears, like Vivie Warren at the end of Mrs Warren's Profession, to prefer the independence of work to conventional family life. For this she earns Smith's admiration. Though she possesses none of the glamour of Isabella Woodward, Harriet Russell has a natural if less obvious beauty: "a fair woman with soft eyes". She is honest, shrewd, hardworking, yet finally without imagination.
In the Epilogue, set some years later, Smith visits Harriet and her husband Cyril Scott, a talented painter who is, like her, partly within society, partly independent of it. He meets their children, witnesses their happiness. "Is marriage really a success?" he asks. This one is a success and Smith finds himself envying Harriet. But she concedes that marriage "is not fit for some people; and some people are not fit for it. And the right couples don't often find one another". Smith is still a non-starter in the marriage stakes. "It doesn't seem to have anything to do with me," he says. Then Harriet invites him to stay for supper, adding: "You know you have only your own inclinations to consult here". But Smith objects. "On the contrary, I have my habits". His habits are his prison - from which he suddenly cries out: "If I were to follow my inclination I would stay here for a week at least". GBS was to follow his inclination in the early 1890s and stay several weeks with May Morris and her husband Henry Sparling in Hammersmith - a menage a trois that ended the marriage. But Smith cannot do this. While most of the characters in Immaturity know and accept their places in the social landscape, whether grand or modest, a few of them veer dramatically in and out. The drama of the novel, its event-plot, depends on these oscillations.
Most fascinating of these entertainers is the poet, Patrick Hawkshaw, who does not know his place. "The fashionable world sought after him as an agreeable guest and distinguished poet," we are told, "not as a possible husband for its daughters". Hawkshaw treats his poetic licence as if it were a magic passport that, given the stamp of wit, will take him anywhere. But though the fashionable world opens itself up to the amorality of his jokes, it closes fast against him once he is detected acting immorally.
This seems to me a prophetic insight, for I believe that Hawkshaw is largely modelled on Oscar Wilde. The Shaws and the Wildes had known one another slightly in Dublin, and after Bernard Shaw came to London in 1876 he began going uncomfortably to Lady Wilde's At Homes at 1 Ovington Square, in South Kensington. Smith's relationship with Hawkshaw in Immaturity, and Shaw's treatment of Hawkshaw in the novel, tell us something about Shaw and Wilde when both men were in their early 20s and unknown to the theatre-going public. On one occasion when Smith, with great elaboration, makes a sophisticated observation about painting, Shaw as narrator intervenes: "Hawkshaw himself could scarcely have surpassed this". Something like that occasional aesthetic merging of styles was to take place when, a few years later, both were employed as anonymous book reviewers on the Pall Mall Gazette and Wilde's reviews, Shaw told David O'Donoghue, "were sometimes credited to me". But of course Shaw and Wilde were in general very different characters, with very different styles and temperaments. In Immaturity it is Hawkshaw's affability that is immediately noted and contrasted with Smith's awkwardness. Smith, we are told, envied "the careless gaiety assumed by Hawkshaw". But what is this careless gaiety, this affability, actually worth? Such charm, it seems, is like courage: a condition of virtue rather than a virtue in itself - after all, it takes courage to rob a bank, and charm can merely be part of a confidence trick. So social affability is an aid to valuable work, but no substitute for it. "I should be sorry to compare Hawkshaw to you seriously,' says Harriet Russell to her husband, Cyril Scott, the painter. "But do you know he is a great deal more good-humoured than you, and more sensible in putting up with the little annoyances which happen to everybody occasionally?" Cyril Scott answers this charge by explaining that he puts all his patience, humour, energy and good sense into his work.
Scott, a man of talent, may make a fool of himself in company occasionally; but Hawkshaw, who affects genius, fools himself when alone. "It is all very well for Hawkshaw, who turns out cheap wares by priming himself up now and then for a desperate fit of working, and gets credit for it all the moment it is before the public, to take things easily," Scott says. "It is different with me; for I have drudged year after year until I have very little patience left for anything but work. If it was easy work, that could be dashed off by the help of a few tricks in a fit of enthusiasm, like his poetry, a man might keep his nerves robust at it. But it is the holding on day after day only a hair's breadth from failure ?" This was how Shaw himself was to work at his novels and then his plays throughout his 20s and 30s. Smith cannot speak for him here since he has no serious work in the novel - that is a mark of his immaturity. It is also worth remembering that when Shaw wrote so dismissively of Hawkshaw's poetry (he merely pens an aesthetic satire on Isabella - a woman of no importance), Wilde at that time had written little more than his Newdigate prize poem Ravenna, and a few slight verses published in Irish magazines.
It was true that Shaw, in his early down-at-heel, novel-writing days in London, knew almost nobody - nobody whom Wilde, taking tea with Walter Pater and Oscar Browning at Oxford, and travelling through Italy and Greece with the celebrated Professor Mahaffy, that connoisseur of fine claret and old silver, knew and would appear to have valued. But when their circumstances eventually changed and it was Wilde's turn to be known by nobody in society, then it was that Shaw went forth to champion him. For they were foul-weather friends, united only by a common enemy, the philistine Englishman. The name Hawkshaw suggests a Shavian element in Wilde - not the Wilde who followed Congreve and Sheridan instead of Ibsen, but the Wilde who was to write The Soul of Man under Socialism and who, after being groomed as the pet of society, became its outcast.
All this raises the question of whether Immaturity is simply a roman a clef. Undoubtedly this autobiographical subtext does enrich the novel, but it has other values. How humiliating it must have been for Shaw to find himself reviewing so many inferior novels, written to a tired 19th-century formula and wholly dead now, while his own remained unpublished. This first novel, written in his early 20s has its shortcomings. As narrator, Shaw exercises too much control over his characters, instead of giving them room to develop and surprise him. His introductions and explanations, which in the plays would be relegated to stage directions, confine the narrative. Yet it retains the reader's attention because Shaw was addressing genuine moral issues - issues that had been raised by George Eliot during the previous 20 years. Shaw finished the manuscript of Immaturity and began sending it round to publishers in the last year of George Eliot's life, and though it was not accepted then it should gain a small but secure retrospective place now in the history of late 19th-century fiction.
From the point of view of the common reader, all Shaw's novels have, I believe, a more modern style and perspective than, for example, those of Gissing and Meredith. On a map of literary criticism, I find myself awkwardly placed somewhere between those pre-poststructuralist Shavian academics who celebrate Immaturity, his novel without a hero, as a triumphant deconstruction of Victorian fiction, and those non-Shavians, such as George Orwell, who like to praise his novels at the expense of his plays. But awkwardness is not something from which any writer on GBS need be unfamiliar.
The above is a condensed version of last Thursday's Richard Irvine Best Lecture by Michael Holroyd, at the National Library of Ireland. The full text will appear in the autumn/winter 2000 issue of Irish University Review, published next month.