Memories of The Great and The Good Read Free Page A

remind them that he was insisting on “Mr. Cooke’s adding in brackets:
(Am. cane-ine).”
    Once the last word had been questioned, argued over and ruled on, the chairman rose to attention, as he had been sitting at attention, and gave an offhand nod, the social equivalent of a thank you and good-bye, stepped down from the rostrum and was out the door. I never remember his mixing with the members or attempting any small talk or socializing in any degree. This was true of the three or four meetings that were held in my time. After a while I could well understand what one or other of the group told me, that Shaw was a man with no friends. In his early, Fabian-campaigning days, he developed at most what you might call enthusiastic acquaintanceships with the other Socialist crusaders, but I can find little evidence, even from his biographer, Hesketh Pearson, that he kept or ever achieved any close friendships at all. Indeed, the notion of Shaw as “a man’s man,” a normal male with several cronies, is as bizarre as imagining his taking up golf or draw poker.
    At one time, in late middle age—say well into his sixties—he socialized, always alone, to the extent of lunching with almost any celebrity who invited him. If they expected a cordial private exchange with a famous public character, they were uniformly disillusioned. The impressions of him from single encounters are strikingly similar. The benevolent P. G. Wodehouse, who liked everybody, was offended by Shaw’s coming as a guest to lunch, imagining his host’s lavish way of life and deploring it. At another luncheon party, Shaw dismayed the company by teasing H. G. Wells with a joke about his (Wells’s) wife’s newly diagnosed cancer. At a luncheon in honor of Bergson, Shaw told the guest, simmering with bottled rage, that his philosophy was not what he thought it was. Arriving as a guest of Thomas Masaryk, the founding president of Czechoslovakia, Shaw described the foreign policy of the new country as a disaster and marched from the room. Winston Churchill was unusually laconic: “He was one of my earliest antipathies. “ James Agate, in the 1930s and 1940s England’s most eminent dramatic critic, although he had made it plain in print that “Shaw’s plays are the price we have to pay for his prefaces,” yet thought Shaw to be the greatest living polemical writer and “a very great man.” Agate was delirious when Shaw invited him to lunch with Mrs. Shaw and was prepared to sit and worship: “He sat upright in a chair which was frail, spindly and altogether beautiful like himself.” Not only did Shaw talk continuously throughout the meal but Agate noticed “an odd habit” (which is surely disturbing to most listeners) “of not looking at you but gazing fixedly at a point somewhere over your shoulder.”
    When Shaw was the host, however, there is ample record that he could be droll and charming, once it was understood that the available food was to be the vegetarian platter prepared by Mrs. Shaw and that the guests had been invited to be present at a monologue. “Although,” Bertrand Russell recalled, “like many witty men he considered wit an adequate substitute for wisdom, he could defend any idea, however silly, so cleverly as to make those who did not accept it look like fools.”
    The meetings of this committee provided my only contact with the great man. It was transitory but vivid and, I now realize, disappointing to a young man who, as an even younger man, had been something of an idolater. At Cambridge I once wrote to him out of the blue and asked him for a photograph and specified, in cocky sophomoric fashion, for “something unusual, not the regular studio portrait.” He sent me a sepia photograph of himself lying down on a divan and tossing a bemused smile at the photographer. Underneath, in his beautiful spidery script, he said that this