Augustus John (119 page)

‘In society he drank porter, champagne, whisky, anything he could get, sometimes swallowing stout enough to make him sick... Although he was never sober, he was seldom utterly drunk. He made efforts to reform himself, and on one occasion succeeded in abstaining for sixteen months; but these efforts always ended in a relapse. On one or two occasions he disappeared for a few days and returned with his watch broken, clothes damaged and every symptom of uncontrolled excess; but ordinarily he came home in the evening fuddled, eat
[sic]
his dinner, had a nap, and
then kept going out for drams until he went to bed. He never drank or kept drink in the house... I have seen him when drunk, seize a small article on the mantelpiece and dash it upon the hearthstone, or kick a newspaper into the air; but though he was very irritable, he never used the slightest violence to any person... his timidity probably made forbearance habitual to him.’

After his father was dead, G.B.S. eliminated much of this sordidness by giving to his published descriptions of it a hilarious Shavian gloss.

‘A boy who has seen “the governor”, with an imperfectly wrapped-up goose under one arm and a ham in the same condition under the other (both purchased under heaven knows what delusion of festivity), butting at the garden wall of our Dalkey Cottage in the belief that he was pushing open the gate, and transforming his tall hat to a concertina in the process, and who, instead of being overwhelmed with shame and anxiety at the spectacle, has been so disabled by merriment (uproariously shared by the maternal uncle) that he has hardly been able to rush to the rescue of the hat and pilot its wearer to safety, is clearly not a boy who will make tragedies of trifles instead of making trifles of tragedies.’

After two or three years at Hatch Street, George Carr Shaw was felled on the doorstep by a fit. Shortly afterwards he became so rigid a teetotaller that those who knew him found it ‘difficult to realize what he formerly was’.

In a letter to a prospective biographer, G.B.S. wrote: ‘You ask whether my father liked Lee. He certainly did not, and would not have tolerated the arrangement if he could have afforded a decent house without it, or if he could have asserted himself against my mother, who probably never consulted him in the matter. There was never any quarrelling in the house: my mother went her own way, which happened to be the musical way of Lee, just as Lee went his; and my father could only look on helplessly.’

It was this impotence that appears to have driven George Carr Shaw to greater drinking excesses. ‘When his children had grown too big for him to play with, and the suspense as to whether he would come home drunk or sober never ceased,’ G.B.S. told a cousin, ‘he got practically no comfortable society from them. His relatives did not want to see him; and my mother did not want to see his relatives: she was interested only in people who could sing, and they were mostly Catholics, not proper company for the Protestant caste of Shaw.’

Before his marriage, and during its early years, George Carr Shaw had
been on visiting terms with his smart Protestant relatives. By the 1860s their doors were shut to him and his family. ‘My immediate family and the Shaw clan,’ G.B.S. recalled, ‘...were barely on speaking terms when we met which we did only accidentally, never intentionally.’ Social conditions, which had helped to drive his father to drink, would also one day pervert Lee, and both men disappointed his mother. So Society became the dragon against which the fabulous G.B.S. would lead his campaign of lifelong knight-errantry.

If I had not returned to the house, I don’t think they would, any of them, have missed me.

Preface to
London Music
(1937)

At Synge Street Sonny and his sisters had been provided with a day governess. Caroline Hill was an impoverished gentlewoman who puzzled the children by her attempts to teach them the alphabet and mathematical tables. She would punish her pupils when their laughter grew too outrageous by ‘little strokes with her fingers that would not have discomposed a fly’.

At the beginning of the summer term of 1865, when he was almost ten, Sonny was sent to his first school, the Wesleyan Connexional, less than half a mile away at 79 St Stephen’s Green. He hated this school. ‘I have not a good word to say for it,’ he wrote. ‘...A more futile boy prison could not be imagined. I was a day-boy: what a boarder’s life was like I shudder to conjecture.’ The chief reason for his dislike of school appears to have been that it took him further away from his mother. This, he came to believe, had been its real purpose – that of ‘preventing my being a nuisance to my mother at home for at least half the day’.

The Wesleyan Connexional School occupied an old private house next door to the mansion of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness. Its big schoolroom stood at the end of a yard at the rear where the stables had been and which by the 1860s served as a playground. It was the cheapest of those Dublin schools patronized by Protestants. The sanitation was primitive and the lessons meagre. ‘In the large classes,’ Shaw recalled, ‘the utmost examination possible in the lessons meant one question for each boy in alphabetical order, or at most two. If you could answer the questions or
do the sums, or construe the few lines that fell to your lot, you passed unscathed: if not, or if you talked in class or misbehaved, you were marked in your judgement book for caning by the headmaster.’

The headmaster when Sonny first went there was Robert Cook, a young Methodist minister who would prepare boys for flogging with spasms of weeping. He was eventually succeeded by a man named Parker who conducted his classes with a ferocious cane in hand.

‘When Parker appeared armed with a long lithe chestnut colored oriental cane, which had evidently cost much more than a penny, and slashed our hand with it mercilessly, he established an unprecedented terrorism. He was young (really too young), darkly handsome: apparently a perfect Murdstone. But he soon found that he was carrying his youthful terroristic logic too far... he had what no schoolmaster should allow himself to indulge: a dislike of stupid boys as such.’

To his biographers, G.B.S. represented Sonny at school as ‘rampant, voluble, impudent... a most obstreperous player of rough games... [who] avoided his school tasks... and was soon given up as incorrigible’. That was how he had felt: it was not how he appeared to others. He was remembered as a quiet boy and on two occasions was awarded good conduct certificates. The other boys liked him for his comic stories about a character called Lobjort borrowed from
Household Words,
but otherwise his remote personality, designed to protect him from unhappiness at home, did not make him popular. His command of long words gave him an air of maturity that appealed more to adults than to children. He seemed unfitted for boy society. ‘I think my treatment as an adult at home (like the Micawbers’ treatment of David Copperfield) made school very difficult for me.’

The roll books at Wesley show that after only three months in 1865 he was taken away and did not return there until August 1867. After another three months he left again, then came back in February 1868 for nine months. During one or more of these intervals he attended a preparatory school at 23–24 Sandycove Road, Glasthule, near Dalkey.

‘My parents,’ Shaw wrote, ‘...acted as if... I would come out as an educated gentleman if I wore the usual clothes, ate the usual food, and went to the same school or other every day.’ But by the end of 1868 he had fallen so far behind that he was withdrawn altogether from the Wesleyan Connexional.

It was Lee, rather than Sonny’s parents, who took the initiative. He had got to know the drawing-master at the Central Model Boys’ School in Marlborough Street, Joseph Smeeth, who persuaded him that the
teaching there was better than at any other of the cheaper genteel schools in Dublin. By the beginning of February 1869, Sonny was sent to Marlborough Street, where he remained a little over seven months. He was to focus on this school almost all the unhappiness of his boyhood. The Central Model Boys’ School, he wrote, was ‘undenominational and classless in theory but in fact Roman Catholic... It was an enormous place, with huge unscaleable railings and gates on which for me might well have been inscribed “All hope abandon, ye who enter here”; for that the son of a Protestant merchant-gentleman and feudal downstart should pass those bars or associate in any way with its hosts of lower middle class Catholic children, sons of petty shopkeepers and tradesmen, was inconceivable from the Shaw point of view... I lost caste outside it and became a boy with whom no Protestant young gentleman would speak or play.’

The enrolment books of the Central Model show that Sonny’s form contained eight members of the Established Protestant Church, only five Roman Catholics and one ‘Other Denomination’. Fathers’ occupations included a hotel porter, two carpenters, a farmer, butcher, solicitor, bricklayer, shopkeeper, hatter, sergeant and gaol warder. It was, in fact as well as theoretically, what Shaw denied it to have been: a non-sectarian experimental school for persons of modest means. What Shaw did, many years afterwards, was to transfer to this place the ‘shame and wounded snobbery’ arising from his Catholic-infested home at Hatch Street.

When Sonny asked to be taken away from school, George Carr Shaw, relishing perhaps the defeat of Lee’s programme, supported him. Sonny left the Central Model on 11 September 1869 and was transferred to the last of his boy prisons. The Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School was a large building with broad staircases and stately rooms on the corner of Aungier and Whitefriars Streets, sponsored by the Incorporated Society for Promoting English Protestant Schools in Ireland. Sonny remained here almost two years and became joint head boy. But his repugnance for all schools was implacable.

*

Sonny made one friend at the Dublin Commercial School. Matthew Edward McNulty, later to become a novelist, bank manager and playwright, was ‘a corpulent youth with curly black hair’. His first sight of Sonny, at the age of thirteen, was of ‘a tallish, slender youngster with straw-colored hair, light greyish-blue eyes, a skin like that of a baby and lips like those of a beautiful girl. There was a faint smile over his face as he listened to his companions and looked around the strange class room... We were, in fact, friends at first glance.’

McNulty was the only person with whom Sonny could share his dreams and ideas. When apart they entered into a tremendous correspondence, full of drawings and dramas.

Sonny dreamed of being a great man, probably a great artist like Michelangelo. He borrowed Duchesne’s outlines of the Old Masters, bought the Bohn translation of Vasari, prowled for hours through Dublin’s deserted National Gallery dragging McNulty with him – two schoolboys, one short and dark, the other tall and fair, going from picture to picture, full of argument, until they knew every work there. They also enrolled together for late afternoon courses at the Royal Dublin Society’s School of Art and passed examinations in perspective, practical geometry and freehand drawing. But Sonny was not satisfied and, taking McNulty back to his room in Hatch Street, he announced a bolder plan. ‘I was to be his naked model,’ McNulty remembered, ‘and, in return, he was to be mine... but I was adamant and Shaw’s long-cherished dream of an inexpensive model was rudely shattered. I was very sorry for him at the time but I would have been more sorry for myself if I had had another attack of bronchitis.’

Sonny eventually renounced the artist’s life because ‘I could not draw’. He had decided instead, he told McNulty, to found a new religion.

At an early age Sonny had tried to build a fanciful world in which to forget the miseries of the real one – ‘a sort of pale blue satin place,’ as Broadbent describes it at the end of
John Bull’s Other Island.
This dream of heaven presented itself as a small square apartment in which he was sitting with his ankles dangling, poorly dressed and filled with fears because

‘I knew that I should presently be brought up for judgment by the recording angel before some awful person in the next room; and I had good private reasons for anticipating that my career would not be found up to the mark... on the only occasion on which I ever dreamt myself in heaven, I was glad when I woke. I also dreamt once that I was in hell; but I remember nothing about that except that two of my uncles were there and that it did not hurt. In my waking hours I thought of heaven as a part of the sky where people were dressed in white, had golden harps, did not eat or drink or learn lessons, and were wholly preoccupied in being intensely good.’

When very young he had used the Lord’s Prayer as a spell against thunderstorms. But one evening on Torca Hill ‘I suddenly asked myself why I went on repeating my prayer every night when, as I put it, I did not believe in it. Being thus brought to book by my intellectual conscience
I felt obliged in common honesty to refrain from superstitious practices.’ By the third night, he tells us, his discomfiture vanished ‘as completely as if I had been born a heathen... this sacrifice of the grace of God, as I had been taught it, to intellectual integrity synchronized with the dawning of moral passion in me which I have described in the first act of
Man and Superman.
’

What Sonny had done was to transfer his religious energy from day-dreaming to his actual life. He had come to recognize that, as an unlovable boy, he could expect nothing from other people. His ‘moral passion’ was a means of producing, independently of other people, the self-respect he lacked. Though he might not make himself into the sort of person his mother loved, he could become the sort of person she was: insensible to public opinion and a Bohemian without Bohemian vices. Before this ‘I was such a ridiculously sensitive child,’ he wrote, ‘that almost any sort of rebuff that did not enrage me hurt my feelings and made me cry’. This new-found Stoicism reached its heretical peak in 1875 with a letter he wrote to
Public Opinion
attacking the Moody and Sankey revivalist meetings then being celebrated in Dublin. He ridiculed the vanity of their ‘awakenings’ which created ‘highly objectionable members of society’, and announced that he had given up religion.