University of Virginia Library

Shaw and Henderson: Autobiographer Versus Biographer
by
Ellen Summers

It is common knowledge among Shavian scholars that Shaw's early biographers were, as Stanley Weintraub puts it, "saddled with autobiographer as collaborator."[1] Not so widely known are the details of Shaw's involvement in the writing of studies of his life. In the case of Frank Harris' 1931 Bernard Shaw, the biographee admitted that he had rewritten the book from its proofsheets, giving his reasons but citing none of the changes. Shaw explained that he had destroyed the proofs "so that neither I nor anyone else will ever know how much of the book is F. H. and how much G.B.S."[2] But in the case of Shaw's "authorized" biographer, Archibald Henderson, we may explore Shaw's collaboration more fully.[3] The proofsheets of an entire biography corrected by Shaw escaped the fate of the Harris proofsheets. And they show that Shaw was virtually an autobiographer.

Henderson, who began his work on Shaw as a 28-year-old mathematics professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote three large volumes on his life: George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Work (1911); Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet (1932); and the posthumous GBS: Man of the Century (1956). In 1960, Henderson donated to the University's Henderson/Shaw Collection the galley sheets of the 1932 biography bearing Shaw's corrigenda. In the preface to his 1956 biography, Henderson quotes the terms of Shaw's collaboration as the price of "authorization": "I authorise you, in the only rational sense of the term: I will supply you with abundant information and materials, essential facts you can learn from no one else; undertake to see that you make no errors of fact; and leave you entirely untrammeled regarding opinion and interpretation; and promise to revise your narrative both in manuscript and proof."[4] Henderson adds, "That gentlemen's agreement was faithfully kept." Closer examination of Shaw's actual revisions, however, cast considerable doubt upon this averral.

Without question, Shaw provided indispensable aid to Henderson in proofreading, correcting "errors of fact," steering the book away from legal complications, and supplying what Samuel Johnson called the "invisible circumstances" that only the subject of a biography can supply.[5] In rendering this aid, he discharged his promise to help Henderson keep the facts straight. But he did not stop there.

In Henderson, Shaw faced an incompatible figure, a young, idealistic Southerner whose enthusiastic response to Shaw begged to be deflated by

Shaw's characteristic anti-sentimentalism. The young Henderson was another Hector Malone in his "chivalrous manners to women, his elevated moral sentiments"[6] —better suited to be a target of Shavian satire than an exponent of it. When the budding biographer betrayed his hero-worship of Shaw in the typescript version of George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Work, Shaw made his response clear: "You must come over and see me some time or other: the vision is still wildly romantic" (10 June 1906, SHC). Unfortunately for their collaboration, Henderson was and remained a good example of the sort of man Shaw was dedicated to reforming—or at least, to making uncomfortable. Though Shaw had promised Henderson in their "gentlemen's agreement" that he would leave him "untrammeled" in matters of interpretation, Shaw's corrections show efforts to offset Henderson's point of view, sometimes to the point of cutting Henderson's critical ground from under him.

Shaw seemed to think that he had not unduly interfered, to judge from the letter he wrote to Henderson in late 1932 explaining why he would not write an endorsement for the biography: "I have some scruples as to interfering with your view of me which have prevented me from attempting to bring you into exact line with me" (1 September 1932, SHC). But it is hard to reconcile this statement with his corrections of Henderson's text. When in the 1932 proofs Henderson's "romanticism" erupted, Shaw did not hesitate to counteract it, as can be seen in the following case. Describing the relationships between the young Shaw, his mother, and her singing teacher, George Vandeleur Lee, Henderson writes that "Lee was a rebel in music; and perhaps, through sympathy with his mother as Lee's comrade in his musical causes and engagements (in the sense of battles rather than of appointments!), Shaw developed keen admiration for the spirit of the rebel." Shaw crosses this out and annotates in red, "This 'sympathy with the mother' is utterly false. Damn your American sentimentality" (proof page 9).

Shaw could scarcely claim, however, that Henderson was the only one of the two to indulge a sense of the romantic. In another passage Shaw's comments reveal their unlike ways of imaginatively exalting women. Henderson originally refers to Annie Besant, an early friend of Shaw's, as a "beautiful, earnest 'comrade,' who dressed in Bohemian style." Shaw runs a red pen through this and remarks, "You must cure yourself of your romantic complex about beautiful women. It betrays you into writing the most abominable bunk" (proof page 33A). All the same, Shaw cherished a few delusions himself about beautiful women, particularly actresses. When Henderson tries to characterize Mrs. Patrick Campbell as a "pleasing and versatile actress," Shaw strikes the phrase, declares it "Impossible to dismiss the great Stella with this commonplace," and replaces Henderson's phrase with "extraordinary stage enchantress" (proof page 117). As usual, Shaw's version was printed (PP, p. 383).

But romanticization of himself and his background, Shaw declared, was intolerable in his would-be Boswell. "Until you know me from behind the scenes," he warned Henderson, "you may be my dupe, but not my biographer"

(18 February 1905, SHC). In the same letter, he proposed that Henderson start his biography by drawing a deliberately exaggerated portrait of GBS, his "persona," and proceed by exploding this romantic image by presenting the mundane, trivial, average facts about Shaw the human being, not GBS the Superman. For the "Alone in Ireland" chapter of the 1932 biography, over 60% of which Shaw rewrote from the proof sheets, the corrections show his deflation of Henderson's "romantic vision." On page 18 of Henderson's typescript, his original account of Shaw's grandmother describes her waging "a heroic struggle to maintain and bring up, on tragically inadequate means, a family of fourteen." Shaw leaves the sentence intact, but adds, "in an unshaken and unshakeable consciousness of their aristocracy" (SHC; PP, p. 11). In Henderson's version, Shaw's grandmother is a romantic heroine; in Shaw's she is a petty bourgeoise with delusions of grandeur that make her poverty seem slightly ridiculous. To Shaw, Henderson's romantic vision created inaccuracy, and so Shaw constantly attempted to adjust the text to his own more "accurate" view of the "facts."

In any case, Shaw certainly fulfilled his promise to proofread, for the proof pages of Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet show the attentions of a perfectionist. Shaw cut up the proof sheets, pasted the pertinent sections on stiff manila paper for easier handling and annotating, and numbered each for reference. He wrote brief passages for insertion in black ink; "background" commentary addressed to Henderson he wrote in red. Shaw's clear handwriting and consistent method make his contributions impressive and difficult to misread. But the line between "correction" and "contribution" is harder to draw when one considers the pages of penciled draft Shaw also included, all of which appeared verbatim in the printed version.

In his proofreading, Shaw proved his genius in the Carlylean sense as his "transcendent capacity for taking trouble first of all." His lists of corrigenda record dozens of corrections of errors in punctuation and spelling. Although the number of minor corrections show Shaw's diligence in small things, they also demonstrate his ability for giving trouble as well as for taking it. Either Henderson or the compositor had had persistent trouble in spelling "thoroughly," and at last Shaw, always orthographically sensitive, could stand it no longer. In one error-riddled passage, Henderson dismisses Shaw's Shakespearean criticism as "thoroughly unsound." Shaw writes in correction: "You probably mean questionable criticism. If so you should analyse it and say exactly what you make of it. Instead you fire off one of your cliché superlatives—'thoroughly [or is it to be thoroly] unsound.'"[7]

Shaw also fulfilled his promise to correct "errors of fact," especially those caused by gaps in Henderson's information. Examples of substantive adjustment abound, particularly where Henderson attempts to speculate on Shaw's early life. Proof page number 6A includes this sentence of Henderson's: "I suspect the real reason why George did not shine at school was because he was so shy and sensitive, physically weak and not athletic." Shaw crosses out the remark and writes, "This is all wrong. I was not shy among schoolboys: my shyness came later, with adolescence. I was rampant, voluble, impudent, and

I cannot remember ever being physically tired as a boy." Had Henderson's subject been dead, as the subjects of most biographies are, Henderson's guess would have been justifiable as the type of speculation required of a biographer to fill in small gaps in understanding; as such, it would have rested in peace. Not so with a live Shaw.

As one might have expected, Shaw occasionally corrected Henderson's interpretation of his personality, as the following example makes clear. Henderson here is trying to delineate the personal difficulties Shaw had in his early London days, and his original runs: "But he was discordantly combative in argument; and his shyness took the familiar form of crude self-assertiveness and somewhat trying arrogance." Shaw emended this to read, "But he tried to learn from everyone whom he thought better informed than himself; and as his method of drawing them out was to contradict them, they were apt to set him down as an insufferable fellow" (proof page 36A; PP, p. 117).

However clear Shaw's "right" to control the wording of interpretations of his character, Henderson as biographer considered himself entitled to his own interpretation of Shaw's ideas. Henderson acknowledged the divergence of their opinion in the preface to the 1911 biography: "For the views expressed in this biography Mr. Shaw is in no sense responsible. On many points we are in hearty disagreement."[8] Nowhere was this more true than on Shaw's criticism of art and literature. When they came to a showdown, however, Shaw shot from the hip and emerged victorious. In one passage Henderson attempts to discuss "Shaw's fundamental mistake, which arises from his scorn or at least disesteem for art." Shaw crosses this out, and underlines it in red, while complaining, "These inconsiderate and inaccurate exaggerations give me no end of trouble. Have you NO analytic faculty, Archibald?" (proof page 98). Shaw's version, printed in lieu of Henderson's, praises "Shaw's inhuman clearness of analysis, which enables him to insult the thinker whilst delighting in the artist. . . ."[9] Shaw was not above exaggeration either, but took care to aim it in a direction favorable to himself. As for Henderson's freedom of speech, censorship took over when he ran afoul of Shaw's own interpretation.

Some of Henderson's critical judgements of Shaw's plays did not go unquestioned, and most interesting are the playwright's challenges to Henderson's discovery of autobiographical material in Shaw's plays. As Henderson discusses the close of Shaw's days as a clerk in Dublin, he writes, "And no better explanation of his departure can be found than the bitter passage of autobiography Shaw has put in the mouth of 'The Man' in Misalliance." Shaw scratches out this statement, replacing it with "It is, however, a complete mistake to take the bitter passage he has put in the mouth of 'The Man' in Misalliance as autobiographical" (proof page 17A; PP, p. 54). This clear rebuke must have indicated to Henderson that speeches in Shaw's plays would be off-limits in discussions of Shaw's life. In the published version of this biography such speculative comments, however reasonable they must have seemed to Henderson in the draft stages, do not survive.

If many of Shaw's substantive revisions cross the line between corrections of "fact" and of "interpretation," they do so not only in areas where private

truths proved the biographer's analysis inadequate. In almost no relevant area, however public, was Henderson's experience sufficiently expert to assure him an authoritative perspective on Shaw's life and work independent of Shaw's own memory and will. As Shaw wrote to Henderson in 1905, because of the numerous and "watertight" compartments of his career, which included novelist, art critic, drama critic, music critic, playwright, stage director, lecturer, socialist, and vegetarian, anyone who attempted to pull together a discussion of all of these "Shaws" would have to accrue knowledge in all of these areas (30 June 1905, SHC). The direct route to such knowledge, of course, was to approach Shaw for it, as Henderson realized, to judge by the many letters he wrote asking Shaw for details. Even so, Henderson sometimes had to learn the hard way. In proof page 104A, he chides William Archer, "who refused to join with me in calling for Shaw's stage appearance at the opening night in London of Saint Joan. . . ." Shaw scolds Henderson: "This is a gaffe which would have horrified W. A. Professional critics do not applaud. It is contrary to etiquette. He would have slain you for such an inference."

But taking such a route through Shavian territory left Henderson little means for independent verification or judgment, positively inviting interference from his subject. Shaw himself warned Henderson: "When you began it I knew quite well that you had no idea of what you were attempting—that a complete life of me in my public capacity would be a history of all of the 'movements' of the last quarter of the XIX century in London. . ." (17 January 1905). Shaw with justice regarded this difference in contemporaneity as a serious limit to Henderson's biographical competence. As Shaw explained to the publishing firm of Stewart and Kidd, which had written him for his opinion of the 1911 biography, Henderson had only to an extent succeeded in his attempt "to recover a biography from a period of which he, as a man younger than myself by a whole generation, and raised in another country at that, has had no direct experience" (4 September 1911; PP, pp. 761-762).

A number of corrections reveal the generation gap: when Henderson writes about the "publicist, John Burns, who often addressed at Battersea Park the audience that there listened so delightedly also to Shaw's brilliant dialectical pleas in behalf of the Socialist program," Shaw retorts, "Utter nonsense. John Burns became as famous as W. J. Bryant [sic]: he cannot be mentioned in this fashion" (proof page 108). In this ad hoc manner was Henderson's education in late nineteenth-century English history supplemented. Shaw's expectation of Henderson—and it was a necessary expectation, given the scope of Shaw's professional life—was that Henderson be not merely his Boswell, but, as he informed Henderson from the start, "a possible Gibbon" (10 February 1905, SHC). It was not enough for Henderson to know Shaw's place in his times; he first needed to know the times themselves, and looked to Shaw for his tuition. But herein was laid part of the foundation for Shaw's encroachment on Henderson's "objectivity."

The battle over anecdotes shows the extent to which Henderson was

helpless to verify or counter Shaw's directed changes. Shaw sometimes objected to his biographer's inclusion of colorful anecdotes because they lacked Shaw's own verification. These apocrypha sometimes resulted from Henderson's misunderstanding of a story which Shaw himself had told him. Shaw's perturbation at these infelicities could sometimes amount to horror, as this response shows: on page 17 of the proofs, Henderson writes: "Little George was actually sent back and forth with notes between the bigger boys and the women of the town for the making of assignations." Shaw underscores this with red ink, runs through it with black ink, and annotates violently in red: "My God, Archibald, NO. It was my uncle at Kilkenny College. A wildly impossible libel."

On the other hand, Shaw sometimes successfully transmitted information to Henderson only to withdraw his verification when confronted with the proofs. As Henderson complained, Shaw was most apt to renege on anecdotes. "It is dangerous to tell anecdotes about Shaw. I have heard a thousand; but it is impossible to check their accuracy. . . . He has repudiated, a number of times, sayings and incidents which he has personally narrated to me" (PP, p. 692). In one case, however, Shaw let in an "unauthorized" story. In the proofs, Henderson relates this tale about William Archer, the theatre critic:

Shaw annotates: "This addition, quite new to me, is pure Henderson; but let it stand." Stand it does in the printed version—to good effect, though with dubious veracity.

Shaw sometimes rewrote anecdotes to sharpen their comic effect, putting his own stylistic precepts into Henderson's practice. He constantly sharpened Henderson's diction: "Change 'a genuine and sincere,' which is a colorless pleonasm, to 'a reciprocally appreciative'" (proof page 31A; PP, p. 101). Most of these changes reflect Shaw's clearer instinct for the right word rather than his more specific information. An instance is Henderson's account of Shaw's "embarrassing experience" with editor Edmund Yates, for whom Shaw worked as music critic: "In his Music column, [Shaw] told a story of a notice he once wrote about a melodrama. When it appeared, he noted instantly that a passage had been cut out. On asking Yates what was wrong with the passage, the great editor gently replied: 'There is nothing wrong with it, but the fact is that the actress you mention is my mother. I thought you would not mind me cutting out reference to her.'" Henderson's version ends, "Shaw 'did not mind'—as the reference, it is to be feared, was not of the most complimentary." Shaw's annotations on the proof page add a comment after "great editor"—in

the margin he writes, "Yates would be pleased"—and alters the final words as follows: "Shaw 'did not mind'—though the reference was not in the least uncomplimentary, and Yates was merely getting in a bit of sentimental acting on his own part" (proof page 94A; PP, p. 310). Henderson's original provided the facts and most of the words, in effect a rough draft; but Shaw's changes produced the comic effect.

In further stylistic "improvements," Shaw occasionally directed the removal of Henderson's intrusive first-person references. But more striking are the reverse situations in which Shaw put first-person sentences into Henderson's mouth, as in the truly Shavian "I know no one who so conscientiously reasons to the logical conclusion, even when he rejects it as a reductio-ad-absurdum" (proof page 39A; PP, p. 126). In another change, which comes at the end of a six-page passage for insertion summarizing Back to Methuselah, Shaw dictates, "As a mathematician, myself, I cannot deny that the thesis of the evolution of thought as passion is possible, strongly attractive, and certainly dignified" (PP, p. 539). To reduce possible confusion on his biographer's part, Shaw wrote above the "I" in red, "Henderson."

Shaw's revisions show his obsession with being "up-to-date," and his horror of the passé played havoc with some of the strictly historical aspects of Henderson's enterprise. For example, Shaw advocated wholesale cuts in the chapters on his involvement in the theatre: "Who on earth wants to read now that 'Burgess and Lexy were capably impersonated respectively by Snooks and Hooks'? . . . All similar old press cuttings and commonplaces about forgotten casts in forgotten performances must be ruthlessly cut. They are unspeakably unreadable" (proof page 121A). At one point, Shaw slashes through a page of references to actors, quipping in the margin, "Out, out, brief candles!" (proof page 130A). Later on in the proofs, he relents to the extent of giving Henderson permission to print a list of performances as an appendix, but he adds, "To expect people to read it as literary matter is like asking them to accept a telephone directory as a romance" (proof pages 135-141). Henderson obviously differed from Shaw in his desire to record history rather than strictly "literary matter." Either purpose would be appropriate to biography, but the preferred purpose of Henderson the historian clearly lost out to that of Shaw the entertainer.

Shaw ridiculed Henderson's "old-fashioned" attitude toward some of his most progressive—and at the time outrageous—ideas, especially those concerning sex and politics. He insisted upon "up-dating" the biography's commentary upon them. For example, Henderson's original criticism of The Philanderer runs, "The shocking, almost revolting character of the play, and not its demands on the 'most expert and delicate sort of acting,' made it impossible, not only at the Criterion and Independent theatres, but indeed at any theatre." Shaw excised this, writing in red, "Good Heavens, Archibald, this is Chapel Hill prudery fifty years out of date, not modern London and New York. The play wouldn't shock a convent in Connemara nowadays." Shaw substituted his own remarks:

In another instance, he substituted seven draft pages of his own for three proof pages containing Henderson's belittling comments on Soviet Communism, which sounded to Shaw "like a veteran Colonel of the Civil War poohpoohing a streetcorner Socialist in 1885. Come off it, Archibald" (proof pages 75, 76 and 76A; insertion pages 73a-c; PP, pp. 250-252).

Shaw's instinct for updating led him to order the alteration of certain passages quoted from previously published Shavian material, and Henderson complied—silently. Shaw had similarly tinkered with Henderson's typescript of the 1911 biography. In it, Henderson cites a passage from "Giving the Devil his Due," a review Shaw wrote of Volumes I and II of the Works of Friedrich Nietzsche: "'Mark Twain emitted some Diabolonian sparks, only to succumb to the overwhelming American atmosphere of chivalry, duty, and gentility.'" Shaw substitutes "see them extinguished by" for "succumb to," and explains, "I meant that the sparks succumbed, not that Mark did; but the passage is ambiguous; so we had better alter it."[10] Shaw felt no qualms in silently revising quotations from himself: his concern was not accuracy but clarity of effect. In the 1932 proofs, Henderson quotes from a newspaper report of a speech Shaw gave in 1896: "'I think it would be not only not dangerous, but very desirable, to have a few persons with a little extra money to spend." Shaw writes in red: "I might have said these things in 1886, but not ten years later. Reports of my lectures are hopeless as authorities" (proof page 73E). As usual, Shaw discounts the past (here represented by the newspaper record) in favor of the present (his own sense now of the way things must have been then).

In spite of Shaw's overshadowing his project, it must be said in all fairness to Henderson that he was not Shaw's dupe. He was aware of the difficulties of writing a factually correct biography of Shaw in his own voice, and failed to the extent that he did only because he was outmaneuvered by his indomitable proofreader. Henderson's scholarly training directed him to consult thousands of documents, and his good sense led him to verify information acquired from Shaw through other sources whenever possible.[11] But with a living biographee who made free with the proofs, Henderson's hands were tied. He felt obliged to comply with Shaw's corrections as the price for Shaw's cooperation. Shaw's changes in his proofs were not suggestions to be considered, but corrections to be incorporated. In the end, then, Henderson's plans for a historically faithful biography gave way to Shaw's plans for the book.

And what were Shaw's plans for Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet? His assessment of Shaw's role in the creation of this biography depends upon one's point of view. From one standpoint, which grants Shaw carte blanche

as the main source of correct information, Shaw clearly performed a myriad of services for the biography. He also quite properly clarified interpretation of his life and work where it was out of line with his own vision of either. After all, who was the final authority on Shaw and things Shavian?

To the extent that he did impose autobiography onto biography, Shaw of course ran certain risks. John A. Garraty characterizes these risks in this way: "The autobiographer, particularly if he is an experienced writer, may be affected by the sound of his own words and permit aesthetic considerations to distort his recollections."[12] But the opportunity to produce a truly Shavian memoir-cum-propaganda-wagon proved too tempting. The playwright in Shaw took over: the character to be drafted, defended, extolled, was his own persona, "GBS." As Shaw confesses in a headnote to "How Frank Ought to Have Done It," his parody of Frank Harris's Shavian biography: "Dramatizing myself from an objective point of view (the method natural to me) enabled me to say things I could not gracefully have said from my own subjective angle; but modesty forces me to add, 'Errors and Self-Delusions Excepted.'"[13] Henderson's biography offered Shaw a chance to present the image of himself and of his work that he wanted to be seen, without the disadvantage of appearing to speak out of self-interest, and thus spoiling the effect. With his characteristic chutzpah, Shaw took the chance, and Playboy and Prophet was the result. We should be grateful to both Henderson and Shaw that he did.

Notes