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SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 24 (2004) 166-185



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Shaw's Sculptress, Kathleen Scott

Many years into their long friendship, Bernard Shaw told Kathleen Scott (she had sculpted him, wearing then-unfeminine coveralls or slacks), "No woman ever born had a narrower escape from being a man. My affection for you is the nearest I ever came to homosexuality."1 Lady Scott, widow of the Antarctic explorer, nevertheless always had trouble deflecting admirers. Nor did she try very hard. Devotees often became subjects for her chisel, and if not then, they became helpless with admiration as they sat for her.

A friend late in her life, who would write Kathleen's obituary in advance (and by request) for The Times in 1937, ten years before she died, called her "alleged vamping of distinguished men" empty charges that were "rubbish." Rather, "famous men sought K. out, even those who were not being modelled," and she would claim in pleased vanity that she had "volumes" of letters from them.2 Shaw's alone would make a small volume.

G.B.S. met Kathleen Bruce in the early 1900s. Born on 27 March 1878, she had studied with Auguste Rodin when just out of her teens, preened at Gertrude Stein's salons, traveled with Isadora Duncan, and volunteered in Macedonia with refugees from Turkish brutality. She introduced Shaw to Isadora, who urged him "to come and sit beside her and hold her hand," Kathleen recalled, because "though I may not be much to look at, I'm very good to feel." Shaw remembered Isadora, who attracted him far less than Kathleen, "clothed in draperies and appearing rather damaged," with a face that "looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone had licked it." Holding out her arms, she appealed, "I have loved you all my life. Come!!" So they sat while "the entire party gathered around us as if they were witnessing a play." If he called on her, Isadora promised, she would dance for him "undraped." He never did.3

Kathleen also radiated unconventionality, but she kept her private life [End Page 166] prior to her marriage a mystery. Like other men, Shaw was attracted by what he described as her vitality, but he was hardly the first votary. Occultist and magician Aleister Crowley, who met her in Paris at Rodin's studio, penned outrageously bad poetry urging her to "Whip, whip me till I burn! Whip on! Whip on!" Masochistic fantasy? The repellent Crowley claimed that her "brilliant beauty and wholesome Highland flamboyance were complicated with a sinister perversity. . . . She initiated me into the torturing pleasures of algolagny on the spiritual plane. . . . Love had no savour for her unless she was causing ruin or unhappiness to others." Crowley may have merely been frustrated—yet enjoying it.4 Old Rodin "would flatter me and my work," she wrote, and he would, like so many other admirers, send her fulsome letters. He would call her "Un petit morceau grec d'un chef-d'oeuvre," she recalled, "and I would look at my stalwart arms and legs and not feel at all fragmentary."5

In Paris, too, was photographer Edward Steichen, whose wife, Clara, identified Kathleen as "the lovestruck young woman" who had allegedly gazed longingly at Steichen across the tables of a cheap café in Paris in 1902.6 Clara perceived, suspiciously, a sexual overture, and was jealous of the arty women she viewed as rivals for her husband even if the relationships were entirely innocent. At work in England later, Kathleen mingled with politicians and artistic people in circles that intersected with Shaw's own. Her admiration of Shaw was so complete that when she was hospitalized for surgery on an abdominal cyst, and "half-expected to die," she became even more certain of that when a nurse asked her if she would like to have a clergyman visit. No, she said, she would rather see Bernard Shaw.7

Her personal world found a focus when she met naval captain and explorer Robert Falcon Scott and...

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