Shaw's Sex Credo

[Shaw's letter to Frank Harris, 24 June 1930, is published in Dan H. Laurence, ed., Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters IV, 1926-1950 (New York: Viking, 1988), pp. 190-93. A slightly bowdlerized version appears at the end of the chapter entitled "Shaw's Sex Credo" in Harris's Bernard Shaw: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1931; London, Victor Gollancz, 1931). Substantial changes, deletions, and additions were made for republication as "To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography," chapter XVI of Shaw's Sixteen Self Sketches (London: Constable, 1949). The letter is also found in Stanley Weintraub, ed., The Playwright and the Pirate: Bernard Shaw and Frank Harris: A Correspondence (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982), whose Introduction summarizes the Shaw/Harris relationship.

For their published versions (upon which the one below is based), Laurence and Weintraub consulted the text of the original manuscript letter in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. However, the letter as it appears below is a conflation of three documents: Shaw's 1930 letter, the changes made for the 1931 Harris biography, and those made for the 1949 sketches. In one instance, for example, Shaw goes from "copulations" (1930) to "gallantries" (1931) to "sex histories" (1949).

Given the context of certain publication by Harris, either verbatim or as (possibly distorted) narrative, Shaw's 1930 letter is surprisingly frank. Even his friends H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett, both incorrigible womanizers, never publicized their sexual experiences in as much detail or with such désinvolture as Shaw does here. A few years earlier, on the other hand, the priapic Harris had unabashedly described his own sexual adventures in his notorious memoirs, My Life and Loves (4 vols., 1922-27; vol. 5, 1954)—"more fantasy than fact," cautions Weintraub (xiii)—the first volume of which was burned by Charlotte Shaw in the fireplace!

The reasons for Shaw's frankness on 24 June—and for his closing caveat: "above all no pornography"—are found in the post scriptum to his previous letter of 20 June. There he cautions Harris that his letter "does not answer the modern biographer's first question nor satisfy the modern reader's Freudian curiosity, which is 'How did you respond to your sexual urges?'" Shaw promises to write further about what he calls "a very wide and complex subject" (quoted in Weintraub, 233). Four days later, he did.

For publication the following year, however, Shaw cleaned up his language: "copulations" was softened to "gallantries and "whore" became "mistress." And an allusion to Jenny Patterson as "sexually insatiable" was deleted, perhaps out of consideration for Charlotte. By 1949 (Charlotte having died in 1943), Shaw was free to thoroughly revise (in some cases rewrite) his 1930 letter, referring to prostitutes and "Sunday husbands," to sexual experience as a "natural appetite," and to his marriage as a "relation in which sex had no part." At ninety-three, Shaw was still concerned about the wide and complex subject of his sexual urges.¹

A note on the text: Brace brackets { } indicate the few 1931 changes, while square brackets [ ] mark the numerous 1949 emendations. Passages in bold are additions; all other bracketed passages indicate deletions. Minor changes—in syntax, punctuation, phrasing, verb tense, pronoun use—have not been included.—M.W.P.]

Dear Frank Harris,
First, O [sex-obsessed] Biographer, get it clear in your mind that you can learn nothing about your [sitter (or Biographee—) from a mere record of his {copulations.}] {gallantries.} [biographees from their sex histories.] [You have no such record in the case of Shakespeare, and a pretty full one for a few years in the case of Pepys: but you know much more about Shakespeare than about Pepys. The explanation is that the relation between the parties in copulation is not a personal relation.] [The sex relation is not a personal relation.] It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously [executed] [consummated] between persons who could not endure one...