VI. The Library at Shaw’s Corner

[Some Principal Shaw Research Sources]

Shaw had no collectors’ instinct for books. The handful he chose to transport to London on his emigration in 1876 was left behind in Fitzroy Square when he married and moved to Adelphi Terrace, eventually to be appropriated by relations or sold when his mother vacated the Square in 1906. Many books acquired in Shaw’s early years as a reviewer were dispersed (moral principles forbidding him to sell them for needed cash) through institutions like the Kyrle Society, which serviced the wards in charity hospitals. When the Shaws traveled, each toted a crammed bag of books, but abandoned volumes in hotel or guest bedrooms, train compartments, and ship cabins once they’d been read.

In spite of Shaw’s lack of literary acquisitiveness, bookshelves in town and country grew crowded with copies of his own works, with hundreds of presentation copies inscribed by their authors, and with accumulated reference tools: postal directories, dictionaries, encyclopedias, Pitman manuals of phonography, and Bibles, of which he had more than a dozen variants, from Tyndale to Ronald Knox, at the ready for his need. As the Shaws eschewed bookplates or ownership signatures, it is rarely possible to distinguish the acquirer of any but presentation books, though one may reasonably assume that most of the works on political theory, economics, and social history were his, while most of the collections of sacred books and philosophic systems (Koran, Vedanta, Upanishads) and studies of occultism and mysticism or treatises on meditation were Charlotte’s.

Not until nearly six years after Charlotte’s death did Shaw, approaching ninety-three, dispose of his London flat and its possessions. “VALUABLE PRINTED BOOKS . . . Sold by Order of G. Bernard Shaw, Esq.” were advertised for auction by Sotheby’s in a catalogue that included several of his showiest holdings, into which he had copied inscriptions drafted to enhance their value. (These were published in Shaw, Flyleaves, 1977.) Sotheby further conspired to insert into each book an unprepossessing pink label, printed in Gothic: “Ex Libris. Bernard Shaw.” The effort was unavailing. Although many of the volumes were fine inscribed presentations from the likes of Woolf, Yeats, O’Casey, and Wells, the sale’s total came to a pitiable £2570.5.0, for over eleven hundred volumes, most of which, Shaw confessed before the sale, he hadn’t known he owned until he perused the catalogue.

The residue of the Shaws’ book (and music) accumulation survived intact because, when Shaw in 1944 presented Shaw’s Corner to the National Trust, the vesting deed guaranteed retention there of all the furnishings, art works, and books. The Shaw “library” at Ayot St. Lawrence, shelfmarked and catalogued in 1980 by a past custodian, G. Fraser Gallie, consists of more than three thousand volumes (exclusive of duplications), housed in the downstairs study and drawing room and in an upstairs guest bedroom (whose frequent occupant had been Lawrence of Arabia), now outfitted with shelved books and identified as the Lawrence Room.

A swift glance will suffice to recognize the extraordinary eclecticism of the collection: Homer, Gibbon, Trotsky, Cowper, Rousseau, Saroyan, Kipling, Croce, Dean Inge, William James, Swami Sivanandra, Jung, Thoreau, Lillian Hellman, Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd series, and Jacques Barzun, in disorderly array. The shelves bulge with Ignatyev’s A Subaltern in Old Russia, a life of Pythagoras, the Blarney Annual, Jack B. Yeats’s La, La, Noo, Turner’s Watercolours at Farnley Hall, R.L. Simon’s Miniature Photography, Joyce’s Dubliners, Partridge’s history of the legal deposit of books, and S.W. Cort’s Cancer: Is the Dog the Cause?

Everywhere one encounters happy surprises: an inscribed copy, from “il suo ferventissimo animaratore Luigi Pirandello,” of the English translation of Six Characters in Search of an Author, posted from Rome a month before the two dramatists met in London in November 1923; a presentation of Winston Churchill’s Great Contemporaries (1937) with an added personal postscript message; a fragile pamphlet The Story of the Irish Citizen Army (1919) by P.O. Cathasaigh, later to be known as Sean O’Casey; a rare copy (not in the British Library or in the House of Lords Library) of a Confidential Report to His Majesty the King of ‘The Irish Convention’ by the Chairman [Horace Plunkett], 1919. Labelled “SECRET” it was sent to Shaw by Plunkett, who had incorporated into it opinions and suggestions supplied by Shaw in correspondence before and during the Convention and in proofs sent to him in the publication process.

Probably the most fascinating of all the library’s treasures is a Festschrift for Shaw’s seventieth birthday, a collection of 105 greetings and salutations in the form of letters and original poems, art works, and musical compositions of the creative elite of Germany and Austria, bound in leather and presented to Shaw through his Berlin publisher in July 1926. Its impressive list of contributors includes Einstein, Mann, Schönberg, Spengler, Ludwig, Schnitzler, Zweig, Werfel, Hauptmann, Klemperer, Korngold, Piscator, Elisabeth Bergner, and Richard Strauss.

Shaw is represented in the library by a significant number of his own works in varying degrees of composition and usage, several of the volumes “measled” with red-inked imprints of the author’s thumb on their covers to denote copies not to be removed or discarded. Among the texts are a rough proof of Pygmalion (lettered “AUTHOR” on its upper cover) containing directorial rehearsal notes for the 1914 London production; a printing of Major Barbara “Used for Sybil Thorndike’s revival” (1929) and of Mrs Warren’s Profession (1902), marked by Shaw for the 1926 London public premiere). A 1931 issue of Saint Joan is indited “Cut for [film] scenario Nov 1934.” A rough proof of The Millionairess contains the shorthand draft of the new ending for Russia, dated 1 June 1936. A “FIRST REHEARSAL COPY” of “In Good King Charles’s Golden Days” (1939) is fully corrected by Shaw. A 1908 printing of Arms and the Man is heavily annotated, possibly for the Arnold Daly production of 1911; and there are abundantly annotated texts in volumes of Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1900 reprint), Three Plays for Puritans (1901), and the John Bull’s Other Island—Major Barbara volume (1907: two copies, both annotated). A rough proof of The Apple Cart survives from the 1929 Malvern Festival rehearsals; and notes in a revised rehearsal copy (1948) of Buoyant Billions, possibly related to the 1949 visit to Ayot of members of the Malvern production for Shaw’s directorial advice.

Augmenting the literary works are some 350 bound musical scores and unbound sheet music, largely of vocal works, ranging from Messiah and the operas Fidelio, Parsifal, and Boris Godunov to collections of English folk songs, chanteys and carols, songs of the Hebrides, country dances, and a two-volume edition of American Negro spirituals. As with the books the range of the material is astonishing. Not just Verdi’s Otello, but I Masnadieri; Mozart’s Zauberflöte, but also Idomeneo; Gounod’s Faust and La Reine de Saba. As might be expected there is a considerable assortment of eighteenth and nineteenth century works: Rossini’s Otello, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, Tchaikowsky’s 1812 Overture, Robert Schumann’s Goethe’s Faust, Beethoven’s Ninth and the fifth piano concerto, Bach’s organ works and cantata solos, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial by Jury.

Especially impressive are works acquired in the early decades of the twentieth century: several of Richard Strauss’s operas, ballet scores, and the 1890s tone poems of Richard Strauss; Puccini’s Turandot; Debussy’s piano music; six volumes of Hugo Wolf’s lieder; Scriabin’s “mystic chord” Sonatas 8–10; and, interspersed, an occasional novelty like Yes! We Have No Bananas (Frank Silver and Irving Cohen, 1923), or a couple of musical settings in manuscript of the Socialist anthem The Red Flag.

It is, however, British contemporary music that dominated Shaw’s interest in his late years, as evidenced by thirty-four works of Sir Edward Elgar, fifteen of Frank Bridge, thirteen of Arnold Bax, a dozen of John Ireland, and nine of Vaughan Williams. Add to this some preludes and fugues of Havergal Brian, Rutland Boughton’s The Immortal Hour, songs by Lord Berners, and William Walton’s Utopian Hymn (his own manuscript, setting words by Shaw for the film Major Barbara), and you begin to get a picture of Shaw’s modern musical tastes.

Among albums of 78 rpm phonograph records one finds disc recordings of Shaw’s voice and spoken dialogue for Waldo Lanchester’s production of Shakes versus Shav (1949), with the “Shav” puppet dangling nearby. If one takes into account photographs (of and by Shaw), portraits, drawings, and caricatures, there decidedly remains much at Ayot for scholars to investigate. It is always nice, too, to be able to finger the Bechstein ivories. At what other library can one do this?

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Some Principal Shaw Research Sources