Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play. Bernard Shaw

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СКАЧАТЬ and so is C [Charrington].

      GBS

      23/ To a renowned English actress and actor-manager Ellen Terry

      28th November 1895

      My dear Miss Terry

      Very well: here is the Strange Lady [The Man of Destiny] for you, by book post. It is of no use now that it is written, because nobody can act it. Mind you bring it safely back to me; for if you leave it behind you in the train or in your dressing room, somebody will give a surreptitious performance of it: and then bang goes my copyright. If the responsibility of protecting it is irksome, tear it up. I have a vague recollection of curl papers in Nance Oldfield [by Charles Reade] for which it might be useful. I have other copies.

      This is not one of my great plays, you must know: it is only a display of my knowledge of stage tricks—a commercial traveller’s sample. You would like my Candida much better; but I never let people read that: I always read it to them. They can be heard sobbing three streets off.

      By the way—I forget whether I asked you this before —if that villain Mansfield plays Arms and the Man anywhere within your reach, will you go and see it and tell me whether they murder it or not? And your petitioner will ever pray &c. &c.

      G. Bernard Shaw

      24/ To Janet Achurch

      23rd December 1895

      My dear Janet

      . . . Does it ever occur to you that if you became the leading English actress you would have to represent your art with dignity among Stanleys [after Rosalind Frances Howard née Stanley] and other such people, and that you would be severely handicapped if they remembered how you had called in Aunt Mary’s brougham [after Lady Mary Henrietta Howard, a person who belongs to the aristocracy] and told them fibs and tried to get money out of them. However, it is useless to remonstrate. You will appreciate the magnanimity of soul which I recommend; but you won’t practise it. Therefore I must act myself—I, who haven’t a wife and child, and have not the means of excusing myself. If the I.T. [Independent Theatre] can get the money to do “Candida” properly, it shall have “Candida” (unless I hit on a better way). But if the least farthing of the money has to be touted for—that’s the hideous right word—touted for by you—if any shareholder is seduced into subscribing by the sight of as much as a lock of your hair or a cast off glove of yours—if there is to be any gift in the matter except our gift of our work, then I swear by the keen cold of this northern wind on my face and the glowing fire of it in my bones, there shall be no “Candida” at the I.T. You may contribute to its success as much as you like by making people love you, or fear you, or admire you, or be interested, fascinated, tantalised, or what not by you. But if you coin the love, fear, interest, admiration or fascination into drachmas, then I cannot have any part in the bargain. If Rothschild or the Prince of Wales want boxes, they know where they can be bought, just as they know where the Saturday Review can be bought. It is inconceivable that such measures should be congenial to you when your mind is properly strung; and you will get better all the faster if you put them behind you. . .

      It is a curious thing to me that you should express such remorse about trifles and follies that everybody commits in some form or other, and that strong people laugh at, whilst you are all the time doing things that are physically ruinous and planning things that you ought to hang yourself sooner than stoop to. There is only one physical crime that can destroy you—brandy: only one moral one—Aunt Mary’s brougham.

      I cannot lock up the brandy—but I can poison it. You must stop now: the change in your appearance shews that you are just at the point where that accursed stimulating diet must be dropped at all hazards. All through your illness you were beautiful and young; now you are beginning to look, not nourished but—steel yourself for another savage word—bloated. Do, for heaven’s sake, go back to the innocent diet of the invalid—porridge made of “miller’s pride” oatmeal and boiled all night into oatmeal jelly, rice, tomatoes, macaroni, without milk or eggs or other “nourishing” producers of indigestion. You can’t drink brandy with wholesome food; and if you take exercise you won’t want so much morphia. Eat stewed fruit and hovis. If you have any difficulty in digesting walnuts (for instance) nibble a grain of ginger glace with them and chew them and you will have no trouble. You will eventually strike out a decent diet for yourself. Anyhow, save your soul and body alive, and don’t turn me into granite.

      GBS

      25/ Bernard Shaw’s diary

      Preliminary Notes 1895

      Still living at 29 Fitzroy Square.

      I began the year by taking the post of dramatic critic to The Saturday Review, under the editorship of Frank Harris. This was the first regular appointment I ever held as a critic of the theatres. Salary £6 [£806.79 in 2020 according to Bank of England’s inflation calculator] a week.

      During my stay with the Webbs [Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb née Potter] at the Argoed in August and September I wrote a play in one act about Napoleon entitled The Man of Destiny. At the end of December I began another play title as yet unknown to me [You Never Can Tell]. During the Easter holidays with the Webbs, [Charles] Trevelyan, etc, at Beachy Head. I learnt to ride the bicycle and got much more exercise during the year than usual, with advantage to my health so far. I kept up the habit of going to the Webbs for lunch every Sunday.

      It was agreed between myself and Richard Mansfield that he should produce my play Candida in New York; and he actually engaged Janet Achurch for the part. She went out; but Mansfield then changed his mind; No I withdrew the play.

      In November Janet, when playing The New Magdalen [by William Wilkie Collins] for the week at the Metropole Theatre in Camberwell, caught typhoid fever, and her illness occupied me a good deal during the last two months of the year, partly because of its bearing on all possible plans for the production of Candida, and partly because I have come into relations of intimate friendship with the Charringtons [Charles Charrington and his wife Janet Achurch] during the past two years or so.

      Frank Harris tried to establish a regular lunch every Monday for choosing members of the Saturday Review staff at the Café Royale. I attended them for some time. Harold Frederic, Mrs Devereux [Pember], Marriott Watson and others used to come. Oscar Wilde came once, immediately before the Queensberry trial, with young [Alfred] Douglas. They left in some indignation because Harris refused to appear as a witness—a literary expert witness—to the high artistic character of Wilde’s book Dorian Gray. These lunches wasted my time and were rather apt to degenerate into bawdy talk. When a play called The Home Secretary [by Richard Claude Carton] was produced at the Criterion Theatre, I took the opportunity to protest against the attempt in the play to trade on the Anarchism bogey, my object being to call attention to some hard features in the case of Charles [Fred Charles Slaughter], “the Walsall Anarchist.” Harris alarmed by this, cut the passage out of the article. This incident brought my growing impatience with the brag and bawdry of the lunches to a head; and I never went again. They seem to have fallen through afterwards.

      26/ To Charles Charrington

      16th March 1896

      Dear Charrington

      Before you go committing yourself to Morell, I want to put before you the case on the other side—the case which has always prevented me from looking to you for Morell as I look to Janet for Candida.

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