The Loneliest Liberal: Where’s the bacon?

By James Knudsen

Finding the right metaphor can be tricky but I think I’ve got it this time: bacon. We’ll get back to that.

GBS on Frank Harris on Oscar Wilde

A special feature of the edition of Frank Harris's life of Oscar Wilde that I finally finished reading today¹ is its inclusion of George Bernard Shaw's brief account, "My Memories of Oscar Wilde." Because Shaw lived until 1950, we may not remember that he was born the same year as Harris (1856-1931) and only two years after Wilde, who died in 1900.
    The part of GBS's account that I enjoyed most was his witty remarks about Harris, into which Harris inserted footnotes, on some of which GBS commented while reviewing the proof for publication:

What your book needs to complete it is a portrait of yourself as good as your portrait of Wilde....
    Pugnacious people, if they did not actually terrify Oscar, were at least the sort of people he could not control, and whom he feared as possibly able to coerce him. You suggest that the Queensberry pugnacity was something that Oscar could not deal with successfully. But how in that case could Oscar have felt quite safe with you? You were more pugnacious than six Queensberrys rolled into one. When people asked, "What has Frank Harris been?" the usual reply was, "Obviously a pirate from the Spanish main."
    ...You had quite an infernal scorn for nineteen out of twenty of the men and women you met in the circles he most wished to propitiate; and nothing could induce you to keep your knife in its sheath when they jarred on you. The Spanish Main itself would have blushed rosy red at your language when classical invective did not suffice to express your feelings.
    ...That is why, in his relations with you, he appears as a man always shirking action—more of a coward (all men are cowards more or less) than so proud a man can have been [sic]. Still this does not affect the truth and power of your portrait. Wilde's memory will have to stand or fall by it.
    ...You could not have carried kindness further without sentimental folly. I should have made a far sterner summing up. I am sure Oscar has not found the gates of heaven shut against him. He is too good company to be excluded; but he can hardly have been greeted as "Thou good and faithful servant." The first thing we ask a servant for is a testimonial to honesty, sobriety, and industry; for we soon find out that these are the scarce things, and that geniuses and clever people are as common as rats.

Here Harris placed a footnote: "The English paste in Shaw; genius is about the rarest thing on earth whereas the necessary guantum of 'honesty, sobriety, and industry' is beaten by life into nine humans out of ten."
    And GBS commented, "If so, it is the tenth who comes my way."

Shaw's account continues:

Well, Oscar was not sober, not honest, not industrious. Society praised him for being idle, and persecuted him savagely for an aberration [homosexual acts] which it had better have left unadvertized, thereby making a hero of him; for it is in the nature of people to worship those who have been made to suffer horribly. Indeed I have often said that if the crucifixion could be proved a myth, and Jesus convicted of dying of old age in comfortable circumstances, Christianity would lose ninety-nine per cent of its devotees.
    ...Now that you have written the best life of Oscar Wilde, let us have the best life of Frank Harris². Otherwise the man behind your works will go down to posterity as the hero of my very inadequate preface to "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets." [pp. 339-343, Appendix A]

And here again Harris placed a footnote: "A characteristic flirt of Shaw's humor. He is a great caricaturist and not a portrait-painter.
    "When he thinks of my Celtic face and aggressive American frankness he talks of me as pugnacious and a pirate: 'a Captain Kidd.' In his preface to 'The Fair Lady of the Sonnets' [sic] he praises my 'idiosyncratic gift of pity'; says that I am 'wise through pity'; then he extols me as a prophet, not seeing that a pitying sage, prophet, and pirate constitute an inhuman superman.
    "I shall do more for Shaw than he has been able to do for me; he is the first figure in my new volume of 'Contemporary Portraits.' I have portrayed him there at his best, as I love to think of him, and henceforth he'll have to try to live up to my conception and that will keep him, I'm afraid, on strain."
    And GBS commented: "God help me!"
_______________

1. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions, 1916, 1917; 1997 edition (simply titled Oscar Wilde) with introduction by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, which concludes with "Oscar's Last Days," by Oscar's lifelong friend Robbie Ross (1869-1918). As I learned from the text-overs at the end of "Wilde" the movie, Ross's remains were moved to Oscar's tomb about fifty years later, as seems to be confirmed on the web.
2. I think we have it, in Harris's memoir, My Life and Loves, 1931.

Repartees you might like to have made

George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill were not the best of friends. The following interchange may be apocryphal, but Churchill's repartee is the sort of thing you might wish you could think of on occasion.

GBS is said to have written to Churchill:

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new Play. Bring a friend...if you have one.

And Churchill is reported to have responded:

Cannot possibly attend first night. Will attend second...if there is one.

That repartee reminds me of another attributed to Churchill. To quote from The Churchill Center:

Lady Astor: "Winston, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee."

Winston: "Nancy, if I were your husband I'd drink it."

This exchange is sometimes attributed to Winston's good friend F.E. Smith, but in Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan's The Glitter and the Gold she writes that the exchange occurred at Blenheim when her son was host. See also the American edition of Martin Gilbert's In Search of Churchill (not in the British edition). In Nancy: The Life of Lady Astor, Christopher Sykes confirms Consuelo Balsan's account.

It sounds like an invention but is well authenticated. [Churchill] and the Astors were staying with Churchill's cousin, the Duke of Marlborough, at Blenheim Palace. Nancy and Churchill argued ferociously throughout the weekend.

I like to think that both interchanges are reported accurately.