Bernard Shaw - Candida & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

No fair play here for you or anyone else. Who wants fair play? London is a fortress in which every man must, as an outsider, batter a breach for himself. Then in, sword in hand. Success, achievement, fruition, is death. Fortunately, they fight you from behind barricades in every street when you have carried the wall; so that there is always an obstacle, and, consequently, an object in life.

All the same, no nonsense this time about an August season. The season is over by the middle of July. Don’t be in a hurry: Candida can wait until next year if it proves worth going on with at all. Immer Mut !

In haste

G. Bernard Shaw

14/ To Janet Achurch

30th March 1895

[My dear Janet]

I am sending by this mail an interview to “Town Topics,” which they may or may not insert. I am so addled by want of exercise, and ceaseless clatter, clatter, clatter at this machine, that I am incapable of writing anything that has not a hysterical air about it. . . I have a frightful feeling that my previous letters have been all morbid. However, no matter. The spring is germinating; this mail finishes all I can do with regard to “Candida” in America; the copyrighting performance is over at last; the Easter holiday is at hand; life rises in me and conscience wanes; and there is animation in my style even as I sing

But what are vernal joys to me?

Where thou art not, no spring can be.

I shall never be able to begin a new play until I fall in love with somebody else. Charrington called yesterday. He said you wouldn’t sign a contract, he was sure of that; you would rather not bind yourself. But my own feeling is that you had a stronger interest in getting a contract than Mansfield has in giving it to you. Suppose “Candida,” as is probable—more probable than any other event—is a success on the first night, a “succes d’estime” for the following fortnight, and then vanishes from the New York stage. Mansfield, in disgust at the whole business, may say that you have failed, and that you are not worth the fifty pounds a week. . .

On the other hand, if you get your two years contract, what will happen then? You will of course stipulate for leading parts (with a reasonable regard for Mrs Mansfield); and you will then be sure of work and fifty pounds a week for two years, during which you can save and look about you with a view to campaigning on your own account afterwards. No doubt two years seems a long time to you, who have been accustomed to start operations in a fortnight; but how have they succeeded? What are you afraid of in the transaction? Is it that Mansfield will not pay you? He must; he cannot exist without considerable property as a theatrical manager; and whilst the property is there, the law can force him to pay your salary. Or is it that he will give you no parts, and prevent you by injunction from playing for anyone else? Do you think people behave that way when it costs them fifty pounds a week?

But you may be dreaming that “ Candida ” will be such a success that it will place New York at your feet. It won’t; and even if it does, it will not place Boston and Chicago and so on at your feet without Mansfield. It will really be a success of the combination of yourself with Mansfield; and it is absolutely impossible for it to justify you in feeling sure that you would maintain your lead without him. You may say that [Charles] Frohmann or somebody will say “Come and be my leading lady at a hundred a week.” Well, the chance of that contingency is just good enough to enable you to extract a two years contract from Mansfield now ; but it is not good enough to risk going without a contract for. Besides, it was Mansfield, not Frohmann or another, that gave you your chance; and he is entitled to the full profit of it if it turns out well. And he has “ Candida ,” subject, it is true, to the condition of playing it fifty times a year with you in the title part, but morally entitled, if you go to another manager for purely commercial reasons, to demand the substitution of—say Ellen Terry. What plays have the other managers got that would shew you to the fullest advantage?

All this you must ponder carefully. In telling Mansfield to let you have your own way, I am running the great risk that he will comply, and that your way will be the old ruinous way. The summing up of the case is this. Either you intend to make your career in America as some manager’s leading lady, or you intend to make it as your own entrepreneur. Well, you cannot begin the latter at once because you have no money; and you must once for all give up the old plan of throwing your friends’ savings into enterprises that are as ill considered as enterprises conducted with other peoples’ money usually are. Therefore, you must work for a salary for a few years at least. Are you going to let the certainty of a two years engagement at fifty pounds a week (excellent pay) slip through your fingers on the chance of “ Candida ” being successful enough to bring you a better offer?

That’s the question you have to face. I don’t advise you one way or the other; I simply take care that the case in favour of a contract shall be put clearly before you. Probably [your husband Charles] Charrington will put the other side with equal eloquence.

GBS

15/ To Janet Achurch

3rd April 1895

[My dear Janet]

I had looked forward to writing you a long letter; but your cable to Charrington saying that Candida is withdrawn has dropped here with explosive force, Charrington being all for an immediate departure as a stowaway on the next liner to New York. However, I shall cable to Mansfield; for he must produce “Candida” now, and produce it at once too, or else there will be forty thousand fiends to pay; for the newspaper boom here is immense—two interviews with me this week, paragraphs innumerable, quotations from the passage about you and Ellen Terry in my preface to [William] Archer’s book, altogether such an outburst of interest that the fact of the advent of Candida under Mansfield’s management with you in the title part is nailed into the public mind. [Clement] Scott ignores it and announces another project of Mansfield’s. If there is any failure, he will jump at the chance of alluding to “misleading statements” and so forth; and then woe to those who trifle with me; for the explanations will lose none of their picturesqueness if I have to make them. It will be an advertisement for me and the play in any case, one which may perhaps end, if Mansfield leaves me in the lurch, in the rapid production of “ Candida ” here, with “ The Philanderer ” on top of it. When I learn that you are not busy rehearsing with all your might, remorse leaves me.

I forget whether I told you that the clause in the agreement relating to you runs as follows:

“The Manager shall engage Miss Janet Achurch and shall cast her for the title part of Candida at all performances given under this agreement and shall not permit Miss Janet Achurch to perform publicly in America on any occasion prior to her appearance as Candida.” . . .

GBS

16/ To Janet Achurch

5th April 1895

My dear Janet

I have played my last card, and am beaten, as far as I can see, without remedy. I have done what I could; I have scamped none of the work, stinted none of the minutes or sixpences; I have worked the press; I have privately flattered Mansfield and abused you; I have concentrated every force that I could bring to bear to secure you a good show with Candida. Can I do anything more? And how long must I keep my temper with these rotten levers that break in my hands the moment the dead lift comes? It is the distance that has defeated me. If only I were in New York, with one hand on his throat, and the other on the public pulse through the interviewers, I would play him a scene from the life of Wellington that would astonish him. Never has man yet made such a sacrifice for a woman as I am making now in not letting fly at him by this mail. But I have so laid things out to force him for his own credit to keep faith with me, that I cannot be certain that he may not tomorrow realize that he had better do Candida after all. He will get letters of mine that are on their way, and may guess from them that my smile has a Saturday Review set of teeth behind it. He may lose heart over whatever other play he intends to open with. He may receive a visit from an angel in the night warning him that Charrington is on the seas after his scalp. If I fire a shot now that cannot strike him for eight days, it may strike you by upsetting some new arrangement made in the meantime. I am tied hand and foot—not a bad thing for a man in a rage—and can only grind my teeth to you privately. If this were a big misfortune I should not mind: if you had dropped all the existing copies of the play accidentally into the Atlantic, it would have wrinkled my brow less than it would have wrinkled the Atlantic: the infuriating thing is that it is an annoyance, and no misfortune at all. I have my play; I have you for the part; I have a huge extra advertisement; I have not a single false step to regret all through. But this only sets my conscience perfectly free to boil over with the impatience of the capable workman who finds a trumpery job spoiled by the breaking of the tool he is using. Besides, my deepest humanity is revolted by his skulking in his throne room and refusing to see you and treat with you as one artist of the first rank with another. The compromise he has made is simply a payment to you to give him the power of preventing you from appearing in New York this season. —But this is waste of time: let me talk sense.