Romance on Paper

Carl Van Doren once wrote, “A great man moving through public affairs leaves far more traces of himself than we usually imagine. The problem is less how to find material enough than how to put it in order and how to reconcile contradictions in the evidence.” How to reconcile contradictions in the evidence and how to piece together those bits of evidence is indeed the art of, to borrow historian Barbara Tuchman’s phrase, practicing history. I spent countless hours in Princeton University Library’s Rare Books and Manuscript Reading Room poring through the Carl Van Doren Papers, and probably an equal number of hours following the trails I picked up in those many linear feet of CVD’s letters and correspondence. Van Doren’s correspondence with Julian Boyd, fellow historian and also Princeton University’s Librarian at that time, was the most comprehensive of his professional correspondence. Elizabeth Marion, a young writer from Spangle, Washington, undoubtedly earns the title of premiere personal correspondent. From the time of their first – and only – meeting in October 1946 until Van Doren’s death in July 1950, the pair exchanged hundreds of letters which covered everything from his work to hers, the often frightful weather in the Northwest, his grandchildren, her visiting aunts, and the individuality of hands.

In a letter dated January 30, 1950, Elizabeth wrote:

 I got up to see what you’d written in the Portable Carl Van Doren, and lo and behold, there was clipped over it the first letter you ever wrote to me, dated November 15, 1946…wonderful, and nice, and corrigible!...over three years ago that was – not a long time, but oh me, so very quick…in three years I’ve grown so used to you as somebody to laugh and talk with, via the red stamps – but when I think of meeting you in the flesh again, I feel exactly like Ellen Terry, I’d run fast around the block and go home and write a cowardly ingratiating note!...because nothing on earth, not even you at your most incorrigible, can ever convince me that you haven’t made me up out of whole cloth, so to speak…which is as close to what I mean as I can get without the detail which you spared me so I return the favor…

The reference to Ellen Terry escaped me, so I did some digging. Ellen Terry, born in 1848, was a popular British stage actress. She would have been just over 100 years old when Elizabeth Marion evoked her memory, about the same age that Elizabeth Marion, born in 1916, would in fact be today. When Ellen Terry was 44 years old, acting at the Lyceum Theatre in London, she wrote a first letter to then-music and theater critic George Bernard Shaw. Shaw was 8 years her junior and not yet the hugely successful playwright he would become (and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925). Today, Shaw’s prestige ranks just below Shakespeare’s in the British literary canon. During the beginning of the pair’s romance, however, those roles were reversed. Terry, a former child actor, was the leading Shakespearean actress in London, widely popular and had made several international tours, while Shaw was known in much smaller circles for his music criticism and political activism. By the time the two “met,” Terry had been married and divorced three times and had two children; Shaw would marry Charlotte Payne-Townshend in 1898.

From her home in Barkston Gardens to his home in Fitzroy Square (about a 4 mile walk, crossing the city through Hyde Park), the pair began a romance that would last for 25 years and which existed almost entirely on paper.

Still, what Elizabeth Marion meant by her comment, “but when I think of meeting you in the flesh again, I feel exactly like Ellen Terry, I’d run fast around the block and go home and write a cowardly ingratiating note” I did not know. It was clear enough that not only was there was a story behind Ellen Terry’s feelings for Bernard Shaw, but that Elizabeth Marion assumed Van Doren would know that story as well.

So more digging, more crumbs to be picked up along the trail. In 1932 the bulk of Terry’s correspondence with Shaw, Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence, was published (posthumously) and included a preface by Shaw himself. The correspondence and the romance, several years after the death of Ellen Terry, was very dear to his heart.

In her early letters to Shaw, Ellen Terry wrote about her dread at the thought of ever actually meeting her correspondent in person. While Shaw attended many of her stage performances over the years, indeed he wrote about many of these performances as a critic for the Saturday Review, the pair had yet to actually meet. She feared that Shaw would be disappointed in seeing her off the stage, fretting that she was too old, not pretty enough, too pale. She was “determined to avoid the meeting at any cost.” Ellen Terry wrote:

23 September 1896. Savoy Hotel

…Am I to hear or read Candida? I think I’d rather never meet you – in the flesh. You are such a Great Dear as you are! And you are such a worker, and I work too for other people…And we both are always busy, and of use!

To which Shaw responded on the 25th, from Fitzroy Square:

Very well, you shant meet me in the flesh if you’d rather not. There is something deeply touching in that. Did you never meet a man who could bear meeting and knowing? Perhaps you’re right…

Ellen responded:

Darling, I only want to know whether [folks] think you would, if we met, have a horrible dislike of me when you found me such an old thing, and so different to the Ellen you’ve seen on the stage. I’m so pale when I’m off the stage… not even the rouge would make you admire me away from the stage. Oh what a curse it is to be an actress!

I passed your house again to-day (on purpose, I confess it). I was going from St. Pancras to Kensington and took a turn round your Square. I’d like to go when you are there! But no, all’s of no use…

Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw loved each other – they told each other so repeatedly. But it was a particular kind of love that flourished best, apparently, on paper. The pair corresponded about their heavy workloads - she acting in plays in London, across the English countryside, in Paris, and in America; his work writing numerous plays which, for many years, found no publisher willing to print. The art of their work was very important to both Ellen and Bernard, and each would often reproach the other to not write again until he or she was properly rested. Ellen wrote, “Be strong. Dont waste your time on any women. Work. Shake the world, you stupid darling… I want a bit of you, of your brain – only you can give me that.”

The pair teased and flirted. After a few weeks went by with no letter, Shaw wrote, “Probably you have forgotten all about me: but you used to write to me years ago…” After one particular letter in which Ellen invited Bernard and his lady-friend Miss P-T (Charlotte Payne-Townshend, whom he would later marry) to come to her next performance, Shaw replied, “No: I wont go round to your room [after the show]; and you know that perfectly well, you tantalizing fiend, or else you wouldn’t have suggested it.”

I love you. You are at liberty to make what use you please of this communication. Of course, I will love you after Thursday; but the point is that I love you now.

- GBS to ET, Dec. 8, 1896

So why did this romance continue for so many years on paper alone? Both Ellen and Bernard had many, many opportunities to meet in person, they lived mere miles from one another. On several occasions, in fact, she went so far as to approach his front door, only to turn around at the last moment in a fit of cowardice. Shaw admitted, “I love you soulfully and bodyfully, properly and improperly, every way that a woman can be loved.” What recipient of love could ask for more? But Ellen quite simply did not want to break the spell, although she battled with herself time and again over this fear that an actual meeting would do just that. “Dont let us break the spell, do let us break the spell, dont, do, dont, do, dont, do, dont – I resolved to let the end of the line decide it, and it has decided nothing.”

Uncovering the history of Ellen Terry’s romance with Bernard Shaw opened a window into my own research on the Elizabeth Marion – Carl Van Doren correspondence. Elizabeth Marion lived much of her life in books, and the books she adored most were volumes of correspondence. She once wrote, “I always love volumes of letters, and always wish they weren’t so few and far between.” Clearly she had read, and probably devoured, the Terry-Shaw correspondence, and she knew of Terry’s hesitation at meeting her paramour in the flesh. In light of Carl Van Doren’s position as a man of letters, Elizabeth Marion could be sure that Van Doren knew the Terry-Shaw correspondence as well. There was no need to explain the Ellen Terry reference in her own letter. Van Doren would get it, and Elizabeth knew that. Indeed, having a fellow bookworm who would appreciate a potentially obscure fact of literary history likely added to the intimate connection between them. Who else in her world would have instantly understood the sentiment behind her the admission that, perhaps, an in-person meeting would break the spell? The stakes were too high, the relationship too precious.  

In his preface to Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence, Shaw responded to criticisms that the pair’s romance existed “only on paper.” He declared, “Let them…remember that only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”