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Bernard Shaw's Postmistress: The Memoir of Jisbella Georgina Lyth as Told to Romie Lambkin

2019; Penn State University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.39.2.0307

1529-1480

Mary Christian,

Literature Analysis and Criticism

Most people who pick up this book will probably be hoping to answer one or both of the following questions: First, what sort of person was Jisbella Lyth (rhymes with blithe, not myth), the Ayot St. Lawrence postmistress who may have inspired Shaw's play Village Wooing? And second, what was it like to know Shaw—to know him as a person, a neighbor, a small-business client?Readers with these questions in mind may be somewhat disoriented to find that in the first nearly thirty pages of the narrative, there is no mention either of Bernard Shaw or of a postmistress. Instead, the book follows Jisbella from her small-farm childhood and teenage years in domestic service to her courtship with Ambrose Lyth and her years as a well-traveled military wife, shipping from England to Hong Kong to North America and a good many places in between, before the couple, returning to civilian life, find work at the Ayot post office. But the early chapters offer a vivid and revealing picture of everyday working-class life in the early twentieth century.Writer Romie Lambkin beautifully captures Jisbella's chatty voice and her pithy and mildly irreverent sense of humor (which one can easily imagine Shaw appreciating). Recalling her early years as a kitchen maid, Jisbella recounts, “A domestic servant, I began to realize, didn't need much intelligence to be a success. I once told my mistress this but she did not understand what I meant. That left me feeling I had surpassed her” (21). She generously offers an occasional laugh at her own expense. For example, she describes her reaction to her husband's military posting in Hong Kong: “China!” I gasped, my acquaintance to that country being limited to one visit to a Chinese laundry with Am's shirt collars. Beautifully done, they were, too. I pictured myself somewhere very steamy and hot and surrounded by small yellow men and women wearing long pigtails and perennially engaged in washing clothes…. I went to the library to study every book dealing with Hong Kong, confusing myself a good deal, but one thing I was sure of and that was, once the initial shock wore off, I was raring to go. (23) Here and elsewhere she good-naturedly laughs at her limited formal education even while highlighting her curiosity, resourcefulness, and sense of adventure (traits that, for readers of Village Wooing, strongly underscore Jisbella's likeness to “Z”).This early part of the story has a few unlucky gaps, possibly due to the chaotic circumstances of the writing process (while writing up the interview material, Romie was packing for a move, looking after her young son, and caring for an adopted dog that had just given birth to nine puppies). The page describing Jisbella's first meeting with her future husband is frustratingly missing from the manuscript, and there may be a missing chapter describing her experiences in Hong Kong (after Chapter 2 ends with her expectations and trying voyage to Hong Kong, Chapter 3 begins with her visit to the United States with a previously undescribed family employing her as nanny to their three boys). But these narrative blanks are fortunately few, and L. W. Conolly's editorial notes are helpful in smoothing over the rough places, as well as identifying possibly unfamiliar people and events.Shaw first appears on the scene on page 40 (of 120), when Jisbella, visiting her sister in Wheathampstead (near Ayot), observes a white-haired man driving by in a car. Her sister points out, “‘There goes that old man from Ayot St. Lawrence. He writes books.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I murmured vaguely, giving a perfunctory glance and immediately forgot him” (40–41). She, along with her husband, later form more detailed impressions: Ambrose “liked Mr. Shaw's musical voice and his sparkling eyes, which looked full of mischief,” and Jisbella recalls that “he wore the biggest hat I have ever seen outside a cowboy film” (48, 53). The portrait of Shaw that emerges over the book's middle chapters is of a generous, good-humored, and practical man, considerate of other people's privacy though he has little of his own.Given that the book will probably be primarily read by literary scholars and enthusiasts whose main acquaintance with Shaw is through his plays and other literary works, one of the most striking features about Jisbella's descriptions of Shaw is her frank bafflement with his writing. She recounts, “I tried to fill in the long dark nights by attempting to plough through some of Shaw's words but, quite frankly, I did not understand a lot of them” (57). She is similarly perplexed by his political opinions. On one occasion, while collecting donations for the local hospital, he irritably tells her, “‘Hospitals should not have to beg…. They should be run and kept up by the state.’ … [He] rattled on with lots more far above my poor intelligence” (65). Years later, she makes a more sustained effort to acquaint herself with his work, but with uneven success: When Mr. Shaw said he proposed giving me a book for my Christmas box I tried to look suitably pleased but I had some misgivings. My intuition proved correct. It was a copy of Everybody's Political What's What?! “Sleepy reading for Xmas” was inscribed on the flyleaf in his own unmistakable hand. It did not send me to sleep for the simple reason that I could not bring myself to attempt the struggle of ploughing through it. (75) She fares better with Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God and with Pygmalion (a present from Shaw, inscribed “To a good girl”): “I did read this one,” she reports, “and was a trifle surprised to find I could enjoy and understand it” (75). For academic readers who regard Shaw as a literary deity, who promote books and performances with a missionary-like zeal and regard unfamiliarity with his works as a pitiable deficiency, Jisbella's unabashedly nonliterary view of Shaw is, perhaps, a wholesome corrective. It reminds readers that there are many kinds of intelligence—and Shaw himself clearly had a ready appreciation for Jisbella's—her resourcefulness, sharp observations, and entrepreneurial ability—irrespective of her literary opinions.In addition to Shavian researchers and enthusiasts, this book also offers a valuable case study for cultural scholars who study celebrity—both the strategies by which celebrity is cultivated and managed and also celebrity's economic and social impact on surrounding lives. Shaw's celebrity affects Jisbella and Ayot in mundane ways, such as the profits Jisbella makes from the postcards he gives her to sell, and the crowds that overwhelm the town after Shaw's death, when his house has been made a national monument. There are also more memorable and sometimes excruciating anecdotes. One reporter, coming to the post office asking to see Shaw and finding him out of town, fulfills his journalistic assignment with a lurid tabloid portrait of a lovesick postmistress: “The article referred to me as the happiest woman in Hertfordshire and all because of George Bernard Shaw. It described me as fondling Mr. Shaw's pictures, and of saying that he was almost my greatest friend, and that hardly a day passed but he did not come to see me…. The letter arrived on my half day and I felt like using it to take my life” (58). Though Shaw comes indignantly to her defense, forcing a public apology from the newspaper and advising Jisbella to sue for two thousand pounds (she eventually gets one hundred), the humiliation takes considerable time to overcome. (Incidentally, this event apparently happened a few years before Shaw wrote Village Wooing, a play in which a shopwoman widely suspected to be based on Jisbella manipulates a Shaw-like writer into a reluctant engagement. It seems odd, though certainly fortunate, that Jisbella does not report any revival of the embarrassing rumors in the wake of the play, or any fear of such a revival. She appears to view the play, and her own possible role as the prototype of “Z,” with unmixed enjoyment.)But the chief pleasure in reading the book, more than any historical insight it offers to scholars of celebrity or Shaw, is the contagious pleasure of its creators in telling the story. Jisbella's friendship with Shaw and her correspondence with countless unnamed Shavian fans; Romie Lambkin's delight in writing the memoir of “rather a special” postmistress in a chaotic house full of children and puppies; Conolly's affection for his subject (he dedicates the volume “For Romie and Jisbella”)—all of these impart a warm sense of human fellowship stretching across time and place, in which readers can hardly help but share (7, v).