A first-rate second-rate mind
Hilary Corke
THE INVISIBLE MAN: THE LIFE AND LIBERTIES OF H.G. WELLS by Michael Coren Bloomsbury, £20, pp. 240 In his last years Wells described himself as 'a first-rate second-rate mind': unless I have invented it, for I do not find the phrase in Coren. One of his redeeming features (and how he needed them!) was a certain bitter self-knowledge, and he was here classing himself with the last and direst of the four classifications of German soldiery — the one who is stupid and energetic, so much more deleterious to the proper functioning of a military machine than he who is stupid and lazy. If Wells had been merely a second-rate second-rate mind he would have been so much the less of a cultural disaster.
Like most persons I suppose of my psalmistic age, I read Wells in my teens voraciously, more than any other author even including Wodehouse. It was of course the sci-fi that I devoured: exemplary fictions such as The War of the Worlds, The Time-Machine, The First Men in the Moon. These were perfect works for a developing imagination to get to grips with, for Wells marvellously balanced the miraculous and the mundane, oiling the wards of the super- natural so that one could enter freely. At night with the lights out one speculated on what one would have done in the heroes' places. Why did he not —? Could one have —? What use would one personally have made of Cavorite, that substance strangely 'opaque to gravity'? One was not Einstein, one probably conceived of gravity as an elastic band of global dimensions.
Later I came, hoping for more moon- serpents, to such works as Anne Veronica or Mr Polo,; and felt, quite wrongly, that I had also entered the presumably wonderful world of adult novels. 'Adult', no doubt, because unmarried people actually made love in them. Just. Not on the other hand, though I didn't yet know it, 'novels'; for they were of course no more than social tracts dressed up in a little perfunctory narrative — as indeed the sci-fi romances had also been to an extent, though an inno- cent teenager in the Thirties was not in a position to notice it. People in these con- structions were invariably 'little men' but they philosophed largely. Shaw was doing something of the same on the stage, from time to time; he did it well because he was immensely witty and had a good ear for dialogue. Wells had neither talent. His little men flailed about in the wilder reach- es of windbaggery with an utter disparity of spoken to speaker. He was in far too much of a hurry to pause to make anything convincing. Here, for instance, is Mr Polly's Uncle Jim:
Man comes into life to seek and find his suf- ficient beauty . . And fear and dullness and indolence and appetite, which, indeed, are no more than fear's three crippled brothers, who make ambushes and creep by night, are against him, to delay him, to hold him off, to hamper him and beguile him and kill him in that quest.
When one has fingered along a bookful of such fustian, it perhaps surprises less to discover that Wells' private love-letters are cut from just the same material. The affair with Rebecca West, here set out in some detail, is surely the dreariest grand amour of their generation. There is plenty of event, Wells is peculiarly foul, Rebecca is peculiarly long-suffering and so on; but essentially none of this is of the slightest interest because these were confrontations of such poor quality sensibilities. All that painful amorous galumphing! All those patently phoney 'good letters'! A couple of Bloomsberries would at least have provid- ed a few good laughs, and this unregener-
Sixty
After several decades' listening To my heart beat, and several times a day Asking myself would I see it happening, Could one observe oneself slipping away; In fact too terrified of dying to Do anything but question what and how I'd feel, or if I would, I did allow, Finally, awareness to sink through The whole show'd be over, or, better said, The sheer weight of anxiety made me know The unretreating future. When or where It would take place, or whether help was there None of that mattered. I was interested Only, now, in letting myself go. David Galler ate reviewer has to confess to a yen for such within the covers of a biography. As it is, Herbert George and Rebecca could never be the heroes of a true romance, only a couple more Wellsian case histories. In her youth, we hear, Rebecca had systematically copied out and learned exten- sive passages from Shakespeare, Browning, Yeats, Whitman and Newbolt.
More second-ratery here, I fear me. No wonder H.G. temporarily abandoned her for the Austrian embraces of Fraulein Hedwig Verena Gatternigg. But nowadays it is perhaps the fourth Mr Wells, Wells the educator, prophet, arbiter of nations, that most concerns us. The sub- ject is at least currently in the air and note that a couple of chapters of John Carey's The Intellectuals and the Masses are specifically devoted to it. One would natu- rally expect Wells, half-instructed like all pop educators, to be remarkably silly. After all, in 1901 when Anticipations, his first Utopian propagandum, appeared, Europe had been approximately at peace for the best part of a century, and the malign nature of the weltpolitik that had been brewing up in the interval was unlike- ly to be very apparent to the lad from Bromley biffing about in the rarefied air of his public library. When, therefore, he wrote And for the rest — those swarms of black and brown and yellow people who do not come into the needs of efficiency? Well, the world is not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go.
I suppose we can (more charitably than he) call it a case of eugenics-in-the-head, like sex-in-the-head, and not twit his ghost With wide-angle shots of Belsen. When, too, three decades later, he confides, after his interview with Stalin, that I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest . .. He owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everr body trusts him, one is equally free to reflect that a mat; who has been bloody silly in 1901 WO' almost certainly still be bloody silly in i93- It is not easy to make a better defence for him. That, and the fact that, despite Mr Coren and despite Mr Carey, to rehearse this wicked gibberish of an ex-party-balloon now reduced to a little ragged triangle of limp red rubber, is of no specific interest, merely yet another instance of the unvarY" ing vacuity of those who elect themselve5 our instructors and informers. It was 001 just Wells, it was a whole gallimaufry tit light-weight expostulatory personages rang' ing from Beatrice Webb to Bernard Shasv. to Hilaire Belloc to Oswald Mosley. It ls still a similar bogful of bullfrogs, splashing all through the multi-media, who continue to croak at us over the air-waves without remission. Anathema to all of them! Hail up who else thinks that Beatrice Web was the most poisonous woman of etc century!
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