In the shadow
Benny Green
The other day the Times Literary Supplement, in its anniversary edition, inaugurated a new parlour game, or at least reminded us of an old one, by asking various luminaries which books and authors they considered to be the most overrated and Underrated of the century. As most of the Judges were themselves eminently qualified to be numbered among the most overrated Judges of the century, the situation was not Without its piquancy, and while giving what E. M. Forster would have described as two
he arty cheers for the downgrading of
E. M. Forster, and while delighted that virginia Woolf, Freud, Malraux, Sartre and that great noodle Teilhard de Chardin should have been so splendidly abused, I admit that it was the more charitable asPect of the exercise, the naming of underrated works, which interested me very much Tilore, with particular reference to H. G. wells. Even here the comic overtones which inevitably accompany critical solemnity Were dominant, for Mr Nabokov named The Passionate Friends as underrated when It is clear even to the most abject Wellsian that The Passionate Friends comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, having been rendered chaotic by the degree to which Wells allowed the personal dramas of the Moment to dictate the action. The man who so obligingly hit my target for me was not Nabokov, but Dan Jacobson, who named as one of the great underrated works of the centurY that great underrated work of the century, Tono Bungay. jt seems apparent that in his own lifetime Iells did sterling work in alienating the anections df those who dictate the literary climate, with the result that to this day s,°,1nething less than justice is being done to 1,ns best work. A distant relation of mine ,°Y marriage, an old lady who knew Wells he.rY well over many years, once described olrn to me as 'a bounder' because he had e apparently thrown over one of her V.Ifriends for another. Of work like Tono °4ngay the old girl said nothing and seemed "Inable to grasp the idea that posterity cares vvery little about private moralities and a itrY great deal about published works. Tono Bungay is the most powerful a°vel of its generation there has never been ,,rIY doubt in my mind, and I find it ironic C'lloat it should continue to languish in 1„ tnParative obscurity while lesser works The Forsyte Saga, The Old Wives' Tale dlitid Howarth. End should enjoy the lime 1381.11tGenerally speaking it is a bad business buaising one book by denigrating others, that t the case of Tono Bungay is so blatant , I feel like raising a flag or two in its "elenee, The eponymous hero of Tono Bungay is a bottle of tonic 'only slightly injurious,' which carries a country chemist and his questioning nephew to the apex of the big business pyramid, and finally sends the whole enterprise plummeting into bankruptcy and death. On this level the book is a study of the comically ramshackle edifice of irresponsible Capitalism grafted on to the decrepit body of feudal England. In the autobiographical sense, however, the book has at least as much to offer the. Wellsian as the three draper novels which preceded it, for if the patent medicine is the symbol of the idiotic pointlessness of most commercial enterprise then Bladesover, the country house in which the narrator of the story spends part of his childhood, is the balancing symbol of the old landed aristocracy already beginning to fall apart before Lloyd George turned up with Death Duties. Vacillating between these two worlds, and striving always to escape into a third, an impersonal Utopia of scientific dedication, the narrator, acknowledging the extent to which Bladesover has contributed to the development of a liberal culture, if only through the power of patronage, finally forsakes both it and the City in his dash for the haven of science.
What Wells was exploring in the book, and indeed in many others, was the pure imbecility of a social system which, taking no account of his brilliant mind, his visionary gift, his fervent idealism, had tried to shove him on to the rubbish dump of industrial capitalism. What enraged Wells as much as anything about this dismissal was its arbitrary nature, the assumption by the powerful that they 'knew better.' How could they know better, Wells asked himself, when it was clear they didn't know anything at all? A society which ignores an H. G. Wells must by definition be a stupid society,
though there were those who reminded him that a society which permits a Wells to rise through sheer ability has something to be said for it. To which Wells would have replied that it was the same boneheaded incomprehension which sat on his head in Bromley that later countenanced his triumph; even in its victimisation society was incompetent.
Considering the extensive deployment of autobiographical material in Tow Bungay, it is surprising how little Wells's biographers
have had to say about it. Lovat Dickson seemed to see it as a mere publishing enter prise, and the Mackenzies approached their life of Wells through the strait gate of Fabianism, which is like writing a life of Nelson which gives the optician's view. The one biographer who acknowledges
Tono Bungay as a source-book for the life is Vincent Brome, although even he cannot spare the space to explore all the avenues. Bladesover is, of course, Up Park, where Wells's mother was once housekeeper; some years ago House and Garden did a photo-feature on Up Park ; it was like visiting the very pages of the book. Similarly last summer I went to dinner one night in a self-consciously olde-worlde restaurant in Midhurst. Depressed by both the cuisine and the proprietors, II went for a walk into the main street and there found a chemist's shop with a notice in the window saying that H. G. Wells had once worked here as an apprentice. It is this shop which figures so prominently in Tono Bungay, and which stands as the opposing pole to Up Park in the story of Wells's early life, a life whose disparate strands he drew together with such brilliant flair in what is after all one of the great underrated books of the century.
Previous page
