ANNIVERSARY

The history of Mr Wells

BENNY GREEN

Twenty-five years ago this week I picked up a morning newspaper and read of the death of H. G. Wells. I was shocked and saddened, shocked because ever since discovering Kipps I had assumed him to be immortal, as Shaw clearly was immortal, saddened because in my innocence I thought him a great writer. In those days, being a young philistine and not well-educated enough to read books about books, I read only the books themselves, and was therefore quite unaware that nobody who was anybody took Wells seriously any more. Later on, much later on, I became much better educated and heard about Virginia Woolf's interesting theory that Dickens couldn't write and that Wells was a ' static ' novelist. But that was all far into the future. On the day of Wells's death I was shocked and saddened.

Since then his reputation appears to have sunk still further, until today his work is hardly mentioned by literary gossips, who, when they care to bring up the subject at all, prefer to harp on the infelicities of his temperament. So far none of his biographers seems to have much affection for him, and the most recent of them, Mr Lovat Dickson, actually succeeded in conveying the disastrous impression that he, Lovat Dickson, and Wells were both writers together. There is, of course, Wells's own work on the theme of Wells, Experiment in Autobiography, but however enthralling the first volume of that work may be, and however soporific the second, it is altogether too ingenious an exercise in self-dramatization to be a reliable biographical guide.

Having after all these years learned how to read books about books, and even books about books about books, my received impression is that in his lifetime Wells not only alienated the affections of a great many people, and antagonized a great many others, but was also regarded as a betrayer by his own disciples. While the custodians of public -morality, selfappointed as usual, regarded his sexual promiscuity as scandalous, those who had come to regard him as the visionary thinker leading them into the new scientific Jerusalem were dismayed by the abject pessimism of his last works. A distant relative of mine, who knew Wells over a long period, once described him to me as 'a bounder.' That was all. Not a talented bounder, or a likeable one, or a mercurial one. Just a bounder, as though his affairs with two of my relative's friends somehow cancelled out his books. The relative was, of course, a woman. As to the pessimism that came with his senility, if senility it was, it is, I suppose, a theory like any other.

Although • I am neither outraged by Wells's promiscuity nor shattered by his pessimism, I can see that both those reactions might be justified in debate. What I cannot see is how one has anything to do with the other. And yet in the years since Wells's death a very odd thing has been happening. His sexual philandering and his scientific pessimism have become so intertwined that there are those who regard them as symptoms of a single condition: . . . a horny man of labyrinthine extraordinary sensibility. As a biologist, as a social thinker, concerned with power and world projects, the moulding of a universal order, as a furnisher of interpretation and opinion to the educated masses, as all of these he appeared to need a great amount of copulation . . . a little lowerclass limey, and as an ageing man of declining ability and appeal. And in the agony of parting with the breasts, the mouths and the precious sexual fluids of women, poor Wells, the natural teacher, the sex emancipator, the

explainer, the humane blesser of mankind, could in the end, only blast and curse everyone.

The voice is that of Saul Bellow's Mr Sammler, so perhaps we need not take it too seriously, but the idea that the optimistic vitality of Wells's imagination was linked irrevocably to the sexual vitality of his body is so vigorously contradicted by the facts that it is wonderful that anyone should offer it as a serious proposition. It is not as if the facts are obscure. Indeed, it is a truism of the Wellsian canon that for sheer black pessimism nothing he wrote is more terrifying than the vision of mankind's eventual dichotomy ioto Eloi and Morlocks as described in The Time Machine, conceived when its author was twenty. Or the triumph of brutishness over intellectual power in The Island of Dr Moreau, less than ten years later.

The corrective to the Wellsian creeping pessimism theory was administered years ago by Anthony West, who showed that his father's imagined community of the year 3002 in When the Sleeper Wakes anticipated many of the horrors depicted much later by Orwell and Aldous Huxley, and suggested that Wells had always been a pessimist by inclination who undertook an intellectual responsibility, as it were, to be hopeful, and only succumbed to the dictates of his nature at the very end of his life. As West's essay on his father is easily the most perceptive and revealing biographical fragment so far published on Wells, it is tempting to accept all its ideas. But just as there is certainly more to Wells's senile pessimism than met Mr Sammler's clouded eye, so there may be more to it than even the sympathetic West discerned. West seemed to feel that Wells's optimism, being contrived, was perishable goods, while his pessimism, being congenital, was not. There is at least one other possible explanation for Wells's inconsistencies, which is that he was by nature an optimist, by training a pessimist, and that he fought to reconcile these extremes with varying success all his life.

So far as posterity is concerned, Wells is an archetype, a member of the very first batch of young people ever to be given a free rudimentary scientific education by the state. But when Wells took up his guinea-a-week scholarship and came to Kensington to sit at the feet of Thomas Huxley, he was exposing to the dispassionate realities of the microscope that buoyancy of temperament without which the British lower orders could never have survived the Industrial Revolution. The exemplar of the type in literature is, of course, Dickens, a writer with whom Wells has much in common, except that Dickens was never educated by the scientists to see that his unique person was really no more than a • few shillingsworth of commonplace chemicals thrown together in an accidental pattern. Wells described his first day at the Normal School of Science as "one of the great days of my life." In a sense it was also one of the most tragic, because it marks the beginning of a conflict which he never really resolved, or perhaps resolved in the wrong way.

His dilemma is clearly enough defined by two of the most famous passages he ever wrote, passages so contradictory that even now it is not easy to accept that they both came from the same brain: . . . a day will come. . . when beings . . who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amid the stars.

' When you get too old to work they chuck you away,' said Minton. ' Lor! You find old drapers everywhere. . . . You got to stick to cribs until it's over. I tell you we're in a blessed drainpipe, and we've got to crawl along it till we die.'

Those extracts, from The Discovery of the Future and Kipps respectively, catch Wells in both his most popular roles, in the first the scientist characteristically whistling in the dark, contemplating the forbidding universe and putting a brave face on it, in the second the creative artist despairing at the indignities of sweated labour. But the interesting thing is that each posture comes perilously close to creating the opposite effect to the one intended. It is that gay optimist with his laughing grab at space who chills the reader to the marrow, the despairing Minton whose fatalism and homely choice of metaphor are very nearly comic. Certainly Wells the stern scientist, the one who knows that Homo sapiens is no more than a fleeting incident in sidereal time, is doing his best to repress his Eloi and his Morlocks; certainly Wells the novelist is trying to be severe about the incidental injustices of indiscriminate capitalism. But in each role he seems to create the effect intended by the other.

Minton's choice of metaphor is especially interesting, because there is no escape from a drainpipe, and yet Wells found one. The draper's crib was for Wells what the blacking factory had been for Dickens, a glimpse of the pit from which only the accident of genius had saved him. But what of Wells's contemporaries, the ones who had no literary gift to get them out of the drainpipe, what of them? In novel after novel Wells struggled to devise convincing routes along which the fictional projections of this haberdashering self might scuttle to salvation. In The Wheels of Chance (1896), Hoopdriver is left at the end with no more than a vague intimation that Education will rescue him. By the time of Kipps (1905), self-help has shrunk to the parody of the fretwork class, and Wells is reduced to the extremity of the hoariest Dickensian device, an unexpected legacy from a mysterious relative.

And then, in 1910 with The History of Mr Polly, Wells solves the problem by showing that it is no problem at all. Polly simply gets up one day and leaves it all behind, to become that Wellsian symbol of independence, a tramp. The prison gates were unlocked all the time. If you are dissatisfied with your life, then change it. At which point the entire direction of Wells's career changes, and the chronicler of lower middle class fortunes starts to pack his bags. It is almost as though having solved Polly's problem, and through Polly the problem of Hoopdriver and Lewisham and Kipps and all those other variations on the theme of his own young self, Wells was done with the novel as art and was embarked on the novel as tract.

In comparing a brilliant work like TonoBungay (1909) with comparative disasters like Marriage (1912) and The Passionate Friends (1913), posterity might understandably curse the scientist for not taking the artist more seriously. But the world educator had got the upper hand, and who can blame Wells, for throwing away his gift, for deriding Henry James and company for their tortuous subtleties, the Webbs for their careful insurrection? Just as Wells the novelist had once seen the ball of green gas hurtling towards the earth in In the Days of the Comet, so Wells the educator saw Spaceship Earth hurtling towards destruction in real life. Under the circumstances, who could be expected to weave fairy stories?

I believe that Wells remained an aspiring science student all his life, and that he never forgot the freemasonry of the men in the drainpipe. In a letter to a friend written in 1932 P. G. Wodehouse writes, "I like Wells. An odd bird though. The first time I met him, we had barely finished the initial pip-pippings when he said, aproops of nothing. 'My father was , a professional cricketer.' If there's a good answer to that, you tell me." There was a good answer to it, and it would have had something to do with Wodehouse's education at Dulwich College. In mentioning his father's occupation, Wells was surely establishing his working-class bona fides. It is worth noting that the impulsive, irascible Wells, who fought so bitterly with the foreigners Shaw and Henry James, who was so contemptuous of those drawing-room revolutionaries Beatrice and Sidney Webb, never lost his affection for those fellow scribes from the lower orders, Arnold Bennett and George Gissing.

One of his favourites among his own works is said to have been The Sea Lady (1902), which postulates in the form of romantic allegory a choice between passion and duty. The hero chooses passion, as most of Wells's heroes did, to say nothing of Wells himself. But he seems to have worried a great deal about duty, and evidently thought he was doing his when he exchanged Kipps for 'The Quality of Illusion in the Continuity of Individual Life in the Lower Metazoa.' But there was one feat he could perform as a novelist for which he is rarely credited, and that is that he could remember what it felt like for a young man to fall romantically in love. When he called ' Kipps a simple soul, I am sure he was paying him the highest compliment he could think of.