Puppy love
Beverley Nichols
H. O. Wells and Rebecca West Gordon M. Ray (Macmillan £2.95) This is a sombre and distressing book. And though it appears with the imprimatin of Dame Rebecca, one suspects that she may have given hee, assent with some reluctance, in the interests of "Posterity" — a grande dame for whiorn she has hitherto shown no great consideration.
• And although it is compiled from authentic records by a scholar and a gentleman — (the soclial qualification is relevant) — it is also an unfair book. True, H.G. has left the stage, and can no longer speak for himself, but in this volUme he speaks at almost inordinate length. Th4 author had eight hundred of H.G.'s letters from which to choose and only a handful of Rebecca's. She makes an occasional comment but she seems content, for the most part, to suffer in silence. Posterity, it is to be hoped, will adjiist the scales. As yet, we have only heard a fration of the evidence, and this emerges as one of-the strangest love stories of the world.
since Dame Rebecca, thankfully, is still with us, the casual reader may be apt to forget that the story began a very long time ago. When thee two geniuses came together, H.G. was a middle-aged literary colossus with a roving eye; Rel}ecca was an enchanting girl of twenty, radiating star-quality, ripe for hero-worship. At an time it would have been a dangerous situation; in 1913 it was explosive.
The shades of Queen Victoria still lingered on the:smooth Edwardian lawns. 'Sex' was still a wotd that no lady would care to use and the ide4 of the 'permissive society' would have seetnecras remote — and far more alarming — IMP any of the dream worlds that were being built in the brain of H.G. himself. Had the rornance occurred today nobody would have liftdd an eyebrow. H.G. and Rebecca would haVe been photographed in recumbent attitudes on the rocks of Cap d'Antibes, and when they returned to Heathrow they would not have been expected to explain themselves. Rebecca, most certainly, would never have found it necessary to employ the current clichd "We are just friends," not only because she was born with a constitutional inability to tell lies, but:because, in any case, the affair would be nobody else's business.
But in 1913, things were not like this, and in the stormy decade that followed she was constantly forced into situations which must have been intensely humiliating — adopting assumed names, enduring the insolence of servants, coping with the manifold social, legal and financial anxieties which — even in these days — beset the life of an unmarried mother, Her public image today may have obscured the fact that she is, and always has been, a woman who bruised very easily, a woman who was frightened by the menace of insecurity. H.G. never gave her security. Repaid some of the bills — apparently with no great enthusiasm — but for the most part she had to fend for herself. It was she who had to cope with the landladies, to deal with the embarrassments of Anthony's education and to face the open hostility of her mother, whom she greatly loved.
Here we have to ask the thousand dollar question "What did she see in him?" It is not a very subtle question but in the circumstances it is apposite. There is no reason to enquire what he saw in her. She had the sensuous allure of an Elizabeth Taylor, an alpha plus brain, and an exquisite sense of comedy. But H.G.? Even as a young man -he was no Adonis. In middle-age he was paunchy, prickly and ill-kempt, and he spoke with the voice of a eunuch. The chemistry of physical attraction is so complex that perhaps we should not be surprised that in spite of these drawbacks he Swept all before him. There must have been an almost hypnotic intellectual compulsion. In The Strange Necessity, which appeared five years after the affair was ended, she wrote of him: "One had the luck to be young just as the most bubbling creative mind that the sun and moon have shone upon since the days of Leonardo da Vinci was showing its form," Since she has permitted this judgement to be reprinted one must presume that she has not repudiated it. Though one trembles at the thought of crossing swords with Dame Rebecca on almost any subject whatsoever I find this very hard to take. Leonardo? Wells was a brilliant historical tipster, with an uncanny sense of the shape of things to come, but even in this field he was not an innovator, and some of his prophecies — which were often expressed in pedestrian prose'— were wide of the mark. As an amateur scientist he "created" nothing at all — not even a new type of corkscrew. As a novelist he created no characters that have any title to immortality. He was, au fond, a shallow thinker. True, he had spiritual yearnings, but when he came to express them, in a very embarrassing .book called God the Invisible King, he spoke with the authentic accent of the, late Mr Godfrey Winn.
What, then, was the secret of his attraction?
Let him speak for himself. In the seventh year of the affair, when they were already on the verge of separation, he wrote to her:
It seems to me that fundamental in this trouble I should call Drive. It's not the same thing as energy because my Drive goes on when I am worked out, producing friction, bad temper, things like this outbreak. It says everlastingly, oh Get on with it. It is a race against death.
You could not talk to H.G. for five minutes without being conscious of this compelling quality. It made you forget the social uncouthness and the plebeian physique. On an Autumn evening over forty years ago I sat with him in his apartment over-looking the Thames, enthralled by his prophecies of the imminent collapse of civilisation. Today, they Would sound commonplace, in the 'twenties they .curdled the blood. He opened a copy of The New Machiavelli which he described to me as "a middle-aged book" — and read out the following passage ...
We do go on, we do get on. But when one thinks that people are living and dying now, quarrelling and sulking, misled and understanding, vaguely fearful, condemning and thwarting one another in the close darkness of these narrow cults and systems — of God! one wants a gale out of heaven, one wants a great wind from the sea!
This, even in middle-age, Was the voice of the authentic H.G., which echoed throughout his strident dialogue with life. And no doubt he employed it in his relentless pursuit of Rebecca, with results which have now been made apparent to the world at large. The story had to be told sooner or later — Posterity would have seen to that — and for her sake we may be grateful that it had interludes of happiness and moments of ecstasy. But by and large it has a tragic rhythm. As we said before, and as those who know her and love her will agree, she was always a woman who bruised very easily. And H.G. — Leonardo or no Leonardo — was not a kindly, lover.
Beverley Nichols has most recently written a memoir, Down the Kitchen Sink, published by Michael Joseph
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