H. G. Wells at 150: The Time Traveller by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie

Here now: the end of an era! (in blogging) But first: my last two reviews of series two Torchwood audios, Broken and Made You Look.

Trade paperback, 500 pages
Published 1987

Acquired September 2016
Read October 2016

The Life of H. G. Wells: The Time Traveller
by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie

At last, my long Wellsian journey comes to an end. After reading two different pieces of autobiography by H. G. Wells (the Experiment and the Postscript), as well as myriad other pieces touching on his life, I wanted to read something that integrated them all into a coherent whole. I picked this particular Wells biography because it was the most recent of the two recommended by Patrick Parrinder in his 2005 introduction to the Penguin Classics editions of Wells's novels.

For the first half of the book, I got exactly what I wanted out of it. As I've commented before, Wells gave short shrift to his own emotional life in the Experiment, and though he filled in some of the blanks in the Postscript, I often struggled to contextualize them. Here, you get his personal history laid out alongside his sexual history, you can see what he was thinking at the same time he was feeling. Plus, of course, the MacKenzies are a bit more honest and forthright than he was about himself: Wells's autobiography barely mentions his battle to reshape the Fabian Society that occupies a number of pages here, and they also had access to what others wrote about Wells, so we can get a fuller picture of his friendships with people like George Bernard Shaw and George Gissing and Margaret Sanger and Joseph Conrad. (Conrad once called Wells "O Realist of the Fantastic!" [141], which is probably as apt a description for Wells as there could be.) On the other hand, Shaw's wife gives a very damning account of the funeral of Wells's second wife Catherine/Jane-- and really hates on the Wells-penned eulogy that he reprinted in The Book of Catherine Wells.

I do think the MacKenzie's literary criticism is a little simplistic at times-- they complain that in When the Sleeper Wakes, "Wells seems unsure whether to approve or disapprove of his projection, whether he is writing a utopia or an anti-utopia" (151), whereas in my mind, that's not a bug, it's a feature! In When the Sleeper Wakes, Wells took apart the utopian sleeper novel and exposed the falsity of its conceits. They also occasionally mention the meeting with the artilleryman in The War of the Worlds in such a way that makes me think they believe he's depicted as a positive figure, whereas it's pretty clear to me that Wells is mocking that figure's terrible plan for reinventing the world. Ditto when they call the ending of Ann Veronica "the escapist's daydream fulfilled" (249): I think the ending is much more nuanced and downbeat than that. Neither Ann Veronica nor Capes fulfills their original dreams! On the other hand, I should say these quibbles aside, they do a good job of contextualizing Wells's literary work in both his personal life and the development of his intellect.

It's also nice to get confirmation that Wells was, objectively, a Big Deal. He of course felt so, but the MacKenzies point out that President Franklin Roosevelt wrote Wells a letter complimenting him on his autobiography. He really was an important cultural figure in the early twentieth century, and for reasons other than his science fiction. It's curious to note how little of the book those materials occupy. When you're just over a quarter of the way through this, he's already written all of the works we remember him for now in 2016! But he did a lot after then, and that was what made him famous in his time, even if at the same time, Hugo Gernsback was championing him as a genre forerunner in Amazing. The MacKenzies sprinkle in a lot of comments from other writers, like the Conrad one above, or T. S. Eliot (who liked The First Men in the Moon), or there was a bit about Ford Madox Ford I really liked: when he "found himself in the front line during the First World War, he noted he had been so conditioned to modern warfare by reading the novels of Wells that when he actually experienced it he felt apathetic and resigned" (392). Wells, the MacKenzies argue, was sometimes too good a prophet. (They also bring up that the inventor of the atomic bomb knew how bad it would be because he'd read Wells's fiction.)

Wells's arguments get a bit ridiculous at times. There's more than one account here of him sending off nasty letters to someone who wrote a bad review of one of his books, though apparently he was so charming, folks usually forgave him in the end. He even sued the BBC for claiming someone else had invented the tank. When George Orwell wrote his famous takedown job "Wells, Hitler and the World State," which included the claim that Wells thought science was the solution to all humanity's problems, Wells wrote to Orwell: "I don't say that at all. Read my early works, you shit" (431). There's no indication here that those two made up.

I found the latter part of the book unsatisfying, however. Not much is said of Rebecca West, even though she bore Wells a fourth child. Even less is said of Moura Budberg, who dominated Wells's later emotional life according to the man himself in the Postscript. Eventually I figured out the reason why when reading the book's epilogue: even though this is a 1987 revised edition of a 1973 book, apparently not very many revisions were done to account for details not revealed until the Postscript was published in 1984. This is a little annoying: why bring out a new edition at all if you're not going to do the work that it would imply? It may have been only three years since the Experiment, but it had been over ten since Gordon Ray's H. G. Wells & Rebecca West, which they dismiss as "a curious volume" (450), yet fail to substantively incorporate the revelations of. I should say they do provide a strong account of Wells's own post-Experiment life, something Wells was unable to do himself, for obvious reasons.

A book of two halves, it leaves me wishing I'd disregarded Parrinder's recommendations and sought out a more recent biography that could have incorporated the past thirty years of scholarship on Wells's life. (I can't blame the MacKenzies for it, but it would be nice to read one that could incorporate the discoveries of McDonald and Dronfield's biography of Budberg.) Well, maybe someday, but not now. This is the twelfth Wells or Wells-adjacent book I've read in the past four months, and I'm afraid I need some time off from the man!

H. G. Wells at 150: A Lady and Her Husband by Amber Reeves

After something of a hiatus, I'm back at it reviewing audio dramas for USF. First up are two recent Torchwood releases, The Victorian Age and Zone 10.

Trade paperback, 341 pages
Published 2016 (originally 1914)
Acquired October 2016
Read November 2016

A Lady and Her Husband by Amber Reeves

I thought that A Very Dangerous Woman would be my last book related to a woman in H. G. Wells's life, but when reading Rachel Ferguson's Alas, Poor Lady in a Persephone Books edition, I realized that Amber Reeves, a young socialist with whom Wells had an affair and a child, had written a novel also republished by Persephone Books, so I decided to extend my Wells journey (now in its six month) with one more book. I said when I read Rebecca West's The Return of the Soldier that I felt guilty only reading her work because of Wells, so I was amused when Samantha Ellis's introduction to this book began, "I wish I had not found A Lady and Her Husband via HG Wells" (v).

A Lady and Her Husband opens with a young woman telling her mother she decided to get married, and I thought this book was going to follow her and be one of those late Victorian/early twentieth century novels about a young woman boxed in by her social limitations, much like the other two Persephone Books I've read. But actually this book is all about the young woman's mother, who for a couple different reasons decides to get more involved in the running of her husband's business. She's not a feminist... but she soon finds herself morphing into one, now that she's allowed to move outside the tiny box she's been confined inside her adult life, and starts seeing the disconnect between the morality Victorian women were supposed to safeguard and the morality that actually went on in the world. It's an incisive book-- similar to a few others I could name, but with more original insight.

Reeves is really good on character. Not quite as good as George Eliot or Thomas Hardy (well duh), but she doesn't present any one-sided caricatures. Even when the husband of the title does completely awful stuff, you get why he does it and why it seems rational from his perspective. On the whole, a surprisingly good book. The daughter's socialism verges into the Wellsian at time, but otherwise (like with Return of the Soldier and The Book of Catherine Wells), this book reveals a side to one of Wells's women that's completely unlike him. Thankfully.

Next Week: My anniversary celebrations of H. G. Wells finally end when I read his biography! Time to find out how truthfully he's been representing himself.

H. G. Wells at 150: The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth

Hardcover, 209 pages
Published 2010 (originally 1903-04)
Acquired March 2016
Read September 2016

The Food of the Gods, and How It Came to Earth
by H. G. Wells

In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who, though they dislike it extremely, are very properly called ‘Scientists’. They dislike that word so much that from the columns of Nature, which was from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as carefully excluded as if it were – that other word which is the basis of all really bad language in the country. But the Great Public and its Press know better, and ‘Scientists’ they are, and when they emerge to any sort of publicity, ‘distinguished scientists’ and ‘eminent scientists’ and ‘well-known scientists’ is the very least we call them. (1)

I found the first third of this novel hugely entertaining, mostly because of quotations like the above. The ways we stereotype scientists have scarcely changed at all in the past 112 years, and most of the jokes Wells makes about them, from their tendency to over-focus on the mundane to their inclination to produce incomprehensible graphs to their desire to eat free food at conferences, still hold true. At first, The Food of the Gods is about a pair of scientists, a chemist named Bensington and a physiologist named Redwood, who invent herakleophorbia a.k.a. boomfood a.k.a. the Food of the Gods, which causes organisms undergoing growth to grow without end: so soon there are giant chickens and giant babies, and once boomfood gets loose in the ecosystem, giant vines and giant wasps.

The last two-thirds of the novel explore different facets of the emerging world of Giants, but I found this material considerably less entertaining than what had gone before. The Food of the Gods is a very different kind of science fiction than Wells was writing in the 1890s, far less about horrific effect and predicting a terrible end for humankind, and more about comedy and a vague hope of a better world. But on the other hand, this is the first Wells story I can think of where he begins with a technological invention and traces it forward, seeing how it would change society. His earlier sf works tend to just jump forward to a realized future (The Time Machine) or to have the invention be a one-off with no social impact (The Invisible Man). Depicting the emergence of a realized future society is a new move for him. Though in this case it's a world ruled by giants, which I suspect is more fanciful than most.

There's also a joke about how much Frederic Harrison loved Comte. I feel proud that I got it. I wonder how many modern readers do?

Next Week: One last Wells woman-- this time for real. I learn about Amber Reeves from her novel, A Lady and Her Husband!

H. G. Wells at 150: A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy

Hardcover, 400 pages
Published 2015

Borrowed from the library

Read August 2016

A Very Dangerous Woman: The Lives, Loves and Lies of Russia's Most Seductive Spy
by Deborah McDonald and Jeremy Dronfield

In the Postscript to his autobiography, H. G. Wells discusses when his long-running affair with the Baroness Moura Budberg (1891-1974) should have come on an end. He had met Moura in Russia, while visiting the writer Maxim Gorky. Many years later, she and he were lovers, and he had proposed marriage after the death of his second wife-- which she rejected. She also refused to come back to Russia with him, saying it was impossible but refusing to elaborate. When Wells went to Russia, with his son Gip instead, Wells was chatting with Gorky and his interpreter. Wells said something about how Moura couldn't be there, and the interpreter said it was a shame, because Wells had just missed her-- she'd been by the previous week. And, indeed, had been in Russia multiple times in recent years.

It's a sort of lurching moment: Wells's world drops away from him. The woman he was in love with enough to propose marriage to (and remember, Wells slept with lots of women) had been systematically lying to him for years. Wells can't take it, especially when she can't or won't explain, and he tries to break up with her. Except that every time she comes back into his life, he accepts her again. The end of the Postscript is a sporadically updated diary from the last decade of Wells's life, and Moura keeps on returning, and despite it all, Wells takes her back, and she was with him until the end of his life.

H. G. Wells, Maxim Gorky, and Moura Budberg in 1920
from mourabudberg.com

Wells died not knowing the whole truth of Moura Budberg, but I did a little research upon finishing the Postscript and discovered that she was a Russian spy, and that in 2015, there'd been a biography of her published, collating previously unaccessible letters and archives. It's a fascinating read.

Moura wasn't a spy in the James Bond sense-- she didn't go on undercover missions in foreign countries for the Kremlin. Rather, she was a popular social presence, and that was occasionally mined for the advantage of various parties with whom she needed to curry favor. Through her first husband's family, she had ties to the Germanophile Russian community; after the Bolshevik Revolution, she threw tons of parties for them and funneled information she acquired back to the Russian government. This is the kind of spying she did for most of her life.

Her life is pretty fascinating. She was a member of the upper classes, but managed to survive the rise of Communism by being useful to the new government-- not just through spying, as she became the lover of Alexander Kerensky, leader of the provisional Russian revolutionary government. McDonald and Dronfield paint a bleak and terrifying picture of revolutionary Russia, showing just how dangerous and desolate it was, as well as how politically fraught, as various political factions moved to consolidate power. Moura was both spied on by the Cheka (the counter-counterrevolutionary police) and spied for them.

Moura c. 1930
from Bibelots London

Moura had connections to the U.K. from her youth, and fell in with Bruce Lockhart, the unofficial British ambassador in Russia. (The U.K. recalled its embassy staff because it couldn't be seen to officially endorse Bolshevism, but it dearly needed Russia on its side against Germany, so Lockhart was sent to do what he could unofficially.) The two became lovers (even though both were married), just another of Moura's significant lovers, which would go on to include Wells and Gorky.*

McDonald and Dronfield cover all the extant facts about Moura, weaving them together into a compelling narrative that goes from the Revolutionary days (1916-19 get a whole 280 pages to themselves in a 340-page narrative), to the mysterious death of her husband, from her time spent selling Russian treasures abroad to obtain funds for the Soviet government to her second marriage (one of convenience, to an Estonian baron), from her time working for the BBC's propaganda department during World War II to her postwar career as a screenwriter and script doctor for Alexander Korda. There is a lot of information packed into here, extensively endnoted. I didn't always always read the endnotes, but they show that McDonald and Dronfield worked hard to sift through the many disparate accounts of Moura's life. (Moura being one of the most unreliable sources of all, given her propensity for storytelling.) Many of the endnotes are devoted to criticizing the previous biography of Moura, by Nina Berberova.

Once I adjusted to the density of the book (I always find biographies slow going, but in a sort of good way), I found the book incredibly interesting-- but I don't know that I understand Moura as a person. Perhaps no one can, given how prone she was to exaggeration, and how much she kept secret. What did she think of her time spying? The key moment, it seems to me, is almost completely skipped over, I assume because we just don't know anything about it. Suddenly she is spying on the Germanophiles for the Soviet government. But how was she recruited, and did she feel bad about the deceit this entailed? Moura never said, and neither did anyone else, so we have no way of knowing. There were similar moments like this throughout the book. At one point the authors speculate that she may have had a role in the death of her first husband... but there's no way we can ever really know, just as we will never know what role she played in the death of Gorky and its aftermath.

Moura in 1971
from Wikipedia

Moura kept so much of herself hidden-- except from Lockhart, for whom she threw a lavish Russian Orthodox funeral that no one else attended-- that even when we know what she did, it's difficult to know what she thought and felt of it. But that's a problem beyond McDonald and Dronfield's capacity to solve, I suspect, and not a dint on this well-researched tome.

Next Week: A detour back into Wells's fiction, as I partake of The Food of the Gods!

* That isn't it for Moura's relations to famous folk: her niece/adopted daughter was the grandmother of Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. from 2010 to 2015.

H. G. Wells at 150: The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

Trade paperback, 90 pages
Published 1998 (originally 1918)

Acquired and read August 2016

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

It's probably a disservice to Rebecca West to read her work as part of an investigation into the life of H. G. Wells. Still, reading about her relationship with Wells made me want to find out what she was like as a writer, as I have never read any of her work, so I picked up The Return of the Soldier, the most popular of her books published during their relationship. (Though I am also curious about The Judge based on Wells's account of its composition in H. G. Wells in Love, and a friend recommended Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.) Like Catherine Wells, West's literary interests are very different from those of her lover, though I was amused when a "Bert Wells" rated a brief mention. (Seemingly no connection beyond the name, though.)

I knew The Return of the Soldier was a Great War novel going in, but that was pretty much all I knew, so I was surprised to find a book that wasn't as much about the war as I thought. Christoper Baldry is a soldier who returns from the front, yes, but his ailment is that he's forgotten his life since 1901, and the novel (or, more accurately, novella) is an investigation into why someone might do this. Sure, the war is the triggering event, but the novel is more a portrait of how the person we thought we ought to be turns out not to be the person we become, and the tragedy that can result from that. West observes character most acutely, and it's in the highs and lows of being where this novel really shines. Not that there's a whole lot else to it, at 90 pages. She sets things up so that the title has a pretty compelling and sad double meaning in the end, too. (Wikipedia reads the ending as much more pat than I think it is intended to be. The wound is healed, but the tragedy lingers.) West is working in that sort of Woolf school of early modernism, and I think one of its better practitioners. Quick, but complex.

Next Week: One last Wells woman, the spy Moura Budberg, who was A Very Dangerous Woman!

H. G. Wells at 150: The Book of Catherine Wells

Hardcover, 323 pages
Published 1971 (originally 1928)

Borrowed from the library
Read July 2016

The Book of Catherine Wells

Reading as much as I have about H. G. Wells and his relationships, I became curious about his second wife, Amy Catherine Robbins, who he nicknamed "Jane" (I think he felt "Amy Catherine" had a little too much flourish for a manager of a household). In his autobiography, H. G. mentions that Jane really liked the writing of Katherine Mansfield while he did not, and as I like Katherine Mansfield, that made me interested to read Jane's own writing-- or, more properly, Catherine Wells's. After she died in 1927, H. G. published a collection of the best of her short stories and poetry, along with an introduction on who she was to him. (This introduction is quite good and a little touching; their son G. P. Wells reprinted it in H. G. Wells in Love.)

(from Book of Catherine Wells, facing p. 24)

Catherine Wells turns out to have been a diverse writer. The first tale here is very funny, a charming modernized fairy tale called "The Last Fairy," about a fairy going on her last trip into the mortal world before retirement; the modern world has been getting a little too cynical and difficult for her: "Another time she had met a bright young Boy Scout who, in the course of business, had helped her across a crowded street, and to whom in return she had given three magic wishes; he had used the third wish to wish for three more and so on, until the poor old fairy had had to retire hastily to fairyland in a bankrupt state, and live very quietly and economically for several years to recover herself" (44). It reminds me of some of the early work of L. Frank Baum, who would have been writing around the same time (I'm not sure when any of the individual stories and poems in The Book of Catherine Wells were originally written or published; H. G. provides no indication). It features an accidental dragon, leaping cheeses, a grandmother transformed into the image of her granddaughter, and a man who runs and talks backward-- all good fun.

Most of the stories aren't this funny; in fact, they range from wistful to downright depressing, most of them in a style I would categorize as early modernist, like Katherine Mansfield or Dubliners-era James Joyce. It's weird suddenly gaining access to the mind of a person you've only encountered at a remove up until this point. In H. G.'s Experiment in Autobiography and its Postscript, we of course only see Catherine/Jane as H. G. presents her to us. Even in the Rinkels' The Picshuas of H. G. Wells, which is about their relationship, our view of Jane is entirely filtered through H. G. Here, suddenly, I feel like I know something about her as a person (inasmuch as you can know anyone through reading their fiction).

I'm always a little skeptical of biographical readings of fiction, but it's hard to resist that sometimes here, when there are several tales of married women in love with other men, or unmarried men in love with married women, all of whom are doomed to never be together: "May Afternoon," "Cyanide," and "In a Walled Garden" all concern such a situation. It's hard not to read what the unhappy wife in "May Afternoon" says to her suitor in light of the many affairs H. G. had: "marriage is a pretty straight bargain for a woman really, it has got no place for this love you bring me [...]. I can't run any risks. I'm married to a man who'd not excuse me-- if he saw you-- holding my hands-- as you did just now. Do understand me, my dear. All this life I have led so long has come to fit me like my skin. If it was torn off me, I should bleed to death" (120-21). Her husband has done something scandalous, described only vaguely, but I assume it involves another woman, and she must accept that yet she cannot embark on an affair herself. Is this how Catherine Wells felt? By all accounts she accepted H. G.'s affairs, yet most of those accounts are from H. G. It's hard not to see in these stories a wife yearning after the same kind of freedom to love that her husband possesses.

Some of her stories are forerunners of the horror genre, though I think like a lot of early horror, I didn't find them particularly frightening. I did like her Renaissance fantasy story "The Draught of Oblivion," about a woman trying to find a love potion but having to settle for a forgetting potion, which has a great twist ending. Her best stories are probably those that capture strange, wistful moments, like "The Dragon-Fly," where a young boy plays with a dragonfly, but the touch of the inattentive adults around him results in its death, or "The Emerald," about a shopkeep who unexpectedly finds a precious stone, which he sells to a young girl for a pittance.

It's interesting what a different writer Catherine was to H. G. She's definitely more interested in character and emotion than he ever was, and though H. G. started his career a master of mood, his science fiction definitely moved away from that as he grew more didactic. But many of Catherine's tales are haunting little vignettes it's impossible to imagine H. G. Wells ever writing. Another of my favorites was "Night in the Garden," about a governess who falls in love with an invalid from the Great War at a dinner party, and their brief imaginings of a future that can never be. H. G. Wells could never have written it-- but of course Catherine Wells was her own person. There's no reason for a husband and wife to write anything alike, but when all we know of a person is entirely filtered through another person's perspective, it's hard to capture what that person's independent existence must have been like. Even if she felt trapped by her husband ("Robe de Boudoir," about a wife daring to buy fancy lingerie, is another story that gives such an impression), she still had a space of her own inside her mind. Many of these stories are about those private spaces wives must cultivate away from their husbands in order to keep going, and The Book of Catherine Wells allows us to see into the private space cultivated by H. G.'s "Jane" when she was "Catherine."

Next Week: I track down another of Wells's women, by reading Rebecca West's The Soldier.

H. G. Wells at 150: The Picshuas of H. G. Wells

Science fiction without any picshuas: I review the eighth Doctor's latest adventure on audio, Doom Coalition 3.

Hardcover, 251 pages
Published 2006

Acquired and read July 2016

The Picshuas of H. G. Wells: A Burlesque Diary
by Gene K. Rinkel & Margaret E. Rinkel

When reading Wells's Experiment in Autobiography, I was entertained but frequently perplexed by the "picshuas" he included: the sketches he would draw for his second wife, Jane, on letters, in her diary, on scraps of paper, and on the title pages of the books he presented her. The Rinkels' book collects many of the picshuas, with a higher quality of reproduction than in the Experiment, and some time spent deciphering Wells's handwriting, contextualizing them in a narrative of the domestic life of H. G. and Jane. Sometimes I felt like I was drowning in details, but the picshuas themselves and the Rinkels' interpretation thereof always carried me through. The Rinkels usually call the duo Bins and Bits, using their nicknames from the picshuas, a nice touch that makes the picshuas seem like an alternate world of sorts.

Bins's bravery was apparently not enough to save their picnic from being colonized by cows.
(from Picshuas of H. G. Wells, p. 26)

There is a lot of cute stuff here, like Bins and Bits going for a picnic and being accosted by cows, or Bits demanding the waves not hit their coastal home, Cnut-style, or Bins looking on nervous as Bits reads his latest manuscript (she was a strong critic, and a strong manager, of his writing career). I wish we knew more about Jane and how she felt about her husbands' affairs: a couple of the picshuas depict her as an avenging air-ship. Was this an attempt to paper over a serious rift, or a harmless bit of fun? The Rinkels also manage to explain all of Wells's weird nicknames for his wife (in addition to Jane and Bits, there's also "P.C.B."!). Wells is a pretty gifted sketch artist, I think, able to evoke a lot with just a few lines.

Death from above!
(from Picshuas of H. G. Wells, p. 152)
Other good ones I could have scanned: the triumph of Bits and Bins when they get their first garden vegetable, everyone falling asleep when Bins gets to lecture at the Royal Institution.

The Rinkels indicate that only the sketches from Bins to Bits count as picshuas (answering a question I had after reading H. G. Wells & Rebecca West, which also includes a number of doodles by Wells), and say that you could fill a whole 'nother book with the existing non-picshua sketches. I'd read it, but ten years on with no sign of it, its existence seems unlikely to me.

Next Week: But who was Jane? I try to find out by reading The Book of Catherine Wells.

H. G. Wells at 150: H. G. Wells & Rebecca West

September might be over, but my celebrations of the 150th birthday of H. G. Wells aren't! I continue my investigations of the life of the man with

Hardcover, 215 pages
Published 1974

Acquired March 2009

Read June 2016

H. G. Wells & Rebecca West by Gordon N. Ray

Wells doesn't say a whole lot about the disintegration of his relationship with Rebecca West in H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography. West was one of three women who bore him a child (that he knew of). Wells couches the end of their relationship in terms of his concept of "the Lover-Shadow," the ideal lover of whom all actual lovers are only a reflection, and thus one perpetually seeks. After one of their separations, he reports, "I was secretly in intense misery and haunted to an extraordinary extent by the thought of Rebecca. At that time I was feeling too acutely to observe myself. But I see now that Rebecca had become for me the symbol of the Lover-Shadow and that I was unable to conceive of it in any other form than hers-- or exist without it. I began to see her on balconies, away across restaurants. Any dark-haired woman would become Rebecca for me. I felt I must at any cost get her back to me and get back to her. I sent her a telegram [...] suggesting we should [...] make another try at a life together. But Rebecca was now inflexibly in revolt."

Published ten years before Wells's take on the relationship in the Postscript was finally released, Gordon Ray's H. G. Wells & Rebecca West reconstructs the relationship between the two from the existing letters, supplemented by interviews with Dame Rebecca herself. Most of the letters that survive are those from Wells to West, leading to a necessarily incomplete account. Wells's perspective comes from the moment, as expressed in the letters, while West's comes in retrospect, meaning it is more considered. But it is what it is.

My impression is of two very intelligent people, drawn to each other yet unable to coexist for any length of time. I wish we had West's letters, because Wells often comes across as unpleasant and condescending, yet we don't have her words to judge his responses by. As the relationship goes on, things get worse and worse between them, and I feel like Wells wanted something West could never give him. Wells wanted another version of his second wife, Jane, a helpmeet who would help him execute his great work, except this one would also have sex with him. But the very things that drew him to West meant she could never supply him with that; she would never subjugate herself to his desires, even though biology and finances meant that she was the one who had to take care of their child together.

Wells actually uses that child as a weapon against her late in their relationship, alternately threatening to take him away from her and to stop seeing him altogether, depending on his whims. It's hard to blame her for being "inflexibily in revolt" given how much of an asshole he could be, and his reaction to feeling "intense misery" seems to be to make her feel that way, too. Wells was not always an emotionally mature man, to say the least.

Dinner party: H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Rebecca West, Mrs. Hardy
Thomas Hardy is just going on and on about "skellingtons" he found when he built his house; West can only go, "Lovely, lovely" in response. Mrs. Hardy is depressed.
(from H. G. Wells & Rebecca West, p. 95)

It's not all misery. There are cute doodles by Wells (I wonder if he called them "picshuas" as he did the doodles he drew for Jane), and they clearly were two intelligent people enjoying each others' intellectual, emotional, and sexual company when their relationship began. But I feel like the seeds of their relationship's disintegration were planted early, even if took them a while to realize it.

Next Week: I delve into the relationship between H. G. and Jane by unearthing The Picshuas of H. G. Wells!

H. G. Wells at 150: The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells by Steven McLean

One last H. G. Wells-related text in my massive backlog of unreviewed books for my continuing celebration of Wells's 150th, this one not by the man but about him:

Hardcover, 242 pages
Published 2009

Borrowed from the library
Read January 2013

The Early Fiction of H. G. Wells: Fantasies of Science
by Steven McLean

Steven McLean is part of a group of Victorianist literary scholars of serial publication. When discussing the writings of H. G. Wells, for example, he doesn't consider them as sort of Platonian ideal objects, but as products of the nineteenth-century periodical press. This necessitates not just reading Wells's novels in their serial versions (where relevant), but also reading what other material appeared in those periodicals, and reading what H. G. Wells was publishing elsewhere. There's so much, largely ephemeral, material out there that can illuminate the world in which these novels were being written and read. He charts three stages for Wells's early science fiction: 1895-96: pessimistic Darwinian fables (The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau), 1897-98: recognizable social settings (The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds), and 1901-05: future directions for humanity (The First Men in the Moon and A Modern Utopia).

What you get from all this is a very solid monograph, one that shows how Wells was interested in what science could say about society: whether society was evolving (and how), how science could be used to shape a better society, what role scientists had to play in society, could eugenics improve society, what did evolution have to do with imperialism, and so on. This is a set of well-articulated perspectives on six H. G. Wells novels, the kind of thing that can be a very helpful grounding when you go off to write about those novels yourself. I should cite it more!

H. G. Wells at 150: H. G. Wells in Love

My celebration of H. G. Wells's 150th birthday continues, with a discussion of the "postscript" to his autobiography that wasn't published until 50 years after the rest of it:

Hardcover, 253 pages
Published 1984

Acquired February 2014

Read June 2016

H. G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography
edited by G. P. Wells

This book covers the details of H. G. Wells's personal life omitted in Experiment in Autobiography, and it contains three main parts. First is Wells's introduction to The Book of Catherine Wells, a compilation of his wife's fiction he edited after her death. Then there are the accounts of his various extramarital love relationships. And then finally there's the diary he kept following the conclusion of the Experiment, keeping things up to date.

In my discussion of Wells's personal life after the Experiment, I commented, "a lot was being held back. Not only were there no mentions of his affairs during his second marriage, but there was scarcely any mention of his personal life at all as the book went on. [...] [T]he death of his second wife is revealed in only a couple passing asides, and his children may as well not even exist for all the role they play in his life once they are born." I had known why his discussion of his affairs was being held back, but I thought it was weird how little he said about the death of his wife, Amy Catherine "Jane" Wells. Well, upon reading the introduction to The Book of Catherine Wells here, it's clear why he said little about her death in the Experiment, as he had already said it, and he had said it beautifully.

The account of her life is good enough, and supplements some material covered in the Experiment, but what truly impresses is the account of her dying days. It's sad to see her dying after all the time I spent with loyal Jane in the Experiment and here, and the very last bit, where Wells takes the advice of George Bernard Shaw and watches the cremation, is a brilliant, moving bit of writing from a man who often skirted around emotion.

The middle section of the book is fascinating, but in a totally different way, as he discusses why he loved so many women, and delves into short descriptions of the more important affairs, with Amber Reeves (who, with Jane, seems part of the model for Ann Veronica), Elizabeth von Arnim (who should have been a friend with benefits but wanted more), Rebecca West (with whom, as with Reeves, he had a child), Odette Keun (with whom he built a villa in France as a symbol of their love, which turned quite tempestuous), and Moura Budberg (a Russian spy, whom he wanted to marry). These accounts are a mix of amusing anecdotes (Wells and Arnim had outdoor sex on an issue of the Times decrying the immorality of the younger generation), heady passion (Wells and Reeves decided to have a child together in a fit of defiance at the world that didn't really pay off), harsh invective (things really didn't do well with Keun), stinginess with money (he seems impressed with his own generosity), and dispassionate analysis (sometimes he understands himself, sometimes he doesn't).

Each of the stories is compelling in its own way; Wells is a good storyteller, and I found myself regaling my family with anecdotes as I read. The stories of Reeves, Keun, and Budberg are probably the most interesting, as those relationships seemed to encounter the most difficulties, both externally and internally imposed. The story of how Wells couldn't quite tear himself away from Budberg even when he was certain she was lying to him is gripping, and I really want to read a biography of her now.

You could probably psychoanalyze Wells a million different ways, but he comes across to me as a man obsessed with sex but rarely emotionally intimate. Or maybe dispassionate about sex, in that he likes it, but isn't attached to how he gets it. (He talks of going to prostitutes, including when he's in Washington D.C. and decides to find out what sex with a black woman is like.) Or maybe a man in search of a connection he can never quite find, possibly because he's dissatisfied with whatever he can actually have. His sexual appetite was as capacious as his intellectual one, and though he portrays himself as pretty egalitarian (he's all for everyone having as much sex as they want), there are times it seems he wants a helpmeet for His Great Work, not an equal partner. Jane was supposedly accepting of all his affairs, as she wanted an emotional connection, not a sexual one, but I'd be curious to get a take on Jane not from Wells's own perspective.

The final section of the book is mostly the "Looseleaf Diary," notes about the progress of his life that Wells would update periodically. Intervals range from a couple months to a couple years, and the diary covers 1935 to 1942 (he died in 1946). After I'd spent around 900 pages in Wells's life between this book and the Experiment, it was melancholy to watch him finish out his days. It comes across as much more unguarded that most of his other personal writings, just jottings every couple months about what he's doing these days and how he's feeling. He kept feeling he'd "really said what I have had in me to say" (222) again and again, convinced that this book is the last, and then writing another. He veers between optimism and pessimism; the Second World War brings out his anger at humanity in general and Britain in particular, and he really begins to doubt in the achievement of the World State. He talks about making films, and Moura flits in and out of his life, as he slowly grows to accept that he can never rid himself of his obsession, no matter her deceptions. But he also seems to grow closer to his family and appreciate them more as his life becomes more memories than predictions.

Even though he felt he had said everything he could, he was ready to do more. Referring to the suicide of a friend and fellow writer, he wrote in April 1942, "I know there is work and urgent and important work I may presently be called upon to do, and that I cannot go like that. I am here with all my books and a loyal household at hand" (228). Indeed, after writing that sentence, he wrote four more books, plus a doctoral thesis in science, irritated that his honorary doctorate had been in letters. He never stopped loving, and he never stopped working.

In Two Weeks: More H. G. Wells! More love! Find out the true story in H. G. Wells & Rebecca West!

H. G. Wells at 150: Experiment in Autobiography, Part 5

Finally, my week-long review of H. G. Wells's Experiment in Autobiography comes to an end with a discussion of that obsession of Wells's late life, the World State. Happy 150th birthday, H. G. Wells! Sorry there's no World State yet.

Hardcover, 718 pages
Published 1934

Acquired December 2010

Read June 2016

Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)
by H. G. Wells

§5
The World State

Like I said in earlier parts of this review, Wells really wants a World State to come into existence. It's impossible to read his discussions of why the World State is what humanity needs, and not recall the current context of Wells's own nation exiting the European Union, which I've no doubt Wells would have strongly praised as a genuine step to the World State.

Wells links his brand of socialism with science, which is nice. For me, I mean, since much of my research concerns those who use scientific vision as a justification for their actions. Wells contrasts his current beliefs (as of 1934) with the ones he held in his youth, when he first came to socialism (to the extent of wearing a red tie!), saying he "did not at first link the idea of science with the socialist idea, the idea, that is, of a planned inter-co-ordinated society. The socialist movement in England was under the aesthetic influence of Ruskin; it was being run by poets and decorators like William Morris [...]. These leaders were generally ignorant of scientific philosophy and they had been misled by Herbert Spencer's Individualism into a belief that biological science was anti-socialist. I do not recall any contributions on my part, in those early years, to correct that misunderstanding" (192). There's probably a book to be written (I assume someone has already written it) on how we got from the aesthetic socialism of Morris's News from Nowhere to the scientific socialism of Wells. (Though I should note that Engels called Marx's socialism "scientific socialism," and I imagine that Wells, based on the comments I quoted above, would disagree most vociferously!)

Red tie? Some kinda socialist!

Wells goes on to sound almost like a Comtean Positivist, proposing the existence of Professors of Analytical History: "Instead of presenting the clotted masses of un-digested or ill-digested fact which still encumber academic history to-day, my Professors [...] would be human ecologists; indeed Human Ecology would be a good alternative name for this new history as I conceive it." These new human ecologists wouldn't be in competition with old-fashioned historians, for "[t]hey would be related to the older school of historians as much as vegetable physiologists[,] ecologists and morphologists are related to the old plant-flattening, specimen-hunting, stamen-counting botanists. The end of all intelligent analysis is to clear the way for synthesis. The clearer their new history became the nearer they would be to efficient world-planning" (552). Perhaps there was never a clearer statement of the idea of idea of a scientific reconstruction of society that I often encounter in fiction-- though I'd like to track down what Wells thought of Comte, because I bet it's not flattering.

Wells predicts that something like human ecology will take over sooner or later, supplanting our focus on history as a series of documents to be memorized and great figures to be canonized, which he says lacks any educational value. I guess this is much like that physics professor he hated, but I don't think what he wanted to happen ever did, at least not in the way he might have hoped for. Wells, in classic Wells fashion, even posits that he's better at history than actual historians. For example, when he discusses his work pushing forward the idea of the League of Nations, he claims, "because I was not a 'scholar' and had never been put under a pedant to study a 'period' intensely and prematurely, and because I had a student's knowledge of biology of of the archæological record, I had a much broader grasp of historical reality than most of my associates" (612-3). The thing about Wells, though, is that when he's cocky, he's still often right; I need to get around to reading The Outline of History and finding out if his arrogance is justified in this case.

Wells actually later wrote a book called The New World Order.
ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED.

It's almost sad to realize to what extent Wells's dream of the World State is not coming to pass. He's decidedly optimistic when assessing the work he and his colleagues have done:

There is no proof that the seed we have already sown has died. On the contrary, the signs of vitality increase. Now it is a series of lessons in some elementary school; now it is a string of broadcast talks like those of Commander King-Hall; now it is a book for children or the newspaper report of a provincial lecture, that comes reassuringly, another fresh green blade forcing its way to the light. The new ideology creeps upon the world now. [...]
     [T]he realization of a new day comes to thousands before it comes to millions; at first the illumination is almost imperceptible, everything is touched by it while nothing stands out; there is a slow leisureliness in its manner of approach that belies its steady and assured incessancy. (624)

Though there are other times he's a little more guarded, saying, "Sometime I feel that generations of propaganda and education may have to precede it" (668). He was hugely disappointed in the path negotiations took after the Great War, thinking Europe had a real opportunity to create a genuine League of Nations that could coordinate human affairs, and instead it was squandered because of timidity and vengeance.

Whatta guy.

At the time he wrote the Experiment, Wells saw two big sources of centralization: the USSR and the USA: "the end sought [in both countries], a precisely more organized big-scale community, is precisely the same" (678). As a result, he arranged interviews with both FDR and Stalin. FDR was the fourth US president Wells met, after Teddy Roosevelt (who liked The Time Machine), Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover. Wells's impressions of Stalin are particularly interesting: "I have never met a man more candid, fair and honest, and to these qualities it is [...] that he owes his tremendous undisputed ascendency in Russia. I had thought before I saw him that he might be where he was because men were afraid of him, but I realize that he owes his position to the fact that no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him" (689). Hardly what I would have imagined! Wells seemed to admire both men, but also be disappointed that neither saw themselves or their countries as playing a role in the increased centralization of humankind.

Since his death, the EU came into existence, which I suspect would have furthered his optimism. Now, of course, the USSR is no more, the UK has voted to leave the EU,* and Scotland even voted on whether or not to leave the UK! Plus you have states like Yugoslavia that came into existence during his lifetime but no longer exist. Now, I'm not convinced of the need for the World State per se (maybe if his science of human ecology had taken off, someone could have proven its necessity to me), but it does seem sad that the thing he devoted the last three decades of his life to is if anything further from realization now than in the 1930s.

* Though, Wells did say that he "had become accustomed to looking westward for the definitive leadership of the English speaking community-- and anywhere but London for the leadership of mankind" (678).

Here's the links to all the parts of this lengthy review:
1. Wells in the Twentieth Century
2. Ways of Seeing: Science and Education
3. Wells's Writing and Wells on Writing
4. Wells's Personal Life
5. The World State

Be Back Monday: I'm not done with H. G. Wells yet, because it's time to hear about his many and varied romances in H. G. Wells in Love!

H. G. Wells at 150: Experiment in Autobiography, Part 4

Hardcover, 718 pages
Published 1934

Acquired December 2010

Read June 2016

Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)
by H. G. Wells

This week, my normal rota of blog topics is taking a backseat as I work through a lengthy review of H. G. Wells's autobiography in honor of his 150th birthday yesterday. (Here is yesterday's post.) Today's topic is:

§4
Wells's Personal Life

One of the things I knew going into H. G. Wells's massive autobiography is that it was only part of the whole. Leaving aside that it was published in 1934 and Wells didn't die until 1946, I knew that Wells omitted many of the details of his personal life to prevent scandal, and that they were eventually published in a "postscript" almost fifty years later edited by his son, called H. G. Wells in Love.

I was surprised, then, that sexual matters were discussed pretty frankly, especially for someone born during the mid-Victorian period: Wells mentions his childhood experiences with masturbation, describes a couple affairs he had during his first marriage (including the one that became his second marriage), and even makes it clear that his first-ever sexual experience was with a prostitute! So I couldn't imagine what was held back for the postscript.

Wells and Jane shared tangerines in 1894, and not again for seventeen years. Wells drew this "picshua" in 1911, positing what they would be like when they got to eat tangerines again in another seventeen years, in 1928. Jane died in 1927.
(from Experiment in Autobiography, p. 379)

But as the book went on, I realized a lot was being held back. Not only were there no mentions of his affairs during his second marriage, but there was scarcely any mention of his personal life at all as the book went on. What takes it over was Wells's obsession in the twentieth century, the coming of the World State. The latter chapters of the book are almost entirely about things Wells said and did in support of this endeavor; the death of his second wife is revealed in only a couple passing asides, and his children may as well not even exist for all the role they play in his life once they are born-- all this in strong contrast to how much attention he gives his parents, especially his mother, in the early chapters of the book.

I think two things drive this. The first is that Wells couldn't afford to talk about his personal life with honesty in 1934. Too many of the things he was writing about affected people who were still alive, and would have repercussions. I'm only a couple chapters into H. G. Wells in Love at the time I am writing this, but I can already see this with clarity. The second is that I think, having been a man early in his life and career accustomed to throwing stones at others' glass houses, Wells erected his own. He really, fully, earnestly believed in the necessity of the rise of the World State and felt that to not devote the latter parts of the book to it would be dishonest, as it seems the World State came to be the only thing he thought about that was not sex, in contrast to the young, imaginative, voracious, polymathic thinker and writer he had been.

Wells sort of tries to paper this over with the subtitle of the book: it is ostensibly about the development of his brain. For example, a lot of the experiences of his youth he ties into his adult way of thinking (connecting a childhood interest in war games with his contemporary disgust at the growing power of Hitler, in one case). Thus, his personal life drops out as it becomes less relevant to the development of his brain. When he discusses politics, he supposes some readers will object "that this is political discussion and not autobiography. It is political discussion but it is also autobiography. The more completely life is lived the more political a man becomes" (668). You may or may not buy this as a justification; I didn't. It's an odd sort of autobiography that barely mentions your children, I expect.

"What is this? Why do the people in the tram car shrink from his presence? Why, in this hot weather sit there in a heap together? Can it be-- Satan? Or the Hangman? Or the Whitechapel Murder[er]? No-- it is none of these things. It is simply a young biological demonstrator who has been dissecting with a large class that particular for of life known as the Dog Fish (scylla canicula). HE STINKS."
(from Experiment in Autobiography, pp. 313-4)

That said, the book is considerably enlivened by the inclusion of a number of "picshuas": this was Wells's nicknames for humorous little doodles he would draw his second wife, usually drawing one every day. They're not all comprehensible, but a couple of them are quite charming. Apparently there's a book collecting a significant number of the existing picshuas; I'll have to seek it out.

Be Back Tomorrow: H. G. Wells on the World State!

H. G. Wells at 150: Experiment in Autobiography, Part 3

Happy Birthday, Herbert George Wells! Today, I celebrate the 150th birthday of one of my favorite authors by continuing my lengthy review of his lengthy autobiography. (Access part 2 of the review here.)

Hardcover, 718 pages
Published 1934

Acquired December 2010

Read June 2016

Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)
by H. G. Wells

§3

Wells's Writing and Wells on Writing

Of course, his literary career is a frequent topic of the book. It's interesting, the extent to which he obviously doesn't rate his scientific romances. The Time Machine gets a bit of discussion, but I suspect only because it had a sort of complicated genesis, and it was his first substantive work of fiction. The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds get only passing asides-- Wells mentions the 1933 film of The Invisible Man (saying it makes the book as well read as ever) and he alludes to biking around Woking looking for places for Martian to blow up. But that's about it, while his more "literary" works get pages upon pages devoted to them, reminding me of how many more of these I have yet to read.

One of the most interesting parts of his discussion of literature was a fourteen-page section titled "Digression about Novels," where he lays out his theory of the novel, especially how he disagrees with Henry James's conception of it. Wells saw the novel as an "ethical enquiry" (410), while James "had no idea of the possible use of the novel as a help to conduct. His mind had turned away from any such idea. From his point of view there were not so much 'novels' as The Novel, and it was a very high and important achievement. He thought of it as an Art Form and of novelists as artists of a very special and exalted type" (411). This feels very much accurate to what I know of James, and I'm always happy to read someone skewering his pomposity.

I also really like Wells's own definition: "I was disposed to regard a novel as about as much an art form as a market place or boulevard. It had not even necessarily to get anywhere. You went by it on your various occasions" (411).

Nice guy, Henry James.

James's big critique of Wells's novels, especially Marriage (which I haven't read, but is a sort-of sequel to Ann Veronica), is that Wells did not care about his characters as people, but as vehicles for ideas. Wells doesn't disagree with his critique of his character development, but rather argues that the novel can be other things than "this real through and through and absolutely true treatment of people more living than life" (413). For Wells, novels should have a free hand to examine big questions, and he even disparages the Victorian writers who dealt with social questions, but who he felt tacitly accepted the values of society; they just "assailed some particular evil, exposed some little-known abuse" (417), while Wells was examining the very values upon which ideas of evil rested. Which is all well and good, but I suspect there's a reason that the more directly Wells engaged with social ideas, the less lasting values his novels have had. We read The Time Machine still and The War of the Worlds (though neither book really has characterization either), but we no long read The World of William Clissold.

Anyway, were I to teach a class on the modern novel again, I would probably pair Henry James's discourse on "The Art of the Novel" with Wells's digression/rebuttal upon the same topic. His account of talking with Joseph Conrad is also amusing:

I remember a dispute we had one day as we lay on the Sandgate beach and looked out to sea. How, he demanded, would I describe how that boat out there, sat or rode or danced or quivered on the water? I said that in nineteen cases out of twenty I would just let the boat be there in the commonest phrases possible. Unless I wanted the boat to be important I would not give it an outstanding phrase and if I wanted to make it important then the phrase to use would depend on the angle at which the boat became significant. But it was all against Conrad's over-sensitized receptivity that a boat could ever just be a boat. (528)

Look, I'm not saying you're wrong, H. G., but we still read Heart of Darkness these days yet everyone seems to have forgot Love and Mr. Lewisham.

Wells does tell some good anecdotes about his early literary career: in particular, there's an incident where he wets an old hat to make it look new when he goes to see an irate editor that is particularly delightful. When you read too much of Wells banging on about the failures of feminism and the necessity of the World State, it's easy to forget that he can actually be quite funny if he likes.

Be Back Tomorrow: H. G. Wells on his own personal life.

H. G. Wells at 150: Experiment in Autobiography, Part 2

Hardcover, 718 pages
Published 1934

Acquired December 2010

Read June 2016

Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)
by H. G. Wells

This week, my normal rota of blog topics is taking a backseat as I work through a lengthy review of H. G. Wells's autobiography in honor of his 150th birthday tomorrow. (You can access yesterday's kick-off here.) Today's topic is:

§2

Ways of Seeing: Science and Education

It's interesting to note that for all he valued science, was trained in science, and even taught science, that Wells doesn't have a terribly scientific mind himself, as he occasionally admits. For example, he described his childhood friend Sydney Bowkett as "one of those who see quickly and vividly and say 'Look,' a sort of people to whom I owe much. [...] Without such stimulus I note things, they register themselves in my mind, but I do not actively note them of my own accord" (79). Wells does, however, recognize a good scientific thinker when he sees one, praising T. H. Huxley (who was Wells's biology lecturer at South Kensington) for his ability to "see life clearly and to see it whole, to see into it, to see its inter-connexions, to find out, so far as terms were available, what it was, where it came from, what it was doing and where it was going" (169).

I will never get tired of this picture of Huxley.

This is in contrast to a professor of physics he had later, who failed completely to do any of these things, as he was "devoid of interrogative liveliness" (169). My impression is very much that Wells wanted to see Huxley's inter-connected vision applied to all society-- which is a theme of Ann Veronica, for example, where the young female science student Ann Veronica (being lectured by Godwin Capes, a Wells stand-in, who was himself lectured by Russell, a Huxley stand-in) has glimpses of applying the organizing principles of biology to all society, as she realizes that biological science "was, after all, a more systematic and particular method of examining just the same questions that underlay the discussions of the Fabian Society, the West Central Arts Club, the chatter of the studios[...]."

However, the form of Britain's educational institutions worked directly against science education creating the kind of all-encompassing vision Wells hoped for; he claims that injecting science into the curriculum was counterproductive, as "when by means of clamour from without, such subjects as physical science and biology were thrust into the curricula, they underwent a curious standardization and sterilization in the process" (279). What should have been about teaching ways of thinking became something so uncontroversial that Wells observes at one point that you could take a biology course at university in the 1890s and never discover the existence of evolution!

I had known Wells was a biology lecturer; what I had not know until reading the Experiment was that he did not lecture at an actual school (though he did hold a couple school posts over the years, including one where his kidney was partially crushed playing, I think, rugby, which yields some entertaining anecdotes), but for a cramming service. The British universities did a remarkably poor job preparing their students for their exams, so Wells worked for a tutoring service that functioned mostly by correspondence (students would write answers to sample questions and mail them in for assessment), but he also did some lectures and demonstrations to allow for "an efficient drilling in the practical work" (283). He observes that the cramming service would make a good subject for a Dickensian comic novel-- he calls teaching students to pass biology exams "an absolutely different thing from teaching biological science" (283)! If he had written this book, there would probably be a lesson for our own testing-obsessed education culture somewhere within it. (He has a good anecdote somewhere about how his teaching of biology much improved once he stopped letting his students do actual dissections and just told them what an ideal dissection would be like.)

I should note before I end that Wells does believe physics can be interesting-- it's just not immediately applicable to daily life. Not necessarily in a bad way, just in a way that means it can't be the subject of his thoughts for a sustained period of time: "I realize that Being is surrounded east, south, north and west, above and below, by wonder. Within that frame, like a little house in strange, cold, vast and beautiful scenery, is life upon this planet, of which life I am a temporary speck and impression. There is interest beyond measure within that house; use for my utmost. Nevertheless at times one finds an urgency to go out and gaze at those enigmatical immensities. But for such a thing as I am, there is nothing conceivable to be done out there" (183). It's a beautiful little image he conjures here, I think. Wells may find his primary sphere of interest within the house, but that does not mean everyone has to.

Be Back Tomorrow: H. G. Wells on writing.

H. G. Wells at 150: Experiment in Autobiography, Part 1

Before we get started on the Week of Wells, I have two reviews of recent-ish Doctor Who audio dramas up at USF this weekend: Nightshade featuring the seventh Doctor and Ace, and The Waters of Amsterdam featuring the fifth Doctor, Nyssa, and Tegan.

Hardcover, 718 pages
Published 1934

Acquired December 2010

Read June 2016

Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)
by H. G. Wells

Anyone who knows me knows that my interest in (obsession with?) H. G. Wells has only grown with the passing of time. There is not an important topic of the Victorian era that Wells doesn't have something to say to, I reckon. So it's only natural that my review of H. G. Wells's autobiography is probably among the longest book reviews I ever wrote. Thus, in honor of H. G. Wells's 150th birthday coming this Wednesday, I'm running my review of it in five parts, breaking it up to cover five semi-distinct topics. First off is:

§1
Wells in the Twentieth Century

Here in the twenty-first century I think we often consider the whole Victorian era to be of a piece: Charles Dickens coexisting with H. G. Wells, Fagin running from Martian tripods. But The War of the Worlds is closer to its own Cold War film adaptation than it is to Oliver Twist, and Wells lived more of his life in the twentieth century than the nineteenth, despite the fact that thanks to steampunk his early science fiction works define our imaginary of the nineteenth century. It's weird to read someone quintessentially Victorian discussing meeting Albert Einstein, Franklin Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin, and having opinions on the women's suffrage movement and Karl Marx.

At one point, Wells prophesies humanity
will outgrow its love of personality in politics.
I guess that didn't work out so well.

Perhaps weirdest of all is in his discussion of Hitler, who he first brings up when covering his life at age thirteen. He describes Hitler as "nothing more than one of my thirteen year old reveries grown come real. A whole generation of Germans has failed to grow up" (75). In fact, his fantasy worlds at thirteen strongly resemble the kind of future-war fiction Wells skewered in The War of the Worlds and The War in the Air: "I was simple even in victory. I made wise and firm decisions, about morals and customs and particularly about those Civil Service Stores which had done so much to bankrupt my father. With inveterate enemies, monarchists, Roman Catholics, non-Aryans and the like I was grimly just. Stern work--but my duty...." (75)

This reminds me of the ends of novels like Angel of the Revolution, where the future-revolutionaries have selflessly taken on the burden of murdering millions to make the world a better place, and then they lay down a set of new laws, one of which is always something oddly specific that makes you think it must have had personal repercussions for the writer, like one of the Seven Laws for All Humankind being about landlord-tenant rights. I've often drawn a connection between the revolutionary impulse of books like Angel and Hitler, so it's nice to see Wells himself draw the same one. I should note that, as I said in my discussion of Little Wars, Wells lumps Winston Churchill in with those still trapped in this phase of development. I wonder if and to what extent Wells revised his opinion of Churchill after the Second World War.

Wells also didn't like Karl Marx very much. My impression is that he saw Marx coming at a similar problem to him, but in an overly simplistic fashion. He claimed Marx had a "plausible, mystical and dangerous idea of reconstituting the world on a basis of mere resentment and destruction: the Class War. Overthrow the 'Capitalist System' (which was never a system) was the simple panacea of that stuffy, ego-centred and malicious theorist. [...] Marxism is in no sense creative or curative. Its relation to the inevitable reconstruction of human society which is now in progress, is parasitic" (143). He also claims that Marxism mostly exists to sustain public anger in face of a very complicated problem: "To abandon the Class War theory of revolution is to give up the use of a very sustaining opiate and to face an intricate riddle. For many rough immediate purposes, drugged fighters may do better than clear-headed ones, but not in the long run" (626). Ouch!

Consistent with this, he claims Russia would have had a much better revolution without Karl Marx. It's interesting to see how Wells articulates a different between the kind of revolution he wanted (gradual, scientifically grounded) and the one he thought Marx wanted (rapid, emotionally grounded), especially given how many of Wells's novels feature massive destruction paving the way for a scientific World State. Here, he argues that "A constructive revolution [...] must begin fragmentarily, it must begin here and there, and it will have associated with it a considerable riff-raff of merely eccentric, extravagant, disgruntled and discredited individuals. [...] Revolution begins with the misfits" (627). I guess a sudden catastrophe was okay for utopian fiction, but not reality, and I guess scientific planning was good for the World State but not for the revolution to bring it into being.

If you know anything at all about Wells, you'll know that he very much liked to be right about everything. (I would uncharitably interpret a number of his works of fiction as establishing that he knew more about certain things than other writers.) It's probably no surprise, then, that he turns out to be a total mansplainer; there's a two-page diatribe about how he had better ideas about feminism than the actual lady feminists. He blames women's cultural inferiority on the biological disadvantage they possess as the child-bearers, concluding that there's no way to equalize it "short of the public endowment of motherhood. These things and not any petty political enfranchisement, I reasoned, must surely constitute the real Magna Charta of Women, and I set myself to explain this with the same tactless simplicity and lucidity that had already caused such inconvenience to the politicians of the Labour Party" (406). Yes, I can see how women would have loved you turning up and explaining why they actually didn't need the vote, H. G.

I guess he recognizes that he was tactless, which is nice, but on the next page he makes fun of their modesty and decries their methods, so twenty years on and he still seems to be acting tactless.

Be Back Tomorrow: H. G. Wells on science and education.