Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

All the same, the minor amendment I have to offer is based largely on what I see as Wells’s second gambit to outwit the death of inspiration—second, I mean, to increasing doses of political speculation which fill his books. The second gambit is the policy of reversal, to which I have referred.

Even his role of educator is a role reversal. He had been the educated. To education he owed his escape from drapers, ignominy, and boots. The great leap of his life was from taught to teacher.

Teachers are forced into cycles of repetition to get the message to sink in. Wells’s books work rather like that at times. The little man of earlier books, Hoopdriver, Kipps, Mr Polly, Mr Lewisham, are recycled as powerful figures, at times only semi-human: Ostrog, Mr Parham, Rud Whitlow in The Holy Terror, and the grand Lunar.

With reversal went repetition. Other commentators have pointed out that the New Woman appears in more than one Wells novel. Ann Veronica has many sisters, not least Christina Alberta, and the charming Fanny Smith in The Dream. I don’t find this cause for complaint. Nor can we complain that so many of the books chase that idea of human betterment; this is grandeur rather than narrowness. What we are justified in complaining about is that so many of those plans for the future reveal an almost willful lack of understanding of mankind’s nature. It was Orwell who said that most of Mr Wells’s plans for the future had been realized in the Third Reich.

A fresh look at Wells’s canon, however, reveals some unexpected pleasures. I have recently had the chance to defend in print In the Days of the Comet (1906), not as a science fiction novel, which it only marginally is, but as one of Wells’s prime Condition of England novels—the phrase is Disraeli’s. It is a reversal, demonstrating how A Modern Utopia might come about, while providing as abrasive a picture of Edwardian England as Tono-Bungay; while in time it stands sandwiched between the two.

I would like to cite a paragraph from In the Days of the Comet, to serve as a reminder of how brilliantly Wells could recreate life in the days before he decided instead to theorize about it.

This is the passage where the humbly born Leadford is about to leave home forever, and to desert his mother as Wells’s mother later deserted him:

After our midday dinner—it was a potato-pie, mostly potato with some scraps of cabbage and bacon—I put on my overcoat and got it [my watch] out of the house while my mother was in the scullery at the back. A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a damp, unsavoury, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our cases by the fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness, opened, and diffused small crunchable particles about the uneven brick floor. It was the region of the ‘washing-up’, that greasy, damp function that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, and rags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called ‘dish-clouts’, rise in my memory at the name. The altar of this place was the ‘sink’, a tank of stone, revolting to a refined touch, grease-filmed and unpleasant to see, and above this was a tap of cold water, so arranged that when the water descended it splashed and wetted whoever had turned it on. This tap was our water supply. And in such a place you must fancy a little old woman, rather incompetent and very gentle, a soul of unselfishness and sacrifice, in dirty clothes, all come from their original colours to a common dusty dark grey, in worn, ill-fitting boots, with hands distorted by ill use, and untidy greying hair—my mother. In the winter her hands would be ‘chapped’, and she would have a cough. And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and watch in order that I may desert her.

Everything comes beautifully together: the hatred of bad social conditions, the mixed feelings for the old woman, the sense that one can only get out and go on. It’s magnificent.

Later, in the mid-1920s, when, on the Bergonzi scale, Wells should be quite past it, we have a couple of novels which form reversals of an interesting kind. Christina Alberta’s Father is about a man who believes himself to be the Sumerian Sargon the First, King of Kings. The present of the novel becomes Sargon’s future. In The Dream, Sarnac is a man of the future who relives a life in the Edwardian present. Both these novels are highly readable, and The Dream is excellent—overlooked, apparently, because Wells failed to give it a noticeable title. The comedy and descriptions of low-life are in the best Kippsian manner. These novels date from 1924 and 1925, when Wells was under considerable mental stress. Indeed, Christina Alberta’s Father strikes a new note. A theme of insanity is introduced for the first time, and the scenes in the mental institution are vivid.

Where Sarnac dreams himself back into an ordinary life, the low Mr Preemby in Christina Alberta’s Father imagines himself to be lord and protector of the whole world. It is a role Wells was clearly taking on himself.

There’s much in Wells which reminds us of the productive French genius, Honoré de Balzac. Balzac wrote to a friend in 1820, saying, ‘Before long, I shall possess the secret of that mysterious power. I shall compel all men to obey me and all women to love me.’ He also said, ‘My only and immense desires, to be famous and to be loved’. He achieved both, and killed himself by overwork. Fame and love together were not enough to quench that void within him which was the fruit of his mother’s rejection and coldness to him. Wells is a similar case. His high and demanding productivity— The Outline of History, for instance, written in a year of ‘fanatical toil’—his deromanticized sexual activity, which continued into his seventies, point to an underlying anxiety and unhappiness.

Some commentators—among them the Mackenzies, I think—ascribe this to Wells’s feeling of pique against the middle class, to whom he had once been made to feel inferior. No doubt class enters into the matter, as it does into most English departments. But something buried deeper fed on Wells, that unassuageable void which a derelicting mother sometimes imposes on her children. Sarah Wells, H. G.’s mother, did her best, but she left her husband and kicked Bertie, then almost fourteen, into the wide world, to fend for himself—or rather, into the narrow world behind the draper’s counter—the same age at which another utopian, Aldous Huxley, lost his mother. The Mackenzies say that Wells bitterly resented this rejection, and we see that bitterness fermenting in his life.

His one escape from the draper’s counter was through education. No wonder that in later days he saw life as a race between education and catastrophe. So it had been for him. But he had made another reversal, into a solipsistic universe, where what was true for him as a youth became true for the whole world.

This turning away from the literary world to quasi-political involvement still seems curious, and curiously unfruitful. Yet an explanation for it appears in the best book on creativity ever written, which explores the vagaries of the creative spirit. In his work, The Dynamics of Creation, [2]Anthony Storr says:

The inability to stop working, to enjoy holidays, to allow time for relaxation or personal relationships, is often found among intensely ambitious men. In psychiatric practice, it is more often found among politicians and financiers than among artists … Politicians often arrange life so that they are busily engaged all the time they are awake … Political life is an ideal one for men who need to be ceaselessly occupied, who are driven to seek power by an inner insecurity, and who substitute extroverted activity for the self-knowledge which comes from cultivating personal relationships … Creative production can be a particularly effective method of protecting the self from the threat of an underlying depression.