Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
this metaphorical use of cats—of which Wells was avowedly fond—and gardens and utopian innocence is immediately accessible to the imagination. The nature of a metaphor is not so much that it should be exact as that it should illuminate with a mysterious glow. That mysterious glow is certainly present in early Wells, and accounts for much of his abiding popularity. But something got in the way of the glow, and that something manifested itself as politics.
We are here to re-evaluate Wells. My contribution would be to say, in part, that Wells is interesting when he talks about people, or social conditions, or science, or those possible worlds of his science fiction; but he was, or has become, terribly boring when he goes on about politics, as, after the mid-twenties, he increasingly does. Remember the Open Conspiracy? The Life Aristocratic? The Voluntary Nobility? The World Brain? The New World Order? Such ideas are now lifeless. We salute the endeavours and intellect of the man who conceived them; but it is as well to face the fact that Wells was no political seer, and there is nothing that turns to dust as promptly as yesterday’s politics.
Those reversals of which Wells was so fond in his fiction were carried into his life. He turned from a creative writer into a sort of political journalist. Why did he do it? What drove him away from the literary to the ceaseless activity represented by The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind?
I will mention one more leopard in Wells’s life and then drop the subject. That leopard leads us into what was next to come in the way of reversals. This time it is a Leopard Man, the famous one who appears in The Island of Dr Moreau. Rendered half-human by Moreau’s vivisection, the Leopard Man escapes and Prendick tracks it across the island, discovering it at last ‘crouched together in the smallest possible compass’, regarding Prendick over its shoulder. Then comes a passage I still find moving:
It may seem a strange contradiction in me—I cannot explain the fact—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realized again the fact of its humanity. In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures of the enclosure. Abruptly, I slipped out my revolver, aimed between his terror-struck eyes, and fired.
The beast in the human, the human in the beast—it’s a powerful theme, and one which seems in Wells’s case to owe as much to inner emotion as to evolutionary understanding. At the end of Island, when Prendick gets back to civilization, he cannot lose his horror of the ordinary people round him, scrutinizing them for signs of the beast, convinced that they will presently begin to revert—an interesting passage derived from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Wells has presented us with many striking images, of which this one I have quoted is not the least. To me, this coining of images is one of the true marks of imaginative genius, greater than the creation of plot or character. But as Wells grew older, the ability to coin images grew fainter. From the image—enigmatic, disturbing, beautifying—he turned instead to elucidation, the image’s opposite. It was another reversal. He set his considerable talents to educating and enlightening the world, stating, in his autobiography, ‘At bottom I am grimly and desperately educational’. That was his mid-thirties, when the urge to pontificate was taking over, when he became shut in a schoolroom of his own making, far from the sportive leopards of his youth.
That remarkable short story, ‘The Door in the Wall’, written when Wells was almost forty, is precognitive in showing what became of his early vision. Wallace, the central character, spends his life searching for that door leading to the garden where the panthers and the beautiful lady were. In later middle age, Wallace comes across it again. In fact, he comes across it three times in a year, that door which goes into ‘a beauty beyond dreaming’, and does not enter it. He’s too busy with worldly affairs. He’s a politician now, and has no time …
The reason Wells has never been properly accepted into the pantheon of English letters—or some would say ‘pantechnicon’—is mainly a squalid class reason, and has nothing to do with the fact that his original soaring imaginative genius eventually fell, like Icarus, back to Earth.
Those of us who love Wells and his books have sought in the past to defend him by claiming that he was successful first as an artist and later as propagandist. This is approximately the view of Bernard Bergonzi in his book The Early H. G. Wells.[1] Bergonzi says, ‘Wells ceased to be an artist in his longer scientific romances after the publication of The First Men in the Moon in 1901’. So persuasive is Bergonzi’s book that many of us have gone along with the reasoning. Any considerable revision of Wells must take into account Bergonzi’s arguments.
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