Shiel, who lived to a great age, became preoccupied with racist fantasies of the ‘Overman’ in his later years. His last work, Jesus, was apparently finished but remains unpublished. He seems to have died a religious maniac, having anointed as his successor to the kingship of Redonda the excessively minor poet John Gawsworth, who reverently kept Shiel’s royal ashes in a biscuit tin on his mantelpiece, dropping a pinch as condiment into the food of any particularly honoured guest. The comedian and scholar of nineteenth-century decadent literature, Barry Humphries, was (unwillingly) one such diner – ‘out of mere politeness’.
FN
Matthew Phipps Shiel
MRT
The Purple Cloud
Biog
K. Macleod, ‘M. P. Shiel and the Love of Pubescent Girls: The Other “Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”’ in the journal English Literature in Transition, 2008
107. H. G. Wells 1866–1946
We’re in a blessed drain-pipe, and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die. The draper’s assistant, Minton, in Kipps
Wells had many enemies to combat through life. One enemy, over whom his victory was at best equivocal, was the English class system. ‘Bertie’ (he did his best to expunge that ghastly lower-class name in later life) was born, the youngest and frailest of four children, in Bromley, on the outskirts of London. His father was a talented professional cricketer, turned untalented shop-keeper, dealing in crockery and cricket bats. This was a period when cricket was firmly divided between ‘players’ and ‘gentlemen’. Joe Wells was no gentleman but he was a demon bowler. A couple of years before his last son’s birth he had taken four wickets in as many balls for Kent against Sussex, but his county career ended in 1877 with a broken thigh – incurred, Bromley gossip had it, in an amorous adventure involving high walls and an angry wife. Joe, his biographers record, ‘always seemed poised to flee when things got difficult’ but, unlike Mr Polly, never made it himself over the wall.
Wells’s mother, Sarah, had been an ‘upper’ servant before marriage. She and Joe bickered and drifted apart. Sarah Wells kept up her connection with Uppark, the grand country house in Sussex, where she had earlier been in service. The upstairs-downstairs life (with himself firmly below) is described in the early Bladesover chapters of Tono-Bungay (1909), as is the ineffable scorn directed at the young hero by the daughter of the house for ‘dropping his aitches’. This class disability is raised to an art form in Mr Polly’s epic – he would say, ‘intrudacious’ – combat with the English language. People sneered at Wells’s ‘squeaky’ voice and ‘put on’ accent all his life. Class will out.
In his years at a private school for the sons of tradesmen, Thomas Morley’s Commercial Academy, young Wells was marked as phenomenally clever. But that, in the 1870s, was no passport to better things in life. Meritocracy was a century away. Being cleverer than ‘gentleman scholars’ at Oxbridge would not help young Wells any more than sporting prowess would have helped his ‘player’ father to the presidency of the MCC. The inevitable bankruptcy of Joe’s shop led to Bertie’s being apprenticed in 1880, aged thirteen, first as a chemist’s boy at Windsor. But Sarah Wells – now housekeeper at Uppark – could not afford the cost of training him as a pharmacist. He was then indentured as a draper’s assistant in a department store in Southsea. What lay before him is anatomised, loathingly, in the description of the hero in The War in the Air: ‘Bert Smallways was a vulgar little creature, the sort of pert, limited soul that the old civilisation of the early twentieth century produced by the million in every country of the world. He had lived all his life in narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, and in a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape.’ This fate is immortalised in the mordantly comic histories of Kipps and Mr Polly. Both are rescued from careers as counter-jumpers by unexpected bequests – that standby of the Victorian novel, rarely encountered in life.
Wells’s own escape from the Kippsian ‘drain-pipe’ was more audacious. He wrote no more moving letters than those to his mother in 1883, beseeching her to let him break the indentures she had – at great sacrifice – paid for. He would, he threatened, kill himself if she did not allow him to free himself. He wanted more out of life than forelock-pulling with the prospect of his own modest ‘establishment’ – if he were lucky. His father’s luck in that line did not encourage optimism. Sarah responded by gallantly staking what was left of her life’s savings on her son’s being indeed worthy of better things.
The British school system was, at this period, recruiting trainee teachers from the lower classes – teachers required to deal with the masses of lower-class pupils enrolled by the 1870 Elementary Education Act. The government programme offered the bookish young Wells (as it would, a little later, D. H. Lawrence) a narrow gateway into higher education and ‘the professions’. It was a step up. In 1884, after a couple of years as a pupil teacher, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later Imperial College) at South Kensington. There he was exposed to the culture of the metropolis and the full force of late Victorian scientific discovery, principally from T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, his freshman teacher. ‘The year I spent in Huxley’s class,’ he later wrote, ‘was beyond all question, the most educational year of my life.’
That year, and the years that followed, were hard: his scholarship afforded him a guinea a week – starvation wages – and the damage to his health was lifelong. Lifelong, too, was his conversion to materialism, free-thinking and socialism – all fuelled by a diffused anger. He never finished his degree – London proved too distracting. In 1887 he accepted a job teaching science at a boarding school in Wales. A few months later, a pupil fouled him on the football pitch, which precipitated a general health breakdown and months of convalescence. Nevertheless, in 1890 he got his B.Sc, did some tutoring in London, wrote a textbook on biology, married a cousin, and promptly abandoned her for one of his students, Amy Robbins, with whom he made a second marriage in 1895. He would philander his way through life.
Newspapers and magazines were by now taking occasional pieces from him. He had been toying, since his time at college, with a ‘scientific romance’, initially called ‘The Chronic Argonauts’. It became The Time Machine (1895) and was hugely successful. He followed up with a string of other foundation texts of early science fiction: The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901). He had left the classroom behind, but Wells remained incorrigibly didactic. His redefinitions of socialism – which included state-enforced eugenics – were idiosyncratic. The ‘low grade man’, he ordained in A Modern Utopia (1905), must be ‘eliminated’. He himself was no longer low grade.
Wells’s fiction changed as Victorian England gave way to the twentieth century. Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) began a line of autobiographical novels which reached a highpoint with Ann Veronica (1909), a ‘New Woman’ novel; and The History of Mr Polly (1910). His personal life over these years was beyond chaotic. At the time of writing Mr Polly, his current mistress, Amber Reeves, had just borne him a daughter. Three years on, his next mistress, Rebecca West, would bear him a son. There were two sons by his second wife, Jane. He called it ‘free love’, but a price was exacted. Mr Polly contemplates divorce from his awful wife Miriam (an ungrateful depiction of his mother) by cut-throat razor. Wells may sometimes have felt something similar – until the next interesting piece of skirt passed by.
As the ‘future’ arrived (some of it – such as the war in the air – strikingly as prophesied by him), Wells transcended mere fiction. It was too small a container for his mind. He became what the Victorians called a ‘sage’, the twenty-first century calls a ‘public intellectual’, and his Southsea mates in the draper’s shop would have called a ‘right old gasbag’. He wrote histories of the world and told the world what to do (he was much in favour of the League of Nations). He wrote some interesting fiction, including his war nov
el, Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916), which is courageously unjingoistic about the beastly Hun. His last ambitious effort in fiction, The World of William Clissold (1926) is over-inflated to busting with its author.
What gives Wells’s best (i.e. early) fiction its distinctive tang is the black vein of gloom running through it. The Invisible Man, like the sighted man in the Country of the Blind, finds himself an alien – doomed, despite his advantage, to be an outsider and a social inferior. The world does not like people better than itself. The work which is regarded as Wells’s most optimistic, The Shape of Things to Come (1933) is dedicated, subversively, to a social thinker even more pessimistic than himself, Ortega y Gasset. At its most controlled, Wellsian pessimism takes the form of satire, as in Tono-Bungay’s scathing comedy on quack medicine and the incorrigible foolishness of the buying public. There’s not one born every day but millions. Comedy, however, cannot keep the awfulness at bay. The Time Traveller, as far in the future as his machine will carry him, stands on a bleak seashore, regarding a fading sun, with only a giant crab for company. Is this what it was all for – science, art, progress, novels? Wells lived to see the atom bomb he had foreseen half a century before dropped on the country of the Samurai which, half a century earlier, he had seen as his ideal. He witnessed his well-meaning eugenic theories tested to destruction by the Nazis. His final thoughts, expressed in his testament, Mind at the End of its Tether (1945), are as hopeless as Kurtz’s: ‘Homo Sapiens in his present form is played out …There is no way through the impasse. It will be the Dark Ages over again, a planetary instead of a European Dark Ages.’ ‘The horror! the horror!’
Writing to a friend, Rebecca West commemorated him cruelly and kindly: ‘Dear H. G., he was a devil, he ruined my life, he starved me, he was an unexhaustible source of love and friendship to me for thirty five years, we should never have met, I was the one person he cared to see to the end, I feel desolate because he is gone.’ The finest portrait of Wells in extremis is found not in straight biography but in David Lodge’s 2011 docunovel, A Man of Parts. The prelude pictures ‘H.G.’ in his Regent’s Park flat. London, blacked out, is under bombardment from the Germans. He is very ill. He does not want to die but must. The end of civilisation and his own end merge. There is one final surge of the energy which has fuelled his remarkable career. To a new Preface to the Penguin reissue of The War in the Air, he adds ‘the epitaph he wished to have inscribed on his tombstone: “I told you so. You damned fools.”’
FN
Herbert George Wells
MRT
The History of Mr Polly
Biog
N. and J. Mackenzie, The Time Traveller: The Life of H. G. Wells (1973; revised edn 1987)
108. Arnold Bennett 1867–1931
They write of unimportant things. Virginia Woolf on Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy
Arnold Bennett was born in the Staffordshire Potteries, or ‘Black Country’ – a region his fiction would make as famous as Hardy’s Wessex. He was one of six children of a struggling Hanley solicitor. The family was Methodist, high-minded, and unusually close-knit. When away from his mother, in later life, Arnold wrote to her every day; on occasion seven times a day. Arnold excelled at school (particularly in French, prophetically) but with all those Bennett offspring higher education could never be afforded, even for a clever lad, and at sixteen he was put to work in his father’s office. By night he studied and penned pieces for local newspapers. A loan from his mother enabled him to go to London in 1889. The transplant from the industrial Midlands to fin de siècle London was electrifying and he promptly gave up any interest in law. His first literary contact was with John Lane – in whose Yellow Book (alongside Wilde and Beardsley) he published his early efforts. Lane it was, on the advice of John Buchan (another rising star), who published Bennett’s first novel, A Man from the North (1898). Bennett was meanwhile coining it with reviews for the London prints: Gissing’s ‘New Grub Street’ held no terrors for Arnold.
By the turn of the century he was sufficiently prosperous to move his now indigent family into a farmhouse in Bedfordshire. At this period he wrote his first Black Country novel, Anna of the Five Towns (1902) – a work whose mood and plot is influenced by his father’s concurrent death. The five towns are the linked centres of pottery production in Staffordshire. It was followed by a very different novel, drawing on the author’s currently cosmopolitan lifestyle, Grand Babylon Hotel (1902). Grand Hotels and the Five Towns would be motifs throughout Bennett’s forty-volume strong fictional oeuvre. Bennett had made himself a valuable literary property and his commercial affairs were entrusted to the agent J. B. Pinker – to whom he was introduced by his friend H. G. Wells.
After the death of his father in 1903, Bennett went to live in Paris for what would be ten years. On his trips to London, he would stay in the Savoy, where the waiters were circulated with his photograph and a dish (a fishy omelette) was named after him by the head chef (who was reciprocally honoured as ‘Rocco’ in Imperial Palace). H. G. Wells, who knew all about philandering (and, as J. B. Priestley claimed, had the ‘better taste in women’), liked to put it about that Bennett was ‘undersexed’. This would seem to be borne out by his not marrying his French mistress, Marie Marguerite Soulié, a woman eight years his junior, until he was forty. But portions of Bennett’s journal, suppressed until the 1980s, suggest sexual sophistication – and perhaps more than that. Four years before his marriage, he recorded, from conversation with a Parisian poule: ‘Concerning sexual perversions. Chichi gave me several of her own experiences. As of the man who always wished to make love on the floor, more canino. The man who had his fesses beaten until they bled … I explained to her the philosophy of the passion for pain in the enjoyment of love and how it grew on a man like drink.’
It was during the Paris years that Bennett produced much of his best fiction: Whom God Hath Joined (1906), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908), the first volume in the Clayhanger trilogy (1910), and the comic novel, The Card (1911). By now the streams of literary, journalistic and stage earnings had made Bennett the richest author in England, and he enjoyed his riches as only the once-poor can. He bought himself a yacht and travelled the world. On the outbreak of war in 1914, he joined the Ministry of Information, where his intimate knowledge of France proved useful. His private misgivings about the conflict are reflected in The Pretty Lady (1918).
With one of his literary roots in the 1890s and his French connections, Bennett was a friend to modernism. He was, none the less, set up as a target by Ezra Pound, in ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’ as the crass, sales-grubbing ‘Mr Nixon’ and – more argumentatively – by Virginia Woolf, who defined her finely touched impression in contradistinction to Bennett’s clumping realism. Sides have been taken by partisans ever since. Woolf is currently well ahead. Somerset Maugham – who liked Bennett and hobnobbed with him in Paris – thought him ‘like a managing clerk in a city office’. Vulgar, that is, with poor French. It did not help that Bennett retained his provincial accent, perhaps to cover up a bad stammer from which, like Maugham, he suffered.
After the war, Bennett gave up his country house, his mother having died in 1914, and separated from Marguerite in 1921. He formed a ‘marital understanding’ with an actress Dorothy Cheston, who was twenty-five years younger (she later changed her surname, by deed-poll, to ‘Bennett’). The union was ‘open’ and fraught. In 1926, when their only child, Victoria, was being born, Bennett wrote to Dorothy on the subject of her two, simultaneously running, lovers. ‘No doubt normal husbands’, he drily observed, ‘would regard it as quite proper for you to have two men at once and to leave our baby in my charge … But I am abnormal.’
During the 1920s, Bennett produced some of his best fiction: Riceyman Steps (1923), Lord Raingo (1926), and Imperial Palace (1930). And, in the Evening Standard, he exercised an authority as a reviewer which has rarely been equalled. The official account of his death is that on holiday in France, with Dorothy, he contracted typhoid from tap-wate
r and died of infection three months later. His last, enigmatic, words are recorded as being ‘the bill, the bill’: appropriate for one so associated with good living. He left some £40,000, which meant that he had no reason to be frightened of hotel bills. Dorothy lived to the ripe age of eighty-six which meant that the dark suspicions that Bennett’s family and friends had about her were suppressed. It was suspected, for example, that she misconducted herself with Bennett’s nephew, Richard, while her husband lay dying and that she ripped a valuable ring from his dying hand. Most luridly, H. G. Wells was led to exclaim, hysterically: ‘She’s a bitch and she killed Arnold.’ Arnold’s sisters concurred, disbelieving, apparently, the official version of his death.
Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives Page 40
