by David Lodge
So there he was in 1902, the proud owner of Spade House, a paterfamilias with a healthy son, respected in the local community (he had been approached about becoming a Borough magistrate), enjoying a crowded and various social life, on friendly terms with a widening circle of important writers and thinkers, and increasingly celebrated as a writer and thinker himself. Anticipations was selling as fast as a novel, and his lecture at the Royal Institution in January, ‘The Discovery of the Future’, was rushed into print for the benefit of the hordes who had been unable to get tickets for the event. But in the same year he wrote another book of a very different kind, which puzzled many of his new admirers when it was published, a short novel entitled The Sea Lady. It was a variation on the Undine myth that playfully mixed incompatible elements of fantasy and realism, but had a serious theme. A middle-class family called the Buntings who occupied a house on the beach at Sandgate saw one day a beautiful young woman swimming in the sea, apparently in difficulties. She was rescued and brought ashore wrapped in a blanket, the blanket concealing a tail. She charmed everyone, especially a young man called Charteris destined for a successful career in Parliament on the Liberal benches. He fell in love with the mermaid, to the dismay of his fiancée, Adeline, who was devoted to the novels of Mrs Humphry Ward and committed to improving the Condition of the Poor, an ambition mocked by the Sea Lady: ‘What is the Condition of the Poor? A dreary tossing on the bed of existence, a perpetual fear of consequences that perpetually distress them, because they do not know what a dream the whole thing is …. And what does she care for the Condition of the Poor after all! Her dream is that she be prominently Doing Good, asserting herself, controlling their affairs amidst thanks and praise and blessings.’ The Sea Lady’s enigmatic motto was, ‘There are better dreams.’ Charteris vacillated between the claims of Desire and Duty, and finally succumbed to the former, sinking beneath the waves in the arms of the Sea Lady.
The idea for this book sprang from an experience on the beach at Sandgate in the summer of 1900. While Spade House was being built, they were renting a villa called Arnold House, one of a row whose back gardens extended down to the shore, very convenient for mixed bathing, an activity still regarded as somewhat daring by conservative Sandgate. One fine morning he went for a stroll along the beach at low tide and was making his way back to his garden gate when he heard a call of ‘Uncle Bertie!’ from the direction of the sea. He turned and saw, wading through the shallow breakers towards him, a vision of transcendent beauty, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus come to life.
She was May Nisbet, the daughter of E.F. Nisbet, who had been drama critic of the Times when he himself was reviewing plays for the Pall Mall Gazette. Nisbet had in fact written a devastating review of Guy Domville which Henry James still recalled with pain, but he never confessed to James that he knew the reviewer personally. They met frequently at first nights, and the experienced journalist had taken a liking to him and given him a few tips of the trade. In due course they became sufficiently friendly for Nisbet to confide that he had an illegitimate daughter at school in Goudhurst in Kent, and when he fell suddenly ill he sent a message begging ‘My Dear Wells’ to look after this girl after his death, news of which had swiftly followed. He had accordingly continued to pay the school’s fees, invited the girl to Sandgate for occasional holidays, and bade her call him ‘Uncle Bertie’. She had been a gawky, pimply adolescent when she first became his ward, but this summer, aged seventeen, she had blossomed into a striking beauty. Now, striding towards him in a wet bathing costume and lit by the morning sun, she seemed like a young goddess. Her costume was a simple schoolgirl’s garment, without the frills and furbelows of high fashion, rather too small for her, and all the more revealing for that. It covered her from neck to mid-calf, but clung like a second skin to every contour of her perfect young body – even, he noticed as she came smiling up to him, the nipples of her swelling breasts. She seemed the epitome of clean, healthy, sun-kissed young womanhood, and he was swamped by a wave of impossible desire for her.
‘Good morning, Uncle Bertie,’ she said, tugging off her bathing cap and allowing her long fair hair to tumble about her shoulders. ‘Aren’t you going to bathe?’
‘No, I want to peel that costume from your limbs and lick the salt water from every inch of your delicious body and then make urgent ecstatic love with you here on the sand like a satyr with a nymph on some Aegean island,’ he wanted to say, but in fact he said, ‘Maybe later. I prefer to go in when the tide is up.’
Perhaps she became conscious that he was staring at her rather fixedly as he spoke, for she blushed and looked round for the towel and bathing robe which she had left higher up the beach. ‘I’d better go in and change,’ she said.
‘Yes, don’t get chilled,’ he said. He could not resist adding, ‘You’ve become a beautiful young woman, May.’
She blushed again and smiled shyly, and mumbled something that sounded like ‘Thank you.’ He watched her, appreciating the alternate rise and fall of each buttock under the clinging short skirt as she moved up the beach, until she found her towel and robe on the dry shingle and covered herself. Only then did she look back at him and wave, and he waved back.
May had a certain musical ability, and had gratefully accepted his suggestion that she should train to be a school teacher of music at his expense, but she was a rather dim and unimaginative girl, whose only attraction was her physical beauty. If he had applied himself to seducing her he would probably have succeeded, but of course the idea was utterly out of the question for reasons of honour and common sense. During the rest of that holiday he confined himself to flirting with her in a sentimental avuncular way, amusing himself by seeing into what bashful pleased confusion even the mildest compliment would throw her. But the image of her rising from the sea like Aphrodite stayed with him, and out of the longing it had triggered in him that morning, he developed the story of the Sea Lady and her fatal allure.
The meaning of the story was ambiguous, and he himself was not quite sure what it was. The Sea Lady was immortal, but her immortality was a burden to her. She envied human beings ‘because you look towards an end’, but criticised them because ‘the little time you have you use so poorly’. Her siren attraction proved fatal to the hero, but she was given all the best lines in the book. Was it a fable illustrating the destructive effect of sexual love, or celebrating its transcendent power? He didn’t really know. It was as if, hesitating on the threshold of a new phase in his life, he was suddenly afflicted by doubts which he tried to work through and throw off in this fantasy. The exercise was effective inasmuch as by the end of that year he had decided to join the Fabian Society and thus committed himself to the cause of radical politics. He could, he was well aware, have settled down at Spade House to build himself a comfortable career as an Edwardian man of letters. A future of quiet, satisfying work, varied by entertaining gossip and mutual admiration at literary societies and dinners, awaited him if he followed that route, leading eventually to a knighthood and a clutch of honorary degrees – but he knew it would not satisfy him. He would continue to write, yes, but he had already experienced the thrill of success in that line, and the prospect of spending the rest of his life merely striving to maintain his place in the literary pecking order with book after book did not appeal. He wanted to achieve something more, something that would touch the lives of people who did not read literary novels, and that meant engaging in political life. He wanted to leave the world in a better state than the one he had been born into. Later he would see the Sea Lady, and the transfigured May Nisbet who inspired her, as forerunners of other young women in his life who upset that mission.
Their next-door neighbours at this time were an amiable family called Popham, with whom he had taken some liberties in portraying the Bunting Family in The Sea Lady. Mrs Popham’s brother and occasional guest was Graham Wallas, a lecturer at the recently established London School of Economics, and it was through meeting this man that he first got drawn into the
Fabian orbit. They took an immediate liking to each other, having many ideas and aspirations in common, though temperamentally they were chalk and cheese. He shared Wallas’s aim of creating a ‘Great Society’ through education, while Wallas for his part was excited by the radical vision of a New Republic in Anticipations. Wallas, who was older than himself, had joined the Fabian Society a couple of years after its foundation in 1884, and been a member of its Executive ever since, though of late, he confided, his influence had waned as the Webbs and Bernard Shaw became dominant. ‘I feel the Fabian has lost its way,’ he said, in the course of a stroll along the Sandgate beach. ‘We can’t seem to make up our minds about any serious issue. We were split over the Boer War. We’re split over tariff reform. We’re split over female suffrage. We debate endlessly and never settle anything. Membership has fallen well below seven hundred, which is our limit, and they’re mostly middle aged or elderly. We need some new ideas, Wells, and I’m not the only one on the Executive who thinks you may be the man to give them to us. I can tell you that Shaw and the Webbs are reading Anticipations with keen interest. I’d like to introduce you to them.’
‘I’ve met Shaw,’ he said, ‘though I doubt whether he will remember. I walked home with him after the first night of Henry James’s Guy Domville. We were both drama critics at the time.’
‘All the better,’ said Wallas. ‘And I’ll wager he will remember you.’ He added conscientiously, ‘Or I would if I were a betting man.’ He had lost his Christian faith as an undergraduate at Oxford, but his evangelical upbringing had left its mark.
Another overture came in a letter from Edward Pease, the Secretary of the Fabian Society, enquiring if he had met the Webbs: ‘they are the pioneers of your New Republic. We have lived for years on Webb’s idea of politics. We want someone else who can also think ahead, and that is why I welcome “Anticipations”.’ The Webbs were invited to Spade House for the weekend and a polite mutual appraisal ensued which seemed to satisfy both parties. The Wellses were invited to dine at the Webbs’ London home, an invitation repeated on several occasions, though usually he went alone. He knew he could never love the Webbs, and wondered a little if anybody loved them, or whether they loved anybody, except each other in a tepid sort of way. Wallas told him they had spent their honeymoon in Dublin studying the history of the Irish Trade Union movement, and he was not surprised. They seemed an ill-matched couple on first acquaintance, she tall and willowy and upper middle class, he short, squat and lower middle class, but they were a formidable team. Sidney had a civil servant’s mind: a tireless capacity for painstaking work, and the ability to absorb and correlate facts and statistics. Beatrice was more intelligent and intuitive. But they spoke, or rather wrote, with one voice (their accents revealed their very different social origins), and they never seemed to publish anything that didn’t have both their names over it. They also had access to a remarkable pool of influential people, whom they brought together under the auspices of a dining club called the Co-efficients, which he joined at their invitation. At one of their own dinners he sat down with Herbert Asquith, a leading light of the Liberal Party, John Burns the trade union leader, the Shaws, and Lady Elcho, one of the ‘Souls’, a circle of intellectually enlightened aristocrats who revolved around the Conservative Prime Minister Balfour, and this contact led to an invitation to a weekend house party at Stanway, the Elchos’ charming seventeenth-century house in the Cotswolds.
Jane accompanied him and, somewhat overawed herself, was impressed by his confident handling of the social challenges of the occasion. He knew not to be surprised when the servants unpacked your bags on arrival and how much to tip them when you left on Monday morning. He knew when you should go to your room to dress for dinner and exactly how long before it was served you should go down to the drawing room. ‘I know how to do it because I used to observe it all from the servants’ point of view when I was a boy,’ he explained to her. It was one of many reasons why he looked back in gratitude for the times he had spent at Up Park, as a delinquent apprentice and convalescent schoolteacher, while his mother was housekeeper there. Chance had given him an insight into the history and structure of English society which normally would never have been vouchsafed to a youth of his class. The country house, with its army of servants, its deferential tenants and villagers, and its extensive acres of land, stolen, requisitioned or enclosed in the distant past, inherited by a privileged few and owned as if by divine right, was the clue to England. It embodied a civilised but rigidly stratified social system that had hardly changed in the last two hundred years, and assumed it would go on for ever, unconscious that its foundations were being sapped by social and economic change. He had begun to brood on the idea of a novel which would examine the destabilising impact of the new industrial and commercial oligarchy on the traditional land-based aristocracy and gentry, but it would be some time before he managed to write it. For the time being he was more exercised by the urgent political need to distribute the use of land and the benefits of the industrial revolution more equitably, and the Fabian Society seemed the best instrument available to further that project.
He joined it in February 1903, sponsored by Graham Wallas and Bernard Shaw. Shaw remembered very well their walk together through the West End to Camden Town after the notorious first night of Guy Domville, when the unfortunate author, taking his bow after the final curtain, was booed by the gallery. ‘You told me that you had just sold a story called The Time Machine for a hundred pounds,’ Shaw said when Wallas re-introduced them to each other in the dingy cellar offices of the Fabian in Clement’s Inn, off Fleet Street. ‘The title left an impression on my mind – so did the size of the fee, which was more than I had ever earned for a single piece of writing – and I’ve followed your subsequent career with interest. You’ve done very well, I must say.’ ‘And you too,’ he replied. When they first met, Shaw had been struggling to get his plays performed, but in recent years he had achieved recognition as the most interesting contemporary British playwright, and also a very entertaining one, whose plays filled theatres. ‘We’ve both done well,’ said Shaw, ‘but it’s taken me longer.’ There was a ten-year age gap between them, and Shaw seemed bent on adopting a kind of fatherly stance towards the new recruit to the Society, which was made easier by the circumstance that he was nearly a foot taller. ‘It’s good to have you on board, Wells,’ he said, looking benignly down his gingery beard. ‘We need shaking up. We need new blood in the membership. You’re the man to attract young people.’ This was all very flattering, but he sensed that Shaw would use him to make reforms in the Society which he thought were necessary but which he could not initiate himself without alienating his old friends on the Executive, and would put the brakes on any proposals that he considered too radical.
He had no intention of being Shaw’s puppet, but he gave none of the Fabian Old Guard, or ‘Old Gang’, as the veterans of the Executive were familiarly called, any cause for alarm with the first paper he delivered to the Society. ‘The Question of Scientific Administrative Areas in Relation to Municipal Undertakings’ was more interesting than its title (which might have been composed by Sidney Webb or intended as a parody of his style) suggested, a development of his argument in Anticipations that the increasing speed of communications in the modern world was making the received notions of regional and national boundaries obsolete, leading inevitably in due course to the establishment of a World Government. But it was uncontroversial, the idea of world government being too remote a possibility to disturb the Fabians. Among the new friends who congratulated him afterwards on his ‘maiden speech’ were two long-serving stalwarts of the Society, Hubert and Edith Bland.
He and Jane had been introduced to the Blands by Graham Wallas some months previously, at Dymchurch, a few miles along the coast from Sandgate, where they had a holiday home. ‘You must meet the Blands,’ Wallas had said early in their acquaintance, evidently considering this would be an enticement to joining the Fabian. And indeed it was:
seldom had he and Jane taken to new friends so quickly and enthusiastically.
He was eager to meet them from the moment Wallas mentioned that Edith was the children’s writer ‘E. Nesbit’, author of The Treasure Seekers. He had been aware for more than a decade of the existence of an E. Nesbit who wrote poetry and short stories, often for children, without taking much interest in any of this work. He didn’t read contemporary poetry, had as yet no children to entertain, and the adult fiction by E. Nesbit which he sampled seemed second-rate. But in 1898 or ’99 he happened to pick up and leaf through a copy of the Pall Mall Magazine which contained the first episode of The Treasure Seekers, and his attention was caught by its opening:
There are some things I must tell before I begin to tell about the treasure-seeking, because I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, ‘“Alas!” said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, “we must look our last on this ancestral home”’ – and then some one else says something – and you don’t know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it. Our ancestral home is in the Lewisham Road.
When he read this he chuckled appreciatively, and not because he was writing a novel called Love and Mr Lewisham at the time. Lewisham was a name he had borrowed for purely alliterative reasons from a railway station on the line between Bromley and Charing Cross. He read on:
It is semi-detached and has a garden, not a large one. We are the Bastables. There are six of us besides Father. Our Mother is dead, and if you think we don’t care because I don’t tell you much about her you only show that you do not understand people at all. Dora is the eldest. Then Oswald – and then Dicky. Oswald won the Latin prize at his preparatory school – and Dicky is good at sums. Alice and Noël are twins: they are ten, and Horace Octavius is my youngest brother. It is one of us that tells this story – but I shall not tell you which: only at the very end perhaps I will. While the story is going on you may be trying to guess, only I bet you don’t.
