by David Lodge
His own work went well, and he finished The War in the Air on schedule at the beginning of September. Before taking up Tono-Bungay again, he and Jane had a well-earned holiday in Switzerland, walking in the Alps. In spite of her slight frame Jane was an agile and enthusiastic walker, with stamina that more than matched his own. They both loved the mountains, the crystal clear air, the sublime views of snow-capped peaks receding into infinity, the peaceful silence broken only by the distant sound of cow bells and church bells rising from the valleys below, the feeling of health and well-being these things instilled. In the course of this happy, companionable interlude, tired but euphoric at the end of the day, they came together as man and wife as they hadn’t done for some time at home.
But from this healing and restorative break he returned to an unwelcome revival of the controversy over In the Days of the Comet. William Joynson Hicks, the Conservative candidate in a forthcoming by-election in October for a Lancashire seat, standing against a Liberal of declared socialist sympathies, had circulated a scurrilous pamphlet warning the electorate that voting for a socialist was the beginning of a slippery slope that ended in sexual promiscuity – citing as evidence that old canard in the TLS review of Comet, about wives being held in common in the socialist Utopia. This smear was picked up and given much wider circulation by an article in the Spectator, ‘Socialism and Sex Relations’, by the editor, St Loe Strachey, a high-minded Tory moralist and leading light of the National Social Purity Campaign, who wrote, ‘we find Mr Wells, in his novel, making free love the dominant principle for the regulation of sexual ties in his regenerated State. The romantic difficulty as to which of the two lovers of the heroine is to be the happy man is solved by their both being accepted. Polyandry is “the way out” in this case, as polygamy might be in another.’ He was drawn into another tedious round of correspondence in the Spectator and various newspapers that repeated the story with variations, and was obliged to trot out once again the defence of his novel that he had employed a year before, which in the repetition seemed somewhat strained even to himself. At one point in the brouhaha, which lasted for several weeks, he resorted to threatening a libel suit against Joynson-Hicks, who then admitted that the defamatory pamphlet had been prepared by his agent, a certain well-named Bottomley, and that he himself had not actually read In the Days of the Comet at the time, but relied on the TLS’s description of it.
In the end he received enough half-apologies from his accusers, and enough support from sympathisers, to feel he had survived this new attack on his reputation, but it rattled him. He became aware that rumours of the Paddington fiasco were circulating after all in Fabian and literary circles, with fantastical distortions and elaborations – that he had been eloping with Rosamund to live with her in France, that she had disguised herself for the occasion as a boy (as if that voluptuous bust could ever be plausibly concealed under male clothing) and that Hubert had given him a public thrashing on the platform at Paddington station. A coolness in the manner of his old friend Graham Wallas when they met, and a look of distaste on Sidney Webb’s face when they passed and saluted each other on opposite sides of the Strand one day, suggested that both had heard some of this gossip. Shaw had evidently received a less highly coloured but prejudicial account of his affair with Rosamund – he suspected Edith was the source – and wrote to reproach him for sullying the public image of the Fabian and jeopardising its mission by his irresponsible philandering. He wrote back: ‘I think you do me an injustice – I don’t mean in your general estimate of my character – but in the Bland business. However you take your line. It’s possible you don’t know the whole situation. But damn the Blands! All through it’s been that infernal household of lies that has tainted the affair and put me off my game. You don’t for a moment begin to understand, you’ve judged me by that matter and there you are!’
When Shaw responded by trying to make a case for Hubert Bland’s integrity and chivalrously protective attitude towards the ‘innocent little person’ of Rosamund, he lost his temper and fired back a furious riposte:
The more I think you over the more it comes over me what an unmitigated middle Victorian ass you are. You play about with ideas like a daring garrulous maiden aunt, but when it comes to an affair like the Bland affair you show the instincts of conscious gentility and the judgment of a hen. You write of Bland in a strain of sentimental exaltation, you explain his beautiful romantic character to me – as though I don’t know the man to his bones. You might be dear Mrs Bland herself in a paroxysm of romantic invention. And all this twaddle about ‘the innocent little person’. If she is innocent it isn’t her parents’ fault anyhow.
The fact is you’re a flimsy intellectual, acquisitive of mind, adrift and chattering brightly in a world you don’t understand. You don’t know, as I do, in blood and substance, lust, failure, shame, hate, love and creative passion. You don’t understand and you can’t understand the rights or wrongs of the case into which you stick your maiden judgment – any more than you can understand the aims in the Fabian Society that your vanity has wrecked.
Now go on being amusing.
As soon as he had posted the letter he regretted its intemperate tone. He had said things which would not be easy to forgive or withdraw, and it would be a long time before he could hope to be back on easy terms with Shaw. He was sorry for this, but he had been oppressed by a sense that enemies were circling in the darkness beyond his tent, plotting, gossiping, rumour-mongering against him, and Shaw’s second letter had goaded him beyond endurance. Only when he was among the young Fabians in Cambridge did he feel free from this poisonous atmosphere. If they knew anything about his affair with Rosamund, they didn’t show it, and didn’t regard it as their business. They knew about the campaign against him in the press of course, but they regarded him as a hero, a martyr for daring to question the old sexual ethics based on repression, ignorance and the double standard. The three lectures he gave there in October, a kind of personal credo summarising his interpretation of socialism, were well attended and warmly received. ‘Are you going to publish them, Mr Wells?’ Amber Reeves asked him after he had delivered the last one. ‘There was so much to take in – I would love to be able to read them.’ ‘Well I have thought I might work them into a short book, when I can find the time,’ he said. ‘Wonderful!’ she said. ‘What will you call it?’ ‘I was thinking perhaps, First and Last Things. What do you think?’ ‘Perfect!’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to see it.’
Before they parted, she asked him to give her regards to Jane, and recalled how much she had enjoyed her visit to Spade House in the summer, especially playing floor games with the boys. ‘I’ve invented some new ones since then,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t there talk of your coming to visit us again, on your own?’ ‘Yes, there was,’ she said, and the way her eyes brightened told him that she had intended to jog his memory. ‘I could come in the Christmas vac, any time except Christmas itself,’ she said. ‘Right ho,’ he said, smiling at her eagerness. ‘I’ll remind Jane and she’ll write to you.’ ‘Thank you!’ she said, ecstatically. She really was a very charming girl, completely unaffected in spite of her beauty and her brains, and it was impossible not to take pleasure in her frank admiration. He looked forward to entertaining her en famille at Spade House and demonstrating his new games, but he must of course be careful how he managed their relationship. Very careful.
Dear Mr H.G.,
Thank you very much for your letters and Mrs Wells for her love. Getting letters from you is a tremendous joy and makes me work hard for days. I am working quite hard at Moral Science and very hard at Fabians. We have affiliated at length to both the Fabians and the S.L.P. but the whole University rang with the struggle. The men are frightfully pleased with themselves because they brought in a Socialist motion at the Union and were only defeated by 100–70. I am in evil odour with the authorities for the moment because I said revolutionary things at a public meeting – the one you were to have spoken at. I was too frightened to k
now what I did say, with two chaperones glaring at me, but the men are delighted. By the way Mr Keeling says if you don’t come next term you will be a skunk. If you don’t come I shall be so unhappy that I shall fail in my tripos. If you could see how I love getting letters from you, you would write again some day.
Yours ever,
Amber Reeves
‘Amber thanks you for sending her your love,’ he said, as he finished reading this letter.
‘I thought I recognised the handwriting on the envelope,’ Jane said. ‘May I read it?’
‘Of course.’ He passed the letter to her across the breakfast table, and spread butter and marmalade on a second slice of toast as she read it. Outside it was a grey February morning, with a blustery wind that dashed raindrops against the window-panes at intervals with a sound like handfuls of gravel, but the dining room was warm and cosy.
Jane chuckled at something in the letter. ‘I’d love to know what it was she said that shocked the chaperones.’
He had the same wish, but instead of saying so he grumbled: ‘It’s absurd that women undergraduates can’t go anywhere in Cambridge without chaperones, even to lectures.’
Jane finished reading the letter and passed it back to him. ‘The girl is in love with you, of course,’ she said. ‘I hope you realise that.’
He munched his toast meditatively before he replied. ‘Do you think so?’
‘It’s obvious from the last few lines. In fact it was obvious to me when she was here after Christmas.’
He glanced at the end of the letter again. ‘I didn’t make love to her, though.’
‘You told her to call you “H.G.”,’ Jane said. ‘That was as good as a kiss to her.’
He smiled. ‘She starts her letter “Dear Mr H.G.”, which sounds rather funny. She obviously thought it would be too cheeky to say “Dear H.G.”’
‘But she didn’t want to go back to the formality of “Mr Wells”,’ Jane observed. ‘You must remember, dear, that I can read the minds of your young women admirers like a book. I’ve been there myself.’
‘I haven’t encouraged her. I’ve actually discouraged her, by pulling out of that meeting.’
‘Only because you wanted to go to Arnold’s play.’
‘Well, Arnold is an old friend,’ he said.
‘You don’t have to explain to me, dear,’ Jane said.
Arnold Bennett’s play Cupid and Common Sense, a dramatisation of his novel Anna of the Five Towns, had been given two performances by the Stage Society in London at the end of January and the only one they could attend clashed with the public meeting of the Cambridge Fabian Society he had half promised to participate in. He had a professional as well as a personal reason for wanting to see the play, because he and Arnold had a long-standing but as yet unfulfilled plan to collaborate on an original dramatic work, but he had felt a little guilty – no, not exactly guilty, but regretful about pulling out of the Cambridge engagement, because he didn’t like to think of Amber being disappointed in him. So he had sent her two letters in quick succession to make up for it, and had now received this wistful appeal for more, with its tantalising hint of what he had missed by his absence. Bennett’s play had been enjoyable, but nothing comparable to hearing Amber make a revolutionary speech.
The receipt of her letter disturbed his thoughts for the rest of the morning, but the second post brought another one from Cambridge which calmed him. ‘That’s a coincidence,’ he said to Jane, as he quickly scanned it. ‘A young man I met in Cambridge, Rupert Brooke, one of Amber’s Fabian friends, is inviting me to talk to a group in his rooms at King’s. He’s said to be a very promising poet, and certainly looks the part. I think I might go.’
‘Can you spare the time?’ Jane asked.
‘These young people are worth it. They’re the hope of the future. And I learn something myself from talking to them.’ So he said yes to Rupert Brooke, taking the earliest of the dates that were offered him, and a few days afterwards had a similar invitation from a Mr Geoffrey Keynes of Pembroke College, which could be conveniently combined with the other engagement, making a stay of a few days.
He was in a restless, febrile state of mind such as usually followed the completion of a book, and looking for distractions like these. He had at long last finished Tono-Bungay, or at least got to the end of it and written the concluding words: ‘I have come to see myself from the outside, my country from the outside – without illusions. We make and pass. We are all things that make and pass.’ Jane was engaged in typing up the final chapter. After he had read it through there would be some rewriting to be done, and more retyping, but essentially the thing was finished. It was to be serialised in a new literary magazine provisionally called the English Review, which he had been planning with Hueffer and Conrad, and in which he was going to invest some money in return for a share of the profits. The idea was to provide a platform for new writing that was truly ‘modern’, and Fordie had the taste and the contacts to make a success of it. All agreed that the first instalment of Tono-Bungay would be an ideal lead item for the inaugural issue, being an ambitious and experimental work by an established author with a large following. He was thinking that his next novel might be on the theme he had vaguely entertained a year ago, of a young woman who dared to assert her independence in defiance of parental and social disapproval. He had it in mind to draw in the topical issue of the suffragette movement, which had lately taken a more militant turn, but the project was still at the tentative, note-making stage. In the meantime he occupied himself with expanding his Cambridge lectures of the previous autumn into First and Last Things.
He saw Amber several times when he went to Cambridge and found her more captivating than ever. She was clever and articulate and beautiful, but what he most admired was her fearlessness – exactly the character trait he had in mind for the heroine of his next novel. She questioned everything and took nothing for granted, which naturally alarmed those who were in loco parentis to her. On his last afternoon he visited her at Newnham and was introduced to Miss Jane Harrison, the tutor who had passed her paper to Gilbert Murray. ‘We think very highly of Amber,’ she said confidentially to him when the girl was out of earshot for a few minutes. ‘But we wish she were not quite so headstrong. She does tend to rush in where angels fear to tread.’ ‘But she’s no fool,’ he ventured to say. ‘No indeed, I used the proverbial phrase loosely,’ she said blushing slightly. ‘We all hope she will get the Double First she deserves.’
Amber herself did not use the bright student’s customary spell for warding off hubris, deprecating one’s prospects of success. On the contrary she said she would drown herself in the Cam if she didn’t get a First in her Part Two. Having introduced him at Newnham as an old friend of her family she was allowed to give him tea in her rooms in Clough Hall, which were smaller than Ben Keeling’s, but bright and comfortable, with chintz curtains and floral wallpaper. There were piles of books and magazines on every surface and socialist posters on the walls. She sat him down in the one upholstered armchair and squatted on a leather pouffe beside the fire to toast muffins on the end of a fork.
‘Why does getting a First matter so much to you?’ he asked her.
‘Partly vanity, and partly to annoy the men,’ she said. ‘But also because I want to do postgraduate research at the London School of Economics.’ She had an interesting thesis topic in mind, the question of Motivation in social service: what motivated those who chose to work in this area of local and national government, poor relief, community health, and suchlike? Was it idealism or professionalism? Were they driven by a vision of what an ideal society should be, or by a practical concern to improve the conditions of life for the masses? It was a subject very close to the bone of the Fabian, full of fascinating possibilities, moral and psychological as well as philosophical.
‘Have you read William James’s latest book, Pragmatism?’ he asked.
‘No, but I really want to,’ she said eagerly. ‘I love Schiller’s Studi
es in Humanism, and he’s a great admirer of James.’
He was acquainted with the work of the Oxford don F.C.S. Schiller, and had met the man himself when he gave a paper to the Oxford Philosophical Society in 1903, so was able to take this reference in his stride. ‘Yes, they have a lot in common. But “humanism” is such an over-used and abused word that I don’t think it serves Schiller well. James’s “pragmatism” is more precise.’
‘Tell me about it,’ she said, laying the toasting fork aside, and giving him her full attention.
‘Well, he makes an interesting distinction in the first chapter which might be a useful tool for analysing Motive, a distinction between the tough-minded and the tender-minded.’
Amber smiled. ‘That doesn’t sound like philosophical language!’
‘But it’s what I like about William James – he uses ordinary language to make difficult concepts intelligible.’
