A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  – And she wrote a review of Experiment in Autobiography, called ‘H.G. Wells – the Player’, published in three parts in Time and Tide.

  – Yes.

  – Which you allude to dismissively as ‘very silly articles’ in the Postscript¸ though they weren’t silly at all.

  – They certainly didn’t constitute a review in the normal sense of the word. They were eight thousand words of character assassination, an act of spiteful revenge – and not just Odette’s. The Literary Editor of Time and Tide then was Theodora Bosanquet.

  – The devoted secretary who typed Henry James’s last pained letter to you.

  – Exactly. She’d been waiting for nearly twenty years to punish me for Boon, and now she saw her chance – hiring my discarded mistress to review her ex-lover’s book. It was a disgraceful abuse of editorial power. Rebecca was appalled when she read it and wrote me a sympathetic letter. She was on the journal’s board of directors, but it was too late for her to do anything about it.

  – You must admit the piece scored some palpable hits. Shall we have a look at it again?

  – I’d rather not.

  – Then I will. She begins by paying tribute to the influence of your early work. ‘It is quite impossible that anyone outside those generations which he was freeing should understand the wildness of the glory and happiness of our relief. I remember when I read, as an adolescent, that noble work First Things and Last Things, I sobbed with the ecstasy, the almost intolerable sense of organic liberation that it brought.’ She anticipated what Orwell said about you: ‘It would be no more than justice to give his name to the twenty-five years between the ’nineties and the War. For it was he who largely wove their intellectual texture.’ But she has an interesting theory about what motivated you. She describes you as a genius who in early life was trapped in an environment that was impoverished in every sense – materially, spiritually, culturally and sexually – and that when you managed to break out of it, you were for ever afterwards trying to take revenge on the world that had nearly condemned you to obscurity and an early death. ‘His motivation was first and foremost the revolt of a powerful and outraged ego.’

  – Ha! She had a nerve to talk of outraged egos!

  – ‘He had suffered in his mind and his body – I have heard him say many times with an undiminished indignation, that if he had been properly nourished in his childhood he would have been in his prime several inches taller.’

  – And so I would have been.

  – ‘His perpetually vibrating physical and sexual vanity, always clamouring for satisfaction, is also the result of a body humiliated in young manhood.’

  – Rubbish!

  – You don’t admit that there was something compulsive about your womanising – as if you had to seize every opportunity to prove your virility?

  – I just happen to enjoy sex, and if I found a woman with the same appetite I had fun with her. I never forced a woman in my life, and I’ve had long-lasting friendships with women who turned me down.

  – But a contradiction runs through your thinking about sex. Sometimes you say it should be regarded as just fun, a healthy form of recreation, like golf; at other times, with a beloved partner, it’s the most sublime physical, emotional and spiritual experience attainable, a portal to the Lover-Shadow.

  – True. I oscillated between those two attitudes to sex without ever reconciling them – but that’s the human being for you. We’re a bundle of incompatible parts, and we make up stories about ourselves to disguise the fact. The mental unity of the individual is a fiction. There is simply, in the human machine, a multitude of loosely linked behaviour systems which take control of the body and participate in a common delusion of being one single self. I explained all this in a doctoral thesis ‘On the Quality of Illusion in the Continuity of the Individual Life in the Higher Metazoa, with Particular Reference to the Species Homo Sapiens’ – successfully submitted to the University of London in 1943.

  – The examiners could hardly fail you, given your age and distinction, but they were obviously somewhat baffled by the argument.

  – Well, perhaps its time has not yet come.

  – Isn’t there some truth in Odette’s theory that your career was shaped by a desire to bring down the social system which nearly stifled your potential?

  – I wanted to save future generations from being stifled.

  – But she says you were always essentially a ‘player’, not a leader, someone more interested in winning than constructing, and constantly moving on from one game to another, and ‘What he did not make, in any country, was a school, a following, a consolidated nucleus of disciples – without which there is no perpetuation of any idea … He was a paradox; personally, an anarchist, incapable of inner discipline, or submission or respect to a system of team-work, who tried to press a world order upon others.’

  – Have you done?

  – Not quite. Listen to her last paragraph. ‘ As he stands now, near to the finish of the contest, he sees the trend of happenings leading away from his own lines; men who are the foes of his thought have become the rulers of nations and have beaten his Utopia. He can no longer shape minds or inflame devotions. This was not inevitable. He had the brain, he had the vision, he had the ability. But that thing which makes the common man endure for an end; which makes the nobler man die for an end; that thing which is integrity of doctrine and selflessness of idealism; that ultimate genuineness which in the last analysis alone makes for permanent force and influence in life – in no form and no measure has he ever had it at all. It was only a game. He was only a player.’ No doubt that judgment was motivated by personal spite and resentment. But aren’t you haunted by the fear that Odette may have been right?

  – No. I never had disciples because I never wanted them. They turn liberation into tyranny. Jesus was fine until he got disciples. I may have failed to change the world, but I did infinitely less harm than those rulers of nations who, according to her, writing in 1934, had succeeded – by their ‘integrity of doctrine and selflessness of idealism’. Who did she mean? Hitler and Mussolini? Stalin? The rulers of Japan? Look at what they have done to the world between them. And don’t bother me any more.

  PART FIVE

  IN THE SPRING of 1945, the façade of Hanover Terrace looks much as it did a year before – if anything, even shabbier and in more urgent need of repair. Most of the windows are still boarded up, for V1s and V2s continue to fall on London throughout March, the last spasm of German defiance as the Allied armies advance inexorably from east and west. There is no longer any suspense about how the war in Europe will end – only about when, and whether the Russians or the British and Americans will get to Berlin first, and whether Hitler will be captured alive. People study the maps on the front pages of their newspapers, shaded and cross-hatched in black and white, with broad curved arrows showing the movements of the various armies, all pointing towards the same target, every day a little closer, and keep their ears cocked to the nearest radio for the latest bulletins. There is a strange mixture of weariness and tension in the air, like a deeply drawn-in breath waiting for release. It would be premature to express joy or triumph at the news of each new advance, each new tally of German prisoners taken, while V-weapons still fall at random on London, and loved ones serving in the forces in Europe and the Far East are still in jeopardy.

  H.G. certainly manifests no such emotions as he scans the daily newspaper and, fatigued, lets it drop to the floor. The prospect of final victory does not excite him. The news seems more like tidings of defeat to him – the defeat of his own utopian dreams for humanity’s future. The photographs of the bombed German cities, Dresden especially, showing block after block of skeletal buildings, mere façades like stage sets, their roofs and interiors all burned away, appal him, and the fact that he prophesied such devastation in his fiction is no consolation. Thirty or forty years ago, in novels like The War of the Worlds, The War in the Air and The World Set Free, he described the
mass destruction of great cities, the crowds of panicked refugees choking the roads, the collapse of civil order and the descent into barbarism, which is the spectacle Europe presents today. In many respects his imagination leapfrogged the First World War in those novels, and made them more prophetic of the Second. He always struck a note of hope at the end of those books, that a benign new world would arise from the ashes, but he has no such optimism now. As he has written in Mind at the End of its Tether, at present with his publishers, ‘the limit to the orderly secular development of life had seemed to be a definitely fixed one, so that it was possible to sketch out the pattern of things to come. But that limit was reached and passed into a hitherto incredible chaos. The more he scrutinized the realities around us, the more difficult it became to sketch out any Pattern of Things To Come.’

  Of course it is good that the Allies are going to win the war – in a narrowly personal sense because both his name and Rebecca’s were known to be on a list of 2,000-odd people who would have been immediately arrested by the Gestapo had Germany successfully invaded England in 1940, but also for more universal ethical reasons. When the first pictures of the liberated concentration camp at Belsen are released in mid-April, and the full horror of Nazi ideology is revealed, not in skeletal buildings but in skeletal human beings, some barely alive, staring gauntly into the camera, others dead and heaped in piles like refuse, and as more details emerge about the extermination camps in Poland discovered by the advancing Russians, their gas chambers, incinerators and ash heaps, the justice of the war is irrefutably confirmed. Nevertheless the fact that it happened at all, that it was necessary only twenty years after the First World War, was a defeat for civilisation, and one he takes personally, since he spent so much time in the intervening years working for peace. It seemed symbolic that in September 1939 German tanks rolled into Poland and Stukas dive-bombed Warsaw just as he was preparing to address the PEN Congress in Stockholm on ‘The Honour and Dignity of the Human Mind’, obliging him to cancel his speech and, like the rest of the delegates, scuttle home to a precarious safety. Now the Human Mind is at the end of its tether, or at least his own is.

  As Hitler’s genocidal persecution of the Jews becomes more and more the central fact of Nazi iniquity in public consciousness, he is uncomfortably aware that certain aspects of his own treatment of Jews in his fiction and non-fictional writings have given offence to Jewish readers in the past and are likely to be held against him more widely in the future, especially some passages in a book called The Anatomy of Frustration published in 1936, where, while condemning the Nazi persecution of the Jews in the strongest terms, he asserted that ‘this must not bar Gentile writers from the frankest and most searching criticism of the many narrowing and reactionary elements still disagreeably present in the Jewish tradition’, invited Jews to consider whether the long history of their persecution did not show that these elements were inherently provocative, and suggested that the ideology of National Socialism ‘is inverted Judaism, which has retained the form of the Old Testament and turned it inside out’. That these and similar opinions were attributed to a fictitious persona called William Burroughs Steele, whose unfinished encyclopaedic masterpiece he himself was supposedly summarising, would not provide him with an alibi.

  A couple of years ago he had initiated a correspondence with Chaim Weizmann, the leader of the Zionist movement, but also a first-class chemist for whose scientific work he had great respect, in which he apologised for having ‘through my own ready irritability and tactlessness, aroused the resentment of Jews who are essentially at one with me in their desire for a sane equalitarian world order. For centuries the Jewish community, whatever its Old Testament tradition, has been the least aggressive of all nationally conscious communities. Mea Culpa.’ He invited Weizmann to publish the correspondence, but as far as he knows the hint was not taken. And even if it were to be published he does not suppose it will excuse him in the eyes of posterity. If you write as much as he has written in his lifetime, and as hastily, you are bound to make some mistakes of judgment at times. It took him a long time, for instance, to recognise how completely Stalin’s police state had betrayed the ideals of the Russian Revolution. But at least he was never taken in by Mussolini and Hitler, as many British pundits and politicians were.

  The war finally comes to an end with Hitler’s suicide on April 30th and Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7th. May 8th is declared Victory in Europe Day, and celebrations throughout the land are described on the BBC’s Home Service as they happen. There are crowds around Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square and in the Mall in front of Buckingham Palace, where the King and Queen come out on to the central balcony with their two daughters, accompanied by Winston Churchill, to wave and receive the cheers of their subjects. There are local street parties for children, and parades of the Home Guard and Boy Scouts and ARP wardens on village greens. As night falls bonfires illuminate the bomb sites and lights blaze from the uncurtained windows of houses. A month later there is an Allied Victory Parade down Whitehall, columns of soldiers, sailors and airmen and women auxiliaries from all over the Commonwealth saluting and saluted by the King with the Queen standing beside him. The mood of these celebrations is less hysterical than those he remembers from November 1918, partly because the war against Japan is not over yet, but there is always something morally repugnant about them. ‘Those who win wars are the dead and the wounded,’ he says to his night nurse, who witnessed the parade in Whitehall and enthuses about it when she comes on duty. ‘The dead can’t parade and the wounded usually don’t wish to or cannot.’ ‘Well, there’s some truth in that, sir,’ the woman says, but she looks as if she feels snubbed.

  The more others rejoice, the more misanthropic he becomes. He writes to Bertrand Russell in late May, ‘This vast return to chaos which is called the peace, the infinite meanness of great masses of my fellow creatures, the wickedness of organized religion, give me a longing for a sleep that will have no awakening.’ There is an echo in this last phrase of some lines written by the wife of Thomas Huxley for his tombstone, which he found in his mother’s workbox after her death, written out on a piece of cheap notepaper in her slanting hand.

  And if there be no meeting past the grave,

  If all is darkness, silence, yet ’tis rest;

  Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,

  For God still giveth his beloved sleep

  And if an endless sleep He wills, so best.

  It had surprised and rather pleased him to discover that his pious mother had towards the end of her life apparently entertained doubts about personal immortality without being unduly disturbed by them, and he wanted to have the lines inscribed on her tombstone too, but the vicar vetoed the proposal. They have been in his head lately because he looked them up to quote in an article for the Cornhill, an ironic self-portrait entitled ‘All’s Well That Ends Well: A Complete Exposé of this Notorious Literary Humbug’, written in the persona of a highly prejudiced biographer called Wilfred B. Betterave. ‘Such is the squalor of this man’s circumstances and character,’ Betterave wrote, ‘I had little reason for supposing, now that he had lived down so much, that he would consent to see it all dragged into the light of day. I put it to him as gently as possible. To which he responded: “Why! – you were made for the job. Let yourself rip. You have carte blanche. See that the mud flies, my boy. You will have quite a market for it and some of it will stick. Some of it ought to stick. I’m not all that proud of it myself.”’

  Early in July a general election is held, ending years of coalition government and restoring party politics. There is a widespread desire for change in post-war Britain which makes Labour supporters hopeful, but also a general presumption that Churchill’s success as a victorious wartime Prime Minister will ensure a Conservative victory. His own sympathies for the Labour Party have ebbed and flowed erratically over the years. When he was in the Fabian he changed his mind more than once about whether the Society should throw i
n its lot with union-dominated Labour, finally deciding against the idea, but in the 1920s he stood twice as a Labour candidate for the University of London seat, coming bottom of the poll on both occasions. Subsequently he left the Party to promote his own ‘Open Conspiracy’, a political movement which never had more than one member, namely himself, and never existed outside the covers of his books. The modern Labour Party is very much a Fabian creation – most of its leading lights and potential ministers have been active members, and the fact that Lord Beveridge, whose 1942 Report on reform of the social services is the blueprint for Labour’s policy, was the young civil servant who helped Beatrice and Sidney Webb to compose their Minority Report on the Poor Law twenty-five years ago, illustrates the genealogy very clearly. To vote Labour in the forthcoming election would be to concede that the Fabians were right all along about how to achieve the aims of socialism, and he was wrong – but who else can he vote for? Not the old Liberal Party, which is a spent force. ‘I think I will vote Communist,’ he says one day to a startled Gip and Marjorie. ‘But you detest the Communist Party, H.G.,’ Gip says. ‘The Roman Catholic Church is my bête noire and the Communist Party my bête rouge,’ says Marjorie, with an air of quoting somebody. ‘Who said that?’ he asks. ‘You did, in ’42 to ’44,’ she says, referring to a book of his occasional wartime writings which she typed. ‘Well, I don’t like the Party as such, but there are some decent people in it. Find out for me who the Communist candidate is in this constituency,’ he says. But there is no Communist candidate in the Marylebone constituency and he is obliged to support the Labour candidate, which turns out to be not such a bitter pill to swallow after all because she is Elizabeth Jacobs, the granddaughter of an old friend, the short-story writer W. W. Jacobs who died a couple of years ago, and she is well to the left of the Labour Party spectrum. Marjorie drives him to the polling station but he is too weak to walk inside, so the Returning Officer brings his ballot paper out to the car and a box for him to put it in. ‘Is this allowed?’ he asks, only half joking. ‘Probably not, Mr Wells,’ says the Returning Officer, ‘but I’m prepared to bend the rules for you.’