by David Lodge
Although Neverbend is humourless, for the reader there is humour, and also pathos, in the clash of his high-flown rhetoric with the instinctive reactions of others, including his own family. Neverbend is a zealot, but not an insensitive one. As the opposition to the Fixed Period grows, he actually begins ‘to ask myself whether I was in all respects sane in entertaining the ideas which filled my mind’, but steadies his resolution by remembering the example of great men like Galileo and Columbus whose radical ideas were mocked and rejected in their own time.
Halfway through the book there is a long episode about a cricket match played between Britannula and a touring team from England, which gives Trollope an opportunity to indulge his penchant for amusing names (e.g. Lord Marylebone and Sir Kennington Oval) and to fantasise about the future development of the game. In 1980 it is played by teams of sixteen players, with mechanical aids such as a ‘steam bowler’ and a ‘catapult’, which require the batsmen to wear wicker helmets and other protective clothing. The match is won by Britannula thanks to Neverbend’s son’s innings of 1,275 runs scored with his special ‘spring-bat’. Trollope’s speculations about other technological developments in the world of 1980 are sparse and rather timid. Transport in Britannula is still mainly horse-drawn, though Neverbend does have a steam tricycle capable of 25 m.p.h. Trollope is more prescient about communications: the British naval officers have a little device which works very like a mobile phone, and there is another which allows voice messages to be sent across oceans and emerge as text. But the novelist is not really interested in the science fiction possibilities of his story. The cricket match is introduced mainly to provide some humour and narrative excitement, and to foreshadow a second visitation from Britain – a gunboat sent to forestall the implementation of the Fixed Period law.
It arrives in Britannula’s harbour just as Neverbend is conducting the sullenly compliant Crasweller to take up residence in the college. The officer in charge of the landing-party intervenes and forbids the President to proceed, invoking the threat of the gunboat’s ‘250-ton swiveller’. Neverbend submits, vainly protesting against this exercise of brute force, and is informed that the island is to be made a Crown colony again, with a new governor to ensure that the law of the Fixed Period, unacceptable to the mother country, is repealed, while he himself must go into exile in England. The narrative we have been reading is in fact written on his voyage there.
To readers prepared to suspend their usual expectations of a Trollope novel, The Fixed Period is an absorbing, thought-provoking and entertaining tale. But what prompted Trollope to write it? According to his biographer H. John Hall he was inspired by a Jacobean play which he read in 1876, called The Old Law, by Massinger, Middleton and Rowley, in which the Duke of Epire promulgates a new law for the old, namely that every man who reaches the age of eighty and every woman who reaches the age of sixty will be put to death, ‘cut off as fruitless to the republic, and law shall finish what nature linger’d at’. The law, however, turns out to be a device of the Duke’s (similar to the plot of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure) to test the ethical character of his subjects: no one is executed, and those who hoped to benefit from the deaths of their elderly relatives are exposed and punished. Trollope’s use of the basic idea is much more complex and challenging to interpretation. To most of its first reviewers The Fixed Period seemed like an extended joke in dubious taste. ‘The joke is a somewhat grim one . . . too grim for light treatment,’ said the Spectator, while the American Nation described it as ‘an elaborate elephantine attempt at a joke by a person without any sense of humour’. But Hall records that when a friend referred to it as ‘a grim jest’ Trollope gripped him by the arm and exclaimed: ‘It’s all true – I mean every word of it.’
Because of its first-person narrative method the import of the novel remains ambiguous, but the remark shows that Trollope wished it to be taken seriously. As to why he wrote it, there are several clues in the biographical record. His letters at that time show him gloomily conscious of declining health. He had driven himself hard for years, and this lifestyle took its toll. By the late 1870s he was overweight and, according to Hall, had congested lungs, was short of breath, and probably suffering from high blood pressure. Two days before finishing The Fixed Period he wrote to a friend: ‘I am now an old man, 66, and shall soon have come to the end of my tether.’ In her biography Victoria Glendinning quotes a letter to his brother Tom written in 1881 or ’82: ‘the time has come upon me of which I have often spoken to you, in which I shall know that it were better I were dead’, and Hall quotes words from another to the same correspondent that seem particularly significant: ‘It will sometimes take a man more than 5 years to die.’ Trollope was not afraid of death, and said so emphatically to his brother: ‘There is nothing to fear in death – if you be wise. There is so much to fear in life, whether you be wise or foolish.’ What he feared particularly was evidently the living death of senility and/or physical helplessness.
It is a fear that haunts our own era. The advances in medicine that prolong our active lives also make it more likely that we will succumb to various forms of dementia, or survive a stroke for years in a helpless and barely conscious state. It is a fear to which writers are perhaps particularly sensitive, partly because they have highly developed imaginations, and partly because, like Trollope, they may become addicted to the exercise of their craft and dread its withdrawal. It seems likely that he used the fable of The Fixed Period to explore and relieve his own anxiety by turning it into speculative fiction. Suppose a rational plan were devised to abolish the pains and problems of old age: what might it be like and how would it be received?
There are more than enough hints in the presentation of John Neverbend to prevent us from identifying his views with those of the implied author, but there is sympathy too. He is not a device of sustained and bitter irony like the proponent of Swift’s A Modest Proposal for preventing the Children of poor People in Ireland, from being a burden to their Parents or Country (i.e., fatten the babies and sell them as meat). Neverbend argues his case sincerely, idealistically, and often eloquently. But the reprieved Crasweller argues effectively on the other side, affirming the human instinct to cling to life, and evoking the peculiar horror of awaiting a fixed date for one’s death. Interestingly Neverbend boasts proudly to the British visitors that Britannula has abolished another institutionalised form of that suffering, ‘the stain of capital punishment’, which makes him seem inconsistent, but more humane. At the end he feels betrayed but also secretly relieved at being removed from his invidious position, and concedes that ‘the Fixed Period, with all its advantages, was of such a nature that it must necessarily be postponed to an age prepared for it’. Our own age, with its memories of crimes committed in the twentieth century in the name of eugenics, is certainly not prepared to accept it. But as we struggle to reconcile the imperatives of sanctity of life and quality of life, Trollope’s fable has resonances for us that it didn’t have for his contemporaries.
Trollope’s odd novel proved, in one respect, uncannily prophetic of his own demise. Neverbend recalls that when the Fixed Period law was being framed there was a long debate about the age at which it should be applied. Eventually this was fixed at sixty-seven and a half, though some flexibility was later allowed. At the beginning of November 1882, the year in which The Fixed Period was published, Trollope suffered a severe stroke, which paralysed his right side and deprived him of speech, but the fate he had feared was mercifully brief. He died in a nursing home on 6 December, five months short of his sixty-eighth birthday.
Postscript
When a shorter version of this essay was published in the Guardian on 15 December 2012, among the comments it received from readers on the newspaper’s website was an interesting contribution from a lady identified as ‘AggieH’. The theme of Trollope’s novel, she wrote,
. . . seems to be an issue for many generations. As I read, I was reminded of similar themes in short stories by Marcel
Aymé in the early ’40s and Kurt Vonnegut in the ’60s. In Vonnegut’s story of the future, the US population has been ‘stabilized at forty million souls’. The average age is 129. ‘There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wards. All diseases were conquered. So was old age. Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.’ This ‘utopian (or dystopian)’ situation was achieved by law. ‘The law said that no newborn child could survive unless the parents of the child could find someone who would volunteer to die.’ To volunteer, you ring the Ethical Suicide Studios – known to all as ‘the municipal gas chambers’ – at the Federal Bureau of Termination. Its telephone number (and the story title) is 2BR02B.
It wasn’t until I looked up Vonnegut’s story that I realised this number when spoken is ‘To be or nought to be’. It’s a black-comic fable about population control: a man whose wife has just given birth to triplets and wants to keep them must find three ‘volunteers’.
‘Tickets on Time’ by the French writer Marcel Aymé (1902–67) is a more whimsical fantasy, though its premise is closer to Trollope’s. The story consists of extracts from the diary of a vain and ambitious Parisian writer, which begins:
A ridiculous rumour is going round the neighbourhood about new restrictions. In order better to anticipate shortages and to guarantee improved productivity in the working portion of the population, the authorities are going to put unproductive consumers to death; unproductive meaning: older people, retirees, those with private income, the unemployed and other superfluous mouths. Deep down, I think this measure is quite fair.
The diarist changes his opinion when he discovers that writers and artists are classified among the less productive and useful members of the community. Nobody, however, is actually killed under this regulation. All are issued with tickets entitling them to a certain number of days of life per month, related to their value to society, and during the remaining days they cease to exist, by some means that is never explained but might be compared to the way digitalised information can be stored in the Cloud, deleted terrestrially, and later recovered. The diary entries over several months record the effects, both comic and serious, of this regime on personal and collective life. An elderly husband who was swallowed up into the ether when his monthly tickets ran out, suddenly rematerialises in his bed between his young wife and her lover. At first the new regulation seems to reduce extravagant consumption by the idle rich, but after a while a black market in tickets predictably evolves, workers selling some of their rations to the wealthy, so the inequalities of society are restored by market forces. Because death is temporary and virtual in this fable, less is at stake than in the other two texts, and it does not engage as directly with the ethical implications of euthanasia.
WRITING H.G. WELLS
EARLY IN 2004, while waiting for the autumn publication of my novel about Henry James, Author, Author, anxiously aware that Colm Tóibín was about to publish his novel, The Master, on the same subject, I occupied myself by writing the introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of H.G. Wells’s novel Kipps. Early in April I made this note in my very occasional diary:
Researching Kipps I came across in Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography (1934) an interesting story of the ménage of Mr and Mrs Hubert Bland at Well Hall, Eltham. He was a Fabian, a philanderer who converted to Catholicism, she was E. Nesbit. Possible material for a novel like Author, Author here. Sex, politics, children’s literature . . . How much has it been worked over?
Author, Author was a complete change of direction in my work, and I had enjoyed researching and writing it so much that I was receptive to this idea for another book of the same kind. The potential novel I glimpsed in those few pages of Wells’s autobiography was one in which his involvement with the Blands and the Fabian Society in the early years of the twentieth century, and the parallel development of his career with Edith Nesbit’s at that time, would provide a structure similar to the relationship between Henry James and George Du Maurier in Author, Author. But I soon discovered from Julia Briggs’s excellent biography, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit (1987) that Edith’s interesting story began long before she met Wells, while his own continued long after they became estranged, so their relationship could be only one episode in a novel that was mainly about him. Meanwhile Colm Tóibín’s novel about Henry James had appeared to great acclaim, which, as I had feared, affected the reception of Author, Author adversely when it was eventually published. If two books on the same subject appear in the same year, the second one invariably suffers. Unwilling to risk the same thing happening to my next book, I shelved the Wells project, and wrote a fictional novel set in the present day, Deaf Sentence, published in 2008; but when that was finished I couldn’t resist going back to Wells.
The postponement was fortunate. I had written in my diary in April 2004: ‘Possible material for a novel . . . How much has it been worked over?’ Little did I know, but it was probably being worked over at that very moment by A.S. Byatt, who five years later would publish a novel drawing on it. By that time I had started my novel about Wells, having spent a couple of years on research, and had written approximately 15,000 words. On 1 May 2009, I wrote in my occasional diary:
I discovered in last weekend’s newspapers that a major character in A.S. Byatt’s new novel The Children’s Book is inspired by and partly based on E. Nesbit and her ménage, and that there is a sexual-predator character who resembles H.G. Wells. The Zeitgeist strikes again! I wondered despairingly if the Tóibín saga was going to repeat itself.
On further reflection I decided there was no real cause for concern. There was obviously much less overlap in the content of the two novels than in the case of Author, Author and The Master, and by the time mine was published there would be plenty of blue water between them. I decided to press on with my book without reading A.S. Byatt’s, to avoid being influenced by it. If, however, I had started writing A Man of Parts straight after Author, Author, it might very well have appeared in the same year as The Children’s Book.
Before I thought of writing a novel about Wells I already knew something about him from writing literary criticism about his work, but the more deeply I looked into the life the more astonishingly rich in human and historical interest it appeared. Beginning inauspiciously (he was the son of unsuccessful shopkeepers and apprenticed to the drapery trade at the age of fourteen) it stretched from 1866 to 1946, a period of global political turmoil, including two world wars in which he played a public role. The bibliography of his publications contains more than 2,000 items, including over a hundred books. He met and conversed with nearly every well-known statesman and writer of his time, and in his science fiction and speculative prose he foresaw the invention of, among other things, television, tanks, aerial warfare and the atom bomb. He made a strenuous effort to direct the Fabian Society towards his own idiosyncratic model of socialism (an updated version of Plato’s Republic) nearly destroying the society in the process, and worked selflessly if vainly all his life for the cause of World Government. His Outline of History, published in 1920, was an ambitious attempt to ‘teach the peoples of the world . . . that they are all engaged in a common work, that they have sprung from common origins, and all are contributing some special service to the general end’. It was a global bestseller.
‘Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation,’ George Orwell wrote in 1941 (‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’). Between the wars, however, his influence gradually declined along with the quality of his writing. The triumph of literary modernism in the 1920s made his fiction look old-fashioned, and the novels which have retained classic status, like The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr Polly, all belong to the first fifteen years of his long literary career. His mind remained fertile with new ideas – in the late 1930s, for instance, he proposed something he called the ‘World Brain’, an enormous bank of human knowledge sto
red on microfilm and distributed free to users by aeroplane, which needed only the invention of the microchip to resemble the internet – but the world paid diminishing attention to them. There was pathos in his own sense of this neglect in his last years, and in his deepening pessimism about the fate of the human race, epitomised in the title of his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945).
Wells was also a prophet of the sexual revolution of our own era. He believed in Free Love and practised it tirelessly. He was married twice to women he loved, but neither of whom satisfied him sexually, and had several long-term relationships and briefer affairs, mostly condoned by his second wife, Jane, and innumerable casual sexual encounters. Of particular interest because of the scandal they aroused were his relationships with three young women half his age: Rosamund Bland, the secretly adopted daughter of Edith and Hubert Bland, who was actually fathered by Bland on Edith’s companion and housekeeper, Alice Hoatson; Amber Reeves, a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, also the daughter of prominent Fabians; and Rebecca West, then at the very beginning of her distinguished literary career, whom he invited to his Essex country house in 1912 to discuss her witty demolition of his novel Marriage in the feminist journal The Freewoman, a meeting which led in due course to the birth of Anthony West on the first day of the First World War, and a stormy relationship that lasted for some ten years. Amber Reeves also became pregnant by Wells, by her own desire, with dramatic consequences. There were interesting liaisons with the writers Dorothy Richardson (who portrayed Wells in her novel sequence Pilgrimage), Violet Hunt and Elizabeth von Arnim. Then there was Moura, the Baroness Budberg, a Russian aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution as the secretary and probably mistress of Maxim Gorky, whom Wells slept with one memorable night when staying in Gorky’s flat in Petrograd in 1920, and met again after the death of Jane in 1927. Moura was the great love of his later life, and his acknowledged mistress, but she refused to marry or cohabit with him. Wells has the reputation of being a predatory seducer, especially of women much younger than himself; but in all the relationships I investigated, with the possible exception of the always inscrutable Moura, he was initially the pursued rather than the pursuer.
