A Man of Parts (30 page)

The letter then went on to discuss his campaign for wholesale reform of the Fabian, and cunningly pointed out the possible drawbacks of victory. He didn’t believe for a moment Shaw’s claim that all the Old Gang except Pease were longing for an excuse to resign from office and be free of the work it entailed – most of them had far too much ego invested in their status – but it was true that if they resigned en bloc out of animosity to himself he might be left with a crippling executive responsibility. Having frightened him with this vision, Shaw exhorted him to learn the arts of political persuasion. ‘
You must get the committee habit … if you are ever to be anything more than a novelist bombinating in vacuo except for a touch of reality gained in your early life. We have all been through the Dickens blacking factory; and we are all socialists by reaction against that; but the world wants from men of genius what they have divined as well as what they have gone through
. He agreed heartily with that, but could never be a dedicated committee man, and had no faith in the committee as an instrument of radical change. That was why he had proposed the Society should be run by elected triumvirates who would exercise the kind of privileged power enjoyed by the Samurai of
A Modern Utopia
. But if he did not accept all Shaw’s arguments, he was impressed and moved by the time and effort expended on them, and wrote back: ‘
You write the most gorgeous letters. I bow down. You are wonderful. The amazing thing is that just at one point the wonderfulness stops short. Why
don’t
you see how entirely I am expressing you in all these things? Fall in with my triumvirates. (They’ll never elect me
).’ This last was a hope, as well as a prediction: he saw his function as providing a blueprint for change and did not want the responsibility of office, though if elected to one of the triumvirates he would of course have to shoulder the burden for a year or two.

It was not long before the scandalous potential of
In the Days of the Comet
teased out by Shaw was realised. The anonymous reviewer of the novel in the
Times Literary Supplement
, summarising the conclusion of the story, observed with sly malice, ‘
Socialistic men’s wives, we gather, are to be held in common, no less than their goods
.’ This was quickly followed by a report in the virulently right-wing
Daily Express
which quoted the
TLS
review as evidence that the ultimate goal of socialism was Free Love, and incited a couple of clergymen to condemn him for promoting it. It was unwelcome publicity, coming at a most inopportune time, just as he was girding himself to lead the Fabian into a new era – he was due to give the lecture solicited by Pease, which he had decided to call ‘Socialism and the Middle Classes’, in October, and to move the adoption of his committee’s report at a General Meeting in December. The Fabians individually held different views on sexual morality, and many of them, like the Blands, led unconventional lives in this respect, but collectively they believed in keeping up the appearance of respectability, some on principle, and all because they feared that the Society’s political mission could be jeopardised if it were associated with sexual promiscuity and the undermining of traditional marriage. He had to admit that this fear was not unfounded. ‘Free’ and ‘love’, two of the noblest and loveliest words in the English language, when joined together possessed an extraordinary power to shock and outrage not only conservative journals and newspapers, but the British public in general, including large sections of the working and lower middle classes whose economic plight the Fabian was dedicated to alleviating. Something in him rebelled against hypocritically supporting the sexual status quo while waging war on all other aspects of a repressive social system, but he had taken to heart Shaw’s homily on political pragmatism. What could be done? He had another look at the passage in the novel’s Epilogue which had caused all the trouble, where the narrator of the dream-like frame story, a representative of unenlightened early-twentieth-century man, questioned the aged Willie about his eventual reunion with Nettie:

I felt a subtle embarrassment in putting the question that perplexed me … ‘And did you –?’ I asked ‘Were you – lovers?
’

His eyebrows rose. ‘Of course
.’

‘
But your wife –?
’

It was manifest he did not understand me
.

I hesitated still more. I was perplexed by a conviction of baseness. ‘But –’ I began. ‘You remained lovers?
’

‘
Yes.’ I had grave doubts if I understood him. Or he me
.

‘
And had Nettie no other lovers?
’

‘
A beautiful woman like that! I know not how many loved beauty in her, nor what she found in others. But we four from that time were very close, you understand, we were friends, helpers, personal lovers in a world of lovers
.’

‘
Four?
’

‘
There was Verrall
.’

Then suddenly it came to me that the thoughts that stirred in my mind were sinister and base, that the queer
suspicions, the coarseness and jealousies of my old world were over and done for these more finely living souls. ‘You made,’ I said, trying to be liberal-minded, ‘a home together
.’

‘
A home!’ He looked at me … ‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘You are pretending the old world is still going on. A home!
’

And Willie threw open a great window to reveal the transformed world of the future in which the stifling individual home was as obsolete as the stifling traditional family.

This was undoubtedly pretty radical stuff. There was no point in denying that it celebrated group marriage against a general background of tolerated promiscuity. The best he could do was to define the Epilogue as not the depiction of a practically achievable society such as socialists were aiming to build, but as a prophetic vision of a totally transformed human nature. Accordingly he wrote a letter for publication in the
TLS
in which he said, ‘
The intention of my book is to achieve an effect of contrast, to tell in dark and despairing tones, with an intensifying note of urgency, of the life of the present, and then to get an immense sense of release, of light coming, of dawn, freshness freedom and purity … the end is not Socialism at all, but a dream of human beings mentally and morally exalted. Given a change in human beings, and it is not my base imagination only, but an authority your reviewer would probably respect that assures the world there would be “no marrying nor giving in marriage
”.’ He was particularly pleased with this invocation of the New Testament, and used it again in writing a more robust letter of complaint to the
Express
. Dorothy wrote to say that the sentence in the
TLS
letter was ungrammatical, and that she planned to review
In the Days of the Comet
for a little anarchist magazine called
Crank
, edited by a friend of hers.

He picked up several indications from correspondence and casual conversation that his opponents in the Fabian were rubbing their hands with glee at the controversy stirred up by the new novel. ‘
That will teach the little upstart not to be so cocky
,’ they were saying to themselves, and to each other. ‘
The membership will think twice before letting a Free Lover take over the Society
.’ But if they thought he would respond by retracting his views on sex and marriage in his October lecture, they were mistaken. Instead he described the current confusion in society about these matters as an opportunity to forge a new sexual ethic based on socialist values and aspirations, such as the abolition of private property and equal citizenship for women. The basic unit of society was the Family, but the family was currently represented in the state only by its male head, whose relationship to its other members was one of ownership. ‘Every intelligent woman understands that, as a matter of hard fact, beneath all the civilities of today, she is actual or potential property, and has to treat herself and keep herself as that … Socialism involves the responsible citizen ship of women, their economic independence of men, and all the personal freedom that follows …’ The phrase ‘personal freedom’ was as near as he came to endorsing Free Love, and the only occasion on which he used that bogey term was to airily dissociate himself from it. ‘Socialists would have forwarded their case better if they had been more outspoken. It has led to preposterous misunderstandings; and among others to the charge that Socialism implied Free Love. I believe that a modest but complete statement of the Socialist criticism of the family and the proposed Socialist substitute for the conventional relationships might awaken extraordinary responses at the present time.’

Rosamund and her friends in the Fabian Nursery had publicised the meeting energetically, so it was well attended by a mainly young or youngish audience, at least half of them women, who responded enthusiastically to the vision he held forth, and their smiling eager faces looking up and nodding agreement as he spoke inspired him to a more than usually effective delivery. He concluded: ‘To begin to speak plainly among the silences and suppressions, the “find out for yourself ” of the current time, would be, I think, to grip the middle-class woman and the middle-class youth of both sexes with an extraordinary new interest, to irradiate the dissensions of every bored couple and every squabbling family with broad conceptions, and enormously to enlarge and stimulate the Socialist movement.’

The applause at the end was long and loud, though Pease, Bland and other older members sat on their hands and looked sour. The Webbs clapped politely – they could hardly do otherwise, since he had accepted their invitation to stay with them overnight, as he sometimes did when Fabian business took him to London. When he stepped down from the platform he was mobbed by an excited crowd of admirers, Maud Reeves and her daughter Amber being among the first to shake his hand. ‘Wonderful, H.G.!’ Maud smiled. ‘Yes, wonderful, Mr Wells,’ Amber echoed. ‘It was really inspiring.’ ‘Shouldn’t you be in Cambridge, Amber?’ he said. She was now in her second year and had matured strikingly in looks and manner. ‘I got permission from College to come down for this,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for worlds.’ ‘Amber is starting up a University branch of the Fabian,’ Maud said. ‘Yes, will you come and speak to us next term, Mr Wells?’ Amber said eagerly. ‘It would be a tremendous boost for the Society.’ ‘Amber! Don’t pester Mr Wells with that now,’ Maud reproached her. ‘Well, if I’m free, I’d be glad to,’ he said to Amber. ‘Write to me about it.’ The young girl beamed triumphantly. ‘Thank you!’ From the back of the crowd Sidney Webb attracted his attention. ‘I’ll get a cab, Wells,’ he called out. ‘Don’t be too long – supper is waiting for us.’

When he extricated himself from the throng he went to fetch his hat and coat and overnight bag from the gentlemen’s cloakroom and on his way back through the labyrinthine corridors of Clifford’s Inn he was waylaid by Rosamund, who drew him into an empty unlit office and ardently embraced him. ‘That was absolutely brilliant, H.G.!’ she said when they came up for air. ‘Thank you, my dear,’ he said, clasping her plump warm body tight against him. It was some time since they had made love. The cottage near Lympne had become too cold and uncomfortable for assignations as the season changed – he was afraid to light a fire in case the smoke attracted inquisitive visitors – and he told her it would be too risky to meet privately in London in case they were observed. In truth he had rather hoped that the affair would quietly lapse because he was growing bored with her puppyish devotion, but at that moment, euphoric with the success of his speech, adrenaline still coursing through his veins, nothing would have pleased him more than to discharge his excitement in a bout of passionate copulation with Rosamund. If he hadn’t been conscious of the Webbs waiting for him outside, he might have taken her then and there, up against the door or sprawled over the desk. ‘When will we make love again?’ Rosamund sighed, as if reading his thoughts. ‘I don’t know, my dear. I’ll think about it.’ ‘I don’t mind that the cottage is cold and damp,’ she said. ‘Well, I do,’ he said with a smile. ‘One day I’ll take you to a really swish hotel. We’ll have a huge four-poster with Egyptian cotton sheets and a marble bathroom and piped heating.’ ‘Oh, lovely,’ she cried. ‘Where?’ ‘Anywhere you like,’ he said recklessly. ‘Paris?’ ‘All right, Paris,’ he said. ‘But at this moment the Webbs are waiting for me in the Strand with a cab, and they will be getting very impatient. You’d better linger here for a few minutes. Goodnight my dear Rosamund.’ He kissed her again and left her sadly alone in the darkened room.

The Webbs’ home in Grosvenor Street was a substantial but charmless town house furnished and decorated with dark durable paper on the walls and hemp matting instead of carpet on the floors. Beatrice congratulated him on a very well received lecture, but she could not restrain herself from taking issue with it over supper, a plain, nourishing repast served by their tall, largely silent Scottish housekeeper. To do her justice, Beatrice tried to be fair to his views, but a deep-seated puritanism, or perhaps it should be called idealism, made her recoil from them. Though like most intelligent people of her generation she had shed her Christian faith early in adult life, she retained its dualistic opposition of flesh and spirit, its fear of the former and privileging of the latter. She still believed in prayer – to whom, or what, was not clear. When he challenged her once on this point she answered him with Matthew Arnold’s formula, ‘
the something not ourselves that makes for righteousness
’, and in this respect her prayers had been efficacious. He had never known a woman whose motivation for her every action, down to carpeting her floors with matting, was so consciously righteous. She was however extremely intelligent, and pounced on the rhetorical sleight of hand by which he had dismissed the Free Love issue.

‘I don’t really see that there would be any difference in actual behaviour between your “proposed Socialist substitute for the conventional relationships” and what is called Free Love,’ she said over dessert.