A Man of Parts (63 page)

Victory came at last, in November, and was made the occasion for an orgy of celebration, when a week of National Mourning for the dead would have been more appropriate, or at least some kind of sober examination of the national conscience. But no, we were going to hang the Kaiser and make the Germans pay. The country was to be made a land fit for heroes – those that were lucky enough to have survived – and God save the King, who rode in a carriage with the Queen through streets crowded with cheering flag-waving patriots to St Paul’s Cathedral to give thanks to the Deity for having demonstrated, eventually, that He was an Englishman. That day, he and Jane happened to leave their London flat to return to Easton Glebe. The crowds blocked the progress of their cab and forced them to get out and lug their bags to Liverpool Street station, and he thought to himself, looking at the happy complacency on every face thronging the pavements, ‘This is the real people. This seething multitude of vague, kindly, uncritical brains is the stuff that dear old Marx counted on to exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat,’ and gave a loud laugh that made Jane, struggling with a valise and hatbox, turn her head and stare quizzically at him.

These disillusioning episodes had, however, positive consequences. His experience on committees concerned with the League of Nations project had convinced him that even their well-educated and well-intentioned members, including himself, were lamentably ill informed about the history of any other nation than their own, while the British people at large knew almost nothing. It was obvious that there was no hope of getting an idea like the League to ‘take’ unless this ignorance was remedied, and he conceived the idea of an ‘Outline of World History’ which would attempt to tell the story of all mankind up to the present day within the compass of a single book. By the end of 1918 he had lined up a number of prestigious experts like Gilbert Murray and Ernest Barker to act as advisers and check his drafts for error, and Jane and others helped him with the research, but essentially he intended to write the whole thing himself. He did not of course aim to discover new facts – the facts he needed were already available in encyclopaedias and other works of reference – but to bring them all together in a way that nobody had thought of doing before. As he said in an article in the magazine of the League of Nations Union:

No one has ever attempted to teach our children the history of man as Man, with all his early struggles and triumphs, his specialization in tribes and nations, his conquests of Nature, his creations of Art, his building up of Science … An enormous amount of work has to be done if we are to teach the peoples of the world what is the truth, viz., 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
.

Originally he had conceived it as a book for older children, but as the idea developed it assumed an adult readership too. It was an enormous undertaking which occupied him for two years of ‘fanatical toil’, as he described it to Arnold Bennett, and ran to three-quarters of a million words, mostly his own. But the effort was fully justified in the outcome. The part-publication of
The Outline of History
sold extremely well, and in its longer book form sold more than two million copies over the next few years in Britain and America, and in numerous translations. His financial worries were now removed for the foreseeable future. He really was a rich man.

– You were also a famous man. Probably, as a result of the
Outline
,
the most famous writer in the world in the early twenties. Surely Orwell was wrong in saying you ceased to influence young people after 1920?

– I was famous for some time after that, in the sense that the man in the street almost everywhere knew my name. My newspaper articles were syndicated all over the world, and my books continued to circulate in cheap editions and influence and educate people, including young people. But I was no longer someone whose latest work you had to read if you wanted to keep up with fashionable ideas and trends, and this became more and more obvious as time went on. At the beginning of the 1930s I published two enormous compilations,
The Science of Life
and
The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind
, to form a trilogy with
The Outline of History
summarising modern knowledge about mankind – historical, biological, and sociological – but they weren’t so successful. Later I tried to interest publishers in the idea of an encyclopaedia which would include
all
knowledge, but there were too many difficulties about copyright. My idea was that it should be free. I imagined an international Encyclopaedia Organisation that would store and continuously update every item of verifiable human knowledge on microfilm and make it universally accessible – a world wide web of information. I wrote a book about it called
World Brain
, but it didn’t catch on. There was a journalist once who called me ‘the man who invented tomorrow’, but people weren’t interested in my tomorrow any more. I was a child of the Enlightenment, a modern Encyclopaedist, an heir of Diderot, but the horrors of the Great War had undermined faith in Reason. Intellectuals looked for salvation to fascism, or Soviet style communism, or Christianity, Roman Catholic or Anglo-Catholic, to all of which I was opposed. Between the wars I was increasingly a lone voice, crying in the wilderness, as a thinker.

– And as a novelist?

– As a novelist I was old hat. Avant-garde experimental writers made the running in the twenties – James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf. It was all stream of consciousness, symbolism, myth, not much story and not many ideas, not what I called ideas. Even Dorothy Richardson started to impress people with her interminable epic of navel-gazing,
Pointed Roofs
. It was Henry James’s theory of the novel taken even further, fiction aspiring to the condition of lyric poetry. And the new writers liked to define themselves in opposition to old fogeys like Arnold Bennett and me. That essay of Virginia Woolf ’s on ‘Modern Fiction’, for instance, accused us of being ‘materialists’
– ‘the sooner English fiction turns its back upon them … the better for its soul
,’ she said. Lawrence famously attacked Galsworthy, who was often grouped with us, and he put his boot into
The World of William Clissold
, my most ambitious novel of the twenties, in
The Calendar of Modern Letters
. He said the book was all ‘chewed-up newspaper and chewed-up scientific reports, like a mouse’s nest’.

– And eventually Rebecca had a go at you. She mocked your love scenes – ‘
the passages where his prose suddenly loses its firmness and begins to shake like blancmange
’. She called you ‘the Uncles’ – you and Bennett and Galsworthy and Shaw
.
‘
All our youth they hung about the houses of our minds like Uncles
…
’

– That was in 1926. We had split up by then. Calling me ‘Uncle’ was a coded way of saying that it was final.

He lost count of the number of times they were on the point of splitting up, only to pull back from the brink and give the relationship another chance. One of the most serious crises of this kind followed from his visit to Russia in the autumn of 1920.

He had taken a keen interest in the March and October Revolutions of 1917, and wrote to his old friend Maxim Gorky in March of the following year to applaud the new Bolshevik government’s peace treaty with the Central Powers, ‘
showing the world the way out of the slaughterhouse
’. Gorky for his part was a huge admirer of
Mr Britling
– ‘
It is beyond doubt the best, boldest, most just and humane book written in Europe during this accursed war!
’ he wrote, and arranged to have it translated and published in Russia, where it was apparently received with acclaim. So important did he believe Russia would prove to be in the politics of the post-war period that he persuaded Sanderson, Oundle’s progressive headmaster, to arrange for Gip and a few other interested boys to be taught Russian: the first time, apparently, that the language was taught in any English school. By 1920 it seemed to him that Gip would benefit by a visit to Russia, and he was also intensely curious to see for himself what life was like under the Revolution. A man called Kamenev at the Russian trade delegation in London had already contacted him to suggest an official visit. Beaverbrook was eager for him to write about it for the
Express
, which would more than cover his expenses, and he might get a book out of the trip as well. He accordingly wired Gorky to say that he was ‘coming to have a look at Russia’ with his son and, as he had hoped, Gorky generously offered to accommodate them at his home in St Petersburg. This proved to be a large apartment-cum-editorial-office of many rooms, where a shifting population of shabbily dressed poets, novelists, intellectuals and female assistants nested. It was a much more authentic and less closely supervised vantage point from which to assess the state of the country than the large hotel that was normally provided for foreign visitors.

Gorky was a person of high standing in Bolshevik Russia. His internationally acclaimed stories and plays about the plight of the lower strata of society under the Czars, and his record of personal suffering in those days, had made him the literary figurehead of the Revolution, and he used his position, to the detriment of his own creative work, to help and protect writers and artists of all kinds. In spite of poor health – he had only one lung as a result of a failed attempt to commit suicide in youth – he worked long hours editing, publishing and organising, finding work and shelter for many who would otherwise have perished in the chaotic conditions of life in post-revolutionary Russia. One of Gorky’s assistants was a young woman who lived in the apartment on Kronversky Prospekt, called Moura Budberg.

He met her, unforgettably, on the day of his arrival. She came into Gorky’s untidy office, every surface of which was heaped with books and papers, bringing some proofs from the printer. She was tall, with dark eyes and black wavy hair. That she was wearing a British military waterproof over a shabby black dress only enhanced her striking looks, and made her seem like a female personification of the Revolution – Hope defying Privation. ‘This is Moura,’ Gorky said to him. ‘Moura – H.G. Wells.’ Gorky added something in Russian to the young woman, who replied in the same language, and then shook his hand. ‘We have met before,’ she said, to his astonishment. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Yes, when you were in Russia in 1914, with Maurice Baring.’ Her spoken English was strongly accented, but fluent and confident. ‘Well, I’m embarrassed to say I don’t remember,’ he said, staring and trying to recall having seen her face before, ‘but I met a great many people on that trip.’ She smiled. ‘It is not surprising. I was wearing a long silk gown at the time, and a great deal of jewellery. It was a big party at the home of my father, Ignaty Zakrevsky, but I was introduced to you as Marie von Benckendorf. My husband, Count Ivan Benckendorf, was a diplomat. We were in Petersburg on leave from the Berlin Embassy.’ ‘That does seem to trigger a faint memory,’ he said, for politeness’ sake, though the names meant nothing to him.

Gorky observed this exchange smiling genially but uncomprehendingly under his heavy broom-like moustache. He said something in Russian.

‘Gorky says I am to be your official interpreter and guide for the duration of your visit,’ Moura said.

‘I’m delighted,’ he replied. ‘Thank you very much.’

‘It will be a pleasure,’ she said.

For a day or two he had long conversations with Gorky, made rather tedious by the necessity of interpretation, and also, to be honest, by their content, for Gorky was anxious to give his visitor a positive view of the Bolshevik state and to excuse in advance the imperfections which he might encounter, so their meetings consisted of homilies from his host rather than interactive dialogue. It was a relief to get out of the apartment and form his own impressions with Moura as guide, sometimes with Gip, but more often on his own because some young people in Gorky’s entourage took his son under their wing, which was better for the improvement of his Russian. She escorted him to the House of Science and the House of Literature and Art, to the Mariinsky theatre and the Nevsky Prospekt, for walks along the embankment of the Neva, to St Isaac’s Cathedral, which was being converted into a Museum of Atheism, and to the sadly neglected Summer Garden, where the leaves were already falling on the overgrown footpaths. Without her company he would have become depressed and homesick.

Petrograd, as it was now called, was a war-worn shadow of the St Petersburg he remembered from 1914. There were practically no shops open, because there was nothing available to buy or sell except tea, cigarettes and matches – and, rather poignantly, cut flowers. The streets had a blank shuttered look like an eternal Sabbath in a provincial English town. Food was rationed by the government, but what was available barely kept the population above the level of starvation. The whole economic system of manufacture, credit and trade had ceased and it was impossible to replace any commonplace utensil or commodity. New clothes were unobtainable: even Gorky owned only one suit, which he wore all the time. The roads were pitted with deep cavities like shell holes, the drains had collapsed and the wooden pavements on many streets had been torn up for firewood. The tramcars were free but grossly overcrowded, and there were numerous accidents to passengers who clung to the outside and fell off, probably weakened by hunger. The people on the streets looked grim, perhaps at the approach of winter, perhaps from malnutrition, but more likely it was their apprehension that the country was in a state of ruin from which it was difficult to see how it could ever recover. When he said as much to Moura, she looked cast down. ‘Is that what you are going to tell the British people when you get home?’ she asked.

Unlike the Bolshevik officials he met, Moura was not a fervent propagandist for the Revolution, and in fact seldom made political comments of any kind, but he was aware that if he made a very unfavourable report on the country when he got home, as Bertrand Russell had recently done, much to the displeasure of his hosts, she might incur some blame. ‘What I will tell the British people is this,’ he said. ‘Firstly, the ruin I see all around me here is not, as they have been told by most of their politicians and newspapers, the fault of the Bolshevik government – it was caused by the total collapse of the rotten capitalist-imperialist Czarist regime under the impact of war. And secondly, I will tell them that the Bolshevik government has so far prevented the country from falling into absolute anarchy, and is the only possible government for Russia for the foreseeable future.’ Moura gave a nod of approval, and seemed satisfied.