A Man of Parts (8 page)

– Did you tell your mother that you were no longer a believer?

– No, though she probably guessed from the suicide threat. Fortunately Byatt improved his offer and proposed to pay me twenty pounds a year, rising to forty in the second year if I gave satisfaction. My mother conceded defeat. I left the Southsea Drapery Emporium and went to Midhurst Grammar School. Ironically I had to agree to be confirmed shortly after I got there, because all teachers at the school were required to be members of the Church of England. I hated submitting to the mumbo-jumbo, acting out a lie, but there was no alternative. There were other turning points in my career, but that was the crucial one. Everything else followed from that act of faith in my own potential, that insistence on getting myself educated.

– You gave satisfaction at Midhurst Grammar, then?

– I certainly did … Byatt was a good man, and I owe him a lot, but he exploited me to some extent. He got grant money from the government, you see, for every exam one of his pupils passed in a science programme which was being promoted by the Education Department at the time – four pounds for a first-class mark, two pounds for a second and so on. Byatt put me in for everything he could think of, and I had to mug up an incredible range of subjects – physiology, botany, geology, mathematics, chemistry, physics … I acquired a grounding in pretty well the whole range of modern science – it was elementary, but it served me well later. I crammed myself out of textbooks, just to pass the exams. But I did more than pass – I got a First in nearly every subject I went in for. I was pleased of course, and Byatt was delighted, but I didn’t realise what a remarkable achievement it was until I was invited to apply for a scholarship to study for a degree at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, and got it – one of only five for the whole country. Poor old Byatt was furious because I applied without telling him, and accused me of breaking my contract, but the chance of studying under the great Thomas Huxley was too good to miss. That was when I first realised that my brain had more than ordinary powers of assimilation.

– But the subtitle of your autobiography is ‘Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very
Ordinary
Brain
’.

– Yes, well, a little modesty always goes down well with the British public …

– And when did you think that you might make your mark on the wider world as a writer?

– Oh, when
The Time Machine
came out, definitely. Up to that point I was just a journalist – turning out articles and sketches and stories tailored to the market. I’d given up teaching as a career. It was a boom time for newspapers and magazines, the 1890s, and if you had a fund of fresh ideas and a certain facility with the pen, you could make a decent living as a freelance. But, as it happened, in 1894 a number of my regular sources of income – the magazines and editors who liked my work – suddenly dried up, and I was strapped for cash. It was a difficult time. Jane and I were waiting for my divorce from Isabel, and we’d moved out of London for her health, which was delicate, as indeed was mine, and we took digs in Sevenoaks under the suspicious nose of a landlady who before long found out we were living in sin but couldn’t actually accuse us without admitting she’d been reading my correspondence, so she just tried to make life uncomfortable for us … Anyway, that was the situation when I dug out a story I’d once drafted called ‘The Chronic Argonauts’ – not exactly a catchy title, eh? – and completely rewrote it as
The Time Machine
. Luckily William Henley, who’d been a patron of mine in the past, but had been out of a job for a while, was appointed editor of a new magazine called the
New Review
, and he took
The Time Machine
as a serial. He offered me a hundred pounds for it. A hundred pounds! That was a fortune to us. And when it was published as a book it was a tremendous hit. I remember one of the magazines, the
Review of Reviews
I think it was, said, ‘Mr H.G. Wells is a genius’. You couldn’t ask for more than that for a first book. It’s never been out of print since.

He opens one of the glass-fronted bookcases in his study where he keeps first editions of his novels and takes out
The Time Machine
, a slim crown octavo volume published by Heinemann, in a pale grey cloth binding, with the title and a line drawing of a sphinx imprinted on the front cover in purple. It is a habit he has acquired lately, going to the bookshelves, taking down one of his books from the past and opening it at random to see how it reads, like putting a sample in a test tube and holding it up to the light. But this test isn’t truly random, for the book falls open where it has been opened many times before, at one of his favourite passages, where the Time Traveller drives his machine, now positioned on a beach, nearer and nearer to the death of the sun and the end of life on earth.

So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. The darkness grew apace. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over … The sky was absolutely black. A horror of this great darkness came on me … Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal – there was no mistake now that it was a moving thing – against the red water of the sea. It was a round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle
.

– The saddle …

– Yes, amusing isn’t it, that I modelled my time machine on a bicycle? I suppose today I would make it more like a car – or an aeroplane. But it was the age of the bicycle when I wrote the tale – motor cars were still prototypes, and aeroplanes nonexistent. The bike was the acme of mechanised transport for most people, certainly one everybody could relate to. And there’s something poetic about the bicycle, something slightly magical. I once saw a picture of a man pedalling with his bike mounted on a set of rollers, for exercise, and that gave me the idea: time was passing, and he had the illusion of movement as the wheels went round, though he stayed in the same place. But supposing he were actually moving
through
time, and the appearance of the place changed accordingly …

– How do you find it reads now?

– Pretty well, I must say. It’s very much of its period of course, the 1890s,
fin de siècle
, the so-called Decadence. Pessimism was fashionable among the literati, and I wanted to be taken seriously as a literary writer in those days. Remember that languid exchange of dialogue in Wilde’s
Dorian Gray
: ‘“
Fin de siècle
” … “
Fin du globe
” …’
The Time Machine
caught that mood. But it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, that black thing with tentacles hopping fitfully about in the blood-red shallows, the last vestige of animal life on the planet, evolution having gone into reverse.

– It’s a very bleak image
.

– Entropy
is
bleak. Sooner or later our solar system will run out of energy and life on earth will end. But actually it will be later rather than sooner, so much later that it’s hardly worth worrying about, because long before that point in time human beings will either have wiped themselves out by some other means, or they will have moved off this planet and colonised some other bit of the universe.

– Which do you think is more likely?

– At this moment, the former, definitely. And when I wrote
The Time Machine
I would have said the same thing. But for many years in between I was more hopeful about the future of mankind, and our ability to survive even the death of the planet.

– As you said in your lecture at the Royal Institution, in 1902, ‘
A day will come when beings, who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, will stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars
.’

– Yes. It caused quite a stir, that lecture.

– Was that what got the Fabian Society interested in recruiting you?

– It certainly helped, but they were already interested. They’d been reading
Anticipations
, which was published the year before.

He goes across to the bookcase of first editions, takes down the plump octavo volume in its dark red binding and opens it at the title page.

–
Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought
, to give its full title.

– You were generally optimistic in that book about the improvements in human life that scientific progress would bring about
.

– Yes.

– But in
The Time Machine
, in the main story, which is set in the distant future—

– 802,000
AD
.

– You imagine that humanity has by then split into two races—

– On reflection, much too distant. I very much doubt whether human civilisation will survive that long.

– Two races: the Eloi, an effete, pastoral people who live an apparently idyllic life of graceful indolence on the surface of the earth, and the cannibalistic Morlocks, workers who labour in underground factories by day and emerge only at night to cull the Eloi, whom they rear as cattle, for meat … It’s a kind of dark satire on the socialist dream of overthrowing industrial capitalism: the proletariat have become the dominant class but exploit the upper class in a peculiarly horrible way. What happened to make you turn, in the space of five years or so, from that nightmarish vision, to the confident prediction in
Anticipations
of a benign social system, attainable within a century, when everybody would be middle class and inhabit a suburban paradise of motor cars and labour-saving domestic appliances?

– The short answer is that I started to make some money – thanks to
The Time Machine
. That book was written out of thirty years of poverty, poor diet and bad health, and if it projected a bleak view of the long-term future that was because my own short-term future seemed bleak to me. I had a defective lung with suspected TB and a damaged kidney. Jane wasn’t in much better shape. Neither of us expected to live more than ten years. When
The Time Machine
was a success I exploited it for all it was worth, turning out novels and short stories like a man possessed, to make the most of the time I thought I had left. In that same year, 1895, I published another novel,
The Wonderful Visit
, and a book of short stories. Two more novels the following year,
The Island of Dr Moreau
and
The Wheels of Chance. The Invisible Man
and another collection of short stories in ’97 and
The War of the Worlds
in ’98. Not to mention countless journalistic articles and reviews. Some of the fiction was as dark and frightening as
The Time Machine
– I still enjoyed putting the wind up my readers, disturbing their complacent trust in things-as-they-are, showing how thin and fragile the veneer of civilisation would prove if some completely unforeseen catastrophe happened, like an invasion of aliens from Mars, or a huge comet which enters our solar system and threatens to collide with the earth, as in my story, ‘The Star’. But I always reprieved the world – the comet just misses the earth, the Martians are killed off by bacteria – and there’s a suggestion at the end of these tales that a new human solidarity comes out of the horror and suffering.

Meanwhile our lives – Jane’s and mine – were improving rapidly. My divorce came through in the same year that
The Time Machine
was published, so we were able to marry and quickly raised our standard of living, moving from house to house and place to place until we ended up in Sandgate. In a few years I had made enough money to build a house there on a prime site, but I still didn’t expect to enjoy a long life. I had it designed with some of the bedrooms on the same floor as the living rooms because I was sure that fairly soon I would have to lead an invalid existence in a wheelchair and be unable to manage stairs. It’s true! But by the time the house was built Jane and I were feeling the benefit of a few years of good food, sea air, exercise and domestic comfort. We walked and cycled long distances. We learned to swim and play badminton and tennis. We grew strong and healthy. Gradually it dawned on us that our lives were stretching out ahead of us much further than we had ever envisaged, full of pleasing possibilities. I thought to myself – not in so many words, but it was the underlying drift of my thinking: if I can transform my life in this way by having a bit of luck as a writer, why shouldn’t the majority of men – and women – have their lives transformed by a more rational arrangement of society? It’s poverty, bad diet, bad health, that keeps them crawling along the drainpipe till they die, and makes them die sooner than those in more privileged circumstances. My escape from the drainpipe radicalised me, it made me want to take our arteriosclerotic social system by the scruff of the neck and give it a good shake – make it see that things didn’t
have
to be ordered in such a way that most men and women led cramped lives of soulless drudgery. It didn’t need a violent revolution to change that – just a revolution in thinking. By the application of scientific intelligence and common sense to the mechanisms of industrial society we could peacefully accomplish a more equitable distribution of its benefits. It was an argument that appealed strongly to the Fabians, who called themselves socialists but rejected the Marxist model of achieving socialism through class warfare, so they invited me to join them, and from my point of view they offered the most convenient channel to get my ideas across to the people that mattered. We were natural allies. Or so it seemed in 1903 when I joined the Fabian.