The H.G. Wells Reader (2 page)

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During this early period Wells cobbled together a living with teaching and writing. Although in poor health and overworked, he nevertheless published a number of articles on science, especially on Darwinism, put out a steady stream of literary reviews, and developed his own comic voice in witty sketches. In the fall of 1894, at the encouragement of W. E. Henley, he again set to work on
The Time Machine
, which he published first serially and then as a book in 1895. It was greeted with great acclaim, and Wells's life changed. Writing “for dear life,” he produced in the next five
years the body of work that would establish the genre he called “the scientific romance”:
The Island of Doctor Moreau
(1896),
The Invisible Man
(1896),
The War of the Worlds
(1898),
When the Sleeper Wakes
(1899),
The First Men in the Moon
(1901), as well as three collections of short stories, most of which are in the imaginative-scientific mode that he was inventing. He also, it should be noted, found time to write, in addition to numerous articles and reviews, three other novels:
The Wonderful Visit
(1895), about an angel who accidentally comes to earth;
The Wheels of Chance
(1896), the comic story of a draper's assistant on a cycling holiday; and the autobiographical
Love and Mr. Lewisham
(1900).

Wells's restless imagination prevented his contenting himself with the success of a genre fiction writer. In 1901, with the publication of
Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought
, he opened up a new dimension of his talent. This vision of the world 100 years later—with detailed descriptions of vastly improved transportation, the growth of suburbs, and a new generosity of mind arising from the emancipation from hard labor—earned him a second reputation as a forecaster. The book is often cited as the first such work in the forecasting genre. On the basis of this book Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the leaders of The Fabian Society, chose to pursue his acquaintance, and for the next six years he was an active and influential—and disruptive—member of the Society. The possibility of actually guiding social change led to a new direction in Wells's work. He began to write Socialist tracts, such as
Mankind in the Making
(1903),
New Worlds for Old
(1908), and the brilliant pamphlet “This Misery of Boots” (1907). In addition, he increasingly indulged his utopian proclivities, not only in
A Modern Utopia
(1905), but in novels like
The Food of the Gods
(1904) and
In the Days of the Comet
(1906), which start from a familiar scientific romance or social narrative but culminate in a wholly new world.

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In 1908 Wells outraged the Fabian society by engaging in a love affair with Amber Reeves, a Cambridge student and daughter of two members of the Society. The affair was, in one respect, a consequence of ideas about what used to be called “free love” that Wells had begun to preach in
A Modern Utopia
and
In the Days of the Comet
. From this time forth Wells became promiscuous, and, with the agreement of Jane, he often kept another house. When the young Rebecca West wrote a dismissive review of Wells's 1911 novel,
Marriage
, they became acquainted, fell rapturously in love, soon had a son (Anthony West, who became a novelist in his own right and wrote an admiring memoir about his father), and stayed together for ten years. The breakup, when it finally came in 1922, was acrimonious.

Wells's life was a long one: after the breakup with West he still had twenty-four productive years ahead. He lived long enough to hear of the defeat of fascism and the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In the 1920s and 1930s he devoted
himself increasingly to a massive educational project, a “Bible of Civilization.”
The Outline of History
(1920),
The Science of Life
(1930), and
The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind
(1931), the last two written in collaboration, were huge encyclopedic works intended to offer the common reader insight into areas of thought that are important for thinking through the possibilities of the future. Although he continued to write fiction steadily, he was recognized in those last decades less as a novelist than as a public intellectual of worldwide reputation and many interests. As totalitarian censorship and persecution became more prevalent, Wells served as international president of the PEN club. In 1939, as discussion of the establishment of the United Nations began, he served as the first chairman of the commission that eventually, under the chairmanship of Lord Stankey, issued “The Declaration of Human Rights.” In the early 1940s he wrote polemical articles about the state of Europe and the war, but by 1945 he had lost some crucial element of energy and optimism.
Mind at the End of Its Tether
, Wells's last book, despairs about the future.

Wells's poor and unpromising origins give him an ideological perspective rare in English literature. He combines a cynicism about the world that he inhabits, a social anger that expresses itself in visions of apocalypse, a strong and unself-pitying ethic of work and its rewards, and a utopian dream of a better situation. His successful escape from the drudgery that his mother had planned for him, his scientific training, and his audacious sense that a mind can solve even the most seemingly intractable problem give him a special and original repertory of devices and expectations. Finally, what is often called his “bumptiousness,” a quality of cheerful aggressiveness, is both a resource for him and a handicap that he has to overcome. In class-conscious England he will always have to struggle to assure himself and the world that he is a legitimate resident of the sophisticated and generally aristocratic world of “literature.” One of his greatest literary accomplishments is his ability to use style to enter that otherwise unattainable literary social space without entirely sacrificing the painful and disruptive ideological understanding that he earned via his upbringing.

A paradoxical advantage of a lower-class background is an ability to take a comic view of the poor and the oppressed without demeaning them the way a more privileged perspective might. Wells puts this comedy to intellectual use. In
The Wheels of Chance
, the novel that he wrote immediately after
The Time Machine
, he performs a magnificent comedy about class difference. Comedy permits Wells to look squarely at the outrageous irrationality of human behavior in the world and render it calmly and in detail. The spottily educated working man confronting the larger worlds of politics and wealth becomes a favorite device. Comedy even gives Wells a realistic and ironic perspective on the basis of his own deepest and most earnest political positions. Under the comic gaze, the rationality that inspires the utopian visions is itself revealed as foolishly ambitious, and humanity is displayed as inadequate to the promise of a utopian technology. From the provincial selfishness and distrust that thwart Griffen's ambitions (themselves revealed to be
ruthlessly
selfish) in
The Invisible Man
, to the ignorance and incompetence of Mr. and Mrs. Skinner, who let loose the Food of the
Gods, the complacent pretensions of human reason are subjected to a withering inspection by Wells's comic spirit.

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Wells is always ready to destroy the world. In stories of devastating assault, he is as much on the side of the attackers as that of besieged humanity. As he said to a friend while writing
The War of the Worlds
, “I'm doing the dearest little serial for Pearson's new magazine in which I completely wreck and sack Woking—killing my neighbours in painful and eccentric ways—then proceed via Kingston and Richmond to London, which I sack, selecting South Kensington for feats of peculiar atrocity” (Mackenzie 113). He would talk of “my Martians.” If Wells humiliates the anarchist in “The Stolen Bacillus,” it is not before he has depicted—in the voice of the scientist it should be noted—the terrible destruction the bacillus could cause. It is remarkable how many of his tales end with disaster even when there is the possibility of a happy ending. “The Country of the Blind,” in the original version that is included here, ends with Nunez dying among the mountains.

Wells appreciated the apocalyptic implications of evolutionary theory and its devastating rebuke to the complacent and self-satisfied pride of pious middle-class Britain. Huxley, in his important series of lectures in 1893, “Evolution and Ethics,” directed in part against the “social Darwinists” who found in the concept of “survival of the fittest” a justification for capitalism, had argued that evolutionary theory could not be used for ethical justifications. In the early 1890s, in some of his first publications, Wells pushed the idea that evolution was neither ethical nor necessarily progressive. Evolution does not favor the human species, and retrogression is always possible. As the Time Traveler memorably put it, “we are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity,” a doctrine that warns that success may jeopardize any species' long-term survival.

Huxley's sense that ethical behavior is an act of moral choice and will—independent of the biological process—led Wells to find moral positions that flew in the face of the evolutionary reality. To be human in the fullest sense would come to mean for him to exercise sympathies that bridge the divisions among competing species. Time and again, in the early work especially, one finds his protagonists put into an evolutionary conflict and at the moment of crisis generously understanding the other creature. The most stunning and paradoxical of such moments occurs in
The Island of Doctor Moreau
when Prendick confronts the leopard man who has reverted to carnivore:

I saw the creature we were hunting. I halted. He was crouched together into the smallest possible compass, his luminous green eyes turned over his shoulder regarding me.

It may seem a strange contradiction in me—I cannot explain the fact—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realized again the fact of its humanity.

In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures of the enclosure. Abruptly I slipped out my revolver, aimed between his terror-struck eyes and fired.

“The fact of its humanity” strikes Prendick just when he sees its “perfectly animal attitude” and its “luminous green eyes.” It is an extraordinary, terrible moment, when the bond between them is recognized across the profound gap of species difference, and yet the only “humane” act possible is to kill the beast man.

In view of the dark quality of Wells's imagination and his readiness to unleash destruction, we may be all the more struck with his seemingly optimistic resolutions to some other dire and unresolvable crises. When at the end of
The War of the Worlds
the Martians die off because of ecological factors, the author is instructing his readers about the complexity of what “the fittest” means in the Darwinian vision of nature. Then there are the many tales which envision a happier world, commonly in the form of a utopian change—the rationality of “larger” humans in
The Food of the Gods
, the global “sanity” at the end of
In the Days of the Comet
—or a pastoral escape, as in
The History of Mr. Polly
.

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Wells is fascinated with the pleasures of fiction, that is, of deception. The fraudulent Taxidermist in “The Triumphs of a Taxidermist” speaks of the “pure joy . . . to a real artist” that artificial creation inspires:

“I have
created
birds,” he said in a low voice. “
New
birds. Improvements. Like no birds that was ever seen before.”

He resumed his attitude during an impressive silence.

“Enrich the universe;
rath-er
. Some of the birds I made were new kinds of humming birds, and very beautiful little things, but some of them were simply rum. The rummest, I think, was the
Anomalopteryx Jejuna. Jejunus-a-um-empty
—so called because there was really nothing in it; a thoroughly empty bird—except for stuffing. Old Javvers has the thing now, and I suppose he is almost as proud of it as I am. It is a masterpiece, Bellows. It has all the silly clumsiness of your pelican, all the solemn want of dignity of your parrot, all the gaunt ungainliness of a flamingo, with all the extravagant chromatic conflict of a mandarin duck.
Such
a bird. I made it out of the skeletons of a stork and a toucan and a job lot of feathers. Taxidermy of that kind is just pure joy, Bellows, to a real artist in the art.”

The “art” of the fiction writer is like that of the taxidermist whom Wells depicts in this early story. Each creates an illusion of a new reality out of random pieces of a more familiar reality. And, like his taxidermist, the con-man writer takes pleasure in the deception with no concern for the moral implications of the lie. The name of the narrator whom the taxidermist addresses, “Bellows,” contains an anagram of “Wells.” And Bellows may be no more trustworthy than the taxidermist. He closes the very brief
story with words that cause us further doubt: “The note about the New Zealand bird certainly appeared in a morning paper of unblemished reputation, for the Taxidermist keeps a copy and has shown it to me.” Can we trust a forger's newspaper? Or even can we trust Bellows himself when he claims to have seen the clipping? We can imagine much, and we can trust nothing.

This double motion—brilliant invention coupled with deep suspicion—appears often in the early work. In “Æpornis Island” a man with the suggestive name “Butcher” tells how he killed the last representative of a now extinct species of bird and how he begrudges the fact that he does not get credit for an ornithological and archeological discovery. Early in the story, however, we are given reasons to suspect Butcher's narrative as self-serving. Sent to a remote island with two native assistants to collect fossils, Butcher exhibits classic signs of colonialist condescension towards his helpers, and when one, claiming to have been bitten by a centipede, drops and breaks a valuable fossil egg, Butcher “hit him about rather” (10). Later, when he finds the helper dead, “all puffed up and purple,” he concludes off-handedly that the native had told the truth and was the victim of “some snake, scorpion, or centipede unknown” (264). The subtle language here rings of evasion: by gratuitously adding the snake and scorpion to the centipede, Butcher implies that there is something mysterious about the death, even as he reveals the plain truth that the assistant had actually been badly stung—just as he claimed. Clearly, Butcher is a man of slippery conscience.