Carey and Dickens
In 1973 the literary critic Professor John Carey published an entertaining study of Charles Dickens’ imagination entitled ‘The Violent Effigy’. Instead of analysing Dickens’ novels in terms of themes or issues or morality or symbolism, of gender or class or race and so on – Carey instead devoted a chapter each to half a dozen primal aspects of human experience which really fired Dickens’s writing, identifying the situations and subjects which triggered his most vivid writing, starting with violence and working through topics like fire, food, sex, death and so on.
Each chapter was stuffed with examples from the novels (and essays and travel books) as if Carey had read Dickens’s complete works with a set of index files constantly open by his side in which paragraphs or entire scenes would be assigned to each theme and sub-theme. The result was chapters made up of quotes and scenes and characters and events and words and phrases and metaphors illuminating each particular topic. Thus the opening chapter, on violence, shows how powerfully, repeatedly and obsessively Dickens was attracted by public hangings, raging fires, murderers, how his gargoyle imagination created characters who burst into flame or wanted to eat one another, and so on and so on.
Kemp and Wells
Well, in 1982 literary journalist Peter Kemp did something similar to H.G. Wells.
Introduction: the Darwinian worldview
Kemp starts from the basic premise, readily attested by umpteen quotes from Wells himself, that the year Wells spent studying under the great promoter of Darwinian evolution, Thomas Henry Huxley, at the South Kensington College, was the most important of his life. And that the central learning of that year was a kind of biological reductionism, the radical teaching that humans are animals like any other, just another twig on the vast tangled bush of life, entirely physical and material in nature, with no hint of a God to promote our sense of specialness and apartness from all the other living things.
No, we are living organisms, one species among the million or so others which have evolved over three billion years of chance and accidents, most closely related to the family of primates and, within that family, to the great apes. In this brief opening chapter Kemp gathers together a dozen or so Wells quotes all repeating the same idea, that ‘humanity is but animal rough-hewn to a reasonable shape’, but ‘an etherealised monkey’, ‘a creature not ten thousand generations from the ape his ancestor’, is:
no privileged exception to the general conditions that determine the destinies of other living species.
Just like all the other animals, humans need to ‘eat, mate, find a congenial habitat, and survive danger – by fighting, escaping or co-operating with other members of his species’. Man is, in other words, ‘the culminating ape’ i.e. the culmination, in the present, of the line of descent from the apes (‘in the present’ for who knows what mutations and evolutions await in the future).
So, having established that this materialist, Darwinian view of humanity underpins everything Wells wrote, Kemp then does a Carey, and devotes a series of chapters to looking in great detail at specific aspects of this human-as-animal worldview, and how these fundamental aspects are embodied and dramatised and described across the full range of Wells’s forbiddingly vast oeuvre.
Kemp’s five big chapters address:
- Food (The Edible Predator)
- Sex (The Slave Goddess)
- Habitat (The Redeveloped Basement)
- Survival Mechanisms (The Pugnacious Pacifist)
- Self Image (The Grand Earthly)
And just like Carey’s book, Kemp’s is stuffed to overflowing with as many examples, quotes, scenes and passages, keywords, symbols and metaphors as he could find about each of these core issues from all over Wells’s works. What it lacks in ‘theory’, Kemp’s entertaining book makes up for in its hundreds of juicy examples and entertaining quotes. It sometimes contains ideas and thoughtful interpretations but really it is a riotous guided tour of the phantasmagoria of Well’s unquenchable imagination, and so it is a riot to read.
1. Food
Having just read it I can confirm that the real message of ‘War of the Worlds’ is not so much alien invasion but the idea that humans, so long accustomed to being top of the food chain, suddenly find themselves the prey and foodstuff of the Martians. Just like rabbits and grouse and all the other animals we’re used to hunting, now we have to go on the run, find burrows, hide during the day and only come out at night.
‘The Island of Dr Moreau’s central idea is to blur the boundaries between the human and the animal, as Dr Moreau does in his demented vivisection experiments. Closely connected to it is the notion of cannibalism, as his half-man half-animal creations show no reluctance to kill and eat people or each other. Kemp offers a summary of Wells’s overall intention:
The cannibalism and carnivorous preying in his books are designed to frighten man into a full awareness of his biological condition. (p.34)
‘The Food of the Gods’ is, as the name suggests, entirely about the impact of a wonderfood which makes babies grow into giants and the social disruption this brings.
One of the Invisible Man’s many problems is that when he eats anything it is, to start with, entirely visible inside him as half-digested chunks of matter. Only as his system breaks food down and absorbs it into him does it become invisible which explains why, after eating, he has to hide till this biological process has been achieved (p.49).
Kemp cites Wells writing that he aimed to counter and refute what he called ‘Bio-Optimism’ i.e. the sentimental belief that evolution means things steadily improve, countering it with a healthy dose of what could be called ‘Bio-Realism’ (p.12). Certainly his scientific romances all point to the disasters that mankind’s accelerating technologies seem liable to bring.
The phrase Bio-Optimism made me think that, if the dictionary definition of ‘woke’ is being ‘alert to racial prejudice and discrimination’, you could conceive a term closer to my sense of things, which would be ‘biowoke’, meaning being ‘alert to the evolutionary, biological, Darwinian nature of human beings’ and, indeed, of the entire natural world we live in.
Anyway, the opening passages about Wells’s polemical materialism soon get swamped by the avalanche of Kemp’s examples, which feel like they quickly wander far from the point and descend to a kind of fascinating triviality.
Leaving the marvels of the scientific romances mentioned above for the bathos of Wells’s social novels, Kemp explains at some length how ‘The History of Mr Polly’ is a novel about a man who is a martyr to his bad digestion (pages 52 to 54). In fact, Kemp shows how Wells’s own personal history of stomach and digestive problems is echoed in lots of novels and characters.
In Mr Polly he builds a whole book around human indigestion…basically, it is the story of a man who leaves a bony woman who is a bad cook for a plump woman who is a good cook. (p.52)
Having just read it, I was amused by the accuracy of this summary. Kemp neatly balances Polly (about bad food and indigestion) with ‘Tono-Bungay’, which is a novel about a cure for indigestion which becomes a worldwide smash hit and propels its creator and his nephew, the book’s narrator, to giddy heights of fame and wealth – but all based on exploiting the bad guts of its credulous consumers (p.55). And so it makes a neat counterpoint to Polly:
Real ills are displayed in Mr Polly; spurious remedies in Tono-Bungay. (p.54)
Kemp modulates from the level of considering entire plots of novels to zooming in on particular aspects of food and eating. He gathers quotes from umpteen novels to show us that Wells had a thing about tentacles e.g the horrible tentacles gathered at the mouths of the hungry Martians and the tentacles of giant crabs the time traveller encounters in the dying days of the planet, through to the social comedies where, for example, innocent Ann Veronica feels harassing Mr Ramage’s hands ‘stretching [like]
hungry invisible tentacles about her’.
And teeth – when we see other people’s teeth we realise they are descended from countless generations of animals which have used them to rip and tear to pieces other living animals. The front teeth are acceptable but sight of the incisors should make anyone with an imagination shiver, so Kemp then proceeds to give us loads of examples of monsters with horrific teeth, or people with notable teeth, examples of where teeth are used as symbols or metaphors, and so on.
So when Kemp is at level 1, showing how a theme or idea dominates an entire narrative, such as ‘War of the Worlds’ or ‘Moreau’ or, in a domestic vein, ‘Polly’ or ‘Tono’, Kemp is interesting and useful. When he shifts down to level 2 and throws at the reader loads of quotes describing tentacles or teeth, he persuades us that these are recurring obsessions of Wells’s which we will, as a result, be more aware of next time we read a Wells text. But you can’t help feeling he is descending to trivia when, at level 3, he has a few pages telling us that Wells repeatedly gives characters food names and rattles off a long list of examples, from Amontillado (a cardinal in Meanwhile) to Wensleydale (in The Sea Lady) via characters named Butter, Beans, Bramble, Cranberry, Cabbage, Lettice. Or when he gives us a few pages full of quotes showing that Wells also liked to use similes comparing people to food (a veiled bride looking like confectionary, an albino having a head like a coconut, someone who is ‘egg-faced’, a man who looks like a chestnut, and so on and so on). You can’t help feeling that, by this stage, the method has dwindled down to a form of stamp collecting or train spotting.
On the other hand, though, this stamp collecting approach does remind you of the thousands of throwaway details in a novel which you enjoy at the moment but tend to forget in the sweep and overall shape of the narrative, and it is enjoyable to be reminded of these details, and hundreds and hundreds of forgotten details is what this book overflows with. I’d forgotten that in the future when ‘The Sleeper Awakes’ the white cliffs of Dover are covered in advertising hoardings – things like that which spark sudden memories of the feel and flavour of books you read a while ago…
2. Sex (The Slave Goddess)
Scientific premise: All animals have to mate. Humans breed. Society replenishes itself with new generations.
Kemp kicks off, a bit tangentially, by highlighting the handful of places where Wells tangles with eugenics, the idea of breeding a better standard of human, but Wells was the first to admit that science didn’t have the first idea how to do this, knowing nothing of genetics.
This chapter gives the impression of flitting about the large subject of sex and love and reproduction almost at random. Next thing we know Kemp is describing the basis biographical fact that Wells married his cousin when he was a very young man, discovered she was dim and sexless so ran off with one of his students, but soon enough got bored of her and embarked on a series of affairs, some of which caused public scandal. The point of all this is just how often he recycled these facts in his novels, marriage to someone markedly beneath the protagonist’s intellectual and cultural level in ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, a dry and disappointing marriage followed by a happier one in Mr Polly, running away for the sake of true love in Ann Veronica, and so on.
Then Kemp spots that Wells, in his autobiography, says his first sexual stirrings came from the images of Britannia and other female national symbols he saw in Punch (the weekly humorous magazine), followed by seeing big bare-breasted sculptures in art galleries, and Kemp goes on to list all the male characters who admit to the same foible scattered through his fiction. And then specific instances of Greek goddesses being cited, Aphrodite or Athena.
The scene of a boy or young man looking up at a girl sitting on a wall occurs in Tono-Bungay and Mr Polly. These and other women are generally a social class above the protagonist, who is looked down on in both a literal and metaphorical sense.
Proposals or love happen at elevations. Helen Walsingham crowds Kipps into proposing to her up the old keep at Lympne. Ann Veronica finally knows passionate love in the Alps, and many other examples.
The ultimate high place is flying, which is described with sensual lavishness in Tono-Bungay.
However, these high-up women invariably end up very much the junior partners, and Kemp brings together the many places where female characters explicitly refer to their men as Master or King, as Ann Veronica does in the Alpine section of her novel. Kemp cites a whole series of characters who are sceptical of women’s ability to have original thoughts and of women who are all too ready to abase themselves as helpers to strong men.
In fact Kemp more or less lists a whole load of sexist attributes which Wells consistently gives to his women, which includes:
- making his women honorary men or boys
- making women describe themselves as slaves who venerate their beloved men as King or Master
- ridiculing women’s intellectual ability as non-existent
- making them indulge in childish play talk with their lovers
- characterising women as extravagant spenders of men’s hard-earned cash
All the early social comedies feature a woman ‘wrecker’ who diverts and destroys a promising man’s career, reworkings of the autobiographical fact that Wells gave up his studies to marry his cousin who turned out to be intellectually dim and frigid – ‘research disruptors’ such as Ethel in ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’, Marion in ‘Tono-Bungay’, Miriam in ‘Mr Polly’, Remington’s career ruined by his elopement with Isabel Rivers in ‘The New Machiavelli’).
Many of the novels feature a love triangle, itself the trigger for jealousy, sometimes murderous rage.
By contrast, his various utopias envisage a jealousy-free world of free love.
For an advocate of free love Wells is surprisingly judgemental about smut and sordid fumbling and horrible male banter. This is all muddy and grubby. It is contrasted with the ‘clean’, pure love of clean young men and women for each other as, for example, Ann Veronica.
Wells the Victorian anathematised what he saw as the moral collapse of the 1920s into obscenity and pornography. Thus he thinks Brave New World demonstrated that Aldous Huxley was obsessed with sex (which is a bit rich coming from the notorious old philanderer). When the Sleeper Wakes he discovers the future has Pleasure Cities where the lascivious and promiscuous exhaust themselves in hedonism till they die childless, what Kemp calls ‘camouflaged extermination chambers’ (p.109). Like everyone who enjoys speculating about utopias and perfect worlds, Wells knows it will require exterminating quite a lot of the actual existing human population.
What comes over is that Wells consistently thinks of sex as a powerful urge which has to be slaked but shouldn’t be over-indulged in or get in the way of work. Incidentally Kemp quotes at length the description of Ramage from Ann Veronica which summarises very well a certain experimental male attitude to sex as endless quest and adventure:
His invalid wife and her money had been only the thin thread that held his life together; beaded on that permanent relation had been an inter-weaving series of other feminine experiences, disturbing, absorbing, interesting, memorable affairs. Each one had been different from the others, each had had a quality all its own, a distinctive freshness, a distinctive beauty. He could not understand how men could live ignoring this one predominant interest, this wonderful research into personality and the possibilities of pleasing, these complex, fascinating expeditions that began in interest and mounted to the supremest, most passionate intimacy. All the rest of his existence was subordinate to this pursuit; he lived for it, worked for it, kept himself in training for it.
Ramage is an example of the City gent as sexual hypocrite, all immaculate facade and coercive exploitation. Another type of hypocrite is the sexually repressed Oxbridge don, such as Prothero in ‘The Research Magnificent’ (1915).
Although he counsels restraint and balance in his books, between grubby promiscuity and his other enemy, celibacy, ‘that great denial of life.’ Celibacy is particularly dangerous when the sexually abstinent take out their frustrated energy in other mediums, especially politics, as Rud Whitlow in ‘The Holy Terror’ (1939).
I’ve just finished reading his feminist novel, ‘Ann Veronica’ so was surprised that Kemp pulls out so many quotes demonstrating Wells’s intense antipathy to the suffragettes. Wells thought they would be a sisterhood of pure-hearted statuesque females as per his fantasies. Instead he was disillusioned to realise they were a screeching rabble, addicted to violence and hooliganism. He has one of his characters describe suffragettism as ‘The Great Insane Movement’.
Kemp is funny on Wells taking the mickey out of the suffragettes. I liked his characterisation of Wells dwelling on the feminists’ preference for ‘damage over debate’, and how, in order to demonstrate the special qualities of reason and compassion which women said they would bring to politics, they set about burning letter boxes, smashing shop windows, spitting at cabinet ministers, assaulting the police, slashing paintings and sending letter bombs. Feminists and our culture, generally, nowadays downplays the impressive Suffragette bombing and arson campaign which contemporaries and the activists themselves referred to as terrorism.
3. Habitat (The Redeveloped Basement)
Scientific premise: species, and life in general, are shaped and moulded by their environments. Man is the first species which can substantially alter his environment and, Wells argued, he needs to do it more and faster if he is to survive.
Basements: The odd chapter title derives from the fact that Wells spent his early formative years living in a series of basements (in his parents’ shop, then when his mother became a housekeeper at Up Park country house, then he was apprenticed to various drapers’ shops). These grim subterranean experiences meant that, once he escaped from a life of humiliating toil, Wells’s imagination fantasised about high, light, open places. And it’s this dichotomy, between dark cramped dingy underground and light bright upstairs, as dramatised in umpteen ways throughout his writings, which this chapter explores.
As with the other chapters, it starts by exploring the theme very literally and then slowly moving out to more metaphorical or related topics.
TM: Probably the most striking example of this upstairs-downstairs dichotomy in The Time Machine between the sunny happy world inhabited by the Eloi, who are preyed on by the Morlocks who emerge from their underground dens, but that’s not where Kemp starts.
Rising: Kemp starts by showing us how very widespread the description of basements is, particularly in the social comedies. By contrast, he shows us that when Wells characters go up in the world they not only rise up the social hierarchy, but move to bigger higher lighter houses (with bigger windows).
Uncle Edward’s ascent: He particularly focuses on Tono-Bungay in which Uncle Edward Pondorevo, as he amasses more wealth, rises from living in a basement in Highbury, to living in a house, to moving out to a house in the country (big windows, aery rooms) and the logical conclusion of all this rising which is to commission his own house to be built on a hilltop. Clearly, this physical ascent out of the gloomy underground to a rich man’s mansion on a height mirrors Uncle Edward’s social ascent, as he climbs the social ladder, taking lessons in etiquette and elocution along the way.
Disorder: But ‘Tono-Bungay’ also demonstrates related topics. For Wells the country house of Bladesover represents order and hierarchy. Kemp demonstrates how ‘Tono-Bungay’ contains a dazzling variety of embodiments of disorder, chaos, collapse, disintegration. This extends from the speech patterns of many of the comic characters who can barely speak or have odd mannerisms, through to the symbolism of ‘quap’ which rots and decays everything it comes into contact with. Kemp lists and explains a whole raft of images of decay which infect the novel at every level and this passage really deepened my appreciation of the novel (pages 131 to 137).
Ruins of the future: In this respect, ‘Tono-Bungay’ is deeply connected to ‘The Time Machine’ because the latter describes collapse and decay but in a science fiction context, as when the time traveller goes exploring the ruins of latter-day London far in the future, and Wells luxuriates in page after page of descriptions of ruined buildings and statues covered in vines etc, images which have become standard in sci fi but which must have been phenomenally powerful to those first readers.
London cancer: This segues into a brief section about Wells’s dislike of the way London has spread out chaotically, like a cancer, swallowing up the nice orderly villages around it (compare E.M. Forster’s similar dislike of London’s inexorable spread, destroying the surrounding country e.g. the end of Howards End).
New York: By contrast Kemp describes Wells’s admiration for New York, with what was then (1910s/1920s) its unprecedented array of soaring skyscrapers. Its height and space dazzled Wells on his first visit (in 1906, described in ‘The Future in America’) and triggered admiring references throughout his writings.
Ideal cities: New York’s mathematical orderliness of avenues and streets was a model for some of the ideal cities of Wells’s utopias and this takes Kemp on to a consideration of the new worlds described in his various utopias which, of course, consisted of high light aery buildings. If they have undergrounds these echo the fundamental dichotomy laid out in The Time Machine as in When the Sleeper Wakes, with its extensive network of of ‘underways’.
Magic transformation of society: This leads Kemp, in passing, to note how bad Wells was at thinking through the process whereby humanity would get from its chaotic present to the gleaming futures he imagines. In one a man falls asleep and wakes up 200 years later. In another a comet passes through the earth’s atmosphere, trailing a chemical which brings about a complete transformation in human nature. In ‘Things To Come’ only a ruinous war which almost destroys civilisation can clear the ground for the bright new future.
Relations between the sexes have always been poor with both sides complaining long and bitterly about the other, and the modern ubiquity of feminism means that it is difficult to think, write or talk about men and women, love and sex, without triggering an avalanche of parti pris comment from one side or another of the toxic culture wars. So the sex chapter (above) felt vexed and embattled.
By complete contrast, this chapter about spatial and geographic metaphors in the life, autobiographies and fictions of H.G. Wells – free of gender cultural controversy – felt enlightening and rather wonderful.
4. Survival Mechanisms (The Pugnacious Pacifist)
Scientific premise: Animals have three strategies to cope with threat: fight, flight or co-operation.
Fight
Destruction: As Kemp’s title suggests he is at pains to show that, although Wells described himself as a pacifist, his imagination overflowed with images of war, specially in the science fiction and utopias. World war destroys civilisation in ‘The War in the Air’ and ‘the World Set Free’ and in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’, and ‘The War of the Worlds’ revels in massive destruction.
Soldiers: His autobiographies reveal that he loved playing with toy soldiers and imagining himself a general as a boy. But once war arrived, in 1914, after an embarrassing early rush of blood to the head (in which he wrote unforgivable things about conscientious objectors) he grew increasingly haunted by the realities of war and Kemp quotes some choice passages from the novels which describe various protagonists at the front squidging through rotten corpses, seeing maggots breeding in dead bodies, rotting faces covered with flies etc.
Wells’s temper: Moving on, Kemp tells us that Wells had a very short temper and was quick to fury. One aspect of this was the scathing letters he wrote to reviewers and fellow authors, the blistering caricatures he carried out at book length (Henry James caricatured in ‘Boon’, Ford Madox Ford in ‘The Bulpington of Blup’).
Anti-Catholic: Wells’s fiction takes swipes at clerics, lampoons bishops and develops a really blistering hatred of the Roman Catholic church, leading up to the gassing of the Pope in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’.
Violent chaps: Wells has surprisingly violent characters: it’s easy to forget how homicidal the invisible man becomes or just how violent us ‘Uncle Jim’ who aims to maim and injure the hero of ‘Mr Polly’, turning what ought to be the bucolic Potwell Inn into a warzone.
Flight
Bicycles: In a typically lateral move, Kemp associates the ‘flight’ part of an animal’s response to danger with The Bicycle. Wells was an early adopter and proselytiser for bicycles, his happiest characters ride one (e.g. Mr Polly) and he wrote an entire novel about a draper shop assistant’s cycling holiday, ‘The Wheels of Chance’. Bert Smallways, hero of ‘The War in the Air’, goes from running a bicycle repair shop in a Kent suburb to witnessing the end of civilisation.
Running away from domesticity: Kemp cites lots of evidence from Wells’s autobiographical writings of his need to escape the chains of custom and habit and the humdrum, which translates into his small trapped men who try to run away – Lewisham, Kipps, Polly. Many of his novels are studies in frustration by a man who moved restlessly from love affair to love affair, and also moved house regularly, and at one stage planned to have four dwellings, two in Britain, two in France, which he could move between, restlessly in movement (p.166). Wells later wrote that the entire novel ‘The New Machiavelli’ was ‘a dramatised wish…about going off somewhere.’ Ann Veronica performs a series of escapes ending up with her running off with her lover, Capes.
Suicide: I think Kemp misses a trick by not mentioning suicide; he doesn’t discuss it and it doesn’t appear in the index and yet a number of his heroes in the social comedies feel so wretchedly trapped that they consider suicide. The most florid example is Mr Polly. After 15 years trapped in a loveless marriage and a poky little shop, the only way out he can conceive of is to cut his throat and set fire to the shop. It is comic that he sets fire to the shop alright but then bottles out of the suicide and so finds himself in the middle of a raging house fire, and it is farcical that this quickly runs out of control into the Great Fire of Fishbourne.
Adventure running: Obviously, in the science fiction adventures there is a great deal or running, such as the narrator running from the Martians or Graham going on the run in ‘Sleeper Wakes’ and the invisible man is on the run from London where he’s committed various crimes. Kemp thinks the scene where Bedford is racing across the moon crater trying to keep ahead of the creeping shadow of the lunar night is the most exciting thing Wells ever wrote. Here, as at other points, Kemp comes close to banality because, when you think about it, almost all adventure stories involve chase scenes…
Flying: Paralleling the passage Kemp devoted to cycling, he then has a section citing all Wells’s references to flying. First there’s the fact that Wells himself became addicted to flying and took early flights to and within a variety of countries. Then Kemp lists the characters who fly, including George Pondorevo who’s a flight designer as well as Graham in ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’, but many other, and not forgetting the ultimate extension of flying, Bedford and Cavour’s flight to the moon.
Co-operation
Finally, Wells thought of flying as having the capacity to bring mankind together into the kind of world state he fantasised about, in two ways: one, commercial travel would bind together countries in common economic and cultural ties. Two, the mere fact of airplanes diminishes the idea of the self-contained nation state. No country is secure once manned flight gets off the ground, every country becomes vulnerable to aerial attack, and so the arrival of manned flight would, Wells, thought, provide a great spur towards nations weakening their identity and moving towards a world government. Some hope. Thus, for example, the fact that the new world order in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’ is established by a brotherhood of engineer aviators, represented in the movie version, ‘Things To Come’ by the aviator hero John Cabal.
In his factual writings Wells used his biological training to highlight examples of co-operation or symbiosis in the natural world and spent 50 years repeating over and over than humanity had to do the same, to coalesce, to become one organism, sometimes meaning it almost literally. Look at the world today: Gaza, Ukraine, Xinjiang, Sudan, Syria, drugs gangs everywhere. Is Wells’s vision of a united human race under a world government any nearer than during his lifetime? No, because it is a profoundly stupid idea which reveals the basic shallowness and naivety of his ‘thought’.
This explains why the three massive factual books he wrote between the wars, the so-called ‘Outline of History’ trilogy – The Outline of History (1920); The Science of Life (1930); The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931) – are completely unread today, because they had little of enduring value to say.
Never judge creative writers for the power of their ‘ideas’ which are almost always tripe. Assess them on the power of their imaginings and their prose, which are often transformational.
All Wells’s writings about a World State are based on one primordial error, which is the assumption, so common up to the present day among western liberals and writers and commentators, that western values are world values, that the values of the west (democracy, human rights, freedom of speech, freedom of expression) are universal values, but they are not. Russia, China and the entire Islamic world are cultures and places where some of these values are paid lip services but other values are more important, nationalistic values in Russia and China and Islam in the Islamic world.
Remember the Iraqi farmer who told Rory Stewart that Iraq would never be a democracy, never. Why not? Because the great majority of its people don’t want it to be – democratic values of the kind Wells spent 50 years (from the 1890s to the 1940s) banging on about, are a particular outcome of the particular religious, social, cultural, economic and military histories of western countries. Other peoples and places haven’t had the same experiences and so prioritise other values. In Iraq identity is predominantly about family, tribe, region and religion, a long way from western notions of deracinated, rootless, atomised units of labour, citizens detached from ancient identities who are free to debate, assemble and vote according to their consciences.
Kemp entertainingly highlights the complete contradiction between Wells’s lifelong hectoring of mankind to co-operate and collaborate more, and his complete failure to collaborate with anyone in his own life. Anybody, like scientist Julian Huxley, who worked with him on joint authored books struggled with his domineering decisions. Beatrice Webb wrote scathingly about his inability to work with anyone in the Fabian Society, his bad manners, rudeness and dictatorial style. And the film professionals he wrote screenplays for complained about Well’s inability to compromise and respect others’ specialisms.
It’s like an alcoholic preaching to everyone about abstinence before passing out from inebriation.
A concrete barrier in Wells’s own writings about a unified mankind was that he himself was riddled with prejudices. Kemp confirms what I’ve noticed in all his books which is a consistent antisemitism, and selects quotations whose gross stereotyping sometimes make Wells sound like a Nazi.
Mind you, Kemp goes straight on to give us quotes where Wells comprehensively badmouths the Germans, who he began criticising during the Great War and didn’t stop for the next 30 years. Germans, in his view, are insensitive, brutish and only happy when obeying orders.
Kemp then quotes Wells’s views on Black people which are at best patronising (colourful clothes, happy smiles, upbeat music) and at worst, casually belittle Blacks with comments about their supposed stupidity and vanity. Wells’s fears are dramatised in ‘When The Sleeper Wakes’ in which, during the world revolution, colonial Black police are sent to London bringing their terrifying reputation for rape and violence. In the Fourth Year (1918) includes the quote:
It is absolutely essential to the peace of the world that there should be no arming of the negroes beyond the minimum necessary for the policing of Africa. (quote p.185)
5. Self Image (The Grand Earthly)
Scientific premise: human beings aren’t really individuals but collections of moods, emotions, personalities and so on. What gives humans a shaky unity is what Wells calls the persona.
This is a promising idea but Wells expresses it in a terrible wishy-washy, humanist manner. Compare and contrast Sigmund Freud’s dazzling succession of theories about the unconscious and the dynamic nature of mind, or Carl Jung’s theories about archetypes, the anima and so on, and Wells is nowhere. (Kemp picks out a passage where Wells explicitly says he prefers Alfred Adler’s theory of the inferiority complex to Freud’s theories of the human mind, quoted p.194).
Still, we’re not interested in Wells as a ‘thinker’ where he’s a non-starter, but as an entertainer. As Kemp aptly phrases it, we enjoy his best works because they are:
enriched with unexpected detail scooped from life by deftly imaginative phrases. (p.214)
In this respect Kemp kicks off with a consideration of how many of his characters pretend to be someone else, associate, worship, model themselves on others.
Kemp starts with the men Wells modelled himself on, paying repeated tribute to the medieval scientist Roger Bacon, but the central figure is Thomas Huxley, who moulded his thinking on scientific lines, who showed the central importance of education, and who showed that being an educator could lead to fame and respect.
So his entire life was dedicated to the role of public educator with reams of articles and lots of books designed to educate the public away from religion and superstition and towards science. He became hysterically convinced that society was in a ‘race between education and catastrophe’, as he put it in ‘World Brain’. And Mr Lewisham has the slogan ‘Knowledge is Power’ pinned to his garret wall.
Yes but knowledge of what? And what kind of power?
Wells makes the two same mistakes most commentators do of thinking a) that most people give a toss about ‘education’, when quite obviously plenty of people hated school, left as soon as they could, and passed on their know-nothing attitude to their kids, whilst many people just aren’t suited to academic study; and b) that education means one commonly agreed thing: i) 100 years later educators are still squabbling about what to teach and how; ii) in many parts of the world, for example the Muslim world, teaching religion is hugely more important than ‘western science’, compare Saudi Arabia’s funding of madrassahs across the Muslim world.
So Wells’s vast output of texts advocating for ‘education’ are i) irrelevant to most people ii) based on an untenable notion that there is just One Education, one kind of knowledge, one incontestable Science which everyone needs to be converted to and which, it becomes clear as his books progress, simply equates to his own views, a utopia where ‘world government’ is the simple-minded answer to all problems.
So it’s a meaningless concept, and even if it had any meaning, it’ll never happen. In fact the error is summed up in Kemp’s pithy opening sentence:
A scientific education saved Wells’s life; he assumed it would do the same for the world. (p.1)
But he was wrong.
Back to the books, Wells spoke about all knowledge being brought together into a ‘World Brain’ (the title of a book) and Kemp links this back to the colourful idea of the Grand Lunar who rules Selenite society in ‘First Men in the Moon’. (This explains the title of this chapter, for the Grand Lunar, essentially one big brain yards wide, cannot believe that earth society is run by governments of men. ‘Is there not a Grand Earthly? he asks.)
The dominating importance of education moves onto the dominating educator. We’ve seen how Wells talked about co-operation but was in practice a difficult domineering personality.
From there Kemp moves on to discuss dictators in Wells’s work, men who exercise total control. He praises Adler because he thinks the inferiority complex and the will to power operate continually whereas Freud’s sex instincts are more intermittent.
But Wells doesn’t venerate one particular leader. In his prophetic writings he went on and on about an elite, what he calls the Samurai in ‘A Modern Utopia’, the subject of his essay ‘An Open Conspiracy’. In ‘After Democracy’ he calls for ‘a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis’ (p.196).
He prided himself on his access to the powerful, to the great minds of the age, a trend which reached its peak in his notorious meeting with Stalin. His idiocy about the world reaches a kind of climax, as he subsequently wrote that Stalin is modest and self-critical and that no-one is afraid of him (p.197). Someone that completely wrong about one of the key figures of the twentieth century and everything he represented is hardly to be trusted on any other subject.
All this can be seen as an astonishing achievement for the son of a housekeeper. More subtly you can see how it is motivated by the wish to create an alternative hierarchy of values and achievers – scientists and educators – than the hierarchy Wells was brought up in and oppressed by – aristocrats and their parasites, religion and superstition.
The exorbitance of his imagination is revealed by the books titles, 11 of which have ‘world’ in the title, most of the others overdoing it – First and Last Things, The Fate of Homo Sapiens, Mankind in the Making.
And the length – many of them are very, very long. Wells freely explained that many of the reasonable length novels (Kipps, Ann Veronnica) were fragments of what he originally planned.
And the unstaunchable prolificness, the terrifying amount he wrote, came at the price of repetition. Many of the later novels echo or repeat plots and characters from earlier ones. Kemp points out that the novels about sexual relations show a tendency to fall back on the same limp scenarios and emotions.
That said, Kemp makes the interesting point that scientists, previously thin on the ground in English fiction, throng Wells’ novels and short stories i.e. he helped to make the serious research scientist a plausible figure, many of them Fellows of the Royal Society, which, as he grew older, Wells yearned to be elected to.
Alliteration
It’s not a heavy theoretical book, there aren’t really many ideas in it although lots of insights, but Kemp clearly set out to enjoy himself and to entertain his readers. One amusing aspect of this is his fondness for alliteration:
Drudgery in draperies sapped his energy… (p.1)
He bounded energetically towards affluence and achievement… (p.1)
Subsisting on a medical menu, Mrs Tewler is duped and doped to death… (p.57)
It’s a trivial detail, really, but Kemp’s enjoyment of his own alliteration is infectious and worth mentioning.
Conclusion
This kind of book has at least two definable merits. One, its selection of quotes and scenes and examples reminds you of moments in the novels which you’d forgotten, so it works as a pleasurable aide memoire, a collection of memory jogs.
Secondly, the extended descriptions of basements and downstairs spaces in Wells’s own life and then in his fiction – as of all the other topics and themes which Kemp lists and describes – don’t explain the novels, they enrich them. They bring all these aspects – which it is easy to overlook in the hurry of reading for the plot – to life. It makes them 3D. it gives them an extra power and pungency. It makes reading or remembering these themes and images in the novels more rich and pleasurable. It enhances your enjoyment. This is a very enjoyable and enriching book.
Credit
The Culminating Ape by Peter Kemp was published by Macmillan Press in 1982. References are to the 1996 revised paperback edition.
Related reviews
Books & Boots 