Norman MacKenzie and his wife wrote a biography of H.G. Wells which was published in 1973. This gives his introduction to this Everyman edition of ‘The New Machiavelli’ an unusual depth and range, so much so that it’s worth summarising his key points in a post separate from one about the novel itself.
Summary of Mackenzie’s introduction
‘The New Machiavelli’ caused Wells more trouble than any other book he wrote.
His regular publisher, Macmillan, had already refused to publish ‘Ann Veronica’ and now refused to publish this, both times on account of their immorality – i.e. their condoning a young woman running off with a married man – with, in this case, the added risk of being libellous.
The risk of libel came in because Wells did another characteristic thing in this book, which was to caricature living people, in this case Beatrice and Sidney Webb, leaders of the Fabian society. (He had already mocked them in ‘Ann Veronica’ whose heroine is taken along to several Fabian meetings and dismayed by the general air of eccentricity and failure.)
As to scandal this was because, to those in the know, the book’s central plot of an older man abandoning his wife to run off with a younger woman was transparently based on Wells’s own affair with the much younger Amber Reeves, who he eloped to Italy with.
In the reviews critics made the by now familiar point that Wells repeatedly used his own life in his novels. He’s referred to as ‘the most autobiographical of novelists’ (New York Tribune). One wit said he was less a novelist than a journalist reporting on himself.
Wells in his autobiography, says it was the last book he took real trouble with in the hope of being accepted as a serious literary writer. He wasn’t and from this book onwards turned increasingly to books devoted to issues and ideas, with less and less interest in plot or character.
Autobiographical writing is relatively easy since all the material is to hand. On the downside, it tends to undermine the strength of other characters in a story, and limit the kinds of scenes you can have to ones which the author has actually experienced.
It also tends to repetition, so that the series of social novels (Love and Mr Lewisham, Kipps, Tono-Bungay, Mr Polly, Ann Veronica) all have a very similar structure or repeat the same basic situations again and again.
In particular, the basic idea of flight, of a man trapped in a loveless marriage running away, recurs in the social novels.
Thus the hero of the book, Richard Remington, is brought up in the same small Kent town as Wells, who even gives him the same list of favourite books when he was a boy.
MacKenzie connects Wells’ autobiographical bent with his immense belief in his own importance. Up to 1914 he kept this reasonably under control but during the war he began to really believe that he was destined to save humanity. Hence his ambitious project to write three big books to educate everyone about a) history b) society and economics and c) science. Hence the outpouring of non-fiction works analysing the failure of society and the need for a world government. Hence, when he did write novels (and he wrote over 40 novels in all), after this one they became more and more vehicles for his (fairly limited) range of ideas.
It’s at this point that MacKenzie digresses to describe Well’s family background and, in particular, the importance of his mother. His mother was a stern and gloomy Christian. MacKenzie claims that the particular flavour of Wells’s end of the world fictions combined with visions of future utopias result from a mashup of his mother’s pessimistic evangelical Christianity and the faith that science can shape the future which he learned at the feet of Thomas Huxley.
MacKenzie says his mother drummed into him visions of hellfire and apocalypse and complete social collapse, before a Last Judgement and the coming of the New Jerusalem and it is the immense power of these boyhood impressions and fears which he channelled so brilliantly into the fiercer of his scientific romances.
MacKenzie claims that evangelical Christians have the concept of a Plan for Salvation and it doesn’t take much to see that Wells spent an enormous amount of energy from the 1890s to the 1940s repeatedly publishing and promoting his Plan for World Salvation. In apocalyptic Christianity the great mass of the people will go down to perdition but God will save his Elect for a life of bliss in the New World. Well, this is the fundamental structure he employed again and again in his fictions, maybe most vividly in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’.
Except that – cross-breeding the Christian substructure with the faith in the new religion of science – Wells’s saved will be a new elite of intellectuals, scientists and social engineers. In ‘Anticipations’ (1901) he calls the elite the New Republicans. In ‘A Modern Utopia’ (1906) he calls them the Samurai. In The Shape of Things To Come he comes clean about the Christian framework and talks about The Reign of The Saints.
MacKenzie briefly references Wells’s flirtation with eugenics (like Peter Kemp in his book about Wells’s imaginative obsessions), quite hair-raising when you read a lot of quotes on the subject altogether, but makes the sensible point that Wells was too much of a rebel and anarchist to endorse anything like a fascist movement, and during the 20s roundly criticised Mussolini and Hitler.
To zero in more closely on this novel, MacKenzie points out that it is a companion piece to Tono-Bungay. TB is an extended look at the world of business, in particular advertising; TNM is set in the world of politics.
The protagonists (George Ponderevo and Richard Remington) are very similar (as all Wells’s protagonists are): men who’ve risen from lowly backgrounds; become famous/rich/successful; feel trapped in arid relationships; in the end fly across the Channel to escape.
Like Lewisham, but in a much more ambitious realm, Remington throws away his chance to reform the politics and society of his time because he cannot restrain his sexual urges/infatuation.
MacKenzie traces this back to the dualism of Wells’s parents, Sarah the symbol of morality, order, repression, and his father the symbol of disorder, indiscipline and erotic gratification.
Macmillan was irked because Wells had promised a book about politics but had delivered yet another one about love and sex, unlucky marriage, the urge to flight, elopement and scandal.
Beatrice Webb recorded in her diary her response to being caricatured in fiction. She was fine about that, even thought it funny, but dwelled on what the book revealed about Wells, namely his shrewd analysis of contemporary society, his bold speeches about fine feeling, and yet his own complete inability to behave ‘decently’. As an attempt to articulate a political philosophy, it was a complete failure, alternating between a vague utopianism and a self-centred cynicism.
Other critics raised questions which have dogged Wells ever since. Were these books literature? (No, clearly not in the league of Joseph Conrad or Henry James). Were they even lighter fiction, in the league of Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy – or just serial fictionalisations of his life? Given that he worked hard to make himself a public figure, were all his books just adjuncts to his career as social commentator and prophet?
Wells was testy either way. If critics wrote about the ‘issues’ raised in his books, he complained about them ignoring his art and craft; if they dwelled on the literary aspects (character, plot, symbolism) he complained that they were ignoring the burning issues he was raising.
MacKenzie cites a quote from Conrad which I’ve read elsewhere in which Conrad explains why the two of them are operating on quite different levels: ‘The difference between us is fundamental. You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not.’
Critics objected to the excessive subjectivity of the book, the confessional nature of the first-person narrative, the disloyal mocking of his former Fabian comrades, and the weird fusion of Liberal and Tory philosophy attributed to Remington and like nothing in the real world. (It’s striking that nowhere in the introduction does MacKenzie mention any of the ideas or policies held by the protagonist of a novel supposedly about politics. This is because, as I suggested in my review, the novel isn’t really about politics at all. It’s about sex.)
As to the book’s obsession with sex, some novelists have written books about sex which are clearly literary exercises (Nabokov). But Wells’s obsession with sex all-too-obviously reflected the man himself.
The Times Literary Supplement thought the novel failed to fuse its overflowing ideas, its didactic vision, with the supposed plot i.e. was split.
The Chicago Evening Post thought the book was too true to Wells the man, was too much a candid exposure of his effervescent thoughts, lacked the detachment of art, at the expense of broader more sophisticated truths (i.e. about human nature). The proliferation of personal idées fixes and hobby horses in the novel suggested a man bursting with his own ego.
Critics pointed out a paradox: Remington the character and Wells the author rail against a world characterised by muddle and confusion and yet… the character reacts in a muddled, confused and chaotic manner when it comes to his own life.
Wells and Remington pile up fine words and noble sentiments but lack all precision. It’s gasbaggery and flim.
Henry James kept up a lengthy correspondence with Wells, recognising his imaginative genius but deprecating what he actually wrote. In the long passage MacKenzie quotes, James condemns ‘the autobiographic form’ for putting a premium on ‘the loose, the improvised, the cheap and easy’, letting him get away with an endless series of cheap effects rather than knuckling down to the discipline of subserving everything to the overall form and affect.
MacKenzie’s introduction turns into a couple of pages describing the ongoing dialogue between Wells and James which eventually went sour when James published some essays criticising the approach of the younger generation (Wells, Bennett, Conrad, Hugh Walpole, Compton Mackenzie) as saturating the reader with irrelevant material instead of winnowing and crafting, of squeezing a plump and juicy orange.
Wells replied with an extended satire on James in his strange fiction, ‘Boon’, which is still very funny:
The only living human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity, and an entirely superficial curiosity. Even when relations are irregular or when sins are hinted at, you feel that these are merely attitudes taken up, gambits before the game of attainment and over-perception begins…. His people nose out suspicions, hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings do that? The thing his novel is about is always there.
It is like a church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string…
And the elaborate, copious emptiness of the whole Henry James exploit is only redeemed and made endurable by the elaborate, copious wit. Upon the desert his selection has made, Henry James erects palatial metaphors… The chief fun, the only exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast metaphors…
Having first made sure that he has scarcely anything left to express, he then sets to work to express it, with an industry, a wealth of intellectual stuff that dwarfs Newton. He spares no resource in the telling of his dead inventions. He brings up every device of language to state and define. Bare verbs he rarely tolerates. He splits his infinitives and fills them up with adverbial stuffing. He presses the passing colloquialism into his service. His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle; they could not sweat and elbow and struggle more if God Himself was the processional meaning to which they sought to come. And all for tales of nothingness… It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den. Most things, it insists, are beyond it, but it can, at any rate, modestly, and with an artistic singleness of mind, pick up that pea…
MacKenzie concludes by repeating his point that ‘The New Machiavelli’ was Wells’s last attempt to write a Serious Novel of the type that James or the literary critics approved of. Wells knew it was a failure and resented it. From 1911 onwards he continued to write prolifically but turned his back on literary ambition and increasingly gave way to his messianic belief that he and only he could save a world hurtling towards ruin.
Credit
The New Machiavelli by H.G. Wells was published by Bodley Head in 1911. References are to the 1994 Everyman paperback edition edited by Norman MacKenzie.
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