Looking back with H. G. Wells

GEORGE DANGERFIELD

A literary Englishman will tell, in his autobiography, of his journey from poverty to fame, from yesterday to tomorrow

In a month's time America will he given a chance to read H. G. Wells' long hoped for Experiment in Autobiography. This lengthy volume of remarkable retrospection will not really lie "published"; it will be dropped into our midst from an immeasurable height. For though Experiment in Autobiography can lie read and enjoyed simply as a great success story—in which the undernourished son of a gardener and a lady's maid changes himself into one of England's most considerable writers—it is really more than that. It is the record of a balloon-like brain; how it strained against the moral and social ropes which bound it to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; how these ropes gave way one by one; and how it soared at last serenely upward into Utopia. . . .

The strangely exciting sixty-eight years' journey, which Mr. Wells here records, had a dreary enough beginning. His parents, having severally retired from digging the flower-beds and lacing the corsets of their betters, had set up for themselves, at about the time of his birth, in a china shop which unfortunately never sold much china. From this gaunt and dismal home the young Wells went unwillingly forth to earn his drab living. Between the ages of thirteen and eighteen he was variously a draper's assistant, a druggist's assistant, an usher in a bankrupt school, and—in the intervals between these misadventures—a sulky, precocious boy with a bad case of social claustrophobia. He felt that his life was loo narrow, poor, and dirty to be lived in; as indeed it was.

But Providence, which sometimes befriends those who do not believe in it, found him a free studentship in the London Normal School of Science. Here, for one year, he gladly studied biology under the great Huxley; here, for two more years, he refrained from studying physics and geology under Professors Guthrie and Judd; and from here emerged into the world at last, a shabby, undersized, underfed rebel, with little to rely upon but his "obstinate selfconceit" and a taste for scientific speculation of a somewhat rapturous kind.

In the next four years he contrived to escape from two wretched teaching jobs and the state of celibacy: in 1891 he married his cousin Isabel, and eloped just twelve months later with a blonde fragile student called Miss Amy Catherine Robbins. All

these years, it seems, lie had been running away—away from sordid beginnings; away from moral conventions, dreary methods of education, comfortable thoughts, inherited beliefs; away from the dreadful, drowned life of the lower middle classes; away from the nineteenth century. . . .

With Catherine Robbins his life properly began. He was an atheist; he was a socialist; he had broken the moral code; he was beginning to write. He attended meetings of the Fabian Society—that odd collection of socialistic poets, painters, writers, civil servants and Mr. George Bernard Shaw with whom, because they believed in advancing slowly, he rapidly lost patience. They were "unscientific", he complained, they could not plan ahead. These were the days in which The Time Machine was written, and in which he composed his scientific articles, part prophecy, part fantasy, for the Pall Mall Budget. His brain was already straining upward towards a planned, improbable future.

In '95 he married Catherine Robbins; in 1900 they reached what he calls a modus vivendi, a compromise. Catherine was something of an invalid, and did not insist that he be completely faithful, relying upon that deep affection which lasted between them until the day of her death. But it was not in the impatient nature of H. G. Wells to keep this compromise to himself. In a series of novels, beginning with Love And Mr. Lewisham, he set forth his theories of sexual freedom. Such theories could be furtively practised in the house parties of Edwardian England; but not preached by a parvenu novelist. With the publication of Anne Veronica (1909)—in which a young lady had the temerity to pursue, with gusto, the man of her choice—he was considered as something between a prophet and a profligate; he was certainly famous.

The theories in Anne Veronica represent the parting of a substantial tie between the brain of Wells and contemporary England. "Sane" sex was not an issue in 1909. Elsewhere another rope had parted; Wells was no longer an orthodox socialist. In The New Utopia and The New Machiavelli he advocated what looks today very like a scientific fascism; and both the Labor Party and the Fabians turned down their thumbs, as well they might. For Wells was altogether too impatient; he wanted to destroy the old world (Continued on page HO) immediately with argument, to drag the present into the future. But the present remained obstinately Edwardian and immovable, and the brain of H. G. Wells prepared to make its journey into the future alone.

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In his soberly fantastic progress through pre-war England, Wells had produced such character novels as Kipps and Tono-B ungay; he was a novelist to be reckoned with. Unlike most rising English writers, he had no social ambitions, be did not pride himself on an acquaintance with duchesses and head-waiters; hut he knew most of literary England. If for no other reason, this Experiment in Autobiography would he immensely valuable for its gallery of pre-war portraits—of Henry James, Shaw, Bennett, Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Stephen Crane and twenty more—in which Mr. Wells dissects the "abundant hut uneducated" brains of his contemporaries with a kind of implacable affection, and in such hard, brilliant writing as England has not produced for a decade.

The war seemed to him like some cruel hut quick path into his privately planned future. It would end, he thought, in an explosion of commonsense; the world would turn socialist, the monarchs would creep away, and everybody would get set for a good scientific education and eventual super-humanity. In God the Invisible King he even contrived a deity, Who anticipated the better features of Mussolini and the Five Year Plan, hut Who was neither very divine nor very permanent. In the disillusion of 1917, in fact, Mr. Wells threw Him overboard. It was like throwing ballast out of a balloon— a balloon which the Treaty of Versailles was eventually and finally to release. From the date of that fiasco onward, the brain of H. G. Wells was not concerned with the immediate, ugly, incoherent present. It was off into Tomorrow, once and for all.

From 1919 to 1933, when the problems of an everyday world no longer occupied him, he produced some of his best work—Christina Alberta's Father, for instance, and the valuable and lucid Outline of History. But his essential self had already climbed high into dreams of what he calls a "specific project", otherwise Utopia. You will find in The Shape of Things to Come (1933) the alarming, final features of this project, which is nothing less than a World State in which the property and enterprise of the masses will he managed by an international organization of high-minded, scientific, middle-class prigs. All the latter part of this autobiography—even the story of Mr. Wells's visits to Stalin and President Roosevelt—is somewhat vague and cloudy; the lofty atmosphere, in which the brain of H. G. Wells now resides, has got into the text.

Yet the journey which he records— away from the nineteenth, away from the twentieth centuries and up into tomorrow—is an amazing journey, and Experiment in Autobiography is undoubtedly a great autobiography. But it is also, and infinitely, more. It is the autobiography of a great human being.

(Experiment in Autobiography will he published by the Macmillan Company.)