H G Wells Omnibus, page 323
Patrick Parrinder
Introduction
(New readers are advised that this Introduction makes the details of the plot explicit.)
Of all the great novels written in the twentieth century, Tono-Bungay has waited the longest for its stature to be acknowledged. H. G. Wells was too journalistic, miscellaneous and prolific a writer for his work to have been recognized during his lifetime as comparable to the modernist classics of Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, but later generations have increasingly understood the depths and strengths of his prophetic literary powers. Tono-Bungay is Wells’s masterpiece. It is a profoundly unsettling novel, epic in scope and encyclopedic in content, yet always disturbingly aware of its own fictional quality, of the self-deceptions of its first-person narrator, and of the fictions and delusions that shape modern life in every sphere from sex to commerce to politics to science.
When Tono-Bungay was published in book form in 1908 (dated 1909; see the Note on the Text for details), its author was already famous for his ‘scientific romances’, notably The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897) and The War of the Worlds (1898), for his quasi-autobiographical comic novels on contemporary social themes, notably Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) and Kipps (1905), and for his non-fictional and fictional works of political and technological prophecy, Anticipations (1902), A Modern Utopia (1905) and The War in the Air (1908). Tono-Bungay combines the themes and techniques of his earlier work in a vast cohesive narrative of ambition, triumph, dissolution and loss.
In its serial publication in 1908–09, Tono-Bungay was subtitled ‘A Romance of Commerce’, and the novel’s central narrative is the history of the stimulating tonic named in the title. Tono-Bungay is the invention of Edward Ponderevo, the chemist (i.e. pharmacist) uncle of the book’s narrator, George Ponderevo. ‘Tono’ suggests ‘tone’ or ‘tonic’; ‘Bungay’ is a town in Suffolk, its name perhaps chosen because Edward likes the sound of it. Marketed as ‘The Secret of Vigour’, Tono-Bungay is successful enough to launch Edward Ponderevo as a financial magnate who builds a vast commercial empire on modern techniques of advertising and marketing, although George Ponderevo knows (and Edward Ponderevo half-tries not to know) that Tono-Bungay is ‘a mischievous trash, slightly stimulating, aromatic and attractive… and insidiously dangerous to people with defective kidneys’.
Edward Ponderevo’s financial saga – which is punctuated by his upwardly mobile ascent from rooms above his suburban shop to a London flat, to a grand hotel, to the venerably ancient Lady Grove and finally to the grandiose modern mansion he starts building on Crest Hill – serves as the focus for half a dozen related subplots: George Ponderevo’s meritocratic rise from servant-class status to his almost classless vocation as a scientist and engineer; George’s marriage to sexually repressed Marion, his casual affair with Effie and his passionate romance across the boundaries of class with Beatrice Normandy; Edward and Susan Ponderevo’s childless marriage and Susan’s half-conscious, unspoken love for George; George’s seaborne quest for the dangerous and valuable radioactive mixture to which Wells gives the suggestive name ‘quap’; and George’s final career as a builder of naval destroyers.
All these stories end in futility and failure, and the novel as a whole is a vision of disintegrating personal relations, a disintegrating society, even a disintegrating universe. The futile erotic relations in the book suggest to George a general theory of modern sexual love disconnected from past and future: ‘Love, like everything else in this immense progress of social disorganization in which we live, is a thing adrift, a fruitless thing broken away from its connections’ (IV.2.§2).1 In IV.3.§1, he connects the fruitlessness of love to the futility of all the hopes and enterprises of his era:
As I turn over the big pile of manuscript before me, certain things become clearer to me, and particularly the immense inconsequence of my experiences. It is, I see now that I have it all before me, a story of activity and urgency and sterility. I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile. What hope is there for a people whose women become fruitless? I think of all the energy I have given to vain things. I think of my industrious scheming with my uncle, of Crest Hill’s vast cessation, of his resonant strenuous career… It is all one spectacle of forces running to waste, of people who use and do not replace, the story of a country hectic with a wasting aimless fever of trade and money-making and pleasure-seeking. (IV.3.§1)
Sterility and futility are ways in which persons and societies decline and fade, but George also imagines more cataclysmic endings. As he moves away from his childhood home in the great house of Bladesover, where his mother worked as housekeeper and where social relations have remained unchanged for centuries, he senses the impending collapse of a whole social system. The eighteenth-century world of Bladesover has not yet fallen, but forces are already at work to destroy it:
It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen; resting for a while, as it were half reluctantly, before it grips and ends the thing for ever. One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience end, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire. (I.1.§3 )
The first two episodes of George’s life after he leaves Bladesover – first in the constricted slums of Chatham, to the east of London, where he shocks his evangelical cousins by doubting the existence of God, then in sleepy Wimblehurst to the south, where his uncle Edward chafes ineffectually against small-town complacency – offer no hint of impending catastrophe. Only when the nineteen-year-old George arrives in London, the largest and richest city in the world, with its newly rising suburbs, does he encounter the modern processes of unplanned, uncontrollable change. The wealthy districts immediately north of the Thames have managed to resist visible changes, but even that region is seeing its wealth pass from a hereditary aristocracy to a new class of manufacturers and press magnates. Meanwhile, everything else in the metropolis has been overrun by physical and social change:
Factory chimneys smoke right over against Westminster with an air of carelessly not having permission, and the whole effect of industrial London and of all London east of Temple Bar and of the huge dingy immensity of London port, is to me of something disproportionately large, something morbidly expanded, without plan or intention, dark and sinister towards the clean clear social assurance of the West End. And south of this central London, south-east, south-west, far west, north-west, all round the northern hills, are similar disproportionate growths, endless streets of undistinguished houses, undistinguished industries, shabby families, second-rate shops, inexplicable people who in a once fashionable phrase do not ‘exist’. All these aspects have suggested to my mind at times, do suggest to this day, the unorganized, abundant substance of some tumorous growth-process, a process which indeed bursts – all the outlines of the affected carcass and protrudes such masses as ignoble comfortable Croydon, as tragic impoverished West Ham. To this day I ask myself will those masses ever become structural, will they indeed shape into anything new whatever, or is that cancerous image their true and ultimate diagnosis? (II.1.§1)
George’s application to London of the words ‘tumorous’ and ‘cancerous’ point toward a more inclusive statement of the same theme later in the book. When Edward Ponderevo’s financial empire is threatened with collapse, George leads his clandestine expedition to steal the heaps of radioactive quap found by a disreputable explorer on an island off the coast of Africa. The substance proves to be destructive in physical, medical and moral ways, and prompts George to meditate on the disintegrating power of radioactivity: ‘… there is something – the only word that comes near it is cancerous – and that is not very near, about the whole of quap, something that creeps and lives as a disease lives by destroying; an elemental stirring and disarrangement, incalculably maleficent and strange’ (III.4.§5). (This is an uncannily prophetic passage: the first indication of a causal relation between radioactivity and cancer occurred the year after Wells finished the book, when leukaemia was noted among British radiologists in 1909.)
George proceeds to describe radioactivity as ‘a real disease of matter… a contagious disease’, and spells out its metaphoric connection with his social themes: ‘It is in matter exactly what the decay of our old culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured reactions.’ And he continues to a tentative apocalyptic conclusion:
I am haunted by a grotesque fancy of the ultimate eating away and dry-rotting and dispersal of all our world. So that while man still struggles and dreams his very substance will change and crumble from beneath him. I mention this here as a queer persistent fancy. Suppose indeed that is to be the end of our planet; no splendid climax and finale, no towering accumulation of achievements, but just – atomic decay! (III.4.§5)
The excursion to Africa is the imaginative and moral centre of Tono-Bungay, and Wells emphasizes its centrality by pretending to deny its relevance to everything else. George Ponderevo devotes the opening paragraph of the book to a long list of his miscellaneous disconnected experiences: ‘One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one’s stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time, and, as it were, in a succession of samples.’ This is followed by a single-sentence paragraph: ‘And once (though it is the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered a man.’ The murder occurs on the island where George steals the heaps of quap, when he impulsively shoots an African who turns to run away after encountering him; in the heat of the moment George thinks, ‘He mustn’t get away and tell them!’ and fires his gun (III.4.S6). The event is ‘incidental’ in that it neither results from nor brings about any other event in George’s life, and has no legal or emotional effect on him, but it encapsulates the moral significance of all the varieties of disconnectedness and indifference that he experiences everywhere else.
Wells gives the whole African episode far greater significance than George understands in narrating it. The island on which quap has risen from the earth is called Mordet (sometimes Mordet’s) Island, a name that alludes to death and murder, and the whole episode echoes the biblical story of the way in which death came into the world. The island is ‘forbidden ground’ – literally, a place where trade with foreign countries is barred by colonial authorities, but figuratively a place of forbidden fruit, such as the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the book of Genesis. George’s almost parenthetical recollection of ‘how Milton, one of the boys, fell from a plank to the beach, thirty feet perhaps, with his barrow and broke his arm and I believe a rib’ (III.4.§5), alludes to the fall of Adam and Eve – who was created from Adam’s rib – a story retold by John Milton in Paradise Lost (1667). Under the influence of quap, George discovers his own potential not only for murder, but for all forms of cruelty and injustice: ‘I understand now the heart of the sweater, of the harsh employer, of the nigger-driver2… I hated all humanity during the time that the quap was near me…’ (III.4.§5).
The voyage to Mordet Island seems ‘incidental’ to George partly because, in writing the rest of the book, he works to forget its significance. In the chapters that precede the African adventure, George describes the research into gliders and guided balloons that he was able to pursue with help of the riches he gained from Tono-Bungay. His recollections inspire him to write a passage about the physical sciences that sounds like something between a love poem and a hymn:
Scientific truth is the remotest of mistresses, she hides in strange places, she is attained by tortuous and laborious roads, but she is always there! Win to her and she will not fail you; she is yours and mankind’s for ever. She is reality, the one reality I have found in this strange disorder of existence. She will not sulk with you nor misunderstand you nor cheat you of your reward upon some petty doubt. You cannot change her by advertisement or clamour, nor stifle her in vulgarities. Things grow under your hands when you serve her, things that are permanent as nothing else is permanent in the whole life of man. That I think is the peculiar satisfaction of science and its enduring reward… (III.3.§1)
Yet only a few chapters later, having apparently forgotten this, George will write about his ‘persistent fancy’ that the substance of the universe itself will decay and crumble, that the permanent scientific truth that he celebrates here is a truth about impermanence and change.
Just as George Ponderevo the scientist is curiously of two minds about the meaning of his scientific research, George Ponderevo the writer is curiously uncertain about the kind of narrative he is writing. In most of the instances where he refers to his own storytelling, he conforms to the usual style of first-person narrators, and tells his fictional story as if it were a true account of historical events. He even refers readers to his scientific articles in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (a real journal), the Mathematical Journal and the Geological Magazine (both fictional). But he also describes his book repeatedly as a work of fiction. In the opening paragraph he says he intends to tell the story of his life in ‘something in the nature of a novel’, and a few paragraphs later calls it ‘my first novel and almost certainly my last’. Not long afterward, he writes that he cannot conform to ‘the restraints and rules of the art’ of novel writing, that ‘it isn’t a constructed tale I have to tell but unmanageable realities’. In other words, this isn’t fiction but truth – although he later writes, ‘this is a novel, not a treatise’ (II.4.§10), and writes near the end, ‘this novel had to be put aside’ so that he could complete work on a new destroyer (IV.3.§2).
George makes a notable innovation in narrative technique: he devotes separate chapters to the public and private aspects of his life, even though those chapters record events that occur more or less simultaneously. Thus he writes a long chapter titled ‘Marion’ about his courtship and marriage, preceded and followed by chapters that record his work with his uncle on Tono-Bungay; instead of preserving chronological sequence by weaving together the two strands of the narrative, he leaves them entirely separate, justifying his technique as a means of expressing the divisions in his life: ‘I see my life as it were arranged in two parallel columns of unequal width, a wider, more diffused, eventful and various one which continually broadens out, the business side of my life, and a narrow, darker and darkling one shot ever and again with a gleam of happiness, my home life with Marion’ (II.4.§1). Wells may have adapted this technique from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), a book dedicated to Wells, in which the narrative at one point doubles back without explanation to an earlier series of events. Wells’s technique is less startling than Conrad’s, but perhaps more subtle in the way it represents the divisions and dissociations that are Wells’s themes. (In what seems to be a private joke between friends, Wells used Conrad’s incomprehensible spoken English as the model for the English spoken by the Romanian captain of the ship that George takes to Africa.)
George Ponderevo is a more adept narrator than he realizes, but he misunderstands much of his own story. He never guesses how deeply his Aunt Susan is in love with him, or the pain with which she experiences his impending marriage to Marion. He seems unaware of the intensity of Beatrice Normandy’s erotic feelings toward him, and tends to use a technical vocabulary when describing them. In the astonishing episode in which he sweeps over Beatrice in one of his gliders while her horse bolts forward with ‘her woman’s body’ across its neck, he is remarkably slow to notice the sexual tension between them after he lands. She falls into his arms (saying only, ‘Those great wings’) while he is surprised by the ‘outrageous new idea… that I must make love to [until around 1950 this meant ‘show amorous intentions to’] and possess Beatrice’, and reports in scientific style that ‘the factor of passion came’ (III.3.§5). In the final sections of the book, as he drives his destroyer from London to the sea, he has a ‘full sense’ of scientific truth as ‘the one enduring thing’, an austere beauty at the heart of life, as if unaware that his own ship, with the lightweight engines of which he is so proud, makes use of scientific truth for the sole purpose of military destruction. While the destroyer makes its way eastward down the Thames from the royal palaces west of London to the modern city where ‘the traditional and ostensible England falls from you altogether’, out into the ‘great spaces of the future’, George traces the degeneration of the old order into formless chaos, but says nothing about the way in which he and his destroyer (built for the American navy because the British don’t want it) contribute to the changes that he laments.
Wells distilled a miscellaneous set of sources into the cohesive themes of Tono-Bungay. The story of George’s rise from provincial obscurity to metropolitan distinction is an essentially autobiographical account of the young Herbert George Wells. Wells’s mother, like George’s, was conventional and constrained, and had been in domestic service at a country mansion in Sussex called Uppark. The real story differs from the fictional one in that Wells’s mother left his father, and not the reverse (as is apparently the case with George’s parents), and that she lived at Uppark only before Wells was born and after he had left home in his early teens. George’s apprenticeship in his uncle’s chemist’s shop is modelled on Wells’s apprenticeships to drapers (i.e. dealers in cloth). George, like Wells, later excels as a scholarship student in London and is thereby launched on a meteoric career.
