H G Wells Omnibus, page 722
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.
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But Wells does not leave us simply with a story of racist offense. After another egg hatches and produces a huge chick, Butcher befriends it in its early stages, lives companionably with it for a couple of years, affectionately names it “Friday,” and imagines “how [he] could make a living out of him by showing him about” (14). Only when as an adult Æpornis the bird becomes dangerous—he “was then about fourteen feet high to the bill of him, with a big, broad head like the end of pickaxe” (15)—does Butcher in self-defense kill him. And then a remarkable thing happens: Butcher, after begrudging the bird’s power over “me a human being—heir of the ages and all that” (15), regrets his act. “I felt like a murderer” (16). Although he was unable to feel any bond with his native assistants, now “I felt exactly as if he [i.e. the Æpornis] was human. As it was, I couldn’t think of eating him, so I put him in the lagoon, and the little fishes picked him clean. I didn’t even save the feathers” (16). It is hard to imagine the man who thoughtlessly murders natives having such feelings or forgoing the profit that the feathers might have brought, but it is the very implausibility that may signal that Butcher is here telling the truth. But then again, we should be cautious: such an appeal to our own sensitivities may be the con-man artist’s best tactic for persuading us of a tall tale’s actuality. We should always remember that the narrator sees the Time Traveler as untrustworthy, and many of the men who know him consider his tale “a gaudy lie.” The point is not that the Time Traveler is a liar. It is that Wells delights in the undecided and the ambiguous, in the situations in which we, the readers, must stay on our toes.
One dimension of this complex style is brilliant satire that retains traces of utopian ideas and hopes. The voice that we hear in the last sections of The First Men in the Moon, when Cavor interviews the Grand Lunar, is fraught with satiric edge, but unlike Swift’s it also plays with the possibilities of the bizarre world being juxtaposed to our own. Consider the following majestic passage toward the end of Cavor’s description of the lunar society in which “every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it” (161):
[Cavor reports,] “The making of these various sorts of operative must be a very curious and interesting process. I am still much in the dark about it, but quite recently I came upon a number of young Selenites, confined in jars from which only the forelimbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine-minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand’ in this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injection while the rest of the body is starved. Phi-oo [Cavor’s informant], unless I misunderstood him, explained that in the earlier stages these queer little creatures are apt to display signs of suffering in their various cramped situations, but they easily become indurated to their lot; and he took me on to where a number of flexible-limbed messengers were being drawn out and broken in. It is quite unreasonable, I know, but these glimpses of the educational methods of these beings have affected me disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off and I may be able to see more of this aspect of this wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand sticking out of its jar seemed to appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.” (163)
Startlingly different tonalities play against each other here: the cool recitation of this “curious and interesting process,” the pathos of the little Selenite’s conditioning, the disturbingly incompatible languages—”being drawn out and broken in” as “educational methods”—Cavor’s effort to overcome his natural revulsion and admire “this wonderful social order,” and finally the wrenching refocusing at the end when this terrible conditioning is understood as benign compared to the horrors of laissez faire industrialism. Profound questions that will plague the twentieth century—of sociological and cultural objectivity, of intuition and reason, of controlled and free economies—are all raised in strong articulation in this amazing passage.
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If Wells is an author who thinks through fiction, however, he is also one attuned to the sheer pleasure that fiction can provide. He is a great descriptive artist. Again and again in the most fanciful invention, he startles us with precise detail. Even after an idea is established, he will continue to think about it and discover new implications, as in The Invisible Man when we discover how vulnerable this supposedly superior man is to such elemental dangers as broken glass and cold. In natural descriptions he takes pleasure in word painting, as in the elegant and symbolic sunsets in War of the Worlds. Nowhere is Wells’s descriptive talent put to more impressive use than in the scenes in The Time Machine when the Time Traveler moves farthest into the future and finds the desolate beach, the dying sun, and the last feeble (though still threatening) signs of life. Before everything else, H. G. Wells is a brilliant storyteller. If he has an eye for small details that make implausible things believable and an ear for the tricks of language that make characters real, then he has a talent for plots that have clear shape, with startling beginnings, developed middles, and meaningful ending.
Between 1924 and 1928 Wells himself published a collected edition of his work in twenty-four volumes, “The Atlantic Edition.” It was limited to 1,670 copies and is generally to be found only in well-stocked libraries. In recent years scholarly editions of some of the early novels (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau) have begun to appear, and a good number of the social novels are occasionally reprinted in paperback. Unfortunately, these last tend to go out of print fairly quickly, and one must be alert to find them. The exception is Tono-Bungay, which has been reprinted more often than the other social novels. Wells himself described his career and the goals of his work in An Experiment in Autobiography (1934). Long after his death, a supplementary manuscript describing some of his love affairs was published by his son, G. P. Wells, under the title H. G. Wells in Love (1985). In the first decades after his death, Wells’s letters to Henry James, Arnold Bennett, and George Gissing were published in separate volumes, and The Collected Letters of H. G. Wells, edited by David Smith, was published in 1992.
I have selected the texts for this anthology with an eye to quality and to what I see as the central issues and styles of Wells. In the case of such a prolific and varied artist, there is danger of dispersal and dilution. I have therefore confined the selection strictly to fiction. I have also narrowed this selection by limiting it to work Wells published in the first decade and a half of his writing career. Later Wells is a fascinating area, but only to readers who already have a sense of what early Wells is about. If I have emphasized the scientific romances, it is with a sense of how it leads into social novels like Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly—for which in his own time Wells was scandalously famous. Some of the volatile issues engaged in these novels have lost their urgency, but these novels continue to resonate with lively ideas and charged anger. Finally, because Wells was an important novelist and this part of his work is often hardest to find in print, I have included one complete novel, and lengthy selections of two others—all of which move beyond the scientific romance. I regret that space limits prevent giving the whole of The Time Machine or of Tono-Bungay, this last an extraordinary work that deserves much more attention than it gets.
Wells was an amazingly enlightened man, but he could not escape certain conventions and prejudices of his age. I have chosen not to bowdlerize or edit the texts to rid them of occasional moments that modern readers may find offensive. As often as not, as I argue above and in the prefaces to each piece, Wells himself would share our sense of outrage, and we underestimate the quality of his art if we too easily ascribe all the attitudes expressed by characters in these works to Wells himself.
