Taking a Chance on Herbert

It is notoriously chancy to meet one’s heroes. In person they might be impressive and even pleasant, but they just as easily could be disappointing and rude. The only way to “meet” non-contemporary heroes is through biographies but the same risk applies. Biases of biographers, of course, must also be taken into account, not least when they are autobiographers.
 
Herbert George Wells was one of my early heroes. He is as responsible for having turned me into a lifelong recreational reader as any other single author. What was he like in person? It depends on whom you ask. H.G. Wells the man has been described by some as personable and charming but by others (including one of his sons) as a jerk. As a reader I never worried about it: charmers and jerks are both capable of being good writers, and it was always enough for me that he was one of those. Nonetheless, when I noticed the bio The Young H.G. Wells by Claire Tomalin on Hamilton Books’ New Arrivals list, I was curious enough to send for a copy.

From Tomalin’s account it is hard not to be sympathetic to the fellow on his against-the-odds path to recognition, and to put any personality quirks in that context. Born in 1866, he was the son of a failed shopkeeper (who drank) and a domestic servant. His mother, more concerned to keep him out of poverty than to nurture his mind, apprenticed him to a draper. He found this soul-crushing, but managed to find ways to pursue his own schooling. Despite adversity and some serious health problems, he eventually became a science school teacher himself at a private school. His first marriage to his cousin Isabel proved a disaster that ended in divorce; in those no-sex-before-marriage days she discovered too late that she hated physical intimacy, which in turn justified philandering in his mind. It was a habit he never broke, even in his much more successful marriage to the freethinking Amy Catherine, who went by the name Jane for some reason. Recognition and money finally came in 1895 with the publication and success of The Time Machine. The apprentice draper suddenly found himself in heady company with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and George Bernard Shaw.
 
I’m not sure how large H.G. Wells looms anymore in the lives of young scifi aficionados, but he used to be huge beyond comparison. Today there are shelves – warehouses – full of so many other major names serving every scifi niche and preference that he is more likely just one voice in the crowd. Even in the misty days of yore when I was a kid many of the golden and silver age scifi authors were writing at the top of their games so there was much other good stuff on offer – and I did encounter their material in my boyhood and (especially) teens. Yet, I read them because I long since had run out of Wells – out of his scifi anyway, since at the time didn’t have much interest in his other writings. Those authors themselves surely grew up on his books. George Orwell, who read Wells starting at age 10 in 1913, regarded Wells as the most influential contemporary writer on him: “I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much.” Decades later he influenced me, too. Kid-literature aside, the first two legit novels I ever read were scifi. The first was not Wells, but The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. The second, however, was Wells’ The War of the Worlds: a hardback edition with a collection of short stories as well. I was hooked.
 
There is a distinct difference between pre-WW1 Wells and post-WW1 Wells. Social commentary is present in all of his work and is not always subtle. For example, in The Food of the Gods, the metaphor regarding masses of petty little people trying to cut down the few who literally have outgrown them is hard to miss, though every major film adaptation to date does. The case is similar in the film adaptations of The Island of Dr. Moreau: only the first (Island of Lost Souls [1932], released when Wells was still alive) clearly gets and makes his point (echoing Freud) that humans, like the vivisected creatures on the island, maintain the veneer of civilization only through violence to their animal natures and the ritual imposition of arbitrary codes of ethics. Yet, this prewar commentary is (for the most part) embedded in the storytelling. It thereby enhances the tales, not detracts from them. Postwar he became more blatant. He wrote less fiction and what he did write comes off as preachy. He opted to write more nonfiction in which commentary is pretty much the whole point. While his nonfiction from this era lacks the charm of his earlier books (perhaps why Tomalin deals only with young Wells) it is not without interest. Wells was an atheist and avowed socialist (though he had nothing nice to say about Bolsheviks) who did his bit to nudge the world step by step in his favored direction. He wasn’t reticent about saying so.
 
There is a belief among some conspiracy theorists that at least since the time of Cecil Rhodes there has been a conspiracy of international elites to create a New World Order: an elite-guided social welfare world-state run by technocrats that is globalized, bureaucratized, centralized, and (despite meaningless elections as distractions and window dressing for the public), fundamentally undemocratic. Today one hears this concern more often from the right, but it always has been present on the populist left, too. Two of Wells’ books have something to do with that: The Open Conspiracy (1928) and The New World Order (1939). No, Wells is not scaremongering against these threats. Quite the opposite. He is all in favor of a conspiracy to effect a New World Order precisely as described and tells the reader how to become a part of it – all for humanity’s own good, of course.
 
I can’t say I’m on board with Wells late-life vision. I give him credit for openly advocating for it though. It is refreshing.
 

 

Clip from 1953 adaptation of The War of the Worlds