The Research Magnificent (1915)

The Novel Turgid.

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[Addendum, 24.07.2018]: OK: that was too dismissive. I read The Research Magnificent last year, at speed and in the middle of what seemed at the time something of a glut of ‘prig’ novels. Conscious that I had probably failed to do it justice, I took it with me on holiday this week and have just re-read it, in more leisurely fashion. And while it's never going to be my favourite Wells, it deserves better than my three-word snark.

It's the story of—except, no, right there: that's the problem. There's no story here. This book is a character study of an individual called William Porphyry Benham from childhood through to adulthood and (premature) death. There's no narrative shape, drama, no arc or pattern. Inheriting a fortune, Benham never needs to work. He attends school and university, travels the world, marries and separates from his wife, and all the while he is engaged in the novel's titular ‘research’, which is how to live a noble and beautiful life.

This is the story of a man who was led into adventure by an idea. ... He belonged to that fortunate minority who are independent of daily necessities, so that he was free to go about the world under its direction. It led him far. It led him into situations that bordered upon the fantastic, it made him ridiculous, it came near to making him sublime. And this idea of his was of such a nature that in several aspects he could document it. Its logic forced him to introspection and to the making of a record. An idea that can play so large a part in a life must necessarily have something of the complication and protean quality of life itself. It is not to be stated justly in any formula, it is not to be rendered by an epigram. As well one might show a man's skeleton for his portrait. Yet, essentially, Benham's idea was simple. He had an incurable, an almost innate persuasion that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly. His commoner expression for that thorough living is “the aristocratic life.” But by “aristocratic” he meant something very different from the quality of a Russian prince, let us say, or an English peer. He meant an intensity, a clearness. Nobility for him was to get something out of his individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendour—it is a thing easier to understand than to say. [Research, ‘Prelude’ 1]

Since Benham's ‘research’ takes him around the world the novel becomes a travelogue; but although some of these episodes are divertingly told (notably Beham and his wife Amanda's ingenuously entered-into, catastrophic trip through a barbaric Serbia, Montenegro and Albania) they don't add up to a novel in any meaningful sense. Travelogue aside this is a text quilted together from hectoring lectures and disquisitions, all of which are, at least notionally, excerpts from a book Benham was writing ‘On the Aristocratic Life’, unfinished at his death and being completed by Benham's author friend White, a Wells-analogue. So we get chunks of familiar Wellsian argumentation, such as ‘preach the only possible peace, which is the peace of the world-state, the open conspiracy of all the sane men in the world against the things that break us up into wars and futilities’ [4.7] and ‘the Invisible King who is the lord of human destiny, the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the sceptre and rule the earth’ [6.4] and

Benham's definition of Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless and philosophical formula that ever dominated the mind of a man. “Prejudice,” Benham had written, “is that common incapacity of the human mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a difference in all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an instinctive hostility to what is unlike ourselves. We exaggerate classification and then charge it with mischievous emotion by referring it to ourselves.” And under this comprehensive formula he proceeded to study and attack Family Prejudice, National Prejudice, Race Prejudice, War, Class Prejudice, Professional Prejudice, Sex Prejudice, in the most industrious and elaborate manner. Whether one regards one's self or others he held that these prejudices are evil things. [Research, 6.3]

It's a ragbag, though; and the thought that it's designedly a ragbag doesn't redeem the novel as a work of fiction. In point of fact Benham exists really only to illustrate one roman-à-thèse slogan: that the world as it is presently constituted isn't ready for the sort of beautiful nobility of character and action Wells conceptualised in his Samurai (concerning which, see here). Benham has all the qualities to make a fine Samurai, but in our world those qualities lead him to alienation, self-questioning, loneliness and eventually to death. Lacking the properly Wellsian speculative context Benham cannot even imagine the Samurai, and instead falls back on incomplete and ultimately misleading conceptions of aristocracy.

The novel also displays, more clearly than some other Wells works of this epoch, some of the problems of Wells's world-state ideological grandiosity. Benham is present at a massacre of Jews in a Ukrainian ghetto, and saves the lives of some people in a house because his sense of honour and fair play, and his frankly short-fuse temper, are roused by the sight. After the danger has receded he gets into a conversation with the Jews he has saved, and even in the immediate aftermath of this (vividly written) pogromic horror Benham (and Wells) quickly manoeuvre the discussion back to questions of incitement.

Now he was at the very heart of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the mystery of this great hatred at first hand. He did not want to hear tales of outrages ... but he wanted to understand what was the irritation that caused these things.

So he listened. The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and usefulness of the Jews.

“But do you never take a certain advantage?” Benham threw out.

“The Jews are cleverer than the Russians. Must we suffer for that?” [Research, 6.5]

This insistence on Wells's part that anti-Semitism must always be something provoked by the Jews leaves an unpleasant taste in the reader's mouth, and the way the passage then shifts mood into a clumsy sarcasm—‘was it not true that the Jews did press a little financially upon the inferior peoples whose lands they honoured in their exile?’ and so on—does nothing to leaven the unpleasantness.

One thing that does come through in The Research Magnificent is a sense of Wells chafeing against the sheer bovine inertia of all those people of the world living in squalor and not wanting to rise out of it into the gleaming domed cities and hygenic togas of the Wellsian World State. All the people Benham meets are passive, with the single exception of his wife Amanda (who at least has the gumption to have an affair with a less priggish, more attentive man). This universal passivity leads Benham, and through him the novel, in the victim-blaming core ideology of fascism itself. A visit to Haiti, and the ruined castle of King Henri Christophe (‘this black ape of all Emperors’ Wells, wincingly, calls him), prompts Benham to ponder how tyrants come to power. He concludes:

Usurpation is a crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility. It is the orderly peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much restraint above as stiff insubordination below that has to be taught to men. There are kings and tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of the unkingliness of men. [Research, 6.4]

Usurpation is a crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility is a profoundly wrongheaded and alarming assertion, on a par with rape is a crime to which men are tempted by human pulchritude and arson is a crime to which men are tempted by the flammability of things. It's that old Übermensch beer, I suppose. It is a heady brew, and (though Nietzsche is at no point mentioned in this novel) quaffing it leaves a man drunk with his own sense of clarity of will and liable to blame the oppressed for their own oppression. We can, I think, do better than this.