The Shape of Things To Come (1933)

I suppose this is the last book Wells published that has any kind of currency today. And that's quite a striking thing, actually: his bibliography stretches through nearly thirty more original titles, up to his death in 1946, and some of those works are really good (his Autobiography, published a year after Shape of Things to Come, is wonderful; and a couple of the later novels are actually very interesting: Star Begotten and The Holy Terror in particular). But there we are. No one today has heard of, let along read, any of those; where people have at least heard of this one. I mean, I'm certainly not claiming it's a novel as famous as Time Machine, War of the Worlds or The Invisible Man; but SF aficionados are at least likely to have heard of it (not something true of 1932's The Bulpington of Blup, if the reaction to my post on that novel is anything to go by).

It helps that a relatively famous movie was made of the work: Things to Come (1936), produced by Alexander Korda and directed by William Cameron Menzies. Wells collaborated enthusiastically with the filmmakers and wrote the screenplay, although the film is a very different beast to the book.

1. Film

It's worth starting with the film, actually, because it slimmed this lengthy, fine-grained novel into simpler shapes, which in turn point out a couple of problems with what's going on in Wells's future speculation. Here's a photo of Wells on set with two of the film's cast: Pearl Argyle and the lead, Raymond Massey.

The film is in three acts, not very smoothly linked-together. It opens in 1940 in the bustling metropolis of ‘Everytown’, where businessman John Cabal (Raymond Massey) is too worried about the danger of impending war to enjoy Christmas.

His friend, Pippa Passworthy (Edward Chapman: did Pippa used to be a man's name, then?) is more optimistic: even if war break out, he thinks it will provide a boost to technological progress. But then war does start: aerial bombardment, general mobilisation, global conflict. The next we see of Cabal he is piloting a plane, and trying to stop a one-man bomber that is gassing his city. Having shot the plane down, Cabal lands chivalrously to rescues the enemy pilot (John Clements) from the wreckage, and the two put on gas masks because of, well, you know: the gas. But then the enemy pilot gives-up his gas mask to save the life of a young girl who chances upon them, and Cabal, impressed at the fellow's sacrifice, takes the girl away with him in his plane.

Act Two steps forward to the 1970s. War has dragged on for decades, and people have forgotten why they are fighting. A plague called ‘the Wandering Sickness’ has devastated the population. Civilisation has collapsed and barbaric local warlords have seized power and rule amongst the ruins.

The film concentrates on one such, a warlord known as ‘Chief’, who rules what's left of Everytown, and who is played with rather more campness that one might think appropriate to the role, by Ralph Richardson:

John Cabal flies into town, landing in a sleekly futuristic plane, and wearing an absolutely extraordinary coal-scuttle helmet. I worry about the helmet. He wears it once, then seems to lose it and we never see it again.

The Chief takes him prisoner and forces him to work mending his warlord air-fleet of battered old biplanes, but Cabal is entirely unfazed. He represents, he says, an elite band of engineers and mechanics, based in Basra, Iraq, who have have formed a group to rebuild civilisation called ‘Wings Over the World’. The Wings have outlawed war and decreed an end to individual nation states. Here's smug Cabal, left, and the paranoid Chief, right.

The Wings Over the World fly-in, in some impressively art-deco aircract, easily beat the Chief's antiquated biplanes, drop sleepy-bombs on the population, and take charge.

Which brings us to the movie's final act. A fast-froward montage shows Everytown (and the rest of the world) being rebuilt as part of the new Wellsian World-State utopia. The new city is all white and shining monumental architecture, rather anticipatory of the Fredric Jamesonian Westin Bonaventure Hotel and, I'd guess, as disorienting actually to live in.

We're now in the 2030s. Massey plays his own great-grandson, Oswald Cabal, who is planning a space rocket to advance mankind's domination to the planets. In a poorly prepared-for final drama, an angry mob appears, it seems from nowhere (notionally they have been incited by a reactionary sculptor played by Cedric Hardwicke, who thinks progress has gone too far). The mob swarms towards the space gun that launches the rocket intent on wrecking it, but Cabal fires the vessel into space just in time. It's a transparent and unconvincing attempt to wring a little dramatic tension out of a profoundly undramatic situation. The movie ends with his pious-pompous speechifying: ‘Man ... must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet and its winds and ways. And then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last, out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of Space, and all the mysteries of Time, still he will be beginning.’

Here's Cabal pointing out details in an improbably regular star-map or else indicating the rivets in the pan of the world's largest Le Creuset. One of the two, certainly.

Now: there are those who think highly of this film. I am not one such. I can't deny that it was influential, especially some of the designs from the last act, which reappeared for many decades in modified forms as the template for cleanly antiseptic future utopian infrastructure in myriad SF films and TV shows. But otherwise this is a bad film; unconvincingly characterised, stiffly acted and disposed into a story that falls between two stools—too large-scale and disconnected for us properly to invest emotionally in specific characters (who can care about the aviator who gives us his gas mask to save the girl? What even happens to the latter? Are there any commonalities apart from name between Cabal the 1940 businessman and Cabal the 1970s Wings Over The World aviator?)—and too bogged-down in its individual stories to create the proper sense-of-wonder longue durée of the novel.

Structurally the whole is too joltingly abrupt in its segues between its three time-periods, and the riot at the end is bafflingly under-motivated. More, there's a conceptual muddiness in the whole: is the movie arguing that the destructive barbarism of its 1940-70 is a necessary period of, as it were, technological retrenchment in order to wipe the slate of history clean and so enable the gleaming 21st-century utopia? Or is the war a regrettable lapse, perfectly avoidable if only the nations of 1940 had listened to figures like Wells, and so a kind of distraction on the path to the broad, sunlit uplands?

There's also an ideological problem. Not to put too fine a point on it: it's hard to imagine a clearer celebration of technofascism than this motion picture. The gleaming war-machine of the Wings Over The World possessing the highest of high-ground and imposing order on the squabbling barbarism below with shock, awe and superior engineering. This is a movie that says: left to its own devices human society descends into squabbling chaos: only the übermensch, clad in his coal-scuttle überhelmet, and focusing his will-to-power through his gleaming aerial machines, can save us.

The film is a starker fable of fascist victory than the book because the appearance of the engineering overlords (out of a Basra that is mentioned briefly and in passing) is so abruptly deus ex machina—might even call its second Act denouement SS ex machina, if only it didn't look like a cheap shot. The political palate of the film is designedly two-tone, which means it only admits of two possibilities: social chaos or rule by the technocratic elite. No other political settlement, says Things To Come, is either possible or even imaginable.

Fascism not only (of course) dominated not only Europe's 1930s, it's an unavoidable load-bearing beam in Wells's own intellectual-ideological make-up. This blog has returned often to those occasions when Wells has expressed what might be called pseudo-fascist ideas. In 1932 he delivered his notorious talk ‘Liberal Fascism’ to the Young Liberals at their Summer School in Oxford in July 1932. I've said before, here, that he wasn't really a fascist, and I stand by that judgment. But he flirted with aspects of the movement, no question.

Wells probably deserves some credit for a few things on this unpromising front. He repeatedly and clearly repudiated the militarism and nationalism championed by actual fascist movements, and his views did change in the later 1930s, as events in Nazi Germany showed how illiberal actual fascism, applied efficiently enough, actually was. But he still felt, as he wrote this novel, that there only was one path to a better future: a quasi-fascist singular focus of power, the top-down application of it to cut the combined gordian knots of history, tradition, bureaucracy and petty self-interest. An aggressive commitment to technological and engineering development. Collective will overriding individual selfishness. And that's quite a fascist set of beliefs, if we're honest. It is easy to judge him with hindsight, but ease doesn't mean that doing so is wrongheaded. The stakes, after all, are high.

Wells's son with Rebecca West, Anthony West, waxes crotchety over the idea that his father was any kind of actual-fascism fellow-traveler. He attacks those who claim that ‘it was only my father's vanity that kept him from taking up the totalitarian cause in the early thirties’, that ‘he would have thrown in his lot [with the fascists] if he hadn't had a swollen-headed feeling that it was their place to come courting him rather than his to go over to them’. West doesn't say who claims this, but, never mind who, he's having none of it:

The next step from there was to indicate that, as the author of The Shape of Things To Come, my father was one of the creators of the spirit of Munich. According to this thesis the fantasia in question, which first saw the light in 1933 and was very soon afterwards made into a film, with my father's active and enthralled participation, has to be considered as one of the many factors which created public support for the policy of appeasement, because it featured a massive air attack on London, shrewdly previsioned as taking place in 1940. [West, H G Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984), 130]

This is not to address the fascistic quality of the Wings Over The World as a movement, although West is adamant that what the book is really saying is, in his words: ‘this is the sort of thing you will more than likely be in for if you don't take a stand against Fascism now’. This strikes me as an argument that includes a fairly high quotient of wishful thinking.

The real question, I suppose, is whether Wells can be acquitted of a culpable naïveté in believing fascism ever could be neatly separated out from its nationalism and militarism. Maintaining a huge fleet of art-deco bombers might be thought a strangely inconsistent thing for an organisation that had outlawed war, after all; and Wells's screenplay tries to fudge the issue by dropping bombs not of high-explosive but of soporific gas. Then again, the gas does kill Ralph Richardson's ‘Chief’ character, and Massey's Cabal delivers a gloating speech over his body: ‘Dead, and his world dead with him—and a new world beginning. And now for the rule of the Airman, and a new life for mankind. For now we have to put the world in order’. Here he is doing just that, with the ‘Chief’ dead in the bottom right-hand corner. I draw your attention to the Chief's charmingly amateurish chalk-board efforts at propaganda.

FURTHER HOSTILITIES WILL BRING A VICTORIOUS PEACE LONG LIVE THE CHIEF is hardly a marching slogan to trip off the tongue, I'd say. The point, and Wells's Act 2 moral, is that history must be erased, and that a Year Zero inaugurated, with all opposition to the coming top-down technocratic utopia eliminated. And there are fewer more terrifying political strategies than insisting upon a Year Zero. At any rate, implying that one might be able to do any of this without the forceable breaking of the old norms to which people are so stubbornly attached, without in other words more war, is, frankly, Wells not thinking-through his own premises with any clarity—very much him pretending his omelette can be made without breaking eggs. His global pacific omelette. Conceivably cooked-up in that gigantic riveted Le Creuset already pictured.

2. Book

Enough about the movie: what about the book? Or to frame the question more precisely: does the novel manage to tell what is, in its broadest lineaments, the same story as the film—from now to a decades-long near future war and out the other side to a World State utopia—in a more nuanced, less nakedly fascistic manner? I think it does. But only up to a point.

Certainly, not only the specifics of the book but the texture is different: the pages are dense with detail, the focus ranges around the world, various individual set-pieces (often vividly realised) intersperse long stretches of expository and explanatory prose. The book has none of the characters of the movie, and no clumsily Bunyanesque ‘Everytown’ touches; instead it carries-through the stylistic strategies of 1920's Outline of History into the future. Indeed, roughly the first quarter of the novel isn't concerned with the ‘to-come’ at all, instead recapitulating and abbreviating Outline of History's account of the 19th-century and the first two decades of the twentieth, and bringing it up to 1933. And as far as that goes, it still reads pretty well. This, for an account of Hitler (for instance) gets to the nub of the issue, which is pretty good going for a date as early as 1933:

Adolf Hitler is one of the most incredible figures in the whole of history. He must have astonished even the teachers and writers who had evoked him. We can study his personal presence from a hundred different angles in Vol. 30112 of the Historical Portrait Gallery, and it is that of an entirely commonplace man, void of dignity, void of fine quality. We can hear his voice, we can hear him persuading, exhorting and attempting to reason from the numerous steel-tape records that were made of his speeches. It is a raucous, strained voice, talking violently but incoherently. It is the voice of a vulgar, limited, illiterate man, lashing himself to fierceness, shouting, threatening, beating his fists at the window, smashing the furniture about him, to escape from perplexity and despair. He was perfectly simple and honest in his quality. And that was perhaps the secret of his career. He gave vent to the German overstrain. He is the voice of Germany losing control.

He denounced foreigners, Jews, Cosmopolitans, Communists, Republicans, owners of property and leaders in finance with raucous impartiality, and nothing is so pleasing to perplexed unhappy people as the denunciation of others. Not their fault, their troubles. They have been betrayed. To Fallada's question, ‘Little Man, what now?’ his answer was, ‘Massacre Jews, expel foreigners, arm and get more arms, be German, utterly German, and increase and multiply.’ [Shape of Things to Come, 2:7]

Not a bad thumbnail sketch, I'd say.

But this dry, historico-analytic tone becomes less persuasive as Wells imagines into the future. His later 1930s is characterised by increasing lawlessness, gangsters seizing power, protection rackets becoming the norm, people driving around in armoured cars and living in fortified houses. Wells does, its true, imagine World War 2 breaking out in 1940, but not because Hitler preemptively invades Poland and France, instead through a random if violent misunderstanding: a Jew, on a train that has stopped briefly in the free city of Danzig, tries to extract ‘an orange-pip or a small fragment of walnut’ from behind his dental plate. A young Nazi on the platform sees what he thinks is a Jew making disrespectful faces at him through the window, boards the train and shoots the Jew dead. This violation of neutrality snowballs until it has ‘released the dogs of war from the Pyrenees to Siberia’ [2:9].

That war is essentially a re-run of 1914-18, a trench-war stalemate that drags on until the 1950s. Then plague ravages the shattered remains of civilisation, described in a chapter with some nice zombie-like touches (‘one terror which is never omitted [in accounts of the plague] is the wandering of the infected. Nothing would induce them to remain in bed or hospital; nothing could keep them from entering towns and houses that were as yet immune. Thousands of these dying wanderers were shot by terror-stricken people whom they approached’ [2:9]) but which has nothing to do with meaningful prophecy.

Finally, in 1965, the remaining aircraft and shipping companies gather in Basra to consolidate and protect their interests. With the roads in ruins, a monopoly on flight and shipping is effectively a monopoly on all travel and trade, and the ‘Union of Tansport’ (not, I was sorry to see, these guys) uses its influence to enforce civilisation and order upon the world. The account of the reconstruction occupies Book 3 (‘The World Renaissance: The Birth of the Modern State, 1960–1978’), and then we get a Cook's Tour of the World State Utopia Books 4 and 5: ‘The Modern State Militant 1978–2059’ and ‘The Modern State in Control of Life, 2059 to New Year's Day 2106’.

In the novel there's no John or Oswald Cabal, no ‘Wings Over the World’ and no rocket to outer space, let alone any random Simpsons rentamob to disrupt the launch. Rather, it's half a novel of Stapledonian extrapolation followed by an end to history, and a survey of the perfected society. This latter is a remix of a lot of old Wellsian friends, from a global currency based on energy rather than precious metals, to the centrality of ‘right’ education, global unity, the eradication of poverty, racism and so on.

Not that the path from here to there is smooth: there is resistance, backsliding, and for a time Utopia is enforced by a ‘Second Council’ of ‘Air Dictators’, who fly around compelling obedience to the new laws. These are the latest iteration of Wells's beloved Samurai. Their credo is ‘I shall do nothing worth while and nothing worth while will be done unless I pull myself together and stiffen up my conduct’:

If the new Air Dictatorship was schooling the world with considerable austerity, it was certainly schooling itself much more so. The code of the first makers of the World-State had been a simple one. ‘Tell the truth,’ they insisted; ‘maintain the highest technical standards, control money and do not keep it, give your powers ungrudgingly to the service of the World-State.’ [Shape of Things To Come, 4:5]

By the end of the novel, humanity has outgrown its need for rule by the Air Dictatorship, and they sportingly and, I have to say, improbably give up power. Homo sapiens is ready for the next phase of human civilisation: radically reshaping the earth (Wells calls this ‘Geogonic Planning’) and a move towards a transcendent group-consciousness of all mankind, to supersede ‘our little selves’ and become a collective ‘Man the Undying who achieves these things through us’ [5.9]

Because this whole historical narrative happens much more gradually, with vastly more specific detail, it doesn't feel as wrenching as it does in the movie. But that fine-grained confident voice is more than a little misleading. The basic wrench, or twist, in historical process is still there, just disguised by a great deal of prose. We still go from a species so violent and self-destructive that we all but annihilate ourselves, through the needle's-eye of a group of technocratic aircraft and ship owners, to a glorious gleaming future Utopia. And we're still entitled to ask: how?

The key, I think, is buried in the middle of the book, and, rather oddly, Wells does not draw attention to it. The novel's framing device is a conceit by which ‘H G Wells’ is actually editing for publication a visionary manuscript completed by his friend Dr Philip Raven (whom I take to be a version of Graham Wallas) immediately before his death. I mean visionary in the strict sense: Raven foresees the shape of things to come in a series of visions, and has written it all down. Immediately after the section on Hitler quoted above, ‘editor’ Wells inserts a short chapter called ‘A Note on Hate and Cruelty’, noting: ‘this section was in a detached fascicle, but its place seems to be here’. This begins:

The student of history will find it almost impossible to understand the peculiar difficulties of political life as it was lived until about a hundred years ago, nor will he grasp the essential differences between what was called education in those days and the educational processes we are still developing to-day, unless he masters the broad facts about these systems of hatred that dominated the group relationships of mankind right up to the assertion of the Modern State. [Shape of Things To Come, 2:8]

Wells styles hatred as a disease, ‘a sort of social dementia’ occasioned by ‘the absence of a common idea of community’. As communities grow and fill-out more of the world's limited real-estate they bump uglies with other communities, and ‘civilized motives [give] place to instinctive hostilities and spasmodic impulses’. Our problem is that we don't understand that hatred is a disease, and therefore eradicable in the same way that diseases are eradicable: ‘our ancestors did not envisage this as a controllable mental disease. They did not know that it was possible to get through life without hatred, just as they did not know that the coughs and colds that afflicted them and most of the phenomena of senility were avoidable’. But that's the magic ingredient ‘X’ that enables the transition from our grisly present to Wells's gleaming future. We cure hatred.

It is, I think, an interesting notion. It is also, so far as I can see, the first time Wells, howsoever tentatively, proposes an actual mechanism by which what we might call ‘human nature’ gets altered far enough to make Utopia practicable. Hatred is not integral to the human animals, he says: it comes about when ‘two or more population groups, each with its own special narrow and inadaptable culture and usually with a distinctive language or dialect’ finds itself ‘by the change of scale in human affairs jammed together or imposed one upon another’. But this hatred is not in any sense a strategic group self-defense or interest, but instead a kind of group psychosis, and literally rather than metaphorically an illness.

It's a beguiling idea, although I don't think it's (you know) true, actually. But it makes me think. It's interesting to me that hatred isn't one of the traditional Christian seven deadly sins: Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy and Pride. I suppose you might bracket it with wrath, but that's a poor fit: one can very easily hate coldly, with a kind of rational clarity, and cruelty—hate's handmaiden—needs a clearer head than ira tends to allow. Indeed, in another sense hate has a place approximate to virtue in Christian thought, doesn't it? We're supposed to hate the devil, and to hate the sin, though we strive to love the sinner. Hate in the proper proportion, or aimed at the correct target, is an indication that you still care. Of course, that puts a lot of pressure on the need to find the correct target.

This is surely the nub of the matter. Hate is not, whatever some people think, the opposite of love. The opposite of love is indifference. Actually, it's surprisingly easy to fall hard for people we find in many ways hateful. Peter Gay's monumental social history The Cultivation of Hatred (1994), itself the conclusion to an even more monumental trilogy of historical analyses, locates the success of the bourgeoisie in the way it, as a class, internalised repressions that then stoked up, precisely, hatreds. For Gray this reservoir of hatred fueled an aggression that middle class subjects sublimated into the new fields of business and money-making: making one’s way in the world is read as the concrete expression, in many ways a constructive and benevolent expression, of hatred.

I suppose what Gay shares, for all his radical differences, with traditional Christianity is a sense that hatred, as wrongness, is one of the secret truths of human existence. Original sin, as the phrase goes. Wells is saying: on the contrary, hatred is an excrescence, a social infection to which social medicines can be imagined; and that if we removed hatred from human breasts then we would leave the other passions in place.

Whether you're convinced by this thesis or not, it does, I'd argue, at least suggest why the novel version of this story works so much more compellingly than the film version. The idiom of the movie is melodrama, and the currency of melodrama is hate, and its related intensities, including hate-hot love. The idiom of the history textbook is one already purged of such destabilising emotional intensities. Form matches content rather better that way.

After Democracy (1932)

This book is not, per its cover, Wells putting in an early bid for the role of the Blue Fairy in the upcoming Wizard of Oz movie. It is, rather, a collection in book-form of sixteen pieces: some speeches delivered (in Madrid, New York, Paris, the Berlin Reichstag and elsewhere) and some previously published journalism.

There are a great many such volumes in Wells's bibliography, yes: but this one is more readable than many of them. In its review, The Spectator called this style of book ‘the stuff which in any other great author appears as a sediment packed into the last volume of the exhaustive addition of the complete works’. But adds: ‘with Mr. Wells somehow it is different. His journalism cannot be dismissed, as can the journalism of almost any other well-known writer, as a merely private matter between him and his bank-manager’ [Spectator (22 October 1932), 20]. Subtitled ‘Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation’ this collection is a useful summary of where Wells's socio-political thinking had reached by the early thirties. Not that that's necessarily a very likeable position. But it is readable. Can't deny that.

Wells is now more fully committed to the idea that a writer cannot simply describe the world, but must try to intervene in it: ‘in a world that moves as our world now moves’ is how he puts it, ‘—a fleet of huge vessels manoeuvring without common plan in an area that grows daily more restricted—it is not the aloof artist that counts, it is the man who dares climb on to a prow and shout instructions with a megaphone’. So what is he bellowing through the megaphone of his global fame? Well, he's mostly shouting his contempt for democracy. Check the book's title.

Instead of the old 19th-century representative democracy he calls for ‘the dictatorship of informed and educated common sense’ (‘The world,’ he says, ‘is sick of parliamentary politics’). In a speech Wells delivered to the Liberal Summer School he urges liberals and socialists alike to study Loyola, of all people. He's still insisting upon the need for his Samurai order to enforce order and happiness on the world, and it still sounds to me like the SS. And although he doesn't specifically bang the eugenicist drum here, the unpleasant odour of that belief-set nonetheless hangs over the whole like a malarial miasma:

The world and its future is not for feeble folk any more than it is for selfish folk. It is not for the multitude but for the best ... I want to make opportunity universal and not miss out one single being who is worth while. [After Democracy, 50]

The kind of thing only somebody who considers themselves part of ‘the best’ is liable to say, of course. Hitler's appointment as Chancellor of Germany, in January 1933, was only a few short months away.

The Bulpington of Blup (1932)

:1:

Going through Wells more-or-less systematically as I'm doing has unearthed all sorts of things I didn't know before. For instance, I hadn't previously realised that Wells was friends with Carl Jung. From the 1920s onward the two of them met, talked and corresponded. Jung's published work several times makes reference to ‘my friend H G Wells’; and Wells in turn gave Jung a walk-on part in The World of William Clissold (1926). Wells's Experiment in Autobiography (1934) frames his whole life-story by distinguishing between his actual self and the self he is prone to narrate into existence, ‘what Jung would call my persona’ [Experiment, 9].

Which brings me to The Bulpington of Blup, a book with surely the most catastrophically ill-judged title of any Wells publication, more like background sound-effects in a David Attenborough documentary about toads than the name of a novel. (I know it's supposed to be comical. That doesn't excuse it, I feel). But a very interesting, and profoundly Jungian, work nonetheless.

Now: I hypothecate, though without hard evidence, that Jung confided to Wells something private and personal about his young life in Switzerland, and Wells then used this as the core idea of his novel.

Confided what? The wider world finally learnt of Jung's childhood secret in 1962, when Jung collaborated with Aniela Jaffé on his autobiography, Erinnerungen, Träume, GedankenMemories (it appeared in English in 1963 as Memories, Dreams, Reflections). Here Jung recalls his childhood in near misery-memoir terms. Jung's mother was a difficult woman, unpredictably alternating remoteness with over-intimate affection. His mild-mannered father was chaplain to a nearby mental hospital and Jung agonized that his own shyness and awkwardness were actually manifestations of ‘hereditary taint’. In John Kerr's words, young Jung was

an asocial miscreant, rejected by his peers. Home was no better—the atmosphere was ‘unbreathable’— ... To relieve periodic choking fits he took to visualising golden angels against a blue background. And there were spaces inside spaces where one might be safe. He carved a tiny mannikin, hid it beneath the attic floorboards, and for a year ritually presented the little man with miniature scrolls written in a secret language. Guilty in his demeanour when challenged, Jung was a natural target at school. His teachers punished him, the other boys tormented him, and he could find no better solution than to fake dizzy spells so that he might stay at home. He was so convincing in this role that the doctors worried his father into believing he might be incurable. [John Kerr, ‘Madnesses’, LRB 17:6 (1995), 3]

Memories, Dreams, Reflections details the psychological defense mechanism Jung developed to handle this situation. He became convinced that he was two people: ‘Personality No 1’ and ‘Personality No 2’. The former was an insecure schoolboy, the individual the world knew; the latter a secret inner identity, a distant, immensely grand and old being, ‘close to nature’ and above all ‘close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever “God” worked directly in him’ [Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 45]. Jung wasn't always able to maintain an intimate relationship with Personality No 2, and in later adolescence he actively concentrated on his ‘ego’ version, Personality No 1, so as to do as well as possible at school, with No.2 receding into his background and being more associated with his depressive moods.

The two were distinct (for example: when Jung planned to go to college, his Personality No.1 wanted to study science and No.2 comparative religion and philosophy) but not schizophrenic, in either the clinical or layman's sense of the term. It seems that No 2 had a name—beyond, that is, ‘Personality No 2’—but Jung didn't disclose it to Jaffé. John Kerr thinks the name was Goethe, and that young Jung might have believed himself Geothe's reincarnation (Jung family legend identified the great man as, supposedly, a distant ancestor). Memories, Dreams, Reflections doesn't say so, perhaps because older Jung was a little embarrassed by this too-obvious lineage, or because his theories had developed past mystic notions of simple reincarnation—although the autobiography has many praising things to say about Goethe otherwise. At any rate, Jung argued that we all, to one degree or another, carry these two sorts of souls within us.

And Wells? The Bulpington of Blup is a novel about shy, troubled youngster called Theodore Bulpington, the only child of a forceful, difficult mother and ineffectual father (a poet with a weak chest). Theodore is conscious of a much grander version of himself within himself. This is how the novel opens:

There had been a time when he felt that he ought not to call himself The Bulpington of Blup. Though it was only in his own mind that he called himself the Bulpington of Blup. He never called himself the Bulpington of Blup to any other human being. But to himself he did it continually. And the effects of doing it spread about in his brain. Sometimes it seemed to help things; sometimes to hinder them. For some years he made a great effort not to be The Bulpington of Blup any more, to be simply and really what he was—whatever that might be ... He had determined to look facts in the face—squarely in the face. He would go for walks whispering, “I am just Theodore Bulpington, a commonplace youth.” Even so he would find himself putting it in phrases that betrayed him. “It ill becomes the Bulpington of Blup to shirk the harsh visage of reality.” [Blup, 1:1]

If this premise was based on Jung's childhood experiences (and Jung is mentioned in the novel, though only in passing [3:2]) then Wells can only have learned of those experiences via Jung's personal confidence.

:2:

Theodore grows up in the English seaside town of Blayport, a version of Folkestone. But his pinching, mundane Edwardian existence there encourages his mind to imagine a more impressive alternative. Since his real life is ‘full of boredom, obligation and frustration’ [1:3], his Personality No 2 inhabits a grander locale. His history teacher tells the class that Brighton was originally called Brighthelmstone, and London Londinium. Theodore invents the idea that Blayport's ancient name was ‘Blup’:

Blup hit upon Theodore’s fancy, hit his fancy indeed, extremely. Blup. It sounded like a great cliff, a ‘bluff’; it sounded like the smack of waves; it made him think of a horde of pirates, desperate fellows, harbouring there, Bulpingtons all. And among them a leader, one, head of the clan, spite of his tender years, the best of the breed, The Bulpington himself. [Blup, 1:1]

Blup soon detaches itself from the reality of Blayport:

It made itself a tortuous rocky harbour like a Norwegian fiord. It retreated up formidable gorges. And then it went inland and became a strange mountainous country where there were dense very green forests and the white roads wound about like serpents. One saw it usually from very far off and particularly about the time of sunset. It had walls and pinnacles of a creamy sort of rock that glittered micaceously, and there were always very still and watchful sentinels upon its ramparts. And at the sunset gun the great embroidered banner of The Bulpington fell down fold upon fold, fold upon fold, gold thread and shining silk, and gave place to the little storm flag that fluttered through the night.

And sometimes Blup receded altogether beyond the visible horizon and The Bulpington thereof, mysteriously in exile, went unsuspected and misunderstood, a slight dark boy going for an apparently aimless walk, a schoolboy treated contumeliously by women teachers of mathematics, a scornful saunterer amidst the vulgar antics of excursionists upon the beach, biding his time for the signal that would change all that. [Blup, 1:2]

Micaceously is a great word, though, isn't it? Jung, in landlocked Switzerland, also imagined a rocky port and romantic medieval castle as the location (‘this is my home’) of his ‘Personality No. 2’.

Not unlike Mrs Jung, Theodore's mother, Clorinda, is a difficult woman, alternating remoteness with over-intimate affection. She disappears to London for many days, and reappears unexpectedly: ‘when she returned she would relapse into her languorous art gowns and her affection for Raymond would be exceptionally ostentatious and abundant’ [1:3]. A handsome young man comes to visit, has hearty academic discussions with Raymond (Theodore's father) and converses with Clorinda in quieter tones. He is as uninterested in Theodore as everybody else is.

In the living-room he came upon Clorinda and the fair young man. They were on the Empire sofa. Their lips were pressed together and the young man’s hand (and half his arm) was thrust in a searching manner into the ample décolletage of Clorinda’s gown. Theodore’s presence was only remarked as he departed.

It was after this that he was given boots instead of sandshoes and told by Clorinda to carry himself manfully and not to “sneak about” so much. She said it got on her nerves. And the relationship of Theodore of Blayport to The Bulpington of Blup took on a new aspect.

Theodore befriends Teddy Broxted, who owns a microscope, perusal through which fills Theodore with wonder. Then he develops a crush on Teddy's sister Margaret, an ordinary Blayport schoolgirl, convincing himself she is a reincarnation of the Sibyl of yore. The three grow through adolescence together, Theodore quoting Henry James about art and form, Teddy announcing that he plans to dedicate his life to ‘science and socialism’ and Margaret insisting ‘I want the Vote,’ (she says this ‘with her eyes askance scrutinizing Theodore’ [3:4]). Margaret and Theodore kiss at a New Year's Eve party.

Then Theodore goes up to London to study art at the Rowlands School. He stays with his Fabian aunt, sees George Bernard Shaw speak, and disagrees with the socialists he meets: ‘“Why talk and work for a Social Revolution if it’s bound to happen?” That was a great point to make’ [3:7]. He decides he is in love with Margaret, but nonetheless he has an affair with one of his fellow students, Rachel Bernstein (‘in some magic fashion sex had lost all touch of obscenity. Rachel had so filled his mind with herself and her lithe vitality’ [4:1])—a betrayal he justifies by arguing that though Theodore loves Margaret, it is the Bulpington of Blup ‘that great figure, full as ever of the love and appreciation of life’ who is dallying with ‘the untidy, eager little Jewess’. It was not really he, but ‘the great young man, so reminiscent of the youthful Goethe, [who] toyed with her’ [4:2].

Goethe, see?

Theodore's father dies, and Wells gives us a very nicely written chapter about the High Edwardian funeral that ensues, touching and absurd at once. Then war breaks out, and Theodore, in an access of patriotism, enlists (‘“Dear England,” he whispered. “My England”’ [6:2]). Socialist-pacifist Teddy and Margaret are both disgusted with him. In contrast to the wartime-penned Joan and Peter (1918), which mocks pacificism roundly, Wells here has a deal of sympathy for the movement. Theodore's reflex patriotism is merely a function of the Bulpington of Blup personality overwhelming his other self: ‘the Bulpington of Blup, built up upon romantic, noble, historical and literary material, accepted the war and his own necessary participation in it as inevitable, and fought down all those mute instinctive objections of the circumambient Theodore’ [6:5].

Wells says the novel is going to skip the war itself:

Our story concerns the brain of Theodore and has no interest in describing the backgrounds of his experiences, except in so far as they changed the tenor of his mind. So here we will not repeat what has been told wonderfully and for all time, out of the richness of their intense personal impressions, by Aldington, Blunden, Graves, Gristwood, Stephen Graham, Ralph Scott, Montague, Sassoon, Tomlinson, Nevinson, Hodson and their peers; the tale of our gently civilized, none too thorough Britons coming out, or being dragged out, of the easy, regular, comfortable, three-meals-a-day-and-a-bed-at-night life in which they had been moulded, to the brutalities and hardships of the barrack yard, to the coarse clothing, to the reek and creeping dirtiness of crowded humanity, to the mean indignities of subjection and petty tyranny, to the exhausting route marches and exercises, to the bayonet training and the bombing school, the brief respite of leave, the sentimental farewells to home and friends, the crowded journey in darkened ships across the water to France, the halts and uncertainties, the shifting from rat-infested billet to louse-infested billet, the first vibration of the guns, the steady journey towards that muttering monster, always muttering louder, the sudden flash and concussion of batteries near at hand, the mud, rain, exposure, the carrying of heavy weights on slippery tracks, the increasing detonations and concussions, the flares at night, the first glimpse of air raids, the first shell-bursts. And so at last, with all the poor habitual decency and convenience of civilization left behind, to the stench and mud, the smashed protections and flimsy shelters, the thundering, rattling, glaring black suspense of the trenches, where in uproar, filth and fatigue they were to meet at the same time the alpha and omega of human evil, the renascent savagery of animal combativeness in alliance with such a mechanical destructiveness as no other age ever conceived. [Blup 6:6]

He doesn't skip it, though:

Quick march. He was told to keep to the right. Everybody was swerving to the right past a blood-bespattered patch of broken-up roadway. Something slippery was under his foot. Bah!—a red smear, and something. He stopped agape. Close at hand was a human body mainly denuded, torn in half. An indescribable mangled mass of red viscera trailed away from it in the dust. The head was lying away from him, seemed to be staring at him. He recognized the contorted face. He had known the man. There was a crumpled figure a few yards further on; what had happened to it? It was as if it tried to conceal its own indignity. God! And again among the weeds—was that an arm? A human arm torn off and flung aside!

“Get on there! Get on! They’re done for. There’s no helping them.”

But before Theodore could get on he had to be sick. He staggered out towards the roadside away from all that.

“Hurry up!” cried a sergeant. “Get it over!”

Theodore wanted to lie down and end. He was punched in the back, shaken by the shoulders and thrust forward. He stumbled along, staggering and still retching, after his section. He was weeping. “My God!” he repeated, “My God!” over and over again. He had never thought it would be anything like this. [Blup, 6:7]

Theodore is promoted, on account of infuentual family friends rather than any personal merit, and posted behind the lines for a while to work on aerial mapping. Here he injures his knee—wrenching it ‘taking a jaunty step down where there was no step outside the drawing office’ [7:1]—and goes to England to recuperate. When the time comes to return to his battalion Margaret and his ailing mother Clorinda urge him not to go. He goes back anyway, although reluctantly. En route to the front he learns that his mother has died. Heartbroken in Paris, he sleeps with an Algerian prostitute and in his postcoital guilt writes a highly-wrought letter to Margaret confessing his infidelity and his feelings of cowardice.

Back at the front for the final push, he has a pacifist epiphany: ‘Teddy had been right. Margaret was right. This is the last insanity of mankind. All these men, the men about him and the men against him, these fantastic men in masks, are mad, mad to have obeyed, mad to have marched to this, lunatics to go on with it. Before everything else he must get out of this nightmare, away from these maniacs’ [7:10]. He deserts, in a kind of fugue state, is captured, and is lucky to avoid execution. The young doctor who examines him is disinclined to send another fellow to the firing squad, and files the patently absurd report that Theodore was ‘leading [his] men splendidly and a shell exploded’ which ‘blew [him]—about a mile and a half to the rear’ [7:10]. Hospitalised with shell shock, Theodore sees out the rest of the war, and afterwards returns to London to try and pick-up the threads of his life. But Margaret has not forgiven him for the Parisian prostitute, and now has a fiancé called Laverock, who turns out, coincidentally, to be the doctor whose lie saved his life in France. Theodore sells his London flat and goes to live in Paris.

The final chapter is set ten years later. Theodore has carved out a new life for himself under the name ‘Captain Blup-Bulpington’ (‘—he never specified his regiment’) as part of the Parisian literary scene, ‘the editor and part owner of a brilliantly aggressive little magazine, called The Feet of the Young Men’ (printed ‘entirely without punctuation marks, merely with gaps of varying length, and all the capital B’s and P’s put backside foremost’):

He was now, it became more and more definite, the only surviving scion of an old English Catholic family, which had diverged from the Roman communion only after the later developments of doctrine—Infallibility and the Immaculate Conception—in the nineteenth century. He was a conservative even among Catholics. He was saturated with ripe, old traditions, a fine and gallant gentleman picking his fastidious way through the bulks and noises of a crude mechanical age. [Blup, 9:1]

This reinvention means that he entirely forgets Teddy and Margaret. A decade of this and he quarrels with the magazine, sells his share and returns to England. On the train home he has a long conversation with a young man, a socialist certain new strategies of education can change human nature and bring about a world utopia. Theodore is startled to learn that this fellow is a student of Teddy Broxted: his former childhood friend, now a eminent Professor and leading socialist agitator.

But if Teddy is going from strength to strength, Theodore retreats into parochial obscurity. He goes to live with his elderly aunt in her Devonshire cottage, and becomes a feature of that provincial world, spinning heroic mendacities about his war-service at dinner parties. At one he invents the tale that, during the final advance, he personally captured the Kaiser, but, recognising his royalty and honorableness, let him go again. His audience of old maids and aunts is very impressed. Later, as he walks home under starlight, the uneasy half-awareness that he has been lying encroaches upon him: ‘this feeling that he had not been telling the truth increased’ [9:7].

Was he a liar? Was he becoming an outrageously careless and preposterous liar? The sort of liar who isn’t even believed? The Headlong Romancer? He questioned himself with an unwonted and unrestrained brutality. [Blup, 9:7]

But as he hovers on the edge of realising the distortion the Bulpington of Blup has effected on his life, he reels back, haranguing the silent night sky with his self-justification:

He considered: “I am that I am.” That was still not quite correct, not quite his intention, and he wished to state his intention very plainly. And besides—come to think of it—it was a quotation.

“No—not what I am, that’s your affair, perhaps. No, I am what I choose to be. See?”

He whispered that over again. “What I choose to be.” That was better. That was right. Thereby he asserted precisely the power of his Will. [Blup, 9:7]

Back home he pours himself several large whiskies, and salutes his grandfather clock as a fellow old-soldier. The last lines of the novel are: ‘A most satisfying evening. Refined intelligent women—ladies. All his values sang together within him.’

:3:

By 1932 Wells's fiction sales had been sliding for a while. Ernst Benn, who carried all the late 20s fiction, had declined to publish The Autocracy of Mr Parham (1930), citing as many as 10,000 unsold returns on previous Wells titles. Heinemann agreed to publish Parham, but they lost £900 on it and weren't interested in The Bulpington of Blup, which was instead acquired by Macmillan. Wells himself thought highly of this novel, or at least thought that its protagonist Theodore was as good a piece of characterization as Kipps (he said this in letters as he was writing it, and repeats the judgement in his Experiment in Autobiography). Contemporaries did not agree. The Kirkus Review (20 Jan 1933) was particularly cutting:

A disappointing endeavor to get back into the stride of Tono-bun-gay and The Adventures of Mr. Polly. The hero is of the stuff of which literary characters are made, but instead of having flesh and blood and bones and sinews, he is a lay figure, which the author exposes successively to the onslaughts of science, adolescence, religion, the new art, sex in the raw, socialism, communism, death, war, the aftermath of war, and the ultimate supremacy of his fantasy self. Artificial, self-conscious, full. We cannot congratulate Macmillan on re-acquiring him.

That egregiously hyper-hyphenated Tono-bun-gay, there, is a nice piece of trolling; and the final dig at Macmillan really quite catty.

Later critical opinion has tended to concur with the negative assessment, if not the cattiness. Although some brave critics have tried to mount a rearguard defence. Robert Bloom, for instance, argues that in The Bulpington of Blup ‘Wells has devised an intriguing form—an anti-Bildungsroman.’ The failure of Theodore to grow into any constructive social role derives, Bloom argues, from ‘such special and dubious forms of the arts as fin de siècle aestheticism, escapist romanticism, and the reactionary poetics of the twenties’ (as per the satire on Modernist Little Magazines, quoted above). According to Bloom, the novel contrasts the forward-looking science-based action of Teddy and Margaret Broxted with the backward-looking romantic-conservative and mendacious passivity of Theodore himself: ‘Wells' whole career is based on the idea that the world can be, must be, changed for the better by the application of science and good will’. [Bloom, Anatomies of Egotism: A Reading of the Last Novels of H. G. Wells (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 57; Christiane Gannon takes a similar line in ‘H. G. Wells and the Aestheticized Individual: Critiquing the Bildungsroman in The Bulpington of Blup,’ Modern Philology 112:3 (2015): 503-521]

It's certainly a wrongfooting novel, but I take that to be, in part, its point. Still, I think Bloom is wrong about it. The anti-Bildungsroman aspect is not that The Bulpington of Blup is not a Bildungsroman. Clearly it is a Bildungsroman: the main character grows and evolves, changes, such that he is not the same person at the end of the novel as he was at the beginning. No: a better argument is surely that this novel works against the grain of the Bildungsroman by inverting the assumptions of its traditional trajectory. I'm talking about the classic form of emotional and existential maturation, the Emma Woodhouse or David Copperfield line—a trajectory, that is to say, away from a lower (less aware, more foolish) subjectivity and towards a higher authenticity of lived experience. Wells instead minutely traces a character who, led by his secret Jungian Personality No.2, grows and changes into a less authentic, less wise human being. And sticks there. Which, now that I am older myself, and as I look around the people who have grown up around me, strikes me as ... well, quite a penetrating observation about human nature, actually. Appropriately enough for the author of The Time Machine, it is a novel not of character evolution but of character devolution. And in this respect The Bulpington of Blup is a remarkable character study. I can understand why Wells thought it worthy of comparison with Kipps.

Theodore is, in plain language, a liar. Insofar as he imposes his lies on the people around him, he's a kind of confidence man. Posing in Paris as Captain Blup-Bulpington, rather than cowardly Bulpington the deserter, is a pretty con-artist manoeuvre, after all. Wells's originality is in telling the story of a liar from the inside, and in a way that avoids the scylla-charybdis of harsh moral judgement on the one hand, or ironic-satiric diabolical celebration on the other. There's no shortage of  liars (from Chaucer's Pardoner through Iago to Melmotte and Merdle) in literature, and no shortage either of trickster figures, from Anansi and Loki through to Melville's Confidence-Man, or (to pick an example more contemporaneous with Wells) Bulgakov's Professor Woland. But in all those cases the trickster owns their trickery; they are, we might say, confident in their confidence-man games. By switching his focus about, and tracing the way an otherwise unremarkable boy grows into an adult defined by his self-deception, Wells is attempting something unprecedented in fiction, I think.

It is a book, to coin a phrase, about truth and lies in a non-moral sense. We don't despise Bulpington, even at the end: bragging impossible feats to an audience of gullible old women. In a letter to Watt, his literary agent, Wells wrote that Theodore was ‘an acutely differentiated character’ adding that ‘there is something of all of us in his mental tangles, and though he is an unfaithful lover, an outrageous liar and narrowly escapes being shot for cowardice, he keeps more of our sympathy to the end than perhaps some of will care to admit’ [26th Aug 1932; quoted in Smith, 301-02]. I think that's right.

That's because the novel is a study not in the morality but in the psychology of lying, and this brings us back to Jung. Several times in his writing Jung argued that any lie, howsoever semantically mendacious, cannot help but be psychologically and imaginatively true. This is Jung's key (just as a for instance) to organised religion:

Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining’, otherwise no consciousness could exist and the occurrence would lack phenomenality. Imagination itself is a psychic process, for which reason it is completely irrelevant whether the enlightenment be called ‘real’ or ‘imaginary’. The person who has enlightenment, or alleges that he has it, thinks at all events that he is enlightened … Even if he were lying, his lie would still be a psychic fact. Indeed, even if all the reports of religious experiences were nothing but deliberate inventions and falsifications, a very interesting psychological treatise could still be written about the incidence of such lies. [Jung, Psychology and Religion (1938); in Jung: Collected Works (translated by R F C Hull; 20 vols, Routledge 1953-91), 11: 5428]

The emphasis in that last sentence is on the psychological.

Bulpington's ‘Personality No 2’ toys with religion at various places—when he leaves England for France following his postwar rebuff by Margaret, his plan is to join the Jesuits—but in the end he is drawn to a more secular, if mythic-magnified, version of things. I suppose we are likely to bracket ‘telling stories’ about saints and angelic miracles as a quite separate sort of perjury from ‘telling stories’ about purely imaginary battlefield heroisms. And Wells is not trying to downplay the socially destructive wickedness that can result from lying. It's that his focus is on the ways we lie to ourselves, rather than on the ways we lie to other people. Even the final dinner party scene here, in The Bulpington of Blup, has more to do with Theodore constructing a version of himself that satisfies himself. Earlier in the novel he lies to impress women because he wants to go to bed with them; but by this stage in the story the old biddies listening, amazed, are a sort of mirror to the glamour of his own mendacity.

Why, this novel asks, do we lie to ourselves? Usually when we lie to other people we are trying specifically to fool them, often for a specific advantage. But why do so many of us lie to ourselves? How can we hope to get away with it? Since the person we are lying to is also the person doing the lying the former surely knows the mendacity of the latter?

The commonsense answer to that question, I suppose, would be: to align our desiring self with the constraints of social acceptability as such, or perhaps more to the point, with those constraints as we have internalised them. Frank Cioffi recounts a story about Samuel Pepys:

Consider a remark which Pepys confided to his journal: ‘Up and at my chamber all the morning doing business and also reading a little of L’Escolle des filles, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read over to inform him in the villainy of the world.’ Let us put aside the question of how Pepys could have been oblivious of what is comically transparent to us and ask instead just how his rationalisation disadvantaged him. He might have made a fool of himself by sporting the book openly and then proffered his absurd justification when challenged or even have offered to lend it to some pious friend on the same ostensible ground that he was reading it himself.

That he did neither of these things was not a matter of luck. We are later told that, having finished the book, ‘I burned it that it might not be among my books to my shame.’ So Pepys was intermittently aware that the motive he gave himself would not be credited by his wife or heirs. His capacity for self-deception thus gave him the best of both worlds. He was able to enjoy his perusal of pornography without self-reproach and to take prudent steps at the same time to protect his reputation. [Frank Cioffi, ‘Porky-Talky’, LRB 16:18 (1994), 16]

Cioffi wonders if this sort of thing is, actually, very widespread; and I daresay it is. But Wells's book is suggesting something rather different, something, in fact, more Jungian: that the real point in lying to ourselves is not to make ourselves feel good, but to make ourselves feel grander—more important, more noble, more sublime. This is where the mythic self-elaboration that turns Theodore into the Bulpington of Blup blurs into religious faith. Wells's friend William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, in Adam Phillips reading, is a work exploring the place where truth flows into creativity. ‘The truth of your beliefs is what they can do for you, James says,’ is how Phillips put it. ‘Truth is the name you will give to whatever turns out to have been good to believe’ [Phillips, Side Effects (2006), 78]. The Bulpington of Blup is a story about the psychological territorial demands that self-oriented sense of good entails.

That inevitably means it becomes a story about storytelling, about Wells's own profession. Indeed, one of the problems of the novel, I think, is that it only touches on this metafictional critique glancingly. Despite being a book of made-up-stories about the psychological perils of made-up-stories that includes occasional satires of the literary world, Wells doesn't dilate upon any of that. My suspicion is that Wells wants to separate out ‘socialist made-up-stories about the coming World State’ from ‘conservative made-up-stories about the sheet-anchor of the dead past’ (on his final return to England Theodore plans to become a writer: ‘He would do for the nineteenth century what Sir Walter Scott had done for the eighteenth ... He would make Queen Victoria the goddess of the story, no Virgin goddess but better, almost symbolically prolific and beneficent. The Prince Consort would be the King Arthur of that romantic galaxy’ [9:4]). It's the partial nature of this that doesn't quite work, I think. If writing neo-Scottian romances is mendacious, then what about other kinds of made-up fiction? What about writing per se?

Although perhaps I'm being unfair. Wells was increasingly defining himself as a writer of non-fiction, after all, and his output of novels certainly thins out over the decade and a half remaining of his life. And, more, he grasps the appeal of Theodore's fantasying, he knows the draw of the lie. There's a Les Murray poem I like that paradoxically (doubly paradoxically for a Christian poet) celebrates lying as the Apollo 11 moon-landing of Blakean experience: ‘Like The Joy At His First Lie’ (1990):

Paradises of limitation, charm
of perpetual doughy innocence—
how quickly the reality
scrubs such stuff from mind.
Today, at eleven and a half,
he made his first purchase:
forty cents, for two biscuits, no change
but a giant step into mankind.

We might say: oh that's a trivial sort of lying, and I suppose it is. But I think Murray is saying something different in this little poem; not the triviality of the lie, but the complicated importance of the step it represents. Not that innocence is to be despised, or abandoned as we move on; but that experience is its necessary corollary for adult living. Just so long as you don't abandon innocence's paradisical limitations altogether. And I think, in its different way, The Bulpington of Blup is saying the same thing. That the moon is beautiful, and a worthy object of man's striving. But you wouldn't want to live there.

The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1932)

The third in Wells's trilogy of Big Synthetic Books (as I like to think of them)—that is, works that aim to synthesize and accessibly re-present everything that is known about a particular topic or field of knowledge. The first was the Outline of History (1920), the second the biological Science of Life (1929-30). The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind was an attempt to consolidate everything that was known about economics, money-theory and social philosophy. You'll see, straight off, that this is a less well-defined subject-category than ‘History’ and ‘Biology’, and it has to be acknowledged that, though Wells laboured long on this volume and had the highest hopes that it would facilitate his ‘Open Conspiracy’ and effect real social change, it had by far the least impact of all three.

It had a troubled gestation. Wells had written The Outline of History pretty much solus, with some assistance from his wife Jane. With The Science of Life he recruited collaborators: Julian Huxley and his son Gip. In that case he was lucky in his co-workers; but with Work, Wealth and Happiness his choices were markedly less felicitous. He initially, in 1928, approached an old acquaintance from his Fabian Society days, Hugh Pembroke Vowles, along with another man called Edmund Cressey. They were offered a flat fee: generous—it seems Vowles was offered £6000—but not the percentage of copyright that Huxley and Gip had received (Wells also seems to have ‘advanced’, or possibly just lent, Vowles £800 up-front; the sum was disputed when the case when to law). Vowles worked for a year or so, before Wells's growing dissatisfaction with what he was producing reached crisis levels. Wells put the whole project on hold, effectively firing Vowles. Then Wells went on holiday. When he returned it was to discover that Vowles had taken his grievance to the Society of Authors (of which organisation Wells was also a member, and which he had supported vigorously through the 1920s and 1930s) and that following their intervention Wells was being sued for breach of contract.

Things got messy. Wells got more and more annoyed. The secretary of the Society of Authors, Herbert Thring, had urged Vowles's to seek legal redress, and Wells, feeling under attack, privately printed a pamphlet to distribute to members of the Society putting his side of the affair: The Problem of the Troublesome Collaborator (1930). This didn't help. Both Vowles and Thring considered themselves libeled by the document, and said a number of disobliging things about Wells. It all made the eventual legal settlement more complex and expensive. In Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie's words, ‘all three principals in the dispute behaved so foolishly that a reasonable agreement had become impossible’ [H G Wells: a Biography (1973), 361].

In the end Wells paid Vowles not the £6000 he demanded, but a substantial portion of it, and agreed to publish a new pamphlet (Settlement of the Trouble Between Mr. Thring and Mr. Wells: A Footnote to The Problem of the Troublesome Collaborator, 1930) retracting some of the things said in the first. Wells junked Vowles's work and, ill and unhappy as he was, for a while the writing of this book fell into desuetude.

But the project was too important to his sense of self to abandon. In H G Wells in Love [142] he says ‘I was disposed to anxiety; I thought my time was drawing to an end, and I was fussily urgent to get on with the scheme of work’ embodied in the book. In fact he wasn't dying. He took his exhaustion and ebbing life-force to a doctor and was diagnosed as diabetic in 1931, after which he responded positively to treatment, and enjoyed a renewed vitality.

Returning to Work, Wealth and Happiness Wells recruited new collaborators: he asked his old friend Graham Wallas to read the political chapters. Wallas was ill himself, and actually died in 1932; but he read and made various suggestions. Wells also recruited his old lover, and father of one of his children, Amber Reeves, now Amber Blanco-White, to work on the money chapters, and his current lover Odette Keun worked extensively on the project too (both Reeves and Keun received a one-eighth share of royalties by way of payment). Wells paid various other experts one-off fees (Alexander Carr-Saunders provided data on population growth and demographic change, for instance).

David C Smith is full of praise for the resulting volume:

The book is an astounding work, especially when one considers than nothing like it had ever before been published. It features strong material on banking, economics, the increase in leisure time, and a history of educational ideas. Perhaps its most outstanding feature (for 1932) were histories of leisure time, games, the theatre and entertainment. Short discrete sections on manufacturing discussed plastics, paper, resin, iron and steel, the transmission and generation of power, production of food, the development of architectural ideas, labour unions, legal education and ideas, banking, the gold standard and its recent abandonment. [Smith, Desperately Mortal (1986), 266]

My reaction to the book is less dithythambic, but only because it strikes me as, frankly, a hodgepodge. A congeries of interesting snippets, gathered together under a loosely Baconian/Diderot-esque encyclopedic logic. Just listing the contents page gives a sense of how variegated the whole is:

INTRODUCTION: THE OBJECT OF THIS WORK AND THE WAY IN WHICH IT HAS BEEN WRITTEN

1. An Account of Human Activities Throughout the World and of the Reasons for These Activities
2. The New Education
3. Apropos of Roger Bacon
4. The Outline of History and the Science of Life
5. The Urgent Need for Sound Common Ideas about Work and Wealth
6. Some Difficulties and Problems in the Writing of This Book. Museums of Industrial Progress. The Device of an Imaginary Encyclopaedia

CHAPTER ONE: HOW MAN BECAME AN ECONOMIC ANIMAL

1. Economics Is a Branch of Biology
2. Primitive Man Haphazard as an Animal
3. The Dawn of Social and Economic Life
4. The Domestication of Animals
5. The Beginnings of Settlement and Sustained Work
6. The Rest of the Historical Overture

CHAPTER TWO: HOW MAN HAS LEARNT TO THINK AND GAIN A MASTERY OVER FORCE AND MATTER

1. Directed Thinking
2. The Criticism of the Instrument of Thought from the Beginnings of Directed Thinking Onward; Nominalism and Realism; Experiment; The Renascence of Science
3. The Practical Nature of Renascent Science
4. Ultimate Truths Are Outside the Diagrams of Experimental Science
5. The Organization of Research
6. The Conquest of Substances
7. Some Typical Modem Materials: Pastes, Enamels, and Cements; Cellulose; Milk Products; Resins; Animal and Vegetable Oils; Dyes; Rubber; Petroleum
8. The Story of Iron and Steel
9. The Conquest of Power. Sources of Power
10. Transmission of Power
11. Points of Application

CHAPTER THREE: THE CONQUEST OF DISTANCE

1. The Increasing Range of Modern Life
2. Railway and Steamship
3. The New Road and the Airway
4. The Transmission of Fact. The Present Moment Becomes World-Wide
5. Print and Film

CHAPTER FOUR: THE CONQUEST OF HUNGER: HOW MANKIND IS FED

1. The World Eats
2. Fertilizers
3. The Mechanized and Electrified Farm
4. The Spectacle of Cultivation: The Vineyard and the Bee-Keeper
5. Substitutes and Adulteration
6. Dining and Drugging
7. The Peasant, the Basis of the Old Order
8. The Passing of the Peasant
9. The World’s Catering Is Still Unorganized
10. The Limits of Plenty

CHAPTER FIVE: THE CONQUEST OF CLIMATE: HOW MANKIND IS CLOTHED AND HOUSED

1. The Wardrobes of Mankind
2. Cosmetics
3. The Dissolution of the Home
4. The Landscape of Homes and Cultivations
5. Modem Architecture and the Possible Rebuilding of the World
6. The Lighting of Town and Countryside
7. Protective and Regulative Services of the Modem Town and Countryside

CHAPTER SIX: HOW GOODS ARE BOUGHT AND SOLD

1. Old and New Shopping
2. Teaching People to Want Things
3. Fluctuations and Vagueness in Distribution
4. Co-operative Retailing

CHAPTER SEVEN: HOW WORK IS ORGANIZED

1. Putting the Personnel into the Picture
2. Guild and Trade Union
3. Industrial Democracy: Workers’ Control
4. Profit-Sharing
5. Continuous Employment and Waiting About: the Possibility of Lifetime Jobs for All
6. The Amelioration of the Factory
7. Vestiges of Slavery and Tropical Forced Labour. Putumayo. Congo Rubber
8. Rationalization
9. The Co-operative Movement
10. The Public or Private Direction of Big Industries and General Services
11. Grades of Social Organization

CHAPTER EIGHT WHY PEOPLE WORK

1. The Persona and Conduct
2. The First Class of Persona: The Peasant Persona and Types Mainly Derived from It
3. The Second Class of Persona: The Typical Nomad’s Persona and Its Variations
4. The Third Class of Persona: The Educated Persona and Its Derivatives
5. The Civilization of the Entrepreneur
6. The Idea of Property
7. The Education of the Lawyer
8. “Scientific” Property
9. The Complexities and Mutations of the Money Idea
10. A Resume of the Co-ordinating Motives in a Modern Community

CHAPTER NINE: HOW WORK IS PAID FOR AND WEALTH ACCUMULATED 1. The Counting House Comes into the Picture
2. What Currency Has to Do and What It Is
3. The Inflation, Deflation, and Devalorization of Currencies
4. The Gold Standard
5. Currency Schemes
6. The Bank
7. The Contemporary Evolution of Banking
8. The Modern Fragmentation of Ownership
9. Contemporary Investment Practice
10. Is the Investing Public More than a Transitory Excrescence upon Economic Development?
11. The Elements of the World Depression of 1929-31
12. The Suspension of the Gold Standard by Great Britain in 1931 and the Situation Thus Created

CHAPTER TEN: THE RICH, THE POOR, AND THEIR TRADITIONAL ANTAGONISM

1. Short Studies in the Acquisition or Attempted Acquisition of Wealth. Hetty Green as an Uncreative Accumulator. The Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, the Rothschilds, and National Loans. Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, and Railway Development. J. D. Rockefeller and the Organization of Oil Production. Thomas Alva Edison. Henry Ford. Alfred Loewenstein. Men Who Have Gone Beyond the Permitted Limits
2. The Contemporary Rich
3. The Alleged Social Advantages of a Rich Class
4. The Ideal of Equal Pay for All
5. Do the Modem Rich Want the Poor to Be Kept Poor?
6. The Poor
7. The Paradox of Over-production and Want. Community Buying
8. The Attempt of Soviet Russia to Abolish Rich and Poor Together
9. The Race between Readjustment, Disorder, and Social Revolution

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE WORLD'S WORK

1. How Far Sex Need Be Considered in This Survey
2. Women as Workers and as Competitors with Men. The Keeping of Wives and Families in Relation to Feminine Employment. Social Neuters
3. The Inherent Difference of Physical and Mental Quality between Men and Women
4. Motherhood and the Dependence of Women because of Motherhood
5. Some Moral Consequences of the Traditional Inferiority and Disadvantage of Women. Feminine Acquiescence and Disingenuousness. Prostitution. The White Slave Trade. The Gigolo
6. The Power of Women through Reassurance and Instigation. Woman’s Role in Determining Expenditure
7. Is a Special Type of Adult Education for Women Needed?
8. Possibilities of Distinctive Work for Women in the Modern Community

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE GOVERNMENTS OF MANKIND AND THEIR ECONOMIC AND MILITARY WARFARE

1. Political Organizations
2. A Short Study of the British Government at Work
3. The Permanent Official
4. A Collection of Governments
5. Assent
6. Frontiers and the Official Intercommunication of Governments
7. The Custom House
8. War Preparation as an Industry
9. The Role of the Armament Industry in Fostering Belligerence. Sir Basil Zaharoff. Alfred Krupp
10. Spying and Spy Hunting
11. The Service Mentality. Police
12. Passive Pacificism
13. The League of Nations and Other Experiments in Internationalism
14. Projects for Cosmopolitan Synthesis: Necessity Drives Us Towards World Controls

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE NUMBERS AND QUALITIES OF MANKIND

1. The Increase of the World’s Population
2. Impact of Races and Cultures
3. Eugenics

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE OVERFLOWING ENERGY OF MANKIND

1. A Short History of Leisure
2. The Travel Bureau
3. The World of Sport. The Sporting Element in War, Insurrection, and Many Murders. Betting, Gambling, and the Lottery
4. The World of Entertainment
5. Art as Overflowing Energy

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: HOW MANKIND IS TAUGHT AND DISCIPLINED

1. What Is Education?
2. The Nature of Primitive Education
3. Religions and Education
4. Universities
5. Education Outside the Classroom
6. Mental Training
7. The Education Needed for the Modem Progressive Community
8. The Role of an Encyclopedia in a Progressive Civilization
9. Open Conspiracy
10. The Recalcitrant

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: THE OUTLOOK OF MANKIND

1. The Next Phase Latent in the Present Situation
2. Uncertainties in the Human Outlook
3. Hope and Courage Are Inevitable

See what I mean?

I offer only brief notes on this volume: my posts on this blog have been overlong lately, and I could't get into this book without sprawling for thousands of words. As you can see, Wells is still—in 1932!—banging on about eugenics (‘there is every reason for the temporary or permanent sterilization of ... certain types of defectives’ [13:3]) and the eleventh chapter, on women, is hamstrung by Wells's belief that raising children and therefore the domestic sphere is the proper arena for womankind although he does propose various ways of improving their lot otherwise.

I think one problem is that the science in this book has aged less well than is the case either in Outline of History or, more surprisingly, The Science of Life. Economics does not admit of objective truth in the way that biology and physics, I suppose, do; and the technological and sociological components of Work, Wealth and Happiness often strike an ungainly, or a deflatingly quaint, note. Can't exactly blame Wells for that. It's a matter of timing, isn't it—before the 1930s were over a war would come that would accelerate technological and therefore social changes on an unprecedented scale. Of course, Wells wasn't to know the colossal importance, say, plastics would come to have. That doesn't stop his account of them reading as drolly musty and old-fashioned:

Other synthetic mixtures are also made, to which coal tar does not contribute. Some of these false resins become harder and insoluble under the action of heat. The natural ones exhibit a contrary behaviour. These artificial products are used in varnishes and as insulating material for electrical apparatus. Since they will withstand a high temperature they have an advantage over rubber, ebonite, and celluloid. Bakelite, for example, which has become popular in a hundred varieties of bright-coloured ware, retains its form and properties when most other materials would soften or decompose. It is one of the most important insulating materials used in the electric industry. Another variety of resin is made from urea, or from thiourea, a by-product of the gas works, treated with formaldehyde. This can be tinted and is used for table and decorative ware of extraordinary delicacy and colour. [Work, Wealth and Happiness, 2:7]

But the biggest disappointment, for me, is the dearth of properly penetrating analysis of the emergent popular culture of the 20th-century. At roughly the time that Adorno and Horkheimer were doing the preliminary work that would bear fruit in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1947), with its (love or loathe it, you have to agree) extraordinary and influential anatomy of popular culture—Wells is piddling around with a over-obvious thesis that ‘leisure used to be only for the rich, but in the future everybody will have a lot more of it’ and penning creaky-old Victorian-y lists like the following:

Leisure has spread down from class to class in the last century or so, and new occupations have been found for it ... [we] would classify man’s leisure activities roughly after this fashion: as (i) exercise and sports, (2) hygienically unprofitable games, (3) sexual dissipation, gluttony and drunkenness, (4) gossip, parading in costumes and loafing about, (5) seeing shows, (6) wandering and travelling to see and leam, (7) making things for pleasure or, as the Victorians called it, "hobbies,” passing insensibly into (8) art, (9) philosophy, scientific enquiry and experiment. [14:1]

Wells loses focus in this great pudding of a book, I'm afraid.

The Science of Life (1929-30)

The success of The Outline of History (1920) inspired Wells to undertake two other mammoth projects of total knowledge synthesis: The Science of Life, a sort of ‘Outline of Biology’ published 1929-30 and 1931's The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, concerning economics, politics and sociology. The former volume was co-written with Julian Huxley and Wells's own son Gip. Like Outline of History it's a massive work. I read it in the ‘Popular Edition’ of 1938 (‘fully revised and brought up to date’), which is a hefty single volume 1599 pages long. One thousand five hundred and ninety-nine pages! All the biological data is here.

The book was a significant success, although not one on the scale of The Outline of History. In his autobiography Huxley recalls that ‘its effects are still manifest in the increased space allotted to biology in the educational curriculum, and the greater interest of the general public in biological facts and their consequences’ [Julian Huxley, Memories (1970)]

It's not really a Wells title, this one. True, he initiated the project, and planned the whole thing in discussion with his collaborators; but in the end (according to Huxley's later estimates) Wells probably wrote about 5% of the whole, with Huxley himself writing roughly 70% and Gip 25% (the distribution of royalties did not reflect this division of labour: Wells took 40% of profits and his co-authors 30% each; but then his was the famous name, and the original idea). It means that we get, amongst other things, celebrated evolutionary scientist Julian Huxley's first compact statement of what evolution is, and it reads very well.

The work first appeared between 1929 and 1920, in thirty-one fortnightly instalments under the title The Science of Life: a summary of contemporary knowledge about life and its possibilities (published by Amalgamated Press) these being bound up in three volumes as the ‘first edition’. It was then reissued in one volume by Cassell in 1931. Cassell took the unusual step of re-serialising the book, because the stock market crash of 1929 had interfered with the commercial possibilities of the former run, reprinting each of its nine constituent ‘books’ separately 1934-1937

I. The living body.
II. Patterns of life
III. Evolution—fact and theory
IV. Reproduction, heredity and the development of sex
V. The history and adventure of life
VI. The drama of life
VII. How animals behave
VIII. Man's mind and behaviour
IX. Biology and the human race

It's still an informative read, and although the science is getting on for nine decades old now, most of it still stands up. The most noticeable difference is that of style, or tone: the prose, whilst always clear and expressive has that patrician flavour that 21st-century pop-sci writers tend to avoid. The book intersperses its technical explanations with quotations from Wordsworth and Shelley, and the later sections stray out of what we would probably think of the proper bailiwick of such a volume—a chapter on the possibility of a World State, presumably part of Wells's 5% (‘The Possibility of One Collective Human Mind and Will’), and a chapter on eugenics treating the subject positively. Since Huxley was a notorious eugenicist, I assume this was one of his:

Negative eugenics is the prevention of undesirable births. Positive eugenics is the promotion of desirable births. Except in so far as the private judgments of young people about to marry are concerned, no attempts at positive eugenics are traceable in the world about us. Most young people about to marry seem to find an ounce of flattery, or a trustworthy investment list, more directive than any eugenic ideas. But negative eugenics is already in operation. In several American states surgical sterilization—a very slight operation, the ligaturing of the oviduct or the vas deferens—is performed upon various types of mental defectives incapable of self-control. 6.000 such operations have been performed in California alone and it would be difficult to find fault with the results. That there is pressing need for such negative eugenics in the Atlantic communities. [Science of Life, 9.3.6]

Ugh! I mean, seriously: fucking ugh. But there are less hideous chapters too: on ‘Borderline Science and the Question of Personal Survival’, which is to say souls and surviving death, on ‘Dream Anticipation and Telepathy’ and a long section on morality, which argues we should conduct ourselves with ‘candour’, ‘restraint and poise’, should show consideration for others, avoid repression (‘repressions accumulate below any line of conduct continually followed’ leading to ‘lapses’ although ‘two thirds of their harmfulness vanishes if this is recognised’ [8.51.4]) and also that we should strive to overcome our tendencies to ‘evasion, indolence and fear’. Which sounds like a pretty good ethical strategy, I'd say.

The Autocracy of Mr. Parham (1930)

I assume, though I have no proof, that the seed-idea for this intriguing political fantasia came from Wells's old and long-dead friend George Gissing. You'll remember that in New Grub Street (1891) Alfred Yule, hard-working literary journalist and domestic tyrant, nurses the dream of founding and editing his own literary review. When Alfred's wealthy brother dies, leaving his fortune not to Alfred but to Alfred's daughter Marian, Alfred becomes wincingly ingratiating with the girl. It's a very cleverly written episode, actually: Marian works as his amanuensis and researcher, and Alfred has hitherto been unfailingly strict: pedantic, distant, a martinet for family discipline. But when he thinks he might be able to persuade her to finance his magazine-dream he begins acting oilily out-of-character.

(Marian's inheritance also catches the eye of handsome but unscrupulous writer Jasper Milvain, whom Marian knows and loves. He proposes marriage, for mercenary reasons. This being Gissing it all goes, of course, wrong: Marian's inheritance is bound-up in dead Uncle John's investments, and these crumble when she tries to extract the money. Faced with the prospect of marrying a poor woman, Milvain backs off; and not only does Alfred not get to establish and edit his journal, ophthalmic disease robs him of his sight too. Poor old Marian loses her feller and has to devote herself to nursing her bitter old Dad).

Something like this idea underpins this 1930 novel, although Wells treats it in a profoundly non-Gissing-y manner. His Mr Parham is an unworldly academic historian, conservative and traditionalist, content for much of his life to piddle around in his abstruse little Oxford world:

He had produced several studies—mainly round and about Richelieu and going more deeply into the mind of Richelieu than anyone has ever done before —and given short special courses upon historical themes; he had written a small volume of essays; he was general editor of Fosdyke's popular ‘Philosophy of History’ series, and he would sometimes write reviews upon works of scholarly distinction, reviews that appeared (often shockingly cut and mutilated) in the Empire, the Weekly Philosopher, and the Georgian Review. No one could deal with a new idea struggling to take form and wave it out of existence again more neatly and smilingly than Mr. Parham. And loving history and philosophy as he did, it was a trouble to his mind to feel how completely out of tune was the confusion of current events with anything that one could properly call fine history or fine philosophy. The Great War he realized was History, though very lumpish, brutalized, and unmanageable, and the Conference of Versailles was history also—in further declination. [Parham, 1:1]

After 1919 ‘everything had gone from bad to worse,’ in Parham's judgement. ‘Persons, events, had been deprived of more and more significance. Discordance, a disarray of values, invaded the flow of occurrence’ [1:1]. He befriends a vulgar but extremely wealthy businessman called Sir Bussy Woodcock (this character is a by no means flattering pen-portrait of Wells's friend, Lord Beaverbook). For six years Parham does his best to butter-up Woodcock, and to ingratiate himself into Woodcock's circle of obnoxious rich friends, for his own Alfred-Yulesque reasons:

This dream, which was destined to hold Mr. Parham in resentful vassalage to Sir Bussy through long, long years of hope deferred, was the vision of a distinguished and authoritative weekly paper, with double columns and a restrained title heading, of which Mr. Parham would be the editor. It was to be one of those papers, not vulgarly gross in their circulation, but which influence opinion and direct current history throughout the civilized world. It was to be all that the Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Nation, and the New Statesman have ever been and more. It was to be largely the writing of Mr. Parham and of young men influenced and discovered by him. It was to arraign the whole spectacle of life, its public affairs, its ‘questions,’ its science, art, and literature. It was to be understanding, advisory but always a little aloof. [Parham, 1:2]

Parham accepts an invitation to join Sir Bussy at a series of séances ‘in 97 Buggins Street, in the darker parts of the borough of Wandsworth’, presided over by ‘Mr. Carnac Williams’ [2:3]. These are rather grander occasions than the one satirised in Love and Mr Lewisham three decades earlier. They are popular with the rich and famous, not least because all sorts of impressive and dramatic things go on in them. At one a dead daughter consoles her weeping mother; at another, Saint Catherine manifests and Parham notices ‘a queer sound that grew louder, a slobbering and slopping sound that was difficult to locate. “That's the ectoplasm,” said old Mrs. Mountain, “working”’ [2:3].

And then, at the next séance ‘the Spirit, which is Will and Power’ comes ‘like a mighty wind, seeking a way’ [2:4]. This entity appears as phosphorescent ectoplasm that coalesces into a body (‘with a shock it came into Mr. Parham's head that he was seeing bones and nerves and blood vessels hurrying to their appointed places in that swimming swirl’ [2:5]): a Byronic-looking figure in a white shirt and knee breeches:

‘You have come from another world?’

‘Mars.’

They had nothing to say.

‘I come from the Red Planet, the planet of blood and virility,’ said the Visitant ... ‘I am the Master Spirit who tries and who cleanses the souls of men. I am the spirit of Manhood and Dominion and Order. That is why I have come to you from that sterner planet where I rule. This world is falling into darkness and confusion, into doubt, vain experiments, moral strangeness, slackness, failure of effort, evasion of conflict, plenty without toil, security without vigilance. It has lacked guidance. Voices that might have given it guidance have found no form of utterance. Vague and foolish dreams of universal peace tempt the desires of men and weaken their wills. Life is struggle. Life is effort. I have come to rouse men to their forgotten duties. I have come to bring not peace but a sword ... This time it is the English who are my chosen people. In their turn. For they are a great and wonderful people still—for all their inexpressiveness. I have come to England, trembling on the brink of decadence, to raise her and save her and lead her back to effort and glory and mastery.’ [Parham, 2:5]

The Spirit then ‘incorporates’ Mr Parham, who finds he is able to command people with a voice they are powerless to resist.

This is the halfway point of the novel: the second half traces how Mr Parham uses his new charisma to seize political power. Book 3 (‘The Strong Hand At Last’) relates how Parham establishes ‘The Duty Paramount League’. He orates to huge crowds who palpitate at his every word: ‘young men and old men, beautiful women, tall girls like flames and excited elderly persons of every size and shape, all fused in one stupendous enthusiasm ... and every eye in all that swaying mass was fixed on the serene determination of the Master Spirit's face’ [3:1]. The people are disillusioned with representative democracy, and Parham/Master Spirit orchestrates a coup d'etat: ‘England fell into his hands like a ripe fruit’. His shock troops (‘in uniforms of a Cromwellian cut’ [3:2]) storm parliament and install Parham as Lord Paramount. Despite its olde Englande touches, this is really a remarkable anticipation of what Hitler managed in Germany, and what Oswald Mosley came close to doing, closer than we like to think he did, in Britain.

Parham takes charge. Sir Bussy becomes one of his council of ministers, but the boot is now on the other foot, and Parham is cuttingly dismissive of the fellow's vulgarity. The Lord Paramount sweeps away the old order, solves unemployment (‘young men must be taken in hand and trained for other ends. The women can go into munitions. If only on account of unemployment, our great empire needs to take a gallant and aggressive line’). He insists ‘I am no Individualist, I am no Socialist; these are phrases left over by the Nineteenth Century, and little meaning remains in them now. But I say, of him who does not work for his country, neither shall he eat in it, and that he who will not work generously must be made to work hard’ [3:4]. Other policies include luxury taxes (‘wantoning in pleasure cities, lavish entertainments in huge hotels, jazz expenditure, must cease. A special tax on champagne—Yes, a tax on champagne’) and an uptick in military spending. Parham makes a secret treaty with Japan, and declares war on Russia on two fronts. But the USA is not happy, and conflict becomes inevitable. Britain blockades US shipping, and World War 2 breaks out—between Britain and America, and their various allies.

It occupies book 4 of this novel. Parham orders the British navy into action (‘a mighty naval crescent within striking distance of New York’ [4:1]) but the American navy's response is ‘unexpectedly prompt and in unexpected strength’, and Britain does not come out well from the resulting Battle of the North Atlantic. Then the Lord Paramount's house of cards begins to collapse:

Blow upon blow rained upon him after that opening day of calamity. First came the tale of disaster from the battle itself: this great battleship lost, that cruiser on fire, a score of minor craft missing. At first both Britain and America accepted the idea of defeat, so heavy on either side was the list of losses. Then followed the relentless unfolding of consequences. The Dominions, with a harsh regard for their own welfare, were standing out. Canada had practically gone over to the United States and was treating for a permanent bond. South Ireland was of course against him; a republican coup d'état had captured Dublin, and there was already bloody and cruel fighting on the Ulster border; South Africa declared for neutrality, and in some of the more Dutch districts Union Jacks had been destroyed; Bengal was afire, and the council of Indian princes had gone over en bloc from their previous loyalty to a declaration of autonomy. They proposed to make peace with Russia, deport English residents, and relieve the Empire of further responsibility in the peninsula. It was appalling to consider the odds against that now isolated garrison. The European combinations of the Lord Paramount had collapsed like a house of cards. [Parham, 4:2]

In another nicely prescient chapter, aerial war breaks out over Europe: ‘night after night the air of Europe was filled with the whir of gigantic engines and the expectation of bursting bombs. The fighting planes kept each other busy; anti-aircraft guns were a disappointment, and all the great centres of population seethed with apprehensions ... There was a press agitation in London for “Gas masks for everyone”’ [4:3]. There are a few false steps (Wells seems to think that underwater warfare would only be practicable far from the coastlines, where ‘the water is opaque enough to hide our submarines’ [5:6]), but by-and-large it all reads pretty convincingly, even today.

London is heavily bombed. Sir Bussy is killed. Public morale collapses, and defeat seems inevitable. But though things are going badly, Parham is unyielding: ‘“This is far more than a war between Britain and America,” said the Lord Paramount. “Or any war. It is a struggle for the soul of man.’ [5:1].

Parham decides the only road to victory involves him gassing his enemies on a huge scale, and insists that supplies of a new nerve agent, ‘Gas L’, be readied. This is a gas that kills in an especially tortuous way, that lingers in the air for weeks, and against which the regular gas-mask is useless (only ‘a sort of sub-aerial diver's helmet’ is any protection): ‘Think of the moral effect of it,’ Parham's advisers tell him. ‘Paris or Berlin, a dead city, dead from men to rats, and nobody daring to go in to clean it up. After such a sample the world would howl for peace at any price whatever.’)

But Camelford, the industrialist who manufactures Gas L, refuses to play ball. The Lord Protector decides to storm his factory, and flies down to Devon. In a surreal final episode, we discover that the seabed has been raised beyond Land's End to provide a new and well-guarded promontory upon which Camelford's factory is situated, this new territory being given the ancient name Lyonesse. Parham's plan is to gas the establishment, killing all inside it. He is worried that otherwise Camelford will blow-up the facilities to prevent it falling into government hands. But when Parham moves in with his men, all suited-up, they discover that Camelford has developed an anti-gas that renders Gas L  perfectly inert, such that Parham's assault is easily overpowered. Camelford subjects the frustrated Parham to a long monologue, telling him his political power-over logic is a thing of the past. A new collective age is coming, ‘a new dawn. Men of no nation. Men without traditions. Men who look forward and not back. Men who have realized the will and the intelligence that we obey and possess in common. Our race has to organize the whole world now, a field for this creative energy that flows through and uses and guides us’ [5:7].

It turns out Camelford has been brewing-up a new gas, of which Gas L was just a preliminary experiment: ‘a vapour to enter into blood and nerve and brain and clean the mind of man as it has never been cleaned before. It will allow his brain, so clogged and stifled still by old rubbish, so poisoned and cramped and crippled, to free itself from all that holds it back now from apprehending and willing to the utmost limits of its possibility’. This in turn will lead to ‘a new world quite different from the world to which your mind is adapted. A world beyond your dreaming!’ [5:7]. He reveals that the new land of Lyonesse was not artificially raised after all; it just emerged, apparently because the Earth itself had decided it was time to make the ‘strange minerals’ necessary for this new gas, previously hidden in the sea-bed, accessible to mankind.

Then—the inevitable, deflating twist: Parham wakes up. Not for the first time, Wells has written an I awoke; and behold! it was a dream story. Parham is still at the séance, he and Sir Bussy having both nodded off. Mr. Carnac Williams is exposed as a faker, and the evening breaks up. But there's a second twist: it seems that both Parham and Sir Bussy had dreamt the same dream, from their respective perspectives, so something uncanny had been going on after all.

The envoi is that Sir Bussy, startled out of complacency by the vision of war he has just dreamt, declares he will fund the magazine, with the intention of making the world a better place. But as Parham's hopes leap up, they are immediately crushed: he doesn't want Parham to edit it, or be involved at all ‘“I wasn't thinking of you ... I'll have to do it with the right sort of fellows,” said Sir Bussy, speaking slowly. “It would be up against every damned thing you are.”’ [5:9] For poor old Parham the whole experience has been a bust: ‘a paper—a great paper, financed by Sir Bussy! And not to be his! A paper against him! Six years wasted! Slights! Humiliations! Irritations! Tailors' bills!’

The US first-edition cover, there (at the top of the post is the UK first-edition, with art by David Low).

So: what to make of this odd fable? David C Smith [Desperately Mortal, 298] thinks it is a novel about ‘the failure of contemporary education to prepare anyone for [the] pressure’ of running a country; but this seems an unlikely take to me. Education is, of course, one of Wells's perennial themes, but even he would baulk at suggesting that being Senior Tutor at ‘St Simon's College, Oxford’ (which is Parham's position) is in any sense supposed to prepare an individual for the remote offchance that he will become Lord Paramount of the Entire British Empire. No: clearly this is a novel in some sense ‘about’ fascism, written between the rise of Mussolini in Italy and the to-come rise of Hitler in Germany. W. Warren Wagar thinks it ‘a Chaplinesque parody of fascism’ [‘Letters From Our Father’, Science Fiction Studies, 25:3 (1998), 530], which is in the ball-park. But I wonder if the novel is rather too complicit in what it represents to function as parody.

Wells has taken at face value Mussolini's political evocation of ancient Rome, and treats that as the core of fascism, ignoring both the mechanistic-futurist Marinetti element in the ideology, but also establishing a false dichotomy between the Italian/Ancient Roman (and English/Cromwellian-Arthurian) historically driven mass movement and the kind of mass-movement Wells wants to see: a future World State collectivisation that will sublate and so dismiss all history in an magical reflex of collective willpower. But (of course) this latter thing is very much more operative in fascism than nostalgic appeals to romanticised History. Hitler certainly made propaganda mileage out of both recent German past (Frederick the Great) and a remoter, mistier Germanic or Nordic mythic history. But he managed much more, practically speaking, by invoking German Volksgemeinschaft: Hitleran fascism was much more a mobilization of Deutsche Geist, and much more, I'm sorry to say, Wellsian, actually. To look again at Camelford's words, already quoted (that the future belongs to ‘men who have realized the will and the intelligence that we obey and possess in common. Our race has to organize the whole world now’) is to be struck by how alarmingly they anticipate Hitleran ideology.

I should add, I don't think it's meaningful to call Wells straightforwardly a fascist. Still: the question of how large is the central pane in the Venn diagram juxtaposing ‘Liberal Socialist’ and ‘Fascist’ at this period is both important and tricky to answer. I've touched on it before on this blog, and will return to it through the 1930s. A good, nuanced account of this debateable land is Philip Coupland's ‘H. G. Wells's “Liberal Fascism”’ [Journal of Contemporary History, 35:4 (2000), 541-558], which reads Wells's political evolution in terms of what Coupland calls his ‘praxis of desire’:

The praxis of desire is necessarily a dynamic thing, evolving in response to changes in the political forces, theories and contingencies of the moment. Thus while, as Warren Wagar's penetrating analysis of Wells's ‘Open Conspiracy’ [W. Warren Wagar, H.G. Wells and the World State (New Haven, CT 1961), 164-205] has shown, many aspects of Wells's thinking in this area long predated the 1930s, I would suggest that at the same time Wells was additionally and significantly influenced by the new political forces which appeared to be coming to dominance in the early 1930s. In this respect he was not alone: in Britain during this period sections of the Labour Party departed both to the ‘left’—the ILP—and the ‘right’—Mosley's New Party and then BUF. Prominent intellectuals of the Labour movement, including Wells's old Fabian colleagues Sydney and Beatrice Webb and Bernard Shaw, and younger Labour figures including Sir Stafford Cripps and G.D.H. Cole, either embraced the authoritarian road to socialism or proposed the radical reform of parliamentary democracy. Labour intellectuals George Catlin and Raymond Postgate saw the need for, respectively, ‘a voluntary aristocracy of asceticism’ and ‘an organization of storm-troopers or ironsides’ as essential for their party in the new conditions. [Coupland, 541-2]

Of course, to say that Wells's socialism was not out of line with (many of) his contemporaries is not to justify it in any larger sense. In The Autocracy of Mr Parham there is some comedy at the notion that a politely courteous Englishman could ever adopt the preposterous hyper-masculine posturing of Mussolini:—as when his followers elide ‘Duty Paramount’, the name of Parham's political organisation, with Il Duce.

The League, someone said, was to be the Fascisti of Britain. There were loud cries of ‘British Fascisti’ and ‘The English Duce’ (variously pronounced). Young Englishmen, hitherto slack and aimless, stood up and saluted Fascist fashion and took on something of the stiff, stern dignity of Roman camerieri as they did so.

‘And who is he?’ cried a penetrating voice. ‘What is his name? He is our leader. Our Deuce! We will follow him.’

‘Doochy!’ someone corrected.

Cries and confusion, and then out of it all the words, ‘Duty Paramount! The Master Paramount! Paramount!’ growing to a great shout, a vast vocal upheaval. [Parham, 3:1]

‘Deuce’ (which means, amongst other things, secondary thing, the devil and a piece of excrement, this latter also being the slang meaning of ‘doochy’) is nice. But then again, what makes this all funny, in the novel's terms, is the incongruity between pencil-neck Parham and these grand dreams. It's not the dreams as such. Those dreams, Wells thinks, do touch on something vital and true: the decadence and entangling bureaucracy of democratic process must be swept aside, and the Will or Collective Vitality of the race be allowed to realise itself. And this latter vision, even so late as 1930, is still trailing in its wake a variety of ghastlinesses (‘finance being so largely Jews,’ says Parham's deputy Gerson, by way of explaining how militarism will reboot and refresh the economy ‘... and at bottom a Jew is always afraid of a soldier’ [3:6]).

Even as late as 1936, in The Anatomy of Frustration [p.275] Wells was praising Fascism for being free of ‘democratic taint’ and the ‘elderly methods of parliamentary democracy’—although to be fair to him, he also criticised it for being infected with the ‘poison of nationalism’. But this isn't much of a fig-leaf, really. Coupland appositely quotes a contemporary [Geoffrey Gorer, Nobody Talks Politics: A Satire with an Appendix on Our Political Intelligentsia (London 1935), 199]: ‘Mr Wells thinks that he hates fascism; he is horror-struck as any liberal at its brutality, its barbarism, its philistinism, its illogicality and its narrow nationalism; but he puts all the blame on the last quality; if it was only international it wouldn't really be so bad.’ Well, quite.

In one sense the problem here is the old Wellsian one: he sees where we are, right now; and he has strong ideas about the version of social and political sanity he wants us all to get to; but the path from here to there is not clearly drawn. Indeed, if there is an ironic redemption to the satirical extrapolation of The Autocracy of Mr. Parham it is in the contrast between the novel's two modes of bringing about the desired future: Parham, inspired by his Martian spirit, wins power by more-or-less traditional means: campaigning, addressing crowds of followers orchestrating a coup d'etat and so on. Camelford, though, has his magic gas which will, when inhaled, cut the gordian knot altogether and bring an In The Days of the Comet-style rewiring of the human brain itself. This latter strategy is, in effect, a tacit acknowledgement that the obstacle to Wells's World State is human nature as such. Absent a reinvention of what it means to be a human being, we're not getting to our flawless World State any time soon.