The Common Sense of War and Peace (1940)

The subtitle gives us our stark choice, as Wells conceives it: ‘World Revolution or War Unending’. To quote Anthony Burgess's Alex, What's it going to be then, eh?

This book steps once again through familiar Wellsian territory. The broad thrust is that we must reconfigure our whole global way of doing things, or else we will war ourselves into ultimate destruction. Humanity is still infantile, Wells thinks, and will not be fully grown up until it realises, as all adults do, that it has no need of leaders at all: no Hitler- or Mussolini-style figures. ‘Grown Men do not need Leaders. But that does not mean that they will not trust a properly accredited equal who has some specific gift or function. You trust your plumber, your doctor, your cook, your automobile scout, your Ordnance Map, conditionally, without either arrogance or subservience’ [1]. Nation-states have to be done away with because they are too small to encompass the newly-released human energies of modernity. Everything is different to the way it was two generations before, and these changes are ‘the bedrock realities upon which all our ideas of social and political policy must now rest’. The whole world has swung about ‘ in less than half a century, from need to possible abundance, and from remoteness to unavoidable contact’ [4]. Only one thing will guarantee peace: ‘World Revolution’.

I ask you not to be afraid of the word ‘Revolution’. Speak English. Don't think of Revolution as an affair of street barricades, the heads of beautiful ladies on pikes, and tumbrils going to the guillotine. Our ‘Glorious Revolution’ in 1688 had none of these ingredients, and the Revolution that established the Hanoverian Succession was practically bloodless. You can have a Revolution without massacre or violence. But anyhow, I submit that organised world peace and welfare mean such a Revolution in human life as will dwarf all previous revolutions to comparative insignificance. [Common Sense, 4]

Slightly selective, not to say cherry-picked, examples of bloodless revolutions, there; and given the scale of the revolution being proposed in this slim book, and the fact that pretty much everyone in the world of 1940 was armed to the teeth, it looks a touch jejune.

The book's larger argument loses its way, rather, in a lengthy middle section in which Wells retorts to an article by Dean Inge that had accused him of class-resentment (‘he says I have never recovered from “the hardships of my early life”; I am “permanently embittered” with the genteel classes; at the sight of real ladies, deer parks, the stately homes of England and the clergy, I “see Red” and “exult in the destitution” which I “hope awaits them”’ [5]). This involves lengthy quotations from Inge, matched with equally lengthy attempts at rebuttal, and it's as unengaging as this sort of point-scoring-record-setting-straight gubbins always is.

Wells insists that air-war is so dangerous a global monopoly on all air-travel and aerial armaments must be the first order of business at any peace conference. The book winds up with an emphasis on the need for a World Declaration of Human Rights, sketches what they might be, and directs the reader to the ‘companion Penguin to this—The Rights of Man’. This latter volume is Wells's updated version of The New World Order volume from earlier that same year, incorporating the revised Declaration, ‘as it has emerged from the hands of Lord Sankey's Drafting Committee’ [10].

He adds two appendices. One is a lengthy quotation from his last major novel (‘I have been writing a novel which is these days of paper shortage mayor may not be published, Babes in the Darkling Wood’ [13]) that ends

Will these old men of the City and the stately homes of England and so forth ever release that stagnating, paralysing grip that holds back our people and all the people in our Empire from any fullness of life, until in sheer despair of their heavy monopolisation we are driven to wrench them off violently? [Babes, 4.3.6]

‘The whole of this present book,’ Wells glosses, ‘is an attempt to discover a possible answer to that young man's question’.

That is one appendix to this pamphlet. Now, by way of a further appendix and a warning, I am going to reprint a document that was drawn up twenty-two years ago, chiefly by Dr. J.W. Headlam Morley and myself, as a memorandum for the propaganda department of Crewe House. It dates in certain details, but on the whole, because of the lack of fulfillment, there is much of it that might have been written this month. This is how we saw things in May, 1918. [Common Sense, 14]

Pages and pages of quoted material follow. We're always fighting the last war when we prosecute the current war, I guess.

The Rights of Man (1940)

This book is, in essence, a reworked version of The New World Order (1940). Wells had been involved with debates about the need for a global Bill of Rights since the outbreak of war, writing letters to the Times and the Daily Herald and talking about it with his fellow National Council for Civil Liberties and PEN members. In part because of his energy on this topic, a committee was established to draft a possible Declaration, which Wells was originally going to chair. He stepped down after getting into some hot-water when one of his newspaper articles attacked, with some vitriol, the architects of appeasement, Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, and the fact were remaining in government to prosecute the war, and instead the committee was chaired by Lord Sankey, a former Lord Chancellor.

Discussion in committee passed into the public area via a monthly full-page report in the Daily Herald, and though the eventual conclusions became known as ‘The Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man’ (1940) it's clear that Wells was the real driving force in the committee. According to Anthony West, who saw him often at this time, ‘he felt an overwhelming need to get a substantial document, on that would seem neither tentative nor specifically western,m on paper and on record before the strange period of inaction that had followed the rapid gobbling up of Poland should come to an end’ [West, H G Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984), 149].

The Rights of Man was issued by Penguin late in 1940, in tandem with another Penguin original, The Common Sense of War and Peace. The two books reference one another, but this is the work mostly concerned with laying-out the main terms of the Sankey Declaration, and explaining its main items in turn. It's clear and persuasive, and is worth reading, even today. Indeed, it was reprinted by Penguin in 2015 with a new introduction by Ali Smith. The contents page of the original edition gives a sense of what it covers:

Preface
1. Imperative Need for a Declaration
2. Security from Violence
3. Habeus Corpus
4. Democratic Law
5. The New Tyranny of the Dossier
6. The Right to Subsistence
7. The Right to Work and to Have Posessions
8. Free Marker and Profit-Seeking
9. The Revised Declaration
10. A French Parallel
11. An Alternate Draft and Some Further Suggestions
12. The New Map of the World
13. A Book For Which The World is Waiting

‘Dossier’, there, means secret police files held against citizens, and that chapter is about the need to guard against the surveillance powers of the modern state. That's certainly not got any less timely.

The actual post-war United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which is a document of dignity and power, is not associated with Wells by any but the most hardened Wells enthusiasts, though. The Sankey Declaration was one of many different sorts of proposed tabulations of human rights that fed into the process that produced that text, and by the time it was passed by the UN General Assembly, right at the end of 1948, Wells had been dead for several years.

All Aboard for Ararat (1940)

A brisk novella, this, with some interesting touches, although it's raw dough rather than baked goods. Or else it's an extraordinary Benjaminian excursus on the radical instability of interpretation as such. One of the two, certainly.

I mean, we can be honest: it's the former. But it is at least an interesting exercise to entertain the notion that it's the latter.

We start with elderly writer and HG surrogate, Noah Lammock, who has been cast into a deep despair (like Wells) by the advent of World War 2. ‘it seemed beyond dispute to [him] that madness had taken complete possession of the earth and that everything he valued in human life was being destroyed’ [1]. He entertains a caller to his house who announces himself as Mr Lord God Almighty. Believing him an elderly escapee from the local insane asylum, Lammock alerts the institution and chats with the fellow until his minders can come and get him.

Wells's God is a rather fine piece of comic writing, actually. He quotes Gosse's Omphalos, complains about being trapped in time with the cosmos he has constructed, is variously bad-tempered about what has happened to his formerly pristine universe, and, like a pre-vision of the superb W G Grace God of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, he absolutely hates grovelers.

People read their Bibles in such a slovenly fashion. You can hardly call it reading! They bolt the stuff in a state of pious awe. I do so wish they wouldn't. I hate pious people. I hate their abject prayers. Almost always they are mean demands for preferential miracles. Whenever I get a chance, I do them bad turns. I never, if I can help it, answer their prayers. Then they say I am trying them and they crawl more than ever. Where do they get these ideas about me? When have I countenanced any of these verminous saints? Read me. Read my Book. My Bible is fairly plain about it. If only people would read intelligently. The people I favour are upright men who walk with God. It says so over and over again. Not crawlers at his feet. Men who stand up. [Ararat, 1]

The longer he talks, the less certain Lammock becomes that he is an insane asylum escapee, and the more he starts to wonder if he is actually God after all. When staff from the asylum come by, God has mysteriously vanished (though He returns to Lammock over the following days) and the asylum staff go off looking for him elsewhere.

Lammock, God tells him, is actually Lamech. He instructs him to build an ark: ‘into that Ark we will put reproductive samples of every good thing that is in the world, beasts, birds, arts and crafts, inventions and discoveries, literature’ [1]. There is, it seems, an Adversary, and he is behind not only the war, but all science and technology. On the subject of the latter, Wells's God sounds like David St Hubbins asked if this is the end of Spinal Tap as a band:

They come along now declaring that Space is finite. Well, I ask you; isn't that plain nonsense? What do they call whatever there is outside Space? This finite Space isn't metaphysics; this is mountebank physics. They declare we live in an Expanding Universe. What does that mean? Expanding into what? They say that the apprehension of Being is a three-dimensional consciousness system falling through a fourth dimension with the velocity of light. And what is worse, he gets them to make experiments to prove it. [Ararat, 1]

This ‘he’ is the shadow God cast when he first said let there be light. By ending the cosmos God would also end his being. But there's a consequence. ‘As God fades out, the Devil fades also,’ says Lammock. ‘Even now you seem quivering on the very verge of non-existence.’

‘Yes,’ said the Almighty, not without a touch of malice; ‘and man as he grows clearer and firmer, discovers that he too casts a shadow.’

‘There is something in that,’ said Noah. [Ararat, 1]

Still, Lammock is inspired by the prospect of hope for the world, after all, an ark that ‘may perhaps take us at last, by way of Ararat, to Shinar again and so to mankind reunited in one brotherhood, growing in strength and power for ever’ [1]. What to save though? God proposes ‘some sort of cache, or caches, containing all human knowledge and thought and achievement up to date, a sort of Museum Encyclopedia’ like ‘that museum of yours, dusty and derelict’ in ‘your Time Machine for example.’ This leads to some metatextual banter, which is (I can be honest) my favourite kind of banter.

‘I never wrote The Time Machine,’ said Noah.

‘Why pretend?’ said the Lord. ‘The same idea is the framework of your Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind. It is World Brain. It crops up more and more frequently in your books as you get older and repeat yourself more and more—’

‘I tell you—. I had nothing to do with these books.’

‘Rubbish! You as are bad as that fellow Bacon. He wrote the entire Elizabethan literature and Ignatius Donnelly proved it. I am a convinced Baconian. You have written every book with the idea of a world reconstruction in it for the last hundred years.’ [Ararat, 2]

This is all pretty jolly, actually. God is excited by the prospect of transferring all human knowledge onto microfiche: ‘“it is possible and practicable to make these microphotographic films ... one thing I will certainly grant you moderns,” said the Lord, “and that is the extraordinary way your gadgets and contrivances facilitate all sorts of things”’ [2]. Noah starts jotting down ideas for the ark, which comes to sound more and more like a Wellsian World-State manifesto:

My Ark cannot be a wide popular movement. Nor can it be a movement among people in power and authority. Ordinary people won't understand a new world they have never seen. That needs some cultivation of the imagination, and people who find this world full of gratifications, will resist any move towards a new world. They will detest the Ark idea, they will gather round to mock and hinder it until the inundation is rolling them over and over. So how do we man the Ark? Wait a bit, Noah; what was that sentence you wrote down when you awoke? Something quintessential for the élite and something very strong and clear and simple for the masses of mankind. Did that get a little deeper into our problem? [Ararat, 2]

It seems that, at this late stage in his life, Wells is slowly coming to an awareness that his proposed Samurai, though he can't imagine the World State Utopia without them, might be, just maybe, who-knows, prone to the temptations and corruptions of power: ‘our élite is our necessity and our menace,’ muses Lammock. ‘The primary danger, I take it, is that the élite will become a self-conscious, self-protective organisation within the State. It will taste the joys of authority and aristocracy ...’ [3] No shit, Sherlammock. Still, Noah thinks this danger can be averted via ‘an intenser religiosity, a livelier passion, a greater awareness of what we are,’ which strikes again the naïve note.

The novella comes to no conclusion. I don't mean in its arguments; I mean actually, in itself. It doesn't even fizzle out; it just stops, mid sentence. So: throughout, God has been putting Noah to sleep (‘dreadfully worried by things—a good long sleep will do him good’) to refresh him. The final chapters of All Aboard for Ararat see Lammock waking up the cabin of an actual ark, far out at sea, with no memory of how he got there. Things, however, aren't going well. The ark has sprung a leak. Arrival at Ararat has been delayed. At this point Wells literally gives-up on telling the tale, and instead jots down a few notes towards the story:

Fish and seagulls become the main articles of diet. The elephants are put on half rations. A stowaway, giving the name of Jonah (which is as much as to say dove in Hebrew) is discovered like a gross devouring maggot among the ship’s stores, thrown overboard, and swallowed by a whale. The whale, after circling about the ark for three days in a manifest indigestion, rejects Jonah contumeliously and offensively. He is taken aboard and complains of his rations ... He shoots an albatross, produces a stagnant and festering calm, and is again put off the ark … and shot by Noah. But continues to float alongside in an unpleasant manner. He swells in his decay. He is towed round to the lee side, but attempts to attach lead sinkers to him fail. [Ararat, 5]

This can't help but disappoint. It would have been interesting to read all this actually written out as proper fiction, rather than being lazily, or exhaustedly, gestured-towards so loosely. They've been at sea for a year and three weeks now. Noah and God have one last conversation, and then the story just stops. ‘Nor will we cease to fight these overwhelming powers ...’ Noah begins to say, and Wells thwunks down his authorial guillotine.

His sentence remains unfinished. The final pages of this story do not appear to be forthcoming. They never may be. As there is so much of current interest in it, it has been decided to print and publish the expanding narrative so far as it goes now. So that this is not so much the end as a colophon, thus:

We are, I guess, sliding down the chute towards Mind at the End of its Tether-level despair. Prospero enacts the end of Shakespeare's writing career by abjuring his rough magic and drowning his book deeper than did ever plummet sound. Lammock enacts the approaching end of Wells's career by just ... giving up, really. It's hard to blame him (I mean, does anyone blame Walter Benjamin for his suicide?). To have lived through the war to end war, having actually coined the phrase ‘The War To End War’, only to have all your worst suspicions confirmed that it was, on the contrary, the War to Enable An Even More Destructive And Appalling War—how could your heart not sink? There's a neat little irony in having your character insist, in Churchillian-Blakean mode, that he will never cease to fight these overwhelming powers as the novel itself abruptly ceases.

On the other hand, the ark itself—Wells's allegory for his hopes of a future achievable Utopia—is still afloat, though leaky, under-supplied and dragging along with it the unsinkable corpse of false-prophets who have lyingly promised the same thing. Or maybe the corpse of Wells's earlier over-optimism. Who knows? God is still with Noah, at the end, after all. And the actual ending of the novella is a colophon (the ark, roiling dangerously in stormy waters), which might make us wonder if it is doomed to sink, but also might offer us a slender beam of hope. After all the English word colophon (‘a printer's or publisher's identifying inscription or logo appearing at the end of a book; a finishing stroke or crowning touch’) is a straight lift from the Ancient Greek κολοφών which means ‘peak, summit’ as well as ‘finishing touch’ and is cognate with κολώνη ‘hill, peak, mountain’. So in a manner of speaking the story does reach its mountain, the Ararat promised in its title.

That manner of speaking is: via textual game-playing, and there's the germ of something interesting in the way All Aboard for Ararat mixes two ludic modes: allegory on the one hand, and a kind of metatextual allusiveness and play on the other. And it is a pretty entertaining, playful piece of writing too, at least until it stages its running-out-of-steam deflationary ending. But allegory and metatextuality aren't actually the same thing, and they fit together in weirdly angular ways here. Lammock allegorically represents Wells, the ark is Wells's lifelong World State project and the flood allegorizes the Second World War. By insisting he did not write The Time Machine, Lammock is actually making a bid to shore-up the logic of the allegory as such. But of course the person who writes all the words that Lammock writes, in this text, did indeed write The Time Machine, so Lammock's doubling-down on the coherence of his allegory is, actually, a kind of lie. Lammock's God is actually a kind of sham (a madhouse escapee, or on another level just a character confected out of words by a writer), but in another sense, since God made the writer who made the words, he is realer than, or at least prior to, anything else in the story

We like to distinguish between allegory and symbolism/allusion by identifying a sort of rigidity in the former mode: Spenser's Redcross Knight is masculine chivalric virtue, and his Duessa is feminine duplicitous falsehood; these characters can't alter their characteristics, any more than Nogbad the Bad could repent and become good. Bunyan's Giant Despair figures despair, and that's as far as interpretation is licensed to go with him. By contrast Blake's sick rose, Williams's red wheelbarrow or, indeed, Shakespeare's Prospero can mean many different things at once. As far as that goes in this novella, Wells won't sit still. What does his Jonah ‘mean’ in the allegory? Wellsian bad conscience? External actors whose actions impede the betterment of mankind (aka the arrival at Ararat)? The text offers us a hint. Jonah leaves the ark and returns with an olive branch, but ‘its leaves were blood-stained and tied with a swastika ribbon’:

‘I have the most satisfactory assurances,’ said Jonah, the Dove, Franco, Pétain, Hoare,* whatever his momentary alias was. ‘If only you would let me arrange!’ [Ararat, 4]

Yes, that's an asterisk, and it leads us to the bottom of the page:

* The reader may season here according to taste in this space reserved for the purpose. Additional pages for the names of local personages and special acquaintances can be inserted if necessary. He will find this an agreeable way of wiling away the time in his air-raid shelter and a fruitful provocative of quite animated discussion almost anywhere.

This Jonah/Ancient Mariner/Pétain opens a ludic space in the interpretive fabric of the novella. Have fun! says Wells. Enjoy your Beckettian Endgame in your air-raid shelter. It's dark enough, as humour, although it's also self-reflexive enough upon the whole exercise to collapse allegory as allegory. This individual is a mad old geezer from a lunatic asylum; and we know he is because officers from that very asylum confirm it as they search Lammock's house for the escapee. But this individual is also God, and God played His own games with allegory, as we all know, by inventing a new variety of the form, calling it Incarnation, and embodying Himself into the world as his own son.

Noah's ark and Jonah-in-the-whale are both an Old Testament stories, of course; but Christian scholars and theologians have appropriated both to a New Testament religious ethos as pre-visions of Christ's saving of mankind, which is why there are so many arks in medieval art. This is, if you like, another kind of allegory, called by its professional practitioners typology, and according to its logic the ark is Christ himself, in whose capacious innards we are all carried to safety through the floodwaters of sin and death; just as, with an aesthetically pleasing inversion, Jonah is also Christ himself, living for three days inside the belly of the leviathan, that is death, before being reborn. Instead of pinning down interpretation into neat patterns, as is the case in Spenser and Bunyan, allegory here begins to proliferate, to metastasize, until the novella itself collapses under the weight of it. Look again at that colophon, with those flame-shaped waves wrapping themselves around that homely ark! Meaning itself is swamping it.

I mentioned earlier Walter Benjamin as an individual who, having struggled through the rise of fascism in the 1930s, eventually gave up. When he believed himself liable to be delivered into the hands of the Nazis, whose mercies towards him (as a Marxist Jew) would not have been tender, he chose instead to commit suicide on the French-Spanish border, September 1940. Part of Benjamin's life work, unfinished at his death, was a theory of allegory. Wells almost certainly knew nothing at all about this: Benjamin's present-day fame as a thinker was far in the future, and at this stage his work was all in German, which Wells did not speak. But it's an interesting conceptual context for what's happening in All Aboard For Ararat.

Benjamin's Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (‘The Origin of German Tragic Drama’, 1928) identifies an expressive version of allegory in 17th century baroque, as a way of unifying mediaeval religiosity and Renaissance materialistion or secularization. For Benjamin Romanticism, by preferring and valorising instead the symbol, and devalying allegory in relation to it, was a wrong-turn in aesthetic history. Read properly, says Benjamin, allegory is not a one-to-one code or mapping operation, but the aesthetic spatialization of the temporal structure of eschatology, a kind of slowing-down of history into a form where we can achieve a kind of transcendent apprehension, into a form in which ‘the measure of time of symbolic experience [Symbolerfahrung] is the mystical instant [Nu]” [Benjamin, Origin German Tragic Drama, 165].

Whereas in the symbol, with the transformation of the deceased the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the facies hippocratica [‘Hippocratic face’, the face of the dying patient] of history lies before the eyes of the observer as a stiffened, primal landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed as a face—or rather in a death's head [Totenkopfe]” [Benjamin, Origins, 166].

Allegory for Benjamin becomes, in essence, a mystic apprehension of things, and his later (and more famous) study of Baudelaire opens with the Baudelaireian epigraph: ‘tout pour moi devient allégorie’: ‘for me everything becomes allegory.’ Here's Bainard Cowan's summary:

In Benjamin's analysis, allegory is pre-eminently a kind of experience. A paraphrase of his exposition might begin by stating that allegory arises from an apprehension of the world as no longer permanent, as passing out of being: a sense of its transitoriness, an intimation of mortality, or a conviction, as in Dickinson, that ‘this world is not conclusion.’ Allegory would then be the expression of this sudden intuition. But allegory is more than an outward form of expression; it is also the intuition, the inner experience itself. The form such an experience of the world takes is fragmentary and enigmatic; in it the world ceases to be purely physical and becomes an aggregation of signs. Transforming things into signs is both what allegory does—its technique—and what it is about—its content. Nor is this transformation exclusively an intellectual one: the signs perceived strike notes at the depths of one's being, regardless of whether they point to heaven, to an irretrievable past, or to the grave. [Bainard Cowan, ‘Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory’, New German Critique, 22 (1981), 110]

This is the free-play-of-signifiers stuff that so endeared Benjamin to the postmodernists and deconstructionists back in those black-roll-neck-sweater-wearing gitanes-smoking 1980s, which I remember so very well. But it is all weirdly anticipated in this broken-backed little novella: play and signification, the corrosion of interpretation, the ship of state reimagined as an impossible ship of future-state by virtue of being a mythological ship of the deep past. The elephants are eventually put on quarter rations. But Ararat is still out there, somewhere. It's just (Wells seems to be saying) we're asking the wrong question. It's not a matter of where this mountain is. It's a matter of what it is.

Babes in the Darkling Wood (1940)

:1:

‘A Novel of Ideas’ says the subtitle, and the heart sinks, just a little, at the phrase. Is this lengthy work (399 close-printed pages) really yet another turgid semi-dramatic novelisation of undramatic ideation? As if there aren't enough of those sorts of books in the Wells backlist already? In his preface Wells does not set our minds at rest:

This present story belongs to a school to which I have always been attracted, and in which I have already written several books ... the dialogue, written or staged, is one of the oldest forms of literary expression. ... The Socratic Dialogue produces character after character to state living views, to have them ransacked by an interlocutor who is also a character subject to all the infirmities of the flesh. Plato's dramas of the mind live to this day.

It's a long preface, actually, and manifests a degree of bristling defensiveness. Wells knows what he's done: written a novel in which two main and several minor characters expatiate and lecture at one another in a variety of places over various topics. But, here's the thing: once you adjust to the form the novel takes, and ramp down expectations of the nuance and richness of some of Wells's earlier novels, this becomes really quite an engaging reading experience. Of course, maybe I'm only saying that because this is Wells's last fully-accomplished novel and I want it to be worthwhile (he published two more fiction titles before his death, but 1940's All Aboard for Ararat is a novella and 1941's You Can't Be Too Careful is, frankly, a misfire).

The novel is fourteen lengthy chapters, disposed into four books, with a ‘tailpiece’ coda. In Book 1, Stella and Gemini are staying in a friend's cottage, having lots of sex and exploring the countryside. They go past the house of the famous sculptor Kalikov, and see him in his garden: ‘a great lump of a man, with a frizzy, non-Aryan coiffure and ears that you would have thought any sensitive sculptor would have cut off or improved upon years ago’.  Kalikov is contemplating a huge block of alabaster in his garden, running his hands over it, and thinking about it. ‘One day he will get his chisels and hammers and things and begin to hew it out,’ says Stella; and Gemini seizes on this as a metaphor for life itself: ‘Clumsy block of a world, monstrous, crushing the grass, bloodshot, and yet in it there is a world to be found, a real world, a great world ... our job is to realise the shape in the block, to get the vision of it clearer and clearer in our heads and then to set about carving it out’ [1.1.2]. Off they wander, these two idealistic young lovers, unmarried but caring not a rag for 1940s social convention. Self-styled revolutionaries.

 The vicar, Morton Richardson, comes to tea. He's modish enough to be almost not shocked by their cohabitation, although he tells them he can't approve it. He tries for smalltalk, but he's in quite the wrong novel for that sort of thing. Instead Stella and Gemini harangue him about the decline of his church: ‘empty pews, silent pulpits—sermons cut to nothing. Yet preventing anything else from taking its place. Why is it, Sir? Why does the Church have nothing definite to say for itself?’ demands Gemini. ‘Our generation is drifting away,’ he tells the Vicar. ‘[We] are reading these sceptical writers, Kentlake and Shaw and Bertrand Russell and Joad, the two Huxleys, Hogben, Levy, J.B.S. Haldane—in preference to any orthodox authorities—[and] mathematicians—mystical mathematicians—Jeans and Eddington for example, Captain Dunne and Whitehead.’ [1.2.2].

They can't see what purpose the vicar serves. He stresses his parish duties (‘births, marriages and deaths. The coal club, the rummage sale, the choir, the bell-ringers, the charities, the school treat and the church wardens. The constant calls for advice, temporal as well as spiritual. The sick and dying in need of consolation’) but Stella refuses to concede that any of this is really church-work: ‘some of that is civil administration; some might be better done by a medical or psychic or educational adviser—or a parish clerk. Or a glorified community schoolmaster’. What about faith? Religious faith? But Richardson can't speak to this (‘the vicar opened and shut his mouth’ [1.2.3]) so Stella and Gemini engage in a lengthy metaphysical debate between themselves about Monism, Freudian psychology, and the need to repudiate the matter-spirit dichotomy.

The vicar doesn't do what any of us would in this situation and slap them both hard. Instead he politely takes his leave. Next up is Stella's choleric uncle Hubert Polydore Hopkinshire (‘he was a Black and Tan and he's never got over it’, says Stella) who writes to say he will come the next day to horsewhip Gemini for debauching his niece. This throws the couple into disarray. Gemini proposes marriage but Stella reminds him ‘we agreed we didn't believe in marriage’; so it looks, in the teeth of the world's hostility, that they're going to have to separate.

Gemini worries about the shallowness of sex: ‘I am head over heels in love with you, I have been making love to you for a week, I am going to make love to you again just as soon as you stop pretending to comb your hair ... [but] what's it got to do with anything, Stella? What's it got to do with the rest of life?’ [1.3.3]. Stella thinks he's being too compartmentalising:

‘What has this love-making to do with anything else, you ask. Well —everything. Sex is not irrelevant to the other side of life. Love, love-making, is as important as hunting, shooting, ploughing, making things, and it's nearer to vital reality. See? Nearer. More than the other side of a coin. Of course it is nearer and closer! Society is built upon sex—more than it is built on any economic or practical necessity. If that is the left hand, sex is the right. The first societies were families and then tribes, the Children of Israel and so on. They were not plantation gangs or trade unions. ... Gemini, can you draw a line between all these linking feelings, between friendship, preference, affection, love, intimacies, caresses? Can you?’ [Babes, 1.3.3]

At any rate, Uncle Hubert arrives with his horsewhip, and so does Gemini's hyper-correct father, a London Police Magistrate, to whom Hubert had written alerting him of the couple's shameful cohabitation. There's a hot-tempered conversation about propriety, and Mr Twain Senior lectures Stella: ‘“do incontinence, fornication, deception, disobedience, then, mean nothing to you? Have you never heard of fallen women? You are living in a Christian country under a definitely Christian moral code and my son there”—he pointed —“has persuaded you to outrage it. And you have done so. Don't you begin to realize your present position? Do you know nothing of the social pena1ties—?”’ [1.4.3] When Gemini refuses to repudiate the relationship, his father bars him from the family home, which interdiction Gemini accepts promptly, promising to live life on his own terms in London. Hubert prevails upon Stella to come home by saying her mother is very sick, and needs her.

In Book 2 the lovers are living apart. Gemini writes to Stella (‘I have been duly turned out-of-doors and I am installed in a shabby apartment in Duluth Crescent near St Pancras Station. It is not very nice’ [2.1.1]). This letter is less a love epistle, and more, pompously enough, a memorandum of their mutual beliefs:

‘Firstly, we have agreed that it is not true, as my father believes, as the parson believes, as Uncle Hubert believes ... that the present moral, religious, political and social system is an inevitable, irreplaceable growth ... Secondly, we have agreed that in this gross, confused, moving and dangerous mass of a world as it is, there is hidden the possibility of a human existence of general happiness. We believe that by a strenuous readjustment of mental and social life, a good, lovely and continually progressive world could be carved out of this enormous dreadful world of today, as a sculptor carves loveliness out of his block. This means that you and I are revolutionaries, to the fullest meaning of the word’ [Babes, 2.1.1]

Gemini walks around London on he brink of war: ‘with the stir of the I.R.A. outrages and the intensification of the Air Raid Preparations ... blimps floating in the air far above the house roofs and a string of lorries of men in training’ there is, he is pleased to note ‘a definite feel in the air’.

Stella, meanwhile, is at home with her intelligent, repressed, slightly hysterical mother, who has never really got over being deserted by her husband, Stella's flighty artist father. For this first time, Stella realises ‘with deepening dismay’, that her mother has ‘a powerful, negative preoccupation with sex’. She lectures him about the beastliness of the male (‘I want you to understand what men are before it is too late’ [2.2.2]). Gemini picks up work as a copy-editor, easing a book by ‘Cottenham C. Bower’ into readable English (it is so full of obscure technical terminology, he writes to her, that it's ‘halfway to Jimmy-Joyce-land!’) which leads to tender love notes from him to her of this sort:

He is using and developing the language of this new Behaviourist conception of life, which, when you come to work it out logically and completely, is in fact an absolute reversal of ideas which men have considered fundamental ideas from the very beginnings of It is no less than that. It is coming into human thought like a still small voice, and it means a revolution far profounder—than Darwinism for example. Pavlov and Watson unfold their ideas with a certain obscure elaboration and hardly seem to realise the astounding quality of their implications. That is where Cottenham C. Bower is so important ... [Babes, 2.2.4]

Honestly, why nobody slaps him, I don't understand.

Matters hang fire for a while. Stella resumes her studies at Cambridge, even though her uncle Robert, who is a don, assures her that universities are all rotten and in need of radical reformation. The sector's only function, he insists, is as a kind of initiation into the university caste itself (giving ‘the young Anglican gentleman all the advantages he needs over the illiterate, a sense of superiority, a class freemasonry, a code of behaviour’). In a rather stiletto-in-the-ribcage throwaway comment, Robert adds that all university does is ‘produce such men, little T.S. Eliots by the hundred, as a rotten caracass produces blowflies. Without an effort. Mental blowflies.’ [2.3.3]. Miaow!

Gemini, meanwhile, has decided he needs to do something more active with his life. He joins the Soviet war-effort. Stella travels to Tilbury docks to see him off, and they have sex one last time. ‘The things they did have been done a billion times,’ Wells notes, ‘but such is the magic of sex that it seemed to them that nothing so full pride and loveliness, so brave and exquisite, had ever happened upon earth before’ [2.3.4], which captures something of the star-eyed nature of our early sexual experiences. Off Gemini sails, hoping to reach the USSR via Sweden.

Germany invades Poland on the 1st September and actual war breaks out. Stella, anxious for Gemini's well-being, has a vivid dream of wandering in a dark forest, and encountering a Great Unseen that says to her: ‘I am the Guide who will never fail you. I am the Friend who will never desert you’. She tries to get get closer.

The secret of courage, the essence of faith, something deeper than thought was coming to her. The ebony darkness about her became positive. It became an intensity of vision that transcended sight. Something immensely wonderful seemed to be pouring into her mind, and at the same moment she realised with dismay that she was dreaming and on the verge of awakening. She felt that something ineffable was slipping from her and she struggled in vain to retain it. [Babes, 3.1.2.]

She hears nothing from or about Gemini until man called Gavin Peters knocks on her door. He tells Stella that he was with him when the two of them were caught up in the invasion of Poland. He explains that ‘Jimmy’ saved his life, and relates some of the martial chaos they both experienced, a little bit of fighting and then a long desperate retreat eastward:

Dust pits in the middle of the trail round which the cart-tracks skirted, dust pits that would become foul morasses as soon as the rains returned. Dead animals occasionally. Once a dead old woman. A sprawl of rags and grey hair. At places they found recent tracks of light tanks, probably German tanks. The houses would be deserted and empty, or dark figures lurked defensively in them. ... In one isolated house there had been a massacre; ‘God knows why. Perhaps they were Jews’; and peering in on the chance of food, they found a stinking mass of rags. They were turning to go. ‘My God!’ Gemini had cried: ‘there's something moving!’

‘It might have been a rat,’ said Peters, ‘but we looked again and saw it was a hand. We both tried to get it out and do something, but it died. It never moved again. It might have been a boy or a girl with dark hair. You see—. Things had happened to the face. It left us empty with horror.’ When they were starving they stole a chicken. A pale gleam of amusement appeared in Peters' face. ‘What would you do with a chicken, if you didn't know how to get its feathers off or how to clean it, and you hadn't a pot to cook it in, or a fire? When we caught it, we thought of roast chicken, beautiful roast chicken. We dragged that bird along with us for live or six kilometers and then—well, we tore it up and gnawed it raw. And it made us ill. But we were almost always ill, disgustingly ill. Filthily ill. We'd eat half-ripe berries and gnaw bits of bark. One place we found a lot of Swedes. Everything we ate seemed to disagree with us. We'd lie up in the woods. No one to look after us. Getting iller and filthier and filthier. He'd never been ill in his life before without somebody tucking him up in bed. He thought that happened to everyone. I suppose it does in England. If it hadn't been for the drive in him, I should be lying in those woods now. Just a sprawl of rags and bones. Dragged about by birds and things. It was he made me go on.’ [Babes, 3.2.2]

(I wonder if Wells bases this on that section at the end of Zola's La Débâcle (1892) where Jean and Maurice trek, ill and desperate, through the post-battle wasteland, at one point stealing a small sack of flour with the hope of baking some bread—but of course they cannot, and end up packing their mouths with raw flour and making themselves ill.)

Anyway: though Gavin Peters got out, he believes Gemini was arrested by the Soviets as a suspected British spy. The next we hear of Gemini is that he has been incarcerated in a Swedish insane asylum. Stella goes over to recover him, but finds him in a catatonic state: ‘in the clinic of Dr Olaf Bjorkminder Gemini lay inert, recognizing no one, answering no one, a Gemini so withdrawn from life that he seemed to want neither to live nor die. He was curved up, [Stella] thought, like an embryo, and the most she saw was a scrub of hair and a very red ear’ [3.3.3]. Pausing only to ventriloquize, awkwardly and uncharacteristically, a lengthy disquisition on the puerility of Freudianism through Stella's mouth, Wells moves us into the fourth and final section of this long novel.

Now Gemini's psychological convalescence begins: ‘one sunlit day in early March, Gemini became aware of himself in an extremely comfortable bed in an extremely comfortable room’

Someone had come in. One of them. One of those people who were trying to put over a lie upon him, who were trying to stand him up again for no good at all, for another overthrow from this malignant, pitiless, hideous universe that had already proved itself too much for him altogether. All his retractions and resistances intensified. One of those people had come in. Presently something would be said. Or they would begin carrying him about somewhere. Lately there had been a lot of carrying about. Airships and sailors and that railway train.....

Then nothing began to happen. Nothing began to happen with a quite positive emphasis. Someone had come into the room, and now there was such a stillness. Yet it was a fact that there was someone in the room. [Babes, 4.1.1]

The someone is Stella's uncle, Dr Kentlake the ‘psychotherapeutist’ (Wells's awkward term) in whose London house Gemini now is. Stella and her mother visit often. They don't entirely succeed ‘in piecing together a consecutive story of his experiences’, but a mosaic of traumatic moments emerges:

‘Stank,’ he said. ‘Stinking rags. It stank; it stank and it was alive and someone had stamped on its face ... children in bits, like rabbits torn to pieces and thrown about by a giant lunatic! Good old Providence sitting up aloft! ... Little... bloody... oozy... bits of human bodies ... Joints. Choice cuts. Bones I knew the names of. The acromial process; the femur, symphysis pubis. Funny to meet 'em lying about in the street. The blasts seemed to have peeled the flesh off. Omo-sternum, exactly like the joint out of a butcher's shop, and that—that squashed woman. Ugh! that woman, wrong way up. Bah! Who would want to have anything to do with a woman again after that? Love! Just playing about with entrails? Bloody entrails.’ [Babes, 4.1.2. Ellipses in original]

He is especially disillusioned by Stalin's Russia (‘filthy fraud of a world. Planes over! Russian planes. Planes from the Land of Promise setting the proletariat of Finland free and bombing them to hell. Run! Run! Run!’), and his piecemeal account of being trapped without food, shelter or proper clothing in a winter wood as the Germans advanced literalizes Stella's dream (and Wells's title). His convalescence takes a long time. When he sleeps ‘unpleasant dreams’ assail him (‘he was confronted by Stella Kentlake and she was deriding him because he was impotent’ [4.1.2]).

Uncle Robert's theraputic approach mostly consists of unloading lengthy Wellsian-y lectures upon his patient, bloviating about Freud, Christ, Stalin and many other topics. It's extraordinarily prolonged, this section, and even though it's only paying Gemini back in his own pompous-lecturing coin it starts to feel egregious—until, that is, Wells bowls us a narrative googly. Gemini starts to improve, but ‘just at this turn of affairs, the blind ruthlessness that flows beneath events in this world decreed that Uncle Robert should die. His death came as a devastating surprise to everyone, including himself’ [4.2.1]. He's knocked down by a van in the street. Wells does at least grant him a death-bed scene in which he can lecture at length one last time.

Things have now broken down completely between Gemini and Stella, and though she still loves him, she kicks him out (she has inherited the house on Uncle Robert's death). ‘“Go!” said Gemini. “Where?” “Is that my affair?”’ [4.3.1]. After a lengthy conversation, or mutual-lecturing-at session, she changes her mind and suggests instead that they marry, even though, with Gemini's impotence, it would be a sham marriage: ‘Did you ever read a book by D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover?’ she asks. ‘A stinking book if you like, but true. That would be our story’ [4.3.2]. Gemini agonizes that, if he's to be Lord Chatterley, who her Mellors could be: ‘he'd get a pistol and kill that lout.... and her’. But of course he won't. They do get married, too, but ‘she never touched him. She never came within three yards of him’.

They honeymoon in the same cottage where the novel opened, the scene of their former erotic bliss. Instead of having sex they lecture at one another at length. They chat again to the vicar, from whom they learn that the sculptor Kalinov has been interned as an enemy alien. When they visit his boarded-up house they find the huge alabaster block still in the garden—weirdly, it chooses just that moment to fall off its wooden supports and roll over, a motion they find tremendously auspicious.

Gradually Gemini becomes more like his old self, and declares his love for Stella: ‘I do now understand everything. Stella dearest, you have brought me back to self-respect. You knew what you were doing and you did it. Thank you’ but no sooner is the I love you out of his mouth than he's back to lecturing, taking the metaphor of the alabaster block as his theme. Will the war crash human civilisation, will ‘some crippled outcome of man's seed, hobgoblins and fairies, Morlocks and Eloi, emerge at the other side of this great débâcle’? Or will humanity finally carve the block?

I can see a world before me, Stella, as full of peace, order, beauty and variety as a well-kept garden, and as full of life, freedom and energy as—there's nothing with which to compare it. All that is still latent in the block. And still it will be Man's world, our world, far more than this world of to-day. Because you see, Stella, eye hath not seen yet, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, what this world might be like were every human being in it fed and lovingly educated—well educated—educated out of its inferiority complex and its spites and arrogance—and put to the job in which it could realise its powers. There is scarcely a human being alive now who couldn't do something well, if you could find the thing for it to do, and presently, when maybe the creatures are more deliberately born, though there will still be infinite variety, there will be no longer anything you will be able to treat as all—round inferiority. The possibilities of breeding and bettering men that are coming within reach of us. They stagger my imagination. [Babes, 4.3.5]

That breeding makes me suspect Wells, even in his late seventies, hasn't wholly given up his youthful eugenic ideas. But at any rate, Gemini resolves to join-up properly to fight the Nazis, not for the now but ‘for the world of, let us say, 1960 or 1970’ [4.3.6]. 1970 eh? A rubicon indeed. Specifically, Gemini thinks the present power-structures will cling-on to a kind of status quo until ‘about 1970 or 80’, when there will be ‘a reaction’ and a World State finally established in which ‘The Right Thing to Do will be the real dictator for adult mankind’. So. Anyhow, Gemini enlists in the Royal Navy (he crews a mine-sweeper) and Stella becomes a nurse, their marriage still sexless but their hope rekindled for the possibilities of the future.

:2:

There's a rather heartbreaking moment in Anthony West's biography of his father, H G Wells: Aspects of a Life (1984) where West describes Wells's last days. The whole tenor of the volume is a little ... I don't know: uneasy-making, somehow. West hero worships his famous Dad, explains-away or more aggressively defends every aspect of his life, every dubious decision, inaction or hurtful episode, and paints Wells's lover Rebecca West, Anthony's own mother, as an evil witch. But the impression the volume gives is that Wells simply didn't return his son's urgent adoration. Wells was mostly an absentee father to his illegitimate son (West's own novelisation of his childhood, Heritage, shows this more clearly): financially fairly generous but emotionally always distant. Anyway: towards the end of his father's life, adult West was in London, working for the BBC. Wells had a nice house overlooking Regent's Park, and West was living in a separate mews flat at the bottom of the garden, known, though I don't know why, as ‘Mr. Mumford's’.

‘Whilst this arrangement lasted,’ says West, ‘I would look in to see him almost every day. I would come in and find him sitting with a light rug over his knees, dozing at what had been his worktable, or, on sunny days, basking in the presence of a variety of potted plants in a big armchair that had been put out for him on the glassed-in balcony at the back of the house. We were sharing silences rather than talking by then.’ Rumours had reached Wells's ears (untruths, West insists) that Anthony was involved in some kind of pro-Nazi conspiracy at the BBC. I've no idea about the veracity or otherwise of these rumours, or how they started, but West talks about how ‘the nightmare cobweb of lies had fallen between me and my father whilst the flying bomb attack on London was at its height’. West says he planned to explain the whole situation to Wells, and put his mind at rest, but that his father was too ill to broach the topic. Then Wells's health rallied, and ‘it seemed wrong to break in on his euphoria with all that stuff’. But then his health collapsed again, and he sank towards death.

Sitting beside him one day, at once close to and utterly remote from him, and thinking him asleep, I fell into a passion of misery and buried my face in my hands. How long my spasm of pain lasted I have no way of knowing, but when its intensity slackened I suddenly felt that I was being watched. I looked up to find my father's blue eyes fixed on me with the light of his full intelligence in them. We stared at each other for an instant, until he said faintly, ‘I just don't understand you ...’ with that light fading from his eyes as he spoke. He had turned himself off, as it were, and had withdrawn into that absence in which he waited for his coming death. The last chance of communication had gone, and there was not to be another. [West, H G Wells: Aspects of a Life (London: Hutchinson 1984), 152-53. Ellipsis in original]

Wells died on the 13th August 1946. David C Smith, whose biography of Wells appeared whilst West was still alive, says nothing about the Nazi-sympathizer rumours, either because he considers them so groundless as not to need rebuttal, or else because there was something in them but he didn't want to get sued by West. At any rate, I just don't understand you is an almost breathtakingly thoughtless and cruel last ever thing to say to your son, given the cloud that was over the two of them.

Step back half a decade and the older generation's ‘I just don't understand you’ in the face of the younger's strange energies and baffling enthusiasms is exactly the tenor of Babes in the Darkling Wood. One of the things that works well about his novel is how it orchestrates that baffled noncomprehension both in terms of an in-text rigidity of moral or social-conventional reaction—as with Gemini's father's stiff-necked disapproval, or choleric Uncle Hubert—and in terms of an as-it-were out-text structuring, a story about and embodying a Great Unseen, and attempting to dissipate the cloud-of-unknowing that clings about it.

The Great Unseen in this novel is the mystery of the world as such, but it's more than that. This book—by an old revolutionary about a new generation of young revolutionaries that he doesn't understand—is, as a whole, a sort of glyph of warding about the ways the old misunderstand the young. The shape of the resulting fiction, in the largest sense is: young love, and especially the intensity of young mutual sexual desire, isolates Stella and Gemini into a bubble where the harshness of the world cannot touch them. Their astronomical names point to a kind of romanticised remoteness from things as they are, I suppose. From the third chapter onwards (that chapter's title is ‘The World's Harsh Voice is Heard Off’) the mundial intrudes into this astro-erotic remoteness, or more precisely the stars are forced to come down to earth. Parents are hostile, society is ostracizing and unhelpful, and when war breaks out the world as such reveals its Schopenhauerian ghastliness. The young lovers are revealed as too existentially and relationally fragile to survive this shock, and though with the help of a therapeutic regime Gemini is brought to a semblance of normal social function, the sexlessness of his final marriage to Stella leaves the novel hanging in a very strange place. Nazism must be defeated, but we can't say that the Stella-Gemini nexus has survived contact with reality.

According to the reading I'm proposing here, the multiple infodump-y lecturettes characters impose upon other characters are not, actually, Socratic attempts at laying a genuine dialogic exploration of ideas before the reader. They are instead an attempt to chuck huge quantities of explanation at the wall of the inexplicable in the hope that some of it sticks. Not much does, I have to say. But perhaps that's exactly the point.

Certainly, the portions of the novel that come most vividly off the page are the accounts of battlefield horrors and refugee misery from occupied Poland. That's to be expected, I suppose, in a novel in which very little vivid or memorable happens at all (even Uncle Robert getting knocked down by a van happens off-stage). Maybe the old-man's ‘I just don't understand you’ in this novel is a tacit: ‘I just don't understand how you can't see how unforgiving and brutal the real world is.’

It's striking odd the way this novel, in effect, repudiates eros in its final sections. Wells, of course, is old by the time he writes this novel, and is winding down, so presumably his sex drive—so important to his make-up for so much of his existence—is not what it used to be. Still, he gets under the skin of young lust well enough in the early sections. I wonder if, in howsoever oblique a manner, he isn't working through his sense that erotic passion, by ruthlessly individuating our libidinal investment, doesn't actually work against the larger solidarity required by the global community spirit necessary to bring about utopia (in 1970—or whenever). Simply excising, through PTSD, the erotic fixation of Gemini upon Stella is a rather extreme way of addressing this I suppose: a kind of textual chemical-castration. But another way of looking at it, in a novel packed to the very gills with undigested chunks of philosophy, is to see this as Wells's gordian-knot intervention into one of the irresolvables of metaphysics as such. ‘Philosophy,’ is how Simon Critchley puts it, ‘has long been entangled between moral optimists like Kant’, who argue that the fullest individual self-realisation, including erotic self-realisation, is perfectly compatible with the claims of human solidarity, and ‘moral skeptics like Nietzsche and Freud’ who insist that ‘the desire for human solidarity dissimulates either the will-to-power or lidibinal drives’ [Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas and Contemporary French Thought (London: Verso 1999), 86]. Wells, we could say, is feeling his way around that same conflict—the tension between the desire to turn inward to personal erotic consummation and the need to look outward, to the larger necessities of the world today—and, finally, simply writing-out the former option to leave only the latter.

The New World Order (1940)

This slender volume was published on its own early in 1940 and reissued bound-in as a twofer with The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939) as The Outlook for Homo Sapiens (1942).

‘In this small book,’ says Wells, kicking off The New World Order, ‘I want to set down as compactly, clearly and usefully as possible the gist of what I have learnt about war and peace in the course of my life.’ When he was a child, in the 1880s, he says, ‘not only I but most of my generation—in the British Empire, America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilised world—thought that war was dying out’. The consensus was that a balance of power had been achieved, and though Wells realises such optimism looks foolish to the point of idiocy from the wrong side of the Great War and at the commencement of the Second World War, he defends his former blitheness. The forces that led to war, though prodigious, were subterranean: ‘deeper forces at work that were preparing trouble’. To put an end to war, says Wells, means addressing those forces, and that means abolishing the nation state, reorganizing the world economy to make war unprofitable and to revolutionize pedagogy on a global footing to give empower not a small elite but the entire globe through education.

It's the hymn Wells has been singing since the 19-teens and earlier, here set out with a useful economy. Modernity had shrunk the world, in terms of travel and communication, and massively increased the power available to humankind for destructive, as well as creative, purposes (‘there is more power expended in a modern city like Birmingham in a day than we need to keep the whole of Elizabethan England going for a year; there is more destructive energy in a single tank than sufficed the army of William I for the conquest of England’ [3])—but humankind persisted stubbornly in thinking in dangerously out-of-date ways about both these new facts of global life. Only a comprehensive reform of everything could ensure the survival of the species going forward.

We must, he insists, take collective control. Wells works to draw a sharp distinction between what he means by collectivisation and the word's more usual Marxist associations: he's not having any of that Marxist gubbins. Indeed, he absolutely refuses to believe that there even is such a thing as a ‘Capitalist system’ on the not entirely unreasonable grounds that the core truth of Capitalism is how completely unsystematic it is. He repeats from The Fate of Homo Sapiens his argument that it is asking for trouble to have so many young men at a loose end, loafing about full of testosterone (Wells doesn't mention that hormone, but that's what he means). ‘The dispossessed young,’ says Wells, ‘find themselves hopeless unless they resort to violence. They implement the ever-increasing instability’ adding that ‘only a comprehensive collectivisation of human affairs can arrest this disorderly self-destruction of mankind’ by answering the question‘How can we offer the common young man a reasonable and stimulating prospect of a full life?’ [5] And Wells states compactly his overall World State philosophy:

The establishment of a progressive world socialism in which the freedoms, health and happiness of every individual are protected by a universal law based on a re-declaration of the rights of man, and wherein there is the utmost liberty of thought, criticism and suggestion, is the plain, rational objective before us now. Only the effective realisation of this objective can establish peace on earth and arrest the present march of human affairs to misery and destruction. We cannot reiterate this objective too clearly and too frequently. The triangle of collectivisation, law and knowledge should embody the common purpose of all mankind. [New World Order, 9]

Along the way, Wells is particularly emphatic on the need for free speech. Wells had given personal and financial support to the creation of the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1934 (he was vice-president of the organisation for a while), and in this book he urges citizens to join it, and otherwise fight for freedom of speech:

Before anything else, therefore, in this survey of the way to world peace, I put free speech and vigorous publication. It is the thing best worth fighting for. It is the essence of your personal honour. It is your duty as a world citizen to do what you can for that. You have not only to resist suppressions, you have to fight your way out of the fog. If you find your bookseller or newsagent failing to distribute any type of publication whatever--even if you are in entire disagreement with the views of that publication--you should turn the weapon of the boycott upon the offender and find another bookseller or newsagent for everything you read. The would-be world citizen should subscribe also to such organisation as the National Council for Civil Liberties; he should use any advantage his position may give him to check suppression of free speech; and he should accustom himself to challenge nonsense politely but firmly and say fearlessly and as clearly as possible what is in his mind and to listen as fearlessly to whatever is said to him. [New World Order, 2]

The New World Order ends with a ten-point proposal for a Declaration of the Rights of Man. Wells wasn't the force in international politics he'd been in 1918, but this, together with his energetic contributions to the Sankey Committee (also 1940) and its ‘Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man’ directly fed into the process by which the actual 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. So in that respect, even in his eighth decade, Wells was influencing world politics. It's an oblique influence, but still.

(1) That every man without distinction of race, of colour or of professed belief or opinions, is entitled to the nourishment, covering, medical care and attention needed to realise his full possibilities of physical and mental development and to keep him in a state of health from his birth to death.

(2) That he is entitled to sufficient education to make him a useful and interested citizen, that special education should be so made available as to give him equality of opportunity for the development of his distinctive gifts in the service of mankind, that he should have easy access to information upon all matters of common knowledge throughout his life and enjoy the utmost freedom of discussion, association and worship.

(3) That he may engage freely in any lawful occupation, earning such pay as the need for his work and the increment it makes to the common welfare may justify. That he is entitled to paid employment and to a free choice whenever there is any variety of employment open to him. He may suggest employment for himself and have his claim publicly considered, accepted or dismissed.

(4) That he shall have the right to buy or sell without any discriminatory restrictions anything which may be lawfully bought or sold, in such quantities and with such reservations as are compatible with the common welfare.

(5) That he and his personal property lawfully acquired are entitled to police and legal protection from private violence, deprivation, compulsion and intimidation.

(6) That he may move freely about the world at his own expense. That his private house or apartment or reasonably limited garden enclosure is his castle, which may be entered only with consent, but that he shall have the right to come and go over any kind of country, moorland, mountain, farm, great garden or what not, or upon the seas, lakes and rivers of the world, where his presence will not be destructive of some special use, dangerous to himself nor seriously inconvenient to his fellow-citizens.

(7) That a man unless he is declared by a competent authority to be a danger to himself and to others through mental abnormality, a declaration which must be annually confirmed, shall not be imprisoned for a longer period than six days without being charged with a definite offence against the law, nor for more than three months without public trial. At the end if the latter period, if he has not been tried and sentenced by due process of law, he shall be released. Nor shall he be conscripted for military, police or any other service to which he has a conscientious objection.

(8) That although a man is subject to the free criticism of his fellows, he shall have adequate protection from any lying or misrepresentation that may distress or injure him. All administrative registration and records about a man shall be open to his personal and private inspection. There shall be no secret dossiers in any administrative department. All dossiers shall be accessible to the man concerned and subject to verification and correction at his challenge. A dossier is merely a memorandum; it cannot be used as evidence without proper confirmation in open court.

(9) That no man shall be subjected to any sort of mutilation or sterilisation except with his own deliberate consent, freely given, nor to bodily assault, except in restraint of his own violence, nor to torture, beating or any other bodily punishment; he shall not be subjected to imprisonment with such an excess of silence, noise, light or darkness as to cause mental suffering, or to imprisonment in infected, verminous or otherwise insanitary quarters, or be put into the company of verminous or infectious people. He shall not be forcibly fed nor prevented from starving himself if he so desire. He shall not be forced to take drugs nor shall they be administered to him without his knowledge and consent. That the extreme punishments to which he may be subjected are rigorous imprisonment for a term of not longer than fifteen years or death.

(10) That the provisions and principles embodied in this Declaration shall be more fully defined in a code of fundamental human rights which shall be made easily accessible to everyone. This Declaration shall not be qualified nor departed from upon any pretext whatever. It incorporates all previous Declarations of Human Right. Henceforth for a new ear it is the fundamental law for mankind throughout the whole world.

‘He’ for ‘S/he’ is awkward, of course, for all that Wells earlier insists he means to encompass both men and women under that pronoun; but otherwise this is a pretty good fist, I think. In particular the addition of the ‘common welfare’ stipulation in 3 and 4 would make for a radical change in present affairs if it were enforced, or if it had made it through to the actual Declaration. Wells returns to the tabulation of human rights in 1943's The Rights of Man.

Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (1939)

This Penguin original, published November 1939, is a kind of travel memoir, although as you'd expect from Wells there's less description of the countryside through which he passes and more political analysis and future-speculation. Several of the pieces collected here were occasioned by his first (and last) visit to Australia, a five week trip from December 1938 to January 1939. He was invited as guest speaker at the 1939 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) conference, and to this engagement he added various public appearances, radio broadcasts (recordings of two of these survive), lectures, dinners and interviews.

Australia, not to put too fine a point on it, went wild for Wells; and he did not disappoint, shocking what was, in 1939, still a pretty conservative Australian establishment by speaking against censorship, for abortion, and mocking Hitler as insane, incurring thereby two very public rebukes by the Australian Prime Minster Joseph Lyons. Lyons died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, shortly after Wells left the country. I'm not suggesting cause-and-effect where that mournful circumstance is concerned. Only ... well, you know.

In Search of Hot Water contains Wells's own account of the Lyons ‘incident’ in chapter 3: ‘Mr Lyons Protects Hitler, the Head of a Great Friendly Power, From My “Insults”’, which is pleasantly droll. Otherwise the book gives us various neatly-written descriptions of the Australia trip: the voyage out on the ‘SS Pukka Sahib’ (chapter 1), a vivid description of a bush fire (chapter 4) and so on. Other chapters speculate about the future, revisit the ‘Jewish Question’ (chapter 3), or survey the current UK political scene ( ‘the shattering of what are called progressive political groupings throughout the British system and the search for some working formula for their effective reorganisation, have been the most striking facts of the past six months’ [chapter 7, ‘Democracy in Patches’]—that's the six months up to March 1939). Wells insists he is still ‘Pro-World-Pax’, but he is not a fool. He understands that appeasement was a bad strategy. Mid-1939 is, I daresay, late in the day to press that point, but it doesn't make it any less valid. ‘Should we resist collectively,’ Wells asks, ‘or appease severally?’ adding, ‘no one has yet discovered where appeasement ends’ [7].

He blames the failure of the League of Nations on ‘sentimental nationalism’ [9] and makes some bold proposals for educational reform:

I propose that the present division of historical teaching into the chiefly political history of localities, of countries, of selected peoples, of periods, should be absolutely and completely scrapped. I propose that the teaching of Greek History, Latin History, Jewish or Bible History, English History, French History, Medieval History, German History, Chinese History, our Island Story, the Empire and so on and so on, as separate subjects, shall be entirely abandoned. [In Search of Hot Water, 9]

Wells position, here, has hardened. This is more than pedagogical reform, this is a new ferocity aimed at history as such—everything from the rise of fascism and the ‘Jewish problem’ and the new war is a consequence of what he, vividly but unhelpfully, calls ‘the poison of history’. This is, I really think, a problematic position to take. I've noted before on this blog that Wells's fiction often takes a frankly cavalier attitude to history, sweeping it away as if it were mere chaff and ashes. But history possesses a determining inertia quite beyond human powers to overcome: the more strenuous the effort to dispatch it, as with Pol Pot's ‘Year Zero’, the more disastrous and criminal the consequences for ordinary human beings. We can only understand present, and so influence the future, by situating it, historically. Always historicize, as somebody once said.

Wells was booked to address the Annual Congress of the International P.E.N. Association in Stockholm on the 4th September 1939. In the event the Congress was cancelled (it seems something had happened in Europe, or something, that made the organizers rethink the conference. I’m not sure of the details), but Wells includes his talk here as the book's tenth and final chapter: ‘The Honour and Dignity of the Free Mind’. It’s a shame the talk was never delivered, because it contains what today I understand are called ‘sick burns’ at the expense of Mussolini. Wells lists some of the atrocities committed by Italian fascists, and then says, since he is addressing a group of writers: ‘I propose to strip off all these disagreeable associations from Signor Mussolini, and to consider him simply as one of ourselves, a playwright, a journalist, an autobiographer’, before sticking the knife right in. Mussolini’s play about Napoleon, which Wells saw when it played in London, is ‘tawdry’, ‘silly’, ‘simple-minded’; his autobiography is ‘a foolish, undignified performance’ that reveals its author as ‘a snob, pretentious and disingenuous’ and so on. Never mind his demerits as a politician, Mussolini is a very bad writer. Speaking as a writer myself, let me assure you: the same chin-jutting Benito who would have remained wholly unmoved by criticisms of his politics would have been absolutely cut to the quick by this line of attack, if (as I assume he was) he was made aware of it. So full marks to HG, there.

The Fate of Homo Sapiens (1939)

This brisk book consists of 26 short chapters, surveying the world and pointing the way forward as Wells saw it. Published in August 1939, it went through three editions in its first fortnight, so it clearly found an audience. Beatrice Webb, who had long since become reconciled with Wells after their Fabian falling-out, recorded in her diary: ‘it is the work of genius in its indictment of western civilisation’. She wrote to Wells that she and her husband Sidney, who was recovering from a stroke, had read the book ‘with unlimited admiration’.

§ 1. Preliminary Statement
§ 2. Biology Invades History
§ 3. How Species Survive
§ 4. History Becomes Ecology
§ 5. Union Now?
§ 6. What Is Democracy?
§ 7. Where Is Democracy?
§ 8. What Man Has To Learn
§ 9. Sample Of A Generation
§ 10. Estimating Hope
§ 11. Survey Of Existing Forces
§ 12. The Jewish Influence
§ 13. Christendom
§ 14. What Is Protestantism?
§ 15. The Nazi Religion
§ 16. Totalitarianism
§ 17. The British Oligarchy
§ 18. Shintoism
§ 19. The Chinese Outlook
§ 20. Subject Peoples
§ 21. Communism And Russia
§ 22. American Mentality
§ 23. Three Factors In Everyone
§ 24. Summary
§ 25. Impossibility Of Utopianism
§ 26. Decadent World

I wonder (though I can find no evidence to support the supposition) whether the American edition was renamed The Fate of Man because its publishers were worried US readers would neither know nor care who Homer Sapiens was, much as the sixteenth James Bond movie had its title changed from Licence Revoked to Licence to Kill, because American test audiences didn't know what ‘revoked’ meant. I daresay I'm being unfair.

It's a compact and readable book: short chapters, direct journalistic prose and some pithy and memorable turns of phrase. Of course, the dedicated reader of Wells through the 1930s will find nothing new in it, but it's a handy summary work. And to cut to the chase: Wells thinks our fate will probably be dire, although he also thinks it's still not to late to avert catastrophe and build towards a global future.

The books starts by describing war as a consequence of the evolutionary and biological success of our species: ‘primitive war was a necessity forced upon the human community by biological success through the production of a surplus of young males ... You can write human history in a variety of ways, but one way of writing it would be to consider how, age after age, humanity has met the problem of What to do with out sons’ [4].

History, according to Wells's slogan, is ecology. The future has become a general issue for the world, in a way that didn't use to be the case (‘the intelligence of the 1890s attached much more importance to the past and much less to the probabilities of the days to come, than do any contemporary minds now’ [9]), and the best possibility for the future is not the partial democracy currently signified by the word, but the full democracy of the egalitarian World State.

If democracy means economic justice and the attainment of that universal sufficiency that science assures us is possible today; if democracy means the intensest possible fullness of knowledge for everyone who desires to know and the greatest possible freedom of criticism and individual self-expression for anyone who desires to object; if democracy means a community saturated with the conception of a common social objective and with an educated will like the will of a team of football players to co-operate willingly and understandingly upon that objective; if democracy means a complete and unified police control throughout the world, to repress the financial scramble and gangster violence which constitute the closing phase of the sovereign state and private ownership system; then we have in democracy a conception of life for which every intelligent man and woman on earth may well be prepared to live, fight or die, as circumstances may require. [Fate of Homo Sapiens, 6]

Wells thinks youth and (in a stirring little chapter) hope are on the side of the angels, where this future is concerned; but then he lists a variety of forces liable to block his much-wished-for consummation. This where things get tricky.

The main obstacle, he thinks, is religion, expanding the term to encompass both traditional faiths and political fanaticism. He starts with the Jews, and the reader's heart sinks just a little bit. Because, although Wells declares himself broadly sympathetic to the difficulties Judaism faces, he can't seem to shake his belief that the Jews themselves are at root to blame for their own persecution by the stubbornness with which they refuse to assimilate to Gentile society. He quotes a Reform Rabbi, Lewis Browne, to the effect that ‘Gentile intolerance makes the Jews and keeps them together’ in order to contradict him: ‘I argue that the Jews make themselves and that Gentile intolerance is a response to the cult of the Chosen People’, and he adds with a breeziness that has aged very badly indeed, ‘the hostile reaction to the cult of the Chosen People is spreading about the entire world today. ’

No country wants them on such conditions. Why should any country want these inassimilable aliens bent on preserving their distinctness? Palestine is an object lesson. Until they are prepared to assimilate and abandon the Chosen People idea altogether, their troubles are bound to intensify. [Fate of Homo Sapiens, 12]

Wells can fuck off with this sort of ‘analysis’, he really can. Although he's harder, in one sense, on Christianity, sketching its evolution as a faith in terms of a vast higgled-piggled accumulation of often incompatible elements (‘century by century, the great fabric of the faith goes on accumulating. It has become a sort of Cumberland Market of religious notions’) and asking, in exasperated mode: ‘why do intelligent people accept this strange heap of mental corruption as a religion and a rule of life?’ [13]. From here it's on to Nazism as a quasi-religion, and Wells's analysis becomes, shall we say, spicier:

It is plain that the Fuehrer is insane; he shows all the symptoms of a recognized form of sex mania, the jealous fear and hate of the great raping black man—who in his case becomes the Jew. Since in his case his obsession endangers the lives of people about him, he should be certified and put under restraint. ... Hitler's insanity would have had little effect upon the world if it had not slotted very easily into certain essential needs of the German situation. But for that he might be shouting, frothing and orating in a madhouse at the present time. But it happened that he supplied just the inflexible spearhead, the inhuman pertinacity, required to give extreme expression to the feelings of a humiliated and outrageously treated people. [Fate of Homo Sapiens, 15]

No less a person than Australian Prime Minister Joseph Lyons took official exception to Wells's comments, rebuking him that talking thus about a sitting Head of State was outrageous, insulting and counter-productive. Not a good look, I must say, defending Hitler only months before Hitler invades Poland and sets-off the most catastrophic war humanity has yet seen. But hindsight is easy, of course. On the bright side: Wells's comments here and elsewhere earned him a prominent place in Hitler's notorious Black Book: he was listed to be eliminated by not one but three branches of the German military machine, Amtsgruppen VIG, IIB4 and IIIA5, which is quite the achievement.

In Chapter 17, ‘The British Oligarchy’, the English aristocracy is treated as a kind of cult, which is an interesting perspective. Then the book jumps via a summary of Shintoism, and some startling anti-Japanese racism (‘their lapses into moody murderousness ... an unintelligent blood-thirstiness is in their nature and tradition’ [17]) to China, Buddhism and Taoism. Wells is grandly dismissive of these ancient, widely-followed religions, paths that many millions have found wise and sustaining, and whilst he's at it, he manages to insert a sideswipe at Aldous Huxley. So that's all good:

Essentially these religions are behavior systems—or misbehavior systems. Taoism is frankly anti-social, an imaginative dissipation of the mind and will, and Buddhism is at least a withdrawal from life. They are both what it is now fashionable to call escape systems. Their teaching finds its Western equivalent in the ‘detachment’ of Mr. Aldous Huxley. Both foster religious orders and inflict a great multitude of monks and nuns upon the community, and neither has anything of importance to contribute to that intelligent reconditioning of the human mind which the present world situation demands. [Fate of Homo Sapiens, 19]

On the subject of Black Africans, Wells is less racist than in some of his earlier works, and trades only in positive stereotypes (although such things are, of course, still stereotypes):

His bitterest detractors are unable to deny the Negro an enviable sense of rhythm, natural good-humor and an instinct for civility, a sense of fun, brilliant mimicry, rich artistic aptitudes. And more than that. In the United States, in spite of the severest handicaps, black men have been able to struggle up to do distinguished scientific and literary work, and in South Africa it has been found necessary to protect skilled white labor from the competition of able colored people by discriminating against the apprenticing of natives to skilled trades and restricting ‘certificates of competency’ in various mechanical employments to whites. Obviously you cannot put up barriers to protect yourself from the colored man and at the same time declare that he is incurably your inferior. [Fate of Homo Sapiens, 20]

A good point. The book ends on a downbeat note: Wells's earlier optimism has deserted him. Utopia is unachievable, western civilisation is in a state of decadence, ‘actual warfare, red war, on a planetary scale’ [26] is about to engulf the globe, and this in turn could bring back ‘the Dark Ages over again, a planetary instead of a merely European Dark Ages’. Even if it doesn't, Wells, with unusual accuracy of prophesy, thinks that the coming war will lead to greater global divisions, and less chance of a World State.

The world emerging from the next great war, then, will be a tougher world, more disunited than ever, abounding still more in concealed aims and secret preparations and the fears and suspicions they engender. What else can it be? [Fate of Homo Sapiens, 26]

Cold War, here we come.