Inventing Tomorrow

H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century

Sarah Cole

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231550161
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

H. G. Wells played a central role in defining the intellectual, political, and literary character of the twentieth century. A prolific literary innovator, he coined such concepts as "time machine," "war of the worlds," and "atomic bomb," exerting vast influence on popular ideas of time and futurity, progress and decline, and humanity's place in the universe. Wells was a public intellectual with a worldwide readership. He met with world leaders, including Roosevelt, Lenin, Stalin, and Churchill, and his books were international best-sellers. Yet critics and scholars have largely forgotten his accomplishments or relegated them to genre fiction, overlooking their breadth and diversity.

In Inventing Tomorrow, Sarah Cole provides a definitive account of Wells's work and ideas. She contends that Wells casts new light on modernism and its values: on topics from warfare to science to time, his work resonates both thematically and aesthetically with some of the most ambitious modernists. At the same time, unlike many modernists, Wells believed that literature had a pressing place in public life, and his works reached a wide range of readers. While recognizing Wells's limitations, Cole offers a new account of his distinctive style as well as his interventions into social and political thought. She illuminates how Wells embodies twentieth-century literature at its most expansive and engaged. An ambitious rethinking of Wells as both writer and thinker, Inventing Tomorrow suggests that he offers a timely model for literature's moral responsibility to imagine a better global future.

1

Voice

One thing can be said with absolute certainty about H. G. Wells: he was read. He was read by men and women of different ages, classes, and political affiliations. He had many readers among working people, coming in second in the list of favorite novelists polled by the Workers Education Association (WEA) in 1936.1 He appealed to politicians and others in public life. Winston Churchill quoted regularly from him, and he met one-on-one with leaders including Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Vladimir Lenin, and Joseph Stalin and with many other luminaries in the arts, industry, and politics.2 From the early success of the 1890s scientific romances; to the social-issue novels of the first decade of the twentieth century, which entered forcefully into the fray of cultural debate and incited often passionate responses; into the war-related works (fiction and nonfiction) of the 1914–1919 years; and in his history, science, and political writings of the 1920s and ’30s, he remained a consistent force in the world of books and reading, The Outline of History’s massive sales of two million representing his most extensive reach.3 Wells’s books were translated copiously; in Europe alone, he was translated into twenty-six languages between 1895 and his death in 1946, including Irish, Serbo-Croat, Latvian, Estonian, Yiddish, and even Esperanto.4 With his works being produced very quickly in the major European and Asian languages—sometimes within months of their initial English publication—and an especially large body of readers in France and Russia, as well as in America, Wells was a genuinely global author, even by our contemporary standards of worldwide exposure.5 Taken as such, it would be accurate to say that Wells embodied what Rebecca Walkowtiz has theorized as being “born translated,” a kind of readiness for the world market that she deems central to our own moment of world literature.6

More than numbers, it is the breadth and recalcitrance of this role in the reading public that distinguishes Wells. In England, the same WEA poll that had Wells in the top rank in 1936 still held him there in 1944, though nearly all others from his generation, esteemed a decade earlier, were no longer being read so widely. George Orwell’s 1941 assessment was that “thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation,” a startling statement.7 Orwell’s point is less about the numbers of Wells’s readers than about how his writing had mattered to them; his was a transformational voice, shaping people’s ideas, providing a model of activist writing and a set of key texts that powerfully motivated young intellectuals like Orwell and others of his generation. Tributes like these are not always flattering—Orwell was mostly concerned to attack Wells for, in his view, remaining an inveterate Edwardian—but they point to the unusual penetration of Wells’s voice in relation to his diverse public, all of which made for a remarkable authorial phenomenon. The goal of this chapter is to show, from a stylistic point of view, what he offered to these many readers, and to excavate from his vast body of work a distinctive Wellsian set of writerly techniques and attitudes. What emerges is a recognizable voice, with implications for how we understand not just Wells but the period’s literary innovations more broadly.

To state it clearly, Wells was read because, despite the great variety of his corpus, he wrote in a certain style. He developed his own distinctive techniques across his body of writing, and these, we may surmise, drew together his array of readers. Discovering his voice will expand the range of what we understand as modernist experiment.8 While later chapters will focus largely on thematic topics, my aim here is to underscore some of the key stylistic and tonal features of his work, in part to construe how he was able to reach such an abundance of readers and, more broadly, as an inauguration into a study of his literary works. These signatures fall into six categories: Wells’s complex and pervasive habits for placing himself in his writings; his unusual uses of figurative language (in particular, his penchant for both employing and explaining his metaphors); his development of a mode of fiction-as-argument that stretches his themes across multiple texts; his idiosyncratic use of specialized language; his construction of an ongoing tonal dialectic, where violent, destructive visions are countered by an essential optimism; and his powerful visual imagination, linking his works up with literary modes like impressionism and with the aesthetics of film. Cutting across all of these categories, what is most striking is the profuse energy and indefatigable spirit of Wells’s voice. No matter how diverse and voluminous the output, it always belongs unmistakably to this author of ferocious, unappeasable drive. Therein lies one of the great contradictions surrounding his work: in endlessly writing himself, he spoke to a massive public; in playing out his private preoccupations, he created a literature of universal dilemmas.

I. THE AUTHOR

It was Wells’s first novel, and it launched his career with a bombshell. The Time Machine has, as its center and climax, a sensational discovery: the sweet, soft, carefree people of the year 802,701 are not alone in the future. Something else is there too, which slinks out menacingly only after dark to terrorize the seemingly joyful Eloi and which, as we soon learn, turns out to be our cannibalistic other half down the evolutionary line, the Morlocks. Everything about the Morlocks is interesting: the primal horror they conjure up (when they paw at the Time Traveller, with tentacle-like touch, they provoke a kind of instinctual terror); the idea of them as the descendants of the working classes, with class transposing into species in the evolutionary scheme; the quality of their subterranean world, part sewer, part factory, part underworld/otherworld; the sense of awful revenge against the complacent well-to-do in Wells’s era—or our own—taken against our children hundreds of thousands of years into the future. And how do we get to these Morlocks—what is their point of emergence and contact with the world? Wells.

As the Traveller first notes of these apertures, “A peculiar feature, which presently attracted my attention, was the presence of certain circular wells.”9 It is easy to overlook the resonance of wells with Wells (a decidedly unscientific poll of students in several lecture courses yielded a 0 percent rate in noticing this conjunction), yet, in another sense, it could not be more blunt. “I sat upon the edge of the well,” says the Traveller, having had his first confrontation with a Morlock, who looks, he thinks, like a “human spider,” “telling myself that, at any rate, there was nothing to fear” (TM, 46). The edge of the well is not deep enough; the Traveller, and we, can only penetrate the truths of the future, and hence of the present, if we actually descend into the wells, experiencing their interior contents. It is a wonderfully rich beginning in many senses: Wells setting up the key to the future of mankind, its dark and awful comeuppance, in a journey into his own psyche, a trip into the wells. Of course, he is having fun with this idea, and his tendency to utilize multiple narrators in his works often functions less to isolate himself from his story than to place himself comfortably within it. In this respect The Time Machine inaugurates Wells’s career very appropriately as a joint venture into the social life, history, and future of mankind and into the always capacious mind of Wells himself.10 He is, in his own specific way, one of the most self-revelatory of all the writers of the modernist era.

It is a competitive field. Critics have long observed what seems like a contradiction between, on one hand, modernism’s poetics of impersonality, to use Maud Ellman’s important phrase, and the powerfully autobiographical elements that suffuse many of the most important modernist novels in English.11 Joyce naturally commands the terrain, with his creation of Stephen Dedalus as one of the greatest alter-egos in twentieth-century fiction. There is something enormously brave and moving about how fully Joyce pours himself into Stephen, not least because his young self can be so unlikable. Lawrence, too, when scripting himself as Paul Morel in Sons and Lovers (or as Birkin in Women in Love, or Somers in Kangaroo, or any of the narrators in his travel writings), forges a voice and persona that combines receptivity to the world with solipsism, in a series of portraits that become recognizable versions of himself. That one can always find the Lawrentian persona in his male protagonists, shouting at the world from their often frail bodies, is one feature that constitutes his canon most distinctively. We can add many others into the list: Woolf, Stein, Hemingway, Richardson, Bowen, to name a few. In a general sense, the modernist novel reads as a moving portrait gallery of its extraordinary authors, and of course the culture of fame and fetishism characterizing these writers shows no sign of diminishing.

Even within this company, Wells stands out for the extent, variety, and sheer gusto of his self-representation across his works, beginning with those intriguing wells. Wells’s works are so thoroughly permeated by their author, in fact, that we need to establish some distinctions and categories.12 There are, first, a host of works whose protagonists are partially modeled on Wells the historical person; these include Kipps (1905), The History of Mr. Polly (1910), Love and Mr. Lewisham (1904), In the Days of the Comet (1906), Tono-Bungay (1909), and Ann Veronica (1909, in the person of Capes), and all of them picture Wells as a young man, forging a way in the world from a position of vulnerability and uncertainty. Other works that closely abut this type of autobiographical novel in the bildungsroman family feature a Wells-like protagonist, even though important enough aspects are changed that one sees both similarity and fairly radical dissonance in the self-portrait; these include The New Machiavelli (1911, where the protagonist Remington is a Tory!), The World of William Clissold (1926, in which Clissold is a rich businessman with a global empire), and even The Holy Terror (1939, where the sulky, angry boy who becomes a world dictator shares some of Wells’s most questionable personal traits). Wells was at times very testy about his role in his works, declaring himself entirely bored by the whole phenomenon of the roman à clef in all its forms.13 In the preface to The World of William Clissold, feeling defensive about having lampooned Churchill several years earlier in the novel Men Like Gods (1923), Wells grumpily asks, “Cannot those who criticise books and write about books cease to pander to that favourite amusement of vulgar, half-educated, curious, but ill-informed people, the hunt for imaginary ‘originals’ of every fictitious character …?” and declares moreover that “if the author had wanted to write a mental autobiography instead of a novel, there is no conceivable reason why he should not have done so” (WC, iv, iii.).

At the same time, he was often explicit about how much of himself and his world he infused into all of his writings and accordingly wrote works of very open self-scrutiny and autobiography. These include the wonderful and widely read Experiment in Autobiography (1934) and, more salaciously, an addendum he waited to have published posthumously, which details his vigorous love/sex life, eventually published as H. G. Wells in Love.14 Throughout his life he documented his own mental and intellectual progress, with characters playing out his ambivalences and dilemmas, and his body of writing a space for testing his ideas as he forged, them, all the way up to the very late and depressed work, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) which sees the end of the world and the end of its author as paired events. It is a subject his biographers and critics have considered, with Jeanne and Norman MacKenzie, as well as Peter Kemp, seeing these tendencies as a sign of obsessional personality and an overwhelming egomania. Perhaps. But the relation of book to self becomes much more revealing and productive when viewed as a praxis, a form of modern self-textualizing that opens up new directions for novelistic exploration.

All of these efforts remain within recognizable rubrics in terms of the author’s relation to his writing, but Wells’s most pointed innovation around these issues falls elsewhere. These are works—and they could almost be said to include all of Wells’s writings, at least after 1900—that centrally include swaths of discussion around his key ideas and primary themes, most prominently world unity, education, innovation, science, and the need to be driven by an interest in the future rather than by the strictures and blind spots of the past. Thematic unity is a central principle in the Wells canon, and that unity is forged in part by the inevitable, recognizable voice of the author, declaiming about the world. It is not, in other words, possible to separate Wells’s development of a new type of essay-novel from his development of an expansive authorial persona, roving through his works across every genre. And then, to add an extra dimension, all of this gets thematized in his books, as, for instance, in his 1937 novella The Camford Visitation, where a “Voice” makes a series of strange intrusions into a small university town, exhorting its inhabitants to rethink their entire approach to education, in essence to follow all of the precepts Wells had been preaching in the preceding decades. Of course, no one listens. The Voice is Wells, as his multitude of readers by then would easily recognize.

Such self-referencing begins with his younger being, breaking out into the world. The image of the young Lewisham in his attic room, with his “schema” pinned to the wall (one list for the day’s schedule, one for the life plan), might stand as the quintessential image of the young Wells, at the outset of his professional career, the student/teacher already impressively advanced from where anyone would have imagined of this son of a grocer and lady’s maid—inspired, struggling, pretentious. Lewisham’s career plan reads as follows: “In this scheme, 1892 was indicated as the year in which Mr Lewisham proposed to take his B. A. degree at the London University with ‘hons. in all subjects,’ and 1895 as the date of his ‘gold medal.’ … and such like things duly dated.” And for the individual day plan, his “Time-table” is even more chronologically demanding: “Mr Lewisham was to rise at five … ‘French until eight,’ said the time-table curtly. Breakfast was to be eaten in twenty minutes; then twenty-five minutes of ‘literature’ to be precise, learning abstracts (preferably pompous) from the plays of William Shakespeare,” and so on for the day.15 “But just think of the admirable quality of such a scheme!” the narrator notes with a wink, and indeed this sense of detachment, irony, but also real pleasure in the figure of Lewisham characterizes the early scenes of the novel (LL, 2). These charming sequences, in which Lewisham begins to fall behind on his schedules, distracted by the lovely Ethel—just too attractive as she walks on the path in the suburban town where Lewisham is a tutor—have about them a poignancy-in-comedy that bespeaks the genuine empathy of one’s personal story. As Lewisham slides from his aspirations, makes fatal mistakes, and acquires only partial compensation in the novel’s concluding focus on the next generation (“it is all the Child. The future is the Child”), the novel evinces a certain severity toward him, yet there remains a sense of empathy and loss in these disappointments (LL, 191).

In portraits like this one—and here too we find Kipps and later Mr. Polly, two of his most famous and beloved protagonists in the years around their publication—Wells creates these appealing men on the border of working and middle class, as they strive and push out of their inherited class positio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Voice
• 2. Civilian
• 3. Time
• 4. Biology
• Conclusion: The World
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index