Lives in Writing (25 page)

It wasn’t until I looked up Vonnegut’s story that I realised this number when spoken is ‘To be or nought to be’. It’s a black-comic fable about population control: a man whose wife has just given birth to triplets and wants to keep them must find three ‘volunteers’.

‘Tickets on Time’ by the French writer Marcel Aymé (1902–67) is a more whimsical fantasy, though its premise is closer to Trollope’s. The story consists of extracts from the diary of a vain and ambitious Parisian writer, which begins:

A ridiculous rumour is going round the neighbourhood about new restrictions. In order better to anticipate shortages and to guarantee improved productivity in the working portion of the population, the authorities are going to put unproductive consumers to death; unproductive meaning: older people, retirees, those with private income, the unemployed and other superfluous mouths. Deep down, I think this measure is quite fair.

The diarist changes his opinion when he discovers that writers and artists are classified among the less productive and useful members of the community. Nobody, however, is actually killed under this regulation. All are issued with tickets entitling them to a certain number of days of life per month, related to their value to society, and during the remaining days they cease to exist, by some means that is never explained but might be compared to the way digitalised information can be stored in the Cloud, deleted terrestrially, and later recovered. The diary entries over several months record the effects, both comic and serious, of this regime on personal and collective life. An elderly husband who was swallowed up into the ether when his monthly tickets ran out, suddenly rematerialises in his bed between his young wife and her lover. At first the new regulation seems to reduce extravagant consumption by the idle rich, but after a while a black market in tickets predictably evolves, workers selling some of their rations to the wealthy, so the inequalities of society are restored by market forces. Because death is temporary and virtual in this fable, less is at stake than in the other two texts, and it does not engage as directly with the ethical implications of euthanasia.

EARLY IN 2004,
while waiting for the autumn publication of my novel about Henry James,
Author, Author
, anxiously aware that Colm Tóibín was about to publish his novel,
The Master
, on the same subject, I occupied myself by writing the introduction to a Penguin Classics edition of H.G. Wells’s novel
Kipps
. Early in April I made this note in my very occasional diary:

Researching
Kipps
I came across in Wells’s
Experiment in Autobiography
(1934) an interesting story of the ménage of Mr and Mrs Hubert Bland at Well Hall, Eltham. He was a Fabian, a philanderer who converted to Catholicism, she was E. Nesbit. Possible material for a novel like
Author, Author
here. Sex, politics, children’s literature . . . How much has it been worked over?

Author, Author
was a complete change of direction in my work, and I had enjoyed researching and writing it so much that I was receptive to this idea for another book of the same kind. The potential novel I glimpsed in those few pages of Wells’s autobiography was one in which his involvement with the Blands and the Fabian Society in the early years of the twentieth century, and the parallel development of his career with Edith Nesbit’s at that time, would provide a structure similar to the relationship between Henry James and George Du Maurier in
Author, Author.
But I soon discovered from Julia Briggs’s excellent biography,
A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit
(1987) that Edith’s interesting story began long before she met Wells, while his own continued long after they became estranged, so their relationship could be only one episode in a novel that was mainly about him. Meanwhile Colm Tóibín’s novel about Henry James had appeared to great acclaim, which, as I had feared, affected the reception of
Author, Author
adversely when it was eventually published. If two books on the same subject appear in the same year, the second one invariably suffers. Unwilling to risk the same thing happening to my next book, I shelved the Wells project, and wrote a fictional novel set in the present day,
Deaf Sentence
, published in 2008; but when that was finished I couldn’t resist going back to Wells.

The postponement was fortunate. I had written in my diary in April 2004: ‘
Possible material for a novel
. . .
How much has it been worked over?’
Little did I know, but it was probably being worked over at that very moment by A.S. Byatt, who five years later would publish a novel drawing on it. By that time I had started my novel about Wells, having spent a couple of years on research, and had written approximately 15,000 words. On 1 May 2009, I wrote in my occasional diary:

I discovered in last weekend’s newspapers that a major character in A.S. Byatt’s new novel
The Children’s Book
is inspired by and partly based on E. Nesbit and her ménage, and that there is a sexual-predator character who resembles H.G. Wells. The Zeitgeist strikes again! I wondered despairingly if the Tóibín saga was going to repeat itself.

On further reflection I decided there was no real cause for concern. There was obviously much less overlap in the content of the two novels than in the case of
Author, Author
and
The Master
, and by the time mine was published there would be plenty of blue water between them. I decided to press on with my book without reading A.S. Byatt’s, to avoid being influenced by it. If, however, I had started writing
A Man of Parts
straight after
Author, Author
, it might very well have appeared in the same year as
The Children’s Book
.

Before I thought of writing a novel about Wells I already knew something about him from writing literary criticism about his work, but the more deeply I looked into the life the more astonishingly rich in human and historical interest it appeared. Beginning inauspiciously (he was the son of unsuccessful shopkeepers and apprenticed to the drapery trade at the age of fourteen) it stretched from 1866 to 1946, a period of global political turmoil, including two world wars in which he played a public role. The bibliography of his publications contains more than 2,000 items, including over a hundred books. He met and conversed with nearly every well-known statesman and writer of his time, and in his science fiction and speculative prose he foresaw the invention of, among other things, television, tanks, aerial warfare and the atom bomb. He made a strenuous effort to direct the Fabian Society towards his own idiosyncratic model of socialism (an updated version of Plato’s
Republic
) nearly destroying the society in the process, and worked selflessly if vainly all his life for the cause of World Government. His
Outline of History
, published in 1920, was an ambitious attempt to ‘teach the peoples of the world . . . that they are all engaged in a common work, that they have sprung from common origins, and all are contributing some special service to the general end’. It was a global bestseller.

‘Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells’s own creation,’ George Orwell wrote in 1941 (‘Wells, Hitler and the World State’). Between the wars, however, his influence gradually declined along with the quality of his writing. The triumph of literary modernism in the 1920s made his fiction look old-fashioned, and the novels which have retained classic status, like
The Time Machine
,
The War of the Worlds
,
Tono-Bungay
and
The History of Mr Polly
, all belong to the first fifteen years of his long literary career. His mind remained fertile with new ideas – in the late 1930s, for instance, he proposed something he called the ‘World Brain’, an enormous bank of human knowledge stored on microfilm and distributed free to users by aeroplane, which needed only the invention of the microchip to resemble the internet – but the world paid diminishing attention to them. There was pathos in his own sense of this neglect in his last years, and in his deepening pessimism about the fate of the human race, epitomised in the title of his last book,
Mind at the End of Its Tether
(1945)
.

Wells was also a prophet of the sexual revolution of our own era. He believed in Free Love and practised it tirelessly. He was married twice to women he loved, but neither of whom satisfied him sexually, and had several long-term relationships and briefer affairs, mostly condoned by his second wife, Jane, and innumerable casual sexual encounters. Of particular interest because of the scandal they aroused were his relationships with three young women half his age: Rosamund Bland, the secretly adopted daughter of Edith and Hubert Bland, who was actually fathered by Bland on Edith’s companion and housekeeper, Alice Hoatson; Amber Reeves, a brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, also the daughter of prominent Fabians; and Rebecca West, then at the very beginning of her distinguished literary career, whom he invited to his Essex country house in 1912 to discuss her witty demolition of his novel
Marriage
in the feminist journal
The Freewoman
, a meeting which led in due course to the birth of Anthony West on the first day of the First World War, and a stormy relationship that lasted for some ten years. Amber Reeves also became pregnant by Wells, by her own desire, with dramatic consequences. There were interesting liaisons with the writers Dorothy Richardson (who portrayed Wells in her novel sequence
Pilgrimage
), Violet Hunt and Elizabeth von Arnim. Then there was Moura, the Baroness Budberg, a Russian aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution as the secretary and probably mistress of Maxim Gorky, whom Wells slept with one memorable night when staying in Gorky’s flat in Petrograd in 1920, and met again after the death of Jane in 1927. Moura was the great love of his later life, and his acknowledged mistress, but she refused to marry or cohabit with him. Wells has the reputation of being a predatory seducer, especially of women much younger than himself; but in all the relationships I investigated, with the possible exception of the always inscrutable Moura, he was initially the pursued rather than the pursuer.

This is not to deny that he was sometimes reckless or selfish in his amorous adventures, just as he was capable of pronouncements on eugenics and race which are morally repugnant to enlightened minds today. The last chapter of
Anticipations
(1902) is particularly shocking, declaring (in a poorly constructed sentence) that

. . . the men of the New Republic . . . will hold, I anticipate, that the small minority . . . afflicted with indisputably transmissible diseases, with transmissible mental disorders, with such incurable habits of mind as the craving for intoxication – exists only on sufferance, out of pity and patience, and on the understanding that they do not propagate; and I do not foresee any reason to suppose that they will hesitate to kill when that sufferance is abused.

And as regards ‘those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people . . . I take it that they will have to go . . . So far as they fail to develop sane, vigorous and distinctive personalities for the great world of the future, it is their portion to die out and disappear.’
¹

For these reasons I foresaw a danger in narrating the main story exclusively from Wells’s point of view, and introduced a critical perspective through what might be called, by analogy with interior monologue, ‘interior dialogue’. Just as young children sometimes handle their guilt or anxiety by engaging in conversation with an imaginary friend, so the aged Wells sometimes hears, and responds to, a voice which

. . . articulates things he had forgotten or suppressed, things he is glad to remember and things he would rather not be reminded of, things he knows others say about him behind his back, and things people will probably say about him in the future after he is dead, in biographies and memoirs and perhaps even novels.

This device makes explicit the faults and follies of which Wells is often accused, while allowing him to defend himself. Most readers liked it, and a minority didn’t, but without it I couldn’t have written the novel. It is an invention on my part – I have no evidence that H.G. talked to himself in old age – but has some justification in that there is a similar dialogic element in several of his books, notably
The Anatomy of Frustration
(1936), where the controversial views of the principal character, plainly voicing H.G.’s opinions, are questioned sceptically by another character supposed to be the editor of the main text.

Representing sexual behaviour presents a special challenge for the writer of a biographical novel: how can you ascertain the facts about this most private and intimate aspect of a person’s life? It wasn’t a problem for me in the case of
Author, Author
, because I share the view of most of Henry James’s biographers that he was a celibate bachelor who repressed or sublimated his inherent homosexual tendencies. Wells was, in this respect, as in others, the antithesis of James. Fortunately, for my purposes, he wrote a secret ‘Postscript’ to his 1934 autobiography about his sexual life, to be published after he and the women mentioned in it were dead, and it eventually appeared in 1984, edited by his son Gip, under the title
Wells in Love
. This gave me the essential facts about the major relationships in his life, and a large number of minor ones, as well as invaluable information about his sexual development in childhood and adolescence. It contains only hints of his proclivities as a lover, but these could be supplemented from other sources, especially his passionate letters to Rebecca West.