Lives in Writing (27 page)

The kind of biographical novel I write is based on documented facts about historical persons, and does not invent any action or event with significant consequences for them, but uses fictional methods to explore and fill the gaps in our knowledge, which is primarily the subjective experience of the persons involved and their verbal interaction. It makes a different contract with the reader from those implied in the novels mentioned above. In
A Man of Parts
(as in
Author, Author
) I spelled it out in a prefatory note:

Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources – ‘based on’ in the elastic sense that includes ‘inferable from’ and ‘consistent with’. All the characters are portrayals of real people, and the relationships between them were as described in these pages. Quotations from their books and other publications, speeches, and (with very few exceptions) letters, are their own words. But I have used a novelist’s licence in representing what they thought, felt and said to each other, and I have imagined many circumstantial details which history omitted to record.

I quoted copiously from letters (with kind permission from the Wells Estate) for two reasons: firstly they give a vivid sense of what the writers were thinking and feeling at critical moments in their lives, and secondly they provide the reader with an occasional reality check on the narrative. The reader can be sure that events the letters refer to actually happened, and assess the consistency of other details in the novel with those facts. In a few places I was obliged to compose fictional letters or fragments of letters because the originals were unobtainable or because it seemed the most plausible means for information in my source material to be passed from one person to another, and I listed these in an appendix to the novel.

This is the most controversial kind of bio-novel because it comes closest to the territory of the historian and biographer, while being quite different in its aims and (apart from quoting from the subject’s letters and publications) in methods. Applying techniques that evolved in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel, especially ‘free indirect style’, which fuses third-person narration with a character’s inner voice, and alternating this kind of discourse with passages of dialogue, a bio-novel can convey a more immediate sense of a person’s life
as lived
than biography, representing it through his or her consciousness, and in their verbal interaction with others. Biographers are confined by their rules to a more limited repertoire of narrative modes and stylistic effects. The voice of the biographer, writing well-formed prose, which may of course be eloquent and witty and a pleasure to read, reports the life mostly in a summary style – partly because there is usually so much life to get through, but mainly because so much circumstantial detail is irrecoverable. When it comes to explaining motivation for which there is no hard evidence, the biographer is forced to rely on formulae like, ‘He may have thought . . .’, ‘Perhaps at this moment she was reminded . . .’, etc. The biographer’s voice remains inevitably dominant, while the novelist can present such speculative material in the inner voice of the character. To make this distinction is not to denigrate biography, but to argue that there is something to be gained by representing the lives of real, historical figures with the techniques of the novel. Hilary Mantel’s comment on her treatment of the events leading up to the execution of Anne Boleyn, in
Bring Up the Bodies
(2012), her sequel to
Wolf Hall
, is apropos:

Until now this story has not been told through [Thomas] Cromwell’s eyes. What can a novelist add to the painstaking work of historians? Perhaps nothing; all she can do is create a parallel version, an intimate version, sneak you into rooms where the door is barred. The affair was a conspiracy. It did not, by its nature, leave those traces in the written record that historians need to understand it. Perhaps we can’t understand it unless we feel it: the foetid atmosphere of Henry’s court, seething with malice, superstition, fear. (
Guardian Review
, 3 October 2012)

The novelistic method involves inventing – or, as I would prefer to say, imagining – innumerable small units, and often larger ones, in the continuum of represented experience, but as long as these are compatible with the factual record, and the book is presented and read as a novel, not as history, no harm is done. Antony Beevor once remarked, no doubt tongue in cheek, that he wished writers of historical novels would print the bits they made up in bold type so the reader would know which they were. As he was well aware, this would completely negate the novelist’s aim, which is to make the seams between the researched facts and the imaginative embodiment of them invisible to the reader, in order to create that illusion of intimate access to another’s experience which the novel can achieve more effectively than any other narrative form. In fact, if
A Man of Parts
was printed as Beevor suggests, most of the text would be in bold. As any competent reader knows, a detailed description of a historical person’s thoughts and feelings has to have been extrapolated from a few factual clues, since every individual’s consciousness is largely concealed from others, and most dialogue in a biographical novel must be similarly worked up from a small amount of data since whole conversations, especially in the pre-electronic age, are very rarely recorded for posterity. An example may be useful at this point.

In July 1905 Wells spent a week at the Blands’ spacious, ramshackle eighteenth-century house, Well Hall, having arrived there uninvited. In her biography of E. Nesbit, Julia Briggs describes the episode as follows:

One afternoon towards the end of July H.G. turned up at Well Hall entirely without warning, carrying his valise and announcing, ‘Ernest, I’ve come to stay.’ He called Edith ‘Ernest’ because he had first supposed that the bare initial stood for a man’s name, and what after all was more important than being Ernest? (Coincidentally, an early Bodleian cataloguer made the same assumption.) Edith was delighted with Wells’s confident expectation of her hospitality, and immediately set about organizing entertainments in the form of tableaux and charades to celebrate his arrival and amuse him next day. These were based on titles of his books and he had to guess what they were: for
Love and Mr Lewisham
, Paul sat at a table, studiously reading, while little John, got up as Eros with a bow and arrow, shot at him. Wells stayed about a week, on this occasion, and while he was there completed the draft of his novel
In The Days Of The Comet
, writing in the garden as Edith herself did; it was not finally published till the following year.

As far as I recall, no biographer of Wells has thought this visit worth recording, perhaps because Wells himself does not mention it in the
Autobiography
or its Postscript,
Wells in Love
. The accounts of his and Jane’s relationship with the Blands in those books are sarcastic in tone, coloured by the breach that occurred as a result of his affair with Rosamund, and give little idea of how intimate with each other the two families were for several years, and how well Edith and H.G. got on together at that time. The visit to Well Hall recorded by Julia Briggs in her biography of Edith illustrates that very vividly, and I made a note to include the episode in my novel when I came across it. The corresponding passage in
A Man of Parts
to the one quoted above is as follows:

He didn’t wire in advance, but arrived uninvited and unannounced at Well Hall, carrying his valise, and said to Edith, when she came into the hall to see who had called, ‘Hallo, Ernest, I’ve come to stay for a few days.’ Her face lit up with a smile of pleasure. ‘What a lovely surprise!’ She took his hand and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You may be wondering why – ’ he began, but she waved away his explanations. ‘We’re always delighted to see you, H.G. Stay as long as you like.’

That evening the family put on charades based on the titles of his books to amuse him and make him feel at home. Paul sat at a table reading text books and taking notes while young John, dressed as Cupid, mimed taking shots at him with a bow and arrow. He guessed ‘Love and Mr Lewisham’ immediately but pretended to be puzzled for a while to let the actors have their fun. An item performed by Edith and the housekeeper-nanny Alice Hoatson kept him guessing longer, till he exclaimed ‘Anticipations!’ Rosamund, now eighteen and a striking young woman, with a pretty face and a buxom figure, did ‘The Sea Lady’, miming the breast-stroke while pursued around the room by Hubert Bland wielding a shrimping net. He couldn’t resist contributing to the entertainment with a couple of improvisations on Nesbit titles, which were warmly applauded. He hadn’t enjoyed anything so much for weeks, and retired to bed in good spirits. ‘You won’t mind if I’m not in evidence tomorrow until the afternoon,’ Edith said as she wished him a good night. ‘I work in the mornings.’ ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘That’s perfect then,’ she said.
here

This follows my source fairly closely, but there are obvious differences which belong to the novel form. Briggs refers to Wells as ‘H.G.’ which is how his family and close friends always addressed him by this date. It’s an index of the familiarity that existed at this time between him and the Blands. My passage begins: ‘He didn’t wire in advance . . .’ The third-person pronoun locates the narrative in Wells’s consciousness, and is used throughout the passage, and in fact throughout the novel, for this purpose. It is usually possible to maintain this intimate effect with some stylistic variation, by using the point-of-view character’s given name, as I did frequently in
Author, Author –
for example, ‘
Henry of course kept his opinion to himself
.’ Wells’s Christian name was Herbert, and he was known to his parents and relatives as ‘Bertie’. Early on in planning the novel I decided it would be inappropriate to use either of these names in passages focalised through his consciousness, since in most scenes other characters would not be using it to address him. On the other hand, I couldn’t use ‘H.G.’ as I had used ‘Henry’ in
Author, Author.
That honorific abbreviation, bestowed upon him in mature adulthood by others, he accepted and obviously liked, but he wouldn’t
think
of himself as ‘H.G.’. If I had begun the passage, ‘H.G. didn’t wire in advance’ it would inevitably open up a gap between the narrator and the narrated for the reader, if only subliminally. Here and elsewhere, therefore, I was restricted to the third-person pronoun (and obliged to use some ingenuity to avoid possible confusion with antecedent references to characters of the same gender).

There is much more dialogue at the beginning of my passage than in Briggs’s, and all of it except Wells’s announcement of his arrival was imagined, to bring out the warmth of the relationship between Edith and H.G. This dramatises the biographer’s summary statement that ‘Edith was delighted with Wells’s confident expectation of her hospitality’. The explanation of why he called her ‘Ernest’ is omitted because I introduced it earlier in the novel in describing their first meeting. The reference to the Bodleian cataloguer – a typical biographer’s aside – is also omitted as irrelevant to the situation. The action is focalised through H.G.’s consciousness – most obviously when he pretends to be puzzled by the charade of
Love and Mr Lewisham.
Briggs describes only one charade; I invented two more to create an effect of ‘scene’ rather than summary, and made the enactment of
The Sea Lady
anticipate Bland’s later inappropriate sexual interest in his daughter. Since I could not imagine the intensely competitive H.G. being a purely passive spectator, I made him reciprocate by miming some titles of Edith’s books. The dialogue at the end of the passage dramatises the information that both hostess and guest worked on their writing during Wells’s stay, and prepares for an extensive development of this fact in the following pages. For me this long visit of Wells was a very useful opportunity to show the two writers discussing their work-in-progress, and to inform or remind the reader of the content of
In The Days Of The Comet
, which was to have important consequences for Wells’s career, and of Nesbit’s masterpiece
The Railway Children.

But why did Wells arrive at Well Hall without warning or an invitation? If the two homes were not connected by telephone at that date, why didn’t he write or send a telegram asking if it would be convenient? And why did he want to go there to write anyway? These are not questions that Julia Briggs felt required to answer, but in a novel we expect actions to be motivated (if they are not, a mystery is created which must be resolved sooner or later). There is a hint of an explanation in the warm letter of thanks Wells wrote to Edith shortly after his return home, which Briggs reproduced in her next paragraph:

The thing cannot be written! Jane I think must take on the task of describing the departure of a yellow, embittered and thoroughly damned man on one Thursday and his return on the next, pink . . . exultant . . . full of the most agreeable memories.

Julia Briggs does not mention that Wells’s visit occurred soon after the death of his mother in June of that year – and there was no reason why she should have been aware of it, since she was writing a biography of Edith, not H.G. His mother was the dominant figure in his family in childhood and he had struggled against her will for years in the effort to escape the wage-slavery of the retail trade to which she had apprenticed him. He felt his subsequent success had never really reconciled them. He was upset by her death, and even more when shortly afterwards he read her private diary. According to Anthony West, in
H.G.Wells: Aspects of a Life
(1984), H.G. was deeply shaken by the unlikeable personality revealed in the diary, by evidence of his mother’s growing dislike of his father, and the fact that she submitted to a third pregnancy in the hope of replacing her adored daughter Possy who died in childhood, only to be bitterly disappointed by the birth of H.G. This was the most likely cause of the ‘embittered’ mood which he hoped to throw off at Well Hall, but it didn’t explain why he arrived there without first ascertaining that he would be welcome. To bridge this explanatory gap I wrote the following passage to precede his arrival.