Lives in Writing (28 page)

He was upset by his mother’s death, but unwilling to share these thoughts with Jane, or anyone else. He was irritable and restless in the weeks that followed the funeral, unable to get on with a new book he had started called
In The Days Of The Comet
. He bickered with Jane about household matters, and shouted angrily at his boys when they made too much noise in the garden outside his study window, making little Frank cry. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ Jane asked. ‘I need to get away,’ he said. ‘Where will you go?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe to the Reform. I could work in the library there.’ He had been elected to this famous club, another feather in his cap, in March. He packed a few clothes and the manuscript of
In The Days Of The Comet
in a valise and set off for London, but on the journey the idea of staying at the Reform in the middle of July, when everybody he knew among the members, like Arnold Bennett and Henry James, would be in the country or abroad, did not appeal. He needed company, sympathetic company. He thought of Edith Bland.
here

This passage is mostly invention, but inferable from or consistent with the facts that are known about Wells’s life at this time. It, or something like it, was essential to preserving the novelistic cohesion of the narrative.

Bio-fiction does not pretend to replace biography, but complements it, offering a different kind of interpretation of real lives. But by putting himself imaginatively inside the consciousness of a historical individual the novelist can sometimes contribute to interpreting biographical ‘facts’. The episode of Wells’s life that required me to use most imaginative reconstruction was his affair with Rosamund Bland. Few hard facts are known about it. It began probably at or near Dymchurch, in East Sussex, where the Blands had a holiday house, near the Wellses’ home in Sandgate, in the summer of 1906, when Rosamund was a nubile, flirtatious young woman of nineteen, secretary of the newly formed group of young Fabians known as the Nursery, and very much under H.G.’s spell. According to Wells’s own brief, slightly ashamed account in the Postscript, he ‘never found any great charm in Rosamund’, but ‘she talked of love and how her father’s attentions to her were becoming unfatherly’, so he decided to protect her from incest by taking over her sexual education, encouraged by her natural mother Alice, ‘who had a queer sort of liking for me’. Hubert Bland got wind of the affair and used it to blacken Wells’s character among the senior Fabians later that year at a critical moment in his campaign to reform the society. Relations cooled between the two families but there was no permanent breach until, at some subsequent date, Wells and Rosamund were intercepted by Bland on Paddington Station in the act of going off together – ‘for a dirty weekend in Paris’ according to her sister-in-law’s later testimony – and by some accounts the enraged father, an amateur boxer who used to spar with Bernard Shaw, thumped Wells before dragging his errant daughter home. It’s an episode which no novelist could resist, and I had marked it for inclusion in my novel from an early stage.

Julia Briggs usefully pointed out that Wells may have planned to travel from Paddington to Plymouth to take one of the transatlantic liners across the Channel, a less conspicuous route than the shorter ones. She also believed the incident must have happened soon after 4 March 1908, because of a surviving letter from Rosamund to Jane Wells of that date, which begins:

Dear Mrs Wells,

Of course you have an invitation to the Nursery lectures. I wouldn’t think of sending you a ticket. It never occurred to me to write and ask you because I thought you would understand that you were to come if you wanted to. I’m so sorry you aren’t coming to our dance on the 20th. I thought I might have had an opportunity of talking to you a little bit.

Briggs asserted: ‘it is virtually impossible that Jane Wells would have been asked to a dance at Well Hall after the event [at Paddington].’ With this I had to agree, but it created a serious problem for the cohesion of my novel. As Briggs was aware, Wells began his affair with Amber Reeves in the spring of 1908 – in fact during her Easter vacation, when she was preparing for her Tripos Part II examinations. It was the culmination of a mutual attraction, cloaked by a kind of tutorial relationship, which had developed at an accelerating pace that year; one of the great passions of Wells’s life, and his most daring experiment in Free Love, which lasted for nearly two years until very reluctantly he agreed to end it. Why on earth would he go off on a dirty weekend with a girl he never deeply cared for, a few weeks before he and Amber became lovers? How could I make this psychologically plausible, and not utterly discreditable? I could not consult Julia Briggs about the dates, because sadly she had died shortly before I reached this stage in the composition of
A Man of Parts
.

The problem baffled me, and blocked the progress of my novel for some time, until I suddenly saw the answer. Because the Blands had dancing when they entertained large parties at Well Hall, Briggs had assumed that ‘our dance’ in Rosamund’s letter referred to such an occasion, but it was much more likely that it referred to a dance organised by the Fabian Nursery to which Jane and H.G. had been invited as members of the Executive. Rosamund was Secretary of the Nursery and would naturally refer to it as ‘our dance’ in her letter. I deduced that Jane had received from Rosamund a Nursery flyer advertising the lectures and an invitation to the dance, and that Jane had written to her asking if she could attend the lectures but saying that she and H.G. wouldn’t be able to attend the dance. Rosamund says in her letter that her sister Iris is staying with the family at Well Hall, convalescing from a difficult childbirth, and that she herself intends to go and stay with Iris for two months when she returns home. It seems very improbable that Edith and Hubert would host a dance at such a juncture, and Briggs had to speculate, without any evidence, that Rosamund changed her plans to stay with Iris, in order to place the ‘dirty weekend’ escapade between the writing of the letter and the commencement of Wells’s affair with Amber in the late spring of that year.

Because the archive of the Fabian Nursery held at the London School of Economics doesn’t begin until 1910 it is impossible to verify that they held a dance on 20 March 1908, but Patricia Pugh’s history of the Fabian Society,
Educate, Agitate, Organize
, confirmed that the Nursery did indeed organise dances in their early years, which was good enough for me. I felt free to place the Paddington episode in the early summer of 1907, a much more plausible date for several other reasons. Rosamund’s letter to Jane nearly a year later has exactly the wistful tone of someone who would like to heal a breach with a former friend, regretting the missed opportunity ‘of talking to you a little bit’.

Of course I could have ignored Julia Briggs’s dating of the Paddington incident when I first encountered it, and placed it earlier in time – very few readers would have challenged me. But that would have been to break the rule I set myself: to respect the known facts. When the different documentary sources I consulted gave conflicting versions of the same event I favoured the one that seemed most plausible to me as a novelist. In the Postscript to his autobiography, Wells describes his third visit to Russia, undertaken primarily to interview Stalin, in 1934. He asked Moura, who had lived independently in Europe since she parted company with Gorky in 1928, but was now in a steady relationship with H.G., to accompany him. She refused, saying she dared not return to Russia for fear of being arrested, and that she had to visit her children in Estonia, where they arranged to meet on his return journey. He took his son Gip with him to Russia as companion instead of her. Visiting Gorky in his dacha outside Moscow Wells was stunned to discover that Moura, unknown to him and contrary to her own accounts of her movements, had stayed with Gorky three times in the past year, most recently only a week before his own visit. Wells felt betrayed and described vividly how he was plunged into paroxysms of jealous rage. He set off alone for Tallinn, Estonia, determined to confront Moura with her deception.

In
H.G.Wells: Aspects of a Life
Anthony West asserts, naming Gip as his source, that Wells and his son deduced between them that Moura must be a spy working for Russian intelligence, that she had been planted on him at the very beginning of their relationship in 1920 and had been reporting on him ever since. According to this account, when Wells accused Moura of this in Tallinn she admitted it, but told him that it was the only way she survived the revolution and that ‘as a biologist he had to know that survival was the first law of life’. In Anthony West’s opinion, although Wells patched up their relationship he never recovered from the disillusionment, and it was the underlying reason for the misanthropy of his last years.

West’s version of the episode was repeated by John Gray in his book,
The Immortalisation Commission
, which was published not long before
A Man of Parts,
and serialised in the
Guardian Review
(8 January 2011). Without Gray’s end-note reference in his book, readers of that piece would have assumed that it came from Wells’s Postscript, mentioned by Gray. It does not. Wells gives a very detailed account there of his showdown with Moura in Tallinn – it is the only dialogue scene in my novel hardly a word of which I had to invent – and at no point in it, or anywhere else, does he accuse Moura of being a spy, only of being ‘a liar and cheat’. Anthony West’s book is a mine of information but he is not always reliable, and in this instance I have followed Wells’s account. If Anthony’s version were true, why would Wells give a false one in a work to be published after he and Moura were dead? I find it hard to believe – and I would have found it hard to render in my novel – that he received Moura’s frank admission in 1934 that she was a Russian spy who had all along exploited him out of self-interested motives, but that nevertheless he soon resumed a sexual relationship with her, begged her to marry him, and maintained that she was one of the few women he truly loved. Also her daughter Tania recalled in her memoir,
A Little of All These
, that Moura asked her in June 1936 to tell H.G. that she had been taken ill in Paris when in fact she had gone to Moscow to visit the terminally ill Gorky. Moura would surely not have bothered with this deception if two years earlier she had confessed to being a regular visitor to the USSR in the pay of OGPU.

It would be surprising if Wells, knowing something of Moura’s life in revolutionary Russia, never suspected that she had been compromised into acting as an agent for Russian intelligence, but I took the view that he suppressed or was in denial of this as a possible explanation of her attachment to him, and in my novel it only surfaces towards the very end of his life. Admittedly, in this position it helps to make my narrative novel-shaped. Early in 1946, ill and confined to bed, he is troubled by doubts about Moura’s past. Is she, as Anthony believes, a spy? Has she been reporting on him to Russian intelligence ever since they first met? He resolves to challenge her when she next visits him, and then changes his mind because he cannot face the consequence should she admit that it is true – the end of their friendship. When she next visits him, bringing a bunch of daffodils which she arranges in a vase, to his horror he hears himself saying without premeditation, ‘“Are you a spy, Moura?”’ After a long pause, she replies:

‘Aigee . . . That is a silly question. Shall I tell you why? Because if you ask that question of someone and she is not a spy she will say “No.” But if she
is
a spy she will also say “No”. So there is no point in asking that question.’

‘No, of course not,’ he says. ‘Forget I ever asked it.’

‘I have forgotten it already,’ she says, with a smile, and removes the newspaper from the chair next to his bed to sit down beside him. ‘Would you like me to read you something from the
Times
?’

‘Yes, please,’ he says. ‘Read me the obituaries.’

We know that Moura visited Wells in his last illness, and that she read to him from newspapers, but this dialogue is all imagined. I make no apology for that because I think the scene reflects the ambiguities of the relationship between these two people without pretending to resolve them. And for me it made an aesthetically satisfying ending to the last scene in the novel in which H.G. appears as a living person.

1
In judging Wells it is worth noting that these and similar sentiments did not offend the leading lights of the Fabian Society, such as George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb. On the contrary, reading
Anticipations
made them eager to recruit Wells to the society. A belief in eugenics as a solution to social problems was ‘politically correct’ in progressive circles in the early twentieth century.

The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.

Allain, Marie-Françoise 4n, 16

Althusser, Louis 125, 130

Amis, Kingsley 22–49, 167, 172

Amis, Martin 25, 26, 27, 29–30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44

Amis, Philip 32, 38, 40

Amis, Sally 33, 37

Aristotle 137

Arnold, Gaynor 238

Auden, W.H. 86

Aymé, Marcel 220, 221–2

Bainbridge, Beryl 51

Bakhtin, Mikhail 188

B
anville, John 19

Bardwell, Hilary (Hilly) 31–2, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 43

Barnes, Julian 118