Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (53 page)

Zangwill followed up the success of this work with
Ghetto Tragedies
(1893) and
Dreamers of the Ghetto
(1898). In 1896 he met Theodor Herzl, then in London from Hungary to proselytise for a Zionist state in Palestine. Zangwill became an eager convert and on Herzl’s death in 1904 he took over leadership of the movement and was a proponent of the so-called Uganda plan for an African homeland for Jews. In later life his active pro-Zionism modified its ‘territorialism’ into a campaign for more general tolerance for diaspora communities.

As a writer, after 1900 Zangwill concentrated on plays for the English and
American stage, of which the most famous was
The Melting Pot
(1908). It was he who put this most equivocal of concepts into general circulation. His last years were clouded by poor health and political frustration: in the depth of his disillusionment he gave a notorious speech in New York, in 1923, declaring Zionism to be dead. In 1903 he married a Gentile, Edith Ayrton (daughter of the physicist William Ayrton) who was also a novelist, and they had three children.

Sensible people ought to have a complete set of Shiel.
Rebecca West

Matthew Phipps Shiel was born in Montserrat in the West Indies, where his father was a jobbing tailor, merchant and lay Methodist minister. Both his parents were of mixed race and Shiel’s grandmothers had been slaves – something he kept from public knowledge during his lifetime. His father was pale enough to pass for white, which enabled a colonist’s education for his son and heir. The ninth child, he was preceded by numerous sisters, and at the age of fifteen was ‘crowned’ by his father ‘King Felipe of Redonda’ – that being a rocky islet in the Caribbean. One of the Leeward group, Redonda was used by gulls, principally as a convenient place to drop guano or birdshit. The Shiels had no legal claim to it – but then, what historical claim did the English have to Montserrat? Shiel took his kingship seriously – a source of much merriment to that remainder of the human race who happened not to be his subjects.

He came to England in 1885. That same year the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed, whose ‘sexual indecency’ provisions would have serious implications for Shiel, as they did for Oscar Wilde. He studied medicine, briefly, at St Bart’s before discovering an aversion to blood (although he would spill it by the bucket in his later fiction). He tried school-teaching, but after 1895 supported himself by his pen. His literary idol was Poe; he was also congenial with the
fin-de-siècle
decadents (Arthur Machen was a close friend) and split his time between London and Paris. Doing what has never been precisely recorded.

As a novelist, Shiel specialised in wildly imaginative science fiction (‘berserk Poe’) with a sideline in detective novels.
Prince Zaleski
(1895), his first published
work, appeared in John Lane’s Keynotes series. It takes the form of three crime mysteries, all solved by an exotic detective with a taste for marijuana. The book was well received and was followed by
The Rajah’s Sapphire
(1896), the story of a gem which haunts its owners.
The Yellow Danger
(1898) fantasises Chinese world domination: somewhat improbably, the oriental potentate Yen How becomes infatuated with Ada Seward, a Fulham nursemaid, and starts a genocidal war to get her. His oriental hordes are foiled by Shiel’s Anglo-Saxon hero, John Hardy, in a sea battle which claims the lives of twenty million.

The Purple Cloud
(1901) is the work of Shiel’s that posterity has come most to admire. The hero, Adam Jeffson (‘the second parent of the world’), goes to the North Pole and thus misses the poisoning of the rest of humanity by a cloud of ‘cyanogen’ gas. He spends seventeen years in solitary, pyromaniac splendour before finding his Eve, cowering in a wood in Constantinople.
The Purple Cloud
earned Shiel the status of an apocalyptic prophet, a role he played with gusto over the following years.

Shiel married twice, the first time in 1898. He abandoned that wife and a daughter after five years. His second marriage lasted from 1919 to 1929. There is, however, considerable mystery about his private life, which was complicated. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Shiel’s popularity had waned and in 1914 disaster struck when he was sentenced to sixteen months in Wormwood Scrubs. It used to be thought that he was imprisoned for fraud – his financial situation was desperate at this period. He himself blandly described it in later life as ‘work for the government’. In fact, as the critic Kirsten Macleod has discovered from examination of his literary remains, Shiel’s 1914 conviction was for ‘indecently assaulting and carnally knowing’ his twelve-year-old ‘stepdaughter’, Dorothy Sircar, with whose mother, Elizabeth Price, Shiel had formed a common-law marriage, and by whom he had a child. The 1885 law had raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen; plus there was the added offence of incest. In an extraordinary letter to his publisher from prison, Shiel protested: ‘I myself am wildly non-English … I have copulated,
as a matter of course
, from the age of two or three with ladies of a similar age in lands where that is not considered at all extraordinary.’ Dorothy, he complacently noted, was two years past puberty. Perfectly eligible for a non-Englishman like himself.

Shiel, who lived to a great age, became preoccupied with racist fantasies of the ‘Overman’ in his later years. His last work,
Jesus
, was apparently finished but remains unpublished. He seems to have died a religious maniac, having anointed as his successor to the kingship of Redonda the excessively minor poet John Gawsworth, who reverently kept Shiel’s royal ashes in a biscuit tin on his mantelpiece, dropping a pinch as condiment into the food of any particularly honoured guest. The comedian
and scholar of nineteenth-century decadent literature, Barry Humphries, was (unwillingly) one such diner – ‘out of mere politeness’.

We’re in a blessed drain-pipe, and we’ve got to crawl along it till we die.
The draper’s assistant, Minton, in
Kipps

Wells had many enemies to combat through life. One enemy, over whom his victory was at best equivocal, was the English class system. ‘Bertie’ (he did his best to expunge that ghastly lower-class name in later life) was born, the youngest and frailest of four children, in Bromley, on the outskirts of London. His father was a talented professional cricketer, turned untalented shop-keeper, dealing in crockery and cricket bats. This was a period when cricket was firmly divided between ‘players’ and ‘gentlemen’. Joe Wells was no gentleman but he was a demon bowler. A couple of years before his last son’s birth he had taken four wickets in as many balls for Kent against Sussex, but his county career ended in 1877 with a broken thigh – incurred, Bromley gossip had it, in an amorous adventure involving high walls and an angry wife. Joe, his biographers record, ‘always seemed poised to flee when things got difficult’ but, unlike Mr Polly, never made it himself over the wall.

Wells’s mother, Sarah, had been an ‘upper’ servant before marriage. She and Joe bickered and drifted apart. Sarah Wells kept up her connection with Uppark, the grand country house in Sussex, where she had earlier been in service. The upstairs-downstairs life (with himself firmly below) is described in the early Bladesover chapters of
Tono-Bungay
(1909), as is the ineffable scorn directed at the young hero by the daughter of the house for ‘dropping his aitches’. This class disability is raised to an art form in Mr Polly’s epic – he would say, ‘intrudacious’ – combat with the English language. People sneered at Wells’s ‘squeaky’ voice and ‘put on’ accent all his life. Class will out.

In his years at a private school for the sons of tradesmen, Thomas Morley’s Commercial Academy, young Wells was marked as phenomenally clever. But that, in the 1870s, was no passport to better things in life. Meritocracy was a century
away. Being cleverer than ‘gentleman scholars’ at Oxbridge would not help young Wells any more than sporting prowess would have helped his ‘player’ father to the presidency of the MCC. The inevitable bankruptcy of Joe’s shop led to Bertie’s being apprenticed in 1880, aged thirteen, first as a chemist’s boy at Windsor. But Sarah Wells – now housekeeper at Uppark – could not afford the cost of training him as a pharmacist. He was then indentured as a draper’s assistant in a department store in Southsea. What lay before him is anatomised, loathingly, in the description of the hero in
The War in the Air
: ‘Bert Smallways was a vulgar little creature, the sort of pert, limited soul that the old civilisation of the early twentieth century produced by the million in every country of the world. He had lived all his life in narrow streets, and between mean houses he could not look over, and in a narrow circle of ideas from which there was no escape.’ This fate is immortalised in the mordantly comic histories of Kipps and Mr Polly. Both are rescued from careers as counter-jumpers by unexpected bequests – that standby of the Victorian novel, rarely encountered in life.

Wells’s own escape from the Kippsian ‘drain-pipe’ was more audacious. He wrote no more moving letters than those to his mother in 1883, beseeching her to let him break the indentures she had – at great sacrifice – paid for. He would, he threatened, kill himself if she did not allow him to free himself. He wanted more out of life than forelock-pulling with the prospect of his own modest ‘establishment’ – if he were lucky. His father’s luck in that line did not encourage optimism. Sarah responded by gallantly staking what was left of her life’s savings on her son’s being indeed worthy of better things.

The British school system was, at this period, recruiting trainee teachers from the lower classes – teachers required to deal with the masses of lower-class pupils enrolled by the 1870 Elementary Education Act. The government programme offered the bookish young Wells (as it would, a little later, D. H. Lawrence) a narrow gateway into higher education and ‘the professions’. It was a step up. In 1884, after a couple of years as a pupil teacher, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science (later Imperial College) at South Kensington. There he was exposed to the culture of the metropolis and the full force of late Victorian scientific discovery, principally from T. H. Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, his freshman teacher. ‘The year I spent in Huxley’s class,’ he later wrote, ‘was beyond all question, the most educational year of my life.’

That year, and the years that followed, were hard: his scholarship afforded him a guinea a week – starvation wages – and the damage to his health was lifelong. Lifelong, too, was his conversion to materialism, free-thinking and socialism – all fuelled by a diffused anger. He never finished his degree – London proved too distracting.
In 1887 he accepted a job teaching science at a boarding school in Wales. A few months later, a pupil fouled him on the football pitch, which precipitated a general health breakdown and months of convalescence. Nevertheless, in 1890 he got his B.Sc, did some tutoring in London, wrote a textbook on biology, married a cousin, and promptly abandoned her for one of his students, Amy Robbins, with whom he made a second marriage in 1895. He would philander his way through life.

Newspapers and magazines were by now taking occasional pieces from him. He had been toying, since his time at college, with a ‘scientific romance’, initially called ‘The Chronic Argonauts’. It became
The Time Machine
(1895) and was hugely successful. He followed up with a string of other foundation texts of early science fiction:
The Island of Dr Moreau
(1896),
The Invisible Man
(1897),
The War of the Worlds
(1898),
When the Sleeper Wakes
(1899),
The First Men in the Moon
(1901). He had left the classroom behind, but Wells remained incorrigibly didactic. His redefinitions of socialism – which included state-enforced eugenics – were idiosyncratic. The ‘low grade man’, he ordained in
A Modern Utopia
(1905), must be ‘eliminated’. He himself was no longer low grade.

Wells’s fiction changed as Victorian England gave way to the twentieth century.
Love and Mr Lewisham
(1900) began a line of autobiographical novels which reached a highpoint with
Ann Veronica
(1909), a ‘New Woman’ novel; and
The History of Mr Polly
(1910). His personal life over these years was beyond chaotic. At the time of writing
Mr Polly
, his current mistress, Amber Reeves, had just borne him a daughter. Three years on, his next mistress, Rebecca West, would bear him a son. There were two sons by his second wife, Jane. He called it ‘free love’, but a price was exacted. Mr Polly contemplates divorce from his awful wife Miriam (an ungrateful depiction of his mother) by cut-throat razor. Wells may sometimes have felt something similar – until the next interesting piece of skirt passed by.

As the ‘future’ arrived (some of it – such as the war in the air – strikingly as prophesied by him), Wells transcended mere fiction. It was too small a container for his mind. He became what the Victorians called a ‘sage’, the twenty-first century calls a ‘public intellectual’, and his Southsea mates in the draper’s shop would have called a ‘right old gasbag’. He wrote histories of the world and told the world what to do (he was much in favour of the League of Nations). He wrote some interesting fiction, including his war novel,
Mr Britling Sees it Through
(1916), which is courageously unjingoistic about the beastly Hun. His last ambitious effort in fiction,
The World of William Clissold
(1926) is over-inflated to busting with its author.