Book of the Month: A Man of Parts (David Lodge)

 

Herbert George— H.G.— Wells, best known these days for his science fiction classics, was an astoundingly prolific British novelist, who published more than hundred books in a career spanning five decades. Wells began his writing career in the Victorian era. When his last book (a work of non-fiction, the relentlessly bleak A Mind at the End of its Tether) was published in 1945, a few months before his death, Victoria’s great grandson George VI was the monarch.

Wells made his early reputation with science fiction novels such as The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Invisible Man, all of which, more than hundred years after they were first published, are still widely read. In the Edwardian era Wells turned his attention to social themes and wrote novels such as The History of Mr Polly (one of his most successful novels) and Tono-Bungay (which he considered to be his best novel, although it failed to sell well). Another novel from this period is KIpps, remarkable for its Dickensian humour.

In 1899 Wells published When the Sleeper Awakes (re-written and republished in 1910 under the title Sleeper Awakes) which (I think) is the first English language novel that imagined a dystopian future.

Wells was once described as a man who ‘invented tomorrow’. An apposite description:  this was a man who, as early as 1914 (in a novel entitled A World Set Free), predicted that areal warfare would come to dominate wars, and imagined atomic bombs being dropped on great cities from aeroplanes killing thousands of civilians. He also imagined, in a novel in 1908, a World War which would pitch Britain against Germany (War in the Air).

The apogee of Well’s writing career is thought to have reached in 1920 with the publication of Outline of History. After this, although he continued to publish prolifically (between 1920 and 1944, Wells published 22 novels most of which have not stood the test of time), his influence waned, and he came to be regarded increasingly as an irascible old fogey, a relic of Edwardian Britain that was overshadowed by modernist novelists such as Virginia Woolf; however even in this phase Wells published a novel in 1933 (The Shape of Things to Come) in which he predicted another world war, which he said would start when Germany invaded Poland. He thought the war would begin in early 1940.

Wells was not just a novelist. He was an outspoken Socialist and a feminist. He was a member of the Fabian Society, many of whose members went on to form the Labour Party. (Wells resigned from the Fabian Society as it was not radical enough for his taste, and his attempts to modernize the society were thwarted by the old Fabians, George Bernard Shaw amongst them).

Wells, a tubby little man (at 5’ 5” he was shorter than average Englishman of his generation; in later life he blamed his impoverished childhood and poor nutrition for his lack of height) with a ‘squeaky voice’,  was also a highly sexed man, who slept with more than 100 women in his life. He had had affairs with female novelists (Violet Hunt, Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth von Armin, and of course Rebecca West with whom he had a son, the novelist Anthony West), daughters of novelists (Rosamund Bland, the daughter of Edith Nesbit, who wrote Railway Children, the perennial children’s classic), and daughters of his friends and fellow-members of Fabian Society (Amber Reeves). He also had a long standing affair with Nick Clegg’s great-great aunt Moura who may or may not have been a Bolshevik spy.

It is little wonder that H.G. Wells has been the subject of several biographies over the years. (He himself left behind two volumes An Experiment in Autobiography, to which he added a postscript, leaving instructions that it be published only after all the women with whom he had had sexual liaisons were dead. The postscript was finally published in 1984, a year after Rebecca West died—Amber Reeves had died 3 years earlier—edited by Wells’s son George—‘Gyp’— Wells, under the title H.G. Wells in Love ).

What has been lacking so far was a novel on the life of one of the most remarkable novelists in the twentieth century.

That gap is filled by A Man of Parts a biographical novel by David Lodge, a formidable novelist of his generation.

The year is 1944. The Second World War is nearing its bloody end, although the sporadic German bombing of London continues. An ailing H.G. Wells is marooned his London flat in which he has stayed put through the war. Wells is dying—he has been diagnosed with liver cancer— and he knows it. He is looking back upon his long life which, it would be fair to say, was not short of excitement.

A Man of Parts focuses on that period of Well’s life which is generally considered to be Wells’s peak—between 1895 (when he published his first novel) and 1920 (when he published Outline of History).

The novel—mostly a third person narrative—gives a panoramic view of Well’s life and how the tubercular son in a lower middle class household, the third son of a cricketer (the novel informs that Well’s father, Joe Wells, while he was never selected to play for England holds the first class cricket record of clean bowling batsmen with four consecutive deliveries) and a housemaid (whose ambition for her son was he work in the drapery business) broke free of his impoverished background and became one of the most influential thinkers of his generation.

The reader learns of the novels Wells wrote during this period, the reckless affairs he conducted with women, some of them half his age (which almost cost his public standing and reputation), the intellectual rigour of his arguments with other members of Fabian society, and his feud with Henry James—whose approach to novel couldn’t have been more different from that of Wells—which the American novelist took to his grave.
Interspersed with the third person narrative is the inner voice of the old H.G. Wells—his conscience if you will—that poses him questions more aggressive than those of Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight, which the aging Wells answers with patience, good will and equanimity.

The tone of the novel is biographical (Lodge warns the reader at the outset: ‘Nearly everything that happens in this novel is based on factual sources’). There are long passages in the novel where it reads more like a biography and less like a novel. Lodge quotes liberally from Well’s novels, his personal letters, and published reviews of his works.  Not a page goes by without some or the other ‘borrowed material’. At times it works, for example Wells’s battle with other members of Fabian society in his (ultimately doomed) effort to modernise it, as much of the information, one assumes, is in the public domain.  The novel thus inundates with historical and biographical information. The flip side of the coin is the inner life of H.G. Wells does not light up. The ambiguities, the contradictions, the nuances of emotional life of Wells are not dramatized, as Lodge rarely ventures beyond the archival material (to which he helps himself liberally). Almost all of Well’s famous sexual liaisons are described in a quasi-reportage format: the young admirers (Rosamund Bland, Amber Reeves, and young Rebecca West) or novelists (Dorothy Richardson, Elizabeth von Arnim) want to sleep with Wells (who, in real life was a proponent of free love so long as he practised it; he would have been mightily uncomfortable if his long-suffering wife had also begun practising it) and Wells goes on to have clandestine sexual liaisons with them, the arrangements of which are described at length. (Almost all of Well’s affairs in A Man of Parts are initiated by women who greatly admire him. Wells sleeps with them because he wants to initiate them—at their own requests—to the pleasures of sex (very helpful) or does not want to disappoint them (how gallant) or, as in the case of Amber Reeves— because he has fallen in love with them (why?)). It is a bit like attempting a watercolour with fabric roller. Catherine or ‘Jane’, Well’s second wife (with whom Wells had two sons and) to whom he remained married for more than 30 years, until her death from cancer in 1927, remains an enigmatic figure. Jane of A Man in Parts is (as no doubt the real life Jane was) totally forgiving of and untroubled by Well’s sexual shenanigans. The novel makes no attempt to elucidate Jane’s inner life, the atmosphere in the Wells household as the great man is absent from home for weeks, canoodling with his latest paramour. When Wells runs away to France with Amber Reeves, the only action (the dutiful) Jane takes is to forward all his correspondence to France. It is a curious failure of imagination from a writer of the calibre of David Lodge.

A Man of Parts is an exquisitely written 500-page long WikiPedia entry on the life of H.G. Wells.  It is an absorbing read (you expect nothing less from David Lodge).  For someone like me who has an interest in H.G. wells but lacks the patience (and intellectual rigour) to trawl through weighty biographies, it works.  (It also helps that David Lodge is my favourite author). Does it work as a novel? Just about.

 

H.G. Wells, David Lodge and Elizabeth von Arnim

H.G. Wells is one of those writers I have great admiration for even though I have not read many of his novels.

Wells’s reputation rests on the science fiction classics he wrote at the beginning of his career. Most of us have read either in abridged or unabridged versions Time Machine, The Invisible Man, War of the Worlds and The Island of Dr. Moreau, all of which have been made into blockbuster films over the decades.

Wells, however, was not just a science fiction writer. In the first 20 years of the last century Wells turned his attention to social themes, and published many novels which were very popular in their times. Wells was also an outspoken socialist and a feminist, although, with respect to the latter, he would appear to have been more interested in free love and the women’s right to sleep with anyone (preferably him) of their choice than in their right to vote. Indeed in a 1905 novel entitled In the Days of the Comet he depicted a ménage a quatre, which must have been a very bold thing to do (unsurprisingly it incurred wrath of the traditionalists).

Wells was also an outspoken socialist and an early member of Fabian society (many of whose members went on to form the Labour Party). Indeed he suggested several changes to modernize Fabian Society, which, in his view, was more of a talk shop than an instrument for change. He eventually resigned from the society in frustration because all of his attempts were frustrated by other members of the society, George Bernard Shaw amongst them. The members of Fabian Society probably heaved a collective sigh of relief when he left. He was screwing daughters of his fellow members, and the concept of free love he advocated in his novels around this time was equated by his political (Tory) opponents with his socialistic views, who indulged in considerably scaremongering by telling the apparently gullible public that power to the socialists would mean end of moral order. (‘Don’t believe us? Just read the novels of H.G. Wells.’)

An initial admirer and sympathizer of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, Wells visited the Soviet Union on 2-3 occasions, and interviewed Stalin (and Roosevelt) in the 1930s during a visit. He was dismayed by what he viewed as Stalin’s refusal to see anything good in the Capitalist system and his (Stalin’s) obdurate insistence on not deviating at all from the Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

Wells was a writer of astonishing output (and longevity). He began his writing career in the Victorian era and, when the last of his books (the relentlessly bleak A Mind at the End of its Tether) was published a few months before his death, Victoria’s great-grandson was the monarch.

Wells published more than 100 works of fiction and non-fiction in a career spanning 5 decades (which means he published on average 2 books every year).

In the middle of writing and publishing books at a furious pace and agitating for political reforms, Wells also found time to bed more than 100 women. At 5’ 5”, Wells was not very tall. He was also tubby and had a squeaky voice. Yet he seemed to have no difficulty in sleeping with women half his age. He was married twice. His first marriage was to his cousin Isabel, but he found that they were ‘sexually incompatible’. He divorced her after 2 years and married Catherine whom he ‘renamed’ ‘Jane’ (with her permission). The marriage lasted for 32 years, produced 2 sons, and ended in 1927 with Jane’s death from cancer. Throughout the 30 odd years of their marriage Wells, with Jane’s knowledge and ‘permission’, slept with other women (including but not limited to the daughters of his friends) and carried out passionate affairs. Jane would appear to have resigned to the knowledge that her husband was a highly sexed man who needed to look elsewhere for the satiation of his sexual appetite. When Wells, at the age 42, fell madly in love with Amber Reeves, the daughter of the feminists and fellow Fabians Pember and Maud Reeves, and eloped with her to France, Jane forwarded to him every day his correspondence. (The lovers returned to England within 3 weeks after Wells made the discovery that irresistible as Reeve’s charms were in bed, he could not live with her.)

I found out all of the above, plus much more (interesting) information about Wells after reading David Lodge’s biographical novel, entitled A Man of Parts. 

Lodge is one of my favourite novelists, and this is his second foray into writing biographical novels. In 2005 Lodge published Author Author which focused on that period in the life of the American novelist Henry James in which James made (a disastrous) attempt at becoming a playwright. Author Author is the least favourite of the David Lodge novels I have read (and I have read all of his published novels except a couple of early novels). I had wondered whether the biographical Author Author was suggestive of a hiatus (or worse, a decline) in the powers of creative imagination. Lodge belied these fears in his next novel, entitled Deaf Sentence. In Deaf Sentence, Lodge was back at doing what (I think) he does best. Writing witty and funny novel set in academia.  With A Man of Parts Lodge has returned (for the second time) to the territory of biographical novels. The result is a mixed bag. At the beginning of the novel Lodge feels obliged to warn his readers that ‘nearly everything that happens in this novel is based on factual sources’. There is tons of biographical information in the novel, as Lodge quotes liberally (and repeatedly) from Wells’s novels, correspondence, and what others said to him, about him and about his novels.  Indeed at times the novel reads less like a novel and more like a biography.  It wasn’t a problem for me, as I have an interest in H.G. Wells, but I lack the patience (and intellectual rigour) to trawl through several weighty biographies of Wells published over the years (not counting his 2-volumes autobiography entitled An Experiment in Autobiography). But it does beg the question as to whether the novel adds anything useful in the way of information about one of the most remarkable men of 20^th century. I assume that Lodge does not cover any grounds that are not covered in dozens of published biographies. And as a novel it is (curiously) not a very well imagined novel. Not a bad novel, mind (Lodge is incapable of writing a bad novel). I shall review it in detail some other time.

                              David Lodge (Doesn't he look a bit like David Irving?)

A Man of Parts focuses on what is generally considered to be the period when Wells was at the peak of his powers—between 1895 (when he published his first novel) and 1920 (when he published The Outline of History). As I read about Lodge’s accounts of the several novels Wells published during this period, I felt I ought to read one of the novels during this period. 

I then remembered that a few years ago I had bought a set of a dozen hard-bound H.G. Wells novels, which were collecting dust on my shelf.  

So I picked up The History of Mr. Polly. 

This novel, first published in 1910, was a commercial success, and (according to A Man of Parts) was never out of print over the next 40 years. It is a comic account of the life of a mediocre man (named Mr Polly) and how he escapes a life of drudgery and finds happiness. There are themes in the novel which will strike a chord more than a hundred years after it was first published—feeling trapped by your circumstances (unhappy marriage, dreadful job), and a yearning to escape and find a utopia. A very enjoyable read.

My plan is to read a few more novels of Wells published during this period. The next on my list is Tono-Bungay, Wells’s satire on Edwardian advertising. Apparently Wells considered Tono-Bungay to be his best novel, although it failed to sell well. (A Man of Parts informs us that Wells wrote Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly simultaneously. Tono-Bungay was the more serious novel and (compared with his other novels) was in the gestation for a long time. The History of Mr. Polly was his commercial novel.)

Back to Wells's bedroom antics. There were quite a few women novelists amongst the more than 100 women Wells had sex with. (A Man of Parts focuses on the more famous of these, and would have you believe that in almost all the cases it was the women who pursued—in some cases stalked—Wells, who, being the red-blooded man that he was, had no option but to sleep with them. Most of these women admired Wells greatly as a writer—were almost in awe of him. He was also exceptionally well endowed and was quite a performer in bed, according to A Man of Parts—don’t know whether this is a ‘biographical detail’ or a figment of Lodge’s imagination.) The most famous of these novelists was of course Rebecca West with whom Wells had a son, the novelist Anthony West. (West published an autobiographical novel entitled Heritage in 1955, in America, in which the mother of the protagonist, who resembled Rebecca West, was shown in a less than flattering light. So stung was Rebecca West by her portrayal that she threatened to sue any publisher who published the novel in the UK. The novel was eventually published in 1984, a year after Rebecca West died. The ‘new introduction’ Anthony West wrote to mark the (belated) UK publication of the novel confirmed that the mother and son had continued with their feud to the end. Anthony West idolised H.G. Wells—the more or less absent father— all his life and was, in contrast, highly critical of his mother.)

One of the novelists Wells had an affair with was Elizabeth von Arnim. I had never heard of this novelist before; however, she was apparently a popular novelist of her generation. According to WikiPedia, she was Australian born and a cousin of (the more famous) novelist Katherine Mansfield. Born Mary Beauchamp, she became von Arnim by her marriage to a Prussian aristocrat. Count von Arnim Schlagenthin ran into severe financial problems (he even served a prison sentence for fraud) and Elizabeth von Arnim began writing partly to find an escape from an unhappy marriage (which nevertheless produced 5 children) and partly to generate income. Her debut novel was published anonymously and was intriguingly titled Elizabeth and her German Garden. It was published in 1898, the same year H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds came out. The novel (I think it is a novel, although it can also be viewed as a memoir) was an instant success upon its publication; it had more than 10 reprints in the first 2 years of its publication, and made Mary Beauchamp a very rich woman. (H.G. Wells had taken note of the book, which had sold more copies than his War of the Worlds.) When, 12 years later, von Arnim—a comfortable widow, the Prussian count, referred to, somewhat dismissively in Elizabeth and her German Garden as the ‘Man of Wrath’, having kicked the bucket a year earlier—indicated that she was willing to be his mistress, Wells was only too willing to oblige. Wells and von Arnim carried their affair—with full knowledge of Wells’s wife—over the next three years. von Arnim lived in a villa in Switzerland during this period. Wells had made it clear that he would not leave his wife, which was acceptable to von Arnim. On her part she had one condition: Wells had to be faithful to her. (She had presumably no pangs of conscience that Wells, in carrying out the affair, would not be faithful to his legal wife.) Wells agreed to this condition, one assumes, in light of what happened subsequently, reluctantly. Expecting this randy old goat to remain faithful to one woman was like asking Sherlock Holmes to give up cocaine. The inevitable happened. When the more vivacious (and much younger) Rebecca West came along, Wells ended up in her bed faster than you can say Mary Beauchamp. von Arnim ended the relationship when she learnt of Wells’s ‘infidelity’. One assumes Wells did not shed many tears, as, according to A Man of Parts, by that time she was beginning to get on his nerves by her snobbish comments about his accent (which she thought was common) and humble origins. 

                                                          Elizabeth von Arnim

I thought I should read Elizabeth and her German Garden to see what was in it that so captivated the later Victorian readers. The novel is in the form of a diary kept by the writer about (as the title suggests) her garden on the estate of her Prussian husband. It is a pleasant, light-hearted, occasionally wry, sometimes piquant (and most of the time twee and schmaltzy) account of a year in the life of its narrator, which she spends in her garden. The narrator is an idle, somewhat snobbish, housewife, who doesn't lift a finger to do anything useful in the way of work, and has tons of opinion about everything and everyone. She considers herself a woman of sly and wicked wit, and is eccentric in a carefully planned manner ('Look at me; I am so different; people consider me eccentric, but I don't care; I will sit in my garden in winter at subzero temperatures to show everyone how eccentric I am'). She passes bitchy comments about her house-guests, her husband, her gardener, her cook (this is a partial list) and her relatives. She also has a disconcerting habit of going into raptures at the sight of roses and acacias. (In short a woman you'd have no hesitation in slipping prussic acid into her tea if you were her  husband.) 


Elizabeth and her German Garden is like an amuse bouche. Not much substance, but it brings an occasional smile to your face. An undemanding read. I might read a few more novels of von Arnim, but I won't be in a mighty rush.