'Blood and Blood and More Blood'
Guest Post by Damon Young
November 10
On August 30th, 1887, a young teacher donned his rugby gear, to do battle against his students. An arrogant Englishman in a Welsh school, he’d put many noses out of joint.
On the field that day, one of them decided to return the favour, but damaged more than the older man’s snoot. During a tackle, the student fouled the gangly teacher, ramming a shoulder in hard just beneath his ribs. He grunted and dropped. The fallen teacher then staggered off the field, later vomiting and passing blood. His kidneys were crushed, liver bruised, lungs perhaps perforated.
The wounded teacher’s name was Herbert George Wells, and he was just given a painful passport to a new life.
Six years later, Wells was still in weak health. Nonetheless, he was working hard – marriage demanded it. Having wed the beautiful Isabel, Wells had finished his science degree, and was teaching, writing textbooks, and penning essays for journals and newspapers. He was a man of science – no longer a fiery student, preaching utopian reform, free love and an end to religious tomfoolery. Sure, his sexless marriage was frustrating him, and his work was dull. Nonetheless, as he neared thirty years of age, Wells was almost respectable.
But his workload, marital anxiety and family stress overwhelmed him. His old rugby injuries returned. His lungs haemorrhaged, in what he called ‘a grand attack.’ There was in his basin, he told his mother Sarah, ‘blood and blood and more blood.’ He believed he was going to die.
He did not. And the breath of death was a whisper of new possibilities. Soon after, ‘Bertie’ the teacher and education writer became H.G. Wells, the renowned novelist, prophet and philanderer. In H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, Michael Sherborne describes what happened next:
Wells felt himself spluttering out of existence and wondering what the final reckoning of his life would be. He had let emotion and conventionality get the better of him and married the wrong woman. In order to achieve that marriage, he had… virtually given up on his creative writing and his socialist commitments. If he had died that night, his memory would certainly not have troubled posterity. But… he survived the attack, and… he began to redirect his life towards the dreams he had neglected.
As told by Sherborne, the tale of Wells’ ascendence is an entertaining one. It has plenty of controversy, spats, glories and trysts. Wells invites the storyteller’s pen, of course – he was a restless, driven, talented hedonist, who controlled his tongue and loins with equal difficulty. Almost every photo of a young woman in Sherborne’s handsome book is followed by words to the effect of ‘…would later become Wells’ lover.’
But Sherborne, a British Wells scholar and teacher, avoids gutter biography, and instead traces a number of fascinating philosophical, social and psychological themes. It is sensational, but not sensationalist.
For example, as a young man Wells struggled with the age-old knot of freedom and necessity. As a scientist, he was taught to believe in a fixed, mechanical universe, where all effects had their causes. It was a calculable, predictable cosmos. Yet in his personal life and his work, Wells also valued spontaneity, unpredictability, chance – in a word, liberty. The scientist saw a world of fixed facts and rational order. The literary man and lover longed for wiggle room and a fruitful will. With his pen, he tried to reconcile the two. At the Normal School of Science, Sherborne writes, ‘he liked to think of himself as an artist among scientists; later, as a famous author, he would claim to be a scientist among artists. Writing creatively proved the most effective way to reconcile the two roles.’ This was not a scholarly solution to the problem, but a literary one: in his better stories and essays, Wells achieved a balance between the usual tropes of structure and agency, system and caprice, science and fiction. His consciousness was the balance.
This equilibrium sometimes declined when Wells peddled a science of socialism, rather than crafting realistic novels or science fiction (what Sherborne calls ‘scientific romance’). Put another way, Wells sometimes sacrificed his artistic liberty to his mechanical ideals. ‘The more he cast himself as a prophet of science,’ writes Sherborne, ‘the less he was able to recognize the imaginative origins of his ideas and subject them to appropriate discipline.’ But this is no slur against his genius and industry. If anything, it’s a testament to the immense difficulty of his achievements: being unseduced by the sirens of onanistic solipsism on one hand, and safe, certain Fact on the other. H.G. Wells made the debate his own, creatively.
This was not expected of him. Indeed, very little was expected of him at all, besides mindless, unfulfilling, ceaseless labour – and perhaps a safe, stable marriage. Of course, he rejected both. In this, Wells is emblematic of the transformations of his age. Like his brothers, he left school as a teenager, and was apprenticed to a draper. Drapery, as his parents saw it, was a respectable, reliable trade, which would provide much-needed income to Wells and his family. The prospect horrified the young man, and he did not last long. Nor did he last as a student-teacher at a National School (‘I fought my class, hit them about viciously and had altogether a lot of trouble with them’), a pharmacy assistant, or at one last draper’s. Yet with hard work, intelligence and a little luck, Wells ended up at the Normal School of Science.
A few generations earlier, this would have been impossible – university was for the rich and the titled, not for the sons of manual labourers. But the nineteenth century saw the rise of meritocratic secondary and tertiary schooling, and the development of an educated, literate lower middle-class. Journals, magazines, newspapers abounded. In this, H.G. Wells was a product of the very forces that produced his audience. And he was rewarded for this, what Sherborne calls his ‘intuitive knowledge of what would appeal.’ The result was not simply a cashed-up gardener’s son, but an invigoration of the author’s social and cultural life. When he was a boy, Wells’ mother Sarah was a servant at Uppark, an aristocratic country house. By Wells’ middle age, he had funded his own version of Uppark, next to the Easton deer park – ‘the Wellsian version,’ writes Sherborne, ‘of an Edwardian country-house.’ There, Wells did what was impossible for Bertie, the draper: he entertained great literary figures, nobility and political peers with sports, games and conversation. Yet he never broke contact with the lower classes – he enjoyed friends ‘at almost every level,’ he said, ‘from that of a peer to a that of a pauper.’
The point of Wells’ transformation is not simply that times change; that each era brings its own heroes and voices. Instead, it’s that an individual’s experience of class can be nuanced and unpredictable. While its forces are profound, and its legacies sometimes unavoidable, class is neither monolithic nor mechanical, particularly in modernity. H.G. Wells’ origins, language and early frustrations were certainly lower middle-class. But his attitudes to class and sexuality were not – witness his ease with all social strata, rather than the narrowness more typical of his “station”. His newfound fame and wealth were not simply a move up the hierarchy, but a chance to broaden his sympathies and sensibilities. ‘One is lifted out of one’s narrow circumstances,’ he wrote of literary success, ‘into familiar and unrestrained intercourse with a great variety of people.’
As this perfect double entendre suggests, part of Wells’ rebellion against his stifling background was sexual. This was what Sherborne calls, with considerable restraint, Wells’ ‘demonstrably polygamous’ temperament. He cheated on his first wife Isabel with one of her students. Then he cheated again with one of his, Catherine. Reader, he married her. But marriage did not mean fidelity. Once wed, he kept up his sexual exploits, sometimes with the daughters of his literary and political peers – and with his wife’s mute consent. His posthumously published memoir, H.G. Wells in Love, is a story of a rampant, often guiltless sexual hunger, sometimes sated outdoors. The great question of Another Kind of Life is why he did this.
For the cynical, this might be a silly question – he did it because he could. He had money, charisma and a wife willing to look the other way.
But a more interesting answer recognises the bonds between his sexual gratification and his art, and the role of both in his distinctive psyche. ‘Without a woman to stimulate him with her observations and behaviour, and encourage him with interest in his work’ writes Sherborne, ‘his life swiftly drained of much of its meaning.’ Sherborne argues that this was a compensation for his mother’s disinterest and disappointment – the neediness of a boy who never lived up to the promise of his late sister, Fanny. Perhaps so.
But there is another answer, and it’s something common to his science, literature and love-life: curiosity. Wells’ novels and short stories are often testaments to wonder; to the encounter between man and a cosmos of inexhaustible mystery. Perhaps his amorous adventures were partly motivated by this very same passion: the desire to confront, intimately and pleasurably, the singular novelty of another human being. This is why he was often drawn to educated, intelligent, outspoken women – they were more opportunities to discover the depths of a new mind, alongside the freshness of new skin, hair and erotic quirks. Wells was an insensitive, selfish bastard at times – but his urges were not all unhealthy or uncivilised. They were intertwined with the wellsprings of his political vehemence and literary innovation.
This is the final gift of H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life: a compelling portrait of civilisation in process. In his unification of science and art, his rational utopianism, his hungry mobility, and guiltless sexual compulsion, Wells was unmistakably modern. His language lacked the avant-garde freshness of Joyce or Hemingway, but Sherborne reveals how Wells’ ideas were bold, his life audacious. It is an infectious vision.
In this spirit, if he cannot quite capture Wells’ own power, Sherborne writes very well – lucidly, warmly, and sometimes wittily. More importantly, the biographer conveys something perfectly Wellsian: enthusiasm. It’s clear that Sherborne cares deeply about his subject, achievements and age, and he reveals this without breathless hagiography. For this alone, the biography achieves something the author must welcome: this quietly smiling reader, reaching again, after twenty years, for his dusty copy of The Time Machine.
Cross-posted from darkly wise, rudely great
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