Wells of Memory

I don’t remember who gave me the fat red book of short stories by H. G. Wells. But I do remember reading it compulsively as a teenager, with frissons of fear as well as pleasure. Wells was a favourite in those days, alongside Somerset Maugham, Conan Doyle and de Maupassant. One day, in a fit of enthusiasm, I lent the book to a friend. It never came back.

Though the stories continued to haunt me, I did nothing about getting another copy. The reason, I suspect, was that I missed the book as much as I did the words and didn’t want to read the stories in any other edition. But from that day I became very stingy about lending books. Can I blame my loss for that? Or is it, more probably, some defect of character which turns a bibliophile into a bibliophiliac? About a year ago, my wife found me another copy of the lost edition. It was exactly as I remembered it: the red cloth binding, jacketless, with its title in gold lettering on the spine, largish print, and a text devoid of all critical apparatus. It felt, it smelt, just the same. When I opened it, I half expected to find my name inside the cover. Nostalgia is a dangerous indulgence. My rule is never to go back to places or things I loved in childhood. It can lead only to disappointment. Even worse, reality erases the happy illusions that kind, unreliable memory has stored up for our lifelong entertainment. So the question was whether my recovered omnibus would bear rereading. Would the Wells of memory be poisoned? After all, these 60-odd stories were already more than half a century old when I first read them, and now they were more than a century old. I climbed on to my time machine, pushed the lever and rode fifty years back into the past to find, with surprise and delight, that Wells’s world was just as I remembered it. He was as good as ever, but now I appreciated him even more. The first thing to strike me was that Wells the writer, as opposed to Wells the prophet, has hardly dated at all. To be sure, the style is more deliberate than today’s, the vernacular is different (and the word ‘nigger’ does occur at one point). And of course the London that Wells describes, with its thousands of smoking chimneys and horse-drawn barges on the Regent’s Park canal, vanished long ago. Why, then, does Wells sound so modern? Partly because he belonged to a generation in revolt against the high-flown rhetoric of late Victorian literature, but also I think because of his humble birth and socialist ideals. He came from a family of poor shopkeepers. He knew hardship, and the misery of a broken home, yet refused to employ his precocious talent in mimicking the affectations of the literary upper class. The second thing to strike me was the extraordinary power of his imagination and his mastery of descriptive language. The finest example occurs in ‘Under the Knife’, the out-of-body experience of a man who submits to an operation which he is sure is going to kill him, and who finds himself hurtling towards the edge of the universe. The grim story of ‘The Cone’ tells of a taciturn steel-master who takes his wife’s lover down to the works at dusk to admire the red and roaring drama of a blast-furnace at full throttle, and there exacts a horrible revenge. Wells was a cunning writer. His miniature ‘The Pearl of Love’ – it’s only four pages long – is about an Indian prince who builds a temple to his dead princess. The sting in the tail of the story is unforgettable, the best I know. Wells is just as good at beginnings, hooking the reader in the first paragraph. Here, for instance, is the start of ‘The Lost Inheritance’:

‘My uncle’, said the man with the glass eye, ‘was what you might call a hemi-semi-demi millionaire. He was worth about a hundred and twenty thousand. Quite. And he left me all his money.’

I glanced at the shiny sleeve of his coat, and my eye travelled up to the frayed collar . . .

H. G. Wells makes the impossible believable by soothing the sceptical reader with crafty disclaimers. ‘I have carefully avoided any attempt at style, effect or construction,’ he writes in one place. And in another: ‘I have been surprised at the credit accorded to the story . . .’ Then you know he’s about to confront you with an incredible proposition. One of his tricks is to place the narrator among a group of friends listening to a tall tale while gathered round the fire after dinner. In ‘The Time Machine’, the story which made Wells famous, it is the Time Traveller who is ‘expounding a recondite matter to us’.

The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses . . . There was that luxurious afterdinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision.

Just as well. For the first words of the Time Traveller are: ‘I shall have to controvert one or two ideas that are almost universally accepted . . .’ Sometimes the narrator is buttonholed by a man in the street. In ‘The Diamond Maker’ it is a ragged character on the Embankment who claims to have spent his last penny perfecting the manufacture of real diamonds in an unfurnished room in Kentish Town. The pauper takes out a stone the size of a thumbnail, offers it to the narrator for £100, and proceeds to tell his story, complaining that no one believes it. The narrator nearly does. And so do we. By such devices the author puts clear water between himself and his readers, lulling them into a state of suspended disbelief. ‘Is it just possible?’ we ask ourselves. ‘Perhaps, after all . . . ?’ So many of Wells’s stories are about other worlds and other times that he is often described as a science-fiction writer – indeed, as a pioneer of the genre. But science fiction dates, and storytelling does not. And I think Wells’s stories survive on literary merit alone. True, his vision of tank warfare in ‘The Land Ironclads’, written in 1903, was prophetic. Wells’s tank was not a tracked vehicle, however; it was based on the already-invented ‘pedrail’, a set of wheels with flexible feet attached to their rims, and it was a monster – a crawling fortress 100 feet long. His several stories about aeroplanes pre-empted the Wright brothers. But the picture of a twenty-second-century airline which he drew in his novella of 1897, ‘A Story of the Days to Come’, was bizarre: an aerial galleon flying tiers of sails with passengers swinging in seats under its hull. In that story, the English countryside has been abandoned and there are skyscrapers, moving walkways and superhighways in the cities. But girls are still chaperoned and their fathers are still choosing husbands for them. Wells used scientific themes not to predict the future, but to criticize the present. He is more Jonathan Swift than Arthur C. Clarke, more of a social seer (after the First World War increasingly a pessimistic one) than a futurologist. ‘The Time Machine’ is not really about time travel. It is a proto-socialist vision – much copied since – of a world of extreme inequality in which an effete upper class drifts about enjoying the sunlight by day, but at night lives in terror of an underclass of cannibal brutes who toil in subterranean workshops. In his stark story of ritual sacrifice, ‘The Lord of the Dynamos’, the machine has replaced God. Here is a scientific education being put to wonderful literary effect in stories which range far wider than science. There are ghost stories (‘The Red Room’) and monster stories, like the unforgettable ‘Aepyornis Island’, where a man is marooned with a giant hatching egg of the extinct Elephant Bird. There are stories of loss and regret (‘The Door in the Wall’) and stories of domestic life. There are morality tales: in ‘The Country of the Blind’, the one-eyed man is not king, but a handicapped immigrant. There are comedies, like ‘The Man Who Could Work Miracles’, in which the hapless Mr Fotheringay begins by willing a lamp to turn upside down in the pub and ends by nearly destroying the planet; and ‘The Truth about Pyecraft’, which turns on the fact that fat people never use the ‘f ’ word but refer always to their ‘weight’. There are even love stories: though I think these are the weakest. Wells may have loved women, but he wrote mawkishly about love. They say it doesn’t matter whether you read a story on paper or on a screen. But the loss and recovery of my Wells proved to me that books are ‘more than a text’ (to misquote Derrida). I cannot now imagine enjoying the short stories in any form other than the one I know, where book and text are bound – emotionally, literally and inextricably – together. I am glad to see that a new omnibus edition has recently been published, and I am grateful to scholars like Patrick Parrinder who have added so much to my appreciation of Wells, but I shall forever hold fast to my big red book.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 37 © Christian Tyler 2013