Finally, Verney-Mary alone is left, drifting south towards the equator, like a character in a J.G. Ballard novel. So Mary tells us how life was without Shelley; her universe had gone. Through science fiction, she expressed her powerfully inexpressible feelings.
In his brief book on Mary,[10] William Walling makes a point which incidentally relates The Last Man still more closely to the science-fictional temper. Remarking that solitude is a common topic of the period and by no means Mary’s monopoly, Walling claims that by interweaving the themes of isolation and the end of civilization, she creates a prophetic account of modern industrial society, in which the creative personality becomes more and more alienated.
Tales and Stories by Mary Shelley were collected together by Richard Garnett and published in 1891. They are in the main conventional. Familial and amorous misunderstandings fill the foreground, armies gallop about in the background. The characters are high-born, their speeches high-flown. Tears are scalding, years long, sentiments either villainous or irreproachable, deaths copious and conclusions not unusually full of well-mannered melancholy. The tales are of their time. Here again, the game of detecting autobiographical traces can be played. One story, ‘Transformation,’ sheds light on Frankenstein – but not much. We have to value Mary Shelley, as we do other authors, for her strongest work, not her weakest; and her best has a strength still not widely enough appreciated.
This collection of stories from scattered journals and keepsake albums indicates Mary’s emotional and physical exhaustion. In the course of eight years, between 1814 and 1822, she had borne four children, three of whom died during the period, and had suffered miscarriages. She had travelled hither and thither with her irresponsible husband, who had most probably had an affair with her closest friend, Claire. And she had witnessed suicides and death all round her, culminating in Shelley’s death. It was much for a sensitive and intellectual woman to endure. No wonder that Claire Clairmont wrote to her, some years after the fury and shouting died, and said, ‘I think in certain things you are the most daring woman I ever knew.’[11]
1. An enjoyable recent biography is Jane Dunn’s Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley, 1979.
2. One thinks here of the scene after Shelley’s death, when Trelawny caused his corpse to be burnt on the shore, Byron and Leigh Hunt also being present. At the last possible moment, Trelawny ran forward and snatched Shelley’s heart from the body.
3. David Ketterer, Frankenstein’s Creation: The Book, The Monster, and Human Reality, University of Victoria, 1979.
4. Leonard Wolf, The Annotated Frankenstein, 1977.
5. David Ketterer, ‘Frankenstein in Wolf’s Clothing,’ Science Fiction Studies, No. 18, July 1979.
6. Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, 1972.
7. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, 1973.
8. Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,’ The New York Review, 21 March 1974, reprinted in Literary Women, 1976.
9. Muriel Spark, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1951. *A biographer of Mary Shelley, writing in the nineteen-thirties, advances the argument that Frankenstein is ‘the first of the Scientific Romances that have culminated in our day in the work of Mr. H. G. Wells,’ because it erects ‘a superstructure of fantasy on a foundation of circumstantial “scientific fact.”’ Shrewd judgement, although the excellence of the novel is otherwise underestimated. (R. Glynn Grylls: Mary Shelley, A Biography, 1938.)
10. 9 William Walling: Mary Shelley, 1972.
11. Claire Clairmont, letter, quoted in Julian Marshall’s Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1889.
‘WHAT OF THE IMMANENT WILL AND ITS DESIGNS?’ ASKS Thomas Hardy at the beginning of The Dynasts, and proceeds to demonstrate at length how little the Will cares for its creations. He leaves us with a faint hope that the Will can in some way evolve, and that ‘the rages of the Ages shall be cancelled,/Consciousness the Will informing,/Till it fashion all things fair.’ Thinking the matter over after the First World War, Hardy conceded that this was a little too optimistic: thereby leaving the door open for Olaf Stapledon.
Stapledon sweeps away the human characters in whom Hardy delighted, to give us a threadbare stage upon which humanity is lost in the incomprehensible toils of creation or the soliloquies of the Star Maker. The Star Maker is the Immanent Will wearing another hat.
W. Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) is a very English kind of writer. He won no great reputation in his lifetime and has accumulated little since; yet he cannot be said to be entirely forgotten, despite his mysterious absence from most of the histories of English Literature.
His work in philosophy – a subject which at one time he taught in the University of Liverpool – has proved impermanent, although A Modern Theory of Ethics went through several reprints.
His kind of visionary writing, which attempts to establish an individual mythology, is not unfamiliar. His novel Odd John has a subtitle which recalls Blake (‘A Story Between Jest and Earnest’ – though there’s precious little enjoying of the lady in it); his grandiosities recall Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, Dawn in Britain, with its quixotic resolve to restore Chaucer to modern English. Two other conflicting voices echo strongly through Stapledon’s fiction: the Milton of Paradise Lost and that great Victorian storm-trooper, Winwood Reade, whose Martyrdom of Man attempted to justify the ways of man to a dead god.
We may call H.G. Wells’s early scientific romances science fiction with a clear conscience. It is more debatable whether Stapledon’s first novel, Last and First Men (1930), and Star Maker (1937) so qualify. They are Stapledon’s attempt to blend fiction and philosophy. Wells’s imagination was untainted by metaphysics, though politics finally eclipsed it; but Stapledon read Modern History while up at Balliol from 1905–09, and most of his fictions strive to iron themselves out into the progressions of historicity, complete with time-charts.
These two vast works, best regarded as a unity, are sui generis. The preface to Last and First Men warns that this ‘is not a prophecy; it is a myth, or an essay in myth.’ Even sterner is the disclaimer at the portals of Star Maker: ‘Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all.’
The Novel has proved itself unexpectedly capacious, but the Immanent Will does seem to demand a less convivial stage on which to enact the rages of the ages. The rages which energise the gaunt structures of Last and First Men and Star Maker are, basically, religious faith versus atheism and the quest for individual fulfillment versus the needs of the community, whether terrestrial or stellar. Modern rages, one might call them.
With their emphasis on spiritual suffering, catastrophe to come, and the surrealist mutations of shape which mankind must undergo in submission to the Creator, those great glacial novels, together spanning the thirties, now appear oddly characteristic of their day.
In many respects, Stapledon himself is markedly of his time. As were many men of his generation, he was torn by religious doubt; he was a non-combatant in the 1914–1918 war, and had some trouble in fitting himself, essentially a Victorian, into post-war society. Along with other intellectuals of his day, he flirted with pacifism and promiscuity. He had strong leanings towards Communism without ever becoming a member of the Party. Like many writers outside the swim of London literary society, he knew few other authors, and was critically disregarded.
It could also be said that the central premise of his work, that mankind is irrelevant to the purposes of the universe,