But a strong self-image is essential for any real achievement. Bernard Shaw recognised that clearly and set out to create one from an early stage. Only his first novel IMMATURITY—written when he was 23 and unpublished for half a century—has the kind of vague, indeterminate hero we find in Wells. Then Shaw produced a series of novels in each of which he experiments with a new self-image, a hero possessed of inner-certainty and conviction, until he found what he was looking for in Sidney Trefusis, the ‘unsocial socialist’ in the novel of that title, and stuck with it. And Trefusis would reappear in the form of Shaw’s most loquacious and forceful hero John Tanner, in MAN AND SUPERMAN. But Wells never learned the trick, and was stuck with his diffident little cockney until he was too old to change.
The last reincarnation of his cockney hero occurs in one of his most curious and interesting novels, CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER, published in 1925, when Wells was nearly sixty. Mr Preemby is another of Wells’s modest little nonentities, who differs from Kipps and Mr Polly in suddenly deciding that he is more important than he had assumed. At a mock-séance in Tunbridge, someone pulls his leg by telling him that he is the incarnation of Sargon, the king of Sumeria; he then decides it is his destiny to bring peace to the world and free humankind from poverty and oppression. After wandering away from home and calling disciples, he is arrested, certified and placed in an asylum. He dies a few weeks after being rescued from it.
But this is not really a novel about a harmless little man going mad. Like Kipps and Polly, Preemby has always kept his imagination alive with books about Atlantis and the secrets of the pyramids and ancient Tibet. So what happens to him when he is told that he is a reincarnation of Sargon is a kind of awakening, such as happens to Mr Polly when he sets the house on fire and realises ‘If you don’t like your lie you can change it’ (a phrase that, in my teens, led me to leave home and take to the road.) Wells is saying that people like Mr Polly and Preemby do not know who they are. The one certain thing is that they are not Mr Polly and Preemby. And since Wells believes that, since the end of the Great War, mankind had entered a new phase, he feels that Preemby is one of any who are awakening to new consciousness. It is this that makes CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER in some ways one of his best novels.
Yet it also marked the beginning of a slowly increasing pessimism that would darken his last two decades. We can begin to understand that pessimism by looking at a novel he had written a year earlier, MEN LIKE GODS. Intended as a successor to the earlier A MODERN UTOPIA, this is the story of a group of distinguished people—including Balfour and Churchill—on their way to lunch at Windsor when they find themselves on a strange planet, having apparently passed through some fourth-dimensional window that has been engineered by the ‘Utopians’. Wells’s picture of this ‘ideal society’ is, quite simply, unbelievably boring, all sweetness and light and genetics. (Aldous Huxley wrote BRAVE NEW WORLD as a counterblast). Wells had simply failed to grasp that human beings need more than tidily-engineered lives to be happy: that they need some kind of creative effort and purpose. In MEN LIKE GODS, that early Wells of the scientific romances has simply run out of steam, and must have been aware of it.
CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER is an attempt to undo the damage, and return to a novel that has some heart and soul. It would be another ten years before Wells began to see the answer, and that came about in the opening pages of EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. (1934).
He begins: ‘I need freedom of mind. I need peace for work. I am distressed by immediate circumstances. My thoughts and work are encumbered by claims and vexations…’
He continues:
‘There is nothing I think very exceptional in my situation as a mental worker. Entanglement is our common lot. I believe this craving for a release from—bothers, from daily demands and urgencies, from responsibilities and tempting distractions, is shared by an increasing number of people who, with specialized and distinctive work to do, find themselves eaten up by first-hand affairs. This is the outcome of a specialization and a sublimation of interests that has become frequent only in the last century or so. Spaciousness and leisure, and even the desire for spaciousness and leisure, have so far been exceptional. Most individual creatures since life began, have been “up against it” all the time, have been driven continually by fear and cravings, have had to respond to the unresting antagonisms of their surroundings, and they have found a sufficient and sustaining interest in the drama of immediate events provided for them by these demands. Essentially, their living was continuous adjustment to happenings. Good hap and ill hap filled it entirely. They hungered and ate and they desired and loved; they were amused and attracted, they pursued or escaped, they were overtaken and they died.
‘But with the dawn of human foresight and with the appearance of a great surplus of energy in life such as the last century or so has revealed, there has been a progressive emancipation of the attention from everyday urgencies. What was once the whole of life has become, to an increasing extent, merely the background of life. People can ask now what would have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can say, “Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but—what do you do?”
‘Conceptions of living, divorced more and more from immediacy, distinguish the modern civilized man from all former life. In art, in pure science, in literature, for instance, many people find sustaining series of interests and incentives which have come at last to have a greater value for them than any primary needs and satisfactions. These primary needs are taken for granted. The everyday things of life become subordinate to these wider interests which have taken hold of them, and they continue to value everyday things, personal affections and material profit and loss, only in so far as they are ancillary to the newer ruling system of effort, and to evade or disregard them in so far as they are antagonistic or obstructive to that. And the desire to live as fully as possible within the ruling system of effort becomes increasingly conscious and defined.
‘The originative intellectual worker is not a normal human being and does not lead nor desire to lead a normal human life. He wants to lead a supernormal life.
‘Mankind is realizing more and more surely that to escape from individual immediacies into the less personal activities now increasing in human society is not, like games, reverie, intoxication or suicide, a suspension or abandonment of the primary life; on the contrary it is the way to power over that primary life which, though subordinated, remains intact. Essentially it is an imposition upon the primary life of a participation in the greater life of the race as a whole. In studies and studios and laboratories, administrative bureaus and exploring expeditions, a new world is germinated and develops. It is not a repudiation of the old but a vast extension of it, in a racial synthesis into which individual aims will ultimately be absorbed. We originative intellectual workers are reconditioning human life…
‘We are like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that have hitherto covered our kind, into the air, seeking to breathe in a new fashion and emancipate ourselves from long accepted and long unquestioned necessities. At last it becomes for us a case of air or nothing. But the new land has not yet definitively emerged from the waters and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon. ( My italics.)
I do not now in the least desire to live longer unless I can go on with what I consider to be my proper business.’
I feel these are not only the most important words