We can begin to understand the pessimism that gradually crept upon him. He felt that CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER was the last of his old ‘Wellsian’ novels, the novels of Wells the story-teller. Now he felt he had to find some new form, which would allow him to speak more directly to the reader. Its beginnings are already plain in CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER, especially its last chapters. After that, in novels like the vast WORLD OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD, he is earnestly addressing us rather than simply trying to entertain. Novels like THE AUTOCRACY OF MR PARHAM or THE BULPINGTON OF BLUP do not even attempt to compete with the early works. We almost need to call them by a new name – or perhaps borrow Graham Greene’s word ‘entertainments’. He is still capable of the occasional tremendous parable, like THE CROQUET PLAYER. But his main work is now to be found in books like WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH OUR LIVES, THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME and THE FATE OF HOMO SAPIENS. He wants to show us the way out of a situation that he feels is becoming increasingly dark.
Which is why, in late 1943, when he knew he was becoming increasingly ill, he began THE HAPPY TURNING. It is almost a return to ‘The Door in the Wall’, with one major difference. That story had been romantically pessimistic. The successful politician yearns for what he feels he abandoned. (In that respect it reminds us of Orson Welles’s CITIZEN KANE.) But now Wells feels he is near the end, and he is still facing that irritating loss of privacy as when he was writing the EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. But at least he finds that his dream life is offering him a kind of ‘door in the wall’. So he permits himself to fantasize about ‘a day when a cleansed and liberated world will take the Happy Turning in good earnest and pass out of the base and angry conflicts that distract us from wholesome living’.
Ever since those early days of ANTICIPATIONS (1901), Wells had seen himself as the social scientist who would design the world’s future Now, in 1945, it seemed that politicians and militarists had ruined that future, and there was little left to hope for. In the deep depression, Wells allowed himself to feel that in the past few months, some fundamental change had taken place, so that ‘the end of everything we call life is close at hand, and cannot be evaded. A frightful queerness has come into life’. It is, he says, as if the force of gravitation has disappeared from the solar system, so everything is flying apart.
It sounds not unlike Yeats’ ‘Second Coming’: ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. But then, Yeats went on to write that great final poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’, in which he recognises that the answer lies in that slow march of human evolution, whose aim is ‘profane perfection of mankind’, so that even globe-trotting tourists can feel its power as they look at the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And Yeats understood something that Wells failed to grasp: that in certain moments of illumination, man suddenly ‘completes his partial mind. Our minds are like the moon in its last quarter; yet, although invisible, the remaining three quarters are there all the time.’ The answer, Yeats realised, lies in the mind itself.
Yet Wells himself had shown his instinctive grasp of the same insight when he wrote: ‘The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, man is a creature of the mind’. Whatever his faults as a writer or human being, that sentence is enough to establish him as one of the greatest minds of modern times.
THE HAPPY TURNING
I
HOW I CAME TO THE HAPPY TURNING
I AM DREAMING FAR more than I did before this chaotic war invaded my waking hours. My days are now wholly full of war effort: What can I do? What ought I to do? Where is the next opportunity and what dangers gather ahead? I am urgent. I overstrain. And now something deep within me protests and rebels, and says: “These war-makers have yoked and enslaved you. You are defeated if you give yourself wholly to war.”
I answer evasively: “Presently I will relax.”
That serves in the daytime but not at night. I take care to keep as fit as I can and not to let my war preoccupations develop into the nervous waste of anxiety. I never dream about war. I dream neither of its horrors nor its strategy. When I sleep, a more adult and modern and civilized part of my being comes into play. More and more are my dreams what I believe the psychologists call compensatory; the imaginations I have suppressed revolt and take control.
Some time ago I dreamt a dream that recurs with variations again and again, so that it is a sort of Open Sesame for all my excursions into dreamland. In my daytime efforts to keep myself fit and active, I oblige myself to walk a mile or so on all days that are not impossibly harsh. I walk to the right to the Zoo, or I walk across to Queen Mary’s Rose Garden or down by several routes to my Savile Club, or I bait my walk with Smith’s bookshop at Baker Street. I have to sit down a bit every now and then, and that limits my range. I’ve played these ambulatory variations now for two year and a half, for I am too busy to go out of town, out of reach of my books, and my waking self has never uttered a protest. But now the—what do they call it?—subliminal consciousness?—has in the most charming way asserted my unformulated desire, with this dream, which I will call the dream of the Happy Turning.
I dream I am at my front door starting out for the accustomed round. I go out and suddenly realize there is a possible turning I have overlooked. Odd I have never taken it, but there it is! And in a trice I am walking more briskly than I ever walked before, up hill and down dale, in scenes of happiness such as I have never hoped to see again. At first the Turning itself was the essence of the dream. Now, directly my dream unfolds I know where I am; it has become a mere key to this delightful land of my lifelong suppressions, in which my desires and unsatisfied fancies, hopes, memories and imaginations have accumulated inexhaustible treasure.
For the first time in my existence I realize what it is to have possession of an entirely healthy and balanced body. I was born astigmatic and in those days nobody bothered about common children’s eyes. I could never be sure of bowling a straight ball, and when I jumped down I hit the ground too soon or too late. I was under-nourished and tuberculous, so that I was a skinny puny youth, easily fatigued. Tolerable health came only in my thirties. Muscular precision and hardiness I shall never know in my waking life. But now, beyond the Happy Turning, I leap gulfs unerringly, scale precipices, shin up trees and am indefatigable. There are no infections there; no coughs, no colds; to cough or sneeze would be to wake up and tumble back headlong into those unhygienic present-day realities where dirt-begotten epidemics have their way with us. Maybe a day will come when a cleansed and liberated world will take the Happy Turning in good earnest and pass out of the base and angry conflicts which distract us from wholesome living. All such liberations are possible beyond the Turn. Now I count it good fortune that I can even dream of the gay serenity of that Beyond.
The Happy Turning leads to a world where distance is abolished. Certain phrases—parroted phrases empty of belief—are already to be found in the newspapers and speeches—the abolition of war, the abolition of distance, the abolition of competition and social inequality. But after people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true. And then it comes true. Beyond the Happy Turning these phrases are realities; hopes fulfilled.
II
SUPPRESSIONS AND SYMBOLISM IN DREAMLAND
BUT THE FANTASIES of dreamland go an immeasurable way beyond what is now conceivable and practical.
The subliminal self is never straightforward. It awakens us, for example, to sex and the social reactions of adolescence in the queerest, most roundabout way. There are sound biological explanations why our minds should work in this fashion, but I cannot go into them now. The submerged intervener is cryptic and oracular; it hints and perplexes. Symbols become persons and persons symbols; individuals, animals, institutions, amalgamate and divide and change into one another.
Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of. The Athanasian Creed is severely logical in dreamland, Isis is transfigured into Hathor, a cow, Quannon, the crescent moon and Murillo’s Queen of Heaven, and still the dream flows on. Osiris becomes his own son Horus, who becomes again Osiris and the Virgin Mother, in incessant rotation. This is the atmosphere of this uncontrollable