Question 7, page 6
‘We decided we had to do something about it,’ Wells recalled many years later. ‘So we stripped ourselves under the trees as though there was no one else in the world but ourselves and made love all over Mrs Humphry Ward.’
When they had dressed again, Wells struck a lucifer off his boot and set alight Mrs Humphry Ward’s denunciation of Rebecca West, seeking to exorcise it all in the chill alpine air.
‘We burnt her,’ Wells recalled many years later. ‘The Times flared indignantly, and subsided and wriggled burning and went black and brittle and broke into fragments that flew away.’
5
Burning remained on his mind when he sat down the following morning in Château Soleil at a bowed Biedermeier desk. In its cupped middle was the beginnings of his new novel while at the far left side was a neat pile of various research papers and books. Wells was particularly taken with The Interpretation of Radium by Frederick Soddy, whose pioneering work with Ernest Rutherford on atomic physics would later win him a Nobel Prize. Wells returned to the page that had made such an impression when the gypsy girl in the blue silk hobble skirt had exploded into his life. The limitless energy that existed in radioactivity, Soddy argued, would, once harnessed, lead to a new world that could ‘rejuvenate itself perennially’. A self-renewing form of energy was the opposite of entropy, the idea of the inevitable running down of all life as energy itself runs out.
Entropy had been the flywheel of Wells’s most admired writing; it was entropy, after all, which had given his readers the mesmerising penultimate chapter of The Time Machine when the time traveller arrives on a forsaken beach that exists in a perennial brooding twilight at the Earth’s endpoint on which the only life forms left are giant algae-slimed crabs. A ‘sense of abominable desolation’ hangs over this world in which the sun is sputtering out, a dying star. In Wells’s imaginings Darwinian evolution has been trumped by physics.
But Soddy’s book made clear that a destiny imposed on the Earth by entropy was vanquished by the promise of the infinite energy implicit in the atom. In words that Wells would have recognised as a summary of his own most successful fiction, Soddy argued that astonishing new discoveries meant ‘We are no longer merely the dying inhabitants of a world itself slowly dying.’6
Decades later, in a preface to a new edition of his ‘dear old Time Machine’, Wells reflected that ‘the geologist and astronomers of the time told us dreadful lies about the inevitable “freezing” up of the world—and of life and mankind with it. There was no escape, it seemed.’ But new scientific discoveries meant that ‘man will be able to do anything and go anywhere’.
It was Soddy’s vision of eternal energy that opened a vista of hope for Wells, which he would explore for the rest of his life. Eternal energy chimed better with the circumstances of a globally successful writer in his glamorous mistress’s Swiss chalet for whom the world grew a little larger with each passing day. His life was now very far from that of the struggling young writer, with a wife and their two baby children to support, who had written his great visionary works of a dying world in a dark little rented house next to a noisy railway line in Woking.
Wells’s early masterpieces had been fantastic nightmares that were all the more effective for refusing to trade in a fantastic style. They slyly coupled a fear of where scientific knowledge might lead to a vertiginous terror of a class-bound hierarchy, a person’s precarious foothold on which was only ever an accident away from being lost and them with it, falling, as Wells’s family had done when his father, a professional cricketer, had fractured his thigh. The family’s principal source of income disappeared and his mother was compelled into domestic service. But by 1912, Wells’s name made, his success assured, his ascent complete and his fall a seeming impossibility, he was trading more in dreams of a future where wise men—mostly self-elected scientists—ruled a better world benignly.
Now he and Little e broke beds in the remote alpine inns they frequented on their walks, they made love in alpine forests, rutting like animals in beds of pine needles, and of a night, when she so chose, his chalet bedroom. She had built a secret door from her room that opened into a wardrobe in his through which she would visit. The limits to life he had assumed in his Woking days no longer existed, the forces that had once threatened to drag him back down to the poverty of his childhood were no more, and the idea of entropy and the terror it brought on in him, which had fired his greatest works, was an illusion. Now he lived in a world of perpetual energy. He lifted a sheet for Little e and was grateful the darkness hid his forced smile as the black rain of a still far-off explosion began killing something in his heart.
6
Meanwhile, Rebecca West was writing of how she couldn’t conceive of a person who ran about lighting bonfires but feared the flame. Yet that was H. G. He wanted people, she sensed, to quarrel and play with, people who raged and wept. But he did not want someone like her, who burnt.
While Wells’s world filled with infinite life, Rebecca West’s thoughts were otherwise. To not have him was for her an emotional failure so complete death seemed less. ‘During the next few days I shall either put a bullet through my head or commit something more shattering to myself than death,’ she wrote.
. . . I don’t understand why you wanted me three months ago and don’t want me now . . . You’ve literally ruined me. I’m burned down to my foundations . . .
You once found my willingness to love you a beautiful and courageous thing. I still think it was. Your spinsterishness makes you feel that a woman desperately and hopelessly in love with a man is an indecent spectacle and a reversal of the natural order of things. But you should have been too fine to feel like that.
I would give my whole life to feel your arms round me again.
I wish you had loved me. I wish you liked me.
Yours,
Rebecca
P.S. Don’t leave me utterly alone. If I live write to me now and then. You like me enough for that. At least I pretend to myself you do.
Wells, having discovered a world of infinite possibility, redoubled his rebuff—though not without leaving the door a little ajar.
‘How can I be your friend to this accompaniment?’ he replied. ‘I don’t see that I can be of any use or help to you at all. You have my entire sympathy—but until we can meet on a reasonable basis—Goodbye.’7
7
Wells returned to his new book, beginning not with radium but with fire, commencing—and continuing for perhaps too many pages—like a spirited, if slightly unconvincing Mechanics Institute lecture on mankind’s slowly growing mastery of fire as a system of energy out of which civilisation grows. The book Wells now wrote between breaking tavern beds, defiling Mrs Humphry Ward’s thoughts, startling alpine deer and trying not to think of Rebecca West, was, it is not unjust to suggest, confused.
Wells later blamed Little e for a loss at this time of his ability to concentrate on the higher needs of his craft and of his artistic focus. Perhaps though the confusion of Wells’s new novel mirrored the confusion of the life of a man with a wife and a mistress now feeling the gravitational pull of a third woman he desperately wishes to exorcise from his panicked soul as again he hears the low rumble of the hidden door in his wardrobe sliding open.
But Rebecca West was not for exorcising.
And at such times he wanted to destroy all that he had with Little e, except for the fact it was everything he craved—sex, security, discretion, an amusing, talented, interesting woman.
But it was not Rebecca West.
He found Rebecca disturbed—and disturbing. But much as he tried to burn her to ash it was that wild flame he coveted.
Wells was no product of a twenty-first-century American writing school instructed to only show and never tell when writing their tales. His global success was built on showing and telling, and when a new thought came upon him at the writing table, telling some more. Borges’s observation that Wells was interested in everything except the story he was writing was never truer than in what was to be published as The World Set Free.
In his new book, characters only slouched out of the shadows occasionally and none was a protagonist of sufficient gravity to interfere with Wells’s numerous swerves off page. None seemed anything other than a cipher to advance arguments and opinions. His principal belief was that human beings, when confronted with the existential horrors that would arise in consequence of modern scientific discovery, would react rationally, and form a rational world government that would work rationally towards rationally ending the world of its irrational problems.
Where his early nightmares had been taut, these later dreams bloated as his mind went everywhere except the manuscript at hand. Distracted by the pine needles that fell out of his underwear of an evening, unsettled by the spectral vision of a naked Little e appearing unannounced out of his wardrobe like a music hall magician’s risqué assistant, disturbed by her warmth and scent that then flowed like a river of wonder into his bed, Wells was undone over and over by the illicit thought of another body that filled his senses whenever Little e filled his arms, that of a hobble-skirted gypsy.
The sound of a distant train came and went. He felt that something in his life was askew but necessary, that same thing which demanded he destroy what he needed. Something delightful had come into his life and this thought he experienced as two fragrant arms around his neck. As his senses swam in lavender the world seemed very agreeable to him. All that lay before him was suddenly clear and straightforward. What was wicked was necessary and yet what was necessary would not end happily or well. He did not care.
He wanted to know life. He did not wish to hide from it. He wondered if the pain that would inevitably flow was somehow as necessary to him as the joy it might bring. And then another distant train sounded and disappeared and he could not return to these thoughts or the lavender smell or understand what a moment before had seemed so clear and straightforward. Everything was once more only the most dreadful tangle as Little e pulled her lips away from his and softly asked him in that voice he had begun to find inexplicably irritating to tell her what he was thinking.
8
Under such trying circumstances, the new book proceeded unevenly. What was meant to bring to the public’s attention the revolutionary potential of radium ended tediously with the story of Marcus Karenin, a Russian sage dispensing cod-wisdom at a Himalayan sanatorium where he has gone to die. A poet argues with Karenin that a great awakening of sexual love is taking place, but the Slavic seer will have none of it: in the new enlightened age long life will liberate us all from the demands of sex and allow us to concentrate on higher things. If it was wishful thinking reflecting a personal dilemma rather than a universal truth Wells’s pen nevertheless staggered on plumbing the ever more implausible.
After all, hadn’t he pulled off similar narrative non sequiturs in some of his earlier books and triumphed? But where once unlikely tropes and strange leaps had succeeded, nothing worked any more, and Wells knew it. He worried, he confided to Little e, that H. G. Wells was a mad man who thought he was H. G. Wells.
Only once did he touch the place that had led him to his greatest stories. Wells had an unnerving ability to discern the destructive possibilities of embryonic scientific discoveries and new technology. Tanks, aerial warfare, the mass bombardment of civilians and the growing lack of separation between the killing of military personnel and the innocent—all these he had foreseen in his earlier novels. And now, between fire, world history, world government and his forlorn hope that perhaps sex might be better vanquished for all concerned—Little e, Rebecca West, Jane, himself, and humanity—there came to him a nightmare redolent of his greatest works, his most enduring nightmare that he would bequeath to posterity and which would come to forever after hang like the sword of Damocles over the world.
Long before the scientists, far earlier than any generals or politicians, Wells had extrapolated from the work of Rutherford and Soddy a military application of the scientists’ discoveries about radium in a new weapon of hitherto unimaginable power. Humanity, Wells wrote, echoing Rebecca West’s letters about him, was a ‘sleeper who handles matches in his sleep and wakes to find himself in flames’. Wells’s invention was an idea of such depraved monstrosity that it shocked even Little e.
‘All you want to do,’ she told Wells, ‘is destroy things.’
Wells called his invention the atomic bomb.
9
Wells imagined the atomic bomb as an infinitely more destructive force than conventional explosives, a weapon so powerful that a man ‘could carry about in a handbag an amount of latent energy sufficient to wreck half a city’. The idea had been vaguely mooted by a few scientists but it was Wells who first foresaw the monstrous reality and consequences clearly and in detail.
Derived from his scientific understanding of the radical implications of the potential energy in atoms, he imagined in The World Set Free the discovery of ‘artificial radioactivity’ in 1933, the subsequent invention of atomic bombs, and an all-out global nuclear war in the 1950s. Wells’s atomic bombs are hand-tossed by aviators out of open plane cockpits, the effect no less devastating for the almost comic mode of their delivery.
At the time Wells was writing of the perils of nuclear war, even military planes remained highly experimental creations, at once still ludicrous to behold and largely impractical to use. That summer, the British Military Aeroplane competition had been won by a Cody V biplane, a fanciful contraption that Little e described, not without justification, as an oversize box kite tacked onto a tricycle. Wells reminded her of the sensational global news of the world’s first aerial bombardment in Libya two years before when an Italian aviator tossed four hand grenades, each the size of a grapefruit, on Ottoman forces from an Etrich Taube, a plane the shape of which suggested a confused moth.
The notion of such mechanical absurdities being capable of any serious military role in the age of the mighty dreadnoughts remained, however, an idea only slightly less ridiculous than suggesting the end of civilisation was implicit in the unseeable atom.
10
‘I was dumbfounded,’ the B-29’s radar operator, Joe Stiborik, recollected about what he saw happen to Hiroshima after Thomas Ferebee released his lever. ‘Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas, one minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared . . . There was almost no talk I can remember on our trip back to the base. It was just too much to express in words, I guess.’
And yet it was words H. G. Wells used thirty-two years before, not only to express what Joe Stiborik was to witness, not only to predict what would happen at Hiroshima, but also to create the very possibility of Hiroshima. Fiction may be only fancy yet reality is often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares. Wells’s words set in train a chain of events—or, to use a more apposite image, set off a chain reaction that led to the mute shock of the bomber’s crew as the silver B-29 banked away from the mushroom cloud and the instant death of innumerable people below, some vaporised leaving only their shadow etched into concrete pavements and walls as evidence of having lived, others condemned to a life that would be a death extended over agonising hours, days, weeks and in some cases years and decades.
‘My God,’ the co-pilot Captain Robert Lewis said over the intercom, ‘what have we done?’, the meaning of which has been much debated ever since.
11
Wells’s atomic bombs are characterised by the paradox of their small size (‘a black sphere two feet in diameter’) relative to their enormous, hitherto unimaginable destructive power. When the atomic bomb detonates, Wells’s aviators observe ‘a shuddering star of evil splendour’ appearing far below, a description unconsciously evoked three decades later by the real-life aviator Captain George Marquardt, who piloted an observation plane that accompanied Thomas Ferebee’s B-29 when it dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. ‘It seemed,’ he later recalled, ‘as if the sun had come out of the earth and exploded.’
Wells clearly foresaw how the site of an atomic bomb explosion would for ‘a score of miles in diameter’ become ‘death areas’ while ‘luminous, radio-active vapour’ drifting ‘scores of miles from the bomb centre’ would kill all it overtook. Bob Caron, the bomber’s tail gunner, saw Hiroshima ‘being covered with this low, bubbling mass. It looked like bubbling molasses, let’s say, spreading out and running up into the foothills, just covering the whole city.’
Wells described how the bomb ‘spread itself out into a monstrous cavern of fiery energy at the base of what became a miniature active volcano . . . a boiling confusion of molten soil and superheated steam’, a description eerily close to that made by Thomas Ferebee decades later. ‘I saw this boiling on the ground and the stem [of the mushroom cloud] was going up and you could see buildings going up in the steam.’ Bob Caron recalled how the cloud ‘was white on the outside and it was sort of a purplish black towards the interior, and it had a fiery red core, and it just kept boiling up.’
‘There was nothing but death in that cloud,’ the then twenty-four-year-old assistant engineer Robert Shumard commented many years later. ‘All those Japanese souls ascending to Heaven.’
12
Yet by the standard of Wells’s previous and spectacular successes The World Set Free was a failure. The lazy plotting, the tedium of its characters, and Karenin’s ramblings failed to win a large audience. Published in 1914 to poor sales and worse reviews, the Times Literary Supplement dismissed it as ‘porridge’.
By then Wells’s affair with von Arnim was over and Wells and West had become lovers. On 4 August 1914, the same day as the First World War began, their son, Anthony Panther West, was born.
After the war to end all wars—another Wells line that began as an idealistic expression and ended up a cynical catchphrase—Wells and West parted. He ceased writing the great novels for which he would be remembered and began writing books no one any longer recalls that paradoxically made him one of the most famous writers on Earth. Rebecca West became Rebecca West and, finally, many decades later, a version of Mrs Humphry Ward, defending Senator Joe McCarthy and denouncing The Times and parts of the BBC as Communist Party organs. She became somebody who had once been somebody else and then was no more than jetsam that signified something mysterious and slightly incomprehensible, somehow out of reach, lost long ago behind the vast seawall of great wars and passing time.
