Review : H.G. Wells : Another Kind of Life
Last Christmas my brother-in-law gave me H.G. Wells : Another Kind of Life by Michael Sherborne. I’ve nipped in just under the wire to finish it just in case it comes up in this year’s round of gift-giving. It’s a good but curious book; I don’t read much biography but I was surprised by how opinionated the author was, not just about Wells’ canon but also his opinions and lifestyle.
I’ve picked up bits about Wells over the years and learned just enough about him to make me think he might be someone I could really admire — hence asking for a biography last year. The reality of his life both affirmed and contradicted my previous views.
In the twenty-first century Wells is best know for his “scientific romances” — principally The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. Yet, the last of those to be published came out in 1898, when Wells was 32, and he wrote nearly 40 more novels and other works before he died in 1946, aged 79.
During his life he was as well, if not better, known for his pseudo slice-of-life novels such as The History of My Polly and Tono-Bungay, as well as a number of thinly plotted stories providing an opportunity for personal pontification on a number of topics. These included The Undying Fire and The Shape of Things to Come (turned into a great but only tangentially connected film).
What I hadn’t previously known was his contribution to the field of textbooks, where his significant contributions included Text-Book of Biology, First and Last Things and the epic Outline of History series: The Outline of History, The Science of Life and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind.
Wells started out in narrative-friendly humble beginnings and slowly became a self-made-man by focusing on studying science, teaching and taking every opportunity to write about both in every context possible. At the same time he began his lifelong support of socialism, which became one of the core topics his fiction and non-fiction would be built around.
After I started to hear more about Wells than his, what would now be called, science fiction stories, this is the first thing that made me interested in finding out more about his life. It was good to discover more about the details of his views and how his commitment to equality influenced so many others. It was less good to discover how many toes he trod on over the years, including at one point inspiring the entire committee of the Fabian Society to threaten to resign, and how he came to view the so-call Fabian Nursery as a place to look for new girlfriends (more of which later).
Being a man with a reputation of speaking out against the problematic issues related to religion also aligned with my personal opinions. It was surprising therefore when his biographer would repeatedly state that he never fully escaped his religious upbringing and, especially toward the end of his life, would refer, in print and in person, to the inevitability of the existence of an all-powerful deity — albeit not one pertaining to any current earthly religion.
Wells has somewhat of a reputation for being problematic in his writings in relation to his attitudes to race, some religions (specifically Judaism) and women. While some of this is true, more so in his earlier work, he made a concentrated effort to make up for that in the second half of his life — to varying degrees of quality and success. He often spoke about the rights of people of colour and his approval of foreign cultures. He also championed women’s causes, including being one of the co-founders of the National Birth Control Council (later the Family Planning Association).
He became very famous in his own lifetime and spent time in discussions with most of the important political figures of the time, including Lenin, Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman. He hobnobbed with stars of stage and screen, Chaplin often visiting his home, and cultivated literary circles in which he built great friendships and great feuds as well as nurturing and supporting the next generation of literary greats. Some years after the debacle of The War of the Worlds radio broadcast, he even made peace and became friends with Orson Welles.
He was one of the great travellers of his time with frequent visits across all of Europe, a number of times extensively in the US, several times to Communist Russia as well as India, Australia and the Far East. He was one of the first popular authors to realise the capacity of air travel in peace and war — highlighted in 1908’s The War in the Air.
It’s also definitely worth referring to the decades he spent on committees and pursuing personal contacts to keep alive the discussions about a proposed League of Nations (later the United Nations) and the concept of a global set of human rights, as detailed in The Rights of Man, which it can be argued directly led to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (though neither bore his name when they came into existence).
Sadly, where my appreciation goes off the boil is in relation to Wells’ personal life. It’s well known that as well as being married twice, Wells had numerous (almost too numerous to count) affairs and had four children by three different women. I had picked up the idea from somewhere that this was a fully open and agreed version of polyamory but the truth is much more complicated and rather darker. Wells liked the idea of having one stable relationship at home while engaging in at least one (sometimes several simultaneous) tempestuous affairs with often highly volatile women as a source of excitement. Although these were tolerated by his second wife, with her even becoming friends with some of his lovers, it was never designed to be a stable situation or a meeting of equals. Wells fully financially supported his extended family, as well as many other friends and relations, but it can’t be said he provided real stability for anyone.
If there was one over-riding take-away from this book it was that being influential can be undertaken in a number of different ways. You can achieve specific goals; publish a book, influence the drafting of a law, lead a committee, etc. But, you can also be influential by spending many years being passionately vocal about the things you believe in. Whether you’re speaking to Presidents, popular authors, the audiences of august bodies, producing stories or pamphlets of your own or just speaking to small groups of friends and family, having strong but not rigid opinions — speaking up for what you believe is right over the course of your life — can be as much, if not more, powerful than achieving any short-term obvious goal. Certainly something to think about.
