The H.G. Wells Reader (3 page)

♦

But Wells does not leave us simply with a story of racist offense. After another egg hatches and produces a huge chick, Butcher befriends it in its early stages, lives companionably with it for a couple of years, affectionately names it “Friday,” and imagines “how [he] could make a living out of him by showing him about” (14). Only when as an adult Æpornis the bird becomes dangerous—he “was then about fourteen feet high to the bill of him, with a big, broad head like the end of pickaxe” (15)—does Butcher in self-defense kill him. And then a remarkable thing happens: Butcher, after begrudging the bird's power over “me a human being—heir of the ages and all that” (15), regrets his act. “I felt like a murderer” (16). Although he was unable to feel any bond with his native assistants, now “I felt exactly as if he [i.e. the Æpornis] was human. As it was, I couldn't think of eating him, so I put him in the lagoon, and the little fishes picked him clean. I didn't even save the feathers” (16). It is hard to imagine the man who thoughtlessly murders natives having such feelings or forgoing the profit that the feathers might have brought, but it is the very implausibility that may signal that Butcher is here telling the truth. But then again, we should be cautious: such an appeal to our own sensitivities may be the con-man artist's best tactic for persuading us of a tall tale's actuality. We should always remember that the narrator sees the Time Traveler as untrustworthy, and many of the men who know him consider his tale “a gaudy lie.” The point is not that the Time Traveler is a liar. It is that Wells
delights
in the undecided and the ambiguous, in the situations in which we, the readers, must stay on our toes.

One dimension of this complex style is brilliant satire that retains traces of utopian ideas and hopes. The voice that we hear in the last sections of
The First Men in the Moon
, when Cavor interviews the Grand Lunar, is fraught with satiric edge, but unlike Swift's it also plays with the possibilities of the bizarre world being juxtaposed to our own. Consider the following majestic passage toward the end of Cavor's description of the lunar society in which “every citizen knows his place. He is born to that place, and the elaborate discipline of training and education and surgery he undergoes fits him at last so completely to it that he has neither ideas nor organs for any purpose beyond it” (161):

[Cavor reports,] “The making of these various sorts of operative must be a very curious and interesting process. I am still much in the dark about it, but quite recently I came upon a number of young Selenites, confined in jars from which only the forelimbs protruded, who were being compressed to become machine-minders of a special sort. The extended ‘hand' in this highly developed system of technical education is stimulated by irritants and nourished by injection while the rest of the body is starved. Phi-oo [Cavor's informant], unless I misunderstood him, explained that in the earlier stages these queer little creatures are apt to display signs of suffering in their various cramped situations, but they easily become indurated to their lot; and he took me on to where a number of flexible-limbed messengers were being drawn out and broken in. It is quite unreasonable, I know, but these glimpses of the educational methods of these beings have affected me disagreeably. I hope, however, that may pass off and I may be able to see more of this aspect of this wonderful social order. That wretched-looking hand sticking out of its jar seemed to appeal for lost possibilities; it haunts me still, although, of course, it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.” (163)

Startlingly different tonalities play against each other here: the cool recitation of this “curious and interesting process,” the pathos of the little Selenite's conditioning, the disturbingly incompatible languages—”being drawn out and broken in” as “educational methods”—Cavor's effort to overcome his natural revulsion and admire “this wonderful social order,” and finally the wrenching refocusing at the end when this terrible conditioning is understood as benign compared to the horrors of
laissez faire
industrialism. Profound questions that will plague the twentieth century—of sociological and cultural objectivity, of intuition and reason, of controlled and free economies—are all raised in strong articulation in this amazing passage.

♦

If Wells is an author who thinks through fiction, however, he is also one attuned to the sheer pleasure that fiction can provide. He is a great descriptive artist. Again
and again in the most fanciful invention, he startles us with precise detail. Even after an idea is established, he will continue to think about it and discover new implications, as in
The Invisible Man
when we discover how vulnerable this supposedly superior man is to such elemental dangers as broken glass and cold. In natural descriptions he takes pleasure in word painting, as in the elegant and symbolic sunsets in
War of the Worlds
. Nowhere is Wells's descriptive talent put to more impressive use than in the scenes in
The Time Machine
when the Time Traveler moves farthest into the future and finds the desolate beach, the dying sun, and the last feeble (though still threatening) signs of life. Before everything else, H. G. Wells is a brilliant storyteller. If he has an eye for small details that make implausible things believable and an ear for the tricks of language that make characters real, then he has a talent for plots that have clear shape, with startling beginnings, developed middles, and meaningful ending.

Between 1924 and 1928 Wells himself published a collected edition of his work in twenty-four volumes, “The Atlantic Edition.” It was limited to 1,670 copies and is generally to be found only in well-stocked libraries. In recent years scholarly editions of some of the early novels (
The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Doctor Moreau
) have begun to appear, and a good number of the social novels are occasionally reprinted in paperback. Unfortunately, these last tend to go out of print fairly quickly, and one must be alert to find them. The exception is
Tono-Bungay
, which has been reprinted more often than the other social novels. Wells himself described his career and the goals of his work in
An Experiment in Autobiography
(1934). Long after his death, a supplementary manuscript describing some of his love affairs was published by his son, G. P. Wells, under the title
H. G. Wells in Love
(1985). In the first decades after his death, Wells's letters to Henry James, Arnold Bennett, and George Gissing were published in separate volumes, and
The Collected Letters of H. G. Wells
, edited by David Smith, was published in 1992.

I have selected the texts for this anthology with an eye to quality and to what I see as the central issues and styles of Wells. In the case of such a prolific and varied artist, there is danger of dispersal and dilution. I have therefore confined the selection strictly to fiction. I have also narrowed this selection by limiting it to work Wells published in the first decade and a half of his writing career. Later Wells is a fascinating area, but only to readers who already have a sense of what early Wells is about. If I have emphasized the scientific romances, it is with a sense of how it leads into social novels like
Tono-Bungay
and
The History of Mr. Polly
—for which in his own time Wells was scandalously famous. Some of the volatile issues engaged in these novels have lost their urgency, but these novels continue to resonate with lively ideas and charged anger. Finally, because Wells was an important novelist and this part of his work is often hardest to find in print, I have included one complete novel, and lengthy selections of two others—all of which move beyond the scientific romance. I regret that space limits prevent giving the whole of
The Time Machine
or of
Tono-Bungay
, this last an extraordinary work that deserves much more attention than it gets.

Wells was an amazingly enlightened man, but he could not escape certain conventions and prejudices of his age. I have chosen not to bowdlerize or edit the texts to rid them of occasional moments that modern readers may find offensive. As often as not, as I argue above and in the prefaces to each piece, Wells himself would share our sense of outrage, and we underestimate the quality of his art if we too easily ascribe all the attitudes expressed by characters in these works to Wells himself.

—
J
OHN
H
UNTINGTON

M
ARCH
2003

___________

Editor's note: ***** indicates text deleted for this volume.

Wells lived an amazingly active and full life, and it would be impossible to do it justice in a schematic chronology. In what follows, I have noted the major changes and events in his life, the publication of the novels included in this
Reader
, and a few other defining publications.