A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  There was an even bigger audience, and even more excitement in the air of Essex Hall, when the second session of the General Meeting commenced on the 14th of December. After Maud had made her diplomatic, conciliatory statement, a number of people spoke from the floor against the amendment and in support of the Executive, among them Clifford Sharp, who had formerly supported the movement for reform, and Hubert Bland, who made some sarcastic remarks about middle-aged men pretending to speak for the interests of youth when in fact promoting their own. But there were also speeches praising the Report, and the atmosphere in the hall was tense as the clock ticked on towards the critical vote.

  It was nine when Shaw rose to speak, and as Olivier had predicted, he immediately made the issue one of confidence. ‘If Mr Wells will withdraw his amendment, the Executive would be happy to debate the Report’s substantive proposals one by one,’ he said. ‘But the amendment ties the acceptance of the Report to the dissolution of the present Executive – in other words, dismissal with dishonour – which would necessarily lead to our resignation, while the Committee of Enquiry has made it equally clear that, if defeated, they would abandon their effort to regenerate the Society.’ There was uproar in the hall as several voices disputed this interpretation of the amendment, and he himself sprang to his feet to say that he had no intention of resigning, whatever happened. ‘I am very glad to hear it,’ said Shaw, with the triumphant air of a man watching the jaws of his trap close on a victim, ‘because it means that I can pitch into Mr Wells without fear of the consequences. But this meeting still has to choose between the annihilation of the Executive and the unconditional surrender of Mr Wells.’ And he proceeded to review the whole history of the dispute in a flagrantly ad hominem fashion, attacking ‘Mr Wells’ for using misrepresentation, invention and personal insult to advance his cause, but all delivered with a genial smile and the apparently effortless wit of which Shaw was a master. The audience had acquired a reassuring sense that there were after all to be no resignations and no irreversible damage to the Society that evening, and settled back to enjoy the entertainment. At one point, speaking of the constraints under which both parties had worked, Shaw remarked, ‘During his Committee’s deliberations Mr Wells produced a book on America. And a very good book too. But whilst I was drafting our reply I produced a play.’ He stopped speaking and looked abstractedly up at the high ceiling, long enough for the audience to think that he had lost his thread, then said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I paused there to enable Mr Wells to say “And a very good play too.”’ There was a great burst of laughter from the house, which he himself had to suffer with a forced grin to avoid seeming a bad sport, and at that moment the occasion passed irretrievably from a serious debate to something more like music hall.

  When Shaw sat down to huge applause, the chairman turned to him and said, ‘Mr Wells, I wonder whether in the circumstances, you would like me to proceed to take a vote, or …’

  He glanced at Sydney Olivier, who shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I withdraw the amendment.’ At which there was another long round of applause, and the meeting came to an end.

  THE RESULT OF the meeting of 14th December was, of course, a humiliating defeat for him personally, even though no vote was taken. If he hadn’t been lured into declaring on the platform that he had no intention of resigning he might well have done so, in disgust at having been beaten by purely rhetorical means, not on the issues. No substantive discussion of his committee’s proposals had taken place. But that was in a way a reason to persevere, as several of his allies in the Society urged, and even Shaw, his adversary in the debate and chiefly responsible for trivialising it, took this line. A few days after the meeting Shaw wrote, making no apologies for his own part in it, but assuring him that ‘you can easily retrieve the situation if you will study your game carefully, or else do exactly what I tell you’. He pointed out that there were more meetings scheduled to discuss the Executive’s views on the future of the Society, at which members of the Wells committee might well succeed in getting their ideas adopted in a modified form, and recommended that he should stand for the Executive at the annual elections in March. He didn’t know whether to resent or admire the cool cheek of a man who presumed to offer constructive advice to the still smarting victim of his devious tactics in debate.

  For the time being he turned his back on the Fabian and threw himself into writing. He resumed work on Waste, now entitled Tono-Bungay, the name of a patent tonic medicine on which the narrator’s uncle built an ephemeral fortune. This character, Edward Ponderevo, was based on his own Uncle Williams, the Wookey schoolmaster and father of Edith and Bertha, a kind-hearted, genial man with a moral blind spot, who had hurriedly to close his school to avoid prosecution for fraudulent misrepresentation of his qualifications. The stupendous success of Ponderevo’s worthless tonic was based entirely on mendacious advertising and aggressive marketing, but instilled in him delusions of grandeur which he would act out in the acquisition and construction of more and more extravagant houses for himself and his wife, until his financial bubble collapsed and he fell into bankruptcy, taking with him the thousands of small investors who had trusted him. He personified a new kind of irresponsible capitalism that was becoming a feature of the Edwardian Age, creating what his nephew George, the narrator of the novel, called ‘the most unpremeditated, subtle, successful, and aimless plutocracy that had ever encumbered the destiny of mankind’.

  He put a good deal of his own experience into the character of George – an upbringing as the child of a servant in a great country house, the struggle to get free of this humble background through a scientific education, problems with sex and marriage in a repressive and hypocritical society – and gave himself room to analyse and generalise about the condition of England by making George present himself from the outset as an amateur novelist: ‘I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration. I want to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle’s) as the main line of my story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last, I want to get in, too, all sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me and impressions I got – even although they don’t minister directly to my narrative at all … I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind.’ Whether this excuse would satisfy Henry James was doubtful, but he believed the tone and texture of the narrative voice, the insistent imagery of disease, degeneration and decay in the social fabric, would give the book unity.

  Early in the New Year, however, he was seized with another idea. He had got to know a young man of unusual experience and talents called John William Dunne. The son of a British General, he had been brought up in South Africa, where he was apprenticed to a farmer, and served in the Imperial Yeomanry in the Boer War, after which he came to England and trained as an aeronautical engineer. He designed a revolutionary kind of monoplane with swept-back wings, based on his observation of seabirds, which impressed the War Office sufficiently for them to employ him at their research unit in Aldershot, though they did not authorise production of a prototype and eventually the idea was shelved. From Dunne he gleaned much interesting information about new developments in aeronautics and their potential applications in warfare – notably the progress of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s dirigible rigid airship in Germany. After a number of failures and crashes, the prototype had recently succeeded in staying airborne for eight hours. ‘These airships would make a perfect platform for weapons, and could be built to enormous size, giving them almost limitless range,’ Dunne told him. ‘You mean, the Germans could bomb London from them?’ he asked. ‘They could bomb New York eventually,’ Dunne assured him.

  He could not get this vision out of his head: the proud skyscrapers of New York crumbling and collapsing under a ruthless bombardment from the air, whole blocks on fire, panic in the streets … Soon his imagination had conceived the outline of a novel in the same genre as The War of the Worlds, which would tap into current British anxi
eties about German imperialism and the accelerating arms race between the two nations. Typically, both nations were preparing to fight the next war with the weapons of yesterday, not tomorrow, building more and more, bigger and bigger battleships. It was obvious if you talked to men like Dunne that air power was destined to supersede naval power, and that the speed, range and mobility of the former would result in the rapid globalisation of warfare. He sketched a narrative in which a conflict between Britain and Germany rapidly drew in America, Japan and other countries, and consisted mainly of the wholesale destruction of large cities by aerial bombing, leading to the total collapse of civilisation. Narrative continuity was to be provided by the character of a cockney cycle-repairer who stowed away in an airship and found himself the involuntary witness of a German surprise raid on New York and the mayhem that followed. The moral, as always, would be that only a world government could ensure the benevolent, not destructive, application of new advances in science and technology. But what excited him was the prospect of once again summoning up an apocalyptic vision of the complacent, familiar present-day world disintegrating under the devastating impact of unprecedented force. It would be a harmless but satisfying discharge of the violence he would like to do to the Old Gang and their followers.

  There was also a mundane reason to pursue this new project promptly: namely, his bank balance was dangerously low. He and Jane liked to entertain in style. They had a houseful of guests nearly every weekend, and the cost of food and drink and hot water ad libitum piped to every bedroom mounted up. He was in the process of adding a tennis court to the amenities of Spade House, which entailed extending and levelling his property, at considerable expense. His involvement in Fabian affairs over the past year had absorbed a great deal of time that would otherwise have been devoted to profitable authorship. Tono-Bungay was not a book he could toss off quickly. It was his most ambitious attempt to write a literary novel that would become a classic, but for that very reason it progressed relatively slowly by his own standards and was unlikely to be a best-seller when it was published. Putting all these considerations together there was a strong case for turning out The War in the Air quickly, while the idea was still bubbling in his head. Accordingly he sent an outline to his agent Pinker and said he could write it in a few months if somebody would give him an advance of £1,200, and knowing that his usual publisher Macmillan wouldn’t put up that kind of money, he wrote to him personally, describing the projected novel as a ‘pot-boiler’ which he proposed to publish with a less distinguished house. Macmillan raised no objection, George Bell & Sons came up with the ready, and he contracted to deliver the book by September.

  As his anger and frustration at the outcome of the December meetings subsided, he resumed a cautious involvement in Fabian affairs. He agreed to be nominated as a candidate for the forthcoming Executive elections, and Maud Reeves persuaded Jane to stand as well, and also to join a women’s group she was forming within the Fabian. In February Maud succeeded in getting the Executive to approve in principle the incorporation of equality of citizenship for women into the Basis, to be ratified at a general meeting in six months’ time, and she saw Jane as a useful ally in ensuring that this victory was followed through.

  In the same month he fulfilled his promise to address the Cambridge University Fabian Society which Amber Reeves had started in collaboration with a young man at Trinity called Ben Keeling who was already a member of the rather sleepy ‘town’ branch of the Society. More than ever he was struck by what an impressive young woman she had grown into – clever, articulate and beautiful, with brown eyes, a straight Grecian nose set in a heart-shaped face and a mass of dense crinkly black hair, which had earned her the family nickname of Dusa, short for Medusa. She was working hard, she told him, as she walked him round the grounds of Newnham before his lecture, and desperately keen to get a First in Part One of the Moral Sciences Tripos in the summer. She would sit Part Two a year later. ‘Women are not allowed to take their degrees, of course,’ she said, ‘but we take the same exams as the men and our results are published with theirs. It’s always such a thrill when a woman does well, it makes the men so sick.’ ‘How ridiculous that you can’t take your degree!’ he expostulated. ‘You should have gone to London University.’ ‘Well, it wouldn’t be quite as nice, would it?’ she said, with a gesture that took in the quietly elegant halls, built in Queen Anne style of red brick with white sash windows and gables, spaciously set out among lawns and shrubberies, and he had to admit she was right. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘I wanted to get away from home.’ ‘What about your Part Three?’ he asked. ‘There is no part Three. Part Two is Finals.’ ‘So why is it called Tripos?’ ‘I believe it was in three parts once,’ she said. ‘They say it goes back to medieval times, when students were given a three-legged stool when they graduated, one leg for each year.’

  It seemed to him typical of Cambridge University that it wrapped up a degree course in philosophy in this mystifying fossilised language. The whole place – he stayed overnight and explored a little – aroused in him powerful contradictory feelings of attraction and repulsion, envy and derision. It was visually ravishing, even in winter; the fine architecture of the colleges, their quiet courts and time-worn cloisters, the green, groomed Backs, the willow-hemmed river, all blended together with a grace and beauty that had taken centuries to mature. And it was exhilarating to walk the cobbled streets of a town so clearly dedicated to the life of the mind, lavishly provided with booksellers, thronged by young people in gowns hurrying to lectures, or chattering and arguing with each other in teashops. He felt pangs of resentment and regret as he compared the ambience of the place with his own student days, the long daily trek through filthy noisy indifferent London to the bleakly utilitarian classrooms and laboratories of the South Kensington Normal College. How he would have loved to study here! But it was of course an environment steeped in privilege, and its retention of archaic and obsolete terminology, of peculiar customs and shibboleths, were methods of exclusion and defences against change. If I had the power, he thought, after a morning spent asking his way from strangers in the street, I would pass laws forcing the colleges to display their names on their frontages, and forbidding the pronunciation of ‘Caius’ as ‘Keys’.

  But when he gave his talk – a bolder and more explicit version of his lecture on ‘Socialism and the Middle Classes’ – in a room packed with young people, mostly undergraduates, many of them literally sitting at his feet, he was disarmed by their admiration and enthusiasm. There was no need for him to feel inferior or excluded because he had not enjoyed their privileged education and his voice retained a trace of cockney vowels and glottal stops. To them he was a genius, a prophet, with a much broader vision than their tutors and professors, and a better grasp of the real world they were preparing to enter and hoped to improve. They lapped up his arguments for political, economic and sexual reform through the application of reason and scientific expertise. They were not of course representative of the student body as a whole. He was aware that not all undergraduates were as earnest and thoughtful as these – there were plenty of arrogant-looking young men in Cambridge whose overheard conversation, conducted in braying public school accents, indicated that they were more interested in rowing and hunting than ideas. Ben Keeling had more than once been threatened with a ragging by undergrads of that type. But these eager young Fabians were the hope of the future – especially the young women. They were the brightest and the best of their gender and generation, and conscious of carrying the standard for women’s rights, taking it from the hands of earlier generations who had struggled valiantly in the teeth of prejudice to obtain higher education for women. The CFS was in fact, Amber told him, the first Cambridge society to admit women as equal members from its foundation. After the meeting the committee bore him off to a convivial supper in Keeling’s rooms in Trinity where he fielded their questions and entertained them with anecdotes and was, he felt, particularly brilliant. Amber, radiant with th
e success of the evening, and the kudos she had acquired in the eyes of her friends by enticing this lion up from London, thanked him effusively afterwards. ‘You were absolutely wonderful, Mr Wells,’ she said, shaking his hand. ‘I do hope you’ll come to Cambridge again, if we have the cheek to invite you.’ ‘I think I would,’ he said, smiling. ‘I find it has many attractions.’ Of which Amber herself was certainly one. But having just extricated himself from an embarrassing entanglement with one young female admirer, he was not minded to get involved with another, even though she was more beautiful and much more intelligent.

  He had in fact already begun a new relationship with a woman who was four years older than himself, the novelist Violet Hunt. They had known each other socially for some time because they had many literary friends in common, and contributed to the same magazines, so were often invited to the same parties. In late 1906 these encounters became more frequent and more flirtatious. Both of them were recovering from setbacks in their lives – he from the Fabian defeat and the associated Rosamund imbroglio, she from the recent death of her first lover, and the aftermath of being jilted by her second – and both were seeking consolation in a new amorous affair without entailments. Early in the New Year he wrote to invite her to lunch at Torino’s in Soho, which had private rooms upstairs: ‘Be nice to a very melancholy man on Tuesday please. Come and Torino at one. I’m rather down, cross, feeble … No afternoon appointments.’ She took the hint in her acceptance, mentioning that she would also be free in the afternoon. Thus began an affair which brought much uncomplicated pleasure to both parties.

  Violet was the daughter of Alfred William Hunt, a water-colourist associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and often confused with the painter Holman Hunt on that account. Violet, whose own looks, with her long chin and mass of hair, were somewhat Pre-Raphaelite, grew up knowing this circle of artists and their mentor Ruskin. She told him that when she was thirteen, on hearing that the great love of Ruskin’s later life, Rose La Touche, had tragically died, she volunteered to marry him in Rose’s place. ‘Mama wrote to Ruskin, whom we knew quite well, to tell him of this offer, thinking he would be amused. He received it gratefully and with complete seriousness – said he would think about it and let us know. He had a penchant for very young girls, of course, and waited for years for Rose to grow up, but he decided not to wait for me.’ This was typical of the many anecdotes with which she entertained him when they lay together resting languorously after sexual intercourse in some room in London hired for the purpose. Long practised in amorous adventure, Violet greatly extended his knowledge of restaurants with cabinets particuliers, and hotels and lodging houses willing to rent out rooms by the hour, a secret metropolitan network of accommodation for illicit sex. ‘Do you know of any convenient place for sin in Kensington?’ he wrote to her once when he was arranging an appointment at the Natural History Museum. ‘If so, write here and tell me and I’ll wire you if I can get away.’ He received the address of a private hotel near the South Kensington Underground station by return of post.