by David Lodge
The next day it is clear that, to general astonishment, Labour has won a landslide victory and Clement Attlee is Prime Minister instead of Winston Churchill. For the first time Great Britain has a government with a proper mandate to create a socialist state, unlike Ramsay MacDonald’s two hamstrung and compromised minority governments in the 1920s. It has a far-reaching programme which includes the nationalisation of key industries, redistributive taxation, free education up to university level, a national health service, allowances to families for each child payable to the mother, and state pensions for all. It is a prospect that would have excited him forty years ago, when he was advocating just such policies, but now he cannot rouse in himself any expectant enthusiasm. It is not that he questions the values these policies are based on – clearly they promise a fairer society in the future; it is that he no longer believes in the future – that is to say, a continuing reality which will provide a firm foundation for progress. Reality as empirically perceived and understood by ordinary rational people now seems to him as insubstantial as the images reflected on the wall of Plato’s cave – or, to use a more contemporary analogy, as the flickering shapes and shadows of the cinema screen, an analogy he has used in Mind at the End of its Tether.
The question ‘Is this all?’ has troubled countless unsatisfied minds throughout the ages, and, at the end of our tether, as it seems, here it is, still baffling but persistent. To such discomfited minds the world of our everyday reality is no more than a more or less entertaining or distressful story thrown upon a cinema screen. The story holds together; it moves them greatly and yet they feel it is faked. The vast majority of the beholders accept all the conventions of the story, are completely part of the story, and live and suffer and rejoice and die in it and with it. But the sceptical mind says stoutly, ‘This is delusion’ … Hitherto, recurrence has seemed a primary law of life. Night has followed day and day night. But in this strange new phase of existence into which our universe is passing, it becomes evident that events no longer recur. They go on and on to an impenetrable mystery, into a voiceless limitless darkness, against which this obstinate urgency of our dissatisfied minds may struggle, but will struggle only until it is altogether overcome.
On August 6th there occurs an event which seems a further confirmation of this bleak vision: the American air force drops an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Tens of thousands of people are killed instantly, and several square miles of buildings levelled to the ground, by a single bomb dropped from a single plane flying at high altitude. A passage from his novel War in the Air comes to mind, the description of the destruction of New York by the German airship fleet, ‘one of the most cold-blooded slaughters in the world’s history, in which men who were neither excited nor, except for the remotest chance, in any danger, poured death and destruction upon homes and crowds below’. Those German airships were of course using conventional bombs; it was in a later novel, The World Set Free, that he anticipated the discovery of nuclear fission leading to the development of atomic bombs, and imagined their awesome destructive power, which would finally abolish the already much violated distinction between combatants and civilians in wartime.
He had written those books to warn of the inevitable consequences of applying advances in science and technology to weaponry unless and until war was abolished by the establishment of a world government. A few weeks earlier another event had taken place which seemed a promising step in that direction: the signing of the founding Charter of the United Nations organisation by fifty member countries. It was a cause for which he had worked all his life, and he had personally played a leading part in drafting the Sankey Declaration of Human Rights which was incorporated into the Charter. But he had no faith that the United Nations would in the long run prove any more effective than the League of Nations. The procedural rules of the Security Council required unanimity from the five permanent members, the so-called Great Powers, which meant that any one of them could veto a proposal they deemed damaging to their interests, and there were signs that the Great Powers were already falling out over the political settlement of the post-war world, Soviet Russia in disagreement with Britain, the USA and France. The falling-out could easily lead to yet another war, with a deadly new weapon available to the combatants.
But the immediate effect of the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and, three days later, on Nagasaki, was to bring the Second World War to a swift conclusion. Only a few voices were raised in the Houses of Parliament and the press questioning the ethics of such massive and indiscriminate destruction of human life. The general reaction of the Allied nations was joy and relief, and it is one he understands and to a large extent shares. It was well known that the imperialistic, militarist autocracy that ruled Japan under its allegedly divine Emperor was determined to resist an Allied invasion of its mainland to the bitter end, no matter what the cost in human life, a resolution it had already demonstrated in the ferocious battle of Okinawa, sending hundreds of young men to their deaths in kamikaze attacks on the Allied fleet. It was grimly amusing to reflect that he had prefigured these fanatically brave pilots in his description of Japanese fighter aircraft in The War in the Air, flying machines which had flexible curved wings like butterflies, and fuselages that their pilots straddled like horsemen, charging the giant airships with rifles in one hand and drawn two-edged swords in the other. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Allied servicemen, mostly American, would have been killed in an invasion of Japan before it was conquered. Who could blame the USA for saving those lives by a show of force which even the stubborn Japanese leaders would recognise as irresistible? Who could blame the Allied servicemen, and their families and friends at home, for suppressing any qualms about the mass liquidation of Japanese civilians in their relief at having the shadow of death lifted from themselves?
He has a personal interest in the end of the war against Japan, because Eric Davis, the husband of his and Amber’s daughter, Anna Jane, is one of its casualties, to an extent as yet undetermined. Eric managed to escape from Singapore, where he was running a radio station, just before the British garrison surrendered in February 1942, and led a group of his staff on a perilous escape to Java, where they continued to broadcast until the Japanese occupied that country too, and then he disappeared without trace. Anna Jane carried on working in India, where she has a government job, in a state of horrible uncertainty about his fate, and he feels all the more sympathy for her because he seriously misjudged Eric Davis on first acquaintance. Back in 1930, when she was a student at the LSE, and announced her intention of sharing her life with Eric, he tried to dissuade her from doing so in a long and – in retrospect – rather pompous letter. Though she had known for some time that he was her father, and seemed comfortable with the idea, this was the first occasion on which he explicitly invoked his paternity to give authority to his advice. Anna Jane however was her mother’s daughter – determined, fearless, independent-minded – and rejected it, politely but firmly. Eric subsequently vindicated her choice by having a useful career, and by demonstrating impressive courage and resourcefulness in wartime, not only in the aftermath of the Singapore debacle, but before that by his conduct on the liner Benares when it was sunk in the Atlantic in 1940 by a German U-boat with great loss of life, including eighty children being evacuated to Canada. He shepherded passengers into the lifeboats, several times refusing a place for himself, and survived by clinging to a raft through a long dark night. It was a story that made him more conscious than ever that he and his sons, mainly through the chance of birth-dates which excused them from military service, had never been tested by such dangers in either of the two world wars they had lived through. In correspondence with Anna Jane he encouraged her to hope that Eric was a prisoner of war, but as the years passed with no news, this seemed less and less likely. Anna Jane says in her recent letters that she is resigned to his being lost, but it would be surprising if she does not privately dream of some happy ending like the return of Teddy in Mr Brit
ling Sees It Through. Perhaps at last there will now be some reliable information about what happened to Eric that will, one way or another, bring her peace.
As an ordinary human being, then, identifying with the feelings of those who still believe in the reality and continuity of events, he cannot sincerely condemn the dropping of the atom bomb. But to the scientific philosopher the invention of the bomb itself – the release of such awesome energy by breaking into what had once been regarded as the smallest irreducible unit of matter – evokes only dread, and the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima is an ominous apocalyptic sign, not just of the end of the world but of the universe.
Our universe is the utmost compass of our minds. It is a closed system that returns into itself. It is a closed space-time continuum which ends with the same urge to exist with which it began, now that the unknown power that evoked it has at last turned against it. ‘Power’ the writer has written, because it is difficult to express this unknowable that has, so to speak, set its face against us. But we cannot deny this menace of the darkness. ‘Power’ is unsatisfactory. We need to express something entirely outside our ‘universe’ … But if we fall back on the structure of Greek tragic drama and think of life as the Protagonist … we get something to meet our need. ‘The Antagonist’, then, in that qualified sense, is the term the present writer will employ to express the unknown implacable which has endured life for so long by our reckoning and has now turned against it so implacably to wipe it out.
Gip, who is proofreading Mind at the End of its Tether with increasing dismay, sitting in Marjorie’s little office in Hanover Terrace, reads this passage aloud to her. ‘What’s got into H.G.? This is pseudo-mystical drivel, like some kind of cosmic Manichaeism,’ he says. ‘What’s manic … thingummy?’ she asks. ‘I wish I could stop the publication of this book,’ he says, ignoring her question. ‘It will only damage H.G.’s reputation. It’s a repudiation of everything he has worked for all his life.’ ‘You can’t stop it,’ she says. ‘It’s how he feels. It’s what he believes now, whether you like it or not.’ ‘But he’s a sick man,’ says Gip. ‘He knows he’s dying – it’s no wonder he’s depressed. Remember Karenin in The World Set Free ?’ ‘I can’t say I do,’ says Marjorie.
Gip’s own memory of the scene in question is somewhat vague, so he goes to H.G.’s study, the author himself being in bed and probably asleep, finds a copy of The World Set Free, locates the relevant pages, and when he has read them, takes the book back to enlighten Marjorie.
‘After the world is devastated by atomic warfare, the nations see sense and make peace. A world government is established, and a splendid new civilisation begins to emerge from the ruins of the old.’
‘That sounds familiar,’ says Marjorie, but Gip ignores this faintly subversive comment and continues his summary.
‘One of the most inspiring leaders of the new order is a Russian intellectual called Marcus Karenin, a key member of the World Education Committee. He’s a congenital cripple with an extraordinary mind. Towards the end of the story he is very ill, in a sanatorium in the Himalayas, where he is due to have an operation which may or may not prolong his life, and various characters make a pilgrimage to hear his words of wisdom while they can. He tells his secretary Gardener that he hopes to die under the surgeon’s knife. This is what he says: ‘I hope he kills me, Gardener … The thing I am most afraid of is that last rag of life. I may just go on – a scarred selvage of suffering stuff. And then – all the things I have hidden and kept down or discounted or set right afterwards will get the better of me. I shall be peevish. I may lose my grip on my own egotism. It’s never been a very firm grip … I do not see why life should be judged by its last trailing thread of vitality … Remember that, Gardener, if presently my heart fails me and I despair, and if I go through a little phase of pain and ingratitude and dark forgetfulness before the end … Don’t believe what I may say at the last … If the fabric is good the selvage doesn’t matter.’
Gip looks up from the page. ‘You see, Marjorie?’ he says triumphantly. ‘It’s as if H.G. foresaw his own final illness, and left us a warning: “Don’t believe what I may say at the last.” This cry of despair –’ Gip slaps his hand down on the galleys of Mind at the End of its Tether ‘– is not the true voice of H.G. Wells.’
Anthony has a different theory about H.G.’s gloom. He sees his father less frequently these days, because he no longer lives in Mr Mumford’s on the other side of the wall at the end of the garden, but with Kitty and the children, having been reconciled with her some months ago, and he has been very busy in the Far East department of the World Service as the war against Japan reached its climax. But he still calls at Hanover Terrace occasionally, chats with his father and exchanges views with Gip and Marjorie, if they happen to be there at the same time, about H.G.’s state of mind and body. When Gip shows him the manuscript of Mind at the End of its Tether, and repeats the argument he put to Marjorie, that its extreme pessimism and renunciation of H.G.’s progressive humanist principles are effects of his physical debility and should therefore be ignored, citing the words of Karenin in support, Anthony shakes his head.
‘No,’ he says. ‘I’ve only skimmed through the book, of course, but I’d say that it expresses a very real, very personal despair.’
‘About what?’ says Marjorie.
‘About the way his reputation has declined, and his audience has dwindled.’
‘Oh, come!’ Gip protests.
‘Did you read ‘The Betterave Papers’ in the July Cornhill?’ Anthony asks.
‘Yes, of course,’ says Gip. ‘But that’s entirely ironic. Betterave is a caricature of H.G.’s enemies, a bigoted reactionary who appropriates and exaggerates every insult and slur my father suffered in his lifetime, and so makes them look ridiculous. Irony is saying the opposite of what you mean.’
‘It can also be a way of saying something you do mean, indirectly. There are criticisms of his own books in that piece towards the end, which are too accurate to be interpreted as irony. On William Clissold, for instance … Is there a copy of the Cornhill here?’
There are several of the author’s complimentary copies in the office, and Marjorie hands one to Anthony.
‘Listen to this,’ he says, turning to the end of the article: ‘“The World of William Clissold is a vast three-decker, issued in three successive volumes of rigmarole, which broke down the endurance of readers and booksellers alike.” You can’t call that irony – it’s absolutely true. And so is the rest of the passage. “It marks the collapse of an inflated reputation. After that Mr Wells might write what he liked and do his utmost. It was no longer the thing to read him. Reviewers might praise him and a dwindling band of dupes might get his books. They vanished from the shop windows and from the tables of cultured people …” And then he lists a number of his later books, with their awful off-putting titles, like The Autocracy of Mr. Parham, and The Bulpington of Blup. And he goes on: “People whom once he had duped would perhaps mention him as a figure of some significance in English literature, but the established reply of the people who no longer read him and had nothing to say about him was simply the grimace of those who scent decay. ‘Oh, Wells!’ they would say, and leave it at that. So that Wells decays alive and will be buried a man already forgotten.” That’s not Betterave speaking, that’s H.G.’
‘It’s not all like that,’ says Gip.
‘No, it’s not,’ says Anthony. ‘There’s some good knockabout fun earlier that you can call ironic. But it’s the ending that leaves the deepest impression.’
‘Well, he won’t be buried – or cremated – as a forgotten man,’ says Gip.
‘No, of course not. There will be obituaries, tributes. And some of his books will endure: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr Moreau, The War of the Worlds, Mr Polly, maybe Tono-Bungay … but they’re all early ones. Mr Polly, is, I suspect, the last of his novels that has never been out of print since it was first published, and that was 1910 – correct me if I
’m wrong.’
‘You’re probably right,’ says Gip. ‘But I think you’re reading too much into “The Betterave Papers”. It’s just a squib. Mind at the End of its Tether is a much more worrying work to me, because its pessimism is so extreme.’
‘But H.G.’s best work was essentially pessimistic,’ says Anthony. ‘It was inspired by ideas like entropy, the randomness of evolution, the innate folly and vanity of mankind, the possible ways in which the world could end, or human civilisation be wiped out. His true vocation was to work that vein of inspiration, producing novels that would last, that would become classics. But he got distracted by his involvement in politics, his sense of vocation changed, he started to believe in Progress, and he began to write books which expounded various ways of achieving it. He claimed he wasn’t interested in creating enduring works of art in fiction, but in responding to pressing social and political concerns, like a journalist. He quarrelled with Henry James about that, and picked over the bones of their disagreement years later in the Experiment in Autobiography. He was unrepentant then. But lately – as Mind at the End of its Tether shows – he’s lost faith in Progress, or in the perfectibility of man, which comes to the same thing. For nearly half a century he campaigned for World Government on the assumption that the only people capable of achieving and running it would axiomatically be enlightened, selfless, reasonable. But recent history has demonstrated that they are much more likely to be ruthless tyrants or, worse still, enlightened, selfless, reasonable people who turn into ruthless tyrants.’