The Last Books of H.G. Wells

by HG Wells

  Yet Wells himself had shown his instinctive grasp of the same insight when he wrote: ‘The bird is a creature of the air, the fish is a creature of the water, man is a creature of the mind’. Whatever his faults as a writer or human being, that sentence is enough to establish him as one of the greatest minds of modern times.

  THE HAPPY TURNING

  I

  HOW I CAME TO THE HAPPY TURNING

  I AM DREAMING FAR more than I did before this chaotic war invaded my waking hours. My days are now wholly full of war effort: What can I do? What ought I to do? Where is the next opportunity and what dangers gather ahead? I am urgent. I overstrain. And now something deep within me protests and rebels, and says: “These war-makers have yoked and enslaved you. You are defeated if you give yourself wholly to war.”

  I answer evasively: “Presently I will relax.”

  That serves in the daytime but not at night. I take care to keep as fit as I can and not to let my war preoccupations develop into the nervous waste of anxiety. I never dream about war. I dream neither of its horrors nor its strategy. When I sleep, a more adult and modern and civilized part of my being comes into play. More and more are my dreams what I believe the psychologists call compensatory; the imaginations I have suppressed revolt and take control.

  Some time ago I dreamt a dream that recurs with variations again and again, so that it is a sort of Open Sesame for all my excursions into dreamland. In my daytime efforts to keep myself fit and active, I oblige myself to walk a mile or so on all days that are not impossibly harsh. I walk to the right to the Zoo, or I walk across to Queen Mary’s Rose Garden or down by several routes to my Savile Club, or I bait my walk with Smith’s bookshop at Baker Street. I have to sit down a bit every now and then, and that limits my range. I’ve played these ambulatory variations now for two year and a half, for I am too busy to go out of town, out of reach of my books, and my waking self has never uttered a protest. But now the—what do they call it?—subliminal consciousness?—has in the most charming way asserted my unformulated desire, with this dream, which I will call the dream of the Happy Turning.

  I dream I am at my front door starting out for the accustomed round. I go out and suddenly realize there is a possible turning I have overlooked. Odd I have never taken it, but there it is! And in a trice I am walking more briskly than I ever walked before, up hill and down dale, in scenes of happiness such as I have never hoped to see again. At first the Turning itself was the essence of the dream. Now, directly my dream unfolds I know where I am; it has become a mere key to this delightful land of my lifelong suppressions, in which my desires and unsatisfied fancies, hopes, memories and imaginations have accumulated inexhaustible treasure.

  For the first time in my existence I realize what it is to have possession of an entirely healthy and balanced body. I was born astigmatic and in those days nobody bothered about common children’s eyes. I could never be sure of bowling a straight ball, and when I jumped down I hit the ground too soon or too late. I was under-nourished and tuberculous, so that I was a skinny puny youth, easily fatigued. Tolerable health came only in my thirties. Muscular precision and hardiness I shall never know in my waking life. But now, beyond the Happy Turning, I leap gulfs unerringly, scale precipices, shin up trees and am indefatigable. There are no infections there; no coughs, no colds; to cough or sneeze would be to wake up and tumble back headlong into those unhygienic present-day realities where dirt-begotten epidemics have their way with us. Maybe a day will come when a cleansed and liberated world will take the Happy Turning in good earnest and pass out of the base and angry conflicts which distract us from wholesome living. All such liberations are possible beyond the Turn. Now I count it good fortune that I can even dream of the gay serenity of that Beyond.

  The Happy Turning leads to a world where distance is abolished. Certain phrases—parroted phrases empty of belief—are already to be found in the newspapers and speeches—the abolition of war, the abolition of distance, the abolition of competition and social inequality. But after people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true. And then it comes true. Beyond the Happy Turning these phrases are realities; hopes fulfilled.

  II

  SUPPRESSIONS AND SYMBOLISM IN DREAMLAND

  BUT THE FANTASIES of dreamland go an immeasurable way beyond what is now conceivable and practical.

  The subliminal self is never straightforward. It awakens us, for example, to sex and the social reactions of adolescence in the queerest, most roundabout way. There are sound biological explanations why our minds should work in this fashion, but I cannot go into them now. The submerged intervener is cryptic and oracular; it hints and perplexes. Symbols become persons and persons symbols; individuals, animals, institutions, amalgamate and divide and change into one another.

  Religions are such stuff as dreams are made of. The Athanasian Creed is severely logical in dreamland, Isis is transfigured into Hathor, a cow, Quannon, the crescent moon and Murillo’s Queen of Heaven, and still the dream flows on. Osiris becomes his own son Horus, who becomes again Osiris and the Virgin Mother, in incessant rotation. This is the atmosphere of this uncontrollable Wonderland beyond the Turn, in which my accumulated loves and suppressions, disappointments and stresses, find release. But very plainly it is my personal needs that provide the substance of the stories with which my dreaming self now consoles and regales me.

  In the past I do not recall dreams as a frequent factor in my existence, though some affected me very importantly. As a child I used to have a sort of geometrical nightmare as if a mad kaleidoscope charged down upon me, and this was accompanied by intense distress. I may have been very young then, because I cannot remember how I awakened or whether I conveyed my distress to anyone. Nor have I ever come upon a description of that dream as happening to any other child.

  But I remember a considerable number of quite frightful dreams that came before my teens. I read precociously, and I was pursued implacably, to a screaming and weeping awakening, by the more alarming animals I read about. An uncle from the West Indies described some frightful spiders that scratched and crawled. I was then put to bed alone in the dark in the upstairs bedroom of a strange house, and I disgraced myself by screaming the house down.

  I had horror dreams of torture and cruelty. One made me an atheist. My mother was a deeply religious woman, but she did her best to conceal the Devil from me; there were pictures in an old prayer-book showing hell well alight, but she obliterated these with stamp paper which I was only partially successful in removing, so that until I held the page up to the light, hell was a mere suspicion. And one day I read a description in an old number of CHAMBER’S JOURNAL of a man being broken on the wheel over a slow fire, and in my sleep it flared up into immeasurable disgust. By a mental leap which cut out all intermediaries, the dream artist made it clear that if indeed there was an all powerful God, then it was he and he alone who stood there conducting this torture. I woke and stared at the empty darkness. There was no alternative but madness, and sanity prevailed. God had gone out of my life. He was impossible.

  From that time on, I began to invent and talk blasphemy. I do not like filth. Merely dirty stories disgust me, and when sexual jokes have an element of laughter in them almost always it is dishonouring and cruel laughter. But theology has always seemed to me an area for clean fun that should do no harm to any properly constituted person. Blasphemy may frighten unemancipated minds, but it is unbecoming that human beings should be governed by fear. From first to last I have invented a considerable amount of excellent blasphemy. ALL ABOARD FOR ARARAT is the last of a long series of drawings and writings, many of which have never seen and probably never will see the light of print. There must be lingering bits of belief in order to produce the relief of laughter, and such jests may fade out very rapidly at no very distant date.

  Only a few other dreams stuck in my memory before I discovered the Happy Turning, and mostly they were absurd a
nd misleading freaks of fantasy. I dreamt my mother was ill and in great distress and wrote off post haste to her. There was nothing at all the matter with her.

  I must have had anxiety dreams when I was over-working, in which everything was at sixes and sevens, I must have had them because I devised a technique for dealing with them. Directly I woke up, I got up and dismissed them. I trained myself to make tea and set to work soberly in a dressing-gown, and soon everything fell back into its place and the disturbance succumbed to fatigue and natural sleepiness. My friend J. W. Dunne, who wrote AN EXPERIMENT WITH TIME, lost himself for a time in a Serial Universe and has come back a most delightful writer of fantastic tales, induced me to keep a notebook at my bed-head and jot down my dreams fresh and hot. I do not remember making a note. I just woke up, and whatever dreams may have been hanging about vanished unimportantly forthwith.

  So my present resort to dreamland is a new experience. I am a happy explorer telling of a delightful world he has come upon, beyond expectation.

  III

  COMPENSATION BEYOND THE HAPPY TURNING

  THE SCENERY OF my dreamland is always magnificent or exquisite or otherwise delightful. I should not note it if it were not, and I find dear and delightful people I had never hoped to see again, happy and welcoming. Sometimes they are just themselves for a time, sometimes they are agreeably blended with other people, and at any moment they may see fit to impersonate someone else and cease to be whatever they began by being.

  Nobody is dead in this world of release, and I hate nobody. I think that this absence of hate may be very recent. It may be due to my subconscious revolt against the unavoidable hates, disputes, suspicions and conflicts of our daily life in this war. Or it may be that with advancing years a mellowing comes to the mind with the attenuation of ambitions and rivalries. They matter so little at seventy-seven. Both factors, the normal one and this abnormal one of war conditions, may be contributing to my escape.

  My waking life is now one of very fierce and definite antagonisms. I feel that the generations ahead may be cheated of much or all of the huge emancipations that could and should follow upon this world storm of fighting; and that ancient and evil organizations and traditions and the necessity common minds are under to believe they have natural inferiors, of whom they are entitled to take advantage, may frustrate all our hopes. I am compelled to spend my utmost energy in warfare against these things.

  Dreamland is in flat contradiction to all this distressful strain. Nothing of these conflicts pursues me beyond the Happy Turning. At the Happy Turning is a recognizable Holy Water Stoup which has somehow identified itself with Truth, and in my Dreamland there is not the slightest difficulty about dipping a finger and sprinkling the Holy Catholic Church, or whatever ugly menace to mankind happens to be upon my heels, with it. Whereupon the evil I fear and fight here with all my strength, explodes with a slightly unpleasant odour, and vanishes. Why did I let my heart be troubled? Why was I afraid?

  IV

  THE HOLY CARNIVAL

  NOTHING DISTRESSFUL TO me can clamber over that Threshold now. But anything and everything that shows me deference may play its part in my relaxation. I have had some very entertaining divine conferences. The gods men worship are difficult to assemble and impossible to count, because of their incorrigible habit of dissolving spasmodically into one another. I have remarked already upon the permutations and combinations, if those words are permissible, of Isis, the original Virgin Mary. Cleopatra’s infinite variety was nothing to it. The tangle of the Trinities is even more fantastically versatile. There is the Athanasian Trinity and the Arian Trinity, the Catholic and the Orthodox, the Logos and that ever ambiguous Virgin. There is the Gnostic Godhead, which makes Jehovah out to be the very Devil, and Pope’s consolidated Deity:

  “Father of all, in every age

  in every clime adored,

  By Saint, by Savage and by Sage,

  Jehovah, Jove or Lord.”

  The vast theogony galumphs about in an endless confusion of identities with a stern transcendent solemnity that never deserts it. “Which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.”

  A few such cries are uttered with an air of profound significance; a considerable amount of thunder goes on, a crackle of miracles, but never a laugh. To laugh is to awaken.

  And in and out and round about this preposterous dance of the divinities, circulates an innumerable swarm of priests and prophets and teachers, wearing the oddest of robes and garments, mitres, triple crowns, scarlet hats, coquettish hoods. No Carnival gone mad can compare with this insane leaping and tumbling procession. They pour endlessly through the streets of my dreamland; striking strange symbolic attitudes, some with virgin beards, some grotesquely shaven and shorn, hunchbacked with copes, bellowing strange chants, uttering dark sayings—but always incredibly solemn. They tuck up their petticoats, these grave elderly gentlemen, and one, two, three, leap gulfs of logic.

  I noted the present Primate, chief now of the English order of primates, his lawn sleeves like the plump wings of a theological Strassburg goose, as, bathed in the natural exudations of a strenuous faith, he pranced by me, with the Vatican a-kicking up ahind and afore, and a yellow Jap a-kicking up ahind old Pope. I had a momentary glimpse of the gloomy Dean, in ecstatic union with the Deity, yet contraceptive as ever, and then, before I could satisfy a natural curiosity, a tapping delirium of shrilling cymbals swept him away, “Glory!...Glory!... ALLELUIA!...”

  As, on the verge of awakening, I watch this teeming disorder of the human brain, which is always the same and increasingly various, I listen for one simple laugh, I look for one single derisive smile. Always I encounter faces of stupid earnestness. They are positively not putting it on, unless earnest self-deception had become second nature. They are not pretending to be such fools. They are such fools…

  There is this phase between dreaming and awakening, there is a sense of rapidly intensifying conflict and strain before the straining catgut snaps—exactly as it snaps when we come out of anaesthesia. The Brocken Witches’ Sabbath begins dispersing and dissolving, becomes a wildly spinning whirl. Will there be enough broomsticks for everybody? Hi broomstick! Are you engaged, broomstick? That’s my broomstick. They all leap for the nearest one. They rush to and fro about me and through me, terrified at the Berlioz clangor that heralds the night of the Gods. The Archbishop, Inge, His Holiness, Rabbis, thrust about me. They spin up towards the zenith colliding and fighting among themselves—serious to the end.

  Cosmo Gordon Lang, I remark, gets into theological difficulties with his steed, which rears and throws him. There is a wild struggle in which his broomstick vanishes. Down he goes, legs and arms and robes, cartwheeling faster and faster. The dream becomes a religious hailstorm. Whiz, whiz, they come pelting.

  I have a vague idea I ought to put up an umbrella. Umbrella?

  I laugh and am awake.

  V

  JESUS OF NAZARETH DISCUSSES HIS FAILURE

  1.

  THE COMPANION I find most congenial in the Beyond is Jesus of Nazareth. Like everything in Dreamland he fluctuates, but beyond the Happy Turning his personality is at least as distinct as my own. His scorn and contempt for Christianity go beyond my extremest vocabulary. He was, I believe, the putative son of a certain carpenter, Joseph, but Josephus says his actual father was a Roman soldier named Pantherus. If so, Jesus did not know it.

  He began his career as a good illiterate patriotic Jew in indignant revolt against the Roman rule and the Quisling priests who cringed to it. He took up his self-appointed mission under the influence of John the Baptist, who was making trouble for both the Tetrarch in Galilee and the Roman Procurator in Jerusalem. John was an uncompromising Puritan, and the first thing his disciples had to do, was to get soundly baptized in Jordan. Then he seemed to run out of ideas. After their first encounter John and Jesus went their different ways. There was little discipleship in Jesus.

  He played an inconspicuous role in the Salome affa
ir, and he assures me he never baptized anybody. But he was brooding on the Jewish situation, which he felt needed more than moral denunciation and water. He decided to get together a band of followers and march on Jerusalem. Where, as the Gospel witnesses tell very convincingly, with such contradictions as are natural to men writing about it all many years later, the sacred Jewish priests did their best to obliterate him. He learnt much as he went on. He seems to have said some good things and had others imputed to him. He became a sort of Essene Joe Miller. He learnt and changed as he went on.

  Gods! how he hated priests, and how he hates them now! And Paul! “Fathering all this nonsense about being ‘The Christ’ on me of all people! Christian! He started that at Antioch. I never had the chance of a straight talk to him. I wish I could come upon him some time. But he never seems to be here… There are a few things I could say to him,” said Jesus reflectively, and added, “Plain things…”

  I regretted Paul’s absence.

  “One must draw the line somewhere,” I said. In this happy place, Paul’s in the discard.”

  “Yes,” reflected Jesus, dismissing Paul; “there were such a lot of things I didn’t know, and such a lot of snares for the feet of a man who feels more strongly than he understands. I see so plainly now how incompetently I set about it.”

  He surveyed his shapely feet cooling in the refreshing greensward of Happyland. The stigmata were in evidence, but not obtrusively so. They were not eyesores. They have since been disgustingly irritated and made much of by the sedulous uncleanness of the saints.