Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
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the winter her hands would be ‘chapped’, and she would have a cough. And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and watch in order that I may desert her.
Everything comes beautifully together: the hatred of bad social conditions, the mixed feelings for the old woman, the sense that one can only get out and go on. It’s magnificent.
Later, in the mid-1920s, when, on the Bergonzi scale, Wells should be quite past it, we have a couple of novels which form reversals of an interesting kind. Christina Alberta’s Father is about a man who believes himself to be the Sumerian Sargon the First, King of Kings. The present of the novel becomes Sargon’s future. In The Dream, Sarnac is a man of the future who relives a life in the Edwardian present. Both these novels are highly readable, and The Dream is excellent—overlooked, apparently, because Wells failed to give it a noticeable title. The comedy and descriptions of low-life are in the best Kippsian manner. These novels date from 1924 and 1925, when Wells was under considerable mental stress. Indeed, Christina Alberta’s Father strikes a new note. A theme of insanity is introduced for the first time, and the scenes in the mental institution are vivid.
Where Sarnac dreams himself back into an ordinary life, the low Mr Preemby in Christina Alberta’s Father imagines himself to be lord and protector of the whole world. It is a role Wells was clearly taking on himself.
There’s much in Wells which reminds us of the productive French genius, Honoré de Balzac. Balzac wrote to a friend in 1820, saying, ‘Before long, I shall possess the secret of that mysterious power. I shall compel all men to obey me and all women to love me.’ He also said, ‘My only and immense desires, to be famous and to be loved’. He achieved both, and killed himself by overwork. Fame and love together were not enough to quench that void within him which was the fruit of his mother’s rejection and coldness to him. Wells is a similar case. His high and demanding productivity—The Outline of History, for instance, written in a year of ‘fanatical toil’—his deromanticized sexual activity, which continued into his seventies, point to an underlying anxiety and unhappiness.
Some commentators—among them the Mackenzies, I think—ascribe this to Wells’s feeling of pique against the middle class, to whom he had once been made to feel inferior. No doubt class enters into the matter, as it does into most English departments. But something buried deeper fed on Wells, that unassuageable void which a derelicting mother sometimes imposes on her children. Sarah Wells, H. G.’s mother, did her best, but she left her husband and kicked Bertie, then almost fourteen, into the wide world, to fend for himself—or rather, into the narrow world behind the draper’s counter—the same age at which another utopian, Aldous Huxley, lost his mother. The Mackenzies say that Wells bitterly resented this rejection, and we see that bitterness fermenting in his life.
His one escape from the draper’s counter was through education. No wonder that in later days he saw life as a race between education and catastrophe. So it had been for him. But he had made another reversal, into a solipsistic universe, where what was true for him as a youth became true for the whole world.
This turning away from the literary world to quasi-political involvement still seems curious, and curiously unfruitful. Yet an explanation for it appears in the best book on creativity ever written, which explores the vagaries of the creative spirit. In his work, The Dynamics of Creation,[2] Anthony Storr says:
The inability to stop working, to enjoy holidays, to allow time for relaxation or personal relationships, is often found among intensely ambitious men. In psychiatric practice, it is more often found among politicians and financiers than among artists … Politicians often arrange life so that they are busily engaged all the time they are awake … Political life is an ideal one for men who need to be ceaselessly occupied, who are driven to seek power by an inner insecurity, and who substitute extroverted activity for the self-knowledge which comes from cultivating personal relationships … Creative production can be a particularly effective method of protecting the self from the threat of an underlying depression.
We look on Wells with admiration. We also should spare him some sympathy. He who had so much drive was greatly driven. We have a right to be sad when his wonderful early sense of fun dies.
Wells reverts to animal metaphors to describe his state of mind. He is ‘a creature trying to find its way out of a prison into which it has fallen’. Indeed, his life seems unsettled and unsatisfying, despite his encounters with the wonderful Moura Budbergs of this world, despite his escapes to the South of France, and the various households he maintained in England and France.
No wonder he dreamed of panthers and pleasant gardens. Big cats are symbols of a guiltless promiscuity. Wells worked hard at that activity, but there was no way in which the door in the wall would ever open again. Such doors have a time-lock on them.
1. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1961.
2. London, Seeker and Warburg, 1972.
In my lifetime, I have read only one story by H. P. Lovecraft. Yet that story I remember well, if only because I came upon it shortly after my twin brother committed suicide.
Somehow, talk of Lovecraft implies hushed talk of the past—awful attics or seedy cellars in which dreadful things lurk, waiting to emerge from long ago or far away, or both. From what I have heard, it is useless for anyone in the Lovecraftian universe to struggle. Lift a finger, and evil forces will come busting in. It was with compulsion greater than myself that I decided I must—whether I liked it or not—read once more that special story of his which has remained with me throughout so many years.
So, bearing a flambeau, I climb the stairs to a dusty attic where my precious few books are kept. On the way, I ponder the kindly if damp spirit of Lovecraft. This was the man who once declared, in words to be echoed by HAL in the movie 2001 almost half a century later, ‘Existence seems of little value and I wish it might be terminated’.
Remembrance told me how L. Sprague de Camp, in his 1975 biography of Lovecraft, had quoted the master as announcing that mankind were ‘wolves, hyenas, swine, fools, and madmen’. What sort of wisdom might we not expect from a man who had torn thus aside the tissue of lies behind which we hide our frailties? Even as I reached the chill attic, pulling my shawl more securely round my shoulders, I was aware of fear welling up inside me in a cascade of adjectives.
There on an upper shelf … I reach out … ah!, got it! That aged black book, from which I blow the dust. I open its pages with trembling fingers.
No, no, it’s not the Necronomicon, Cthulhu be praised! It’s a volume entitled Modern Tales of Horror, selected by Dashiell Hammett. The volume was published in London in 1932, by Victor Gollancz.
A precocious lad, I was seven when I bought it. For many years, it was my favourite book—favourite because it scared the life out of me. Also precious to me because at that age I was trying to become on good terms with my mother, and discovered that she was not averse to a good horror story. So I read aloud to her in our scullery while she did the ironing.
Two stories in the Hammett collection I read over and over. They were Paul Suter’s ‘Beyond the Door’ and Michael Joyce’s ‘Perchance to Dream’. (Thirty years later, I included that marvellous latter story in my Best Fantasy Stories, published by Faber & Faber.) We both trembled, my mother and I, in those long cosy peacetime afternoons. As long as she kept ironing and I kept reading, she never said another word about sending me off to an orphanage.
One story in the Hammett collection made us scream. It was ‘The Music of Erich Zann’, written by H. P. Lovecraft. We screamed with laughter. After all these years, it’s hard to see why we found it so funny; of course, it was a nervous time for us: the police were still investigating. The very name of Erich Zann broke us up. Then again, Zann, the crazy old musician, played