MARTIN RAY 77

Lives and letters G P. WELLS (ed.), H . G. Wells in Love: Postscript to An Experiment in

The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. Oxford, Clarendon Press, vol. 3, 1902-1908, 227.50. vol. 4, 7909-1973,

The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 7, 1861-1897, ed. Frederick R. Karl

ZDZISLAW NAJDER, Joseph Conrad: a Chronicle. Cambridge University Press, 219.50.

The man who has read no Shakespeare, (3. P. Snow once famously remarked, is uncultured. Before we all wallow in our erudition, however, we should remember that Snow proceeds to describe such an ignoramus as no more uncultured than the man who cannot cite the second law of thermodynamics. Our blushes may be slightly spared by the reflection that very few of this century’s writers could, on Snow’s criteria, pass muster - only Snow himself, naturally, and perhaps H. G. Wells, student of the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, and first-class honours graduate in zoology. I have many reservations about Snow’s recipe for the white hot age of cultural synthesis, and I cannot help feeling that King.Lear knows all there is to know about DNA. Still, at a time when the humanities are under such withering siege from the sciences, the continued neglect of H. G. Wells is very curious. Here is a writer who can teach our students about the Higher Metazoa, such as Homo Sapiens, while Tono-Bungay, that veritable manual of industrial initiative, should be compulsory reading for the budding entrepreneurs whom we must now pro- duce, although the regrettable final chapters may have to carry a Government health warning.

The nhglect of H. G. Wells has two principal causes. Firstly, he was a polymath, and polymaths do not fi t easily into any single university depart- ment. Wells knew too much on too many subjects. He was a man of enormous creative energy, and he perhaps dissipated that energy and fell between too many stools. He hobnobbed with Lenin and Roosevelt, drove the Fabian party to despair, wrote the history of mankind and settled its future, and still found time to write the best Edwardian novels.

The use of that adjective ’Edwardian’ lleads us directly to the second reason for Wells’s current absence from lecture timetables. We have all been taught by Mrs Woolf to regard ’Edwardian‘ as a term of abuse, to be applied not to writers who are historically Edwardian (late James, early Forster, above all Conrad) but to writers of that period whom, quite simply, Mrs Woolf did not like very much, namely Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy. A kinder and more humane man than Galsworthy never put pen to paper, but I have no wish to

Autobiography. Faber & Faber, $8.95.

$25. V O ~ . 5, 1914-1919, 222.50.

and Laurence Davies. Cambridge Uriiversity Press, $20.

78 Critical Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 4

promote a revival of interest in his work, and he seems destined to remain, of all our century's novelists, the ideal babysitter. With Bennett and, especial- ly, Wells, the case is different. It is surely time that they were liberated from the tyranny of Bloomsbury and seen for what they are, the powerfully imaginative guardians of the realist novel and the natural heirs of Dickens. To effect such a liberation, one does not need, in turn, to denigrate the novels of Mrs Woolf, or to argue that, at her worst, her characters inhabit a pastel world of pale subjectivity, derived in equal measure from the works of Henri Bergson and Laura Ashley. It is sufficient to recognise that different traditions of the novel can quite happily co-exist, and one might even be tempted to say that the line of Wells and Bennett has proved more durable.

Wells's greatest sin, of course, was that he pretended to be a middlebrow, and that alone was enough to earn him Mrs Woolf's wrath. As she said in her essay on 'Middlebrow' culture, 'if any human being, man, woman, dog, cat, or half-crushed worm dares call me "middlebrow" I will take my pen and stab him, dead. If one wishes to see a specimen of the middlebrow, she helpfully explains, one should not go to Bloomsbury, because she lives there, nor to Chelsea, where the lower orders dwell, but to South Kensington. Bearing in mind the postal code of Wells's a h a mater, it is clear that he is branded indelibly as unworthy of Mrs Woolf's attention, which means, in short, that he had a huge readership and grew very rich in the process. Oh dear.

Socially, of course, reaching even the middlebrow level of culture was quite an achievement for Wells, given his upbringing 'below stairs' and the fact that his father was a professional cricketer, in the days when the game, like the world, was divided into players and gentlemen. H. G. Wells was certainly no gentleman, as is apparent in the new volume of his autobiography, published forty years after his death, H. G. Wells in Love. His Experiment in Autobiography appeared in 1934, but understandably it said little about his numerous love affairs. Shortly after Experiment, Wells began a postscript to it, subtitled 'On loves and the lover-shadow', and it is this Postscript which constitutes the major part of H. G. Wells in Love, edited by his son, G. P. Wells, who is responsible for the title. It is a misleading title, as he admits, since the Postscript does not discuss either of Wells's two marriages. It is doubly misleading, I would suggelt, in that, by his own admission, Wells was not in love with most of the women he describes here; they 'had much the same place in my life that fly-fishing or golfing has in the life of many busy men'.

The book is obviously no mea culpa, and Wells is pleasantly frank, fresh and free of spite. Even Rebecca West manages to seem quite likeable at times, while most of the other women are recollected in tranquillity. Dorothy Richard- son, for instance, makes a fleeting appearance as a 'most interestingly hairy woman' who would lecture Wells in bed about the lingering traces of his Cochev

Lives and letters 79

accent. Such cameos tell us much more about Wells than about the women, of course, and the dominant impression which the book gives is that he was quite unable, and unwilling, to keep separate his literary, amatory and political affairs. He had his fair share of Dorothea Brookes, and he would pursue his quarrels with the Fabians by seducing their daughters. He seems to have lived at the point where polymathy becomes polygamy, but at least he did not frighten the horses, and in that, above all, he is a true Edwardian.

The most surprising part of the autobiography is Wells’s occasional wish to add a gloss of Shelleyan sentiment to his escapades by introducing the notion of the Lover-Shadow, which he explains thus: ‘a vast proportion of human conduct is explicable only as a continual urge in the mind to realize, more or less completely, something if not all of the Lover-Shadow, some aspect at least, some gleam of that complex of craving and hope‘, with the result that ’the beloved person is for a time identified vvith the dream’. Such passages could be lifted almost verbatim from Hardy’s The Well-Beloved, whose hero, Jocelyn Pierston, has always been faithful to his kind of Lover-Shadow. It was simply that his ’well-beloved’ kept taking different identities, and flitting from Lucy to Jane to Flora to Evangeline. In short, Jocelyn’s Platonic beliefs provide him with a convenient Rake’s Charter, and it is a slight weakness in Wells‘s book that he should try to add a similar sentimental veneer to what is otherwise a very revealing and frank discussion of the male libido. Or is it very revealing of the male libido that Wells should wish to add a sentimental veneer?

There is no critical industry surrounding Wells to compare with that deluge of writing about Thomas Hardy. This is partly the result of Wells’s willingness to tell us how many illegitimate children he had. He should have kept quiet and not spoiled the fun. Lois Deacon, with her obsession about Hardy’s progeny, threatened at one time to become the Tarn Dalyell of Hardy studies, but Robert Gittings’s splendid demolition of her work in his Young Thomas Hardy (1974) seems to have put a total exclusion zone around the subject of Tryphena Sparks. Similarly, there are no critics now who wish to regard Hardy as some kind of Baedeker of the barnyards and the past decade has seen many fine studies (by Page, Millgate, Gregor and Bayley, to give an invidious selection). Although it is only nineteen years since Philip Larkin placed his small ad. in the personal columns of this journal, ’Wanted: Good Hardy Critic’, one can say that Hardy criticism has already come of age. Much remains to be done, of course. There is an urgent need for a critical collected edition, and the excellent work of Dale Kramer on the text of The Woodlanders could provide a model for such an undertaking. It would also be of some interest to have a volume of letters by Hardy’s wives, Emma and Florence, especially the Iatter. Hardy was in the habit of dictating letters to Florence, composed in the third person, which she would then sign, as if written by her. This ruse was originally devised to frustrate

80 Critical Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 4

autograph hunters, but it bears a close resemblance to Hardy’s method of composing his Life, in which he played his own ghost.

In the three latest volumes of Hardy‘s letters, superbly edited by Purdy and Millgate, Florence and her hand are frequently visible. Within a month of Emma‘s death in November 1912, Hardy has Florence taking dictatioil of letters which begin with such sentiments as ‘I send you a line of sincere thanks for your words of sympathy with me on my loss’. Hardy is obliged to dictate such letters since he is suffering from eyestrain, which is hardly surprising in view of the mountain of mourning stationery which issued from Max Gate in December 1912. So many of these letters show Hardy already beginning the mythologising of Emma, and his role on the day of her death (‘I did not at all foresee the possibility of her passing away’). Although occasionally, to close friends, he acknowledges ’the differences‘ which ruined his marriage, and the ’certain painful delusions’ from which Emma suffered, the dominant tone is illustrated by a statement such as ’my life is intensely sad to me now without her’.

The final letter he wrote to Emma, some eighteen months before her death, tells a different story. It is sent from London, and begins simply ’Dr E’: Hardy writes to inform her that he is postponing his return to Dorchester, and the tone is very much that of a husband trying to allay the fears of a suspicious, even paranoid, wife. He has met Mrs Crackanthorpe, although he called on her only ’casually’, and she has bought tickets for a play, so Hardy supposes that he must stay in London. He has also seen Lady Lewis, but again it was ’accidentally’, he stresses. Hardy is careful to give the impression that all these fortuitous social engagements with titled ladies are really such a trial. Even the weather is ’cold and wintry’, and poor Hardy has to ‘walk about in it’, visiting Lady St Helier, etc. He ends this masterpiece of studied misery merely with his initial, ’T.

At least Hardy had the good grace not to write to Florence on mourning paper. The first letter to her after Emma’s death, written in January 1913, contains one of the few glimpses we receive of a buoyant Hardy (perhaps the only other moment of elation is his letter to Frederic Harrison, which begins, ‘I have been looking for evidence of hanging in chains‘). Hardy tells Florence that ’I am getting through Es papers . . . It was, of course, sheer hallucination in her, Po& thing, & not wilfulness . . . If I once get you here again won’t I clutch you tight: you shall stay till spring.’ The original of this letter is not extant, and what the editors reproduce is Florence’s partial transcript of it, which she gave in her letter to Edward Clodd, written the next day. What possible motive could Florence have had for telling Clodd what Hardy had written? Did she want to convince Clodd that Emma was indeed mad, as Hardy’s reading of her diaries suggested? Perhaps she felt that a mad Emma would explain, and excuse, her relationship with Hardy during Emma’s later years. Or was Florence trying to compromise Hardy by

Lives and letters 81

revealing his romantic expressions to a third party, thereby making it difficult for Hardy to retreat, should he feel inclined? We cannot judge her motives without knowing the context of her letter to Clodd, and this is the only occa- sion when Purdy and Millgate do not provide whatever a curious reader may wish to know. Their annotations elsewhere are excellent, and give a vast amount of information in a succinct and readable form.

I was slightly surprised that they felt it necessary to explain why there were no streetlights in Dorchester during the war (Hardy walked into some railings in the dark), but a definitive edition such as this must bear in mind its future readers, as yet unborn, who may well need an annotation for 'blackout'. Hardy too, one suspects, is writing his letters for posterity, or rather, against it. As the grand old man of literature, he must have realised that his letters would one day be published, and there are very few moments of personal revelation here. He is reticent and guarded, and often deliberately dull. Consider, for instance, his letter to Florence Henniker in February 1914, announcing his recent marriage to Florence. What might Hardy the poet have made of such an announcement to his 'one rare fair woman'? Hardy the correspondent shows no glimpse of the potential irony or pathos. Instead, he talks about gardening: 'I am glad to know you are on chalk. My experience is that chalk is the healthiest subsoil of any.'

The marriage with Florence, as Hardy described it, was the 'union of two rather melancholy temperaments'. They had much to be melancholy about, and although Florence may have taken perverse pleasure in ordering Emma's tomb- stone, the spirit of her predecessor clearly oppressed her. Hardy was, after all, still writing on that endless supply of mourning paper until a fortnight before their wedding. One doubts whether he was simply being thrifty, although the war gave him a good excuse to indulge his natural parsimony; as he tells Edmund Gosse, 'we put on our coals as it were with sugartongs, drink cider only, in wineglasses, & send our ancient shoes to be mended instead of buying new ones - So you see we are getting on'. Florence, some forty years his junior, was not entirely depressed however, and she can be seen fighting back occasionally. When she was copying out Hardy's letter to Lady Hoare and came to the phrase 'I simply adore' Scott's Marmion, she added, '(can that be T. H. speaking?)'. The very notion of Hardy adoring anything, or anyone, must have been sadly alien to her. On her first wedding anniversary, she wrote to Edward Clodd that 'really 0 truly (I am not joking now) it has been a year of great happiness'. To underline is to undermine. Clodd seems to have been Florence's main confi- dant at this time, and the circumstances of his life are curiously similar to those of Hardy - his estranged first wife died and he married his secretary. The difference between them, however, is that Clodd could write in his diary, 'Relieved to find myself a widower'.

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The publication of Hardy’s letters is now sufficiently advanced to permit the judgement that the editing by Millgate and Purdy is a model of judicious tact, and their annotations make these first five volumes an indispensable, definitive, edition. With the Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, however, it is far too early to assess the achievement of. Karl and Davies. This is only the first of eight volumes, and most of the letters here have been published before. The real test will come when we reach Conrad‘s letters to his agent, J . B. Pinker, of which there are more than a thousand, often extraordinarily detailed and complex.

A reader who wants a harsh review of this first volume can consult Donald Rude’s brilliant article in Conradiana (17:1), where one will find an exhaustive analysis of textual errors. There do indeed appear to be disquieting mistakes which do little for one‘s confidence in the volume. For instance, one of Conrad’s letters to Edward Garnett (pp. 309-10) is not extant, and Karl has reprinted it from Garnett’s Letters f rom Joseph Conrad (1928). This exists in a British and American edition and the latter is used as copy-text. Unfortunately, the American edition is bowdlerised, and such coy omissions are unwittingly reproduced, with the result that Conrad’s ’I am sitting in the lee scuppers’ ought to read ‘I am sitting on my bare ass in the lee scuppers’.

The standard of annotation is usually excellent, and the only obvious weakness is the editors’ failure to identify the recipient of Conrad’s letter dated 9 December 1897, to a reviewer of The Nigger. One need only spend a minute or two in consulting Norman Sherry’s Conrad: the Critical Heritage, hardly the most recondite of books, to see that Conrad is addressing W. L. Courtney, the author of the Daily Telegraph review which appeared the previous day. One may now like to compare Conrad’s gushing and grateful letter to Court- ney with one which he wrote to Stephen Crane a fortnight later, the postscript to which begins ’Have you seen the Daily Tele: Article by that ass Courtney?’. Incidentally, the index reference to W. E. Gladstone is bizarre: for ’343‘, read ‘12’ and ‘16‘.

The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ was first published in America under the rather bland title, The Children of the Sea. I used to think that the publishers, Dodd, Mead, were sensitive souls, trying to avoid any racial offence, but actually they were motivated simply by the fear that no one would want to buy a book about ’niggers’. Commercial. considerations have similarly played their inevitable part at Cambridge University Press, and the editors have been obliged to omit the text of Conrad’s letters in Polish, on ‘economic grounds’. This is absurd, since half of thafirst thirty pages are either blank or contain merely the year of the letters which immediately follow. The snow which covers Russia in Under Western Eyes is compared to ’a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history’. One can easily conceive of a use for these monstrous blank pages, here, however.

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Frederick Karl's Joseph Conrad: the Three Lives (1979) has been indispensable because it is the only source of so many otherwise unpublished letters, but the eventual completion of the Collected Letters will diminish the importance of Karl's own biography. Although Zdziskaw Najder was. at one time the co-editor of the letters, the principal foundation of his 'new' biography, Joseph Conrad: a Chronicle is not only in his thorough knowledge of the letters but also in his definitive research into all of the numerous Polish sources for Conrad's life, and his exhaustive study of the memoirs and recollections of his contemporaries. It may appear to be a new biography, but twelve of its fifteen chapters were published in Polish before 1977, and so it antedates Karl's work.

Many of the records and documents which Najder cites have never been studied by any other Conradian scholar and could have been found only by inspired detective work and hours of serendipity. The result is that this biography is absolutely essential reading, for its author is the most knowledgeable of all Conradians. Occasionally, it is true, he seems to make slightly excessive claims for his discoveries. For instance, a correspondent in the New Statesman (1928) did indeed describe how he saw Conrad in 1892 trying to sell some translations of Polish stories to a journal, three years before the official start of his writing career. However, nowhere in that letter, pace Najder, is i t specifically stated that Conrad himself was the translator of those stories. The only defect in the book is its quality of notation. Volume numbers are usually omitted in citing periodicals, as are subtitles and names of publishers from books. There are also a few errors (p. 553, note 93, should read Memories, not Memoirs, while p. 562, note 120, should read '1933', not '1934'). The only substantive error in the text is Najder's account of Conrad's 1932 interview with Ernest Rhys, in which Conrad is described as claiming that he read Maupassant too late to be influenced by him (p. 433). Thankfully, it is not true that Conrad made this preposterous claim, for he was in fact referring to Turgenev, not Maupassant.

In addition to its brilliant research, another great strength of this biography is its honesty. Najder has no single key to the mythology of Conrad's life, and he is not trying to squeeze him into some grand theoretical grid. As Ford Madox Ford, Conrad's collaborator, once remarked, 'Romance is life seen as a scheme; realism is life seen without a scheme'. The distinction between Najder's and Karl's biographies is that Karl, in his procrustean pursuit of Conrad the 'marginal' and alienated man, is in danger of writing a romance.'Najder, on the contrary, has very few theories about Conrad, and very few illusions. It is not simply that he shows us a Conrad who can lie, cheat and forge, for Karl revealed all th4t as well. Rather, Najder is never tempted to reduce Conrad to the convenient dimensions of some romantic scheme. Nowhere is this better seen than in Najder's treatment of Conrad the exile, for no one is in a better position than Najder to appreciate the pleasures, as well as the pains, of being a Polish emigrant

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then as now. Najder, recently sentenced to death by the 'Polish' authorities for his broadcasting activities, can no doubt perceive the advantages of remaining absent, and his depiction of Conrad stresses the solace which he found in his thoroughly English home and family, just as much as he gives due weight to the torment of alienation which Conrad undoubtedly felt.

The Conrad who emerges.from this biography is not cheapened or belittled by Najder's meticulous attentions. He appears less romantic in a conventional sense (a? inch or two under six feet, like his own Lord Jim), but his courage in struggling to create so much great writing in the face of a chronic depressive illness, as Najder diagnoses it, has its own kind of heroism. If anyone ever belittled Conrad, it was his wife, Jessie, in her appallingly mean and carping biographies of him, which were, understandably, posthumous. Now, it may well be true that no man is a hero to his valet, or his wife, but Jessie's books do support Edward Garnett's remark that her ideal job would have been to run a rest home for retired barmaids. The only surprising feature of Najder's utter distaste for her is that it should be so obvious in what is otherwise a scrupulously objective biography.

Najder suggests that there may be more to learn about Conrad, but there will be no major surprises. On the evidence of this biography, one might assert that, if Najder does not know it, then it is not worth knowing. Certainly there will be no Wellsian confessions of amorous adventures to surprise the Conrad- ians of the next century, since the most erotic adjective which Conrad ever used about a woman was 'yummy'. Conrad once said to Wells that ' "the difference between us, Wells, is fundamental. You don't care for humanity but think they are to be improved. I love humanity but know they are not!" ' Wells may seem to have cared for quite a lot of humanity, on the evidence of his memoirs, but, in the words of that other Ancient Mariner, it is Conrad who 'loveth best All things both great and small'.

Book reviews

KATHARINE WORTH, Oscar Wilde, Macmillan, $11 .OO, $3.95 (paperback).

Professor Worth's writings on modern drama are well-known and distinguished and her study of Wilde, the latest to hand in the Macmillan Modern Dramatists Series, is no exception. Wilde's wit and comic genius have always, as she points out, been acknowledged but grudgingly and to the detriment of any judgement on Wilde as a serious artist. Criticism has tended to see his plays as split bet- ween wit and melodrama rather than giving credit to his 'provocative counter- pointing of one with the other'. In fact his plays have received very little serious critical attention - the life of their creator presenting a more sensational drama.