If writing meant that, it was not worth doing - The Tunnel, fourth book of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage

The Tunnel (1919) by Dorothy Richardson, the fourth book in the Pilgrimage series, is what I will write about here.  There are always interesting things in these books.

1. Our autobiographical heroine is now in London, working in a dentist office and living in a little room in St. Pancras.  The genre of the novel is “young woman in the city.”  The previous novels, where Miriam was a teacher in Germany, a teacher in North London, and a governess, were all false starts, but Richardson, and thus presumably Miriam, will work as a secretary – office manager, maybe – for the dentists for ten years, so maybe this roman is finally going to start fleuving.

Three false starts in the first three novels is just one more reason why Richardson is neglected.  Patience testing.

2.  Richardson’s method continues to be relentlessly interiorized, inside Miriam’s head all the time, and fragmented, with lots of the usual writing that connects scene to scene missing.  The reader is tossed into the pool headfirst, over and over again.  A mass of material results – lots of extraordinary social detail, like all of the stuff where Miriam learns to ride a bicycle, and lots of questionable but at least provocative thinking from young Miriam.  I have been wondering, though, how it is all being shaped by Richardson.  Really, if it is shaped.  My prejudice is that all else equal, shaped is more artful than unshaped.

Both Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf reviewed The Tunnel in 1919.  Both were, at that point, the authors of one book each, so this is early, before their major works.  But I assume they were both better readers than I am, and both vote that Richardson’s novels are unshaped.

Mansfield: “Only we feel that until these things are judged and given each its appointed place in the whole scheme, they have no meaning in the world of art.”

Woolf: “We want to be rid of realism, to penetrate beneath it, and further require that Miss Richardson shall fashion this new material into something which has the shapeliness of the old accepted forms.”

These are both positive, if skeptical, reviews.  Many thanks to Neglected Books for collecting these reviews among so much other useful material.

3.  In real life, Richardson reconnected with a high school friend around this time (1894 if I am dating the time of the novel correctly).  The friend was recently married to a young writer who turned out to be H. G. Wells.  I mean, he always was, but in 1894 he had not yet published a novel, just a mass of short stories and newspaper writing, so he was not yet, you know, H. G. Wells.  Anyway, this sounds so unlikely to me, but it happened, and if it happened it went into Pilgrimage, so there is some fascinating stuff about Miriam hanging around with the Wells circle.

One way Pilgrimage is perhaps shaped is as a portrait of the artist as a young woman, and much of that theme is developed in the “Wells” chapter.  For example:

[T]he business of the writer was imagination, not romantic imagination, but realism, fine realism, the truth about ‘the savage,’ about all the past and present, the avoidance of cliché . . . what was cliché? . . . (Ch. 6, 122 ellipses in original)

Rows and rows of ‘fine’ books; nothing but men sitting in studies doing something cleverly, being very important, ‘men of letters’; and looking out for approbation.  If writing meant that, it was not worth doing. (Ch. 6, 130)

To write books, knowing all about style, would be to become like a man.  Women who wrote books and learned these things would be absurd and would make men absurd.  (Ch. 6, 131)

Many great lines in Chapter 6.

I’ll save #4 for tomorrow.  Zola and Gissing tomorrow.

Base immediacies fouled the truth - Wells's comet-induced Year Zero - books, countless books, too

The story of In the Days of the Comet – the one where the maddened socialist tries to murder his girlfriend under the green glow of a comet – is told in retrospect by the murderer.  Or not told, but written in his old age, because, he says, he had always wanted to write a book.  He frequently addresses young readers, suggesting or insisting that they will not understand what he has written about politics, violence, poverty, religion, privacy, and so on, all of which has been eliminated.

Now you must understand that the world of thought in those days was in the strangest condition, it was choked with obsolete inadequate formula, it was tortuous to a maze-like degree with secondary contrivances and adaptations, suppressions, conventions, and subterfuges.  Base immediacies fouled the truth on every man’s lips.  (I.1.2)

Wells does not cheat.  He spends the last third of the novel describing the creation of the world-wide Utopia, all caused by the mysterious gases of the comet that has hit or rather enveloped the Earth.  Human nature is instantly changed, making all – all – people pacifists and collectivists.  It is the end of ownership, war, crime, and churches.  Maybe the worst part of this section is an argument about free love, essentially, that strains against but is defeated by Edwardian sensibilities.  By which I mean, Wells is either craven or confused on this point, or wants me to think that he is.

Otherwise, he is bold.  Wells makes the comet a Year Zero, after which all is new.  Humankind spends its first two years tearing down almost every city and building on the planet and replacing them with cities of reason.

Most of our public buildings we destroyed and burnt as we reshaped our plan of habitation, our theater sheds, our banks, and inconvenient business warrens, our factories (these in the first year of all), and all the “unmeaning repetition” of silly little sham Gothic  churches and meeting-houses, mean looking shells of stone and mortar without love, invention, or any beauty at all in them, that men had thrust into the face of their sweated God, even as they thrust cheap food into the mouths of their sweated workers; all these we also swept away in the course of that first decade.  (II.3.1)

But that is not all.  Into the bonfires go “great oil paintings, done to please the half-educated middle-class,” “a gross multitude of silly statuettes and decorative crockery, and hangings, and embroideries, and bad music, and musical instruments,” and “books, countless books, too”:

And it seemed to me that when we gathered those books and papers together, we gathered together something more than print and paper, we gathered warped and crippled ideas and contagious base suggestions, the formulae of dull tolerances and stupid impatiences, the mean defensive ingenuities of sluggish habits of thinking and timid and indolent evasions.  There was more than a touch of malignant satisfaction for me in helping gather it all together.

By this point if not before a horrified reader may either deem Wells insane or realize that In the Days of the Comet is a Lucianic satire, a book that deliberately undermines its own arguments.  It is, in the great tradition of literary Utopias, sneakily anti-Utopian.  The central premise of the novel is that a workable pacifist socialism is only possible with a massive, universal change in human nature as caused by, for example, a magic comet.  This was not an argument I expected from H. G. Wells.  He is subtle, or devilish.

He also misses, or hides, the best part of his own invention.  The narrator wonders about the strange chance that brought green, gassy salvation to his planet, but of course the atmosphere-altering comet did not collide with the Earth by chance.  It was a weapon.  It was obviously a weapon, but one so fiendish that it not only disarms its victims but removes their ability to understand that it was a weapon.  As the novel ends, unknown to the rabbit-like humans, their alien enslavers draw near.

“Let me only kill!” - In the Days of the Comet by H. G. Wells

In the Days of the Comet (1906) is an H. G. Wells novel in which a comet passes the earth, releasing a gas that permanently makes humans, all of them – in fact all air-breathing animals – pacifists and economic collectivists, allowing for the establishment of a worldwide communist Utopia.

You might note that this novel comes several years after the famous Wells science fiction novels from the late 1890s.  Perhaps there is something in my description that explains why this one is not so famous.

Yes, perhaps.  Yet it is mostly quite good, as well or better written than the earlier novels, if less inventive.  Some of the political writing threatens to turn the book into an Edwardian period piece, but other ideas retain interest.

Most of the book, its actual story, is about a young labor radical, Willie, whose steady girl jilts him for a poshie, not just because the rival is rich but because the narrator’s politics have made him a bit of a pill.  Willie is driven into a murderous rage:

“Let me only kill!” I cried.  “Let me only kill!” (Bk. I, Ch. 4, Sub 1)

Frankly, he presents himself as a psychopath.  Meanwhile, a green, gassy comet is approaching, growing ever more visible and brighter, allowing Wells to play with his paint box:

It turned our ugly English industrial towns to phantom cities.  Everywhere the local authorities discontinued street lighting – one could read small print in the glare, – and so at Monkshampton I went about through pale, white, unfamiliar streets, whose electric globes had shadows on the path.  Lit windows here and there burnt ruddy orange, like holes cut in some dream curtain that hung before a furnace. A policeman with noiseless feet showed me an inn woven of moonshine, a green-faced man opened to us, and there I abode the night.  And the next morning it opened with a mighty clatter, and was a dirty little beerhouse that stank of beer, and there was a fat and grimy landlord with red spots upon his neck, and much noisy traffic going by on the cobbles outside.  (I.5.1)

The shadows of the streetlamps are a fine touch, one of many in the book.

Meanwhile (another meanwhile), war erupts between Britain and Germany, a war as realistically intricate and pointless as the one that would actually occur eight years later.  Wells the pacifist knew his subject.  He is particularly good describing a naval action that uncannily prefigures the 1915 Battle of Dogger Banks.  But at that time everyone interested in international politics was obsessed with the new-fangled massive battleships, the way we had to be experts in nuclear deterrence strategy to keep up in the 1980s.  Wells-the-prophet scores some points.

Willie’s lunatic (cometic?) drive to murder his ex-girlfriend provides plenty of narrative drive as the novel moves along, as does the impending and then active war, as does the comet that’s about to hit the Earth.  Maybe that is too much narrative drive.  There is a culminating scene where the madman is chasing his ex, shooting at her, while a naval battle is occurring in the background, all in the weird green light of a comet that will save mankind (the story is retrospective, so that we know) any minute now.  Pretty wild.

Then comes tomorrow’s subject, world peace, communal dining, and bonfires of books.  Utopia.

as it is written in the book – as it is written in the book : ghost stories by Kipling, Wells, and M. R. James

I don’t know if A. S. Byatt’s Oxford Book of English Short Stories is truly eccentric or if I am imposing a pattern suggested by her clever misdirection.  But she says she developed a “dislike for the ‘well-made tale’” (xvi), and I see the evidence of it.  She likes stories that go screwy, that take a big swerve.  Hey, me too.  And she likes fantasy stories of many types.  I’ll glance at three of those, three ghost stories.

The M. R. James selection, “Two Doctors” (1919, maybe), is the most traditional ghost story, or else has no ghost at all but rather perhaps some other kind of hobgoblin.  Some readers might remember that two years ago I spent a week reading ghost stories, which was instructive even if I was “shaken a bit by the fact that 75% of the ghost stories I read this week were about haunted bedrooms and the mysterious movements of bedclothes.”  Hey, guess what’s in “Two Doctors”?  I can’t even.  This time it’s a pillow.

“Under the Knife” (1896) by H. G. Wells is a science fantasy on the theme of anesthesia.  The ghost is the narrator, who, certain that he will die during surgery, has what we now call a near-death experience, first watching his own surgery before dying – this is where the story swerves – and being flung into the cosmos:

At last a quarter of the heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered together.  It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o'-lantern driven by the wind.  I had come out into the wilderness of space.  Ever the vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me on every side.  (136-7)

I have doubts about that jack-o’-lantern.  Maybe I should have saved this story for Halloween.  The cosmic journey climaxes with a vision of God, or perhaps Steve Ditko’s Eternity (see left).  Alan Moore pilfers the scene for Swamp Thing #50.  This is why people come to Wuthering Expectations.

In Rudyard Kipling’s “’Wireless’” (1902), the ghost is John Keats, or the electromagnetic spirit of radio, or some mix of both.  Whatever the source, which is never resolved, much of the latter half of the story is a description of a fellow in a trance composing Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” as uncanny a performance as I have ever seen a fictional ghost pull off.

He repeated it once more, using ‘blander’ for ‘smoother’ in the second line; then wrote it down without erasure, but this time (my set eyes missed no stroke of any word) he submitted ‘soother’ for his atrocious second thought, so that it came away under his hand as it is written in the book – as it is written in the book.  (123)

This ought to be the dullest story ever written.  We watch one fellow write a poem while another tinkers with a radio. But that was not my experience.  The story is of course a parable about creativity as Kipling saw it – magic and science, good luck and hard thinking, what is right in front of me plus what no one has ever seen.

Other things are doubtful, but that is certain - some Wellsian political allegory, and even some science

Two more modes or lodes or nodes Wells uses in The First Men in the Moon.  Politics and science.

The novel is not just an excuse for inventing wondrous atmospheric explosions and moon sunrises and so on.  It is also an anti-imperialist allegory.  Not a bad one at that, although Wells makes one really cheap decision.  His moon is, it turns out, abundant with gold.  Sure, why not gold.

"On the other hand, here's gold knocking about like cast iron at home.  If only we can get some of it back, if only we can find our sphere again before they do, and get back, then –“

“Yes?”

“We might put the thing on a sounder footing.  Come back in a bigger sphere with guns.”

“Good Lord!” cried Cavor, as though that was horrible.  (Ch. 18)

Cavor is the scientist, at once narrowly devoted to the cause of knowledge yet in the end much more of a humanist than the narrator who is always wishing for guns.  He wants to conquer the moon people and plunder their resources, an impulse that he feels is entirely natural, while the scientist just wants to study them.  Here we see that  Cavor has joined a Committee for the Abolition of War:

“Sooner or later it must come out, even if other men rediscover it.  And then ... Governments and powers will struggle to get hither, they will fight against one another, and against these moon people; it will only spread warfare and multiply the occasions of war.  In a little while, in a very little while, if I tell my secret, this planet to its deepest galleries will be strewn with human dead.  Other things are doubtful, but that is certain.”  (Ch. 18, italics in original)

It was really the spears that caught my attention, though.  The moon people are a highly advanced, tightly organized society that fights with spears.  The Anglo-Zulu Wars were fought in 1879, not that long before the novel was written.  I suppose there are other relevant colonial conflicts.  I don’t know.

The science – that actual science.  Wells was trained as a biologist.  Jules Verne wanted him to be an engineer, but in The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau and The War of the Worlds, the scientific principle under investigation is that of Charles Darwin.  In The First Men in the Moon Wells ingeniously prefigures sociobiology.  The moon people are part of a superorganism, an ant colony that has evolved to the point of employing language and advanced technology by means of extreme specialization, each individual “exquisitely adapted to the social need it meets” (Ch. 24).  Wells is the prophet of E. O. Wilson.

These two strands, the political and sociobiological, are combined at the novel’s end, as the scientist fumblingly explains to the big-brained ruler of the moon ants impossible concepts like nations, democracy (“When I had done he ordered cooling sprays upon his brow”, Ch. 25), and war.  However extraneous the satire, Wells does fold it back into the plot in the last few pages.  He is still a novelist more than a reformer at this point.  The scientist becomes the simian snake in the moon ant Eden, destroying their innocence and leading them to commit their first act of war.

The sequel can be found in what must now be hundreds of science fiction novels, stories, and movies.

towards the edges magnified and unreal - Wells writes well

The two lunonauts land their gravo-sphere in a moon crater just before sunrise.  Wells imagines that the moon’s atmosphere freezes into a kind of snow during the two weeks of darkness, and then rapidly, almost explosively returns to its gaseous state when the sun reappears.

The sunlight had crept down the cliff, it touched the drifted masses at its base and incontinently came striding with seven-leagued boots towards us. The distant cliff seemed to shift and quiver, and at the touch of the dawn a reek of gray vapour poured upward from the crater floor, whirls and puffs and drifting wraiths of gray, thicker and broader and denser, until at last the whole westward plain was steaming like a wet handkerchief held before the fire, and the westward cliffs were no more than refracted glare beyond.

This is a sample of Chapter 7, “A Sunrise on the Moon.”  Besides an element of chemical thermodynamics, and a bit of literal atmospherics (“shift and quiver”) this is just good invention and good writing.  No amount of science plops that wet handkerchief into the crater.

Much of the chapter is similar.  In the next chapter, the plants pop up, which is just as good.  “Beyond, out of gullies and flats that had been hidden from us, but not from the quickening sun, over reefs and banks of shining rock, a bristling beard of spiky and fleshy vegetation was straining into view, hurrying tumultuously to take advantage of the brief day in which it must flower and fruit and seed again and die.”

All of this seen “you must bear in mind… through a thick bent glass, distorting it as things are distorted by a lens, acute only in the centre of the picture, and very bright there, and towards the edges magnified and unreal” (Ch. 8).

Even if it is all made up, what reader does not want to see the creation of the moon-air?  I know the answer to that question: readers who claim to have no visual sensibility and skim or skip descriptive passages.  The rest of us will take that last phrase – “magnified and unreal” – as literal within the story but also a metaphor about how we are reading and what we are imagining.

Just thinking about these descriptive flourishes, I would call The First Men in the Moon the best written of the Wells novels I have read.

It is also the most comic – the most purely comic – a result, as I mentioned yesterday, of the necessity of winking at the long tradition of moon journeys.  Between the jokes and the nuggets of especially good writing, the novel was a treat.

Wells had a couple more modes which I will save for tomorrow, plus the adventure story mode which I will skip as more standard stuff.

Let me get these curiosities out of the way here.  Did you know that Jack Kirby stole the huge-brained, tentacled Kree Supreme Intelligence directly from The First Men in the Moon, Chapter 25, “the enhaloed supreme intelligence that hovered above me”?  Now I am talking about superhero comics.  Between one and zero Wuthering Expectations readers care about this.  Tolkien fans may want to compare certain passages from the flight through the caves in Chapters 15 through 16 to certain passages in the “Mines of Moria” section of The Fellowship of the Ring.

“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. - The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells - but he was not a reader of fiction

What I should be doing is continuing on with Ibsen, writing about his ungainly ten act masterpiece Emperor and Galilean.  But at some point I took a break from Ibsen to read The First Men in the Moon (1901) by H. G. Wells, so now I will take a break to write about it.  Easier to read, easier, to summarize, easier to bat around.

Summary:  An absent-minded scientist, Cavor, invents an anti-gravity metal, Cavorite.  For some reason the first thing he does with it is fly to the moon.  For some other reason he takes a venal bankrupt with a fancy prose style with him.  The men are captured by the moon-men, the Selenites, and taken to their phosphorescent moon-caves.  Thus the puzzling preposition in the novel’s title.  Wells wrote “in” and meant it.  The bankrupt escapes and writes a shocking and, frankly, almost unbelievable memoir about his experiences.

The literary tradition of trips to the moon goes back at least to Lucian’s True History (2nd century), where the method of transport is a whirlwind.  A knight in Orlando Furioso (1532) gets to the moon by hippogriff.  Jules Verne shot his astronauts to the moon with a giant cannon, much like Georges Méliès did in A Trip to the Moon (1902).

“That's perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed.  That, of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have to be a valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without much loss of air.”

“Like Jules Verne's thing in A Trip to the Moon.”

But Cavor was not a reader of fiction.  (Ch.  3)

The 1993 Everyman paperback I read has a lot of baffling stuff about the reaction to this particular Wells novel, a lot of nonsense about science and Wells as a “prophet,” even though a trip to the moon is less of an original prophecy than anything Wells had written before.  The passage above is a winking acknowledgment.

Yet Jules Verne insists the science is on his side, as he says in a 1903 interview:

I make use of physics.  He invents.  I go to the moon in a cannonball, discharged from a cannon.  Here there is no invention.  He goes to Mars [?] in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation.  That’s all very well but show me this metal.  Let him produce it.  (p. 189)

Yes, H., why do you not produce the magical metal?  Verne, after all, produced the giant cannon.  He must have.  Otherwise his challenge makes no sense.  Charitably, I take all of this an amusing hoax on gullible readers.  Less charitably, I fear Verne believed himself – “Here there is no invention.”

The Wells novel is almost nothing but invention, some of it absolutely marvelous, some of it satirical and even political, some of it just for laughs.  The First Men in the Moon is a fifth book of Gulliver’s Travels, or Alice in Lunarland, or the teleplay for Laurel and Hardy in Space.  I am not sure who should play the scientist, Laurel or Hardy.  The movie would work either way.

There is even some science, although not where it seems it should be.  Ignore Verne’s misdirection.  Remember The Time Machine (1895) and so on.

I might be able to avoid Ibsen for several days with this piece of fluff.

The quotation in the title is from Chapter 13.

It will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me - ghost stories by H. G. Wells and F. Marion Crawford

“The Upper Berth” (1886) by F. Marion Crawford and “The Red Room” (1896) by H. G. Wells.  The titles link the stories – both are in the “spend the night in a haunted house” ghost story sub-genre, sub-sub-genre “haunted room.”  If you are thinking that I’m slicing things a little thin, you are correct.  But I’m not the one who wrote the stories.

Crawford sets his ghost story on a passenger liner, and the haunted room is actually a haunted cabin.  A surprising amount of space is given to the mechanics of a cabin porthole which refuses to stay closed:

My eyes were riveted upon the porthole.  It seemed to me that the brass loop-nut was beginning to turn slowly upon the screw – so slowly, however, that I was not sure it turned at all.

One of the great benefits of the ghost story is that it forces writers to pay such close attention to objects and spaces and movement – a brass loop-nut, you don’t say.  Ghost stories are often so pleasingly material, much like good mysteries.

“The Upper Berth” is written like a mystery, and is a cousin of the “locked room” mystery sub-genre.  The narrator and his assistants dismantle the cabin’s furniture and test the walls to make sure there are no secret passages.  I have been wondering how some of these stories would seem if a reader did not suspect that they were ghost stories.  If I had not encountered Crawford in The English Book of Ghost Stories I might have read it looking for clues to the puzzle rather than signs of the supernatural.  I might have been disappointed by the ending, since an immaterial ghost is not really such an ingenious solution to a locked-room mystery.

Now, to read “The Upper Berth” this way I also would have had to skip the two-page frame in which I am directly told that this is a story about how the narrator saw a ghost.

H. G. Wells is even more direct in “The Red Room,” beginning the story with this:

"I can assure you," said I, "that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me."  And I stood up before the fire with a glass in my hand.

"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, and glanced at me askance.

The first line is pure irony.  The idea that a tangible ghost is more frightening than an intangible one is just the kind of youthful hubris a ghost story is meant to deflate.  This particular narrator, though, unlike Crawford’s, seems to overestimate his steadiness and rationality.  He is practically reduced to hysterics by the shadows in the corridor outside of the haunted room:

A bronze group stood upon the landing hidden from me by a corner of the wall; but its shadow fell with marvelous distinctness upon the white paneling, and gave me the impression of some one crouching to waylay me.  The thing jumped upon my attention suddenly.  I stood rigid for half a moment, perhaps.  Then, with my hand in the pocket that held the revolver, I advanced, only to discover a Ganymede and Eagle, glistening in the moonlight.  That incident for a time restored my nerve, and a dim porcelain Chinaman on a buhl table, whose head rocked as I passed, scarcely startled me.

And we still have another paragraph before he sets foot in the room.  “Scarcely startled” – it’s gonna be a long night, kid.

Wells does something curious and irritating at the very end of the story.  Questioned about his bad night, which had already been described in detail to the story’s reader, the narrator turns to allegory.  What was in the room? 

"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal men," said I; "and that is, in all its nakedness --Fear!"

Crawford’s narrator, late in his story, specifically tells us he was frightened.  M. R. James did the same thing; so did Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.  I wonder why this is necessary.

But this was not a method, it was an idea - science and The Invisible Man

Here comes science fiction book #3.  Ideally it would round out and definitively prove my arguments about science fiction, but I fear it does not.  The Invisible Man (1897 – I have returned safely to the 19th century) is barely a science fiction novel at all.  I have been calling science fiction a branch of fantasy; the Wells novel at least supports that argument.

Oh sure, there is plenty of science.  Whatta ya call this if not science?

I found a general principle of pigments and refraction – a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions.  Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of molecular physics…  But this was not a method, it was an idea, that might lead to a method by which it would be possible, without changing any other property of matter – except, in some instances colours – to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air – so far as all practical purposes are concerned.  (Ch. 19)

Just ask this scientician! (Warning, the link talks).  The invisible man might as well be a practitioner of alchemy for all it would matter in the novel.  And if Wells had any actual interest in science he would not make the invisible man a sociopath.  That decision kinda narrows the possibilities of the story.

Yet The Invisible Man is an entirely different creature than the kind of dream-fantasy George MacDonald or Lewis Carroll wrote.  The invisibility is magic but once that is granted the rest of the novel proceeds logically.  The section describing Mr. Invisible’s frustration with his superpower is especially amusing:

"I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again."

"I never thought of that," said Kemp.

"Nor had I.  And the snow had warned me of other dangers.  I could not go abroad in snow – it would settle on me and expose me.  Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man – a bubble.  And fog – I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad – in the London air – I gathered dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin.  (Ch. 23)

This, to me, was among the finest inventions in the novel, the image of the ambulatory man-shaped bubble of air pollution (quaintly called “fog” in olden times).  The business about eating refers back to an earlier memorable scene, in which an observer notes  that Mr. Invisible has been eating cheese and bread.  Ick!  Fortunately the superpower conceals his excretory tract.  Our standards of permissibility have made one of the novel’s shocks invisible.  I do not know another Victorian novel that spends so much time emphasizing – concealing but by concealing revealing – digestion and male nudity.

The face of Mr. Cuss was angry and resolute, but his costume was defective, a sort of limp white kilt that could only have passed muster in Greece. "Hold him!" he bawled. "He's got my trousers! And every stitch of the Vicar's clothes!"  (Ch. 12)

The invisible man flees the dangerous city for an English village, which is where the real fun lies.  He is, at his worst, just one naked maniac, but he acts as a chaos seed in the quiet, orderly villages.  Coordination against him is impossible, plans collapse, and no one seems to realize that blankets would make decent weapons.

I suppose The War of the Worlds (1898) repeats the idea.  In both novels, the peaceful English countryside is disrupted; in one case the threat is small, in the other enormous.  Comic rather than sublime.  Blissfully free of ideas, except perhaps that the English villager will, after several clumsy missteps, come through in the end.

H. G. Wells and writing about plot

I had not really planned to write more about H. G. Wells, and tomorrow I will move on to an even duller writer, but I thought of something I want to say about the plots of the Wells novels.

Plots are information delivery systems.  Wells has cooked up a mixture of ideas, images, set pieces, cool things, and, potentially, at least, characters.  He needs to arrange them in a sensible manner.  With The War of the Worlds, a number of steps are pretty well fixed by the choice of story.  The Martians arrive, spread, are resisted, defeat the resistance.  These two steps can be repeated as long as the writer thinks the reader can stand it, although the scale of the threat and the ingenuity of the resistance have to ratchet up each time.  Wells really only does this twice.  Two more steps: victory belongs to the Martians!  Or not!

But the problems have only multiplied.  How does Well describe each of these steps?  Does he tell the story as if he is floating in the air, going wherever he wants?  Is he a historian, retrospectively assembling imaginary sources?  How about an eyewitness account?  Wells chooses the latter, which allows a lot of immediacy and surprise, but creates new dilemmas.

The narrator is present at the point of invasion, and presumably survives long enough to write up his account – in fact, Wells tells us on the third page that the “storm burst upon us six years ago now,” so we know the narrator will give us a complete story.  No “and as I pen these last words, they come for me” and ominous final sentence fragment.

How likely is it that one person observes all of the steps of the story?  Not too likely, so Wells has to bend a bit.  In particular, Wells wants to see how the invasion looks from London, leading to the great “Exodus from London” chapter.  He switches to the narrator’s brother, or, really, the narrator switches to tell us what happened to his brother.  He also, as he sees fit, refers to newspapers and some “as we now know” information.  Wells also drops the narrator into one extraordinarily unlikely coincidence which gives him some privileged information, and explains why he, of all people, is writing this particular book.

Some features of the plot make Wells’s life easier.  Characters, fleeing the Martians, wander the countryside, allowing Wells to have his narrator meet anyone he wants.  The reader won’t mind the coincidence – any encounter is coincidence.

I could repeat the same exercise with the efficient The Island of Dr. Moreau.  In the two and a half pages of the first chapter, we have a shipwreck, the threat of cannibalism, and the delivery of one piece of mysterious information, “a disconnected impression of a dark face with extraordinary eyes close to mine.”  No island yet, and no doctor, but Wells lets us know how we’re going to get to them, and gives us just one little clue about what to expect when we get there.

Readers, bloggers, often claim to care a lot about plot, even to read for plot.  I never quite believe them, because they so rarely write about plot, meaning the decisions a writer makes about plotting, which decisions are better and worse, what the consequences are.  Book bloggers write about characters, mostly; book groups discuss characters.  The creation of plausible imaginary people who we can get to know in a uniquely intimate way is the greatest achievement of prose fiction, so this is as it should be.  Plots give those characters something to do. 

Except in, for example, science fiction novels by H. G. Wells, where the characters are simply useful cogs in the plot machine.  The three Wells books I have read all feature nearly identical narrators, dullish fellows.   Dull first-person narrators result in occasional dull passages.  Or do the dull passages result in dull narrators?   Perhaps, in the kind of wild stories Wells writes, a dull narrator is a necessity.  I mean, the dang Martians are invading!  What more do I want?

this dear vast dead city of mine - smashed cities

I’m reading H. G. Wells because of Gustave Flaubert.  Salammbô ends with the siege and near-destruction of Carthage.  Any number of details evoked the horrific 1870 Siege of Paris, but since Flaubert’s novel was published in 1862 that event was probably not a source for the book.  Probably.  The siege of Sevastopol, though, during the Crimean War, now that’s a possibility.  Don’t miss young officer Tolstoy’s Sevastopol Sketches (1855-6).

So I began casting about for other fiction about the destruction of cities.  Thus, London-as-toxic-waste site in After London (1885).  Or, London eroded by the passage of eons in The Time Machine (1895).  Or, London pulverized by Martians a few years later.  I’m pretty sure Wells levels London at least once more, in The World Set Free / The Last War (1914), this time with atomic weapons – or so I guess, since I have just glanced through it at the library.

Then there’s a related path, books leading to more books, exploring exotic North African cities and satirical Utopias, but set that aside.  What smashed up 19th century cities am I forgetting?  Great fires, perhaps?  Plagues?  We are so used to our cities and monuments being demolished by cinematic aliens and tidal waves and so on now.  Ho hum.  I'm trying to recapture the excitement.

Parts of 19th century London, the poorer, cholera-ridden sections, may not have literally been poisonous swamps, but the metaphor was close enough.  As economic specialization spread, as wealth concentrated in cities, and as the urban populations exploded, I am guessing that European writers began to see how cities were not just the centers of civilization, but in some ways the weakest parts.  No cities, no civilization – I know, an etymological tautology, but I wonder if disasters like the bombardments of Paris and Sevastopol made the fragility of cities more obvious.

London actually comes off fairly well in The War of the Worlds.  It’s the suburb of Woking that really gets the business, although they seem to have forgiven their enemies (do click, oh, do).  Wells does not destroy London, but instead indulges in the “empty city” fantasy, allowing the hero to wander through an abandoned metropolis.  I saw part of a recent Will Smith movie that did the same thing.  The idea stretches back to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), at least.  Leafing through the book, looking at chapter II.8., “Dead London,” I see that the scene where the narrator explores a silent, empty London is only a couple of pages long.  Too bad – it’s good, but Wells has a story to wind up.  And ending in London allows this:

The dome of St. Paul's was dark against the sunrise, and injured, I saw for the first time, by a huge gaping cavity on its western side.

And as I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and churches, silent and abandoned; as I thought of the multitudinous hopes and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build this human reef, and of the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I realised that the shadow had been rolled back, and that men might still live in the streets, and this dear vast dead city of mine be once more alive and powerful, I felt a wave of emotion that was near akin to tears.

removed his boot, shook out a pebble, and hobbled on again - England Invaded! Thousands Flee London!

More chronicling of what I didn’t know.  The War of the Worlds (1898) was not near the beginning of a genre, but merely earlyish, if the genre is not science fiction but English invasion literature, which was launched in 1871 by George Chesney, author of The Battle of Dorking.  Germans invade England; England resists; England triumphs - no, England is conquered!  I haven’t read it.  Sampling a page or two, it looks like a curiosity, literary wargaming.

Chesney is obviously responding directly to the Franco-Prussian War and the horrors of the Siege of Paris, fresh in the mind, or the newspapers, at the time.  Replacing the German or French army with Martians is not exactly a minor adaptation – the hundreds of subsequent stories of alien invasion could exist in ignorance of The Battle of Dorking, but not of Wells.  Sparkling Squirrel reminds me that one of the best, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), actually features invaders who are clever blends of the original Martians and the invasive weed they bring with them.

The strange experience, reading The War of the Worlds, was the feeling that I was reading a novel about World War I.  I’m thinking not so much of the poison gas attacks, although there are those, but of the extraordinary chapter I.16, “The Exodus from London,” which is almost generic, in the sense that it in no way requires invading Martians.  London will soon be attacked; an unprepared populace flees; the result is chaos and disaster.  I wonder if, sixteen or seventeen years later, Belgians fleeing Brussels, or refugees from any number of other cities in Europe, felt any déjà vu, if they thought “I’m living through that scene in War of the Worlds!”

They began to meet more people.  For the most part these were staring before them, murmuring indistinct questions, jaded, haggard, unclean.  One man in evening dress passed them on foot, his eyes on the ground.  They heard his voice, and, looking back at him, saw one hand clutched in his hair and the other beating invisible things.  His paroxysm of rage over, he went on his way without once looking back.

That’s pretty good.

A little old man, with a grey military moustache and a filthy black frock coat, limped out and sat down beside the trap, removed his boot - his sock was blood-stained - shook out a pebble, and hobbled on again; and then a little girl of eight or nine, all alone, threw herself under the hedge close by my brother, weeping.

Also pretty good.  I guess we are used to scenes like this now, from movies, movies about wars and perhaps even alien invasions.  And for all too many people, all over the world today, from experience.  My imagination fails.  Thus the usefulness of fiction, of H. G. Wells.

Its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe - invasive species and Victorian ecosystem fiction

The Old Book Conundrum:  I make startling discoveries that are already well known to anyone who cares about the subject.  I plant my flag on the peak, not noticing the other flags, and the little book in the tin box which has been signed by thousands of other climbers, and the little café that sells hot cocoa and strudel.

Everyone already knew, yes, that in early English science fiction much of the “science” under discussion was Darwinism?  I had no idea.  I guess I thought it was all about machines.  The inventor in The Time Machine (1895) invents a time machine.  The invading Martians in The War of the Worlds (1898) crush humanity with their ray guns and space dreadnoughts and ansibles and whatnot.  Perhaps Jules Verne really is a bit more about machines?  Like I know from Jules Verne.

The time machine of The Time Machine is not related to science in any way – it’s pure fantasy.  Necessary, though, because H. G. Wells correctly understood the time scale of Darwinism.  If he wanted big evolutionary changes, he needed millions of years.  Thus, a veneer of time travel was draped over a story about advantageous evolutionary traits and natural selection.  Thus, the strange decision of the time traveler to constantly push forward – I hardly see how, for the sake of the story, Wells needed the final vision of the entropic death of the Earth.  But that scene, stripped of human content, is the thematic climax of the novel, and the best thing in the book.

Richard Jefferies explored new Darwinian ideas in After London, or Wild England (1885) by eliminating the machines altogether, regressing to medieval technology.  He was working on the idea of the ecosystem, although he did not yet have that word.  His novel was, in part, a mental experiment:  remove human pressure on the environment, and see what happens to fields, forests, rivers, wildlife, and, not least importantly, humans.  I’m sure a modern biologist would find it all too simple, but I was able to detect Jefferies’s excitement about the idea that it all fits together.  Or perhaps the new idea was that the system is dynamic, but coherent and understandable.

Wells was studying the ecosystem, too, in The War of the Worlds, this time by introducing invasive species.  I knew about the highly evolved Martians, of course, but not about the other invasive species:

[T]he seeds which the Martians (intentionally or accidentally) brought with them gave rise in all cases to red-coloured growths.  Only that known popularly as the red weed, however, gained any footing in competition with terrestrial forms…  It spread up the sides of the pit by the third or fourth day of our imprisonment, and its cactus-like branches formed a carmine fringe to the edges of our triangular window.  And afterwards I found it broadcast throughout the country, and especially wherever there was a stream of water.  (II.2.)

The red weed spreads throughout the novel, until it, too, succumbs to the clever ecological trick ending, when the terrestrial ecosystem strikes back.

I have not read any other Wells.  I would guess that The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) has more of this, while The Invisible Man (1897) does not, although I am probably wrong.  The novel about bicycles is presumably really about bicycles, maybe?

A day or two more, I guess, poking at the hideous corpses of the Martians.

The Best Books of the Year - 1909

Every year at Wuthering Expectations at this time, I look back 200 years and mourn the heroic deaths of all of the good books that have been culled by the fine-toothed winnowing machine that is time.

Or I am mocking people who make Best of 2009 lists.  Whatever.  That's not my point.

Perhaps I am cheating by going back so far.  Perhaps the first decade of the 19th century was unusually bad for literature.  That might be true.  But in my judgment, there is more to it.  The winnowing process, however it works, has pretty much run its course after 200 years.  Older books can still receive more or less attention - the process never entirely ends - but much of what will be, is.  Look back one hundred years, and the process is more visible.

Warning: from, here on out, I don't know what I'm talking about.  Nevertheless, my guess about the current status of the literature of 1909 gives me the following list of fiction:

Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten
Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
Jack London, Martin Eden
H. G. Wells, Ann Veronica and Tono-Bungay.

I have read none of those.  I have read Sholem Aleichem's Wandering Stars, and Lamed Shapiro's single best story is from 1909. 

I don't know how to judge the children's books that came out this year:  Gene Stratton-Porter's The Girl of the Limberlost, or Lucy Montgomery's Anne of Avonlea, or Frank Baum's The Road to Oz (altough I have read that one).   Kids' books follow a different path. These are all still read, certainly, probably more than those Wells or London novels.

William Carlos Williams's first book of poetry was self-published in 1909.  Ezra Pound released two little collections.  My Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2, Third Edition, politely ignores both books, as does the Library of America Selected Poems of WCW.  The first book of the modern Greek poet Angelos Sikelianos seems to be genuinely important, but now I have moved from ignorance to total ignorance.  How about Thomas Hardy's Time's Laughingstock, and Other Verses?  Or George Meredith's Last Poems?

I want to read all of these, at least the one's that are for adults.  But I doubt many will be read by non-scholars one hundred years from now.  Meaning, I predict that Tevye the Dairyman will still be read, and that there will be Sholem Aleichem scholars, and that some of them will read dusty old copies of Wandering Stars.  Same goes for some of the others, maybe all of them.

Have I cheated again, by picking a year that I knew in advance was thin?  Yes.

The 1909 painting is Both Members of This Club, by George Bellows.  Visitors to Washington, DC can see it in the National Gallery.