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INTRODUCTION TO

THE HAPPY TURNING BY H. G. WELLS

- COLIN WILSON (JUNE 06)

THE HAPPY TURNING, the last but one of H. G. Wells’s books, was written at the end of his life, when he was suffering from his final illness, the cancer of the liver that would kill him. Yet, unlike his last book, MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER, it is not a pessimistic work. On the contrary, it captures a mood of happy reminiscence when, suddenly freed from the sense of oppression brought about by the war, he experiences an odd sense of relaxation and happiness, as his unconscious mind decides to rescue him by sending interesting dreams.

Wells describes how he takes a daily walk from his home near Regent’s Park down to his club in Mayfair, and how, in his dreams, he has begun to find a turning that he has never seen before. He wanders in a pleasant dream world where anything can happen, including conversations with Jesus, who has harsh things to say about St Paul for inventing the religion that Shaw would label ‘Crosstianity’.

I was immediately reminded of an earlier story, written about 1910, called ‘The Door in the Wall’, which has always been a favourite of mine.

It is told to the narrator by a politician named Wallace, a member of the cabinet. He tells how, as a child of five, he was wandering down a street near his home in West Kensington when he saw a white wall, and a green door that stood open. And on the other side there was a magical garden, which even contained tame panthers who rubbed against him like friendly cats. He feels a ‘keen sense of homecoming’, and is met by a tall kind girl, who takes him by the hand. He meets other children and plays games, and a dreamy woman who shows him a book about himself. Then he finds himself back in the long grey street and back in a grey world.

He saw it again as a schoolboy, then passed it in a cab on his way to go up to Oxford, and again as a young man on his way to see his ladylove. He is always in a hurry and passes it. And now, he tells the narrator, he has seen it three times in a year. And has passed it each time, for political life holds out the prospect of success which he feels to be more important than that door ‘into peace and delight’. But next time, he tells the narrator, he will go through it.

He is found dead at the bottom of a deep shaft made by workmen. It has been surrounded by a fence with a door in it, which has accidentally been left open.

That story clearly connects Wells with the romantics of the 1890s, that ‘tragic generation’ Yeats wrote about, who rejected the real world as too coarse and stupid for the sensitive soul. But by the time he wrote it, Wells was a highly successful writer, the author not only of the early scientific romances, but of novels like THE HISTORY OF MR POLLY and TONO BUNGAY. At the age of 45, he may have felt a twinge of suspicion that he has also ‘sold out’ to success.

When my daughter Sally was about 5, we took her to see THE WIZARD OF OZ. And as we came out of the cinema she said with sudden conviction ‘I wish there was a land over the rainbow’. And suddenly I experienced that immense sadness of grasping how much children wish they didn’t have to grow up into this practical world that they don’t really like.

Was Wells, that remarkable prophet of things to come, really a romantic MANQUÉ? The other day, when preparing to write this Introduction, I selected half a dozen biographies of him off my shelf, and spent an afternoon browsing through them. And I realised with sudden clarity something that I had only half-grasped so far. For a man of genius—which he certainly was—Wells was curiously unsure of himself. Compare him, for example, with Joyce, and you see that he lacked a clear self-image. Stephen Dedalus has no doubt that he will be a writer of major importance. But in Wells’s self-portraits - in the cockney cyclist Hoopdriver in THE WHEELS OF CHANCE, who falls in love with a pretty middle-class runaway, or Kipps, who settles for the working-class Ann Pornick, or Mr Polly, who daydreams romantically of a pretty girl in a private school who betrays him by bringing her school friends to listen-in to his romantic declarations —we always feel that he holds a low opinion of himself. The endless love affairs for which he became notorious may be seen as attempts to reassure himself, and improve his self-image. By the time he came to write THE HAPPY TURNING in 1943, at the age of 77, he had reconciled himself to being a dying man whose life had been, in a sense, a failure.

But a strong self-image is essential for any real achievement. Bernard Shaw recognised that clearly and set out to create one from an early stage. Only his first novel IMMATURITY—written when he was 23 and unpublished for half a century—has the kind of vague, indeterminate hero we find in Wells. Then Shaw produced a series of novels in each of which he experiments with a new self-image, a hero possessed of inner-certainty and conviction, until he found what he was looking for in Sidney Trefusis, the ‘unsocial socialist’ in the novel of that title, and stuck with it. And Trefusis would reappear in the form of Shaw’s most loquacious and forceful hero John Tanner, in MAN AND SUPERMAN. But Wells never learned the trick, and was stuck with his diffident little cockney until he was too old to change.

The last reincarnation of his cockney hero occurs in one of his most curious and interesting novels, CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER, published in 1925, when Wells was nearly sixty. Mr Preemby is another of Wells’s modest little nonentities, who differs from Kipps and Mr Polly in suddenly deciding that he is more important than he had assumed. At a mock-séance in Tunbridge, someone pulls his leg by telling him that he is the incarnation of Sargon, the king of Sumeria; he then decides it is his destiny to bring peace to the world and free humankind from poverty and oppression. After wandering away from home and calling disciples, he is arrested, certified and placed in an asylum. He dies a few weeks after being rescued from it.

But this is not really a novel about a harmless little man going mad. Like Kipps and Polly, Preemby has always kept his imagination alive with books about Atlantis and the secrets of the pyramids and ancient Tibet. So what happens to him when he is told that he is a reincarnation of Sargon is a kind of awakening, such as happens to Mr Polly when he sets the house on fire and realises ‘If you don’t like your lie you can change it’ (a phrase that, in my teens, led me to leave home and take to the road.) Wells is saying that people like Mr Polly and Preemby do not know who they are. The one certain thing is that they are not Mr Polly and Preemby. And since Wells believes that, since the end of the Great War, mankind had entered a new phase, he feels that Preemby is one of any who are awakening to new consciousness. It is this that makes CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER in some ways one of his best novels.

Yet it also marked the beginning of a slowly increasing pessimism that would darken his last two decades. We can begin to understand that pessimism by looking at a novel he had written a year earlier, MEN LIKE GODS. Intended as a successor to the earlier A MODERN UTOPIA, this is the story of a group of distinguished people—including Balfour and Churchill—on their way to lunch at Windsor when they find themselves on a strange planet, having apparently passed through some fourth-dimensional window that has been engineered by the ‘Utopians’. Wells’s picture of this ‘ideal society’ is, quite simply, unbelievably boring, all sweetness and light and genetics. (Aldous Huxley wrote BRAVE NEW WORLD as a counterblast). Wells had simply failed to grasp that human beings need more than tidily-engineered lives to be happy: that they need some kind of creative effort and purpose. In MEN LIKE GODS, that early Wells of the scientific romances has simply run out of steam, and must have been aware of it.

CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER is an attempt to undo the damage, and return to a novel that has some heart and soul. It would be another ten years before Wells began to see the answer, and that came about in the opening pages of EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. (1934).

He begins: ‘I need freedom of mind. I need peace for work. I am distressed by immediate circumstances. My thoughts and work are encumbered by claims and vexations…’

He continues:

‘There is nothing I think very exceptional in my situation as a mental worker. Entanglement is our common lot. I believe this craving for a release from—bothers, from daily demands and urgencies, from responsibilities and tempting distractions, is shared by an increasing number of people who, with specialized and distinctive work to do, find themselves eaten up by first-hand affairs. This is the outcome of a specialization and a sublimation of interests that has become frequent only in the last century or so. Spaciousness and leisure, and even the desire for spaciousness and leisure, have so far been exceptional. Most individual creatures since life began, have been “up against it” all the time, have been driven continually by fear and cravings, have had to respond to the unresting antagonisms of their surroundings, and they have found a sufficient and sustaining interest in the drama of immediate events provided for them by these demands. Essentially, their living was continuous adjustment to happenings. Good hap and ill hap filled it entirely. They hungered and ate and they desired and loved; they were amused and attracted, they pursued or escaped, they were overtaken and they died.

‘But with the dawn of human foresight and with the appearance of a great surplus of energy in life such as the last century or so has revealed, there has been a progressive emancipation of the attention from everyday urgencies. What was once the whole of life has become, to an increasing extent, merely the background of life. People can ask now what would have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can say, “Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but—what do you do?”

‘Conceptions of living, divorced more and more from immediacy, distinguish the modern civilized man from all former life. In art, in pure science, in literature, for instance, many people find sustaining series of interests and incentives which have come at last to have a greater value for them than any primary needs and satisfactions. These primary needs are taken for granted. The everyday things of life become subordinate to these wider interests which have taken hold of them, and they continue to value everyday things, personal affections and material profit and loss, only in so far as they are ancillary to the newer ruling system of effort, and to evade or disregard them in so far as they are antagonistic or obstructive to that. And the desire to live as fully as possible within the ruling system of effort becomes increasingly conscious and defined.

‘The originative intellectual worker is not a normal human being and does not lead nor desire to lead a normal human life. He wants to lead a supernormal life.

‘Mankind is realizing more and more surely that to escape from individual immediacies into the less personal activities now increasing in human society is not, like games, reverie, intoxication or suicide, a suspension or abandonment of the primary life; on the contrary it is the way to power over that primary life which, though subordinated, remains intact. Essentially it is an imposition upon the primary life of a participation in the greater life of the race as a whole. In studies and studios and laboratories, administrative bureaus and exploring expeditions, a new world is germinated and develops. It is not a repudiation of the old but a vast extension of it, in a racial synthesis into which individual aims will ultimately be absorbed. We originative intellectual workers are reconditioning human life…

‘We are like early amphibians, so to speak, struggling out of the waters that have hitherto covered our kind, into the air, seeking to breathe in a new fashion and emancipate ourselves from long accepted and long unquestioned necessities. At last it becomes for us a case of air or nothing. But the new land has not yet definitively emerged from the waters and we swim distressfully in an element we wish to abandon. ( My italics.)

I do not now in the least desire to live longer unless I can go on with what I consider to be my proper business.’

I feel these are not only the most important words Wells ever wrote, but among the most important words written in the past century.

We can begin to understand the pessimism that gradually crept upon him. He felt that CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER was the last of his old ‘Wellsian’ novels, the novels of Wells the story-teller. Now he felt he had to find some new form, which would allow him to speak more directly to the reader. Its beginnings are already plain in CHRISTINA ALBERTA’S FATHER, especially its last chapters. After that, in novels like the vast WORLD OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD, he is earnestly addressing us rather than simply trying to entertain. Novels like THE AUTOCRACY OF MR PARHAM or THE BULPINGTON OF BLUP do not even attempt to compete with the early works. We almost need to call them by a new name – or perhaps borrow Graham Greene’s word ‘entertainments’. He is still capable of the occasional tremendous parable, like THE CROQUET PLAYER. But his main work is now to be found in books like WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH OUR LIVES, THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME and THE FATE OF HOMO SAPIENS. He wants to show us the way out of a situation that he feels is becoming increasingly dark.

Which is why, in late 1943, when he knew he was becoming increasingly ill, he began THE HAPPY TURNING. It is almost a return to ‘The Door in the Wall’, with one major difference. That story had been romantically pessimistic. The successful politician yearns for what he feels he abandoned. (In that respect it reminds us of Orson Welles’s CITIZEN KANE.) But now Wells feels he is near the end, and he is still facing that irritating loss of privacy as when he was writing the EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. But at least he finds that his dream life is offering him a kind of ‘door in the wall’. So he permits himself to fantasize about ‘a day when a cleansed and liberated world will take the Happy Turning in good earnest and pass out of the base and angry conflicts that distract us from wholesome living’.

Ever since those early days of ANTICIPATIONS (1901), Wells had seen himself as the social scientist who would design the world’s future Now, in 1945, it seemed that politicians and militarists had ruined that future, and there was little left to hope for. In the deep depression, Wells allowed himself to feel that in the past few months, some fundamental change had taken place, so that ‘the end of everything we call life is close at hand, and cannot be evaded. A frightful queerness has come into life’. It is, he says, as if the force of gravitation has disappeared from the solar system, so everything is flying apart.

It sounds not unlike Yeats’ ‘Second Coming’: ‘Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’. But then, Yeats went on to write that great final poem ‘Under Ben Bulben’, in which he recognises that the answer lies in that slow march of human evolution, whose aim is ‘profane perfection of mankind’, so that even globe-trotting tourists can feel its power as they look at the Sistine Chapel ceiling. And Yeats understood something that Wells failed to grasp: that in certain moments of illumination, man suddenly ‘completes his partial mind. Our minds are like the moon in its last quarter; yet, although invisible, the remaining three quarters are there all the time.’ The answer, Yeats realised, lies in the mind itself.

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.