HG Wells: apostle of Free Love

A Man of Parts by David Lodge – review

David Lodge's novel is an intimate portrait of HG Wells

Blake Morrison The Guardian, Saturday 9 April 2011


Irresistible ... HG Wells Photograph: © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

While DH Lawrence preached the sexual revolution, HG Wells put it into practice. Free love was demanding work but someone had to do it, and no one could accuse HG of slacking. When his first wife failed to satisfy him, he married a second, Jane, and when she proved a wet blanket he turned to other women, with her consent. He was not the most alluring of men: small (5ft 5in), fattish, domineering and opinionated. But the women kept coming. Several were virgins half his age. Others were seduced by his celebrity and radical thinking. In bed Rebecca West called him Jaguar and he called her Panther, names which dissolved old gender norms of prey and predator.


A Man of Parts by David Lodge

Wells wrote about his love affairs or "passades" in a postscript to his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), leaving instructions that it be suppressed till a decent interval (50 years) had gone by. "My story of my relations with women is mainly a story of greed, foolishness and great expectation," he concluded, adding that its insights into "the misfit of male and female desires" made it a story worth telling. David Lodge retells it as a 500-page biographical novel that explores the relationship between author and lover, prophet and philanderer, bed and book.

"He smelled of walnuts and he frisked like a nice animal," West said, explaining what made Wells attractive. Elizabeth von Arnim thought he smelled of honey. There was also – or there is here – the prostitute he went to for his first experience of sex, who exclaimed: "My, you've got a big one for a little chap." No less important an endowment was his boundless enthusiasm. The women who fell for his high-flown talk of "triangular mutuality" might have been less pleased to learn that Jane was his true love and that he thought of sex as recreation, on a par with tennis or badminton. But they enjoyed his ingenuity and lack of stuffiness. He liked to make love in the open air, and once did so (with Von Arnim) on top of the Correspondence page of the Times, above a letter denouncing West.

His self-deluded pursuit of harmless fun invariably ended in farce or disaster. A carefully planned secret trip to Paris with the youthful Rosamund Bland got no further than Paddington, where they were intercepted by her outraged father. Amber Reeves became pregnant and had to be married off. He also got West pregnant while distracted by the presence of a cleaner in his flat (so much for his command of coitus interruptus). Then there was Hedwig Verena, who turned up one night naked under her raincoat and slit her wrists; quick thinking saved her from death and him from exposure in the press, but he was beginning to learn that there's no such thing as a free ride. He spent his later years being relatively loyal to Moura Budberg, his Russian mistress.

If history is (in Alan Bennett's phrase) one fucking thing after another, the risk in writing Wells's history is that it will become one fucking fuck after another. Fortunately Lodge is also interested in Wells's books (parts of A Man of Parts read like literary criticism) and in his tussles with the Fabians. The personal and the public are, in any case, hard to separate. When Shaw and the Webbs fought his plans to reform the Fabian Society it was, in part, out of fear that his ideas about marriage (and the gossip surrounding his private life) would discredit the socialist endeavour.

Lodge isn't the first novelist to recognise the potential of such material. In a little book about West in 1985, Fay Weldon characterised their affair as "Wells and West! The encounter of giants – Godzilla meets King Kong!" Lodge's Wells is a monster, too, but a lovable and sometimes pathetic one. Where circumstances demand male badinage, he can keep his end up ("What's the most times you've done it in one night?" "I don't know . . . I lose count after it gets into double figures") but he cuts an increasingly isolated figure.

The virtue of good biofic – and A Man of Parts is excellent biofic – is that it makes you want to go back to the primary sources. The drawback is that, until you do, you can't be sure what's factual and what's invented. Did Bland, on her last time in bed with Wells, come to "a genuine, uncontrollable climax, crying out in surprise and joy"? Could Reeves "effortlessly cross her ankles behind his neck while lying underneath him"? Did Rebecca West have a "luxuriant bush"? Was Violet Hunt "shamelessly versatile" in the art of fellatio? "I have imagined many circumstantial details which history omitted to record," Lodge admits, and the innocent reader will probably conclude that these are among them.

Still, just as HG was tireless in his philandering, so Lodge has been tireless in his research, and nothing here has been casually inserted. The Acknowledgments run to several pages, and he not only lists the many biographies consulted but specifies which letters in the novel have been made up. Less grounded novelists would let their imagination run away with them but Lodge remains scrupulous and scholarly. With some subjects that would be a failing, but Wells's life is so extraordinary that it needs no embroidery.

What it does require is a shape, and Lodge gives it one, first by beginning at the end, in Hanover Terrace, London, in 1944 as the dying author reviews his past life and, second, by having Wells interrogate himself, as if conducting a Q&A session with an unusually well-prepared interviewer. It's not the most subtle of devices but it does allow a break from the free indirect style. Moreover, the questions – easy full tosses at first – gradually get tougher, with Wells forced to confront his failures. Eugenics, antisemitism, warmongering, male chauvinism, double standards: he answers the charges with a mix of stubborn defensiveness and belated guilt.

There'll be some who feel that Lodge still lets his man off lightly, and that the outward amenability of Wells's wife Jane as he takes each new mistress fails to register the price she paid. But Lodge does succeed in showing what made Wells, in his lifetime, so irresistible. It helps that there are affinities between author and subject – a lower-middle-class south London childhood, for instance – that were absent from Lodge's earlier novel about Henry James. But sympathy is no guarantee of success: you also need narrative drive. Unlike many of Wells's, Lodge's novel has that. It bounds along terrifically and never tires, even in bed.

Blake Morrison's The Last Weekend is published by Vintage.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011

This is great:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFfZFvvuXWc
Richard Burton reads the opening of HG Wells' The War of the Worlds.

Paperback Q&A: David Lodge on A Man of Parts

The author explains how his fascination with HG Wells's literary, political and sexual careers grew into a novel

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 14 February 2012 12.44 GMT


David Lodge: 'finding a novel-shaped story in Wells's life'. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

How did you come to write A Man of Parts?

Preparing an introduction for a new edition of HG Wells's novel Kipps (1905), I looked into his life at the time he wrote it, when he was active in the socialist Fabian Society and involved with the children's writer Edith Nesbit, her husband Hubert Bland, and their daughter Rosamund. This story, in which radical politics, literary life and sexual intrigue were sensationally intertwined, prompted me to write a biographical novel about Wells of the same kind as the one I had written about Henry James, Author, Author.


A Man of Parts
by David Lodge

What was most difficult about it?
First, finding a novel-shaped story in Wells's long life, which encompassed so many varied interests, changes of fortune, literary productions, political interventions, and sexual relationships. Second, how to handle the many flaws and contradictions in his character and behaviour.


What did you most enjoy?
Solving those problems – at least to my own satisfaction. Firstly by making Wells's relationships with the most important women in his life – two wives, three young women half his age, and the enigmatic, elusive Russian Moura Budberg – the spine of the narrative; secondly, by framing it with an account of his last two years of life, and giving him a second, inner voice with whom he goes over his past, accusing and defending himself.


How long did it take?
About 18 months once I started writing. More than that for research.


What has changed for you since it was first published?
After a gap of some years I have got involved in live theatre again. A new play, Secret Thoughts, a two-hander based on my novel Thinks… was premiered at the Bolton Octagon last May, and opens in Paris this month as Pensées Secrètes, translated by Gérald Sibleyras.


Who's your favourite writer?
The one I most admire and have learned most from is James Joyce. Those I most enjoy re-reading are probably Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh.


What are your other inspirations?
Biographies, memoirs, newspapers, magazines, TV documentaries … and what the late Simon Gray called "old life".


Give us a writing tip.
Try to read your own work in draft as if you hadn't written it, projecting its effect from sentence to sentence on someone who doesn't have to keep on reading if s(he) is bored, irritated, or unconvinced.


What, if anything, would you do differently if you were starting the book again?
Very little. I revise a good deal in the process of composition. Of course when you revisit a text of your own there are always sentences you would on reflection like to tweak, or perhaps delete, and there are a few in A Man of Parts.


What are you working on now?
Nothing I'm ready to talk about.