Darrell Schweitzer: The H.G. Wells Problem

My investigations into what might well be old news to some of you began when I belatedly read H.G Wells’s The Invisible Man. Belatedly, I say, because at age 64 I had never actually done so. Sure, there are inevitably gaps in anyone’s reading, and there is a parlor game, “Humiliations,” in which you admit what famous works you have not read, and the loser is the first one to look foolish rather than merely candid. It happened that the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society’s book discussion group (useful for catching up on classics you’ve neglected) chose The Invisible Man for a topic, and although I was not actually able to attend that, I read it anyway, since, indeed, it was high time I did, and a very attractive, jacketed copy of Seven Famous Novels had been sitting on my shelves, only partially read, for decades.

The first thing you will notice, if you’ve only known the story from the 1933 movie or the Classics Illustrated comic book, is how humorous the opening sections of the book are. It is almost a rustic farce with broadly drawn, funny-talking villagers trying to figure out the secrets of their mysterious guest. But the tone darkens after a while, and there is suspense, melodrama, murder, and a chase. The details are important. This is after all the ancestor of virtually all subsequent invisibility stories. Wells even considers that food eaten by the invisible man might remain partially visible until digested, and that he would become vaguely visible in rain. The one major logic lapse is that Griffin, the invisible man, first experimented with making a piece of cloth invisible. If so, then why does he suffer the inconvenience of running around naked in the winter when he could have easily made himself an invisible suit of clothes? Of course that would have ruined the iconic image of the mysterious figure unwrapping his bandages to reveal ... nothing. So it is certainly better that he didn’t.

But never mind that. The book’s internal logic is not what I want to address. What bothered me was that in the midst of what is really quite a good yarn, there is a bit of completely gratuitous and easily avoidable anti-Semitism, right out in plain sight. The invisible man (admittedly, not a good person, possibly going mad) comes into conflict with his landlord, “an old Polish Jew in a long grey coat and greasy slippers” and his two “thick-lipped, bearded,” Yiddish-speaking stepsons. The invisible man feels an almost overwhelming impulse to strike one of the stepsons right smack in the middle of his “silly countenance,” but instead he sets the house on fire and flees.

Now, casual anti-Semitism is pretty common in Victorian fiction, so we learn to brace ourselves for this sort of thing. Dickens has his Fagin. H. Rider Haggard, whose late correspondence reveals him to have been an absolutely frothing anti-Semite in his later years, fortunately does not disfigure most of his major works this way, but occasionally something slips through.

But that’s not what we expect from H.G. Wells, is it? He’s supposed to be one of the good guys. If you know some but not too much about Wells, your conception of him probably goes like this: He was a self-made man from a very humble background who managed to escape the dead-end life of a draper’s apprentice, get an education, and become a journalist. Then, in a single, glorious decade from roughly 1895 to 1905, he wrote all of his famous science fiction and fantasy, which laid the foundation for so much of the imaginative fiction in English thereafter. Later, he turned pundit, propagandist, and professional prophet. He was a major celebrity—sort of a cross between Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, although vastly more famous than either. His opinions and presence were sought by heads of state from Roosevelt to Stalin. If he seemed a little too chummy with Stalin, well, so did George Bernard Shaw and many other Western intellectuals at the time. His last major work was the screenplay for Things to Come (1936), although, to put things in perspective, the book of his that sold the most copies was The Outline of History (1920), which was a major educational tool for the Depression generation who couldn’t afford to go to college. He was also regarded as the new Dickens. His mainstream novels, particularly Kipps and Tono-Bungay, made him Literature. He is often seen, though, as a sad example of a writer who sold out his art for a pot of message. He advocated socialism, world government, scientific progress, Darwinism, and peace.

All that is true, but of course it is not the entire story. I reached for the nearest biography of Wells to hand, and it happened to be The Invisible Man, the Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells, by Michael Coren (Vintage Books, 1993). I looked up “anti-Semitism” in the index.

Oh dear ... the story darkens. I ended up reading the whole book. The first hint of trouble comes when the author tells us in his “Prelude” that he does not accept the received wisdom that a biographer should have some sympathy with his subject. After all, how then could one write a biography of Hitler, Stalin, or other evildoers? “I prefer a sympathy with the truth,” writes Coren.

As Coren tells it, there was a good deal to dislike about Wells. He was ill-mannered and aggressively argumentative, acutely aware that he had never quite made it as a “gentleman” in English society. (Even Lenin said, “Ugh! What a narrow, petty bourgeois! Ugh! What a Philistine!”) In his personal life, he was a philanderer extraordinaire who had long affairs with (and children by) other women while still married. One gets the impression that all of this was for his emotional satisfaction without much consideration for any of the women, particularly his long-suffering second wife, Amy Catherine (whom he arbitrarily renamed Jane.)

But the worst parts come from his writings. He was indeed consistently anti-Semitic. It shows up early in The Invisible Man and also in The War of the Worlds. There is a hideous passage in chapter 16 of War during the panic-stricken evacuation of London involving a “bearded, eagle-faced man,” whom we are doubtless intended to take for a Jew, carrying a satchel of gold coins. The satchel splits open. The man hurls himself into the street, frantically stuffing coins in his pockets. He is run over by a carriage. Even after his back is broken, he is still crawling along, grasping for gold. Onlookers show no sympathy. They heave him out of the way like trash. (Coren doesn’t mention this one. It was pointed out to me by my anthologist colleague, John Ashmead. When I read that passage for the first time as a teenaged Catholic schoolboy who had never even met a Jewish person, I didn’t notice. Now I do.)

It gets consistently worse.

Wells referred to Jews as “parasites.” He seemed to have had an intense loathing for them—notice that the Jewish landlord has to be made slightly disgusting with his greasy slippers—which reminds me more than anything else of H.P. Lovecraft in his more anti-Semitic days as described in his letters to Rheinhart Kleiner, in which he says that in high school he felt an “instinctive” aversion to the Jew as basic as that of a mammal to a reptile and claimed that this was the normal reaction of anyone of his generation. (One of Lovecraft’s great mistakes, one shared broadly by bigots, was a tendency to assume that his impressions were somehow general laws of the universe.)

And worse. Wells blamed the Jews for “the fever of irrational nationalism” while repeating the old saw that Jews never care for the troubles and dangers of their “host” countries but only look out for themselves. Shortly before World War II, a Jewish acquaintance asked him what he thought would happen to the Jews of Europe. Wells replied that he would rather be asked what would happen to all mankind. “What about my people?” said his questioner. “That is exactly what is the matter with them,” said Wells.

He opposed nationalism generally but Zionism in particular, writing, “Only a psychoanalyst could begin to tell for what they wanted this Zionist state. It emphasized their traditional willful separation from the main body of mankind. It irritated the world against them.” (All these quotes come from Coren, 211–19.) In his autobiography, Wells (proudly? smugly?) wrote, “I have always refused to be enlightened and sympathetic about the Jewish question.”

Not surprisingly, he had few Jewish friends or acquaintances. He did know the novelist, Israel Zangwill, but even less surprisingly, the two men fell out over Wells’s views.

He even managed to draw a rebuke from Eleanor Roosevelt.

There is, alas, more. Back in that glorious decade, when Wells was turning out works of immortal genius at an astonishing rate, he also wrote his first nonfiction bestseller, Anticipations (1901), and followed it up with A Modern Utopia (1905). In both he took up the cause of eugenics and suggested that an authoritarian world government should make sure that only the right sort of people get to breed. If there had been no true master race in the past, in the Wellsian utopia, there would definitely be one. (In A Modern Utopia, the masters are exotically called Samurai.)

As for everybody else:

—those swarms of black and brown and yellow people who do not come into the needs of efficiency? Well, the world is not a charitable institution and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world, as I see it, is that they will have to go. (Coren, quoting Wells, 66)

In other words, dictatorship, genocide, concentration camps, the works. For the betterment of “mankind,” of course.

I think we may have a problem here. I will admit that my knowledge of Wells is not profound, and it would take much more research to refute or confirm Coren’s conclusions, but just be glad we have not been handing out busts of H.G. Wells for outstanding achievement in science fiction all these years. As Coren tells it (without mentioning Lovecraft, I hasten to add), this is a lot worse than Lovecraft writing awful things in private letters to his aunts. I would add that Lovecraft (kind of) got better. He wasn’t entirely cured by the time he died, but he married a Jewish woman and had lots of Jewish friends, so either he got over that phobia of the “reptilian,” or he learned to control it. Wells, on the other hand, refused to be enlightened. He does seem to have written a letter of apology to Chaim Weizmann (first president of Israel) shortly after World War II, but he did not generally retract what he had written. The important point (which Coren makes about Wells) is that unlike Lovecraft, who had no influence in the world at large, Wells had a great deal of influence. In books like Anticipations and A Modern Utopia he mainstreamed and rendered respectable ideas that never should have been countenanced by anyone.

Incidentally, Wells was also intensely anti-Catholic, an attitude he had carried forward from his earliest youth as his intensely Protestant mother apparently taught him that the Roman Church was the Whore of Babylon and the pope the Anti-Christ. This climaxed in a 1943 screed called Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Catholic Church that Penguin rather inexplicably published as a mass-market paperback. There was concern at the time that, since Penguin books were given out to the troops, this was not the sort of thing soldiers should be reading as they entered Catholic countries like France and Italy if they wanted to win hearts and minds. The only American edition came out from a minor American publisher who specialized in anti-Catholic tracts. None of this did Wells’s reputation any good at all.

Now what? Maybe it is just as well that most people have the abbreviated, rosy view of Wells that I outlined at the front of this article. Maybe Coren overstates his case. Maybe the balance is somewhere in between. You may reasonably ask why, if the man was a monster, he was so widely praised and respected and why his friends (who do not seem to have been monsters themselves) liked him. His damn-near martyred second wife, to whom he could always come home after his latest affair, remains a mystery. His main mistress, Rebecca West, put up with quite a lot, too, and stuck with him.

Do we have the whole story? Probably not. Do I have the whole story? Almost certainly not. But the first point I want to make is simply this: that we can’t just seal away the past or the literature of the past. That will only make us shallow and superficial. It is terribly arrogant to proclaim that only our time and our generation have all the answers and are paragons of moral excellence. Nobody withstands the test of time. Mark Twain may have been one of the most enlightened of all (white) nineteenth century writers on racial matters. He even put a promising black student through law school on his own dime. But he admitted he enjoyed minstrel shows and probably wouldn’t have understood how anyone could object to that. The future will likely judge us and condemn us for something we haven’t even thought of. A Roman of the first century a.d. (unless he was Seneca, who was a party pooper whom nobody liked) would not have understood an objection to gladiatorial shows. The common wisdom was that they were edifying stuff that you should take the kids to, to toughen them up.

I’ve often proposed (or run) this as a convention panel topic, usually with a title like “That Awful Twentieth Century—You Mean Goldfish Didn’t Have the Vote?” The future is going to be disappointed in us, I am sure.

What about Wells? So what if the glorious founder of our field has a dark side? His illegitimate son, Anthony West, after reading through some of his father’s worst statements, merely remarked, “It is for the past and in the past.” Anthony West went on admiring his father all his life.

That is one answer. It could come down to the Wagner Problem, which may be stated as, “Wagner was a schmuck, but he still wrote great music.” It is still great music. Even if Wells had become a great criminal, you could say that before he did, he had a ten year period of creative glory in which he wrote most of the early classics of our field. Benito Mussolini wrote a novel (The Cardinal’s Mistress) before he became dictator. What if it was good? What if it was great even? I don’t know. I’ve never read it. But regardless of what happened later, the text is still there, and it hasn’t changed. Regardless of what we may learn about H.G. Wells, The Time Machine is still The Time Machine. Biographical criticism can only take us so far. Knowing that Wells was an anti-Semite does elucidate that passage in chapter 16 of The War of the Worlds. But ultimately, if we separate Wells from his work and just look at the words on the page, the great works are still great works. Inevitably we do read a book with some idea in our heads of who the author was. This has always been so. It is why the ancient Greeks very likely invented the myth of the blind poet, Homer, and could show the tourist his several birthplaces, the pen he wrote the Iliad with, and so forth. It is why people go nuts over Shakespeare and keep inventing other “authors” for his plays—because we don’t quite know enough about him to know his mind.

We do know the mind of H.G. Wells. Maybe we know too much. The best we can do, I think, is take the good with the bad. We have the knowledge. It informs us. You might want to ask yourself why you are reading Wells. If you just want splendid entertainment, stick to the science fiction and the short stories. If you want to explore his thought further as an important part of the history of ideas or even to gain a fuller understanding of his work, then you are going to have to confront the bad stuff. I’ve gone too far now. I’ve lost my innocence. One of my first responses to all this was to order a cheap copy of Anticipations off eBay. At this point, I need to know.

I think we just have to accept that most people, even allegedly progressive people, never shed all the prejudices of their upbringing. Maybe Lenin was right, and Wells was a narrow-minded, petty bourgeois all his life, the product of lower middle-class, mid-Victorian Britain. But he still wrote The Time Machine, which concludes with what Ursula K. Le Guin once described as “the most beautiful nightmare” in all of literature.

---

Darrell Schweitzer lives in Philadelphia.

Comments

[Phil Taylor]

Wells was anti-nationalist if anything and not a supporter of Zionis (given what's been happening in Palestine/Israel over the last few decades, his concerns were well founded). Like the rest of he's only human and had his prejudices, based on life experiences, but later on in life he came to regret his attitudes to the Jews as he became more aware of the Nazi atrocities in WW2. He even wrote a letter of apology to Chaim Weizmann for his past statements. I'm currently reading Coren's bio of Wells and his bitter dislike of Wells really says more about Coren than it does of Wells. Wells penned some beautiful prose in his time and, with all due respect raking through the millions of words he wrote looking for traces of antisemitism really misses the greater picture he was painting about the future great possibilities for humanity.

[Leslie Kellen]

Very sad that a man who overcame the difficulties of his youth, was in essence one of the small minded people he loves to describe.
I am just finishing his autobiography, which was published in 1934.
His list of friends gives you the hint of anti semitism, but when he describes the great religions as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, one knows instantly, that he was extremely flawed.
Was a master of false modesty.

[Cathy S.]

I'm a practicing Catholic and I don't mind that Wells was anti-Catholic. People need to be less sensitive to slights: what doesn't destroy me makes me stronger! As for criticism in general, well, "better out than in," as long as they're not advocating violence. I will gladly continue to read Wells without assuming that he's the font of all Beauty, Goodness, and Truth. That's God's job.

I did get ahold of a copy of "Crux Ansata." The first chapter, "Why Do We Not Bomb Rome?" has a provocative title, but Wells's argument is a somewhat reasonable one: in 1943, the Allies were holding off from bombing Rome because the Pope had begged them not to. (Vatican City is in the middle of Rome.) Wells thought Rome should be treated like any other enemy city in wartime.