Studies in a Dying Culture

"Christopher Caudwell is an extraordinary figure. He died in the Spanish Civil War at the age of only 29, but he had already had an amazing career. He was a polymath: someone who wrote poetry and crime novels, someone who was a publisher, and an expert in aeronautics. He wrote books on physics and consciousness and poetry, and then was killed fighting the Fascists after he joined the volunteers of the International Brigade. I chose him because he wrote an incredibly insightful essay on H G Wells, which I think really nails his contradictions. His portrait of Wells is very critical. We tend to think of H G Wells as a Socialist: he believed in utopia, and in the idea of a World League or a World State. We might be tempted to think of him as a Communist: he wanted to get rid of democracy and replace it with a rational technocracy, which is not all that far from what happened in the Soviet Union. Wells travelled to the Soviet Union and met with Stalin. However, Caudwell, who joined the Communist Party in 1935, argued that Wells was far from being an ally of the left. For Caudwell, the problem with H G Wells was that he was petit bourgeois . As a strict Communist in the 1930s, Caudwell believed—following Marx—that there were two agents of history in capitalist society: the working class and the bourgeoisie. Caudwell was on the side of the working class against the capitalist bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of production. It was an era of extremes, where one had to choose sides. But the problem with H G Wells was that he did not belong to either of these classes. He suffered in this interstitial, lower middle-class, petit-bourgeois condition. He flip-flopped on every single issue because he had no class roots for his convictions. I do think that Caudwell helps identify some of the problems we have reading H G Wells. Wells started out in the lower-middle class, and then slipped down the social scale as a child. He was alternately anxious and belligerent about his ‘uppity’ class position. He was a member of what has been called the ‘intellectual proletariat’ that emerged in the 1890s. Like George Gissing and other friends, they were not gentlemen of independent means but had to write professionally to live. Wells became very successful very quickly. He made lots of money from writing after 1895, and had even designed and built his own house by 1901. However, he was aware that he was not really a member of the literary classes. He knew Henry James, but Henry James found him in the end rather vulgar. Aldous Huxley in the 1920s called Wells a ‘horrid, vulgar little man’. Virginia Woolf also thought of him as this brutish, blunt writer who was not of her intellectual class. None of the Bloomsbury group much liked him. Wells did not go to Cambridge; he did not get trained in Classics. When he travelled to Rome he did not fall into ecstasies, but hated the weight of redundant history there. He wanted to get rid of it, to clear out the rubble and address the future. He wanted to think about science and progress, and not about the awful past that was lingering and rotting around him. Because Wells was not embedded in his class identity, he shifted his stance on many issues all the way through his career. In the middle of the First World War, he thought that Christianity might actually be a good idea, and so wrote several books about that. Then he stopped, and thought that the Soviets were great. Later he thought—once an understanding of Stalin’s rule became clearer in the 1930s—that they were awful. Caudwell in the 1930s is able to identify one of key problems with Wells: his class ambiguity. He is a victim of it, rather than ever fully in control. I agree with Caudwell on that. What he is objecting to there, I think, is Wells’s arguably fascistic vision that you need to dismantle democracy and give it to a rational and technocratic elite. This is the problem with the utopias of the twentieth century, both on the right and the left. They are top-down and elitist, and involve imposing a complete vision. You have to be prepared to eliminate the recalcitrant elements of society who do not agree with you—foreigners, Jews, Communists, liberal democrats, the old, the weak, the disabled, the mentally ill. After the disasters of the Third Reich or the Cultural Revolution , our age is much more cautious about asserting total plans. There are those who imagine only flawed or ‘compromised’ utopias. This is the idea that you cannot plan everything out to the last curtain and pelmet because you need to give space for accident, for history, for development, for liberty, and for the unforeseen. That is perhaps why we do not write utopias so much anymore, and why we are so interested in dystopia. We have the advantage after 1945 of seeing that any planned utopia—and particularly a eugenic one—is a catastrophe. It results in the death of millions of people. We now know what Stalin was doing in the 1930s, and what Hitler was doing in the camps. One of Wells’s last books, Mind at the End of its Tether , was written in 1945. He lived long enough to hear about the atomic bomb, and the revelations about concentration camps. He realised that all of his plans for trying to rationalise and control the world through world government were ruined. After George Orwell’s 1984 , we have the advantage of being able to understand the catastrophe of utopia. But of course Wells did not have that: he was writing in a fervour of genuine optimism in a totally different era. Totally, yes. He is most famous for those early scientific romances, but after that he went through a very interesting social realist phase. Although they are fairly conventional Edwardian realist novels, Kipps and Tono-Bungay are very good. Ann Veronica is a very lively novel. It is exasperating because it is a defence of feminism and women’s rights, but told from a hilariously masculine and macho point of view. Nevertheless, it gives a great insight into sexual politics at the turn of the century. As well as his fiction, his short books on a World State are provocative. He even wrote textbooks on biology . His other great book is Experiment in Autobiography , which he wrote in the 1930s. It is an experimental book of self-examination. In the more liberal 1960s, a little postscript was added about his extraordinary sex life. Wells was short and had a ridiculous high piping voice, yet he must have been possessed of extraordinary personal charisma, because he seemed able to have sex with virtually anyone he met! He ended up in relationships and had affairs with a whole host of people, and had children by many of them. He examines this part of his self in a very modern way, pointing out his various flaws and his peculiar psychological compulsions. It is an amazing book, a kind of late flowering. It complicates the idea that Wells was an anti-Modernist. He was just a man in a great deal of hurry."