Collected Essays

If the occupying force is shown as corrupt under its polished veneer, the English are no better. The good ones were killed off in the invasion and the Pacification. Those left are mainly a pack of docile tipplers, devoid of morale and culture, living in a kind of rustic sub-world. It is a dystopia quite as convincing and discomfiting as Orwell’s urban warrens.

To parallel this total loss of English qualities, the occupying force has lost all belief in its motivating creed, Marxism, which died out about 2020.

A Moscow-generated New Cultural Policy, ‘Group 31’, plans to restore England to the English.

Group 31 wish to get Alexander involved. He is willing enough. To be a revolutionary is a great romantic pose which panders to his narcissism. He is callously prepared to assassinate his liberal father, if need be.

Unexpected deaths follow, yet the underground theme proves less exciting than it should be. What is more interesting, perhaps because more unusual, is the attempt, prompted by Moscow, to launch a performance of a once banned Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet. The play is to be the climax of a festival in which English culture is handed back to the English.

The Russians do not and cannot care for the past they have obliterated. Nor do the English care—except for a few over fifties, who scarcely count. It is true that they refer to their conquerors as The Shits, but this is a fossil appellation, almost without malice. By such small authentic notes, the originality of the novel declares itself.

An audience is somehow raked up to attend the great event. The music recital is moderately successful. It includes works by ‘Dowland, Purcell, Sullivan, Elgar, the composer of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’’, Noel Coward, Duke Ellington (taken to have been an English nobleman of some sort), Britten and John Lennon.’ But with Romeo and Juliet it is different.

Alexander has a drink at the Marshal Stalin in St John’s Street before attending the theatre. The play about the death of innocence—although it has been cut to an hour in order not to tax people’s patience too greatly—is a disaster. There is a near riot, the theatre is set on fire, and Alexander decides not to rescue the girl playing Juliet.

In scenes of ghastly comedy, Shakespeare’s island race rejects its old culture and religion when they are offered. It prefers to queue quietly for food—a typical meal being cabbage soup, belly of pork with boiled beets (since there’s now a third fresh-meat day in a week), and stewed windfalls. Or it will booze at the Marshall Grechko (to become The Jolly Englishman under the New Cultural Policy).

Once a culture ceases to be common coinage, it has gone forever. It is a grim warning, one which elevates the novel far above the jingoistic military warning, Be Prepared! Sadness rather than jingoism is the imprint of these pages.

Alternative histories and worlds represent curious byways of science fiction, seeming usually to have more affinity with history than science. Such is the case with the novels cited here. Often this is because their authors stand rather apart from the mainstream of science fiction. Such can be said of Robert Harris, for instance, author of Fatherland, in which Nazi Germany, having won World War II, is about to celebrate Hitler’s seventieth birthday.

The exceptions to this rule are, of course, Philip Dick and Harry Harrison, both life-long practitioners of the art. Amis is not an exception. Despite his life-long interest in SF, and his anthologies, his reputation lies elsewhere, as a major comic novelist. There is almost a sense in which alternative histories are prolonged pokerfaced jokes—as is the case with the classic Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, in which an accident changes the history of the United States.

Like Ward Moore’s novel, Russian Hide-and-Seek presents us with military or militaristic situations. No joke is intended, just as its serious and unusual cultural theme is no cause for laughter.

Fittingly, the usual Amis humour is, in Russian Hide-and-Seek, suffused into a permeating irony. Detail is piled on disconcerting detail—each unexpected but just—like the young English woman girlishly longing to get to Moscow (an echo of Chekhov here), until the whole disastrous tapestry of a lost England hangs before us.

All that we value has been swept away. Culture is irrelevant. Nihilism prevails.

Those who know Amis, or perhaps have read only his Memoirs, will recognize his powers as an anecdotalist. One of his stories well illustrates the theme of his novels.

Amis was invited in the early 1980s to dine with the Prime Minister, together with other illuminati at 10 Downing Street. It happened to be the very day on which Hutchinson published Russian Hide-and-Seek, so Amis took along a copy of the novel, inscribed to Mrs Thatcher. She asked him what it was about.

Amis replied, ‘Well, in a way it’s about a future Britain under Russian occupation’. It was a typically modest Amis answer. And what was Margaret Thatcher’s response?

‘Huh! Can’t you do any better than that? Get yourself another crystal ball.’ As Amis says in his memoirs, an answer both unfair and unanswerable.

Now we know what those with power over us think about SF. They share an uninquiring ignorance of intellectual literary circles. And they know as much about culture as the occupying Russians.

WELLS AND THE LEOPARD LADY (#ulink_ef94e17c-94bc-5d57-962f-1237511c1371)

Lecture delivered at the International Wells Symposium (#ulink_f38b92d4-a462-5401-84ce-af5f24d3482a)

H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods begins with Mr Barnstaple driving along what Wells calls ‘the Wonderful Road’, and entering Utopia. Barnstaple and his party meet with a leopard which is benevolently inclined. By this symbol, Wells shows us the nature of an earthly paradise; the lion lying down with the lamb, etc. Dante on his journey to the Inferno first meets a leopard as a sign of great mysterious change ahead.

Large cats, leopards, cheetahs, panthers, and other furry carnivores, play a fairly active role in the Wellsian pantheon, generally linked with Wells’s perennial impulse to escape from the mundane world. While presenting these carnivores as tame and amiable, he also depicts himself, as he often says, as a carnivore. This policy of reversal operates in many of his books, including one or two of the neglected ones I mean to discuss.

But the theme of my talk is really the strangest reversal of all: the fact that despite his enormous success, which it would be impossible for any author nowadays to rival, there was a part of Wells, and a vital part, which no amount of success could ever appease, and which he was continually trying to suffocate under more work.

If our opinion of Wells is to be revised, then it is first necessary to confront the Himalaya of Wells studies: that long career punctuated so conspicuously by the ascent of literary heights and the decline into political shallows. The Wells, in other words, with that marvellous sense of fun, the Great General of Dreamland, to use his own description, who became the hollow apostle of world order, who exchanged the cloak of imagination for the tin helmet of instruction—as the Chinese say. Wells was a dear and honest man; he would not mind, I hope, our looking into this puzzling question. For he has become, rather unexpectedly, not the great prophet whom earlier generations saw, but the brilliant if eccentric writer who—almost by his own decision—went off the gold standard.

Wells had a career problem. He rose from the unprivileged classes to a position of great privilege where he was free to travel round the world talking to Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt. This rise—this escape—one of Wells’s numerous wonderful escapes—challenged his early identification with ‘the little man’. The Food of the Gods (1903) is almost a parable of this dilemma. The novel starts on the side of the little men and ends up on the side of the big, the Gods. Such reversals manifest themselves in numerous ways in Wells’s life and thought.

Let me remind you of one of Wells’s most famous reversals, which occurs in The War of the Worlds. Wells cleverly delays his description of an invading Martian until well into his story—in fact until Chapter 2 of Book II. And then the creatures are revealed as horrible enough to shock anyone. Not only do they exist by sucking the blood of living things—like those monsters of which Bram Stoker had written only a year earlier—but they never sleep. And—mounting horror—they are ‘absolutely without sex’.

These are, nevertheless, no alien creatures. Wells continues, remorselessly, ‘It is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brains and hands … at the expense of the rest of the body’.

It is an evolutionary point Wells is making. Eighty years later, it may sound fairly conventional; that was not the case originally. Not only was Wells one of the first writers to use evolutionary themes directly in his work, but he was here using them against the grain of his generation’s perception of the meaning of evolution. Whereas many interpreted evolution as a biological mechanism which had carried man to the top of the tree, Wells understood Darwin better; indeed, no English writer has shown a surer grasp of the scientific challenges of the modern age. War of the Worlds demonstrates that the continuous process of evolution was as likely to work against mankind as for. If we continued as we were doing, there was no known way in which we could prevent ourselves becoming, in effect, Martians. The Eloi and Morlocks, you remember, had already pointed that moral, with different emphasis.

Embedded in Wells’s first scientific romance are many of the themes—not only the evolutionary one—which he would develop in the course of his next 120-odd books. The idea of utopia is there. The Eloi live in a kind of utopia. Present too is the dream of a perfect garden, which always haunted Wells. Perhaps when he visited his absconding mother, Sarah, at Up Park, where she worked as housekeeper, he saw something like a perfect garden, a place without stress. And his father had been a gardener.

Here is the descriptive passage from The Time Machine:

After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but, even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals—and how few they are—gradually by selective breeding: now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating: things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.

In summary, Wells says, ‘There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidence of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.’ It’s clever comment, wedding the evolutionary with the social.

The gardens reappear. Meanwhile, there was all of mankind to be reformed.

The promising thing about mankind, as Wells perceived, is its mutability. Yet that mutability is also perceived as threatening.

If we had prognathous jaws only two million years ago, why not grossly over-developed crania two million years from now? The leopards and the big cats are different. They were plain leopards two million years ago, not a spot different, and will presumably continue to be leopards two million years from now—unless we exterminate them next year. So the big cats in Wells’s books are free not merely in the ordinary sense in which big playful pussies always mean liberty, but in the way they appear to be apart from that dreadful evolutionary machine which so inspired and alarmed Wells.

This link between big cats and freedom appears in one of Wells’s best-known and most poignant short stories, ‘The Door in the Wall’. You recall that when Wallace the narrator was between five and six, that crucial age, he came upon the door somewhere in Kensington—that magical door through which he went to pass into ‘Immortal realities’, and, throughout the rest of his life, was never again able to enter.

Wallace found himself in a garden. ‘You see’, he said, with the doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things, ‘there were two great panthers there … Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid. There was a long wide path with marble-edged flower borders on either side, and these two huge velvety beasts were playing there with a ball. One looked and came towards me, a little curious as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very gently against the small hand I held out, and purred. It was, I tell you, an enchanted garden.’

Well, there are many enchanted gardens in fantasy writing, just as the symbol of the country house appears over and over in English fiction. None so poignant though as this one of Wells’s. If you wonder why there is no big cat in that first garden, in The Time Machine, well, of course, there is: that enigmatic cat, The Sphinx.

Exactly how Wells felt is stated simply in In the Days of the Comet, when Leadford’s mother is dying. ‘ “Heaven”, she said to me one day. ‘‘Heaven is a garden.” ’

The leopard in Men Like Gods also stands as a sort of sentinel to the magic which is to follow. It is about to allow itself to be stroked, when it sneezes and bounds away, and the cattle don’t stir a muscle as it runs past them. That’s another reversal of the natural order.

Later we learn more about this particular leopard. Like others of its kind, it has sworn off meat. ‘The larger carnivora, combed and cleaned, reduced to a milk dietary, emasculated in spirit, and altogether de-catted, were pets and ornaments in Utopia.’ In this Utopia, so we hear, ‘the dog had given up barking’. Wells was always dubious about dogs. They brought dirt into the house, and disease with the dirt. Perhaps that dreadful late-Victorian London had given him an especial loathing of dogs and horses, whose mess was everywhere to be seen. They certainly aren’t allowed in A Modern Utopia:

It is only reluctantly that I allow myself to be drawn from my secret musings into a discussion of Utopian pets.

I try to explain that a phase in the world’s development is inevitable when a systematic world-wide attempt will be made to destroy for ever a great number of contagious and infectious diseases, and that this will involve, for a time at any rate, a stringent suppression of the free movement of familiar animals. Utopian houses, streets, and drains will be planned to make rats, mice, and such-like house-parasites impossible: the race of cats and dogs—providing as it does, living fastnesses to which such diseases as plague, influenzas, catarrh and the like, can retreat to sally forth again—must pass for a time out of freedom, and the filth made by horses and the other brutes of the highway vanish from the face of the Earth.

No wonder the horsey classes objected to Wells. All the same, there is a whiff of crankiness about his attitude to pets. Science would vote against him now, claiming that pets are good for psychic health, stroking them helps people get over heart attacks, and so on.

Of course, all utopias fear dirt. I’ve yet to read of a utopia where dogs were encouraged. Maybe in dog utopias there are no men.

The utopia in Men Like Gods is also likened to a garden. We read of ‘the weeding and cultivation of the kingdom of nature by mankind’. Nowadays, as in so many other things, we would not trust ourselves with that same confidence to do a good job. The cultivation of Brazilian rainforest into timber is not an encouraging example.

In The Shape of Things to Come we find more gardens, termed ‘enclosures and reservations’, in which specially interesting floras and faunas flourish. ‘Undreamt-of fruits and blossoms may be summoned out of non-existence.’ Here sex is directly linked to big cats. The Puritanical Tyranny, in suppressing sex, thought they had ‘imprisoned a tiger that would otherwise consume all’. It was not so. Under the more relaxed dispensation following the Tyranny, people could now go naked and love as they like—the old Wells aspiration. ‘Instead of a tiger appeared a harmless, quiet, unobtrusive, and not unpleasing pussy-cat, which declined to be any way noticeable.’ As early as The Time Machine, free love-making is a feature of utopia, without emotional attachment.

Sex and big cats. Also sex and childhood. Consider a passing remark in that large rambling volume, The Shape of Things to Come which yokes such matters with the idea of utopia.