H.G. Wells’ novel The World of William Clissold opens with precision set in time: ‘Yesterday I was fifty-nine, and in a year I shall be sixty.’ First published one hundred years ago, appearing in three volumes over three months from August 1926, both author and his protagonist-author celebrated their sixtieth birthdays that year. It was an appropriate time for Wells to make his most determined – and certainly longest – attempt through fiction to create and portray – to embrace – a world.
During his long career Wells was many things – and certainly a ‘novelist of ideas’. Colin Wilson – who was another – discussed some of them in the long preface to his novel Man Without a Shadow (1963). He made the case that Wells was the ‘finest – and most underestimated’ novelist of ideas. This was because of the ‘characteristic that distinguished all his later work: a desire to write with urgency about real problems – the problems he felt at the time of writing – as well as telling a story. Sometimes the result was superb […] Sometimes it was indifferent […] In The World of William Clissold he tries to make the novel as big as life, and fails.’ This was not due to Wells’ want of ambition or willingness to experiment: ‘As a novelist, Wells lacked what [Henry] James possessed – the desire to give his books reality, even if it took a thousand fine brush strokes. He can write well only about his own life and experiences, but not about other people’s. Still, what he wanted to do to the novel was in no way as old-fashioned as the followers of Joyce and Eliot pretended.’
Wells felt the need to justify ‘what he wanted to do to the novel’. In ‘A Note Before the Title Page’ (five pages in my edition) he asserted: ‘Novels with prefaces are like pictures with inscriptions below them; there is a confession that something was left over and had to be expressed by an addendum. This book […] is claimed to be a complete dress-novel, that and nothing more. William Clissold is a fictitious character, and his thoughts and ideas throughout are the thoughts and ideas natural to his mental and social type. He is (to the best of the author’s ability) his own self and not his author’s self, in his emotional reactions, in his hard wilfulness, in his faith, in his political ideas, in his judgements. He is a specimen of modern liberalism, using liberalism in its broadest sense. He is a study of a modern type seeking modes of self-realisation. […] If you are the sort of person who will not accept it as a novel, then please leave it alone. You are not getting sly peeps at something more than the reality of art, and your attempts to squint through will only make you squint very unbecomingly.’
When we get there, squinting or not, it is William Clissold who must justify himself: ‘It is not exactly an autobiography I want to write, and not exactly a book of confessions. […] I should say that a description of my world best expresses what I have in view; my world and my will. I want it to be a picture of everything as it is reflected in my brain. I want it to be a comprehensive picture.’ Clissold describes how he sees the world and human life, including the loss of his religious faith. He goes on to recount his early life and that of his brother Richard (usually referred to as Dickon). Dickon marries, raises a family and becomes successful in advertising, and is awarded a knighthood. William puts his scientific training to good use as a researcher and inventor, so that his employers ‘came to realise that they had to pay fairly for the science and initiative I could give them’. He runs a profitable subsidiary, the Clissold Mineral Paint Company. Unlike his brother’s, Clissold’s love-life is intense and fraught. But after a failed marriage and several affairs, he meets Clementina. Their relationship, while not conventional, is loving and provides the stability both desire.
Much space in the later part of the novel is devoted to the ‘Open Conspiracy’. (Wells went on to publish an entire book on his scheme, The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution, in 1928.) Clissold describes it as the belief that humanity is on the brink of ‘complete metamorphosis’ and those who are able perceive it must work to ensure it succeeds. Otherwise it could only proceed ‘against such increasing resistances that it may even fail to achieve itself, and end in the failure and death of the species.’ Clissold declares that ‘we can build up the monetary and economic world republic in full daylight under the noses of those who represent the old system. For the most part I believe that to understand us will be to be with us… It is not a project to overthrow existing governments by insurrectionary attacks, but to supersede them by disregard.’
Clissold also writes about his personal plans – but his intentions are to be unrealised. An epilogue by Dickon explains that his brother and Clementina were killed in a car accident, and his work left unfinished. Dickon closes the book with the Greek phrase: ‘Panta rhei [Everything flows]. He has passed. These words, and they are wonderful words and come like a refrain throughout his book, shall be put as his sole epitaph upon his grave.’
Having informed the reader about his intentions with an introductory note, Wells also gave a hint through the subtitle: ‘A Novel at a New Angle’. As Adam Roberts stated in H.G. Wells: A Literary Life (2019): the ‘“new angle” is more than simply the fitting together of equal parts narrative and disquisition to form one complete novel. It’s also that this novel includes among its fictional characters a great many real 1920s people, most of them friends of Wells’s… It is the admixture of the two modes, one fictional and one non-fictional, that had characterised Wells’s entire career, here worked more closely than ever before into a lamination.’
Wells bonded his layers so well and firmly that they cannot easily be prised apart – but had Colin Wilson still been right to believe that The World of William Clissold failed in its objective? Perhaps it could never have been otherwise. Yet: ‘Where William Clissold is good, it is […] electric with feeling, with personal intensity.’ That is where Wells truly succeeded – and still does. Wells made Clissold share the gifts he had. Everything flows. If Wells had been the one to die in 1926, his book completed by another hand, its last words would have still been accurate.
(John Howard)
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