The Centenary of 'The World of William Clissold' by H.G. Wells: A Guest Post by John Howard

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)

Image: H.G. Wells by Walter Stoneman 1925

 © National Portrait Gallery, London

The Centenary of 'Christina Alberta's Father' by H.G. Wells: A Guest Post by John Howard

The novels that H.G. Wells published after the end of the Belle Époque seem to get something of a bad rap. The early scientific romances and the comic and social novels of the Edwardian years have largely stayed in print since their original appearance, but Wells’ later novels tend to be overshadowed, dismissed for verging on the polemical and not keeping up with literary trends. It is true that Wells seemed to concentrate on non-fiction, especially his three great attempts to systematise and make accessible whole fields of human knowledge: The Outline of History (1920), The Science of Life (1930), and The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (1931). And there were the numerous other books in which he addressed current affairs and fired-off solutions to the world’s problems, charting the way forward to a socialist future of peace and prosperity for all – if only his sane and reasonable suggestions were adopted. Wells wrote his books and a tremendous amount of journalism while maintaining a headlong schedule – travelling widely, speaking at meetings and conferences, visiting and talking at length with influential people including world leaders.

Yet in most years Wells still published at least one novel – often a very substantial one. Although they sometimes did serve (at least in part) as fictional vehicles for Wells’ ongoing concerns and ideas, that was nothing new. Many of the novels of the inter-war period are full of interesting and characteristically Wellsian things: vivid incident and character, with sharp observation and not a little humour along the way.

In addition to everything else, the turbulence of Wells’ private life – actually not always particularly private – was legendary. This was particularly so during 1923, when his relationship of ten years with Rebecca West conclusively ended. It was during this fraught period for Wells that he wrote what Adam Roberts, in H.G. Wells: A Literary Life (2019), refers to as ‘one of his oddest, most striking and most unjustly overlooked novels’ (321). This is Christina Alberta’s Father, first published one hundred years ago in September 1925.

Christina Alberta’s father is Albert Preemby. Wells opens by proclaiming ‘This is the story of a certain Mr Preemby… Some remarkable experiences came to him. […] it is a story of London in the age of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, broadcasting, and the first Labour peers.’ Preemby starts out as another of Wells’ ‘little men’: of humble origin, put-upon and dominated by other people and their circumstances. While still a very young man Preemby meets Christine Hossett and quickly finds himself married: ‘He was carried over his marriage as a man might be carried over a weir’ (16). Christina Alberta, their only child, is born soon after the wedding, and her father settles down to family life and the laundry owned by his wife’s family. Denied any real involvement in the business, Preemby spends his time reading, particularly ‘ancient history, astronomy, astrology, and mystical works. He became deeply interested in the problem of the pyramids and in the probable history of the lost continent of Atlantis’ (17).

Twenty years go by, and Preemby finds himself a widower and single parent. Father and daughter emerge from the shadow of Christine Preemby. Christina Alberta soon realises that ‘Mother had kept him dried up for nearly twenty years, but now he was germinating and nobody could tell what sort of thing he might become’ (31). Selling the business, they embark on a life in boarding houses and meet people who live on the borders of bohemianism. A dispute over spiritualism between two fellow boarders leads to Preemby taking part in a séance – and it is then revealed to him that he is Sargon the King of Kings, ‘Lord of Akkadia and Sumeria […] come back as Lord of the World’ (87).

Sargon disappears. Christina Alberta and her friend, the author Paul Lambone, walk the streets looking for him. They miss him at Buckingham Palace, where they find that he might have been planning to offer an audience to George V. To Sargon Trafalgar Square was ‘Just a little patch this was in one of his cities. For, you see, by the lapse of time and the development of his ancient empire, he was the rightful owner and ruler of this city and of every other city in the world. And he had come back to heal the swarming world’s disorders and reinstate the deep peace of old Sumeria once again’ (106). After looking out over London from the dome of St Paul’s, Sargon decides to reveal himself. He attracts his first ‘disciples’ and swiftly loses them – except for the young journalist Bobby Roothing, who turns out to be Sargon’s saviour in the troubled days and weeks that follow.

At this time an ambiguity in the novel’s title is also revealed – or rather confirmed, as hints were sown in the first two chapters. Christina Alberta accepts the reality of the situation. Dr Devizes is her biological father, and they agree to regard themselves as cousins; Sargon remains her ‘little Daddy’.

As Sargon undergoes what will be his final illness he explains: ‘I am Sargon, but in a rather different sense from what I had imagined. […] I am not exclusively Sargon. You – you perhaps are still unawakened – but you are Sargon too. We are all descended from Sargon […] We all inherit. […] Of course, everybody is really Sargon King of Kings, and everybody ought to take hold of all the world and save it and rule it just as I have got to do. (227-9). Wells has moved away from his Edwardian dreams of a modern utopian world ruled by an order of ‘Samurai’ to something very different – and much more approachable, although just as problematic. This was not to last. For example, in Wells’ film Things to Come (1936) the remnants of civilisation are saved by a small elite: the ‘freemasonry of science’ operating as ‘Wings Over the World’.

In Christina Alberta’s Father, as Adam Roberts notes: ‘Wells is asserting the fundamental and essentially spiritual dignity of even the most overlooked and neglected of human beings. The point of this novel, in other words, is that Preemby is a king not despite being (in Jung’s cruel but accurate phrase) a ‘midget personality’, but because of it: that we are all great-souled and royal no matter how unprepossessing our exteriors’ (321-24).

Perhaps there is some hope after all.

(John Howard)