Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, Nicholas Reid recommends "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published five or more years ago.
I have never had much sympathy for people who under-rate the
power of good storytelling, that is, the ability to spin a yarn and to hold a
reader’s attention. Certainly these things alone are not the acme of literary
achievement, where we have to start considering those little matters of style
and structure and psychological insight. But they are not to be under-rated
either. So if I say negative things about H.G.Wells (1866-1946) it’s not
because I fail to appreciate his grip as a storyteller. You would have to have
been pretty dry if you did not, as a teenager, enjoy his best science fiction,
especially the early stuff like The Time
Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Doctor Moreau and above all The War of the Worlds, which I see as
his genre masterpiece. (The War in the
Air, When the Sleeper Wakes and The
First Men in the Moon haven’t worn as well, if only because their
“predictions” now seem rather quaint). The Dickensian social comedies Kipps and The History of Mr Polly are still good fun, too.
But when
Wells attempted to write serious grown-up novels on big issues, something
always went badly wrong. Usually it was the strident polemical tone, mixed in
with clumsy elements of roman a clef,
and often it was the fact that the issue in question was highly topical when the
novel was written, but now seems a period piece. Thus The New Machiavelli (about his attempts to take over the Fabian
Society). Thus Ann Veronica (a
disguised account of William Pember Reeves’ daughter Amber, with whom Wells had
one of his many affairs). Thus Love and Mr Lewisham (daring Edwardian
ideas of “free love”). Then there was the fact that Wells, to his very last
days, couldn’t stop churning them out. He had a huge audience and may have been
the most popular English writer of his generation. But progressively through
the 1920s and 1930s his work got worse and worse and stylistically more
slapdash. One day on this blog, I might discuss his The Shape of Things to Come (1933) as an example of how not to write predictive fiction; and
this would be without mentioning the heavy tinges of Social Darwinist racism in
nearly all Wells’ work.
All this is
by way of introducing the novel that is sometimes touted as Wells’ literary
masterpiece. Tono-Bungay has
certainly never been Wells’ most popular novel, but it is the one academics
mention when they want to promote Wells as a suitable candidate for study in
university Eng Lit departments. Its first-person narrator George Ponderevo is
clearly a version of Wells himself, so this autobiographical outing can be seen
as Wells’ David Copperfield,
especially as George’s most important relationship is with a character who
could be seen as a modified Micawber.
George Ponderevo is the only son
of a solo mother who is senior servant in a country house. Young George seems
destined for a life of kowtowing to the country gentry, whom he detests. After
he is involved in a fight, his mother sends him away to live with a narrow
psalm-singing, chapel-attending evangelical family. Finding this even more
unbearable than the condescending gentry, little George escapes back to his
mother. (So far, these events are similar to the early life of little
H.G.Wells). This time, George’s mother sends him off to live with his uncle
Edward Ponderevo, who is married but childless. George’s relationship with his
Uncle Edward (or Uncle Ponderevo as he is often called) is the pivot of the
novel.
Uncle Edward is a small-town
pharmacist, frustrated by the backward and unenterprising nature of his
neighbours and vaguely wanting to make something of himself in the world. He
quickly recognizes young George’s intelligence and enterprise (he calls them
his “whoosh”) and sends him to the local school, where the adolescent George
begins to win prizes in science, and then wins a scholarship to study at
Birkbeck College in London (as H.G.Wells did).
As a student, the young man
George is distracted sometimes by women and sometimes by his raffish sculptor
friend Ewart. When he catches up with his Uncle Edward, the older man has begun
to promote a dodgy patent medicine called Tono-Bungay. Uncle Edward employs
George to make his plant more efficient and to tweak the product. George is
basically aware that Tono-Bungay is medicinally worthless and (because of
unspecified ingredients) may indeed be mildly harmful. Nevertheless, he goes
along with his uncle’s schemes. By advertising and publicity and puffery,
Tono-Bungay becomes immensely popular and both uncle and nephew become rich.
Funded by his uncle’s profits, George is able to pursue real research in aeronautics,
designing gliders, dirigibles and flying machines that would have been
brilliantly new concepts when the novel was first written.
The novel seems to be setting
itself up as satire on the relationship of science and commerce and how the
latter can corrupt the former. Indeed it is as such that Tono-Bungay is often praised. But alas, it lacks focus, and Wells
takes his first-person narration as an excuse to throw in things and episodes
as they occur to George’s mind, rather than according to their coherence as
narrative. One self-contained chapter tells of George’s marriage to, and then
divorce from, the vapid and apparently brainless Marion, before he goes
philandering off with the typist Effie and later re-marries.
Meanwhile Tono-Bungay prospers,
Uncle Edward Ponderevo gives himself airs as a self-made gentleman (sometimes
reined in by his no-nonsense wife Susan in the novel’s best comic scenes) and
devises more and more grandiose schemes to spend his profits. These culminate
in his employing an army of contractors to build a huge modern mansion. It is
at about this time that George crash-lands in one of his flying machines, and
has an affair with the aristocratic Lady Beatrice Normandy, who nurses him back
to health.
Shoddily supported by borrowed capital,
Uncle Ponderevo’s patent-medicine-producing empire begins to fall apart. In an
effort to help save it, George sets off on an antiquated hired ship to steal a
valuable pile of a mysterious radioactive mineral called “quap” from the coast
of Africa. The expedition goes badly wrong, the ship sinks as it is returning
to England, and George and the crew are lucky to escape with their lives.
George returns to England to find his uncle bankrupt, being pursued by
creditors and harassed in public by a newspaper magnate called Boom. The
unfinished, grandiose mansion becomes a symbol of the pointlessness of Uncle
Ponderevo’s jerry-built schemes. Uncle Ponderevo absconds from the bankruptcy
hearing in London. George spirits him out of the country in one of his flying
machines. The two of them fly across the Channel and crash-land somewhere near
Bordeaux. George plans for the two of them to pose as rambling tourists but,
worn out by his losing campaign to be solvent, Uncle Ponderevo sickens and
dies, babbling incoherent nonsense as he does so.
A disconsolate George returns to
England, hoping to take up with his aristocratic lady. But she prefers the
comfort of being the mistress of a titled gentleman. George, the practical
research scientist, ends up designing destroyers for the highest bidder. The
novel fades out on George travelling down the River Thames through London,
giving a mystic account of what little things we and all our aspirations really
are. The final words are: “I have come to
see myself from the outside, my country from the outside – without illusions.
We make and pass. We are all things that make and pass, striving upon a hidden
mission, out to the open sea.”
Am I allowed to say how
profoundly this novel annoys me?
I restrain myself from commenting
at length on the number of very dated ideas it proposes, which must have seemed
very “advanced” at the time. Tono-Bungay
has often been described as a “Condition of England” novel, so I suppose I
can’t harp on its topical journalistic aspect, which is the very thing that
gives “Condition of England” novels their historical interest. But I do note
how evasive so much of it is. The final mystical note dodges so many of the
issues that the novel has raised. If we are just moving we know not whither
towards the open sea as we “make and pass” etc., then we do not have to
interrogate our own motives or the consequences of our actions. They become,
literally, meaningless. This problem is implicit in the whole mode of narration
of the novel. Wells appears to have set out to write a novel satirising
“puffery” and pointless commerce in worthless articles – in this case patent
medicine – with industry and energy spent in creating nothing of value. But his
narrator, George Ponderevo is implicated in his uncle’s schemes and benefits
from them. His occasional moralising comments on his uncle are thus badly
compromised (a bit like the more skilful
narration of Jack Burden in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men – look it up on the index at right). He is
not an impartial observer, and yet neither he nor Wells seems to realize this.
No. This is not an “unreliable narrator” of the sort so beloved by more recent
novelists. It is an ill-conceived narrator, with Wells at times fully
identifying with George when he makes his social commentary.
George Ponderevo’s lack of
self-awareness parallels Wells’ own. Wells takes shots at the social abuses and
snobberies of his day – the gentry, tycoons, newspaper editors – without
considering how much he himself shares his age’s prejudices and daydreams.
Note, for example, the anti-Semitic caricature of the Rumanian Jewish captain
on the expedition to get “quap”. Note how, on the novel’s first page, George
promises us that he will tell us many startling things about himself, such as
that “once (though it was the most incidental thing in my life) I murdered a
man”. The murder is the casual shooting of an African during the “quap”
expedition, basically seen by George (and Wells) as a matter of little
importance. Indeed Social Darwinist racism ran deep in those imperialist days,
even among writers who thought themselves the epitome of rationalism.
I am aware that Wells is
rehearsing much of his own sex life in George’s accounts of Marion, Effie and
Lady Beatrice. (If you have not yet caught up with it, check out David Lodge’s
2011 novel A Man of Parts for a funny
and sad version of Wells’ experiments in “free love”.) But, as they appear in
this novel, the three women are basically sexual conveniences for George, and
those notorious Wellsian rows of dots (“…….”) are another instance of evasion –
in this case evading the complexities of human sexual experience.
My main reason for being so harsh
on this novel, however, is this: There is so much evidence here of a prodigious
story-telling talent, but it is not equal to the task of building rounded
characters or making events anything more than passing amusements. When George
goes in search of “quap” it is like an improvisation to sustain readers’
interest. When George flies his uncle across the Channel in a primitive flying
machine it is another improvisation. Even the self-contained chapter on
George’s marriage to Marion has the air of ticking a subject off before moving
on. The novel is a collection of bits.
And in the end, what a boyish
view the novel has of commercial “success”! It is impossible to believe that
one-dimensional, chatty, caricatured Uncle Ponderevo would ever become a
business tycoon – even one selling a dodgy product on the basis of dodgy
finance. Here we have the essence of “whoosh” in Wells’ work – an adolescent
enthusiasm with little real thought or analysis to back it up.
Stray parting shots: There are three things about Tono-Bungay that are intriguing, but for
reasons unconnected to the novel’s literary worth.
i.)A biography of the realist novelist George Gissing told
me that, in Uncle Ponderevo’s incoherent death-bed babblings, H.G.Wells was
borrowing from accounts he had heard of Gissing’s rambling death-bed soliloquy.
ii.) There is the strong (but unproven) possibility that
Wells’ patent medicine “Tono-Bungay” was partly based on Coca Cola. In a
courtroom case in 1902, it was revealed that the “stimulant” Coca Cola – in its
original form – had caffeine and unspecified amounts of cocaine among its
ingredients. It was partly this revelation which led to the passage of the
USA’s Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, a mere two years before Tono-Bungay began to appear in serial
form. Wells’ fictitious stimulant has a name with the same rhythm as Coca Cola,
and Wells was aware of the American case. So Coca Cola may well have been the
original of the novel’s medicinal rubbish in a bottle, although there were
plenty of other quack remedies for Wells to attack.
iii.) Finally, a passage that amuses me from this novel, but
not for reasons Wells would have intended. In Chapter Two, the boy George
Ponderevo is arguing with the children of the narrow evangelical family he has
to live with. The relevant passage goes thus:
“ ‘There’s no hell’, I said, ‘ and no eternal
punishment. No God would be such a fool as that.’
My elder cousin cried aloud in
horror, and the younger lay scared, but listening.
‘Then you mean,’ said my eldest
cousin, when at last he could bring himself to argue, ‘you might do just as you
liked?’
‘If you were cad enough’, said I.”
Fair enough
to have a go at evangelicalism and hellfire, I guess. But I am amused by the
boy’s “if you were cad enough”.
Here’s the notion that it would be ‘caddish’ to do some things, but without any
attempt to define how we arrive at conclusions on what is or is not ‘caddish’.
This is pardonable in the boy in the novel, but regrettably this notion of
morality (that it’s no more than a social sanction) underpins much adult
thought now.
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