“Now you will tell us. How does one know the truth about something? Do we know it in a flash – So! – or does it come to us very slowly like a tortoise? Is it a big thing or is it little things? There you are. A difficult question …”
“A difficult question?” he said. “I should have thought it was quite simple, if you know all the facts. It’s just a matter of getting every detail in its right place, isn’t it? Making the right pattern.”
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)
IN 1916, H.G. WELLS EXPERIENCED a moment of epiphany. He was taking his usual noonday walk from the flat in St. James’s Court to lunch at the Reform Club. It was one of life’s more pleasant city ambles, north on Buckingham Palace Road, past the palace grounds, through St. James’s Park and onto the Mall, heading towards the club on nearby Pall Mall. Just beyond Clarence House and St. James’s Palace, he reached Marlborough House. As he walked alongside it, he noticed a large poster on the courtyard wall. It was a royal proclamation, a message from the King to his people. The message itself was unimportant: what struck Wells was the language George V used. He spoke of “my people.” Suddenly Wells realized that what he had believed about the war and its disruption of civilization had been a delusion.1
Much of what Wells had written during the first two years of the war had reflected his view that the conflict in Europe meant the breakdown and destruction of the old order he so detested. He believed that the common sense of people would recognize this and would help sweep away existing political systems and outmoded reactionary beliefs. In its place, he thought, a new international and “confederated system of socialist republics” would arise. The King’s appeal to “his” people disabused Wells of this naive optimism. As he made his way to the Reform Club, the monarch’s words echoed in his mind. “My people.” Wells had long been a firm republican, but his reaction went well beyond the institution of monarchy. “ ‘My people,’ ” he muttered, “– me and my sort were his people!”2
It struck him that the “war to end war” was not “a war for civilization”; this was merely a “consoling fantasy.” It was instead, as reflected in the King’s words, a reassertion of already established “policies, interests, treaties and secret understandings after the accepted manner of history.” These policies continued to be directed by “duly constituted military authorities, engaged in war with the allied central powers.” Under such a state of affairs, “no other war was possible.” He could not get this thought out of his mind.3
Unless there was a revolution in human consciousness through a new understanding of history, he now believed, nothing fundamental would change. He resolved to do his part to bring this change about. Britling had gone some way along these lines, but by the novel’s end Britling has found God, not the way to a socialist future. Wells held no faith in traditional forms of Christianity – especially the Anglican church – so for a time during the war he turned his idea of a New Republic into a divine monarchy. As earlier in Britling, it was an attempt “to deify human courage.” The year 1917 saw the publication of further attempts at the personification of progressiveness and the deification of humanity in God the Invisible King and The Soul of a Bishop.4
No work better exemplified Wells’s discontent than his novel Joan and Peter, to which he gave the subtitle The Story of an Education. Written in the latter half of 1917 and early 1918, it was nominally the story of the upbringing of two cousins whose parents die, leaving their lives and education initially in the hands of a cantankerous aunt, Lady Charlotte, the very personification of hidebound Victorian Tory and Anglican England, and two spinster aunts, Phyllis and Phoebe. When the imperious Charlotte and the maiden aunts threaten litigation over control of the children, a fourth guardian is called in to take care of them. He is their uncle, Oswald Sydenham, a figure more reminiscent of Richard Remington in The New Machiavelli than of Mr. Britling. An imperial adventurer with a background in science and an interest in education, and also a Victoria Cross winner whose face has been severely disfigured in war, Oswald is the vehicle in Joan and Peter for Wells’s acerbic views on all manner of subjects: Tory England, the Anglican church, the army and its generals, the universities, schoolteachers, socialists and other misguided progressives, pacifists, and politicians.
Covering the years between 1893 and 1918, Joan and Peter allowed Wells to castigate all the groups that, collectively, had helped bring the world to the hopeless impasse of the Great War. In many ways, it was one more failure as art, at least to those such as Henry James and his admirers. Its overriding didacticism – severe even for a Wells novel – was off putting and the book was not well received, although it sold well enough on the strength of Britling. But the novel is a remarkable key to H.G.’s state of mind during the latter half of the war. Above all, Oswald concludes, education in the broadest sense is the only solution to the problems of humanity. Reform of institutions is impossible without this.
As Wells put his thoughts onto paper and into Oswald’s mind, he provided his protagonist with lengthy meditations on the historical forces at work in the evolution of human culture and society. The shock of war is the beginning of the real education of Joan and Peter, as Wells thought it should also be for humanity. Their previous schooling had been a sham. They had learned the official version of history, a history of kings and queens and other great people, but what did this tell them of the social forces hidden in the historical record? What did it tell them of power or imperialism or the origins of war?5
Oswald does his best to re-educate his charges to face the world as it really is. Gradually, the shades begin to fall from Peter’s eyes. Unsettled, he ruminates about war, Empire, God, and life in general. But it is, of course, Oswald to whom Wells affords the last word – in truth, many of them – in a lengthy final chapter that constitutes his “valediction” to Joan and Peter.
Oswald pontificates in “broad generalisations” on the foolishness of the generals, the mendacity of the politicians, and the plight of the world. Again and again he returns to the idea of history – not that of great men, of kings and queens, but of something else entirely. “All history,” he comes to see, “is the record of an effort in man to form communities” and of the constant failures to realize that ideal – failures that lead to war and disaster.6
Oswald, like Wells, begins to think along another line: the idea of a League of Free Nations, of a world-state or world republic. This is “the rediscovered outline, the proper teaching of all real education, the necessary outline now of human life.” Historians, like the universities, should be “working to a common end, drawing together all the best minds and the finest wills, a myriad of multicoloured threads, into one common web of a world civilization.” History as kings and queens and empires and nations did a disservice to humanity. It failed to address the will of the species, to recognize the reality and the power of human passion. That is why, for Oswald and for Wells, attention always returned to the idea of a League of Free Nations, an idea that has come, thinks Oswald, “with the effect of a personal and preferential call.”7
February 1918: Florence’s history was complete. It had taken her the better part of four years, four long years during the most senseless and tragic of all wars. She had laboured hard and been constant to her task and to the interwoven threads of her argument. Reflecting on her efforts many years later, Florence was to write: “The basic theme of this outline was ‘Man’s struggle for social values,’ including woman’s share in that struggle. Thus I endeavoured to weave in chronological order a fabric composed of facts, … the story of the world essential to a historical perspective from ‘the beginning’ down to to-day … In it was featured the work and influence of woman in weaving up the story of the human race – the web of human history.”8
“The web.” She had noted recurring images drawn from weaving while she had drafted her manuscript. Then one day, quite “accidentally,” she said, those two words took on heightened resonance. The image of a web linked human progress to woman’s place and predicament, and that was exactly her argument. Her book had at last found its title: “The Web of the World’s Romance.”
Her struggle to express her view of the history of humanity was her own peaceful counterpoint to war, fought in a library and in a home. Four years of a battle against conventional historical interpretation, against the snare of history told as the story of man alone, and she had prevailed. She had written her “Web” as a war against all wars, her own quiet act of sacrifice in the service of love.
The western front was going badly. The military desperately needed bodies. The first conscripts under the Military Service Act had already been called up. Throughout Canada, farms were without workers and thousands of schoolboys now served as “Soldiers of the Soil.” Food was scarce, fuel in short supply. Churches held services in common, and schools remained closed for weeks on end. Offices, shops, and warehouses lacked heat.9 Even in the library reading room people kept their overcoats on. The streetcar rides from the library north to Farnham Avenue seemed to Florence longer than ever, and her fellow passengers looked tired and tense. She could not for the life of her tell whether it was stoic resolve or quiet desperation she glimpsed in their eyes. Perhaps it was just winter, which, like the war, seemed to have no end in sight.
At home, she had spent endless nights typing her manuscript into finished form, making two copies in addition to the original. This was no easy matter. In an age before the photocopier made reproduction of a limitless number of perfect copies of typescript a simple and painless matter, preparation for this purpose remained laborious and time-consuming. The typing of each page involved the lining up and insertion of sheets of carbon paper between the pages of bond paper, in this case involving five pieces of paper for each page typed; and after each error in the typing came the task of removing the sheets, making erasures by hand to the original and two copy pages, rearranging and reinserting them beneath the typewriter’s platen, aligning the paper accurately, and typing the correct character. All this for the prospect of carbon copies that often lacked sharpness and that faded badly with each copy made. Little wonder that few literary manuscripts other than the original existed for the purpose of circulation.
This making of precious extra copies was necessary but hard-won. Florence stuck to it as she had stuck to the research and writing. She was well aware of the many ways her book failed to do full justice to the majesty of history, but even so she was pleased with what she had accomplished. In a way, it was her only child, the only progeny to which she would give issue. At the age of fifty-four, she had at last given birth. And for this blessing, at least, she could give thanks.
She had written eighteen more chapters since reaching the Renaissance in 1916, and her final chapter – the thirty-fourth – had taken her story to the Great War.10 Wherever possible, she had taken pains to stress the ongoing influence of women in history, an influence that had continued even as patriarchy endured and grew, placing women in a position of subjection. She had delighted in pointing to Lucrezia de Medici’s influence on the education of her son Lorenzo. It was she who “really ruled Florence.” Columbus had learned his map-making skills with the help of his wife, Philippa, daughter of Perestrello, one of the foremost Portuguese navigators.
Again and again, Florence placed women at the centre of attention: Isabella of Aragón, the power behind the throne of late-fifteenth-century Spain; Marguerite de Roberval, who helped establish domestic life in sixteenth-century New France; Marguerite Luther, who had been so instrumental in forming the character and beliefs of her son Martin. “The family home,” Florence insisted, “– not the Renaissance – made Luther what he was.” Talented women, not only men, helped make the Renaissance: Vittoria Calonna, the marchioness of Pescara; Veronica Gambara, countess of Corregio; Constanza d’Avalos, duchess of Amalfi; Laura Ferracina, Laura Battiferra, Gaspera Stampa, and others. In her treatment of women during the Reformation, she evoked the lives of Florentine of Upper Weimar, who escaped from an unhappy life as a nun, and of Elizabeth, wife of Joachim I (elector of Brandenburg), who was menaced by her husband after he discovered her Protestant faith. Successful in evading his threat to “wall her up,” she became instrumental in bringing the people of Brandenburg to Protestantism.11
Florence regaled her mother and sisters with the stories of such women, and there were so many to talk about: Luther’s wife, Catharine von Bora, of whom he said, “I would not part from my Kathe, no, not to gain all Florence and Venice”; Mary, daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, who “spoke fluently all the modern languages,” who “could hold her own in controversy with the most subtle diplomat,” and who “was accomplished in music and was practically educated in the New Learning.” And of course Elizabeth I, for whom Florence’s admiration knew few bounds. Elizabeth had secured to herself an absolute power equal to any European despot, yet “she had so judiciously used that power as to promote a peace within her border through which her people became wildly ebullient in the joy of living, of union, of prosperity, of learning and of liberty.”12
As one might guess from a historical work that depended on the long view of history already mapped out by nineteenth-century liberal historians such as Victor Duruy and John Richard Green, “The Web” was written within the general interpretive framework known to later twentieth-century historians as “Whig history.” This approach to the past assumed progress to be inevitable and located the signs of that progress in the gradual triumph of constitutional democracy over various forms of autocratic government. It was history written with the democratic present in mind, a history fundamentally Protestant in bias and with representative government and parliamentary supremacy assumed to be the desirable and almost necessary outcome.13 Florence showed her pleasure when the past moved towards democracy and equality, and her scorn when institutions impeded their advent or when civilizations or cultures spurned them.
Florence Deeks was no philosopher of history, and she had little knowledge of contemporary schools of historical interpretation. She preferred the English Whigs to the Tories during the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, and she saw parliamentary supremacy as a better system than rule by crown alone, however “enlightened” it might be. For her, this was not a matter of historical interpretation: it was plain common sense. Who, after all, would prefer enlightened despotism to democracy and equality? So she provided the only interpretation of the past that made sense to her and to the generation in which the British Empire had reached its zenith.
Yet hers was a Whig history with a difference, one that set it apart from other accounts of the day. The impediment to progress in politics and society remained for Florence the perpetuation of patriarchy and the incessant aggression of men in power, and she took pains to point this out. Earlier forms of subjection through the sale of women and the gradual triumph of patriarchal lineage had merely been transformed into more sophisticated forms of subjection through the possession and inheritance of property. Women continued over the ages to maintain bonds of family and cooperation, but were usually thwarted in their efforts to gain control over their own lives. The power of loving kindness inevitably, therefore, was too often sacrificed to the interests of aggression and private gain, usually by means of war.
To Florence’s way of thinking, woman was the “infallible index of a nation’s status.” But in order to demonstrate this, it was not sufficient simply to portray the great women of history, whether Aspasia or Florence Nightingale. It was necessary also to remind her readers of the ways in which women’s interests had been sacrificed to those of men, whether in ancient Israel or India or in the modern world. In the case of Restoration England, she was particularly harsh in judgment. “Woman now suffered,” she wrote, “perhaps, the deepest degradation that the country had ever known … Everything that belonged to her, real or personal even her clothes as well as anything that she might inherit after marriage, became the possession of her husband … She had no power to sell any of her landed property, and even her household property went to her husband … He would will away all her property … And even their children belonged wholly to the father. Thus a woman owned nothing – scarcely body or soul.”14
Women remained influential, she insisted, but as individuals, not as a group. Poor women remained uneducated. They were indoctrinated to believe that woman’s capabilities were inferior to those of man – for example, that a girl who ceases to blush has lost her most powerful charm and that she should seek to influence men not by reason but by caress. Pioneering women educators such as Mary Anstell sought a proper education for women, but they worked in the face of extraordinary obstacles. The French Revolution may have advanced the cause of liberty, but it was not extended to women. Women of France lost more than they gained by the revolution, and the struggles of the women of Germany “for independence and equality” became more difficult, since the introduction of conscriptive military service took men away from what Florence thought of as “useful and productive work” in order to train them for war.15
The history of woman was that of courage and perseverance in the face of such adversity. Often her initiatives had not improved her own circumstances, but, like the women of the French Revolution and the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, they left an enduring legacy. They inspired others, such as Elizabeth Gurney Fry, to persist in their efforts to alleviate human suffering. Such women in nineteenth-century England, Florence wrote, “were peacefully exercising an active, beneficent and vital influence upon the development of constitutional liberty which the democracy of England had succeeded in establishing and maintaining, and whose principles therefore became so deeply rooted in the life of the nation that no militaristic power has been strong enough or subtle enough to eradicate them.” Women as well as men campaigned for the suffrage, and women as well as men were bayoneted or trampled upon by troops at Manchester in 1819 when they attempted to listen to the great radical orator Henry Hunt.16
In Florence’s view, the accession of Victoria to the English throne was “the fairest day” since “the close of the matriarchate” at the dawn of history. Hers was a reign governed by the principles of “domestic virtue,” learning, “nobility of purpose,” and “intelligent activity.” A Victorian herself, Florence had nothing but praise for the ethos invoked by the example of the English queen whose name became that of the age. “The sovereign power of Victoria,” she wrote, “was exercised with a loving and judicious firmness that worked wonders. It produced a silent and humane revolution which force could never accomplish, and which tended to subdue violence, refine manners, and to awaken in woman a realization of her superior endowments … And in proportion as force gave place to gentleness and justice and mental superiority, woman’s position rose and peace settled down upon the spirit of the nation, and steady advance was made in both political and social reforms.”17
The polarities of Florence Deeks’s history of the world were oppression and liberty. Liberty, she believed, “had its origin in no particular country and in no particular creed.” It was born, instead, “in the home.” In this respect, her perspective was that of the maternal feminism of her day. The legislation that enlarged the sphere of freedom may have been initiated by men, but its seeds had been laid throughout the ages near the family hearth and at the cradle. Genuine liberty became possible, she insisted, only as a result of “the altruistic, insinuating, beneficent, subtle persistent influence and effort of normal woman” in the face of “indescribable sufferings imposed by the physical force of the warrior.”18 If history embodied progress, it was in large part because ordinary people did extraordinary things in acts of nurturing, kindness, cooperation, and benevolence, thereby making improvement in the human condition possible. Florence had one word to capture the source of such acts of selflessness. It was “love.” Before aggression, before war, before kings and despots and tyrants and generals, before patriarchy and armies and laws – before all these things there had been love, and love had somehow endured.
As the Great War reached the middle of its fourth horrific year, Wells found himself near the seat of imperial power, yet he maintained his critical stance. After his tour of the Italian, French, and German fronts in the late summer of 1916, he had written of his experiences and projected his thoughts forward in a book called War and the Future, published early the next year. In it, he had complained about the “ineffectiveness” of British and other organizations in explaining the meaning of the war. Much of the propaganda, he said, was nonsense. This war would not end war: in this belief he had been deluded. The experience of the war was “like something in a dream”; the world, he said in proclaiming his pacifism, was “not really awake.” The war was nothing but “waste, disorder, disaster,” a brutal mixture of flags and nationalities and “irrational creeds and ceremonies.” Only when people awoke from their dream-like state would they turn from their Babel-like nationalities to the “one God of mankind.”19
This was a man whose energies needed to be harnessed to the Allied cause, for from the perspective of British leaders his ideas were at best unhelpful, and at worst dangerous. He had declared that the war might well go on into 1918 or 1919 and was critical of the “peace at any price” campaign. His insistence that the Allies be absolutely clear about their war aims and devote attention to the shape of peace after the war took attention away from the desperate need for victory. Worse, he argued that to be effective the post-war peace treaty must control munitions throughout the world and that the United States must take the lead in proposing the peace settlement.20
During the spring of 1918, Lord Northcliffe, the press baron who had become director of enemy propaganda, asked Wells to chair an advisory committee aimed at spreading propaganda in enemy territory.21 He liked what Wells had written for him in the early stages of the war, and the writer’s collections of essays such as An Englishman Looks at the World, published in 1914, and What Is Coming?, which appeared two years later, had provided further proof of the continuing fertility of his prophetic imagination. Northcliffe now sought to harness it once again to the cause of patriotism by enlisting Wells for service at Crewe House.
Wells joined the advisory committee because he believed he could harness official propaganda to his League of Free Nations idea. It did not work; he experienced nothing but frustration. At St. James’s Court he spent sleepless nights annoyed that his imagination had not been called upon to help develop effective tanks (after all, it was he who had dreamt up the notion of Land Ironclads in a Strand Magazine piece back in 1903), and at Crewe House he did little more than superintend the manufacture of leaflets to be distributed by secret agents and the forging of “pseudo-German newspapers with depressing suggestions.” This was nothing compared with what he believed the ministry should be doing. All day long he helped manufacture lies, and he wanted desperately to tell the world the truth. Above all, the combatant powers must somehow reach a common understanding of the mechanisms of a lasting peace.22
To Wells, the war effort was in the hands of small-minded men, men of “limited outlooks and limited motives.” He continued to press within Crewe House for a clear declaration of Allied war aims, and he was instrumental in drafting a memorandum by the advisory committee insisting on the development and implementation of his idea of a League of Free Nations, led by a security council of the great powers, that would limit the Allies’ sovereignty, territorial possessions, and subject peoples “in the common interest of mankind.” The document was duly sent from Northcliffe to Arthur Balfour and the Foreign Office. Wells initially assumed that the principles outlined in it had been accepted, and continued in his propaganda effort. He soon concluded, however, that he and his Crewe House colleagues were merely being used as “decoys” by Foreign Office officials who had no intention of acting upon the advisory committee’s recommendations and who had put Northcliffe in charge of propaganda only to keep him from knowing too much about Foreign Office initiatives. Even more frustrating for Wells, Northcliffe himself was two-faced. As master of Crewe House, he had sent out the League of Free Nations memorandum under his signature, but as the press baron of Printing House Square, he sanctioned the ongoing “rant” of newspapers such as the Times, the Daily Mail, and the Evening News over the perfidy of the Germans.23 Wells complained to Northcliffe, to no avail, and by the end of June he was on the verge of resignation from the propaganda work.
Increasingly he devoted his energies to the League of Free Nations, helping consolidate several groups into a single League of Nations Union with a research committee consisting of the major figures of the movement. Along with Wells, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Lionel Curtis, J.A. Spender, and Leonard Woolf, the research committee included the prominent scholars G. Lowes Dickinson, Gilbert Murray, and Ernest Barker. Collectively they put together two pamphlets, The Idea of a League of Nations and The Way to the League of Nations. “It is clear,” said the former, “that if a world league is to be living and enduring, the idea of it and the need and righteousness of its service must be taught by every educational system in the world.” In this way, the research committee repeated the central message of Joan and Peter: that world peace was fundamentally a matter of an education in humanity.24
Once again, however, Wells’s efforts were thwarted. In 1917, acting on his belief that the Americans must lead the way to peace, he had sent a lengthy outline of his League of Free Nations idea to President Woodrow Wilson by means of a letter delivered through an American intermediary. Early in January 1918, in an address to both houses of Congress, Wilson introduced his “Fourteen Points” for a peace settlement. It included a proposal to establish a League of Nations. The winds of initiative had been taken right out of the British sails. Wells faced the prospect of endless committee meetings, all of which now had necessarily to respond to policies emanating from across the Atlantic.
This proved too much for him to bear. He hated committee work, and while the Fourteen Points led generally in a direction of which he approved, it held out little prospect for the broader ideal of a new world confederation of socialist states.25 In early July, he presided over a Reform Club dinner attended by British and American champions of the League of Free Nations. During it, he spoke at length of the need for a new understanding of history. By midsummer Wells had announced his resignation from the propaganda committee. He continued with League work, but his attention had drifted to other matters.
Whatever course the remainder of the war would take, one thing was clear to Wells the prophet: that the peace must usher in a new world order. He was determined that the world would learn of his vision of the future. In order to secure a foothold on that future, humanity would need first to heed the lessons of its past. It was time to act on this conviction. The moment had come to set aside fiction and to embark on his own history of the world, however long it might take.
At the end of July 1918, Florence Deeks stepped off the streetcar at Yonge and Dundas Streets, carrying a bulky package under her arm. A short block east on Dundas, she turned south. Bond Street was pleasant – only a few blocks long, and shaded on both sides by large trees, a pocket of repose that almost kept the din of Yonge Street at bay. Florence could see St. Michael’s Cathedral at the first intersection, not far from Massey Hall.
The building she wanted was number 70, and she found it standing proudly between the offices of Presbyterian Publications and a house once lived in by the fiery Upper Canadian rebel William Lyon Mackenzie. It was an impressive structure in its own right, five storeys high, mainly of brick but with a first storey of Ohio blue-stone.26 Number 70 Bond Street was the headquarters of the Macmillan Company of Canada.
The interior was just as striking. Florence passed through a vestibule of marble panels into a bright inner hall with a mullioned window of leaded cathedral glass. Just past the spacious staircase and the passenger elevator, she found the waiting room and educational office. Settled in one of the wooden chairs, her parcel on her lap, she took in the surroundings. The room seemed perfectly suited for the Canadian headquarters of a great publishing firm – wall panels and bookcases in dark stained wood, complemented by a wallpaper of deep green. The atmosphere seemed just right, dignified but not sombre. From where she sat, she could see the office of the president and directors off to the side, and the president’s secretary busy at her desk.
Shortly after putting the final touches on “The Web” she had written to the education editor of Macmillan’s Canadian branch, John C. Saul. Florence had been worried that perhaps she had drawn too heavily on Green’s Short History of the English People, both in paraphrase and in quoted extracts. Since she understood that Macmillan, publisher of the book, held copyright, she felt obliged to ask the company whether any exception might be taken to her use of Green. In a letter to Saul of February 22, she had explained her problem, mentioning in passing that her manuscript was a short history of the world and that she would conform to the publisher’s wishes in every way. Saul had responded around the middle of March, saying that it would be best if she left the manuscript with him so he could examine it. “Of course,” he wrote, “you are quite aware that if your book was very much like Greene’s [sic] ‘Short History of the English People,’ our English House would probably not sanction its publication.”27 He suggested that she telephone him to arrange for an appointment.
Florence had not acted immediately on the invitation. Macmillan was one of the largest and most prestigious publishing firms in the world, and its imprint was seen on books by famous authors such as Tennyson and Kipling and H.G. Wells. She had been reluctant to subject her work to the scrutiny of its editors, even if only to check passages from Green. But she did need to have some professional eyes examine it, so she had gone first to the Methodist Book and Publishing House in the Wesley Building at the corner of Queen and John Streets and left her manuscript with a Mr. E.J. Moore to look over and provide advice. She also left a copy with J.M. Dent and Sons.
The act of surrendering “The Web” to strange men’s eyes required more courage than Florence felt she possessed, and she could not bring herself to give her own name as its author. Instead, she chose a pseudonym that combined humour and self-deprecation in equal measure, as if to distance herself from potential criticism. The title page of “The Web” indicated only that it had been written by “Adul Weaver.” By whatever name, its author remained taut with worry about its fate. After a couple of weeks without word from Moore, she had become so nervous that she asked him to return it. He did so, along with a letter that declined to publish because of economies forced on the firm by the war.28 Dent reacted in a similar way.
Sitting in the Macmillan waiting room, fingers nervously tapping the wrapped copy of her manuscript, she wondered whether she had made a mistake in asking Mr. Saul for an interview. Suddenly he was in front of her, hand outstretched in welcome, a tall, amiable-looking man about fifty years old, with a slight stoop, dishevelled hair, and a wild moustache that badly needed a trim. Judging by his looks, he could just as easily have been a scholar or a bohemian as a respected publisher.29
Like the man, Saul’s office bore little resemblance to the dignified atmosphere of the waiting room. His desk was strewn with bulky files. A pile of manuscripts and folders threatened to topple from it. Books lay in disarray on shelves, organized in no obvious order. They were on all manner of subjects, from nineteenth-century poetry to histories of Russia. A pile of detective stories sat near the edge of the desk. Even before Florence was able to unwrap her copy of “The Web,” a cloud of smoke from Saul’s pipe threatened to engulf the room.
The meeting was brief. She told Saul hesitantly about her history of the world, mentioned that she was seeking advice with a view to eventual publication, and repeated to him her fear that she had used Green too much. Then she gave him her manuscript, and he sat back in his chair and, puffing away, flipped through it at random, reading portions as he went along. Somehow, she observed, the unruly hair and moustache did not jibe with the high, stiff stand-up collar and straight tie he wore. After a few minutes, he put the manuscript down and asked to keep it for a while. Summoning her remaining courage, she took a few poems from her handbag and offered them to him. He shook his head. “We are not interested in poetry, we do not buy,” he said.30 So she put them back. The interview was over. She thanked him for his consideration, took her leave, and left the building for Farnham Avenue and home.
A couple of weeks later, on August 14, she received a letter from Saul, apologizing for the fact that he had not yet been able to give any detailed attention to her manuscript and asking her permission to allow it “to remain where it is” until he returned in a couple of weeks from a business trip. She did not mind at all, for she was about to leave Toronto herself for a brief vacation.31