Fools make researches and wise men exploit them.
H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)
EXACTLY WHEN H.G. WELLS TURNED from thinking about the problem of re-educating people about history in general to doing the actual work on the narrative history of the world that was to become his most successful and lucrative book has been something of a mystery. Biographies are curiously silent about the period from the fall of 1918 until the summer of 1919, when much of the research and writing of The Outline of History was completed. Wells himself is of no more help in his Experiment in Autobiography, for he says virtually nothing about the months in which he wrote what the literary historian Samuel Hynes was later to call “the most important history in English in the twentieth century.”1
Biographers invariably point to Wells’s preoccupation with history by 1918 and imply that he was able to research and write his massive tome so quickly because he was a prolific author. And massive it was. At first, he had estimated that the book would run to about 200,000 words, long enough. But the North American first edition contained well over 400,000 words in 1,324 pages (including the 48-page index) that required publication in two volumes.2 In some unspecified way, biographers hint, Wells had been preparing it most of his life. Besides, if he could write at such confident length about an unknown future, would it not be easy for him to do so about a known past?3
Above all, the conventional explanation goes, he had surrounded himself with an impeccable team of learned collaborators, named on the title page of The Outline: Ernest Barker, Oxford classical scholar and student of political thought; Sir Harry Johnston, African explorer and expert on its languages and cultures; Sir E. Ray Lankester, zoologist; and Gilbert Murray, the Oxford classical scholar with whom Wells worked on the research committee promoting a League of Free Nations.
Wells himself came to date his first discussions of The Outline of History to his meeting with League of Free Nations advocates over dinner at the Reform Club in mid-July 1918. Among the party was the American scholar Henry Seidel Canby, who solicited an article from Wells soon afterwards for the Yale Review. Although the article was to cover “How American History Should be Taught,” Canby made no mention of any interest in world history that he might have heard Wells express at the dinner.4 It seems clear that Wells had only begun to map out his book that summer, when he was with Rebecca West. While she worked on what eventually became her novel The Judge, he began to sketch The Outline, much to her annoyance. “She came to hate The Outline of History,” he later wrote, “almost as much as she hated Jane.” He wanted to write history as “a picture of developing inter-communications”; she wanted him to devote his imagination to more creative work.5
It is one thing for an author with a keen interest in history, a fertile imagination, and a fluid pen to gain an overall sense of the past, but quite another to do the research necessary to execute the subject. For this, a great deal of reading is necessary if only to discover where to look and what subjects to include or exclude. Rebecca’s pension held few, if any, of the necessary resources for the task at hand. He needed help from people deeply familiar with history as a formal subject of study. He needed expert advice.
Wells’s wide circle of acquaintance gave him many such people from whom to seek guidance. The men he chose had extraordinary reputations. When they allowed their names to accompany that of the author on the title page of The Outline, they provided an implicit explanation of how he was able to write such a lengthy and detailed work of history in a very short time when it was his first venture into the subject. Michael Coren, Wells’s most critical biographer, refers to these men as “a gifted think-tank.”6
The first member of the “think-tank” was Sir E. Ray Lankester, an eminent zoologist. Son of a physician and coroner, Lankester had met Darwin and Huxley as a boy and had gained a first-class degree in the honour school of natural sciences at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1868, at the age of twenty-one. A series of prized academic appointments soon followed. By 1898 he held the Fullerian professorship of physiology and comparative anatomy in the Royal Institution and was also director of the natural history departments and keeper of zoology in the British Museum, South Kensington.
On his retirement in 1907, Lankester was knighted. He had written some two hundred scientific papers, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. General editor of the multivolume Treatise on Zoology (1900–9), he had also published several books of popular science, including Extinct Animals (1905) and The Kingdom of Man (1907). Who could possibly question Sir Ray Lankester’s place as a major contributor to H.G. Wells’s Outline of History?7
Lankester had long been an admirer of Wells’s work, and corresponded regularly with him or with Jane from early in the century. When others attacked or ostracized Wells after the publication of Ann Veronica, he had stood by his friend.8 But by 1918 he was an irascible old man of seventy-one, as often as not complaining from his Kensington flat about how depressed and debilitated he was because of the war. “I returned on Monday night last,” he wrote Wells in October 1917, “& heard horrible accounts of the bombing & the panic amongst the people. I confess I can’t stand it. I can’t work. I sit here alone in a constant state of apprehension – & I don’t see exactly what to do. I never bargained (so to speak) for a recurrent bombardment of London & it gets on my nerves. At any moment they may be at it again – & every sound … startles me.” Two months later he felt no better. Perhaps to soothe the frayed nerves of their old friend, the Wellses dined with him in London and invited him on occasion to spend weekends at Easton Glebe.9
Sir Ray had no written contact with Wells from July through September 1918, and when the correspondence began again it was not about The Outline but about Joan and Peter, which had just been released. “It is splendid,” Sir Ray wrote, “& seems as all your books do as they follow one another – to be just what my own latest thoughts amount to.” He went on to talk about Wells’s views on God but made no mention of The Outline. His friend clearly replied to these kind words, for nine days later Sir Ray wrote Wells again, thanking him for an invitation to visit the Wellses at Easton Glebe later in the month. There is no doubt that by now Wells had broached the subject of his projected history. “I like your idea of a history of Man,” wrote the zoologist. “It should include all the present romance of mixed races and nationalities and savages and a sort of traveller’s geography.”10
Early in November, more than a month after staying with the Wellses, Sir Ray wrote a letter giving Wells advice about his history. It concerned cavemen and their drawings. After he had finished complaining about being cold, wet, and alone, he offered his first written suggestions about books Wells ought to consult. A few days later, he was at it again. Addressing Wells as “Beloved pup,” he began, “We know nothing of the Heidelberg chap except his jawbone,” expressing his skepticism about the recent discovery of Piltdown Man. Other advice about toes and thumbs of chimpanzees, lemurs, and humans followed in the letter, but that was it. These were his only written contributions to The Outline of History during the months when Wells did most of his research, apart from a letter of November 24 to Jane Wells. Any other help he provided must have taken place through conversation.11
A second member of the “think-tank” was Sir Harry Johnston, in his own way as noteworthy as Sir Ray Lankester. Born in 1858, Johnston was a man small in size but large in stature, the very embodiment of the Victorian “all-rounder.” From an early age, his interests were language and art, animals and adventure. After a grammar school education, he moved in 1875 to London, where he began to study modern languages at King’s College, painting at the Royal Academy Schools, zoology in Regent’s Park, and anatomy in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. His thirst for adventure unslaked, Johnston also undertook a sketching tour of Majorca, Spain, and France.12
At the end of the 1870s, Johnston began an association with the African continent that was to last for the rest of his life. It started with his role as artist, journalist, and adventurer. In addition to collecting scientific evidence along the Congo basin and in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, he also negotiated a number of treaties with tribal chieftains, thereby laying the basis for the later formation of the British East Africa Protectorate in 1895. He received a knighthood the following year.
His skills as a diplomat discovered by the Foreign Office, Sir Harry acted on its behalf in Cameroon and the Niger delta, mollifying local tribes and opening up the region for British trade. As the imperial powers negotiated over the partition of Africa, he was often at the table or in the field. Sir Harry Johnston, the special commissioner to Uganda, pacified the region; Sir Harry the scientist-adventurer explored Mount Rowenzori, recorded flora and fauna, discovered unknown animals, and studied the pygmies of the Congo forest.
Wells first met Sir Harry in 1915 at a meeting organized by Sir Ray Lankester and others concerning the conduct of the war. Sir Ray had come to be “astounded” at the blunders of the British high command and drew together a large gathering of those connected with science at the headquarters of a scientific society in Burlington House, London. Sir Harry may have been an imperial adventurer, but he was no warmonger. He had long been a critic of imperial excess, having made an enemy of Cecil Rhodes in the 1890s when he refused to cooperate with Rhodes in an attack on the Portuguese. Now he found himself allied with Sir Ray and Wells in their mounting criticism of war leadership. Before very long, Sir Harry was an occasional visitor to Easton Glebe, where the two men swapped stories – the adventurer of his African experiences and the writer of his visit to the Italian front. Sir Harry must have been pleased when he read Wells’s Joan and Peter upon its release in September 1918, for there he was in its pages, cast as himself but playing the role of Oswald’s anti-imperialist African mentor.13
Sir Harry Johnston’s reputation as a master of African tribal dialects and of the anthropology, zoology, and botany of the “Dark Continent” made him an obvious choice as an expert source of help for Wells’s Outline, particularly its early chapters. But in 1918 the health of the sixty-year-old man had broken down. In 1917, while lecturing to troops at the front under the sponsorship of the YMCA, he had suffered from an attack of mustard gas; now he faced prostate surgery and two quite serious liver-related operations.14 In several chatty letters to Wells written between 1916 and 1919, he provided details on the intricacies of operations on the prostate gland, talked about a novel he was writing, commented on Wells’s own novels, and expressed his disgust with the politicians’ and generals’ conduct of the war. He talked about many things in his letters to Wells between 1916 and the end of summer 1918, but not about The Outline of History.15
Early in September 1918, Sir Harry wrote to Jane Wells, confirming his intention to stay with the Wellses at Easton Glebe during the latter half of the month. This was a good time in which to talk directly about The Outline, and to point Wells in fruitful directions. Given the phenomenal subsequent success of the book, the exchange between expert and author should have been a memorable one, worth recording. But when Sir Harry wrote his memoirs, all he could remember was that “in between my medical consultations I paid him a visit at Easton in September 1918. We talked about the War, about Hubert Parry, and this, that, and the other thing, whilst the other week-end guests were there.” Of the nine letters he subsequently wrote to Wells between October 1918 and August 1919, not one mentioned The Outline.16
This was probably because Sir Harry Johnston had more things to worry about by then than the history of the world. His health was getting worse, to the point that he looked forward to surgery. His heart was weak, and he spent much of his time in a nursing chair in Poling, more or less an invalid. He had the operation late in 1918 and spent the following months recuperating. He did not return to Poling from his nursing home until April 1919. Whenever he could muster enough energy, he used his time to complete his novel, The Gay-Dombeys, which appeared under the Macmillan imprint in 1919, thanks to Wells’s sponsorship.17 After he felt sufficiently recovered, he worked towards the completion of his two-volume study of the Bantu language. In the summer of 1919 he undertook a journey up and down the Rhine Valley and gave lectures for the War Office to the army of occupation in the French and American sectors.18
When Wells later commented on Sir Harry’s contribution to The Outline of History, it was not to thank him for his contributions but instead to complain that “his weakness, or rather, his excessive strength, lay in the abnormal though no doubt righteous, spelling of well-known historical names.”19 In their conversations, Wells no doubt learned much from Sir Harry’s store of arcane knowledge about Africa. The question, as with the similar contribution of Sir Ray Lankester, is whether it constituted anything remotely resembling the degree of knowledge or research into the sweep of history necessary to write The Outline. These men knew much about zoology, botany, and anthropology, but what could they tell Wells about Pericles or Alexander the Great that he may not already have had at hand in his library at Easton Glebe?
The remaining two members of the “gifted think-tank” thought to have contributed so much to the making of The Outline of History were Gilbert Murray and Ernest Barker. Here, perhaps, was the true font of the kind of historical knowledge required to provide the detailed research for the book. These men were Oxford-educated scholars of classical antiquity but with broad-ranging historical and political interests. Certainly, no one could possibly take exception to their right to a place on the title page of The Outline.
Born in Australia in 1866, Gilbert Murray had excelled in Greek and Latin composition while at St. John’s College, Oxford. But from the outset of his studies he had expressed his dissatisfaction at the narrowness of the conventional approach to the classics, seeking instead to breathe imaginative life into the subject. Study of the classics, he believed, was about culture and civilization, not only language and literature. When he married Lady Mary Howard in 1889, Murray also assumed the chair of Greek at Glasgow. In 1905, he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of New College, followed three years later by appointment as Regius professor of Greek.20
Wells and Murray began to correspond in 1917, by which time Murray was well known as the author of Rise of the Greek Epic (1907), Four Stages of Greek Religion (1912), and Euripides and His Age (1913). In that year, Wells sent him a copy of God the Invisible King, in which Murray had been quoted. More serious acquaintance took place, however, when the two men became involved in the campaign for a League of Free Nations and began to work together to bring it to fruition. At one level, they had much in common, for both held strong internationalist beliefs. But the relationship was not without tension, since Murray believed Wells would ruin the idea with his too-broad notion of a world federation, while Wells was convinced that people like Murray, however well intentioned, were of too limited a vision.21
Murray was as indefatigable as Wells. By July 1918, he was director of the League of Free Nations Association, and over the next year he spent much of his time attempting to unite the League of Nations Society and the League of Free Nations Association. Throughout the autumn Murray was deeply involved with other writers in government work intended to find ways of counteracting German propaganda among neutral countries. He came to call the Ministry of Information at Wellington House the “Mendacity Bureau,” but he gave it his full attention. By early 1919 he had agreed to serve on a committee to discuss the Foreign Office draft for the League of Nations covenant. Throughout the last half of 1918 and well into 1919, then, Gilbert Murray was even more involved than Wells in League and war work.22
The archival papers of Murray and Wells say next to nothing about any collaboration. The two men wrote to each other infrequently between July 1918 and July 1919. Not until Wells wrote Murray an undated letter from Easton Glebe, most likely in 1919, does the subject of The Outline arise. In it, Wells complains that he is physically unable to continue League work. He has grown disenchanted with the research committee’s intention to work as a group to write an educational textbook aimed at furthering internationalism. “I can’t rise to that task,” he complained. “I’m naturally a solitary worker. Team work for me is like using a razor to carve marble.” Then, clearly for the first time, he introduces his current project. “For some time I’ve thought of writing an Outline of History as a sort of experiment in teaching arrangement. I believe the History of Man can be [written] as easily as the History of England” and that a world “educated in universal history” would be “a different & better world altogether. I think after I have rested I shall go on with that.”23 He does not solicit Murray’s help.
A clear indication that Gilbert Murray became involved with The Outline of History only well into 1919 is provided in a letter Wells wrote to him on June 15, 1919, after much of The Outline had been drafted, from his flat in St. James’s Court. “Don’t forget,” he began, “I’ve got my eye upon you to help out my history. It’s a rash tale of stuff I warn you & I screw up to this exaction, but I simply must get help. It’s the Outline of History from the incandescent globe stage to this year of grace 1919.” He goes on to mention that he has got J.F. Horrabin of the Daily News “doing endless maps” and “good outline drawings of extinct beasts,” while Sir Ray Lankester is providing help with the early chapters. Sir Harry Johnston, it appears from the letter, has yet to make his contribution, since Wells expresses his hope that “I think I can count on” him “for the Ethnology.” Wells now proposes to send Murray what he has written – the chapters up to “about 1000 AD.” Murray’s task? “What I want you to do is to blue pencil howlers & to note serious disproportions in your own regions of special interest. That is what I mean by checking but what I mean by support is something different and I don’t know whether you will care to do that for me.”24
Wells makes it clear in the letter that the “support” he asks for is not that of an expert’s research on the book; instead, it is the weight of Murray’s scholarly reputation. “The book,” he warns Murray, “will rouse anybody in the history textbook & history teaching line to blind fury. It is a serious raid into various departments of special knowledge … It is a necessary counter to nationalism & imperialism. There will be a sustained attempt to [represent?] me as an ignorant interloper & dispose of me in that way.” That is why Wells needs the weight of academic authority. “Well, what I want is to be able to name some indisputable names on my title page,” Wells concludes, expressing his hope that Murray will be willing to lend his name in just such a way. Not until late July 1919 does Murray receive the first stack of typescript Wells has promised.25
Like the involvement of the other experts, Ernest Barker’s contribution to The Outline of History was neither early nor sustained. Compared with them, he was a young pup of forty-four in 1918, a scholar whose star was still on the rise. At the time a Fellow and tutor at New College, Oxford, Barker was a political theorist and historian who had established his reputation with the publication of Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle in 1906. His support of the cooperative movement and of the Workers’ Educational Association and the National Council of Social Service furthered his reputation as a man of politically progressive views, and this obviously appealed to Wells. Barker and Murray corresponded occasionally in late 1918 and early 1919, but the letters made no mention of Wells or his project.26
Barker’s contribution to The Outline, like Murray’s, did not begin until the summer of 1919, when he received the typescript to vet. Barker took his responsibilities seriously, and perhaps because he was younger, more healthy, and less preoccupied with other matters than the other collaborators, he was able to provide Wells with detailed notes on the text. They included suggestions from Oxford colleagues in fields such as Chinese and Indian history, as well as references to the main books on various subjects. This was helpful, but only to a point. It was the kind of aid required at the commencement of research, but he offered it only after Wells had already drafted much of his book. Barker later expressed his amazement at what Wells had been able to achieve. “The sweep of the panorama,” he said, “makes me almost breathless: it is what I imagine an aeroplane flight is like in the material world.”27
The achievement was enough to take almost anyone’s breath away. Biographers of Wells uniformly fall back on the “team approach” to the research and writing of The Outline of History when they attempt to explain it, especially when they must account for its production at a time when Wells was seeing Joan and Peter through to publication, continuing to campaign on behalf of the League of Free Nations idea, writing The Undying Fire (1919), and carrying on life at Easton Glebe as well as his on-again, off-again affair with Rebecca West.
Even those who, like Barker, knew how quickly Wells wrote and how prolific an author he was remained astonished at his achievement. For most such people, the presence of the names “Mr. Ernest Barker, Sir H.H. Johnston, Sir E. Ray Lankester and Professor Gilbert Murray” on the title page of The Outline of History, just below the notation that the book had been “written with the advice and editorial help” of these distinguished men, was sufficient to explain the accomplishment – particularly the speed at which it had been executed. If this was not enough, Wells thanked nearly fifty of his friends by name. These people had helped him with many details; at times, they had disabused him of interpretive errors. But, like the title-page collaborators, they did not advise him on the overall conception or structure of the work. Instead the long list of their names added to the aura of expertise that the title page had established, one that helped explain the mystery surrounding the writing of The Outline.28
Arnold Bennett, the author’s closest literary friend, was himself a sufficiently adroit writer that more than once he had drafted entire novels in the span of weeks, but even he was incredulous. He had spent a good deal of time in 1918 with Wells at the Reform Club and knew exactly how busy he was. “The more I read of H.G.’s Outline the more staggered I am by it,” he was to write to Jane Wells early in 1920. “How the fellow did the book in the time fair passes me … I cannot get over it. It’s a life’s work.”29
When the book appeared, Wells minimized his own capacities as author. “His disqualifications are manifest,” he wrote in the introduction, using the third-person singular as if to distance himself from the process. Wells pointed, instead, to his hard-working wife and collaborators: “Such work needs to be done by as many people as possible, he was free to make his contribution, and he was greatly attracted by the task. He has read sedulously and made the utmost use of all the help he could obtain. There is not a chapter that has not been examined by some more competent person than himself and very carefully revised.”
By all accounts, Jane Wells, once more a silent voice at a crucial point in her husband’s career, was his saving grace in the creation of The Outline of History. “Without her labour in typing and retyping the drafts of the various chapters as they have been revised and amended, in checking references, finding suitable quotations, hunting up illustrations, and keeping in order the whole mass of material for this history, and without her constant help and watchful criticism, its completion would have been impossible.”30 There they were at Easton Glebe, state his biographers Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie – H.G. and Jane, “often working long hours at a stretch, pillaging references and blending them up into a smooth mixture.”31
Three of the most experienced and prolific professional historians in the world, James Harvey Robinson, Charles A. Beard, and James Henry Breasted, had required several years to research and write their collaborative history of Western civilization. Wells and his ever-faithful wife ventured into their first and only exercise in the writing of history with few research notes and little intensive help from others, and somehow managed to accomplish the task in a span of time so short that it beggars the imagination. In mid-November 1918, nothing on the project had advanced as far as the typescript stage. By February 5, 1919, Jane had produced 50,000 to 60,000 words in typed form. Twenty days later, her husband had reached the 125,000-word mark – halfway through the projected book. He had written between 75,000 and 80,000 words in under three weeks, researching along the way. In mid-August, Jane sent the first five polished chapters off to Newnes for serialization; The Outline began to appear on November 22, 1919. At the end of the year, the whole manuscript was complete.32 The achievement was nothing short of miraculous.
George Brett was a very busy man in a highly competitive industry. New, aggressive, and very accomplished book publishers had entered the New York publishing scene since his early days in the business – Knopf, Doubleday, Random House, and others. To succeed, it was essential to stay focused on important matters, not be distracted by extraneous issues. Yet there on his desk lay a letter of complaint of the sort he did not need. In it, a Miss Laura B. Durand informed him that under John Saul’s direction she had written for Macmillan of Canada a work on astronomy intended for children. After she submitted her manuscript to the editor, he had refused to publish it. The woman was distraught. What, Brett wrote to Wise in May 1919, were the circumstances of the case?33
Wise replied within three days, as if to snip the Durand issue in the bud. Miss Durand, he told Brett, had for many years been an occasional writer of “society items” for the Globe newspaper in Toronto. “She is an intolerable nuisance and reminds me a good deal of our late friend, Mrs. Hogan, whom you will remember as a frightful pest in the days when I was with you.” Then he placed the blame for Miss Durand’s complaint on his recently departed editor. “Unfortunately, Saul had a bad habit of compromising himself with many authors who came. His instructions from us were specific that under no circumstances was he to even encourage an author until the matter has been submitted to me. Of course, when he was out on a trip he had a certain latitude in getting options on MSS, until they could be submitted, but for anyone in town there was no excuse whatever for his departure from the set rule.”
Whatever problems the Toronto branch had with errant manuscripts or irate authors, Wise suggested, they lay with Saul, not himself. He had warned Saul not “to compromise himself” in such situations. When Miss Durand had spoken to Wise about a manuscript of hers on apple trees, for the rights of which she had been offered $800 from another publisher, he had advised her “to hire a taxi and rush over before they changed their mind, and keep the taxi to take her to the bank to have the cheque marked.” He had never seen her again, he said. “But I suppose Saul must have deceived her by his abominable inability to say ‘no.’ ” If Brett wished, however, Wise would get in touch with the troublesome Miss Durand. If her astronomy book was any good, perhaps he might be able to interest a couple of the western provinces in it for school library purposes.34
With such assurances, Wise no doubt thought the matter had ended. But it would resurface a decade later, and with more sinister implications.
One of the reasons why Frank Wise responded so quickly to George Brett’s inquiry about Miss Durand was that it reminded him of an awkward and potentially embarrassing situation in which he and Saul had found themselves a few years back. Early in the century, when still with Morang, Saul had commissioned the superintendent of the Ottawa school board, J.H. Putman, to write a history text for him. The book had been published in 1904 as Britain and the Empire: A History for Public Schools. Years later, Macmillan had compiled its own history text for schools, and Putman discovered that it contained substantial portions of his book. He had consulted his lawyers and then threatened to bring legal action against Macmillan. The case had never reached the courts, however, in part because the Crown, not Putman, held copyright. But Putman had insisted on an interview with officials at Macmillan, and he brought along his lawyer. Saul admitted that he had “used Dr. Putman’s material.” An arrangement was then made to purchase Putman’s silence by acquiring the rights to his book for $1,500.35 With that, a potential lawsuit over plagiarism had ended. No paper trail on the matter was left in the Macmillan files.
The following month, Brett had much more to worry about over Frank Wise. Early in June 1919, an anonymous letter crossed his desk, and it was of sufficient gravity that he immediately sent a copy to Sir Frederick Macmillan in the London office. Written in point form, it was marked “Private and Confidential,” and for good reason. It read, in full:
Facts which the Macmillans should know –
1. Both Mr. Wise and Mr. Purver’s time while [sic], I presume, Macmillans pay for, is being devoted almost entirely to “The Times History of the War.”
2. A large part of the staff is being employed on this.
3. The name of Macmillan is being used to solicit orders for this, otherwise they would not get the business.
4. They have some crooks as representatives, whom Macmillans would not wish associated with them.
5. Mr. Purver is not the kind of man who should be second president. He is not straight, nor could he be if he tried.
6. The Macmillan Co. is devoting its time and energies to everything but Macmillan business. This latter takes second place.
7. It would be in the interest of the directors to find out how much Mr. Wise and Mr. Purver have made out of the Times history, in addition to their salaries, during the past six months.
8. Good honest people will not stay with the Canadian Macmillans, and when they leave Mr. Wise sits and blackguards and writes lies about them.
9. I just give them a year longer, and their competitors will have all the business out of Macmillans hands – they are very busy now, while Macmillans are employed on The Times.
10. Their education department is going to the dogs. They have a problem running it.
If you don’t believe the words of a well-wisher, find out for yourself. This is true, I assure you. I have made careful investigations.36
Brett did not know quite what to make of these astounding charges. He ventured the guess that the letter had come from John Saul, for he knew the opinions of Frank Wise on the circumstances of the editor’s sudden departure from the firm. Saul “has, I am told, since he left the Company endeavored in every possible way to interfere with its business and detract those in authority in the Canadian office.”
Nevertheless, the accusations remained extremely serious. Brett and Sir Frederick had continued to be concerned about the lax accounting methods of the Canadian branch. Now had come the even more troubling suggestion that by being involved in the Times history project, as Sir Frederick told Brett, Macmillan’s employees “had become shareholders in another book-selling concern.” To the head of the parent company, this was intolerable. “Our own idea is to say to him frankly that either he must confine himself entirely to the work of the company or he must resign his position and be replaced by somebody else.”37
Brett had already been in contact with Wise over the absence of monthly financial reports. When he had attended the annual meeting of the Canadian company a month or so before, he had discovered that the accounts ending on March 31 had not yet been closed, that the annual statement and auditor’s report had not been ready, and that in spite of an increase in sales revenue to $280,000, the deficit on educational contract business had continued to increase. No doubt, he had expressed his concerns directly to Wise at the time. Perhaps he also sensed that hidden motives lay behind the dismissal of the company’s original secretary in 1917.
Wise admitted to Brett in July that possibly he had left the matter of profits accruing to Sales Unlimited vague. Such profits arose only through the new distribution and sales agency created in Winnipeg, MacVicar-Newby, to handle Sales Unlimited’s business in the west. His own company was therefore left without direct profit, “which, of course, is eminently proper under the circumstances.” A week later he wrote Brett again. “Next year will mark my twenty-fifth year with the Macmillans, and I shall never forget my entry and the ever kindly manner in which you recognized my attempts to further the interests of the concern.”38
The Canadian publisher’s uncharacteristically obsequious words did little to lessen Brett’s worries. The situation was even more complex than he had thought. Not only was the existence of the Canadian manager’s private company a fact, but another sales agency had apparently become involved. And it was by no means clear where the profits went or what the activities of these companies really were. He conferred with Sir Frederick in London and was instructed to take personal control of the Canadian operation. This was the last thing Brett needed, and he suggested in return that he much preferred that initiatives concerning the Canadian business come from the London directors. He informed Wise of these views.39
Wise now recognized that his position in the company was threatened. He wrote to Brett blaming Saul for conducting “a most determined assault” on him in the west. “It has also come to me from New York, Winnipeg, and Montreal, that Saul has stated several times that he was after me, personally, as well as Macmillans. I should not be at all surprised to learn that his propaganda has been carried not only to yourself, as was evident last time I saw you, but also to England.”40
For the most part, the smooth talk worked. Brett wrote to Sir Frederick Macmillan that Wise had received “a severe lesson” and that it would now be “quite safe” to leave him in charge of the Canadian office. He had instructed Wise to divest himself of shares in Sales Unlimited, and he recommended that no final decision should therefore be made about any change in the Canadian management. Then he added that if such a decision became imperative, he had someone on hand who could “properly and efficiently undertake this work.”41 Late in 1919, Wise wrote to Brett stating that he had resigned from any connection with Sales Unlimited.42 For the next six months the situation appeared to stabilize.
In the spring of 1920, a full year after she had retrieved her copy of “The Web” from the offices of Macmillan of Canada, Florence found herself with sufficient resolve to begin revisions to the manuscript. For this purpose she used one of the two carbon copies, not the original she had left with Saul. A few months later, having made significant progress, she had occasion to look at that original. She retrieved it from her room, unwrapped it, and was astonished. As it lay in front of her, she found it “soiled, thumbed, worn and torn, with over a dozen pages turned down at the corners, and many others creased as if having been bent back in use.”43 Yet at the time she had submitted it, the manuscript had been fresh from the typewriter, its pages in pristine condition. For a manuscript seen by only two or three people, it had been left in a badly worked-over condition. She could certainly not show this copy to any other publisher.
She assembled the pages used for her revision into a neat pile and put it on the living room table. The paper in the stack had not been treated with any particular care, and it showed. The original copy of “The Web” was next to it. Then she asked her mother and sisters to look at them and tell her which seemed to have been more soiled. “They did not know which stack of paper was which, but they all independently agreed that the returned manuscript from Macmillans definitely looked the most used.”44 The whole business seemed very peculiar, but Florence soon returned to her revisions, and the women thought no more about the little mystery. Not until she picked up her copy of Saturday Night on a cold December night later that year, and read Hector Charlesworth’s review of The Outline of History.
That same spring, George Brett discovered that a recent advertisement in the Canadian Medical Quarterly had given the address of Sales Unlimited as 70 Bond Street. How could Wise have severed his connection with the sales company when it continued to operate out of Macmillan’s Toronto office? Wise tried to explain that the company was merely a tenant in the Macmillan building, but the excuse was a weak one. Brett remained alarmed. And what about this journal, advertised as a Macmillan of Canada publication? Since when did the Canadian branch have its own medical division? What else did it do? What were its employees up to? He travelled immediately to Toronto to investigate the matter.
It did not take him long to discover the seriousness of the disorder in the Toronto office. Its staff seemed ill at ease. At one point Wise’s personal secretary even asked to have some words with him in private. But Brett did not want to be distracted, and besides he was too pressed for time. So he told her to put whatever she had to tell him in writing.
Not long after his return to the New York office, a lengthy letter arrived from Toronto. It was from Miss May Mercer, secretary to Mr. Wise, dated May 19, 1920, and marked “Without prejudice and confidential.”
I shall endeavor, in as concise a way as possible, to place before you a few facts in regard to the Toronto office.
In the first place I think the worst feature of the situation is that Mr. Wise is not dependable. He misrepresents things horribly, and I myself have found that he is not to be trusted. Not only is this the general opinion of the heads of departments of the Company, but I find it is that of the trade, the Governments, and practically everyone with whom he comes into contact. When I tell you that even the janitor in the building has confided to me that he would not trust Mr. Wise, to use his own words, “as far as the corner,” you will perhaps have some idea of what is responsible for the disorder that exists in the Toronto office …
When I tell you that never in all my experience have I seen or heard of any firm being run in the wholly disastrous manner the Toronto house is pursuing, you will perhaps better understand how it is that the annual returns are so thoroughly disappointing. Caprice, whim, self-gratification and self-glorification would seem to be the guiding motives rather than ultimate benefit to the Company or what is in accord with the name of Macmillan; in fact, more often than not Macmillan is entirely lost sight of.
I have always felt that the business could be run in a much more economical manner, and have so expressed myself on many occasions to Mr. Wise. While he has listened very attentively to the suggestions I have put forward and coincided in many of them, I have found it simply to be a “waste of breath” on my part since he does not want any ideas that might prove of benefit to the Company but would prefer rather to take advice from those who are really working for their own ends. One “extravagance” is the Medical Department, which has really never paid for itself but is, I consider, a sinking fund for the money derived from the paying end of the business. I have held that this could be run, in the case of the Toronto house, under the General Sales Department, and thus do away with a medical staff who are simply “eating their heads off.” … Then, as of course you know, Mr. Purver has had charge of both the medical and bookkeeping departments all along, which possibility accounts for the very good showing for this department in the annual returns. This Medical Department has also been the campus for Mr. Wise’s “favorites” and at the present time shelters Dr. Routley, whose car is at Mr. Wise’s disposal when required, and his medical service within call of the Wise household. The latest adjunct is a Mr. Britton – a thoroughly worthless fellow – who has been getting the advertising for the Medical Monthly but was formerly, I understand, in the shirt-making business in London. Only a few months ago Mr. Wise had no use whatsoever for this man on the staff of Macmillans. There is also a Mr. Thomas connected with the Medical Department, who is making a good thing out of Macmillans.
Perhaps from what I have said you will understand how the morale of the place has been thoroughly destroyed. There is no incentive for a conscientious worker who has the good of Macmillans at heart, but every encouragement for the unscrupulous individual, who is ever granted a hearing by Mr. Wise …
I do not know whether the Directors are aware of the fact or not, but Mr. Wise is not confining his efforts solely to the Macmillan business in Macmillan hours. Further particulars of this I can give you when I have the opportunity. You can understand, therefore, how it is that Mr. Wise has completely lost hold on things Macmillan – he does not even know the Macmillan books always …
I also wish to put on record the fact that I was not given the report which went to the Directors in regard to the Times History of the War. This was dictated to Mr. Purver’s stenographer, partly by Mr. Purver. I know the true facts of the case were not put before you and that Mr. Wise purposefully avoided dictating this report to me, the reasons for which I think are obvious.45
The letter confirmed Brett’s worst suspicions. Wise seemed to have put the whole Macmillan operation in Toronto to use as his personal fiefdom. Sloppy accounting, slush funds, private businesses, personal factotums and lackeys, a chauffeur, and a private medical attendant – what else might be going on? So these were the reasons why the medical journal had lost $7,000 over the past two years! Furious, he instructed Wise bluntly to dispose of the journal. “Moreover,” he added, “the account bears some evidence of having been unduly favored in the matter of expenditures and, perhaps, also favored in the matter of receipts, at any rate the account is, as I gather, made up wholly or in part by those who are interested in having you still carry on the publication of the Journal.” The next day, he sent a copy of Mercer’s letter to Sir Frederick in London, concluding it by telling Sir Frederick that similar concerns had been expressed by Hugh Eayrs, a young Englishman who had recently replaced Purver as secretary of the Toronto branch.46
Brett was now very near the end of his patience with Wise and informed him that both he and the London directors were “very much dissatisfied with the progress of the Toronto house.” He noted that rumours now circulated that Wise was about to tender his resignation, but said nothing more about them. For his part, Wise blamed the high costs of the Toronto firm on John Saul.47
Matters did not improve. In October, Brett reported to Sir Frederick that Wise had still to dispose of the Canadian Medical Journal. The same month, Sir Frederick learned that the Kiplings, with whom Frank Wise had such bad relations, had decided to end their relationship with Macmillan and move to Doubleday. Wise offered to negotiate with the author and his wife, but Sir Frederick told him in exasperation not to do so under any circumstances. Hugh Eayrs reported on a visit to New York that Wise did not appear at his office until eleven and was seldom there after four. And – the final straw – the MacVicar-Newby agency now threatened to sue Macmillan over Wise’s irregular dealings with it.48
In December, Brett informed Sir Frederick Macmillan that Eayrs was about to visit the London firm and that its directors should look him over. “I believe that Mr. Eayrs is a young man of considerable enterprise, great energy, and possessing a fairly good taste in literature and matters pertaining to books.”49
Wise knew that his career at Macmillan was over. In a letter of January 27, 1921, he informed George Brett that his resignation as president of Macmillan of Canada could be expected in the mail at any time, and that he was tired and worn out. Eayrs wasted no time in consolidating his position as Wise’s interim replacement. At the end of the month, he instructed the company’s solicitors to provide in writing the instructions he had received to take control of the internal affairs of the company and asked them to provide “any information required from, or banking attended to by Mr. Wise.”50 A meeting of Macmillan’s Canadian board of directors early in February formally accepted the resignation of its founding president.