“It’s an unpleasant business. More like some detective’s job … I will say one thing though: as historians we’ve got to tell the truth about the past as far as we know it, but that’s quite a different thing from searching into the truth of people’s lives here and now. All this prying and poking about into what other people prefer to keep hidden seems to me a very presumptuous and dangerous fashion.”
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)
ONE EVENING DURING THE WINTER of 1920–21, Florence finished reading the second thick volume of H.G. Wells’s Outline of History. She had already been struck by the fact that Hector Charlesworth’s review of the book might just as well have been about “The Web.” Now she understood why. Both works had been highly critical of militaristic thinking and of the age-old desire to gain the property of others; both authors held out hope for an eventual unity of mankind – Wells through some kind of socialist world order, Florence through the spirit of altruism. Each surveyed the entire history of the world, from earliest origins through the full span of human habitation. She was so annoyed that a few days later, books in hand, she took the streetcar to Eaton’s and demanded her money back.
Before long, however, she reckoned that she had made a mistake. Her emotions had gotten the better of her, and she had acted in haste. The two works had so much in common in presentation of fact and in theme that, apart from its acknowledgments of helpers and authorities, Wells’s preface could quite easily have served as her own. But one matter especially alarmed her: both works had at times made the same mistakes. The revision to which she had subjected the carbon copy of “The Web” over the past year had made her aware of a number of factual errors and omissions of important events in the original she had submitted to Macmillan. Yet the same errors and omissions also marred The Outline of History.1 How could this be?
A thorough comparison of the two works was clearly in order, so she returned to the department store and bought The Outline of History again. First, she began her analysis of the two works by studying their structures; then she turned to comparing them word by word and line by line, for content, for omissions, and for verbal similarities. She knew that to the casual observer “The Web” and The Outline would appear very different. The Outline was more than twice as long, and Wells went into much more detail than she had. As a professional writer, he had the capacity to make prose leap off the page. His book was dramatically written, opinionated, and imaginative. By comparison, her own prose seemed amateurish and florid. “The Web” contained a lot of material about woman in history, but she was scarcely mentioned in The Outline. The 1,276 pages of text in its two volumes, written by a champion of feminism, resulted in only eight index references under “women.”
As she grew intimately familiar with the two texts over the months that followed, Florence did not find any lengthy passages from her work incorporated into The Outline; instead, she found a general similarity in plan. “And here it was,” she wrote later. “These two histories were virtually the same in plan and treatment and in these respects they differed from all other written histories of the world. THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY contained the very vital portions of ‘THE WEB’, the portions which comprised its real value, and which in THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY produced a result similar to that produced in ‘THE WEB.’ ”2
Her comparison consisted of two columns, with passages from “The Web” on the left and those from The Outline on the right. By the time she had finished, she had a typed, single-spaced document on legal-size paper that ran to seventy-nine pages. She also made a list of subjects inadequately treated or omitted in both works. These included: “1) the making of the earth; 2) any adequate account of the early civilizations of Egypt and Western Asia; 3) the great range of oriental civilization which had entered Rome; 4) Rome’s contribution to modern civilization; 5) the social and agricultural organization of medieval Europe with its manors or villas and its lords and tenants; 6) the territorial organization of medieval Europe and the development of centralized authority; 7) any account of the United States of America from War of Independence 1776 to Monroe doctrine 1823. From 1823 to opening of Japan 1854. From civil war to end of century.” There were, she added, “many other cogent examples.”3 As a Protestant of Lutheran background, Florence had naturally placed considerable emphasis on Martin Luther; but while she mentioned Calvinism several times, Calvin, the great Genevan predestinarian, appeared in “The Web” only once. In The Outline of History, a work hostile to the Christian religion, Luther received prominent attention; Calvin did not appear at all.
Unlike almost all other works of general history, “The Web” and The Outline began not with Mesopotamian, Egyptian, or Greek civilization but with the solar system. Florence began with the sun. “There floated in the immensity of space a speck, comparatively, but, in reality, a prodigious nebulae [sic] which in the course of time became concentrated into the focus of heat and light known as – the Sun.” Wells began with the earth, “a mere speck in the greater vastness of space.” Her sun “at times threw off masses of cosmic matter,” which became the planets; his was “a spinning mass of matter” from which fragments detached themselves, forming the planets. Wells’s sun had “not yet concentrated into a compact centre of heat and light.”
This was very significant. It was one thing for words of similar meaning, such as “The Web” ’s “atmosphere” and “revolve” and The Outline’s “gaseous fluid” and “circle,” to appear in the opening pages of the works. But the near duplication of a distinctive phrase about the formation of the sun was quite another matter. An outside observer might conclude that the two authors had simply come up with similar phrasing independently. But Florence knew better, because she remembered where she had gotten her words. She had extracted the phrase “concentrated into the focus of heat and light” directly from Victor Duruy’s General History of the World. In retrospect, she realized that she should have placed them within quotation marks, but the fact was that she had not. Here in front of her were Duruy’s words on Wells’s page, yet nowhere did he indicate that he had consulted Duruy’s book.4
Florence began to see a sustained pattern of common use in the two works, less in the use of common phrases (Wells was after all a wordsmith with an extraordinary vocabulary) than in the sequence in which he presented his facts. Pages of “The Web” that had been folded down at the corner when she retrieved it from Macmillan had contained passages about the Phoenicians. She drew up the sequence of factual treatment in her columns:
| THE WEB |
| 1. Phoenician Fleets |
| 2. found their way to Indies |
| 3. Their caravan |
| 4. Traversed the land of Asia |
| 5. gathering up the best Productions |
| 6. Ivory from Ophir |
| 7. the most beautiful |
| 8. of pearls … precious |
| 9. silks from China |
| 10 glassware and purple |
| 11. the skill, especially of women, was responsible for rare productions. |
| THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY |
| (a) Phoenician shipping. |
| (b) was making its way to the East Indies |
| (c) the caravans. |
| (c) toiled … across Africa and Arabia and through Arabia and through Turkestan (Arabia and Africa) |
| (a) with their remote trade. |
| (c) ivory from Africa (Ophir) |
| the most beautiful |
| (c) there was hardly a variety [of] precious stone that had not been found and … |
| (c) silk … from China. |
| (c) pottery and porcelain. |
| (c) Men had learned to weave fine linen and delicate fabrics of coloured wool they could bleach and dye. |
By revisiting her sources, Florence found it possible to reconstruct exactly which words had been her own, and which had been those of Duruy or of her other main source on the Phoenicians, Chambers’ Encyclopedia. Original wording she marked with an “a” in parentheses; the words of Duruy became (b); those of Chambers’ were designated as (c). In this way, she found that she could establish “the same unusual features, the same order of details, the same original language, and the same original mistakes as in ‘The Web.’ ”5
Florence found such mistakes to be revealing. She had relied on the mythical rather than the historical explanation of the origins of the Persian Wars. So did Wells, and the relevant page of “The Web” had again been folded down. In an attempt to use modern terms, she had spoken of the Roman general Sulla as “aristocratic.” But she had been mistaken in this. Contemporary authorities seldom, if ever, used the anachronistic term. Quite properly, they said he was “patrician.” But to Wells as to Florence, he was “aristocratic.” “The Web” had stated that Charlemagne became emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in 800 AD, when Leo III placed on his head the crown of the Caesars. This, she now recognized, was the kind of error an undergraduate might make. Work on her revision had taught her that the Holy Roman Empire had not been founded formally until 962 by Otto I (“the Great”). Charlemagne’s coronation had made him emperor of the revived Roman Empire. An arcane distinction, perhaps, until Florence examined Wells’s cited source: James Bryce. But Bryce had given the proper date, 962. Why, then, did Wells use 800? Where had he gotten his information?6
Then there was the matter of Columbus’s first voyage. Both “The Web” and The Outline claimed, falsely, that he believed he had found India. Florence had since learned that not even Columbus had believed this. Yet the mistakes remained common to both works.7
With such mistakes in both her own work and that of Wells, common use of language that otherwise might have been considered mere coincidence became pregnant with meaning. Early on, when writing about the subjection of women, she had written, “Tribal wars were engaged in for the sole purpose of seizing women … The captured women were adopted into the tribe.” The Outline read that “the captive woman and children were assimilated into the tribe.” Her “Roman society” had been “a festering mass of …”; his “was festering with …” In “The Web,” Leonardo da Vinci had been surrounded by “a brilliant galaxy of stars”; in The Outline, he was associated with a “galaxy of names.” When she discussed the era of Columbus, she said at one point, “On a beautiful morning … the little expedition set sail”; for Wells, “The little expedition … stood out … in beautiful weather.” She had spoken of “the unquenchable spark of divine love”; he had written of the “unquenchable personality of Jesus.” In dealing with the Stuart period in England, Florence had quoted seven passages from Green’s Short History of the English People, four of them lengthy ones. The Outline of History contained the same four passages, word for word. All seven passages from Green used in “The Web” found their way into The Outline, and in precisely the same sequence.8
It took Florence most of the year 1921 to make her comparison of the two works, to compile a list of the books cited as sources by Wells, and then to examine them in the downtown library. “I prepared a list of hundreds of such verbal similarities,” she wrote, “phrases, clauses, and parts of sentences; whole sentences and paragraphs slightly changed or colourfully altered but containing the same details and original features of THE WEB, and mistakes. All of these were applied to the same time and subjects and ran in the same sequence order of arrangement. About one hundred were identical in wording … Not one similarity in the above list was traceable to any one of the two hundred and fifty, or more, sources and authorities cited by Mr. Wells in THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY. The significance of this comparison lay, not only in the actual language employed, but also in the piling up of many similarities. The cumulative effect became overwhelming.”9
She now saw a heavy reliance of The Outline on “The Web” from its very first pages. One conclusion, and only one, was possible, from the fact that Wells had used the words she had copied from Duruy while nowhere indicating that he had consulted the French historian’s book: that, with “The Web” or with notes from it in front of him, H.G. Wells had simply copied down Duruy’s words from “The Web” and they had become his own.
To Florence, The Outline seemed to draw upon her own work in a myriad of ways. Yet there was one major difference: the treatment of women. So prominent in “The Web,” they were virtually absent in The Outline. Even in this case, however, a comparison of the two works proved revealing. Her portrayal of woman as “a constructive force in civilization” became, in The Outline, omission or disparagement. It was as if, with “The Web” or passages from it on the subject of women in front of him, Wells had written his own few accounts of women as a direct rebuttal to her claims. Thus, when Florence had stated that woman domesticated fire and “constructed ingenious stoves to cook the food, and as vessels were needed for cooking, she moulded the earth into shapes and dried and burnt them so pottery was produced,” Wells had said: “They do not seem to have cooked their food … they had no cooking implements … they had no pottery.” In her view, women “kept and tamed the animals brought back from the forest by the hunters, the goat for its milk, the cat to kill the mice in the granaries”; Wells had written, “It is improbable that they had yet learned the use of animals’ milk as food … they had little to do with any sort of domestic sheep or cattle … There were no cats … no mice or rats had yet adapted themselves to human dwelling.” “The Web” said, “Men built habitations … to take the place of the tree shelters and the tents and huts which woman had built, and their great activity in agriculture drove women more and more to indoor labour to which confinement some scientists attribute the diminution of her size and physical strength … Lastly she manufactured her own dyes by extracting the juices from vegetables and plants.” The Outline said, “They had no buildings. It is not even certain that they had tents or huts … they had no cultivation of grain or vegetables of any sort … The women were probably squaws, smaller than the men.”10
There were devils in such details and in their sequence of presentation. The results of her comparison now became as much a subject of conversation in the Farnham Avenue home as “The Web” itself had been during the war years. All the Deeks women were incensed at what Wells had apparently done. Late in 1921 the family matriarch, Melinda, spoke to her son George about Florence’s predicament. He then asked Florence what she thought. Mabel later reconstructed the conversation: “She told him that she was convinced her manuscript had been used in the writing of The Outline of History.” Florence reminded him that in 1916, having made good progress on her book, she had taken out interim copyright, which registered her intention to publish the work in the near future. A short time later, George, who in Mabel’s view “had great regard for her judgment,” arranged to have his lawyer explore the legal implications.11
In the view of George Deeks’s lawyer, the interim copyright might still exist, since “The Web” had not been published and the act governing copyright in Canada did not contain any provision for the length of time in which “an action to recover damages for infringement” might be brought.12 But there was a caveat: the Ontario statute of limitations would be applicable in the absence of any provision to the contrary in Dominion legislation. This meant that if Florence Deeks wished to bring any action in the matter, it had to be initiated within six years of the unauthorized publication of the work in question – in this case, The Outline of History.13 The Newnes company had begun publishing the work as a serial in 1919. Florence could not launch a lawsuit later than the fall of 1925.
With the publication of The Outline of History in 1919 and 1920, H.G. Wells became more wealthy than he could ever have imagined. Never a good manager of his finances once royalties came in, he spent freely and his expenses were substantial; but he had always been a shrewd negotiator of contracts with publishers. “Earning a living by writing,” he wrote to a friend in 1919, “is a frightful gamble. It depends neither upon knowledge nor literary quality but upon secondary considerations of timeliness, mental fashion & so forth almost beyond control.” By deciding to reduce his output of fiction in order to work on his Outline, he had taken an immense gamble, and he was determined to make it pay. Not one to trust publishers, he harried them constantly about contracts, marketing, and especially advances on royalties. “I always ask for as big a cheque as possible,” he later wrote, “because from my point of view it will guarantee that the publisher will go all out for the book in question. It is his role, not mine, to take risks on the book and lose if the book fails.”14
Considered as a product for sale rather than a body of text, The Outline of History was not one book, but three, for Wells saw it from the first as having at least three different markets requiring as many publishing agreements. By arranging with Sir Frank Newnes to have it sold in twenty or twenty-four cheaply produced parts, he could reach those who could not afford the full price of a cloth-bound edition or who wished to read only about certain periods of history. Then there were the British and American markets. To secure the former, he had contacted both Sir Frederick Macmillan and Newman Flower of Cassell & Company. Macmillan had turned him down, but Flower proved enthusiastic. “I am very keen to have the handling of this book,” he wrote, “because I believe, with our many ramifications, we could make a big thing of it.” In spite of his misgivings about the vagueness of Wells’s plans for the book, George Brett, too, had been optimistic about its possibilities in America.15
However, when Brett sent Wells a draft contract a month later, as a negotiating tactic he stressed the heavy editorial and production costs and minimized the potential market. From his perspective, the proposal for royalties was generous. The publisher offered a royalty of twenty per cent for world rights of the regular edition, with a £1,500 advance against those royalties. He also offered a royalty of ten per cent for any cheaper school edition, instead of the usual rate of six. Wells was not satisfied, nor would he concede world rights to Brett since he already had English publishers lined up. He noted that these English publishers, not Brett’s firm, would be assuming most of the production expense, such as the production of maps and plates. Wells agreed substantially to the financial terms Brett laid down, and Brett retained publication rights for all of North America.16
Sir Frank Newnes, too, thought himself to be generous in what he offered. He was willing to pay £600 for the serialization rights and £1,000 in advance of a ten per cent royalty based on the published price of each part. Again Wells objected. His name, he said, “must account for something” in determining the number of sales. “I’ll agree to £1,000 for the first 25,000 of each part and then [a] royalty of 10 per cent. on the sales of each part [above] 25,000 with a guarantee of another £1,000. That is, if after the whole thing is published the royalties after 25,000 do not amount to £1,000, you will make up the deficit.” This was the agreement to which both parties eventually agreed.17
Wells exacted an even better agreement on royalties from Cassell & Company, publisher of the British edition. His advance was to be £2,000 against a return of twenty-five per cent on the sales price of twenty shillings. For each volume sold in the “Colonies and Dependencies” (Canada excluded), he was to receive one shilling and eightpence.18
From the moment of its first publication, The Outline of History was immensely profitable. It struck a responsive chord in English-speaking countries around the world, for in the wake of the catastrophe of world war people sought to understand what had made civilized nations go so wrong. Wells offered an answer infused with hope for the future. Within a few years, sales in the United States and England alone exceeded two million copies. From 1920 to 1927, Macmillan in New York shipped over 11,000 copies to Canada. The book continued to sell year after year.19
Wells no longer needed to worry over finances: he was set for life. But in other ways, he was a desperate man. In the fall of 1920, during a trip to Russia, he had renewed his acquaintance with Maxim Gorky’s alluring secretary, the twenty-seven-year-old Moura Budberg, whom he had met during his first trip to Russia in January 1914. To Wells, this woman – who had divorced her first husband, whose second had been murdered by Bolsheviks, and who had then married the Baron Budberg – remained “gallant, unbroken, and adorable.” At his entreaty, one night she came to his room in Gorky’s spacious flat and into his embraces. Another thread had been woven into his tangled love life, and it required a sorting out. He loved Jane “steadily and surely,” he said; his commitment to Rebecca only neared love; but his new paramour, Moura, a creature of pure impulse, “had magnificence.”20 The sorting out, however, came much later. Upon his return from Russia, he was in a distraught mental and emotional state.
At the time, Rebecca West was in the final stages of recovery from a nasty infection resulting from a fall into a cistern in Cornwall in the spring. H.G. had neglected her badly during the preparations for his trip to Russia, and she was scarcely mollified by his suggestion that she confer with another of his female acquaintances, the visiting American reformer of sexual mores Margaret Sanger, about the best methods of birth control. He wanted Rebecca to continue their relationship, he later said, because it suited his needs. She acceded, so they continued seeing each other, spending half-days and evenings together either at the flat he had taken in Whitehall Court just after the war or at hers in Kensington. But to Rebecca, this was not enough. He seemed less committed to her than ever, and she insisted that they either marry or separate.21
There is more than a hint at her anger and frustration in a brief passage, otherwise out of place, in her 1941 masterpiece of political and social commentary on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. In it, she speaks of “a kind of lowness that is sometimes exhibited in the sexual affairs of very vulgar and shameless people: a man leaves his wife and induces a girl to become his mistress, then is reconciled to his wife and to please her exposes the girl to some public humiliation.”22
H.G. and Rebecca quarrelled constantly after his return from Russia. The trip had thoroughly unsettled him. Jane faced the prospect of a hysterectomy, and he would not abandon her; nor would he let fade the enticing image of Moura. During one of the arguments he let slip to Rebecca that he had been unfaithful with Moura, estranging her further. As always, his writing proved therapeutic, and he worked on his next novel, The Secret Places of the Heart. The book was published in 1922. In the view of a serious student of the relationship between Wells and West, Wells intended it “to be an admonition to Rebecca.” It carried a refrain as tired as it was familiar: an ambitious genius struggling against the forces of capital and labour is hampered by a mistress whom he sees as “a rival” to his duty. He is the steadfast one, she the source of inconstancy, and in the end he dies a broken man. Martin Leeds, the mistress to whom Wells for some reason gave the name of a man, is left at the side of his coffin, crying, “Oh! Speak to me, my darling! Speak to me, I tell you! Speak to me!”23
The author sought to breach the gulf between himself and Rebecca in late 1920 by writing her a series of letters, steeped in contrition, in which he professed his undying love. At the same time, however, he had discovered in himself a deep “affinity” with Margaret Sanger. Rebecca would have to wait her turn.
Wells and Sanger had met that summer in London through a mutual acquaintance, the sexual reformer Havelock Ellis. To Margaret, the prophet was already a figure of heroic stature. When she had run into legal trouble in 1915 over the notorious Comstock Law, an act of the American Congress passed forty-two years earlier aimed at suppressing obscenity in the mails (Anthony Comstock, author of the act, had once gone so far as to describe George Bernard Shaw as an “Irish smut dealer”), Wells had signed his name to a letter to President Woodrow Wilson, protesting the indictment. On her 1916 lecture tour, Margaret recalled, “his name had been on everybody’s lips.”24
Meeting Wells in the summer of 1920 was “the event” of the American social reformer’s visit to London. She knew of his reputation as an advocate of sexual freedom; in that respect, as in others, the two were of one mind. Attracted by the openness of his personality, she was delighted when she discovered that “his twinkling eyes were like those of a mischievous boy.”25
Wells was certainly interested. At forty-one, Margaret Sanger remained a very attractive woman, a second coming of Ann Veronica not only in her freedom of spirit but even in the uncanny resemblance she bore to the physical description he had provided of his heroine. And since her reputation brought with it an obvious openness to sexual adventure, he wrote to her proposing a rendezvous in New York in December.26
It was not yet to be. In early winter H.G. came down with pneumonia, and Jane was still recovering from her hysterectomy, so he cancelled the American trip. His own inner life perfectly mirrored that of the protagonist of Secret Places of the Heart, Sir Richmond Hardy: unsatisfied by success, restless, confused, dreaming of love but never finding it. “Often I cared nothing for the woman I made love to,” Sir Richmond admits. “I cared for the thing she seemed to be hiding from me.”27
H.G.’s life was now one of drift on uncontrollable tides of desire. A trip to Malfi with Rebecca in January 1921; back to Easton Glebe in March; with Rebecca in her London flat during the summer; two months in the United States late in the year on the trip postponed from the previous year, including time in New York alone with Margaret in an apartment she rented at his request.”28
After their liaison, Wells left America for Spain and Rebecca, although he continued to correspond with the woman he addressed affectionately as “Dear little Mrs. Margaret.” He and Rebecca quarrelled, and in Algeciras early in 1922, emotionally fragile, he forced her into the role of the “the ill-treated mistress” of an older man, demeaning Rebecca so often in public places that a concerned hotel proprietor offered her the fare home.29 Fortunately, Wells left for England and Easton Glebe, to which he had invited Margaret.
To those who knew him only by his reputation as a novelist and as the author of The Outline of History, he continued to impress. Cornelia Otis Skinner, later to become a successful writer and humorist, was a young American innocent, abroad with her family and a friend, and eager for the Twenties to roar. When she and her family paid a visit to Wells at Easton Glebe one Saturday (thanks to an earlier introduction of her father to the famous Englishman), he impressed her with his cheerfulness and his “teeming vitality,” the strange mixture of his guests, and the peculiar games he insisted they play.30 When it started to rain, Wells pronounced that they all must rush out to the barn-like structure behind the house. “This was obviously Mr. Wells’ Rumpus Room,” Cornelia said to herself. Soon they found themselves outfitted in ill-fitting tennis shoes, divided into teams (Americans versus Europeans), and madly running around engaged in a Wellsian combination of volleyball and tennis – subject to arbitrary rules of the creator’s making as the game progressed. One player, described to Cornelia by the host as “the greatest educationalist in all England,” took a serve from her in the face; others, young men fresh from Cambridge, answered to nicknames like Bungy and Poodles. An American woman named Sanger, a crusader for the cause of birth control, remained on the margins of play. “Mrs. Sanger wasn’t so bad, and I don’t believe she was so good either,” Cornelia Skinner remembered, “but at least she was moderately inconspicuous. The remainder of us were awful.”31
Those who knew Wells rather better than this had come to hold a less benign view of his life in the early 1920s. Sidney and Beatrice Webb visited him in the summer of 1923, and Beatrice found that he seemed to have “coarsened.” As she noted in her journal: “He is far too conscious of literary success, measured in great prices for books and articles – he has become a sort of ‘little god’ demanding payment in flattery as well as in gold … Moreover, he has another and even more damaging consciousness – he feels himself to be a chartered libertine. Everyone knows he is a polygamist and everyone puts up with it. He is aware of this acquiescence in his sins – an acquiescence accompanied with contempt. And this contemptuous acquiescence on the part of friends and acquaintances results in Wells having a contempt for all of us, because we disapprove, and yet we associate with him.”32
Some, however, remained fiercely loyal to H.G. and to all he represented. One such person was Wells’s long-time friend Richard Gregory – now Sir Richard, for he had been knighted for his service to the cause of British science. It was a much-deserved honour. He had become one of the most eminent popularizers of science of his generation, a worthy successor to the mantle of Huxley. But it was his dear friend Wells with whom he identified. In part, this was because he shared with Wells a rise to eminence from very humble beginnings.
Born in Bristol in 1864, Richard Gregory was the son of a cobbler, John Gregory, the Methodist “shoemaker poet” of the city, a man heavily involved in the local socialist movement. The son, too, became a champion of the cause of the working man.33 Unlike Wells, he had flourished at the Normal School of Science, securing first-class honours in astronomy and physics in 1889. Gregory’s subsequent career as a writer and lecturer was meteoric. By 1893, Sir Norman Lockyer had made him assistant editor of Nature, and so began his long association with Macmillan, which owned the journal.34
By the time he received his knighthood in 1919, Richard Gregory had long made his mark and was in heavy demand as a public speaker. In addition to his many articles, he had published several popular books, such as The Vault of Heaven in 1893, followed by The Planet Earth in 1894. Macmillan had appointed him its scientific editor, specializing in educational matters, in 1905 (a position he was to hold until 1939). Virtually the editor of Nature under Sir Norman’s nominal direction since 1907, he had been instrumental in enhancing the journal’s reputation as a “clearing-house for new ideas” in science. He assumed the editorship in the same year as his knighthood. Little wonder that in October 1918, when his friend Wells had sought information about astronomical temperatures and other matters in the distant past for his work on The Outline, it was to Sir Richard Gregory he turned, and the scientist had quickly provided the required information. Such was Sir Richard’s sense of affinity and regard for Wells that the only photograph he kept to the end of his life of a person not related to him was of the young H.G. Wells.35
By the spring of 1922, her comparison now completed, Florence Deeks was more convinced than ever that H.G. Wells had seen “The Web” and had made use of it in writing The Outline of History. To her, the correspondences between the two works made its infringement of her proprietary rights and copyright nothing less than “appalling.” Her detailed analysis of the texts was shown to George’s lawyer, W. Norman Tilley, K.C., of Tilley, Johnston, Thomson & Parmenter. After examining the materials, Tilley informed George Deeks that in his view Florence had a prima facie case and that action should be taken immediately. George, however, was more cautious, and suggested to his sister that she should “work up” the case first.36
Florence had no idea by what means “The Web” had reached Wells, only that somehow it had, and she sensed that John Saul must have some idea of what went on. It was time to pay Mr. Saul a visit. Accompanied by Mabel, who thought it best to be with her sister on important occasions such as this, she found Saul in his office at Gage. Nearly four years had passed since they had met, but he remembered “The Web” and the situation surrounding its submission. Later, she reconstructed their conversation.
I said: “Mr. Saul, I should like to speak about a manuscript I gave you when you were with the Macmillan Company.”
He exclaimed: “What! That history of yours? Have you never got that back yet?”
I replied: “Yes, I got it back but it has been used by Mr. H.G. Wells for writing ‘The Outline of History.’
Mr. Saul (surprised, silent for a moment): “Well, things like that do happen sometimes through unscrupulous writers. Why, the Dent people put out a new encyclopedia. It was no sooner published than the Encyclopedia Britannica came down on the Dents and accused them of taking material from the Encyclopedia Britannica. The passage in question was examined, Mr. Dent said, ‘Well, gentlemen, I see that your work has been used. I knew nothing of the matter. But my hands are up – You will have to make your demand and I shall meet it!’ It cost the Dent people 16,000 pounds. The money was paid over and the two books went on, just as if nothing had ever happened.”
I remarked upon Mr. Wells’ use of my entire work, and Mr. Saul then informed us that: “Just the other night there was a man came up to my house and he accused the Macmillans of using a manuscript that he had submitted to them. He said there were paragraphs taken out of his manuscript with just the words turned around. He showed me some and they were a good deal alike too.
“Has Mr. Wells got whole sentences like yours – three would be enough to prove that he had taken it.”
“He has not whole sentences identical,” I replied, “but he has many passages with the wording slightly changed – or the words changed round.”
“That is the same thing,” Mr. Saul assented. “If I could see your material I could tell in twenty minutes if he had copied it. I would not ask you to bring it to the office; I would go to your house to see it at any time that would suit you – morning, afternoon or evening. If he has used your manuscript to write THE OUTLINE it would be a piece of plagiarism to go down in the history of literature for 200 years to come,” and “if this comes out the Macmillans might just as well close their doors.”37
Saul’s sympathetic attitude encouraged Florence. A day or two later, she telephoned him at his home. His wife, Lillian, answered. Her husband, she said, had told her “all about the matter,” and she thought Miss Deeks would feel more comfortable if she understood this. She added that, in future, perhaps it would be better to discuss this business at their home rather than at her husband’s office.
Florence was pleased to oblige and expressed her happiness that Mrs. Saul “understood things.”
The conversation between the spinster and the wife continued amiably. “She said Mr. Saul was terribly agitated over it,” Florence recalled. He had gone upstairs to his study after supper on the evening of their conversation, and when Lillian Saul joined him he was pacing up and down the room. “Well, I can’t tell you what he said on the telephone,” said Mrs. Saul, “but I never heard him use stronger language.”
Saul’s sudden agitation alarmed Florence sufficiently that she did not let Saul see her comparison list. But she and Mabel decided to keep the case “constantly and in detail before his mind” through further visits and telephone calls, so that he would not forget his involvement in it. She recognized that it would be some time before her legal action could be launched, particularly because she wanted to have some literary experts compare “The Web” and The Outline and report their conclusions to her. Meanwhile, she decided to concentrate her energies on finishing the revisions to her work, and in such a way as to render it publishable. She was no longer content simply to make alterations to “The Web.” Her new work would be a different one altogether.
She decided to call it “The Highway of History.” Not without regret, she had already eliminated most of the more speculative references to women, but to her mind she had made up for this by basing it on more up-to-date scholarship. To make certain that her new history possessed scholarly respectability, she made her way to University College in the University of Toronto. Its Department of History was located there, and it was within its impressive, ivy-covered stone walls that she encountered Professor W.P.M. Kennedy.
In a department populated mainly with graduates of Oxford, W.P.M. Kennedy was something of an anomaly. Appointed by George Wrong in 1916 to teach constitutional history, he had graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and among his fellow historians he was the only one to hold the doctoral research degree. He was also one of the department’s few Roman Catholics. By the time of his encounter with Florence Deeks in June 1923, he had risen to the position of assistant professor at a perfectly respectable salary of $2,750 per year.38
Kennedy was not a congenial colleague. He was mercurial, cantankerous, and arrogant, and by the early 1920s George Wrong was by no means certain he had made a wise choice in appointing him to his department. So irritating and eccentric were Kennedy’s ways that at one point Wrong solicited the advice of the university’s distinguished psychologist George Sidney Brett about him. “He said that his peculiarity would probably intensify as he grew older,” Wrong later reported to the university’s president, Sir Robert Falconer, “and considered him as distinctly abnormal.” Everything had convinced Wrong of Kennedy’s “lack of sane mentality.” Kennedy claimed he was an official adviser to the Irish state, bragged that “all the Canadian provinces” consulted him, and did not pay the bills for the books he bought on credit.39
When Florence met with Professor Kennedy and asked him whether he would help her render “The Highway of History” into publishable shape – for a fee, of course – he leaped at the opportunity. He expressed “great interest in the book” and told her that not only would he help her revise each chapter but he would also write a preface, help find a publisher, and see the book through to publication by reading galley proofs. At first, Florence was impressed by the Irishman’s enthusiasm and encouragement, and she did not object when he charged a sizable fee for each chapter he examined. “He enjoyed secrecy with regard to his private help,” she later wrote to her lawyer. “He especially did not want Prof. Wrong, the head of his department, or Sir Robert Falconer to know.”40
Initially the work with Kennedy went well, but, as he worked on each chapter, he revised his rates steeply upward. Eventually Florence became alarmed at the costs and asked him to establish a firm and fixed charge for his services – “from which,” she later wrote, “he constantly deviated.” But what was she to do? She needed the kind of expert scholarly and editorial advice Kennedy could provide. Since George “made no serious objection” to the costs and her book seemed to be progressing well, she continued to take advantage of the professor’s help.41 George dutifully paid the bills.
Gradually she came to suspect Kennedy’s good faith, with respect not only to his fees but also to his services. He began to make changes in the manuscript that she thought weakened rather than improved it. Then he suggested the addition of ten or more chapters. This left her shaken, for her brother had already disbursed a considerable sum of money. Cautiously, she withdrew from accepting any more of his help. There were others at the University of Toronto on whose expertise she could draw, and she did. By the time she had finished revising “The Highway of History,” she had secured “the valuable services” of some of the most able members of the university’s academic staff. Among them were numbered George Wrong himself, his son Murray (then at Oxford), the economic historian C.R. Fay, and the diplomatic and political historian Ralph Flenley.42
One day during a conversation with George Wrong, Florence “almost accidentally” mentioned Kennedy’s earlier involvement. Wrong became indignant about his colleague and proceeded to tell her, as she later recalled, “a few things about him which, he said, I might tell my brother & our lawyers but no one else.” Just what these matters were, she did not say; but she was beginning to catch a whiff of conspiracy. This was reinforced by a later conversation with John Saul, who told her “that Prof. Kennedy & Prof. Stewart Wallace, the university librarian, were completely ‘tied up’ with the Macmillan Company. It was said – generally – that Prof. Kennedy, Prof. Wallace & Mr. Eayrs (President of the Macmillan Co. of Canada) were on especially good terms of friendship.”43
Catherine Wells was no doubt touched. The morning post had brought with it a charming letter from Sir Harry Johnston, who had turned sixty-five only a few months before. As usual, Sir Harry complained about his frail health, this time his recent bout with influenza, which had kept him cooped up in his flat in St. James’s Court far too long. The main concern expressed in his letter, however, was for Jane. “You seem, from all account, to have had a trying and exhausting two years, involving operations and strain on your constitution; and if I had more control over you I should have prescribed and insisted on carrying out a two years’ rest cure, to date from Jany. 1st, 1923; during which you were only to be approached by a select band of visitors, all of them rich, talented, beautiful and generous.”44
She must have appreciated the thought. The past several years had been exhausting ones. She could scarcely bring herself to think about the hundreds of hours she had spent between late 1918 and 1920, helping with The Outline. The search for books on a host of subjects; the flagging and transcription of passage after passage from various weighty historical works, for her husband’s use; the typing of H.G.’s scrawling manuscript, understandable only to her and to a few others, into clean copy; the endless correspondence with H.G.’s friends, with the illustrator, Horrabin, and with the publishers. It had all but broken her.
No sooner had the bulk of her work on The Outline been done, it seemed, than she had faced her operation and the months of recovery from it, often alone, for H.G. seemed less capable than ever of staying in one place for any length of time. On the occasions when he returned to Easton Glebe he surrounded himself with as many people, and as much activity, as necessary to feed whatever unfathomable hunger gnawed at him. Through it all, she had driven herself to remain the supremely competent and unflappable Jane everyone knew and expected her to be. She had been with this man for thirty years, but still she could scarcely guess what drove him from book to book, from place to place, and from woman to woman. She did know that his was a complicated, driven, unsatisfied soul.
None of her husband’s relationships with other women was now, or for some time past had been, a mere passade. The word, she knew, had been a convenient fiction of the early years of their marriage, intended initially to bolster her sense of security, if not her dignity. Margaret Sanger she knew from 1920, when the American woman had visited them at Easton Glebe, and she was aware that H.G. had continued the relationship during his trip to America late in 1921. Sanger’s appearance in The Secret Places of the Heart came as no surprise.
Sir Richmond Hardy, distraught and under psychiatric care because his life is without meaning, finds renewal in a young woman, Miss Grammont, an attractive and soft-spoken American woman who is an advocate of birth control and world population planning. Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont become minds in harmony, and they go on to talk about the history of the world, the ruins left by the Great War, and the coming crisis of civilization.45 It remained to be seen how abiding this harmony might be. Would it burn itself out, like the affair with Amber Reeves, or would it prove durable, like H.G.’s affair with Rebecca West, now a decade old?
Everything about her husband’s life seemed somehow to have become unhinged, without a centre, almost out of control. Oh, he was as productive as ever. The lectures from the American tour, following the international success of The Outline and its crusade for a world-state, had been published by Cassell in 1921 as The Salvaging of Civilization. He had set forward his views on the Versailles settlement in Washington and the Hope of Peace the next year, and had found the time to condense parts of The Outline into A Short History of the World and to see The Secret Places of the Heart through the press. But Secret Places, she knew, was scarcely H.G. at his best: there was too little self-knowledge in it, and too much self-pity. Even the novel he was about to publish, Men Like Gods, showed signs of its author’s emotional disarray. Nominally a return to the themes of his famous novels of the 1890s, with a protagonist who is transported to Utopia, the book was less scientific romance than it was escapist fantasy.
He had not been able to escape from his latest adventure: Frau Gatternigg. The sorry business with her seemed to symbolize just how much Wells’s private life had grown beyond his command and how tragic the consequences could be.
The affair had begun when a young Austrian journalist, Hedwig Verena Gatternigg, began to correspond with Wells during the winter of 1922–23, just when his relationship with Rebecca was nearing the breaking point. Answering her request for a meeting to discuss problems of the educated classes in Austria, he invited her to his flat in Whitehall Court. There, Jane served tea. Wells saw in front of him a petite and attractive woman in her late twenties, with dark hair and big brown eyes with long curling lashes. As he later wrote: “I hate to snub an exile in distress, and she was an extremely appetizing young woman.”46
Hedwig Gatternigg proved to be more than open to the prophet’s advances. She arranged to stay in a house in Felsted near Easton Glebe, and when Wells arrived there to meet her hosts, he found them gone and his favourite exile “minding it in a tea-gown and little else. ‘This must end,’ said I, ‘this must end’ – allowing myself to be dragged upstairs.” The invitation to tea became a weekend of passionate lovemaking. To Wells, such infidelity was no betrayal of Jane. The thought never entered his mind. It was Rebecca he had betrayed, and even then he excused his behaviour by convincing himself that she had flirted with the American novelist Sinclair Lewis.
Before long, Wells concluded that the fling was well out of hand, and he determined to end it. He instructed his maid that should Hedwig call at Whitehall Court, she was not to be given access to the flat. Instead, in order to cool her ardour, he suggested that she meet with Rebecca West.
For her part, Rebecca had come to the conclusion that her own relationship with Wells must end. At the outset of a trip to America in the spring of 1923, a sanctimonious Boston clubwoman had even tried to have her held up at Ellis Island on charges of immorality. Her earlier insistence that he either leave Jane and marry her or end their affair had become an ultimatum, and it now reached its all-too-predictable conclusion. He would remain with Jane. Rebecca was bitterly disappointed, but she sensed his confusion, and its attendant drift. His routine had come to consist of “a feverish week-end at Easton, from Monday to Tuesday in the London flat, two days with me, two days at London again, back to Easton. He was then,” she recalled, “very chesty and in poor condition, and often in a pitiful state of overwork and exhaustion. Of course it was death to his writing.” Much later, recounting the last year of their relationship to Wells’s biographers the Mackenzies, she said: “He went round and round like a rat in a maze.”47
By the late spring and early summer of 1923, it had become well past time to end their shared agony. If Wells insisted on staying with Jane, Rebecca demanded as settlement a guaranteed income of £3,000 per annum. Eventually, she settled for £500 per annum until she married or was “otherwise with a man.”48
Hedwig Gatternigg presented herself at Rebecca West’s London flat on a June morning in 1923, accompanied by a letter of introduction from H.G. The Austrian woman was clearly distraught, her manner so strange that West’s maid took it upon herself to go to the street to see if a policeman was on duty at the end of the block. “I was puzzled,” West later recalled, “to know why H.G. had sent me this peculiar person.”49 On June 20, a day that reached 91 degrees, Hedwig showed up unannounced at Wells’s Whitehall Court flat, wearing not much more than a raincoat, shoes and stockings. “You must love me,” Wells recalled her saying, “or I will kill myself. I have poison. I have a razor.” Wells’s account of the scene portrays him in heroic action, seizing the razor from the distraught woman, putting her in a chair, “bleeding profusely,” and rushing off for cold water to staunch the flow.
“Let me die,” he recalled her saying. “I love him, I love him.”50
Soon the hall porter appeared, and then two policemen. She was taken away to Charing Cross Hospital, “still asserting her incurable passion for me.” Wells’s first thoughts were that his shirt and cuffs had become bloodstained, that he would need to replace his carpet, and that he had missed his dinner party. The next day, the Star broke the story. It was like something out of an H.G. Wells novel: a hysterical woman, presumably a stranger, gains access to the flat of a famous author, attempts to cut her throat, and is saved from herself only by his quick thinking.51
For Rebecca, beset by reporters about the Austrian woman because of an allusion to her in the Star account, the episode confirmed the wisdom of her decision to break with Wells. She was disturbed by the unseemly events in his flat, and although she agreed to stand by him and his story about the business with Hedwig, she was also profoundly annoyed at the needless way he had involved her, and at his attitude towards her. “Not once did he say ‘I am sorry I have got you into this,’ ” she recalled. “He simply used me for his protection, and had no other thought about me … I was desperately anxious from that moment to get quit of all connection with both H.G. and Jane.”52
The sentiments are understandable, but a question remains. Given the circumstances, why mention Jane at the end of this particular passage? Unless, that is, Rebecca knew that Jane had been present when Hedwig arrived. Nowhere in Wells’s account, or in the newspaper stories that relied on it, does she make an appearance. Yet in H.G. Wells and Rebecca West, by the distinguished Wells scholar Gordon Ray, another view is offered. Of the suicide attempt, Ray, who had full cooperation from Rebecca West when writing his book, states: “That evening Frau Gatternigg attempted to kill herself in Wells’s flat. Wells was absent at the time, and it was Jane who discovered her at 4 Whitehall Court. Jane called the police, who saw to it that Frau Gatternigg was taken to a hospital.”53
That is all. We are left with two incompatible versions of the same events: the dramatic rescue told by the famous novelist, and the cleaning up of a messy situation by a protective, faithful, and all-enduring wife. Given the peculiarities of the longue durée of the marriage of this husband and this wife, one is inclined to accept Ray’s account, very likely provided by West, as the accurate one. Always there, always half visible in the background, stood the faithful Jane, waiting for the moment when her husband needed her. As she knew he would.
In 1925, with a lot of effort and expensive advice, “The Highway of History” was ready for publishers to see. Any number of University of Toronto professors of history had helped Florence with it, and for it they had been handsomely paid. Early in April, she received a letter from George Wrong. He noted that his son Murray, the historian, had finished reading the final chapters and had made comments on them and on the book as a whole. Wrong enclosed the twelve-page report. “What I have read,” Murray Wrong wrote, “seems to me to flow easily and to read quite well … The parts that I have read seem to me readable, interesting, and generally quite convincing. My impression is that little difficulty would be found in getting a publisher, and that the book, with a few maps & some well chosen illustrations, would be quite useful.”54
Armed with such a lofty academic assurance, Florence and Mabel travelled to New York City that summer with freshly typed copies of “The Highway of History” in their baggage. They spent several weeks there, making the rounds of the most prominent publishing firms, lugging copies of the bulky manuscript and asking to see the people in charge. It was daunting to be in the heartland of North American publishing, but Florence was convinced that at last she had written a publishable book, offspring of “The Web” but much improved on it. So after each interview she and Mabel left a copy with the firm. Then, after a bit of a holiday, they took the train back to Toronto. “The Highway of History,” by Florence A. Deeks, sat on editors’ desks at Doubleday, Page and Company, Charles Scribner’s Sons, Ginn and Company, Houghton-Mifflin, and Little, Brown and Company. Safely home on Farnham Avenue, the two sisters waited each day for the postman to arrive.
The letters followed a few weeks later. Rejections, all of them. Charles Scribner replied personally, writing that while “The Highway of History” was “a very readable and comprehensive outline of the world’s history,” his firm could not undertake its publication “with quite the degree of confidence” it liked. Houghton-Mifflin responded with the good news that “we are impressed with the thoroughness and care with which you have done the work, and we can readily see a probability that if published the work will get a welcome from some students and other readers who need just such a guide”; the bad news was that, from the firm’s point of view, “it does not seem clearly a book for us to take up.” Ginn and Company admitted that it was “tempted” because “your work … is so good,” but the publisher found it “not at all feasible” to publish the book because several successful general histories already existed in the marketplace.55
The most prominent of these books, of course, was The Outline of History. How frustrating and infuriating it must have been for Florence, then, when Beecher Stowe of Doubleday wrote that he had decided to reject “The Highway of History” because “it so nearly duplicates the Wells outline,” or when an editor at Little, Brown, the last of the publishers to respond, informed her: “Your book would be subject to comparison with Wells’ ‘Outline of History.’ For that reason I think you will have difficulty in securing a publisher at the present time.”56