“I’m afraid … that he’s always tried to make history a substitute for life. And, of course, it won’t work.”
Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956)
FLORENCE AND HER LAWYERS had announced their intention to sue H.G. Wells and his publishers in the autumn of 1925, but they did not serve the writs on any of the defendants at that time. As a result, throughout 1926 and most of 1927 public interest in the case waned, helped in part by the stance taken by Wells himself that the case was fraudulent and frivolous and if ignored would go away. There was, however, a good deal of activity behind the scenes.
It is fair to say that without George S. Deeks, his sister’s case against Wells would never have arisen, for he was the one who paid the bills. By the 1920s, he was at the peak of his career in engineering, construction, and real estate. An intensely private man, he had quietly supported his sister and her cause since she had first grown suspicious about the origins of Wells’s book. He had sent her to his own law firm and had continued to meet requests for money from her.
Yet even he had limits. By 1927, Tilley, Johnston, Thomson & Parmenter had been retained on the case for six years. Reimbursements had also been issued to a number of historical experts. George’s cheque stubs bore the names of G.S. Brett, W.P.M. Kennedy, G.M. Wrong, C.R. Fay, R. Flenley, I.A. Richards, H.S. Canby, H.E. Barnes, L.J. Burpee, B. Windle, and others.
Two years into the legal action, Norman Tilley had still not served the writs on the defendants, possibly because he had not yet uncovered proof of the means by which “The Web” had been secured by Wells. He expected that the case would be won or lost on such evidence. Florence had suspicions based on a chain of circumstances, but he needed proof.
Whether it was George Deeks or Tilley who took the initiative, George stopped his financial support for his sister’s lawsuit shortly after returning from a Florida vacation in February or March of 1927. As a consequence, early in May, Tilley, Johnston, Thomson & Parmenter announced its withdrawal from the case. “After full consideration of the facts and circumstances,” R.H. Parmenter wrote to George Deeks, “including The Analysis of the two works prepared by Miss Deeks, I am still of the opinion that without conclusive proof that Miss Deeks’ manuscript was actually in the hands of Mr. Wells no judge would find in her favour even though the action was undefended by Mr. Wells … If notwithstanding what I have said you still desire to proceed with the action I am afraid we shall have to ask you to let us retire from the case.”1
Parmenter went on to remind George Deeks and his sister how time-consuming and costly any continuation of the case would be. First, there was the difficulty and the expense of examining the defendants and their records in Toronto, New York, and England. This task, in itself, was enormous and expensive. But adequate preparation would also require knowledge of the most arcane of historical details. The Deeks lawyers would need to have at their command nothing less than “a comprehensive study of the whole scope of both works, including the reading and consideration of all available authorities on the historical and other subjects dealt with therein.” Life, Parmenter and Tilley may well have concluded, was far too short for them to undertake an informal but advanced course in the history of the world since creation.
Florence was disappointed but undeterred. To her mind the New York publishers had confirmed that, had Wells not produced The Outline, her “Web” would probably have been published, for there was a definite market for such a book. Now she was on her own, so she immediately contacted Gideon Grant, of the prominent Bay Street firm of Johnston, Grant, Dods & Macdonald. She admitted that her backing for the case was now uncertain, but Grant was sufficiently struck by the woman’s obvious sincerity that he agreed to take over the action.
George Deeks had no sooner withdrawn from the case than one of those unlikely Dickensian coincidences took place that supposedly do not happen in “real life.” As his sister later put it, almost as if to preserve the mystery, “Just then a friend came to our assistance.” Nothing is known of this “friend,” except for Florence’s use of the pronoun “he.” Was the person a member of Bloor Street United Church, her congregation? Is it possible that “he” was not a man at all, but a rich matron of the affluent upper-middle-class district in which the Deeks families lived? Or did Florence’s mother or her sisters manage to find the means of further support for her cause?
Was this mysterious benefactor, in fact, an individual at all? Until she became consumed with writing her book and pressing her lawsuit, Florence had been involved in a wide range of activities. If she had been of a mind to mount a private fundraising campaign in support of her cause, she certainly would have had the capacity to do so, for she could draw upon many contacts and – just as important – had access to their addresses. Was such an appeal made, and if so, to whom? The matter remains a mystery.
Somehow, Florence did find the means to press on. Judging by her legal and other correspondence, if she received funding from a single benefactor, it must have come to her episodically and in small amounts, for that is how she paid her bills.2
Wells had not really recovered from the sense of drift and ennui noted by others earlier in the decade. In the aftermath of the near-scandal over Hedwig Gatternigg, he had attempted to convince Rebecca West to remain with him. The overture did not work, for she rebuffed his enjoinders. Even so, still “haunted” by her, he said, he continued to write love letters into the second half of 1924. Meanwhile, he spent time with Jane in Paris that spring. Occasionally Rebecca consented to a visit, and Margaret Sanger perked him up somewhat during her tour of England.3
It was not enough. Still restless, the dogs of depression nipping at his heels, he announced his intention to take a world tour in late summer. Its first stage was Geneva, not least because it promised a rendezvous with Odette Keun, a woman the fifty-eight-year-old author had not yet met. Born in Constantinople, daughter of a Dutch diplomat and an Italian mother, she had for the past year written him fawning letters that spiralled towards intimacy. In one, she dramatically pleaded with him to “take” her before she died.4 Given the circumstances of Wells’s personal life, he was not of a frame of mind to spurn the attentions of a woman – any woman. And this one, at thirty-six, was ripe.
On Odette’s instructions, staff of her Geneva hotel sent Wells up to her room. “She flung herself upon me with protests of adoration,” he recalled. “She wanted to give her whole life to me. She wanted nothing but to be of service to me. ‘If you feel like that,’ said I.” Odette had turned off the lamp before he entered the bedroom and they coupled without having seen each other at all. “I did not know whether he was a giant or a gnome,” she recalled, “but it did not matter.”5
In the cold light of the days and months that followed, Wells came to see his relationship with Odette as a refuge from his discontent. Jane continued to keep an impeccable house at Easton Glebe, but she had grown distant, had her own circle of friends, and had managed to carve out for herself an existence almost independent of him. He found that he could no longer work there. Rebecca had rejected him, and Margaret was seldom available, so he took shelter with Odette in a rented farmhouse named Lou Bastidon in Provence, near Grasse. “I wanted someone to keep house for me,” he said of Odette, “and I wanted a mistress to tranquillize me and companion me. She would be there. She would never come to Paris or London with me or invade my English life.”6
At first, bathing in the afterglow of having captured such a famous man, Odette Keun behaved in ways that met Wells’s approval. But before long, much to his chagrin, “she began to assert herself.” Having forgotten her part of the bargain he thought they had made, she took apparent delight in displays of outrageous sexual exhibitionism and words intended to shock those around her. She argued with him. She nagged. “She was,” he recalled, “from certain points of view, a thoroughly nasty and detestable person; vain, noisy and weakly outrageous.” But, in her “warped” way, Odette was affectionate and she made him laugh. In some respects she met his needs. When he could no longer abide her, he escaped to England; when he was merely bored with her, he could invite Margaret Sanger to visit Grasse. And he did.7
During the months after Florence Deeks launched her “literary piracy” suit against him in the fall of 1925, Wells buried himself in his work. His major novel was The World of William Clissold, and it occupied much of his time in 1924 and 1925. Published the next year, the two-volume epic, dedicated to Odette Keun (“Self-forgetful friend and helper”), proved to be the lengthiest novel he was to write. In part, it was a revisitation of themes that had informed The Research Magnificent, the thinly disguised story of his relationship with Rebecca West, published in 1915; now, he brought the story of his affairs with Rebecca and other women up to date.
The plot was a familiar one: William Clissold, educated at the Royal College of Science, is a successful businessman bent on fame and fortune. After a failed early marriage to Clara, followed by “quite a lot of promiscuous love-making,” he finds several years of contentment with a mistress named Sirrie, followed by another called Helen. The former dies, and he eventually quarrels with the latter and they separate. So he flees, first to Geneva to see the League of Nations at work and then to the south of France with Clementina, a woman he has picked up in Paris. At last, in the coddling warmth of Provence, he finds the detachment and peace of mind necessary to engage in the world of thought, and to “define at last the Open Conspiracy that arises in the human will to meet and wrestle with the moulding forces of the universe, that Open Conspiracy to which in the end I believe I shall succeed in correlating all my conscious being.”8
Define he does, not only the Open Conspiracy (a benign alliance of bankers and industrialists who will rule the world by bypassing legislative democracy) but much else. For the final 250 pages, using Clementina and his brother Richard as foils, William Clissold directly or indirectly informs the world of his considered views on social change, leadership, force and violence, race, education, universities, politics, sex, women, love, and much, much else. Only the death of William and Clementina in an automobile accident staunches the relentless flow of words – and even then not quite. For in the final pages of the 797-page novel, Wells affords Richard an elegy to brother William, allowing their creator the luxury of penning an obituary of himself that was as generous as it was premature.
Wells intended The World of William Clissold to be a summing-up of his mature philosophy and the main contours of his life. It was also a settling of personal accounts in ways suitable to his needs. The novel was so patently autobiographical that Wells took the extraordinary measure of writing a seven-page preface denying any truthful resemblance between his life and loves and those of his protagonist. Yet there they were: Isabel as Clara, Catherine as Sirrie, Rebecca as Helen, and Odette as Clementina. And in each case, in this therapeutic recasting of his real life, the major failings were of their making, not his. The portraits Wells drew of the women in his life remained true to their originals in certain traits of character and in some of his attitudes towards them.9 But he departed from reality in order to explain the end of his relationships, and his inventions were clearly intended to shift the burden of responsibility from him to them.10
Oblivious to Wells, but abundantly clear to his readers, his critics, and his biographers, was the fundamental lack of self-awareness Wells exhibited as Clissold. He thought he was demonstrating that he understood his women; but what he created instead was a sustained and painfully obvious essay in self-dramatization. Unconsciously but clearly, he confirmed for others, in the words of the biographers Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, the “profound truth about his attitude towards the women he desired sexually: that the search for passion in successive infidelities led him to devalue, and then discard, the women he possessed.”11
At last, in mid-September 1927, Florence’s new legal representatives served writs on both North American branches of Macmillan. “We thought this wretched thing was done with, but I am not worrying,” Hugh Eayrs wrote to Sir Frederick Macmillan, informing him that he could expect a visit from Miss Deeks’s English lawyers. “The whole thing is a bluff,” he assured George Brett in New York. But Brett was not convinced. It was, he replied, “possibly a very serious matter, indeed, and if … you are thinking that the present move is a bluff I advise you to remove such an idea at once from your mind … Personally I think we shall have to take considerable pains in this matter to make sure that we shall not be beaten in the case.” Chastened by this rebuke, Eayrs replied that he had meant only that the Deeks woman was probably after an out-of-court settlement – but this implied that, if true, the “bluff” could be a costly one to the defendants. He might have added, but did not, that it would be perceived as an admission of Wells’s guilt. Bluff or not, one thing was now clear: it was essential for the defendants to mount a defence.12
Establishing a coherent case for the defence was logistically difficult, since at that point it involved legal firms located in two continents and three countries. Individually, those charged were the Canadian branch of Macmillan and its English parent company, whom the plaintiff accused, respectively, of secretly sending and receiving “The Web”; George Newnes Limited, London publishers of The Outline in its initial serialized form; Cassell & Company, publishers of the English edition; and the Macmillan Company, Inc., of New York, publishers of the North American edition. Then there was the peripatetic Wells himself, whose correspondents found him by 1927 variously in London at his flat or at the Reform Club, at Easton Glebe, or wintering on the Continent. That is, when he was not staying in his recently established apartment in Paris.
Beyond the vicissitudes of transatlantic and cross-Channel mail boats, there was the problem of determining just what Wells’s defence would be. Finding their client was difficult enough, but pinning his thoughts down on the subject seemed near impossible. His legal advisers found it difficult to obtain any information from him, except that the whole matter was preposterous.
When the suit was first launched in 1925, Wells had sent a “Memorandum of the Case of The Web” to George Brett in New York.
Either the claim is a genuine but silly claim or it is a blackmailing claim based on a faked MS.
In the former case the resemblances of the MS. to the Outline will be due to a common obvious idea and to the use of common sources – which should be easy to establish.
In the latter the MS. has been extensively altered since it was in the hands of Macmillan & Co. This should be proveable by the testimony of the reader or readers of Macmillan & Co. to whom it was submitted in 1918. Our case will be that the Web has been rewritten to substantiate this claim since the appearance of the Outline.
In either case Messrs. Macmillan must substantiate that the MS. never left the hands of their representatives in the period during which their responsibility lasted and could not have been seen by Mr. Wells.
Mr. Wells denies having seen such an MS. or being in the least obliged to any report of it. He broached the idea of an Outline of History at a lunch of representative American visitors before the end of the War. A history of the origin of the Outline can no doubt be made up from Mr. Wells’ letter files, but it would be a tiresome business and he does not propose to do that until he has the statement of the claimant’s case and knows what points need refuting.13
Wells’s memorandum was an outline of possible defence strategy, but it was a peculiar declaration of moral outrage for an innocent party. Rather than do the obvious – offer his lawyers the original draft of The Outline to examine, along with any notes he might have made – he threw the responsibility for demonstrating his innocence instead onto his publishers. It was up to them to ensure that no evidence existed that “The Web” had left the possession of Macmillan. Since the officers of the three branches of the company were by no means confident that this was so, they were left with two conclusions: first, that the case, far from being frivolous, was a serious one; second, that if The Outline did indeed resemble “The Web,” the possibility that the Deeks manuscript had been altered after publication of The Outline required investigation. Wells, clearly, had little intention of helping his lawyers clarify the circumstances surrounding his writing of The Outline.
The possibility that “The Web” had been revised to resemble The Outline was certainly on Sir Frederick Macmillan’s mind when he rejected George Brett’s assertion that the suit was “possibly of serious consequence.” Alteration of “The Web” would explain everything. Wells’s solicitor, W. Sanders Fiske of Gedge, Fiske & Gedge, was of similar mind, for he advised Wells that, based on Deeks’s vague statement of claim, the whole affair amounted to “an attempt at blackmail.”14
Because Wells had for the most part been silent on the Deeks affair, except for suggesting that blackmail might be involved, Hugh Eayrs and his lawyers in Toronto decided to initiate their own lines of inquiry. Perhaps Deeks had indeed copied from Wells. Eayrs knew that she had been working on at least one version of her history after The Outline had been published.
This trail of assumption inevitably led to the earlier involvement of W.P.M. Kennedy in the preparation of “The Highway of History.” Could it be that, as Wells suggested, the entire exercise was some kind of elaborate smokescreen, a way of incorporating elements of The Outline of History into a second Deeks manuscript and then somehow slipping them into an altered version of “The Web” as if to suggest they were Florence Deeks’s original thoughts?
That this was a very real possibility emerged when Eayrs learned late in 1927 from the sociologist Robert M. MacIver, who had just left the University of Toronto for Columbia University, that Florence had consulted him no fewer than three times about “The Web” and The Outline, and that he had advised her to drop the case. Rumour had it that her lawyers had recently declined to continue and that she was going to stop her action. To establish whether this was true, Brett determined to speak with MacIver in New York.15
Following his interview with Eayrs, MacIver filed a “Confidential Memorandum” with Macmillan New York. It detailed a discussion he had had with George Wrong in 1925 about W.P.M. Kennedy’s involvement in the Deeks affair. The precise details of Kennedy’s role remained sketchy, but what had annoyed MacIver most about the involvement of his colleague was that while Kennedy had originally demanded $100 per chapter, it was rumoured that he had eventually managed to extract as much as $15,000 from the woman for the work he had done, in part at his rented summer cottage. Miss Deeks had complained of these “heavy expenditures” for Kennedy’s work in her conversation with MacIver. Professor Wrong had been worried after learning these details, since far more money had been involved than any Toronto faculty member, even its president, earned in a year. Should the facts become known, the university community would be outraged at Kennedy’s apparent greed.
Not stated in MacIver’s memorandum, but clearly implied, was the notion that Kennedy would only have charged such an exorbitant amount if he had been involved in something of great risk to himself and his career. Had the mercurial Irishman become a party to plagiarism? If so, it was important to find out exactly when Kennedy had taken the Deeks manuscript to his cottage. This might determine which manuscript he was working on – “The Highway of History” or “The Web.” Or perhaps both at the same time? As Brett put it, rather laboriously, to Eayrs: “Whereas formerly it seemed a perfectly honest and innocent suit it now apparently becomes a plot to rob this and the other companies attacked in this suit not only of their money but of their good name, Miss Deeks evidently relying upon the fact that two manuscripts prepared on the same subject by herself, assisted by Mr. Kennedy, and Mr. Wells on the other hand, must necessarily, the subject being the history of mankind, closely resemble each other in many important particulars as they deal with the same facts throughout.”16
The publishers thought they had found a serious fault line in the armour of sincerity worn by Miss Deeks. If it could be proven that she and Kennedy had conspired to alter the text of “The Web” after publication of The Outline, and in a way that made her manuscript resemble Wells’s book, her case would collapse. Perhaps Deeks had copied from Wells! Eayrs and Brett agreed that if discreet inquiries “were made in the proper quarters by a man of the right calibre” they might learn more about Kennedy’s involvement. The question was, Just who should this person be? The obvious choice to put pressure on Kennedy was Sir Robert Falconer, the Presbyterian minister, professor of theology, and president of the University of Toronto since 1907. But Wrong had compromised Falconer on this matter a few years earlier, when, in confidence, he had expressed his worries about the large sums Kennedy was charging for his offcampus services. To involve Falconer now, it was thought, would involve the betrayal of that earlier confidence.
Eayrs therefore sought the advice of the librarian of the University of Toronto, W. Stewart Wallace, and asked him whether it was wise to consult the president, “the idea being that Sir Robert might inform Kennedy of his knowledge of the transaction and considering it somewhat unsavoury from the standpoint of the University bring pressure to bear on Miss Deeks through Kennedy.”17 Perhaps, subjected to such pressure, Kennedy would admit the true nature of his involvement.
The whole business was singularly confusing, with not one Deeks manuscript now to worry about, but two. It was, as Eayrs wrote to his lawyer, “of utmost importance that we differentiate between the original manuscript Miss Deeks submitted to this Company, and the latter manuscript which has been revised by Professor Kennedy. How are we to know which manuscript is put in by this woman for examination, that is to say, how can we be sure that the original manuscript is the one put in?” The only way, it seemed to Eayrs, was to make the culprits somehow reveal their duplicity.18
Brett was receptive to the idea but warned Eayrs that “it would be a great misfortune indeed if Miss Deeks and her lawyers were to ascertain the amount and the kind of information we have already obtained … and which I am hoping you will be able greatly to enlarge in detail.”19 By this time, an agent employed by the defence had interviewed the owner of the cottage Kennedy had rented at Kincardine in the mid-Twenties, and knew the rough dates and exact amount of rent he had paid. Two hundred and fifty dollars for the summer season. Probably in 1924.20
Hugh Eayrs eventually decided that he would let the decision about Falconer’s involvement rest with Macmillan’s lawyer W.W. McLaughlin, who had taken over the file from his colleague Johnston.21 But the documentary record does not reveal what happened next. The letters of Falconer, Wrong, and Kennedy in the University of Toronto Archives are silent on the matter, as are the publishers’ records, but this is not surprising since such a delicate combination of academic diplomacy and espionage was the kind of business usually conducted in senior common rooms or private clubs.
What can be said is that Falconer would not have been surprised had he received a polite note from Wrong or someone else in the university asking him to do something about Kennedy’s behaviour, for the Irish scholar had been the problem child of the history department for many years. Not much time had passed, in fact, since Wrong had complained to his president of Kennedy’s lack of sanity.22
Whatever was done, if anything, the stratagem did not work. The defendants gleaned nothing further about the relationship between “The Web” and “The Highway of History” before the trial took place. By then it did not matter, for all the while “The Web” remained in its original and unrevised state on Farnham Avenue. But by writing “The Highway,” Florence Deeks had inadvertently thrown an awfully large red herring onto the path of the defence.
The year 1927 was H.G. Wells’s annus horribilis. He felt assaulted by a world that did not understand him. Clissold had been a critical failure, doubly damned. The preface in which he insisted that the novel was not autobiographical had been dismissed as disingenuous, while the tenderness with which he had intended to enfold the story of his loves had endeared him to no one. Few were enthusiastic about his idea of the Open Conspiracy that alone, he believed, could usher in a new world order of peace, prosperity, and progress. D.H. Lawrence described the book as a “mouse’s nest,” while Bernard Shaw condemned it as not a novel at all, but a blend of history and sociology. “Clissoldism” had become in public parlance a term of ridicule, a word for the pretentious meddling of any busybody who sets out to reshape the world according to a blueprint of his own making. The novel had even inspired a parody, in H.A.M. Thomson’s The World of Billiam Wissold.23
While his friend Shaw told him that, in publishing Clissold, it was as if Wells had returned to writing The Outline of History,24 his masterpiece had itself come under severe attack. The previous year, Hilaire Belloc, the brilliant but cantankerous champion of a revitalized but nostalgic Roman Catholicism, had subjected The Outline to venomous scorn. Few could command the English language like Belloc, and he put his talent to extraordinary use in a series of articles denouncing Wells’s history for its treatment of the Catholic religion and much else. The book was “provincial,” Belloc wrote. “A schoolboy ought to know better than to write this.” “So much for the book,” he concluded. “It will have a prodigious vogue in its own world and an early grave.”25
As painful to Wells as the harsh and personal criticism itself was Fleet Street’s lack of interest in publishing his rebuttals to Belloc. He was vexed by the refusal of the Catholic weekly the Universe to print his response to Belloc’s articles, even when he offered it free of charge. That the English daily press did not find his views to be newsworthy was even more troubling. It was an implicit assault on the public persona he had constructed for himself.
Against the advice of friends and acquaintances, whether Arnold Bennett or G.K. Chesterton, Wells entered the verbal fray after Belloc published his articles in book form as A Companion to Mr. Wells’s Outline of History. Almost lost in the din of controversy that surrounded the acrimonious exchange of insults between Belloc and Wells was Chesterton’s response to The Outline, published at the end of September 1925. Much more restrained and dignified in tone than Belloc’s polemic, The Everlasting Man was Chesterton’s own Outline of History, a Roman Catholic indictment of “the rationalist treatment of history” on which secular historical scholarship and scientific speculation were based. It was to become Chesterton’s neglected classic.26
Belloc relished a good war of words; Wells, congenitally defensive, was not temperamentally suited to wage one. Nevertheless, his tract Mr. Belloc Objects to “The Outline of History” appeared in 1926. The exchange of argument and insult did little to enhance Wells’s reputation. Belloc stood on the foundation laid by Aquinas; Wells on that of Darwin and Huxley. But even on such familiar ground, H.G. ran into trouble. When he challenged Belloc to uncover any contradiction in The Outline, Belloc delighted in noting that at one point Wells had stated that paleolithic man “did not know of the bow.” Yet there before him, “in Mr. Wells’s own book, were reproductions of cave paintings, with the bow and arrow appearing all over them.”27
Wells gradually retreated, although Belloc continued his relentless attack, with mounting sarcasm, on the inadequate scientific foundations of The Outline and its author’s lack of acquaintance with up-to-date scholarship. The vituperative dispute immediately became the stuff of literary legend. One story had it that the two enemies encountered each other at the Reform Club shortly after Belloc had declared victory to be his. “Still looking for Neanderthal Man, H.G.?” asked Belloc. “No – Woman,” the prophet is said to have replied. 28
When the secretary of the Cassell publishing company wrote to H.G. Wells on September 23, 1927, to inform him that his firm had just been served with a writ “in the case of Miss F.A. Deeks v. Wells, Macmillan, Newnes and Cassell,” the author was not disposed to pay it much attention. The war with Belloc and the reception of Clissold remained on his mind. Neither the substantial and highly favourable review of the novel secured by Sir Richard Gregory for Nature, nor the way the editor had rallied his journal in support of Wells in the dispute with Belloc over history, had improved H.G.’s mood.29 Wells was preoccupied for a more painful reason than these. Jane was dying, and her husband had all but predicted it.
In the final pages of the account of William Clissold’s relationship with Sirrie Evans, Sirrie finally succumbs to tuberculosis. Devoted William is with her to the very end. “A tired, flimsy, pitiful frame she had become, something that one just took care of and treated very gently,” the novelist had written. “Her motionless eyelashes touched my cheek, and she passed away so softly that until, with a start, I noted her coldness, I did not suspect that she was dead.”30
The account, ever so tender, was sadly prophetic in more ways than this, for the novelist had inadvertently given two different years of Sirrie’s death, 1905 and 1908.31 It was as if the true date remained to be filled in, and to the extent that Sirrie was Jane – both were devoted gardeners, voracious readers of novels, and passionate travellers – the year might just as well have been 1927. For in April 1927, shortly after the wedding of their son George to Marjorie Craig, Catherine consulted a surgeon about severe abdominal pains. Wells had already returned to his recently constructed villa – Lou Pidou – in Provence, to be with Odette.
While H.G. was there, Catherine underwent exploratory surgery. The result was the worst possible: a diagnosis of advanced and inoperable cancer. She had at most only months to live. Wells received the news from his son Frank. Writing from his French retreat, he was now all love and tenderness. Genuinely concerned, yet forced to play the role of Clissold in real life, he wrote to Jane: “My dear, I love you much more than I have loved anyone else in the world & I am coming back to you to take care of you & to do all I can to make you happy.” Only now did the terms of endearment of the early years return to him: “My dear, my dear, my dearest heart is yours. Your loving Bins.”32 The precious words came far too late.
He returned to Easton Glebe to play his part in the final real-life chapter, the doting husband constantly at his wife’s side – except for the trip he made each month to spend two days at Lou Pidou. Friends such as Charlotte Shaw and Arnold Bennett wrote letters, offering him the support they thought he needed and his ailing wife the attention they had not always previously been mindful to furnish. Wells was without question deeply distraught, but there was an element in him that relished the pathos. He would not attend the World Population Conference in Geneva, he wrote to Margaret Sanger, because “my little wife has to die of cancer & I want to spend what time remains of her life with her.”33
Catherine Wells died early in the evening of October 6, 1927, her husband at her side. She was cremated at Golders Green, London’s crematorium, a few days later. A memorial service followed, attended by many friends. Lent a book of stock funeral addresses, Wells had altered the eulogy, bit by bit, constantly finding “some new way of fitting it more closely to this special occasion,” until it became “almost entirely a personal testimony.”34 “The best and sweetest of her,” the eulogist told the sombre gathering, in words penned by the grieving husband, “is known only to one or two of us: subtle and secret, it can never be told. Faithful, gentle, wise, and self-forgetful, she upheld another who mourns her here to-day: to him she gave her heart and her youth and the best of her brave life … She was a noble wife, a happy mother, and the maker of a free and kindly and hospitable home … She could forgive ingratitude and bore no resentment for a slight … She was a fountain of pity and mercy, except to herself.”35
The Shaws were present when these words were read next to the coffin, with the furnace of the crematorium in plain sight. Charlotte Shaw was appalled at what she witnessed, and said so in a letter to T.E. Lawrence.
It was dreadful – dreadful – dreadful! I haven’t been so upset … for a long time … The organ began a terrible dirge. We all stood up – and stood for what seemed hours and hours … while that organ played on our nerves and sense and knocked them to pieces. H.G. began to cry like a child – tried to hide it at first and then let go. After centuries of torment the organist stopped … and we all sat down and pseudo-Balfour [the classicist T.E. Page] began to read a paper, written, as he told us, by Wells. It was terrible beyond anything words can describe; a soul in torment – self torture. He drowned us in a sea of misery and as we were gasping began a panegyric of Jane which made her appear as a delicate, flower-like, gentle being, surrounding itself with beauty, and philanthropy and love. Now Jane was one of the strongest characters I ever met. She managed H.G. and her good curious sons and her circle generally according to her own very definite and very original theories – with almost unbroken success – from the point of view of her theories. Then there came a place where the address said “she never resented a slight; she never gave voice to a harsh judgment.” At that point the audience, all more or less acquainted with many details of H.G.’s private life, thrilled, like corn under a wet north wind – and H.G. – H.G. positively howled. You are no doubt aware that he was not a conventionally perfect husband … O it was hideous – terrible and frightful. I am an old woman and there is one thing I seem, at least, to have learned. The way of transgressors is hard.
As the biographers of Wells who quote this passage add, with an acid of understatement infusing otherwise innocent words: “A few days later H.G. left for Paris, and by November he had again established himself at Lou Pidou.”36
Words uttered at a funeral had by no means met Wells’s need to address the meaning of his wife. Safe again in his sunny French villa, he set about writing a memoir of his life with her. It was published by Chatto and Windus in 1928, as a forty-four-page “introduction by her husband H.G. Wells” to a collection of Catherine’s little-known short stories and poetry. He chose to call it The Book of Catherine Wells. After thirty years or more as Jane, she had at last regained her rightful name. Wells had already written the deathbed scene, in Clissold, but, undeterred, he found fresh words to convey the real-life setting: “She spoke no more, she became a breathing body from which all token of recognition had departed, and an hour or so later, with her unresponsive hand in mine, she ceased to breathe.”37
Biographers and critics have often commented on the husband’s portrait of his dead wife, but they have said little about the wife herself. Seldom have they dwelt on the ways in which her stories and poems may have reflected her thoughts and feelings. If words are any measure of their interest, those who have read and commented on the book seldom penetrated beyond page 44. The identity of Mrs. H.G. Wells became of fixed construction the moment her husband penned his introductory declamations about Jane, “the tangible Catherine,” the woman who “made decisions freely, while Catherine herself stayed in the background aloof.”38 Catherine Wells has remained, for subsequent observers, this mute voice and this fixed image. The collection of her writing bore her name, but nowhere on its title page was she designated as its author. Instead, she became the long-suffering and compliant wife of literary legend, still silent and in the background.
By the autumn of 1927 everything about the case seemed to lead to unceasing frustration, delay, and expense. As they waited for Florence Deeks to provide them with a copy of her list of parallel passages, the Macmillan lawyers decided to see whether they could gain access to the reports Windle and Burpee had prepared for her. Hugh Eayrs and George Brett had learned that J.F. McCormick, editor of the New York-based Catholic journal the Commonweal, had once discussed the Deeks case with Sir Bertram Windle. The two Roman Catholic scholars shared a deep disdain for Wells and all he represented, so the publishers convinced McCormick to write a seemingly innocuous “fishing letter” to his fellow Catholic. Brett’s assistant, Curtis Hitchcock, reported to Eayrs that if he got a promising response he would convince McCormick to “run up to Toronto” to see Sir Bertram – and with any luck return with a copy of his report.39
McCormick’s letter to Sir Bertram was penned on the day Catherine Wells died. In it, he reminded his colleague of their discussion of the Deeks manuscript over lunch a year or so back, and noted in passing that he had recently learned from Macmillan that it was involved in a lawsuit involving H.G. Wells. For the rest, McCormick feigned forgetfulness. “When I learned this, I mentioned the fact that you had said something to me about this manuscript, but it so happens that I had almost entirely forgotten the incident. The details, of course, had left my mind completely, but whether you said there was a ‘deadly parallel’ or just the opposite I cannot remember. They, of course, are very anxious to find out what your reaction was … If you do not mind, I wish you would let me have for my own personal information a summary of what you told me that day regarding the manuscript.”40
Sir Bertram marked his reply “private and confidential,” for he was wary. He reminded McCormick that the discussions between Miss Deeks, himself, and her lawyers were “of a private nature.” That said, he was willing to tell McCormick what happened provided the details not be used other than in conversation with the gentlemen McCormick mentioned. He noted that he had undertaken the task of comparing the Deeks manuscript and the Wells book with great reluctance. “But I was pressed and offered a fee which I could not afford to refuse and did so. It was the weariest job of my life for though I did not have to correct or even point out mistakes I was sick to death of Wells and his grossly over rated book before I had done with it.” Sir Bertram had made his report, but had heard nothing; that was the only reason he had been willing to discuss the matter with McCormick. Then, when the case revived, he had expressed his willingness to testify in court if his view was deemed “worth expressing.” He had not used the phrase “deadly parallel” in his report, he said, so he could not have used it in their conversation. When he had last heard from Miss Deeks’s lawyer – “some months ago” – the case was apparently not going to proceed.41
Sir Bertram Windle’s cautious letter provided the defence with nothing of value to its case, and it was obvious that its author was not going to do so. “Evidently we should have a good deal of trouble in persuading Windle to let us see the report,” Brett’s assistant told Eayrs, “and Mr. Brett feels on the whole that it would be wiser not to make any more efforts in this direction for the present.” Eayrs agreed, but meanwhile he had found out a little about the report. “It is reiterated to me by Saul and Watson (the former being at one time the Editor of this Company, and the latter being the Manager here for Thomas Nelson’s and Sons) that Windle’s report is overwhelmingly favourable to this woman’s claim, although both these gentlemen take pains to add that it goes into little or no detail. Sir Bertram’s anti-Wells bias is, of course, well known.”42
Sidney Watson, to whom Saul had confided about the report, frequently played golf with the editor from Gage. This was not to be the only important secret Saul and he would share concerning the Deeks affair.
The defence did not pursue Sir Bertram further, much to his relief, for the aging scholar had heard more than enough about Deeks and Wells. His involvement, he had told McCormick, had given him “far more trouble than it was worth.” He had hoped not to testify, and he would be granted his wish. In 1929, at the age of seventy-one, he died. The case of Deeks v. Wells threatened to become the Canadian equivalent of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the lawsuit in Dickens’s Bleak House that went on so long that its expenses consumed the inheritance at stake in the first place. Miss Deeks’s action against H.G. Wells had a long way to go yet before it could reach the courts, and she now needed to find another expert to take Sir Bertram’s place.
Eayrs, meanwhile, had discovered that one of Deeks’s experts had been his “old friend” Lawrence J. Burpee, and he reported to Brett his amazement. How, he wondered, could someone as eminent as Burpee arrive at “an opinion favourable to her views”? Burpee’s explanation, said Eayrs, was that “Miss Deeks wrote to him and assured him that the manuscript had been passed to Mr. Wells, and taking her assurance at face value he then compared her parallel passages and constructive similarities. He said that he did think there were here and there marked similarities between THE WEB and THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY.” Eayrs risked straining his friendship by writing to Burpee in Ottawa, asking him for loan of his report and his correspondence with Deeks. Burpee agreed to do so, but only because, as Eayrs told his lawyer, “I have stormed him until he did.” As with the intelligence McCormick had gleaned from Sir Bertram, the material was to remain strictly confidential.43
Eayrs had been able to understand Sir Bertram’s willingness to take the side of Deeks. He knew that almost everything Wells represented, as novelist and historian, and in his personal life, was repugnant to faithful Roman Catholics. And Eayrs well remembered the acrimonious dispute a few years earlier between Wells and Belloc. Sir Bertram, it might be claimed, had used his assessment of “The Web” as a means of declaring his devotion to Roman Catholicism.
Burpee’s involvement, however, worried him, for he had no religious or ideological axe to grind. He also held a substantial reputation as one of Canada’s foremost and most popular historians and men of letters. He had published with Musson, Newnes, Ryerson, Lane, and Morang. The latter had been absorbed by Macmillan in 1912, so, in a way, Burpee was a Macmillan author. Clearly, anything he might say on behalf of her case would carry the weight of great authority. Surely he would not risk damaging his reputation by appearing in court on behalf of a case he thought was lacking in substance?
Eayrs sent the Burpee report and correspondence to W.W. McLaughlin and to Brett in New York. Brett read it, and concluded that Burpee had found resemblances between the two works only because he had been preconditioned to find them when led to understand that the Deeks manuscript had been sent to Wells. Once again, the defendants agreed that the fate of the case would hang on the whereabouts of “The Web.”44 And that meant pinning down John Saul’s story.