A child’s ignorant eye can make a Western out of a Dumas tapestry. Many of us can remember the quality of the Western:
‘I will reward you, my dear, by passing that time with you, which I intended to pass with your mistress.’
The years have taught us that D’Artagnan did not pass the time in showing Kitty those tricks of fence with which he and/or Douglas Fairbanks was able to pink a brace of opponents. As for La Vallière, Buckingham and the Queen, as for the ladders and trapdoors, the assignations and billets-doux, the hissing, tittering complications — I, personally, am stunned when I think what a passionless pattern I made of it all. If we revisit our childhood’s reading, we are likely to discover that we missed the satire of Gulliver, the evangelism of Pilgrim’s Progress, and the loneliness of Robinson Crusoe.
But when we revisit some books in this way, we find that the iridescent film has burst, to leave nothing behind but a wet mark. Henty, Ballantyne, Burroughs, require an innocence of approach which, while it is natural enough to a child, would be a mark of puerility in an adult. I declare this with some feeling, since during the last week or so I have undertaken a long course of Jules Verne, and suffer at the moment, not from indigestion so much as hunger.
Yet once these books1 satisfied me. They held me rapt, I dived with the Nautilus, was shot round the moon, crossed Darkest Africa in a balloon, descended to the centre of the earth, drifted in the South Atlantic, dying of thirst, and tasted — oh rapture! It always sent me indoors for a drink — the fresh waters of the Amazon. And now?
Of course the books have not vanished wholly. They have the saving grace of gusto. Verne had his generation’s appetite for facts, and he serves them up in grande cuisine: ‘How amazing … were the microscopical jellyfish observed by Scoresby in the Greenland seas, which he estimated at 23,898,000,000,000,000,000 in an area of two square miles!’ But a diet of such creatures palls, for Verne’s verbal surface lacks the slickness of the professional; it is turgid and slack by turns. Only the brio of his enthusiasm carries us forward from one adventure to another. What is left for the adult is off-beat; something so specialized that to enjoy it is about as eccentric as collecting the vocal chords of prima donnas. For Verne attracts today, not so much by his adventures as by the charm of his nineteenth-century interiors. The lamplight lies cosily on thick curtains and elaborate tables. Clubs are as rich and secure as an Egyptian tomb. They have no servant problem, the carpets are never worn, and the subscription will never go up. Here live the savants, and a savant is related to a scientist as an antiquary is to an archaeologist. He is a learned enthusiast, a man of boundless absurdity, energy and stubbornness. At any moment he may leap from his hip-bath, sell his Consols and buy 1,866 gallons of sulphuric acid, 16,050 pounds of iron and 11,600 square feet of twilled Lyons silk coated with gutta-percha. His oath is ‘A thousand thunders!’ Cross him, and he will dash his smoking-cap into the grate. Take leave to doubt his wisdom and he will attempt to assault you. Held back by force, he will wager a fortune on the outcome of his adventure. Without knowing it, he passes a large part of his life under the influence of alcohol, for at the touch of success he will dash off, or drain off, or toss off, a bumper of brandy, which he follows with an endless succession of toasts. This half-gallon or so of brandy has as little effect on him as whisky has on the tough hero of a television serial. Indeed, his euphoria has always been indistinguishable from intoxication. Champollion is his ancestor in the real world, and Conan Doyle’s professor in The Lost World his literary descendant.
This typification is moderated but not destroyed by national distinction. Verne reserved, as was perhaps natural, his greatest élan for the French, or at least, the Europeans. He divided sang-froid between the English and the American. All these qualities, and others, are laid on with the trowel of farce. Indeed, the sang-froid of his Englishman, Mr. Phineas Fogg, is at times indistinguishable from advanced schizophrenia. But when his characters let themselves go — here is Captain Nemo expressing his sense of displeasure:
‘Captain Nemo was before me but I could hardly recognize him. His face was transfigured. His eyes flashed sullenly; his teeth were set; his taut body, clenched fists, and head hunched between his shoulders, betrayed the violent agitation that pervaded his whole frame. He did not move. My telescope, fallen from his hands, had rolled at his feet.’
I must remember that these jerky cut-outs once convinced me, moved me, excited me, as they still move children. They fit our picture of the nineteenth century. What about the Marquis of Anglesey and the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo?
‘By G—d Sir, I have lost my leg.’
‘By G—d Sir, so you have.’ If that had not been a real exchange, Verne would have invented it.
What the child misses most in these books — if I am anything to go by — is the fact that Verne was a heavy-handed satirist. The organization which fires its shot at the moon is the Gun Club of Boston. These were the savants who engaged in the arms race of the American Civil War.
‘Their military weapons attained colossal proportions, and their projectiles, exceeding the prescribed limits, unfortunately occasionally cut in two some unoffending bystanders. These inventions, in fact, left far in the rear the timid instruments of European artillery.’
After that we are not surprised to learn that the honour accorded to the members of the Gun Club was ‘proportional to the masses of their guns, and in the direct ratio of the square of the distances attained by their projectiles.’ Their personal appearance is at once ludicrous and horrifying:
‘Crutches, wooden legs, artificial arms, steel hooks, caoutchouc jaws, silver craniums, platinum noses, were all to be found; and it was calculated by the great statistician Pitcairn that throughout the Gun Club there was not quite one arm between four persons, and exactly two legs between six. Nevertheless, these valiant artillerists took no particular account of these little facts, and felt justly proud when the dispatches of a battle returned the number of victims at tenfold the quantity of the projectiles expended.’
Throughout the seventeen books there is an almost total absence of women. Verne was honester here than some of his SF descendants who lug in a blonde for the look of the thing. His male world was probably all he could manage. You cannot hack out a woman’s face with an axe; he could not, or would not, write about women. He remains the only French writer who could get his hero right round the world without meeting more than one woman while he was doing it.
Verne’s talent was not spurred by a love of what we should now call pure science, but by technology. His books are the imaginative counterpart of the Great Eastern, the Tay Bridge, or the Great Steam Flying Machine. It is this which accounts for his continued appeal to sub-adolescent boyhood. For the science sides of our schools are crammed to bursting with boys who have confused a genial enjoyment in watching wheels go round with the pursuit of knowledge. His heroes, too, are a pattern of what the twelve-year-old boy considers a proper adult pattern — they are tough, sexless, casually brave, resourceful, and making something big. Compared with the Sheriff of Dumb Valley, or the Private Eye, they constitute no mean ideal; to the adult, their appeal is wholly nostalgic. Apart from the odd touch that convinces — the pleasures of Professor Aronnax when, after years of groping for fish, he observes them through the windows of Nautilus; the willingness of the Frenchman to go to the moon with no prospect of coming back — apart from this they are a dead loss.
A study of Verne makes me uncomfortable. It seems that on the level of engineering, predictions can be made that will come true. So the soberer SF is no more than a blueprint for tomorrow. In time we can expect to see photographs — TV programmes — of acrobats performing on the moon, beneath the blue domes of Lunarville. The hot-spot which lies near the gantries of Marsport, that sleazy cantonment peopled with whisky-slinging space pilots and interplanetary whores, is a fact of the twenty-first century. This prospect would not dismay me, had one of Verne’s characters not suggested that the heating of a colossal boiler to three million degrees would one day destroy the world.
Nevertheless, Verne’s nineteenth-century technology and mania for size sometimes result in a combination which has a charm to be found nowhere else. He was excited with arc lighting and gives us a picture with all the fascination of an early lantern slide. Light itself, sheer brilliance, is an enchantment to him, when it is produced by man. In The Wilderness of Ice, we can share a forgotten moment. Today, the light of an atomic explosion is a savage thing which blinds and burns. We have gone as far as our eyes can go. If we want to discover a new quality in light, we have to return to the pit lamp, or candle. But to Verne, the white-hot carbon was a near-miracle:
‘Then two pieces of carbon rod, placed in the lantern at the proper distance, were gradually brought closer together, and an intense light, which the wind could not dim nor diminish, sprang from the lantern. It was marvellous to see these rays, whose glory rivalled the whiteness of the [snowy] plain, and which made all the projections round it visible by their shadow.’
Perhaps the best moment comes when we get a mixture of the fantastic, but future and possible, with the ordinary paraphernalia of nineteenth-century living. In Round the Moon, the three voyagers move about their spaceship, peering delightedly at this and that. In the shadow of the earth all is dark; but as they move into the sun’s rays, they find them shining up through the base of the ship — and are able to turn off the light, in order to save gas.
Lastly I must mention a splendid picture from the original edition of this book, which the publishers, to their great credit, have preserved for posterity. It is a, or rather the, moment of free fall — not the modern sort which can be endless, but the nineteenth-century sort, the point where earth and moon gravity is equal. The three voyagers, dressed as for a stroll in the park circa 1860, are helpless in the air, as are the dog and the two hens. A telescope and top hat hang near them. The walls of the spaceship are padded, but the padding has the effect of ornate wallpaper. The three gentlemen, a little startled, but not distressingly so, hang over their shadows. Softly, the gaslight pours down.
1 Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, From the Earth to the Moon, Round the Moon, Five Weeks in a Balloon, At the North Pole, The Wilderness of Ice and Propellor Island.