No books of mine are autobiographical though of course I use all my experiences … ¹

H. G. Wells

Soon after he moved to Sandgate in Kent, first renting No. 2 Beach Cottages in 1898, and then building Spade House by the sea in 1900, Herbert George Wells launched out in several fresh directions from the journalism and extraordinary science fiction tales which had made his name as a writer. In Love and Mr. Lewisham (1900) and Kipps (1905), he struck a new, equally brilliant Dickensian vein of social realism and comedy which came much harder to him than the propulsive imaginative stories of science and survival in The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and The Invisible Man (1897). There were autobiographical elements in all his science fiction which brought it down to earth—quite literally in The First Men in the Moon (1901) where the narrator, Bedford, returns from his lunar adventures, landing on the Kent coast at Littlestone-on-Sea, not so far from Sandgate. But in his more realistic mode, Wells drew more fully and widely from life, setting free the increasingly unpredictable and volatile elements of novelistic autobiography. Sometimes, these elements had unwanted repercussions in the real world. Nonetheless, Wells was to write more and more books like this over the years.

While Henry James was vampiric in his use of autobiographical elements to vivify his fiction, grasping pieces of other lives here and there to feed into his own work; and while Joseph Conrad redramatized experiences which were safely disconnected in the past, Wells increasingly used things—and people—very close to his present existence. In such moments, his writing became a way of working through—thinking through—his personal situations and dilemmas. When the dilemmas became acute, and social issues and politics also began to outweigh his interest in novels, especially after he moved from Kent to Hampstead in 1909, Wells often became frustrated with the falsity of the fictional enterprise, and its masks. Mid-novel, he can be seen pushing his characters off the page, impatient to get on and air his own views.

He could be very quick to denounce any such autobiographical traces in his novels. Indeed, he often seemed enraged by such hints, showing flashes of hot temper. In 1900, after a review of Love and Mr. Lewisham conflated the details of the novel and his life, Wells wrote a letter to the editor, quashing the “insinuation that the book is a thinly veiled autobiography”—“there is no sort of parallelism or coincidence between my private life and the story I have invented.”² In 1908, after similar claims were made about Tono-Bungay, Wells was more irate. “Please trace the Fool who started this to his lair & cut his obscene throat,”³ he wrote to Ford, who was more unperturbed, if still sometimes cautious, about such links being made between himself and his own novels. Wells was deeply uneasy with the autobiographical slants of his fiction. He wanted his life and art to be separate. He knew that comparisons between the two spheres denied his novels their status as fully finished art, implying that he always had one foot in the picture, that he wasn’t concerned to entertain or invent. Equally, he resented his private life being revealed or decoded through his work. So such comments by reviewers were a bête noire, countered in numerous prefaces where Wells protests that the book you are about to read is a novel, not autobiography.

But part of his fury at these remarks lay in his recognition of their essential truth. If he didn’t wish to be seen undisguised in his books, he made few efforts to disguise the other real people he portrays. In The New Machiavelli (1911), he included fictionalized portraits of the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, so close to provoke justified fears of libel. In a letter to Macmillans marked “OBVIOUSLY PRIVATE” Wells is unpenitently forthright about the resemblances. “Are the Baileys a libellous picture of the Webbs? That is quite right.”⁴ Later in life, he even wished he had put the Webbs in under their real names.⁵ Only as he aged, did he become more open about such matters. By the time of his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), he unashamedly points to the real events in his novels.⁶

Real-life depictions such as those of the Webbs reflect the “cheek” James saw in Wells: his irreverent, satirical urge to debunk. Close caricature lies at the heart of his creative spirit, which is gleefully mischievous, sprite-like. But even James complained that Wells’s tendency to draw so closely from life, from things which had only just happened to him, allowed Wells to stop creating—and inhabiting—fully fictional characters. The Master wrote to H. G. from Boston in 1911 after reading The New Machiavelli, gently deploring the lack of “detachment” and “chemical transmutation” in such “autobiography brought […] up to date.”⁷ It was the same old charge, put with greater subtlety. James hinted at insufficiencies in Wells’s fictional process, implying that the materials which he transformed from life into his fiction were too near to him, and were only partially being modified in their journey from life to the page. Breathing the new air of art, characters formed in this way might fail to survive. To keep them alive, more inner vision and transformation—the very lifeblood of fiction—was required.

In Boon (1915), however, Wells notoriously brought his depictions of real people closer still, including a merciless, prolonged, undisguised portrait of James, among other contemporaries. With savagely playful mimicry, Wells ridiculed James’s art of the novel—revealing how much his own childish humor could taunt and wound. James, Wells wrote, built his novels on an avoidance of reality: he “sets himself to pick the straws out of the hair of Life before he paints her. But without the straws she is no longer the mad woman we love.”⁸ Wells picks James’s plots apart and can’t see anything there: “people in the novels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand, rather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous brains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence.”⁹ “Upon the desert his selection has made,” Wells notes, “Henry James erects palatial metaphors […] The chief fun, the only exercise, in reading Henry James is this clambering over vast metaphors.”¹⁰

In Boon, Wells also spoke through his thinly-veiled characters more than ever, as he argued in cartoon-like skits about where the novel as artform was heading. Described as the posthumous papers of George Boon, prepared for publication by Reginald Bliss, with an introduction by H. G. Wells (and Wells insisted publicly that Boon and Bliss were the authors),¹¹ Boon was a celebration of heterogeneity—a ragbag of loose odds and ends—deliriously performed by Wells’s own splinter-selves. After mocking James, it rushes via a Special Train to Bâle—crammed with writers, with Ford “wandering to and fro up and down”¹² the corridors—for a “World Conference on the Mind of the Race.” Wells’s pseudo-selves soon splinter off, until Bliss is complaining how hard it is to follow Boon as Boon “goes on with the topic of Hallery again”;¹³ until Boon is explaining that he “invented Hallery to get rid of myself, but, after all, Hallery is really no more than the shadow of myself.”¹⁴

After many later experiments with dialogue-novels, Wells eventually found another way to speak his mind over or through his characters, in The World of William Clissold (1926). Here, playing with generic conventions, he turned to the forms of life-writing, framing the book as the autobiography of a wealthy industrialist, William Clissold, who looked back on his life as he turned sixty, as Wells did around that time. The World of William Clissold became a diffuse, three-volume canvas on which Wells discovered, like Proust, that free from fiction’s demands of plot and suspension of disbelief, he could talk about whatever he wanted to. He relished the inclusiveness and elasticity of the autobiographical form. But he wanted to keep the mask half off, half on, making elaborately transparent declarations that William Clissold is William Clissold and H. G. Wells is H. G. Wells—just as he wrote at the outset of Boon that “Bliss is Bliss and Wells is Wells. And Bliss can write all sorts of things that Wells could not do.”¹⁵ In his lengthy “A Note Before the Title Page” of William Clissold, Wells states pre-emptively (echoing Ford’s Joseph Conrad) that “this book, then […] is a novel,”¹⁶ not an autobiography. He begs us not to peer through Clissold’s world back to Wells, as “this is not a roman à clé [sic]. It is a work of fiction, purely and completely.” Yet “one thing which is something of an innovation has to be noted. A great number of real people are actually named in this story.”¹⁷ But the fictitiously named characters, Wells writes, are fictitious. Drawing attention to the multiplicity of the characters he has created throughout his writing life, Wells implies that it would surely be impossible for him to be all these different people.

It would be a great kindness [if] William Clissold could be treated as William Clissold, and if Mr. Wells could be spared the standard charge of having changed his views afresh […] because William Clissold sees many things from a different angle than did Mr. Polly, George Ponderevo, Susan Ponderevo, Mr. Preemby, Dr. Devizes, Dr. Martineau, Remington, Kipps, the artilleryman in The War of the Worlds, Uncle Nobby, Benham, Billy Prothero, and the many other characters who have been identified as mouthpieces […] it is a point worth considering in this period of successful personal memoirs that if the author had wanted to write a mental autobiography instead of a novel, there is no conceivable reason why he should not have done so.¹⁸

Wells is so defensive that he draws attention to his vulnerabilities.¹⁹ Insisting that William Clissold is a full-dress novel, he also argues in this preface that all novels have to be drawn from life. He makes the same points in the preface to The New Machiavelli—that “it is only by giving from his own life and feeling that a writer gives life to a character”²⁰—likewise concluding: “why on earth if one wants to write an autobiography should one write a novel?”²¹

There are many reasons, as Wells knew. His earlier experiences with writing biography, and his libel wranglings over The New Machiavelli, made him intensely aware of the contingencies of all non-fictional life-writing, and the protective coverings of fiction. In the Christmas of 1903, Wells had been much shaken when he traveled to St.-Jean-Pied-de-Port, to his friend George Gissing’s deathbed. After Gissing’s death, on his return to Sandgate, Wells began a preface for Gissing’s unfinished novel Veranilda, but during his researches discovered more about his friend than he wanted to know. In March 1904, he wrote to Edward Clodd, “There are things […] that must not come out,”²² and he had also written in January to Elizabeth Healey, asking her to destroy any old letters of his own. He was shocked how Gissing’s old papers were turning up secrets after death. He wrote an evasive preface, withdrawn by the Gissings²³ and replaced by an even more sanitized introduction by Frederic Harrison.²⁴ It was a crash-course in the pitfalls of biography, from both ends: revealing the dangers both for the subject and the writer. Wells never again attempted anything similar, until the death of F. W. Sanderson, the headmaster of Oundle, where he sent his two boys Gip and Frank. Wells’s The Story of a Great Schoolmaster (1924) was his only full-length attempt at biography; yet it too brought to mind the all-too-earthly contingencies of writing about real people, being undertaken after his initial compilation of a memoir on Sanderson ran into problems with his widow.²⁵

Biography is a blind art, shaped from all sides by circumstances. And autobiography, where it touches on other people—as all autobiography, as soon as the writer tries to depict anything outside his or her own self must do—is equally contingent, in ways that a novel is not. Biography and autobiography, as two different methods of writing about real and not invented people, share an intrinsic sociality and relationality. But they stand on opposing sides from their main subject. “Biographers,” as Janice Biala told Ford’s biographer Alan Judd, “are like blind men with their sticks.”²⁶ The source material, even when overwhelming, is always fragmentary—more letters, friends, or diaries can always surface—and so the biographer is always working in the dark, from a viewpoint of eternally partial knowledge. Yet autobiographers also work in the dark at times, filling in the gaps and blanks of memory; and curiously, as Hermione Lee remarks, “biographers are supposed to know their subjects as well as or better than they knew themselves,”²⁷ even if their knowledge is completely different in texture, built up from facts, intuitions, and deductions, rather than the sensoria of lived experience. The relationship between biographer and subject—or between biographer and autobiographer—resembles that between the lawyer and the witness, or the detective and the suspect, with each side guessing what the other side might know.

When Wells, after years of writing autobiographical fiction, set out to write his autobiography, it was partly because he had been biographized by “Geoffrey West,”²⁸ in H. G. Wells: A Sketch for a Portrait, which appeared in 1930. As West wrote, Wells was an “ideal biographee,”²⁹ proving generously unobstructive; Wells, meanwhile, wrote that he “kept nothing back of any importance”³⁰ from West, and would read the book to correct it, but only “for any slip in the facts.”³¹ Wells’s interests in education and science meant that he saw biography, from a factual point of view, as scientific. He learned more about himself, as West’s researches dug up old letters and associations, many of which he had forgotten. Wells likewise saw that to set the record in the future as he wished, he would have to write his own version of his life. His autobiography eventually became a trilogy—but he had no idea at the outset that it would.

Wells wrote the first pages of the Experiment in Autobiography in the spring of 1932. He was sixty-five, and had led more lives—sometimes simultaneously—than are usually squeezed into one earthly existence. A superhuman energy, vigor, and ability to bury his emotions lay beneath what he always felt was his rather unassuming physique: he was small, with tiny feet, piercing blue eyes, and a squeaky, high-pitched voice. What he called his “Drive”³² had propelled him, just as his early fictions propelled their narrators far beyond the everyday, irrevocably out of the successive orbits of his life, which was by then largely split between a London flat at 47 Chiltern Court near Baker Street, and the villa, Lou Pidou, he built at Saint Mathieu near Grasse in Provence, with his lover Odette Keun. In recent years, other people had been falling away from him. His second wife, Amy Catherine, or “Jane” as he called her, had died in 1927 from cancer; after her death, he had sold the house, Easton Glebe in Essex, where his family had lived since 1912. His first wife Isabel died in 1931, as did his close friend Arnold Bennett. Another friend, Frank Swinnerton, recalled seeing H. G. in 1931, and finding him crying as he read Bennett’s obituary in the newspapers.³³ This glimpse of an emotional outpouring, giving way to sorrow, is remarkable precisely because it is so rare and “out of character.”

His solution to emotion was work. He pushed hard that year on The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, the last part of his trilogy on history, biology, and economics. By the early months of 1932, wintering at Lou Pidou, he was also writing a novel, The Bulpington of Blup: Adventures, Poses, Stresses, Conflicts, and Disaster in a Contemporary Brain. Finished quickly, that July, it lampooned his old friend Ford Madox Ford under the veneer of its central character, Theodore Bulpington, a “liar in a world of lies”³⁴—a deluded coward and self-mythologizer who shapes his life, “past and future, just as I please.”³⁵ It seems an odd time for this attack; Wells was very likely prompted by Ford’s recent reminiscences in Return to Yesterday, published around the same period. In the novel, Wells skewers the discrepancy between Theodore, and his self-conception or ideal self—a gulf which widens horribly, as Theodore’s tragicomic life comes to nothing, and he preserves his own delusions. All his life, Wells was suspicious of people who “romanced” their existence, people who pretended, as he clearly thought Ford did. All his life, Wells was obsessed with facing facts. His view of life and character was more direct and “scientific.” Even during the war, as he wrote his journalism, propaganda, and novels, split mostly between London and Essex, Wells had tried to remain pragmatic to the last degree. He never allowed things to fester. He never got stuck in a rut. This was a huge factor in his success.

But by the 1930s, he was beginning to face obstacles which even he found insurmountable. Facing facts is easier when the facts being faced can be changed or at least understood; and over these years, Wells would learn, first-hand, the refuge in a protective self-ideal. In the Experiment in Autobiography—subtitled Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866)—he began with a passage written “one wakeful night […] between two and five in the early morning”³⁶ that spring of 1932. His disquiet, anguish, and impatience are palpable, if mysteriously offstage, as he sketches out his character at this point in time: what he goes on to elaborate, via Jung, as his persona.

I need freedom of mind. I want peace for work. I am distressed by immediate circumstances. My thoughts and work are encumbered by claims and vexations and I cannot see any hope of release from them; any hope of a period of serene and beneficent activity, before I am overtaken altogether by infirmity and death […] I am putting even the pretence of other work aside in an attempt to deal with this situation. I am writing a report about it—to myself. I want to get these discontents clear because I have a feeling that as they become clear they will either cease from troubling me or become manageable and controllable.³⁷

In the Experiment, continued throughout 1933 and 1934, Wells tried to write and think his way out of the situation which brought about this state of mind. (Note how many times the word “work” is mentioned in that opening paragraph.) The book was an experiment not only with the form and content of autobiography, but with its effect on the writer. It was a performance staged in real time, enacted for the sake of his own healing. He wanted it to be a “dissection”: an almost scientific analysis of his brain and its impulses, motives, and sensations, as one sample specimen of humanity. He often refers to this lump of grey matter—“that organized mass of phosphorized fat and connective tissue which is, so to speak, the hero of the piece”³⁸—as “it” in the third person, as if “it” didn’t quite belong to him. Autobiography, for Wells, was biology, as much as psychology. It was an empirical investigation into the nature of character, and human behavior, using the only material he had to hand: himself. The Experiment was a close act of self-scrutiny, during which he professed to heal himself, and to make discoveries about his own and others’ nature.

As an autobiographer, Wells showed an unusual awareness—a disarming frankness—about the problems and temptations of the genre. He laid them openly out in full view: the lost zones of memory, the limitations of viewpoint, the constant urge to avoid or omit. “You will discover a great deal of evasion and refusal in my story,”³⁹ he writes early on. Such barefaced admission creates the impression of absolute honesty. He also points to places where he has been tempted to skip: “a few tactful omissions would smooth out the record beautifully.”⁴⁰ As for memory’s tricks, he displays none of the sensuous amazement of Henry James in his autobiographies. He treats his brain as a piece of hardware, which forgets when there are no connecting links between memories, or when a memory has not been revisited for long stretches of time. There is no psychological reason for forgetting or remembering, Wells writes, disavowing subconscious suppressions. When he forgets, “it is merely that the links are feeble and the printing of the impressions bad. It is a case of second-rate brain fabric […] If my mental paths are not frequently traversed and refreshed they are obstructed.”⁴¹

Wells saw his duty as an autobiographer to be absolutely frank. Yet from the start, he fell prey to the pattern-forming impulse inherent in all life-writing. He was always strong on the outlines of his books, often preferring the stage when he planned and mapped out his plots, to the phase of actual writing. His motto, when seeing the very different compositional methods of Rebecca West, was “Construct, Construct”;⁴² and the skeletons of even his weakest books are so strong they stand up straight regardless of the prose. From the outset of the Experiment, Wells knew what the overall narrative arc would be. It was to depict a gradually broadening outlook, as the hero moved from the lowly surroundings of his Victorian upbringing “in a shabby bedroom over the china shop that was called Atlas House in High Street, Bromley, Kent,”⁴³ to his eventual status as a citizen of the world. It was to glide from the particular to the general, with Wells a mere part in a wider social frame, as he stumbled “from a backyard to Cosmopolis; from Atlas House to the burthen of Atlas”⁴⁴—with struggles and adventures along the way.

By his own admission, his own development as a novelist had made him more interested in the “splintering frame”⁴⁵ of the society surrounding his characters, than in the characters themselves. He knew he could make full use of this in the autobiography, using this angle to deflect the intrinsic egotism of the genre; and also giving a wider portrait of the era. “An autobiography,” Wells writes, “is the story of the contacts of a mind and a world.”⁴⁶ And his own trajectory, progressing from poverty, through the British scientific, educational, journalistic, and political worlds of the early twentieth century, took in an unusually diverse array of spheres. It connected the invisible cultural and political lines reaching from the Socialism of William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites, to the Fabians and the rise of Marxist sympathy on the Left with Russia, while also tracing the shifting grounds of art and science through this seminal period.

Wells likewise had a strong sense of the persona he wanted to reflect. His persona, he writes, is a frame of mind in which he can work uninterruptedly towards his aim of service to the World-State. (This ever-elusive utopian dream was much—perhaps too much—in Wells’s mind after the First World War.)⁴⁷ It is a vision of work unencumbered by life: in a resonant image of the split between life and art, he compares himself to a toad, with the crystal of an idea. Wells took the term persona from Jung, adapting it slightly, and using it variably, noting that all personas fluctuate. Yet the main divergence from Jung, Michael Draper argues, lies in Wells’s idea of the persona as something desirable, where Jung sees it more in negative, delusory terms.⁴⁸ In The Bulpington of Blup, Wells extensively mocked the strain of wishful self-delusion he saw in Ford; yet in his own autobiography, he built the entire structure of the narrative around his own equally abstract self-ideal. Oddly, he believed in it, almost religiously, and enshrined it in his life-story, while retaining an awareness that it was a self-deluding fiction.

If this persona represented an end or vanishing point towards which Wells saw the autobiography as heading—even from its conception—he also soon became aware that there would be hurdles in his account of how he got there. The tone of the Experiment from its very opening is unforgiving, brutally honest and self-analytical. But he could only apply such total frankness to himself, and it was in his depictions of others that he thought he would face his greatest obstacles. In early phases of the writing, he planned to cut the story of his life short at 1900. Most of his letters in 1932 were unusually discreet, if not downright secretive about the autobiography, as he mentioned other ongoing projects such as The Shape of Things to Come and his subsequent work on the film Things to Come with Alexander Korda. But Wells did write in January 1933 to S. S. Koteliansky, doubting that the autobiography at this stage could go on further than 1900, “because that would involve an intimate discussion of quite a number of living people.”⁴⁹

How was he to get from 1900 to his persona? Wells did find an answer to this initially central problem of the autobiography. But his first solution was to draw out the early part of the book, and the years before his birth, turning the courtship of his parents—Sarah the lady’s-maid in the country house at Up Park,⁵⁰ and Joseph the gardener at the estate—into something like a mini-novel. So, after the early passages of analysis, the mode of static, dissection-like self-disclosure gives way to narrative, as Wells turned his early years into a rattling story: a mixture of Jane Austen, say, and one of his own social realist comedies. His childhood, as he portrays it once he enters this tale in Atlas House, is a sustained attempt to escape from his upbringing by two servants-turned-shopkeepers. His progress is a series of “fugitive impulses”;⁵¹ and the only initial escape is illness, or broken limbs.

A fall on a tent peg at a cricket match (his father was a talented cricketer) breaks H. G.’s tibia at “seven or eight”⁵²—the accident is seen as a stroke of luck, which gave him time to read.⁵³ A later smashed kidney and the onset of tuberculosis is likewise recast, as a chance to write. Wells recounts, with some humor, all his false “starts in life”:⁵⁴ apprenticeship at fourteen as a draper with Rodgers and Denyer in Windsor; a spell with the chemist Samuel Cowap; another draper’s apprenticeship at Southsea; Grammar School in Midhurst; a scholarship to study science at South Kensington. Like his early fiction, it is a story of survival, with Wells only falteringly finding his feet. And the self-portrait gives both the history of his brain, and of his body. He provides a verbal sketch of his anatomy at twenty, still marked by early poverty, showing “what sort of body it was that carried this brain about and supplied it with blood”:⁵⁵

By 1887, it had become a scandalously skinny body. I was five foot five and always I weighed less than eight stone. My proper weight should have been 9 st. 11 lbs., but I was generally nearer to seven, and that in my clothes. And they were exceedingly shabby clothes […] I would survey my naked body, so far as my bedroom looking-glass permitted, with extreme distaste […] There were hollows under the clavicles, the ribs showed.⁵⁶

This forms the prelude to his first, failed marriage, to his cousin Isabel; and a new series of fugitive impulses and false starts which dominate his life, while he became a teacher, and then a journalist and writer. Wells’s two marriages, to Isabel, then to “Jane,” start to occupy the center of the frame—in conflict with his self-avowed persona. Wells was fascinated, even obsessed, by the irrationality he had shown in his romantic attachments; and as the Experiment progressed, he set to a much closer investigation of this behavior. The closer he looked at his romantic and sexual life, however—the more he analyzed emotions and feelings, through kept letters, that were fixed at one point in a now distant present—the more he felt bafflement and intrigue.

H. G. Wells’s autobiography suggests that we are strangers to our later selves. Letters, often written shortly before and after the time of the things they relate, provide glimpses of evidence that surprise autobiographers, whose tone is always affected by the amount of time separating them from the self they depict. In writing his Experiment, Wells shifted between passages about the present of the writing, and recollections of more distant events. But his persona only cohered when he stood further away from it. The image of the self he discovered was pointillist, or like an Impressionist painting. It made perfect sense from far away, but dissolved when examined up close. Indeed, it even depended on a lack of close scrutiny.

Wells easily turned the story of his parents’ marriage into a novelistic narrative, since it occurred so long ago, before he was even born. But revisiting old letters, photographs, and shards of passions from thirty or forty years earlier, he could not quite make sense of them, was bemused by his own inconsistencies. His self, as it emerged, was a swarming constellation of impulses, tangled, protean, in flux, contradicting each other under the microscope. To depict it, in the opening of the second volume of the Experiment, Wells paused, rewound the narrative slightly, raking back over his relations with Isabel and “Jane,” both now dead, “as though I were a portrait painter taking a fresh canvas and beginning over again.”⁵⁷ Breaking the flow of his progress from student to teacher to writer, he told of anomalies disrupting that life-story. He recounts how he made love with his wife’s assistant one day after he was married to Isabel; how he still wanted Isabel after their divorce, when he was settled at Spade House with “Jane.” So his fugitive impulses returned, in new forms.

For “Jane,” there was not only the evidence of letters, but of “picshuas”: the pen-and-ink cartoons Wells drew for her over the years. He reproduced some “picshuas” in the Experiment, using them to tell the inner domestic life of their long marriage. They skew the portrait of their relationship, as he wanted, emphasizing its foundation in companionship, humor, and tolerance, rather than great sexual passion. He calls these off-the-cuff self-caricatures, of which hundreds “accumulated in boxes,”⁵⁸ “a sort of burlesque diary of our lives.”⁵⁹ Fixed in the present tense of their drawing (many were done in an instant, ending up in the wastepaper basket), the “picshuas” reveal Wells’s swiftness and economy of line as a caricaturist, along with his comical role-playing and nicknaming. They show the sense of fun which balanced his “Drive.” Spontaneous, exuberant, and relentless, they are also evidence of an overproduction of selves.

As the Experiment begins to show, Wells had many names, and he always gave nicknames to others around him. To his family, he was the “Buzzwhacker” or “Buss” or “Bussums” as well as “Bertie.” With Isabel, he was “Buzzums” to her “Izzums.” In the “picshuas,” Wells was “Bins” or “Mr. Bins”—a Cockney contraction he derived from “Husbinder” or “’Usbinder,” shortened to “Mr. Binder” and eventually “Bins.”⁶⁰ “Jane” became “Bits or Miss Bits or Snitch or It, with variations.”⁶¹ One of the many slightly unhinged, madcap “Pomes” or poems in the Experiment showed how much Jane, as Wells writes with dry humor, “was being, to use Henry James’s word ‘treated’, for mental assimilation”:⁶²

CHANSON

It was called names
Miss Furry Boots and Nicketty and Bits,
And P.C.B., and Snitterlings and Snits,
It was called names.
Such names as no one but a perfect ’Orror
Could ever fink or find or beg or borror
Names out of books or names made up to fit it
In wild array
It never knew when some new name might hit it
From day to day
Some names it’s written down and some it ’as forgotten
Some names was nice and some was simply ROTTEN […]
It was called names.63

Such skits were more than a joke. Deciphering these exhibits and “picshuas” in the Experiment, Wells describes them as deflating self-dramatizations. Like Boon in spirit—and Boon was his only other book published with “picshuas” in it—they also had their serious side, offering psychological insights in comical form. Sometimes, the picshuas were completely explicit about their role in the circuits of self-delusion and self-portraiture: one “Satirical Picshua” in the Experiment centered on the discrepancy between “Bits as she finks she is,” and on another page, “The real Bits.”⁶⁴ Another, done in 1910 at a time of crisis in the marriage, as Gene and Margaret Rinkel write, was entitled “Bits Under the Microscope,” showing “the biologist, Bins, in his lab coat,” while he “examines a highly magnified image of little Bits.”⁶⁵

For all the humor in the picshuas, skits, and “pomes” to Jane, Wells’s portrayal of their marriage in the Experiment became as frank as he thought he could make it. He writes of the arrangement they came to, whereby she granted him freedom to seek sexual gratification elsewhere; he also says that, much as this arrangement worked, it had its imperfections. Wells’s portrait of “Jane” is precisely that: a portrait of her as she was with the name he gave her. Amy Catherine remains an elusive figure. We never discover how she coped with the constraints her life with Wells put on her. Although Wells writes of her self-sacrifice, something appears to be missing in his perception, in his emotions. The two-dimensionality of the “picshuas” hints at deeper patterns of thought and feeling in his many dissimilar selves.

If, as Janet Malcolm writes of biography, recalling E. M. Forster’s distinction in Aspects of the Novel (1927), there are always “flat characters”⁶⁶ in the background, all the characters in the “picshuas” are quintessentially “flat.” Just as Wells sometimes found it hard to inhabit and see right through to his characters in fiction, the recurrent playfulness and superficiality of the portraiture in the Experiment—which by its second half is a gallery of the people Wells knew—suggests that he sometimes failed to fully appreciate or understand other characters in life. His perception is comic, sharp, unemotional. The portraits of Gissing, Bennett, and Stephen Crane, among others, are vivid, but without nuance. As Wells reflected on James’s critique of his novel Marriage (1912), perhaps he, H. G., “had not cared enough about these individualities.”⁶⁷

Wells draws attention to this lack. It underlies his account of his gradual rift with James, Conrad, and Ford, all of whom he saw fairly often while living in Kent from 1898–1909. Wells’s divergence from these Impressionists—which evolved into a skepticism about being a novelist at all—was rooted not only in his belief in content over style, but in the very way he saw things. Throughout the Experiment, Wells often wonders if his own senses are not somehow less strong than those of many people he knew. At one point, he recalls sitting on the beach at Sandgate, next to Conrad, as they argue about how to depict the boat they are both looking at.

How, he demanded, would I describe how that boat out there, sat or rode or danced or quivered on the water? I said that in nineteen cases out of twenty I would just let the boat be there in the commonest phrases possible […] But it was all against Conrad’s over-sensitized receptivity that a boat could ever be just a boat. He wanted to see it with a definite vividness of its own.⁶⁸

The anecdote pinpoints the different prose styles of the two writers; but it goes further, spilling over into their lives. Wells suggests that the “strength of reception”⁶⁹ of his own brain was more matter-of-fact than “these vivid writers” with “their abundant, luminous impressions.”⁷⁰ And indeed in the Experiment, Wells depicts Conrad with a certain comic shallowness, as if his Polishness and seriousness were just a role or pose. Wells saw none of the absurd laughter in Conrad that Ford understood; Wells’s portrait of Conrad in the Experiment laughs at his expense. Conrad, Wells writes, had “acquired an incurable tendency to pronounce the last e in these and those. He would say, ‘Wat shall we do with thesa things?’”⁷¹

He finds Conrad’s prose over-wrought; he says he agrees with Conrad’s own judgment of The Mirror of the Sea as his favorite book. “At first he impressed me,” writes Wells of Conrad, “as he impressed Henry James, as the strangest of creatures. He was rather short and round-shouldered with his head as it were sunken into his body. He had a dark retreating face with a very carefully trimmed and pointed beard, a trouble-wrinkled forehead and very troubled dark eyes.”⁷² Wells recalls that he first met Conrad at the Pent, “and my first impression […] was of a swarthy face peering out and up through the little window panes […] We never really ‘got on’ together.”⁷³

As for Ford, Wells thinks he is under-rated, but says his recent autobiography It Was the Nightingale shows his “extraordinary drift towards self-dramatization”⁷⁴ since he changed his name after the war. He depicts Ford, in words that apply much more to himself, as “a great system of assumed personas and dramatized selves.”⁷⁵

The most sustained portrait of a writer-acquaintance in the Experiment is of Henry James, whose presence hovers over Wells whenever he turns his thoughts towards the art of the novel. But Wells cannot resist the impulse to have some laughs at James’s expense—his account of seeing Guy Domville (1895) on his first night as a theater reviewer shows more relish than it should in its impersonation of the stilted dialogue: “Be keynd to Her … Be keynd to Her.”⁷⁶ Wells’s James is a curiosity, “a strange unnatural human being, a sensitive man lost in an immensely abundant brain.”⁷⁷ He is an over-elaborate phenomenon, beside whom Wells feels uncouthly direct. But the reverence is clear, as James’s very mention leads Wells in the Experiment into a prolonged justification of his own “scamped”⁷⁸ or rushed work.

James, along with the other Impressionist writers, forces Wells to consider what he thinks about the aesthetics of the novel—and ultimately leads him to his self-definition as a journalist, the label he defiantly gave himself when he parted ways with these artistic types. (“I write as I walk because I want to get somewhere and I write as straight as I can, just as I walk as straight as I can, because that is the best way to get there.”⁷⁹) And Wells also argues defensively that there are more kinds of novels and stories to tell, than the Jamesian method of depicting “deep and round and solid” characters—a method which “no more exhausts the possibilities of the novel, than the art of Velasquez exhausts the possibilities of the painted picture.”⁸⁰ For the literary study of character, Wells writes, perhaps the forms of biography and autobiography are ultimately more suitable than the novel.

Who would read a novel if we were permitted to write biography—all out? Here in this autobiography I am experimenting—though still very mildly, with biographical and auto-biographical matter. Although it has many restraints, which are from the artistic point of view vexatious, I still find it so much more real and interesting and satisfying that I doubt if I shall ever again turn back towards The Novel.⁸¹

However, Wells was partly to “scamp” the Experiment, too. He even tells us that he is rushing the book, as though he cannot slow down. After 1900, the building of Spade House with the architect C. F. A. Voysey—documented by photographs in the original edition—is not followed in the same key as the earlier pages. The last quarter of the autobiography swerves away from the in-depth frankness of the previous sections, as Wells leaves much of the action from 1900–34 offstage, moving doggedly towards his persona and the World-State.⁸² Precisely at the point where his life became problematic and implicatory as regards other people, Wells made the Experiment a study of his work.

Partly, this was a matter of the “restraints” of autobiography. He recounts his increasing turn towards politics, propaganda, and polemical journalism during and after the war, and the evolution of his World-State ideal; yet the shadow of the personal stories submerged in the background spreads under all these discussions. The timeframe sweeps forward, leaving inexplicable gaps, until Wells reaches his climax: the interviews he conducted with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin in 1934. The narrative ends as a travelogue. Wells visits America, and later flies to Russia with his son Gip on July 21, 1934, “reaching Moscow before dark on the evening of the 22nd.”⁸³ By now, the book is a “psycho-political autobiography,”⁸⁴ with the two world leaders as prime exhibits. After an unsatisfying meeting with Stalin, Wells flies to Tallinn. “I am finishing this autobiography,” he writes, “in a friendly and restful house beside a little lake in Esthonia… . ”⁸⁵ The Experiment, having caught up with the present again, is deemed a success.

I began this autobiography primarily to reassure myself during a phase of fatigue, restlessness and vexation, and it has achieved its purpose of reassurance. I wrote myself out of that mood of discontent and forgot myself and a mosquito swarm of bothers in writing about my sustaining ideas. My ruffled persona has been restored and the statement of the idea of the modern world-state has reduced my personal and passing irritations and distractions to their proper insignificance. So long as one lives as an individual, vanities, lassitudes, lapses and inconsistencies will hover about and creep back into the picture, but I find nevertheless that this faith and service of constructive world revolution does hold together my mind.⁸⁶

This persona, however, was more of a refuge for Wells than a true destination. It was not that Wells’s politics and persona were not central to his later sense of himself—the entire second half of his life was concerned with them—but that they have somehow come adrift from reality. He mouths the words, here at the close of the autobiography, sleepwalking almost. Something much closer to home still appears to be bothering him.

When he began the Experiment in 1932, Wells was still a huge success. One biographer, Lovat Dickson, describes seeing Wells around this time, and his celebrity surrounds the portrayal like a spotlight. The biographer sees him instantly as the unmistakable figure that “the cartoonists had made familiar to us […] Hardly a week passed when he was not in the news.”⁸⁷ The finale of the two volumes of the Experiment offered a suitable self-portrait for this great public figure. And the two volumes were well-received, clearly fulfilling their public role as portraiture. But Wells was not satisfied for his Experiment to be left where it was.

Ever since Jane’s death in 1927—even though they had lived apart for years, as Wells spent more and more time with Odette Keun in France through the 1920s—his personal life had been unraveling with alarming speed. Without Jane to be unfaithful to, Wells tried to install Odette in her place, as a satellite around which to orbit. But Odette was not keen to play such a subsidiary role; nor was she so suitable. Wells only spent time in France with her; he never saw her in London. By 1932, Odette’s volatility was also becoming unbearable to Wells, who seems, for all his desperation, to have conducted the affair for many years in the spirit of farce. When he began to transfer his emotions, rather confusedly, to Moura Budberg, whom he had met years earlier on another Russian trip, Odette became vehemently jealous. There are many conflicting accounts of the eventual rift. Ultimately, Anthony West writes, Odette threw Wells out of Lou Pidou.⁸⁸ By 1932–3, while he was working things out in the Experiment, H. G. was, he thought, now fully with Moura. He wanted marriage: but she didn’t. Early in 1934, with the autobiography coming closer to its premature end, they stayed together in Bournemouth for almost a month. And by July that year, Wells set off with Gip to Russia, for his interview with Stalin. He said goodbye to Moura at Croydon airport. She was going to Estonia, where they agreed to meet soon at Kallijärv—where Wells, as he says, finished the autobiography.

If the Experiment’s ending felt scamped and evasive, this was largely due to what was going on in Wells’s life at the time of the writing. Wells made a discovery in Moscow, which had nothing to do with his persona or the World-State. At Maxim Gorky’s house, a stray remark by his interpreter revealed to him that Moura had just been in Moscow, at Gorky’s very house, days earlier, without telling him. She had, it seemed, also been to Russia several other times that year—also without telling him.

In Estonia, he confronted Moura as to the truth. She lied, then wouldn’t give him a straight answer. To this day, Moura remains a biographer’s—and autobiographer’s—sphinx. She was a spy, although it remains unclear for how many sides. Some of the men in her life before Wells included Gorky and the British agent Robert Bruce Lockhart, and indeed she had been seeing both men during all her time with Wells, and her relationships with both of them went deeper than her feelings for Wells.⁸⁹ Contemporaries all agreed on one thing: her serenity—yet this serenity came out of danger. Potential exposure was always imminent. Andrea Lynn writes that Nina Berberova, in her biography of Moura, “alleged that in Moscow, Moura was thought to be a secret agent for England; in Estonia, a Soviet spy; in France, Russian émigrés believed that she worked for Germany; and in England, she was regarded as an agent for Moscow.”⁹⁰ If the tangles of Wells’s love life in later years, as we will see, reached an innate profusion, he had met his match in Moura, who was possibly planted on him. The calmness at the end of the Experiment was feigned. He was on deadline to finish the text. His persona was far more scattered than when he had begun. He kept on at Moura in Kallijärv to tell him the truth, but it appears she never did. His distress in the second half of 1934 became frighteningly real. As Gip writes, the shock of disillusion with Moura “was followed by a deep, nearly suicidal depression. Slowly he worked himself out of it. The self analysis involved in the writing of the Postscript, which he then undertook, played a major part in his recovery.”⁹¹ Autobiography, once again, was the cure.

The Experiment was published in its two volumes that autumn; Wells now set to writing his life all over again in a “Postscript” to that text: this time recounting the things that were left out. He had reached right up to the present in the Experiment, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t retell his life-story. This Postscript forms the central part of H. G.’s new autobiography, which he knew would have to be published after his death—and after the deaths of the other people he now wished to include. The resulting text was edited and published in 1984 by Gip with the title H. G. Wells in Love. Gip writes in his introduction that this book was assembled from a mass of papers left unpublished at Wells’s death in 1946. It is a compilation, consisting of Wells’s elegiac introduction to The Book of Catherine Wells (1927), and the two main sections of the Postscript: “On Loves and the Lover-Shadow” and “The Last Phase.” Gip also tells us that the Postscript was begun in late 1934. Wells drew a characteristically strong outline, then wrote the text “straight through […] until he got to the words THE END, and doubly underlined them, on May 2nd, 1935.”⁹² Wells rewrote the text “a dozen times in eighteen months until, on September 18th, 1936, he wrote THE END for the last time, accompanied by a note, later deleted, ‘On which date I am strongly disposed to write Finis to it all’.”⁹³

Yet as the dates strewn throughout the text in H. G. Wells in Love indicate, this Postscript remained constantly in revision even later through the 1930s—Wells kept on reviewing these pages obsessively, almost to atone for his scamping of the Experiment. As this process went on—as Andrea Lynn writes, with H. G. fussing “over his personal love history, writing and rewriting it intermittently over a period of eight years—and in his tiny, often illegible handwriting, to what must have been the horror of his secretary and daughter-in-law, Marjorie Wells [Gip’s wife], who typed his manuscripts”⁹⁴—a mass of extra material, placed in folders marked “rejected” or “deleted” or “discarded” was generated. And there was also much material in the final version which Gip was forced to cut, mainly due to concerns over libel.⁹⁵

In one phrase from these deleted pages, Wells defines his project thus: “Let me, to make sure that no one misses my point, repeat that this Postscript is not full autobiography; it is autobiography strictly below the belt.”⁹⁶ He wanted it to be published and bound together with the two volumes of the Experiment, turning the whole into a trilogy. But where the Experiment tells the story of his two marriages and his persona, the tale which Wells unveils in the Postscript is of his “Lover-Shadow”: the force which constantly pulls the other way from his persona, settling on one object of sexual desire after another. The Postscript takes up the story of Wells’s life once again from 1900, restructuring it as a search for fulfilment with a succession of different women. First is Jane, given pride of place, as Wells tries to see her now as Amy Catherine. Then come affairs with Violet Hunt, Dorothy Richardson, Amber Reeves or “Dusa,” Elizabeth von Arnim or “Little e,” Rebecca West, Odette Keun, and Moura Budberg. This series is itself a tidy simplification of the passades and encounters which occurred in Wells’s life. As Andrea Lynn writes, following hints in David C. Smith’s biography, there were also at least two major later passions: Constance Coolidge and Martha Gellhorn—the latter tantalizingly glimpsed in H. G. Wells in Love as *****. In his “Note about the Publication of this Postscript,” Wells gives his instructions for the posthumous assembly, suggesting a delay until “Moura and Dusa are either dead or consenting,”⁹⁷ for “***** won’t mind.”⁹⁸ (“She did”⁹⁹ writes Gip.)¹⁰⁰

It’s easy to dismiss Wells’s conception of his “Lover-Shadow,” as some critics have, as a woolly self-justification for bad behavior, or a scramble of notions from Freud and Jung.¹⁰¹ But in H. G. Wells in Love, it is very effectively portrayed not so much as a theoretical abstraction, but a semi-visible metaphor for sexual desire—almost a character of its own. And it fits into a larger scheme of imagery. Like Proust’s madeleine, the “Lover-Shadow” is primarily a novelistic idea, which works through association; it is always in flux, and is not a fixed concept.

Everywhere in these pages, love is seen as a game or performance. Wells writes about the games of charades and role-playing that used to go on at Spade House and Easton Glebe: little plays or shadow shows—“freakish quaint affairs, into which people threw themselves with astonishing zest.”¹⁰² Jane loved “dressing up,”¹⁰³ Wells recalls, as he tries to glimpse more of her ever-changing “facets”: she excelled at these burlesques. His tone as he writes of them is playful, sinister, soft, like a pantomime. Sexuality and personality are glimpsed as a series of poses, selves, and disguises. All this prefigures the idea of the “Lover-Shadow.” Trying to give a more searching portrait of Jane, Wells clutches at the successive outer layers of her dress, before he portrays the other self glimpsed in her writings. Character, Wells implies, is, like the self, most clearly glimpsed as an outline or shadow. Just as the self dissolves under the microscope, sexual attraction and the Lover-Shadow—in all their endless clothes and performances—become a baffling series of intermittent impulses, as Wells recounts the affairs which occurred during his marriage to Jane, all excised from his earlier self-portrait.

These appear to begin harmlessly enough, as Wells is keen to insist, retelling the story of the Experiment after 1900, making his passades and amorous adventures seem like mere sport. Writing of his relationship with Violet Hunt, for example—who was relatively unrevealing about Wells in The Flurried Years—Wells makes everything sound cool and rational:

I met Violet Hunt, a young woman a little older than myself, who had already written and published several quite successful novels. She had a nervous lively wit laced with threads of French […] We talked of social questions, literary work, and the discomforts and restlessness of spinsterhood […] we came to an understanding, and among other things she taught me were the mysteries of Soho and Pimlico. We explored the world of convenient little restaurants with private rooms upstairs […] we lunched and dined together and found great satisfaction in each other’s embraces.¹⁰⁴

But even by the time he writes of the fiascos beneath his tangles with the Fabian Society, and the birth of his child with Amber Reeves, the willed impression of a carefree lack of consequences becomes harder to sustain.¹⁰⁵ With Rebecca West—with whom H. G. had another child, Anthony, born “on a memorable date, August 4th, 1914,”¹⁰⁶ and who would also much later write his father’s biography—part of the tint on her portrait came from the raw pain on his side, as he underplays a relationship which had only fizzled out in the 1920s. West, Wells writes, became pregnant very early in their affair: “It was entirely unpremeditated. Nothing of the sort was our intention […] and when we found ourselves linked by this living tie, we knew hardly anything of each other. We were all, Jane included, taken by surprise […] We came to like each other extremely and to be extremely exasperated with each other and antagonistic.”¹⁰⁷

The Lover-Shadow continues its relentless role, but H. G.’s portrayal of love as a pantomimic charade or shadow-show—an affair of endlessly, playfully shifting silhouettes and poses—eventually puts the narrative, and his own life, under severe strain. A woman in the 1920s tried to commit suicide in his room, as he tells, with an ostentatious frankness. And his experience of betrayal with Moura is agony.

In wanting to bind this third layer of autobiography to the earlier two volumes of the Experiment, Wells was aiming at a particular aesthetic effect: a “stereoscopic self-portrait,”¹⁰⁸ depicting the several sides of his life simultaneously. But this stereoscopic effect, while increasing our vision, makes large parts of the Experiment feel like a sham, as the three parts of the whole rub together. As a trilogy, the third volume radically exposes the fraudulence, omission, and evasion in the first two books. Retelling events which appeared before in different guises, as Wells runs over the same patch of ground from new angles, induces a kind of vertigo. It opens up the void beneath all biography and autobiography, if not beneath all lives, and invites us to peer in. It is like the moment in a marriage where the so-called truth comes pouring out, after years of mutual silence. Wells has not been withholding one secret, but a whole sequence of affairs which, as they multiply, show nothing so much as their own essential profligacy. He wants to be frank as an autobiographer—writing, for instance, in his account of his relationship with Rosamund Bland, that “I would rather I had not to tell of it,”¹⁰⁹ before going ahead and telling. He makes us keenly aware of his autobiographical duty to tell all. The more he tells, however, the more one merely suspects the double bluff. His honesty has the duplicitous effect of revealing earlier gaps and lies. This opens up an insatiable craving for truth, an insatiable doubt. Can anyone tell all? At what point would one stop?

Where the climax of the Experiment lies in Wells’s reassertion of his persona and the World-State, the narrative climax of the Postscript is the revelation of Moura’s duplicity. As the story reaches Russia once again, the Moscow crisis is told with verve: pages of fevered dialogue and anxious soliloquy which seem torn from a spy romance. This is the point towards which the Lover-Shadow narrative has been heading with a terrible inevitability: Wells giving everything, all his emotions, to a woman whose job it might be to deceive him. After all the affairs and passades, the story has the classic arc of tragedy: an almost fatal comeuppance for hubris.

I was wounded as I had never been wounded by any human being before. It was unbelievable. I lay in bed and wept like a disappointed child. Or I prowled about in my sitting-room and planned what I should do with the rest of my life, that I had hoped so surely to spend with her. I realized to the utmost that I had become a companionless man.¹¹⁰

Wells’s terrifying dream of Moura as a hollow shell, which he recounts in the Postscript, is also an inevitable realization of his drama of the Lover-Shadow. The excavations of the self and of love which Wells performs throughout the Experiment and H. G. Wells in Love pull tighter and tighter in their interest, precisely at the speed at which the narratives on which they are built begin to unspool. The movement of this story—learning less and less about someone at exactly the same time as one learns more; knowing less and less about someone, the closer one comes in intimacy and even love—gave no points of traction for Wells’s endless “Drive” to get at. His despair during the 1930s, and the intellectual and emotional impatience which also gave rise to his strange book The Anatomy of Frustration (1936), and later, to the thesis collected in ’42 to ’44: a Contemporary Memoir (1944)—in which the self is depicted as so unstable as to be an almost total illusion¹¹¹—probably came from the impossibility of finding a solution to the impasse to which his late life and loves had brought him.

As his biographer David C. Smith writes, Wells’s obsessive interest in his own sexual passions and love life has been misunderstood: “Most biographies of HGW skate fairly quickly over his personal and sexual life, often exhibiting distaste.”¹¹² Yet Wells wanted to bind it into his own life-story. In doing so, he was, on one level, merely pursuing the biological slant which he asserted as one of his main purposes as an autobiographer, and also defining his self in keeping with his interest in Freud, Jung, and psychoanalysis. But the need to understand the essence of his fugitive sexual impulses was also more compulsive, multiple, unstoppable.

In the autobiographies, Wells tried to understand how he came to his impasse, and how to get out of it. The Postscript also became an attempt to confirm his self-image after betrayal by Moura, and a search for motives, as his jealousy over Moura tormented him. The text itself recounts how he worked himself out of jealousy: one day, he says, after he had also cured himself through further infidelity, Moura’s spell just evaporated. He shows this process at work even before this magical moment, recounting his affair with an “American widow.”¹¹³

At the end of 1934, despite their disagreements, H. G. and Moura planned to fly to Sicily for a winter holiday; due to bad weather, they landed in Marseilles, and ended up spending Christmas week with Somerset Maugham at his Villa Mauresque in the South of France. That winter, after Moura went back to England, and Wells stayed in France, he began this other affair. When Moura returned, “the three of us met, and we got on extremely well together. We made excursions; we lunched and dined together and went over to Maugham’s to lunch. To the vivid interest of Maugham.”¹¹⁴ Wells has almost regained equilibrium. But the account of Moura in the Postscript continues in asides and dated notes in the text, implying that they kept up an off-on relationship, which meant more to him than to her, throughout H. G.’s last years. Much as Wells deplored self-delusion, once he saw that Moura wouldn’t tell him who she was, he seems to have wanted to remain on the surface and to delude himself in his relations with her. In the last, cantankerous years of his life, he appears to have been forced to accept this. This is one subtext of H. G. Wells in Love. “We both had a very clear sense of the incurable complexity of individual life; its sustaining pretences and false simplifications,”¹¹⁵ Wells writes in the Postscript. “The invincible ego lies below mask after mask, even hiding from itself […] Why go down to that? Why doubt that a woman has a heart until you have torn it out?”¹¹⁶

Wells was left with surfaces. This was a logical progression for a self whose very depths consisted of a series of two-dimensional poses; the final destination of a notion of love which was essentially a series of sexual encounters. In late life, he had moved so far beyond his roots, that he didn’t know what else to do, but to keep on spinning further away from them. This often looked like evasion—as G. K. Chesterton said, “whenever I met H. G. he always seemed to be coming from somewhere rather than going anywhere”¹¹⁷—but it was also part of his endless attempt to face facts. He found solace in writing. He used the autobiographies to shed and commune with earlier selves, and with earlier lives. Just as in his fiction, he drew close to the present, using his pages to help work things through, often almost while they were happening. This allowed Wells, as in a pivotal scene in William Clissold—where the hero talks aloud to himself in the “swaying, jangling, creaking compartment”¹¹⁸ of a hurtling train across Europe from Geneva to Paris—to “Get it plain. Write it down. Get it plain. Write it down.”¹¹⁹ But it was also a lonely solution.

In his essay “How Do Diaries End?,” Philippe Lejeune argues that autobiographies, unlike diaries, always have a fixed end point, in the time of their writing. “An autobiography,” writes Lejeune, “is virtually finished as soon as it begins, since the story that you begin must end at the moment that you are writing it. You know the end point of the story, because you have reached it, and everything you write will lead up to this point, explaining how you got there.”¹²⁰ Autobiographies have moments where the past catches up with the present: the two tenses touch, and bring the story of one’s life up to date with the story of the writing. Often, these crossing-points signal that the text is near its end. In H. G.’s case, however, his autobiographies are strewn throughout with crossing-points: especially in the revisions of the Postscript, which interlace the past and present, in a constellation of reflections from different places in his life.

In their rewritings, the autobiographies proved essentially unfinishable: retelling over and over again, before finally entering the present like a diary. In “The Last Phase” of the Postscript, the compulsiveness of Wells’s autobiographical impulse meant that even after having finished and refinished his posthumous passages on the Lover-Shadow, he still has things about himself he wants to say. The writing edges closer to a journal. As this “Looseleaf Diary” appears in H. G. Wells in Love, it runs to a little over twenty pages, with short entries separated by greater ellipses and gaps of time, as Wells kept it more and more sporadically. There is over half a decade compressed in these notes, which offer a chronicle of the ever-shortening distance before death, with the notes crossing over through the present to look ahead to the approaching end. Time appears to be speeding up, as entries dealing with The Anatomy of Frustration and Korda’s film of Things to Come slip away and segue into entries from the end of the 1930s. The marks become a log of old age and ailments—a medical diary—with increasing noting of dates as Wells crawls towards the finish line, now living in his last house at Hanover Terrace, seeing in the Second World War in his seventies. The last entry is dated April 28, 1942; and the “Looseleaf Diary” ends with a space left by Wells for someone else to write his obituary, in a “Note by Another Hand.”

Wells drew out his endings. He couldn’t quite let go. He had exhausted the subject of himself, he thought. Yet he kept on thinking about it. And he kept on thinking about Moura. “I doubt if there is any other woman now for me in the world […] at least that is how I feel now. I have, I realize, still to master this last phase of life […] I feel the work I am doing now is worth while,”¹²¹ he wrote in 1935. But Moura came and went as she pleased, an essential mystery. And he kept on writing, making journal entries for his posthumous book. There were various endings drafted for the Postscript, as Andrea Lynn tells us. One discarded ending, now lying in the Wells Archive at Illinois, was dedicated to a posthumous Lover-Shadow. By now, Wells was writing almost purely for the company of writing. By now, he was all on his own.

I happen to be most damnably lonely to-night. I cannot sleep and I lack the vitality to turn my mind to other work. So I scribble here on and on and I shall wander about my flat and lie down and get up and scribble a bit more and so worry through the night. And the morning will come in due course and bring a sort of healing distraction with it. Even this night cannot last for ever. I shall shave and bath when the day comes […] And it helps me a great deal, posthumous Lover-Shadow, to think that some day you will read what I am writing.¹²²

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, 5, rue Christine, 1945 by Cecil Beaton.

5

Alive and kicking

H. G. Wells