"H G Wells: a Literary Life" (2019)

During Lockdown I've doodled around on this blog with imaginary books, but perhaps it's time to mention a real one, by me: H G Wells: a Literary Life (Palgrave 2019). Since my old author website has fallen into desuetude this blog is the place linked-to in, for instance, my twitter bio and other such places; so it probably wouldn't hurt to use it for self-promotion from time to time. So, here we are. This title was shortlisted for the 2020 BSFA Award and did not win, and is presently shortlisted for the Locus Non-Fiction Award (and will not win). I'm quite proud of it, actually. Publisher's blurb:

This is the first new complete literary biography of H G Wells for thirty years, and the first to encompass his entire career as a writer, from the science fiction of the 1890s through his fiction and non-fiction writing all the way up to his last publication in 1946. Adam Roberts provides a comprehensive reassessment of Wells’ importance as a novelist, short-story writer, a theorist of social prophecy and utopia, journalist and commentator, offering a nuanced portrait of the man who coined the phrases ‘atom bomb’, ‘League of Nations’ ‘the war to end war’ and ‘time machine’, who wrote the world’s first comprehensive global history and invented the idea of the tank. In these twenty-six chapters, Roberts covers the entirety of Wells’ life and discusses every book and short story he produced, delivering a complete vision of this enduring figure.

Available from all good etc etc.

"W. H. Auden, the W. H. Stands For Wu-Han You Know"

As I stayed-in one evening,
Not walking down any street,
Tapping away at my laptop
My horizons newly petite.

In at my always-in earbuds
I heard a lover sing
Over the thrum of guitar chords:
“Le virus has no ending.

“I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till the plague is finally beat;
And the river jumps over the mountain
And people go masked in the street;

“I'll love you till the ocean
Is emptied of plastic, and clean;
And scientists, winged, go squawking
That they’ve made a real vaccine.

“We’ll run through fields like rabbits,
For in our blood we will hold
The Flower of Antibodies,
To take us back into the world.”

But all the Covids in the city
From -1 running up to -19
Said: “let not songs deceive you.
You shall not unquarantine.

“In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where all is contagiousness,
We watch you from the shadow
And cough when you would kiss.

“In headaches and in worry
Your life would shudder away,
For contact promotes infection
To-morrow just as to-day.

“Into the lung’s pink valley
Rolls the cytokine storm;
And through the threaded bloodstream
The hordes of virus swarm.

“O plunge your hands in water,
And scrub them in soap as long
As it takes you to sing, sing twice
All the Happy Birthday Song.

“The schools reopen this summer,
The crowds pack Beachy Head,
Though the touch of a hand-shake opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

“O look, look in the mirror?
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and say:
I can still love my neighbour, just
In a socially-distanced way.”

It was late, late in the evening,
The song was over and done;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the lockdown carried on.


[Note: I originally jotted this into a series of tweets on Twitter a couple of weeks ago, but I find myself moved to extract it from the welter of that platform to bung it here. I'm not sure why, unless it's a sense that my nation, which today moved more-or-less comprehensively out of lockdown despite tens of thousands of new weekly Coronavirus cases and thousands of continuing deaths, is undertaking something reckless and foolish. My concern is, I cannot deny, personal as well as general. I'll be 55 this month, and have suffered lifelong from an asthma that renders me, so far as I can gauge it, at rather higher risk of serious illness and death from Covid-19 than many others. So I do not share the heady sense of invulnerability many younger people (wrongly, I think) seem to think justifies a collective rush back to shops and beaches bars and nightclubs. Auden's great poem catches something of my mood, perhaps.

There he is, at the head of this post. Apparently Auden's face looked that way not merely because of a lifetime's smoking and sunshine, but because he suffered from ‘Touraine‐Solente‐Golé syndrome’, also known as ‘Behçet's disease’: an autosomal recessive form of pachydermoperiostosis. This was news to me, I must say. ‘The main features,’ according to Jeffrey K Aronson, ‘apart from the skin changes, are digital clubbing, subperiosteal bone formation, and arthropathy; other features include anaemia, blepharitis, hyperhidrosis, and congenital cardiac defects. There is an excellent description in Rook's Textbook of Dermatology, at times poetic: “The pattern of folds and furrows on the forehead and cheeks, and the heavy thickened eye-lids, stamp the patients with a uniform expression of weariness and despair”.’ Blimey!

I've never quite known what to make of the celebrated David Hockney remark: ‘I kept thinking, if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ I suppose Hockney means: if that's his face his balls must be extraordinarily wrinkled; but the bon mot has always taken me the other way, to the notion that Auden's balls had struck some kind of Faustian pact, along the lines of Dorian Gray's picture in the attic:—that as Auden's face collapsed into that amazing tangle of runnels and crevasses his balls became purer, smoother and rounder until, on his deathbed, they were two billiard balls of unblemished perfection.]

Sketches by Zod

[Continuing this blog's lockdown theme of ‘books I would actually write, if only I had the time’, here are four SFnalisations of Dickens that, quite genuinely, it would be a pleasure to make real: the full Dickensian prose treatment, gnarly Dickensian characters and all the tastiest steampunky trimmings.]

Isn't It Good/Empsonian Wood

I’m reading Michael Wood’s On Empson (2017) and enjoying it very much. I am, it's worth saying, an Empson fan of longstanding (both Some Kinds of Pastoral and, in a rather different way, Milton’s God strike me as properly amazing, enduring works of criticism) and Wood’s take on Empson is full of insight and thoughtfulness. But here's one small thing that struck me as I read. In his account of Empson’s first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Wood says:

Among his cases of the sixth type of ambiguity Empson includes a famous speech of Othello’s and makes what must be among the most brilliant commentaries ever on the possibilities of the word “it”—hard even to see what the competition would look like.

It is the Cause, it is the Cause (my Soule)
Let me not name it to you, you chaste Starres,
It is the Cause. Yet Ile not shed her blood,
Nor scarre that whiter skin of hers, then Snow,
And smooth as Monumentall Alablaster:

Wood then quotes Empson, that, if he were ‘guessing at a one-word referent, he would say “it” was blood’.

But it is no use assuming … that one case can be assigned, and one thing it is the cause of. There is no primary meaning for lack of information, and secondary meaning, therefore, holds the focus of consciousness, that we are listening to a mind withdrawn upon itself, and baffled by its own agonies. As primary meaning of it, however, thus thrust back among the assumptions, one might list his blackness, as causing her defection; the universality of human lust (in both him and her), as causing her defection and his murder; her defection, as causing his horror and his death. [ST, 185-86]

But isn’t this to isolate the wrong word for its ambiguity? ‘It’ strikes me as like ‘this’, one of those radically ambiguous words that (as Hegel noted) always means both something particular, something specificied and individual, and at the same time, in its capacity for referring to literally anything at all, is the least specific and individualised of words. (That's a perfectly Empsonian observation, I think).

Surely the operative ambiguity in Othello’s speech is not ‘it’ but ‘Cause’, a word that can mean both the reason for or rationale of an event or action—that which produces or effects a result (which is how Empson takes the word) and a movement, a belief-set, even a party (such as one might say: ‘he dedicated his life to the cause of women’s rights, or racial equality, or whatever). Othello is certainly a play about cause-and-effect in the first sense, but in this speech here Othello himself, manifestly urging himself on to do something he doesn’t really want to do, is surely reinforcing his determination by identifying as part of a ‘cause’, a group of people with a common belief-set dedicated to achieving particular goals: policing chastity, reinforcing women’s roles, asserting the authority of the husband, somesuch patriarchal bullshit. Iago is able to bend Othello to his will not only by insinuating certain plaguing fantasies into the man’s imagination, but by stressing (something he does repeatedly) that they are in it together. Before he presses the detonator on his bomb-vest, the terrorist thinks not of the cause-and-event that brought him to this place, but of the cause in this latter sense, and especially of his comrades-in-terror. This speech is Othello quieting that inner voice, the one saying fool, what are you doing? He’s doing ‘it’, and it is murdering the woman he loves; and this action is part of the cause to which he has, now, dedicated himself, even though it will also result in his own destruction.

Excerpts from T S Eliot's "Covid Wasteland"

“April is the Covid month, breeding
Lockdowns out of the dread bug, mixing
Boredom and more boredom, watching
Netflix with much wine.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Minds in blessed ignorance
Of how bad this all could get.
Trump surprised us, suggesting we all guzzle bleach and”


------------

“Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Can't get a Coronavirus test
Not being a celebrity. Here, said she,
Is your card, the shag-haired British P.M.
(Those his words they all are lies. Look!)
Here is Kier Starmer, the starmerer,
The stare-eyed.”


------------

“O O O O that Televehision Rag—
Let's watch Tiger-King
It's quite baffling
‘What shall I do now? What shall I do?
I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
With my hair down, so.’

‘Don't do that. The police will have a word.’”


------------

“Virus the Increasing, logarithmic dead,
Ignores the cry of trolls, the news cycle
The profit and loss.
                                A current under all
Picks our lives to whispers. As it rises
We pass the stages of our age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.

Consider Virus.”


------------

“—O sallow sallow
Le Prince Maladie au monde abolie
London Town is falling down falling down falling down
Why then Ile fit you. POTUS’s mad againe.
Cough. Shallowcough. Deepcough.
       Wuhantih        Wuhantih        Wuhantih”

Rebecca West, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1941)

There's a consensus among critics and readers that Rebecca West's enormous travelogue, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941) is her magnum opus. Magnus it certainly is: it's more than 1100 pages long, rich and detailed throughout; more a meditation on how history shapes the present, and how both factor in specific identities, societies and cultures. I'm reading it at the moment, in between other things. It's not a book to bolt: full of fascinating detail, often very funny in a mordant kind of way, and advancing several key Westian ideas: for instance that women are idiots and men lunatics. At the book's beginning she recalls being in hospital in 1934, and hearing on the radio ‘how the King of Yugoslavia had been assassinated in the streets of Marseilles that morning’. She adds ‘it appeared to me inevitable that war must follow’:

I rang for my nurse, and when she came I cried to her, “Switch on the telephone ! I must speak to my husband at once. A most terrible thing has happened. The King of Yugoslavia has been assassinated.” “Oh, dear!” she replied. “Did you know him?” “No,” I said. “Then why,” she asked, “do you think it's so terrible?”

Her question made me remember that the word “idiot” comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy; they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

This is the sort of idea that gets under your skin, and as West returns to it (several times) in this book, she adds nuance and depth to it. Speaking for myself, I can only push-back against its manifest gender-essentialism; and yet it is saying something quite profound, I think.

At one point, about halfway through volume one, staying in Sarajevo with her husband, West disgresses into a claim that twice in the history of Europe the Slavs have achieved victory over their enemies by allowing those enemies an apparent victory that only, with time, revealed itself to have been a profound, veiled defeat: ‘once, on the simpler occasion, when the Russians let Napoleon into the core of their country, where he found himself among snow and ashes, his destiny dead. The second time it happened here in Sarajevo [when] the heretic Bosnian nobles surrendered their country to the Turks in exchange for freedom to keep their religion and their lands’ [West, BLGF 1:307]. West explains this strategy with what is, in effect, a sketch for a short novel, although not a very comfortable-sounding one.

There is a kind of human being, terrifying above all others, who resists by yielding. Let it be supposed that it is a woman. A man is pleased by her, he makes advances to her, he finds that no woman was ever more compliant. He marvels at the way she allows him to take possession of her and perhaps despises her for it. Then suddenly he finds that his whole life has been conditioned to her, that he has become bodily dependent on her, that he has acquired the habit of living in a house with her, that food is not food unless he eats it with her.

It is at this point that he suddenly realises that he has not conquered her mind, and that he is not sure if she loves him, or even likes him, or even considers him of great moment. Then it occurs to him as a possibility that she failed to resist him in the first place because simply nothing he could do seemed of the slightest importance. He may even suspect that she let him come into her life because she hated him, and wanted him to expose himself before her so that she could despise him for his weakness. This, since man is a hating rather than a loving animal, may not impossibly be the truth of the situation. There will be an agonising period when he attempts to find out the truth. But that he will not be able to do, for it is the essence of this woman’s character not to uncover her face. He will therefore have to withdraw from the frozen waste in which he finds himself, where there is neither heat nor light nor food nor shelter, but only the fear of an unknown enemy, and he will have to endure the pain of living alone till he can love someone else ; or he will have to translate himself into another person, who will be accepted by her, a process that means falsification of the soul. Whichever step he takes, the woman will grow stronger and more serene, though not so strong and serene as she will if he tries the third course of attempting to coerce her. [West, BLGF 1:306-7]

Since man is a hating rather than a loving animal ... as with the naked gender essentialism of her idiot/lunatic distinction, I can only push-back against the starkness, even cynicism, of that little thumbnail of homo sapiens. And yet ...

Lockdown Poem

Sumer is icumen in
Lhude sing loccdown
Groweþ plump
doun in þe dump
and scowlþ þe wide froun
Sing loccdown

Ma bleteþ after gin
stil in her nightgown
Netflics sterteþ
faþer farteþ
gloomie sing loccdown.

Loccdown loccdown
Wel singes þu loccdown
ne swik þu nauer nown

Sing loccdown nu • Sing loccdown.
Sing loccdown • Sing loccdown nu.