book review

A Man of Parts by David Lodge

This is a novel in the form of a biography, or possibly a biography in the form of a novel, about H.G. Wells. Lodge had written a previous biographical novel, about Henry James, but I never succeeded in reading that one, because I'm not very interested in Henry James. (James, who knew Wells, is a character in the present book, but I found the material on James to be about the least interesting part.) I am more interested in H.G. Wells, though, or at least I came to be interested, because it says virtually nothing about Wells's SF, which is the part of him I know best.

This book concentrates almost entirely on two aspects of Wells. One is his career as a societal reformer and prophet of the near future, mostly around the first decade of the 20C, when most of the book takes place. (Wells predicted a world war, but not really soon.) There's much about his interaction with the Fabian Society during that period.

The other is his personal life, which means mainly his sex life. This is absolutely hair-raising, particularly half a century before the sexual revolution. Even at age 50, Wells was so magnetizing that every beautiful and intelligent 20-year-old woman he met threw herself at him and demanded a sexual affair, and he was happy to oblige. The reader is liable to roll eyes at this and suspect the novelist's overheated imagination, but all these affairs really happened, and the recorded aftermaths suggest they happened pretty much this way.

The affairs are rather sad stories, though. The women start out as shining and eager to embrace life, and the sex with H.G. is great, but he has to pack them off into isolation for social propriety's sake, and then he can't give them his undivided attention, and they get bored and cranky. This happens over and over. At one point Wells is asked, don't you ever learn?, and he replies, I guess I don't. In addition to this, somehow he manages to marry the only two women of his age he knows who don't like sex.

Lodge incorporates a lot of imagined conversations into his story, but they fit well, and his research has been prodigious and is well-integrated into the story. (I caught one tiny mistake in the political history of the period: it's on p. 146.) Lodge's manner of laying out exposition (some of the best of it in a running imagined interview with Wells in which the above question is posed) and of covering a story that takes place over many years entirely fits what I want in this kind of novel, which is why I found it so compulsively readable, despite a pretty hefty length, over 400 pages.

Its treatment of Wells as a writer is curious. He writes easily, and is often described as going off to spend an entire morning, or indeed a hermetic span of weeks, doing nothing but writing, but we the readers hardly ever see him doing it, the way we see him having the even more private activity of sex. This is a weird imbalance I've seen in other novels relating the sex life of writers or indeed anybody who does something other than have sex. Usually the sex is the only part described in detail, although at least here you get the social reform activity too.

Several of Wells's novels are described in detail, but only the ones that draw, if distantly, on his own life. After a while, this selectivity becomes conspicuous.

Nevertheless, there is a lot of good material in here, and a renowned supporting cast, including - besides Henry James - Bernard Shaw, E. Nesbit, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Ford Madox Ford, and a lot of other authors and celebrities of the time and place whom it's not surprising Wells knew. And there's a lot of great lines. In the imaginary interview, Wells is depicted as saying about Bernard Shaw, "His real point of view was hard to pin down, as usual. He liked to goad people into re-examining their assumptions, but all he usually succeeded in doing was to annoy the hell out of them," which is about as good a summary of Shaw as you're likely to get.
Wells had generated a lot of controversy for depicting extramarital affairs in some of his novels, but the book's summary of his later novel The History of Mr. Polly, a comedy featuring arson, insurance fraud, faked death, and other shenanigans, concludes: "It was the most immoral story [Wells] had ever written, but the British public received it without a murmur of disapproval because there wasn't a word in it about sex."

One more thing about the sex. It is commonplace these days to describe self-declared "incels" as men who believe that beautiful women owe them sex, and to mock them for this absurd self-aggrandizement. But that's not what the incels I've read actually say. What they do is point to men like the H.G. Wells in this book, and say, "Here are men who treat women shabbily but get unlimited sex. Why can't I, who try to be more polite than that, get some too?" That's a much more reasonable question. I think I know the answer, but they're not going to like it.