Authors: David Lodge
Like most people who have studied Wells’s life and work, I came to the conclusion that he was riven with contradictions in principle and practice, but that he was also one of the most interesting and prodigiously talented figures in twentieth-century cultural history. The main problem for me was to find in a mass of fascinating material, including both his public and private life, a novel-shaped story, by which I mean one which has more cohesion and patterning than the faithful chronicle of a life can provide – ‘life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection’, as Henry James said in his Preface to
The Spoils of Poynton
, and as he also said in the Preface to
Roderick Hudson
:
Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Very early in the gestation of
A Man of Parts
I saw it as a companion piece to
Author, Author
, in which James would be a minor character as Wells had been in the earlier novel; but Wells’s life proved a greater challenge to fictional form than James’s. When I abandoned the idea of making his relationship with Edith Nesbit and her family the hub of the story, it was not immediately obvious how I could draw an elegant circle round Wells’s multitudinous interests and experiences. Gradually a solution evolved. There would be a frame story divided into two parts, very like the one in
Author, Author
, of Wells’s last years, beginning in 1944 and ending with his death in 1946, set mainly in his Blitz-battered Regent’s Park house, showing H.G. failing in health and morale, depressed by the negation of all his utopian hopes for mankind by the Second World War and the decline of his reputation as a writer, and bothered by the crisis in the marriage of Anthony, his son by Rebecca West, which was uncomfortably reminiscent of his own marital history. From this perspective he looks back at his life and asks himself whether it is a story of success or failure. Then between these two book-ends I would tell the story of the most interesting part of Wells’s life, from childhood to the mid-1920s, following the sequence of relationships with the women who meant most to him: his wives Isabel and Jane, Rosamund Bland, Amber Reeves, Rebecca West and Moura, showing how they affected, fed into, disrupted, and threatened at times to destroy his career as a writer and public man. There were symmetries and correspondences in this series of women: two wives whom he loved but found sexually incompatible; two brilliant young women half his age, Amber and Rebecca, with whom he had children; two – Rosamund and Amber – who had younger admirers, rivals to H.G., whom they eventually married at almost exactly the same time. These parallels would help to give the novel pattern, that combination of repetition and variation which is present in all art, as well as illustrating an obsessive-compulsive streak in H.G.’s character.
In the title essay of my book
The Year of Henry James
(2006) I observed that the biographical novel, which uses fictional techniques to represent real lives, had become increasingly popular with writers and readers of literary fiction over the previous twenty years or so. The output of novels subsequently did nothing to make me revise this view: it seemed to me that at least 25 per cent of those I saw reviewed in newspapers and magazines were of this kind (and several of them were about Henry James). As the publication of
A Man of Parts
in the spring of 2011 drew near, this flourishing sub-genre figured in a more wide-ranging critical controversy in the media. William Skidelsky wrote an article in the
Observer
of 23 January under the heading, ‘
It’s time to stop this obsession with works of art based on real events
.’ He picked out
The King’s Speech
, the hugely successful film about King George VI’s struggle against his speech impediment, and Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novel
Wolf Hall
, about the life of Thomas Cromwell, as symptomatic of a general tendency in all the arts, and he cited a large number of other examples (including
The Children’s Book
and my own forthcoming novel) as symptomatic of ‘a shift in recent years away from works of pure imagination towards ones which combine fact and fiction’. This shift is undeniable, and is as evident in theatre, television drama, and even the visual arts, as in movies and novels. More contentious was Skidelsky’s assertion that this tendency is a Bad Thing, because ‘by being placed at the service of factual knowledge, creativity loses its justification and becomes devalued as a result’. In fact the works he cites are not ‘at the service of factual knowledge’ but build creatively on the basis of factual knowledge. A week later the historian Antony Beevor attacked the trend from a different direction, in a talk to the Royal Society of Literature on ‘The Perils of Faction’ which was published in a condensed form in the
Guardian Review
(19 February 2011). One of the chief perils he identified in historical and biographical novels was that ‘when a novelist uses a major historical character, the reader has no idea what he or she has taken from recorded fact and what has been invented in their recreation of events’. This was to some extent true of most historical writing from antiquity to the Renaissance, but modern historiography is strictly evidence-based, making the biographical novel an object of suspicion to most historians and biographers.
I understand the concerns voiced by Skidelsky and Beevor, and sympathise with some of them. ‘Faction’, especially on film and television, media that are notoriously subject to cynical manipulation for commercial ends, can give a seriously distorted account of important historical events and personages, spreading in their audiences confusion and misapprehension which are not easily corrected. When applied to living people who are not in a position to protest, such productions can be hurtful and intrusive. The current wave of fact-based or fact-inspired narrative certainly carries with it a good deal of rubbish, some of it dangerous and meretricious rubbish, but because it is a genuine cultural phenomenon it is futile to oppose it on principle. These two writers object to ‘faction’ on opposite principles – Beevor because it is not wholly factual, and Skidelsky because it is not wholly imaginative. But the categories of narrative are not watertight: they leak into each other. Or, to change the metaphor, they belong to a spectrum which extends from the most starkly factual to the most fantastic, and in most examples of literary interest and value some elements of both fact and fiction are invariably present to some degree, from the Homeric epics and the stories of the Old Testament to the plays of Shakespeare and the prose fiction of the last three centuries. The modern novel as a literary form had its origins partly in the explosion of popular documentary or pseudo-documentary narrative in the late seventeenth century – confessions of reformed sinners, biographies of criminals, and reports of current events like plagues and wars.
Robinson Crusoe
(1719), arguably the first classic English novel, was a work of fiction disguised as a factual story, and so was Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
(1740), the original model for many greater works of fiction, including his own
Clarissa
. The realist novel of the nineteenth century, in which the personal life is portrayed against a panoramic social background, evolved from the novels of Scott, whose fictional characters interact with historical personages and events. The Victorian novelists applied Scott’s method in a modified form to the present or the recent past, connecting their own invented stories to real events, like the Battle of Waterloo in
Vanity Fair
or the Reform Bill in
Middlemarch.
James Joyce went to extraordinary pains to make his modernist masterpiece
Ulysses
, about the experiences of a number of Dubliners on a single day, 16 June 1904, correspond to historical and topographical fact in every detail.
The arguments of Skidelsky and Beevor depend on an oversimplified distinction between fact and fiction, but this is not to say that we should collapse the distinction altogether, as the American writer David Shields advocated in a book published in 2010 called
Reality Hunger: A manifesto
. It was a manifesto for precisely the development Skidelsky and Beevor deplored. Shields claimed that ‘an artistic movement, albeit an organic and as-yet-unstated one, is forming’, one of its key features being ‘a blurring to the point of invisibility of any distinction between fiction and nonfiction: the lure and blur of the real’. Among Shields’s favourite texts are Rebecca West’s
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
, Simon Gray’s
Smoking Diaries
, and the confessional prologue to Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse Five.
‘Living as we do in a manufactured and artificial world,’ he asserts, ‘we yearn for the “real”, semblances of the real.’ There is, however, a difference between the real and a semblance of the real, and as readers we may legitimately object to being tricked into taking the latter for the former. That would apply, for instance, to publications that purport to be genuine memoirs by survivors of the Holocaust, but are exposed as works of fiction. The best-known example is Binjamin Wilkomirski’s
Fragments
(1996) which won several prestigious prizes and awards before it was shown to be a fraud. However well-written they may be, such books muddy a vitally important historical record and their exposure as fictions encourages Holocaust-deniers. A less disturbing, but symptomatic, deception was James Frey’s account of his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction,
A Million Little Pieces
(2003), which became a number one bestseller in America but was subsequently shown to be largely fictional, with punitive consequences for the author. Frey has since revealed that the book was rejected by seventeen publishers when he submitted it as a novel, but accepted when, with a little tweaking, it was repackaged as a memoir. Not surprisingly, since he is committed to work which ‘blurs’ the distinction between factual and fictional narrative, Shields was sympathetic to James Frey in his manifesto, and ridiculed the publisher’s offer to refund purchasers of
A Million Little Pieces
if they supplied a sworn statement that they had ‘bought it with the belief that it was a real memoir, or, in other words, that they felt bad having discovered they had accidentally read a novel’. As for himself, Shields says, ‘I doubt very much that I’m the only person who’s finding it more and more difficult to want to read or write novels.’ Instead he is drawn to various forms of life writing: memoirs, journals, and something he calls ‘the lyrical essay’.
Shields’s manifesto is an exhilarating challenge to fresh thinking on these matters, but I don’t share his disillusionment with the fictional novel, or his tolerance of the fraudulent nature of Frey’s book. It’s a matter of the implied contract between writer and reader. The words, ‘a novel’, on a title page are a clear declaration that the book is not purely historical, and that is crucial. But there are many different ways of combining fact and fiction, and each work must be judged on its own terms. Some bio-novels, for instance, put their historical characters into situations which they never actually experienced, or imagine encounters between historical characters who never met. Among the several novels about Henry James published after mine and Colm Tóibín’s was
Lions at Lamb House
(2007)
,
by Edwin Yoder, a Pulitzer Prize winner in the field of journalism, in which Henry James’s brother William, the famous Harvard-based philosopher and psychologist, arranges for Sigmund Freud to visit Henry James, and submit him to a full-scale analysis to get to the bottom of his depression. Another was
What Alice Knew
(2010) by Paula Marantz Cohen, which has Henry, William and their invalid sister Alice collaborating to solve the mystery of Jack the Ripper’s identity. Cynthia Ozick published a tale called
Dictation
in 2008 about a mischievous conspiracy between Henry James’s and Joseph Conrad’s secretaries. These books are of varying literary merit, but few readers are likely to be misled about their relation to reality.
There is another kind of bio-novel which gives historical characters fictional names, to signal that it is a work of imagination rather than history. Not surprisingly, this is a device of which Antony Beevor approves. An example is Gaynor Arnold’s
Girl in a Blue Dress
(2007) in which Charles Dickens is recognisably portrayed as the hugely popular Victorian novelist ‘Alfred Gibson’, seen from the point of view of his wife ‘Dorothea’ (Catherine Dickens). The novel deals mainly with the couple’s courtship and married life, which became increasingly unhappy and ended when Dickens fell in love with the actress Nellie Ternan and separated from Catherine. It ends with a long scene in which the question of whether Dickens’s relationship with Nellie was sexual, which Dickens denied, and scholarly research has been unable to determine, is answered in an interview between the widowed Dorothea/Catherine and the character representing Nellie, a meeting for which there is no evidence and which is inherently unlikely. In this novel Alfred Gibson both is and is not Dickens. Dorothea both is and is not Catherine. We read with a kind of double vision, and when something occurs in the story that seems improbable or inconsistent with our knowledge of Dickens or Catherine we attribute it to their fictional avatars (in the cybernetic sense of that term). It is well done, but the constant readjustment of the reader’s assumptions and expectations, which this convention requires, weakens the illusion of being immersed in the subjectivity of a historical person.
Having eventually read and enjoyed
The Children’s Book
, I would not describe it as a biographical novel, but as a work of fiction built on a foundation of extensive historical research. There are resemblances between several of the characters and real people of the period which, for the reader who recognises them, enhance the authenticity of the novel’s presentation of social history, but it would make perfect sense to a reader who did not. And there are always more important differences than resemblances, not least in the unlikeable character of the writer Herbert Methley whose controversial views on sex, and seductions of young women, associate him with Wells, but who is in most respects quite unlike H.G. Reinforcing this point, Wells is in fact one of several historical figures of the time who are referred to by name in the novel, and sometimes have walk-on parts, to give specificity to its historical context.