Excerpt

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Chapter One

Excerprt One

H.G. and Jane Wells

"Between the ages of thirty and forty I devoted a considerable
amount of mental energy to the general problem of men and women . .
."—H. G. Wells

AUGUST 5, 1914. A few minutes after midnight as Britain was
entering the war, an illegitimate baby was born in a conspicuously
anonymous redbrick house on the northern coast. His mother, Rebecca
West, whose real name, which nobody used, was Cicily Fairfield,
held the sleeping bundle in her arms, while her sister and a friend
perched on her bed. The baby's father, H. G. Wells, was one hundred
miles away, sitting up late in his llama-wool pajamas, in the
second-floor study of his large comfortable house in Essex, putting
the finishing touches on an essay for the Daily Chronicle, which he
was planning to call "The War That Will End War." He poured himself
a cup of tea, which he had brewed himself on the small stove
nestled in the fireplace, and nibbled a dry biscuit. His wife,
Jane, was asleep in the bedroom, her dark blond hair fanned out
against the pillow. He loved his wife, and he loved his young
mistress. He loved his ivy-covered Georgian house, Easton Glebe,
which was a gracious symbol of how far he had come from his
hardscrabble origins. Unlike nearly everyone he knew, Wells was
feeling optimistic about the war, exhilarated by the possibilities
of the world in flux. Through his window he could see the familiar
outline of a fig tree in the darkness.

Wells prided himself on the fact that there had been no deception.
Jane knew all about the affair. This was not the first one, and it
would not be the last. Jane was his anchor, his foundation, his
sanity--there was no question of his living without Jane--but he
suffered from a sexual restlessness that he had long ago ceased to
resist. This particular manifestation of it had been set in motion
in September of 1912, in the drawing room of Easton Glebe. Rebecca
West was a rising nineteen-year-old journalist who wrote fierce,
witty pieces for the suffragette paper The New Freewoman and the
Clarion. H. G. Wells was already a world-famous author with
influential friends, a classically pretty wife, and two small sons.
At this point, Wells was best known for scientific romances like
The Time Machine, but he had recently written a series of
scandalous novels examining the relations between the sexes,
several of which were banned from circulating libraries, denounced
from pulpits, and attacked in newspaper editorials for poisoning
the minds of young people with their promiscuous morals. In her
role as professional provocateur, Rebecca had just written a
taunting review of the latest: "Of course, he is the old maid among
novelists; even the sex obsession that lay clotted on Ann Veronica
and The New Machiavelli like cold white sauce was merely an old
maid's mania . . ." Somehow this critique had amused or intrigued
him--who was this young woman?--and he invited her to lunch.

As soon as she walked in, she was overwhelmed by his unlikely
magnetism: a small, round, middle-aged man, with extraordinary
light blue eyes, thickets of eyebrows, and a mustache, he emanated
the energetic confidence of a man highly valued by the world. For
his part, Wells admired her wide brow, dark expressive eyes, and
"splendid disturbed brain." As always, Rebecca arrived looking
bright and disheveled, as if to broadcast that there were other,
more pressing things on her mind than grooming; it was perhaps this
tendency that inspired Virginia Woolf to write rather meanly:
"Rebecca is a cross between a charwoman and gypsy, but as tenacious
as a terrier, with flashing eyes, very shabby, rather dirty nails,
immense vitality, bad taste, suspicion of intellectuals and great
intelligence." At a certain point in the afternoon, Wells's wife,
Jane, discreetly withdrew, leaving the two writers alone, and was,
the young feminist noted, "charming, but a little bit effaced."
Their lunch lasted for more than five hours.

The next time Rebecca visited Wells at his London house they found
themselves kissing in front of his bookshelves. With her usual
boldness, Rebecca appears to have asked him to sleep with her and
relieve her of her innocence. In this, she may or may not have been
influenced by Wells's infamous young heroine, Ann Veronica, who
threw herself at a married man, proclaiming in what now seems like
an absurd piece of dialogue: "I want you. I want you to be my
lover. I want to give myself to you." In any event, Wells wrote to
her shortly afterward: "Dear Rebecca, You're a very compelling
person. I suppose I shall have to do what you want me to do." But
then, entangled with a long-term mistress, Elizabeth Von Arnim, and
fearful of the damage yet more scandal would do to his reputation,
he changed his mind. He and Rebecca wrangled back and forth over
his decision, until he disappeared on a trip abroad. He had told
Rebecca that even friendship between them would be impossible. The
abrupt break launched Rebecca into great storms of melodrama. She
had a theatrical streak, had in fact trained to be an actress
before turning to writing. "You've literally ruined me," Rebecca
wrote. "I am burned down to my foundations. I may build myself up
again or I may not . . . I know you will derive immense
satisfaction from thinking of me as an unbalanced young female who
flopped about in your drawing room in an unnecessary heart attack."
Rebecca emerged from the attenuated flirtation so distraught that
her mother whisked her off on a restorative tour through Spain and
France.

After reading her published accounts of the trip, Wells wrote to
her: "You are writing gorgeously again. Please resume being
friends." They began to see a little more of each other, and months
later, when Wells quarreled with Elizabeth Von Arnim, whom he
called "little e," he and Rebecca became lovers. The leisurely
affair that might have ensued was cut short by a moment of
carelessness, a rushed afternoon encounter in his London flat
during which she conceived a child. By both accounts, it would
appear to have been an accident, though Rebecca would later write
wildly to her son that H. G. wantonly impregnated her "because he
wanted the panache of having a child by the infant prodigy of the
day." Given Wells's caution in approaching the affair and his
fervor for secrecy this seems highly unlikely, but throughout her
life Rebecca remained, on the subject of Wells, partial to colorful
distortions and interesting slurs. As soon as he heard the news of
her pregnancy, Wells's response was to tell his wife immediately.
Wells told his wife everything. That was part of their pact. But
for all three of them, the wartime baby would be a test of their
forward-thinking ideas.

Wells's unorthodox relation to his wife had already become the
subject of much public speculation. The prominent literary hostess
Ottoline Morrell would later remember discussing it with Bertrand
Russell over lunch in her town house on Gower Street, both
expressing their disapproval: not at the adultery, which they had
engaged in themselves, but at the openness of it. The scandal was
Jane Wells's quiet tolerance of her husband's carryings-on.
Beatrice Webb, the founder of the Fabian Society, theorized that
Jane couldn't criticize Wells's philandering because of the murky
origins of her own relationship with him. When Jane met him he had
been married to another woman. In the carnivorous, gossipy circles
they moved in, accustomed as they were to dissecting character,
Jane's reticence, her grace, some might call it, was maddening. "In
all this story," the flamboyant lesbian writer Vernon Lee wrote to
Wells, "the really interesting person seems to me to be your wife.
. . ." And something about her position did seem to arouse
curiosity--who was Jane Wells?

This would not be an easy question to answer. For one thing, Jane
wasn't really Jane. In an improbably domineering gesture, Wells had
renamed his wife, Amy Catherine Wells, "Jane." When Mrs. Wells was
younger she had always gone by Catherine, which she preferred to
Amy. But Wells wanted to conjure a competent, sensible helpmate,
and the proper name for this admirable and upstanding young woman
seemed to be Jane. All of their friends called her Jane, and she
herself willingly adopted the plain, serviceable name; but what did
she think of a man who took creative liberties with fundamental
pillars of her identity? And what did it say about that man that
all of his fantasies of uxorious harmony and romantic perfection
should converge in the name "Jane"?

There is no doubt that, to the world, Jane presented a composed and
contented exterior. There are several photographs of her with her
fine profile, her wavy, ash-blond hair swept into a voluminous bun,
bent over a Remington typewriter as she typed up her husband's
manuscripts, looking, in her striped button-down shirt, the epitome
of the dignified secretary. In addition, she managed all of his
business affairs, shepherding his significant fortune into prudent
investments and corresponding with his legion of agents,
translators, and editors. At the same time, she was adept at the
more traditionally feminine arts. She was a member of the Royal
Horticultural Society and kept an extensive journal to improve her
gardening technique. She organized amateur theatricals and games of
tennis for their weekend guests with great enthusiasm, altogether
creating the pleasing and comfortable environment that made it
possible for the fussy and sensitive Wells to sit down and do his
work. On a deeper level, Jane answered some chord of self-doubt in
him in a way that no one else could. She soothed the fits of rage
and melancholy that sometimes paralyzed him, and gave him the
constancy and peace he needed. When his self-image faltered, she
reflected back a confident, glowing version of who he was. "She
stuck to me so sturdily," he put it, "that in the end I stuck to
myself." She was his ideal companion, a consummately wifely wife.
But there had always been a lack of sexual sympathy at the heart of
the marriage. Wells rarely described her without using certain
words, like "fragile" or "delicate" or "innocent" or "Dresden
china." Though he admired her enormously, she lacked the vitality
that attracted him: he couldn't imagine being rough or playful with
her in bed.

There was a certain irony to the fact that Jane had become the
perfect housewife. When Wells and Jane began their association in
the 1890s neither of them believed in the institution of marriage.
He was in the process of leaving his first wife, and with fifty
pounds between them, the two of them moved into modest rooms
together. They had a double bed, and folding doors opening out into
a living area with a tin bathtub, and a dining room table that
doubled as a desk. Wells was struggling to cobble together a living
from articles and reviews, which he produced in enormous volume,
and it was only the constant irritant of the reaction of neighbors,
landladies, and servants that finally convinced them it wasn't
worth expending all of their energy on not being married. In 1895
they went to the registrar's office and became man and wife. In
these early years together, Jane had become a ballast to him. He
wrote, "It was a good thing for me that behind the folding doors at
12 Mornington Road slept a fine and valiant little being, so
delicate and clean and so credulous of my pretensions, that it
would have been intolerable to appear before her unshaven or
squalid or drunken or base." This valiant little being was the wife
of the writer he wanted to be, somehow finer than the rest of the
fallen world.

Wells would later look back on this period on Mornington Road as
their happiest. Their landlady would bring up coffee on a tray, and
Jane would sit in her blue nightdress and long blond braids,
buttering her toast, the slate sky framed by large bay windows. The
only thing marring the cozy scene was his inchoate sense of sexual
disappointment. Something appeared to him to be missing in her
responsiveness. As he put it, Jane "regarded my sexual
imaginativeness as a sort of constitutional disease; she stood by
me patiently waiting for it to subside." During this time he began
to draw what he called "pischuas" for her: elaborate cartoons of
their life together that seemed in their infantile humor, their odd
visual language, to replace a more adult form of intimacy or
communication, as if he were a very clever child presenting his
imaginative offerings as a frantic and troubled tribute to a
mother. This would be his first effort to scribble over the reality
of their life together.

In the beginning, when he was struggling with his career, Wells
didn't think much about women; but later, after the publication of
his scientific romances The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds,
as he became famous and sought after, the subject appeared to raise
itself. Intriguing, intelligent, liberated women seemed to emerge
from the chatter of every cocktail party, and the newly celebrated
author was interesting to them. He had always had the kind of
intellectual arrogance that drew women to him, and now he had the
worldly success to back it up. He also emanated an unapologetic
hedonism that rarely escaped the notice of the women in a room. He
would later offer this extraordinary formulation: "I was not under
such prohibitions as we impose upon lawyer, doctor, or
schoolmaster. Except in so far as affection put barriers about me,
I have done what I pleased; so that every bit of sexual impulse in
me has expressed itself."

An early turning point in their marriage was the harrowing birth of
their first son, George Philip, whom they called "Gyp," in the
summer of 1901. For twenty-four hours, both mother and baby were in
serious danger. H.G.'s curious response to the ordeal was to run
off to the south for several months, leaving Jane to convalesce
with the baby in the care of two doctors, a nurse, and the
servants. For at least a few weeks, it seems, she wasn't sure where
he was, and their entire relationship was thrown into question.
This was one of those rare, fluid moments when a marriage opens
itself to change, and the terms begin to define themselves. Instead
of responding to her husband's sudden absence with anger, Jane
wrote H.G. a warm, understanding letter in which she blamed herself
for being too possessive when he left, and set their relationship
on its stable new course. In her own way, she conveyed that she was
going to allow him the absences he needed. She would even go so far
as to understand those absences. She would purvey the perfect,
infinitely flexible, unconditional love he craved, and create a
stable family home he could leave and return to at will. The
arrangement she seemed to be offering was quite extraordinary, and
one can only guess at her motivations. Would she have acted
differently if he had remained the impoverished biology teacher he
was when they met? Was the license she granted him somehow
connected in her mind to his literary genius? Was she, as Rebecca
and others suspected, interested in the things she had accumulated,
and their rising material success? Or was it simply that she loved
him so much she couldn't risk losing him? It is hard to say, but we
do know that Jane was not unadventurous. After all, she had traded
the safety of her mother's home for an ambiguous connection with an
impecunious married man. She was willing to give up her chances, as
an attractive and educated young woman, for a more stable marriage
for the sake of his personal magnetism. Altogether, it seems more
likely that she was acting out of love, rather than the grasping
materialism or unnatural passion for security that she would later
be accused of, but we can't know for certain. We do know that by
the time Rebecca came along a decade later, H.G. and Jane had
worked out what he called a "modus vivendi" whereby he could have
his affairs, which he lightly referred to as "passades," and she
could be assured of his highest regard.

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