UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939
Katie Roiphe
The Dial Press
Literary Memoir
ISBN-10: 0385339372
ISBN-13: 9780385339377

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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.

PANTHER AND JAGUAR

In the spring of 1914, Wells established the conspicuously pregnant, twenty-one-year-old Rebecca in a bleak, semidetached, redbrick house in a small seaside town. The setting was appropriately dramatic with its steep, windy cliffs leading down to the sea. As their son, Anthony, would later observe, the only recommendation of his birthplace was “that it was so far off the socially beaten track, so desperately without conventional allure, that nobody who was anybody... was likely to be encountered there.” One of Rebecca’s doctors said that she was in danger of a miscarriage, which she appears to have interpreted as a veiled offer to help her along with one. In fact, Wells was still holding out some hope that she would give the child up for adoption. He had written, a few years earlier, that bearing a baby by a lover “in the present state of public opinion, in almost every existing social atmosphere, would be a purely anarchistic course.” But Rebecca was determined to keep the baby. She was considering sending him to “foster” somewhere for a year so that she could devote herself to her work, but she did not want to give him up.

The drastic change in her circumstances must have been hard for Rebecca to take in. All of a sudden she herself had become one of the engrossing social problems she and her feminist colleagues had analyzed so energetically in their discussion circles. A year earlier, as an ardent social critic, she had written indignantly that an out-of-wedlock mother was “the most outcast thing on earth.” (Ironically, she had also made fun of one of the feminists from The New Freewoman “who was always jumping up asking us to be kind to illegitimate children, as if we all made a habit of seeking out illegitimate infants and insulting them!”) H.G. had impressed on her the need for discretion, writing that it would leave them freer with each other and save Jane enormous embarrassment if she could keep her condition a secret, and so the frank and voluble Rebecca managed to hide her pregnancy from nearly everyone outside her family, referring to the mysterious ailment that kept her in isolation as a “lung inflammation.”

Once the baby was born, Rebecca wrote a spirited letter to her friend Violet Hunt, the glamorous writer, socialite, and consort of Ford Madox Ford, who herself had been involved with Wells, explaining the reasons for her secrecy. “My illness is finally over,” Rebecca began, “and I am quite definitely not dead.” She claimed that she had no choice but to become involved with Wells once her feelings became clear to her. Like Wells, Rebecca believed that not acting on one’s sexual impulses was the height of hypocrisy—it was a moral imperative to follow through on one’s attractions. Nonetheless, the idea that she would be judged by her affair with a hugely prominent man was still daunting to her. She was apprehensive about the monumental impact it would have on her nascent reputation, and the bewildering intricacies of her moral position at that precise moment in time: “I knew that if it was talked about there was a sporting chance that I would become a heroine.
Pale Fabians would say that I was the Free Woman, and wanted to be the mother of the Superman, and the older school left over from the nineties might say I was his wife in the sight of god, and similar clichés.” Altogether the letter made a show of sophisticated gaiety, with the whole episode coming off as a kind of interesting lark, but Rebecca also revealed a certain amount of anxiety about what she was already calling the polygamy of the situation.

When the baby was born, Rebecca had been with her friend Mrs. Carrie Townshend, who had become a trusted confidante of both parents. Faced with the tableau of mother and nursing child, Mrs. Townshend was skeptical that Rebecca would accept the divided life Wells was offering her, and sent him a warning note: “She isn’t the kind that keeps sex in a water-tight compartment. She’s not a bachelor-woman but all that there is of the most feminine . . . I don’t think R. is really suited for polygamy though I admit that she would like a 5th of you better than the whole of anyone else.” At this point, Rebecca was still caught up in the grandeur of her gesture, and had not yet begun to absorb the daily realities of her life. She was also, in spite of her biting, worldly writing voice, extremely young. As usually happens in these sorts of situations, Wells assured Rebecca that he would create a home for the three of them that would be the center of his life, and as also usually happens in these situations, he did not. Over the next few months Rebecca began to feel more and more the insecurity of her position. She wanted to write. She was working on a polemic calling for harsher book reviews for the first issue of the American periodical The New Republic. Her physical isolation may have contributed to the new independent edge in her writing voice, and she began to hone her feminist position into increasingly subtle and brilliant permutations. She started an essay on how women’s love of luxury kept them from being geniuses. Inflamed by what she saw as the weakness of even the most intelligent women in their relations with men, she ranted against the traditional feminine goals of elegance and desirability. Love, she wrote, should be entered into only reluctantly. Here one gets a taste of her frustration with herself. She denounced women “keeping themselves apart from the high purposes of life for an emotion that, schemed and planned for, was no better than the made excitement of drunkenness.” One senses in this essay’s electric passages a disappointment with her own choices: she was giving up some of her wildness, some of her outrageous, chattery self, for that same unreliable emotion. Was love worth everything she had already given up? And why should she give up more than Wells? The extraordinary essay was entitled “The World’s Worst Failure,” and by this failure she meant women. “Since men don’t love us nearly as much as we love them that leaves them much more spare energy to be wonderful with,” she complained in one of her novels, and one can’t help seeing in those words some reflection of her increasingly tangled relation with Wells.

The last thing the ambitious young feminist wanted was to be the concubine to a great man, but ironically, locked up with a new baby, in a remote cottage by the sea, dreaming of parties in London and beautiful clothes in the windows of the stores on Bond Street, that is precisely what she seemed to have become. She found herself frittering huge swaths of time waiting for “the Great Man.” As she wrote to a friend, “I hate domesticity. I don’t want to stay here and I don’t want to go to Westcliffe. I can’t imagine any circumstances in which it would be really amusing to order 2 ounces of Lady Betty wool for socks for Anthony . . . I want to live an unfettered and adventurous life.”

With all of their radical ideas, Wells and Rebecca seem to have fallen into a life of fairly traditional hypocrisy. Their fragile new ménage was based on the usual lies. He visited her as a fictional “Mr.West” who was either in the movie business or a roving journalist. The servants were told that Rebecca was not the child’s mother, and Wells snuck down the hall into her room at night to keep up appearances in front of them. In order to maintain the integrity of this flimsy series of untruths, they moved houses several times. For a while, the baby Anthony was taught to call Wells, “Wellsie,” and his mother, “Auntie Panther.” Wells brooded about his already besmirched reputation, and what effect it might have on his literary career. He believed that his earlier, highly public affair with a girl named Amber Reeves, with whom he had also had an illegitimate child, had shaken his general standing in the literary world and endangered his livelihood. Later he would say that he deplored Rebecca’s transparent deceptions, but he himself was not ready to claim Anthony as a son: his bold rhetoric, as always, matched by startling flashes of conservativism in his personal life. And so, the baby lived in a strange, shifting household, in which his mother and her friend drifted past, and changed forms.

Wells was convinced that the world was evolving before their eyes, that his new ideas about sexuality were taking hold, with university students eagerly passing around his books, and a new youthful cachet adhering to his middle-aged efforts. As he proclaimed in The Fortnightly Review in 1911, after the attacks on his racier books: “We are going to write, subject only to our own limitations, of the whole of human life. We are going to write of wasted opportunities and latent beauties until a thousand new ways of living open to men and women.” Unlike his rival Henry James and many of his contemporaries, Wells had never been interested in art for art’s sake; as he says, his literary purpose was no less than to invent for a generation “new ways of living.” He viewed himself as a political visionary whose imagination could be set to work in the practical business of the revolution. But in the small towns Rebecca inhabited, and in vast swaths of London, the near-Victorian sensibilities of the larger populace remained virtually intact. Wells wrote Violet Hunt, asking, “Do you—in all of your knowledge of London— know some amusing, fairly clean little hotel, that wouldn’t bother its head about who we are?” He and Rebecca often dined in obscure restaurants in Kensington where they would not be seen. And years later, when Wells went to pick up Anthony at school instead of his nurse, the boy was expelled, with the curt explanation that the school had already tolerated too much scandal on Anthony’s behalf.

The truth is that even in their liberal, artistic circles, Wells and Rebecca couldn’t move with complete freedom. Rebecca’s good friend Sylvia Lynd met her at a dinner party at her favorite restaurant in London, Le Petit Riche. The small group ate and chattered in the candlelight. And in the middle of the meal Wells strolled in with his friend Arnold Bennett. The two writers had dined at the Reform Club and drunk a good deal of champagne. Bennett proceeded to spear the end of a cigar with a pocket knife and smoke it while Wells launched into a stream of his charming, contrarian talk. Sylvia Lynd was appalled by his arrival. She said later that her sense “of propriety believed in neat compartments . . . besides I like Janie, and all the nonjealous business is humbug—it’s the price they pay for Pasha’s company—converting all of their sounds of woe to Hey nonny nonny.”

At least on the surface, both women did seem to tolerate each other’s existence. Jane cabled her “dear love” to Rebecca when she had her baby. Whatever her deeper feelings, Jane, who was now in her early forties, had internalized Wells’s desire that she treat his mistresses with pleasantness and affection. Paradoxically, it had come to be part of her wifely supremacy that she tolerated, and even helped, the women he was involved with. With each benign gesture she confirmed that she was unconcerned, above the fray. And when Jane was ill, Rebecca also wrote a mannerly get-well note: “Dear Mrs. Wells, I have just heard from H.G. how ill you have been and I wanted to tell you how sorry I am to hear that you have had such a distressing time and how glad I am to hear that you are getting on well.” Privately, though, Rebecca complained bitterly about Jane throughout her life. With her considerable, sometimes unchecked imaginative powers, she began to transform Jane into a controlling virago who dominated H.G. with “appalling fantastic wickedness.” And Jane in her own ineffectual, private way may have expressed her difficulties with
Rebecca. She used to take the letters she received from Wells’s paramours, and either underline in pencil or write faint exclamation marks next to the most insincere portions of their letters: extracting and recording for herself a bitter humor from the situation. She would in her own quiet, schoolteacherish way, have the last word.

Wells, meanwhile, found the baby unromantic. He enjoyed visiting Rebecca and taking her for rides in his new motor car, which he called “Gladys,” in the surrounding countryside. But he did not enjoy the baby’s crying, or the nursery, or the waiting around, which he referred to in a stern letter to Rebecca as a “severe test” of his love for her. With her clever housekeeping and sprawling homes, Jane managed to insulate him from the daily noise of childrearing. And it galled him particularly that he should be confronted with the evidence of babies in the home of his mistress, the place he expressly intended as a flight from all the noise and clutter of domesticity. In fact, the impinging of domestic cares on love was one of Wells’s great themes. In his novel The Passionate Friends, one of his characters says to her lover that if she marries him they will cease to be lovers, and their relationship will devolve into her making him coffee. This is a striking encapsulation of his romantic philosophy: in Wells’s world, even making coffee is incompatible with the erotic flare of a grand amour; the wearing, practical concerns of daily life are not to be mingled with the sacred frivolity of sex. He found it particularly galling to surrender the unreal, wine-soaked atmosphere of a semi-illicit love to the tangible, unlovely demands of a baby.

For her part, Rebecca was finding it hard to do the work she very much needed to do. In 1916 she had published an irreverent book on Henry James in which she called his trade uncommon mark sentence “a delicate creature swathed in relative clauses as an invalid is in shawls.” But she was still doing too much of what she thought of as the hackwork of journalism, and couldn’t carve out enough time for her real writing. A photograph from this period shows a fairly stout Rebecca in a white dress, her hair rolled into two untidy buns over her ears, looking somehow more shapeless and uncertain than usual, and an alert, anxious little boy impeccably dressed in a white sailor suit and patent leather shoes. In one of her feminist essays, Rebecca condemned women who “took up work not because they loved the work but in order that they might affect an appearance of strength which some man would find a virile satisfaction in breaking down into weakness, an appearance of independence which some man would be proud to exchange for a dependence on him.” And Rebecca was determined not to exchange her work for a dependence on Wells, no matter how tempting the prospect might seem. And so, they sent the baby away to board at a Montessori school in London, before he turned four. Rebecca consoled herself that Anthony was thrilled to see that there were “little girlies” in the school, and ran off to join the other children without looking back. But when he grew up, Anthony Panther West would find much to complain about in his odd, uprooted childhood. In a simmering screed in The New York Review of Books, he would describe in furious detail what he saw as his mother’s “passionate desire” to do him harm.

During their long and frequent separations, Rebecca and H.G. wrote each other letters filled with an affectionate patois in which they referred to each other as “Panther” and “Jaguar.” He wrote to her, “I shall roll you over and do what I like with you. I shall make you pant and bite back. Then I shall give you a shake and quiet you and go to sleep all over you and if I snore, I snore. Your Lord. The Jaguar.” But the two frolicking, dangerous cats they created often seemed poised to rip each other to shreds. For one thing, Wells was jealous. He admitted that all of his elaborately articulated theories about free love fell apart when faced with the realities of his obsession. He found even her mildest flirtations or friendships with men unbearable. He insisted that it was much worse for a man if a woman was unfaithful. And on her side, Rebecca was beginning to sense that one-fifth of Wells might not, after all, be enough. During one of his increasingly long absences Rebecca, then twenty-three years old, wrote, “My life is simply empty and I am possessed by a terrifying sense that I am growing old and that there are no more peacocks and sunsets in the world.”

As time went by, Rebecca was increasingly bewildered by Jane’s tenacity. She had only to open a copy of the literary review The Bookman to read an account of Wells’s idyllic family life at Easton, with its stylish, impromptu soccer parties, complete with rolling tea carts. It had become clear not just to Rebecca but to the reading public that Wells’s center of gravity had not shifted. And then, Rebecca also resented the eagerness with which Wells received Jane’s letters while he was with Rebecca. Even at the height of his absorption with Rebecca, he wrote to Jane every day. In fact, he once wrote to her from his perch with Rebecca: “I love you very warmly. You are, in so many things, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh and my making. I must keep you.” To the modern ear, the words “of my making” are jarring, but his attachment to his wife is clear. To Rebecca’s surprise, Wells continued to view Jane’s role as inviolable, her position in his life as non-negotiable. At one point, he wrote crankily to Rebecca of “this growing mania of yours about the injustices of my treatment of you in not murdering Jane.”

Wells and Rebecca were also beginning to have the kind of domestic quarrels that generally only overtake people who are living together or married. Wells found himself constantly aggravated by Rebecca’s dramatic problems with her servants. His temperament demanded a smoothly run house, but he didn’t want to have to think about the minutiae involved in running one. To an outside observer this seems like a fairly trivial issue, but for Wells it was not. He was enormously concerned with being properly looked after. After one of Rebecca’s many crises in managing her servants, he and Jane sent an older woman who had nursed one of their friends at Easton to look after the household. This Miss North installed herself in Rebecca’s living room, drinking endless cups of tea and complaining and clucking and criticizing, until Rebecca threw her out. Anthony later interpreted Miss North as a human message from Jane to Rebecca, an embodiment of her patronage and condescension. He believed that she had been placed there to exacerbate the situation and to make the contrast with Jane’s own well-ordered home more pronounced. Whether or not this was literally true, the fracas over Miss North was a sign of a certain irritability, a palpable, electric current of rivalry between the two households.

In January of 1922, Rebecca planned to meet Wells in Gibraltar for a two-month holiday in the south of Spain. Wells was on his way home from a tremendously successful lecture tour in America, where his fame had swelled to the point that people recognized him in the street. Rebecca couldn’t wait to see him. On the boat, she noted in her diary: “heart beating fast with love.” But Wells arrived in Gibraltar in a state of dangerous exhilaration and nervous exhaustion. After a few walks on the beach and a quick tour of the sites, he took to his bed. He had nosebleeds. He had a sore throat. Rebecca had to make her meals out of sandwiches and fruit because the sound of a knife or spoon scraping a plate irritated him. His apocalyptic attitude toward his minor ailments particularly irritated her because he had criticized her so often for her digestive problems, bronchial ailments, and frequent infections.

At one point, in the lobby of their hotel, he told Rebecca to fetch his coat from upstairs in front of other people, and she exploded. Why should she have to be his maid? Who did he think he was? She believed the adulation of audiences in the
States had gone to his head. She later claimed he was behaving so badly that several strangers, hotel owners, and chaplains offered to help her escape him and get home. Whatever the literal truth of this claim, Rebecca was undoubtedly feeling trapped. They toured the mountains and marigolds of Ronda, and the orange trees and cathedrals of Seville, but the clash of wills was now all-consuming. Wells wanted someone to care for him, and Rebecca wanted someone to fuss over her. He wanted nurturing; she wanted romantic excitement. The little difficulties of traveling gnawed at them, and toward the end of the trip, they argued bitterly about losing the way back to their hotel in Paris, and whose responsibility it was to guide the other. They both arrived home disgruntled, and after receiving her litany of his flaws by mail, Wells wrote to her: “The old male pusted (i.e. cat) has read her letter attentively and declines to plead guilty to an enlarged egotism. He objects to the Better Jaguar movement.” As the tension between them mounted, both writers turned their considerable critical powers on each other. There had always been an element of teasing in their relationship—one of the qualities they admired most in each other was their ability to push and prod at the weaknesses of a façade. But now they began to take each other’s character apart in cruelly effective ways. Wells attacked Rebecca for the relentless darkness of her perspective; Rebecca attacked Wells for being a “nagging schoolmaster.” They quarreled over Anthony. They quarreled over quarreling. And finally, Wells wrote rather cruelly to Rebecca, “For ten years I’ve shaped my life mainly to repair the carelessness of one moment. It’s no good and I am tired of it.” In the year that followed, they repeatedly broke things off and came back together. They found each other maddening, compelling, brilliant, difficult, attractive, and neither was able to break the dark, magnetic force field between them.

At around this time, when his relationship with Rebecca was at its most tenuous, Wells became involved with Hedwig Verana Gatternigg, a slight Austrian translator with, he thought, a face like the Mona Lisa. As usual, he found it hard to resist a pretty female fan and he did not, at first, pay much attention to her obvious instability. She quickly became deluded about the seriousness of the affair, and he backed off. He told her he wouldn’t see her and asked his servants not to admit her to any of his residences. She visited Rebecca and apparently tried to persuade her that Wells had seduced her. And then one June evening, Hedwig somehow slipped into Wells’s flat, virtually naked under a raincoat, and threatened to kill herself if he didn’t love her. He went into the hallway to call the hall porter, and as soon as he stepped out of the room she slashed her wrists and armpits. His rug and shirt were covered with blood, and he called to cancel his dinner with the secretary of state to India. She wasn’t seriously hurt, but the whole imbroglio ended up on the front pages of the world’s newspapers, where he could not immediately exercise his influence, like The New York Times: “Woman Tries Suicide in Flat of H. G.Wells.” The next morning Rebecca met Wells for a long talk in Kensington Gardens, where he seems to have given her a somewhat whitewashed version of the basic facts, which downplayed the extent of his involvement with Hedwig and placed Jane at the scene of the suicide attempt. On the advice of his lawyer, Wells and Rebecca later lunched together at the Ivy to publicly show their solidarity. Rebecca intended to be supportive. But the incident brought home to her the impossibility of the situation. Wells’s life was simultaneously too operatic and too inert: she was beginning to think about running off to America.

THE VALIANT LITTLE BEING

At some point in the delicate creation of their triangle, Wells, Jane, and Rebecca each believed they could overcome the petty jealousies that plague ordinary people. But tradition ended up exerting too great a pull on all of them. The classical model of husband and wife cast too great a shadow for them to resist. During the last years of their relationship, Rebecca’s yearnings for a fairly mundane respectability began to take over. Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan would call her “the personification of all of the vitality, the courage, and the independence of the modern woman.” But the daring, provocative Rebecca West, the same Rebecca West who penned an article called “I Regard Marriage with Fear and Horror,” wanted to be Mrs. H. G.Wells. And the hedonistic Wells couldn’t, in the end, contemplate leaving his wife. He had never seriously considered it. Jane offered him a security, an unconditional, unthreatening, unimpassioned love that he could not live without. The lure of his comfortable home nestled in its beautiful gardens, and his wife, who was an integral part of that home and that comfort, were too great for him to resist.

After her mother died in 1921, Rebecca slipped into the language of married couples when she wrote to Wells, “Thank you for being such a good husband—I will try to be a good wife to you.” The primal power of marriage began to exert more of a hold on her imagination as she found herself relying more and more deeply on him. In her later years, she wrote that she wished she could have pleased her mother by never meeting Wells, and marrying young. And when she eventually married a banker named Henry Andrews in 1929 she seemed almost to revel in the little tokens of surrendered identity, sending a note to Virginia Woolf signed “Cicily Andrews” and sending out Christmas cards with printed greetings from “Mr. and Mrs. Henry Andrews.” She went on to travel alone through Yugoslavia and write Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and publish the pioneering investigation The Meaning of Treason after the Second World War. She went on to be featured on the cover of Time as the world’s single most famous woman writer and was granted the honorary title Dame Rebecca West by the crown. But she also wrote a playful article for The New Yorker about a housewife’s trials during the Second World War, and continued to enjoy the feminine trappings of an old-fashioned marriage.

As for Wells, his domestic fantasies always seemed to circle back to his spacious Georgian house. It may seem strange that a house should be so important to an avowed socialist, but for Wells, Easton Glebe was a tangible symbol of everything he had accomplished. Unlike some of the more free-spirited writers and intellectuals he associated with, Wells’s home with its tennis courts and weekend visitors was as important an invention to him as his novels were. After a visit there Sir Sydney Waterlow, literary gadfly and highbrow gossip, wrote in his diary:

I feel that every day he chuckles with renewed energy over the fact that here he is, saved by his own energy out of the misery of the underworld. . . . The reflection that he has a good house with comfortable beds and pretty furniture and is able to drink as much burgundy as he likes, seems to give him constant thrill and delight.

What Waterlow was getting at, with fairly undisguised snobbery, was that Wells’s mother had been a housekeeper and lady’s maid, and his father had been a gardener. Wells harbored rather extreme, Dickensian memories of the house he grew up in, with its unspeakable odors, smashed cockroaches, and potato-heavy meals, and the even more Dickensian memory of being apprenticed off to a draper. His mother ended up leaving the family and living out her days in a small cottage in the shadow of Up Park, the great house she worked in, yearning toward its moneyed tranquility. And it may be because of this that Wells did not take bourgeois comfort and respectability entirely for granted: it may be that he invested more in his home, and the affluent security of his family, because of the poverty and insecurity of his childhood. Whatever outlandish arrangements he made in his private life, his house stood inviolate, with his wife and children inside. Easton was his dream of domestic security incarnate, a physical embodiment of his steadfastness and achievement. But even if Wells were inclined to leave Easton and Jane, would he have left them for Rebecca?

The truth is there was a competitive spark in his relationship with Rebecca, an inflammatory equality he found unnerving. He was enormously attracted to the New Woman, as his affairs with noted feminists like Rebecca West and Margaret Sanger attested to, but only up to a point. He admired but didn’t quite trust their vaunted independence. As he said to Rebecca: “Jane is a wife. But you could never be a wife. You want a wife yourself—you want sanity and care and courage and patience behind you just as much as I do.” There was, in his ostensibly strange relationship with Jane, something sweet and sustaining, at least for Wells.

Occasionally, Wells admitted that his arrangement with Jane was not perfect. He was willing to concede that she may have spent a few painful evenings alone. But he continued to see their originality as a couple as a feat of intellectual bravura: they had to think up a new way to live, like writers inventing a new style, or socialists penning a manifesto, or anthropologists conducting an experiment. How could two people who weren’t sexually compatible live together? They were no longer sleeping together, but the affection and cumulative history remained. As he put it, “two extremely dissimilar brains were working very intelligently at the peculiar life problem we had created for each other.” And in the end, he felt that their attachment was stronger and more enduring than the more mundane, constricted marriages he saw around him.

But was their union as balanced and happy as Wells would have us believe? Is it possible that Amy Catherine Wells was content being her husband’s business manager, and puttering around her garden with its blue cedars and apricot roses, scrawling entries in her gardening journal while he was off with a string of fascinating mistresses? When he was gone she sometimes went to the theater with friends. She loved her boys, and involved herself in their upbringing before they went off to boarding school. She curled up and read Remembrance of Things Past. But was that enough? It’s difficult to know. Wells wrote: “We two contrived in the absence of a real passionate sexual fixation, a binding net of fantasy and affection that proved in the end as effective as the very closest sexual sympathy could have been in keeping us together.” In the end, Wells’s version of events was so powerful, so charismatically set out, and disarmingly honest that it was taken up and echoed in chorus by nearly all of the observers of their relationship. Everyone from his own son to Julian Huxley to his servants would parrot his phrases in describing the marriage: Jane was like “Dresden china,” too “fragile” for his sexual demands, his affairs were “passades,” and their arrangement a “modus vivendi.” His account of his marriage was so enchanting in its apparent frankness, so lively in its quasi-scientific investigation of rakishness, that it would eclipse any other version of the relationship that might have emerged.

Mathilde Meyer, the Swiss governess of the two Wells boys, wrote a telling description of her first impression of Jane in her memoirs: “Who was Mrs.Wells? I wondered. I thought that there was a certain wistful melancholy about her. Was she a widow left with two sons?” And then there is a photograph of the family—the two little boys in sailor suits, kneeling on the floor with a train set, Wells hovering restlessly in the doorway, and his wife slumped in a rocking chair in an unmistakable posture of defeat—that hints at a different family portrait than the one Wells so painstakingly paints.

When Wells was off in France or Italy with one of his mistresses, he liked to picture Jane cheerfully tending the garden at home. He told himself that these wafting feminine charms of hers, like her “love of beauty,” would somehow provide an occupation for her. He saw the two of them united in a common purpose as they “defied the current wisdom and won.” But who exactly was winning? The closest he ever came to saying that Jane did not entirely embrace their arrangement is the following: “Though she helped and sustained me with her utmost strength and loyalty, I do not think she believed very strongly in my beliefs. She accepted them but she could have done without them.” This is not a very strong statement of discontent, and it was crucial to Wells’s self-image, to the meticulous, almost clinical investigation of his romantic life he conducted in public, that he had not caused her too much pain. It was crucial that he not see her suffering as a source of remorse, that he not be forced to examine his affairs too closely in relation to her. In fact he felt confident enough in his blamelessness to write cheerfully: “I never get the slightest regret out of any of my sexual irregularities. They were amusing and refreshing and I wish there had been more of them.”

In April of 1906, when he was lecturing in America, Jane offered a much darker assessment in one of her letters:

I am thinking continually of the disappointing mess of it, the high bright ambitions one begins with, the dismal concessions— the growth, like a clogging hard crust over one of home & furniture & a lot of clothes & books & gardens & a load dragging me down. If I set out to make a comfortable home for you. . . . I merely succeed in contriving a place where you are bored to death . . . Well, dear, I don’t think I ought to send you such a lekker, (sic) it’s only a mood you know.

That she would entertain a mood like this argues against the cheerful hostess and eternally happy gardener Wells presented to the world, along with the materialistic hausfrau others extrapolated. The letter continued: “I feel tonight so tired of playing wiv making the home comfy & as if there was only one dear rest place in the world, & that were in the arms & heart of you.” This small snippet of domestic dialogue expresses a more intense, physical longing, and a more consuming, anarchic sadness than Wells ever admits in his cool, sensible Jane.

There is also the fact that a few years after the war, before Virginia Woolf delivered the first version of her famous A Room of One’s Own as a lecture, Jane Wells took rooms of her own in Bloomsbury. She admired Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, and she wanted to write. H.G.— fairly remarkably for someone used to controlling everything— never saw those rooms. Jane wanted a hidden place of her own, away from him. Her desk in Bloomsbury seems to have been her great rebellion, her own retreat from the well oiled domesticity of their home at Easton. She kept the rooms until a year before she died.

Jane submitted the stories she was working on to various periodicals without her famous last name, and for the most part they were rejected. She was not a natural writer. Her sentences tended toward lifelessness and cliché. But unlike many aspiring writers, she had something to say. Her stories, which Wells calls “wistful” and “very charming” and “sweet,” are in fact filled with straightforward expressions of pain. They are populated with wives comfortably abandoned, tactfully ignored, “enshrined” in charming houses. “The Beautiful House,” which ran in Harper’s Magazine in March of 1912 under the name “Catherine Wells,” is about the ache of a woman watching her beloved with a lover. Reading its feverish pages, one can’t help imagining Jane’s anxiety with each of her husband’s new liaisons— would this one break up her marriage?—and then her relief when it settled into the same pattern as all of the rest. While from the outside their marriage seemed stable after so many years, it must have felt precarious to her each time one of these excitable young women drank a cup of tea in her house.

Another surprise of Catherine Wells’s fiction is its elaboration of sexual fantasy: in one of her stories, a handsome young photographer who comes to photograph a famous husband sets in motion an overwhelming longing in his wife, which is described with all the pulpy heat of a novelette. In fact, the honeyed, sexually charged prose makes one wonder if its author could be as dry and devoid of sexual energy as Wells would have us believe. He wrote that she was “immune” to the fevers of sexual desire, that she lacked the sensual strength and imagination to have a vivid sexual life. Was Wells deliberately playing up this aspect of her character? Was it one of those exaggerated characterizations that rise up between a married couple, agreed upon in some unspoken way out of expedience or tact? Jane seems to have allowed him the convenient fiction that she was sexless, or somehow too fragile and good to withstand his advances. But why? Could it be that she was afraid to admit to the sexual feelings she elaborates in these stories? The bestselling meditation on the sexual quandaries of British marriage, Married Love by Dr. Marie Carmichael Stopes, explained, “Most women would rather die than acknowledge that they do at times feel a physical yearning, indescribable, but as profound as the hunger for food.” One wonders if Jane Wells would have come across this book, as it was so much discussed, and sold so many copies. It seems likely that she would have. But Wells claimed that the “Catherine” who penned these stories was a stranger to him; and it seems unlikely that the Jane he lived with voiced any of her frustrations or fantasies directly to him.

Mrs.Wells’s story “Walled Garden” comes tantalizingly close to the details of her own situation. It describes a healthy, vivacious woman whose rather effete literary husband announces that he is going to rename her “Rosalind.” She says flirtatiously, “Baptize me then!” and imagines them splashing each other with water, but instead he kisses her solemnly on the forehead. Their wedding night contains a revelation: “Bray made love to her delicately and reverently, and Rosalind, after an interval of puzzled discovery, settled down to her married life with a feeling of faint disappointment which she could hardly justify.” Reading this, one wonders if the delicacy H. G. Wells regretted in their sexual life was coming from her or from him. Was the reverence she laments here a product of his view of her, rather than something innate in Jane’s character? Wells tells us that Jane loved to ski and climb mountains, which makes the physical “fragility” he often complains about a little hard to credit. (In fact, it was he whose “bad lungs and kidneys” made it impossible for him to join her in these exertions.) It seems possible that Wells, in his self-conscious rebellion against “the definite sexual codes of the time,” his deliberate throwing off of Victorian constraint, was himself prey to more than one Victorian idea: perhaps his innocent wife had to be treated delicately, and couldn’t fulfill his sexual demands, simply by virtue of being his wife. (His first wife, Isabel, coincidentally, also failed to manage his sexual needs, forcing him to look elsewhere. And one can’t help noting that his sexual disappointment within the institution of marriage is matched only by his uninhibited joy outside of it.) In Married Love, Dr. Marie Carmichael Stopes argued, “The idea that woman is lowered or ‘soiled’ by sexual intercourse is still deeply rooted in some strata of our society.” She most likely would not have intended by this one of the great libertine thinkers of the era, but this seems to be precisely how he felt. In spite of his advanced theories and risqué novels, Wells seemed to believe that the women he married were somehow above the baseness and physicality of the rest of the world.

Ironically, Wells may have found himself in a Victorian quandary of his own making and psychology: it wasn’t Jane who couldn’t keep up with him, but he who couldn’t allow her to.

In his autobiographical writings, Wells claimed that no other woman entered as deeply or intimately into his emotions. Of his ten-year interlude with Rebecca West, he concedes only that “I was always very near loving Rebecca, as she was often very near loving me.” And in his own mind, Jane remained his one true companion. When he heard that she was sick with cancer in the winter of 1927, while on a motoring holiday in France, he wrote to her immediately, “My dear, I love you much more than I have loved anyone else in the world and I am coming back to you to take care of you and to do all I can to make you happy.” Over the next few months, he immersed himself in work and tried to stay close to her, remaining at Easton for longer stretches than he was accustomed to, though he did manage to escape for a few weekends in France with his current mistress, Odette Kuehn. When Jane finally died that fall he was utterly lost, and wrote great paeans to the fineness of her character. He found it hard to believe that he couldn’t gather up huge armfuls of white and purple daisies and bring them to her.

That week, Rebecca wrote to a friend she was worried that now that Jane was dead, Wells would become tiresome to her. The two had maintained an intermittent and touchy friendship since their separation, and Wells had stayed in touch with their son, but Rebecca still bore traces of the decade-long affair, which Virginia Woolf called “the hoofmarks” of Wells. Twenty years later, when Rebecca heard Wells had died in the middle of the night, she would still muster a stream of violent, contradictory feeling: “He was a devil, he ruined my life, he starved me, he was an inexhaustible source of love and friendship to me for thirty-four years, we should never have met, I was the only person he cared to see to the end, I feel desolate because he has gone.”

In the days after Jane’s death, Wells crafted a formal oration for her funeral that was delivered by a professional actor. Jane emerged from this ornate oratory as such a saintly, patient figure, such a pale Victorian angel, that there was almost no place for authentic human grief. George Bernard Shaw’s wife, Charlotte, who was a close friend of Jane’s, complained: “He drowned us in a sea of misery and as we were gasping began a panegyric of Jane which made her appear as a delicate, flowerlike gentle being surrounding itself with beauty, and philanthropy, and love. Now Jane was one of the strongest characters I ever met.” Wells was beginning to write their relationship, as he would one of his novels, and in the process Jane’s character was abstracted into a fluttering female archetype. One wonders how aware he was of the fiction he was crafting. In the clever, comic “auto-obituary” he wrote for himself in 1943, the same obituary in which he referred to himself as “one of the most prolific literary hacks of his era,” he said, rather tellingly: “When he dealt with passion he was apt to write insincerely.” The gentle, tolerant femininity of his Jane strained credulity. And her humorless perfection, so carefully established and prettily described, did not ring true to those who knew her best. Arnold Bennett, an intimate of both Wellses, who was close enough to Jane to begin his letters to her “My Sweet
Jane,” also took exception to the strong element of mythmaking in Wells’s elegy. That evening, he commented dryly in his journals: “The oration was either not well done, or too well done.”

The October day was clear and sunny. The chapel opened onto the garden with its brilliant flowers, and several mourners had the unsettling impression that Jane might walk in at any moment, with her red gardening shears and basket dangling over her arm. Charlotte Shaw wrote, “There came a place where the address said, ‘She never resented a slight; she never gave voice to a harsh judgment.’ At that point the audience, all more or less acquainted with many details of H.G.’s private life, thrilled, like corn under a wet north-wind, and H.G.—H.G. positively howled.”

Accompanied by his sons, Wells followed the coffin into the crematorium. He saw the white-gold flames lick the sides of the coffin. Did he suddenly see his finely wrought arrangement with Jane in a different light? Did he feel a great untruth surge behind his words “she bore no resentment”? Did he feel the pain he knew he had caused her, and see her words, in her girlish, curly writing: “I feel tonight so tired wiv making the home comfy”? One cannot know the answer, of course, but he bowed to his own failures when he wrote: “The best and sweetest of her is known only to one or two of us, subtle and secret; it can never be told.”

Excerpted from UNCOMMON ARRANGEMENTS © Copyright 2008 by Katie Roiphe. Reprinted with permission by The Dial Press. All rights reserved.

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