The War of the Worlds (Penguin Classics) Read online

  Moreover, another nasty trait of the alien invaders, to be revealed later in the book, has perhaps been developed from Darwin’s statement in The Origin of Species. In the chapter entitled ‘The Struggle for Existence’ Darwin states, ‘The action of climate seems at first sight to be quite independent of the struggle for existence; but in so far as climate chiefly acts in reducing food, it brings on the most severe struggle between the individuals . . . which subsist on the same kind of food.’ Undoubtedly, the colder climate of the Red Planet would intensify this struggle, as Wells understood.

  We can see that The War of the Worlds is a compendium of many nineteenth-century concerns. Of course it is more than that, for those concerns are woven into an extraordinary and fascinating tale. It is the foundation stone for all alien invasion stories, whether in print or in the cinema. Following Wells’s example, many other stories were to come where the world, or England at least, is laid waste. Among these are Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt, John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, John Christopher’s The Death of Grass, J. G. Ballard’s The Wind from Nowhere, Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence and my own Greybeard. The danger and interest in writing of such things is that, in defying ‘common sense’, one does not fall into common idiocy. Wells is adroit in such matters.

  But of this sub-genre of catastrophe, it is the unsympathetic Martians who wear the laurel crown.

  Scientific romances and science fiction are generally considered to be remote from the author’s experience. That can never be the case; what we are fills the fictions we tell, often without our realizing it. What lurks as fugitive in the mind comes out clearly on paper. As Mary Shelley says in her introduction to Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), ‘Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void, but out of chaos; the materials must in the first place be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.’ This was true in Wells’s case; he had an ample stock of dark, shapeless substances.

  We see this clearly in two instances. When the narrator is trapped with the curate in a ruined house, we find theirs is a filthy semi-subterranean entrapment. They are confined to the scullery of the half-destroyed building. We have here, unmistakably, a reconstruction of the scullery of Atlas House in which, when Bertie Wells was a lad, his mother slaved away years of her life. The squalor and discomfort of that room remained with Wells. Wells, like Orwell after him, knew that dirt has political significance. We find that scullery described again in the novel In the Days of the Comet, in Section III, Chapter 4 – described with sorrow.

  He depicts it there in part as ‘a damp, unsavoury, mainly subterranean region . . . rendered more than typically dirty in our case by the fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness, opened, and diffused small crunchable particles about the uneven brick floor.’ There his mother works, ‘a soul of unselfishness’. ‘And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and watch in order that I may desert her.’

  This sad place is employed in The War of the Worlds as a symbol, for kitchens are places where things are prepared for eating. As the curate discovers.

  The Martians have invaded Earth for a good meal. The narrator/storyteller sits down to a good meal before getting into his tale. Wells had an obsession with food – with both eating and being eaten. You can, to adapt an old saying, take the man out of the kitchen but you cannot take the kitchen out of the man. Peter Kemp wrote an entire book about Wells’s appetites, entitled, H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape. People in The War of the Worlds are depicted as being part of the food chain. The inhabitants of Woking flee ‘as blindly as a flock of sheep’ from the Martian fire, as from a cooking pot!

  The second instance in which Wells’s early experience informs his thinking shines an interesting light on his attitude towards society. Wells the socialist followed a good radical pedigree. Like William Godwin, he regarded humanity as perfectible; like Percy Bysshe Shelley he believed in Free Love. Yet this socialist was never entirely on the side of his fellow men. He had little belief in the immutability of the social order. The artilleryman, an unpleasant character, looks forward to the overturn of society. ‘“There won’t be any more blessed concerts for a million years or so,”’ he says; ‘“there won’t be any Royal Academy of Arts, and no nice little feeds at restaurants.”’

  Wells in his youth had experienced a remarkable example of social change which came about peacefully. His mother, Sarah Wells, left his father and went to work as housekeeper at Uppark, ‘the big house’ in Sussex. Lady Fetherstonehaugh was the owner of Uppark. She had started life as a milkmaid in the grounds, under the rather apt name of Mary Ann Bullock. The lord of the manor had taken a fancy to Mary Bullock; he packed her off to Paris to be educated and refined, and then married her. After his death, Lady Fetherstonehaugh ruled Uppark in solitary splendour. She was a striking instance of the social mobility which Wells himself achieved.

  Despite frequent illness, Wells was a high-spirited chap. At the least, he put on high spirits. His letters to his mother and his friends are adorned with comic little sketches – the ‘picshuas’, as he calls them. But as to the intellectual aspect of the culture, there was much to depress a thinking Victorian. Lord Kelvin had pronounced that the lump of rock on which everyone lived would last for only another twenty million years. The death of the Sun, in the days before nuclear activity was understood, was also thought to be comparatively and depressingly close.

  These were matters dramatized in Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895, three years before The War of the Worlds.

  Patrick Parrinder, a great Wells critic, has resolved the mystery surrounding the year 802,701 prominent in the former book. ‘What is missing from The Time Machine is the openly prophetic narrative rhetoric exemplified in The War of the Worlds, where . . . we are given, without benefit of a time machine, an eye witness narrative of events occurring “early in the twentieth century” . . .’

  It had once been the habit of many English novelists to open their novel with the words, ‘It was in the winter of the year 18—. . .’, or ‘Early in the reign of King William IV . . .’ , these dates possibly signifying a time when the author was young; things were assumed not greatly to have changed since that date. However, as the nineteenth century progressed, things were greatly changing. Gradually novels crept into the present. Wells, in his impatience, starts his novel in – leaps into – the future.

  Could this strange idea of setting novels in future time be a contributory factor for the way in which such novels are ruled out of court by a literary elite? Surely it is not only ‘the masses’ who think of the future as a proper dwelling-place for the imagination . . . In any case, Wells enjoyed a splendid creativity for the seven years from 1895–1901. The best of his science fiction (though not of his ordinary social fiction) was written then, and most of the stories are of social dissolution, of uncomfortable new worlds opening up, old worlds being bludgeoned down to their knees.

  There is an argument which says that much of this mood is attributable to fin de siècle angst; I would rather attribute it, as Wells himself did, to a new way of thinking. In his brilliant discourse, ‘The Discovery of the Future’, delivered to the Royal Institution in 1902, he distinguishes between two divergent mental attitudes. He opens his speech by saying he wishes to ‘contrast and separate two divergent types of mind, types which are to be distinguished chiefly by their attitude towards time’.

  The predominant type scarcely thinks of the future. A much less abundant but more modern type ‘thinks constantly and by preference of things to come, and of present things mainly in relation to the results that must arise from them’. Wells sees this type of person as ‘perpetually attacking and altering the established order of things’.

  The pungent medicine so artfully infused throughout The War of the Worlds is designed to conscript more minds into the futurist category.

  An o
lder mistaken point of view was expressed by C. K. Shorter in 1897: ‘The imagination is everything, the science is nothing; but the end of the century, which shares Mr Wells’s smattering of South Kensington, prefers the two together; and I sympathise with the end of the century.’

  Be that as it may, Wells’s vivid imagination won the day. His success was assured, his poverty left behind. The destruction of a world that has become so dingy is perhaps Wells’s way of living down the ugly world, the sordid scullery, from which he had escaped. He remains troubled nevertheless. His friend Arnold Bennett praises Wells for writing for ‘the intelligent masses’, in the days when intellectuals were against newspapers, as later they were against the cinema and then television and, in short, anything popular.

  Such problems are well aired in John Carey’s book, The Intellectuals and the Masses. He puts Wells’s time and Wells’s problems into context by quoting briefly from Wells’s Marriage (1912), where Trafford speaks of a dyspeptic socialist in these terms:

  It seemed to him that in meeting Dowd he was meeting all that vast new England outside the range of ruling-class dreams, that multitudinous greater England, cheaply treated, rather out of health, angry, energetic, and now becoming intelligent and critical; that England which organised industrialism has created.

  Wells’s problem was that he liked to consort with the great; yet he could but remain an Outsider, a steppenwolf, forever discontented. Carey well understands Wells’s dilemma – as with today’s science fiction writers, in general ring-fenced away from ‘Literature’.

  In 1902, Wells published his book of essays, Anticipations. He was listened to increasingly as a prophetic voice. He began to talk about the real world – as he saw it – rather than create more ingenious fantasies. The visionary novel In the Days of the Comet was published in 1906, and has never received the attention it deserves. It contains a harsh indictment of the ugliness of the world in which Wells grew up.

  Wells, like Charles Dickens before him, became popular and successful in a way no contemporary writer could be, no Salman Rushdie, no Jeffrey Archer. He flew to Moscow to talk to Lenin and Gorki, he flew to Washington to talk to Roosevelt. Yet he was always an astringent writer, as in the present novel. Nowadays, astringency is out of fashion in popular literature, more’s the pity.

  How easily the end of The War of the Worlds could have been a happy one, full of rejoicing at the defeat of an alien enemy. Instead, the chapter preceding the Epilogue is called ‘Wreckage’. London seems to have become a city of tramps. Four weeks have gone by since the first cylinders landed. Mankind’s view of a human future has been modified by the Martians: ‘To them, and not to us, perhaps, is the future ordained.’

  The comment is justified. Humans are not victors but survivors. In comparison with the Martians, humans are a lesser breed. Unpleasant though the Martians are, they are intellectually our superiors. Unlike the Morlocks in The Time Machine or the Selenites in The First Men in the Moon, both of which groups live subterranean lives, the Martians come from ‘above’, the realm of the super-ego.

  In fact, the novel fizzes with metaphors which signify mankind’s low estate. As we see, the very first paragraph of the book shows mankind and their affairs being studied much as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the creatures swarming in a drop of water.

  We soon learn that the Martians have ‘brightened their intellects, enlarged their powers and hardened their hearts’. In consequence, we who inhabit the Earth ‘must be to them at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us’.

  When it comes to the exodus from London, Wells’s fear of the fragility of civilization and his dislike of the masses is again in evidence:

  All the railway lines north of the Thames [were choked], and the South-Eastern people at Cannon Street had been warned by midnight on Sunday, and trains were being filled. People were fighting savagely for standing-room in the carriages even at two o’clock. By three, people were being trampled and crushed even in Bishopsgate Street, a couple of hundred yards or more from Liverpool Street station; revolvers were fired, people stabbed, and the policemen who had been sent to direct the traffic, exhausted and infuriated, were breaking the heads of the people they were called out to protect.

  Undeniably, Wells had himself brightened his intellect, enlarged his powers and hardened his heart. Yet we know there is another Wells, a playful man who invented brilliant games for boys (I played his ‘Little Wars’), who spoke up for women’s rights, who led a campaign in 1924 to save the whales. He was generous to other writers, he consorted with many women – who in general remained ever after friendly towards him. He enjoyed good company, good wine. He was a serious man, yet he was fun. The intelligentsia, lacking claret and clarity, have never taken to Wells as a literary force.

  I agree with the other members of the H. G. Wells Society in admiring, even loving, Wells. His son Anthony West says of Wells: ‘Beyond that close circle of people who knew him, there was the larger army whose hearts were armed by the abundant spirit and courage which emanate from his writings and which make it easy to miss the intensity of his internal struggle with his demon.’

  Wells said of himself, ‘I fluctuate, I admit, between at the best a cautious and qualified optimism and my persuasion of swiftly advancing, irretrievable disaster.’ We find him still so readable because we know in our hearts that the global disaster is still in progress.

  If there is a conflict between his temperament as a man and as a writer – a conflict evident in many authors – we can only say that seated at a typewriter (how Wells would have relished the computer!) we know for a certainty that we have, if not the best life, then our very best choice of life for ourselves. And what we pour out, alone in the room, is much like sessions of psychoanalysis, as we produce things that astonish even ourselves.

  A similar case is that of Emile Zola, of whom his biographer, F. W. J. Hemmings says that when Zola was writing, ‘he passed into a totally different state of being: private terrors, dreams of ecstatic sensual delight, abominable visions of nightmarish intensity, took temporary possession of him.’

  It is not difficult to conjecture that the destruction of Woking released similar demons and energies in Wells.

  That ghastly optimist, the artilleryman, appears again, to announce that he and his kind will survive. He will live in London’s drains and ‘degenerate into a sort of big, savage rat’. The passages regarding the artilleryman were inserted by Wells after the serialization of his story. Perhaps he wished to have a mouthpiece who so starkly pronounced on the death of civilization; or, as some critics have suggested, Wells sympathized with this extremism. He also saw the world as too full of people, particularly those, as the artilleryman states, who are ‘useless and cumbersome and mischievous’.

  Most of those who flee the city meet with no compassion from Wells; they are likened to dodos, sheep, monkeys and rats. People are fighting, being trampled, crushed, shot and stabbed, or ploughed under by railway engines.

  The social body has liquefied, like liver under an attack of cancer. Sickness goes with the disorganization. Wells had a lifelong hatred of illness and disorganization. ‘Martian sanitary science,’ we are told, ‘eliminated illness ages ago. A hundred diseases, all the contagions and fevers of human life, consumption, cancers, tumours and such morbidities, never enter the scheme of their life.’

  Here one recalls Joseph Conrad’s old jibe at Wells: ‘You don’t care for humanity but think they are to be improved!’

  One must admit that there is certainly room for improvement. And we remain grateful to H. G. Wells for pointing the matter out in this brilliant novel, so cogently, so memorably, so unsympathetically.

  Brian Aldiss

  Further Reading

  The most vivid and memorable account of Wells’s life and times is his own Experiment in Autobiography (2 vols., London: Gollancz and Cresset Press, 1934). It has been reprinted several times. A ‘postscript’ containing the previously suppr
essed narrative of his sexual liaisons was published as H. G. Wells in Love, edited by his son G. P. Wells (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). His more recent biographers draw on this material, as well as on the large body of letters and personal papers archived at the University of Illinois and elsewhere. The fullest and most scholarly biographies are The Time Traveller by Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie (2nd edn, London: Hogarth Press, 1987) and H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal by David C. Smith (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986). Smith has also edited a generous selection of Wells’s Correspondence (4 vols, London: Pickering & Chatto, 1998). Another highly readable, if controversial and idiosyncratic, biography is H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life (London: Hutchinson, 1984) by Wells’s son Anthony West. Michael Foot’s H. G.: The History of Mr Wells (London and New York: Doubleday, 1995) is enlivened by its author’s personal knowledge of Wells and his circle.

  Two illuminating general interpretations of Wells and his writings are Michael Draper’s H. G. Wells (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987) and Brian Murray’s H. G. Wells (New York: Continuum, 1990). Both are introductory in scope, but Draper’s approach is critical and philosophical, while Murray packs a remarkable amount of biographical and historical detail into a short space. John Hammond’s An H. G. Wells Companion (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) and H. G. Wells (Harlow and London: Longman, 2001) combine criticism with useful contextual material. H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, edited by Patrick Parrinder (London: Routledge, 1972), is a collection of reviews and essays of Wells published during his lifetime. A number of specialized critical and scholarly studies of Wells concentrate on his scientific romances. These include Bernard Bergonzi’s pioneering study of The Early H. G. Wells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961); John Huntington, The Logic of Fantasy: H. G. Wells and Science Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Patrick Parrinder, Shadows of the Future: H. G. Wells, Science Fiction and Prophecy (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995). Peter Kemp’s H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) offers a lively and, at times, lurid tracing of Wells’s ‘biological themes and imaginative obsessions’, while Roslynn D. Haynes’s H. G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1980) surveys his use of scientific ideas. W. Warren Wagar, H. G. Wells and the World State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) and John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) are studies of his political thought and his schemes for world government. John S. Partington has also edited The Wellsian (The Netherlands: Equilibris, 2003), a selection of essays from the H. G. Wells Society’s annual critical journal of the same name. The American branch of the Wells Society maintains a highly informative website at http://hgwellsusa.50megs.com