The Centenary of 'The World of William Clissold' by H.G. Wells: A Guest Post by John Howard

H.G. Wells’ novel The World of William Clissold opens with precision set in time: ‘Yesterday I was fifty-nine, and in a year I shall be sixty.’ First published one hundred years ago, appearing in three volumes over three months from August 1926, both author and his protagonist-author celebrated their sixtieth birthdays that year. It was an appropriate time for Wells to make his most determined – and certainly longest – attempt through fiction to create and portray – to embrace – a world.

During his long career Wells was many things – and certainly a ‘novelist of ideas’. Colin Wilson – who was another – discussed some of them in the long preface to his novel Man Without a Shadow (1963). He made the case that Wells was the ‘finest – and most underestimated’ novelist of ideas. This was because of the ‘characteristic that distinguished all his later work: a desire to write with urgency about real problems – the problems he felt at the time of writing – as well as telling a story. Sometimes the result was superb […] Sometimes it was indifferent […] In The World of William Clissold he tries to make the novel as big as life, and fails.’ This was not due to Wells’ want of ambition or willingness to experiment: ‘As a novelist, Wells lacked what [Henry] James possessed – the desire to give his books reality, even if it took a thousand fine brush strokes. He can write well only about his own life and experiences, but not about other people’s. Still, what he wanted to do to the novel was in no way as old-fashioned as the followers of Joyce and Eliot pretended.’

Wells felt the need to justify ‘what he wanted to do to the novel’. In ‘A Note Before the Title Page’ (five pages in my edition) he asserted: ‘Novels with prefaces are like pictures with inscriptions below them; there is a confession that something was left over and had to be expressed by an addendum. This book […] is claimed to be a complete dress-novel, that and nothing more. William Clissold is a fictitious character, and his thoughts and ideas throughout are the thoughts and ideas natural to his mental and social type. He is (to the best of the author’s ability) his own self and not his author’s self, in his emotional reactions, in his hard wilfulness, in his faith, in his political ideas, in his judgements. He is a specimen of modern liberalism, using liberalism in its broadest sense. He is a study of a modern type seeking modes of self-realisation. […] If you are the sort of person who will not accept it as a novel, then please leave it alone. You are not getting sly peeps at something more than the reality of art, and your attempts to squint through will only make you squint very unbecomingly.’

When we get there, squinting or not, it is William Clissold who must justify himself: ‘It is not exactly an autobiography I want to write, and not exactly a book of confessions. […] I should say that a description of my world best expresses what I have in view; my world and my will. I want it to be a picture of everything as it is reflected in my brain. I want it to be a comprehensive picture.’ Clissold describes how he sees the world and human life, including the loss of his religious faith. He goes on to recount his early life and that of his brother Richard (usually referred to as Dickon). Dickon marries, raises a family and becomes successful in advertising, and is awarded a knighthood. William puts his scientific training to good use as a researcher and inventor, so that his employers ‘came to realise that they had to pay fairly for the science and initiative I could give them’. He runs a profitable subsidiary, the Clissold Mineral Paint Company. Unlike his brother’s, Clissold’s love-life is intense and fraught. But after a failed marriage and several affairs, he meets Clementina. Their relationship, while not conventional, is loving and provides the stability both desire.

Much space in the later part of the novel is devoted to the ‘Open Conspiracy’. (Wells went on to publish an entire book on his scheme, The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution, in 1928.) Clissold describes it as the belief that humanity is on the brink of ‘complete metamorphosis’ and those who are able perceive it must work to ensure it succeeds. Otherwise it could only proceed ‘against such increasing resistances that it may even fail to achieve itself, and end in the failure and death of the species.’ Clissold declares that ‘we can build up the monetary and economic world republic in full daylight under the noses of those who represent the old system. For the most part I believe that to understand us will be to be with us… It is not a project to overthrow existing governments by insurrectionary attacks, but to supersede them by disregard.’

Clissold also writes about his personal plans – but his intentions are to be unrealised. An epilogue by Dickon explains that his brother and Clementina were killed in a car accident, and his work left unfinished. Dickon closes the book with the Greek phrase: ‘Panta rhei [Everything flows]. He has passed. These words, and they are wonderful words and come like a refrain throughout his book, shall be put as his sole epitaph upon his grave.’

Having informed the reader about his intentions with an introductory note, Wells also gave a hint through the subtitle: ‘A Novel at a New Angle’. As Adam Roberts stated in H.G. Wells: A Literary Life (2019): the ‘“new angle” is more than simply the fitting together of equal parts narrative and disquisition to form one complete novel. It’s also that this novel includes among its fictional characters a great many real 1920s people, most of them friends of Wells’s… It is the admixture of the two modes, one fictional and one non-fictional, that had characterised Wells’s entire career, here worked more closely than ever before into a lamination.’

Wells bonded his layers so well and firmly that they cannot easily be prised apart – but had Colin Wilson still been right to believe that The World of William Clissold failed in its objective? Perhaps it could never have been otherwise. Yet: ‘Where William Clissold is good, it is […] electric with feeling, with personal intensity.’ That is where Wells truly succeeded – and still does. Wells made Clissold share the gifts he had. Everything flows. If Wells had been the one to die in 1926, his book completed by another hand, its last words would have still been accurate.

(John Howard)

Image: H.G. Wells by Walter Stoneman 1925

 © National Portrait Gallery, London

The Centenary of Ronald Firbank's 'Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli': A Guest Post by John Howard

Ronald Firbank’s biographer Miriam Benkovitz declared that ‘No one in the history of English letters has been more dedicated to the literary vocation than Ronald Firbank. Until his ninth novel was published in 1924, he had got back not “one farthing piece” for all his work, and even then he received less than a thousand dollars’ (Ronald Firbank, 1969). Benkovitz did not speculate on the earnings, if any, that would have accrued to Firbank for his tenth novel, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, which was first published one hundred years ago in July 1926. Benkovitz had reached the final page of her biography. Time and space had run out, for Firbank had died, aged forty, six weeks before. This centenary of an appearance is also that of a departure.

Of anecdotes concerning the eccentricities of Arthur Annesley Ronald Firbank there seems no end. Benkovitz described how Firbank would saunter through London’s streets, ‘skirting Covent Garden to void the “massacre of flowers” and holding a handkerchief before his eyes when he passed a butcher’s shop’. In Charing Cross Road he would examine the books in the bins in front of the shops. H would frequently visit Cyril Beaumont’s bookshop and ask: “Have you anything in my line today; you know, something vague, something dreamy, something restful?” Did Firbank perhaps have his own novels in mind? The description could fit – but it is far from entirely accurate. Benkovitz considered Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli to be, in its way, ‘a masterpiece of morality and technique’. While it carried Firbank’s ‘deepest and most mature convictions, it is in fact a wholly imaginative creation inspired by the “rose coloured palace” of the Archbishop of Seville and the “giddy flight” of the “Giralda-tower”. She also wondered whether in his ‘compulsion to seem wicked, a feeling which recurred throughout his life, might not Firbank have presented in Pirelli a perverse apotheosis of himself and then, as he was almost ready to do with his own artificial temperament, stripped the Cardinal of his gaudy trappings?’

In the great cathedral of the Andalucian city of Clemenza, Cardinal Archbishop Don Alvaro Pirelli conducts a baptism – of the Duquesa DunEden’s new pet, a police-dog puppy called Crack. Pirelli’s latest eccentricity has not gone unnoticed – or unreported. There have been many previous ‘frolics’ and the ‘consequences of cutting too dashing a figure’. Perhaps the Pope will be asked to decide the fate of the figure responsible for the ‘scandals of Clemenza’… In the vast cathedral sacristy the Secretary of the Chapter, Don Moscosco, ‘a burly little man, a sound judge of women and bulls’, sits at his bureau and holds court ‘with tactful courtesy, at the disposal of anyone soliciting information as to “vacant dates,” or “hours available,” for some impromptu function.’ The sacristy serves as the place where information – gossip – is received and exchanged amid the backbiting.

In Rome Pope Tertius II, ‘out-of-doorish, as Neapolitans usually are’ strolls in his garden, contemplating the possibility of having to condemn or even unfrock Pirelli: ‘a snarl, a growl, a bark, a yelp, coming from the font, would be quite enough…’ In the ‘decaying monastery of the Desierto’ Pirelli is on retreat, ‘idly considering his Defence. “Apologia, no; merely a defence”’. Chicklet, a favoured young acolyte from the cathedral, is with him ‘serving both at Mass and table’. Lingering after dinner, Pirelli imagines that ‘the great Theresa herself would flit in from the garden […] seeking, it was supposed, a lost sheet of the manuscript of her Way of Perfection.’ After drinking bumper after bumper of wine he begs her to teach him (once again?) that Way.

In his palace Pirelli prepares to leave for Rome. While packing he muses on the punishment he has given Chicklet for chasing mice in the cathedral: ‘It must have been love that made me do it.’ The Cardinal, ‘his sensitiveness hurt by the lad’s disdain and frivolity’ had locked him into the cathedral in the dark, with the mice. Deciding to relax his punishment, Pirelli goes to release the boy. Their verbal fencing becomes a game, accompanying pursuit and evasion. No innocent, Chicklet keeps out of reach until dawn is near, when he escapes from the church. The chase ended and now alone, ‘dispossessed of everything but his fabulous mitre, the Primate was nude and elementary now as Adam himself’. Pirelli collapses before a painting of Christ’s crucifixion. Unknown to him, he had been observed by Madame Poco, his faithful housekeeper: ‘It looked as though his Eminence was far beyond Rome already.’ She coils her chaplet about him: ‘“It’s wonderful what us bits of women do with a string of beads, but they don’t go far with a gentleman”’.

Firbank was a cardinal of camp and snobbery whose ‘wholly imaginative creation’ in Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli crafted a succession of set pieces or sketches, highly pictorial and brightly coloured, into a slim novel. Each scene is enacted within what is, effectively, a stage set where everything is bathed in heat, sunshine, or moonlight. All are packed with sensual detail, snatched incident, and dialogue at a slant. Even if there is ‘no story’ there are happenings – a gradual progression. Events, one thing after another hazily and partly revealed, lead to the surely inevitable conclusion. The narrative flows, switching scenes and characters as a dream does. In terms of dream it holds together and coheres – but purely on its own terms. To expect anything else in a Firbank novel is to look in the wrong direction.

Perhaps part of the explanation lies in the way Firbank wrote. Often on the move, he kept notebooks which he filled with single words, odd phrases and sentences, and cartoonish drawings. He would then select, assemble, and expand these into a string of pearl-like episodes – his new book. Firbank conceived Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli while staying in Seville, made notes in Lisbon, and wrote it in Rome. During that time his beloved mother died, and he suffered a ‘psychic and physical collapse’ – yet he continued to write. Ronald Firbank proved that nothing could prevent him from remaining true to his literary vocation. At the end there was a man alone, naked before death and his God – and a brutally funny novel.

(John Howard)