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I remember him. He died during a heatwave, on 30 July 1975, which happened to be the day I finished writing The Malacia Tapestry. It fell to my wife and me to find a burial place for Jim in Oxford. His last wish was to be buried in an Oxford college—he who was the graduate of an American college. It proved no longer possible to be buried in a college, unless one was perhaps a principal: the sacred but limited ground is choked with bones of earlier scholars.
‘They lie three deep’, one sexton reported to me, leaning on his divining rod.
We found Jim a resting place finally, in the overgrown St Cross cemetery. He lies within sight of the walls of Magdalen, not too far from where Maurice Bowra is buried, and another story-teller, Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows. I often pass the cemetery when going through Oxford, and think of my old friend, whose imagination travelled beyond the limits of our universe. R.I.P.
CULTURE (#ulink_c6461bb9-31c8-5a1d-bb8a-2e337bd53b77)
Is it Worth Losing Your Balls For? (#ulink_7e208bf9-b329-5166-a06b-73f38ee957e9)
The learned papers on the SF of Kingsley Amis—even with titles like Revisionary Right-Wing Hermeneutics—have been few. I cannot compete in that area. However, some reflections might be set down with a view to reminding readers of an author, remarkable in his own right, who also took a great and amiable interest in SF over a number of years. During that period he produced two novels which should be better known to all those seriously interested in SF.
Since New Maps of Hell was published as long ago as 1960, we perhaps need reminding how widely influential it was. It was witty and knowledgeable, cocking a snook at the establishment, and served to silence many ill-informed critics. Indeed, it contributed to the slow upward climb (‘if that’s what it is’, I hear some say) of SF into respectability.
With that respectability, Amis and his friend Robert Conquest were soon to quarrel. Their argument was that SF was best within narrow compass under John W. Campbell’s jurisdiction, that the so called avante-garde experiments merely replayed much work of a similar disastrous kind done in the 1920s, and that respectability inevitably meant forsaking a previously unembarrassed muse.
On another front, Amis was conducting a war against educationalists, at a time when educational establishments were opening their doors to more students—and, Amis argued, thereby diluting quality. His slogan was, ‘More means less’.
In view of what has been happening since, we can see that if this slogan is applied to the SF field, Amis is probably right. Certainly the SF short story—the jewel in the crown of 1940s and 1950s SF—has suffered of late, when it is half-way financially profitable to write SF. (Once upon a time, so the legend goes, you wrote because … well, because it was SF, not because it paid.)
However, whatever Amis’s doubts, he wrote a few SF stories, ‘Something Strange’ being published in The Spectator in 1960, and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme. It bears a family resemblance to my story ‘Outside’. He also edited the Spectrum anthologies with Robert Conquest, and reviewed SF for many years in The Observer—a post later taken over less sympathetically by his son, Martin Amis.
I had an early suspicion regarding Amis’s reading tastes. After the still explosively funny Lucky Jim he wrote That Uncertain Feeling (1955). Both novels were filmed, the latter as Only Two can Play, with Peter Sellers as Lewis, the awful Welsh librarian. (Amis himself appears in the film, hopping nimbly off a double decker bus.)
In That Uncertain Feeling, Amis came out of the closet. Whatever faults Lewis may have, in the way of boozing and chasing skirt, he is redeemed by his addiction to Astounding Science Fiction. Astounding gets two mentions in Chapter Five and one in Chapter Eight. It was about this time that Amis and I first met, to discover how well-versed we were in The Worlds of Nul-A.
Amis’s two SF novels are elegant exercises in their particular subgenres. Russian Hide-and-Seek (1980) is cautionary: ‘If this goes on …’ The Alteration (1976) is an impeccable alternative world.
Incidentally, we observe that when a noted humorist like Amis turns to SF, he becomes rather serious. The Alteration, indeed, centres round the topic of whether a young chorister, Hubert Anvil, should have his testicles removed. The scene is an England which has never renounced Catholicism.
At the end of the drama, contemplating its effects, the American Ambassador to Britain says, ‘When I think of the immensity of the chance …’ Ambassador van den Haag looks down in pity at Hubert Anvil in his hospital bed. He is unable to finish his sentence. Words have failed him.
But that unfinished sentence contains, in a way, the whole substance of the story. Are we to believe that what happens to Hubert is simply malign chance—or could it be the action of a malign God? Accident? Design? Are we reading in The Alteration a further instalment of Kingsley Amis’s depiction of the triumph of the forces of evil, continued from The Anti-Death League and The Green Man? There’s no reason to imagine otherwise.
The Alteration ranks in the succession of Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). Amis’s novel also has something in common with Harry Harrison’s Tunnel Through the Deeps (1972); both novels depict the United States in globally subsidiary roles. Amis’s New England is Dutch-dominated and rather full of ‘Red Indians’, while Harrison’s America remains a British colony, in which George Washington ranks as a traitor. Harrison receives honourable mention in Amis’s novel: ‘the great Harrison’ is the engineer who has built the railway line between Coverley and Rome, on which Hubert travels in the Eternal City Rapid.
Both Amis’s and Harrison’s novels feature early industrial forms of transport. Against Harrison’s coal-powered airplanes, Amis offers giant dirigibles, the ‘Edgar Allan Poe’ being over one thousand feet long, as the only form of aerial transport. But the jovial tone of Harrison’s alternative world is a far cry from Amis’s grim presentiment of what in New Maps of Hell he dubs a ‘counterfeit world’.
Amis’s major alteration is to display a religion-ruled present very different from what passes as the real one. The England in which his story is set is dominated by the Vatican in Rome. The power of the Catholic Church stretches round the world, as far as Hanoi and Nagasaki. Only the Republic of New England is Protestant. It is to New England that Shakespeare has fled—to die in exile. The main enemy of Christendom is the Ottoman Empire; and the Turks get as far as entering Brussels.
Critics have argued about whether the novel is an attack on Catholicism, or on religion in general or, more generally, on a superpower mentality (rather a safe wicket, you might say, in the 1970s). The Church stands in here for the role played by the conquering Russians in Russian Hide-and-Seek; both prelates and commissars, professing creeds in which they have no belief, represent thuggish oppression. Talents as non-diverse as Beria and Himmler have found refuge in the cloth. A delicate distaste for empty rituals salts both novels. Amis’s universal church has come into being because intelligence and creativity have been beaten down.
His great alterations hinge on a number of historic factors—Martin Luther, instead of being a prime mover in the Reformation, became Pope Germanius I; Henry VIII never got his divorce; the Spanish Armada was not defeated; and so on. Four centuries of near-peace have resulted, in which the powers that be have gradually tightened their grip.
It’s small wonder the American ambassador finds that words fail him when in England. Under the dispensation which he hates, words have lost their value. As one of the plotting clerics puts it, ‘In our world a man does what he’s told, goes where he’s sent, answers what he’s asked’. Even singing becomes another perversion of the voice.
When the story opens, the might of the Church is about to be exercised on the crotch of a ten-year-old choir boy, Hubert Anvil.
Hubert is singing in the choir at the laying-to-rest of King Stephen III of England. It’s a great ceremonial occasion, held in the Cathedral Basilica of Coverley, a magnificent place built by Christopher Wren. There’s irony even here: Coverley, we learn, is Cowley. In our reality, Cowley, a suburb of Oxford, is far from being the home of sanctity. It is the home of one of Britain’s main car manufacturers. But private cars don’t exist in Hubert’s day and age—though there is a hint that Coverley will revert to type.
What does exist is a seemingly decent holy calm over all, in which the arts have a revered place. We might think, to begin with, that this quiet world was a pleasant enough place in which to live. However, Amis follows the general rule in these matters; the tenor of alternative world stories is generally consolatory. We realize as we read that accidents of history—such as the Reformation?—have landed us in a better world than might have been the case (though undoubtedly the writers take pleasure in constructing their reactionary worlds—else why bother?).
So behind the holy calm lies force, behind the present, smothering tradition, behind the arts, cold calculation. Before Hubert Anvil, a decision. Hubert’s beautiful voice will break in a short while. The decision hardly rests in his hands, but in the hands of the manipulative clergy. There is a need for that wonderful high voice of Hubert’s to be preserved. Women may not sing in the churches of Rome. And there is a way by which his voice can be preserved: by a little alteration. He can become rich and famous—but also despised; or he can remain whole, probably obscure, and experience sexual love.
The action aspect of the novel involves Hubert’s attempts to comprehend his predicament and escape from it. Soon enough, he is on the run and being hunted.
And so begins a tug of war, with interesting characters ranged on both sides.
For preserving Hubert’s creative powers as a composer, along with his testicles, are Margaret Anvil, Hubert’s mother, and Father Matthew Lyall, the Anvil family chaplain; unexpected support comes from the American Ambassador, who happens to have a pretty daughter of Hubert’s age. Those who are determined that Hubert should have the operation as soon as possible include Abbot Peter Thynne, Father Dilke (reminiscent of Trollope’s character Obadiah Slope), Tobias Anvil, Hubert’s coldly pious father, and the dead weight of custom. At every step, the cruelty is masked by piety.
When Hubert’s alteration appears to be a foregone conclusion, he is taken to Rome on the Rapid by his father. There they are granted an audience with Pope John XXIV. The Pope, an Englishman (a Yorkshireman), is the most amusing character in a book where humour is generally subdued into irony and satire. After their audience, Tobias and Hubert meet with two ageing castrati, Mirabilis and Viaventosa. Viaventosa breaks down and begs Tobias not to consent to the operation on his son. Otherwise the boy will become the pitiful creature he (Viaventosa) is.
Once away from their company, Tobias falls on his knees, clutches Hubert and begs his son to comfort him. Almost to himself he says, ‘Where am I now to find the strength to endure what will be done to this child of mine?’ Such devouring selfishness and hypocrisy finds a strong place in the novel, as it does in the later Russian Hide-and-Seek. It seems that if absolute power corrupts, hypocrisy is one of its chief pimps.
Even more fervently hypocritical is Abbot Thynne, who schemes to have the altered Hubert glorifying his own church and sing in Coverley, not Rome. It is Thynne who prays to God regarding Hubert to ‘bring it about in Thine own way that he forsake the path of rebellion …’ Does God directly answer this prayer? On that score Amis leaves every reader to decide for himself. Although God does not put in a personal appearance in The Alteration (as he does to scarifying effect in Amis’s horror novel, The Green Man), He certainly makes his presence felt. He is, after all, the head of the Church—or at least its absentee landlord.
In the midst of his troubles, Hubert has one consolation. He and his friends in the choir school read science fiction, a forbidden kind of gutter literature. He buys his SF from Ned, a stable boy whom Hubert, to his confusion, sees copulating with a country girl.
Considering the ecclesiastical suspicion of science, it is hardly surprising to find that the term ‘SF’ is unknown. Hubert and friends read ‘TR’—Time Romance—and ‘CW’—Counterfeit World. The boys in their dormitory are reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. This delicate tribute reveals that of course Dick’s novel in Hubert’s world is not quite the same as the version we know and love …
One of Hubert’s friends, Decuman, scoffs, saying that TRs always contain flying machines. But by the end of the book we learn that the Smith brothers in America have achieved flight in a winged machine travelling at a speed of ninety miles an hour (thus saying something about the predictive qualities of SF).
Part-concealed throughout Amis’s novel lie various references to other works of science fiction: John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, Keith Roberts’ Pavanne, and Anthony Burgess’s The Wanting Seed. In similar vein, for this is a feature of the game-playing of alternative worlds, one can find references to Ian Fleming’s ‘Father Bond’ stories. We learn that Percy Shelley, ‘a minor versifier’, lived to commit both arson and suicide. Mozart lived to a ripe old age. G. B. Tiepolo has taken the place of Michelangelo, who committed suicide, prompted by Luther’s philistinism. And so on.
Despite the background of art and music, many of the characters are as indifferent to arts as they are to science. The Pope shrouds his apartment in the Castel Alto with plain hangings, so that he is spared the sight of fine marbles and the Tiepolo ‘Creation’ on the ceiling. I have always regarded this as a particular blasphemy. My own alternative world, The Malacia Tapestry, published in the same year as Amis’s novel, is based on an interpretation of Tiepolo’s magical etchings.
This contempt by the powerful for the finer things of life is more heavily emphasized in Russian Hide-and-Seek. In the later novel, Shakespeare is decisively rejected by the English—just as here he is excommunicated. Not only words but their sensible orderings have failed. His two novels, so unlike in other ways, dramatize Amis’s feelings of distaste for the way the world was going, as he saw it, in the 1970s, and a fear of the latent evil in men—of which Hubert’s alteration is a small but significantly betraying detail.
Culture is precious—but is it worth losing your balls for?
The central motif of Russian Hide-and-Seek is a time-honoured one in SF terms: invasion. Britain, owing to its lack of vigilance, has been taken over by the Russians, and is now a satellite of the Soviet Union. This seems to place the book in the dire warning category of The Battle of Dorking and When the Kissing had to Stop. In 1980, the question carried a freight of topicality.
But matters are less simple than that. It is part of Amis’s cunning that he does not show us the invasion of the island. Like an Ibsen play, a lot of history has flowed under the bridge before the curtain goes up. We are confronted with a Britain fifty years after the coup. And we are to find that the English have lost both balls and culture.
The opening is magisterial. A grand English country house is surrounded by pasturage. The son, Alexander, an ensign in the Guards, is vexing his family, and indeed everyone else. The mother worries about flowers and dinner arrangements. We might be embarking on a leisurely nineteenth-century novel. The one blemish to the rural picture seems to be the hundreds of tree stumps which disfigure the grounds of the mansion. That, and the family name, Petrovsky.
What we at first may assume to be threatened is in fact absolutely overwhelmed. There is no way to undo fifty years of history. This is an England no longer England. It is now the EDR, Soviet-occupied.
There is nothing futuristic about the EDR. It has been reduced to an imitation of pre-revolutionary Russia. It’s a world of stately country homes with a vengeance, with the English as servants. Parties are thrown, dances are held, and dashing young fellers ride about on horseback. This reversion follows the somewhat similar patterns the victorious Nazis impose on Europe in Sarban’s The Sound of His Horn, which once appeared with an admiring introduction by Kingsley Amis.
The novel is one of fine surfaces and corrupt interiors. Here is another large house. White-coated servants move about, supplying drink and food. Tennis is in progress on two courts. A small orchestra is playing old-fashioned waltzes. Everything is supposedly done in high style.
But:
No one thought, no one saw that the clothes of the guests were badly cut from poor materials … that the women’s coiffures were messy and the men’s fingernails dirty, that the surfaces of the courts were uneven and inadequately raked, that the servants’ white coats had not been properly washed, or that the pavement where the couples danced needed sweeping … No one thought any of that because no one had ever known any different.
Ignoring the fact that this is rather obtrusive authorial comment, we see embodied here the fine surface/corrupt interior principle on which the novel hinges. To everything there is another aspect.
Alexander Petrovsky starts like a Henry Fielding hero, young and spirited. He makes a fine impression on readers—and on Commissioner Mets, the power in the land. He impresses Mets by addressing him in good English, the language of the conquered. Alexander has gone to some pains to learn a few useful phrases and to pronounce them properly. ‘But his vocabulary had remained small and his ability to carry on a conversation smaller still.’ Alexander bullies his subordinates. His sexual appetites are gross, and scarcely satisfied when he encounters Mrs Korotchenko, who likes being trampled on before the sexual act, and introduces her twelve-year-old daughter Dasha to join her lusty variety of fun. They perform in a kind of sexual gymnasium.
If the occupying force is shown as corrupt under its polished veneer, the English are no better. The good ones were killed off in the invasion and the Pacification. Those left are mainly a pack of docile tipplers, devoid of morale and culture, living in a kind of rustic sub-world. It is a dystopia quite as convincing and discomfiting as Orwell’s urban warrens.
To parallel this total loss of English qualities, the occupying force has lost all belief in its motivating creed, Marxism, which died out about 2020.
A Moscow-generated New Cultural Policy, ‘Group 31’, plans to restore England to the English.
Group 31 wish to get Alexander involved. He is willing enough. To be a revolutionary is a great romantic pose which panders to his narcissism. He is callously prepared to assassinate his liberal father, if need be.
Unexpected deaths follow, yet the underground theme proves less exciting than it should be. What is more interesting, perhaps because more unusual, is the attempt, prompted by Moscow, to launch a performance of a once banned Shakespeare play, Romeo and Juliet. The play is to be the climax of a festival in which English culture is handed back to the English.
The Russians do not and cannot care for the past they have obliterated. Nor do the English care—except for a few over fifties, who scarcely count. It is true that they refer to their conquerors as The Shits, but this is a fossil appellation, almost without malice. By such small authentic notes, the originality of the novel declares itself.
An audience is somehow raked up to attend the great event. The music recital is moderately successful. It includes works by ‘Dowland, Purcell, Sullivan, Elgar, the composer of “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay’’, Noel Coward, Duke Ellington (taken to have been an English nobleman of some sort), Britten and John Lennon.’ But with Romeo and Juliet it is different.
Alexander has a drink at the Marshal Stalin in St John’s Street before attending the theatre. The play about the death of innocence—although it has been cut to an hour in order not to tax people’s patience too greatly—is a disaster. There is a near riot, the theatre is set on fire, and Alexander decides not to rescue the girl playing Juliet.
In scenes of ghastly comedy, Shakespeare’s island race rejects its old culture and religion when they are offered. It prefers to queue quietly for food—a typical meal being cabbage soup, belly of pork with boiled beets (since there’s now a third fresh-meat day in a week), and stewed windfalls. Or it will booze at the Marshall Grechko (to become The Jolly Englishman under the New Cultural Policy).
Once a culture ceases to be common coinage, it has gone forever. It is a grim warning, one which elevates the novel far above the jingoistic military warning, Be Prepared! Sadness rather than jingoism is the imprint of these pages.
Alternative histories and worlds represent curious byways of science fiction, seeming usually to have more affinity with history than science. Such is the case with the novels cited here. Often this is because their authors stand rather apart from the mainstream of science fiction. Such can be said of Robert Harris, for instance, author of Fatherland, in which Nazi Germany, having won World War II, is about to celebrate Hitler’s seventieth birthday.
The exceptions to this rule are, of course, Philip Dick and Harry Harrison, both life-long practitioners of the art. Amis is not an exception. Despite his life-long interest in SF, and his anthologies, his reputation lies elsewhere, as a major comic novelist. There is almost a sense in which alternative histories are prolonged pokerfaced jokes—as is the case with the classic Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore, in which an accident changes the history of the United States.
Like Ward Moore’s novel, Russian Hide-and-Seek presents us with military or militaristic situations. No joke is intended, just as its serious and unusual cultural theme is no cause for laughter.
Fittingly, the usual Amis humour is, in Russian Hide-and-Seek, suffused into a permeating irony. Detail is piled on disconcerting detail—each unexpected but just—like the young English woman girlishly longing to get to Moscow (an echo of Chekhov here), until the whole disastrous tapestry of a lost England hangs before us.
All that we value has been swept away. Culture is irrelevant. Nihilism prevails.
Those who know Amis, or perhaps have read only his Memoirs, will recognize his powers as an anecdotalist. One of his stories well illustrates the theme of his novels.
Amis was invited in the early 1980s to dine with the Prime Minister, together with other illuminati at 10 Downing Street. It happened to be the very day on which Hutchinson published Russian Hide-and-Seek, so Amis took along a copy of the novel, inscribed to Mrs Thatcher. She asked him what it was about.
Amis replied, ‘Well, in a way it’s about a future Britain under Russian occupation’. It was a typically modest Amis answer. And what was Margaret Thatcher’s response?
‘Huh! Can’t you do any better than that? Get yourself another crystal ball.’ As Amis says in his memoirs, an answer both unfair and unanswerable.
Now we know what those with power over us think about SF. They share an uninquiring ignorance of intellectual literary circles. And they know as much about culture as the occupying Russians.
WELLS AND THE LEOPARD LADY (#ulink_ef94e17c-94bc-5d57-962f-1237511c1371)
Lecture delivered at the International Wells Symposium (#ulink_f38b92d4-a462-5401-84ce-af5f24d3482a)
H. G. Wells’s Men Like Gods begins with Mr Barnstaple driving along what Wells calls ‘the Wonderful Road’, and entering Utopia. Barnstaple and his party meet with a leopard which is benevolently inclined. By this symbol, Wells shows us the nature of an earthly paradise; the lion lying down with the lamb, etc. Dante on his journey to the Inferno first meets a leopard as a sign of great mysterious change ahead.
Large cats, leopards, cheetahs, panthers, and other furry carnivores, play a fairly active role in the Wellsian pantheon, generally linked with Wells’s perennial impulse to escape from the mundane world. While presenting these carnivores as tame and amiable, he also depicts himself, as he often says, as a carnivore. This policy of reversal operates in many of his books, including one or two of the neglected ones I mean to discuss.
But the theme of my talk is really the strangest reversal of all: the fact that despite his enormous success, which it would be impossible for any author nowadays to rival, there was a part of Wells, and a vital part, which no amount of success could ever appease, and which he was continually trying to suffocate under more work.
If our opinion of Wells is to be revised, then it is first necessary to confront the Himalaya of Wells studies: that long career punctuated so conspicuously by the ascent of literary heights and the decline into political shallows. The Wells, in other words, with that marvellous sense of fun, the Great General of Dreamland, to use his own description, who became the hollow apostle of world order, who exchanged the cloak of imagination for the tin helmet of instruction—as the Chinese say. Wells was a dear and honest man; he would not mind, I hope, our looking into this puzzling question. For he has become, rather unexpectedly, not the great prophet whom earlier generations saw, but the brilliant if eccentric writer who—almost by his own decision—went off the gold standard.
Wells had a career problem. He rose from the unprivileged classes to a position of great privilege where he was free to travel round the world talking to Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt. This rise—this escape—one of Wells’s numerous wonderful escapes—challenged his early identification with ‘the little man’. The Food of the Gods (1903) is almost a parable of this dilemma. The novel starts on the side of the little men and ends up on the side of the big, the Gods. Such reversals manifest themselves in numerous ways in Wells’s life and thought.
Let me remind you of one of Wells’s most famous reversals, which occurs in The War of the Worlds. Wells cleverly delays his description of an invading Martian until well into his story—in fact until Chapter 2 of Book II. And then the creatures are revealed as horrible enough to shock anyone. Not only do they exist by sucking the blood of living things—like those monsters of which Bram Stoker had written only a year earlier—but they never sleep. And—mounting horror—they are ‘absolutely without sex’.
These are, nevertheless, no alien creatures. Wells continues, remorselessly, ‘It is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brains and hands … at the expense of the rest of the body’.
It is an evolutionary point Wells is making. Eighty years later, it may sound fairly conventional; that was not the case originally. Not only was Wells one of the first writers to use evolutionary themes directly in his work, but he was here using them against the grain of his generation’s perception of the meaning of evolution. Whereas many interpreted evolution as a biological mechanism which had carried man to the top of the tree, Wells understood Darwin better; indeed, no English writer has shown a surer grasp of the scientific challenges of the modern age. War of the Worlds demonstrates that the continuous process of evolution was as likely to work against mankind as for. If we continued as we were doing, there was no known way in which we could prevent ourselves becoming, in effect, Martians. The Eloi and Morlocks, you remember, had already pointed that moral, with different emphasis.
Embedded in Wells’s first scientific romance are many of the themes—not only the evolutionary one—which he would develop in the course of his next 120-odd books. The idea of utopia is there. The Eloi live in a kind of utopia. Present too is the dream of a perfect garden, which always haunted Wells. Perhaps when he visited his absconding mother, Sarah, at Up Park, where she worked as housekeeper, he saw something like a perfect garden, a place without stress. And his father had been a gardener.
Here is the descriptive passage from The Time Machine:
After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of today are still in the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little department of the field of human disease, but, even so, it spreads its operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals—and how few they are—gradually by selective breeding: now a new and better peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because Nature, too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating: things will move faster and faster towards the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs.
In summary, Wells says, ‘There were no hedges, no signs of proprietary rights, no evidence of agriculture; the whole earth had become a garden.’ It’s clever comment, wedding the evolutionary with the social.
The gardens reappear. Meanwhile, there was all of mankind to be reformed.
The promising thing about mankind, as Wells perceived, is its mutability. Yet that mutability is also perceived as threatening.
If we had prognathous jaws only two million years ago, why not grossly over-developed crania two million years from now? The leopards and the big cats are different. They were plain leopards two million years ago, not a spot different, and will presumably continue to be leopards two million years from now—unless we exterminate them next year. So the big cats in Wells’s books are free not merely in the ordinary sense in which big playful pussies always mean liberty, but in the way they appear to be apart from that dreadful evolutionary machine which so inspired and alarmed Wells.
This link between big cats and freedom appears in one of Wells’s best-known and most poignant short stories, ‘The Door in the Wall’. You recall that when Wallace the narrator was between five and six, that crucial age, he came upon the door somewhere in Kensington—that magical door through which he went to pass into ‘Immortal realities’, and, throughout the rest of his life, was never again able to enter.
Wallace found himself in a garden. ‘You see’, he said, with the doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things, ‘there were two great panthers there … Yes, spotted panthers. And I was not afraid. There was a long wide path with marble-edged flower borders on either side, and these two huge velvety beasts were playing there with a ball. One looked and came towards me, a little curious as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very gently against the small hand I held out, and purred. It was, I tell you, an enchanted garden.’
Well, there are many enchanted gardens in fantasy writing, just as the symbol of the country house appears over and over in English fiction. None so poignant though as this one of Wells’s. If you wonder why there is no big cat in that first garden, in The Time Machine, well, of course, there is: that enigmatic cat, The Sphinx.
Exactly how Wells felt is stated simply in In the Days of the Comet, when Leadford’s mother is dying. ‘ “Heaven”, she said to me one day. ‘‘Heaven is a garden.” ’
The leopard in Men Like Gods also stands as a sort of sentinel to the magic which is to follow. It is about to allow itself to be stroked, when it sneezes and bounds away, and the cattle don’t stir a muscle as it runs past them. That’s another reversal of the natural order.
Later we learn more about this particular leopard. Like others of its kind, it has sworn off meat. ‘The larger carnivora, combed and cleaned, reduced to a milk dietary, emasculated in spirit, and altogether de-catted, were pets and ornaments in Utopia.’ In this Utopia, so we hear, ‘the dog had given up barking’. Wells was always dubious about dogs. They brought dirt into the house, and disease with the dirt. Perhaps that dreadful late-Victorian London had given him an especial loathing of dogs and horses, whose mess was everywhere to be seen. They certainly aren’t allowed in A Modern Utopia:
It is only reluctantly that I allow myself to be drawn from my secret musings into a discussion of Utopian pets.
I try to explain that a phase in the world’s development is inevitable when a systematic world-wide attempt will be made to destroy for ever a great number of contagious and infectious diseases, and that this will involve, for a time at any rate, a stringent suppression of the free movement of familiar animals. Utopian houses, streets, and drains will be planned to make rats, mice, and such-like house-parasites impossible: the race of cats and dogs—providing as it does, living fastnesses to which such diseases as plague, influenzas, catarrh and the like, can retreat to sally forth again—must pass for a time out of freedom, and the filth made by horses and the other brutes of the highway vanish from the face of the Earth.
No wonder the horsey classes objected to Wells. All the same, there is a whiff of crankiness about his attitude to pets. Science would vote against him now, claiming that pets are good for psychic health, stroking them helps people get over heart attacks, and so on.
Of course, all utopias fear dirt. I’ve yet to read of a utopia where dogs were encouraged. Maybe in dog utopias there are no men.
The utopia in Men Like Gods is also likened to a garden. We read of ‘the weeding and cultivation of the kingdom of nature by mankind’. Nowadays, as in so many other things, we would not trust ourselves with that same confidence to do a good job. The cultivation of Brazilian rainforest into timber is not an encouraging example.
In The Shape of Things to Come we find more gardens, termed ‘enclosures and reservations’, in which specially interesting floras and faunas flourish. ‘Undreamt-of fruits and blossoms may be summoned out of non-existence.’ Here sex is directly linked to big cats. The Puritanical Tyranny, in suppressing sex, thought they had ‘imprisoned a tiger that would otherwise consume all’. It was not so. Under the more relaxed dispensation following the Tyranny, people could now go naked and love as they like—the old Wells aspiration. ‘Instead of a tiger appeared a harmless, quiet, unobtrusive, and not unpleasing pussy-cat, which declined to be any way noticeable.’ As early as The Time Machine, free love-making is a feature of utopia, without emotional attachment.
Sex and big cats. Also sex and childhood. Consider a passing remark in that large rambling volume, The Shape of Things to Come which yokes such matters with the idea of utopia.
