Reality and the Word: The Last Books of H. G. Wells

151 REALITY AND THE WORD: THE LAST BOOKS OF H. G. WELLS By William J. Scheick (University of Texas, Austin) Although The Happy Turning (1945) and Mind at the End of its Tether (I945) fall to contribute critically to our estimate of their author's literary achievement, their republication by the H. G. Wells Societyl provides an opportunity to reconsider their relationship to the themes and motifs of Wells's earlier, more successful writings as well as their alleged depiction of an overriding pessimism.2 In the former work the predominant motif Is that of the dream; indeed, It is chiefly an exercise In the use of fantasy and dream as vehicles for Wells's Ideas. The dream here represents the real world of human potentiality as opposed to the delusive, chaotic one of war: "When I sleep, a more adult and modern and civilised part of my being comes Into play" (p. 21). In this "sane World of Dreams" he finds escape from the oppressive anxieties of his waking life. Just as this dream motif Is broadened to Include curtain and veil Images in his previous works, so also In Mind at the End of its Tether Wells constructs a related and striking image derived from motion pictures: "The cinema sheet stares us in the face. That sheet is the actual fabric of Being. Our loves, our hates, our wars and battles, are no more than a phantasmagoria dancing on that fabric, themselves as unsubstantial as a dream" (p. 71). He further comments that to "discomfited minds the world of our everyday reality Is no more than a more or less entertaining or distressful story thrown upon a cinema screen. The story holds together; it moves them greatly and yet they feel It is faked. The vast majority of the beholders accept all the conventions of the story, are completely part of the story, and live and suffer and rejoice and die in It and with It. But the sceptical mind says stoutly, 'This Is delusion'" (p. 74). The Second World War was, of course, the major contributor to the chaotic landscape of this nightmare in which Wells found himself. This landscape recalls Wells's earlier works In its role as a microcosm depicting the macrocosmic tension between the world's abysmal dream-reality and its real but unrealized Utopian possibility . In The Happy Turning the narrator's garden becomes the microcosm, the "little Creation to which I play Lord": "It never dawned upon me that it was also a Cosmos" or that God doubtless "found Creation almost as obdurate and frustrating and exasperating as I do my garden" (pp. 4-3,48). Although he deplores the persistent "indisciplines, contradictions and disorders" of his own garden's shrubs and flowers, the persona primarily reserves his animosity for his neighbor's deserted garden (that "centre of weed distribution") and especially for a symbolic Sycamore, capable not only of thriving In the midst of that garden's ruin but also of destroying the similarly abandoned gardens beyond. 152 Jor the narrator the Sycamore, which will "live through anything, no matter what evil ensue," objectifies the many people who remain "too stupid to have an idea of the Mew V.'orld we poor sensitive ^en dream of extracting from our present disasters": "I saw Sycamores as men walking, and they were scheming as awful a London of saualld jobbery as it is possible to imagine" (pp. 44, 45). Contrasted to what he terms "Sycamorism in general" (which he curses in a parody of biblical diction) is the Fdenic splendor, the "rlysian greensward," of the happy turning, described in paradisiacal imagery (p. 37). Here two flowers of the Spirit of Man blossom: the human imagination, which formerly had been blinded by the harsh glare of the cinematic world, manifests itself in inexhaustible treasures and the human mind perceives and appreciates the "invincible divinity" of eternal beauty (pp. 71, 22, 49). This world thrives as an outgrowth of human brotherhood, is rooted in rational understanding, and bears the fruitful fulfillment of human hopes and desires. However, as in nearly all of Wells's writings, scepticism, like the giant Sycamore, overshadows his brightest confidence in...