The Womb of Time: Spengler's Influence on Wells's Apropos of Dolores

217 THE WOMB OF TIME: SPENGLER 1S INFLUENCE ON WELLS'S APROPOS OF DOLORES William J. Scheick (University of Texas, Austin) Like most of H. G. Wells's late fiction, Apropos of Dolores (1938) has been shunted aside by literary critics as an insignificant novel typifying its author's preference for explicit pronouncement rather than for the artistic embodiment of his ideas. If they mention the work at all, critics generally tend to focus on the unimportant matter of Wells's alleged revenge on Odette Keun in the book.-1· In one strange instance, however, the novel's extensive dialogue is cited, though the writer confesses that "it is very difficult to tell what the talk is about."2 Even in the year of its publication the book received at best a dubious reception. Although one reviewer praised it as the best novel Wells had written in years and two others appreciated the portrait of the narrator,3 complaints readily surfaced concerning dullness, poor characterization, obtuseness and unintentional humor.* Both then and now, in my opinion, commentaries on many of Wells's "novels of ideas" have relied too comfortably on certain fixed critical coordinates, such as those determined by the Wells-James controversy.5 The application of Jamesian standards to Wells's fiction inevitably undercuts Wells's achievement; for in spite of several illuminating attempts to discover similarities in the artistic practice of the two authors, the fact remains that James's aesthetic devices are multivalent while those of Wells most frequently remain univalent. Wells's execution of whatever techniques he shared with James was always less complex, less multidimensional , less universal. In this essay, then, I would like to step outside the delimiting perimeter of the Wells-James controversy and to introduce a different approach and vocabulary for discussing Apropos of Dolores, a new set of aesthetic coordinates derived from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918; authorized English translation, 19261Γ Although it is difficult to say just when Wells encountered Spenglerian ideas, ample warrant for discussing them in relation to Apropos of Dolores is given by the novel's narrator, Stephen Wilbeck, who at one point asks; "Is this I am discovering here a bit more arbitrary than Spenglerism?"" Besides this explicit reference, abundant details and remarks appearing in the book correspond to observations made in Decline of the West. Moreover , as this essay will argue, the form or shape of Apropos of Dolores proves to be wholly organic to the themes or ideas of the novel when the book is read in the light of Spengler's differentiation between culture and civilization. With this Spenglerian distinction in mind, Wells saw his novel as an expression of an emerging culture and dismissed fiction in the Jamesian school, with its emphasis on aesthetic formalism, its manifestation of ornament and its implicit pronouncement of art for 218 art's sake, as typical of the sort of artistry found in a declining civilization. Wells discovered in Spengler's views an explanation of the art he was already practicing, a stimulus urging him to a more conscious refinement of that art in Apropos of Dolores. Apropos of Dolores concerns two chief characters who represent dialectic historical, psychological and evolutionary forces. At the historical level, Wilbeck's wife, Dolores, typifies the civilization stage of Western culture, as defined by Spengler. According to Spengler, every culture, independent of every other culture, undergoes the organic cycle of birth, growth, decay and death. Culture is the word he uses to refer to the vital, creative phase of this cycle; civilization, the inevitable subsequent stage, refers 1so the rigid and cold declining phase of the cycle. A culture attains its apogee when it "has actualized the full sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, dogmas, arts, states, sciences"; then "the Culture suddenly hardens, it mortifies, its blood congeals, its force breaks down, and it becomes Civilization ." A princess by a previous marriage and formerly "one of the most brilliant women on the Riviera accustomed to gentlemen, to men of title, to princes, to men of the world, to unquestioning gallantry," Dolores represents the traditional values of Western civilization (146, 154). Wilbeck identifies...