A MAN OF PARTS BY DAVID LODGE – REVIEW
Wells's life would suit a great biography or a novel. This hybrid
doesn't quite come off
HG Wells: 'A winning
combination of pheromones gave him the aroma of walnuts or honey.' Photograph:
Kurt Hutton/Getty Images
A Man of Parts is either a biography of HG Wells in the form of a
novel, or a novel in the form of a biography of HG Wells. David Lodge has
imagined some details and manufactured some correspondence, detailed in an acknowledgements
section, but the novelistic element is kept within bounds. It's true he has
invented interviews (or self-interviews, in which Wells accuses and defends
himself in dialogue form) to supplement his narrative, but this modest liberty
is hardly more than some biographers claim as a matter of course – Ackroyd on
Dickens is an obvious example.
The benefit of this hybrid form for the writer is that it frees up
the texture of the book, avoiding the build-up of clogging documentation, and
allows him to hurry over or emphasise themes at will. The benefit for the
reader isn't so clear.
In the opening section, set in 1944, Wells is in his late 70s,
unwell and despairing, writing Mind at the End of its Tether with what energy
remains to him, and also working on a very different piece of prose called The
Happy Turning: "It is a slight, sunny prose fantasia, a carnivalesque
reworking of his story 'The Door in the Wall'. It owes something to the idea of
'dreaming true' in George du Maurier's Peter Ibbetson and even more to Henry
James's tale 'The Great Good Place'."
It's hard to identify this professorial voice as belonging to
anyone but Lodge himself (even without the knowledge that he has written a
novel about the friendship of du Maurier and James). It seems to rule out the
readerly surrender on which fiction depends.
The bulk of the book amounts to a flashback to Wells's earlier
life, returning to his last months in the final section. Here his work is
discussed in a more conventionally novelistic way, with family members looking
up from reading the proofs of a book to pass comment, or consulting the shelves
to substantiate a point ("'Remember Karenin in The World Set Free?'").
Lodge's title suggests both Wells's unusually broad portfolio of
interests and also a recurrent obsession. Short, unshapely and not always able
to produce respectable middle-class vowel sounds, HG Wells was perhaps the
least likely sex machine in literary history. His two marriages were to women
who were hardly on speaking terms with desire, but he more than made up for
this in his spare time. The interest in strong, independent women was sincere,
but it was hardly impaired by their regular sexual availability. The secret of
his success seems to have been a winning combination of pheromones, which gave
him the aroma of walnuts (according to Rebecca West's testimony) or honey
(Elizabeth von Arnim).
Rebecca West is given a point of view in the first and last
sections, but not during her involvement with Wells, when she was transformed
from a drily savage critic of his work to a woman obsessed. The novelistic
element of A Man of Parts would have been stronger with invented or elaborated
testimony from the remarkable women (including Dorothy Richardson and Amber
Reeves) who found Wells an object of fascination.
The affair with Reeves would make the best self-contained fictional
narrative. She inspired Ann Veronica, but the scandal made relations impossible
with the straitlaced Fabian Society, in which Wells had made his most sustained
attempt to turn socialist principle into practice.
There's a fair amount of gush in the book's tone when dealing with
its hero's love life, along the lines of: "'I never felt such sensations
before,' she sighed after a gratifying orgasm. 'And I never realised a man could go on for so long.'" This
novelettishness can't really be blamed on the deluded romanticism of the women
involved, in the absence of their point of view. HG Wells wrote something
called Boon, but not for Mills & Boon.
The book's final verdict on Wells, given by
Rebecca West, is that "HG was like a comet. He appeared suddenly out of
obscurity at the end of the 19th century and blazed in the literary firmament
for decades, evoking astonishment and awe and alarm, like the comet of In the
Days of the Comet which threatened to destroy the earth, but in fact
transformed it by the beneficial effect of its gaseous tail." She
anticipates that one day he will glow in the firmament once again.
In recent years David Lodge has suffered a
different type of astronomical event, a partial eclipse by other writers. First he had the bad
fortune to publish a book with Henry James as a major character shortly after
Colm Toíbín had produced The Master. Now he has chosen a protagonist who
becomes involved in the unconventional household of Hubert and Edith Bland (who
wrote under the name of E Nesbit). This is a fascinating little world of
secrets and cross-currents, ideals and betrayals, but his version has none of
the intensity AS Byatt gave to her transformation of it in The Children's Book.
Henry James also features in A Man of Parts, since the two writers
were under the impression they were friends, and lavished ambiguous compliments
on each other's books until Wells published Boon, containing savage parody
impossible for James to take in good humour. David Lodge defers to James's
status but doesn't seem attracted to his principles of writing. He must know
that James would have found his chosen approach hopelessly miscellaneous.
The narrative's uncertain distance from the
protagonist is shown by one mannerism in particular. A number of times Lodge
refers to the central character as "himself", in a way that is
awkward and sounds almost Irish: "She declared that the Webbs' friendship
with himself was at an end", for instance. At other times he stays loyal
to "he": "The general editor, who admired her book reviews, had
invited [Rebecca West] to contribute to the series on a subject of her own
choice, and she proposed Henry James – to his displeased surprise…" Here
"his" attaches, by any orthodox grammar, to "editor".
Again: "[William] Joyce was granted leave to appeal, which is where
[Rebecca West's] article ends. Writing to congratulate her he says that he enjoyed reading it, but
would enjoy seeing her even more." A long moment's thought is needed to
understand that it isn't Lord Haw-Haw who is writing to, congratulating and
wanting to see Rebecca West. It seems to be worth quite a lot of clumsiness to
avoid saying "Wells", and sounding like the straightforward biography
A Man of Parts so much wants not to be.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/17/man-of-parts-david-lodge-review
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