A Man of Parts
David Lodge
Harvill Secker
Unassuming at first glance, the cover of A Man of Parts carries two warnings – or disclaimers, if one is given to cynicism.
Lodge hammers home two points before the reader can even open the not insubstantial life and times of HG Wells. One is that this “biography” of Wells is in fact a novel; and two, that one understands the double entendre of the word “parts”. Whether this emphasis is necessary is iffy. Lodge may call it a novel, but it reads more like a biography fleshed out with fiction; and the opening page carries a dictionary entry explaining the meaning of “parts”, in case you didn’t get it. Parts PLURAL NOUN 1. Personal abilities or talents; a man of many parts. 2. short for private parts.
By page 10, you will know that HG Wells was not able to use these parts at the same time. Multitasking was not his strong point. He may have spent his mornings writing, but when he wasn’t doing that he was scribbling all over the show with his man pencil.
The tale opens during the last months of World War II, with a dying 78-year-old Wells, telling two former mistresses, and the resultant illegitimate children, that he doesn’t want to die. One imagines he is hoping to squeeze in a deathbed quickie before pitching up at the eternal hunting ground, no doubt in pursuit of 72 virgins.
It is liver cancer that is ousting him from the planet but, by the end of the book, you will be amazed that he isn’t riddled with syphilis. And that he managed to write any books at all, what with his bed-hopping and the resultant offspring.
Women apparently flocked to him in their droves, and, ever polite, Wells was incapable of disappointing even one of them.
Despite the fact that he was married to one or the other of his two long-suffering wives at any given time, he was the embodiment of “free love” long before the Swinging Sixties. Except in reality he only believed in his sexual freedom, though he glossed over this in his 1905 book A Modern Utopia.
Sex was simply a recreation, much like tennis, to be played with as many people as possible. Witness: “There comes a moment in the day when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that’s the time for sex.”
Why his wives, first his cousin Isabel Wells, and three years later Amy Catherine Robbins, are happy with this arrangement is anyone’s guess, but both are informed that they cannot nearly satisfy Wells’s appetite.
Lodge’s writing is impeccable, though hardly imaginative. Perhaps he thought he could get away with writing a biography and then call it fiction, because HG Wells lived the kind of overstuffed life that needs no embroidery.
Wells was of course active in many other ways, not least of which was his liberal political stance, which may well have been seen as somewhat unhinged for that era.
For much of his life, he was deeply involved with a British socialist movement, The Fabian Society (of which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are members today). It was through this alignment that he met such other venerable minds as George Bernard Shaw, Edith Nesbit and Bertrand Russell, and the political weft is far more intriguing than his indecorous lust-life.
But Wells was too liberal even for most Fabians of the day, and Lodge is at his best when recounting the numerous political tussles involving Wells, who, it must be said, had a touch of the sociopath about him. When he starts seducing the young daughters of members he gets himself into very hot water.
It’s all fun and games until someone loses their virginity… and Wells makes sure they do.
Seemingly incongruently, despite his veritable meat market of women, Wells considered himself a feminist, advocating women’s liberation and (then controversial) birth control as a necessary condition thereof, something that worked only sporadically for Wells.
He wasn’t all that concerned with the ankle-biters resulting from his dalliances – he rather hypocritically left the women to deal with the aftermath and hardly involved himself in their lives once the affairs were over. He did, however, support them financially.
Nonetheless, he was a pioneer in the literary world, and his success was unrivalled as virtually all his works were overnight sensations.
An amusing sideshow is a lifelong light banter with Henry James, the older man being a little green around the gills regarding Wells’s dazzling literary successes. Disguising it as only the English can, a friendship between the two was mutually beneficial, until Wells naturally took it too far.
Lodge structures the novel into five parts, beginning with the ailing Wells responding to questions by an imaginary interviewer – or even a voice inside his head – which allows Lodge to move forwards and backwards along Wells’s lifeline, as well as helping the reader get a grip on what the dickens is going on.
Of course, Lodge cannot have been privy to HG’s actual thoughts, and the few that he inflicts upon us will leave you dribbling with gratitude that he didn’t torture us with more.
Lodge’s plain-vanilla prose could have done with more David Lodge and less HG Wells, but A Man of Parts is a veritable treasure trove if Wells is your particular passe temps.
Wells was undeniably a very clever man, and given his passion for astronomy, and comets in particular, it is odd that he never grasped the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun, not him.
l Verbaan is an editor and award-winning journalist.