The Book of the Dead

service ended sooner than expected and Joe—pretending to prune a vine—was caught red-handed. Some years earlier, his son Bertie (never Herbert) had also broken his leg, aged seven. He always said this was the beginning of his love of books: His father brought him piles of them to read in bed while he recovered. When he was thirteen Wells wrote his first story, a comic strip called “The Desert Daisy,” but his literary ambitions were put on hold after his father’s accident. Never particularly well off, the loss of Joe’s cricketing income meant Bertie could no longer be sent to school at the Bromley Academy. To bring in money he was apprenticed at a draper’s shop, but was sacked for being too common, an experience he was to chronicle in his novel Kipps (1905) about a draper who comes into money and tries to mingle with the upper classes. Wells himself was more interested in mingling with women—lots of them.

During his two years as a draper, Wells showed extraordinary powers of self-discipline. He devoted every scrap of spare time to educating himself and was proud to say that during these years he never read a work of fiction or played a single game. His hard work paid off and he secured a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London, studying biology under the great T. H. Huxley. Dirt poor, shabbily dressed, and permanently hungry, Wells graduated with a degree in zoology, discovering the joys of English literature and socialism en route. He worked as a teacher, first at a boarding school in Wales and then in Kilburn, where his star pupil was A. A. Milne, author of Winnie-the-Pooh. While lodging with relatives, he fell in love with, and married, his cousin, Isabel Mary Wells. He was twenty-five and she was twenty-two. Until then, his only sexual experience had been with a prostitute several years earlier.

The newlyweds moved to Wandsworth, where Wells continued to teach, earning extra money by writing educational journalism and producing his Textbook of Biology, which stayed in print for thirty years. On the side, he was also making up for lost time in the sack. By 1894 the marriage was over. Wells moved in with, and then married, one of his students, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he called Jane. Although Wells wasn’t your typical Lothario—he was short and scrawny, with a limp mustache and a squeaky voice—he bubbled with ideas and self-confidence, and loved to talk, fixing people with his piercing blue eyes. He discovered that women found him irresistible.

His political awakening, his immersion in Darwinism, and his struggle to pull himself out of poverty led him to believe that love meant freedom from restraint and the judgment of others, and this could only be achieved if he had more than one sexual relationship. In Jane he found a woman who seemed happy to go along with this radical logic, allowing him to keep an apartment in town for assignations and to hang photographs of his lovers in the family home. She was even prepared to deal with the human fallout of Wells’s endless bacchanals, taking one of his spurned lovers, the Austrian journalist Hedwig Gatternigg, to a hospital after she had slashed her wrists outside his flat, distraught at the idea that he didn’t truly love her.

Wells’s health had troubled him since his time at the boarding school in North Wales. He had been aggressively fouled while playing soccer and, falling badly, had acquired a crushed kidney and hemorrhaged lung. The lung problems developed into a condition that his doctors suspected was tubercular and he wasn’t given long to live. This added urgency to his sexual conquests, but also gave him time while convalescing to begin writing the scientific romances for which he is still best known. In a tremendous four-year burst of creativity he produced The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898). He founded modern science fiction at a stroke, marrying thrilling, apocalyptic stories with the latest scientific and political ideas. He would later come to disparage their popularity, but they propelled him to the front rank of English novelists and gave the couple much-needed financial security. Moving to the healthier air of Sandgate on the Kent coast, he discovered a thriving community of fellow writers, with whom he soon became good friends, including Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and George Bernard Shaw. He gradually got fitter and began a lifelong passion for cycling: “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race,” he wrote. By 1909 he felt well enough to reenter the intellectual ferment of London, and he, Jane, and their two boys, Gip and Frank, moved to 17 Church Row in Hampstead.

Wells’s “open marriage” scandalized literary London, but it worked for them. He called her “Bits” and “P.C.B.” (Phylum: Companion of the Bath). She called him “Bins” (short for husbinder) or “Mr. Binder” or sometimes “Pobble.” They communicated in “Picshuas”—little scrawled cartoons that caricatured incidents in their marriage and that, Wells said, “softened our relations to the pitch of making them tolerable.”

This childlike domestic contentment gave Wells a secure base from which to sally forth on his carnal adventures, to explore the “sexual imaginativeness” that Jane could not provide. His lovers included the birth- control campaigner Margaret Sanger and the novelists Dorothy Richardson and Elizabeth von Arnim. Richardson was a school friend of Jane’s and her underrated novel Pilgrimage (1915) invented the stream-of-consciousness technique that Virginia Woolf later made famous. It also contained a vivid portrait of life in the Wells household. An affair with Bertie, it appeared (rather as with Casanova), could be great fun and a tonic for the ego. Here he is writing to Margaret Sanger:

My plans in New York are ruled entirely by the wish to be with you as much as possible—& as much as possible without other people about. I don’t mind paying thousands of dollars if I can get that.

He added that she was, at all costs, to dress up in the “costume of a tropical island…. Everything else is secondary to this.”

In 1907 Wells addressed the Cambridge University Fabian Society, which had been founded the previous year by a sparkling young undergraduate called Amber Reeves. After the talk, Wells bundled her onto a train and took her to Paris for the weekend. She was, he wrote:

a girl of brilliant and precocious promise… a sharp, bright, Levantine face under a shock of very fine abundant black hair, a slender nimble body very much alive, and a quick greedy mind.

Two years later, she was pregnant with Bertie’s child. This dismayed her mother and father (they were friends of Wells’s), and the couple ran away to Le Touquet and tried to make a go of it. It lasted three months. Amber was lonely and depressed and Wells put her on a ferry back to England. There, she found comfort in the arms of a mutual friend, a young lawyer called George Rivers Blanco White, who gallantly married her before the child was born. Amber’s daughter, Anna-Jane, was eighteen before she found out that H. G. Wells was her real father.

In 1912 the precocious feminist journalist Rebecca West wrote a critical review of Wells’s novel Marriage, calling him an “old maid.” As we know, Wells liked spirited young women, so he (forty-six) invited her (twenty) to tea. She gave birth to his son Anthony in 1914, and the boy was told that Wells was his “uncle.” Anthony’s second name was “Panther,” the nickname Wells had used for Amber. (Amber had called him “Jaguar.”) Messy as all this sounds, it actually worked out quite well for everyone. In 1939 Amber wrote to Wells to say that neither she nor her daughter had ever, for a moment, felt “they were not worth the price.”

Wells visited Russia twice, in 1914 and 1920, and there he met and impressed the writer Maxim Gorky. Not everyone was so generous. After a brief meeting, Lenin called him “a dreadful bourgeois and a little philistine!” For his part, Wells disliked the cult of personality that surrounded Karl Marx, whose face loomed from every wall and bulletin board:

About two-thirds of the face of Marx is beard, a vast solemn woolly uneventful beard that must have made all normal exercise impossible. It is not the sort of beard that happens to a man, it is a beard cultivated, cherished, and thrust patriarchally upon the world. It is exactly like Das Kapital in its inane abundance, and the human part of the face looks over it owlishly as if it looked to see how the growth impressed mankind. I found the omnipresent images of that beard more and more irritating. A gnawing desire grew upon me to see Karl Marx shaved.

The highlight of the second trip for Wells was, true to form, the addition of a new lover. She was his interpreter, Baroness Moura Budberg (1892–1974). The Baroness had been married twice, first to the tsarist diplomat Count Johann Benckendorff and then, after he was shot by the revolutionary authorities in 1919, to Baron Nikolai von Budberg-Bonningshausen. She had also been the mistress (at different times) of Maxim Gorky (who had recommended her to Wells) and the British spy Sir R. H. Bruce Lockhart, author of the bestselling