Wells extends the analysis before and beyond the Bladesover era via the last two houses Edward Ponderevo annexes. The penultimate Ponderevo mansion, Lady Grove, is also the oldest of the lot, its founders having fought in the First Crusade. Remote as it is, the period of Lady Grove's origin represents an awakening that sleeping Bladesover has forgotten. Wells wrote of the First Crusade in The Outline of History: 'Here for the first time we discover Europe with an idea and a soul!.. It is clear that we are dealing with something new that has come into the world, a new clear connection of the common interest with the consciousness of the common man.' Even having long vanished, the period is less evanescent than Bladesover in its senile presence; on the house's earliest portraits, George finds 'smiles of triumphant completion,' while the Victorian decorations of the house seem 'even more extinct… than the Crusades.' But when Teddy attempts to go beyond Bladesover, to found his own house-'a Twentieth-Century House!' — Crest Hill, he fails utterly. The ultimate house of Ponderevo is, like the Europe of 1900, an incoherent accumulation of contradictory ideas, none themselves new. Its literal collapse prefigures the coming European smash. -669-
Just as the new owners of England cannot build, so they cannot engender; George describes Crest Hill as 'the empty instinctive building of a childless man.' Tono-Bungay represents the most formidable union of Wells's political and sexual radicalisms, for it suggests that the modern capitalist version of Bladesover is powered by a diversion of sexual energies. Tono-Bungay, 'The Secret of Vigour,' becomes such a walloping success because of its whispered promise of forbidden sexual vitality. Indeed, the failure of sexual pleasure is the foundation of business; in the presence of Teddy, George's friend Bob Ewart explains the economics of desire: 'What do we want? You know. I know. What we all want to be is something perpetually young and beautiful… pursuing coy half-willing nymphs through everlasting forests.''Damn clever fellow,' Teddy praises Ewart after his departure. Ewart immortalizes his perception in a mock advertisement that, George writes, featured 'my uncle, excessively and needlessly nude… engaged in feats of strength of a Gargantuan type before an audience of deboshed and shattered ladies.' The motto of Tono-Bungay appears beneath the drawing.
Tono-Bungay is the false promise of sexual vigor in a world that denies the reality-denies it in order to sell the false promise. George's romantic life proves an apt emblem of Tono-Bungay's malign influence. He enters his uncle's employ in order to attain the three hundred pounds a year that Marion Ramboat demands before they wed. In effect, he must purchase sanction for the sexual union he desires-Bladesover extends property law to women. The marriage fails, however, because Marion cannot release the sexual instincts that it has always been in her best interests to repress-to yield too early would mean to lose the chance of marriage altogether, and so be hemmed in a sordid corner of life. The two can only meet on a presexual level: 'There was a nonsensical sort of baby-talk I picked up… that became a mighty peacemaker.' The enduring Victorian ideal of romantic love, with its willful indifference to physical facts, is thus depicted as a means for repressing socially inconvenient sexuality. A different sort of romance claims Teddy Ponderevo. In accordance with his Napoleonic conceit-he styles himself on that emperor-he briefly takes a mistress. His wife, Susan-who, the novel hints, really belongs with George, did convention allow such matches-puts a quick end to the affair. But the effect on Teddy is profound, nearly ruining his marriage. He cannot feel satisfied without the romantic illusion of careless love, the romantic eleva-670- tion of the desires of the heroic self. Romance, whether in monetary or human commerce, receives a very bad press in Tono- Bungay.
The pain of frustrated sexuality colors every fiber of the novel. George Ponderevo's halting, disconnected narration is a long avoidance of his loss of Beatrice Normandy: 'The pain I felt then I have felt a hundred times… that is what haunts this book, from end to end.' Once George has told his central trauma, the novel ends, just as psychoanalysis would. But this failure of desire is hardly personal; it at once produces and is produced by the consciousness of the age. Wells ironically titles the chapter in which George relates the tale of his doomed love for Beatrice 'Love among the Wreckage.' Robert Browning's 'Love among the Ruins,' of course, contrasts love with the ruins of empire, concluding 'love is best.' In Tono-Bungay, there is no such contrast. The ruin of love preserves the sterile health of society; love is indeed among-in the sense of being part of-the wreckage. Beatrice is the daughter of a family with noble bloodlines but no wealth to support the old style of living. She attaches herself as mistress to a providing aristocrat, the only role such a system has reserved for her, work or a low marriage having been programmed out of her. Instead of leading her lover to paradise, she has herself been ruined by the Bladesover system.
This final failure drives George back once again into the service of a society that is sowing its own destruction. He returns first to his flying machines. The root of his Icarean endeavor to fly is the mingled desire to impress Beatrice and to forget his difficulties with her. George speaks figuratively of science as the perfect mistress, thus revealing the sexual displacement at the root of his infatuation with it. He experiences 'contact with primary and elemental necessities' not through sexuality but through flight, which he describes in unmistakably sexual terms: 'I set my teeth and groaned. It was a groan wrung out of me in spite of myself. My sensations of terror swooped to a climax.' Flight means only escape, not spiritual elevation; George's one scientific triumph, a successful channel-crossing in his airship, occurs in a desperate attempt to spirit his uncle away from the authorities after his financial chicanery has been revealed. George concludes of his own tale: 'I have called it Tono-Bungay, but I had far better have called it Waste. I have told of childless Marion, of my childless aunt, of Beatrice wasted and wasteful and futile.' At the novel's end, George is engineering destroyers for the international market, apparently intent on speeding the passage of his era into oblivion. Frustrated love is death. -671-
George Ponderevo's quest to retrieve quap from Mordet Island is on one level the logical international consequence of the national system. If all national production serves a few monarchs of commerce, then the products of all the world should serve the few monarchs among nations, especially England. Such an arrangement reduces the inhabitants of other lands to commercial obstacles; George declares 'I meant to get that quap aboard if I had to kill some one to do it.' And so he does. The African he shoots (in the back) has evidently already suffered a transition into the world of commerce: 'He carried a musket, and a powder flask was stuck in his girdle.' He is the mirror image and secret guilt of Bladesover; his corpse is disinterred from its grave twice, and it becomes confused for George with the nightmare vision of his uncle's face hovering dead-white over a garishly slit throat. But this adventure also implies that the universe, rather than being successively refined by evolutionary progress, might betray the same tendency to chaotic collapse as the European social order. The antithesis of Tono-Bungay, the reality to its vital lie, is the lethally radioactive quap. It parallels the real bankruptcy behind the Bladesover façade: 'It is in matter exactly what the decay of our old culture is in society, a loss of traditions and distinctions and assured reactions.' But quap is more than a symbol; it reveals the literal potential for dissolution in the physical universe, and for that very reason it cuts the pins from under any conceivable teleology. George entertainsa queer persistent fancy. Suppose indeed that is to be the final end of our planet; no splendid climax and finale, no towering accumulation of achievements but just-atomic decay!.. If single human beings-if one single rickety infant-can be born as it were by accident and die futile, why not the whole race?
The idea that the social organism must evolve naturally toward justice and stability, cherished by such nineteenth-century thinkers as Herbert Spencer, is ironically reversed in Tono-Bungay, which denies progressive evolution as the universal principle of either humanity or matter. Wells the social realist and Wells the scientific romancer dovetail in Tono-Bungay as in no other novel.
Despite its indulgence in the most extreme apocalyptic prophecies, Tono-Bungay is in one sense an optimistic book. It assumes that illusions will vanish and that ultimate realities, however dire their consequences may be, will at last assert themselves. Teddy Ponderevo's empire must collapse if he cannot finally 'show value'; that is, produce -672- substantial assets to cover the rising debt of his false promises. Wells is true to the realist tradition in assuming a phenomenal world separate from and knowable by consciousness. For all the flamboyant, engaging improbability of its plot, Tono-Bungay is utterly realist in its continual, explicit correction of romantic illusions: the romance of commerce, the romance of the Napoleonic leader, the romance of romantic love. Even the mild experiment of displaying the influence of the narrator's consciousness on the tale he narrates does little to call into question the human capacity for distinguishing between illusion and reality. Wells, in fact, never creates more than one real consciousness-one real point of view-in a novel. Many of Wells's novels bear eponymous titles and practically all of them could. Wells never registers more than one guest at a time in his house of fiction; he is intent on examining Wells, on wrestling with his own real beliefs about the real world. As he cheerily blustered in a letter to Bennett, 'I am a purblind laborious intelligence exploring that cell of Being called Wells.' The fictionality of fiction held an ever-diminishing interest for him. 'Who would read a novel,' he asked rhetorically in 1934's Experiment in Autobiography, 'if we were permitted to write biography-all out?' He goes on to speculate that prose fiction could not endure 'against a literature of competent historical and contemporary studies.'
