H.G. Wells and World War I

As I have remarked time and again H.G. Wells is these days little remembered but as a science fiction novelist--and at that, a producer of that handful of early novels that Hollywood and its foreign counterparts endlessly remake (The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The War of the Worlds). His later science fiction works generally go ignored, and still more his realist novels like Tono-Bungay (assailed by critics from Virginia Woolf to Mark Schorer in line with the unfortunate trend of letters over the century). Meanwhile as a historian and social and political thinker of whom George Orwell, even when criticizing him brutally, could say that in the Edwardian era he had seemed an "inspired prophet," such that he "doubt[ed] whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much," it can seem that even less is left of him. (Indeed, it seems all too symbolic that Warehouse 13 recreated the character along lines of post-modernist, status politics-minded wish-fulfillment, while it seems that a great many are salivating at the thought of "canceling" him, and seizing on any excuse to do it.)

All of this has struck me as profoundly unfair, and indicative of profoundly unhealthy tendencies (including a contempt for history, and colossal hypocrisy in some quarters). Still, while much of his accomplishment stands the test of time it is clear that his contributions had their limitations as well. I think of how in works like The War of the Worlds, The War in the Air, The World Set Free, Wells fiercely opposed imperialism, nationalism, militarism and much else associated with them, pointedly warning against the coming of a conflict like the First World War and its effects--but then when that war actually broke out in 1914 propagandized for that cause in works like Italy, France and Britain at War (1916), where he portrays the Allies as fighting to end the old evils, and bring about a better world, in line with the narrative that this was a "war to end war."

Post-war Wells abandoned such conduct, assessing and condemning the conflict in line with his long-established principles, but his war-time propaganda was an undeniable betrayal of his intellectual and political principles. Indeed, one finds him having to reckon with the "extremely belligerent" journalism he produced during the conflict in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934).I In discussing that lapse he acknowledged that "sanguine exhortation . . . swamped [his] warier disposition towards critical analysis and swept [him] along," with his mind not "get[ting] an effective consistent grip upon the war until 1916," and Wells requiring "months of reluctant realization . . . to face the unpalatable truth that this . . . 'war to end war' . . . was in fact no better than a consoling fantasy," that the reality was that the Allies were playing the same dirty old great power game "in pursuance of their established policies, interests, treaties and secret understandings . . . and that under contemporary conditions no other war was possible." Despite that, even in the last year of the war he kept hoping that "indignant commonsense that would sweep not simply the Hohenzollerns but the whole of the current political system" out of existence, to the point that in his journalism he could still spew anti-German propaganda.

And remembering that I find myself remembering, too, the limitations of his vision. He saw rather clearly that the world was a mess, and he rather clearly pictured something better as a necessity, but he was not so strong on how the world could get from one state to the other. Indeed, in The World Set Free, written the very year before World War I's outbreak, he imagined that the leaders of the warring powers themselves, facing the destructiveness of the conflict they had unleashed, would themselves work toward ending the fighting and building that better order.* As he himself realized before the end of the conflict this was not happening, and indeed he looked in other directions--but more pessimistically, and not necessarily convincingly.** Thus was he susceptible to persuasion that the better order to which he looked forward could somehow emerge from the Allied victory--and go on to encourage others in such illusions.

I dare say that others who saw the situation more clearly were less vulnerable on this score (not just a John Maclean, but even a Keir Hardie, from whom the Labour Party's current Keir could not be more different in sensibility and style). However, a remembrance of the matter would not be complete without remembrance of how the war-time atmosphere so "swamped his warier disposition." The climate of a country at war, the anger and fear and hate, the authoritarianism and intolerance, all of which get exploited to the full by those who stand to gain from them, are not conducive to critical thought, or free discussion--and invariably when some measure of the insanity passes many are ashamed of how they acted, little good as their realization does anyone given how readily those who made the mistake the last time usually plunge it into again, certainly for having failed to learn anything from the experience--and one may as well admit it, for lack of character too.

* The war in The World Set Free was a nuclearized conflict, which saw hundreds of cities hit with atomic weapons, and therefore the more severe and frightening--but all the same the actual world war may be taken as showing the falsity of his expectations.
** In The Shape of Things to Come the world leaders fail to stop a war which, while not nuclear, saw aero-chemical attacks on cities that were the interwar period's conflict, after which the war ran its course--to international breakdown (as the war, a less vigorous thing than it might have been as a result of their having already been exhausted, followed by a pandemic readable as a more murderous equivalent of the post-World War I Spanish flu). The result was that here the World State emerged out of post-apocalyptic ruins, built by "practical middle-class types" who realized the old game was up.