"Entrepreneurship" and Self-Made Millionairedom in H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay

Reflecting upon the rise and fall of his uncle's pharmaceutical empire in H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay (1909) George Ponderovo remarks "the supreme unreason of" the situation which saw his uncle Edward--who "created nothing . . . invented nothing . . . economised nothing," whose businesses never "added any real value to human life at all" and indeed "were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving of nothing coated in advertisements for money"-- was rewarded by the "community in which we live" "for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies" with "a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions" at his peak (the equivalent of a billionaire in today's terms).

The contrast between the understanding of such a figure in Wells' novel, and the tendency of American literature, is really extraordinary. After all, Wells here satirized not merely any rich man, but that figure so central to the "aspirationalist," Horatio Alger tale-addicted mythology dominating the American cultural, social and political imagination, the self-made rich man. Admittedly American orthodoxy does not demand unqualified admiration for all such persons. It allows that they may have personal failings--their perhaps not always being as gentle with others as they might be, for example. However, it brooks no questioning of the view that they did give something to the community, a lot more than they got in return no matter how many billions they have made out of it, and respect for them as the Atlas bearing up the sky on his shoulders as they can only be because they are "smarter" and more "hard-working" than everyone else (this means you), you, geniuses all, all as their fortunes are the glory of the social model which permits them to exist, while even excusing their failings as a necessary part of the package, their nastiest behavior "necessary" for "getting things done" given the worthlessness of the inferior human material with which the best have to work (and once again this means you). Granted, every now and then some figure comes along that even the most strident champion of this view cannot deny proved to be a fraud rather than some great creator of value--but they regard such as a regrettable but unavoidable, temporary, not very important error inevitably corrected by the Market on which they prefer not to linger, regarding it as unseemly, even calumnious to society's worthiest strata to give too much thought to the Ken Lays, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, the Elizabeth Holmeses and the rest as they ceaselessly sing tech billionaires they assume to be "the real deal."

In George's telling, however, the Edward Ponderovos are not a bug but a feature of the system, and indeed fundamentally characteristic of the "irrational muddle of a community" in which the Ponderovos lived, with its social system out of date and, in the very same perversity that rewards such frauds, stifling of anything that would bring real progress.

All that being the case it seems little surprise that Wells' book is little read in our times--and indeed, that Mark Schorer, doing his bit to persuade the student of literature that Wells is not worth their time, singled out Tono-Bungay for abuse in his landmark essay "Technique and Discovery," not incidentally a significant moment in the cultural Cold War in which Schorer was such an enthusiastic soldier. (After all, just ask Richard Lingeman who it was that destroyed Sinclair Lewis, and why.)