XI A Look at H.G. Wells
When H.G. Wells came over here to the Naval Conference as a star reporter for the liberal New York World and the neo-Tory London Daily Mail, his restless curiosity urged him to find time from his preoccupation with high international politics to bestow a little attention on The Liberator. Max Eastman had him to dinner at his home in Greenwich Village, and later there was an informal reception for the Liberator staff and collaborators.
I had stumbled upon Wells at about the same time that I began reading Bernard Shaw. While I admired Shaw for the hammering logic of his prefaces and his sparkling wit, I liked in H.G. Wells those qualities I like in Dickens—the sentimental serving of his characters with a vast sauce of provincial humor.
During my residence in London I had followed Wells’s popular Outline of History as it appeared in instalments, and upon returning to America I read in the published volume the instalments that I had missed.
If it is worth recording, I may say here that I took a violent prejudice against Mr. Wells’s History. I felt something flippant in the style and I did not like Mr. Wells’s attitude toward colored people in general and Africa and Negroes in particular. In the League of Free Nations book he put out in 1918 he said: “Africa is the great source upon which our modern comforts and conveniences depend.... The most obvious danger of Africa is the militarization of the black.... The Negro makes a good soldier, he is hardy, he stands the sea and he stands the cold....”
I suppose the average white reader will exclaim: “And what’s wrong with that? It is wise and sane and humanitarian.” But he should remember that I am Negro and think that the greatest danger of Africa is not the militarization of the black, but the ruthless exploitation of the African by the European. There is also something to be said in favor of native comforts and conveniences. Before the arrival of the European with gunpowder the African was accustomed to protecting his rights with arrow and spear. Now, against modern civilization, he must needs learn the use of modern methods and weapons. The liberal apologists of the European grip on Africa may be very unctious and sentimental about native rights. But the conditions indicate that if the natives must survive, they must themselves learn and practice the art of self-protection.
Mr. Wells always seems to be shouting about his unusually scientific mind. Yet I must confess that I was shocked by the plan of his large tome outlining world history. Because it appears there as if Africa and Africans have not been of enormous importance in world history. Mr. Wells mentions Africa in his language-formation section and leaves Africa there as if nothing more developed. One learns more of Africa from earlier historians than Mr. Wells, who did not know so much about science. Herodotus gives us some remarkable information that he acquired by traveling four hundred years before Jesus Christ. And Ptolemy, the Egyptian geographer, has rendered a remarkable description of Central Africa in the second century after Christ, although I learned as a school boy that it was discovered by David Livingstone. And as late as the fifteenth century, in the high tide of the European renaissance, Leo the African adventured below the Sahara to give the world historical facts about the Negro nations.
Mr. Wells gives a large outline of the nations of Europe and a not-so-large one of the nations of Asia. He makes no mention of the great Negro nations of Western Africa and the Western Sudan before and after the Moslem invasion; of the Negroid nations of Songhoy and Ghana, Fezzan and Timbuctu, Yoruba and Benin, Ashanti and Dahomey, which were arrested in their growth and finally annihilated by the slave traffic and European imperialism, nor of the Senegalese who played a dominant part in the history of Morocco and the conquest of Spain.
Yes indeed, Africa and its blacks are of foundational importance in the history of the world, ancient and modern, and in the creating of European civilization. However, Mr. Wells’s ignoring of the African civilizations in his Outline of History may be deliberate. In his marvelous World of William Clissold, he speculates whether the Negro could participate in “common citizenship in a world republic.” Says he: “The Negro is the hardest case... yet... in the eighteenth century he was the backbone of the British navy....” It is entirely too funny to think—seven years after the appallingly beastly modern white savagery of 1914-18—of Mr. Wells naïvely wondering whether the Negro is capable of becoming a civilized citizen of a world republic. He cites the precedent of Negroes in his British navy. He might have gone farther back and mentioned the Negro contingent in the army of Xerxes the Great (when Britons were savages) and about which Herodotus so glowingly writes.
But even if Mr. Wells likes to take a popular crack at history, he is none the less a first-rate novelist in the tradition of Charles Dickens and I don’t think he imagines himself a historian any more than I do, so one must be tolerant if his Outline has the earmarks of a glorified Research Magnificent.
Also, I did not like Mr. Wells’s inspired articles on the Naval Conference. Paradoxically, I found myself sympathizing with the Daily Mail, which rebuked him for his offensive against Japan. Mr. Wells injected much violent prejudice into what should have been unbiased reporting. While Mr. Wells was outlining history, he might have reserved a little of his English sentimentality for Japan, from the knowledge that Japan might not have been a “yellow peril” today if the white powers hadn’t broken open her door and forced their civilization upon her.
Wells’s little Liberator reception was a question-time picnic for the Liberator collaborators—especially for the ladies, to whom Wells is exceptionally attractive. They asked him many questions about the war and the peace and the aftermath, about Russia and Europe, Japan and America and universal peace. Mr. Wells smilingly and slickly disposed of all problems to the satisfaction of all.
William Gropper, the artist, and I had concocted a plan to ask some impish questions. But everybody was very pleasant. It was a nice party. So we said nothing. I was standing, leaning against the mantelpiece, and Mr. Wells approached me in a sly way as if he desired a close-up scrutiny of me without my knowing it. I seized the opportunity to take a good quick look at Mr. Wells’s eyes. Journalists always write about the jolly twinkle in Mr. Wells’s eyes. I didn’t like them. They made me think of a fox.
Some years later, after my trip to Russia and returning to France, I met Frank Harris in Nice. I was in the company of a brilliant American writer who was meeting Frank Harris for the first time. We went to the Taverne Alsacienne for our drinks. Mr. Wells had recently published his William Clissold, which we had all read and were discussing.
Frank Harris said that what amazed him about H.G. Wells was the fact that the more he tried consciously to expand his writings on a world scale, the more provincial they became. I said, “The higher a monkey climbs, the more he shows his tail.” Frank Harris roared. Then he said that perhaps Wells himself was not aware that his early novels of fantasy and sentiment were his most universal things.
The American writer, said that an English gentleman had remarked to him in London that Wells as a writer was a cockney. I didn’t like the reference to class, especially as I had at least two very dear cockney friends. Harris said that Wells wasn’t a cockney as a writer; that he was a fifth-form public school boy, the same as Kipling. I said I always thought of Kipling as the bugler of the British Empire, and that perhaps Wells was the sub-officer.
It was interesting, after another little lot of years had passed along, to read what Wells had to say about Harris in his Experiment in Autobiography. Wells’s first encounter with Frank Harris interested me, especially because of the fact that my own meeting with Harris was one of the high spots of my life. But it appears as if Wells could not forgive Harris for once being a big and successful editor and discovering him a poor and unknown writer. He writes of Harris’s roar receding with the years until it sounded something like a bark. But a lion may lose its voice through age and worry. Wells mentions one interesting fact, which must be one of the reasons why Harris was such a great editor. The first story he sent to Harris was excellent; the second, Wells admits, was bad. And Harris summoned and gave him a loud talking to over the bad one. Yet when Harris became editor of another magazine, he remembered only the good story and wrote to Wells asking him to become one of his special contributors. And that gave Wells his real start. The point is that many editors wouldn’t remember at all, or if they did, they would remember only that the second contribution was bad.
The American writer left us for Cannes, and Harris invited me to drink champagne with him. We went to the terrace of a café on the Promenade. Harris was not a steady free drinker as he was when I had known him seven years before in New York. His skilful hands trembled under the weight and accumulated cares of three-score years. His hair was dyed, and from the heat of the Midi and of alcohol some of the color had dissolved and mixed with the perspiration oozing from the deep lines of his face, which resembled an antique many-grooved panel with some of the paint peeled off.
Again Frank Harris talked reminiscently and interestingly as always of his acumen in perceiving greatness in Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells and getting them to write for him when they were unknown. “But I am prouder of Shaw,” he said. “Shaw is really a great genius. I don’t always agree with what he says, and he went wrong about the War, but his ‘Common Sense’ was a great piece of polemic. Shaw has intellectual integrity. But I don’t think Wells understands what intellectual integrity means. He is too full of vanity to be a serious intellect. He is a modernistic fiction writer who is discontented with his talent and wants to be a social philosopher. But he is impossible because he has never learned to think.”
I said I thought it was a marvelous thing, something like second-sight, for a man to pick a genius by his first inadequate efforts. Harris said that it took a genius like himself to discover geniuses, and that as an editor, he never played favorites. When he found good stuff he accepted it. But he didn’t go back-slapping and printing bad verses by pretty women. He had had great temptations, but he never let his desires interfere with his intellectual judgment.
His manner was boastful but not offensively so, for I think Frank Harris had something to boast about. After all, he was Gaelic, and I preferred his manner to the hypocritical English way of boasting by studied understatement. And when he spoke of the enormous financial as well as artistic success of Shaw and Wells, there was no envy, but I could detect a shade of personal defeat and frustration in his voice.
Frank Harris’s phrase, “intellectual integrity,” kept agitating my thoughts like a large blue-bottle against a window pane. For a long long time I had carried something on my mind which I had hesitated to get off. But now, with the champagne working in my head and a warm and mellow feeling suffusing me, and with Frank Harris’s features softening a little, I was emboldened to let go.
During my second year as assistant editor on The Liberator a woman called to see me one day bringing a little book of poems. She offered me ten dollars if I would review it in The Liberator. I said that The Liberator did not accept money for printing reviews, but if her poems seemed worth while, we would review them. She said that she had paid Frank Harris a thousand dollars to get the book printed, yet he hadn’t even reviewed it in Pearson’s. And afterward, she said, she had seen a literary agent who informed her that the cost of printing was about two hundred dollars. She thought that Frank Harris had swindled her. I did not review the verses, because to my mind, they were not worth while.
Also, I had heard stories of Frank Harris posing as an art connoisseur and palming off fake pictures as old masters, and of his getting material for his magazine from writers who thought they would be paid and then not paying them—tales of petty racketeering that were more funny than vicious. And so, being champagne drunk with Harris on a café terrace looking out on the calm blue Mediterranean, and feeling elastic and free, I, who admired the extraordinary ways of Frank Harris more than any other intellectual of my acquaintance, was interested to hear from himself the truth. I told him the story of that woman who had visited The Liberator and complained about him.
Frank Harris was wonderful to look at under the influence of the champagne, his lion-roaring, his face like a pirate’s, yet with a sublime gleam of genuine kindliness in his eyes! What I said he did not affirm or deny. He just exploded with a mighty sermon about the artist and intellectual integrity. He said that the way of the artist was hard, for if he had a talent that appealed to popular imagination, everybody desired to use him—women and men, politicians, philanthropists, reformers, revolutionists, organizations, governments. Many artists won success by sacrificing their intellectual integrity. He himself had had large success. But whenever he felt the urge and the bounden duty to declare his opinion, he could not restrain himself, and so he had not remained successful. He had not been a puritan about life. Perhaps he had done things that Jesus would not have done. But he had not given his soul entirely to Mammon. Perhaps he had taken gifts from persons who thought they had been swindled and who were better off perhaps, if they were. But whatever he did he had reserved intact his intellectual integrity.
It was a great sermon and I felt that Frank Harris was greater because of it. He was no hypocrite. He had no social pretensions, although he delighted in the company of smart and fashionable people. He was aware, that there was plenty of dross inseparable from the gold of life, and he embraced the whole. Nobody could deny that he was indeed a follower of the Jesus who dominated his mind, that he sincerely believed in sin and redemption.