A Man of Parts (32 page)

The hall in Clifford’s Inn was far too small for the General Meeting, so Essex Hall was hired, and several hundred members – more than a third of the total membership, which had increased significantly since he began to take a leading role in its affairs – crowded in on both levels. An excited buzz of chatter filled the air until the chairman, one Mr H. Bond Holding, banged his gavel and opened the meeting. Two substantial documents had been circulated to everyone present: the Report of the Committee of Enquiry (as the ‘Wells Committee’ was officially known) and the Executive’s reply to it. The Report proposed a new Basis and a more efficient executive structure, attacked the policy of ‘permeation’, and urged that the Society should greatly expand its membership, rename itself the British Socialist Society and join similar bodies in putting up candidates for Parliament. The Executive’s response, in which the hand of Shaw could be detected, welcomed constructive criticism, but wondered how the more ambitious proposals were to be funded. They were unimpressed by the revised draft of the Basis, defended the doctrine of permeation, and thought that a direct intervention in Parliamentary elections would be premature. Shaw proposed a long and complex motion which approved a cautious move forward in the direction indicated by the Enquiry Committee while positively committing itself to very little.

His own speech was in the form of an amendment, endorsing the ‘spirit and purport’ of the Report and calling for the election of a new Executive to implement it. Strictly speaking Sydney Olivier, as chairman of the Enquiry Committee, should have spoken to the Report, but in the euphoric aftermath of his October lecture on ‘Socialism and the Middle Classes’ he had insisted on performing this function himself. His confidence had taken several knocks since then, and he felt nervous, sitting on the platform listening to Shaw’s smoothly turned sentences uttered in a mellifluous Irish accent, as his own time to speak approached. Then all his old faults as a public orator returned in their worst form. Avoiding eye contact with his listeners, he mumbled into his moustache or piped into the rafters; he stumbled over his notes, and fumbled his jokes. He felt himself steadily losing the audience’s goodwill and went on for over an hour, far too long, in a hopeless effort to recover it. When he had finished there was no time for a proper debate. Webb made a short speech saying that it seemed members had to choose between an Executive that had enjoyed their confidence for many years and an untried and inexperienced new leadership. Sydney Olivier said the Society was in danger of becoming a ‘small, hidebound, learned body’ if it did not reform its constitution. The chairman declared it was now too late in the evening to bring the debate to a conclusion, and adjourned it for a week.

He was cast down by his own performance and apologised afterwards to Olivier and other colleagues on the committee. ‘Don’t despair,’ Olivier said. ‘It was not your finest speech, Wells, but all is not lost. There are a lot of young people in the Society now who are hungry for change.’ Shaw evidently thought so, because in the following week he circulated a message to all members of the Society making it clear that if the Executive were defeated by Wells’s amendment they would all resign, ‘
with the most serious consequences to the Society
’. Olivier shook his head over this missive. ‘Shaw is very cunning. He’s making your amendment into a vote of no confidence in the Executive. The members will never vote to chuck them all out in one go. It would be like multiple parricide.’

On the eve of the second meeting he had a conversation with Maud Reeves which tended to confirm Olivier’s misgivings. She was due to speak first in the resumed debate, and warned him, with obvious embarrassment, that she would not be pressing for the adoption of his amendment, but advocating a compromise between the two contending parties. ‘I’m very sorry, H.G.,’ she said, ‘but I just can’t support what has now become such a divisive amendment that it could lead to the collapse of the Society.’ ‘I understand, Maud, don’t feel bad about it,’ he said. ‘Oh, but I do,’ she said. ‘You’ve been such a stalwart supporter of the women’s cause that I hate to let you down now. But Shaw says that with Beatrice’s recent change of heart it’s very likely that equal citizenship will soon be incorporated in the Basis, without any need to tear the Fabian apart.’ So Shaw had been getting at Maud privately. And he had a shrewd idea that she was also under personal pressure from her husband not to support a takeover of the Society by someone whom Reeves would regard as a dangerous proponent and, in the light of recent gossip, exponent of Free Love. But he sympathised with the difficulty of her position, and told her not to worry. ‘I think there’s enough momentum for change for us to carry the day,’ he said. ‘And I believe Shaw is bluffing when he threatens that the Executive will resign en bloc if they’re defeated.’

There was an even bigger audience, and even more excitement in the air of Essex Hall, when the second session of the General Meeting commenced on the 14th of December. After Maud had made her diplomatic, conciliatory statement, a number of people spoke from the floor against the amendment and in support of the Executive, among them Clifford Sharp, who had formerly supported the movement for reform, and Hubert Bland, who made some sarcastic remarks about middle-aged men pretending to speak for the interests of youth when in fact promoting their own. But there were also speeches praising the Report, and the atmosphere in the hall was tense as the clock ticked on towards the critical vote.

It was nine when Shaw rose to speak, and as Olivier had predicted, he immediately made the issue one of confidence. ‘If Mr Wells will withdraw his amendment, the Executive would be happy to debate the Report’s substantive proposals one by one,’ he said. ‘But the amendment ties the acceptance of the Report to the dissolution of the present Executive – in other words, dismissal with dishonour – which would necessarily lead to our resignation, while the Committee of Enquiry has made it equally clear that, if defeated, they would abandon their effort to regenerate the Society.’ There was uproar in the hall as several voices disputed this interpretation of the amendment, and he himself sprang to his feet to say that he had no intention of resigning, whatever happened. ‘I am very glad to hear it,’ said Shaw, with the triumphant air of a man watching the jaws of his trap close on a victim, ‘because it means that I can pitch into Mr Wells without fear of the consequences. But this meeting still has to choose between the annihilation of the Executive and the unconditional surrender of Mr Wells.’ And he proceeded to review the whole history of the dispute in a flagrantly ad hominem fashion, attacking ‘Mr Wells’ for using misrepresentation, invention and personal insult to advance his cause, but all delivered with a genial smile and the apparently effortless wit of which Shaw was a master. The audience had acquired a reassuring sense that there were after all to be no resignations and no irreversible damage to the Society that evening, and settled back to enjoy the entertainment. At one point, speaking of the constraints under which both parties had worked, Shaw remarked, ‘During his Committee’s deliberations Mr Wells produced a book on America. And a very good book too. But whilst I was drafting our reply I produced a play.’ He stopped speaking and looked abstractedly up at the high ceiling, long enough for the audience to think that he had lost his thread, then said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I paused there to enable Mr Wells to say “And a very good play too.”’ There was a great burst of laughter from the house, which he himself had to suffer with a forced grin to avoid seeming a bad sport, and at that moment the occasion passed irretrievably from a serious debate to something more like music hall.

When Shaw sat down to huge applause, the chairman turned to him and said, ‘Mr Wells, I wonder whether in the circumstances, you would like me to proceed to take a vote, or …’

He glanced at Sydney Olivier, who shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I withdraw the amendment.’ At which there was another long round of applause, and the meeting came to an end.

THE RESULT OF
the meeting of 14th December was, of course, a humiliating defeat for him personally, even though no vote was taken. If he hadn’t been lured into declaring on the platform that he had no intention of resigning he might well have done so, in disgust at having been beaten by purely rhetorical means, not on the issues. No substantive discussion of his committee’s proposals had taken place. But that was in a way a reason to persevere, as several of his allies in the Society urged, and even Shaw, his adversary in the debate and chiefly responsible for trivialising it, took this line. A few days after the meeting Shaw wrote, making no apologies for his own part in it, but assuring him that ‘
you can easily retrieve the situation if you will study your game carefully, or else do exactly what I tell you
’. He pointed out that there were more meetings scheduled to discuss the Executive’s views on the future of the Society, at which members of the Wells committee might well succeed in getting their ideas adopted in a modified form, and recommended that he should stand for the Executive at the annual elections in March. He didn’t know whether to resent or admire the cool cheek of a man who presumed to offer constructive advice to the still smarting victim of his devious tactics in debate.

For the time being he turned his back on the Fabian and threw himself into writing. He resumed work on
Waste
, now entitled
Tono-Bungay
, the name of a patent tonic medicine on which the narrator’s uncle built an ephemeral fortune. This character, Edward Ponderevo, was based on his own Uncle Williams, the Wookey schoolmaster and father of Edith and Bertha, a kind-hearted, genial man with a moral blind spot, who had hurriedly to close his school to avoid prosecution for fraudulent misrepresentation of his qualifications. The stupendous success of Ponderevo’s worthless tonic was based entirely on mendacious advertising and aggressive marketing, but instilled in him delusions of grandeur which he would act out in the acquisition and construction of more and more extravagant houses for himself and his wife, until his financial bubble collapsed and he fell into bankruptcy, taking with him the thousands of small investors who had trusted him. He personified a new kind of irresponsible capitalism that was becoming a feature of the Edwardian Age, creating what his nephew George, the narrator of the novel, called ‘
the most unpremeditated, subtle, successful, and aimless plutocracy that had ever encumbered the destiny of mankind
’.

He put a good deal of his own experience into the character of George – an upbringing as the child of a servant in a great country house, the struggle to get free of this humble background through a scientific education, problems with sex and marriage in a repressive and hypocritical society – and gave himself room to analyse and generalise about the condition of England by making George present himself from the outset as an amateur novelist: ‘
I warn you this book is going to be something of an agglomeration. I want to trace my social trajectory (and my uncle’s) as the main line of my story, but as this is my first novel and almost certainly my last, I want to get in, too, all sorts of things that struck me, things that amused me and impressions I got – even although they don’t minister directly to my narrative at all … I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind
.’ Whether this excuse would satisfy Henry James was doubtful, but he believed the tone and texture of the narrative voice, the insistent imagery of disease, degeneration and decay in the social fabric, would give the book unity.

Early in the New Year, however, he was seized with another idea. He had got to know a young man of unusual experience and talents called John William Dunne. The son of a British General, he had been brought up in South Africa, where he was apprenticed to a farmer, and served in the Imperial Yeomanry in the Boer War, after which he came to England and trained as an aeronautical engineer. He designed a revolutionary kind of monoplane with swept-back wings, based on his observation of seabirds, which impressed the War Office sufficiently for them to employ him at their research unit in Aldershot, though they did not authorise production of a prototype and eventually the idea was shelved. From Dunne he gleaned much interesting information about new developments in aeronautics and their potential applications in warfare – notably the progress of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin’s dirigible rigid airship in Germany. After a number of failures and crashes, the prototype had recently succeeded in staying airborne for eight hours. ‘These airships would make a perfect platform for weapons, and could be built to enormous size, giving them almost limitless range,’ Dunne told him. ‘You mean, the Germans could bomb London from them?’ he asked. ‘They could bomb New York eventually,’ Dunne assured him.

He could not get this vision out of his head: the proud skyscrapers of New York crumbling and collapsing under a ruthless bombardment from the air, whole blocks on fire, panic in the streets … Soon his imagination had conceived the outline of a novel in the same genre as
The War of the Worlds
, which would tap into current British anxieties about German imperialism and the accelerating arms race between the two nations. Typically, both nations were preparing to fight the next war with the weapons of yesterday, not tomorrow, building more and more, bigger and bigger battleships. It was obvious if you talked to men like Dunne that air power was destined to supersede naval power, and that the speed, range and mobility of the former would result in the rapid globalisation of warfare. He sketched a narrative in which a conflict between Britain and Germany rapidly drew in America, Japan and other countries, and consisted mainly of the wholesale destruction of large cities by aerial bombing, leading to the total collapse of civilisation. Narrative continuity was to be provided by the character of a cockney cycle-repairer who stowed away in an airship and found himself the involuntary witness of a German surprise raid on New York and the mayhem that followed. The moral, as always, would be that only a world government could ensure the benevolent, not destructive, application of new advances in science and technology. But what excited him was the prospect of once again summoning up an apocalyptic vision of the complacent, familiar present-day world disintegrating under the devastating impact of unprecedented force. It would be a harmless but satisfying discharge of the violence he would like to do to the Old Gang and their followers.