Woman of Valor (25 page)

Terribly self-absorbed, and perhaps stuck in a perpetual pubescence himself, de Selincourt always seemed grateful for Margaret's attentions. She was, after all, an attractive and high-spirited woman of international accomplishment and prominence, and he flattered her shamelessly, appealing in a puerile transatlantic correspondence to what he called the “spiritual” side of her nature, though it was probably her vanity he captured. Ellis snidely characterized this capacity for pandering when he wrote to Margaret that de Selincourt had been down to see him, and was reveling in one of her letters and “purring like a cat before the fire.” On another occasion he told her that Hugh was “disconsolate” because he was not able “to kiss your darling feet for an hour or two.”

The bond between Margaret and Hugh was unabashedly physical. His letters to her were hopelessly saccharine. He remembered her variously with words like “tender,” “sweet,” “saintly,” “sensitive,” “delicate,” and “lovely,” but his prose did achieve greater authenticity when he wrote explicitly of their sexual encounters—as on the one occasion he described her in down-to-earth fashion as “so gorgeously free.” Whatever the two may actually have thought of each other, they seemed to have been genuinely ravished by their sexual dynamic. Margaret had at last found the accomplished and indefatigable lover she had been looking for—the “chemistry” that had eluded her—and her memories of him apparently nourished her during the long periods between their brief encounters. The letters she wrote Hugh over a decade's time, across vast distances, and often from the bed she shared with a second husband, were gushy and graphically sexual. She wrote of reaching out to hug and hold his “adorable head,” of desiring his kisses in precisely “two places,” of “the joys and delights a certain English old thing has given me”—often having not seen him for months or even years and with no expectation or demand of anything more tangible in the immediate future than more of his fawning responses. In the early 1930s, she tried to arrange for him to come to America on a lecture tour, but she was unsuccessful, and once the Depression and World War II intervened, they scarcely ever saw each other again.

“Our American husbands are everything but lovers. It seems to be a lost sense in the American male,” she confided to him in 1932, entreating him, at the same time, to see Juliet Rublee, who was en route to London and had also long been availing herself of his services. Margaret first introduced the sexually unsophisticated Rublee to de Selincourt in 1921, and while the two of them were preoccupied with one another, she willingly turned her own attentions to Harold Child. “She needs you too,” Margaret was still telling de Selincourt eleven years later, and on Rublee's return from that trip, she added: “She says you attracted her as no man has. She adores you now like I do, and we love each other all the more because of you.”
⁷

The Wantley experiment may have been plainly and simply a narcissistic exercise, however grandly conceived. Its devotees were almost certainly preoccupied with momentary self-gratification and probably incapable of sustained intimacy. At the same time, their rebellion was genuinely felt. They experienced their commitment to liberation from conventional moral and sexual behavior and from common, petty jealousies as a serious political act. Child may have best embodied the group's philosophy when he wrote in 1921 that the main source of human strength, activity, and happiness is love, and then defined love as neither “comfort nor contentment—not a negative measure of shutting out—but a positive measure of taking in more and more.”

The various and complicated couplings of the Wantley circle were apparently never concealed from the larger group, and some of these sexual encounters may have involved more than two at a time, in configurations that joined the women, as well as the men. At one point in 1924, in a breathless letter to Juliet, Margaret confided that Hugh had spent the night, that Harold and Janet had also come to celebrate her return, and that she and Janet had “an embrace beyond any earthly experience.” Still, it is clear that these unusual arrangements were best maintained without conflict when the parties kept at least an ocean's distance between them.
⁸

 

Margaret also began a second affair during the summer of 1920, this time with someone she not only found endearing in bed but also embraced for his luminosity as a man of letters and of influence. H. G. Wells, novelist and essayist, had at that moment reached the pinnacle of his career and was quite possibly the best known writer in the Western world. If his reputation was preeminent, however, it was by no means conventional. He too was a dedicated free lover who had already been married twice and created a small scandal with two affairs that produced children out-of-wedlock, a daughter by one woman and a son by another, the aspiring critic and writer Rebecca West.

Wells had risen from humble Cockney origins. As a young author of science fiction, popular romances, short stories, and criticism, he churned out copy with an astonishing grace and speed. His extraordinary early successes encouraged him to try his hand at more complex literary works, and in the early years of this century he produced several critically acclaimed and enduring novels about Edwardian social conventions. He also began writing about politics. As a principal architect of Fabian Socialism, with its preference for incremental reform over revolution, he had a profound influence on progressive political philosophy in America and was so highly considered by Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl, and Walter Lippmann that they took the name for
The New Republic
from his writings. Following World War I, he emerged as a leading internationalist and exponent of the idea of the League of Nations. In despair over the power of demagogues to influence public opinion, he set out to raise the level of popular intelligence by writing a comprehensive outline of human history. With its wide circulation in the English speaking world and in translation, the book made him both a world figure and a man of considerable personal wealth.

Wells's reputation with the intelligentsia would decline during the 1930s, when his virulent contempt for Stalin provoked what many in England and in America judged to be a reactive, sentimental celebration of the virtues of democratic capitalism. Still, when he died in 1946 he had published more than one hundred books and was, in the view of a biographer, “the most popular of the serious writers of his time, and the most serious of the popular.”
⁹

Before World War I, Wells was well known as a prophet of liberation. Though a relatively small circle was privy to his personal escapades, his 1909 novel,
Ann Veronica
, created a widespread furor with its affectionate portrait of an emancipated modern woman who flaunted her independence and her sexuality. In a more serious vein, he promoted a Socialist theory that repudiated the patriarchal private ownership of women and children in favor of state support of mothers. He envisioned a Utopian society that guaranteed the practical equality, economic independence, and personal freedom of men and women in and out of marriage. He was an avid proponent of scientific birth control as a sine qua non of domestic reform and had lent his name to the letter of support for Margaret Sanger that went to Woodrow Wilson.
¹⁰

Wells and Sanger shared striking similarities of background and temperament. He wrote of them himself in a delightfully funny novel begun in the fall of 1920 when they first met, and then published two years later, after he had gotten to know her even better.
The Secret Places of the Heart
tells the transparently autobiographical story of a man caught in the turmoil of an emotionally satisfying marriage that provides him no sexual fulfillment, and a turbulent extramarital affair that gives him sex but not happiness. The situation recapitulated his own arrangement with Catherine (Jane) Wells, who then shared his home, family, business, and social affairs but sent him off to bed with other women, including West, with whom his long-standing illicit relationship was just then becoming tempestuous.

In the hope that a change of scene would help him resolve the dilemmas of his personal life, the protagonist of Wells's novel, who is called Sir Richmond Hardy (the name apparently an allusion to his sexual appetites) motors off to the English countryside on a fine summer day in the company of a medical doctor. The doctor serves as a vehicle for poking fun at Freudian paradigms, which were becoming much the rage in literary London. No sooner do the two men reach their destination, than Hardy becomes distracted by a woman named Miss Grammont, a “finely-featured, frank-minded but soft-spoken” American who is touring England for the summer with a friend. They strike up a conversation. She is a supporter of birth control and world population planning. She dresses smartly for dinner and wears a silver band with deep red stones in her hair. Hardy confesses that he is not good at judging a woman's age but guesses her to be somewhere in her twenties. He finds her charming and clever, yet he is most impressed by the depth of her experience in matters of love and of life.

There are many thin disguises, some of them attributing facts clearly drawn from Juliet Rublee's life and not from Margaret's, but many details are exact, down to the way Margaret managed her evening coiffeur at the time. Wells was even sensitive to her vanity about age. Of the meaning of the name “Miss Grammont,” one can only speculate. Perhaps some reference was intended to the intelligent but licentious lover of Lord Byron, “Miss Clairmont,” the clue resting in the deliberately formal identification of the two heroines only by their surnames.

Margaret Sanger was in many ways the embodiment of Wells's vision of the new woman: smart and sassy (though never really quite as articulate as he makes her in the book), attractive and sexual, and, above all, reconciled to the notion that love need not compel obligation. In the novel, he seems smitten by her.
The Secret Places of the Heart
was hardly a major literary achievement, but Wells was a lucid writer, and much of what he wrote undoubtedly described Margaret as he saw her.

A few pages later the conversation becomes somewhat less exalted but no less compelling:

The characters continue their intense conversations as they tour the sights, share elegant meals, and then retire to a lovemaking that is only inferred. Anthony West, Wells's son by Rebecca, maintains in his vivid and controversial memoir of his father that Wells omitted graphic love scenes from his novels not only to avoid the censors, but also because he was inept at writing them. In
The Secret Places of the Heart
, the plucky Miss Grammont, after several romantic weeks, boards the train that will take her to Southampton and her return ship to America. She and Hardy make arrangements to write chatty letters to one another about political matters and common interests, but never about their affair. She says:

And so they did. West also acknowledges that his father was never really as successful as he wished to appear at keeping his love affairs short and casual. Margaret, by the son's recollection, was “more genuinely pagan.” Wells went off to Russia in the fall of 1920 to interview Lenin for a sympathetic newspaper series he wrote on the Bolsheviks and to spend time with his friend and intellectual mentor, Maxim Gorky. He and Margaret did not meet again until the following summer in London, and then later that year when Wells came to America to cover the Washington Naval Disarmament Conference, a major postwar diplomatic initiative. Margaret was clearly on his mind at that time. From London he wrote that she was “the most refreshing little human I've met for years” but then bemoaned that “We're like 2 busdrivers each very busy on his route who never get much nearer than lifting a hand as we pass.” And later he wrote: “My plans in New York are ruled entirely by the wish to be with you as much as possible,
as much as possible without other people about
.” He wanted “sure sweet access” to her, and, recognizing that as two prominent individuals they had to be discreet, he suggested she rent him an apartment for the week, rather than a hotel room, so that he might “visit a lot with you in the costume of tropical island.”