The votes are in for this month’s Reading group, and after a close contest featuring nominations for more than a dozen of HG Wells’s novels, not to mention a good number of short stories, Tono-Bungay has come out on top.
This is a decision that Wells himself might have liked. Tono-Bungay is an often funny book, but its author took it far more seriously than he did most of his output. “I have to admit that the larger part of my fiction was written lightly and with a certain haste,” he confessed in his autobiography, but he singled out Tono-Bungay as one of the exceptions.
It took him longer to write, for a start. Wells turned out classics such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds in a matter of months, but he worked on Tono-Bungay over a number of years. Admittedly, he also turned out quite a few other books at the same time, but the fact that he started it in 1906 and it was only serialised (by Ford Madox Ford in his English Review) in late 1908 was fairly unusual.
Wells said that he saw Tono-Bungay as a book on “Dickens-Thackeray lines” and that “I shall never come as near to a deliberate attempt upon The Novel again as I did in Tono-Bungay”. He published his autobiography in 1934 (some of it anyway; an extra volume about his sex life came out posthumously). That was a good 12 years before his death, but he never did manage to produce a more complete and successful conventional novel.
Mind you, even for Tono-Bungay, “conventional” probably isn’t the right word. Wells also wrote:
Even Tono-Bungay was not much of a concession to Henry James and his conception of an intensified rendering of feeling and characterisation as the proper business of the novelist. It was an indisputable Novel, but it was extensive rather than intensive. That is to say it presented characters only as part of a scene. It was planned as a social panorama in the vein of Balzac.
That reference to Henry James needs some explanation. An interesting thing about HG Wells is that no matter how famous he became, no matter how successful and no matter how influential, he always carried a chip on his shoulder (one of several things he has in common with George, the hero of Tono-Bungay). Wells never felt entirely accepted as a man of letters, possibly because he came from a more humble background than most successful Edwardian writers. And partly because, even at the turn of the 20th century, there was a certain snobbery about people who wrote about scientific ideas and philosophical and historical concepts rather than the higher emotional life of the mind. A snobbery it would be easy to suggest was embodied by Henry James.
Although, as often, Wells was being slightly unjust to James in that autobiographical quote. Certainly, if you look at one of James’s relatively early essays on the art of fiction, he’s more lenient than Wells suggests. He asks, for instance (with typical deliberation): “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character?”
If you read the rest of that essay, you’ll discover many more delicate, thoughtfully ambivalent ideas about the importance of character. And, if you’re anything like me, you’ll also discover you’ve got something of a headache: the James sentence is, as Wells famously described it, “a delicate creature swathed in relative clauses as an invalid in shawls”.
Wells’s prose was always more forceful and direct, his writing more fun to read. Which is possibly why James also stuck the knife into his one-time friend (and close neighbour while Wells was writing Tono-Bungay). The American wrote an article in the Times Literary Supplement in 1914 lumping Wells in with a generation of authors producing “affluents turbid and unrestrained”. Wells responded by dedicating a whole chunk of his experimental novel Boon to making fun of James and those relative clauses, and having a “complimentary” copy delivered to James at the Reform Club on Pall Mall. James was mortified. He wrote a stiff letter to Wells complaining about the fact that Wells had found him so “futile and void”. There followed a desperate and sad exchange in which Wells tried to claim that Boon was nothing more than “a waste-paper basket” and reasserted his admiration for James. But James pointed out that the contents of wastepaper baskets weren’t normally published, condemned Wells’s bad manners and drew a line under their friendship. James died soon after, leaving Wells smarting – and prickly ever after.
All of which explains why Wells was at once so keen to have Tono-Bungay measured against James’s yardstick – and so ambivalent about what that actually meant. I’m not entirely sure either. But at least that odd quote shows the special feeling Wells had for this book and proves his desire for it to be taken seriously. Hopefully, by the end of this month on the Reading group we’ll also have a clearer idea about those characters and how “intensively” they’ve been rendered, not to mention the social panorama into which Wells said he put them.
Until then, of course, the thing to do is to take the advice of another of Wells’s famous friends (and later on his enemy, too) DH Lawrence: “Read, read Tono-Bungay, it is a great book.”
To further that end, we have five copies of the Penguin Classics edition to give away to the first five readers from the UK to post “I want a copy please”, along with a nice, constructive comment in the comments section below. If you’re lucky enough to be one of the first to comment, email Laura Kemp with your address (laura.kemp@theguardian.com). Be nice to her, too. And as usual, all suggestions and ideas for future discussions will be gratefully received.
