A Man of Parts Read online

  About the Book

  ‘The mind is a time machine that travels backwards in memory and forwards in prophecy, but he has done with prophecy now …’

  Sequestered in his blitz-battered Regent’s Park house in 1944, the ailing Herbert George Wells, ‘H.G.’ to his family and friends, looks back on a life crowded with incident, books, and women. Has it been a success or a failure? Once he was the most famous writer in the world, ‘the man who invented tomorrow’; now he feels like yesterday’s man, deserted by readers and depressed by the collapse of his utopian dreams.

  He recalls his unpromising start, and early struggles to acquire an education and make a living as a teacher; his rapid rise to fame as a writer with a prophetic imagination and a comic common touch which brought him into contact with most of the important literary, intellectual, and political figures of his time; his plunge into socialist politics; his belief in free love, and energetic practice of it. Arguing with himself about his conduct, he relives his relationships with two wives and many mistresses, especially the brilliant student Amber Reeves and the gifted writer Rebecca West, both of whom bore him children, with dramatic and long-lasting consequences.

  Unfolding this astonishing story, David Lodge depicts a man as contradictory as he was talented: a socialist who enjoyed his affluence, an acclaimed novelist who turned against the literary novel; a feminist womaniser, sensual yet incurably romantic, irresistible and exasperating by turns, but always vitally human.

  About the Author

  David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks..., Author, Author and, most recently, Deaf Sentence. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

  A MAN OF PARTS

  A Novel

  by

  DAVID LODGE

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also By David Lodge

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Four

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Five

  Acknowledgements

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446467367

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Harvill Secker 2011

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Copyright © David Lodge 2011

  David Lodge has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

  HARVILL SECKER

  Random House

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  www.rbooks.co.uk

  Addresses for companies within The Random House Group Limited can be found at: www.randomhouse.co.uk/offices.htm

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 9781846554964 (hardback)

  ISBN 9781846554971 (trade paperback)

  To Jim Crace

  who guessed the subject of this book

  before I had written a word of it.

  Also by David Lodge

  FICTION

  The Picturegoers

  Ginger, You’re Barmy

  The British Museum is Falling Down

  Out of the Shelter

  Changing Places

  How Far Can You Go?

  Small World

  Nice Work

  Paradise News

  Therapy

  Home Truths

  Thinks …

  Author, Author

  Deaf Sentence

  CRITICISM

  Language of Fiction

  The Novelist at the Crossroads

  The Modes of Modern Writing

  Working with Structuralism

  After Bakhtin

  ESSAYS

  Write On

  The Art of Fiction

  The Practice of Writing

  Consciousness and the Novel

  The Year of Henry James

  DRAMA

  The Writing Game

  Home Truths

  Parts PLURAL NOUN 1. Personal abilities or talents: a man of many parts. 2. short for private parts.

  Collins English Dictionary

  He could imagine as existing, as waiting for him, he knew not where, a completeness of understanding, a perfection of response, that would reach all the gamut of his feelings and sensations from the most poetical to the most entirely physical, a beauty of relationship so transfiguring that not only would she – it went without saying that this completion was a woman – be perfectly beautiful in its light but, what was manifestly more incredible, that he too would be perfectly beautiful and quite at his ease … In her presence there could be no self-reproaches, no lapses, no limitations, nothing but happiness and the happiest activities … To such a persuasion half the imaginative people in the world succumb as readily as ducklings take to water. They do not doubt its truth any more than a thirsty camel doubts that presently it will come to a spring.

  This persuasion is as foolish as though a camel hoped that some day it would drink from such a spring that it would never thirst again.

  H.G. WELLS, Mr Britling Sees It Through

  A young mind is like a green field and full of possibilities, but an old mind becomes more and more like a cemetery crowded up with memories.

  H.G. WELLS, Looseleaf Diary, April 28, 1942

  Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources – ‘based on’ in the elastic sense that includes ‘inferable from’ and ‘consistent with’. All the characters are portrayals of real people, and the relationships between them were as described in these pages. Quotations from their books and other publications, speeches, and (with very few exceptions) letters, are their own words. But I have used a novelist’s licence in representing what they thought, felt and said to each other, and I have imagined many circumstantial details which history omitted to record.

  D.L.

  PART ONE

  IN THE SPRING of 1944 Hanover Terrace, a handsome row of Nash town houses on the western perimeter of Regent’s Park, is looking distinctly war-worn. Its cream stucco façade, untended since 1939, is soiled, cracked and peeling; many windows, shattered by bomb blast or shock waves from the anti-aircraft guns on Primrose Hill, are boarded up; a house towards the end of the terrace, hit by an incendiary bomb, is a gutted shell, s
tained with smoke. The elegant arcade running the length of the building, which serves as a communal porch for the front doors of the houses, is chipped and flaking, as are the massive Doric columns supporting the building’s central feature – a pediment framing statuary of classical figures engaged in various useful and artistic pursuits, two of whom have lost their heads and one an arm. The goddess who formerly stood on the apex of the pediment, clasping an orb, has been removed as a potential danger to people below if she should be suddenly toppled by an explosion; and the cast-iron railings that, smartly painted in black and gold, used to divide the service road and its shrubbery from the park’s Outer Circle, were long ago cut down and taken away to make munitions.

  Only one house, number 13, has been permanently occupied throughout the war by its owner, Mr H.G. Wells. During the London Blitz of 1940–41 he was frequently teased with the suggestion that this might prove an unlucky number, to which he responded, consistent with a lifetime’s contempt for superstition, by having a bigger ‘13’ painted on the wall beside his front door. He stubbornly refused to move to the country, saying ‘Hitler (or in male company, “that shit Hitler”) is not going to get me on the run’, and stayed put in Hanover Terrace as, one by one, his neighbours slunk off to safe rural havens and their houses were occupied by sub-tenants or left empty.

  As long as he was physically able to do so H.G. put on a tin hat and took his turn at fire-watching from the roof of Hanover Terrace, partly from a sense of patriotic duty and partly from a personal solicitude for the Aubusson carpet in his drawing room. It also gave him a gloomy satisfaction to observe from, as it were, a grandstand seat, the fulfilment of his prophecy as far back as 1908, in his novel The War in the Air, that future wars would be dominated by air power and involve the destruction of cities and civilian populations by indiscriminate bombing. Admittedly he had been mistaken in assuming that this strategy would be carried out mainly by enormous airships, big as ocean liners, rather than aeroplanes, but given the state of aeronautical engineering in 1908 that was not such a wild guess, and certainly didn’t seem so a few years later when German Zeppelins appeared in the night sky over England. Penguin Books considered The War in the Air still sufficiently relevant to the current war to reissue it in 1941, with a brief new Preface by himself that concluded with an epitaph he wished to have inscribed on his tombstone: ‘I told you so. You damned fools.’

  Fire-watching is beyond him now, but there is little need for it. In the spring of 1944, the sirens seldom sound. The unexpected resumption of German night raids at the beginning of the year turned out to be just a token retaliation for the carpet-bombing of German cities by the British and American air forces and soon petered out. Now there is only the occasional hit-and-run daylight raid by some fast low-flying fighter-bomber that slips under the radar shield, and these rarely get as far as central London. Nazi Germany has more important things on its military mind: grimly resisting the advance of the Russian armies in the east, and preparing to repulse the invasion of occupied France which everybody knows is imminent. London is safe again, and one by one the leaseholders of Hanover Terrace are creeping back to reclaim their property, viewed with some contempt by H.G. who has been here for the duration, keeping to his routine, writing his books, answering letters, going for a daily constitutional – across the road and into the park, to the Zoo or the Rose Garden, or down Baker Street to the Savile Club in Brook Street, pausing for a browse in Smith’s bookshop on the way.

  Lately he has had to give up these excursions – even the Rose Garden is too far. He is not well. He has no strength. He has no appetite. He rises late and sits in an armchair in the small sitting room, or in the sun lounge, a glassed-in balcony at the back of the house, with a rug over his knees, reading and dozing intermittently, woken with a start by the sound of his book sliding to the floor, or by his daughter-in-law Marjorie, who has acted as his secretary ever since his wife died, coming in with some letters that need answering or just to check that he is comfortable. In the evenings he is visited by his elder son Gip, Marjorie’s husband, or by Anthony, his natural son by Rebecca West, born on the first day of the First World War. He is conscious of these three people going in and out, scrutinising him with worried frowns. For some time he has had a nurse in the house at nights; now his physician Lord Horder has recommended that they employ a day nurse as well. He wonders if he is dying.

  One evening in April, Anthony West rings up his mother. She receives the call at her home, Ibstone House, the surviving wing of a Regency period mansion, with its own farm attached, in the country near High Wycombe, where she lives with her husband Henry Andrews, a banker and economist now working at the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,’ Anthony says. ‘Horder says H.G. has cancer of the liver.’

  ‘Oh God!’ says Rebecca. ‘How awful. Does he know?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You’re not going to tell him, I hope?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been talking it over with Gip. We think we should.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘H.G. has always believed in facing facts. He’s not afraid of death. He’s said so on many occasions.’

  ‘It’s one thing to say it …’

  ‘I don’t think we should discuss this over the phone, Rac,’ Anthony says, using the nickname she acquired when she married Henry and they began calling themselves Ric and Rac after two French cartoon dogs. ‘I wish I could have come over and told you in person.’

  ‘Because you’re feeling dreadful?’

  ‘Because I thought you would feel dreadful.’

  ‘Well, of course I do,’ says Rebecca, bridling slightly. Their conversations tend to be barbed with little implied or inferred accusations and rebuttals, which often turn into bigger ones.

  ‘I can’t get over to Ibstone at the moment,’ Anthony says. ‘We’re short-staffed in Far East and I’m very busy.’ He is currently working as a sub-editor in the Far Eastern Department of the BBC’s Overseas Service.

  Anthony summarises Horder’s prognosis: H.G. might experience some remission, but he probably has only a year to live, at the most. They argue again about whether he should be told, until Rebecca irritably terminates the call. She goes to her study and records it in her diary, concluding: ‘My chief anxiety is that Anthony should not be hit too hard by this news. I have made my peace with H.G. I have not forgotten the cruel things he did to me, but our affection is real and living.’ Her diary is written with one eye on her future biographers, who will quote from it.

  Anthony rings up Jean, a pretty young brunette with superb breasts who works as a secretary at Bush House, with whom he is having a passionate affair, and tells her the news about his father. She is sympathetic, but unable to enter fully into his emotions because she has never met H.G., and she cannot be introduced to him or to the rest of the family because Anthony is married to Kitty, who is running their farm and looking after their two children while he works at the BBC, and Kitty is at present unaware of Jean’s existence. Meanwhile Anthony when he is working in London lives in the mews flat at the end of the rear garden of number 13 Hanover Terrace, known in the family as ‘Mr Mumford’s’ after some former tenant long gone and probably dead.

  ‘Have you told your wife about us yet?’ Jean asks Anthony, lowering her voice so her flatmate Phyllis won’t hear. Their affair is consummated mainly in this flat, situated conveniently near Bush House, in daytime hours snatched when they are free and Phyllis is at work.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘When will you?’

  ‘I have to wait for the right moment.’

  ‘There’ll never be a right moment. You just have to do it.’

  ‘I can’t while we’re all absorbing this news about H.G.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘I love you, Jean.’

  ‘Love you too. But I hate this hole and corner thing.’

  ‘I know, but be patient, darling,’ he says.


  Some days later Rebecca receives a phone call from Marjorie, asking her to come and see H.G. ‘Would he welcome that?’ Rebecca asks. The wounds of their parting in 1923 or ’24 (it was never clear to either of them exactly when it became final) after a stormy and passionate relationship that had stretched over a decade, have healed, and they have been on friendly terms in recent years, but knowing that he has a life-threatening illness makes a visit potentially stressful. ‘He said he would like to see you,’ says Marjorie. ‘Then I’ll come,’ says Rebecca. ‘Does he know about his … ?’ ‘Yes,’ says Marjorie.

  Rebecca takes with her a basket containing eggs and butter and cheese from the Ibstone House farm, precious largesse which the housekeeper receives gratefully. ‘Mr Wells can’t stomach the dried eggs any more whatever I do with them,’ she says. ‘A nice fresh egg soft-boiled might tempt him.’ H.G. has had a bad night and is not quite ready to see Rebecca when she arrives, so she is shown into the long drawing room on the first floor to wait. She has never liked the house: it is grand but cold and rather gloomy, with dark polished parquet floors and beige walls, furnished with impersonal good taste, like an expensive hotel. There is an Aubusson carpet in the drawing room and a Tang terracotta horse on the mantelpiece but they express the owner’s wealth, not his personality. H.G. never did have much visual taste, she reflects. He was obsessed with functionality in domestic architecture, but indifferent to décor, a fanatic for plumbing, but a poor judge of pictures. The house lacks a woman’s touch – Moura Budberg, his mistress when he bought the lease in 1935, wisely refused either to marry or to cohabit with him, and she has had no successor. Even his study, which Rebecca peeps into on her way to visit the lavatory, with its mahogany desk bearing a green-shaded reading lamp on a heavy ziggurat base, a matching inkstand and a leather-bound blotting pad, might be the office of the chairman of a bank – except that on the polished surface of the desk there are two foolscap manila folders, creased and dog-eared from use, one to each side of the blotter, which look as if they contain manuscripts rather than accounts.