The Map of Time and The Turn of the Screw. Felix J. Palma

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СКАЧАТЬ up the naturally slow process of evolution. It was also a tribute to Jonathan Swift, his favourite author: the scene in which Prendick returns to England to tell the world about the phantasmagorical Eden he has escaped from is almost identical to the chapter in which Gulliver describes the land of the Houyhnhnm. And although Wells had not been satisfied with his book, which had evolved almost in fits and starts from the rather haphazard juxtaposition of more or less powerful images, and had been prepared for a possible slating by the critics, it stung all the same.

      The first blow had taken him by surprise, as it had come from his wife, who considered the killing of the doctor by a deformed puma he had tried to transform into a woman a jibe at the women’s movement. How could Jane possibly have thought that? The next jab came from the Saturday Review, a journal he had hitherto found favourable in its judgements. To his further annoyance, the objectionable article was written by Peter Chalmers Mitchell, a young, talented zoologist who had been Wells’s fellow pupil at the Normal School of Science, and who, betraying their once friendly relations, now declared bluntly that Wells’s intention was simply to shock. The critic in the Speaker went still further, accusing the author of being morally corrupt for insinuating that anyone succeeding through experimentation in giving animals a human appearance would logically go on to engage in sexual relations with them. ‘Mr Wells uses his undoubted talent to shameless effect,’ declared the reviewer. Wells asked himself whether his or the critic’s mind was polluted by immoral thoughts.

      Wells was only too aware that unfavourable reviews, while tiresome and bad for morale, were like storms in a teacup that would scarcely affect the book’s fortunes. The one before him now, glibly referring to his novel as a depraved fantasy, might even boost sales, smoothing the way for his subsequent books. However, the wounds inflicted on an author’s self-esteem could have fatal consequences in the long-term: a writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition and, regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit it, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded approach to his work that would eventually stifle his latent genius. Before cruelly vilifying them, mud slingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavours were a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavour, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.

      But they would not get the better of Wells. Certainly not. They would not confound him, for he had the basket.

      He contemplated the wicker basket sitting on one of the kitchen shelves, and his spirits lifted, rebellious and defiant. The basket’s effect on him was instantaneous. As a result, he was never parted from it, lugging it around from pillar to post, despite the suspicions this aroused in his nearest and dearest. Wells had never believed in lucky charms or magical objects, but the curious way in which it had come into his life, and the string of positive events that had occurred since then, compelled him to make an exception in the case of the basket. He noticed that Jane had filled it with vegetables. Far from irritating him, this amused him. In allocating it that dull domestic function, his wife had at once disguised its magical nature and rendered it doubly useful: not only did the basket bring good fortune and boost his self-confidence, not only did it embody the spirit of personal triumph by evoking the extraordinary person who had made it, it was also just a basket.

      Calmer now, Wells closed the magazine. He would not allow anyone to put down his achievements, of which he had reason to feel proud. He was thirty years old and, after a long, painful period of battling against the elements, his life had taken shape. The sword had been tempered and, of all the forms it might have taken, had acquired the appearance it would have for life. All that was needed now was to keep it honed, to learn how to wield it and, if necessary, allow it to taste blood occasionally. Of all the things he could have been, it seemed clear he would be a writer – he was one already. His three published novels testified to this. A writer. It had a pleasant ring to it. And it was an occupation that he was not averse to: since childhood it had been his second choice, after that of becoming a teacher – he had always wanted to stand on a podium and stir people’s consciences, but he could do that from a shop window, and perhaps in a simpler and more far-reaching way.

      A writer. Yes, it had a pleasant ring. A very pleasant ring indeed.

      Wells cast a satisfied eye over his surroundings, the home with which literature had provided him. It was a modest dwelling, but one that would have been far beyond his means a few years before, when he was barely scraping a living from the articles he managed to publish in local newspapers and the exhausting classes he gave, when only the basket kept him going in the face of despair.

      He could not help comparing it with the house in Bromley where he had grown up, that miserable hovel reeking of the paraffin with which his father had doused the wooden floors to kill the armies of cockroaches. He recalled with revulsion the dreadful kitchen in the basement, with its awkwardly placed coal stove, and the back garden with the shed containing the foul-smelling outside privy, a hole in the ground at the bottom of a trodden-earth path that his mother was embarrassed to use – she imagined the employees of Mr Cooper, the tailor next door, watched her comings and goings. He remembered the creeper on the back wall, which he used to climb to spy on Mr Covell, the butcher, who was in the habit of strolling around his garden, like an assassin, forearms covered with blood, holding a dripping knife fresh from the slaughter. And in the distance, above the rooftops, the parish church and its graveyard crammed with decaying moss-covered headstones, below one of which lay the tiny body of his baby sister Frances, who, his mother maintained, had been poisoned by their evil neighbour Mr Munday during a macabre tea party.

      No one, not even he, would have imagined that the necessary components could come together in that revolting hovel to produce a writer, and yet they had – although the delivery had been long drawn-out and fraught. It had taken him precisely twenty-one years and three months to turn his dreams into reality. According to his calculations, that was, for – as though he were addressing future biographers – Wells usually identified 5 June 1874 as the day upon which his vocation was revealed to him in what was perhaps an unnecessarily brutal fashion. That day he suffered a spectacular accident, and this experience, the enormous significance of which would be revealed over time, also convinced him that it was the whims of Fate and not our own will that shaped our future.

      Like someone unfolding an origami bird in order to find out how it is made, Wells was able to dissect his present life and discover the elements that had gone into making it up. In fact, tracing the origins of each moment was a frequent pastime of his. This exercise in metaphysical classification was as comforting to him as reciting the twelve times table to steady the world each time it became a swirling mass. Thus, he had determined that the fateful spark to ignite the events that had turned him into a writer was something that might initially appear puzzling: his father’s lethal spin bowling on the cricket pitch. But when he pulled on that thread the carpet quickly unravelled: without his talent for spin bowling his father would not have been invited to join the county cricket team; had he not joined the county cricket team he would not have spent the afternoons drinking with his team-mates in the Bell, the pub near their house; had he not frittered away his afternoons in the Bell, neglecting the tiny china shop he ran with his wife on the ground floor of their dwelling, he would not have become acquainted with the pub landlord’s son; had he not forged those friendly ties with the strapping youth, when he and his sons bumped into him at the cricket match they were attending one afternoon, the lad would not have taken the liberty of picking young Bertie up by the arms and tossing him into the air; had he not tossed Bertie into the air, Bertie would not have slipped out of his hands; had he not slipped out of the lad’s hands, the eight-year-old Wells would not have fractured his tibia when he fell against one of the pegs holding down the beer tent; had he not fractured his tibia and been forced to spend the entire summer in bed, he would not have had the perfect excuse to devote himself to the only form of entertainment available to him in that situation – reading, a harmful activity, which, under any other circumstances, would have aroused his parents’ suspicions, which would have prevented him discovering Dickens, Swift and Washington Irving, СКАЧАТЬ