English Innocents Abroad: Wells and Lewis

Amused by the questions they ask him at immigration (”Are you a Polygamist? Are you an Anarchist?”), as well as startled by the cunning with which they invite him to incriminate himself, H.G. Wells launches into a discussion of the Future, America’s future (in The Future in America). It’s a curious choice; after noting that people would expect him to write about England, he recuses himself by pointing to the partiality of his English eyes which prevent him from examining his own native country. Maybe. But he also notes that “Our future is extraordinarily bound up in America’s and in a sense dependent upon it…a common Englishman has an almost pathetic pride and sense of proprietorship in the States; he is fatally ready to fall with the idea that two nations that share their past, that still, a little restively, share one language, may even contrive to share an infinitely more interesting future…in that sense indeed America belongs to the whole western world…” It’s still a curious choice, though.

Apparently he was to have co-written a novel with Henry James (the mind boggles), and here he discusses the “the prophetic habit of mind” they share:

“I find this characteristic turn of mine, not only in Heraclitus, the most fragmentary of philosophers, but for one fine passage at any rate, in Mr. Henry James, the least fragmentary of novelists. In his recent impressions of America, I find him apostrophizing the great mansions of Fifth Avenue, in words quite after my heart;–

“It’s very well,” he writes, “for you to look as if, since you’ve no past, you’re going in, as the next best thing, for a magnificent compensatory future. What are you going to make your future of, for all your airs, we want to know? What elements of a future, as futures have gone in the great world, are at all assured to you?”

“I had already, when I read that, figured myself as addressing if not these particular last triumphs of the fine Transatlantic art of architecture, then at least America in general in some words. It is not unpleasant to be anticipated by the chief Master of one’s craft, it is indeed, when one reflects upon his particular intimacy with this problem, enormously reassuring, and so I have gladly annexed his phrasing and put it her to honor and adorn and in a manner to explain my own enterprise.”

And, just to throw a little counterpoint on the grill, here’s a bizarre bit of dialogue from America, I Presume, Wyndham Lewis’ repulsive but funny travel narrative to the states. Before being commissioned to travel to the States, he meets an old college friend in a club and they strike up a conversation:

“What are you up to now, Kitters? I asked. “Still n*****-driving, on the Dark Continent? Or up in Chitral?”
“God no!” said he, looking over at one of the women, and tipping his glass, I thought, in her direction. “Africa’s played out. Another Dark Continent claims all my attention. I spend most of my time in America”

Heavy is the Hand of H.G. Wells, pt 1

This 1936 film is Things to Come. And it’s exactly as incoherently bombastic and grandiose as it sounds. Not only is the main city in the first ten minutes called “Everytown,” in a non-ironical way (as in, we hear the announcement “Air raids approaching Everytown!”), and the hearth and home Christmas set-piece that opens the film too horrible for words, but before you’ve recovered from these crimes against aesthetics, there’s this scene:

(Above the cliffs of Dover, approximately a million billion single-wing jets streak across the sky. The camera cuts away to two biplanes locked in combat, now the only two planes in the air. The world’s least exciting dog-fight ensues. One of them shoots down the other. The downed plane drops like a stone, but luckily, the pilot is okay.)

Airman #1 (having landed and now cradling Airman #2’s head in his arms): Why has it come to this? Why are we murdering each other?

Airman #2: Go my friend. That is my gas. It is a bad gas.

(He is, however, not referring to the melodramatic flatulence that passes for dialogue but some kind of bombing raid nearby. Airman #1 struggles to give Airman #2 his gas mask, but out of absolutely nowhere, a little girl runs into frame, and stands there waiting to be aided.)

Airman #2: Give it to her! I’ve given it plenty to others! Why should I not have some myself? Give it to her! I’m done!

(If only it were true. As the others scurry away, Airman #2 goes into a horrible soliloquy about how funny it is that he bombs people with poison gas and then gives them his own gas mask. Soon he starts to strangle on this horribly misguided attempt at ironic insight into the modernist plight of humanity, and the shovel he was using to deliver it, and he has to shoot himself, not a moment too soon. It is a bad gas, indeed).

Things get mildly more interesting once the movie gets seriously into the business of wiping out humanity. After decades of warfare, there’s apparently some kind of bizarre “wandering sickness,” where people who are infected sort of wander around until somebody shoots them. A sizeable chunk of humanity gets wiped out–with a Malthusian logic hamfistedly linked to the black plague of the middle ages and its role in starting the industrial revolution–such that the survivors devolve into warring clans, setting up little petty states in which ludicrous furs are considered the height of fashion. “Everytown” turns into some kind of feudal kingdom and we get to hear both a doctor and an airplane engineer bitching about lacking medicine and petrol. They are quite petulant about how the collapse of civilization has greatly inconvenienced them, and I wish someone would drop poison gas on them.

But this is not to be, for the plane that comes circling in is carrying a character introduced much earlier, way back in the nightmarish parody of a domestic scene that opened the movie, who has since become a member of the “brotherhood of efficiency.” As this expositionary force informs us, a group of engineers have banded together, now calling themselves “Wings over the World” and they apparently fly around the countryside starting civilization over again, sort of like in Star Trek but with much, much worse helmets.

More to come, perhaps; 37 minutes of this dreck has left me a little disoriented and its not even halfway through. I’ve had fever dreams with more consistent plotting and characterization, but then I am interested to find out if it can top itself. Those enormous helmets were a nice touch; I’m hoping we’ll get more of that, and a “dark lady” was just introduced (she’s a brunette, that’s how you know) so maybe the phallic imagery in the background will take a more active hand in the action. Or not, but hope is the only thing that keeps me going here. Stay tuned.