H.G. Wells Possibly Interested In Infantalism?!

[ForbiddenFruit]

On Friday morning I was doing some research on H.G. Wells's (the 19th and 20th century science fiction author, not the character from Warehouse 13) history with eugenics for an essay by reading some of his correspondance, collected in 4 immense volumes.

It's quite interesting stuff, and as I had time to kill I ended up reading his letters to Joyce, Gandhi, Wilde, and when I was flipping to the index I stumbled across a letter he wrote to his wife, more than likely at a time when he was having an openly-known affair. This little snippet, the very opening, caught my eye.

Dst Person,

I’m a remorseful and sad Binder this morning, with a general feeling of ‘aving frown fings at the only person worth loving in the world.

I did a doube take at 'aving frown fings. I assumed he was trying to make a mockery of a lower class by dropping the H or something to that effect, ironic considering his own background, but then I glimpsed the footnote.

As is often the case Wells reverts to a sort of baby talk when writing to his wife and sweet-hearts. This usually occurs when relationships are strained, as in this letter. There is a Wells essay in Pall Mall Gazette, 4 December 1894 entitled ‘In the Library: Some Reflections on a Married Couple’, which is a discussion of baby talk between husbands and wives.

I simply had to type these out with a huge grin on my face! Since then I've done a brief google for this 1894 article with no success, but, hell, I'm certainly going to try! This is just golden!

[Diapered Jason]

Lucky you, there is a CNN report on state-sponsored sterilization.

Anyways, the guy is an idiot for supporting such a thing. Perhaps he should be sterilized for reverting to baby talk when communicating with his wife.

[ForbiddenFruit]

Actually, he declared it a sham science himself, wikipedia is being very misleading when it says he supported it. He disagreed with Galton and most institutionalised eugenics and his own view was more or less regurgitated Darwin (he just phrased it so horribly , horribly wrong). Unsurprising considering Huxley tutored him.

Oh, and on a side note, I wish English departments would wake up to the fact that despite the fact he's a great thematic writer, he loved his adverbs far, far too much. He was a smart writer who, well, fell into an idiot's pitfall far too often.

[Diapered Jason]

That is some good researching you are doing there. I guess I will have to recant my last post.

[ForbiddenFruit]

Oh, not at all It's a very hairy quote. This is the bit that's quoted frequently:

“The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born. It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.

[gah!ghost]

I could be wrong because I don't know a huge amount about his connection to eugenics but it sounds a bit like the cries of pedophile associated with Lewis Carrol. Where we in modern society look back on his photography of children nude through a modern lens without understanding the historical context. In that case being, from what I understand, that nude child photography was very popular at the time and Lewis Carrol was just participating in that movement.

A better example might be Lovecraft who is often said to have been a horrible racist, which is actually true. But it was a lot more complicated than that. He also hated Jews yet married a Jewish woman and hated gays and had a very good friend (humorously named Loveman) who was gay. Later in life it also seems he began to question and discard his prejudices and you can see it in his work. There's some excellent stuff about the dangers of racism and the acceptance of the "other" in At The Mountains of Madnesss.

[ForbiddenFruit]

A better example might be Lovecraft who is often said to have been a horrible racist, which is actually true. But it was a lot more complicated than that. He also hated Jews yet married a Jewish woman and hated gays and had a very good friend (humorously named Loveman) who was gay. Later in life it also seems he began to question and discard his prejudices and you can see it in his work. There's some excellent stuff about the dangers of racism and the acceptance of the "other" in At The Mountains of Madnesss.

Funny you should bring this up as I'm doing a project on him. Yes, Lovecraft was racist, needs to be admitted, but he had 'phases'. His background would have made him 'casually racist' to begin with. Now add in the fact that his family was particularly old-fashioned. Now consider he himself was a recluse for a massive portion of his life. He communicated, yes, but mainly through letters (about 87,500 exist).

Then, kill off the closest family members, and slowly break apart his marriage with the only woman to kiss him since he was a child. Throw him into New York, a world he doesn't understand, failing to find a job after responding to hundreds of hours, and all the while he's sharing a city with people he can't understand. People who aren't Anglos. People who play music, rhythmic music, in the streets. Bang. Racist habits blow up into a paranoid neurosis, writing panicked letters describing 'rat-faced jews' and 'negroes that resemble gigantic chimpanzees', suggesting the use of cyanide to 'quell the New York mongoloid problem'. THAT, is racism, but it's another thing. Fear. Fear of something you don't understand.

It's impossible to excuse some of Lovecraft's behaviour, even in context, but it can be explained.

[gah!ghost]

He was far less of a recluse than I thought he was. He traveled a lot and visited with many of the people he wrote letters to. I cannot remember the exact time period or who the hell it was but I know he went and lived with one of his correspondents in Florida for awhile. A number of weeks as I recall. From what I have read he was also a very outgoing and entertaining person in public situations. And as you mentioned he did not like living in New York, but also while living there, despite his fear of immigrants and the "other" he spent a lot of time wondering around the city on foot, often in the middle of the night. I do believe the story "He" (you can read it online if you haven't already) was based directly on Lovecraft's experiences wondering the streets of New York in the middle of the night.

I think this is right, but don't quote me on this, Loveman burned a lot of the letters Lovecraft wrote him after hearing from Lovecraft's ex-wife about Lovecraft's dislike of basically anyone that wasn't him including gays and jews.

I can excuse a lot of his racism as he seemed to become very introspective and doubting of his beliefs on the matter later in life. I think we also have to remember how young he was when he died, only 46, and a lot of the very racist stuff was from when he was even younger, he was only 35 when living in New York. It takes a lot of people quite while to get over those sorts of prejudices. Like I said, there's inklings of it earlier but I think Mountains of Madness really shows his change in views. The story is too damn long so I can't find the exact quote but there's a bit where one of the human protagonists ponders the fate of one of the Old Ones and contemplates on the fear of the alien and how when it comes down to it, this poor murdered creature was just a scientist like he was and he is able to feel sorry for the completely alien creature.

I have more to say on the subject, but we're already getting way way off topic. You should check out some of S.T. Joshi's books on Lovecraft if you haven't already.

[ForbiddenFruit]

Hah, you have a point, we could go back and forth like this for days As a foil, I'm going to have to recommend HP Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life by Michel Houellebecq