The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(39)
The scene where 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 very satisfied with his book, which had evolved almost in fits and starts out of the rather haphazard juxtaposition of more or less powerful images, and had been prepared for a possible slaying by the critics, the truth is it stung all the same. The first blow had taken him by surprise, as it came from his own wife, who considered the doctor perishing at the hands of the deformed puma he had tried to transform into a woman as 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 favorable in its judgments. To his further annoyance, the objectionable article was written by Peter Chalmers Mitchell, a young, talented zoologist who had been a fellow pupil of his 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 unfavorable reviews, while tiresome and bad for the morale, were like storms in a teacup that would scarcely affect the book’s fortunes. The one before him, glibly referring to his novel as a depraved fantasy, might even boost sales, further 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. For 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 an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius. Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavours were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, 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 him. 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 immediately felt his spirits lift again, 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 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, as by 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.
Feeling a lot calmer, 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 and painful period of battling against the elements, his life had finally 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, as ever since childhood it had been his second choice, after that of being a teacher. He had always wanted to stand on a podium and stir people’s consciences, but he could also 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.
Once he had succeeded in calming down, Wells cast a satisfied eye over his surroundings; the home that literature had provided him with. It was a modest dwelling, but one that would nevertheless 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 his father used to douse the wooden floors in to kill off the armies of cockroaches they were obliged to live with. 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 toilet, a hole in the ground at the bottom of a trodden earth path his mother was embarrassed to go down each time she wanted to empty her bladder. She imagined the employees of Mr. Cooper, the tailor next door, were watching her comings and goings. He remembered the creeper on the back wall, which he used to climb in order to spy on Mr. Covell, the butcher, who was in the habit of strolling around his garden, forearms covered in blood, like a weary assassin casually 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 neighbor Mr. Munday during a macabre tea party.