Tono-Bungay

Two points about this odd, sour, sometimes zippy but more often quite tedious novel that Wells thought was his greatest work.

I really love that well-known guide 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die Horribly, it’s true book porn, all those mug shots of authors who I hardly thought had faces at all (ee cummings, Thomas Mann), some of which seem to be chosen to be the least flattering as possible (Peter Esterhazy, Mario Puzo). But sometimes this book seems to be playing games with us. Do they really really deep down in their hearts think everyone should read Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit by John Lyly (1578) or Aithiopika by Heliodorus (250 AD)? And sometimes the short essay about the book in question seems, well, quite off-putting. As is the case with Tono-Bungay. They say

The work is loosely structured, replete with often suspect or woolly generalisations about the state of England and contains various anti-Semitic and racist features.

And ends up with

Wells seems to be almost in love with the cynical greed that he depicts

As recommendations go, I have read more enthusiastic.

Second, this novel has comedy sections and serious sections, there’s no mistaking one for the other, the gear changes are screechingly loud, and the story of George’s first marriage is very serious, almost the best part. He is a very inexperienced young man and falls in love with a woman named Marion. She doesn’t seem so keen on him but he turns up the pressure until they get married. Only then does he find out she has a horror of physical contact. But there’s more :

I do still recall as the worst and most disastrous aspect of all that time, her absolute disregard of her own beauty. It’s the pettiest thing to record, I know, but she could wear curl-papers in my presence. It was her idea, too, to “wear out” her old clothes and her failures at home when “no one was likely to see her” – “no one” being myself. She allowed me to accumulate a store of ungracious and slovenly memories.

Poor George. Then I remembered a Burt Bacharach song from 1963 called "Wives and Lovers". It covers the same territory. Here’s how it goes:

Hey, little girl, comb your hair, fix your makeup
Soon he will open the door
Don't think because there's a ring on your finger
You needn't try anymore
For wives should always be lovers too
Run to his arms the moment he comes home to you
I'm warning you

Day after day there are girls at the office
And men will always be men
Don't send him off with your hair still in curlers
You may not see him again

Could be Hal David, the lyricist, had been reading Tono-Bungay or maybe just reflecting on his own life. When the great Burt died in February I didn’t notice this one was listed amongst his greatest works. Can’t think why.



Look how serious Jack is about warning you girls!

This is my first Wells. I was a bit turned off by the description, which suggests most of the plot revolves around the development of a quack medicine (the strangely-named Tono-Bungay). That's a chunk of it, but there are other chunks; it's also a very well done Bildungsroman in which the protagonist and first-person narrator George grows up as the son of the housekeeper of an enormous country house, acutely conscious of his lower class status, observing the banal conversations among the aristocrats, sneaking into the large library to read books (as Wells did himself when his mother was housekeeper at Uppark:)



and falling in love three times (twice to the same person). George's relationships with women are interesting, and he is introspective to a point. He knows what he wants in a woman, but he has no idea of what's good for him - or what will work. He realizes with insight what he gets from Beatrice, his first and last love, the daughter of a viscount: an audience.

...I began to live for the effect I imagined I made upon her, to make that very soon the principal value in my life. I played to her. I did things for the look of them. I began to dream more and more of beautiful situations and fine poses and groupings with her and for her. ...It certainly robbed my work of high patience and quality. I cut down the toil of research in my eagerness and her eagerness for fine flourishes in the air, flights that would tell. ....And it robbed me, too, of any fine perception of absurdity. ...

Wells's teenage drapery apprenticeship comes in handy as George describes all the hideous ways fabrics are employed in various lower middle class and parvenu Victorian drawing rooms and salons.

Plopped into the story of the Tono-Bungay business and George and his uncle and aunt's resulting upward mobility is a strange side trip to an island off the coast of West Africa, where George has been persuaded by a shadowy figure (who can't make the trip himself) to invest in a cargo of "quap" lying on the beach. No one aboard is happy about loading up the quap, which becomes understandable when it turns out to be radioactive, and it sinks the ship. Before this happens, George surprises a native in the forest and kills him. This episode feels like something out of H. Rider Haggard.

The Guardian thinks this is a comedy. I would classify it as something slightly more earnest, although it certainly has its comic moments:

She walked across to the piano, took a pile of music from the cabinet near, surveyed Lady Osprey's back, and with a gesture to me dropped it all deliberately on to the floor.
"Must talk," she said, kneeling close to me as I helped her to pick it up. "Turn my pages. At the piano."
"I can't read music."
"Turn my pages."
Presently we were at the piano, and Beatrice was playing with noisy inaccuracy. ...
"At the back of the house is a garden - a door in the wall - on the lane. Understand?"
I turned over the pages without any effect on her playing. ....
..."I can't play tonight," she said, standing up and meeting my eyes. "I wanted to give you a parting voluntary."
"Was that Wagner, Beatrice?" asked Lady Osprey, looking up from her cards. "It sounded very confused."

The cover art is John Singer Sargent's 1898 portrait of Asher Wertheimer, an art dealer who was Sargent's good friend. He also painted eleven other portraits of the Wertheimer family. At first you might think: this man represents the protagonist, George, or his uncle, Edward. Instead, he seems to represent some of the extremely rich Jewish parvenus mentioned in the novel; for example, the Sir Reuben Lichtenstein who rents the fictional Bladesover House (which is based on Uppark in the photo above) after its owner, Lady Drew, dies. There are various small anti-Semitic bits scattered throughout, as when George's Aunt Susan critiques some of the "Oriental" ladies she has socialized with, and George remembers wandering one day in London, finding "a shabbily bright foreign quarter, shops displaying Hebrew placards and weird, unfamiliar commodities, and a concourse of bright-eyed, eagle-nosed people talking some incomprehensible gibberish between the shops and the barrows. And soon I became quite familiar with the devious, vicious, dirtily-pleasant exoticism of Soho." Men like Sir Reuben "were not so much a new British gentry as "pseudomorphous" after the gentry. They are a very clever people, the Jews, but not clever enough to suppress their cleverness." There's also a sailor who refers to a Roumanian Jew as a Dago. The portrait must have been chosen by this edition's editor, who specializes in literary representations of Jews.

Finally, a little side hobby I have when reading the classics is documenting the uses of "nigger." There are two here. Uncle Edward Ponderevo, the creator of Tono-Bungay, asks George to help him in the company. "Come in and stiffen these niggers. Teach them that wo-oo-oo-oo-osh." (These company workers he's referring to are mostly likely white, as there weren't many nonwhites in England at the time.) And after George has spent weeks supervising the loading of quap on Mordet Island, "I understand now the heart of the sweater, of the harsh employer, of the nigger-driver."

H. G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay may be strangely named, but it is one of the better-known of his many novels that are not “scientific romances.” The first-person narrator is George Ponderevo, a country boy who comes to work for his get-rich scheming uncle Edward “Teddy” Ponderevo. Tono-Bungay is a quack patent medicine created by George’s uncle, and a near-endless ticket for both of them through many stages of growing wealth in then-contemporary Britain. There is no significant science fictional content, although Wells, being Wells, cannot help but occasionally comment on science as a human pursuit. The novel was first published in 1908, five years after the first controlled sustained flight of a powered heavier-than-air aircraft by the Wright brothers, so while very current, the air flight is not really speculative. The novel is more an extended criticism of capitalism/advertising, and the pretentions of social class and British plutocracy.

I had some sympathy for the main character during the poignant unravelling of his first marriage, which was so introspectively described as to make me think it could be somewhat autobiographical. But I lost any such sympathy during his later radioactive quap mining raid on the African Coast - essentially piracy. His mockery and disdain for anyone and anything not British grew intolerable to me. Even worse, I got the sense that this Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism was an unquestioned presumption by Wells himself, even while he criticized other aspects of British society.

The novel was well-written and entertaining, but not of any special interest from a science fictional or utopian perspective. I’m glad to have read it in ebook, because I was able to jump to dictionary definitions on certain words – some of them 19th century English idiom, and some of them just vocabulary unfamiliar to me.

‘Tono-Bungay’ is a story of the English class system, social mores and social climbing. More specifically, it is a story of capitalism, the advertising industry and the generation of income / creation of wealth based on the sale and promotion of pointless, ineffective products that the buying public never knew they ‘needed’ until they were actually told that they (apparently) did. The novel explores the moral dilemmas intrinsic to this process and looks at the very thin line between advertising / creative marketing and fraud.

It is against this backdrop that ‘Tono-Bungay’ follows the emotional life and development of main protagonist George Ponderevo, his various relationships and their associated challenges. It looks at George’s disillusionment with religion and the moral questions thrown up by the business ‘opportunities’ offered to him throughout. Along with his entertaining aeronautical adventures and endeavours, the parts of ‘Tono-Bungay’ concentrating on George’s relationships are for me the most convincing and compelling parts of the novel.

Where ‘Tono-Bungay’ works less well is as political / social satire, an attempt that for me isn’t quite as successful as perhaps it could be. The metaphors here (e.g. village / estate / London / voyage down the Thames) as microcosms of society / life etc, are either too obvious, blunt or just don’t work as well as they should do.

Where the novel is more successful is as a critique and deconstruction of capitalism and the free market economy. ‘Tono-Bungay’ looks at the deceptions of the advertising industry, the wealth consequently generated and the discomfort of George Ponderevo with that underlying premise. Wells looks at society as seemingly built almost entirely on this basis and the resultant disparities and inequalities in wealth. To some extent, it is here where the novel is most revealing, enlightening and thought-provoking.

Whilst it is appreciated that (for example) ‘The History of Mr Polly’ and ‘Kipps The Story of a Simple Sole’ are more entertainment, less serious and satirical in nature than ‘Tono-Bungay’ – it just doesn’t work as well as either of those two novels (likewise with Wells classic science fiction novels) – ‘Tono-Bungay’ doesn’t engage, compel or convince in the same way and doesn’t have the same sense of authenticity.

Undoubtedly there are some powerful messages contained here in ‘Tono-Bungay’ – seemingly: ‘none of this is real’ – (‘this’ presumably being a society being run on a capitalist, wealth based system with all its intrinsic inequalities) and that in life we should be looking for ‘truth’, the ‘heart of life’ and what Wells character refers to as ‘reality science’.

Wells talks in this novel of the voyage of life and about becoming trapped and restrained in life by the meaningless distractions, contrived processes, relationships, falsehoods, false premises – with the deceptions inherent in a society based on capitalist free market economy, but isn’t ultimately clear on what the answer or alternative would be?

‘Tono-Bungay’ has been referred to as Wells most artistic novel, which indeed it may well be. But for me, despite some excellent sections and passages in this novel it is ultimately somehow less than the sum of its parts.

This is Wells writing stylistically like Dickens in a mode of novel-writing that aims at the nineteenth century version of social justice (even though it was published at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century).
Today he is mainly remembered for his science fiction. "Tono Bungay" is an unusual work in that it straddles two of these genres: it is both science fiction and social commentary. The novel follows the rise and fall of an empire built on a quack medicine. The medicine, Tono Bungay, gives the book its title. Regardless of what it stands for, it is clear that Tono Bungay is not entirely good for you, and probably harmful in the long run. The short-term effects are however sufficiently pleasing so as to make a fortune for its inventor.
The novel is narrated by a young man, George Ponderevo, who, while not as appealing as the best of Dickens' heroes, has a certain charm. His rise along with that of his Uncle Teddy is chronicled with wit and an ear for the details of turn of the century commerce that make the book rewarding to the interested reader. Wells was able to write deeper and had a greater pallette than those who may have only read his early science-romances might imagine. However Wells does add instances of science fiction even in this novel and often they are only remotely related to the main topic. Such is the case for the various experiments in air travel which make up a substantial part of the book. Yet another science fiction episode concerns a mysterious ore, which appears to be radioactive. Ostensibly, the purpose of this ore is to provide Tono Bungay a new infusion and lease on life. Radioactivity had only recently been discovered when Wells wrote this novel, and indeed was very mysterious . Wells treats the radioactive ore as something that fundamentally corrupts all that it touches.
The result is an unusual book that as a whole is better than most of Wells' many works of science fiction.

I have read a number of H.G. Wells's early sci-fi novels. This is the first time I have read one of his "other" novels, and I am surprised to see that it is by far his best work. Tono-Bungay is a bildungsroman about growing up poor in Victorian England and making one's way in the world by a combination of luck, good and bad.

The good luck is hero George Ponderevo's association with his uncle Edward, the inventor of a nostrum called Tono-Bungay. He brings his nephew George in with him and becomes a fantastically rich financier -- until ... until the whole thing comes undone.

The bad luck consists of George's three attempts at love. He marries, but it ends in a kind of listless divorce. Then there is a bright affair with a secretary, but that goes nowhere. Finally, there is Beatrice Normandy, whom George knew from his childhood. Unfortunately, she had made her accommodation in a lazy ongoing relationship with an English lord.

There are times when the novel seems to lose its way, as if Wells was not used to writing a 400-page novel, but he keeps coming back:

Don't imagine that I am coming presently to any sort of solution of my difficulties. Here among my drawings and hammerings NOW, I still question unanswering problems. All my life has been at bottom, SEEKING, disbelieving always, dissatisfied always with the thing seen and the thing believed, seeking something in toil, in force, in danger, something whose name and nature I do not clearly understand, something beautiful, worshipful, enduring, mine profoundly and fundamentally, and the utter redemption of myself; I don't know—all I can tell is that it is something I have ever failed to find.

I will continue to read more of Wells's sci-fi novels, but I think I will also check out Kipps and The History of Mr. Polly.

good first half, bad 2nd half

This is my first non-science-fiction book by Wells. I have to admit, I didn’t like it as much as his science fiction. Here, he explores more of his political ideas. The book traces the rise and fall of the Ponderevos through their advertising schemes. I always love a good critique of advertising, and Wells certainly delivers. He points out some real flaws in the society of his time, and he does it through story, which makes his critique that much more powerful. It’s not the most exciting book, but it is interesting, and I for one enjoy Wells’ style. Of course, I don’t agree with all of Wells’ critiques, or maybe it’s more that I don’t agree with the solutions he hints at. In conclusion, it’s an interesting book, but I’m not sure when (or if) I’ll return to it again.