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      INTRODUCTION TO

      THE HAPPY TURNING BY H. G. WELLS

      - COLIN WILSON (JUNE 06)

      THE HAPPY TURNING, the last but one of H. G. Wells’s books, was written at the end of his life, when he was suffering from his final illness, the cancer of the liver that would kill him. Yet, unlike his last book, MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER, it is not a pessimistic work. On the contrary, it captures a mood of happy reminiscence when, suddenly freed from the sense of oppression brought about by the war, he experiences an odd sense of relaxation and happiness, as his unconscious mind decides to rescue him by sending interesting dreams.

      Wells describes how he takes a daily walk from his home near Regent’s Park down to his club in Mayfair, and how, in his dreams, he has begun to find a turning that he has never seen before. He wanders in a pleasant dream world where anything can happen, including conversations with Jesus, who has harsh things to say about St Paul for inventing the religion that Shaw would label ‘Crosstianity’.

      I was immediately reminded of an earlier story, written about 1910, called ‘The Door in the Wall’, which has always been a favourite of mine.

      It is told to the narrator by a politician named Wallace, a member of the cabinet. He tells how, as a child of five, he was wandering down a street near his home in West Kensington when he saw a white wall, and a green door that stood open. And on the other side there was a magical garden, which even contained tame panthers who rubbed against him like friendly cats. He feels a ‘keen sense of homecoming’, and is met by a tall kind girl, who takes him by the hand. He meets other children and plays games, and a dreamy woman who shows him a book about himself. Then he finds himself back in the long grey street and back in a grey world.

      He saw it again as a schoolboy, then passed it in a cab on his way to go up to Oxford, and again as a young man on his way to see his ladylove. He is always in a hurry and passes it. And now, he tells the narrator, he has seen it three times in a year. And has passed it each time, for political life holds out the prospect of success which he feels to be more important than that door ‘into peace and delight’. But next time, he tells the narrator, he will go through it.

      He is found dead at the bottom of a deep shaft made by workmen. It has been surrounded by a fence with a door in it, which has accidentally been left open.

      That story clearly connects Wells with the romantics of the 1890s, that ‘tragic generation’ Yeats wrote about, who rejected the real world as too coarse and stupid for the sensitive soul. But by the time he wrote it, Wells was a highly successful writer, the author not only of the early scientific romances, but of novels like THE HISTORY OF MR POLLY and TONO BUNGAY. At the age of 45, he may have felt a twinge of suspicion that he has also ‘sold out’ to success.

      When my daughter Sally was about 5, we took her to see THE WIZARD OF OZ. And as we came out of the cinema she said with sudden conviction ‘I wish there was a land over the rainbow’. And suddenly I experienced that immense sadness of grasping how much children wish they didn’t have to grow up into this practical world that they don’t really like.

      Was Wells, that remarkable prophet of things to come, really a romantic MANQUÉ? The other day, when preparing to write this

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