H. G. Wells - The Rights of Man

Ali Smith

These people were two hundred years further on in the march of civilisation than the Victorian generation. It was not likely they would be less humane.

H. G. Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes, 1899

I was sitting in the caf of a theatre in London waiting to go in to see a new play about cloning. The play was rather mysterious, or rather, the process of getting in to see it was. On my ticket there wasnt a seat number, there was just a number. Number 103. What does this mean? Id asked the man at the box office. It means youre number 103, the man said.

I checked my phone, which is what I use now, like so many of us, instead of a watch. There were forty-five minutes before the doors. I sat down and took my book out of my bag. Ann Veronica. 1909. H. G. Wells.

I was spending quite a lot of my days in this very recent past worrying about a lecture that I was going to have to give in Edinburgh in the too near future. I had no idea yet what it would be about. It was in honour of Wells, I knew a bit about him, I knew a great deal vicariously Id seen the films, knew the tropes but had read very little by him, though I knew what we all knew, that hed written several of the most seminal visionary texts not just of the past century or so, but ever, and hed been world-famous, hugely so in his time, and deeply politically engaged, and very very human, it sounded like, with so many extramarital lovers that his social and amorous peccadilloes were an open joke among some of the more aesthetically experimental writers alive at the same time as him about whom and by whom, because of the way my life had taken its shape, I happened to have read much more. Id hardly read him though, and hed written a hundred more than a hundred books, and me supposed to be so well read etc. and the lecture was relatively soon, and though it could really be about anything and didnt have to be about Wells, I had decided to read as much by him as I could in the time I had and see what happened. Ann Veronica. 1909. Page 1. Chapter 1. Ann Veronica Talks to Her Father.

It was about a spirited young woman on the edge of her seat on a train, determined to make a future for herself different from the one thats expected and permitted. She lives in the suburbs and is on her way home right now to have a blazing argument with her father about how she wants to live her life and do what she wants regardless of what he wants; shes bright, and full of kick and spirit, all coiled energy, life and impetus, and the question all through the prose is: can such energy be contained?

She wanted to live. She was vehemently impatient she did not clearly know for what to do, to be, to experience. And experience was slow in coming. All the world about her seemed to be how can one put it in wrappers, like a house when people leave it in the summer. The blinds were all drawn, the sunlight kept out, one could not tell what colours these grey swathings hid. She wanted to know. And there was no intimation whatever that

But I couldnt concentrate, because of the man sitting next to me, who was holding forth to a young woman he was with about his Watch. They were both in their late twenties, maybe early thirties. Were they together? It was hard to tell, she was sitting opposite saying almost nothing while he told her how many steps hed taken that day, how many minutes in the hour had been exercise minutes compared to the number of minutes when hed been sitting down, hed done two hours and forty-three minutes of exercise today so far, and then he detailed the difference between the exercise minutes which were moving-about minutes and the minutes in each hour hed merely stood for, hed been standing rather than sitting, according to his particular time machine, for three to four minutes in every hour. Which was apparently a really good standing-for statistic, he said.

I carried on pretending to read my book and surreptitiously glanced at the young woman. I was wondering how much longer shed stand for much more of this stunningly boring self-mythologizing. But she was nodding and saying nothing, so I started worrying that maybe this was now the new chat-up routine, and that maybe Id become dated myself not to know that this was what passed, in a different generation, for a display of prowess. Choose me, I stand for an average of three minutes and forty-seven seconds in every sixty minutes. Anyway, she and I, both, had to stand literally about twenty more minutes of what the Watch had told him about himself, before I looked at my phone and saw it was time to find out what number 103, my number, meant, and closed my unread book.

The play was good. It was by Caryl Churchill, and called A Number. Shes one of our visionaries right now, and her vision of the future, and of the tragedy of the lost original self in all the multiple selves were capable of, meant I didnt open my book on the train home, I just sat and stared out the window, thinking about the games people play with real lives in the real world. Then I began to worry again about all the work I had to do, real catch-up work reading one of the original modern visionaries, and when I got home I still didnt open the book but distracted myself instead thinking about the word watch. I began wondering why watches had been called watches, and what watching had to do with time, and vice versa, how time was related to the word watch, and to notions of watching.