QI The Book of the Dead

loved.’ Moura was equally smitten. When quizzed by Somerset Maugham on what she saw in ‘the paunchy, played-out writer’, Moura replied: ‘He smells of honey.’

    If Wells showed no signs of slowing down in his personal life, this was matched by his phenomenal productivity as a writer. In a career spanning fifty years, he published over 130 books. Instead of mellowing, his political and social philosophy got more extreme as he got older and his later books alternate between a kind of Utopian authoritarianism (he was a keen supporter of eugenics) and muscular ‘we’re all doomed’ pessimism. His finest work of non-fiction, The Outline of History (1920), became an international best-seller, describing the modern world as ‘a race between education and catastrophe’. Wells was a passionate advocate of world government and he knew his subject, interviewing both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lenin and Stalin. He rejected both communism and fascism from the start and, if few people now take his political philosophy seriously, the Nazis, at least, felt otherwise. Top of the blacklist of intellectuals to be liquidated after their planned invasion of Britain was the name H.G. Wells.
    For all Wells’s talk of the Great Sexual Liberation and his socialist dislike for the bourgeois institution of wedlock, he was happily married for much of his life. The final volume of his Experiment in Autobiography was published in 1984, after the last of his lovers had died. In it, he admits that he often wanted to leave Jane and the drudgery of family life for one of his younger, eager-minded lovers, but knew that she was a steadfast presence, a true friend that he couldn’t do without. This was not the case with the other women he had known: ‘The women I have kissed, solicited, embraced and lived with, have never entered intimately, and deeply into my emotional life.’ Sex with his mistresses occupied ‘much the same place in my life that fly-fishing or golfing has in the life of many busy men’. This is hardly a missionstatement for a new world-order of sexual liberation; it sounds more like a man having his cake and eating it. Jane forgave Wells and put up with his philandering because it posed no real threat. The ‘World-Man’, the ‘hero of the future’, always came home for the sympathy, support and encouragement that only she could give him. As he himself once confessed:
    I can’t bank on religion. God has no thighs and no life. When one calls to him in the silence of the night he doesn’t turn over and say, ‘What is the trouble, Dear? ’
     

     
    The story of the loyal wife making sacrifices to support the career and unruly appetites of a gifted husband is a familiar one. But what happens when the boot is on the other foot? What if Jane had written about the marriage instead of Bertie? Reading the work of Colette (1873–1954) is practically a rite of passage for adolescent girls in France. In more than fifty novels, she lays bare the ambiguities of female love with such acuity and startling originality that they make H. G. Wells’s social novels look like so much high-minded puffery. If a chap wants to understand women’s sexuality, Colette is the perfect place to start. She laid out her stall early on. While still a schoolgirl, she decided she would be known by her surname, as the boys were. None of her friends in Burgundy ever used her Christian names – Sidonie-Gabrielle – and she continued the habit when, aged twenty, she married Henri Gauthier-Villars. Fifteen years her senior and an art critic who dabbled in fiction, he saw at once that she was the better writer, encouraging her to produce a series of novels based on her character ‘Claudine’, and locking her in her room untilshe had produced the requisite number of pages. First published under his pen-name ‘Willy’, they were runaway best-sellers, titillating French society with their implied lesbian relationships among schoolgirls.
    ‘Willy’ had an adventurous sex life himself, openly bringing a succession of young lovers back home and giving Colette at least one dose of gonorrhoea. She left him in 1906, earning her living as an actress, and she formed a close lesbian relationship with the aristocratic Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belboeuf, better known as ‘Missy’. Colette and Missy were a scandal. At performances of Rêve d’Egypte in 1907, there were riots when they bared their breasts and exchanged a kiss on