Books: Persona Gratified

EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY — H. G. Wells—Macmillan ($4).

“The brain upon which my experiences have been written is not a particularly good one. If there were brain-shows, as there are cat and dog shows, I doubt if it would get even a third class prize.” In spite of this frankness — which some readers may mistake for modesty — Author Herbert George Wells will continue to be taken at his face value as one of the First Citizens of the (nonexistent) World State. Autobiographer Wells denies that he is a dual personality but admits having a persona, an idea of himself somewhat at variance with the humdrum facts. Of late his persona has been a little under the weather. To get his persona back on its feed he has written this highly Wellsian Experiment in Autobiography.

True frankness is always surprising, and Author Wells surprises the reader more than once. Says he: “You will discover a great deal of evasion and refusal in my story. . . . There is a sort of journalistic legend that I am a person of boundless enthusiasm and energy. Nothing could be further from the reality. For all my desire to be interested I have to confess that for most things and people I don’t care a damn. Writing numbers of books and articles is evidence not of energy but of sedentary habits.” He speaks gratefully of “the pleasures, the very real pleasures, of vanity.” He regards himself in the same breath as normal: “I am being my own rabbit because I find no other specimen so convenient for dissection. Our own lives are all the practical material we have for the scientific study of living; the rest is hearsay.” And supernormal: “The originative intellectual worker is not a normal human being and does not lead nor desire to lead a normal human life. He wants to lead a supernormal life.”

As a mere success story Wells’s career makes stimulating reading. His father was a small shopkeeper and professional cricketer; his mother, a lady’s maid who rose to be a housekeeper. Young Bertie, after a scattered schooling, started real life as a draper’s apprentice. He hated the job, did it badly. He liked school teaching a little better, being a student at the South Kensington Normal School of Science even more. But as a science student he found so many things to interest and annoy him that at the end of three years he flunked, had to go back to teaching once more. A long apprenticeship at freelance writing taught him gradually how to write naturally. Slowly he became a journalist, an author, a Great Man.

Wells’s first marriage, when he was 25, was a failure from the start. A long romantic engagement did little to prepare either party for marital reality. Wells confesses that “quite soon” after his marriage he went to bed with his secretary, felt much better for it. When he fell in love with another woman his wife insisted on a separation; until he could get a divorce he and Amy Catherine Robbins lived cheerfully outside the pale. Since his second wife was fragile and Wells was increasingly amorous they established a modus vivendi. “In theory, I was now to have passades.” He hints he had them but is reticent about the details.

Other more obvious mistakes he manfully admits. During the War he “shouted various newspaper articles of an extremely belligerent type.” His pamphlet, The War that Will End War, popularized a phrase that has become a byword and a hissing. He wishes he had not, in a “phase of terminological disingenuousness,” talked so much about God; he has always been an atheist. One thing he never admits to is garrulity: “Here at page 424 of this experiment in autobiography I have to assure the possibly incredulous reader that my attempt to compress it and reduce it to a quintessence, has been strenuous and continual.” Wells has often said he takes no thought for the literary morrow and regards himself as a journalist, but he does not take his talent quite as casually as he makes out. He quotes a letter to himself from no less a litterateur than the late great Henry James:

“I have read you, as I always read you, and as I read no one else, with a complete abdication of all those ‘principles of criticism,’ canons of form, preconceptions of felicity, references to the idea of method or the sacred laws of composition, with which I roam, with which I totter, through the pages of others. . . . Under your spell I do advance. … I live with you and in you and (almost cannibal-like) on you, on you H. G. W. . . . Your work [is] more convulsed with life and more brimming with blood than any it is given me nowadays to meet. . . .”

At the end he calls his 707 big pages a success: “My ruffled persona has been restored. . . .”

Last fortnight Author Wells might well have been gratified in his other, more bourgeois self. Not only did the Book-of-the-Month Club choose Experiment in Autobiography as its November book but the Literary Guild also picked The Science of Life (TIME, Feb. 2, 1931), a one-volume reprint of one of his famed outlines of knowledge.