The War of Wells’s Lives

Abstract

H.G. Wells has often been unlucky in his biographers. He told the story of his own life in Experiment in Autobiography (1934), a two-volume work filled with vivid recollections and fascinating detail but weighed down at last by its author’s dedication to “The Idea of a Planned World,” which leads him to assert that his progression “from a backyard to Cosmopolis” has made him “the conscious Common Man of his time and culture” (417-18, 643). Here was a bubble waiting to be pricked, especially as the autobiography was supplemented by an episodic, unpublished “Postscript” containing suppressed details of his tangled love-life. The “Postscript” would make its first appearance fifty years later under the title (chosen by his son, G.P. Wells) H.G. Wells in Love, but by that time its contents had been heavily trailed in biographies stepping delicately around the British libel laws. (Though Wells was dead, most of his lovers were still alive and some, notably Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn, were highly litigious.) From Vincent Brome’s H.G. Wells (1951) to Gordon N. Ray’s H.G. Wells and Rebecca West (1974), an air of scandal-mongering surrounded Wellsian biography, and to some extent this still remains. Andrea Lynn’s Shadow Lovers (2001) contained new revelations, particularly about Martha Gellhorn, and David Lodge's biographical novel A Man of Parts (2011) revisits Wells's earlier love affairs at great length. Lodge, however, seems to have been unaware of Wells’s unpublished correspondence with Amber Reeves (the mother of his daughter Anna-Jane), which is drawn on in Michael Sherborne’s biography. In his foreword to Another Kind of Life, sf novelist Christopher Priest calls Wells “a great writer” who “left us dozens of great works.” Moreover, he was “an interesting man, a decent man, and an honest one” (11). This verdict is strikingly different from that given by several of Wells’s earlier biographers, even though they were prepared to admit somewhat grudgingly that he was a great writer, at least of science fiction. Lovat Dickson in H.G. Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (1969) and Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie in The Time Traveller: The Life of H.G. Wells (1973) found him both indecent and personally dishonest. The Mackenzies in a 1987 epilogue to The Time Traveller wrote of “the personal irresponsibility which so vitiated every aspect of H.G.’s life” (458), while Dickson found in that life “the almost complete absence of any moral values” (315). Still more outspoken was Michael Coren, whose The Invisible Man: The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells (1993) added political debunking to slanderous personal assessment. Coren’s declared aim was to demonstrate that “Wells’s influence on his own age, and his influence on [the] ages to come, were, taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive” (11). At least