All Brains, Little Heart

H. G. WELLS: HIS TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES by Lovat Dickson. 330 pages. Atheneum. $10.

It is hard to remember H. G. Wells except as a caricature. He looms as a kind of cartoon figurehead on the prow of the 20th century--plump and cheerful, goggle-eyed with confidence, breasting a sea labeled Progress.

Alas, the marvels of science so relished by Wells have produced far less than Utopia. Lovat Dickson, formerly an editor and director of Macmillan and Co., Wells' London publisher, cannot quite forgive the man who blithely sold the masses on the future. But he makes clear that Wells was the first gulled victim of his own salesmanship, and that with his extraordinary capacity for hope went an extraordinary capacity for disenchantment. Inside the complacent optimist, a desperate pessimist was signaling wildly to get out.

Up and Out. Wells did not begin at all ebulliently. He was, in Dickson's words, "a rather sickly young man from the lower class," the son of a housemaid and a failed shopkeeper. After failing himself as a draper's assistant, Wells won a scholarship to the Normal School of Science in South Kensington, where Thomas Huxley was teaching biology at the time. It was Huxley who first excited Wells' interest in science. But young Wells' omnivorous curiosity--always subject to other intellectual temptations --was diverted into Fabian socialism, literature and debating. Putting more and more time into self-education, he muffed his degree examinations. As a schoolmaster exiled to the borders of Wales, he was stomped in the back while refereeing a football match and almost died of a ruptured kidney.

At 21, Wells suddenly stopped playing the loser: "I have been dying long enough. I mean to live." With these words--and one of the most facile pens in the history of English literature--he began the climb from congenital failure, up and out of "generations of dark, deprived life."

It was less a climb than a rocket launching. In quick order The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and other futuristic fantasies made Wells the English Jules Verne. He stirred the minds of his generation to science, the new possibility in their lives, and the paying public rewarded him with possibilities in his own life. Both prophet and audience shared a kind of mutual fulfillment--in Wells' phrase, "possessing joys not promised them at birth."

Passionate Urge. Wells, in one of his favorite words, had the "woosh" of a man who judges everything to be within his grasp. When his first wife proved a sexual disappointment, he took a second. When the second wife proved a superb hostess-manager--but another sexual disappointment--he kept her and took mistresses, including the novelist Rebecca West, who in 1914, when she was 22 and he was 48, presented him with a son.

Wells' energies were legendary. When he decided that people (including himself) did not know enough about history, he produced the three-quarter-million-word Outline of History in a year. Between the time he turned 60 and his death at 79, he wrote 39 books.

Wells had flair--an irresistible sweep and bounce. He was a missionary who liked to begin and end sentences with "... if the Race is to be saved." He had, as Dickson points out, "the passionate urge to simplify, to convert." Only one thing was lacking: he didn't care much for people. His vision of the future always reduced itself to an elite world with H. G. Wells in charge.

Preliminary Splutter. His best novels --Kipps, Tono-Bungay, Mr. Britling Sees It Through--have their share of belowstairs social comedy and wistful aspirations. But as an artist as well as a prophet, Dickson judges Wells "all brains and very little heart." In Boon, his wicked attack on Henry James, he may have been assaulting in James what was missing in himself: infinite care and moral responsibility.

What finally redeems Wells for the contemporary reader is the shadow of doubt beneath the bravado--the unspoken but ever-present question of young Wells, the born loser: "What if I'm wrong?" When he was only 25, Wells wrote: "Science is a match that man has just got alight . . . It is a curious sensation, now that the preliminary splutter is over and the flame burns up clear, to see his hands lit and just a glimpse of himself and the patch he stands on visible, and around him, in place of all that human comfort and beauty he had anticipated--darkness still." It is this Wells, awed, uncertain, a bit frightened, who is still a brother of today.

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