A Controversial Wells Biography

ELT 40:1 1997 the First World War." It seems that Jones's version of the British culture assaulted by the war means less to Fussell—and more to Bergonzi— than Sassoon's version and Blunden's. In any case the two books complement each other, one with its focus on the fate of heroism, the other with its focus on kinds of remembering. Together they still offer the best general introduction to the literature of the Great War. Heroes' Twilight, thirty years on, is still fresh, and Bergonzi has virtues as a writer which are not as common as they should be. He is always judicious, always generous when he can be, and always lucid. He never patronizes either his subject or his reader, and he never shows off. Douglas Kerr ______________ University of Hong Kong A Controversial Wells Biography Michael Foot. H G. The History of Mr. Wells. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1995. xvii + 318pp. $29.00 THE PUBLICATION of Michael Foot's reassessment and defence of H. G. Wells evoked a storm of criticism. Leading the critics was Professor John Carey who, in his The Intellectuals and the Masses (1991), accused Wells of elitism, racism, anti-Semitism and failure to understand and respect the masses. Carey is sharply censured by Foot (286-87) as a "politico-philosopher" who had collapsed "into absurdity" in his attempts to associate Wells with the elitism and the racial prejudices of Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis. Reviewing Foot's "profoundly inadequate book" in The Sunday Times (1 October 1995), Carey conceded that Wells was "the first writer to say that mankind had been a biological catastrophe, and to suggest how the degeneration of the planet might be halted," but also declared that despite Foot's efforts to portray Wells as a "socialist saint," he is unable to ignore Wells's advocacy of eugenicist "racial cleansing by selective elimination of black and brown and dirty white and yellow people." Indeed, said Carey, "By glorifying Wells, as the model of 'what all socialism should be,' Foot is ... silent about these alarming proposals" and Wells's racial "cleansing," as stated in his Mankind in the Making (1903) and A Modern Utopia (1905). Nor can Foot ignore the fact that almost all of what Wells wrote "is contradicted somewhere else in his vast output." 86 BOOK REVIEWS Peter Ackroyd was more indulgent in dealing with what he described as "Foot's panegyric" of Wells in his review in The Times (5 October 1995). To Ackroyd, Foot's endeavors "to enter certain events and periods of Wells's life with . . . conviction and sympathy," his emphasis on the profound influence on Wells of such Enlightenment "iconoclasts" as Thomas Paine, Jonathan Swift, and Voltaire, and his attempts to place Wells in the English tradition of Dissent merit "commendation and assent." Unfortunately, adds Ackroyd, Foot is much "too enthusiastic a biographer to consider any of his subject's faults or follies in elaborate detail" and, "If Foot's biography suffers from any particular fault,... it is the implicit belief that the personality of a writer is as great as his works." However, if this book is in part hagiography, "it is... illuminated by genuine passion and understanding" and Foot's conviction that Wells was "a great London writer who saw something of what was to come" for mankind. In The Sunday Telegraph (5 October 1995), Professor Robert Skidelsky asserted that where "Foot goes astray is in failing to distinguish between Wells's good and bad art" and in attempting "to resurrect Wells as a libertarian and feminist." Skidelsky is convinced that basically what Foot has produced is "a book about feminism, loosely linked to some biographical facts; that Wells advocated 'free love'; that he philandered extensively; and that he loved and was loved by three outstanding women—Amber Reeve, Rebecca West and Moura Budberg." Finally, for Skidelsky, the "chief defect" of the book is Foot's prose which "envelopes everything in a romantic haze" that makes readers "feel vaguely uplifted , but learn surprisingly little." Allan Massie's review in The Daily Telegraph (14 October 1995) was more generous and rated Foot's production as an excellent example of...