Essays on Wells

BOOK REVIEWS latter play would not amuse the London theatre—going public. The new information may be found in the "Preface" and the "Notes and Acknowledgments ." That these justify a new edition of an 800-page volume seems doubtful. Alfred Habegger University of Kansas Essays on Wells John Huntington, ed. Critical Essays on H. G. Wells. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. ν + 186 pp. $38.00 JOHN HUNTINGTON'S volume on Wells in the Critical Essays on British Literature series opens with a helpful statement of its underlying theme: Ή. G. Wells poses many difficulties for modern criticism. ... A disruptive presence in his own time, he remains to this day an enigmatic and provocative figure who forces us constantly to rethink our categories and to reconsider our values." All the essays Huntington has chosen wrestle to some degree with the difficulty of "placing" Wells—a prolific author who not only confounded "literature" and "journalism," but freely mixed genres such as science fiction, social fiction, autobiography and history. To anyone whose professional status depends on "Literature" as a privileged category of writing, Wells's bibliography may look like something out of a nightmare. The ease with which Wells moved from fiction to polemic and back again implies that his books contain meaningful statements about life, demanding something quite different from an institutionalised literary response. (Virginia Woolf caustically suggested that the most fitting reaction might be to write a cheque for some good cause, then replace the book on the shelf, permanently.) In his later years, as he prioritised "message" more and more openly above "medium," Wells acknowledged that his books could not be "literature" in the sense that those of Henry James and James Joyce were, and said so in letters to both of these sources of unmistakably syllabus-worthy material. It is hardly surprising , then, to find Mark Schorer in 1948, two years after Wells's death, dismissing his writings as the work oî a clumsy philistine: "In Wells we have all the important topics in life, but no good novels." Huntington includes an extract from Schorer's well-known essay "Technique as Discovery" as a sample of academic hostility to Wells based on "essentially Jamesian aesthetic values." The brevity of the extract Oust two pages), though understandable enough in the present context, serves to conceal the equally misplaced confidence with which 221 ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 Schorer wrote off Defoe and Lawrence. That all three authors are still being read and studied today suggests that his criteria of literary excellence were unduly narrow. The orthodox defence of Wells is represented by the contributions of A. J. P. Taylor and Patrick Parrinder. Both concede that Wells's non-fictional work is now largely of historical interest, but detect bona fide literary qualities in his fiction. In an article written for the centenary of Wells's birth, Taylor values him as a purveyor of "humanity" and "fun," praising his gifts for social comedy and for the fictional development of fantastic hypotheses. Taylor's discussion is refreshingly blunt, clearsighted and free of jargon but, as in his historical writings, his sense of humor leads him to unsympathetic patronage. To describe Wells as "a spluttering imaginative little man in a hurry, bouncing from one contradiction to the next" is like describing Shakespeare as a bald and verbose playwright, over-partial to puns—true in itself but not exactly helpful. Complementing Taylor's overview, the extract from Patrick Parrinder's book H. G. Wells examines Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly in some detail and discovers considerable artistic subtleties in them. Schorer, among others, is reprimanded for an undiscriniinating reading of these books: for taking their Utopian conclusions too much at face-value and looking for artistic unity at too superficial a level. Parrinder's own reading, in contrast, is alive to the peculiar challenges of Wells's subject matter and sensitive to the range of artistic devices brought to bear on it. Parrinder, like Taylor, argues his case with great lucidity and is not afraid to criticise Wells for genuine lapses of judgment . Readers may, incidentally, be puzzled by a mysterious allusion to a "boat at Sandgate" on page 51, where Parrinder...