Wells Scholarship in Perspective

12. WELLS SCHOLARSHIP IN PERSPECTIVE Robert P. Weeks /Editor's Note: This report ivas presented orally and informally at the meeting of the Conference on English Fiction in Transition in New York City, 29 December 1958_¡_7 Even before H.G. Wells died in 1946, his reputation as a writer was being drastically revised downward. Today, the tempo of this process of depreciation has slackened —not because his detractors have'had a change-of heart but because many of them have exhausted their resources. What, for example, was there left for Mark Schorer to say after he had declared of Wells the critic: "Seldom has a literary theorist been so totally wrong"? And of Wells the novelist: "In Wells we have all the important topics, but no good novels"? Among those who have regarded Wells as a publicist or social propagandist rather than as an artist, there are many whose depreciation of him is as devastating as Schorer's. They believe that with the horrors of World War II still fresh in our minds and the radioactive clouds of thermonuclear war darkening the horizon it is no longer possible to see Viells as anything but a fatuous Optimist« If we trace the downward curve from the tough but high optimism of MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH (1916) to the angry-despair of MIND AT THE END OF ITS TETHER (1945), then extrapolate it to the present, we can only conclude that Viells himself would join those who are most merciless in attacking the easy optimism they find in nearly everything he wrote prior to 1939. But one can hear this chorus of disparagement of Wells as artist and thinker—and even join it—yet feel the need to study his work and place it in its proper perspective in literary and intellectual history. One of the tasks of this generation of literary historians is to review the scholarship on Viells and to sort out what is valid from what is merely fashionable and emphemeral. In this task they have what can be an invaluable advantage. As younger men, they have not been subjected to the truly phenomenal influence that Wells exerted on the generation that reached intellectual maturity during the years 1900 to 1920. Because they are neither apostles of Wells nor what is worse, former apostles, seeing him for what he is and was becomes that much easier. This is the central and most demanding task of Wells scholarship, one that will require the work of a number of hands on a variety of problems. Before attempting to state some of these problems, it might be helpful to review what has already been done. Past Scholarship on Viells In a review of Wells scholarship one observes, first off, that' there is no definitive bibliography. There are several fairly complete ones, however, that could be consolidated and supplemented» There is also a need for a definitive biography. Of the several biographies of Wells, Vincent Brome's (1951) is probably the best. A biographer who takes Wells as his subject must be able to write with authority about the widely diversified activities of this versatile man. Brome is able to do this uncommonly well, although his performance falls short of being outstanding. A third major deficiency in Wells scholarship is the fact that few full-length scholarly studies have been done on Wells and most of these are seriously flawed in one way or another. In spite of the fact that it covers only the first third of Viells' career, Van Wyck Brooks' THE WORLD OF H.G. VJELLS (1915) is a remarkably useful explication and assessment of Wells' world. Brooks' delineation of the essential shape of Wells' thinking is so perceptive that-even though Wells for 31 years after its publication poured out a-flood of novels, stories, tracts, histories, radio scripts, articles, and manifestoes, many of them written in response to a 13. current event or controversy, he did not in any notable way break the pattern Brooks perceived» Admittedly, however, Brooks' book is limited by its inability to deal-with these later works. Also, if Viells did not break out of his original pattern, he certainly made innumerable...