Antidote for Poisoned Wells

79 BOOK REVIEWS 1. ANTIDOTE FOR POISONED WELLS Anthony West. H^ G¿_ Wel Is: Aspects of a^ Life. New York: Random House, 1984. $22.95 At the center of Anthony West's H_;_ G^ Wel 1 s: Aspects of a Li fe is a painful episode which is mentioned twice in the book. This incident occurred while Wells lay dying in bed. During this final illness he had been told by someone, for some arcane reason, that his son, Anthony West, was being blackmailed into complicity in a pro-Nazi conspiracy. Patiently West awaited a chance to tell his father that there was not a shred of truth in the allegation; but at the last moment Wells regained consciousness only long enough to say to his son, "I just don't understand you." Wells died before West had a chance to say a word. This was a bitterly intense moment for West, who had been a lonely and neglected child and who was now thirty in 1945; three years later he began to write a book about We lis, a book not completed unti 1 West had reached seventy years of age. The book West has given us strives to do some final good service for his father, as if to testify to the fact that West has kept faith with Wells's expectations of his son. This emotional center of West's book is informed as well by what West perceives as his father's pervading sense that he himself had failed to make a final, definitive statement of his beliefs, that he lacked some final achievement which would convey the essence of the humanitarian goal he had been striving for all of his life. West explains, "It occurred to me that if nobody else was prepared to state the case for thinking of him as one of the more influential ancestors of the truly progressive outlook of today, doing that might be a pleasant way of paying my debts to him" (p. 356). Specifically , for West, during the 1920s and 1930s Wells went against the grain of the opinion of the times and thereby contributed to a climate of ideas which eventually led to the formation of two great outgrowths of a faith in reason, the United Nations and the European Economic Community. The motivation informed by these two central concerns is reinforced by West's wish to present an antidote for the maliciously poisoned misrepresentations of his father that have resulted from deliberately falsified information given to various biographers by such people as Dorothy Richardson and Rebecca West. He is particularly annoyed by Gordon Ray's account of the relationship between Wells and West's mother, Rebecca West; Ray's account, West contends, is too dependent 80 upon stories and evidence fabricated by his mother, who was "an incurable self-dramatiser" (p. 367). West is alarmed by the fact that since the middle 1960s she has played an "increasing role as a source in the developing field of Wells studies" (p. 58). According to West, his mother's pride was hurt by Wells's refusal to leave Jane and marry her, a hurt especial Iy worsened by her increasing awareness of her position in the background of Wells's attention and by the portrait of her in The Secret Places of the Heart (1922). In West's opinion, Jane was "the balance wheel of his existence ," whereas Rebecca was "a species of tonic" (p. 21). Reading West's book convinces me that apparently there is much to revise in our understanding of Wells's life. West demonstrates that his mother's claim that she dutifully attended a sick and nearly insane Wells during the years of 1918 to 1923 is ridiculous, especially in the light of Wells's productivity during that time, including the writing of The Out!ine of Hi story (192 0). Equally false is Rebecca West's account of her role in Hedwig Gatternigg's attempted suicide in Wells's home. Similarly, West challenges Leon Edel's portrait of Henry James and Wells as friends; and West indicates that Wells failed to argue further with James not because he secretly believed that...