ABSTRACT
Wells wears well: the past few months have produced a variety of new books
about him or new editions of books by him. The reasons for this revival, or should one say survival, of interest are not immediately apparent. It may be that Wells's earliest work - the apocalyptic scientific romances of the fin de sii!Cle - blends easily into the gloomy global forebodings of the closing years of our own century. But it seems just as likely that the optimism and energy of mind
of Wells's later writings suggest that there might be a way forward from our
present troubles and that doom may not be inescapable (though Wells himself,
in the final depressed post-Hiroshima year of his life came to believe that it
was). He offers the potentially appealing spectacle of an accomplished and entertaining fiction-writer who was not afraid of ideas and opinions, though he
made a few ideas go a long way and was continually changing his opinions. He
thus provides a change both from the artistic rigour of the canonical
modernists, who are now so much the object of academic concentration, and from the more purely literary concerns of his fellow-Edwardians, Galsworthy and Bennett, who, like Wells, were rubbished by Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence in the 1920s. Wells had a quick, well-stocked and untidy mind, and
little sense of limitation; an element in his appeal is that of the cheeky chappy
who doesn't mind what he says and does and who is willing to have a go at
practically anything. Such a figure has evident attractions in an age of strict
professional specialisms and institutional role-models. There are times when
Wells's life looks as interesting as his writings; the two converge in what
seems to me the best of his later books, the two-volume Experiment in
Autobiography of 1934, which is now reprinted, though without the
photographs in the original edition.
