Through the Novelist’s Looking-Glass

During more than half a century as a writer of fiction, H. G. Wells was a tireless—and protesting—autobiographer. He deplored the practice of “reading between the lines” of his books. He demanded that people accept a novel of his as “nothing but a novel” instead of trying to “squint through” it, looking for the author. Yet he left so many portraits of himself in his fictional characters that no one has had the temerity even to collate them. Indeed to try to see him through his own mirror is to be faced with several images at once; and each of these—the journalist, the prophet, the scientist manqué, the unwitting artist—was offered up again in 1966, during the centennial celebration of his birth, as the real H. G. Wells. But if we want to grasp the protean Wells, the man beneath the various shapes he seemed compelled to assume, we cannot ignore the mirror held up to him by his close friend and reader, the novelist Dorothy Richardson. In her long serial-novel Pilgrimage, recently republished, is a brilliant full-length portrait of Wells under the guise of fiction. Few have noticed the portrait or troubled to take it into account, even though Wells himself acknowledged it. Now that Pilgrimage has been made available once again, Miss Richardson may be recognized as Wells’s most authoritative “biographer” thus far. She provides, us in any case with a second looking-glass into Wells which m his own seem much less crowded and forbidding.

He certainly did all he could both to multiply his likeness and to discourage autobiographical reading. The less his readers knew him, he once scoffed, the more certain they were to discover him in his characters (and then to charge him with inconsistency because the opinions of his heroes varied “scandalously” from book to book). Of course his major characters resembled him, he pointed out: “how can one imagine and invent the whole interior world of an uncongenial type?” But if he wished to write “a mental autobiography instead of a novel,” Wells argued, he would not hesitate to do so—and to reveal his mind in full.