The Evolution of H.G. Wells

THE FIRST complete biography of Herbert George Wells comes at no better time. With the comet Kohoutek whispering across the winter skies, and new visions of apocalypse conveniently centering themselves around its strange apparition, science is experiencing one of its cyclical, popular questionings. While Kohoutek harkens back to one of Wells's more obscure works, In The Days of The Comet, another more recent scientific popularization revives what was a major issue in Wells's life and works. That is the great debate of nature vs. nurture, genetics vs. environment, Shockley vs. the sane world. For, throughout Wells's works, there is a recurring pattern of ideas which centers around the stark determinism of Darwinian evolution, the possible effects it may have if inferior men continue to breed, and the need for an enlightened (ie. genetically superior) elite to rule the world. This pattern looms large in H.G. Wells, an enlightening--if limited--new biography by Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie.

The biographical approach is exciting. Relying on a thorough investigation of meticulously collected documents, letters, unpublished manuscripts, and personal accounts, the MacKenzies have set out to sketch in detail the growth and development of Wells's ideas. The man behind the ideas is sometimes obscured, but in many cases his overpowering, prolific writings justify the technique, just as their raw energy and wide scope sometimes dwarfed Wells himself in his own day. At times, however, this is slightly annoying--if not downright disconcerting. Wells, after all, led a colorful life, as a pulp-writer, a man of letters, a radical politician, and a libertine par excellence.

The rise of H.G. Wells from a boy in extreme poverty to a man of influence in the early twentieth century is infinitely more intriguing than analogous stories on this side of the Atlantic about Carnegie or Rockefeller. Wells was born in 1866 to a fanatically fundamentalist mother and a relatively impotent cricket-playing father perched ominously close to the bottom rung of a socially immobile ladder of Victorian society. Relying mostly on his raw intelligence, voracious reading habits, and an outstanding ability to cram, Wells was able to avoid the draper's life his mother had so carefully planned for him. 'Bertie' was the youngest child--spoiled, frail, and often "dreamy." Later in life, this same dreamy imagination would spring Wells into the public eye via his scientific romances. Fro the time being, it sparked his curiosity and led to honors grades in school. After a rather torturous two years as a draper's apprentice, he was finally able to find some schooling and, in 1885, gain entrance into London University. It was here that many of Wells's strongest ideas were formulated. T.H. Huxley, one of his teachers in the first year, but by no means his mentor (Wells recounts saying only two words to the man, "Hello, Professor."), was to be a guiding inspiration for the rest of his life. What promised to be a stellar academic career faded quickly the following year when Wells began to find radical politics more interesting than intellectual pursuits. At the same time, inspired by Huxley, he was cutting his teeth on Marxism--Darwin's theory of evolution.

These would prove central to his scientific romances of the 1890s: The Invisible Man, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon. Wells saw in Darwinism the basic roots of man's decay: natural selection would eventually separate the weak and the strong into two distinct classes. The powerful class would oppressively dominate the subservient one, using it for whatever means it wished. This theme is best seen in The Time Machine, where the cave-dwelling Morlocks lord over the gentle, but inferior Eloi. The War of the Worlds reflects a different kind of Darwinism, where the Martians kill off the "weak and the silly," leaving the earth to begin again, ruled by the strong. The MacKenzies are sensitive enough to perceive Wells's frustrated attempts to synthesize evolution and entropy into apocalypse as a projection of his own sense of personal collapse from chronic lung disease. But this is an exception. They often fail to explore the full influence of his personal life on his work beyond a superficial level.

AS ENGLAND turned towards novelty in both the arts and sciences at the turn of the century, Wells turned more and more towards realistic social prophecy, and a new optimism in which free will and determinism would control Darwinism. In Anticipations he talks of a new "Human Ecology" which could help predict "biological, intellectual, and economic consequences." At the forefront of his "free will" is a new "mass of capable men," engendered by sterilization programs in which mankind can "tolerate no dark corners where the people of the abyss may fester." In A Modern Utopia, these supermen are called Samurai. And even though they rule over a socialist state, it is they--and not the masses--who are the key to the society. His gigantic Outline of History is more Wells than history, as again, nations and cultures rise because of a ruling elite, and fall on account of a natural social selection.

Throughout the thirty years of his scientific romances and prophecies Wells was in a constant state of emotional flux. His first marriage to his cousin, Isabel, in 1893 lasted only two years. He then married his mistress, Amy Robbins, and soon asked her to "accept" his promiscuous ways with other women. She accepted it, but certainly Wells's life was profoundly affected by his short-term infatuations. The MacKenzies explore his wanderlust as one of his deep-seeded conflicts between rationalism and irrationalism--and this seems to make a great deal of sense. Wells always saw in science both a new order that would prove mankind's salvation and the apocalyptic reaper.

BY THE END of his life, Wells had embraced and then rejected his literary friends, Henry James, Arnold Bennett; and his socialist friends in the Fabian Society, including George Bernard Shaw. In 1946, after two world wars, he wrote Mind at the End of its Tether. Here Wells finally resolves his classic conflict: The mind, in the evolutionary process, in the creation of visionary socialist societies, could simply not be counted on at all.

Wells's imagination soared to unequaled heights in the early parts of the twentieth century. But its unfirm grasp of reality and its reliance on magical science--which at times predicted many real things to come--was too shaky. It had to fall. The MacKenzies have captured much of that capitulation in H.G. Wells. In a way, they have missed a lot, too. Their strict chronological progression never really succeeds in making Wells lifelike. He remains, to a certain extent, a flat two-dimensional shadow lurking behind an endless series of documents and letters. His works are too simply explained away by his life. Biographies should give life to their subjects. But perhaps Wells will always be an invisible man.