H.G. Wells in Love: Postscript to an Experiment in Autobiography

Rating:
Summary: LOVE'S LABORS REVISITED
Review: This is one of the most remarkable and insightful pieces of autobiography ever written. Wells was a massive, prolific writer with a central vision - the non-utopian harmonious World State that would ensure mankind's survival - but he was also prolific in his capacities as raconteur and romancer. Here, in this unmissable novel-paced addendum to Experiment in Autobiography (also recommended and findable in two fine Faber&Faber volumes), he enthusiastically recounts his promiscous life in terms of a mortal, and moral, imperative. That his prose is so elegant only enhances and endears - and perhaps distracts from the one questionable weakness of the work: namely the ease with which he dispenses intimate revelations of his lovers' personal lives. But the overwhelming grace of the narrative is in its self-critical honesty and Darwinian clarity. He sidesteps nothing, declaring frankly who he loved (only his two wives and Moura Budberg), where the sensual trade-offs sufficed, how his sex life was subsidiary to his work, and his work to his politico-social vision, and his vision to the vagaries of living - his depressions, lapses of faith (in life's fundamental worth), his diabetes. The book's writing took him (takes us) to his deathbed. Formally and gracefully in the closing pages he hands over to his son to complete the work, prophesying his own demise by heart attack in the night (he was almost right: he died in the afternoon). The last footnote he penned is fascinating, and utterly optimistic of the human spirit despite his despair in the face of World War 2. He cannot conclude an autobiography, he insists, without admitting - against his better judgement - a sense of predetermined life. He feels honor-bound to record this dissenting whisper, but insists that free will has the edge, that it is the fuel of individuality and the mandate for creative action that must take man-the-animal from the destruction of uncontrolled appetites to survival. The anatomizing of Wells' own sensual appetites, and of human relations generally, leaves one with the warm reassurance of benevolent sexuality, a notion that has become so politically unfashionable as to read like divine revelation.