Wells in Parvo

STAR-BEGOTTEN--H. G. Wells--Viking ($1.75).

Every man, it is said, has one good book in him. But many a professional writer distributes his first-rate potentialities over a series of second-rate books. This is one of the most serious criticisms that has been leveled at 70-year-old Herbert George Wells, who has written more than one book for every year of his life. Star-Begotten, published last week, made his 79th. Enthusiastic Wellsians would indignantly deny that Author Wells had never written one good book, might cite Tono-Bungay, The Outline of History, Anticipations, many another. But Wells himself, though admittedly a man of parts, would rather be judged by the whole sum of his books than by any one of them. Plainly ticketed as one of the 20th Century's Great Men, he has never had securely pinned on him the title of Great Writer. Last week there was nothing new to say about H. G. Wells, but his latest book reminded readers of all the good and bad things that had been said about him in the last 40 years. For if not the very essence of Wells, if not exactly a Wells anthology. Star-Begotten was Wells in parvo.

Little indeed it was, especially for a writer with Wells's reputation for garrulity, but in its 217 pages he found room enough to pack a trademarked sample of nearly all his tricks.

Pseudo-Science. Author Wells has had enough scientific training to have fun with what he knows, but he has too great a respect for Science to let his fun-making become irresponsible. It irritates him to be compared to Jules Verne. A pseudo-scientific yarn like Star-Begotten, like his famed Time Machine, like all of them, is not intended to be more convincing than "a good gripping dream." But it has an idea behind it, and it is intended to make its readers think. Idea behind Star-Begotten: human nature is changing, and its changes can eventually result in either a war of the worlds or in men like gods.

Joseph Davis, typical Wellsian man-of-straw. is a conservatively intelligent product of the conservative English upper-middle-class system. Because he has more imagination than the usual public-school- cum-Oxford-man he has taken to imaginative writing as a career. His historical romances all go to show how glorious life was, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen. First fly in the pleasant ointment of his life is his wife, a silent, self-sufficient woman who at first puzzles him, then fills him with vague alarm. Added to the dawning doubts about the worth of his work are the normal jitters about his imminent firstborn. At this point Joseph Davis hears about cosmic rays, leaps like an electron to an entirely new orbit.

Suppose, he supposes, these mysterious cosmic rays have some mysterious connection with the people Joseph Davis does not understand--the queer, silent, self-sufficient people like his wife. Might it not be possible that the Martians, if they exist, are using these cosmic rays patiently, experimentally on us human guinea-pigs, gradually evolving a type a little nearer the Martian heart's or mind's desire? Hence Mrs. Joseph Davis; hence all the unusual people who have begun to appear all over the place and whom Joseph Davis cannot otherwise explain. The Martians "are thrusting mutations upon us. They are experimenting with human mutations. They are planning human mutations. So that presently our very children may not prove to be our own!'' The more he broods on this theory the more it gets him. He tries it on his wife's obstetrician, who at first thinks Joseph a mental case, then takes fire himself.

The idea spreads, leaks out, geysers up into the penny press. For a brief day, "Martians" become the rage. "In America the disclosure of the Martian intervention was received with bright incredulity. Rigamey's articles were syndicated everywhere and credited nowhere." The publicity fanfare dies away, but Joseph Davis and a few open-minded scientists continue their speculation and researches. By this time Joseph's idea has played hob with his work, his romantic ideas, his whole mode of life. He forswears his writing dedicates himself to the service of his indubitably Martian wife and his possibly Martian son. Just the same, Joseph Davis feels uncomfortably like an obsolete man, until one fine day his wife makes everything all right by suggesting that he is a Martian too. At that everything falls into its proper place. "Of course!" whispers Joseph Davis.

Suggestive Generalizations. A generalizer from way back, H. G. Wells knows how to make his sweeping statements excitingly suggestive, if not demonstrably exact, is usually canny enough to let one of his straw-men raise the really big clouds of controversial dust. Samples from Star-Begotten: "These great men of yours never existed. The human affair is more intricate than that. More touching. Saints are sinners and philosophers are fools. Religions are rigmaroles. If there is gold it is still in the quartz. . . . Haven't all reasonable civilized men nowadays this feeling of being dilettantes on a sinking ship?"

Utopianizing, as every Wellsian knows, is H. G. Wells s crowning glory or besetting sin. In Star-Begotten his Utopian agents are extraterrestrial. The Martians know much more than Earth-dwellers but inhabit a nearly worn-out planet, have got to have greener pastures. Their attempt to Martianize the Earth at long distance is thus not wholly unselfish, but neither is it necessarily sinister. "This is a world where lots of us live upon terms of sentimental indulgence towards cats, dogs, monkeys, horses, cows, and suchlike inhuman creatures, help them in a myriad simple troubles, and attribute the most charming reactions to them!" With a twinkle Wells implies: perhaps the Martians feel sentimentally indulgent towards us. Anyhow he still sticks to his hopeful story, Martians or no Martians: "A new sort of mind is coming into the world, with a new, simpler, clearer, and more powerful way of thinking. That I think is manifest. It has already got into operation individually here and there and produced a sort of disorder of innovation in human affairs."

Talky-Talk. Wells's straw-men are also ventriloquial dummies: they all have the dubious gift of gabble. And for every keen sentence he lets them blurt, he makes them babble a tedious paragraph. Star-Begotten is a short book but spots in it seem very long. His scientists may be angels in the laboratory or operating room but often they talk like poor Poll. Says one of them: "In a fools' world sane men will have a bad time anyhow; but they can help wind up the world of fools even if they cannot hope to see it out." Suggested methods of winding it up: sabotage, political assassinations. But when one of his characters says: "The queer thing is that, when this lunatic comes to you and starts this idea in your head, you don't say Pish or Tush and just turn it down; you begin to have a vague sense that somehow you have felt something--you hardly know what," he expresses what the sympathetic reader feels about such a Wellsian book as Star-Begotten. And occasionally, as a good journalist may, Wells's burbling, suggestive, enthusiastic talk strikes out a suddenly poetic phrase that rings in the memory: "With their hard, clear minds and their penetrating, unrelenting questions stinging our darkness as the stars sting the sky."

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