Prophet, Card, Born Writer

H. G. WELLS: PROPHET OF OUR DAY (338 pp.)--Antonina Vallentin--John Day ($4).

When the atom bomb landed on Allied headquarters in Paris, the boiling waters of the Seine surged into the streets of the stricken city. There appeared to be "nothing else in the world but a crimson-purple glare and sound, deafening, all-embracing, continuing sound ... A great ball, of crimson-purple fire, like a maddening living thing that seemed to be whirling about very rapidly amidst a chaos of falling masonry that seemed to be ... burrowing into [the earth] like a blazing rabbit. . .'

The late Herbert George Wells wrote this account of atomic devastation in a book called The World Set Free, which was published six months before the first World War, 31 years before Hiroshima. It seemed absurdly exaggerated to him when the war (which he had hopefully called "The War That Will End War") turned out to be just one more exchange of everyday high explosives. Not until he was an old man of 78, stubbornly sticking to his home in the heart of blitzed London, did Wells experience the "strange confrontation" of picking up the morning paper and seeing that fantastic prophecy had found a target at last in Japan.

H. G. Wells: Prophet of Our Day appears four years after his death in 1946. Poland-born Antonina Vallentin, a naturalized Frenchwoman, has two qualifications for the job: 1) she knew Wells, 2) she is practiced in writing books about famous men (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, Heinrich Heine, Gustav Stresemann, Mirabeau, Goya). With H. G. Wells, she comes to grips with her first eccentric Briton--and emerges from the struggle wearing the pained, puzzled expression of a fighter who has been repeatedly but deftly rabbit-punched.

Who Goes There? The English, notes harassed Biographer Vallentin, look upon Alice in Wonderland, with its "strong undercurrent of cruelty," as an ideal book for children. But how could even the English have missed the "curiously sadistic strain" that she found in some of Wells's very first work, his fancy for cataclysmic upheavals and devastating horrors? Biographer Vallentin wonders. And yet, to all appearances, he was a hearty, jovial man, bursting with a robust humor that Miss Vallentin tries in vain to reflect, and inspired with a sense of duty to mankind that she manages to get across very well.

Even his fellow countrymen found "H.G." a bit of a puzzle, almost a cross between a card and a cad. Unlike most of the distinguished British authors of the century, he was neither an English gentleman nor an American expatriate. His father worked as a hired gardener, later owned a pottery shop which brought him little success; his mother, a onetime housemaid, became a rather incapable housekeeper. His own visage, which, in his journalistic heyday, beamed down on Londoners from billboards and the sides of the city's big red buses, was unrefined, not to say coarse; his voice was shrill and slightly cockney. While indubitably a born writer, he was not in the least an esthete --indeed, he compared Esthete Proust's Remembrance of Things Past to "a 20-year-old store catalogue." Though a staunch socialist and avid student of political economy, he considered Karl Marx "the worst type of bore," and he summed up the Soviet image of the revolutionary worker as a "pithacoid Proletarian, dishevelled and semi-nude."

Wells was finally received by British society, but neither then nor before did he try to deny his succession of mistresses. His wife Catherine, who died in 1927, had to learn to accept them. His intellectual friends considered him a Don Juan. Wells did not flaunt his women, but he never hesitated to be seen with them in public. One of them took care of him with complete devotion to the end.

Doing Poorly. Once when Wells, safe in wealth and fame, was talking about his early poverty, a listener reminded him that at least he had never been reduced to the twin extremes of irremediable hunger and absolute homelessness. This was rather like reproaching a man who had lost both arms with not having lost both legs as well. For several years, Wells lived in an exhausting state of penury, lunching off a roll of bread, attending science school with only one battered collar (made of celluloid and washed every night) between him and ignominy. All that sustained him, and continued to do so until his last, embittered years, was the passionate belief that knowledge alone could save mankind, and that consequently "the final decision as to the fate of life on our planet depends today upon man's own will."

Of Wells's struggle first to win knowledge for himself, then to pass it on (often in the tempting form of fantastic fiction) to the rest of the world, Biographer Vallentin writes with intelligence and sympathy, making clear that Wells was, as one critic said, "a glorified edition of the ordinary man." On the other hand, her biography of him might equally well be called an ordinary .edition of a glorified man. It lists and describes, precisely but unimaginatively, practically everything Wells ever wrote, and it proceeds in a similar, if sparser, fashion to tick off the rest of the Wells story (falling back on pseudonyms where living people are scandalously involved). In short, it makes of "H.G." pretty much what a Baedeker would make of Alice in Wonderland.

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