The Days of the Prophet

By R.Z. Sheppard

H.G. WELLS by NORMAN and JEANNE MACKENZIE 487 pages. Simon & Schuster. $10.

H.G. Wells continues to be a biographer's dream and a book reviewer's waltz. His life stretched very nearly from Appomattox to Hiroshima. He was one of the world's great storytellers, the father of modern science fiction, an autobiographic novelist of scandalous proportion, a proselytizer for world peace through brain power, an unsurpassed popular historian, a journalist and inexhaustible pamphleteer, the friend and worthy adversary of great men and the lover of numerous beautiful and intelligent women.

But when he died in 1946 at the age of 79, Wells' reputation had long suffered from overexposure. Wells had some cause for gloom. Among the last of his 153 published books was A Mind at the End of Its Tether, a pessimistic essay written in 1945 that gave man little chance for survival. He had lived through two of the most destructive wars in history, a fact that must have frequently been on his mind, since in 1917 he coined the phrase "the war that will end wars." On the other hand, about a decade later he predicted that World War II would start in 1939.

Wells was the last of the high-level saturation prophets. His success as a futurist was based on a supreme confidence in man's worst instincts. For Wells, an atheist, theological good and evil did not exist. Original sin resided in the pinkish gray folds of the brain and expressed itself through brutish linkage, which operated the prehensile thumb. Given tools enough and time, Homo sapiens would turn the most charming toy, the most fetching theory, into a weapon.

Patience is the prophet's greatest ally. In 1900, three years before the Wright brothers puttered over the sand at Kitty Hawk, Wells foretold the modern air armada in The Shape of Things to Come. On the eve of World War I, after reading a book about radium, he wrote The World Set Free, a novel that predicted the atomic bomb with such imaginative precision that the late physicist Leo Szilard acknowledged that the book had inspired the building of his own apparatus for starting chain reactions.

Wells' life was involved in the most important ideas and events of his times, and British Biographers Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie patiently retell it in more detail than has heretofore been marshaled in any single book. Wells was a sickly boy, the son of a servant mother and a father who would rather play cricket than run his failing crockery shop in Kent. Wells escaped from genteel poverty when he moved from draper's assistant to scholarship student at London University in 1884. There he came under the lasting influence of Darwin's disciple, T.E. Huxley. It is not hard to imagine how Wells would be impressed by a theory that made the monkey the common ancestor of kings and cockneys. He was soon mixing Darwinian science and the social philosophy of Herbert Spencer in articles and stories that found ready outlets in Grub Street periodicals.

War of the Worlds. Wells was lucky to have come of age during one of journalism's most expansive periods. The new prosperity of the late 19th century stretched class lines and increased literacy and public curiosity. In addition, Darwinism had cut deeply into faith, adding to normal end-of-the-century malaise a vague sense of guilt and anxiety. One result of all that was a widespread hunger for tales of horror and apocalypse. Wells, who had a profound distrust of perfectibility through industrial progress, fed this hunger with his best-known and still widely read novels: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. They were all written between 1895 and 1897. In an argument that is echoed today by many science-fiction writers, Wells stated that the novel was the only medium through which the great questions of social change could be discussed. Fiction would have to yield to his procrustean devices. "Before we are done," he said, "we will have all life within the scope of the novel."

Of course, Wells was too restless to be hemmed in by this or any other doctrine. He used the novel for comedy, satire and what the MacKenzies call "auto-analysis." Love and Mr. Lewisham, Kipps, Tono Bungay and the History of Mr. Polly were all based largely on his own experiences in rising up from the lower-middle class. Anne Veronica (1909), a thesis novel about free love, borrowed shamelessly from his own prolific sex life.

He was a Don Juan by any standard. Shortly after his first marriage to a cousin. Wells seduced her best friend. A second marriage too was quickly followed by numerous affairs. He stayed married, but was honest and open about his affairs. Secretaries, students, wide-eyed admirers filled his bed. He preferred brainy, emancipated females like Novelist Rebecca West, who during a long friendship bore him a son, the writer Anthony West.

Wells seems to have equated love with what the MacKenzies call "intellectual euphoria." Sex, by contrast, was mainly for the relief of tension and depression. "There comes a moment in the day," he once told Charlie Chaplin, "when you have written your pages in the morning, attended to your correspondence in the afternoon, and have nothing further to do. Then comes that hour when you are bored; that's the time for sex."

He was too impatient an idealist to be much of a political animal. He also knew too much history to be taken in by demagogues and dictators. In 1920 he brought out what became by far his most successful book, An Outline of History, a sweeping two-volume narrative of human progress. Outline is a kind of bible of social engineering. Written in a single year of disciplined enthusiasm, it starts with cavemen and ends by pointing toward a New Jerusalem achieved through knowledge and World Federalism--a vision he constantly conjured up to dispel his chronic pessimism. A colleague recalls Wells during this period emerging from his study after a day's writing and chanting "Here we come over the High Pamirs--and mix with the Aryan peoples."

By the late '30s, much of what Wells had predicted had come true. A world already in future shock either forgot him or patronized him. Cruelly, Lytton Strachey snobbishly noted: "I stopped thinking about Wells the moment he became a thinker." Not everyone did, however. As late as 1969, Michael Crichton took the basic gimmick from The War of the Worlds and turned it into the bestseller The Andromeda Strain. For millions of people, one Wellsian prediction, as headlined in the New York American in 1933, has yet to lose its Chill: H.G. WELLS VISIONS THE ENTIRE WORLD IN THE CLUTCHES OF ORGANIZED CRIME: SEES ERA OF DESERTED ROADS, FORTIFIED BANKS, BARRICADED HOMES. qedR.Z. Sheppard

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