Triangle

By Stefan Kanfer

H.G. WELLS: ASPECTS OF A LIFE by Anthony West Random House; 405 pages; $22.95

They met in the fall of 1912. He was 46, married, a prolific author of verve and renown. She was 19, single and unknown. When their affair ended ten years later, three people had been wounded beyond measure or retribution. But it was not for want of trying. In his day, H.G. Wells railed against his ungrateful mistress Rebecca West. She in turn portrayed herself as the suffering Other Woman, 15 forced to bring up their illegitimate son, Anthony West, on a restricted income. Now, at the age of 69, Anthony has weighed in.

It is not the first time. In 1955, West described his unhappy early life in Heritage, an autobiography masked as a novel. Rebecca West (1892-1983) blocked its publication in England, and in a new introduction to a paperback reissue of Heritage, the author bitterly recalls "my mother's passionate desire to do me harm." Given this bias, one could hardly expect a dispassionate recollection of times past. But H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life is more than the defense of a neglected author. It is a kind of intellectual's Mommie Dearest, a serious chronicle that uses Rebecca West as a counterweight to raise the reputation of her lover.

In the biographer's view, Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a genius with a powerful physical presence. His foresight, combined with a generous, romantic spirit, made him irresistible to women and children and, indeed, to much of the reading public. Rebecca West, by contrast, was a woman of sharp beauty, "wit, acute observation . . . and a wild paranoia." Through the ten years of their romance, she tells friends of various humiliations: Wells ignores her, he suffers from fits of maniacal rage, he becomes childishly dependent. But the author says, "I cannot believe a word . . . they are inventions," and then goes on to document "what my father was doing in the real world, as opposed to that of my mother's fantasy."

That strategy is only partly successful, since West prefers the exaggerated phrase. His father is "a very big man indeed." As for Wells' opponents, Henry James is charged with literary dictatorship and George Bernard Shaw with "Stalinism." And yet the author's praise is not entirely fulsome. Prophetic fiction owes its very existence to Wells. He was, as Joseph Conrad wrote, a "realist of the fantastic." In The World Set Free, he predicted the atom bomb; in The Island of Dr. Moreau, organ transplants; in The War of the Worlds, laser beams. Wells also produced a vast body of nonfiction, capped by The Outline of History, an almost hysterically optimistic attempt to trace mankind's ascent from darkness to a science-aided summit far from the present day. Like most of Wells' work, it was a monumental bestseller in its own time, and is almost unread today.

Why should the writer of some 50 celebrated books have suffered such a reversal? For one thing, although West refuses to acknowledge it, Wells was not in the same league as his colleagues James and Shaw. For another, science has far outrun imagination -- even Wells'. As for his popular histories, they have long since been superseded by works that use evidence instead of fancy. But all this is irrelevant to the biographer. To him the alterations of time and taste are as nothing compared with the depredations of Rebecca West.

The former Cicily Fairfield nourished acting ambitions long before she became a writer, and her son argues that Rebecca never quite left the stage. The brilliant reporter of history (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, A Train of Powder) melodramatized every personal slight, and when she found that she could not have Wells to herself, she decided, West contends, "to pull down his literary reputation" with ad hominem attacks and accusations that he had turned publishers against her. In 1928, "Wells gave her a very short answer to these charges," says the author. "She was lying, and she knew it as well as he did. The correspondence was abruptly over."

But the conflict remains. Nearly four decades after the writer's death, H.G. Wells amply demonstrates that in domestic wars as in wider ones, truth is often the first casualty. For in the end, despite all of West's approbations, H.G. Wells seems a monument, not a man, and Rebecca West appears as an overdrawn termagant, rather than an authentic human being who must have suffered innumerable hurts of her own. The only entirely credible figure is Anthony West--when he appears as the damaged son. In the part of chronicler he is sadly though understandably miscast. In their times, his parents predicted and covered many events. But it is unlikely that they ever saw themselves in their present roles, as the main characters in a new permutation of Rashomon.