Yet Wells’s life is so diverting, to use an old-fashioned word, that we can overlook the running current of his literary career. This guy was the Fabio of the Fabians? Apparently so-a reminder that erotic charisma is a spell cast by action, not a collection of enumerable traits. In the surviving newsreels that feature him, we see a portly little pundit whose pie-faced, high-pitched, condescending singsong tones make him sound like a “Beyond the Fringe” character. Even an affectionate fictional portrait by David Lodge, “ A Man of Parts” (2011), gives us a Wells who’s more a left-wing Toad of Toad Hall than a coherent artist. First, after two World Wars, his belief in perpetual progress came to seem fatuous, and then, in the age of Woolf and Joyce, his Victorian style looked baggy and gassy. Sinclair Lewis, the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, named his oldest son Wells before he’d ever met the man. Wells: Changing the World” (Penguin Press)-that his eroticism was in no small part feminist in its promotion of a woman’s right to choose her own sexual partners, unconstrained by the strictures of a father or a husband. A case can even be made-indeed, to make it you can draw on Claire Tomalin’s new biography, “ The Young H. G. Like most “first use” claims-the number of words that Shakespeare supposedly used first has decreased as Elizabethan data banks have enlarged-this is probably overstated, but Wells certainly made the word, well, sticky. Lewisham,” as a shorthand for the totality of the activity. “Every bit of sexual impulse in me has expressed itself.” The case is sometimes even made that Wells invented the word “sex”-that he pioneered its modern use, in his 1900 novel, “Love and Mr. He is also remembered, among Brits with a taste for evergreen gossip, as perhaps the most erotically adventurous man of his generation, the satyr of the socialists. Wells is remembered today mostly as the author of four visionary science-fiction perennials with premises so simple and strong that they can sustain any amount of retelling: “ The War of the Worlds,” “ The Invisible Man,” “ The Time Machine,” and “ The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Social historians recall Wells as one of the brighter technological optimists and left-wing polemicists of the early part of the twentieth century.
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