H.G. Wells: aspects of a life.

ONE OF THE most eloquent passages in Anthony West's biography of his father concerns not the life H. G. Wells lived, lived but the one he escaped. If he had persisted as a draper's shop assistant he would have seen floor walkers eying him with distaste, and he would have seen older versions of himself, weedy and shambling, cringing when they were exposed to the same unappreciative glares. These partly worn-out men, penny-pinching to build up some reserve against the evil day when they failed to please in their last crib, were what his brothers were becoming, were what he would surely become if his mother had her way.

Sarah Wells, who had the peculiarly English horror of rising above her station, spent much of her unhappy marriage waiting for the day she could leave her husband and go back into service. But her son, despite his mother's warnings against ambition, managed to break free from the drapers and the pharmacist to whom he was apprenticed and get enough of an education to start writing novels, history, political philosophy, and prophecy. Once embarked he never stopped flying, and his mode of conveyance was always the seat of his pants. Shortly after the First Wood War, novels like Mr. Britling Sees It Through and popular tomes like the Outline of History made him rich; the mass-circulating platform provided by Lord Beaverbrook's papers made him an influence.

His son celebrates him as "an authentic genius" who helped along or foresaw, among other mixed blessings, the nuclear age, the United Nations, and the Common Market. Wells's visions were in fact so far-flung and elastic that West must defend him against charges ranging from "fatuous optimism" to "crypto-fascism."

British socialism as represented by Beatrice and Sidney Webb and the Fabian Society was too small to hold him, a good idea for a time but in the end not imaginatively sustaining. Also, the "ingrown and clubby" Fabians had trouble countenancing his bumptious sex life, which was at least as internationalist as his politics. If he was "notoriously inept when it came to writing love scenes," he had no lack of practice playing them. Wells was a feminist philanderer whose conquests included a Soviet agent, a Dutch-Greek jounalist raised in Constantinople, a British university student, and the American birth-control proselytizer Margaret Sanger. An Austrian woman named Hedwig Verena Gatternigg even slashed her wrists over the squirrely little man Rupert Brooke called "wee, fantastic Wells." His long marriage to Amy Catherine Robbins (whom he called Jane) was made possible by her need of "a husband who could be counted upon to be unfaithful to her" as she manufactured the conditions of domestic tranquillity necessary to his prodigious literary output. Jane Wells was a formidable doormat--someone who made herself indispensable even while she was abandoned--and Anthony West cleary admires her tenacity.

She was not his mother. The author is the illegitimate son of the late Rebecca West, a woman who "thought of her life history as something that could easily be improved by editing." The own mother in this book assures its place as the literary equivalent of Anthony Perkins's filial performance up the road from the Bates Motel. And yet, for all the interest this guarantees, H. G. Wells is chiefly distinguished by its peculiar structure. I can think of no other biography whose subject dies in Chapter VII before his father is born in Chapter VIII. West regards the "aspects" of his father's life--his politics, womanizing, literary achievement, friendships--in an aggressively unchronological way. Reading this book is like looking at a tray of slides that have been shuffled or sitting in Wells's own time machine with a hot-rodder at the controls.

This is not just a biography marbled with memoir. It is an obsession. West began it in 1948, and as he settles all sorts of posthumous scores for the father he knew rather distantly and now admires hugely, he allows himself to become shrill; to crawl out on some thin psychological limbs; and to interpret the chemicals off whatever old photographs he finds. This book does indeed read like one that has been on its author's mind for nearly forty years. For all West's precision within individual paragraphs, the back-and-forth quality of his memory and presentation gives the volume an odd garrulousness. What the reader ends up with is a series of late-night gnawings, armchair perolexities that have taken decades to be vented. Yet the book that has finally resulted is not unworthy, just difficult: a challenging addition to the still under-experimented-with genre of literary biography. In the end its frustrating clocklessness may make more sense than the great digital monsters that keep lumbering out of English departments. After all, chronology stops at the grave. Our memories of the dead are forever arhythmic, and the ghost who show up wrinkled tonight is free to wear knee pants tomorrow.