Reshaping H.G. Wells. (Letters to the Editor).

Regarding your August 12th issue, in his article "Shaping Things to Come," William Norman Grigg attempted one of the most incomprehensible revisions of H.G. Wells I've seen in some time. To call the piece misleading is to be kind. He has deliberately taken aim at a man who admired and loved the U.S. for its love of freedom and liberty, its institutions, and its diversity. I find it appropriate however that his only biographical reference of Wells was to Michael Coren, author of 1993's meandering piece, The Invisible Man: the Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells.

Completely disregarding the truth about Wells in his fervor to warn us against the dangers of what he perceives as ideological/conspiratorial science fiction, Mr. Grigg made several egregious errors and omissions in his historiography of Mr. Wells. Despite citing the dates 1890-1920 to predicate Wells' zenith of influence, he mentions only The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, Food of the Gods, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. The problem with this is that this selection covers only 1895-1904, less than 10 years of Wells' writing career, and at that, only his very first works. What of his social novels and historical texts that helped make his a household name? Does Mr. Grigg know any of those by name?

Is Mr. Grigg aware that The Time Machine and The First Men in the Moon are actually prime examples of dystopian novels, and not the utopian propaganda he imagines them to be? Does he imagine Wells meant us to be awestruck with the Selenite utopia in the Moon so as to work for its immediate creation on Earth?

Contrary to Grigg's belief, at no time was H.G. Wells a Marxist--let alone a "devoted Marxist"; in fact, Wells was outspoken in his lifelong opposition to Marxism. Mr. Grigg trumpeted Wells' joining the Fabian Society to further this tenuous link to Marxism, yet conveniently failed to point out that Wells had resigned from the society by 1908 after a failed coup against the Fabian "old guard" of the Webbs and George Bernard Shaw.

And in another thinly veiled attempt to hijack the history of Mr. Wells to fit his own agenda, he quotes only specific pieces Coren mentioned in his own slanted and incomplete study of Wells. If Wells was truly the evil totalitarian and Social Darwinian elitist Grigg makes him out to be, how is it possible that Wells wrote in Socialism and Freedom (from Christian Commonwealth, December 8, 1909), "Socialism without a tradition of personal freedom, without free literature whose freedom is jealously preserved, without artists, thinkers, speakers and writing, free from official domination may easily, because of the very completeness of its organizations, become the ugliest and most stagnant tyranny the world has ever seen.... There is an ungainly, self-righteous, almost conscientiously dishonest side to modem socialism of which Jam afraid."

Mr. Grigg has done your readers a terrible disservice.

CHARLES KELLER

Director, The H.G. Wells Society,

the Americas; Webmaster and Executive,

The H.G. Wells Society, U.K.

William Norman Grigg responds: "When I was a boy of fourteen," wrote Wells in his book Russia in the Shadows, "I was a complete Marxist long before I heard the name of Marx." As a student at the Normal School of Science--which he left in 1887 after failing his exams--Wells' immersion in socialist activism and speechmaking severely undermined his studies. If Wells was a lifelong opponent of Marxism, as Mr. Keller insists, why would he have joined the Fabian Socialist society?

Wells did become disenchanted with Soviet-style Marxism, and it is true that he left the Fabian society (in 1906, not 1908, as Keller inaccurately states) after a falling-out with Shaw and the Webbs. But he never abandoned his devotion to socialism. In his autobiography, Wells explained that he supported World War Ion the assumption that it would "sweep the whole of the current political system, the militant state and its symbols, out of existence, leaving the whole planet a confederated system of socialist republics."

Despite his break with the organized British left, Wells insinuated Fabian themes into political manifestos like New Worlds for Old (1908) and The New World Order (1940). His 1928 book The Open Conspiracy is a veritable handbook on Fabian-style agitation and infiltration by those working to build a "World State"--a campaign in which science fiction plays a significant role.

As to Michael Coren's biography being a "slanted and incomplete" treatment of his subject, I will let the author defend himself: "When I set out to write my life of H. G. Wells I had nothing but affection and admiration for the self-made man of so many achievements. It was only during my three years of research for the book, when I came across a plethora of negative facts and events which had been omitted from previous biographies, that I realized two things: that Wells was possibly not the man I had thought; and that other biographers had been far too selective in their inclusions."

Any biographical study will, of necessity, be incomplete, and this is certainly true of the thumbnail sketch included in our article. Among the many significant facts about Wells I neglected to mention are: his shameless promiscuity; his brazen adulteries (which he broadcast to the world in autobiographical novels) and selfish mistreatment of his wives; his advocacy of abortion; his shockingly crude anti-Semitism, and the similarly vulgar anti-Catholicism that he embraced late in life; and the nearly career-destroying humiliation he suffered when Hilaire Belloc publicly eviscerated Wells' Outline of History (for which Wells took sole authorial credit, but which was actually assembled by a team of young scholars under his direction).

In the worst sense of the expression, Wells was a maker of the modern world, and his vision of the future should be fiercely opposed by all decent people.