|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The Decline and Fall of H.G. Wells
| Article
# : |
11003 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1993 |
2,839 Words |
| Author
: |
Michael D. Aeschliman
Michael D. Aeschliman teaches English literature at the
University of Virginia. He is the author of The Restitution of
Man. |
THE INVISIBLE MAN
The Life and Liberties of H.G. Wells
Michael Coren
New York: Atheneum, 1993
240 pp., $22.50
Except perhaps for Karl Marx, H.G. Wells (1866-1946) was probably the most influential writer in the world for most of the first half of the twentieth century. Between 1919 and 1934 alone his Outline of History sold over two million copies and was translated into numerous languages. He had private interviews with Lenin, Stalin, and two Roosevelts, and his popularizations of a scientific and "progressive" worldview or ideology had a massive influence on his contemporaries.
Yet it is the contention of Michael Coren's fine new study of Wells' life and works that, in Coren's words, "Wells' influence on his own age, and his legacy to those ages to come, were, taken as a whole, pernicious and destructive." This may seem at first a harsh verdict on the most influential educator of the twentieth century the heir and popularizer of Enlightenment rationalism and modern science, though Coren is by no means alone in making this judgment. Even Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, in their standard and outstanding biography, The Life of H.G. Wells: The Time Traveller (1973; rev. ed., 1987), a sympathetic but scrupulously and exhaustively fair work, found it necessary to dwell on, and to condemn, Wells' private life and especially his ruthlessly promiscuous abuse of women, "the corruption of the physical appetite he so rapaciously indulged." Wells set himself up to be a teacher of society a revolutionary cleanser of defunct and decadent ideas, values, and practices, in the interest of his own vision of moral renovation and reformation for an imminent utilitarian utopia. His own personal life is hardly consistent with this high moral program, tone, and role.
Yet Coren's case against Wells is not only made against his "life and liberties" but against his whole ideological view and effect, his whole progressive program, in outline and in detail. He particularly focuses attention on Wells' anti-Semitism and his anti-Catholicism, his recommendation of eugenics, his admiration of Stalin, and his elitist, authoritarian statism. More generally, he convicts Wells of having promoted a falsely optimistic view of collective human progress across time and of a potential utopia to be brought about in the near future through the wholesale application of science and technology to the affairs of social and individual life.
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
