Fairly Open Conspirator*

Fairly Open Conspiratorsb

H. G. WELLS--Geoffrey West--Norton ($3)/-

Except for campaign purposes or to equip a newspaper morgue, it might be considered a doubtful compliment to any man to write his biography while he is still alive. Many a Wells enthusiast, however, will agree with Biographer Geoffrey West that his subject is a fit specimen to be pickled while still breathing.

Herbert George Wells, 64, was born the son of a shopkeeper (not a grocer, as many a rumor hints) who was a cricket enthusiast, who played the game so well he was a professional (for Kent), so enthusiastically that his shop failed. Mrs. Wells went back into service as a house- keeper, and her son spent many a weary week in the snobbish atmosphere of the servants' hall, thinking his own thoughts and learning to keep them to himself. "Bertie," a frail child with an active mind, grew up to want something better than the job of draper's clerk. He won a scholarship in the School of Science at South Kensington and studied under Thomas Huxley, with enthusiasm but little academic success. Then he taught school for a while at Henley House, alma mater of Alfred Harmsworth, presided over by A. A. Milne's father. When his health broke down he turned to writing. With The Time Machine he was a made man.

The Wells Sunday afternoon field-hockey games (described in Mr. Britling Sees It Through) are famed. Wells also likes to play charades; once appeared "adorned with a long tow beard and enhaloed by a dinner mat, and circling slowly in strange gyrations across the room in illustration of a familiar quotation, presently explained as: 'God moves in a mysterious way. . . . ' "

Friendly with contemporary writers (Arnold Bennett is his greatest friend), Wells would never take Art seriously, though Geoffrey West thinks Tono Burgay "one of the two or three great English novels of this century. . . . The godly strove tirelessly to convert him, but his participation in these portentously grave deliberations was wholly defensive; he evaded their arguments by declaring himself ... no artist but a journalist." His self-estimate showed itself correct during the War, when he roared against the Hun as loudly as any Horatio Bottomley, prophesied speedy victory often, always incorrectly. After the War he went to Russia, where he met Lenin and liked him. It was not mutual. Said Lenin afterwards: "What a bourgeois he is! He is a Philistine! Ah, what a Philistine!"

Wells had long been a bestseller, but with The Outline of History he became a super-seller (more than one and one-half million copies) and a rich man. No longer a novelist, he now preaches for the World State as opposed to a League of Nations, may get some better idea before he stops writing altogether.

H. G. Wells himself has written an introduction to this book, in which he informs you that "Geoffrey West's" real name is Geoffrey H. Wells, no relation, who adopted his pen-name to avoid confusion. Everything in the book, says Wells, is quite true as far as it goes. "I have kept nothing back from him of any importance and if he has kept anything back from the public that is a matter of his own discretion. I have lived in accordance with my convictions and if I am troubled by remorse for certain things I have done, they are things so trivial by the ordinary standards . . . that even I cannot explain why they can still be sometimes almost excruciating to recall; hard, wounding things I have said to people . . . the way I once hit at and did not kill a rat and had to go on killing it, and other things on that scale." Corroborates Biographer West: "The gossip flourished, but no story of meanness or betrayal has ever faced the light. No story has ever faced the light. There is no story that cannot face the light. The paper of his study at Easton Glebe bore the garter and Honi soit qui mal y pense. That states his case."

Geoffrey West makes no mention of his pseudonymous fellow, Rebecca West (Cicely Isabel Fairfield, now Mrs. Henry Maxwell Andrews), onetime great & good friend to H. G., who once sat at his feet, has since penned some interesting observations of her former master. Wells's attitude to his profession is hardboiled, so sensible you wonder if he can really mean it. Says he: "I have never taken any great pains about writing. I am outside the hierarchy of conscious and deliberate writers altogether. . . . Sir J. C. Squire doubts if I shall 'live' and I cannot say how cordially and unreservedly I agree."

New Testament

THE LIFE OF CHRIST IN WOODCUTS-- James Reid--Farrar & Rinehart ($3).-sb

In many a Roman Catholic church worshippers reverently view the "Stations of the Cross"--14 (sometimes 15) scenes from the end of Christ's life. London's Westminster Cathedral has a fine example cut in stone by Sculptor Eric Rowland Gill. Woodcutter James Reid, more ambitious, less successful, has attempted to picture the whole life of Christ in 71 scenes.

Unlike other tellers of stories in pictures, Artist Reid has the advantage that everyone is familiar with the tale he has to tell; he can often be decorative instead of continuous. But he labors under the difficulty that faces all modern portraitists of Christ: either to be original at the risk of irreverence or heresy, or traditional without originality. On the whole he sticks close to the traditional. Exceptions: showing Christ as a young man wistfully watching the youths and maidens walking out together through the fields; making Judas an evident fiend, a bat-eared Apollyon. Best cut: Lazarus.

Casanovan Apocrypha

CASANOVA'S HOMECOMING -- Arthur Schnitzler -- Simon & Schuster ($1)./-

Just at the moment when Germany entered its blackest days (end of 1918) Arthur Schnitzler surprised and offended his countrymen by publishing this tactlessly irrelevant little novel. Its first U. S. edition (Thomas Seltzer, 1922) received little attention but last summer Vice-Suppressor John Saxton Sumner tried to bar Simon & Schuster's new edition, failed, succeeded as usual in booming sales.

Author Schnitzler tells of an imaginary incident in Casanova's later career. Beginning to be an old man (53), Casanova longs for his beloved Venice, and returns as near it as its edict of banishment will let him. Near Mantua he meets an old friend, Olivo, who has married one of Casanova's half-forgotten loves. Olivo insists on Casanova's paying them a visit. When Casanova sees his host's beautiful niece Marcolina, he immediately desires her, but she is repelled by him. Besides she has a lover, the handsome young ne'er-do-well Lorenzi. But Lorenzi needs money badly, and Casanova bribes him. For a night he takes Lorenzi's place. In the morning, when Marcolina sees who her lover has been, she is horror-struck. Lorenzi is waiting in the garden; Casanova has to kill him to get away. Then he rides off to Venice, where the city fathers will allow him at last to return, if he will serve them as a spy.

The Author. Arthur Schnitzler, 68, onetime physician (he practiced till he was 40), Jewish Viennese novelist and playwright, has a heavy beard, frowns at the camera. He has never been to the U. S.

He says to himself: "In some respects I am the double of Professor Freud. Freud himself once called me his psychic twin. I tread in literature the same path which Freud explores with amazing audacity in science." Other (translated) novels: Fraulein Else, Beatrice, None But the Brave, Rhapsody.

Good Hunting

I MET MURDER--Selwyn Jepson--Harper ($2).

Author Jepson has taken his title from Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mask of Anarchy, and the title is pat, though the modern detective-story tradition of cheerful realism has kept the poet's atmosphere of horror out of this ingenious and pleasantly written thriller.

Sociologist Arden was giving a dinner party at his country house: the venal Vicar, Profiteer Page, amoral Anita, coy Lady Codrington, sere Inventor Skinner. Suddenly the wineglass in his hand, halfway to his lips, fell shattered to the table, and a bullet plunked into the paneling behind his head. That time the murderer missed; but he was a good shot, as was successively proved upon the bodies of five well-drilled victims.

I Met Murder is so refreshingly well told that this virtue should help to excuse it from a certain retrospective implausibility.

Founder of Methodism

JOHN WESLEY--John D. Wade-- Coward McCann ($3).sb

The school of biography which Lytton Strachey (Queen Victoria) started has had many pupils but few who have graduated with honors. John D. Wade leads the class of 1930. No slavish imitator of his master, Wade's manner is less mordant, more philosophically calm; he seems to have no personal animus against his victim Wesley.

John Benjamin Wesley (1703-91) founded the Methodist Episcopal Church but did not mean to. A conservative and a high Churchman, he lived & died a member of the Church of England. He vehemently inveighed against his followers who left the Anglican fold. But before his death the U. S. Methodists under his lieutenant Francis Asbury were already de facto a separate church; Wesley's demise legalized the divorce. Wesley was a gentleman and had a gentleman's education. At Oxford before he was converted he wrote verses envying Chloe's flea for its ability to roam Chloe, and attended at least one expensive & bibulous banquet. But such peccadilloes were later more than expiated. When John and his brother Charles got religion they took it hard, in a day when godliness was milder than measles.

Many women loved John Wesley, but for a long time he thought celibacy the only state, finally marrying a widowed shrew who brought him four ready-made children and continuous quarrels. Wesley was a missionary to the marrow, but his single attempt on the U. S. (in Georgia) was unsuccessful; England was his proper field. There he traveled 200,000 miles, preached 40,000 sermons, gathered 120,000 followers. "By 1770 whatever else people thought of Wesley, they were bound to think that he was among the most important forces of his time."

Wesley once encountered Beau Nash, professional dandy, who was foolish enough to start an argument. Nash, objecting to Wesley's sermons, admitted he had never heard one, but said he judged them by common report. Said Wesley: "Sir, I dare not judge of you by common report."

Wesley was small, dictatorial, sure of himself (Wade calls him a "hard, pertinacious little paragon") but he must have had a certain charm. Literary Tycoon Sam Johnson who knew and liked him once complained: "I hate to meet John Wesley. The dog enchants you with his conversation, and then breaks away to go and visit some old woman. This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have his talk out as I do."

The Author. John Donald Wade, a Georgian, is descended from "a long line of vigorous Methodists." In his life of Methodism's founder he has not so much bitten the hand that fed him as examined it coolly, skeptically. Member of the faculty of Vanderbilt University, he is also an assistant editor of the Dictionary of American Biography, is regarded by fellow-Southerners as one of the coming men in a possible Southern literary renaissance.

/-Published Dec. 1. sbNew books are news. Unless otherwise designated, all books reviewed in TIME were published within the fortnight. TIME readers may obtain any book of any U S publisher by sending check or money-order to cover regular retail price ($5 if price is unknown, change to be remitted) to Ben Boswell of TIME, 205 East 42nd St New York City. -Published Nov. 20.

/-Published Aug. 10. sbPublished Sept. 29.

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