Young Wells

SEVEN FAMOUS NOVELS--H. G. Wells-- Knopf ($2.75).

Twenty-five years ago Herbert George Wells was a youngster of 42. His name stood for exuberant modernity, trailblazing science and a freely roving intelligence always starting up some new species of Utopian hare. But most of all it stood for exciting tales--plausible narrations of improbable happenings. Last week readers who had encountered Author Wells only as a compiler of outlines-of-knowledge or a pamphleteering old World Conspirator, had a good chance to make his acquaintance as a young man. And every faithful and once-faithful Wellsian was glad that these early tales (The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, The Food of the Gods, In the Days of the Comet} had been reissued, looked forward to recapturing the excitement of their first reading.

In a revelatory preface. Author Wells comes as close as he ever has to defending his own development. It annoys him that these stories should have got him the name of "the English Jules Verne. As a matter of fact there is no literary resemblance whatever between the anticipatory inventions of the great Frenchman and these fantasies." Wells admits his stories are intended to be only temporarily plausible; "they aim indeed only at the same amount of conviction as one gets in a good gripping dream." Surprisingly, he finds himself much more like Jonathan Swift, says "my early, profound and lifelong admiration for Swift appears again and again in this collection, and it is particularly evident in a predisposition to make the stories reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions." But old Author Wells is rationalizing long after the fact of young Author Wells. He now calls The Island of Dr. Moreau "an exercise in youthful blasphemy. Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time. . . ."

With the current verdict that with age he has become more garrulous and less worthwhile. Author Wells snappishly disagrees, preferring himself as he is now. "People are simply warned that there are ideas in my books and advised not to read them, and so a fatal suspicion has wrapped about the later ones. ... It is no good my saying that they are quite as easy to read as the earlier ones and much more timely." Authors are often mistaken about their own work; Author Wells may well be about his. For even readers who have written him off as an aging utopiantiquary will have to modify their judgment, count these well-varnished tales to his credit.

Seven Famous Novels is the June choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

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