Tewleremia

You CAN'T BE Too CAREFUL--H. G. Wells--Putnam ($2.50).

You Can't Be Too Careful is a witty, very ugly, very sorrowful book. If it had eloquence, and a despair of soul as well as of mind, it would rank not far below Troilus and Cressida and Journey to the End of the Night among the world's great nihilistic poems. Lacking these, it is a forceful, rather tortured tract, without the complete clarity of design that might make it an instructive parable.

The book's major theme is the Wellsian life history (from zoosperm to zany) of Edward Albert ("Teddy") Tewler, who, for Author Wells, symbolizes the lower middle class in general, and the British lower middle class in particular. It is a classZJr, more essentially, a state of being--which Herbert George Wells loathes (not without pity) with the aching contempt of familiarity. He springs from it. Wells feels the same aching contempt for 'Teddy" Tewler. But like all crusaders, he longs to redeem the thing he loathes. This novel is a fictional prelude to redemption. Its purpose: to show Teddy Tewler as a total horror, so that other Teddies and their well-wishers may be shocked, if they are not inspired, to reform.

Unheroic Hero. Teddy Tewler was born ("shyly, not headfirst but toe-first, like a timid bather") about the turn of the century. Even his conception was an accident. "One knew there was some sort of knowledge about [contraception], but one couldn't be too careful whom one asked, and your doctor also in those days couldn't be too careful in misunderstanding your discreet hints and soundings." When Teddy was four, his father died of indecision (you can't be too careful) among a convergence of busses. In his extreme youth Teddy enjoyed sticking out his tongue at caged lions. But he shunned even squirrels (you never know what germs they may carry), to say nothing of playmates. His mother began to worry about Teddy and sex long before he discovered its existence.

Discovery came at long last during Teddy's life in a lower-middle-class London boardinghouse.

There he sat at table with a broken-down laboratory assistant, a lavender college student, a mousy-genteel kleptomaniac widow, a moth-eaten elocutionist, a stale bibliophile who dismissed all ideas with "forgive my sense of humor"--a gallery which should convince almost everybody that Wells, like Dickens, is no caricaturist of English life but a dispenser of literal and horrifying truth. And there Teddy ran foul of two "overripe virgins," bleached Miss Blame and malapropist Miss Birkenhead, who once spent six months in Paris, calls her Paris sugar daddy her faux pa.

Until Evahgeline Birkenhead's advent, Teddy's amative life had been in part fanciful, in part optical, in part under suburban hedges ("Starp it, I tell you!"), entirely virginal. When Teddy surprisingly received a comfortable bequest, Miss Birkenhead beat Miss Blame in the race for Hero Tewler. The seduction, marriage and sexual initiation, cruel but convincing, are brightened only by a dandified best man who neighs a stentorian Hey! before every brontosaurian innuendo.

Ideers. With biological maturity, Teddy developed the only idea he ever had--the idea that all "ideers" are pernicious "Character" and "deeds," he decided, have nothing in common with ideas. The one sure way to exorcise intelligence is to shout the word "Bawls!" Teddy Tewler had reached complete Tewlerhood.

By & large Author Wells sets up his awful, trapped symbol of mass man without benefit or need of comment. But in the last pages he speaks his mind. Tewler m Wells's opinion, is not only the symbol of a class, but of nations. Everywhere the Tewlers of this world have the same desperate deafness to the voice of reason the same vulnerability to the voices of church, state, school, law, wealth, authority m all its forms. Reason: these voices are themselves the voices of the Tewlers Between outsize Tewlers who lead and run-of-the-counter Tewlers who follow, Tewlensm is responsible for the present state of the world.

What Then Shall We Do? This question Biologist Wells answers with another questionQ+s Homo Tewler born dumb or is he made dumb? Is Tewleremia hereditary or environmental? If the former, the end of man (thanks to the appalling power of human ingenuity) is not far off Another war or two will do it, if this one fails. But if, as Wells believes, Homo Tewler is a bundle of terribly conditioned reflexes, then he is redeemable. First however, he must discard his mental and social shackles, do the two things he is conditioned never to do: listen to reason and quit being careful. The same instruments, Wells argues, which have made Tewlers what they are--and the world what it is--can also make the world one community for the teaching, healing saving of Homo Tewler--for the establishment, indeed, of the Wellsian World State towards which this volume like much of his life's work, is a combined gadfly and sales talk. These instruments are chiefly the radio and the cinema--what Wells calls "canned teaching." The knowledge Wells would have them impart is chiefly scientific. As a reason for remaking the world to redeem not the soul but the dim wits of Teddy Tewler, Author Wells's program raises a simple question: "Is it worth it?"

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