Content area
Full Text
Simon J. James, Maps of Utopia: H.G. Utopia Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture (Oxford University Press, 2012, 230pp, £53)
Reviewed by Paul Kincaid
In 1910, George Bernard Shaw designed a stained glass window for the Fabian Society. It shows Shaw, Sidney Webb and Edward Pease industriously building the new world while other society members kneel reverently. Except, at the back, H.G. Wells is rising from his knees and thumbing his nose at the assembly. It is an image that says a great deal about Wells: he was a gadfly, an irritant, perpetually discontented with any society that would have him as a member.
Wells as contrarian was prone to making sweeping statements guaranteed to startle. In a letter to Shaw, for instance, he once proclaimed that 'Culture is merely the ownership of stale piddle' (18). And when his friend Henry James reproved Wells in an essay he wrote for the inaugural issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Wells responded with a savage attack upon James in his novel Boon (1915). This literary battle royale arose from their very different notions of culture. Simon James expresses it thus: language, '[t]he window, which for [Henry] James marks the detachment of the artist from the world, is for Wells a nexus between the controlled interior of work, duty, responsibility, idealism, and reading, and the uncontrollable exterior of Nature, sexual drive, and play' (92).
In other words, for Henry James Culture is a detached, distanced view of the messy confusions of everyday life, and therefore is something eternal and unchanging, while for Wells it is a direct engagement with that mess, and must therefore be susceptible to the ever-changing nature of the world. These differences had been rehearsed many times throughout their acquaintance, but Boon ended their friendship forever, and is often cited as the point at which Wells became persona non grata for the modernist critical establishment. But such postures were not merely intended to irritate the bourgeoisie, those representatives of high culture with whom Wells so often came into contact. Rather, as Simon James demonstrates in this fascinating book, they arise from a considered and consistent intellectual position, a position that underlined and increasingly came to dominate all of Wells' writing.
At first, and if...