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Wells's Journalism: An Annotated Bibliography David C. Smith. The Journalism of H. G. Wells: An Annotated Bibli- ography. Patrick Parrinder, ed. Uitgevers, Netherlands: Equilibris Publishing, 2012. 428 pp. euro119 Cloth euro78 Paper
"I HAD RATHER BE CALLED a journalist than an artist," H. G. Wells informed Henry James in 1915. This statement successfully put an end to the lectures on literary methodology that James had been inflicting on him for seventeen years. However, in more recent times some critics have homed in on the ambiguous declaration and taken it to be a confession that Wells was not a genuine creative writer, only a commentator who made use of stories as vehicles for his ideas. While this description fits some of Wells's later books all too accurately, it is hardly a fair characterisation of his life's work.
The word "journalist" can mean many things, after all. We can safely assume that Wells was not trying to convince James of his undistin- guished style or short-term perspective. Rather, in refusing to sign up to the master's artistic criteria and adopt Flaubert as his role model, Wells was using the word "journalist" to identify himself with an alter- native literary tradition, that of Defoe, Swift and Dickens, writers of classic fiction who engaged head-on with contemporary issues and who readily found room in their oeuvres for nonfiction books, pamphlets and articles.
James had emphasised composition, as though a novel was a paint- ing whose elements could be resolved into a single coherent image. To Wells, writing such as his own which incorporated contentious ideas was bound to be discursive and, to a degree, self-contradictory. A novel of this type was not a painting to be looked at, more like a building to be walked around and explored: a house of many mansions equipped with curious installations, garrulous tour guides, some ironic doubling back and even the odd dead end. The reader should reach the exit with some sense of aesthetic satisfaction no doubt, but should also be left with questions that could only be pursued outside...