MR WELLS SEES IT THROUGH

Evening Star, Issue 21784, 28 July 1934, Page 19

MR WELLS SEES IT THROUGH

AH EXPERIMENT IN AUTOBIOGRAPHY Mr Wells, in his London flat,' looking incredibly less than his sixty-seven years. His. two-volume Experiment in Autobiography ’ is to bo published (wrote Hubert Griffiths, in the ‘ Observer •). .:: Mr WeU?, . one 1 of the'best arid .most . copious talkers,: living. Is. dissolved in ' malice against the interviewer tor, .want-’ ing him to.talk' about it in advance. ‘‘. Yes, I hate it. It’s,actite discomfort. There’s the .autobiography. _ I’vo; written, it—and there it is! What,else is there to say about it? .. ,: There is a pause’for.-collection of ideas, unwillingly undertaken. “I’ve been thinking of some sort of autobiography ■ 'for two or three years. ._ ...... I didn’t originally intend to .publish it,, It was ...written at first chiefly as a sort of > . memorandum for, my sons and a few . dntimates. I began to jot down what I could remember . . . „ the story of my brain,- or how I became , . acquainted with the world. “ By a conspiracy of. accidents, the job has been made easy. I, have been . able to get a mass of material for 'it, . almost too great, a mass—l wrote a lot . of letters when I was young, and my ’.friends of those days, schoolfellows and fellow-students, seem to.have kept the • letters. And I used to draw. Possibly it, was those little sketches that acted as:--a preservative. In going back over these 1 have been able to check up the . authenticity of what I. experienced. .1 ... .found that" in many ways my recollection of it was not-really correct. Events had, so to speak,' got- treated ’ by my , mind. Going back over those docu- ■. ments. was like conducting a research into my young boyhood and adolescence. “ The biography comes down to the present time. The most interesting half of a life should, psychologically, be the first half. Everything that is acqifired is acquired in that tuiie. The rest is only the working out—the fulfilment. Barrio (Sir James) says that nothing ever happens to anyone after he is nine years old. 1 should give it a little ' lorigef than that—say till thirty. Nothing much has ever happened to me. The whole thing may turn out to be the tamest-affair really. ,1 . PERSONAL CONTACTS. “ Would a good title for it be Balzac’s title, ‘ The Lost Illusions ’ ? ” I “0 God, no!” said Mr Wells. “In ■ the first place, 1 don’t quite know that :.I started out with any particular illusions to lose. Will there be jokes in it? I don’t know. It is not a comic work—and it is not a collection of anecdotes. There are personal contacts and experiences in it, and sketches of all the people who have influenced my development—of my school masters and - teachers at the Royal College of Science —of my own days of teaching, when 1 ■ ■ was a lecturer and crammer—and of what 1 learnt from teaching; how I ■ began to write —and how 1 learnt to write; arid of Shaw, and the Henry Webbs, and Graham Wallass, Glissing, and Henry James. “ When I was in my thirties I was much in contact with Henry James arid Conrad and Bennett, ana exchanged views and comments with them; and this ipvolves, in its turn, comment on all these people in the autobiography. “I have lived through,” said Mr . Wells, “extraordinary changes in the life of England. In 1866, when 1 was born, most people could pot read or did not read The influence of the railways and telegraph and so on had not yet come to its full effect. One thought of ‘ Japan,’ for instance, as being in another world, so remote as to be outside our world. One thought of it almost entirely in terms of Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘ Mikado.’ There has been the impact of the war, England has passed through unanticipated economic stresses. I have lived through a complete change in the scale of human affairs, and the consequences of the, change of that scale.” “Have you enjoyed It?” “On the whole,” said Mr Wells, “ excepting to-day—wlven you are interviewing me—it has been a very agreeable adventure. And I suppose

that that will appear in the book, which is not all personal and social psychology. I escaped by the skin of my teeth from extreme poverty and hopelessness. Much of it is recorded in letters-—and by drawing pictures. Many of these will appear in. the book. For more than thirty years 1 used to keep, as it were, a sort of diary in pictures, to amuse myself and my wife. ‘‘All the time since 1894 Up to the week she died there were these pictures. Drawing them used to be a regular part of tho day—most days—recording visits, and ideas; and people, ami travel abroad. 1 find that, more than anything else, looking at these brings me back to the ‘ mood of the time.’ They are not classically drawn—l never worked in an art school—and they might bo called figurative and symbolic. I invented a way of drawing of my own, that ‘ gets there ’ sometimes—at any rate, gets there as far as I am concerned. ... “ And now is the worst over? ” asked the author of ‘ Kipps ’ and ‘ Tono Bungay,’ who has already put something of autobiography into these two books. “ Why do I dislike interviews so much? Because ii the reporter doesn’t report what you sav, it is bad —and if he does report what you say it is probably worse. . . ” At any rate, with the ending of the interview there is an obvious lightening of Mr Wells’s heart, and his talk, again flows forth on all other subjects on eartb.