Wells v. Bigelow

Not long ago the famed novelist-historian H. G. Wells picked up a fat autobiography entitled Seventy Summers, by one Poultney Bigelow, aged U. S. journalist-lecturer, son of a former U. S. Ambassador to France.

At first Mr. Wells flipped over the pages contemptuously. Then his eye kindled at the following description of himself, interlarded with an account of a tea party at Lady Russell's London flat:

"Of all that roomful Wells, perhaps, was the only one who could be picked out as a lucky stockbroker or traveling salesman. He chatted pleasantly of the fabulous amounts forced upon him by the paradoxical publishers of hundreds of periodicals in every corner of the world, clamoring for his pages. Verily it was all a fairy tale gone mad.

"We stood in a window recess. We had a splendid view of the Thames, and one of us--I think it was Anthony Hope--expressed regret that so glorious a landscape and such graceful arches as characterized the stone bridges should be marred by a rectangular iron railway structure. H. G. Wells interrupted him.

" 'Oh,' exclaimed he dramatically, 'how can you utter such words? To hie a railway has elements of sublimity. It is eloquent. It means progress.'

"The blow was comparatively a light one to a New Yorker, but Anthony Hope winced. His eyebrows lifted just a little and on his lips rested the enigmatical smile that Leonardo da Vinci immortalized on Giaconda."

As Mr. Wells read this crude bit of tittle-tattle, he experienced a pang of annoyance which he proceeded to vent by dashing off for the press his own version of his meeting with Mr. Bigelow on the afternoon in question:

"He sought an introduction to me and forthwith stared at me with ill-mannered inquiries about my sales income and such like impertinences. . . .

"I did my best to convey to him that he had as much right to pester me about these things as to ask where I bought my trousers or whether I had an overdraft at the bank. After a time I succeeded in stunning or killing these tentatives to vulgarity and then he proceeded to discuss the view.

"A change in the topic meant no change in the quality of his discourse. The Charing Cross bridge was ugly, materialistic, rectangular. To people like Bigelow anything curved is more beautiful than anything rectangular.

"'That bridge,' said I, exasperated beyond endurance, 'at sundown or in the twilight can be the most beautiful and the most romantic thing in the world. . . . '

"[In Bigelow's book] I am represented as a large traveling salesman sort of person pervading in Lady Russell's party with violent boastfulness about purely imaginary royalties that so galled Bigelow -- that is, the sort of person he wanted me to be, and that's the sort of person he means me to be if lying can do it--and when the remarks about the Charing Cross bridge come in they are very generously ascribed to Anthony Hope, who is quite incapable of such stupidities.

"I suppose this thing is a libel and a damaging libel, but life is too short to chase libels."

The publishers of newspapers barely noted this tempest in a tea party. They were engaged in trying to decide whether to lease from the McClure Newspaper Syndicate "the much heralded new volume of the famous Outline of History and the Arts, by Mr. Wells, which is being offered in 15 Sunday articles, fully and authentically illustrated."