Mr. Wells Sees Through It

Herbert George Wells, 77, is still fighting the whole world--especially the middle class from whose lower levels he came. In London last week he published 42 to 44, 205 pages of miniature battle, thrusting and cutting at practically everybody in creation except the late voluminous, statistical humanitarian Beatrice Webb (of the socialist tandem: Beatrice and Sidney Webb).

Calling his latest diatribe "strong meat for babes," the author of The History of Mr. Polly and Mr. Britling Sees It Through published only 2,000 copies of his sensational book, presumably to add to the discomfort of the comfortable classes, who will not be able to buy the shocker when the 2,000 copies are snapped up. If present plans hold, the book will not be published in the U.S.

42 to 44 is Wells at his most vigorous and entertaining, lashing out at men and parties and pulling no punches.

Some of the lashings:

P: Hitler. "Whatever comes of this war there must be no killing of Hitler. Not that there can be any serious objection in these sanguinary days to a certain amount of preventive and exemplary killing. . . . There is a long list of sane men, torturers, sadists and murderers, who should be tried and marked down for execution and given no quarter. But not this poor, crazy Austrian imbecile.

"He was the social equivalent of the nasty little hairdressers' assistants and boys from schools 'near Eton' and so forth who 'want Mosley' in England. . . . He suffered from sexual anxiety and a sense of impotence and race jealousy, a feeling very common below the Mason and Dixon Line in America. ...

"But in one respect Hitler was and is exceptional. There was a jabbering fever swirling in his brain, and by phases known to every alienist he passed from loquacious vanity, boasting and shouting, to uncontrolled lunacy. ... I do not know when he became certifiable. . . . Our real enemies, the supporters of the long tradition of Vansittart's unanswerable Black Record, are at one with the viler elements of our own Anglo-Saxon ruling classes, in wanting him to come to an end, before the liberating resentment and enlightenment, that follow the stresses of every great war, lead to actual world revolution. . . . He will never commit suicide--he hasn't the guts and our proper treatment of him, if we can catch him in time, is to certify him and put him away in a not too luxurious asylum for criminal lunatics. And forget about him."

P: Sir Samuel Hoare. "It is appalling that this blinkered, pleasant, gossipy, gullible snob, after being Air Minister, Secretary for India, Foreign Secretary, Lord Privy Seal, should have been, installed at last in Madrid as the spokesman of the democracies. . . . No need to wish to harm him. He is what Britain made him. His proper job now is to be a gossip correspondent for a smart newspaper."

P: Lord Vansittart. "It's a terrible thing to say of any public figure, but I confess that (after reading Vansittart's Lessons of My Life and Black Record) I was provoked to class him with Sir Samuel Hoare. If he is not nearly so silly, he certainly comes off the same shelf. He seemed as oblivious to what is happening to mankind today, on the whole, as a well-fed cat asleep, and his ideas of legitimate controversy seemed about as subtle as those of the same animal out on the tiles. He has got out of all responsibility, I gather, now, and is speaking his mind and letting us know how limited it is. ... There are moments when I could imagine Van was a misprint for Von. Yet the Vansittarts have been English for two hundred and fifty years."

P: Sir Richard Acland (leader of Britain's Common Wealth Party). This "versatile adventurer would apparently stop at nothing in his thirst for political leadership. Now, in the autumn of 1942, he reappears, happily leading a jumble of discontented people who find the existing administration of British affairs unendurable. The jumble is called 'Common Wealth.' . . . His intelligence is very limited and unstable. He is as imitative as a monkey, any claptrap that seems to be popular goes into his bag and any 'religious' cant, and his ambition for 'leadership' is uncontrollable."

P: The English and Americans. "They have as a mass no philosophy whatever; their education is limited and dismally inadequate, their knowledge of history, if one may call it knowledge, is a training in patriotic bragging and lying. Their religion, so far as America goes, is a sincere worship of the dollar as a source of power, freedom and the pursuit of all the good things in life. In the British system this money worship is complicated by a genuine and earnest snobbery."

P:Franklin Roosevelt. "Franklin D. Roosevelt, like our own Winston Churchill, is a natural born war leader, a necessary evil, but more alive to constructive ideas than our very Anglicized Anglo-American Winston."

P: De Gaulle. "The occupation and disarmament of Germany will end nothing; it will only inaugurate a scramble of such egocentric 'liberators' as De Gaulle and his like."

P: The Communist Party. "A gang of second-raters who have guessed badly."

P: Beatrice Webb. "She went down to the poor as the saints do; I come up from the poor in a state of flaming rebellion, most blasphemous and unsaintly. Beatrice wanted to socialize the ruling classes and make them do their duty. I wanted to destroy them. Now they are destroying themselves."

Wells's fans were ravished by this williwaw of invective. Said British Reviewer Michael Foot: "Wells has produced a book rich with the flavor of Paris in the heyday of the terror. It might even have been written by the immortal Marat, whom Wells himself, in his Outline of History, has rescued from the clutches of defamation. From cover to cover it is angry, explosive and morally indignant. It revives all that is best in the great tradition of English invective." Others were reminded of a line from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: "Voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells."

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