Published: 27 May 2010
by GERALD ISAAMAN

SEX bomb. Today’s tabloids would have massacred HG Wells, who chased girls like a rampant bull left free in a cowshed to enjoy himself.

Passion dominated his life. He made love on the beach, in woods, on hillsides, in church, and once even on a news­paper displaying an adverse review of one of his novels.

He recklessly endured the wrath of the men he cuckolded, their legal threats and exposure to public humiliation cramp­ing his often overlapping sexual exploits for a while, but mainly ignored with disdain.

No handsome Lothario, he was an over-sexed plump little man with a squeaky voice and a droopy moustache. The bad boy from suburban Bromley, known as Bertie, was not an obvious seducer of brilliant and brave new world women like Amber Reeves and Rebecca West, seeking emancipation and enjoying “free love”.

He had ideological confrontations with many of his contemporaries, from George Orwell and Henry James to Stalin and Churchill, never giving up any challenge to his views on socialism and his pioneering belief in human rights, and much else.

Yet when he died in 1946, an obese figure hobbling around his home in Hanover Terrace, St John’s Wood, with a stick and muttering to himself that one day he would write a “real book”, he was hailed as a great writer, the father of science fiction alongside Jules Verne, and a remarkable prophet, the cause of his own death, even today’s globalisation among his predictions.

And declaring too that only world government would save mankind from destroying itself with its “savage egoism”.

“I do not think of HG as dead at all but as going into a far country,” wrote one of his admirers as Wells was cremated at Golders Green. “He is alive to me as ever he was, his spirit remains to encourage mankind to high endeavour, for many generations.”

His image and impact remains today, but more for those amazing novels and short stories that gave us The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, The History of Mr Polly, Tono-Bungay, The Island of Dr Moreau and the much-filmed War of the Worlds, which ended with the defeat of the aliens on Primrose Hill.

It was an area he knew well since he once lived in Fitzroy Road, first when unemployed, then when initially married.

Wells forever pushed new boundaries with his audacious ideas in a life that straddled two centuries in which the doom of mass death, from war and disease, ran parallel with the advance of scientific wonders that nobody, except perhaps for the amazingly prolific Wells, thought possible.

In many respects it began in 1894, in two rooms at No 12 Mornington Road (now Terrace), Camden Town, where Wells, having ditched his first wife, lived in adultery with Jane, his second, and secured his first contract writing “scientific romance” for the Pall Mall Budget.

Out of that episode came The Time Machine, together with the realisation of his own talent and what he might achieve – and did achieve in a swirl of success, combined with learning to ride a bike and many romances of his own. 

Some women virtually threw themselves at him. Dashing young feminist Amber Reeves he called Dusa – because of her Medusa and muse-style overflowing hair – while she dubbed him the Master. And using prev­iously unpublished letters, biographer Michael Sherborne provides vivid and fascinating detail of Wells’ boldly beating, sometimes blasphemous heart.

Amber was, after all, the daughter of friends and fellow Fabians, whom Wells met when she was but sweet 17, a girl in emotional turmoil who adored him as a hero, pleading with him: “Give me a child.”

“We walked and talked about the silvery dunes, and sat and made love in the warm night darkness under the silent sweeping beams of the two lighthouses,” wrote Wells in one letter. And in another: “Always among beautiful things I want you – and all this morning I have been walking on the hills longing to feel your shoulder touching mine. Always when I am unhappy I want you.”

She defied convention, became his mistress and the mother of Anna-Jane, before eventually marrying barrister Rivers Blanco-White. They lived in Hampstead, where she hated washing up, wrote novels, voted Tory, and was living in Downshire Hill when she died, aged 94, in 1981.

It is an enthralling tale Sherborne tells, one that gives new insight into Wells’ thoughts. Indeed, the title of his book comes from a passage in Tono-Bungay, in which Wells writes: “Most people in this world seem to live ‘in character’; they have a beginning, a middle and an end… But there is another kind of life that is not so much living as a miscellaneous tasting of life. One gets hit by some unusual transverse force, one is jerked out of one’s stratum and lives crosswise for the rest of the time…”

Yet, despite his welcome research and scholarship, Sherborne is not always accurate, telling us that Wells lived for a time in a “17th-century house in Church Row, West Hampstead”, with a church nearby. A visit would have told him that No 17 Church Row is in Hampstead’s premier Georgian terrace, close to elegant Hampstead Parish Church, and was, subsequently, the home of the comedian Peter Cook.

You can forgive him that error when he reveals that Wells finally considered himself to be a Liberal democrat. There’s nothing quite like trusting the old promiscuous prophet HG to be bang up to date.

• HG Wells: Another Kind of Life. By  Michael Sherborne. Peter Owen £25