“Experiment in Autobiography” by H. G. Wells: The difference between him and Henry James is that James had multiple personality, but Wells doesn’t

H. G. Wells

“We may have single or multiple personas and in the latter case we are charged with inconsistencies and puzzle ourselves and our friends…

“I do not find in this cerebrum of mine any trace…of what is called double personalities. In the classical instances of double personality psychologists tell of whole distinct networks of memory and impulse, co-existing side by side in the same brain yet functioning independently, which are alternative and often quite contradictory one to the other…I have met and lived in close contact with one or two individuals of this alternating type…but it is my belief that I remain always very much the same personality. I do not think I delude myself about this” (1, pp. 9-19).

Henry James

“…discussions I [H. G. Wells] had with Henry James a third of a century ago. He was a very important figure in the literary world of that time and a shrewd and penetrating critic of the technique by which he lived. He liked me and found my work respectable enough to be greatly distressed about it. I bothered him and he bothered me…He had no idea of the possible use of the novel as a help to conduct. His mind turned away from any such idea. From his point of view there were not so much ‘novels’ as The Novel, and it was a very high and important achievement. He thought of it as an Art Form and novelists as artists of a very special and exalted type… I was by nature and education unsympathetic with this mental disposition…

“I recall a talk I had with him soon after the publication of [Well’s] Marriage. With tact and circumlocution, James broke it to me, that he found a remarkable deficiency in that story…

“[In Well’s story,] in order to avoid the traffic in the high road the two young people take their respective donkey carts into a side lane and remain there talking for three hours. And this is where James’s objection came in. Of the three hours of intercourse in the lane the novel tells nothing, except that the young people emerged in open and declared love with each other. This, said James, wasn’t playing the game…Gently but firmly he insisted that I did not myself know what had happened and what was said in that lane…that I had not thought out the individualities concerned with sufficient care and thoroughness…Henry James was quite right in saying that I had not thought out these two people to the pitch of saturation and that they did not behave unconsciously and naturally…

“If the Novel was properly a presentation of real people as real people, in absolutely natural reaction in a story, then my characters were not simply sketchy, they were eked out by wires and pads of non-living matter and they stood condemned…

“…by implication…my so-called novels were artless self-revelatory stuff, falling far away from a stately ideal by which they had to be judged” (1, pp. 410-415).

Comment

The above is a discussion of the difference between novels written by someone who does not have multiple personality trait, H. G. Wells, and someone who does have multiple personality trait, Henry James (search Henry James for past posts). However, Wells fails to connect the issue of multiple personality to the difference between him and James in how they got their characters.

It is not, as Wells thinks, that James had “thought out the individualities [of his characters] with sufficient care and thoroughness,” but that James had not gotten his characters by thinking them out. James’s characters had come into being as alternate personalities with minds of their own.

1. H. G. Wells. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866). New York, The Macmillan Company, 1934.