H.G. Wells, el humanista sin corazón

Vivian Gornick relee a HG Wells (via):

Like many other writers of his time, Wells thought of himself as a Man of the Future, but his style of self-presentation remained Victorian. His was a life, he insisted, no different in its beginnings or potential than millions of others. He wished only to put his “personal origins into the frame of human history and show how the phases and forces of education that shaped me . . . were related to the great change in human conditions” that had been gathering force for three centuries “to disperse the aristocratic estate system . . . promote industrial co-ordination . . . necessitate new and better informed classes . . . break down political boundaries everywhere and bring all men into one planetary community.” To see his own life in this light—as the exemplar of an ordinary, representative brain alive at a telling moment in social history—was to understand the times in which he and his readers were living.

Yet within a few paragraphs, Wells also tells us that he has never entirely loved any one person, place, or thing. It was not in him, he observes. Now that he is looking more closely at himself, he perceives something odd in his own make-up. “I am,” he confesses, “rarely vivid to myself.” That is, “not wholly or continuously interested, prone to be indolent and cold-hearted. I am readily bored.” When he tries to make up for what he takes to be a character flaw, he inevitably finds himself acting a part. He becomes falsely charming and feels as though he is hiding out inside. “You will discover a great deal of evasion and refusal in my story,” he forewarns the reader.

Esta es la portada del número doce, volumen VIII de la revista Time [20 de septiembre de 1926]. Wells aparece entre el emperador de la censura cinematográfica y Rudyard Kipling, al que George Orwell bautizó como profeta del imperialismo británico.