The Book of Catherine Wells,
with an Introduction by Her Husband, H. G. Wells.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928.
PROBABLY the best that a married pair have to offer each other at the end of a long life together is a courteous mutual apology. But this should be privately spoken and the secret guarded. Husbands and wives do ill to explain each other in print, more especially if the one explained is dead.
The preface written by Mr. H. G. Wells for the collected short stories of his wife is a singularly unfortunate example of the literature of marital bereavement. Catherine Wells was a noble wife, a happy mother and the maker of a free, kind and hospitable home. She was sweet and valiant, faithful, wise and self-forgetful. Pity and habitual helpfulness were very characteristic of her. She was stoical in suffering, shy and reserved in her real emotions and briskly impatient of nonsense in any form. She died with courage and dignity after months of suffering.
All this, it seems to me, should have served fully for the enrichment of Mr. Wells’s life while she lived and for the present consolation of his memories. It is rather sadly beside the point in a preface written with the stated purpose of introducing Catherine Wells, not as the wife of her distinguished husband but as a talented writer of short stories.
The literary judgment of Mr. Wells seems somewhat at fault, too, as well as his taste in other matters. The short stories in this book of Catherine Wells have qualities of delicacy, tender feeling and a restrained fancy, but the book as a whole belongs to her husband and will attract the reader because his name is conspicuous on the cover.
This is sad and the end of a story full of irony. Amy Catherine Robbins meant to become a biologist; she married H. G. Wells while she was a member of his class in practical biology. This was about 1893. They had £50 between them and small expectations of a long life, for neither of them was in good health. Mrs. Wells developed at once the hundred-sided capacity necessary for successful wifehood to a driving, ambitious, vastly confused but completely self-centered literary man. The compromises, the adjustments of temperament to the common life were mainly hers: she furnished the faith and the attention to practical details of daily life; she was the charming companion and the good housekeeper; she acted as private secretary, literary agent and shock-absorber for her busy husband, and she had the legitimate satisfaction of seeing him famous and wealthy at an early age. The role of hostess to the many friends of fame now devolved upon her. She became a talented amateur actress and the inventive entertainer of her two children. Her gardens were works of art. Her husband and his friends even took the liberty of changing her name to fit their conception of her domestic character. They called her Jane and she answered to it cheerfully.
In the classic role of woman her life was complete. Yet this indefatigable woman asked for one thing more. She asked for one fragment of her mind that might be her own to use as she liked. She resolutely set herself to write and took no one, not even her husband, into her confidence. Through agencies unconnected with her husband and under her right name of Catherine she attempted to market her stories, rejecting the easy use of her husband’s influence. Most of the stories remained unpublished.
Jane had quite supplanted Catherine. When Mrs. Wells searched that part of her mind left for her own uses there remained only the heroically suppressed preoccupations with death, the terror fantasies of ghosts, of childish disappointments and griefs, the young maiden dreams of frustrated romantic love. All the adult experiences of her life since marriage refused to be transmuted into literature. She could not evoke the realities of Jane on paper.
Within less than a year after her death the stories she could not publish by herself have been collected, chosen by her husband as final critic and introduced with his praise, his name joined to hers on the cover. Death served to force her withheld confidences and shatter her last reserves. The stories offer a strange contrast to the portrait her husband gives of a vivid, tireless, beautiful woman whose endless good sense and ground loyalty to the man of her choice make her a model for all good women and prove that she was a writer of very slender talents. An act of conscious cruelty could never have been so subtle.
“She stuck to me so sturdily that in the end I stuck to myself,” says Mr. H. G. Wells. That is her epitaph.