The Passionate Friends by H. G. Wells, is my most prized example of the unjustly ignored masterpiece. I must have been fourteen or fifteen when I went through its author’s fiction after some five winters of tacit access to my father’s library. Today at seventy-seven I clearly remember how affected I was by the style, the charm, the cream of the book, while not bothering about its “message” or “symbols” if any. (I have never reread it and now I see it as a colored haze leaving only some final details—growing a little closer to me in time—still coming through.)
The last meeting of the lovers takes place under legal supervision on a summer’s day in a stranger’s drawing room where the furniture is swathed in white covers. As Stephen, after parting with his mistress, walks out of the house in company with another person, he says to the latter:
Simply to say something and finding only a poor little statement concerning those chairs.
“Because of the flies.”
A touch of high art refused to Conrad or Lawrence.
* “Reputations Revisited,” Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 21, 1977, 66. On its seventy-fifth anniversary, The Times Literary Supplement “asked a number of writers, scholars and artists to nominate the most underrated and overrated books (or authors) of the past seventy-five years.”