Mr. Britling Sees It Through

He wrote in a creative fury, usually revising heavily in the afternoon what he had drafted the same morning. Wells wrote his way toward what he wanted to say, his eye fixed on the object of his writing, not on the writing itself. Bennett knew what he wanted to say; he wrote with his attention turned toward his own technique in writing it. Wells confessed fully attending to technique in only one of his forty-odd novels: Tono-Bungay (1909), though Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) and Joan and Peter (1918) also received unusual care. The rest he admitted to writing in the journalistic spirit, sufficient unto the work of the day with no pretensions to permanence. In disavowing the artfulness of ninety percent of his novels, however, Wells did not disavow their worth as much as it seems. Art and life remained resolutely separate for Wells, and he valued service to the latter over devotion to the former; he perceived the novel chiefly as a vehicle for the delivery of an idea, a means of transmission. Wells identified «art» with formula, understood the conventions of fictional presentation as barriers against the inclusion of real life ...»