H.G. Wells: An Updike connection

Most readers probably didn’t come to H.G. Wells’ two books of history, "The Outline of History" and "A Short History of the World," via his science fiction but through John Updike. You may remember that Wells’ "Outline" is integral to Updike’s early story "Pigeon Feathers."

T he reissuing of the works of H.G. Wells by Penguin Classics continues this month--not with "Outline" but with the book he published two years later, "A Short History" (Penguin: 372 pp., $15 paper). Written in the wake of World War I, both books were a reaction to the war, which Wells had hoped would signal the beginning of a brighter, new global order. Bitterly disappointed by the outcome, he turned to world history, which, with exasperation, he called nothing but a "race between education and catastrophe."

"An Outline" seethes with spleen: No wonder it stuns and traumatizes Updike’s young main character, David, in particular when he reads about Jesus. Updike characterizes Wells’ handling of Christ in this way:

"Then, before he could halt his eyes, David slipped into Wells’s account of Jesus. He had been an obscure political agitator, a kind of hobo, in a minor colony of the Roman Empire. By an accident impossible to reconstruct, he (the small h horrified David) survived his own crucifixion and presumably died a few weeks later. A religion was founded on the freakish incident."

This trivialization sends David into a youthful existential crisis that subsides only when, in studying the delicate design of a pigeon’s wings, his belief in a Creator of all things is restored (the epiphany comes, though, after first blasting several pigeons in the family’s barn before they ruin some furniture stored there).

If young David had been reading Wells’ "Short History" instead, the crisis might have been averted (and we’d lose a beautiful story, an early demonstration of Updike’s brilliance!). For "Short History" is much calmer, without the same tone found in the earlier book (notably when it comes to Jesus). Wells ends on a grudgingly hopeful note: "What man has done, the little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the things that man has yet to do."

Nick Owchar