H. G. Wells & Rebecca West, by Gordon N. Ray (Yale University Press, 215 pp., $7.95). Mr. Ray is not a bad writer, and he quotes extensively from two very good writers indeed, his subjects. The book is further enlivened by reproductions of a score of Wells’s letters to Rebecca West, all of which contain amusing little sketches. As an account of the unsuccessful attempt of two volatile, highly intelligent people to conduct a happy love affair, H. G. Wells & Rebecca West is fascinating—but, I fear, almost prurient. I don’t, for the most part, mean pornographic; I mean that I’m not at all sure anyone but the principals has any business knowing most of what Mr. Ray tells us. The fact that Dame Rebecca allowed him to interview her absolves him of the charge of invading her privacy, but not of a lack of taste. The argument that we have a right to know how a novelist transmutes what he sees into art is powerful, though debatable; but Mr. Ray does not seem primarily concerned with this question, thus robbing himself of the one excuse for writing this sort of book.
LINDA BRIDGES
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