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Show 2E The Salt lake Tribune Sunday, July 15, I'M H.G. Wells as seen through sons eyes ll.G. Wells Aspects of a Life, by Anthony West; Random House, 374 pp., $22.95. 3t G. Wells is, by most standard . a forgotten, neglected author. Admittedly, many of his books were, to use his own expression, potboilers, and at least a few of them reflect the haste with which they were written. But rereading such vintage Wells as or his Food of the Gods will illustrate his early-o- n belief that the enor-mpu- s Tono-Bunya- y, prolifera- tion of in Britain (shipbuilding, steel, chemicals, oil) was somewhat akin to the growth of cancer in a living body. He foresaw destruction of English values as he fotesaw the evils of two world wars arjd the ruin of two generations of his nations brightest lads. 3n many ways he was (aside from Jules Verne) the progenitor of serious science-fictiowith his The Time hfachine stiff, stilted, artificially plotted, but one of a multitude of works that made him an international figure before radio telescopes, video and laser were the subjects for theoretical discourse. Perhaps the most important result of Anthony Wests lovingly indignant volume will be awakening a desire among some members of the new generation to read his fathers science fiction, and evfen his romantic novels, such as Ann Veronica and The Passionate super-business- Friends. Loved Dad, Hated Mom Literary importance aside, the gripping, and at times depressing aspects of the Wellsian family tale center around the sexual matters detailed herein. Anthony West, as has previously been made abundantly clear, was a bastard. That is to say, his 'mother, author Rebecca West, Utah Photo Oy Olivia Emmet Anthony West writes of his father in II.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. West is Wells bastard son by author Rebecca West. was not married to his daddy, H G Wells. Anthony, who was pointedly forbidden to call Wells "papa, or daddy or even father, came to love the bustling little literary firebrand when he made his occasional, increasingly argumentative visits to his mother. Understandably confused, the youthful Anthony came to hate, to despise, to literally loathe, his mother. He insists she conspired to "do me harm." with herself It would take a better man than Sigmund Freud to analyze the love-hat- e relationship between this father, son, mother, mistress, family, or to make much sense of the antics, or of Jane Wells, wife of H G Wells. At the tender age of 19, Rebecca had thrown herself at H.G Wells, who after all had written a brace of books in which sexual freedom was labeled an intellectual virtue. Rebecca, pregnant, was certain Wells would leave his wife for her. No non-antic- s, such thing Jane had already accepted the all too obvious truth that her wordsmith hubby felt the need for fling after fling, affair upon affair, in order to balance out the shortcomings of married life. In fact Wells seemed unable to write his novels unless the actions and characters had had. or were having, a basis of fact in his own busy life His affair with Amber Reeves, as with Rebecca West and a dozen other g women, can be traced in the books with which he regaled Lonbest-sellin- dons Bloomsbury residents and others, readers who often took great glee, and great umbrage, in identifying his cast of characters. Readable Biography This is, to be sure, a loving, extremely readable biography of Anthony Wests father, a volume that gives us fresh insight into the Fabian movement, gives us a fresh view of George Bernard Shaw (a coldly cruel man"), a volume that reminds us again and again that HG Wells was one of the most important social thinkers of his time, one of the initial proponents of the League of Nations, and later, of what would became the United Nations. 1 hat neither worked out quite as he predicted was not the fault of this astoundingly energetic little man. He was one of the first of a long line of English socialists to visit the USSR, and assuredly one of the first (after long talks with Gorky and Lenin) to tell the world communism had failed. Likewise he was one of the first Englishmen of stature to insist, vocally and in print, that what went on between consenting adults who were not married was their strictly private affair. He was among the first literary lights to toss brickbats at his fellow who were collectively great cutters of woodcuts, operators of hand presses, weavers on handlooms, binders of books and relentless art potters who relieved their horror of the aesthetic brutalities of the industrial age they lived in by making coarsely conceived and hideously ugly parodies of medieval and Elizabethan household articles only very rich collectors could afford to buy. One wonders how he would have viewed many booths at the recent Utah Arts Festival. But while son Anthony gives us a view of his warm, dad, one wonders if any mother could have been half as vicious and malicious as this son paints her? She gets no respect, quite the opposite, from her offspring who insists that, even in ripe old age, she was busily lying about both her role in literary life, and that of son and her erstwhile lover. Jack Goodman. Gateway to Nevada Tight look at Utah lore, lifestyle UTAH Gateway to Nevada, by Tim Kelly, Neil Passey and Mark Knudsen; dream Garden press, 96 pp., $6.95 (paperback). Did you know our fair state was named after Gordy Utah, that intrepid, revered and all-bforgotten frontier hairdresser, he who tamed the split ends of the West, the creator of the Beehive hairdo? If you are a sort, scholarly sort, a history-minde- d or even an economist of sorts you will recall (granted you have been blessed with total recall) that the learned Dr. Joseph Alois Schumpeter was wont to say: "history sometimes indulges in jokes of questionable taste. Or even in history, factless facts and reportage of questionable veracity. v It will come as no surprise, then, that the volume at hand does not bear the imprimature of the Utah Travel Council, the Utah Historical Society or even the Harvard Lampoon. It is, instead, the result of painstaking research by a trio of persevering authors, men of letters who have obviously puzzled long and hard, have left no stone unturned, have gone to unbelievable lengths to give us this reconstructionist view of Utah and its long neglected lore. You know, of course, that a pioneer story tells us only one tree was visible in the Salt Lake Valley when the hardy Mormon settlers toiled through the mouth of Emigration Canyon. Tis true, indeed, our latter-da- y historians testify "the tree was a potted palm, its owner Gordy Utah." As Mr. Utah later told Brigham Young, I had just set it outside for a day or two while the decorators were here. A few more gems of factual Utah history will help your reviewer painstakingly set the tone of this tome. In 1776 Father Silvestre Valez de Escalante both established a Motel Six and discovered remains of a paleolithic refrigerator in the Utah region . . . 1952 Uranium discoverd in southern Utah, Plutonium State Park is proposed 1987 Arabs buy the Mormon Church. as well as modern history finds its place in this treasure-trov- e t. of One tale, too painful to repeat, may explain the otherwise inexplicable disappearance of the Anasazi from these parts a triumph of deductive reasoning that has its beginnings at an archeological dig 15 miles southwest of the modern community of No Gas, Utah. The petroglyphs and pictographs left by the ancient populace inform us that youthful braves, claiming to be Jewish, were locally denounced for their use of the peace pipe. Much, much later, (but tastefully depicted in a handsome wood engraving) the modern mores and folkways of Deseret are spotlighted when .... Pre-histo- non-fac- Proto-Mormo- n a husband reaching our land in a VW, chides his companion to hide the cable TV, Sandra, were not in Colorado anymore Rather than prove a spoilsport. I'll refrain from further reportage upon the wheat and chaff of this tidy volume, but will flip to the back cover, upon which a representation of the Salt Lake Temple displays a basketball hoop and backboard religiously affixed to the structures central architectural element. The volume concludes, quite correctly and succinctnone dare call it Idaho. ly: Utah There are those among us who will view this locally printed item as sophomoric, others will take umbrage at the rather rough treatment accorded the states predominant religion, the states lifestyle, its birthrate and even the artful rendering of the West Valley City Cultural Center, d housed in a handsome a flanked by bowling camper pin fountain donated by a local tanner yclept 0. C. Brunswick. There are others among us, one hopes, who will view the little volume as a sign Utah esis slowly approaching maturity pecially so if it goes on sale at This Is the Place emolument, or even at Deseret Book and its branch locales in the hinterlands. As Puck put it. Laugh and the world laughs writh you. Cringe and you do so alone. Jack Goodman. pickup-mounte- Eljc Salt ul;r strikes tens of thousands of innocent victims Best-selleri- tis By Jonathan Yardley Washington Post Writer Into a busy Washington bookstore the other day scurried a woman, feverish of brow and clasping in one quivering hand a tattered copy of Umberto Ecos The Name of the Rose, that most impaperback probable of mass-markbest sellers. She rushed to the vacantyoung man who eyed, lounged behind the cash register and, in a voice fairly rattling with indignation, shouted: What is this, anyway? This book isnt at all what I expected it to be! I want my money back! Poor woman. Like millions of other Americans now and in years past, she had fallen victim to the dread disease that strikes persons foolish enough to believe that if its popular, it must be something theyd like. She had also been fooled by the misconception that you can tell a book by its jacket, and just to make matters worse she had been further aggrieved by purchasing a copy of one of those books that thousands buy and no one reads. Poor woman indeed, to be unstrung by so many evil influences on and within the covers of a single book! Everybodys Doing It there is probably Of nothing to be said that has not been said before. One of the most fundamental and lamentable truths of human nature is that people do things because other people do them. Thus it is that countless millions of teenagers buy the recordings and videotapes of Michael Jackson, and thus it is that adults in smaller but still significant numbers have purchased copies of The Name of the Rose not because the music or the book is necessarily good, but because everyrepeat, bodys doing it. Nowhere is the herd instinct more nowhere abundantly in evidence than in readlists. ers responses to the best-sellThe popularity of Michael Jackson is as easy to understand as to deplore, but that of The Name of the Rose is rather more mysterious. Last year I sat down with the novel but, after a good-faiteffort of five pages, put it aside; the brilliant Mr. Eco is brilliant about matters of little interest to me, so I went on to other business and assumed that most other readers, however they might initially be attracted by the books appealing title and handsome jacket, would do likewise. Imagine my surprise, then, when a few weeks later The Name of the Rose appeared on the hardlists and, a few cover best-sellWASHINGTON - gum-poppi- s, s, er (Tribune Book Rcie Tolstoy and Russia h er weeks after that, made it all the way to the top. Now it perches atop the mass-marklists, which is even more difficult to comprehend. In the hardcover lists, where sales in the low six figures can often put a book at the top, from time to time a work of difficulty and intellectual depth can enjoy a freakish success. But the mass-marklists, where sales in the low seven figures are necessary to reach the top spot, are dominated by romances, romans a clef, espionage tales and other forms of escapist entertainment. That, no doubt, is what our poor woman thought she was getting in The Name of the Rose, since it was, after all, at the very top of the list. It may well have been the surprise of her life. What Lies Inside? The novels paperback publisher, of course, helped her along the road to this surprise with a jacket that does little to inform the potential buyer as to the precise nature of what lies inside. One could hardly expect Warner Books to say on the front cover: CAUTION- Contents include semiotics, esthetics, philosophy and monks. Contents do not include sex, movie stars, drugs or jet airplanes. Postgraduate education recommended. Intellectual discretion advised. No, as any publisher in his right mind would do, Warner chose to emphasize on the cover the book's status as a number-on- e hardcover best seller and to suggest, in the jacket art, that romance and mystery lie inside to suggest, if you will, that what weve got here is a heavyweight Silhouette or Harlequin. The poor woman, doubtless thinking that several hours of delirious bodice-rippin- g lay ahead of her, snapped it right up. And then, miracle of miracles, she actually tried to read the thing. In so doing she flew directly in the face of the prevailing opinion within the book industry that The Name of the Rose is a classic example of the coffee-table best seller a book that, for reasons not always easy to follow, tens of thousands of people decide should be prominently displayed in their households as evidence of their intellectual correctness, but that tens of thousands of people never actually read. Did anyone actually read Katherine Anne Porters Ship of Fools all the way through, first page to last, no skipping? Probably not, or at least I am unacquainted with anyone who did; but by the thousands See Page E-Column 1 book-buye- rs Tolstoy and the Russians: Reflections on a Relationship, by Alexander Fodor (Ardis: $22.50) is a splendid contribution to our understanding of and of the Soviet the great novelist system. Fodor places Tolstoy amid his courageous ancestors, chronicles his frustrating struggles for a peasantry unimaginably tyrannized by the czars, and details the bitter ideological debates that raged over him after the Revolution. How Tolstoy came to be venerated by his countrymen despite the revisions of his reputation reflects in microcosm the workings of the Soviet regime over A first-rat- e the past work. Chris Pasles, Los Angeles Times. half-centur- y. & Summer Clearance Sale : Starting Monday, July 16 at 10:00 A.M. Summer Sleepwear Absorba and Petit Bateau Infantwear Boys and Girls Shorts 200 Pairs Imported Shoes 200 Boys Shirts 100 Girls Cords All Swimwear & Coverups All Nantucket Blouses and Sportswear 30 50 OFF OFF off 30-6- 0 All Simonetta and David Charles PLUS... 10 Discount on Everything in the Store!!! ALL SALES FINAL For the Finest In Clothing for Children of cfhe 355-86- HOURS: MON. thru SAT. ) Agee . . . 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