Time machine to sex machine

HG WELLS was famous in his own day for his ingenious stories and his romanticisation of scientific advances; later in the 20th century he became recognised as a genre pioneer and later still - with the confessional autobiographies of his son, Anthony West, and the gradual appearance of posthumous memoirs, letters and biographies - he gained notoriety as a prolific lover. From Time Machine to sex machine is an interesting trajectory, but does Wells have the staying power to hold our attention now? Andrea Lynn thinks Wells was "the greatest intellectual force of the English-speaking world", so naturally believes that his last three love affairs, conducted in the final decade of his life, merit a whole book to themselves. His girlfriends were interesting women in their own right; Russian adventuress and possible double agent Moura Bomberg ("the most intelligent woman of her time", according to Lynn), American society hostess Constance Coolidge ("an international femme fatale") and pioneer woman war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. But Lynn can't quite make her mind up if she is writing about these women as individuals or merely in relation to the Great Man, so includes too much, paraphrasing whole correspondences and providing exhaustive data about all the ex-boyfriends and husbands of all the ex-girlfriends and wives.

In the teeth of this thoroughness, much remains unresolved, notably the real nature of Wells's relationship with Gellhorn, 44 years his junior and who vigorously denied having a sexual liaison with him. She lived long enough to be interviewed by the current biographer and insisted that Wells had completely misrepresented the case out of vanity; nevertheless, she is given the same weight as a "mistress" alongside Bomberg, Wells's long-term partner and sexual nemesis.

Wells seems, for all his non-stop flirting, to have been a lonely man, desperately seeking distraction from melancholia and given to bouts of self-pity. His sexual success well into old age is hard to account for, especially given the fact that he was short and fat, had tiny hands and feet and a squeaky voice that everyone hated. Gellhorn's claim that many of his conquests were "imaginary" seems tempting, though Wells clearly had charisma. His biographer seems as vulnerable to it as anyone, thrilled to write of Wells "bedding" women, "siring" children and having people "succumb to his charms", as if she was some kohl-eyed flapper swooning before the Sheik of Araby. She seems keen to perpetuate the myth of Wells as a supposed sexual superman and "great intellectual force", even though his own behaviour and utterances all point to deep insecurities on both counts. "I am, I know, trying to be something too big for my powers," he wrote in his secret autobiography. "I am an insufficient and often irritable 'great man' with an infantile craving for help."

Much weight is given to Wells's concept of the "Lover-Shadow", which he developed at length in papers published posthumously as HG Wells in Love. By "Lover-Shadow" Andrea Lynn takes Wells to mean his "complete female counterpart, his intellectual-emotional-sexual equal", whom he strives to find partially reflected, but never (surprise, surprise) wholly present in successive lovers.

From the way Lynn talks of this "complex original notion" you'd think Wells was a second Plato rather than yet another bloke with a fancy excuse for moving on. It doesn't suit her to admit what Wells himself makes plain occasionally, that he was an ordinarily selfish and demanding lover, who needed a "prostitute-housekeeper" (as he described one co-habitant) as much if not more than any "Lover-Shadow".