Boon, HG Wells’s 24th novel, written and published in 1915 under the shadow of Ypres, the Dardanelles and the Lusitania, is a difficult book to enjoy. An apparently aimless melange of half-realised short stories, Platonic dialogues and sociological speculation, told to an authorial proxy by a modestly successful writer called George Boon, it was particularly disagreeable to one of its first readers.
Henry James, regarded by most of his peers as the greatest living writer in English, dropped in to the Reform Club in London on 5 July, where he collected a copy of the novel – a gift from its author, whom James had befriended in the 1890s. For James, a writer whose distinguishing feature was exceptional sensitivity to impressions, Boon’s fourth chapter, “Of Art, of Literature, of Mr Henry James” must have been a shock. It is a merciless attack on the Master, barbed with cruel similes: James’s writing is quintessentially superficial, like a “water-boatman as big as an elephant” that is “kept up by surface tension”; he populates his novels with “eviscerated people” like rabbits cleaned “for the table”, who “never make lusty love, never go to angry war, never shout at an election or perspire at poker”. His fiction, therefore, is much ado about nothing, like “a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost… upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den”.
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