Mr Wells and Mr Buchan

Summary

Kate Macdonald uses 508 rediscovered letters from John Buchan’s early years at Thomas Nelson’s to illuminate his wide-ranging work as an editor, rights negotiator, marketer and architect of the cheap Sevenpennies series. The correspondence shows Buchan enthusiastically pursuing H. G. Wells’s fiction and, in 1908, urging Nelson’s to acquire Ann Veronica after reading it, while requesting that Wells revise a sexually explicit passage. Wells instead sold the novel to T. Fisher Unwin, which published his preferred text in 1909, prompting controversy that later made Buchan call it “indefensible.” Subsequent disputes over Wells’s publications and threatened litigation hardened the relationship, revealing both Buchan’s initial commercial optimism and Nelson’s growing concern about the reputational risks of publishing Wells.

Highlights

• In the spring and summer of 1908, Wells was writing a very personal novel, Ann Veronica. The plot drew from his affair with Amber Reeves, a twenty-one-year- old undergraduate and a great friend of his second wife, Catherine. According to most of Wells’s biographers, Reeves was determined to have Wells’s child, and he promised to dedicate Ann Veronica to their as yet unconceived daughter, whom they were already calling Anna-Jane. An affair that was already building such castles in the air would require financial planning.
• This makes Buchan one of Ann Veronica’s first readers. On December 1, 1908, he wrote to Brown: “I sat up till the small hours this morning reading Wells’ new novel, Ann Veronica. I think it very good, and as it is about a girl who runs away from a suburban home and becomes a Suffragist and a Fabian its interest is exceedingly topical. I am inclined to think we might make a great success of it. The ending was absurd at first, but he has altered that now”.
• He does not specify which “passage” he found objectionable, but it is likely to have been the same one that scandalized the novel’s reviewers: a frank depiction of a young woman asking for a sexual relationship with a married man. “… Are you sure what it is you want of me?” “I want you. I want you to be my lover. I want to give myself to you. I want to be whatever I can to you.” She paused for a moment. “Is that plain?” she asked.
• Ten years later, the bad blood between Buchan and Wells had clotted. As Buchan told Brown in a letter of February 20, 1920, Wells was “quite the most disgusting person we have had to do with I have ever met, and, though I know him pretty well, I do not at all like him”.

Source

Author

Kate Macdonald