As I re-read Experiment in Autobiography - as I read for the first time HG Wells in Love, which he thought of as the Postscript to it, and which for me is like receiving a letter delayed in the post for half a century - I realise that only with difficulty can I bring to bear the detachments of a reviewer. The essential Wellsian postures, the vigorous candour, the view of oneself as a sort of very rough human draft, the solemnities the impatient wish to make a handful of history, the one-man-show quality of it all, entered deep into many of us in the 'twenties and 'thirties. Half a page of his prose and I'm helplessly 17 again: I advance behind his impertinent bulk and am wonderfully rude to my elders.

HG Wells in Love is Mr Polly starkers. Wells was dismayed that absurdities like the laws governing libel and obscenity made it necessary to confine his sexual history, in the Experiment, to various orders of hint. So he set out to write this Postscript.

It started, says his son, when one of the three true loves of his life, Moura Budberg, failed him. He had wandered into a novel written by someone else. In Russia, staying with Gorky, he discovered that, though she'd said she could not and would not return to the country, she'd been there last week, and twice before that year. I made him want to cut her out of his life. Damn it, what he'd longed for was 'a collaborator in a great political adventure,' 'a world-interested woman to my world-interested man.'

It was much as it had been with Amber Reeves, 20 years earlier. But Moura 'would not rouse herself from that petty squalid exile life of hers ..the chatting nocturnalism.' (One overhears Mr Polly at some dyspeptic five-barred gate: 'Blighted degenerated Chatting Nocturalism!')

But he does love her: it is like Amber Reeves, from the collapse of his affair with whom he recovered by writing Mr Polly: 'It is odd to recall that some of the best of that I wrote weeping bitterly like a frustrated child.' He rounds on himself, now, in the middle of rounding on Moura: he's to blame, of course, for his 'unreasonable monstrous demands for a Lover-Shadow based on the exacting enormity of the persona I have devised for myself.'

The Lover-Shadow! It's a typically Wellsian concept: he might have devoted a pamphlet, a doctoral thesis, an encyclopaedia to it. It's a 'complex of craving and hope' that lies in everyone's background. From a lyrical yearning (see the early chapters of Experiment) it was usefully 'vulgarised and made practical,' he tells us - converted into a resolve to 'get women' - by an encounter with a friend of his youth, Sidney Bowkett, who probably didn't know he was about to be transformed into Chitterlow in Kipps.

While Wells's second wife was alive, it was necessary for the women he got to understand that nothing was allowed to threaten his marriage. He required that when this Postscript was published, it should be prefaced by his introduction to The Book of Catherine Wells, which came out in 1928, after her brave death from cancer. It's the tenderest account of a woman, 'delicately inagressive,' who, at what must have been deep cost to herself, provided his turbulence with a calm centre. When she'd gone, the getting of women was like the rest of his productiveness - pamphlets, novels, the shortest of stories and the longest of urgent polemical compendiums.

After Amber, there was Elizabeth von Arnim: once, having read a narrow-minded letter in the Times by a rival novelist, they stripped under trees, laid the newspaper down, and 'made love all over Mrs Humphrey Ward.' There was the 'long struggle' with Rebecca West: as he saw it, 'the fight of two wilful people to compel each other to accept the conditions of an uncongenial Lover-Shadow.' The affair with Odette Keun became a clash of the enraged: 'Periodically she was mad, I think, certifiably mad.'

He believed love affairs kept him alive and fresh, alongside the reflection that the whole business of sex had grown 'a vast distressful preoccupation.' The final section of the Postscript is a suicidal note that is, in fact, a defiantly non-suicidal note. The Wells who had a testily objective view of himself ('infantile', 'silly', 'fitful') alternates to the end with the self-made Titan ('I shall have to write a book called Reconstruction, a sort of assembly and criticism of hopes and projects').

HG Wells in Love, is like so much he wrote, a work of frank self-defence, that's also a work of frank self-demolition. It seems likely to emerge in the end as the most enjoyable of all the irreconcilable reports of these events. Turn to the experiment, and it's seen that the exploration of the sexual theme doesn't add as much as one might have thought. The trust, the mix of tears and fun, the grand schemes never quite getting off the nursery floor, and the indignant rationality, are all there. The first third is best: autobiography as jauntily vulnerable as the youth it celebrates.