After the Fireworks

BY GARY GIDDINS

1.

I
n the marketplace of literary standing, Aldous Huxley's stock has veered so often in the hundred years since he published his first volume of poetry (
The Burning Wheel
, 1916) that the volatility itself fascinates. Each era defends its own reasons to rekindle or extinguish his light as novelist, essayist, and sage, and for that matter as poet, dramatist, biographer, and epistler, a debate that began long before his death. A promising poet of the 1910s, who rhymed erudition and made the didactic lyrical, he burst loose on the 1920s as the defiant, surgically mocking novelist who deemed nothing sacred and nothing—least of all sex, bodily functions, and God—off limits. Before Hemingway and Faulkner, it was Huxley who gave voice to the lost, postwar generation: a fearless, suspicious, unabashedly bookish voice, easier than Joyce, sunnier than Lawrence, and so contagiously liberated that even Faulkner vainly attempted to borrow (in
Mosquitos
) the mordantly funny Huxley touch.

By the 1930s, his illustrious name was synonymous with smart. When the Marx Brothers went to school in
Horse Feathers
, they enrolled at Huxley College; when Liza Elliott articulated her delusions in the Broadway smash
Lady in the Dark
, she warbled, “Huxley wants to dedicate his book to me.” Huxley was born in 1894 in Godalming, a part of Surrey (the climactic setting of
Brave New World
), forty miles southwest of London. His lifelong interest in genetics reflected his own remarkable gene pool: the family tree boasted his paternal grandfather T. H. Huxley, the evolutionist, and his maternal great-uncle Matthew Arnold, the critic and poet. His adolescence was financially secure, but traumatic. At fourteen, he lost his mother. Three years later, he lost his sight to keratitis; he mastered Braille and regained partial vision, but remained near-blind all his adult life. Three years after that, his beloved brother Trevenen succumbed to depression and hanged himself. Aldous went to Eton and Balliol Colleges, where he began to focus on writing. He published his first book at twenty-two.

In 1915, he encountered D. H. Lawrence, who ten years later would exert a great if passing influence on him, his future wife Maria Nys, a refugee from Belgium (a background reflected in “Uncle Spencer”), and Garsington Manor, the artistic enclave created by Lady Ottoline Morrell, where he lived, worked, and associated with Bertrand Russell, Nancy Cunard, Dora Carrington, Mark Gertler, Augustus John, Lytton Strachey, and others who inadvertently posed for character studies in his fiction. In his daz
zling Peacockian debut as a novelist, he remade Garsington as
Crome Yellow
. If his second novel,
Antic Hay
, exemplified a hilarious nihilism, his subsequent work, especially the short novels collected here, documented his way to a more meticulous, intellectual, compassionate, yet no less amusing approach to the novel. We owe to Edith Sitwell this indelible portrait of young Aldous:

Aldous Huxley was extremely tall, had full lips and a rather ripe, full but not at all loud voice. His hair was of the brown, living color of the earth on garden beds. As a young man, though he was always friendly, his silences seemed to stretch for miles, extinguishing life, when they occurred, as a snuffer extinguishes a candle. On the other hand, he was (when uninterrupted) one of the most accomplished talkers I have ever known, and his monologues on every conceivable subject were astonishingly floriated variations of an amazing brilliance, and, occasionally, of a most deliberate absurdity.
¹

Brave New World
, his twenty-ninth book, in 1932, clinched his cultural centrality. Five years later Huxley, the quintessential Englishman, moved to the land of John the Savage, establishing himself on the rim of the Mojave Desert, savoring the quiet while apparently going Hollywood with a vengeance. His 1939 fillet of the movie world, the alternately sidesplitting and pedantic
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
, showed that the vengeance ran deep.

He overcame his initial disdain of talkies to adapt Austen and Charlotte Brontë to film. He and the openly bisexual Maria, who facilitated a busy sexual life for him, en
tertained concentric circles of friends, encompassing Gerald Heard, Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Igor Stravinsky, Orson Welles, Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, and other boldface names. He championed, to the dismay of his original fan base, mystics, searchers, and very likely a quack or two. Huxley embraced the Bates method of eye training, Vedanta and various Eastern approaches to the perennial philosophy, and an uncompromising pacifism of the sort that Orwell dismissed as “objectively pro-fascist.” As Hitler made Germany great again and Roosevelt attempted to arm Great Britain, Huxley told a friend it was no more useful for him to attack Nazism than for him to attack sin. Abhorring the threat of another war more horrific than the one that his failing eyesight and poor health saved him from fighting (though he did try to volunteer), he ardently, profusely, philosophically appeased.

Prolific as ever, he slipped from the spotlight. Yet before the war ended, he published an ingenious novel,
Time Must Have a Stop
, followed by the dystopian screenplay-as-novel
Ape and Essence
; the terror-filled biography
The Devils of Loudun
; and a short account of his experiences with mescaline,
The Doors of Perception
, which eventually brought him legions of followers that his younger self—the self of
Antic Hay
and
Point Counter Point
—might have roasted on a spit.

We can sample the curve in Huxley's standing in the collected letters of Thomas Mann. 1934: “I admire Aldous Huxley, who represents one of the finest flowerings of West European intellectualism, especially in his essays. I prefer him to D. H. Lawrence, who is no doubt a significant phenomenon and characteristic of our times, but whose fevered sensuality has little appeal for me.” 1944: “[
Time Must Have
a Stop
] is exciting because it is a work of talent, and in literary terms an engagingly avant-garde performance. Yet it is reprehensible. . . . But my own conscience is not so clear when the question of morbidity and decadence is raised.” 1949: “[A] good many things by Aldous Huxley . . . are greater and, as documents of the age, more illuminating than anything produced so far by the young.” 1954: “[
The Doors of Perception
] represents the last and, I am tempted to say, the rashest development of Huxley's
escapism
, which I never liked in him. Mysticism as a means to that end was still reasonably honorable. But it strikes me as scandalous that he has now arrived at drugs.”
²

Despite or because of Huxley's anointment as a savant of druggy diversions and insights, his readership narrowed beyond the perdurable
Brave New World
. Critics who thought he went off the rails (Mann, again: “being rapt over the miracle of a chair and absorbed in all sorts of color illusions has more to do with idiocy than he thinks”) underappreciated his last novel,
Island
, a series of dialogue-essays, explaining the ways of a paradise built on logic, science, spiritualism, hallucinogens, and (here's the rub) a genetic sameness that makes its inhabitants congenial—all threatened by the West's unslakable thirst for its oil reserves. Most critics agreed, however, that his next and last book,
Literature and Science
, proved to be charming and rational in a way that was pure Huxley. He died and was greatly missed.

In the decades subsequent to his death, in 1963 (overshadowed by the simultaneous assassination of JFK), Huxley never failed to maintain prestige. Yet much of his best work is neglected. His presence in the academy is limited to
Brave New World
, a perennial middle school pursuit.
Point Counter
Point
is neither an obligatory text nor a rite of passage, though it remains a unique achievement, which (the rambling Laurentian soliloquies notwithstanding) captures its time and consequently ours in all its confusion, class warfare, fascinating fascism, lost labors of love, and boundless vanities. Huxley's early novels came to represent a demoded fashion, fussy and overemphatic in style and learned to the point of condescension. The polyglot allusions and polymathic presumptions that we wrestle with as the price of reading
Ulysses
, suggest elitism in Huxley. He was not, as he readily conceded, a congenital novelist and yesterday's irreverence is today's ho-hum. Harold Bloom imperiously conceded that he treasured Huxley's social comedies in his youth but saw no reason to revisit them; two
New York Times
reviewers recently dismissed
Brave New World
because the embryology is dated and the middle-class mischaracterized—the kinds of observations a character in
Point Counter Point
might have made before tumbling down a marble staircase.

And still his stock rises. Huxleyans quietly proliferate, like disaffected Alphas. Several studies of his work have appeared, along with anthologies of his previously uncollected writings and lectures. In the past twenty years, an American publisher produced the six-volume
Complete Essays,
and a German publisher launched the overpriced but illuminating
Aldous Huxley Annual
, which has uncovered dozens of unremembered and uncompleted works, not least Huxley's (may it be produced!) musical-comedy version of
Brave New World
. His novels remain in print, as do several key works. Recent biographies have supplemented the 1973 tour de force by Sybille Bedford; a second collection of letters,
edited by the dogged Huxleyan James Sexton, augments the indispensable 1969 doorstop edited by Grover Smith.

2.

M
uch of the posthumous attention accorded Huxley has centered on his role as guru to stoners, with or without mystical overtones, or seeks to reconcile his voluminous work with an overarching philosophical song. I speak for a more plebeian readership: we who read him not to have our minds improved or blown (though these are surely collateral effects), but for the pleasure of his company, which can be stimulating, grotesque, and uproarious all at once. I speak for those who look not for consistency, preferring to revel in the multitudes of a man incapable of not thinking and of worrying each thought into prose; who regard him not as a saint, though his humbly stooped 6' 4" frame, rocky cheekbones cradling glassy eyes, and polite, patiently sonorous voice, typecast him for the part, but as a master chronicler of pettiness: overarching pride, paralyzing insecurity, counterfeit love, spurious ambition, every kind of cant and duplicity.

My lifelong affection for Huxley transcends without overlooking (I wince and move on) his love of exclamations and pointless adverbs (irrevocably, bottomlessly, insufferably); his assumption that I have read, seen, heard, and retained all the things he has and can recognize a line from Meister Eckhart in German when I see it; his disdain for jazz (the true moksha); his not-so-youthful indulgences in
racial and Semitic stereotyping (he blames, quite rightly, blacks for jazz and Jews for monotheism), not to mention his fling with genetic engineering. Mine is a devotion captured by Anthony Burgess in
99 Novels
, his survey of English-language literature from 1939 to 1983. Huxley alone is represented by as many as three novels. Burgess writes of
After Many a Summer
, “It is Huxleyan in that it is a novel with a brain, and if it nags at human stupidity when it should be getting on with the story—well, we accept the didacticism as an outflowing of the author's concern with the state of the modern world. Huxley's novels are always
concerned
, and therein lies their strength and continuing relevance.”
³
Still, I do insist that strength and relevance reside no less in his wit, discursive learning, and an understanding of people that urges readers to groan at his vainglorious creatures while recognizing themselves in the gallery.

Huxley wrote eleven novels, accounting for one-fifth of the volumes he published, and he evidently regarded them as his most important work in that they represented “finished” presentations of his ideas. He wrote poetry for a quarter-century, but gave it up during the Second World War. He wrote stories throughout the 1920s, among them “The Gioconda Smile,” “The Tillotsen Banquet,” “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow,” “Nuns at Luncheon,” “Young Archimedes,” “The Bookshop,” and “The Claxtons,” but gave that up in 1930, writing only a few more—most notably his last, “Voices” (1955), one of the nastiest supernatural caprices this side of Saki and Patricia Highsmith—that he inexplicably declined to collect in his books. He professed little enthusiasm for modern theater, but like Henry James tried time and
again to mount plays, enjoying one success with his 1948 adaptation of “The Gioconda Smile.” But the novels came steadily between 1921 and 1962, like benchmarks. In context with his dozens of other volumes, they invariably dramatize ideas and interests explored and developed in intervening essays, stories, poems, reviews, histories, and prefaces.

Of that work, much of it long out of print, the short novels collected here are most treasurable, and what pleasure it is to welcome them back. Each of them might have secured a more enduring place in his bibliography had they been initially issued as standalone novels. All were written in the defining decade when he was most keenly focused on fiction, and Huxley favored them enough to include them in retrospective collections. So why and when did they vanish?

Between 1920 and 1930, Huxley published—in addition to three volumes of poetry, two travel books, four collections of essays, and a play—nine works of fiction: the novels
Crome Yellow
,
Antic Hay
,
Those Barren Leaves
, and
Point Counter Point
, and the story collections
Limbo
,
Mortal Coils
,
Little Mexican
,
Two or Three Graces
, and
Brief Candles
. The last three were mostly given over to these short novels—novels, it must be said, no shorter than
Ape and Essence
or
The Genius and the Goddess
. Perhaps publishers and readers in the '20s took the page count more seriously as a mercantile consideration; in any case Huxley accompanied them with thematically complementary stories, like swans and cygnets. In 1957, he published
Collected Stories
, raiding the five story volumes of their shorter stories (plus “Sir Hercules” from
Crome Yellow
), and rendering the novellas basically homeless. That same year a paperback re
print appeared of
After the Fireworks
with a cover suitable for a Harlequin romance. “Uncle Spencer” and “Two or Three Graces” didn't even get that; nor were they salvaged when
After the Fireworks
was offered as a novel in 2010: out of print, out of mind.