Huxley, Aldous - V. S. Pritchett (review date 1957)

V. S. Pritchett (review date 1957)

SOURCE: “Mellifluous Educator,” in The New Statesman and Nation, Vol. LIII, No. 1371, June 22, 1957, p. 814.

[In the following review of Collected Short Stories, Pritchett contends that the short story form was indadequate for Huxley's “great scoldings.”]

The attraction of the early Huxley was—as I recall—that of a young fashionable preacher: he was brilliant, worldly, flashing with culture. He was profane and yet soothing, destructive but—inevitable in the Huxleys—a mellifluous educator. The pleasure of his novels came not very much from his people (who were indeed thin transcripts from educated society between London and the Mediterranean) but from the non-stop talk by which he drove them into exhaustion and nagged them into nothingness. Talk was the cult of the Twenties and he was its exploiter. With him it was not table talk; he talked the clothes and souls off his...

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