[In the following review of Collected Short Stories, Newby finds Huxley's short stories strained and anti-intellectual, contending that Huxley is not a true short story writer despite the brilliant analysis and observation revealed in some tales.]

One thinks of Aldous Huxley as an intellectual writer. One associates him with the Twenties, short skirts and chromium plate; and one thinks of him, again, as an historian and pamphleteer, disenchanted with the twentieth century, doubtful whether the past was any better and apprehensive of the future; a pessimist, in short. The Collected Short Stories do not, however, bear this out. They provide no text for a dissertation on Mr. Huxley's ideas as they might have done had he been the intellectual, the sustained critic or satirist one, rather idly, supposed. Indeed, there is a strain in the stories which might be thought anti-intellectual. The other misconception is of Mr. Huxley in a bright, Twenty-ish world when he is, more obviously, an Edwardian. The period touch is provided not only by the historical details—a character calling at an inn for a glass of port, a comment on the absurdity of trying to find energy in the atom—but by the urbane literariness of the style.

The owner of the shop was standing in the doorway, a little man, grizzle-bearded and with eyes very active round the corners of the spectacles that bridged his long, sharp nose.

‘Trade is good?’ I inquired.

‘Better in my grandfather's day,’ he told me, shaking his head sadly.

‘We progressively grow more Philistine,’ I suggested.

‘It is our cheap Press. The ephemeral overwhelms the permanent, the classical.’

‘This journalism,’ I agreed, ‘or call it this piddling quotidianism, is the curse of our age.’

One would have liked all these stories dated. That one, “The Bookshop,” is obviously very early. But how early? When was “Limbo” published? By looking up the reference books we can discover all this information for ourselves, but a volume of Collected Short Stories needs documenting if the author happens to be Aldous Huxley. He has roots in the pre-Joycean strata and one wants to follow them upwards into the clear light of Italy. The discovery of Italy seems to have been determinant in his career. There is an unmistakable cordiality in his references to all things Italian. The possession of Italian blood is a sufficient explanation for beauty. ‘Ah, that explained it,’ his narrator says of someone he had thought German and now discovers to be Italian. ‘I had been wondering how Bavaria could have produced this thin-faced creature with the dark eyes, the finely modelled nose and chin, and the fleshy lips so royally and sensually curved.’ The best story of them all, “Little Mexican”, is about Italy, and so is the worst. And after Italy? Well, one wants to know. One wants to know about Mr. Huxley himself. The stories and sketches in this volume are illustrations in his biography and reading them is an historical rather than a literary pleasure.

Really intelligent characters are almost as great an embarrassment to a writer as really good ones. If they are presented at all convincingly they are also, like Jane Austen's Emma, not really liked; and in less skilful hands than Jane Austen's these intelligent characters are bores into the bargain. They frustrate the possibility of an interesting story because they are so almighty knowing and self-contained and long-suffering. Mr. Huxley has a great many intelligent people in his stories and he solves the difficulty (rather unfairly, I think) by making them absurd. Think of poor Herbert Claxton, for example, with his beard, knickerbockers and Oriental religiosity! Or John Tarwin, who is an expert on tumours, values people according to their knowledge and ideas and accordingly is turned into a cuckold. In “Happily Ever After” (a very good story) there is, certainly, a highly intelligent man who is not made fun of, Mr. Jacobsen. If he is looked at closely, however, Jacobsen turns out to be a scholar, not an intellectual and, indeed, he is to be found criticizing a nascent intellectual for presuming to think. ‘It was bad for him to think; he wasn't strong enough.’ Presumably Jacobsen is strong enough and his strength is to be gauged from his enjoyment of bad sermons; they afford him ‘the philosophic amusement of counting the undistributed middles and tabulating historically the exploded fallacies in the parson's discourse.’

Ideally, one suspects, Mr Huxley would have liked a sympathetic intellectual near the centre of a good many of these stories; but he is defeated by the conventional demands of fiction. In “Young Archimedes,” where the attempt is seemingly made, the result is an embarrassing dilettante who meditates for whole paragraphs at a time on music, mathematics, and the rise of civilization. Perhaps this is only another way of saying that Mr Huxley is, by temperament, more of an essayist than a short story writer; or that his short stories are most successful when he is being least himself.

When one thinks of their various limitations, these stories ought, after thirty-five years some of them, to seem faded. But time and again they are redeemed by brilliant analysis and observation. “Little Mexican” is a delightful account of an Italian family over a period of years; perhaps it succeeds partly because none of its characters is particularly clever. “The Gioconda Smile” succeeds very well in its slightly theatrical, Somerset Maugham-ish way. “Happily Ever After” is hard and economical and oddly Kiplingesque. Mr Huxley is, too, an irresistible travelling companion and guide. One would have liked him to say even more about the villas on the Brenta, about Tuscany and Florence, even about London on a Saturday afternoon. There is a great wealth of material in this volume to be explored, and if it is not more successful as a collection of stories then it is probably because Mr Huxley is not by nature one of the two types who really can write stories as distinct from novels; the gossip and the teller of folk tales.