“The Gioconda Smile,” perhaps Aldous Huxley's best-known short story, presents in cameo form one of the leading themes of his major fiction.¹ The utter insufficiency of the hedonist's way of life is a recurring idea in Huxley's fiction, an idea that conveys his seminal theme of the essential absurdity of a life without genuine purpose. Henry Hutton's inner conflict in the story reflects the need of the Huxley hero somehow to temper his irresponsible frivolity and to acquire some substantive emotional, moral, or religious values. Like so many of Huxley's vitiated hedonists-in-spite-of-themselves—Gumbril Jr. in Antic Hay, Cardan in Those Barren Leaves, Beavis in Eyeless in Gaza, Farnaby in Island—Hutton refuses to take “yes” for an answer, refuses to discover some antidote for his teleological malaise. Hutton is aware of the fundamental preposterousness of his mode of existence, struggles unsuccessfully to adopt a more responsible way of living, and becomes, in the end, a victim of his own commitment to absurdity.

Hutton is, from the outset, vain, priggish, slightly effete. He fondly imagines himself as “the Christ of Ladies,” a gift to the other sex and yet supremely superior to it. He invites Janet Spence to lunch with him and his wife, Emily, quipping cynically: “‘You'll do us both good. In married life three is often better company than two.’”² On another occasion, as he is chauffeured home, he enjoys the youthful unsophistication of his mistress, Doris, in the back seat of his car. But while he is kissing her he allows his mind to wander to sea-cucumbers and aquariums. A typically jaded Huxley male, he responds to an emotional situation with irrelevance and aloofness, calculatedly shunning real passion. For Hutton recognizes clearly the ingrained imbecility of his frolicking hedonism. He reviews the history of his stale love affairs prior to Doris and concludes that it is all “imbecile wantonness” (p. 33). He wonders if he can even consider himself properly a hedonist because there is no reasoned choice in his pursuit of pleasure. In fact, the irrationality of his capitulation to eroticism, its frustrating nullity, is what bothers him most. His life, he sees, is void of any fruitful, sustaining values. And yet he persists in his folly, perhaps illustrating in action Huxley's favorite passage in Ovid: video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor—“I see the better and I approve; but I pursue the worse.” (Metamorphoses, VII, 19.)

The death of his wife arrests Hutton momentarily and prompts him to reconsider his situation. For a short time he actually succeeds in living more reasonably, more industriously. He spends his mornings supervising agricultural concerns on his land, while he devotes his afternoons and evenings to serious study for a book, The Effect of Diseases on Civilization. But, however laudable his intentions, he returns to Doris within a fortnight: “Unreason had triumphed; at the first itch of desire he had given way.” (p. 35)

Hutton senses that life is nothing more than a vast joke. Unable to check his irrational behavior, he commits himself entirely to an absurd existence. He decides to marry Doris, convinced that the match would be “the best joke he had ever made in his life” (p. 37). But the joke backfires when Hutton visits Janet Spence. He is confident and gallant with her, jovially excited at the prospect of playing with her emotions: “He had discovered in irresponsibility the secret of gaiety” (p. 40). His bubbling humor, however, dissipates rapidly when Janet makes an ardent confession of her love for him. Thoroughly discomfited, Hutton slips from her worshipful embrace and retreats from the house. He is dismayed to learn that his frivolity has evaporated in a crisis. Rather than respond in dupery to Janet's passion and take advantage of her, Hutton is immobilized by her gravity. He now discovers that the role of the irresponsible hedonist is not simply dissatisfactory; it is embarrassingly unreliable. Yet his only recourse at this point is to continue to indulge, if half-heartedly, in his hedonistic pursuits.

Absurdity, nonetheless, has a final, more devastating joke to play on Hutton. While he and Doris lounge at a villa in Florence, word arrives that Janet has charged Hutton with murdering Emily in order to marry Doris. At first Hutton is merely amused, knowing that he has married Doris on a whim, as a jest. But damning evidence accumulates until he begins to suspect that he is himself the victim of some indefinable, irresponsible joke. He sees, dimly, that absurdity is exacting its only logical retribution on him: “Confusedly he felt that some extraordinary kind of justice was being done. In the past he had been wanton and imbecile and irresponsible. Now Fate was playing as wantonly, as irresponsibly, with him” (p. 58). Shaken and bewildered, Hutton tries to pray as he used to forty years ago. As he recalls from childhood the nightly prayer blessing his parents and relatives, he is struck by the knowledge that all but one are now dead. The recollection seems to have a grim effect on Hutton, for death, he perceives, is his unalterable destiny. That afternoon the coroner's jury indicts him and, some time after his execution, we discover that it was Janet who poisoned Emily.

Hutton appears, at the last, to be only apparently a man. As death approaches, he grows aware of the total emptiness of his life. Like Edward Darley in Huxley's first chapter of a new, unfinished novel, Hutton comprehends that he is “someone who was going to die.”³ Exposed to the uncompromising truth, with all pretence removed, he sees the inevitable fact of death as the purest form of absurdity. He has toyed with other people's lives for his own amusement. He has driven Janet to murder and Doris to attempted suicide by his thoughtlessness. Now he is caught up by his own folly. Evading responsibility and self-control through a lifetime, Hutton has no viable rationale with which he can counter irresponsibility. Shunning emotional, moral, and religious values habitually, he has nothing with which to fill in the void created by the sudden disappearance of his pursuit of sensuous pleasures. That gay absurdity that in its license had seemed so attractive to him now turns inscrutably upon him. At the end, his diminution is complete; he dies a victim of his own abandonment of responsibility.

Huxley was from the start convinced that existence is strange, multifarious, paradoxical. He admired William Blake's lines, “Do what you will, this world's a fiction / And is made up of contradiction.” The force of his writing, though, is emphatically toward some definition of meaning in the context of modernity. As C. J. Rolo proposes, “All his work is a quest for values in the face of scepticism battening at the vitals of belief. …”⁴ Novels such as Crome Yellow, Antic Hayand Point Counter Point depict at length the unavoidable failure of hedonism as a way of life, and the man who subscribes to it as his way of life is doomed to a teleological limbo. In this sense, then, in “The Gioconda Smile” Huxley crystallizes a significant theme in his work—the absurdity of the hedonist.

Notes

1. The story first appeared in the English Review, XXXIII (August, 1921), and was the lead item in Mortal Coils (1922), Huxley's second volume of short stories. It is reprinted in several collections, e.g., R. B. Heilman's Modern Short Stories and the Cerf-Moriarty Anthology of Famous British Stories. Huxley created a much enlarged stage version of the story in 1948, and in the same year he collaborated with Universal-International's Zoltan Korda for a motion picture version called A Woman's Vengeance, with Charles Boyer in the leading role.

2. Mortal Coils, Collected Works (London, 1958), p. 6. Subsequent references in text to “The Gioconda Smile” are from this edition.

3. See Laura Huxley, This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (New York, 1968), p. 238.

4. The World of Aldous Huxley (New York, 1947), p. xii.