The story sparkles. Several technical instruments and factors in the management of content contribute to the display. The immediate scene in the restaurant gathers together and unifies for a single effect a number of told immediate scenes and a multitude of details widely separate in space and time. There are two narrators. The more important because more prominent is, of course, Miss Penny; but the function of “I” should not be underrated or misunderstood. “I” describes Miss Penny, contributes suggestions and a long descriptive scene, spurs on the chief teller or reins her in, and is, actually, the motive force behind the story. It was plainly Mr. Huxley's intention for “I” to represent himself: “I” is a writer of fiction; his laconic and noncommittal speech, well calculated to lead on Miss Penny, was shrewdly managed to draw interest and sympathy while acting as contrast to her voluble telling and overbearing manner; his early statement, “but that had been said before,” and, rather late in the story, his reply to Miss Penny's urging that he write a story on the material she is giving him, “You may be sure I shall,” seal the certainty. We must take Mr. Huxley's word for it; we cannot, in considering this short story, differentiate between the author as a living person and the author as a character. He is there in the story by his own admission and wish, and is to be appraised as a character. Both narrators, we note, are trained writers, observing life as a matter of course and holding decided opinions about living and dying. Both are acutely imaginative. A further advantage is gained, through instinct or design, by the fact that both tellers are ostensibly only playing with story material, pretending, imagining the writing of a story while the story is being told; so that they may stop, start again, stop again when and where they wish, interpolate their feelings and opinions or, as effectively, be silent without losing the thread of narrative or becoming incoherent. Thus the vehicle of expression works as smoothly and as effortlessly as a precision machine. Small wonder, then, if the extremely ingenious and intricate structure of the story—its back-and-forth movement in time holding suspense when needed, preparing every detail for the accelerated pace and swift ending—remains unseen.

The strongest element is unclassifiable under technique or content. Only the most captious reader will find “Nuns at Luncheon” less than highly readable. Once under way, the story induces a snicker or chortle in almost every line. There is release in the laughter produced, possibly a hysterical or near-hysterical sense of pleasure in seeing institutions and customs long held sacred not only torn to shreds but tramped upon. The incongruity is cumulative, the pressure builds up to a long-pent roar of mirth when Sister Agatha, discovered by woodcutters and unable to explain her predicament because her seducer has stolen her false teeth, is quite naturally taken for a fool. The total effect of the story is both authentic and astounding; burst follows burst of incredible fireworks; yet here it all lies quiet, in cold black type.

Obviously, too, the intent of the author was satire. But when one tries to discover the cause and nature of the attack, and particularly its object or objects, no solution appears. Since Juvenal, this form of writing has seemed best justified, promising permanence as art, when one or more of the following attributes is present: a corrective motive indicated by suggested betterment of conditions satirized; impersonality covering the identity of satirist and the satirized by symbolism or allegory; and detachment from local or temporal circumstances that, being soon forgotten, would render the attack meaningless. None of these conditions obtains here. Miss Penny is exhibited, especially at her triumphant exit from the story, as a growing menace to society about whom nobody, least of all the author, need have the slightest misgivings; the satirist not only appears in person but bids for the reader's interest and sympathy, while the individual satirized is drawn with such vigorous acerbity and exactitude of grotesque detail that, though her identity now after thirty years may be forgotten, she must have had a living prototype (she is as certainly factual and as basically unadulterated fact as was Maugham's portrait of Hugh Walpole in Cakes and Ale); and the circumstances of time and place are so particularized that already they are hazed over and in another thirty years may require a gloss. And Miss Penny, although the chief object of attack, is by no means the only one. Any attempt to enumerate other butts will fail unless a list is made of persons and beliefs not attacked. We cannot call this story satire. We must call it satirical, bitterly and generally satirical, for some reason not yet determined. We are far from all that laughter.

So doubt enters. We must get at the meaning of the story, and the only method possible is through a study of its enactors, one of whom is Mr. Huxley himself. (Or so he has asked us to believe.)

Two interpretations of the story are tenable, depending on our interpretation of “I” and Miss Penny. Neither redounds greatly to the author's credit as catcher and creator of personality, and the consequent ambiguity between the two readings (although it may have afforded him a private joke-of-all-jokes at the reader's expense) seems to constitute a further detraction from what at first appeared a brilliant achievement in this factor of management.

The only fully grasped person here is Miss Penny. Her the author seems to have known so well that he could embroider factual details into the purely fanciful—such as the earrings, the woman journalist's outward scorn of but inward yearning to write fiction, the savage curiosity of an old maid about sex—without making the caricature too outlandish, in a swiftly moving story, to be credible. By this first interpretation, the author uses Miss Penny not so much as a storyteller, rather as a mouthpiece through which he can jeer at a good many activities and customs and institutions that he personally finds ridiculous: spinsters, journalists, American magazines, Roman and Protestant Churches, universities, sexual inhibitions and sexual drives, but especially and above all ideal love—in short, at almost everything and everybody conveniently in sight at the moment, with one exception. Himself. But this very wanton and extensive jeering, plus his ostentation of utterance and choice of material (note his proffered familiarity with French, German, Latin used mock-heroically or mock-romantically) actually reveal himself as something of a joke that he missed, while at the same time undermining the illusion of reality within which a story must operate. In this instance, the story told by Miss Penny, of the authenticity of whose facts we have no assurance and some cause for doubt, becomes more and more a sort of fairy tale within a warped but perhaps basically factual anecdote, creating neither convincing fiction nor credible fact. By this interpretation the piece begins as fiction but ends as polemic.

It seems hardly necessary to add that the distortion of some unknown person into a caricature called Miss Penny is suggestive of the failure to create individual personalities in Kuno and Sister Agatha. The former is at best, just as visually represented, a worn photograph; he never speaks a word in the reader's hearing; he comes to us via the Doctor, Miss Penny, and Mr. Huxley, and probably was guessed at. Sister Agatha's false teeth give her away at once (as did Miss Penny's “corpses hanging in chains” earrings). She again is only a broad type with luridly grotesque touches, a character who can be pushed at the author's humorous whim from seduction into near-sainthood into farce.

By a second interpretation this story is an intensive, rather than extensive, attack. There is no general polemic, the author is not accountable for what Miss Penny rails at, and the story proper occurs only in the restaurant, its only characters being Miss Penny and Mr. Huxley. The story told by Miss Penny within the story is to be taken as nonsense, made up by her out of whole cloth, and is used merely as a lever by which Mr. Huxley, through his modest aloofness and reluctant participation, pries open and reveals the tremendous sexual yearning and the equally strong sexual repression within Miss Penny's unconsciousness. This leverage begins where Miss Penny wonders if she will ever be “exploited.” The negative, embarrassing silence that follows compels her to justify herself as person, as professional, and as contented because courted (if not yet won) spinster. The stages of the told story follow the pattern of this attempted justification, as Miss Penny repeatedly tries to lure Mr. Huxley into collaboration, only to snatch the telling from him. At the same time the author allows her, before the reader's eyes, to deny and refute by implication (note the early description of her eyes and ears; note that she, a reporter of facts, is here spinning the wildest species of yarn while at the same time professing disgust at it and extreme boredom; note the ironic application to her of the funeral of Sister Agatha) all three phases of her intended vindication of herself, and in the very words that she believes creates and confirms them.

Yet, if this interpretation is correct, our conclusion must be that Mr. Huxley has drawn a superficially comic but essentially an incredibly stupid person, a monster in chains, far too exaggerated for anyone not momentarily blinded by laughter to believe. Katharine Brush's “Good Wednesday” shows a similar (much simpler) pattern of self-condemnation disguised as justification, the author using stages in the revelation of the protagonist as substitute for movement by motive-obstacle-success or -failure. But there is no ambiguity, the method is straight and clear, the material no less keenly satirical but carefully objectified and held in control; and the result is a story that provides no laughter but knocks the reader all but off his chair by producing a shattering surprise based on thoroughly realized and thoroughly credible characteristics of human nature that might turn up at any time, anywhere.

Here, what meaning, what general truth is present and demonstrated, by either interpretation? All female reporters are like Miss Penny? All aging spinsters have an ungovernable appetite that will out if properly baited? All social, intellectual, or religious institutions are preposterous? Certainly not. Yet something is achieved here that must be taken reluctantly as the meaning of the story. “Nuns at Luncheon” emits a derisive blast at both the possession and the loss of virginity; this, by whatever interpretation of material and details, is proved by the title. It is a curious achievement, a childish revolt from faith once celebrated with hymns and prayers and the building of cathedrals in honor of a virgin. It is an act of defiance of and disbelief in the classical-Christian idea and ideal of humanism; and to it the reader may finally react with a loud laugh or a corresponding disbelief of his own in the author's ability to be, in this instance, anything more durable than a showoff or an incompetent cartoonist.

The story seems to sparkle. The question is whether with the spark of life or the duller, iridescent glow of decomposition.

Characterization must show balance, and within balance characters must usually move—like spinning tops, like persons. Something more or something less than a desire to ridicule humanity is needed behind the writing of a short story. “Nuns at Luncheon,” readable as it is, provides an illustration in reverse, an anything-else-but, for personality-catchers.