Huxley began his literary career in 1916 with a volume of poems called The Burning Wheel. Four years later Limbo, his first volume of short stories was published, followed by his first novel Crome Yellow in 1921. During the period from 1920 to 1930 Huxley tried all literary genres: he wrote poems, short stories, novels, essays, dramas and travel books. The predominant genre in the 1920s, however, was short fiction, and Limbo was followed by four more volumes of short stories, Mortal Coils (1922), Little Mexican (1924), Two or Three Graces (1926) and Brief Candles (1930). In these stories Huxley is mainly concerned with the ‘human condition’, with fate and predestination which man cannot escape, however hard he tries. Recurrent is also his use of irony, a stylistic device Huxley employs most successfully and most brilliantly in his short stories and early novels.

The single unifying feature in Huxley's work is irony. The moral dilemma is sustained in novel after novel by the irony inherent in the dilemma itself: man as a product of his genes and glands; man as a creature of sensitivity and suffering.¹

Whether Huxley exploits the ironical relationship between the artist and his work in “The Tillotson Banquet” (Mortal Coils) or whether he uses lyrical irony as in “Green Tunnels” or grim and cruel irony as in “Nuns at Luncheon” in the same volume, the device may be traced in the five volumes of short stories and all “major novels, with the exception of Island”.² “Huxley's art depends above all on a dialectic of ideas”, Peter Bowering maintains, “a dialectic engendered by the major ironies inherent in the human condition”.³

The discrepancy between Huxley the human being and Huxley the author of so many satirical pieces seems to be of great interest in this respect. Laura Huxley's book This Timeless Moment and the contributions of Huxley's relatives, friends and acquaintances to the Memorial Volume (Aldous Huxley, 1894-1963. A Memorial Volume) edited by his brother Julian two years after Aldous' death convey a very personal view of Huxley. Their intention is not so much to praise his achievements as a writer, but to praise Huxley the human being, his admirable personality and his noble character. John Atkins writes in his study of Aldous Huxley that nearly all of the 27 contributors “seemed at pains to stress that the popular image of Huxley as an immensely intellectual but essentially cold man was entirely false; that the quality that impressed itself most deeply on his friends was his human warmth, his capacity for pity and his abiding charity”.⁴

Humphry Osmond was most impressed by the “kindness and tolerance of this man, whose writings led me to suppose that he would be disillusioned, cynical and even savage”.⁵ This is exactly what is understood by the discrepancy between the attitude of the writer and the character of the person Aldous Huxley.

His cousin Gervas Huxley, who attended the same preparatory school with him for five years cannot remember him ever “losing his self-control or giving way to violent emotion” as most of the other pupils did. “It was impossible to quarrel with him. Any waves of ill-natured spite or temper broke up at once when they met the shore of his integrity and complete unselfishness”.⁶

Laura Huxley's view of her husband—she was his second wife—is not only characterized by deep love and admiration for the man Aldous Huxley, but also by a certain awe that is only too easily transferred to the reader. The warmth with which she describes her husband's first marriage, which had been a very happy one, renders her account of Huxley's life honest, sincere and objective (as far as she can be objective in her position), without the slightest feeling of jealousy or rivalry. His second marriage to the much younger Laura, who was Italian, proved to be very happy as well and was ended, like the first, by death, by Aldous's death on the 22nd of November 1963, the day President Kennedy was assassinated. And like his first wife Maria he had faced death with “dignity and courage”,⁷ like her he died of cancer, and just as he had been sitting day and night at Maria's deathbed, Laura had been sitting at his, assuring him of her love till the very last moment.

Here the question arises: how can a man like Aldous Huxley, who has experienced real happiness in life, who was so gentle, tolerant and noble, who faced life and death with the same dignity, be capable of such bitter cynicism? According to George Woodcock the source of Huxley's cynicism is the “realization that suffering and death exist”,⁸ thus supporting Peter Bowering's idea of the irony inherent in the human condition. Aldous Huxley had to make this bitter experience very early in his life. His mother Julia, to whom he was very devoted, died in 1908, when he was only fourteen, too young to be able to cope with this terrible shock, this most incisive event in his life. Ironically he should lose his first wife Maria through the same fatal disease that killed his mother and that should also kill himself. Whereas he was prepared for Maria's death and also for his own—he had developed a deep interest in the idea of “ars moriendi”⁹—he was not prepared for his mother's death. This change in his attitude towards death is best revealed in his short novel The Genius and the Goddess, published in 1955, the year of Maria Huxley's death, where the protagonist John Rivers says to his friend, the narrator,

“Dying's an art, and at our age we ought to be learning it. It helps to have seen someone who really knew how. Helen [River's wife] knew how to die because she knew how to live—to live now and here and for the greater glory of God.

In the process of living as one ought to live, Helen had been dying by daily installments. When the final reckoning came, there was practically nothing to pay.”¹⁰

But there was much ‘to pay’ at Julia's death, for his mother was too young to die and Huxley was too young to understand fate's ironic ways, so that his reaction was quite naturally a rebellion against the inevitability of death. An interesting parallel to Huxley's attitude may be found in Dylan Thomas's poem about his father's death “Do not Go Gentle into That Good Night”,¹¹ in which the poet “exhorted his dying father ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’”.¹² Premature death struck the Huxley family a second time when Aldous's favourite brother Trevenen committed suicide as a result of an extremely sensitive disposition, depression, failures and an unhappy relationship to a girl.

Huxley's youth and years of adolescence were overshadowed by personal bereavement, but Charles Holmes claims that Huxley's “period of blindness, even more than the family deaths, had left deep marks”.¹³ Huxley suffered from an inflammation of the cornea which afflicted him at the age of sixteen. This disease of the eyes called keratitis punctata not only destroyed all his hopes of a career as a writer in Aldous Huxley, but made him also isolated and vulnerable, more isolated and more vulnerable than he already was at that age as a result of his extremely sensitive disposition and his mother's death. “And of course I am also to a considerable extent a function of defective eyesight. Keratitis punctata shaped and shapes me …”,¹⁴ he wrote to his friend Naomi Mitchison. Huxley's eyesight was considerably improved when he practiced seeing according to the method of Bates, who “was never tired of insisting on a fact which is now a commonplace of psychology, namely that vision is at least fifty per cent a mental process”.¹⁵

A further source of Huxley's irony may be found in his attitude towards war, which soon changed from patriotism to fierce hatred of the horrors of war. In a letter to his brother Julian he writes on March 31st, 1916:

The longer this war goes on, the more one loathes and detests it. At the beginning I shd. have liked very much to fight: but now, if I could (having seen all the results), I think I'd be a conscientious objector, or nearly so.¹⁶

His poor eyesight prevented him, of course, from taking an active part in the war and in “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” (Limbo) he made the protagonist the conscientious objector he would have preferred to be.

Juliette Huxley, his brother's wife, is also well aware of the obvious discrepancy between the writer and the human being Aldous Huxley when she reflects that “curiously the ferocity which was often manifest in his early work was never apparent in his personal relationships, for he was the gentlest companion”.¹⁷ Doubtless she sees the reasons for his ironical tone in his short stories and early novels in these shattering experiences. “One cannot help wondering whether his achievement would have taken a different shape had Aldous not been exposed, in his early formative years, to these traumatic experiences”.¹⁸

Huxley's cynicism is directed against society in general and the human condition and its innate contradictions in particular. His eccentric characters, mainly artists and scientists, are the constant targets of his satire. “The great vice of the intellect is its total indifference to everything outside its own area of reference and this has produced the professional one-sidedness which is the prime object of Huxley's satire”.¹⁹ Northrop Frye classifies this form as “Menippean satire”:²⁰

The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior.²¹

“The short form of the Menippean satire”, Frye explains, “is usually a dialogue or a colloquy, in which the dramatic interest is in a conflict of ideas rather than of character”,²² of which Huxley's short stories are brilliant examples because the dialogues serve almost exclusively the purpose of dealing with intellectual themes and the different opinions on them.

Huxley's geniuses are all characterized by a professional one-sidedness that makes them rather helpless outside their fields of specialisation. The eminent physician Sir Watney Croker in “The Rest Cure” (Brief Candles) and the famous biologist Lord Tantamount in Point Counter Pointhave remained children at the bottom of their hearts.

In the depths of his unspecialized, unprofessional being Sir Watney was a bit of a baby himself. Too much preoccupation with the duodenum had prevented this neglected instinctive part of him from fully growing up.²³

Nevertheless, he seems quite able to organize his life, he has a professional housekeeper, gives dinner parties for a few privileged (specialists and other important people) and spoils his granddaughter Moira, who is living with him as her parents both died young. But through his lack of instinct, of feeling, through his complete ignorance of the most basic principles of educating children, he becomes indirectly also responsible for Moira's tragic death. This discrepancy between the highly developed intellect and the neglected instinctive part becomes even more obvious in Lord Edward Tantamount:

At forty Lord Edward was in all but intellect a kind of child. In the laboratory, at his desk, he was as old as science itself. But his feelings, his intuitions, his instincts were those of a little boy. Unexercised, the greater part of his spiritual being had never developed.²⁴

But like the great physicist Henry Maartens in The Genius and the Goddess, Lord Tantamount has a wife without whom he would be completely helpless, who organizes his life outside his laboratory for him. Although the ambitious physician John Tarwin in “The Rest Cure” (Brief Candles) claims to be a man of universal genius, as proud of his knowledge of cancer tumours as of his knowledge of history and art, his “appreciation of Nature and his poetical love-longings”,²⁵ he also shows the weaknesses of the Huxleyan specialist, lacking intuition in his marriage to Moira to such a degree that he is also to blame, just as her grandfather, for her suicide.

In Stürzl's opinion the reason for Huxley's one-sided portraits of scientists whose intellect is overdeveloped at the expense of the emotional part is to be found in his own family:

Wenn auch ältere Wissenschaftler Huxleys, wie etwa der Krebsforscher Tarwin in der psychologisch fein durchdachten Novelle “The Rest Cure” keineswegs vorbildhaft erscheinen und selbst in der Zeichnung der ehrwürdig ergrauten Gelehrtengestalten eine gewisse Ironie durchschimmert, so mag das daher rühren, daβ Huxley in seiner Familie in so enger Beziehung mit der Wissenschaft stand und daher die Schwächen ihrer Vertreter gründlich kennenlernen konnte.²⁶

Other eccentrics whose egoism contributes considerably to the ironical tone in Huxley's short stories are the writers Kingham in “Two or Three Graces” in the volume of the same name, Tilney in “Chawdron” and Miles Fanning in “After the Fireworks” (Brief Candles). But unsurpassed in their eccentricity and egoism, and thus depicted with greater ironic skill than any other characters of his shorter pieces, are Martha and Herbert Claxton, two hypocritical cranks, in “The Claxtons” (Brief Candles). Huxley's eccentrics suffer not only from one-sidedness as a result of over-specialisation, but also from a split personality. The division of the self, the duality of nature, is the main theme of the opening short story of Limbo because Huxley

doubtless recognized in himself, in the combination of fascination and repulsion with which he regarded his world, in the demands of flesh and spirit that warred within him, the divisions that he portrayed with higher lights in his characters.²⁷

Dick Greenow, the protagonist of “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow” (Limbo) is a Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde personality with an alter ego, a woman novelist who writes popular fiction during the night. The male part is an intellectual interested in philosophy and science, who is completely unaware of the female part in him. As long as the woman does not disturb him in his studies, he does not care at all; on the contrary, he lives happily on the profits made by her writing. The title itself is full of bitter irony, as Dick's life ends in a very tragic way. Caused by his split personality his sanity breaks down, “the two personalities have worn out the body, comedy has turned sour”.²⁸ When the woman novelist gradually becomes the dominating part and wants the vote, he is taken to a lunatic asylum, where he dies in delirium after a hunger strike. Not even the very last moments lack the irony of his tragic fate: while shouting and moving wildly with his left hand, his right hand writes, as usual, what the female part dictates him, namely that “World will always be hell”.²⁹

Some of this consciousness of duality as a tragic condition appears even in his earliest work, and in his novelle it exists as evidence of the absurdity of human destiny. In Huxley's shorter stories, there is naturally less development of character than in the novelle, and the structure tends to be episodic rather than narrative. While the stress is less on the duality of personality than on those other dualities between action and intent, between expectation and reality which are the more usual province of the ironist.³⁰

Absurdity of human destiny is the chief target of Huxley's irony in the two longer short stories “Uncle Spencer” (Little Mexican) and “Two or Three Graces” in the volume of the same name. In “Uncle Spencer”, the opening story of Little Mexican, which occupies almost half the volume, the policy of internment at the beginning of the First World War brings people of different nationalities and different social classes together in a temporary internment camp, which the German authorities have established on the top floor of the Ministry of the Interior in Brussels. Among them are Uncle Spencer, a middle-aged Englishman living in Belgium, and Monsieur Alphonse, an Indian and husband of Uncle Spencer's housekeeper's sister. Monsieur Alphonse becomes the victim of a bad joke of a journalist, a fellow-prisoner, who improvised a trial in which Monsieur Alphonse is cross-examined, found innocent and given a sheet of paper with the words ‘laissez passer’ on it, the journalist's signature and a seal. Convinced in his naiveté that the document will release him, Monsieur Alphonse is so deeply disappointed and shattered in his beliefs when it is made clear to him that everything was just a joke, that he finally dies of despair. Ironically, “on the thick red wax [of the seal] appeared the figure of a shorthorn cow with, round it, the words: ‘Pour l'amélioriation de la race bovine’”.³¹ It used to be an official seal “with which, in happier times, certain agricultural diplomas were stamped”.³² John Atkins's idea of punishment in Huxley's fiction, which “possesses a peculiar irony of its own”,³³ proves true in this novella: Monsieur Alphonse must pay with his life for his foolishness to have taken the joke seriously.

The irony of fate does not spare Uncle Spencer either: he falls in love with a fellow-prisoner, the young music-hall star Emmy Wendle. She also likes Uncle Spencer; above all she feels so safe with him “because he was, obviously, such a gentleman, because of the signs of unworldliness and mild idealism stamped all over his face”.³⁴

Before Monsieur Alphonse dies, he prophesies how long the war will last and what will become of the other prisoners and surprisingly, all prophecies are fulfilled with remarkable exactness except one. Monsieur Alphonse has foretold that Uncle Spencer's relationship with Emmy Wendle, “that would probably be impossible in peacetime”,³⁵ will end in marriage. Uncle Spencer desperately clings to this prophecy and after the war he searches for her together with his nephew, the narrator of the story, all over London without finding a trace of her. ‘ “And yet the Indian”, he murmured, “he was always right. …” And perhaps he may still be right in this. Who knows?’³⁶

Irony of fate plays also an important role in “Two or Three Graces” in the volume of the same name. Dick Wilkes, a music critic and narrator of this novella, finds it necessary to state that he “was never Grace's lover. … An ironic fate had reserved me for a less glorious part—the part, not of the lover, but of the introducer of lovers”.³⁷ “Less glorious”, because at some time of his relationship with Grace, mother of three children and wife of a most boring solicitor, he probably wanted to be her lover, and secondly, because the two love affairs which he had unconsciously and unwillingly initiated by introducing her to the painter Rodney Clegg, her first lover, and his friend Kingham, her second lover, left her extremely unhappy when these affairs ended. His own marriage, however, turns out to be extremely happy, the only happy marriage—it bears many autobiographical traits—in all of Huxley's short stories. After Grace's affair with Kingham she is so desperate that Wilkes and his wife are worried about her future.

I

[Wilkes] was wondering what would become of Grace now. Without Rodney, without Kingham, what would she be? The question propounded itself insistently. And then, all at once, the page of printed music before my eyes gave me the oracular reply. Da capo … After all, it was obvious. Da capo. John Peddley, the children, the house and almost certainly another love affair.³⁸

Everything would start again from the beginning. Grace Peddley, like Henry Hutton in “The Gioconda Smile” (Mortal Coils) belongs to those characters whom experience does not teach, who make the same mistakes again and again without gaining any insight through them. She is bored with her life, bored with her husband and wants to escape from the dullness of her home by having love affairs. But she does not realize that these affairs will end sooner or later and leave her more frustrated than she has ever been before. John Peddley, her husband, whose “genius for dulness caused him unfailingly to take an interest in the things which interested nobody else” and who “had the power of rendering the most intrinsically fascinating of subjects profoundly dull”³⁹ must endure his wife's unfaithfulness, which he does not even realize for a long time, as punishment for his insensitiveness.

Other characters who are punished for being “vicious or foolish”, “imbeciles or bores”,⁴⁰ are Henry Hutton in “The Gioconda Smile”, the painter Tillotson in “The Tillotson Banquet”, Sister Agatha in “Nuns at Luncheon” (all three in Mortal Coils) and Moira in “The Rest Cure” (Brief Candles). In these shorter pieces the source of irony lies, as already mentioned, in the dualities between action and intent, but the paradox of fate plays again an important role.

According to John Atkins Huxley's best known story “The Gioconda Smile” “depends upon clever, sometimes dazzling ironies … Huxley has transformed the ironic style of the most polished early poems into a fully disciplined, total ironic view”.⁴¹ George Woodcock understands “The Gioconda Smile” as “a story of crime and its reasons within the human heart, of the irony of motives misunderstood, of the ways in which our own actions doom us”.⁴²

Janet Spence misunderstands the intentions of the hedonist Henry Hutton, his first wife Emily does not understand the motives of his actions, and Doris, his lover and later his second wife, misunderstands him right from the beginning of their relationship, and Dr. Libbard, their doctor, understands all their motives and actions but does not interfere. The reason for his indifference and fatigue is not a lack of interest in his patients' private lives, but the fact that he “understands the ironic way things work out”⁴³ in life. George Woodcock regards Dr. Libbard as a “tired cynic”,⁴⁴ which does not seem quite justified. He is tired, too tired to care, but he is not a cynic. The reader does not know much about this minor character, nothing about any experiences in his life that might have caused this attitude of total indifference, so that he may assume that Dr. Libbard has witnessed a great deal of life's bitter ironies in his patients' lives. In the short episodes in which he makes his appearance, he is revealed as a competent physician who also shows deep psychological insight into the problems of his patients. Erwin Stürzl describes him as “angeblich einfachen Landarzt, der jedoch als allwissender Beobachter den wahren Grund ihres [Janet's] Siechtums längst geahnt hatte”.⁴⁵ He has a deep understanding for his patients, for all their weaknesses and faults, but he does not show the slightest intention of attempting to reform them. He does not even blame them because he has realized that life will take its course and man cannot do anything about it or at least very little, because everything is predestined. The experience of crime and cruelty, of guilt and despair in his profession has made him indifferent, not willing to fight against this evil. And yet his presence is a great comfort for those who need it, for Emily, Hutton's sick wife, for Janet Spence who has pangs of conscience, and for the young Doris whom he prevents from committing suicide. Huxley's great ironic skill is also revealed at the end of the short story when Dr. Libbard, the detached spectator, says during one of his frequent visits to Janet Spence:

“By the way”, he said in his soft, melancholy voice, “I suppose it was really you who poisoned Mrs. Hutton.”

Miss Spence stared at him for two or three seconds with enormous eyes, and then quietly said, “Yes”.

After that she started to cry.

“In the coffee, I suppose.”

She seemed to nod assent. Dr. Libbard took out his fountain pen, and in his neat, meticulous calligraphy wrote out a prescription for a sleeping-draught.⁴⁶

Every word is carefully chosen in these lines, the epithets, the adverbs, and the casual tone, as if they were discussing the weather and not a murder, as if this revelation did not matter at all, as if Janet Spence's confirmation of Libbard's suspicion was of no importance, did not make any difference at all. The truth has been revealed, but nothing is going to happen, nothing is going to change, perhaps because Dr. Libbard believes in the punishment by fate just as Henry Hutton feels 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. It was tit for tat, and God existed after all.⁴⁷

Or perhaps the reason is to be found in the nature of the short story itself, in the ‘slice of life story’ aspect:

Die Kurzgeschichte im allgemeinen, sicherlich aber “The Gioconda Smile”, zeigt nur ein Stück herausgerissenes Leben das hinterläβt das Bewuβtsein vom Fragmentarischen alles Menschlichen, von der Fragwürdigkeit aller menschlichen Einrichtungen, deren Vertretern—wie hier den Jüngern der Justitia—die Wahrheitsfindung letzten Endes versagt bleibt.⁴⁸

It is interesting to note that Huxley also wrote a play (The Gioconda Smile, published 1948) with the basic situation unchanged. But Dr. Libbard's role is significantly changed as he saves Hutton, in whose innocence he believes. In Woodcock's opinion “the changed role of Libbard and the contrived happy ending rot the piece of its original sombre impressiveness”.⁴⁹

The painter Tillotson in “The Tillotson Banquet” (Mortal Coils) also belongs to those Huxleyan characters who get what they deserve. The short story is mainly concerned with the ironical relationship between the artist and his work. The artist Tillotson belongs to the world of transitoriness, time does not spare him, does not make him immortal, he is subject to decay and death, whereas his work will live on generation after generation, century after century. The idea of the immortality of art as constrasted with the mortality of man is not new in literature, Shakespeare praises the immortality of poetry in his famous sonnet “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day”.⁵⁰ By chance the art critic Spode sees a marvellous painting by Tillotson in Lord Badgery's art collection and finds out that the artist must still be alive. When the Lord decides to have a whole room full of Tillotson frescoes, Spode sets out to search for the artist. He succeeds in finding him at last, but realizes immediately that the Lord's wish will remain unfulfilled: Tillotson is 93, almost blind, and lives in a basement full of beetles in a Holloway slum—a most depressing sight for the young art critic. Spode is really moved by the conditions in which the once great man lives and feels morally obliged to do something for him. A banquet is organized with “patrons and patronesses, art critics and dealers and even a few painters”⁵¹—all people who hate each other so that they will also get some ‘fun’ as reward for the money they are supposed to donate on behalf of the old painter. Pathos is added to the comic-ironical scene when Tillotson tries to make a speech and tells the sad story of his master Haydon, constantly repeating himself. Spode is well aware of the fact that ironically Tillotson's paintings were much better than his master's. After this “brief embarrassing interlude”⁵² the return to his basement in a borrowed evening suit with the “broad green ribbon of some unknown order”⁵³—he is taken home in Lord Badgery's second Rolls Royce—is even more grotesque. The 58 pounds he is presented with after the banquet will help him to survive for a short time only, nobody will look after him, and he will be doomed to oblivion again after this short interlude of his re-discovery so that the reader asks unhesitatingly, ‘What was it all for?’ The answer lies again in the irony of fate which man cannot escape from. The senile painter, “betrayed by time”,⁵⁴ is deceived by the illusion that his fame will be restored by his re-discovery, that his life will change completely, which turns out to be a mistake the moment he enters his filthy basement again after the banquet. “The story is amusing, but its humour stems from cruelty”.⁵⁵

In “The Portrait” (Little Mexican) the target of Huxley's satire is also the characters' attitude towards art. When Mr. Bigger, an art-dealer, assures an obviously rich but simple-minded customer that an Old Master is a symbol of social prestige, the customer is flattered because the other has expressed exactly what he himself has always believed—at least since he bought a Manor House which now has to be filled with pictures. Mr. Bigger, being a clever business man, pretends to appreciate the opportunity of being able to discuss painting with an expert, feeling delighted that his ironic remarks are taken seriously by the customer. The story ends with the owner of the Manor House buying a portrait of an Italian Lady of the eighteenth century whose life had been told to him by the art dealer to rouse his interest. The trick has worked, the customer pays almost £ 700 for an imitation Mr. Bigger got for £ 25, not without asking the dealer for a typewritten copy of the story to tell his guests at dinner.

In the final dialogue between Mr. Bigger and the young painter who does the imitations for him Huxley's comic and mocking irony gives way to a more serious irony revealing the hard life of young painters and the unscrupulousness of businessmen. Mr. Bigger gives the young man, who is short of money, generously £ five more than they had agreed for this portrait, for which he himself got nearly £ 700, and the painter does not know how to thank the art-dealer for his benevolence.

Cruel and painful irony is also used in “Nuns at Luncheon” (Mortal Coils), in which the punishment of Sister Agatha at the end of the story has a macabre note. The title itself is full of irony, as the story of poor Sister Agatha is told to the narrator by Miss Penny, a woman journalist, over lunch in a London restaurant. The fact that Miss Penny, “an example of grotesque irony herself”,⁵⁶ who is always wearing “massive and improbable jewellery”⁵⁷ (e.g. rattling corpses hanging in chains as earrings) provides an ironic frame for the ironies in the nun's life: “the irony of an insensitive person describing pain”.⁵⁸ It is the pain of a disgraced nun who is observed by Miss Penny, then a patient in the German hospital where the nun is working, performing no longer the duties of a nurse, but those of a hospital charwoman, dressed in an overall, with a handkerchief instead of a winged coif on her shaven head and without teeth. Eager to get the whole story, Miss Penny sets out to interview the girl's family as soon as she is well again.

Sister Agatha, the efficient nurse who has proved extremely successful at converting patients, also looks after criminals who need medical treatment in hospital. So the young Italian thief Kuno is put into her special charge, in the hope that he will be reformed. But Kuno soon sees his chance and escapes together with the naive Sister Agatha in nuns' clothes, which she has stolen for him. Having still only his salvation in mind she follows him to a shepherd's hut, where Kuno seduces her and robs her of her set of golden teeth. Ironically she has not realized that her talent of conversion does not work with him, that it is he who has done the converting. In her zeal to achieve his salvation she even persuades herself that theft is justified, when it helps to save a person's soul, according to the proverb that the end justifies the means. But there are of course moments when she is overcome by doubt and pangs of conscience, conveyed with brilliant irony by Aldous Huxley. George Woodcock regards her as not being “proof against temptation”, she had been “sexually assaulted”⁵⁹ by her father's old friend, Professor Engelmann, when she was a young girl. And her set of “imperishable teeth, all gold and ivory”,⁶⁰ of which she is forcibly deprived by the unscrupulous Kuno, provides the story also with a peculiar irony, as she had got the new set of teeth after losing her own through neglect after her Aunt Bertha's death. She believed she had to do penance for her feeling of relief at the death of poor Aunt Bertha, whom she had hated ever since she kept house for her father after her mother had died.

After her seduction she is forced to attend her own burial and walk as a dead person among the living as punishment for her most shameful behaviour. “The picture is ordinary”, Laurence Brander says of this short story, “but the frame is glittering”.⁶¹ Charles Holmes claims that the inhumanity in “Nuns at Luncheon” goes so far that it “apparently left Huxley with misgivings”.⁶²

Moira in “The Rest Cure” (Brief Candles) is, like Monsieur Alphonse in “Uncle Spencer” (Little Mexican), a victim of her own foolishness and of fate's irony: she has to pay with her life for a series of mistakes she makes and others make, Sir Watney Croker, her grandfather, John Tarwin, her husband, and her Italian lover Tonino. Although Sir Watney loves and spoils her, she is not more than a hobby for him, like fly-fishing and metaphysics. Even when she grew up he wanted her to preserve her childishness, for he himself, because of his specialisation, had remained a child and could only love the child in her. Moira marries John Tarwin, the promising research scientist and youngest member of her grandfather's circle of specialists to escape the life with Sir Watney and his veteran geniuses. Travelling round the world with John Tarwin seemed so much preferable to her than the life she was leading. Naive as she was, she thought that all these smaller reasons added together would be the equivalent of the one big reason, the one cògent reason: love. Moira realizes very soon that she ought not to have married him. After a nervous breakdown—the result of her unbearable marriage—she goes to Florence for a rest cure upon her doctor's advice and falls in love with Tonino, a young Italian, who exploits her financially. After a quarrel, caused by Moira's jealousy, her purse, containing a considerable amount of money, has disappeared. Suddenly her husband's verdict of Tonino, whom he called “a black-haired pimp from the slums of Naples”,⁶³ is brought home to her. She suspects Tonino of having stolen her purse and it becomes clear to her that her husband has always been right about Tonino's character. She cannot bear life any longer with this conviction and kills herself in despair. Huxley ends the story with a “last sardonic twist”,⁶⁴ an effect of surprise:

The sound of a shot brought them running upstairs. They found her lying face downward across the bed, still faintly breathing. But she was dead before the doctor could come up from the town, On a bed standing, as hers stood, in an alcove, it was difficult to lay out the body. When they moved it out of its recess, there was the sound of a hard, rather metallic fall. Assunta [the maid] bent down to see what had dropped. “It's her purse”, she said. “It must have gut stuck between the bed and the wall.”⁶⁵

Moira has again been mistaken, but this time the mistake is fatal. She has been trapped by her naiveté, by her folly, and by her desires. “The Rest Cure” is one of Huxley's most interesting short stories, as the author's deep psychological insight is brilliantly mingled with his great ironic skill.

In “Chawdron” (Brief Candles) chance again plays havoc with the characters' lives. “Huxley has always been impressed by the importance of accident in human affairs”,⁶⁶ John Atkins maintains. Chawdron, a rich business man, has a weakness for young girls whose only concern is to exploit him. The first to profit from this weakness is Charlotte, a cellist, who knows exactly how to treat Chawdron in order to get what she wants. But unfortunately she makes the mistake of going to America for a concert tour for two months and immediately another young girl, Maggie Spindell, takes her place. She is the governess type and “the unlikeliest femme fatale you ever saw”, whose “only visible merit was that she was young”,⁶⁷ says Chawdron's friend Tilney maliciously. Providence had played an important role in their relationship right from the beginning. If both his secretaries had not fallen ill on the same day—“what a fateful thing to happen!”⁶⁸—Chawdron would never have met his little Fairy, as he calls Maggie Spindell. The secretaries had strict orders to deal with all kinds of begging letters summarily, but as Providence had given both private secretaries the flu Chawdron read the letters himself—the third being by the Fairy. What she wrote impressed him so much that he gave her an appointment and she “came, saw, and conquered”.⁶⁹ From the moment the Fairy lives in Chawdron's house as his librarian—she is always anxious to be regarded as such—she develops an air of hypocritical spirituality that is only surpassed by Martha Claxton's in the next story of the volume. As the Fairy believes that the spirit of love is incompatible with the eating of meat, she tries to eat as little as possible by means of auto-suggestion. The consequence of her asceticism is naturally a constant bad state of health and “touched by her imagination, the headaches became mystic” so that she died “regularly every Tuesday and Friday”.⁷⁰ Her predecessor's mistake had been the concert tour to the United States already mentioned, the Fairy's mistake is that she “retired to the mystic death bed once too often”,⁷¹ as Tilney again maliciously but brilliantly explains to the narrator. Her pretensions have become true at last and she really dies, another victim betrayed by her own nature and fate.

As in “The Tillotson Banquet” (Mortal Coils), irony is also used to describe the relationship of an artist to his work, in this case of the writer Tilney. Tilney is a friend of Chawdron, but their relationship is a parasitical one, the rich business man Chawdron wants fame, wants his “little niche in the literary histories”,⁷² and the young writer needs money—so he writes Chawdron's autobiography and the demands of both men are met. But Tilney soon regrets having sold his talent, having betrayed himself:

“And the absurd, ironical thing”, he continued, “is that the one really good piece of work I ever did is another man's autobiography. I could never prove my authorship even if I wanted to. Old Chawdron was very careful to destroy all the evidences of the crime. The business arrangements were all verbal. No documents of any kind. And the manuscript, my manuscript—he bought it off me. It's burnt”.⁷³

He knows that it is his fault, that nobody else is to blame, because it was a mutual agreement; but the realisation that he has most probably also sold his ‘own little niche’ with his manuscript is very bitter for him.

Hypocritical spirituality depicted with great ironic skill is also the main theme of the short story “The Claxtons” in the same volume. Already the opening statement reveals the main characters' eccentricity with a brilliantly mocking tone:

In their little house on the common, how beautifully the Claxtons lived, how spiritually. Even the cat was a vegetarian—at any rate officially—even the cat.⁷⁴

But the reader is soon confronted with the problems caused by false spirituality and Huxley is always ready to uncover and attack hypocrisy wherever he finds it. In John Kooistra's opinion

“The Claxtons” is a model of good writing: the key in which it has been conceived is unvariedly sustained throughout its forty pages, the satire never changes its tone. The principles are dealt with devastating continuity, not once relieved by a walloping sledge-hammer blow.⁷⁵

Another interesting source of irony in this short story is the familiar conflict between body and mind. Joseph Bentley maintains that Huxley's “novels are filled with passages in which the anatomical, scientific, or subtly scatological image intrudes into a context of romance, spirituality, or aesthetic high seriousness”,⁷⁶ a fact that can also be applied to some of his short stories. Like Maggie Spindell in “Chawdron”, Herbert Claxton suffers from constipation, and the context in which Huxley mentions this fact is most striking: while Herbert's daughter Sylvia is playing Chopin's Valse in D flat, he is sitting on the stump of a tree doing breathing exercises for his constipation. Bentley calls this method ‘semantic gravitation’, which he explains as follows:

The presence of the elements with low connotation creates a gravitational pressure pulling the high elements downward and thereby functions satirically.⁷⁷

This device is also used in the description of Miss Spindell in “Chawdron”, whose “spiritual look in her eyes”⁷⁸ undoubtedly comes from uncorrected myopia, from headaches and chronic constipation, thus contributing to the ironic mood of the short story.

Irony of a lyrical quality is used in the short story “Green Tunnels” in the volume Mortal Coils. The lyrical element lies in the romantic dreams of a young girl surrounded by old, lifeless and boring people, her parents and Mr. and Mrs. Topes, who are living in Italy as so many Huxleyan characters. The beauty of the landscape is ironically contrasted with the dull and boring atmosphere in the house so that Barbara's only wish is to escape from this life which is only an endless succession of meals and discussions of art which do not interest her at all. She tries to avoid reality by fleeing into a world of fantasy and imagination which her elders have no access to.

In “Green Tunnels” Huxley also criticizes the characters' endeavour to preserve their status in a foreign country. “In India we always made a point of being properly and adequately dressed. An Englishwoman must keep up her position with natives, and to all intents and purposes the Italians are natives”,⁷⁹ says Mrs. Topes. And she decides to take Italian lessons to be able to talk to the servants—apparently for no other reasons—, because “One must never be ridiculous before servants”,⁸⁰ and give them orders from the writing table without turning round. So it is not surprising that even young Barbara, brought up never to forget her position, doubts the correctness of her manners on the beach:

Barbara waved her hand, then thought that the gesture had been a little too familiar … and added the corrective of a stiff bow.⁸¹

In George Woodcock's opinion “Green Tunnels” is a “masterpiece in its mingling of multiple ironies with a lyrical tenderness rare in Huxley's work”.⁸²

There is always the hope in Huxley's work that a more desirable way of life can be found, that the search for this better life will not be in vain. “At no stage was Huxley's satire intended to be merely destructive. It was meant as a corrective, or perhaps even more as a way of seeking and showing truth”.⁸³

Notes

1. Peter Bowering, Aldous Huxley. A Study of the Major Novels, London: Athlone Press, 1968, p. 213.

2. Ibid., p. 214.

3. Ibid., p. 230.

4. John Atkins, Aldous Huxley. A Literary Study, London: Calder and Boyars, 1956, p. vii.

5. Julian Huxley, ed., Aldous Huxley 1894-1963. A Memorial Volume, London: Chatto & Windus, 1965, p. 116.

6. Ibid., p. 57.

7. Ibid., p. 123.

8. George Woodcock, Dawn and the Darkest Hour. A Study of Aldous Huxley, London: Faber & Faber, 1972, p. 37.

9. Ibid., p. 40.

10. Aldous Huxley, The Genius and the Goddess, London: Chatto & Windus, 1955, pp. 10f.

11. Dylan Thomas, “Do not Go Gentle into That Good Night”, in: Dylan Thomas: The Poems, ed. by Daniel Jones, London: Dent & Sons, 1974 (first publ. 1971), pp. 207f.

12. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 40.

13. Charles Holmes, Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality, Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1970, p. 5.

14. Grover Smith, ed., Letters of Aldous Huxley, London: Chatto & Windus, 1969, p. 373.

15. Laura Archera Huxley, This Timeless Moment, London: Chatto & Windus, 1969, p. 59.

16. Grover Smith, ed., op. cit., p. 97.

17. Julian Huxley, ed., op. cit., p. 42.

18. Julian Huxley, ed., op. cit., p. 42.

19. Peter Bowering, op. cit., p. 10.

20. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 309.

21. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 309.

22. Ibid., p. 310.

23. Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles. Stories, London: Chatto & Windus, 1930, p. 62.

24. Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, London: Chatto & Windus, 1963 (first published 1928), p. 25.

25. Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles, p. 65.

26. Erwin Stürzl, “Aldous Huxley. Zeitgebundenheit und Zeitlosigkeit seines Werkes”, in: Stimmen der Zeit, Monatsschrift für das Geistesleben der Gegenwart, April 1955, Heft 7, Band 156, p. 53.

27. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 66.

28. Laurence Brander, Aldous Huxley. A Critical Study, London: Hart Davis, 1969, p. 45.

29. Aldous Huxley, Limbo, London: Chatto & Windus, 1920, p. 110.

30. George Woodcock, op. cit., pp. 67f.

31. Aldous Huxley, Little Mexican and Other Stories, London: Chatto & Windus, 1968 (first published 1924), p. 92.

32. Aldous Huxley, Little Mexican and Other Stories, London: Chatto & Windus, 1968 (first published 1924), p. 92.

33. John Atkins, op. cit., p. 91.

34. Aldous Huxley, Little Mexican, p. 112.

35. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 112.

36. Aldous Huxley, Little Mexican, p. 154.

37. Aldous Huxley, Two or Three Graces and Other Stories, New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926, p. 72.

38. Ibid., p. 217.

39. Ibid., p. 32.

40. John Atkins, op. cit., p. 91.

41. Ibid., p. 32.

42. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 89.

43. Charles Holmes, op. cit., p. 34.

44. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 89.

45. Erwin Stürzl, “Huxley. The Gioconda Smile”, in: Die englische Kurzgeschichte, hrsg. v. Karlheinz Göller und Gerhard Hoffmann, Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1973, p. 233.

46. Aldous Huxley, Mortal Coils and Other Stories, London: Chatto & Windus, 1971 (first published. 1922), p. 62.

47. Ibid., p. 58.

48. Erwin Stürzl, “Huxley. ‘The Gioconda Smile’”, p. 234.

49. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 91.

50. William Shakespeare, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day”, in: Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. by W. G. Ingram, London: Univ. of London Press, 1964, p. 45.

51. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 92.

52. Ibid., p. 93.

53. Aldous Huxley, Mortal Coils, p. 145.

54. Laurence Brander, op. cit., p. 49.

55. John Atkins, op. cit., p. 91.

56. Charles Holmes, op. cit., p. 35.

57. Aldous Huxley, Mortal Coils, p. 201.

58. Charles Holmes, op. cit., p. 35.

59. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 95.

60. Aldous Huxley, Mortal Coils, p. 216.

61. Laurence Brander, op. cit., p. 49.

62. Charles Holmes, op. cit., p. 35.

63. Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles, p. 96.

64. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 165.

65. Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles, p. 77.

66. John Atkins, op. cit., p. 92.

67. Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles, p. 25.

68. Ibid., p. 26.

69. Ibid., p. 27.

70. Ibid., p. 42.

71. Ibid., p. 57.

72. Ibid., p. 11.

73. Ibid., p. 9.

74. Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles, p. 116.

75. J. Kooistra, “Aldous Huxley”, in: English Studies, Vol. XIII, Oct. 1931, p. 167.

76. Joseph Bentley, “Semantic Gravitation. An Essay on Satiric Reduction”, in: Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. XXX, 1, March 1969, p. 5.

77. Ibid., p. 7.

78. Aldous Huxley, Brief Candles, p. 42.

79. Aldous Huxley, Mortal Coils, p. 174.

80. Ibid., p. 187.

81. Ibid., p. 180.

82. George Woodcock, op. cit., p. 95.

83. Ibid., p. 63.

Works Cited

Atkins, John, Aldous Huxley. A Literary Study, Calder and Boyars, 1956.

Bentley, Joseph, “Semantic Gravitation. An Essay on Satiric Reduction”, in: Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. XXX, 1, 1969, p. 3-19.

Bowering, Peter, Aldous Huxley.A Study of the Major Novels, London: Athlone Press, 1968.

Brander, Laurence, Aldous Huxley. A Critical Study, London: Hart Davis, 1969.

Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Holmes, Charles, Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality, Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1970.

Huxley, Aldous, Limbo, London: Chatto & Windus, 1920.

———. Mortal Coils and Other Stories, London: Chatto & Windus, 1971 (first published 1922).

———. Little Mexican and Other Stories, London: Chatto & Windus, 1968 (first published 1924).

———. Two or Three Graces and Other Stories, New York: George H. Doran Company, 1926.

———. Point Counter Point, London: Chatto & Windus, 1963 (first publlished 1928).

———. Brief Candles. Stories, London: Chatto & Windus, 1930.

———. The Genius and the Goddess, London: Chatto & Windus, 1955.

Huxley, Julian, ed., Aldous Huxley 1894-1963. A Memorial Volume, London: Chatto & Windus, 1965.

Huxley, Laura Archera, This Timeless Moment, London: Chatto & Windus, 1969.

Kooistra, J., “Aldous Huxley”, in: English Studies, Vol. XIII, Oct. 1931, p. 161-175.

Shakespeare, William, “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day”, in: Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. by W. G. Ingram, London: Univ. of London Press, 1964.

Smith, Grover, ed., Letters of Aldous Huxley, London: Chatto & Windus, 1969.

Stürzl, Erwin, “Aldous Huxley. Zeitgebundenhe it und Zeitlosigke it seines Werkes”, in: Stimmen der Zeit, Monatsschrift für das Geistesleben der Gegenwart, April 1955, Heft 7, Band 156, p. 49-59.

———. “Huxley. The Gioconda Smile”, in: Die englische Kurzgeschichte, hrsg. v. Karlheinz Göller und Gerhard Hoffmann, Düsseldorf: Bagel, 1973, p. 225-234.

Thomas, Dylan, “Do not Gentle into That Good Night”, in: Dylan Thomas: The Poems, ed. by Daniel Jones, London: Dent & Sons, 1974 (first publ. 1971).

Woodcock, George, Dawn and the Darkest Hour. A Study of Aldous Huxley, London: Faber & Faber, 1972.