illustrated portrait of English author Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley

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Mellifluous Educator

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In the following review of Collected Short Stories, Pritchett contends that the short story form was inadequate for Huxley's “great scoldings.”
SOURCE: “Mellifluous Educator,” in The New Statesman and Nation, Vol. LIII, No. 1371, June 22, 1957, p. 814.

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 people, he talked them out of life into limbo and, since he was astute enough to know what he was doing, Limbo was the title of his first book of short stories. They are the hors d'oeuvre of a prolonged cannibal feast.

It is thirty-four years since the publication of Limbo and now we have the Collected Stories of his lifetime. They belong mainly to a period now remote: the last age of rich old hedonists, businessmen (vulgar), intellectuals (incompetent in love), savage hostesses, grumpy artists. The old educated class is seen breaking with Victorian commitment as it loses its sons or its property, and ascending into that captious island of Laputa which floated in sunny detachment above Western Europe between the wars. As a writer Mr. Huxley has always been proficient in every genre he undertook, but it would not be just to judge him by these shorter pieces. He needed space for the great scoldings, for if you hate life it is best to hate it in a big way. He needed more room for the horrors, the savageries; more room for the kinder and learned comedies. In the very short stories—I exclude his nouvelles—his intellect turns out people like skinned rabbits. They are either not worth his trouble or one resents that his brain has reduced their worth. In general his stories are not about people and situations; they are talk about people in relation to ideas that appear to have been set up in order to snub them. It's when the people seem equal to the ideas that the good stories emerge; in the bizarre and tragic “Sir Hercules,” in the sinister “Gioconda Smile,” in a sharp light thing like “Half Holiday,” the geniality of “Little Mexican,” one of the rare life-loving tales, in “The Rest Cure,” a triumph over the talker, and in the pitying tale of “Young Archimedes.” Here the driving voice abates and the preacher's chastisements are softened. A very good book.

In the other satires one is sooner or later aware of Mr. Huxley's weariness of his own brain. We cannot separate ideas and people; and there is a disagreeable disparity between the cleverness of the commentary and the banality of his realism. No one drops so surprisingly into cliché when describing the ordinary run of feeling. His lovers speak out of the pages of magazines. Mr. Huxley is self-conscious enough to be uncomfortable about the clichés. After all, are not all the valued human feelings clichés and are they the worse for that? The answer surely is that, to the artist, they are not clichés. It looks as though Mr. Huxley was frantic for novelty when he was tired. In the end it has been the accumulation of novel ideas, once so golden, that have now become heavy as lead in these comedies of displeasure.

One excellent story—“Chawdron”—stands out as a remarkable example of a writer's ability to use all his powers. It is at once a story of emotional nausea and a story of talking about it. The influence of Lawrence can be felt here. Lawrence was a master of magnetism in the short story. He forced his characters and their situations to a standstill, while he whipped them by repetitive phrases into greater intensity. Without passion or the poetic imagination, the method becomes merely frenzied and that is Mr. Huxley's case; but the genial, broken-down writer who has talked his talents away redeems him. “Hogwash” is his word for the emotions of the tycoon he is describing. Hogwash, hogwash, hogwash, he repeats throughout, in all varieties of scorn known to a clever man. The effect is funny, cruel, devastating, indignant and dismissive. And the fact that the talker himself, who knows all the beauties and delinquencies of talk, is the prisoner of an old housekeeper who comes in and out contemptuously, without saying a word, adds the final macabre commentary. I have mentioned this Jamesian masterpiece also because it is an example of a story which could hardly now be written. The subject is good enough; the financial chimpanzee who at fifty falls in love with a pious baby-bitch who calls him Nunky and is herself called Fairy by him—that is irresistible. By embedding this in a lot of clever theorising, by working in the usual art notes on St. Catherine of Siena, Carlo Dolci, Rowlandson, Podsnap, Othello and Jesus, the characters are properly snubbed and we are skilfully given an intellectual comedy—but not the comédie humaine. This is the kind of tale which is now dealt with directly. We write the dialogue, describe the moves; and being up against the characters themselves and not a sexual theory, we find the situation richer and more alarming. We would see Chawdron corrupting the educated writer. We would see Fairy hating him. We would laugh more or be more terrified. We would have lost educated explanation and its clever footpaths along the precipices of life; we would have lost talk and gained the explicit. But there it is: for better or worse, Mr. Huxley has always been the artist-educator, the preaching connoisseur who finds his stern text in our spiritual bric à brac, the illusions and novelties of belief.

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