Aldous Huxley

Donald Watt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136209765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literarische Sammlungen

This set comprises forty volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.
This second set compliments the first sixty-eight volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

1. Virginia Woolf, unsigned notice of The Defeat of Youth in TLS

10 October 1918, p. 477

Among the earliest notices of Huxley's work were those in TLS, which said his first book, The Burning Wheel, revealed ‘considerable literary talent,’ but advised he should give up ‘grinding dark brooding thoughts into tortured expression’ (5 October 1916, p. 479). Huxley found the TLS review of this first book ‘pleasantly offensive,’ and the one in the Morning Post quite pleasing: ‘They make me out very distinguished. Don't they?’ (B, I, p. 68).

ES (Item 1242) attributes the present notice to Virginia Woolf (see No. 2 for a biographical note). Woolf has here been discussing Muriel Stuart's The Cockpit of Idols, which she reviews along with Huxley's book, Edith Sitwell's Clowns’ Houses, and an anthology of recent poetry.

The connexion between Miss Stuart and Mr. Huxley is the obvious one that they have nothing in common. The one is strong precisely where the other is weak. Miss Stuart has too many ideas and emotions, and is too careless as to what she does with them. But after reading the first few poems in Mr. Huxley's little book it is clear that any idea or emotion that comes to him has the best possible chance of surviving beautifully. The criticism implied is, of course, that he is better equipped with the vocabulary of a poet than with the inspiration of a poet. He writes about the things he has thought and seen rather than about things he has felt, and in rendering them he shows a facility which begins by charming, but ends, as verse that relies so much upon happy adjectives is always apt to end, by running fluently to waste. The advice that one is inclined to give to an urbane and cultivated writer of his quality is to cease to use poetry in the serious, traditional manner, and to use it instead to explore those fantastic, amusing, or ironical aspects of life which can only be expressed by people of high technical skill and great sensibility.

[Refers to ‘Social Amenities,’ ‘Topiary,’ and ‘On the ‘Bus’ as ‘quite capable of doing this’]

LIMBO

February 1920

2. Virginia Woolf, unsigned review in TLS

5 February 1920, p. 83

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), novelist and critic in the first rank of English women authors, wife of Leonard Woolf (see No. 31), and a central figure of the Bloomsbury Group. In her Writer's Diary Woolf expresses a distinct aversion to Huxley's fiction (Introduction, p. 13). For Huxley's views of Woolf's works, see PR, p. 208.

ES attributes the review to Woolf (Item 1258). The title of the review, ‘Cleverness and Youth,’ suggests an ambivalence, in complimenting Huxley for his cleverness, which recurs often in later responses to his writing. See Introduction, p. 7.

We know for ourselves that Mr. Huxley is very clever; and his publisher informs us that he is young. For both these reasons his reviewers may pay him the compliment, and give themselves the pleasure, of taking him seriously. Instead, that is, of saying that there are seven short stories in Limbo which are all clever, amusing, and well written, and recommending the public to read them, as we can conscientiously do, we are tempted to state, what it is so seldom necessary to state, that short stories can be a great deal more than clever, amusing, and well written. There is another adjective—’interesting’; that is the adjective we should like to bestow upon Mr. Huxley's short stories, for it is the best worth having.

The difficulty is that in order to be interesting, as we define the word, Mr. Huxley would have to forgo, or go beyond, many of the gifts which nature and fortune have put in his way.

[Discusses Huxley's wide reading and intellectualism]

We hold no brief for the simple peasant. Yet we cannot help thinking that it is well to leave a mind under a counterpane of moderate ignorance; it grows more slowly, but being more slowly exposed it avoids that excessive surface sensibility which wastes the strength of the precocious. Again, to be aware too soon of sophisticated society makes it tempting for a young writer to use his first darts in attack and derision. If he is as dexterous and as straightforward as Mr. Huxley the attack is an inspiriting spectacle. Humbug seems to collapse, pretension to be pricked.

[Cites examples of Huxley's ability to entertain: the description of Mr Glottenham, pp. 40–1, and the dinner with Mr Crawister, p. 18]

It is amusing; it is perhaps true; and yet as one reads one cannot help exclaiming that English society is making it impossible to produce English literature. Write about boots, one is inclined to say, about coins, sea anemones, crayfish—but, as you value your life, steer clear of the English upper middle classes. They lie, apparently, so open to attack, they are undoubtedly such an obstacle to vision; but their openness is the openness of the tiger's jaw which ends by swallowing you whole and leaving no trace. ‘Happily Ever After’ is but another proof of their rapacity. Mr. Huxley sets out to kill a great many despicable conventions, and to attack a large and disgusting schoolmaster. But having laughed at the conventions and the schoolmaster, they suddenly turn the tables on him. Now, they seem to say, talk about something that you do believe in—and behold, Mr. Huxley can only stammer. Love and death, like damp fireworks, refuse to flare up in such an atmosphere, and as usual the upper middle classes escape unhurt.

But with Mr. Huxley it is only necessary to wait a little longer; and we can wait without anxiety. He is not merely clever, well read, and honest, but when he forgets himself he discovers very charming things.

[Quotes the descriptions of fashion plates and the piano from ‘The Bookshop,’ pp. 261–2]

Emboldened by our pleasure in such good writing as this, we would admonish Mr. Huxley to leave social satire alone, to delete the word ‘incredibly’ from his pages, and to write about interesting things that he likes. Nobody ever takes advice; even so, we hazard the opinion that Mr. Huxley's next book will be not only clever, amusing, and well written, but interesting into the bargain.

3. Herbert S. Gorman, review in New Republic

13 October 1920, xxiv, pp. 172–3

Signed ‘H.S.G.’, quite likely Herbert [Sherman] Gorman (1893–1954), journalist, critic, biographer and editor. Gorman's review characterizes the enthusiastic American reception of Limbo.

Mr. Aldous Huxley, a new and extremely prepossessing English writer, has just been introduced to America with two volumes, Limbo, a collection of prose sketches written in a vein that is, to say the least, individual, and Leda and Other Poems, containing verse that smacks mightily of Mr. T. S. Eliot, and yet has an intriguing appeal quite its own. It was, I believe, in 1916 that Mr. Huxley's first book, The Burning Wheel, was published. A slender volume of verse, bound in paper covers and forming a link in Blackwell's Adventurers All Series, it hardly awakened more than a passing curiosity. But there was more in it than dexterous rhyming. The influence of Jules Laforgue was faintly manifesting itself; a precocious sophistication made itself dimly evident. Mr. Huxley has progressed as a poet since those days.

But it is the prose of Mr. Huxley that has suddenly projected him into the English periodicals and induced an American publisher¹ to bring him out over here. The seven pieces that make up the book (not all of them may be defined by the term ‘stories’) form a delectable ensemble. Mr. Huxley possesses the insolence of youth and a sprightly sophistication that can hardly be called disillusioned, although it approaches cynicism with frequency. It is a fastidious cynicism, though. If he suggests the pessimist at times we may be very sure that it is not the false pessimism of youth. He does not fly to extremes. He has not suddenly discovered that art is short and time is fleeting or that there are more people in the world intent upon bread and cheese than lyrics and lilies. Mr. Huxley is well-bred, without suggesting it. He is debonair without any flamboyant swashbuckling. He is precise in his prose and irresistible with his epigrams. Above all, he is the City. It is the sophistication of Hyde Park that he emanates.

So I come to the one English writer with whom he appears to have a certain kinship. Behind the pages of Limbo (at least for me) glimmers the nonchalant phantom of Max Beerbohm. The incomparable Max, a trifle weary, yawning a bit obviously, swings a gallant cane behind the ‘Farcical History of Richard Greenow’ and ‘Happily Ever After.’ He even appears, perhaps, a trifle more poetical than his wont, in ‘Cynthia’ and ‘The Bookshop.’ This may be doing a grave injustice to both Max Beerbohm and Mr. Huxley, and perhaps it is wise to insist that I am not attempting to postulate that the younger writer is at all aping his elders. It is merely a kinship of mood, a likeness of general attributes. ‘The Farcical History of Richard Greenow’ might have fitted into Max Beerbohm's Seven Men without disordering that adorable volume in the least, but it is equally native to Limbo. Both writers are of the City. Both of them draw their characters with smartness and with individuality. Both of them display a sophistication that is beyond their years. Alas, we may not say this of Max now, but when we consider Max Beerbohm collecting his half dozen essays into a slender volume, writing a farewell preface to them, and publishing them as his Collected Works, while he was still in his early twenties, we smile and attribute his gesture to the insolence of youth. The same insolence hovers over Limbo. If anything Mr. Huxley is a bit more poetic. He is urbane but not to the extent of Max Beerbohm. Neither is his gift of humor so magical, so consistent. Mr. Huxley likes to be serious at times. His sophistication does not suggest the playfulness that is evident in Mr. Beerbohm's work.

The two pieces in Limbo that appear to stand out most startlingly are ‘The Farcical History of Richard Greenow’ and ‘Happily Ever After.’ Both of them are animated by a worldliness that is more implicit than expressed. Richard Greenow possesses a dual mind. Mentally he is an hermaphrodite. The figure of this man changes rapidly from light comedy to tragic implications. The crashing down of the war upon England eventually destroys him. When we consider Richard, part of whose time is taken up living the life of a radical editor of a paper opposing the war and the rest of it existing as a lady novelist writing the most obvious patriotic war-mush, we must smile, but behind the incongruous theme is a passionate and heart-rending situation. Even in his death-throes Richard's dual nature is fighting against itself.

‘Happily Ever After’ is obviously cynical. It is satire handled with a deftness that is admirable. There is a truthfulness about the figure of Marjorie that ought to hurt. Perhaps this story is the best in point of character drawing, for there is a roundness about all the figures that move through its action. They suggest reality in a vivid and startling fashion. If we are to consider Marjorie being comforted in the arms of George when she hears of Guy's death in battle too seriously, we are apt to grow a bit cynical about the durability of love.

[Quotes pp. 190–1]

While ‘Cynthia’ and ‘The Bookshop’ and ‘Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers’ may be merely mentioned as delicious trifles or tours de force, two other sketches in the book must be especially noted. ‘Happy Families,’ written in dialogue form, possesses a symbolical significance that sets it a bit apart from the other efforts. By means of certain figures the hidden traits of the two principal personages are presented. Thus a slobbering Negro who keeps interjecting himself into the action personifies the man's primitive instincts.

‘The Death of Lully,’ which concludes the book, may be suspected of being an old legend or at least having its derivative inspiration in some old story. It is not Raimon Lully, the contemporary of Molière that is meant, but a religiast of the Mediterranean. Here again there is symbolism, and a surprisingly obvious symbolism for Mr. Huxley.

Limbo, taken as a whole, suggests a fine maturity in a writer so young. Mr. Huxley has fulfilled the promise that he intimated in his earlier books to the few who knew him, and demonstrated that he is one of the finest writers of prose in England today. He is finished and fastidious, sophisticated and diverting, an authentic figure of some actual importance and with many potentialities. That he must take a decided place among the younger contemporary writers in England is without doubt.

¹ George Doran in New York. Frank Swinnerton called Limbo to Doran's attention: ‘… I suggested to Doran that if he wanted to cultivate young talent, as he did, he should take the American rights.’ Figures in the Foreground, p. 188.

LEDA

May 1920

4. Desmond MacCarthy, review in New Statesman

4 September 1920, xv, pp. 595–7

For a biographical note see No. 57.

Mr. Aldous Huxley is one of the most interesting of the new poets, partly because he has already written good poetry, but chiefly because he is a finer, richer poet in the making. But the emotional and intellectual elements in him have not yet been fused together into a malleable compound fit for the handling of the subjects which most often attract him. It naturally follows that it is the expression of an emotional or intellectual discord that he is most often prompted to express in verse. This is a characteristic common to many of the new poets. They can point to examples in past literature in which discords of that kind have flowered in poems of high excellence; the immense admiration which Donne's poems excite today springs from the need to point out to the world that the thing can indeed be done.

[Discusses Donne ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
• Title Page
• Copyright
• General Editor's Preface
• Contents
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• A LIST OF HUXLEY'S MAJOR WORKS
• INTRODUCTION
• NOTE ON THE TEXT
• 1 VIRGINIA WOOLF, unsigned notice of The Defeat of Youth in TLS, October 1918
• Limbo (1920)
• Leda (1920)
• Crome Yellow (1921)
• Antic Hay (1923)
• Those Barren Leaves (1925)
• Two or Three Graces (1926)
• Jesting Pilate (1926)
• Point Counter Point (1928)
• Do What You Will (1929)
• Music at Night (1931)
• Brave New World (1932)
• Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
• Ends and Means (1937)
• After Many a Summe0r (1939)
• Grey Eminence (1941)
• Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
• The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
• Ape and Essence (1948)
• The Devils of Loudun (1952)
• The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
• Collected Essays (1959)
• Island (1962)
• APPENDIX I References for the Introduction
• APPENDIX II Translations
• APPENDIX III Collected works sales
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX