I just finished Aldous Huxley's second novel, Antic Hay (1923). Early last year I read his first, Crome Yellow (1921), which seemed much more conventional. Although it introduced some typical Huxley themes, it was really a sort of country house novel. Antic Hay, on the other hand, moves into an even more satiric vein and explores some of the aimlessness and disillusionment common to the generation that had just experienced the trauma of the first world war. The characters are a mad array of artists and writers who seem all to be attracted to a certain somewhat bored and beautiful young woman (Myra Viveash) who is seeking diversion from the loss of her lover, a young soldier killed in the war.
The book starts rather slowly, as though Huxley isn't quite certain where he's going, following the flight of the central character, Theodore Gumbril Junior, as he leaves behind his teaching job and returns home to London to live with his father and seek his fortune as an inventor of inflatable underwear, an idea that came to him while seated on a hard pew in the school chapel. Huxley obviously thinks this is a very funny idea, and pursues it throughout the novel as Theodore sets about having his tailor design a prototype and then goes in search of capital to produce his product in quantity.
Fortunately, there's more to the story as the focus follows first one of Gumbril's eccentric intellectual friends and then another as they clash in their disputes about art and life. There's also a rather constant pursuit of women, who seem to turn up rather easily for Gumbril, although most of his friends have a somewhat harder time with them. Most of the sexual exploits, although numerous and frequent, are left to the reader's imagination at this stage in Huxley's career -- something he would remedy in some of his later novels.
Beneath the antic surface of Antic Hay lies the recurring theme of the recent war and the losses suffered by those who survived it. I suppose this sorts well with the literature that was written between the wars. The flight to art and various forms of hedonism as a means of escape is satirized in the novel's various characters. And despite the foolishness of the plot, there is a constant mood of depression and lost opportunity that haunts the novel's characters, some of whom come close to suicide, and nearly all of whom are fragile and wracked by self doubt when they are not caught up in their own fantasies and delusions of grandeur.
I could certainly see Huxley's influence here on Waugh's fiction, although Waugh's is much tighter and funnier. There is also serious exploration of Huxley's familiar themes, especially a sort of despair over the absence of religion coupled with the quest for some meaning in human existence. There is also, as I've already said, some insight into Huxley's fascination with human sexuality as he seems to ask whether lasting sexual relationships are possible or even desirable.
Having said this much, I can't say that I really liked the book. I enjoyed some parts of it, others felt more like a chore that needed completion in order to get on with it -- not an uncommon experience I think when reading Huxley's novels. Nevertheless, having begun, I intend to continue looking into these earlier novels, and perhaps going back to some of those I read back in high school and college. I'm also interested in continuing my exploration of the literature written in England between the wars. In fact, at the moment I'm reading Robert Hewison's Under Siege: literary life in London, 1939-1945 (1977). When I'm done with that I expect I'll pick up another of Huxley's early novels, that is if I don't get distracted by something else.
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