Crome Yellow

I was a huge fan of Aldoux Huxley when I was in high school. Of course, the first of his books I read was Brave New World. I thought of it as the flip side of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and where I found Orwell somewhat depressing, Huxley's vision of the future struck a chord. (It turns out they were both prophetic, but that's material for another post.) After reading BNW I went on to other Huxley works in a similar vein: Ape and Essence, The Genius and the Goddess, and Island. All of these were later books; Island was published in 1962, shortly before I discovered it, and not long before Huxley died on November 22, 1963, a date that would be remembered for a very different reason. The next Sunday I donated flowers at my church in Huxley's memory, something that probably would have amused him. It certainly did not amuse the members of my church, who thought a memorial to John Kennedy would have been more appropriate.

My youthful passion for Huxley endured a while longer. The next book of his I read was The Doors of Perception (1954), which had been inspired by his continuing search for enlightenment and his very early experiments with psychedelics. No question about it, so far as I and my friends were concerned, Huxley was hip. But with the passing of time and the coming of more serious pursuits, both in literature and in life, my interest in Huxley began to wane. I did manage to pick up some of his earlier novels (some in first editions), but when I discovered that they were not what I expected, I put them aside and moved on to other authors. In time I realized that Huxley was not really a very good writer of fiction, however much I admired his analysis of human nature. Basically, his books are extended lectures or sermons. He was more a preacher than a novelist.

And so when I decided to go back and take a look at Huxley in his youth, starting with his first novel, Crome Yellow, published in 1921, I brought along with me some considerable baggage from my own youth. And I have to admit that Crome Yellow was pretty much what I expected. It's a country house novel, a popular genre of English fiction, which was experiencing another revival in those years just prior to and after World War I. Huxley's hero, Denis Stone (a young and very innocent poet hopelessly in love with the daughter of the current owner of Crome), spends a few frustrating days at the great house and encounters several familiar English types. What struck me most about the book was Huxley's tendency to break his novel into a number of set pieces, some of which merely advance his plot (what there is of it). But other chapters come across as rehearsals for his later works, as his characters examine human psychology and predict a future for human kind when children will be born in test tubes and raised to join specific social groups destined either to rule or to work for society. It isn't quite yet a vision of alphas, betas, and deltas, Brave New World would not appear for another decade, but those implications are clearly already there in Huxley's own imagination.

They say that the youthful Huxley, fresh from Balliol and a young teacher of French at his old public school, Eton, wasn't very good, particularly as a disciplinarian. But according to Cyril Connelly he had an influence on his students, who included, as well as Connelly, Eric Blair (George Orwell) and others of their set, who were impressed by Huxley's love and knowledge of literature, especially that then being written by his contemporaries. Crome Yellow has a certain appeal: its satire is amusing, and Huxley captures something of the aimlessness and yearning of postwar English youth. He also skewers some of the contemporary fascinations, with spiritualism for example, that appear in other books from that period or a little later, including Anthony Powell's. In fact, Crome Yellow seems almost a sort of primer for Powell's early fiction, particularly From a View to a Death, Powell's own go at country house satire.

But I think, since I don't have a copy of Antic Hay handy at the moment, I will leave Huxley for a time and move on to Evelyn Waugh. More of this later.

Reading in 2012

My reading this year began as a continuation of last year's more or less determined effort at a programatic reading of books and authors who were prominent in Britain between the world wars. And so, having read Cyril Connolly, Robert Graves, and Harold Nicolson, as well as Martin Green's Children of the Sun, I began this year with several of Evelyn Waugh's earlier novels, Handful of Dust, Decline and Fall, and Vile Bodies. Then I launched into George Orwell, who was unquestionably my favorite. I'd read 1984 and Animal Farm in high school, and some of his essays in college, notably "Shooting an Elephant" and "Politics and the English Language", but I'd never read some of his other important works. So I bought a complete edition of his non-fiction prose and began with Down and Out in Paris and London, then proceeded through The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia before reading all the rest of his prose essays. For a time I was thoroughly under the spell of Orwell's style and politics. I was struck again and again by how perceptive he was, which was reinforced when I read Christopher Hitchens' very instructive book, Why Orwell Matters, which should be required reading for those who want to understand Orwell's strengths as well as his weaknesses.

I took a bit of a break from Orwell with Aldous Huxley's first novel, Crome Yellow. Huxley is another of those writers I read in high school, but mostly the later work, Brave New World and others in that vein. I have a substantial collection of Huxley's other early novels which I may turn to next year. After Huxley, I took a little break from my between-the-wars program and picked up an advanced reader's copy of Michael Frayn's Skios that was lying around the house. I'd just read some reviews that suggested it might be fun, and it was. Then I read Jan Morris's Manhattan in 1945, which was sort of a return to the program, but also something of a coda. And I followed that with a return to Orwell, only this time one of his early novels, Burmese Days, which I was surprised to find thoroughly entertaining, as well as the blistering indictment of British colonialism I knew it would be.

Next I got on a bit of a paperback kick that began with some serious book sorting we were doing after our relocation back to Texas. First, I found some Malcolm Bradbury books I'd wanted to read earlier as part of a different program -- books about the academic life: Eating People is Wrong, set in the 1950s at an English red brick-like university; and The History Man, a sendup of the discipline of sociology and England's new-style universities in the 1970s. Then I jumped back to Ronald Blythe's rather personal take on England in the 1920s and 1930s, The Age of Illusion. But that didn't seem to restart my program, since I then read another advance reader's copy I found lying around, David Dalton's Who Is That Man? -- a biography of Bob Dylan.

I still had a stack of paperbacks I'd uncovered while sorting all the books we'd had in storage, so I decided to begin making my way through those. I'd never read anything by Beryl Bainbridge, so I started with Harriet Said, certainly one of the strangest books I've ever read, both entertaining and disturbing, as well as frighteningly convincing. Then I launched on a little personal festival of Graham Greene novels: Stamboul Train, England Made Me, The Ministry of Fear, and The End of the Affair. I had never read any of Graham Greene's novels, although I've seen many of the movies based on them, and The Third Man has always been one of my all time favorites. Now I'm hooked on his writing and will probably be making my way through the rest of his books next year. 

If I've counted correctly that's about twenty-one books: not a great accomplishment, but about average for the last few years, which I take as a sort of small victory for a year in which we were otherwise so preoccupied with relocating from Virginia to Texas. In any case, I'll just have to see how well I do next year. At the moment I'm re-reading Washington Irving's Christmas essays, which I like to do this time of year. It's a stretch now that I'm back in Texas, since there is very little around here to remind one of Christmas time in merry old England. But it's still good bedtime reading anywhere. 

Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay

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.

Those Barren Leaves

I just finished reading the third of Aldous Huxley's early novels, Those Barren Leaves (1925). So far I think I've enjoyed Antic Hay (1923) most. It was consistently funny, as well as satirically sharp, and had the most interesting array of characters. While Those Barren Leaves mounts another attack on culture snobs and poseurs, it has an underlying melancholy associated with the well-known English failure to cope with feelings and emotions related to interpersonal relationships. Huxley emphasizes this by shifting the point of view around throughout the novel, allowing readers to glimpse inside the heads and thoughts of the various characters as they interact with one another and perform seemingly endless amounts of self-analysis. Well, it's an Aldous Huxley novel.

Unlike the earlier two, which were set in England, the first in the country and the second primarily in the city, London, this third work is set abroad, and we have the well-known story of the English at play in their favorite travel destination, Italy. Naturally the Italian countryside plays a considerable part in the story as the central characters fall under the spell of the sea and the mountains and the spectacular views, all of which offer an ideal setting for Huxley's cast of self-styled intellectuals and aspiring philosophers to contemplate the meaning of life. Near the beginning and again at the end there are very affecting descriptions of the way the Italian light illuminates and plays over the vistas of mountains and valleys at sunset.

But regardless of the setting, much like Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves spends a considerable amount of narrative time gazing inward, examining love and sexual attraction. There are several unsuccessful pairings, as well as one potentially successful (or perhaps disastrous) one between the two youngest characters. One always has the feeling when reading Huxley that several of the male characters in his novels are there to represent some sort of inner debate Huxley is having with himself, or with himself and some imaginary opponent. In each of these novels I've detected elements of the utopian (or dystopian) themes that become much more overt with Brave New World (1932) and some of the later novels: principally, how to manage the messiness of human sexuality and reproduction.

I'm still not sure what it is that continues to attract me to Huxley. Of course, he can be a very good writer for stretches. His prose is usually very clear, and his ability to handle philosophical and aesthetic questions is quite apparent. At other times he's very poetic, which can sometimes be a little taxing, but also yields very moving passages of description or insight into his characters and themes. But he is inconsistent and sometimes appears to lose his way or even lose interest. In any case, I find that he loses me. This can result in patches of rather dull writing or sudden shifts in attention from one character or theme to another, as well as some rather bizarre plot twists. And yet at the conclusion of each of these novels, so far, I've felt an overall sense of satisfaction that I can't really account for.

One further note: Huxley gives his characters names that I'm sure have some significance, but are often difficult to hold in the mind or even give mental voice to while reading. The main characters in Those Barren Leaves are Lillian Aldwinkle, an aging hostess who attempts to assemble her salon of artists for an Italian vacation; Mary Thriplow, a successful writer who like her hostess is unsuccessful in love; Mr. Calamy and Mr. Cardan, two of the notable men of Mrs. Aldwinkle's salon, and Francis Chelifer, her prize and prospective love interest. Then there are the youthful Lord Hovenden (who falls in love with Irene, Mrs. Aldwinkle's niece) and his mentor Mr. Falx. Later, and somewhat unexpectedly, we meet poor and simple Miss Grace Elver, the childlike heiress whom Mr. Cardan turns up during his quest for an antique work of art.

Point Counter Point

With Point Counter Point (1928) I've now completed the most complicated and ambitious of Aldous Huxley's early novels. It's clear that Huxley wanted to write a different kind of novel -- novels of ideas, works that confront big issues. And the complaint that his novels are too talky is certainly borne out by both Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point. His characters tend to be writers and artists and journalists who spend a good deal of time eating out together and arguing about the meaning of life and art and science.

In some respects Huxley is the embodiment of C.P. Snow's two cultures: a man well educated in the arts who is also current in his knowledge and understanding of the latest scientific advances. But this doesn't seem to result in a particularly harmonious existence either for Huxley himself or for the characters who populate his novels. There is constant tension between the quest for artistic truth and the desire to harness scientific knowledge, and in addition an undercurrent of spiritual alienation in the presence of the modern, twentieth-century milieu his characters inhabit. The period between the two world wars was not a happy time for Huxley or for George Orwell or for most of the other British intellectuals I've been reading and re-reading.

While I recognize what Huxley was attempting to do with Point Counter Point, and while I was interested in the story and the characters, as well as the themes and ideas and narrative structure, I can't quite bring myself to say I found the book entertaining. Huxley is honest enough, or foolish enough, to include a character who is attempting (and failing) to write just such a book, and perhaps the lesson both for Huxley and for his readers is that such experiments are likely doomed to fail, and yet may fail in interesting ways. Huxley's fascination with music and musical structure governs his narrative, from an opening evening concert to a climactic phonograph recording of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15, the third movement of which offers one seriously deranged character proof of God's existence. But Huxley's attempt to translate musical patterns to narrative does little to stitch together the various strands of his wandering plot.

Once again in Point Counter Point the cast of characters is a somewhat heterogeneous collection of well to do eccentrics and lower class strivers who are attempting (and generally failing) to relate to one another either romantically or as family or friends. One of the most striking characters in this novel is Everard Webley, the leader of a nasty and growing gang of fascists who call themselves the Brotherhood of British Freemen. Some readers have seen a reference to Oswald Moseley, but 1928 is too early even for Huxley to have seen where Moseley was tending or would end up. What is so striking about this element of the plot, however, is that it reveals Huxley's prophetic ability. Both he and Orwell saw where the trends of the early twentieth century were leading British culture. One of Huxley's characters in Point Counter Point exclaims that he gives current European civilization about ten more years. Given what was coming in 1939, that turns out to be just about right.

Point Counter Point, like Crome Yellow,  Antic Hay, and Those Barren Leaves, tries out themes that will re-emerge a few years later in Brave New World (1932).  All of these novels offer a critique of the aimless existence of contemporary English society, and in various ways predict a coming collapse, owing to some extent to a misplaced faith in what they thought was scientific progress, and also to the exhaustion of human spirituality brought on by what Huxley diagnoses as a misguided trust in religion, especially Christianity. Each novel has at least one character who longs for a more natural human existence, perhaps a foreshadowing of John the Savage. Other themes that will re-emerge in Brave New World include Huxley's fascination with human sexuality, his suspicion of the motives of the educated classes, especially the scientists and politicians who are fashioning the modern world, and his faith in the sustaining and redemptive power of art and literature.

Up next is Brave New World, which I'm going to read again now in its proper place in the development of Huxley's fiction. The first time I encountered it, I was in high school in the 1960s. Then I taught it when I was not much older and a teaching assistant at the University of Texas. But on those occasions I read Huxley's novel out of context, relating it more to my own world than to his, and comparing it to Orwell's 1984, which was written nearly two decades later and reflected a very different perspective on English culture. This time around I want to attempt to put Huxley's book back with its predecessors and in the context of an England struggling to come to terms with life after the disaster of the First World War, and in that early period of anxiety brought on by the growing realization that another world war was almost certainly inevitable.

Reading in 2011

I can see that in retirement this blog is turning into a reading journal, which is fine. Reading has always been my main vocation. Now two of my favorite pastimes are reading and playing my guitars. However, of late, guitar playing seems to have plateaued. I probably need the stimulation of playing with friends to get me moving in a more ambitious direction. In relative isolation I think I've only learned two new pieces on my classical guitar this year, although I have several in various stages of "perfection," which for me means simply being able to play them all the way through without stumbling too much over the notes. I practice regularly, but not with sufficient dedication to see significant improvement. Perhaps in the new year I will do better.

But as for my reading program, there I have been able to gain some traction recently on books from the early 20th century. It has long been established that the first world war changed everything, especially for the European countries most engaged in the fighting. It took most of the rest of the century to come to terms with some of those changes. In England the generation that came of age just after the war was much affected by the trauma of the war. Martin Green, in Children of the Sun, suggests that the result for the educated classes was a flight from maturity into aestheticism and decadence. At the moment, that is where my reading is focused. I'm still working my way through Green's study, but also reading Huxley, and looking forward to Waugh, Orwell, and others, having just completed Robert Graves's Good-Bye to All That and Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise.

But in addition to this continuing fascination with 20th-century writing, I've also found time to read some more recent work: Julian Barnes's The Sense of an Ending and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. And a few weeks ago I picked up a copy of Curt Stager's Deep Future at the Alexandria library and enjoyed learning more about the long view of global warming. A little earlier in the year I got myself distracted by another library book, Benjamin Taylor's edition of Saul Bellow's Letters, a book I had been curious about after reading several reviews. Bellow got me interested in Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, and earlier I had read Anne Roiphe's Art and Madness, books in my own collection I had been meaning to read but needed some impetus to push me in their direction.

The book that refocused my attention on the early 20th century was Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. I had intended to read that one last year when I read McMurtry's memoirs, but for some reason got distracted by other things. McMurtry mentioned Cyril Connolly's Enemies of Promise and Graves's Good-Bye to All That, both books I'd long meant to read but hadn't yet got around to. In fact, I'd also been reminded of Cyril Connolly earlier in the year when I was reading William Boyd's Nat Tate and Any Human Heart. Boyd's Logan Mountstuart, had he actually existed, would surely have known Connolly and others in his circle, including Anthony Powell and Ian Fleming, who does make an appearance in Any Human Heart.

Two books I read this year have a rather peculiar relationship to my 20th-century project. One, Harold Nicolson's Good Behaviour: Being a Study of Certain Types of Civility, was a sort of continuation of an earlier fascination with English gentlemen. A friend had lent me the book a couple of years ago, when I was reading Anthony Powell and Noel Annan's The Don's and David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.  I suppose those were the first signs of my lastest fixation on this period. Realizing I should return the book to its owner, I quickly finished reading it. Then later in the year I returned to Nicolson when I  decided to do some background reading on Harold and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, two prominent members of my group of authors; and so I read their son Nigel's Portrait of a Marriage.

But while much of my reading has lately been focused on this single obsession with a rather small group of English authors of the twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties, I began my year, following an earlier concentration on biographies and memoirs, with Joyce Carol Oates's A Widow's Story, Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in Twenty Questions, and Kenneth Slawenski's J.D. Salinger: A Life. After finishing the latter, I went back and re-read Salinger's Nine Stories, having realized their significant relationship to his war experiences as well as their importance for his apprenticeship as an author.

The only other book I recall reading this year, which would make nineteen if I counted correctly, doesn't seem to fit in any specific category. Just before I retired I picked up a reference somewhere to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, and realizing that this was one of those major gaps in my life reading list, I decided to sit down and read it then and there. It turned out I really enjoyed the book, the plot was entertaining, if ridiculous, and the characters were engaging. I gained new respect for Goethe and determined that I should read more, only to discover that The Sorrows of Young Werther were not much to my liking.

And so Johann Wolfgang Goethe will have to remain on the shelf a little longer, while I continue to explore the writing of early 20th-century Britain. Next up is Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow, a book I started earlier this week, to be followed by a re-reading of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and Decline and Fall, both of which I last read when I was an undergraduate. I fear I was too young and inexperienced then to appreciate such brittle humor and satire, so I'm looking forward to reading them again in the context of Huxley, Connolly, Powell, and all the rest of that little group that left such a big imprint on British literary culture. I may even return to Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, realizing now that the character of Fleming's hero very likely owes much to a group of rogues and dandies he knew in public school. Perhaps that is why I always thought Roger Moore, with his combination of wit, charm, and rakish humor, captured more of Bond than any of the other actors who attempted the role. But these are thoughts for another year and perhaps a different sort of reading obsession.

Huxley Revisited

I've just finished reading two more of Huxley's pre-WWII novels, Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1939). I'm not entirely sure why I picked up these particular books at this time. I've been meaning to continue my project of reading through all of Huxley's fiction which I began a couple of years ago, but seem to have let drop after re-reading Brave New World. Then finding a small gap in my book club reading list, I saw an opportunity to return to Huxley, and not only were these two novels the next up, but I also happen to own both in original American first editions. They are not in perfect condition, and are missing dust jackets, but they are handsome volumes that have beckoned to me ever since I picked them up for about $5 apiece from a bookseller in Shreveport. We found several little treasures there, in an old rambling two-story house filled with books. You had to make an appointment to browse the shelves, since the owner ran the business as a mail order operation. Of course, that was years before the Internet would become the principal means of distribution.

For some reason, I read them out of chronological order, which may have been a mistake. In any case, Eyeless in Gaza seems to me the far superior work, but that could have as much to do with personal taste as any objective criteria. The shadow of World War II hangs over Eyeless in Gaza even more than After Many a Summer (which was the English title of that novel). In fact, the shadow of both world wars falls over the action and characters, since it follows in broken chronology the life of Anthony Beavis, the central figure of the story, who came of age just prior to World War I, and who like many of his contemporaries, reacted with disgust and cynicism to the war and its aftermath.

Similar to most of Huxley's protagonists, Anthony leads a very privileged and cerebral existence, but is troubled both by his own lack of engagement and by the apparent meaninglessness of human existence. As often happens with Huxley's fiction, Anthony eventually encounters a sort of spiritual guide who convinces him that there is meaning in life, but the quest for it requires both disengagement and commitment to something greater than and exterior to the individual self and more mundane desires. Fittingly, given the date of publication, there is also a strong pacifist element to this quest for greater humanity that runs counter to fascism and communism, as well as to capitalism and Christianity and, to a certain degree, the intellectualism that tends to attract Anthony. As is frequently the case with Huxley, there is a nod in the direction of Zen Buddhism, but even that is a bit too specific for Huxley's quest for some form of mystical escape from the brutality of the human condition.

One notable feature of Eyeless in Gaza is the non-chronological progression of the narrative. Huxley focuses on four distinct periods of Anthony Beavis's life, from his childhood in the 1890s, just after the death of his mother, to 1935 when the novel closes with a sort of spiritual epiphany for Anthony. Several recurring characters, including his childhood friend, Brian Foxe, and Helen Amberley, the daughter of his first mistress, help tie the story together and help us sort out Anthony's growth as an individual as the narrative jumps between dates in the 1890s, 1914, the late twenties, and the early to mid thirties. As the novel draws to a close, Anthony is determined to follow his new-found spiritual leader in what appears an obviously hopeless attempt on the eve of war to convince the English and the rest of Europe and the world that violent means can only lead to even more violent ends, that pacifism is not cowardly but requires a supreme act of courage.

Shortly after publishing Eyeless in Gaza, Huxley moved to California and took up residence in the U.S. After Many a Summer Dies the Swan is the first novel published after his emigration, and the first with an American setting. Naturally enough, the object of his satire shifts from upper-class English mores to the crass materialism of California and America in general. The plot of After Many a Summer revolves around the quest of a wealthy industrialist for prolonged, if not actually eternal, life. And although there is a good deal of silliness in the story, as well as the usual amount of sexual desire, both repressed and otherwise, the novel raises a number of interesting issues related to the recurring hope that science and medicine will eventually allow us, or those among us who can afford it, to put off the unpleasantness of aging and dying for an indefinite amount of time. Of course, Huxley also introduces a character who represents the opposing view, that life is hardly worth extending unless it has some meaning and purpose other than sexual gratification and material acquisitiveness. And even more than in most of his other novels, the characters in After Many a Summer are little more than mouthpieces representing the different perspectives in Huxley's philosophical discussion of the meaninglessness of human existence and the necessity to undertake some form of self-examination that will result in a quest for spiritual enlightenment and understanding.

After Many a Summer Dies the Swan marks the beginning of Huxley's American phase. I've actually already read several of these later novels -- including his last, Island (1962), shortly after it was first published. I'm not sure they are worth taking the time to read again, but since I have first editions of some of them, I may go ahead and have another look. In any case, I believe Eyeless in Gaza is probably the last really good novel Huxley wrote. In fact, all of his fiction, from Crome Yellow on, is marred by his desire to construct philosophical arguments. And after all, the appeal of Brave New World is more owing to its insights into our misguided use of science and the way that has warped human nature than to its elements of plot and character, which are both rather minimal and sometimes laughable. But at the same time, Huxley has a natural satiric wit that makes his fiction entertaining even when he burdens it with the most tedious lectures on science and religion and spirituality. He was, after all, a very intelligent man, and he made no apologies for that intelligence. Ever since I discovered him when I was in high school, I've been attracted to that aspect of his writing.