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Aldous Huxley’s
Short Fiction
Andrija Matić
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Aldous Huxley’s Short Fiction
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
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Andrija Matić
Aldous Huxley’s Short
Fiction
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Contents
Introduction
1
Initiation in Limbo
9
Toxic Masculinity, Pseudo-Intellectualism,
and “Sexo-Religious Psychology” in Mortal Coils
35
Irony, Popular Art, and Progressive Education in Little
Mexican
61
Nonsense, the Other, and Applied Science in Two or Three
Graces
83
Religion, Seduction, and Spiritual Education in Brief
Candles
103
Uncollected Stories
123
Conclusion
169
References
177
Index
183
vii
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About the Author
Andrija Matić is an adjunct assistant professor at Baruch College, The
City University of New York. He is the author of five novels, a collection of short stories, and a study on T. S. Eliot’s complete works. He has
also published many articles on Anglo-American literature, especially on
modernist poetry and short fiction. Andrija Matić has taught at universities in Serbia, Kuwait, Thailand, Turkey, and the USA. He lives in
Brooklyn, New York.
ix
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Introduction
Aldous Huxley was one of the most prolific writers in the first half of the
twentieth century. Not only was he the author of eleven novels, but he
also wrote poetry, travel literature, film scripts, plays, music reviews, and
essays on a variety of topics. In addition, he published five collections of
short fiction and a dozen stories that appeared in magazines during his
lifetime. Despite Huxley’s commitment to short fiction, no scholars have
thoroughly analyzed this segment of his literature.
There are several reasons for the neglect of his short fiction. Some
critics think that Huxley’s stories do not deserve much attention because
they are the extensions of his ideas, already expounded in his essays. For
example, V. S. Pritchett claims that Huxley’s 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” (Pritchett, 1975, p. 424). His
observation is probably built upon David Daiches’ superficial reading of
Huxley’s novels. Daiches (1939) saw Huxley as a “frustrated romantic”
(p. 202) or a fake novelist “who has never mastered even the elements of
form and structure in fiction” (p. 209). To put it simply, in Daiches’ view,
Huxley is nothing but an essayist, and if we want to understand his novels
and short stories, we should focus on his nonfiction. Perhaps because of
such incorrect judgements, rehashed in different forms over the years,
Huxley’s short fiction has been sidelined. Moreover, in a recent book
titled The British Short Story by Emma Liggins et al. (2011), Huxley’s
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2
A. MATIĆ
short stories were not mentioned a single time, let alone analyzed in
terms of their structure, characterization, themes, or style. Aldous Huxley
Annual is the only place where this aspect of Huxley’s literature is treated
as it deserves. However, despite the efforts of Bernfried Nugel, Jerome
Meckier, and especially James Sexton, there is no book that analyzes
Huxley’s short fiction in its entirety.
Another reason for such a disregard could be the belief that the short
story is a miniature novel. Applied to Huxley’s literature, this misconception implies that we should not waste time on his short fiction because his
novels will tell us everything we need to know. In the last few decades,
however, many scholars explained the specific nature of the short story,
that is to say, its autonomy as a genre. Susan Lohafer (1983) underlines
several qualities of the short story that make it a distinct literary form.
For instance, due to its length, the short story contains “a contracted
language” that “binds its reader less closely to the word than a poem
does, and more closely to the sentence than a novel does” (p. 50). Aimée
Gasston (2021) emphasizes the “ergonomics” of short fiction, together
with the “increased frequency of [its] endings” and “activity of interruption” (p. 200), owing to which the readers can reflect on their life more
often. Charles E. May (2002) points out the short story’s “intensity” that
“comes from a tight dramatic patterning of the incident in such a way that
its dramatic tension is exposed and felt” (p. 119). Clare Hanson (1989)
underscores the “limited quality” of the story that serves as a frame in
which we can “accept a degree of mystery, elision, uncertainty,” which
we would not normally do while reading a novel (p. 25). Dominic Head
(1992) argues that short stories should not be compared to novels but to
other genres such as film; otherwise, we risk promoting the principle “the
bigger the better” (p. 4). (In 1992, when Head’s book The Modernist
Short Story was published, film might have been the most suitable association, but nowadays TV series such as Black Mirror seem to be the
nearest equivalent.) Valerie Shaw (2013), on the other hand, seeks a definition of the short story in visual arts. She believes that the novel offers
a “record of linked events” while the story offers a “picture” (p. 12), so
a collection of short stories is more akin to “an art exhibition” (p. 16).
But even prior to this wave of short fiction scholarship that started a few
decades ago, it was clear that the short story should not be treated as
inferior to the novel. For instance, Walter Benjamin (2015), as early as
in 1936, realized that short fiction should be decoupled from the traditional definitions of narrative. In his view, the short story “has removed
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INTRODUCTION
3
itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on
top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most
appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed”
(p. 92). Despite all the studies that highlight the short story’s unique
characteristics, many scholars still see it as a minor literary genre, which is
evident in the number of academic journals, articles, and books dedicated
to the art of short fiction. That might explain why Huxley’s short stories
have never been given full attention.
As regards the short story in the period of modernism, literary research
usually sees it as less significant than other art forms. Even though the
writers such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce—the indisputable representatives of modernist canon—regarded short fiction as an important
element in their literary expression, studies on their works are almost
exclusively centered on their novels. Gasston (2021) finds it astonishing
that the short story is frequently “peripheral to the canon” and that it
is often “dismembered by modernist scholarship” (p. 3). In her opinion,
the biggest example of such marginalization can be found in Bradbury
and McFarlane’s Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890–1930,
as their book does not include short stories in the overview of modernist
poetics. Dominic Head (1992) explains that the modernist short story
can be regarded as a subgenre of modernism because it entails “formal
dissonance” and “relative autonomy” (p. 33). On the other hand, Emma
Liggins et al. (2011) warn that glorifying modernist experimentation
as the highest achievement in literature “risks falsifying literary history
because it ignores those writers whose works are not deemed ‘experimental’” (p. 122). This statement can explain the position of Aldous Huxley’s
short fiction in modernist scholarship. Due to his atypical views on
literary experimentation, his pronounced disdain for modernist art, and
his reputation as a novelist of ideas, Huxley’s short stories are nowhere
to be found in the literature on modernism, not even in the studies that
acknowledge the importance of short fiction.
Aldous Huxley’s Short Fiction aims to show that Huxley shared more
characteristics with distinguished modernists than it is usually believed.
Most misunderstandings of Huxley’s works result from shallow comparisons between him and other modernist authors, wherein critics are fixated
on a set of formal characteristics and exclude other features that do not
fit into their understanding of modernism. Such a limited approach overlooks many elements of Huxley’s literature that might not be modernist
in the narrow sense of the term. This book emphasizes his similarities
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4
A. MATIĆ
with other modernist authors, highlighting his unique contribution to
modernist short fiction. The analyses of his short stories point out his
relation not only to Anglo-American modernists such as Virginia Woolf,
James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Carson McCullers, Ernest
Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and D. H. Lawrence, but also Russian
futurists and German and Austrian expressionists. Aldous Huxley’s Short
Fiction explains that Huxley’s parallels with these authors can be found
in his use of myth and fairy tales, intertextual references, attitude to organized Christianity, aesthetics of ugliness, experiments with transrational
language, portrayals of dehumanization in the modern metropolis, and
many other topics. This book particularly examines Huxley’s humor and
irony, the areas he developed more than any other author of modernist
short fiction.
Since literary works cannot be locked in one period but relate to
all previous and subsequent epochs as well, this book explores other
features of Huxley’s short stories that stand outside the confines of
modernism. The fact that his stories span from 1919 to 1955 compels
us to examine them in a broader context. Thus, Aldous Huxley’s Short
Fiction analyzes Huxley’s depictions of consumerism, mainstream education, shallow intellectualism, women’s emancipation, toxic masculinity,
and sensational journalism, themes that correspond with both his time
and our world, positioning him among the most prophetic authors of
the twentieth century. This book also demonstrates that Huxley’s characters are not always embodiments of his ideas, but that some ideas
were initiated in the process of characterization, gaining their theoretical
formulations much later. Likewise, Aldous Huxley’s Short Fiction tracks
the development of his literary style—from the colorful satirical outbursts
in his first collection Limbo to the concise prose in his last short stories.
This book shows that Huxley’s short fiction can answer some questions
that remain confusing or partially explained in the research on Huxley’s
works. For instance, a brief literature review on his stance on religion
and mysticism can reveal disagreements on many issues. James R. Baker
(1990) assumes that Huxley explored different spiritual experiences in
his attempt to find “an acceptable religious faith” (p. 316). June Deery
(1996) believes that the interpretations of Huxley’s works are impossible
without defining his interest in mysticism (p. 101). For Jerome Meckier
(1969), Huxley was “an alleged mystic who [was] always clear and rational” (p. 7). On the other hand, Harry Oldmeadow (2004) claims that
Huxley’s perennial philosophy was supposed to be a substitute for a
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INTRODUCTION
5
universal religion or “a kind of religious Esperanto” (p. 81). Dana W.
Sawyer (2021) refutes the idea that Huxley believed in universal religion,
asserting that Huxley did not see mystical experience to be “synonymous
with the essence of religion” (p. 7). Jake Poller has a similar view on
Huxley’s attempt to bring together religious texts from different cultures
and epochs. According to Poller (2019), these texts were not meant to
indicate a universal religion; Huxley only detected their compatibility in
certain areas, which made him assume that “the One with whom these
mystics were united or identified was the same” (p. 2).
Scholars disagree on Huxley’s attitude to particular faiths as well.
Ronald T. Sion (2010) argues that after Brave New World, Huxley chose
“a Buddhistic view of life, seeking an ultimate nirvana” (p. 77). Poller
(2019) states that Huxley, especially in his novels after World War II, was
interested in the religious teachings from Taoism, Tantra, and Buddhism
(p. 34). However, John Attarian (2003) reduces Huxley’s Brave New
World to a “warning … of life in a world which has fled from God”
(p. 9). He believes that Huxley’s main concern is to show that “suffering and mortification are the price of transcendence” (p. 19). There
is no consensus on the development of Huxley’s mysticism either. Sion
thinks that Huxley’s novels can be divided into those before and those
after Brave New World, published in 1932 (p. 77). Deery (1996) points
out that mysticism was an integral part of Huxley’s literature from Eyeless
in Gaza (1936) to his death (p. 109). Frederick W. Conner (1973)
suggests that Huxley criticized mysticism and oriental spirituality until
1925, whereupon he became more inclined toward mysticism (p. 286).
Sally A. Paulsell (1995) assumes that Huxley’s interest in different forms
of mysticism was constant from his first book of poetry to his last novel
(p. 81). Finally, Poller underscores that in the 1920s Huxley was both
“attracted and repelled” by mysticism, that his next phase, inspired by D.
H. Lawrence, was “life worship” (p. 91), that his mystical transformation
took place in 1935 (p. 74), and that in the last decade of his life Huxley
embraced “this-worldly forms of mysticism that celebrated the body and
the world as manifestations of the godhead” (p. 5).
Aldous Huxley’s Short Fiction attempts to answer some of these questions. First of all, the book illustrates Huxley’s opinion on organized
religion, especially on mainstream Christianity. The stories from 1919 to
1955 show that Huxley’s understanding of religion never changed despite
his ideas on God and spirituality after the mid-1930s that sent many
scholars on a wild goose chase. As regards Huxley’s views on mysticism,
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6
A. MATIĆ
the analyses of his short stories indicate that some of his ideas did change
over time, whereas others remained the same. This book also explores
the shift in Huxley’s descriptions of sexuality and religion that occurred
in the 1930s. Finally, Aldous Huxley’s Short Fiction highlights the connection between the stories from the 1950s and the ideas explicated in The
Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception.
This book also clarifies Huxley’s political opinion, which is often
misunderstood due to his advocacy of pacifism. Ever since the publication
of Huxley’s pamphlet What Are You Going to Do about It? The Case for
Constructive Peace (1936), many authors, neglecting his literature from
the 1920s, have treated Huxley as a controversial writer out of touch
with reality who advocated non-violence against Nazism. The tone was
set by Stephen Spender, who accused Huxley of sacrificing “oppressed
pacifists and socialists in Italy, Germany, and Austria, on the altar of a
dogmatic and correct pacifism,” and C. Day-Lewis, who asked: “Where
was Mr. Huxley when the lights went out in Italy, in Germany?” (Murray,
2003, p. 294). Aldous Huxley’s Short Fiction paints a different picture. It
proves that Huxley was always interested in politics—from Mortal Coils
(1922), where he warned against the new political force in Italy called
Fascism, to “Time’s Revenges” and “Voices,” the stories from the 1950s
in which he referred to a range of global issues such as the Korean War,
the coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran, and Joseph McCarthy’s
persecution of intellectuals and artists in the United States.
Aldous Huxley’s Short Fiction analyzes all Huxley’s works from
Collected Short Stories and most of the stories from “Consider the Lilies ”
and Other Short Fiction, republished owing to the efforts of James Sexton,
who collected Huxley’s stories that appeared in magazines such as Coterie
and The Atlantic. “The Nun’s Tragedy” is the only short story that will
not be interpreted in this book, as it is the early manuscript of “Nuns at
Luncheon,” which Huxley included in Mortal Coils , his second book of
short fiction. Such a wide selection does not imply that all Huxley’s stories
are of the same quality. There is no doubt that some of them suffer from
rudimentary plot, poor characterization, more telling than showing—
flaws that can be found in his novels as well. Nevertheless, I believe that
all Huxley’s short stories deserve to be interpreted either because they
contain dimensions which have not been previously explored, or because
they show Huxley’s relation to other modernist authors, or because they
demonstrate his development as a writer, or because they can answer
important questions about his literature and philosophy.
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INTRODUCTION
7
This book does not analyze Huxley’s novellas such Farcical History of
Richard Greenow and Two or Three Graces , which were published within
the official collections of Huxley’s short stories. The novella is a distinct
literary form in both its structure and purpose. As Judith Leibowitz
(1974) emphasizes, “the novella’s techniques of selection” (p. 12) are
different than in novels and short stories. She adds that while “the short
story limits material and the novel extends it,” the novella produces “the
double effect of intensity and expansion” (p. 16). Therefore, Huxley’s
novellas should be analyzed independently of his short fiction.
The secondary literature includes most of Huxley’s nonfiction together
with the scholarship on his literature that spans from the early reviews
of his short stories (some of them written by Arnold Bennett, Virginia
Woolf, and T. S. Eliot) to articles in Aldous Huxley Annual and books
by the contemporary scholars such as Jake Poller. This book also refers to
relevant studies on the short story as an autonomous literary form.
Chapter 2 analyzes Limbo (1920), Huxley’s first book of short stories,
indicating his early thematic scope, stylistic features, and character types
that he will explore in his subsequent works. Chapter 3 focuses on Mortal
Coils (1922), especially on the topics such as toxic masculinity, superficial
intellectualism, religious fanaticism, and modernist perception of visual
arts. Chapter 4, devoted to Little Mexican and Other Stories (1924),
explains not only Huxley’s views on progressive education advocated
by Maria Montessori and John Dewey, but also Huxley’s early experiments with form, humor, and irony, which bring him closer to modernist
short story writers. In Chapter 5, I analyze Two or Three Graces (1926),
Huxley’s fourth book of short fiction, especially the complexity of his
characterization, the way in which he incorporates myth and fairy tales,
and the intertextual relations with modernist short fiction. Chapter 6
examines three stories from Brief Candles (1930), Huxley’s last collection of short fiction, focusing on the themes such as intellectual abuse,
religious manipulation, and pseudo-spiritual education. The final chapter
is dedicated to Huxley’s uncollected short stories, starting with the first
“Imaginary Conversation” (1919) and ending with “Voices” (1955),
Huxley’s last short story published in The Atlantic. The interpretations
of Huxley’s uncollected short fiction point to constants in Huxley’s literature, depicted in his novels and official collections of short stories, but
they also highlight elements we cannot find anywhere else.
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8
A. MATIĆ
References
Attarian, J. (2003). Brave New World and the Flight from God. In H. Bloom
(Ed.), Aldous Huxley (pp. 9–24). Chelsea House.
Baker, R. S. (1990). Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia. Twayne
Publishers.
Benjamin, W. (2015). Illuminations. The Bodley Head.
Conner, F. W. (1973). “Attention!”: Aldous Huxley’s Epistemological Route to
Salvation. The Sewanee Review, 81(2), 282–308.
Daiches, D. (1939). The Novel and the Modern World. University of Chicago
Press.
Deery, J. (1996). Aldous Huxley and the Mysticism of Science. MacMillan Press
Ltd.
Gasston, A. (2021). Modernist Short Fiction and Things. Palgrave Macmillan.
Hanson, C. (1989). “Things Out of Words”: Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction.
In C. Hanson (Ed.), Re-reading the Short Story (pp. 22–33). St. Martin’s
Press.
Head, D. (1992). The Modernist Short Story: A Study in Theory and Practice.
Cambridge University Press.
Leibowitz, J. (1974). Narrative Purpose in the Novella. Mouton.
Liggins, E., et al. (2011). The British Short Story. Palgrave Macmillan.
Lohafer, S. (1983). Coming to Terms with the Short Story. Louisiana State
University Press.
May, C. E. (2002). The Short Story: The Reality of Artifice. Routledge.
Meckier, J. (1969). Aldous Huxley: Satire and Structure. Chatto & Windus.
Murray, N. (2003). Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. Abacus.
Oldmeadow, H. (2004). Journeys East: 20th Century Western Encounters with
Asian Religious Traditions. World Wisdom.
Paulsell, S. A. (1995). Color and Light: Huxley’s Pathway to Spiritual Reality.
Twentieth Century Literature, 41(1), 81–107.
Poller, J. (2019). Aldous Huxley and Alternative Spirituality. Brill.
Pritchett, V. S. (1975). V. S. Pritchett on the Collected Short Stories. In D. Watt
(Ed.), Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage (pp. 423–425). Routledge.
Sawyer, D. W. (2021). Redressing a Straw Man: Correcting Critical Misunderstandings of Aldous Huxley’s Perennial Philosophy. Journal of Humanistic
Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221678211024399
Shaw, V. (2013). The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. Routledge.
Sion, R. T. (2010). Aldous Huxley and the Search for Meaning: A Study of the
Eleven Novels. McFarland.
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Initiation in Limbo
When Limbo was published in January 1920, Huxley was considered a
young, promising poet and talented contributor to the Athenaeum and
Westminster Gazette. He had acquaintances in London’s literary circles,
given that he had frequented Garsington Manor where he had met D.
H. Lawrence and writers from the Bloomsbury Group. In addition, he
regularly visited the Eiffel Tower restaurant and other popular modernist
venues where he dined with distinguished artists and intellectuals of that
era. His family history played a role in establishing his early reputation
as well. As Nicholas Murray (2003) explains, Lady Ottoline Morrell, the
patroness of Garsington, introduced Aldous to her other guests not as a
young poet or critic but as Thomas Henry Huxley’s grandson (p. 55).
Sybille Bedford (1974) underscores that Limbo sold only 1,600 copies,
but that young literary enthusiasts recognized a new writer “expressing
so essentially the coming post-war mood” (108).
The book was published by Chatto & Windus, which would turn out
to be Huxley’s life-long publisher. However, Percy Spalding, a partner
in Chatto & Windus, was far from impressed in the beginning. In his
autobiography, Frank Swinnerton (1936), a novelist and critic who was
a reader at Chatto & Windus at the time, explains that Spalding was
interested in Aldous’ manuscript primarily because he was T. H. Huxley’s
grandson (p. 311). Soon he discovered that Limbo was “appallingly gross,
blasphemous, and horrible” (p. 311), and refused to publish it. Not
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10
A. MATIĆ
even Spalding’s admiration for T. H. Huxley could help him approve
the manuscript. It was only after he and Swinnerton scrutinized every
problematic detail and Huxley agreed to make minor revisions that the
manuscript was accepted.
The first reviews of Limbo were mostly favorable. Michael Sadleir wrote
that Huxley was “the most readable of his generation,” predicting that
in three decades he would become a prominent English writer (Murray,
2003, p. 119). In an anonymous review for the Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Woolf praised Huxley’s witty satire but reproached him for
attacking “easy targets” (p. 119). Limbo was also Huxley’s first book to
be acclaimed in the United States. Writing for the New Republic, Herbert
S. Gorman characterized Huxley as “one of the finest writers of prose in
England today” (Gorman, 1975, p. 45).
The analyses in this chapter show that Limbo was Huxley’s initiation
into major topics he would develop in his novels and essays: organized religion, the craze for obscure beliefs after World War I, dominant
educational models at the beginning of the twentieth century, onedimensional intellectualism, imposed promiscuity and mass consumerism.
Moreover, Limbo contains the nuclei of almost all character types in
Huxley’s fiction. From “Happily Ever After” to “The Death of Lully,”
we find peculiar educators, corrupt clergymen, pseudo-occultists, sexually repressed mystics, disillusioned artists, and intellectuals who suppress
their emotions. However, contrary to the common misconception that
Huxley’s characters are always embodiments of his ideas, this chapter
explains that Huxley’s ideas sometimes evolved from characters in his early
short fiction.
Happily Ever After
In a 1918 letter to his brother, Julian, Aldous Huxley admitted that he
was working on a play which was “more suitable for a long-drawn Henry
Jamesian short story” (Huxley, 1969, p. 157). The only part he liked was
the depiction of Cobby.1 Although Huxley never finished the play, he
transformed it into the short story “Happily Ever After,” which explores
several themes that will become the landmarks of his prose.
In the first place, the story depicts three outlandish teachers who represent three pedagogical models dominant at the time. Alfred Petherton is
an old-school university lecturer who has a passion for evoking obscure
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INITIATION IN LIMBO
11
philosophers and reading gossips in The Times. He finds the same inspiration in Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire and the forthcoming marriage of Beryl Camberley-Belcher. His
name is respectable in academia, for he is the author of “meritorious, if
not exactly brilliant, books” such as Plato’s Predecessors or Three Scottish
Metaphysicians (Huxley, 1992, p. 15). As befits the man of a sedentary lifestyle, he suffers from poor digestion and heart palpitations, and
throughout the whole year, even in June, he has a shawl over his shoulders because he is terrified of drafts. He bombards his daughter, Marjorie,
with numerous questions, which at times deal with “personal immortality of the soul” (p. 19), whereas at other times they boil down to
inquiries about current celebrities. Petherton, however, does not expect
answers. His questions are meant to indicate that a great man should
grasp complex metaphysical problems and keep abreast of latest gossips
in the high society. It is not a coincidence that Marjorie, raised in such an
isolated environment, finds it difficult to communicate with her relatives
and acquaintances, let alone understand what a meaningful relationship
should be.
Petherton’s brother is the Reverend Roger, “a master at one of [the]
most glorious public schools” (Huxley, 1992, p. 23). Unlike Alfred, who
adheres to conservative pedagogy and newspaper gossips, the Reverend
has idiosyncratic views on education. He proposes “plenty of beating”
(p. 28) as the most effective teaching method. He believes that beating
can work even for students who do not want to learn, for “if you can’t
hammer knowledge in at their heads, you can at least beat a little in at
their tails” (p. 28). Roger also detests scientists and would never provide
them with school accommodation because they cannot keep discipline.
On top of that, he has objections to their stance on religion:
Some of these men never come to chapel except when they’re on duty. And
then, I ask you, what happens when they prepare their boys for Confirmation? Why, I’ve known boys come to me who were supposed to have
been prepared by one or other of these men, and, on asking them, I’ve
found that they know nothing whatever about the most solemn facts of
the Eucharist. … You see how absurd it is to let anyone but the classical
men have anything to do with the boys’ lives. (Huxley, 1992, p. 29)
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A. MATIĆ
In his opinion, teachers of any subject, regardless of their knowledge
and experience, can be effective only if they accept their inferior position to “the classical men,” that is, the conservative teachers holding
the nineteenth-century values. In a way, the Reverend Roger resembles
Father Butler form Joyce’s story “An Encounter,” who complains that
his students read The Apache Chief instead of good old Roman History
(Joyce, 1991, p. 9). However, Roger’s rant against the lack of discipline
among scientists and their indifference to school ceremonies has a deeper
cause than Father Butler’s disapproval of comic books. It indicates the
Reverend’s fear of science, especially its ability to prove that many religious concepts are groundless. That is why he does everything in his
power to curb the influence of the scientists at his school.
Alfred Petherton and the Reverend Roger are the products of outdated
educational models that imply supreme position of teachers regardless
of their qualifications and respect for students. The narrator of “Happily Ever After” highlights not only the loopholes in their knowledge but
also their self-centered approach that disregards students’ opinion. Alfred
never misses the opportunity to ignore his daughter’s indifference to his
pseudo-lectures, whereas Roger cares for his students only in relation
to the school’s religious observances. Their stance on education is also
marked by their reluctance to change. They are not willing to reconsider
their pedagogies, let alone adjust to modern tendencies in education.
Even though Huxley worked as a full-time teacher for less than two
years—that is, from September 1917 to the end of spring term in 19192 —
education was always an important topic in his fiction and essays. In
“Happily Ever After,” he criticizes obsolete educational practices and their
proponents. It is interesting that he elaborates on these issues in Proper
Studies (1927), seven years after the publication of Limbo. In his opinion,
one-sided lectures are doomed to failure because they are too remote
from students’ experience and hard to apply to their own life. He underscores that “too much stress is laid on teaching and too little on active
learning” (Huxley, 1927, p. 114). To solve this problem, Huxley suggests
games that would train the senses and lessons that would “be wedded in
some way to practical life” and “spring from the ordinary experiences of
modern man” (p. 105). Regardless of how obsolete or self-evident these
statements may seem nowadays, we should put them in the context of
the early twentieth century when active learning, promoted by the likes
of Maria Montessori and John Dewey,3 was still a novelty, often ridiculed
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13
or looked down on, and when people like Alfred and Roger Petherton
were considered supreme authorities in education.
Huxley’s satire in “Happily Ever After” is directed against modern
educators as well. Although some authors believe that Jacobsen is “a
highly intelligent man who is not made fun of” (Newby, 1957, p. 66),
many passages in this story prove otherwise. Peter Jacobsen is Alfred
Petherton’s former student, a Norwegian born in Argentina and educated
in several countries, who has come all the way from Chicago to spend time
with his former mentor. Due to his cosmopolitan education and unrivaled
international experience, he looks down on all his interlocutors. The ones
who are spared his contempt can hope only for his sympathy. His religious
belief is ambiguous: Jacobsen respects the church as an institution, yet he
cannot stand the “childish imbecility of its representatives” whose “intellect [is] only a little less limited than that of an Australian aboriginal”
(Huxley, 1992, p. 21). His biggest flaw, however, is that he constantly
suppresses his emotions. He even boasts about never being “moved by
external things” (p. 31). That is why he is surprised when he learns that
George has lost his leg in the war:
George had lost a leg. There would be no more of that Olympian speed
and strength and beauty. Jacobsen conjured up before his memory a vision
of the boy running with his great fawn-coloured dog across green expanses
of grass. How glorious he had looked, his fine brown hair blowing like fire
in the wind of his own speed, his cheeks flushed, his eyes very bright. And
how easily he ran, with long, bounding strides, looking down at the dog
that jumped and barked at his side! (Huxley, 1992, p. 40)
The artificial sentimentality in this paragraph indicates that Jacobsen’s
grief is not genuine. He knows that he should feel something given that
his young acquaintance lost his leg, but he cannot handle a pure emotion.
Instead, resorting to the clichés such as “Olympian speed,” “hair blowing
like fire in the wind,” and the stereotypical image of a boy running with
his dog, Jacobsen tries to convince himself that his reactions are proper.
The culmination of his delusion is his attempt to rationalize George’s
amputation. His ingenious mind ties the boy’s predicament to the differences in tone between the English word stump and its French translation
moignon. This unexpected comparison transforms into a dream about
“slimy red knobbles, large polyp-like things, growing as he looked at
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14
A. MATIĆ
them” (Huxley, 1992, p. 40), indicating that he feels nothing but fear
and disgust.
However, when he learns that Guy has been killed, he succumbs to
grief. The external influence he has been trying to avoid finally takes over.
As the narrator emphasizes, it has been “steadily encroaching upon him”
and now he is “at its mercy” (Huxley, 1992, p. 42). It is the first time
that he acknowledges the horrors of the Great War, which he successfully disregarded up to that point. When Marjorie comes to the room, he
escapes through the window and walks aimlessly in the garden, trying to
cope with his overwhelming emotions. The narrator leaves for the reader
to decide whether this turn of events affects Jacobsen to the point of
changing his perception of the world or it is just a temporary disturbance that his intellectual shield will eventually shrug off. Whatever the
result may be, there is no doubt that Jacobsen is the caricature of a selfconscious intellectual and that he is clearly, despite Newby’s observations,
made fun of.
Although more progressive than Alfred and Roger Petherton, Jacobsen
also embodies the dysfunctional education that Huxley mocks in his
essays. In Ends and Means , Huxley (1946a) explains that mainstream
education is either too specialist or too intellectual. Having completed
the usual educational cycle, specialists lack broader knowledge, whereas
intellectuals are deprived of experience. Moreover, Huxley points out that
even someone who is generally believed to be the “successful product of
our academic education is an unsatisfactory person” (p. 196). Jacobsen
is a typical Huxleyan intellectual who, despite his academic performance
and international experience, lacks emotional maturity. We should keep
in mind that “Happily Ever After” was published more than fifteen years
before Ends and Means, which indicates that Huxley’s characters are
not always the mouthpieces of ideas shaped in his nonfiction; on the
contrary, some of his ideas first appeared in his short stories, gaining their
theoretical explanations much later.
“Happily Ever After” criticizes organized religion epitomized by the
Reverend Roger. He is “sleek and glossy like a well-fed black cob”
(Huxley, 1992, p. 26), which implies his privileged position in society.
He has a “red neck as thick as his head” and hair “cropped with military closeness” (p. 26), so that he can “set a good example to the boys,”
especially the ones with “aesthetic tendencies” (p. 27). All these characteristics refer to the Church of England at the time: its rigidity in
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INITIATION IN LIMBO
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education, reluctance to change, and opposition to free artistic expression. The Reverend Roger also demonstrates the fear of the then clergy
that they might lose their influence in British society. That fear comes to
light when Roger denigrates the poor who, in his opinion, have “plenty
to eat, plenty of money, and no taxes to pay” (p. 35). That the Reverend
is unable to identify, let alone empathize, with anyone outside his caste
becomes obvious when he hears that Guy, his niece’s fiancé, died in the
war. After Jacobsen reminds him that Guy had a lot of “potentialities,”
Roger does not miss the opportunity to mention that he was not on good
terms with Guy because he was “too eccentric” and “too clever” (p. 42).
What is even worse, the Reverend tries to console his niece with the
words from his latest sermon, asking her to be proud of Guy’s death. His
behavior could be best described with a line from The Devils of Loudun
(1952), where Huxley makes a difference between a mundane egoist and
a religious egoist. The former “merely wants what he wants,” whereas the
latter, having received religious education, believes that “what he wants
is what God wants” (Huxley, 1959, p. 18). Thus, even at such a tragic
moment when he is supposed to comfort his niece, the Reverend Roger
cannot extinguish his religious egoism.
The Reverend Roger’s attitude toward science and art, his obsolete
pedagogy and inability to empathize with his niece and the victims of
World War I illustrate the Church’s dissociation from modern society,
especially from the people who embraced the changes at the beginning of the twentieth century. For Huxley, the Church of England and
other Christian churches in Europe produced nothing more than “an
affair of rituals, mechanical observances, mass-emotions,” as he described
them in Proper Studies (Huxley, 1927, p. 178) or “organized sacramentalism” (Huxley, 2009, p. 270), as he called them in The Perennial
Philosophy. He claimed that Christian churches in Europe, despite their
differences, lacked the original tenets of Christian belief—the vestiges
of which Huxley could find mostly in Christian mysticism—that would
never ignore human suffering. The Reverend Roger is the first character
in Huxley’s fiction to incorporate negative characteristics of institutional
Christianity. Mr. Bodiham in Crome Yellow (1921), “a grey metallic face
with iron cheek-bones and a narrow iron brow” (Huxley, 1958b, p. 52),
illustrates only one aspect—dark, rigid, inhumane—whereas the Reverend
Pelvey from Antic Hay (1923) is merely a voice at the sermon, offering
a backdrop to Theodore Gumbril’s ruminations on God and life.
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16
A. MATIĆ
“Happily Ever After” contains several prototypes that will develop in
Huxley’s novels and subsequent short stories. Alfred’s daughter, Marjorie,
spends all her time serving her father and entertaining his pseudometaphysical lectures. She has a modest real-life experience and therefore
can only have a grotesquely idealistic relationship with her fiancé. That
type will evolve into a range of young women—for instance, Melpomene
Fugger from “Nuns at Luncheon,” Irene Aldwinkle from Those Barren
Leaves , Moira Tarwin from “The Rest Cure,” and Marjorie Carling
from Point Counter Point —women who, due to their rigid upbringing,
become an easy prey for petty criminals and quasi-intellectuals. On the
other hand, Guy Lambourne, Marjorie’s fiancé who dies in World War
I, resembles the writers/intellectuals such as Denis Stone from Crome
Yellow, Philip Quarles from Point Counter Point and Anthony Beavis
from Eyeless in Gaza. He is contemplative, rebellious, and extremely selfconscious, doubting his writing talent and admitting he will always be
“second-rate, physically, morally, mentally” (Huxley, 1992, p. 25). Finally,
George White, a sensitive and spiritual young man who loses his leg in the
war, embodies the type that will take its full shape in John the Savage from
Brave New World and Brian Foxe from Eyeless in Gaza.
This story has many stylistic features that will be dominant in Huxley’s
subsequent works. His recognizable humor and irony are astonishingly
developed in “Happily Ever After” if we bear in mind that Limbo was
Huxley’s first book of short fiction. For instance, Jacobsen recognizes
the importance of the church as “one of the few hopes for humanity”
(Huxley, 1992, p. 21). This idea is followed by a casual remark about
other reasons for his interest in churches. We also learn that he likes
visiting churches as a “student of anthropology,” “Freudian psychologist”
and due to “the philosophic amusement of counting the undistributed
middles and tabulating historically the exploded fallacies in the parson’s
discourse” (p. 21). This paradox indicates his awareness of the social
significance of Christianity, but also suggests his contempt for Christian
practices, which he never voices in public. Another example of Huxley’s
irony is the beginning of Chapter 4, where we find the Reverend Roger
“biting the end of his pen and scratching his head” as if he were “in
the throes of literary composition” (p. 41). Soon we realize that this
demanding intellectual activity results from his attempt to write an obituary for Guy. Not only does this scene put Roger’s teaching skills in
doubt—if he struggles to compose a couple of courteous sentences, he
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must be struggling with more difficult tasks such as preparing meaningful lectures for his students—but it magnifies his insecurities, which
do not go away even when he should console his grieving niece. The
contemplations of many chaste women in Huxley’s novels are announced
in this story. Reading Guy’s letter in which he alludes to his sexual desire,
Marjorie responds: “I dreamt the other night I was holding you in my
arms, and woke up hugging the pillow” (p. 18). Marjorie Petherton is the
first of many women in Huxley’s fiction whose personalities will be dominated by sexual repression, although she does not suffer the consequences
as Melpomene Fugger from “Nuns at Luncheon” or Marjorie Carling
from Point Counter Point (that they are namesakes is not a coincidence).
Finally, Guy’s unsuccessful writing attempts resemble similar thoughts in
Denis Stone from Crome Yellow and Philip Quarles from Point Counter
Point. Thinking about his novel, Guy moves on to explain the purpose
of his writing: “What I want to get is something very hard, very external.
Intense emotion, but one will somehow have got outside it” (p. 26). His
thoughts correspond with the ruminations of many writers in Huxley’s
fiction, especially with their self-doubt and inability to express emotions.
Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers
In “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers,” Huxley satirizes
modernist art and the craze for the occult and minor religious beliefs at
the beginning of the twentieth century. It is a story about Emberlin, a
peculiar intellectual whose mind is a strange mix of “fantastic speculativeness of the undergraduate” and “wise and antique dons” (Huxley, 1992,
p. 48). But Emberlin is far from the black-and-white illustration of a
failed scholar who finds relief in occultism. He has many other distinctive
qualities:
To be allowed to listen to his post-prandial conversation was a privilege indeed. Not only was he himself a consummately good talker, but
he had also the power of stimulating others to talk well. He was like
some subtle wine, intoxicating just to the Meredithian level of tipsiness.
In his company you would find yourself lifted to the sphere of nimble
and mercurial conceptions; you would suddenly realize that some miracle
had occurred, that you were living no longer in a dull world of jumbled
things but somewhere above the hotch-potch in a glassily perfect universe
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18
A. MATIĆ
of ideas, where all was informed, consistent, symmetrical. (Huxley, 1992,
p. 47)
This quotation, apart from demonstrating Huxley’s literary talent,
showcases a feature of Huxley’s characterization that we can find in all
his satirical works. The narrator provides many clues about Emberlin’s
personality, which we cannot fully understand because it is the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, we are put on the right track to interpret
Emberlin’s uncanny talents later on. For instance, we learn that he is a
good talker, yet his eloquence does not bring a substantial change to our
beliefs. The metaphor of “subtle wine” that produces “the Meredithian
level of tipsiness” points to an amusing atmosphere that will not turn
our world upside down but will enable us to enjoy Emberlin’s idiosyncratic ideas. This excerpt also contains Huxley’s elegant irony. Emberlin’s
“nimble and mercurial conceptions” will transpose us to the artificial
world in which everything is “informed, consistent, symmetrical.” We
might assume that Emberlin’s theories are based on rigorous examinations, comparisons with other similar concepts, and eliminations of
discrepancies, which result in a set of perfect ideas that is hard to refute.
In the remainder of the story, however, as we are given more information about his strange theoretical framework, such an introduction creates
powerful irony.
Although a prolific writer, Emberlin refuses to publish his works so as
not to succumb to “exhibitionism” (Huxley, 1992, p. 48). He made that
mistake only once, in his youth, when he let a collection of his poems
see the light of day, but soon he realized the magnitude of his irresponsibility and, before the book could reach a wider audience, gathered all the
available copies and burned them. His first great love was alchemy and
he achieved “considerable proficiency in the Great Art” (p. 53). Experimenting with mnemonics, he made a syllogizing machine in an attempt to
gain universal knowledge prescribed by a Catalan mystic and poet Ramon
Llull (1232–1316) or Raymond Lully, as he is known in the Englishspeaking world. However, nothing has influenced Emberlin more than
Eupompianism, a school of thought founded by Eupompus, a forgotten
Alexandrian painter who used to be famous for making portraits of the
rich before he set about discovering the secrets of numbers. Eupompus’
poetics inspired a small group of people who called themselves Philarithmics, celebrating the numerical art and philosophy of their master. In
line with his long-lasting spiritual practice, Emberlin has evolved into
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a pious Philarithmic, counting tiles in public lavatories and explaining
the “statistics about the speed of light or the rate of growth in fingernails” (p. 54). His whole life revolves around numbers as if “some mental
leprosy” (p. 54) has covered his intellect.
Unlike “Happily Ever After,” which criticizes institutional Christianity
and its reluctance to change, “Eupompus” is a satire against cults and
obscure beliefs at the beginning of the twentieth century. Emberlin seems
to be a strange mix of Aleister Crowley4 and MacGregor Mathers, “half a
lunatic, half knave” and a lonely “ghost-lover” who became “more arrogant being a ghost” (pp. 225–226), as W. B. Yeats (1970) calls Mathers
in “All Souls’ Night.” Even though Huxley was open to different schools
of thought, he never advocated Emberlin’s “one-pointedness” that results
in “more or less total atrophy of all but one side of the mind” (Huxley,
2009, p. 299). From his youth to the end of his spiritual journey, Huxley
aimed to unite diverse forms of knowledge and experience—traditional
and non-traditional, mainstream and obscure—that would enable him
to understand deeper layers of reality. He did not support the limited
perception of life that inevitably led to blind alleys. As Peter Firchow
(1972) argues, both Emberlin and Eupompus believe that “the analytic
intellect” (p. 38) is the only means of discovering the truth. Since they
deliberately limit their perception of reality, they become “incapable of
seeing other human beings except as numerical objects,” which leads to
their “isolation and inhumanity” (p. 38). The idea of one-pointedness
that results in obscurity and isolation from other people will become a
recurrent theme in Huxley’s fiction. Emberlin is also the literary illustration of what Huxley (1927) calls a “crank” (p. 223). In his opinion,
cranks possess “a specific tendency to receive beliefs and endow them
with qualities of absoluteness” (p. 223), clinging to extreme ideas so
passionately because they secretly doubt their truth. The more problematic a concept, the more personal their reaction, which makes the concept
look even more solid. Like Emberlin and his experiments with alchemy,
mnemonics and Eupompianism, cranks “ride several hobbies in succession, treating each in turn as an absolute and religious dogma” (p. 223).
Guided by this complex mechanism, the controversial ideas are elevated
to such a level that they become a new belief. Sometimes, according to
Huxley, a person’s subconsciousness stages a “counter-attack” (p. 224),
launching a new set of accusations against the initial concept, in which
case, as a form of overcompensation, the belief turns into fanaticism. In
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20
A. MATIĆ
that sense, Emberlin, like many other characters in Huxley’s early short
fiction, introduces a theory that Huxley will later develop in his essays.
“Eupompus” mocks the urge in many modernist artists and intellectuals to find a substitute for religion. As Pericles Lewis (2010) points out,
secularism was a “minority position in England” (p. 39) at the beginning
of the twentieth century. Cristanne Miller (2009) states that modernism
did not repudiate religion but mostly the hierarchies of “formal religious institutions” (p. 261). Huxley, on the other hand, was among
the rare authors of modernist era who thought the world could live
without religion. He considered it a system of superficial rituals that was
in place not to elevate the soul or deepen the perception of reality but
mostly to preserve the privileges of its followers. Dana W. Sawyer (2021)
rightly claims that Huxley for the most part despised religion, deeming
it “a province of gatekeepers, power grabbers, sycophants, and obscurantists” (p. 6). Of all religious practices, Huxley praised individual mystical
insights, which I will explain in the analysis of “The Death of Lully” and
the stories from the 1950s.
Huxley mocks some forms of modernist art in this story. Eupompus’
works after his numerical illumination are more akin to modernist experimentations than ancient portraits. For instance, one of his jewels is an
enormous canvas covered in thirty-three thousand black swans. Another
is an “orchard of identical trees set in quincunxes” (Huxley, 1992, p. 52).
His most controversial painting describes an amphitheater with multitudes of Cyclopes whose eyes “are fixed, in a terrible and menacing
scrutiny, upon a dwarf-like creature cowering pitiably in the arena”
(p. 52). George Woodcock (1972) interprets Eupompus’ art as a satire on
modernist movements which believed to have “a scientific basis for painting” (p. 72). In his opinion, the representation of the one-eyed Cyclopes
who stare at the dwarf, the only one with two eyes, mocks cubists who
“abandon the stereoscopic two-eyed vision” in order to obtain the “three
dimensional solidity” of an object (p. 73). In “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers,” Huxley seems to suggest that the art satisfied
with the representation of a single number/symbol is not a modernist
invention. The only difference is that in the ancient past it was called
madness, whereas in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century
such a concept is promoted as a supreme artistic style. Indeed, in his early
essays, Huxley criticizes cubist obsession with geometry. For instance,
in “The New Romanticism,” he writes that cubists have removed from
their paintings “everything that might appeal to the individual soul” and
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INITIATION IN LIMBO
21
filled the gap with “solid geometry” (Huxley, 1931, p. 193). Needless
to say, modernist painting—even if it displays a black square on white
as in Malevich’s famous work—offers much more than plain geometry,
as the narrator of this story would probably interpret it. “Eupompus” is
Huxley’s first short story to showcase his traditionalist views on painting.
In both his fiction and nonfiction, he will frequently satirize modernist
art, especially the idea whereby anything new is to be regarded as superior to the old (Antic Hay being a prime example). It should be noted
that in the 1950s, after his famous experiments with mescalin, Huxley
modified his views on cubist perspective and representation, which I will
explain in the analysis of “The Tillotson Banquet” from Mortal Coils .
The modern-day Philarithmic and his ancient idol are among the
funniest characters in Huxley’s short fiction. Regardless of whether we
read about Emberlin’s colorful personality or Eupompus’ dedication to
numbers, we cannot help admiring Huxley’s exceptional humor and
irony, especially if we remember that he was only twenty-six when Limbo
was published. For instance, to show Emberlin’s eloquence, the narrator
describes him as a “godlike” man whose words can build “this crystal
Eden, where no belly-going snake … might ever enter and disturb its
harmonies” (Huxley, 1992, p. 47). This complex image suggests not only
Emberlin’s rhetorical acumen and the pseudo-religious basis of his belief
but also his crank-like fervor that not even Satan can undermine. The
effect is even stronger when we learn what he considers to be the absolute
truth. Another example of Huxley’s wit is the source of Eupompus’ biography. It is “a volume of Zuylerius … not the Zuylerius one knows … the
familiar John Zuylerius, Junior, but the elder Henricus Zuylerius” (p. 50).
People who see John Zuylerius, Junior, as a familiar figure inhabit a realm
inaccessible to mere mortals, and their stories have to be more unusual
than anything one has heard before. While explaining Eupompus’ reputation as a portrait-painter, Emberlin, referring to the elder Zuylerius,
claims that “great courtesans would pay him a month’s earnings” for “a
half-length in oils,” that merchants would grant him “the costliest of their
outlandish treasures,” and that Ethiopian rulers, having made a grueling
journey, would give him “camel-loads of gold and spices” for their miniatures on ivory (pp. 50–51). Here we can enjoy Emberlin’s storytelling,
which would convince even diehard skeptics. Again, the humorous effect
becomes complete once we realize why the great painter sacrificed his
fame.
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A. MATIĆ
The most ironic part of this story is the depiction of what could
have been Eupompus’ last painting had he not killed his followers and
committed suicide. According to Henricus Zuylerius, Emberlin informs
us, the painting was “a representation of Pure Number, or God and the
Universe … a picture of the cosmos seen … through a rather Neoplatonic camera obscura” (Huxley, 1992, p. 53). Emberlin believes that the
masterpiece was supposed to be “a very adequate rendering in visible form
of the conception of the one and the many, with all the intermediate
stages of enlightenment between matter and the Fons Deitatis ” (p. 53).
Since Eupompus decided to murder his followers rather than finish the
painting, we can assume he knew that his ultimate goal to explain the
world by numbers could never be achieved and that his sacrifice had
been in vain. However, scholars who explore Huxley’s alternative spirituality—and that has to be the most ironic aspect of this painting—might
recognize an interesting detail: Eupompus’ unfinished representation of
God and universe with “the conception of the one and many” and
different “stages of enlightenment between matter and the Fons Deitatis ”
resembles Huxley’s idea of the absolute or the divine ground,5 the knowledge of which he will see, more than two decades later, as the “ultimate
reason of human existence” (Huxley, 2009, p. 21). Although these two
concepts are not the same, the similarities are striking. It seems that
Huxley’s idea of the divine ground did not come out of the blue in the
mid-1930s, as it is usually believed. “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art
by Numbers” indicates that the sketch of that concept had been around
at least since 1920.
The Death of Lully
Raymond Lully, the Catalan mystic, poet, and missionary featured in
“Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers” as Emberlin’s former
paragon, is the protagonist of “The Death of Lully”. We learn about his
life from the captain of a Genoese ship, who tells a Spanish nobleman
and his mistress that Lully used to be an alchemist, poet, and “a raffish
young dog” who was “drinking, drabbing, and dicing” (Huxley, 1992,
p. 73), but became a hermit as he learned that the love of his life suffered
from breast cancer. Henceforth, according to the captain, the “Illuminated Doctor” was engaged in missionary work in Northern Africa until
he was murdered by the infidels.
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Despite Lully’s unsavory reputation among European sailors, the
captain sees Lully’s death as Providence. He intends to steal the martyr’s
corpse and pay his dues to Christianity. However, when the captain’s crew
bring Lully’s body to the ship, he turns out to be alive. Due to his age and
condition, he is not likely to survive for more than a day, so the captain
is faced with a difficult dilemma: whether to take Lully’s corpse to Spain,
where people would venerate him as a patron martyr, or to Genoa, the
captain’s hometown where people might refuse Lully’s body because he
is not Genoese.
Even though Lully’s life portrayed in this story is not always based
on facts, his controversial approach to Christianity is closer to historical
records. As Joaquín-José Cuéllar Trasorras (2022) explains in his essay
on Huxley’s references to Spanish mysticism, the Illuminated Doctor
had issues with the Inquisition due to his interpretations of traditional
Christian concepts (p. 100). Huxley’s story explores this aspect of Lully’s
religious belief. Thus, the narrator contrasts Lully’s understanding of
Christianity with the behavior of Christians on the ship. The Spanish
nobleman is “proud as sin” and “as jealous as a stag,” treating the
sailors like “slaves or dogs” (Huxley, 1992, p. 68). The narrator calls
him the “possessor” (p. 68) of his mistress. His jealousy often turns into
rage, especially if someone smiles at his property. For him, Christianity is
nothing more than the ideology that secures his country’s colonial power.
He is not interested in helping people or controlling his emotions, much
less in elevating his soul. The Spaniard’s mistress is afraid of his anger and
cruelty; yet she cannot resist him because he is a nobleman. She allows
him to do whatever he pleases as long as he does not hurt her physically.
The captain, on the other hand, intends to steal Lully’s corpse because
he wishes to be praised for rescuing the martyr from infidels. He does
not care about spiritual dimensions of Christianity. He understands the
importance of Christian faith in the social hierarchy of his republic and
wants to use Lully’s corpse to his benefit.
The contrast between Lully and his fellow-Christians is most striking
in his final monologue. As he confesses to the Spaniard that it has
been fifty years since he had his last “earthly passion,” Lully explains
that people’s souls “fester inwardly,” that man “thirsts” for “swamps
of evil” while a “devouring cancer gnaws at his entrails,” and that he
has lived for half a century with “fever and cancer” or “acids that burn
and corrode” (Huxley, 1992, pp. 76–77). This expressionist account of
human condition—which perhaps prompted Nicholas Murray (2003) to
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A. MATIĆ
regret Huxley’s “morbid interest in human decay and debility” (p. 138)—
is not something we expect from a Christian martyr on his deathbed.
The quoted section of Lully’s monologue contains at least two important ideas: 1) Lully’s fifty-year-long commitment to Christianity started
after his last sexual intercourse,6 that is, after he learned that the love
of his life had breast cancer, which highlights the connection between
repressed sexuality and religious zeal; 2) his search for spiritual enlightenment has led him to detest human body. These two ideas are crucial for
our understanding of Huxley’s early views on Christian mysticism.
The rest of Lully’s monologue unites alchemy and Christianity. He
admits that he has spent most of his time trying to create gold from
secondary ingredients. The following paragraph gives us more details on
his idea of spiritual awakening:
And yet God made all perfect; it is but accident and the evil of will that
causes defaults. All metals should be gold, were it not that their elements
willed evilly in their desire to combine. And so with men: the burning
sulphur of passion, the salt of wisdom, the nimble mercurial soul should
come together to make a golden being, incorruptible and rustless. But the
elements mingle jarringly, not in a pure harmony of love, and gold is rare,
while lead and iron and poisonous brass that leaves a taste as of remorse
behind it are everywhere common. (Huxley, 1992, p. 76)
Lully claims that free will is the main cause of human suffering.
However, as he states that only the alchemist unity of disharmonic
elements can make a harmonious whole, he signals that free will could
be a tool of redemption. This seemingly contradictory opinion becomes
clearer when Lully explains that one’s will to follow a single path is to
blame for any “defaults.” Only if the elements combine with the aim
of reaching the total “harmony of love” will the new solution become
“incorruptible and rustless.” It is also interesting that Lully, unlike many
Christian mystics, considers the mix of passion, wisdom, and soul as the
only path to salvation. In his view, passion—provided it is not pursued as a
goal but as a part of a bigger unifying force—is not an obstacle to perfection and God’s kingdom. If combined with other elements in pursuit of
the divine totality, passion transforms into the necessary ingredient. The
only problem is that Lully came to this conclusion too late.
Despite all his wisdom, Lully doubts that his life-long endeavor has
been worth the struggle and he thanks God for bringing his suffering to
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INITIATION IN LIMBO
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the end. His alchemist metaphors, controversial lifestyle, and the lack of
support by the Church put him in between the institutional Christianity
and general public. Moreover, Lully’s discoveries imply that Christianity
alone is not enough to transform the human soul. One needs alchemy,
too, which signifies other beliefs and practices. This is one of the first
indications in Huxley’s fiction—if we exclude the satirical descriptions
of Emberlin’s endeavors mentioned in the analysis of “Eupompus Gave
Splendour to Art By Numbers”—that only a comprehensive philosophy,
consisting of various forms of knowledge and spiritual experience, can
enable someone to transcend their selfhood and reach other dimensions
of reality.
As I have stated above, “The Death of Lully” shows Huxley’s early
views on Christian mysticism, that is, the practice epitomized by the likes
of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, or St.
Teresa of Ávila (and, of course, Ramon Llull) whereby one can achieve
the union with God through a specific state of mind which entails the
annihilation of the self. Even though the experiences and results of the
aforementioned mystics were different, each of them aimed to transcend
their selfhood and gain “unitive knowledge with the divine Ground”
(Huxley, 2009, p. 21). Jake Poller (2019) correctly observes that Huxley
was both attracted and repelled by mysticism in his early works (p. 91). I
would add that Huxley—who at the time was unable to connect Christian
mysticism with similar experiences in oriental cultures—was attracted by
genuine efforts of Christian mystics to understand the human condition
and repelled by the extreme results that such efforts usually produced.
That is to say, he praised Christian mystics for their attempts to transcend
their ego and decipher hidden aspects of reality, but criticized their physical austerities and rejection of carnal love. (In the analyses of the stories
from the 1950s, I will explain how Huxley reconciled Christian mysticism not only with other faiths but with individual mystical insights which
are not related to any religion.) Finally, this short story criticizes onepointedness in religious belief. In his final monologue, Lully regrets not
seeing that the North African heathens are the same as his fellow Christians in Europe. He realizes that one needs a more inclusive approach than
Christianity to perform a “more difficult alchemy, the transformation of
men” (Huxley, 1992, p. 77).
The story shows the Freudian connection between religious fanaticism and repressed sexuality, typical of many modernist authors. Having
learned that his mistress had cancer, Lully decided never to succumb to
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26
A. MATIĆ
an “earthly passion” again. He was a “fanatic of puritanism,” as Huxley
(1927) calls this type in his essay “The Substitutes for Religion,” a fanatic
who “overcompensates a secret prurience” (p. 220). The alchemist paragraph quoted above implies that Lully, on his deathbed, became aware
of his main limitation. His striving toward the Absolute did not include
passion, that is, carnal love—on the contrary, he did everything in his
power to run away from it—which is why his endeavor ended in failure. It
should also be noted that in Science, Liberty, and Peace (1946), published
almost three decades after this story, Huxley dismissed the idea whereby
“spirituality is nothing but wish fulfilment and misdirected sex” (Science,
Liberty and Peace 29), which illustrates the change in Huxley’s perception
of spirituality that occurred in his later years.
Cynthia
In his 1920 review of Limbo, Herbert S. Gorman labeled “Cynthia”
(together with “The Bookshop” and “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art
by Numbers”) as a “delicious trifle” (Gorman, H. S. 1975, p. 45). It
is a story about Tom Lykeham, an Oxford undergraduate who meets a
goddess at the theater and believes he is Apollo. One evening during a
walk with the narrator, Lykeham becomes enchanted by the moon. He
rushes to the top of the hill so that he can be close to the celestial force.
It is then the narrator sees Lykeham kneel in front of a woman as she
caresses his hair. Leaving them to enjoy each other, the narrator returns to
his dormitory room and, after checking Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary,
concludes that Lykeham is not Apollo but a goat-foot Pan.
As in “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers,” the narrator
sets the tone at the beginning of the story, which the reader should follow
in order to understand the protagonist’s personality and ideas. We first
learn that Tom Lykeham is a descendant of an old Anglo-Saxon family
and that his name is a derivation of lycam, which means “corpse” in old
English. His ancestry and outlandish name contain at least three important allusions: 1) His family background refers to the ancient past with
its historical and mythological frameworks; 2) being a corpse, Lykeham
the man is only a façade that conceals another person or entity; 3) the
ambiguity of his name implies other possible meanings that could reveal
his identity. Each of these cryptic allusions plays a role in shaping our
expectations. The narrator suggests that Lykeham is not who we think he
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is and that we should look for his identity among the dark forces of the
ancient past.
To introduce Lykeham’s personality, the narrator chooses the
following scene:
Through the open window Tom was shouting a deep E flat, with a spread
chord of under- and over-tones, while the guitar gibbered shrilly and
hysterically in D natural. Lykeham laughed, banged down his guitar on to
the sofa with such violence that it gave forth a trembling groan from all its
strings, and ran forward to meet me. He slapped me on the shoulder with
painful heartiness; his whole face radiated joy and excitement. (Huxley,
1992, p. 57)
On the surface, the first sentence in this paragraph shows that Lykeham’s talent for music is not as remarkable as he believes. It also implies
his disregard for harmony and logic, together with his pronounced
neurosis, because he does not sing but shouts, and his guitar does not play
but “gibber[s] shrilly and hysterically.” His erratic behavior is amplified
when he bangs his guitar against the couch, which emphasizes how unpredictable his decisions can be. At the same time, his face is not contorted
with rage but reflects “joy and excitement.” The narrator explains that
Lykeham’s tastes are “eccentric, his habits deplorable, the range of his
information immense” (Huxley, 1992, p. 56). This description could
apply to Emberlin as well. However, despite everything the two characters have in common, they do not belong to the same type. Perhaps the
biggest difference between them is that Lykeham has an insatiable sexual
appetite, whereas the pious Philarithmic spends all his time isolated from
other people.
A neurotic man with an uncontrollable sexual desire whose name
alludes not only to a corpse but to Mount Lykaion in Arcadia7 could
not be any other deity but Pan. In her article on D. H. Lawrence’s
fascination with Pan, Fiona Richards (2015) points out the “astonishing
diversity” of texts in English literature that featured Pan in Lawrence’s
time (p. 90). Huxley’s “Cynthia” undoubtedly fits in with the literary
climate at the beginning of the twentieth century. If we move beyond
the literal interpretation of the story and take into consideration Huxley’s
satirical approach in Limbo, we can assume that Lykeham’s obsession with
his goddess and especially his belief that he is Apollo ridicule modernist
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A. MATIĆ
infatuation with mythology, which made even mediocre talents believe
they could reach Parnassus just by invoking ancient divinities.
Apart from demonstrating Huxley’s use of allusions and ambiguities, “Cynthia” displays many characteristics of his short fiction. In
his descriptions of Lykeham, the narrator resorts to humor and irony,
complementing the tone he set in the beginning. For example, Lykeham
admires his physical appearance not because he is handsome and irresistible but because he is at the same time “repulsive” and endowed with
“fascinating ugly beauty” (Huxley, 1992, p. 60). His narcissism corresponds with the image the narrator has been creating from the start in
order to hint Lykeham’s identity. In addition, when Lykeham attempts to
depict his goddess’ unique beauty, he says she is “frozenly virginal” and
“virginally passionate” (p. 59). Most of us would not use these oxymorons
to describe a person to whom we are attracted. They also imply predatory
masculinity, which is yet another allusion to Pan.
It is interesting that both Lykeham and the narrator refer to Huxley’s
poem “Frascati’s,” published in Leda the same year. As he recalls his
encounter with the goddess, Lykeham says that they were sitting “rapturously happy,” to which the narrator adds: “And quietly perspiring palm
to palm. I know exactly, so we can pass over that” (Huxley, 1992, p. 58).
The last four lines in “Frascati’s” are:
… But when the wearied Band
Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.
And there we sit in blissful calm,
Quietly sweating palm to palm. (Huxley, 1926, p. 38)
R. C. Bald (1950) thinks that Huxley included the last verse into the
story because he wanted it to be read by a wider audience (p. 184). Given
that both Limbo and Leda were published in 1920, it is hard to imagine
that Huxley lost hope for his collection of poems so quickly. For all we
know about his style in Limbo, Huxley’s decision to borrow his own verse
is motivated by self-irony, which has greater significance than Huxley’s
critics usually believe. When writers allude to their own life, the allusion
becomes part of the narrative, revealing a hidden character who briefly
comes onto the surface to sabotage the plot. Huxley uses this tool in other
stories such as “Green Tunnels” and especially in “Over the Telephone,”
which I will analyze in the chapter on Huxley’s uncollected short fiction.
That he resorts to self-irony in “Cynthia” seems even more plausible if
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we know that the line from “Frascati’s” is recited by the narrator, who is
Lykeham’s interlocutor and who can easily be Huxley himself.
The Bookshop
“The Bookshop” has a simple plot: A middle-class intellectual visits a
slum where he finds a bookshop which has preserved the qualities of the
previous epoch, providing a partial escape from the materialistic world.
The owner plays a tune on the piano and convinces the narrator to buy a
book he does not need. On the way home, the narrator throws the book
in the bushes as he does not want to be a slave to things. However, as it
is usually the case in Huxley’s short fiction, beneath the surface we can
discover many features of his witty style, together with the themes that
will be dominant in his later works.
This is the first short story in which Huxley’s protagonist steps outside
the usual, intellectual, middle-class bubble and dares to explore a slum:
It seemed indeed an unlikely place to find a bookshop. All the other
commercial enterprises of the street aimed at purveying the barest necessities to the busy squalor of the quarter. In this, the main arterial street, there
was a specious glitter and life produced by the swift passage of the traffic.
It was almost airy, almost gay. But all around great tracts of slum pullulated dankly. The inhabitants did their shopping in the grand street; they
passed, holding gobbets of meat that showed glutinous even through the
wrappings of paper; they cheapened linoleum at upholstery doors; women,
black-bonneted and black-shawled, went shuffling to their marketing with
dilapidated bags of straw plait. (Huxley, 1992, p. 63)
Our first impression while reading this passage is that the narrator
is disgusted. As if taken from Dickens’ or Zola’s novels, or poems
by German and Austrian expressionists such as Gottfried Benn and
Georg Trakl, this description undoubtedly emphasizes filth and misery.
In the slum’s main street, brimming with “busy squalor,” men are
holding “glutinous” chunks of meat, while women, “black-bonneted and
black-shawled,” are carrying their “dilapidated bags.” The neighborhood
“pullulates dankly,” as if not inhabited by people but rats. Except for
the bookshop owner, no one stands out. Each person is dehumanized by
hardship and poverty. We can also feel the distance between the narrator
and the slum inhabitants. He describes them as if they were from another
country or even from another time. (Eventually the narrator informs us
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A. MATIĆ
that the slum is near Regent’s Park in London.) It is not clear whether he
enters the bookstore because he hopes to discover a rare book or because
he is afraid of the neighborhood the members of his class never visit.
That such a gruesome place has a bookstore which opens the gates to
another epoch and illustrates the nature of humanity might seem unexpected. Bearing in mind the narrator’s social status, it would be more
appropriate for him to come across the bookshop in Covent Garden or
a similar district in London. However, given Huxley’s thoughts about
London intellectuals and artists at the time, the bookstore’s location
comes as no surprise. In his opinion, most of his contemporaries—
artists, intellectuals, scientist, and socialites—committed themselves to a
tiny sphere of existence, hiding their dysfunctional personalities. (Crome
Yellow and Antic Hay, the novels that satirize London’s intellectual and
artistic crème de la crème in the early 1920s, were published within three
years after Limbo.) That is why the narrator of “The Bookshop” has to
visit a slum to find out the truth about the world’s broken humanity.
There people do not have the luxury of pretending to be someone
else. Huxley’s faithful readers will also recall “The Monocle,” a story
published six years after Limbo, where Gregory discovers his own emptiness during an encounter with a dehumanized person who turns out to be
more authentic than all Gregory’s friends and acquaintances.8 “The Bookshop” may not provide the most complex depiction of that idea, but it is
certainly the first story where Huxley’s characters learn about themselves
and the world after venturing into a less controlled environment.
Despite its rudimentary plot and characterization, “The Bookshop”
showcases Huxley’s literary talent, which scholars usually overlook or do
not emphasize enough. For example, the narrator sees the bookshop as
“a brown twilight, redolent with old leather and the smell of that fine
subtle dust that clings to the pages of forgotten books, as though preservative of their secrets—like the dry sand of Asian deserts beneath which,
still incredibly intact, lie the treasures and the rubbish of a thousand
years ago” (Huxley, 1992, p. 64). This complex, synesthetic image—
which suggests that the space, behind its modest façade, has captured
in time a dying world whose values will be discovered when the hierarchies of treasure and rubbish will not matter anymore—is astonishingly
mature for a novice writer. Another powerful metaphor is in the passage
where the bookshop owner opens the lid of his square-shaped piano. The
narrator sees “the yellow keys” as “the teeth of an ancient horse” (p. 65).
The ancient horse, inevitably calling up associations to the Trojan War,
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embodies the untamed force of the past that is about to engulf the bookshop as soon as the owner invokes it with his performance. This image is
upgraded a few paragraphs later when the narrator, listening to the owner
playing and singing Valse Infernale from Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable,
explains that he does not hear music or words anymore but feels as if
“the fatal demons, the phantasms of horror, had made a sudden irruption
into this peaceful, abstracted place” (p. 66). The owner’s unusual performance transposes the narrator to the past with all its colorful imagery, far
away not only from the impersonal slum but also from his sterile, unimaginative existence. He associates his experience with the demonic power as
it shatters his comfort zone and forces him to reevaluate his perception
of life.
But more important for this analysis is the emergence of ideas that will
take center stage in Brave New World and Huxley’s nonfiction. First of
all, the narrator and the bookshop owner criticize cheap journalism as
“piddling quotidianism” where the “ephemeral overwhelms the permanent, the classical” (Huxley, 1992, p. 63). Huxley was a contributor
to many newspapers and saw first-hand that the most superficial articles usually had the biggest impact. In his nonfiction he will constantly
disparage this form of journalism. For instance, in his essay on Pascal,
he offers a similar explanation of the effect that newspapers and other
media have on the general public, the effect that makes “the clerk and
the taylorized workman leave their imbecile tasks to spend their leisure
under the influence of such opiate distractions” (Huxley, 1958a, p. 353).
Likewise, comparing an old book of fashion-plates that glorify home and
family life to the modern catalogues featuring beauties “with their heels
and their arch of instep, their flattened faces and smile of pouting invitation,” the narrator concludes that he is a “deteriorationist” (Huxley,
1992, p. 64). On the one hand, here we can see Huxley’s conservative
side which never embraced modernist tendencies in art and design; on
the other hand, this is a protest against imposed promiscuity that will
culminate in Brave New World’s orgy-porgies.
Having listened to the owner play and sing, the narrator looks through
the door and sees the usual hustle and bustle of the slum’s main street.
He realizes that people live “under the tyranny of things” (p. 66). Before
leaving the bookshop, the narrator describes him and the owner as people
“in particular” as opposed to “the whole of humanity in general, all
faced with the hideous triumphs of things” (p. 66). These sentences
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convey what Laura Oulanne (2021) calls the “tension between commodities and authentic objects” (p. 10), typical of many modernist texts. She
explains that modernist authors, including André Breton, Ezra Pound,
and Gertrude Stein, were “inspired by … the philosophical and psychoanalytical discussions of materiality and things” (p. 11). Huxley seems to
follow the trend in this story.
The quoted sentences from “The Bookshop” anticipate Huxley’s criticism of mass consumerism and impersonal life in the modern metropolis,
characteristic not only of Brave New World but of his essays from the
1940s and 1950s. For instance, in Science, Liberty and Peace (1946),
Huxley claims that “vast numbers of men and women pass their whole
lives in hideous cities” being “rootless, propertyless and entirely divorced
from the world of nature” (Huxley, 1950, p. 23). This quotation directly
applies to the characters in “The Bookshop”. The depiction of the slum
in this story is his first attempt to formulate the idea of human degradation in London and other big cities. In Brave New World Revisited
(1958), Huxley (1965) has a proposition for anyone who intends to live
in a metropolis: “If you wish to avoid the spiritual impoverishment of
individuals and whole societies, leave the metropolis and revive the small
country community … in which individuals can meet and cooperate as
complete persons” (p. 114). While writing “The Bookshop” Huxley did
not see the solution to the overpopulation and poverty in vast urban areas,
but he detected the problem that would haunt him even forty years later.
Notes
1. Cobby refers to C. O. Bevan, with whom Huxley shared lodgings
at Eton and who will become the Reverend Roger in “Happily Ever
After”.
2. However, after World War II, Huxley, together with Jiddu Krishnamurti and Rosalind Rajagopal, was the trustee of the Happy
Valley School, “a small co-educational, non-sectarian and … nonsegregated high school,” as Sybille Bedford (1974) describes it,
adding that the school’s motto was “Aun Aprendo, I Am Still
Learning” (p. 516).
3. The influence of the progressive educators such as Maria Montessori
and John Dewey is examined in the analysis of “Young Archimedes”
in the chapter on Little Mexican and Other Stories .
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4. Jake Poller (2019) claims that Coleman from Antic Hay, Huxley’s
second novel, published three years after “Eupompus,” could also
be partly based on Aleister Crowley, even though the main source
was the composer Philip Heseltine (p. 20).
5. I will elaborate on this concept in the chapter on Huxley’s uncollected stories.
6. Joaquín-José Cuéllar Trasorras (2022) explains that Lully’s decision to become a mystic after his last earthly passion is not based
on historical facts but on an anecdote from the sixteenth century
(p. 101).
7. Mount Lykaion in Arcadia refers to the legend on Syrinx, the nymph
who was seduced by Pan and turned into a river-reed, which the
naughty god used to make his flute.
8. See Chapter 5 for a detailed analysis of “The Monocle.”
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Bedford, S. (1974). Aldous Huxley: A Biography. Chatto & Windus.
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Gorman, H. S. (1975). Herbert. S. Gorman, Review in New Republic. In D.
Watt (Ed.), Aldous Huxley: The Critical Heritage (pp. 43–45). Routledge.
Huxley, A. (1926). Leda. Chatto & Windus.
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Huxley, A. (1958a). Collected Essays. Harper & Brothers Publishers.
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Windus.
Huxley, A. (2009). The Perennial Philosophy. Harper Publishers.
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