Old Bestseller: Antic Hay, by Aldous Huxley

Old Bestseller: Antic Hay, by Aldous Huxley

(I note to begin with that Antic Hay was likely not really a bestseller, but it was a novel that gained considerable notice in its time.)

Aldous Huxley was born in 1894 and died in 1963 -- famously on the same day in November as C. S. Lewis and as a certain American President. He was the grandson of the famous zoologist T. H. Huxley, best remembered now as an early defender of Charles Darwin's views. Aldous wrote a dozen novels, two of which at least can be considered Science Fiction -- his most famous, Brave New World, and his last, Island. Huxley also wrote short stories, poetry, many many essays, and screenplays. He was co-scenarist on several very successful movies -- the Garson/Olivier Pride and Prejudice, Madame Curie, and Jane Eyre. Late in his life he gained some notoriety for using the drugs mescaline and LSD, and for a book, The Doors of Perception, about his experience with mescaline.

Antic Hay (1923) was Aldous Huxley's second novel.  It seems to have been the novel that established his reputation.  I had not previously read any Huxley save Brave New World and Island, both quite some time ago.  Antic Hay is rather a different beast than those books.  It's very much an early '20s book -- recalling quite directly, for instance, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. I was also reminded strongly of Anthony Powell, particularly Powell's pre-War novels, indeed most notably his first novel, Afternoon Men.  (Though echoes of Antic Hay seem to be present also in From a View to a Death and Agents and Patients.) I think the Powell novels are better, but that is, I suppose, a matter of personal preference only -- certainly Huxley (of this period) was a direct influence on Powell.

The novel concerns several youngish men and women in London, in 1922.  The main character is Theodore Gumbril, a thirtyish man who at the opening resigns his job as a schoolteacher to try to develop an idea for "Gumbril's Patent Small Clothes": an inflatable bladder to be inserted in the seat of one's pants, so that one could sit more comfortably on hard benches. He returns to London, and we meet his circle: a failed artist named Lypiatt, a precious and supercilious newspaper writer named Mercaptan, a physiologist named Shearwater, and a strange man named Coleman. Soon the various characters are engaged in the typical empty machinations of such novels: Gumbril's former lover, Myra Liveash, puts off Lypiatt's advances while dallying with Shearwater, and eventually, perhaps, ending up with Gumbril again.  At the same time Gumbril, in disguise, seduces the foolish and naive Mrs. Shearwater, who ends up by mistake seeking out Gumbril at Mercaptan's rooms, then Coleman's, whereupon the latter rapes her (an act presented as hardly anything out of the ordinary). Gumbril finds himself in love with an innocent and virginal married woman -- but he cannot bring himself to believe in being in love ...  and so on.

It's quite wittily written, though the tone seems wobbly, at times serious and romantic and idealistic, at other times utterly cynical. The characters are very sharply presented, to the point of caricature in some cases (Mercaptan, for example). The whole attitude is pure early '20s disgust with the "civilization" that led the West to the first World War. Powell's Afternoon Men (1931) has a broadly similar scheme (as do many other novels, of course), but Powell maintains a more consistent, more cynical tone, that I think works better.