And how did she spend her time?… Well, she read a lot of books; but most of the novels she got from Boots’ seemed to her rather silly. ‘Too much about the same thing. Always love.’
(Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley, chapter 12)

‘You bore me,’ said Mrs. Viveash.
‘Must I talk of love, then?’ asked Gumbril.
‘It looks like it,’ Mrs. Viveash answered, and closed her eyes.
(Chapter 21)

Comedy of manners

Antic Hay is a contemporary comedy of manners set in 1922 (p.45). The comic hero is Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon., an intellectual young public school and Oxbridge graduate who has taken a job as a teacher at a public school, like so many before and after him (like Evelyn Waugh did in 1924 and W.H. Auden did in 1930 and Edward Upward did, all hating it).

(After spelling it wrong, I realised that Gumbril is only one transposed letter away from being Grumbil i.e. grumble, which is largely his function.)

Theodore Gumbril is a ‘bony starveling’. He is, in other words, yet another iteration of the over-intellectual, under-active, permanent miasma of jealousy, alienation and resentment which populates Huxley and Waugh’s satires. He hates the Head Master of his school, a man with fierce whims, he hates the music master Dr Jolly but most of all, he hates the boys.

He fantasises about living in a fine Italian villa, hosting magnificent parties, having just the right word of wit and intelligence to say to all his famous guests – of beautiful women who fall into his arms naked, of giving money to the composer Arnold Schoenberg, and discussing quantum theory i.e. he is totally up to speed with all the latest trends. And fired by this fantasy, at the end of chapter one Gumbril writes a letter of resignation to the Head.

Thus begin his efforts to ‘make a living’ out in ‘the real world’. In the school chapel, with a sore bottom from sitting on the hard benches, Gumbril conceives the idea of trousers containing an inflatable rubber pad under the bottom. Yes! He can patent it, he’ll call it his Patent Small-Clothes! He’ll make a fortune!

Theodor’s father, who lives in a shabby square in north London, bursts into laughter when his son tells him his plan. ‘Make money?’ ha ha ha. Mr Gumbril senior is a failing architect who has a spare room full of models of cathedrals which would put Brunelleschi and Wren to shame, but to earn his bread is obliged to design huts for the workers at Bletchley Park.

The book presents a series of comic types and characters who then circulate around the bars and restaurants and salons of London, bumping into each other like dodgems at a funfair. They include:

Casimir Lypiatt (40) – a Titan of an Artist and Poet, always booming loudly about Art, the need for a modern Michelangelo, who laughs:

with the loud and bell-mouthed cynicism of one who sees himself as a misunderstood and embittered Prometheus

In fact it’s a running joke of the author’s that when Lypiatt laughs, all the elements of his face collapse. Lypiatt is supposedly a caricature of the Vorticist painter and self-proclaimed ‘Enemy’ of bourgeois conformity, Wyndham Lewis, who himself wrote a number of blistering satires on England’s artistic circles during the 1920s and 30s.

Jim Shearwater – a scientist, biologist to be precise. It’s a recurring joke that Shearwater seems to take up a lot of space and always blunders into tables and cupboards. He is married to pretty young Rosie who he completely neglects.

Mr Mercaptan – a flourishing aesthete, ‘wherever he was, it was Paris’ – a great exponent of civilisation, a word which he pronounces with great care and definition; he is theatrically and amusingly appalled by all the paintings at Lypiatt’s exhibition. It is a close secret that his first name is Pasteur. He is 34.

Coleman – ‘a huge bearded Cossack of a man’, ‘a young man with a blond, fan-shaped beard stood by the table, looking down at them through a pair of bright blue eyes’ – even louder and more bombastic than Lypiatt, huge strong Coleman never misses an opportunity to mock and satirise Christianity.

Myra Viveash (25), a beautiful socialite who Gumbril hangs around like a dog and who gave herself to him for a few days, then just as quickly dumped him – a haunting memory of brief bliss which makes Gumbril permanently miserable. As the plot develops we realise at least two of the other male characters are ‘in love’ with her. But unbeknown to them, she herself had a great love, gorgeous blue-eyed Tony Lamb, who was killed in the Great War, in 1917. She has never recovered. She cultivates the pose of being an exquisite creature too good for this world, and speaks in a highly mannered style as if every sentence consisted of her final, dying words. This is a fashionable pose and yet, deep inside, she really is broken forever by the death of the only man she ever loved.

Bruin Opps – top-hatted, monocled toff, Myra’s current lover.

Lypiatt also loves Myra and, when she goes to his rundown mews and studio to pose for her portrait, it becomes all too clear that 40-year-old Lypiatt loves her too, so much as to burst into tears at her knees, and next moment smash his fist into the wooden dais.

I read this and thought: Love is a boring subject. There is nothing whatever mysterious about it. It is the pre-mating behaviour of Homo sapiens. It is merely a question of how long and tortuous the negotiations will be before the inevitable act of sexual intercourse is undertaken.

In Huxley’s first two novels it takes the same form – the beautiful but unattainable, nubile young woman (Anna in Crome, Myra here) and a little cluster of men all convinced they are head over heels in love with her or that she has broken their hearts. As Anne complains in Crome, men are so boring.

Chapter 7

Lypiatt holds an exhibition of new work at the gallery of the bumptious optimistic salesman, Mr Albemarle. Lypiatt has written the catalogue which rages against everyone else in the arts who he calls ‘the modern impotents’. Numerous art critics attend, including little Mr Clew and the thin, long, skin-covered skeleton of Mr Mallard. Mrs Viveash attends accompanied by Mr Mercaptan, who amusingly poo-poohs everything he sees.

Chapter 8

As mentioned above, Gumbril is pinning his hopes of generating an income on his invention of inflatable ring inside gentlemen’s trousers. In this chapter he visits his tailor who’s been working on a prototype. Well, they look pretty clumsy. His tailor is a comically loquacious character who, the first time we met him, chatted about Lenin and revolution. Now he shares his theory on how political leaders need some kind of identifying symbols or markers.

Chapter 9

On the way home Gumbril – tired of feeling like a weak loser – drops into a costumier’s shop and orders a fan-shaped blonde beard to stick onto his face to try and look more manly. It certainly makes him look bigger, wider, stronger, and more capable of the ‘conquest’ of the fair sex (p.95).

He is transformed from the Mild and Melancholy Man into The Complete Man. As I said, a lot of literature can be reduced to biology.

With the beard on, he goes walking along the Bayswater Road, finds himself looking in the same shop windows as a mysterious slender lady and, acting the role of The Complete Man, chats her up, steers her into Hyde Park, they chat for an hour, he accompanies her back to her flat in Maida Vale.

Huxley lets us see inside her head and understand that she is just as much of a fantasist as Gumbril. She pretends it’s a rented flat and that the ghastly heavy furniture isn’t hers (though it is). She says the real furniture is at her place on the Riviera where she is, of course, used to playing hostess to soirees of poets. She tries to cultivate a Catherine the Great grandeur but, for a moment the conversation flags and they both see who they are and what they are – two sad losers in a shabby flat in Maida Vale. But then Gumbril remembers he is The Complete Man, takes her in his arms and carries her to the bed.

Lying there with her eyes shut, she did her best to pretend she was dead.

Yes. I’ve had that experience too, the young women who think of themselves as madly passionate, excitingly, daringly transgressively sexual, until you try to kiss them and they squeal and freeze. It’s difficult to know what to do next, especially if you’re young and very inexperienced. Make a cup of tea? Make your excuses and leave?

Anyway, the text simply cuts from that sentence, to Gumbril preparing to leave. It seems that they have had sex in the interim, although the censorship prevents it being in any way described. Now he is leaving. During sex (whatever that was like) he has, apparently, discovered her name is Rosie. At the door he asks her full name so he can write to her, and she hands him a card and girlishly closes the door.

On the dark stairs Gumbril peers at the card and realises – she is the wife of his friend Shearwater! She is Rosie Shearwater! He is reeling from this discovery when the front door into the hall opens and Shearwater walks in. Now luckily, he walks into the darkened, shared hallway of the flats and, also, Shearwater is in conversation with a younger man about some experiment – so that Gumbril after a moment’s panic, is able to pull his hat down over his face, rush down the stairs and blunder gruffly between the two men, who both ignore him.

That evening, for the first time in their marriage, Shearwater is happy because his wife is quiet and leaves him to his scientific thoughts, after dinner lying on the sofa quietly. Good little woman. She is of course, remembering Gumbril’s caresses of her smooth, secret, pink body. But the result of her adultery is their first evening of domestic bliss in years.

Chapter 10

Gumbril has several meetings with Mr Boldero, a boosterish business man and master of advertising. His lengthy speeches are, I imagine, intended to be a satirical description of 1920s advertising, more sophisticated and manipulative than ever before, there are paragraphs devoted to how advertisers play on modern people’s ignorance of science, wish not to be left out, wish to be up to date, enjoyment of novelty for its own sake, and the argument from economy.

Mr Boldero’s financial terms for going into partnership are initially risible. Gumbril writes a firm letter and then turns up wearing his beard and a thick greatcoat which makes him look much larger and more threatening. In the guise of The Complete Man. He says the terms are unacceptable and bangs the table. Mr Boldero is genuinely intimidated and Gumbril walks out with a check for £350 down and promise of £800 a year for taking lead responsibilities in the company, namely ‘to act as a managing director, writer of advertisements and promoter of foreign sales’.

Chapter 11

Gumbril spends the afternoon at Rosie’s i.e. having sex. I thought the situation would throw him into utter confusion, as it would have done Denis Stone from Crome Yellow but Theodore Gumbril is obviously made of tougher stuff. He is in his father’s flat composing advertising copy for the Patent Small-Clothes when who should knock at the door by Shearwater himself. For a moment he panics that the man has found out he’s having an affair with his wife, but it soon becomes clear Shearwater has been seeing Myra Viveash of all people and is coming out of his scientific shell and falling love with her. He’s come to ask Gumbril’s advice. Gumbril is jocular and tries not to burst out in hysterical laughter at the absurdity of the situation.

They are interrupted by the return of Mr Gumbril senior. He takes them upstairs to a room which is usually kept locked. Now, he unlocks it and shows them a scale model of London as it would have looked if it had been rebuilt to Christopher Wren’s designs after the Great Fire of London which e describes at some length.

Chapter 12

To our surprise we learn that Gumbril, dressed in his beard as The Complete Man, picked up two young women in the National Gallery (‘Old Masters, young mistresses,’ being the cynical advice Coleman gave him). Molly flirts and rolls her eyes but Emily is more sensitive. The novel risks becoming quite serious when she tells Theodore her story, namely that she gave in to the blandishments of a kindly older man, when she was just 17 but as soon as they married he beat her and assaulted her severely. Doctors took her to a rest home after he ruptured a blood vessel in her throat and she decided not to go back. Gumbril, posing as The Complete Man, feels ashamed. So does the male reader.

In a taxi he tries to kiss her but she is really traumatised, pushes him away, is in floods of tears. He feels dreadful and grovellingly apologises, it takes ages to persuade her to see him again. Next day he takes her to Kew Gardens, they walk easily hand in hand, they sit on the grass, they talk about wildflowers which he used to collect as a boy with his mother, they talk about playing the piano – she likes the opening of Beethoven’s Sonata 32 opus111 – Theodore admires her neck and hair, thinks how beautiful she is (occasionally also remembering Rosie in her pink underwear).

Suddenly Gumbril realises they’re going to be late for the evening he’s planned. The exit the Gardens and grab a taxi and race into London, but are a bit late to arrive at the classical concert he’s bought tickets for. Nonetheless, they get in in time to see the ‘Sclopis Quartet’, plus extra viola, play the Mozart String Quintet No.4. Huxley gives us over a page of prose poetry designed to match or evoke the music (pages 148 to 149).

But that is nothing compared to the extended lyricism of the passage which describes them going back to his ‘rooms’ in Great Russell Street, where they sit talking by candlelight till it is very late and then, in an ecstasy of expectation, he invites her to stay the night.

Like shy fawns they strip in the night and get into bed, but all he does is stroke her neck and arms while she shivers from cold and fear, gently gently reassuring her till she falls asleep in his arms and then he falls asleep, too.

So the book is not at all played for laughs. In some places it can be as sensitive as D.H. Lawrence.

Chapter 14

Similarly all kinds of new psychological depths are played with in this chapter. Mrs Viveash exits her house weary and bored. She had cancelled all her appointments but now is overcome with futility. At the corner by the London Library she sees a familiar face and haloos Gumbril. He runs up, says hello, tells her he can’t stay as he has an appointment to catch the 2 o’clock train from Charing Cross. Lovely Emily has rented a cottage in Sussex and will be waiting at the station in a cart.

But Mrs Viveash really pressurises him to joining her for lunch, and something in him gives in, and we follow in detail his changing psychology as he says Emily is only a girl, and is seduced by Mrs Viveash’s sophistication, and is led by her to a post office where he sends Emily a telegram saying he’s had a slight accident, will come down tomorrow same time, then lets himself be led off for a heavy lunch of lobster and wine.

Over lunch he is a hilarious clown, quotes poetry and Mozart opera, is very witty. Afterwards in a cab back to her place he is sad, but not as sad as Mrs Viveash who is overcome by memories of Tony Lamb, young and beautiful with blond hair and blue eyes, they shared a glorious week together in 1917, then he went back to the War and was killed. Now she imagines his beautiful face and blue eyes rotting under the ground and is devastated, but is too controlled to weep.

Chapter 15

That evening Theodore and Myra are dancing at a revue or cabaret club to a jazz band of four people of colour (they’re referred to as negroes or blackamoors in the text). They’re dancing to a tune called ‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ with its refrain ‘Nothing at all’ and, once again, the text isn’t really funny, it’s a combination of almost stream-of-consciousness rendition of their thought processes, heavily flavoured by Mrs Viveashe’s depression, her sense that everything is Nil, you can’t escape Nil, nothing can escape Nil.

‘What’s he to Hecuba?’ Lachrymosely, the hilarious blackamoors chanted their question, mournfully pregnant with its foreknown reply. Nil, omnipresent nil, world-soul, spiritual informer of all matter. Nil in the shape of a black-breeched moon-basined Toreador. Nil, the man with the greyhound’s nose. Nil, as four blackamoors. Nil in the form of a divine tune. Nil, the faces, the faces one ought to know by sight, reflected in the mirrors of the hall. Nil this Gumbril whose arm is round one’s waist, whose feet step in and out among one’s own. Nothing at all. (p.167)

Chapter 16

This is a peculiar, and (presumably) consciously ‘experimental’, chapter.

The band ceases, packs away behind curtains, then the curtains open to reveal the stage is set for a play. In Act I a mother has just died in childbirth and the grieving father, infuriated by the baby that did it, gets a tubercular cow brought on stage and milked into a dirty bucket, which milk he proceeds to feed the baby, or ‘Monster’ as he calls it.

Curtain down, scene change, Theodore and Mrs Viveash make desultory, jaded, cynical conversation. This is all a bit like the Weimar Republic cabaret vibe depicted in the Neue Sachlichkeit artists like Otto Dix and George Grosz.

Act II: The Monster has grown into a sickly man, bandy-legged from rickets, coughing up lung from TB. He’s just turned 21 and is poetically minded. He looks out the window at a lovely girl and rhapsodises about her.Unfortunately we hear her thoughts and she’s worrying about whether to buy some fabric for new underwear, specially as her fancy man, Roger, might any day now go as far as seeing her underwear and she doesn’t want it to look middle class now, does she? The monster reaches out through his window towards the girl but she flings his hand away, yuk, disgusting at that point Roger strolls up, healthy and fit, his motorbike is on the corner, they both mock the Monster and leave. Another woman comes along, a painted prostitute. ‘Feeling lonely, ducks?’ He asks her in, the curtain descends for the duration of a quick sexual act, then she kicks up a fuss because he tries to write her a check.

During all this onstage action, Mrs Viveash and Theodore make ironic comments. She is appalled, not at its ‘immorality’, but because it is so clichéd and dire.

As in Joyce or Woolf, words and phrases connected with her lost, dead love, her only one true love, Tony Lamb, recur and repeat, broken up and recombined in her half-drunk consciousness.

Then Coleman turns up, punning cynically, accompanied by a very pretty, drunk young man. He wittily introduces himself as Virgil and the young man as his Dante, who he is taking him on a tour of the circles of hell (in fact he found him drunk at some nightclub and about to be fleeced by two prostitutes twice his age).

Back to the onstage play, Act III: The Monster, now bald, sans teeth, with a patch over his eye, is confined in an asylum. He makes a speech certain that there are real men somewhere, living in freedom and beauty, climbs the back of his chair, topples off it and breaks his neck, as verified by the same doctor from Act I, who enters, now terribly old with a long white beard.

Mrs Viveash is relieved the ghastly thing is over. The others want to carry on drinking and so, against his better judgment, Gumbril invites them back to his ‘secret’ rooms in Great Russell Street. they drink heavily and are blasphemous. This is the secret room where he spent that magical evening with Emily, by candlelight, until he coaxed the delicate bruised young faun into bed with him. Now Coleman and his pick-up boy are carousing on the same divan and suddenly the boy is sick all over it. As Gumbril throws them out, the boy tells them all his name is Porteous and boasts about how much money he’s spent drinking and debauching.

This is the last straw as Porteous is the name of one of Theodore’s father’s oldest friends, a poor man who’s had to scrim and save all his life.

So these last couple of chapters have described the complicated frame of mind in which Gumbril has allowed himself to betray Emily’s trust, and led away from his better self to the cynical, sophisticated nightclub roue. It’s a long way from the clever sweetness of Crome Yellow.

Chapter 17

Predictably enough he feels like hell in the morning, and not just in a physical way. He’s barely roused himself at 11.30, planning to catch the 2 o’clock train, when he gets a telegram from Emily, a long, long telegram telling him how upset she was when she got his telegram, after all the plans she’d made for a perfect day, and how, then, thinking about it, she realised their relationship was doomed from the start; for him she was just a nice adventure but sooner or later he’d tire of her and dump her and then she would never recover, whereas he’d get over it. So she says it’s goodbye, she’s packing her bags and leaving the cottage and he’ll never see her again.

Gumbril spends an agonising train journey beating himself up for his stupidity, and casually mentions that this afternoon he had to pass up ‘an afternoon’ with Rosie, and – in a spirit of malicious satire – sent her a note telling her he was indisposed & could she please come and see him at 213 Sloane Street. It is a wicked joke because that’s the address of Mr Mercapton and his rococo boudoir.

Gumbril really seems to have evolved very fast from the frustrated schoolteacher of the first chapter who was shy around girls. He’s metamorphosed into a rake, juggling a harem of women. I suppose this is the meaning of the book’s epigraph, a quote from Marlowe:

My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay

‘Men like satyrs’, to be precise, Gumbril is the satyr in question, dancing with his clumsy goat-feet.

The chapter returns to a lighter mood because it contains a crusty old gentleman who tut tuts at all the suburban villas the train is passing and when Gumbril sympathises, launches into a long speech about how overpopulated the world is becoming. Gumbril agrees, partly in a satirical spirit of getting the old dog to carry on but then is disarmed when he offers to give Theodore a case of his best brandy. He is just writing Theodore’s name in his notebook when Theodore looks up and realises the train is pulling out of the station he should have got off at. He leaps to his feet, flings open the door and jumps onto the platform, stumbling a few paves then managing to stop. The old man waves inaudibly from the window. Presumably the story is meant to show us just how fickle and superficial Theodore is.

When Theodore finally arrives at the cottage a) it is every bit as beautiful as Emily predicted b) she is long gone c) she left no forwarding address. Miserable, he catches the next train back to London.

Chapter 18

Broad comedy. We find Mr Mercaptan in his exquisite rococo rooms putting the finishing touches to an exquisite essay. In barges Lypiatt who is furious. His exhibition was a failure, he sold nothing, and he was infuriated by Mercaptan’s superior, mocking review which implied his works were insincere.

After a brief exchange, Lypiatt loses his temper and boxes the exquisite dandy about the ears until Mercaptan tells him the cruelest barb in his review – that Lypiatt’s paintings looking like adverts for Cinzano – was actually thought up by Mrs Viveash. The woman Lypiatt adores. He is instantly crushed and quelled.

He is standing silently by the mantelpiece when Rose Shearwater is shown in. She is very confused. She was expecting to meet Theodore who, we now learn, has never told Rosie his real name, preferring to be referred to as ‘Toto’. To cut a long story short, Rosie quickly adjusts to the new surroundings – determined to play the grande dame who nothing flusters – while Mercaptan in his dandyish way proceeds to flatter and impress here.

We are given to understand that they end up having sex on his sofa. Well, Rosie moved on from Theodore easily enough. Later, that evening, she’s at home while boring Shearwater tries to write an essay about kidneys but just can’t, he is so upset at the way Mrs Viveashe picked him up for about three days and now appears to have dropped him.

Plucking up his clumsy courage, Shearwater blurts out a confession to Rosie that he’s had a crush on another woman, that it’s over now, and that he feels guilt about how he’s treated her and will do better in future – and is disconcerted when Rosie is so relaxed as to be indifferent.

Chapter 19

Lypiatt returns to his mews utterly devastated by the news that it was Mrs Viveash who contributed the most telling thrust in Mercaptan’s devastating review of his art exhibition i.e. that they looked like posters advertising Italian drinks. He sits down and writes her an extended soul-searching letter wondering whether his entire life has been a wretched failure.

He is surprised and fearful when he hears steps coming up to his studio. To his surprise it is a funny little man who introduces himself as Mr Boldero (the thrusting businessman who has agreed to take up & promote Theodore’s idea of the Patent Small-Clothes. He listens in a daze as the man explains his silly scheme, but then Boldero makes the mistake of saying that they’d like him to do the art work for their advertising campaign, something in the style of Italian liquor posters, and this triggers a titanic wave of rage and frustration in Lypiatt who rises from his chair, rushes at Boldero, seizes and shakes him till the man wriggles free and makes a run for it down the stairs, out the door and along the mews.

Chapter 20

Coleman lives with Zoe in an atmosphere of violent arguments. One of these ends with her stabbing him in the arm with a penknife and rushing out. Coleman tries but can’t stanch the bleeding. At that moment Rosie arrives. She’s been given Coleman’s address by Mercaptan, on the misunderstanding that her original lover ‘Toto’ had a blonde beard. None of them realise that ‘Toto’ is Gumbril because he never told Rosie his name. Instead Rosie arrives just in time to administer some first aid and bandage the wound.

Coleman is a huge Cossack of a man with a big blonde beard, very loud, talks loudly and tactlessly, quoting the Christian Fathers about women being bags of ordure, and so on, in a way which puts Rosie off, she gets up and runs to the outer door but it won’t open and in a few paces Coleman is upon her. When she starts screaming and crying, he is enraptured and licks her tears. Are we to understand that he ‘ravishes’ her? That he rapes her?

Chapter 21

The taxi chapter. Gumbril turns up to see Mrs Viveash. She is feeling increasingly bilious and unhappy. He accuses her of wrecking his life i.e. persuading him to go for lunch with her so that he missed his date with Emily.

She is tired of men blaming her for everything and, frankly, so am I. Gumbril, Lypiatt, Shearwater, they all blame her for making them fall in love with her. How tiresome men are! (This is precisely the sentiment expressed by Anne in chapter 21 of Antic Hay).

Gumbril tries talking about things other than love and for two pages we are treated to a surreal jumble of facts about the natural world or literature until Mrs Viveash shouts at him to stop. Gumbril announces he’s fed up of everything and is going to leave the country. Mrs Viveash says they must have a going-away dinner. So they decide to go and invite all their friends. This, as it turns out, is a pretext for a kind of survey of the state of play with each of them:

They take a taxi across London to Lypiatt’s studio. Cut to Lypiatt plunged in the deepest melancholy and contemplating suicide. He is just putting a loaded Service revolver against his forehead when he hears the taxi pull up, a knock on the door and the sound of Mrs Viveash’s and Gumbril’s voices outside.

After a few more knocks they decide Lypiatt must have gone out and depart. Lypiatt remains in his darkened studio, in utter misery. It’s a feature of this chapter that Mrs Viveash and Gumbril comment on the lights of Piccadilly twice as they pass through on their to Lypiatt’s and back i.e. a little bit of social history of which adverts were there at the time. And to emphasise the depths of Mrs Viveash’s Weltschmerz.

Mrs. Viveash drew the corners of her mouth down into a painful smile and did not answer. “Aren’t we going to pass through Piccadilly Circus again?’ she asked. “I should like to see the lights again. They give one temporarily the illusion of being cheerful.’

Instead they go to visit Mr Mercaptan but he’s not there (according to his gabbling housekeeper). And we cut to Mercaptan having a delightful time staying with rich Mrs Speegle amid her butlers and staff at the delightful Oxhanger House. She had wittily thrown out the comment that some people have skins as thick as pachyderms whereas you and I, darling, we have painfully thin skins because we are such spiritual and artistic people. And so Mercaptan has worked this up into one his simply adorable little essays, dividing the poor pachyderms into lots of sub-categories, as he amusingly explains to Mrs Speegl and Maisie Furlonger at dinner.

Meanwhile Lypiatt lies at home lost in the void. Gumbril and Mrs Viveash take a taxi to Coleman’s. It’s not too long since Coleman ravished/raped Rosie. He answers the door. Gumbril glimpses past him the open door to his bedroom, and there a bare female back, and as it turns over, for a split second he recognises beyond doubt Rosie! My word! He’s astonished and disgusted.

The text cuts to a little stream-of-consciousness as we dip into Rosie’s mind and see her stream of memories – unhappy domestic scenes with Jim Shearwater, and then memories of being made love to by huge animal Coleman. Which is disconcerting. Anyway, Coleman says he can’t come to any farewell dinner.

They then take the cab to Shearwater’s house in Maida Vale. He’s out and so is the Missus, according to a characteristically uneducated maid (it doesn’t seem to occur to any of the bourgeois characters, when they talk about love and, occasionally, fairness or a better society, that this might include the army of servants and butlers and drivers and cleaners who service their oh-so-sensitive lives).

Gumbril leaves a message for Mrs i.e. Rosie, to tell her that Mr Toto apologises for not having spoken to her when he saw her in Pimlico. I.e. signalling that he saw her at Coleman’s.

Lastly they call on Mr Gumbril Senior, happily sitting on the balcony of his apartment watching his beloved starlings in the plane trees in the square. The text reverts back to Huxley’s Peacockian approach i.e. a character becomes the mouthpiece for a theory, in this case, Mr Gumbril Senior explains to Mrs Viveash his theory that we humans have a capacity for telepathy which we have let go to rust, but we could revive it if we wanted.

Look at the general development of the mathematical and musical faculties only within the last two hundred years. By the twenty-first century, I believe, we shall all be telepaths.

Remember the exquisitely detailed model of London as designed by Christopher Wren which Gumbril’s father had made? Remember how we met Gumbril Senior’s father’s friend, Porteous, and were told how he had scrimped and saved to raise a family and build up a library of precious books. Well, now Theodore’s father takes his son aside to tell him how Porteous’s son has drunk away all the family money and then borrowed more and gambled that away, so that Porteous has been forced to sell his library.

That is why, Gumbril Senior explains, he has sold his model of London to the Victoria & Albert Museum to raise money for his friend. Theodore is touched. So much for the ‘beyond good and evil’, post-war cynicism of his generation. It is a sentimental beacon in an otherwise deliberately cynical narrative.

Mrs Viveashe is touched by Gumbril Senior and his theories about his starlings and telepathy. He is a sweet and kind old man. They get back into the taxi for the last time (this cabby is making a fortune out of them).

Chapter 22

The final chapter describes experiments going on at Shearwater’s laboratory. He is in a sealed room, wearing only a loin cloth, pedalling an early version of an exercise bike. The aim is to find out how long a man sweats for and to catch and analyse his sweat. We enter his head, as we have most of the other characters, and discover he is still tormented by his thwarted passion for Mrs Viveash, is dreaming, as he steadily cycles on, of fleeing her, getting away. Which explains why it is quite a comic moment when he looks up and sees at the porthole looking into his experiment room… none other than Mrs Viveash! Convinced he is hallucinating a nightmare, he turns back to facing the wall and pedals all the more furiously.

His assistant, Lancing, shows Gumbril and Mrs Viveash around the garish and grotesque biological experiments they’re carrying out in the lab. Animal identity is being tampered with through extensive vivisection. Maybe human beings will be next. They look out a big window across the Thames to St Paul’s illuminated in the night and both are awed into silence by thoughts of time and destiny.

Then are roused back to the present. ‘Come on’, says Mrs Viveash. ‘Let’s go and see Piers Cotton.’ The great issues of time and destiny may stand over us. But most people hide them by getting on with the endless tittle tattle of their busy social lives. We are, according to Aristotle, first and foremost social animals, interested in gossip and tittle tattle. Big Ideas and theories come a looooooooong way back in the queue.

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Recurring themes

1. As others see us

The theme which strikes me as recurring most obviously in Crome Yellow and Antic Hay is the panic fear various characters have of realising that they are beings-in-the-world – their horrified realisation of the gap between their own sense of themselves as full of life and ideas and passions which are serious and deep and full – and the terrible realisation that for most other people you barely exist, and if at all, mostly as the butt of cheap jokes.

Most other people think that I – the vital, all-important I that lives and moves and loves and feels – am scarcely relevant to their busy lives, or at best the punchline of a crappy anecdote.

Lypiatt stood with folded arms by the window, listening. How lightly they threw his life, his heart, from hand to hand, as though it were a ball and they were playing a game! He thought suddenly of all the times he had spoken lightly and maliciously of other people. His own person had always seemed, on those occasions, sacred. One knew in theory very well that others spoke of one contemptuously – as one spoke of them. In practice – it was hard to believe. (Antic Hay, chapter 21)

Thus when I am in love, it is all Wagner and Shakespeare. Whereas other people in love ‘are always absurd’ (p.238).

2. Working classes

It’s such a tiny theme as to be almost buried, but just now and then the upper-middle-class characters meet people from the working classes. None of the characters in these novels has a job: Mrs Viveash doesn’t work, Lypiatt is a poor artist, Mercaptan dashing off his reviews is hardly work, Theodore lives off a legacy from an aunt (£300 a year from ‘the intolerable Aunt Flo’, p.24).

It’s only when members of the working class intrude a little that you realise what a solidly upper-middle-class book this is, set among the owners of manor houses, rich widows and their amusing hangers-on – writers and artists. Thus the dawdling dilettante Pasteur Mercaptan’s housekeeper, Mrs Goldie, is one of the few working class characters and voices in the book:

Mr. Mercaptan, it seemed, had left London. His housekeeper had a long story to tell. A regular Bolshevik had come yesterday, pushing in. And she had heard him shouting at Mr. Mercaptan in his own room. And then, luckily, a lady had come and the Bolshevik had gone away again. And this morning Mr. Mercaptan had decided, quite sudden like, to go away for two or three days. And it wouldn’t surprise her at all if it had something to do with that horrible Bolshevik fellow. Though of course Master Paster hadn’t said anything about it. Still, as she’d known him when he was so high and seen him grow up like, she thought she could say she knew him well enough to guess why he did things. It was only brutally that they contrived to tear themselves away.

Yes, the working classes do have a habit of nattering on so, don’t you find?

There is one place where serious social concern does intrude, a ‘sudden irruption’ into the self-obsessed peregrinations of the narcissistic characters.

After a typical night’s drinking and arguing the Bohemian crew (Lypiatt, Coleman, Shearwater, Gumbril) find themselves at the all-night coffee stand at Hyde Park corner. It’s here that they bump into Mrs Viveash and her monocled posh-boyfriend. But as they gossip and make clever witticisms about Love, they slowly become aware of a pair of hard-core, down and out, unemployed, homeless proletarians slumped up against the railings nearby.

One wrecked specimen is telling a small crowd a hard luck story about how he was leading his rag and bone cart when the cops stopped him and told him the old pony Jerry was too unwell for the job and took him away and now he doesn’t have any work, couldn’t get work, him and the missus heard of work in Portsmouth so they walked there, his missus being heavily pregnant but no money for transport, but there was no jobs in Portsmouth and so they had to walk back.

‘’Opeless,’ ’e says to me, ‘quite ’opeless. More than two hundred come for three vacancies.’ So there was nothing for it but to walk back again. Took us four days it did, this time. She was very bad on the way, very bad. Being nearly six months gone. Our first it is. Things will be ’arder still, when it comes.’
From the black bundle there issued a sound of quiet sobbing.
‘Look here,’ said Gumbril, making a sudden irruption into the conversation. ‘This is really too awful.’ He was consumed with indignation and pity; he felt like a prophet in Nineveh.
‘There are two wretched people here,’ and Gumbril told them breathlessly, what he had overheard. It was terrible, terrible. ‘All the way to Portsmouth and back again; on foot; without proper food; and the woman’s with child.’
Coleman exploded with delight. ‘Gravid,’ he kept repeating, ‘gravid, gravid. The laws of gravidy, first formulated by Newton, now recodified by the immortal Einstein. God said, Let Newstein be, and there was light. And God said, Let there be Light; and there was darkness o’er the face of the earth.’ He roared with laughter.
Between them they raised five pounds. Mrs. Viveash undertook to give them to the black bundle. The cabmen made way for her as she advanced; there was an uncomfortable silence. The black bundle lifted a face that was old and worn, like the face of a statue in the portal of a cathedral; an old face, but one was aware somehow, that it belonged to a woman still young by the reckoning of years. Her hands trembled as she took the notes, and when she opened her mouth to speak her hardly articulate whisper of gratitude, one saw that she had lost several of her teeth. (pp.65-6)

The narrative then swiftly returns to its endless permutations of love affairs and artistic agonising among the educated and unworking classes, but it’s a dark and disturbing moment. Its bleakness puts all the self-obsessed navel gazing of the main characters into perspective. And makes you ask: one hundred years later, have are we any close to solving the issues of homelessness, unemployment and poverty?

Social history

Here are some references scattered through the text which indicate what Huxley’s readers in 1922 had heard of or were thinking about, topics in the news:

Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution. Gumbril’s tailor Mr Bojanus gives his ideas about ‘liberty’, which people resent the rich, and why he’d welcome a revolution, despite thinking it would make no great difference (people will never be ‘free’ because they will always have to work).

The Russian famine ‘After you’ve accepted the war, swallowed the Russian famine,’ said Gumbril. ‘Dreams!’

The first famine in the USSR happened in 1921 to 1923 and garnered wide international attention. The most affected area being the Southeastern areas of European Russia, including Volga region. An estimated 16 million people may have been affected and up to 5 million died (Wikipedia)

Nietzsche ‘Beyond good and evil? We are all that nowadays,’ thinks Theodore. The interesting point is that he frames it in Nietzsche’s terms, i.e. evidence of the endurance of Nietzsche’s thought into the 1920s.

Freud Gumbril and friends criticise Lypiatt’s use of ‘dream’ in a poem saying that nowadays ‘the word merely connotes Freud.’ I.e. by 1922 sophisticated urbanites were so over Freud.

Stopes ‘British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women’s rights… With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual ‘Married Love’ (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse.’

Schoenberg avant-garde composer and inventor of the twelve-tone system which would come to dominate classical music after the Second World War

Heroin I was surprised by a reference to heroin, I thought cocaine was the fashionable drug of the 1920s:

‘Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time.’
‘I can tell you all about heroin,’ said Mrs. Viveash. (p.224)

Style

Huxley flexes his wings a little. In the two years since he published his first book, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce had brought out The Waste Land and Ulysses, respectively. Huxley doesn’t go mad, but the text includes some noticeable linguistic experiments.

Inverted word order

Floating she seemed to go, with a little spring at every step and the skirt of her summery dress – white it was, with a florid pattern printed in black all over it…

This is probably more Victorian poeticism than modernist.

Rare vocabulary

• rachitic – feeble, weak
• imberb – beardless
• callipygous – having finely developed buttocks
• empest – to corrupt or infect
• priapagogue – an invented word
• paronomasia – a play on words; a pun
• disembogue – of a river or stream, to emerge or be discharged into the sea or a larger river
• inenarrable – incapable of being narrated, indescribable

Onomatopoeia

And in a handful of places he makes the prose onomatopoeically mimic the action being described. These are all timid baby steps which distantly echo the revolution in writing taking place at the time.

Piranesi

There are recurring references to Piranesi, specifically the suggestion that the archway into the mews where Lypiatt lives looks like one of the arches in Piranesi’s series of etchings of vast imaginary prisons. As it happens I recently visited a free exhibition of Piranesi at the British Museum so had a good idea what he was talking about.

• Piranesi drawings: visions of antiquity @ the British Museum

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Credit

Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley was published by Chatto & Windus in 1923. All references are to the 1984 Panther paperback edition.

Related links

• Antic Hay online

Aldous Huxley reviews

• Crome Yellow (1921)
• Antic Hay (1923)
• Those Barren Leaves (1925)
• Point Counter Point (1928)
• Brave New World (1932)
• Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
• After Many a Summer (1939)
• Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
• Ape and Essence (1948)
• The Genius and the Goddess (1955)
• Island (1962)