Word: aldous
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...Dostoevsky was nonpareil, others came off less fortunately. Conrad, the letter reader learns, was a "distant admiration." Joyce was a doubtful quantity: "I don't know that he's got anything very interesting to say." Henry James emerged as "faintly tinged rose water." Ezra Pound was "humbug." Aldous Huxley, "in spats and grey trousers," proved eminently resistible. The elegant aphorist Logan Pearsall Smith left an impression of "perfect sentences of English prose served up in a muffin dish, over a bright fire, with the parrot on a perch...
Both Fitzgerald and Faulkner, along with their less disillusioned colleague, Aldous Huxley, would have been surprised to learn that a few years after Faulkner made these remarks, two writers again turned toward Hollywood in search of the American ideal. Nathaniel West, slaving in a B-grade studio to reduce the images of silver screen gangster sagas to flicks like The Black Coin where a young hero, wearing a white sweater, is attacked regularly by four burly men in black, turned the ideal upside down. In The Day of the Locust America became a Hollywood burlesque...
...characters on enemies, rivals and unfaithful lovers has provided an accepted tool of revenge. Ernest Hemingway scored in The Sun Also Rises (Harold Loeb, the now-forgotten model for Robert Cohen, was satisfactorily furious, and one of the minor real-life woman characters took to bed for a week). Aldous Huxley did a number on D.H. Lawrence as the brilliantly insufferable crank, Mark Rampion, in Point Counter Point. Political debts have been paid too. One of the first romans à clef, Madeleine de Scudéry's Artamène; ou Le Grand Cyrus (1649), encoded in fiction...
...husband. She was the inspiration for the character of Hermione Roddice in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, the eccentric baronness whose passion for the hero, Birkin, is more a contest of will than a deep emotion. She knew them all: Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, J.M. Keynes, Aldous Huxley, Henry Lamb, William Butler Yeats, Henry James...
Virginia Woolf described Ottoline as "a Spanish galleon, hung with golden coins and lovely silken sails." Other writers, Darroch says, described her variously as "an oversized Infanta of Spain, an enormous bird, a lion-hunting hostess." In Those Barren Leaves, Aldous Huxley described those moments, just before retiring, when the Ottoline-like character would turn to her house guest and ask probing, intimate questions. "For on the threshold of her bed-chamber she would halt," he says, "desperately renewing the conversation with whichever of her guests happened to light her upstairs. Who knew? Perhaps in these last five minutes...