Word: huxleyism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Aldous Huxley, 63, is now so venerable a figure of modern letters that a middle-aged critic-the Atlantic Monthly's Charles J. Rolo-owns a poodle named Aldous. Evelyn Waugh, 54, never reached the same status of a chic literary household pet. But, unlike poodles, both writers-two of the century's most gifted entertainers-are no longer quite fashionable. Both have had the premature burial of collections in their lifetime, Huxley's latest prepared by an anonymous Harper editor, Waugh's by Rolo...
...Huxley and Waugh share many things apart from talent and an interest in drugs and religion (in Huxley's case mescaline and Vedanta, in Waugh's wine and Roman Catholicism). Each has a deep artistic integrity and an interest in odd characters -almost, unlike modern young men, to the exclusion of his own. If the '20s and '30s are remembered as nothing more than a dismal tract of history leading to present discontents, it will be partly because two wondrously articulate Fools were wiser than the lugubrious Lear of the tottering old order, whose motley they...
...Huxley's Horrors. Each took his time and made a horror comic of it. The characters are British middle and upper class of the great inter-bellum years-but Huxley's are drawn with a Daumier-like fascination and disgust, Waugh's by the lunatic but precise line of a Ronald Searle...
...Huxley stories in the collection bring out the spite without heat that is his peculiar intellectual climate. If there is one central virtue in his art it is that his creatures have the capacity to explain themselves: the central defect is that they have the compulsion to explain themselves away. Huxley rarely creates a character that he does not destroy...
...Gioconda Smile, Huxley's most famous story, is the best. His hero, Mr. Hutton, is clever, covered in tweed and money troubles, able to explain everything about everything except his own sex life. Sex, typically, is represented by Doris, a lower-class ball of margarine-and-fun; also typically, the hero's wife is a virtuous bore with a distressing number of ailments. Huxley writes of women with the ruminative repulsion of a male spider half-digested in mid-honeymoon. When Mrs. Hutton is poisoned, it looks like Hutton's work. Actually another Huxley horror woman...