Word: huxleyism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...cultural calm has settled over the nation's colleges, at least on the surface. No campus is without its atrocity story of intellectual deadness. At the University of Michigan, Vice President for Student Affairs James Lewis asked a group of 100 students what they thought of Aldous Huxley. "Only one or two of them," he reported, "had ever heard of him." At Kenyon, Poet-Critic John Crowe Ransom sadly detects "a sort of idleness of the creative imagination." At the University of Illinois, English Professor Charles Shattuck complains : "A secondhand bookstore wouldn't be supported in this town...
...parallel concerns for country, are assets in his short stories, but they make him an extremely limited critic. The more remote his subject is from Ireland, the worse O'Faolain's criticism becomes. He is at his best in the few pages on Joyce; but his chapter on Huxley and Waugh is mediocre, and the chapter on Hemingway is simply...
...Faolain's provinciality has given his book a central defect and a number of gaping holes. The central defect is over-simplification. After due deliberation, he concludes that Huxley's books are too full of intellectual fireworks to make coherent points, that Greene gives an unrealistic prominence to suffering, that Hemingway is not so hard-bitten as he seems at first. These conclusions are all very sound, but none of them come as revelations...
Cozzens' favorite writer is Swift. Among moderns, he prefers Maugham, Huxley and the early Waugh-all of which suggests that he is an ironist in default of being a satirist, possibly for lack of humor or savagery. Like any good storyteller, James Gould Cozzens peddles no "message." Says he: "I have no thesis except that people get a very raw deal from life. To me, life is what life...
Bagged in Manhattan by a London Sunday Dispatch interviewer, sad-eyed old Satirist Aldous Huxley, 63, rhapsodized about his Hollywood hermitage, where "foxes, possum, raccoons, even coyotes, are always trotting across my terrace," lamented the pointless counterpoint of the brave new world. On Manhattan: "The psychological cost of living is rather high in New York. I find the streets horrifying and spend most of my time in my hotel room in a sort of fool's paradise." On television: "Who needs that little screen with disgusting little grey figures hopping around?" On writing: "It's getting...