Word: huxleyism
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Others, especially visitors from abroad, were troubled by this American spectacle. "I cannot say that I am in the slightest degree impressed," announced the English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, "by your bigness or your material resources, as such. Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation. The great issue, about which hangs a true sublimity, and the terror of overhanging fate, is what are you going to do with all these things...
...format, it turns out, does not particularly enhance a headline service. There sit Barbara and Harry Reasoner, with backs half-turned to the camera, looking at their interview subject on what seems to be another television screen on the wall; the effect on the viewer is something like Aldous Huxley's definition of infinity: A Quaker Oats box with a picture on it of a Quaker holding a Quaker Oats box on which is a picture of, etc. A reporter bundled up against the cold reports on Congress against a backdrop of the U.S. Capitol, then is cross-questioned...
...generous provider is even less credible in the later sections of Some Time in the Sun. The talents of William Faulkner, which resulted in films like "The Maltese Falcon," "To Have and Have Not" and "The Big Sleep," go largely unappreciated by either the movie people or Dardis. Aldous Huxley, more successful in Dardis's terms because he made more money than Faulkner, spent his last years in Hollywood meditating on his own limitations. Nathanael West, forgotten in the basement of a second-rate studio where he slaved night and day to write cheap gangster flicks, had his vengeance...
...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...