Word: huxleyism
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Fallen Heart. The Oscar Levant Show repels some people and delights most. Drawing on his motley acquaintance, Levant has corralled both name stars and intellectuals as his guests. Eddie Cantor was followed by Christopher Isherwood, Adolphe Menjou by Aldous Huxley, Red Skelton by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. His subjects run the gamut from highly intellectual topics to brutal digs. Isherwood told him: "You are like a Dostoevsky character-completely unmasked at all times...
Sick-Sick. Never before has KCOP had so much mail. Some call it the "sick-sick show," but most rejoice at "rediscovering" Oscar, the dictionary, and good books as well. Says Huxley: "He represents intelligence-something all of us can use more...
...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...
...Monocle shows Huxley using the old symbol of aristocracy to gouge the good eye out of his victim, a sensitive type named Gregory. Gregory is as phony as a man who would wear a monocle over a glass eye. He mismanipulates the monocle as a social rather than an optical device in a series of appalling drawing-room misadventures-until it falls to the floor of a London cab. and with it falls its owner...