Word: huxleyism
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...Genius and the Goddess is just about what one would expect of a play by Aldous Huxley. A sharp, glib, often brilliant novelist, he can give his play a facade, but his matter is not always up to his manner. Moreover, his construction is often obvious or even awkward, and he does not build up to important moments quite plausibly...
...credit for this constantly engaging role goes not just to Huxley but also to Alan Webb, whose face, postures, coughs, and general acting of the part come close to perfection. This portrait of a professor deserves to be seen and remembered...
Nancy Kelly is more than competent as the less intriguing, more familiar wife; Michael Tolan seems appropriate but not fortunate in the rather lifeless role of the professor's assistant, a role that seems to be forgotten by Huxley at the end of the play. Billy Quinn is a charming young boy, but Nina Reader, who plays his sister, should perhaps be sent back to a toy store. She intrudes on a play that is on the whole an often amusing bit of nearly nothing...
...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...
...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...