Word: huxleys
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...AFRICAN POISON MURDERS -Elspeth Huxley*- Harper ($2). This one has everything, including literary quality. Herr Munson, a nauseous Nazi farmer on the veldt, is paid off in a native African poison. Inspector Vachell can't understand the mutilated ducks and dogs, and the reader gets the creeps...
...Aldous Huxley whose early books so skillfully anatomized human viciousness and human hopelessness is no more. With Eyeless in Gaza he turned to painful self-searchings. With Ends and Means he grew stonily didactic. One of the gifted moral satirists of modern times, he had become, by logical development, a definitely religious man. He still is, but in his new book he turns to his earlier technique: uses once more the light realistic fantasy and the sharp surgical analysis which first made him famous, but uses them to say the most serious things he has ever...
...Swan" of Huxley's sour fable is Jo Stoyte: old, half-mad with wealth and power ("they are the same"), desperately hanging on to his sexual potency, desperately afraid of its loss, of age, of death. In his gigantic ferroconcrete château in Southern California he lives with his young mistress, Virginia Maunciple, a born courtesan with a short upper lip who frequently repairs, for penitence, to the "Lourdes Grotto" which "Uncle Jo" has built for her. Jo's other mainstay is sleek, Levantine Dr. Sigmund Obispo, who keeps the old man hopped up with hormone injections...
...proper hands, it could be pulp fiction. In Aldous Huxley's it is quite as plausible as highly intelligent satire need be. In his hands, too, it is the excuse and occasion for the things he particularly wants to talk about. Scattered in short (but stiff) doses throughout the narrative, they are spoken by a Mr. Propter, the straightest and maturest straight man Mr. Huxley has ever permitted himself. As he speaks them, they are some of the firmest, most beautifully articulate essays Huxley has ever written...
...Aldous Huxley went to Southern California about 18 months ago, not to write film plays but because of his eyes. In 1911 he contracted keratitis, which, he says, "left one eye slightly, and the other almost completely, covered with scar tissue, besides inducing large errors of refraction." He went to Los Angeles for instruction in the Bates method of training his eyes to "relax." Although he moves about like a partially blind man, and his right eye looks blind (a blue film), he now reads without glasses, can do things "I couldn't have any more done than...