Proper Studies

[From Traveller’s Library, Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1933, pp. 1167-8, 144:]

Finally, a delicate dish to set before a sated king, I have placed A Night at Pietramala by Mr Aldous Huxley. Here certainly is charm, and earlier on I confided to the reader (not expecting him to care one way or the other) that charm was a quality I could have enough of; but this is charm backed by an admirable education and a personality of power and originality. I think there is no one writing in England just now who has a more comprehensive culture than Mr Huxley. His great gifts are supported by a knowledge which to anyone as ignorant as I seems encyclopedic. His attitude towards life is individual. He has humour, candour and courage. I think at present show more he is somewhat lacking in humanity; that is why he seems to me a better essayist than novelist; but Mr Huxley is still young. Youth when it is intelligent is apt to be ruthless, but life teaches one tolerance, and the advantage of being intelligent is that you can learn. Mr Huxley’s English is cultured, but racy and vivid. It is an admirable instrument for his purposes and he uses it with the easy assurance of a craftsman accustomed to his tools. To those interested in such matters it is a great pleasure to notice his apt use of epithets. With many authors these seem to be written with a flowing, heedless pen, but with Mr Huxley you have the impression that they are chosen with deliberate and tender care. Often they come upon you with the joyful surprise of a wayside flower that you have never seen before. I have every confidence that one of these days Mr Huxley will write a very great novel.

[…]

I think it possible that the short story should occupy itself with a single moment of time. I was interested to see how Aldous Huxley, than whom no writer is more aware of what he is about, in a story called Chawdron, in which he related events that had occurred during many years, used the device of making the narrator tell the story to a friend in the interval between breakfast and luncheon. In this ingenious way he used the materials of a novel for a very well constructed short story.

[From Great Modern Reading, Nelson Doubleday, 1943, p. 335-6:]

Aldous Huxley is an essayist whom I would be ready to rank with Hazlitt. Though essays are written still, the essay such as it was written in its great days has fallen into decay. They are either technical pieces on literary or other subjects, interesting chiefly to experts, or tittle-tattle about any subject upon which an author thinks he can write a couple of thousand words to fill the column of a newspaper or a page or two in a magazine. They bear reading in book form with difficulty.

If Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Macaulay, or Bagehot were writing now they would find it hard to get a hearing. The essayist needs character to begin with, then he needs an encyclopedic knowledge, he needs humor, ease of manner so that the ordinary person can read him without labor, and he must know how to combine entertainment with instruction. These qualifications are not easy to find. Aldous Huxley has them; so, in a much smaller way, had Virginia Woolf. To my mind both these writers have been more successful in this particular style than in the novel. It is singular that this should be so, for both seem to be possessed of many of the gifts necessary to write fiction. I hazard the suggestion that if Virginia Woolf did not write it so successfully as might have been expected, seeing how keen her observation was and how subtle her sense of character, it is because she had an inadequate acquaintance with life.

Aldous Huxley has greater gifts than she had, a vigour, and a versatility that were beyond her, and if he has never quite acquired the great position as a novelist that his talent seems to authorize, I think it is because of his deficient sympathy with human beings. The novelist must be able to get into the skin of the creatures of his invention, see with their eyes and feel with their fingers; but Aldous Huxley sees them like an anatomist. He dissects out their nerves, discovers their arteries with precision, and peers into the ventricles of their hearts. The process gives rise in the reader to a certain discomfort. In saying this I do not wish to disparage Aldous Huxley’s fiction; he has the priceless gift of readability, so that even though you balk at his attitude, you are held by his narrative skill and stimulated by his originality. show less