20th
Century Classic. I like reading Aldous Huxley because he’s smart and funny.
I’ve read not only Brave
New World (the one everybody reads), but also a travel book Jesting
Pilate, a late career novelette The
Genius and the Goddess, the science fiction-like After Many
a Summer, and a history The Devils
of Loudon. Because I’m a reading
snob, that’s why.
Those Barren
Leaves – Aldous Huxley
In the early 1920s, Huxley became a best-selling writer
with satirical novels such as Antic Hay
and Time
Must Have a Stop. The story of Those Barren Leaves also stars members
of the Lost Generation, disillusioned and trying to keep body and soul together
after the smash-up of Western ideals brought on by WWI.
Huxley introduces a number of characters, each a puppet
controlled by their unique string. Calamy is affluent and respected but is intimidated
by the apparent terms and conditions of life and wonders if there is really a
mystery behind all the anger greed, lust, and violence. He’s rather an
existentialist before that orientation became hip in that he feels responsible
for his own life, but doesn’t know the way forward.
Like Uncle Eustace in Time Must Have a Stop, Cardan is the semi-likable cynic and epicure
(small e). He fears an old age dogged by poverty so he contemplates a marriage partner
so outrageously unsuitable that I can’t possibly reveal her in a review. The poet Chelifer
represents the rootless, nihilistic intellectuals of the 1920s who see as empty
religion, patriotism, moral standards, and social reform. While working as hapless
editor of Rabbit Fancier’s Gazette,
Chelifer holds onto verse as the last refuge in an idiotic world. Miss
Thriplow, a young novelist, finds herself between lovers so in her search for
the next big project, it strikes her that she ought to be more spiritual and
more serious.
The last part of the novel follows Calamy as he undergoes
a spiritual crisis. He embraces, for lack of a better word, mysticism, explaining “It takes a certain
amount of intelligence and imagination to realise the extraordinary queerness
and mysteriousness of the world in which we live.” So in this 1925 novel we see
Huxley moving away from satire and relativism to the introspection and
disciplined thought that serious Vedantists, post-modern stoics, existentialists,
and CBT types choose.
Hardcore readers into post-WWI literature, satire, and
what I hesitatingly call mysticism will like this novel. Because the Savage is
such a weak character, I have always had qualms about Brave New World, rather regretting that is the only Huxley novel
readers know when Huxley wrote so many other solid novels of ideas.
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