After the Fireworks (2 page)

3.

U
ncle Spencer” (1924) begins as innocently as its title indicates, with a memory piece about a beloved oddball character from the narrator's boyhood. But the tone, tempo, and attitude change abruptly midway with the onset of the First World War. The war hovers over much of his early work, but this is Huxley's only extended venture into describing its impact. In a severe narrative turn, switching from direct memory to an objective recounting, he quarters Uncle Spencer and a memorable cohort in a German prison, creating a claustrophobic story within the story that anticipates the novel within a novel of
Point Counter Point
while echoing Kafka and presaging Sartre's
No Exit
: “My Uncle Spencer soon grew accustomed to the strange little hell into which he had been dropped.” Until that point, we follow rather blissfully the annual pilgrimage of Uncle Spencer and his nephew, whose neglectful parents are stationed in India, from Eastbourne to Dover to Ostend to Brussels to Limburg where Spencer owns a sugar factory. “Every page” of this section, an anonymous reviewer wrote in the
TLS
in 1924, “is delightful,” and it remains so.

Huxley, the grandson of one of the most influential biologists of the nineteenth century and the sibling of two of
the most prominent biologists of his own day (Julian Huxley and the Nobel laureate Andrew Huxley), all but patented the use of biological, zoological, botanical, and physiological metaphors, and here he has a field day with prawns and pigs (the latter auguring the German occupation), as well as handmade foods, from “ferial apple fritters” to chocolate bedpans. The last offends Spencer, despite “his professional belief in the virtues of sugar,” and inspires the narrator to a lexicon of euphemisms from
coprophily
and
scatological
to a thunderous
excrementitious
. Huxley, who mocked Swift's “insensate hatred of bowels,” was not easily alienated from the messier precincts of the human condition. As the story deepens with an integrated marriage, we encounter tropes that will recur throughout his work: teenage priggishness, sudden death, an ugly woman who exerts sexual magnetism, the vain thought that future writers might concentrate on “man's relation to God” instead of romance, the naïve refusal to believe war is coming (this is the twentieth century, after all), and the equally naïve assent, because “War is always popular, at the beginning.”

Confined to the German Ministry of the Interior, Spencer finds that the prisoners are crueler to each other than are the jailors; nightmares are habitual. Yet he also finds, for the first time in his life, love in the person of a “golden-haired male impersonator,” a Cockney music hall entertainer named Emmy Wendle, one of Huxley's most haunting creations: young, independent, morally adventitious, utterly fickle, and androgynous in the way of a Hemingway femme, touching down like a bee on the divided groups of prisoners who, “equal in their misery, still retained their social distinctions.” No good can come if it, yet Huxley ramps up the
farce as Emmy retails her nine greatest loves and her devout superstition involving a pig.

In the realm of flighty women, however, Emmy is a patch on the redoubtable Grace Peddley of “Two or Three Graces” (1926). Although I think “After the Fireworks” is Huxley's most masterly performance in the more-than-a-story, not-quite-a-novel idiom, I suspect that “Two or Three Graces” would have benefited most had it been offered as a novel. Huxley may also have thought so: unlike “Uncle Spencer,” which debuted in
Little Mexican
(
Young Archimedes
in the United States) and “After the Fireworks,” which debuted in
Brief Candles
, “Two or Three Graces” was the title story in a volume where it counted for 195 of 272 pages. Structurally, it stands among Huxley's most ingenious inventions.

It opens with a bank shot. Huxley's droll riff on the etymology and variety of bores introduces Herbert Comfrey, an old acquaintance of the narrator: a music critic named, we eventually learn, Dick Wilkes. The story is not about Comfrey, who is rather the cue ball that temporarily separates Wilkes from his far-from-boring friend Kingham, and sends him to the pocket of Comfrey's brother-in-law, John Peddley. John is a different species of bore (“an active bore,” yet kind and intelligent), who traps unwary travelers in relentless one-sided conversations. He introduces Wilkes to his darling wife Grace—tall, lean, ugly, but “positively and actively charming.” Stimulated by their platonic friendship (like Denis in
Crome Yellow
, Dick hesitates), Grace undergoes a kind of psychic mitosis. In the end there aren't two or three Graces, but four, each reflective of a man she attaches herself to—each gracefully inept in her own way. She incarnates one of Huxley's favorite lines, from Fulke Greville:
“O wearisome condition of humanity! / Born under one law, to another bound,” except that she is bound to another and another and another.

With her husband, John, Grace is a devoted but strangely deficient bourgeois wife who fails to connect with her children (“You're a little girl, mummy,” her four-year-old attests). With Wilkes, she is a dedicated concertgoer who doesn't understand a thing about music. After he alienates her with a cruel joke and introduces her to the bohemian painter and faker Rodney Clegg, she takes him as her lover and out-bohemians him and his followers until he drops her, at which point, Kingham returns. A writer who lives for passion and strife, creating the latter when it does not unfold naturally, Kingham demands that Grace fall madly in love with him. She does, growing so appositely overwrought that she ponders suicide when he drops her. Wilkes, now married to a sane and cautious woman, returns in the nick of time.

Older writers—Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy—complained that Huxley did not truly end his stories, but merely stopped them. “Two or Three Graces” has so many riches, page after page (note that his physical description of Clegg practically begets Sitwell's of Huxley), that the ending may seem abrupt, a testament to the eternal feminine in which Grace is doomed to repeat her circuit of affections. But then as Wilkes realizes, and underscores for the reader, the story has the structure of music: from suburban andante to Clegg's scherzando to Kingham's molto agitato to the adagio of Beethoven's arietta to . . . Da Capo, from the head, begin again.

“Two or Three Graces” is often seen as a test run for
Point Counter Point
, which is unfair to its thoroughly distinct qualities. One connection is the presumed twice-told conjuring of D. H. Lawrence. But while Lawrence is admittedly the template for the later work's Rampion, he only looks like Kingham, with his short red beard and refusal to divulge his Christian names beyond the initials. Huxley had met Lawrence just once when he wrote “Two and Three Graces.” That encounter probably contributed to the portrait, but the sexually ravenous and distraught Kingham is not Lawrence. By 1928 they were great friends; Huxley esteemed and even loved him, which may explain why Rampion succumbs to a sage's monotony while Kingham roars off the page. In “After the Fireworks,” published in the year of Lawrence's death (1930), he is accessed only as a literary jape: the self-styled “fatal woman,” Clare Tarn, the mother of the story's demigoddess and genuinely fatal woman Pamela Tarn, seeks the “dumb, dark forces of physical passion” in the arms of—a “gamekeeper? or a young farmer? I forget. But there was something about rabbit shooting in it, I know.”

“After the Fireworks” is a major work and a turning point for Huxley, leading directly to
Brave New World
in its burlesque of sexual awkwardness and chagrin and the embarrassments of aging (he does here for European health spas what he would later do for Hollywood cemeteries in
After Many a Summer
), Ford and his assembly line, ruminations on a world without goodness, and theisms of one versus many gods. This is a comedy, the last uncompromisingly funny novel or story Huxley wrote, unimpeded by didactic lectures and sagacious swamis. Fireworks figure in the prose as well as the plot, which is basic. A middle-aged writer at rest in Rome, Miles Fanning, whose popular novels
excite the dreams of adolescent girls, is stalked by a twenty-year-old fan who he tries vainly to resist. He has used his finest witticisms so often that he can no longer recite them without impatient interruptions. Pamela Tarn has not heard them. Nor can she figure out why a writer would spend hours writing when he could be with her. “Death in Venice” meets “The Humbling,” heterosexually.

Huxley is always facile with animal metaphors, and he breaks the bank here, beginning with the first lines, regarding a woodpecker. A few lines down he complains of letters getting through every barrier, like “filter-passing bacteria,” a simile more suited to the blight of email. Bears turn up on the next page, with camels on their heels, and then ostriches and whitings, jellyfish and clams, the inevitable baboon, and with the arrival of Pamela Tarn, a combination animal metaphor and adverb: hippo-ishly. Huxley lavished attention on names, and one may wish there were more of Wilber F. Schmalz and his unctuous correspondence if only to relish his moniker. Fanning notes, in Latin, that he never liked art that conceals. Neither does Huxley. He italicizes and underscores zoological traits and innermost thoughts, flitting into Pamela's mind as well as her riotous diary as easily as he does Fanning's mind and his unfinished letter. He drops linguistic banana peels every few pages. Fanning is one of those personages who strive to speak in epigraphs, which are wasted on fellows like the clerk at Cook's who tells him “Gratters on your last book,” to which Miles responds, “All gratitude for gratters.” Miles loves the word
impertinence
, which earns a new meaning regarding Pamela: even her breasts are impertinent, “pointed, firm, almost comically insistent.”
⁴

The lyrical passages remind us that Huxley was a formidable travel writer, but even they serve to remind Miles that a comedy is a series of unavoidable pratfalls. The sibilant panorama of Rome at the heart of the tale—“golden with ripening corn and powdered goldenly with a haze of dust, the Campagna stretched away from the feet of the subsiding hills, away and up towards a fading horizon, on which the blue ghosts of mountains floated on a level with her eyes”—works its magic, but as Miles breaks the “sad, sad but somehow consoling” silence, his knees crackle to let him know that he is tarnished with age and Tarn is “dangerously and perversely fresh.” If he were a younger man, he might rant, as John the Savage will in two years, “I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

F
OREWORD
: J
ESTING
A
LDOUS

         
1. Edith Sitwell in Stephen Klaidman,
Sydney and Violet
, Doubleday, 2013, p. 187.

         
2. Richard and Clara Winston (ed.),
Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955
, Knopf, 1970, pp. 213, 455, 581, 664.

         
3. Anthony Burgess,
99 Novels
, Summit, 1984, p. 24. The other Huxley works he includes are
Ape and Essence
and
Island
.

         
4. Pamela has run away from her censorious Aunt Edith, a relationship Huxley returns to in his final story, “Voices,” in the deadly conflict between another twenty-year-old Pamela and her Aunt Eleanor.

L
ATE AS USUAL. LATE.” JUDD'S VOICE WAS CENSORIOUS.
The words fell sharp, like beak-blows. “As though I were a nut,” Miles Fanning thought resentfully, “and he were a woodpecker. And yet he's devotion itself, he'd do anything for me. Which is why, I suppose, he feels entitled to crack my shell each time he sees me.” And he came to the conclusion, as he had so often come before, that he really didn't like Colin Judd at all. “My oldest friend, whom I quite definitely don't like. Still . . .” Still, Judd was an asset, Judd was worth it.

“Here are your letters,” the sharp voice continued.

Fanning groaned as he took them. “Can't one ever escape from letters? Even here, in Rome? They seem to get through everything. Like filter-passing bacteria. Those blessed days before post offices!” Sipping, he examined over the rim of his coffee cup the addresses on the envelopes.

“You'd be the first to complain if people didn't write,” Judd rapped out. “Here's your egg. Boiled for three minutes exactly. I saw to it myself.”

Taking his egg, “On the contrary,” Fanning answered,
“I'd be the first to rejoice. If people write, it means they exist; and all I ask for is to be able to pretend that the world doesn't exist. The wicked flee when no man pursueth. How well I understand them! But letters don't allow you to be an ostrich. The Freudians say . . .” He broke off suddenly. After all he was talking to Colin—to
Colin.
The confessional, self-accusatory manner was wholly misplaced. Pointless to give Colin the excuse to say something disagreeable. But what he had been going to say about the Freudians was amusing. “The Freudians,” he began again.

But taking advantage of forty years of intimacy Judd had already started to be disagreeable. “But you'd be miserable,” he was saying, “if the post didn't bring you your regular dose of praise and admiration and sympathy and . . .”

“And humiliation,” added Fanning, who had opened one of the envelopes and was looking at the letter within. “Listen to this. From my American publishers. Sales and Publicity Department. ‘My dear Mr. Fanning.'
My
dear, mark you. Wilburn F. Schmalz's dear. ‘My dear Mr. Fanning,—Won't you take us into your confidence with regard to your plans for the Summer Vacation? What aspect of the Great Outdoors are you favouring this year? Ocean or Mountain, Woodland or purling Lake? I would esteem it a great privilege if you would inform me, as I am preparing a series of notes for the Literary Editors of our leading journals, who are, as I have often found in the past, exceedingly receptive to such personal material, particularly when accompanied by well-chosen snapshots. So won't you co-operate with us in providing this service? Very cordially yours, Wilbur F. Schmalz.' Well, what do you think of that?”

“I think you'll answer him,” said Judd. “Charmingly,”
he added, envenoming his malice. Fanning gave a laugh, whose very ease and heartiness betrayed his discomfort. “And you'll even send him a snapshot.”

Contemptuously—too contemptuously (he felt it at the time)—Fanning crumpled up the letter and threw it into the fireplace. The really humiliating thing, he reflected, was that Judd was quite right: he
would
write to Mr. Schmalz about the Great Outdoors, he
would
send the first snapshot anybody took of him. There was a silence. Fanning ate two or three spoonfuls of egg. Perfectly boiled, for once. But still, what a relief that Colin was going away! After all, he reflected, there's a great deal to be said for a friend who has a house in Rome and who invites you to stay, even when he isn't there. To such a man much must be forgiven—even his infernal habit of being a woodpecker. He opened another envelope and began to read.

Possessive and preoccupied, like an anxious mother, Judd watched him. With all his talents and intelligence, Miles wasn't fit to face the world alone. Judd had told him so (peck, peck!) again and again. “You're a child!” He had said it a thousand times. “You ought to have somebody to look after you.” But if any one other than himself offered to do it, how bitterly jealous and resentful he became! And the trouble was that there were always so many applicants for the post of Fanning's bear-leader. Foolish men or, worse and more frequently, foolish women, attracted to him by his reputation and then conquered by his charm. Judd hated and professed to be loftily contemptuous of them. And the more Fanning liked his admiring bear-leaders, the loftier Judd's contempt became. For that was the bitter and unforgivable thing: Fanning manifestly preferred their bear-leading to
Judd's. They flattered the bear, they caressed and even worshipped him; and the bear, of course, was charming to them, until such time as he growled, or bit, or, more often, quietly slunk away. Then they were surprised, they were pained. Because, as Judd would say with a grim satisfaction, they didn't know what Fanning was
really
like. Whereas he did know and had known since they were schoolboys together, nearly forty years before. Therefore he had a right to like him—a right and, at the same time, a duty to tell him all the reasons why he ought not to like him. Fanning didn't much enjoy listening to these reasons; he preferred to go where the bear was a sacred animal. With that air, which seemed so natural on his grey sharp face, of being dispassionately impersonal, “You're afraid of healthy criticism,” Judd would tell him. “You always were, even as a boy.”

“He's Jehovah,” Fanning would complain. “Life with Judd is one long Old Testament. Being one of the Chosen People must have been bad enough. But to be
the
Chosen Person, in the singular . . .” And he would shake his head. “Terrible!”

And yet he had never seriously quarrelled with Colin Judd. Active unpleasantness was something which Fanning avoided as much as possible. He had never even made any determined attempt to fade out of Judd's existence as he had faded, at one time or another, out of the existence of so many once intimate bear-leaders. The habit of their intimacy was of too long standing and, besides, old Colin was so useful, so bottomlessly reliable. So Judd remained for him the Oldest Friend whom one definitely dislikes; while for Judd, he was the Oldest Friend whom one adores and at the same time hates for not adoring back, the Oldest Friend whom one
never sees enough of, but whom, when he
is
there, one finds insufferably exasperating, the Oldest Friend whom, in spite of all one's efforts, one is always getting on the nerves of.

“If only,” Judd was thinking, “he could have faith!” The Catholic Church was there to help him. (Judd himself was a convert of more than twenty years' standing.) But the trouble was that Fanning didn't want to be helped by the Church; he could only see the comic side of Judd's religion. Judd was reserving his missionary efforts till his Friend should be old or ill. But if only, meanwhile, if only, by some miracle of grace. . . . So thought the good Catholic; but it was the jealous friend who felt and who obscurely schemed. Converted, Miles Fanning would be separated from his other friends and brought, Judd realized, nearer to himself.

Watching him, as he read his letter, Judd noticed, all at once, that Fanning's lips were twitching involuntarily into a smile. They were full lips, well cut, sensitive and sensual; his smiles were a little crooked. A dark fury suddenly fell on Colin Judd.

“Telling
me
that you'd like to get no letters!” he said with an icy vehemence. “When you sit there grinning to yourself over some silly woman's flatteries.”

Amazed, amused, “But what an outburst!” said Fanning, looking up from his letter.

Judd swallowed his rage; he had made a fool of himself. It was in a tone of calm dispassionate flatness that he spoke. Only his eyes remained angry. “Was I right?” he asked.

“So far as the woman was concerned,” Fanning answered. “But wrong about the flattery. Women have no time nowadays to talk about anything except themselves.”

“Which is only another way of flattering,” said Judd ob
stinately. “They confide in you, because they think you'll like being treated as a person who understands.”

“Which is what, after all, I am. By profession even.” Fanning spoke with an exasperating mildness. “What
is
a novelist, unless he's a person who understands?” He paused; but Judd made no answer, for the only words he could have uttered would have been whirling words of rage and jealousy. He was jealous not only of the friends, the lovers, the admiring correspondents; he was jealous of a part of Fanning himself, of the artist, the public personage; for the artist, the public personage seemed so often to stand between his friend and himself. He hated, while he gloried in them.

Fanning looked at him for a moment, expectantly; but the other kept his mouth tight shut, his eyes averted. In the same exasperatingly gentle tone, “And flattery or no flattery,” Fanning went on, “this is a charming letter. And the girl's adorable.”

He was having his revenge. Nothing upset poor Colin Judd so much as having to listen to talk about women or love. He had a horror of anything connected with the act, the mere thought, of sex. Fanning called it his perversion. “You're one of those unspeakable chastity-perverts,” he would say, when he wanted to get his own back after a bout of pecking. “If I had children, I'd never allow them to frequent your company. Too dangerous.” When he spoke of the forbidden subject, Judd would either writhe, a martyr, or else unchristianly explode. On this occasion he writhed and was silent. “Adorable,” Fanning repeated, provocatively. “A ravishing little creature. Though of course she
may
be a huge great camel. That's the danger of unknown correspondents. The best letter-writers are often camels. It's a piece of natu
ral history I've learned by the bitterest experience.” Looking back at the letter, “All the same,” he went on, “when a young girl writes to one that she's sure one's the only person in the world who can tell her exactly who and what (both heavily underlined) she is—well, one's rather tempted, I must confess, to try yet once more. Because even if she were a camel she'd be a very young one. Twenty-one—isn't that what she says?” He turned over a page of the letter. “Yes; twenty-one. Also she writes in orange ink. And doesn't like the Botticellis at the Uffizi. But I hadn't told you; she's at Florence. This letter has been to London and back. We're practically neighbours. And here's something that's really rather good. Listen. ‘What I like about the Italian women is that they don't seem to be rather ashamed of being women, like so many English girls are, because English girls seem to go about apologizing for their figures, as though they were punctured, the way they hold themselves—it's really rather abject. But here they're all pleased and proud and not a bit apologetic or punctured, but just the opposite, which I really like, don't you?' Yes I do,” Fanning answered looking up from the letter. “I like it very much indeed. I've always been opposed to these modern
Ars est celare artem
*
fashions. I like unpuncturedness and I'm charmed by the letter. Yes, charmed. Aren't you?”

In a voice that trembled with hardly restrained indignation, “No, I'm not!” Judd answered; and without looking at Fanning, he got up and walked quickly out of the room.