Barren Leaves*

Barren Leaves*

Mr. Huxley Capitalizes Self-Consciousness

The Story. Mrs. Aldwinkle was proud of Italy. The fauna, the climate, (was it not the best in the world?), the music, the mandolins of Sorrento, the bells of Capri--even the stars that tremoloed with tender, operatic passion in the black night-sky --all belonged to her. She had bought them, it seemed, when she bought the palace of the Cybo Malaspina which perched-a splendid example of baroque architecture--on a hill above the little town of Vezza. Ah, Italy! The boot fitted; she had put it on.

Mrs. Aldwinkle saw herself as a princess, surrounded by a court of poets, artists, philosophers. She desired that beautiful women should swim through her great salons and gardens, glowing with love for the men of genius who might be found lounging, there. Among the beautiful she had collected, at Vezza were an Aldwinkle niece, one Irene, who preferred composing her own chemises to hemming her own sonnets but did the latter to please Mrs. Aldwinkle; Miss Mary Thriplow, novelist, who wanted to be "simple and deep" and whose efforts to please made her, at last, a hypocrite even to hypocrisy; among the men of genius, Tom Cardan, three-bottle philosopher with a face that had two sides-one glowering, the other lifted in perpetual satire, as if stretched in infancy by an enormous monocle; Lord Hovenden who, for all his 21 years, pronounced the "th" in "thingumabob" as a "v," but had a 'wonderful physique and a motor car; Mr. Calamy, 'by inclination a minor prophet, by fate an amorist, whose talent for meditation incessantly scuffled with his genius for seduction; Falx, Guild Socialist, who was amazed and deeply shocked at the characters, at the conversations of these people.

Adjacent to the Malaspina palace was a lofty tower from which one could get a bird's-eye view of the whole country by climbing 208 stone steps. One of Mrs. Aldwinkle's guests climbed these steps every day. He did it to get away from Mrs. Aldwinkle.

He was Francis Chelifer, a poet of no mean ability (as Mr Huxley's verses testify), vacationing in Italy from his duties as editor of The Rabbit Fancier's Gazette. One afternoon, while he had been swimming in the Tyrrhenian, the prow of Mrs. Aldwinkle's sailboat had knocked him unconscious. The lady had thereupon made him her guest and, convinced that by conveying him to the palace in her Ro-Ro/- she had saved him from drowning, had fallen in love with him.

Brilliantly, beneath the flamboyant ceiling-piece of the banquet hall, on the terrace under the tremoloing stars, the company conversed. They spoke of man's relationship to the Absolute, of the art of Correggio, contraception, the difference between amour and amore, hypocrisy (it gangrenes gallantry), religion, cats. Little by little, they split off into pairs, these beautiful women, these men of genius. Irene became engaged to Hovenden despite his lack of dental fricatives; Calamy gave himself to Miss Thriplow and made her regret it; Mrs. Aldwinkle, rebuffed by Chelifer, went off to Monte Carlo.

Significance. As may be inferred from the above account, the story does not matter. God the Father in a tunic of blue crepe-de-chine, throned among his squadrons on the ceiling of Mrs. Aldwinkle's best bedroom, does not matter, for Aldous Huxley has made these people, not in the image of the Omnipotent, but in his own. It is the unquiet imp of his own self-consciousness that squirms in each. He capitalizes self-consciousness as a literary idea. Like Jehovah, and better than any man since, he understands the implication of that famed formula, I am. His writing is a gallery of many mirrors, variously awry, each reflecting the pale and sharply smiling image of the weariest young man of a too brilliant century--a young man who beholds with urbane derision his many reflections, and laughs for the pleasure of seeing his laugh contorted from glass to glass.

The Author. Aldous Huxley, an admirer of Charles Dickens, a nephew of Mrs. Humphrey Ward, educated himself at Eton and Balliol. For two years during his boyhood he was stricken with partial blindness but learned to read Braille embossed type. Now 30, he is the author of nine books The Burning Wheel, The Defeat of Youth, Limbo, Leda, Chrome Yellow, Mortal Coils, Antic Hay, Young Archimedes and Other Sketches, Those Barren Leaves.

Songs, Sighs

LOVES AND LOSSES OF PIERROT-William Griffith-Button ($2.00). The prose of this age is positive in spirit, like the prose of the 18th Century; the verse is negative, like the verse of the mid-17th Century poets whose inspiration was the English countryside rather than England. The main current of prose sweeps with the sweep of the times; its movement is, if not heroic, at least large; whereas verse slides, rebellious and cunning, against that heavier tide, like an eddy coiling back from a cataract. To find fault with contemporary lyricists because they make no attempt to reproduce on their melodious halmas, their tinkling clavichords, the surge and thunder of the Odyssey is an error in criticism. They do not belong to the period the less by being in reaction against its stridencies. Among the more capable halma players is William, Griffith. His note is small, facile; it has the grace of not taking its grace too seriously. Of Pierrot the poet he sings, and of Pierrette who is beauty; their loves and losses, songs, sighs, their tears that fall like spangles in a snow storm by Debussy.

*THOSE BARREN LEAVES--Aldous Huxley--Doran (.$2.50). *From Max Beerbohm's THE NEW AND THE OLD-William Heinemann, London ($6.00). /-Gutter Italian for Rolls-Royce.