Antic Antiques

COLLECTED SHORT STORIES (397 pp.)--Aldous Huxley--Harper ($5).

THE WORLD OF EVELYN WAUGH (411 pp.)--Edited by Charles J. Rolo--Little, Brown ($6).

Aldous Huxley, 63, is now so venerable a figure of modern letters that a middle-aged critic--the Atlantic Monthly's Charles J. Rolo--owns a poodle named Aldous. Evelyn Waugh, 54, never reached the same status of a chic literary household pet. But, unlike poodles, both writers--two of the century's most gifted entertainers--are no longer quite fashionable. Both have had the premature burial of collections in their lifetime, Huxley's latest prepared by an anonymous Harper editor, Waugh's by Rolo.

Huxley and Waugh share many things apart from talent and an interest in drugs and religion (in Huxley's case mescaline and Vedanta, in Waugh's wine and Roman Catholicism). Each has a deep artistic integrity and an interest in odd characters --almost, unlike modern young men, to the exclusion of his own. If the '20s and '30s are remembered as nothing more than a dismal tract of history leading to present discontents, it will be partly because two wondrously articulate Fools were wiser than the lugubrious Lear of the tottering old order, whose motley they wore. Each disdains modern life. Huxley presents one character who might well speak for both authors when he recalls "Oxford in the remote days towards the beginning of our monstrous century."

Huxley's Horrors. Each took his time and made a horror comic of it. The characters are British middle and upper class of the great inter-bellum years--but Huxley's are drawn with a Daumier-like fascination and disgust, Waugh's by the lunatic but precise line of a Ronald Searle.

The 21 Huxley stories in the collection bring out the spite without heat that is his peculiar intellectual climate. If there is one central virtue in his art it is that his creatures have the capacity to explain themselves: the central defect is that they have the compulsion to explain themselves away. Huxley rarely creates a character that he does not destroy.

P: The Gioconda Smile, Huxley's most famous story, is the best. His hero, Mr. Hutton, is clever, covered in tweed and money troubles, able to explain everything about everything except his own sex life. Sex, typically, is represented by Doris, a lower-class ball of margarine-and-fun; also typically, the hero's wife is a virtuous bore with a distressing number of ailments. Huxley writes of women with the ruminative repulsion of a male spider half-digested in mid-honeymoon. When Mrs. Hutton is poisoned, it looks like Hutton's work. Actually another Huxley horror woman has done the deed. Hutton, the reader feels in the end, was unjustly but well and truly hanged.

P: The Monocle shows Huxley using the old symbol of aristocracy to gouge the good eye out of his victim, a sensitive type named Gregory. Gregory is as phony as a man who would wear a monocle over a glass eye. He mismanipulates the monocle as a social rather than an optical device in a series of appalling drawing-room misadventures--until it falls to the floor of a London cab. and with it falls its owner.

P: Rest Cure almost suggests that Huxley denies even the possibility of happiness. A woman in a nervous relation with her marriage escapes to Venice and the arms of an aristocratic Italian who is actually a rapacious and coldhearted spiv. She kills herself--at the moment of truth.

Waugh's Woes. The Waugh sampler takes in more territory than the Huxley collection, but it is scrappy. Waugh is the most economical of writers, and Editor Rolo has performed a doubtful service by cutting his little dancing paper figures into even smaller ones. But those who encounter Waugh for the first time will still enjoy the old combination of blackface comedian and commando: face darkened for his curiously combined operations, surrounding atmosphere crackling and popping with the sound of snapping bones. And Waugh veterans will be glad to meet again some of the more outrageous characters. Among them:

P: Basil Seal, the aristocratic hero-spiv who, in the guise of a billeting officer, deploys an atrocious tribe of refugee brats named Connolly to terrorize and blackmail the decent dullards of the country.

P: Seth, Oxford-educated but progressive-minded Emperor of Azania. who in one decree imposed compulsory Esperanto, and abolished, among other things, the death penalty, marriage, all native dialects, mortgages and infant mortality.

P: Mr. Todd. mulatto ruler of a savage Amazonian tribe, who kept an English explorer captive in order to have the works of Dickens read to him every night.

P: Lady Circumference, who thought that what her backward son. little Lord Tangent, needed was "beatin' and hittin' and knockin' about generally.''

It is clear that Waugh is on the side of Lady Circumference. He satirizes the British nobility not because they behave as aristocrats but because they do not. Whimsically, Editor Rolo has included Waugh's first known work. The Curse of the Horse Race, written when the author was seven. It is about a betting man named Rupert, with "a dark bushy mis-tarsh and flashing eyes," who is hanged for killing a "puliesman." Adds Master Waugh darkly: "I hope the story will be a leson to you never to bet." Forty-eight years later, Waugh, now a self-made conservative Catholic country gentleman, is in business at the same stand: comic policeman and characters in guardsman mustaches still take their pratfalls. All is gaiety on the shiny, brilliant stage--only the author-manager in the darkened wings fails to laugh; he is a moralist.

In his introduction Editor Rolo has used the best phrase for Waugh--"funny as hell." Huxley, as the title of one of his books suggests, deals with a place where there are fewer fireworks--Limbo.

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