There was a passage heard randomly on the radio – I mostly only listen doing the washing up – that made me chortle and linger; it turned out to be a dramatisation of Aldous Huxley‘s novel, Antic Hay (1923). I had no idea he had a sense of humour. Or anything, really, beyond the later stuff: Brave New World, the awful Island, and his famously – The doors of perception – taking LSD (so providing Jim Morrison and pals with a decent band name). Worth pursuing, I reckoned, and was not disappointed.
Antic Hay starts off in classic comic novel mode with main man Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. (Oxon) enduring a minor public school assembly, excruciating both mentally and physically on a hard unforgiving seat. He has an idea: inflatable trousers (‘Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes’ to be) – their commercial potential enough, he reckons, to warrant giving up teaching and put him on a path to being his own man.
There’s an entertaining visit with Gumbril Senior back in London – an architect with grand ideas and great model making skills (whole cities, even) but a modest practice: “‘And to think,’ he said after a pause, ‘that I’ve been spending these last days designing model cottages for workmen at Bletchley.’” (Yup, sorry Bletchley; even then, well before the coming of Milton Keynes, considered cheap laugh fodder).
More entertainment – but also a broadening into satire, big ideas and social commentary – comes with a session with the Gumbril family’s tailor, Mr Bojanus – who professes, among other things, in his own way, ‘a great admirer of Lenin’ – for the purpose of constructing a prototype of the trouser.
There follows a glorious account of a boozy meal in a restaurant favoured by London’s various bohemian sets later that evening. The gang’s all here, and ‘The art school dance goes on forever’ (to quote from a Pete Brown’s Piblokto album title). It’s not not so much a period piece as one might have feared – fun and jeers, jibes, rivalries, boasts and flannel, including a heated discussion over the use of a single word in an epic poem.
As the group disperses – all male but one, and she’s hardly said, though implied, a dismissive word – enter the stunning Mrs Viveash, aka Myra, who pretty much haunts proceedings – in the flesh, mind, but still – for some of the men from now on. The love of her life was lost in the Great War. The description of the way she speaks is a nice running bitter-sweet joke – variations on “she hallooed faintly but penetratingly, from her inward death bed” and “as if every word was her last” run through the novel. Subsequently married to a rich absentee (“engaged at the moment in hunting elephants, hunting fever and carnivores among the Tikki-tikki pygmies“), she proceeds around town with a string of insignificant beaus to the frustration and sadness of those – Gumbril, the artist Lypiatt, of whom much later, the scientist Shearwater – in love with her: “Why was it people always got involved in one’s life? If only one could manage things on the principle of the railways. Parallel tracks – that was the thing.” Not for nothing is this considered a Lost Generation novel.
Ah,the aforementioned Casimir Lypiatt. It was one of the passages about him that had me laughing when I heard it on the radio. He’s older than the rest:
All these years … Time had worn the hair from his temples; the high steep forehead seemed higher than it really was. He was forty now; the turbulent young Lypiatt who had once declared that no man could do anything worth doing after he was thirty, was forty now.
Such lofty ambition, such grand canvasses and epic poems. It’s Gumbril doing the thinking here:
“Painter, poet, musician,” cried Lypiatt. “I am all three.”
Poor old Lypiatt, he was thinking. Dear old Lypiatt, even, in spite of his fantastic egotism. Such a bad painter, such a bombinating poet, such a loud emotional inproviser on the piano. And going on like this, year after year, pegging away at the same old things – always badly! And always without a penny, always living in the most hideous squalor! Magnificent and pathetic old Lypiatt.
But as things progress – Mrs Viveash’s reaction to his portrait of her (“‘You’ve made me look,’ said Mrs Viveash, ‘as though I were being blown out of shape by the wind.’ […] But Casimir was delighted by her comment. […] ‘The wind, the great wind that’s in me.’“) and his profession of love, never mind his big exhibition’s utter failure – he becomes a tragic figure, and is given a long lonely monologue that is not without its moments and insights.
Some will find Gimbril’s transformation from ‘the Mild and Melancholy Man‘ who can make no headway with women into ‘the Complete Man‘ (or, ‘the complete and Rabelesian man’ as he also puts it) via a false beard a silliness too far, but it made me laugh, and as a plot driver it does its stuff. Unknowingly he manages to seduce Rosie, the scientist Shearwater’s wife, who has her own fantasy running:
The lady and the poet, she was thinking, the grande dame and the brilliant young man of genius. She liked young men with beards, but he was not an artist, in spite of the beard, in spite of the hat. He was a writer of sorts.
That leads to a farcical pursuit of him – somewhat cruelly instigated by Gumbril’s campaign of misinformation – that Rosie makes around London, with her landing at Lypiatt’s and Mr Mercaptan’s door (sorry, literary critic, obsessed by an obscure sex eighteenth century novel that actually exists – I looked it up – by someone called Crebillon, narrated by the sofa on which stuff happens). (Ultimately, for her, it ends well.)
This post is getting out of hand (I have a backlog, for God’s sake). A lot else goes on featuring a couple of other interesting characters I’ve not mentioned so far. There’s the excruciating bit of avant-garde theatre to experience (and some jazz), physiologist Shearwater’s grueling sweat experiment, and a conversation Gimbril cannot escape from with an old buffer on a train. I’ve got to give some space, though, to the magnificent Boldero, Gumbril’s business partner, and his elaborate marketing campaign for the ‘Patent Small-Clothes’. A great comic tour de force, but at the same time … not a lot has changed:
‘Our modern flattery must be manly, straightforward, sincere, the admiration of equal to equal – all the more flattering as we aren’t equals.’ Mr Boldero laid a finger to his nose. ‘They’re dirt and we’re capitalists …’ He laughed.
[…] ‘This sort of medical and philosophical dope,’ Mr Boldero went on, ‘is always very effective, if it’s properly used. The public to whom we are making our appeal is, of course, almost absolutely ignorant of these, or, indeed, on almost all subjects.’ […]
‘Mr Gumbril, there’s nothing like a spiritual message to make things go. Combine spirituality with practicality and you’ve fairly got them. Got them, I may say, on toast.’
Antic Hay ends with Gumbril, disillusioned and disappointed, deciding to leave a tired old England – as indeed did Huxley himself in the very year the novel was published. He tells Mrs Viveash his plan: “I go to Paris first“:
‘I thought of giving myself a farewell banquet,’ Gumbril went on. ‘We’ll go round before dinner, if you’re feeling well enough, that is, and collect a few friends. Then, in a profoundest gloom, we’ll eat and drink. And, in the morning, unshaved, exhausted, and filled with disgust, I shall take the train from Victoria, feeling thankful to get out of England’.
Which sadly ends up something of an anticlimax, with he and Myra Viveash sharing salmon sandwiches and a bottle of wine in the back of a taxi criss-crossing London – via the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus, which she loves and he is tortured by – as one pal after another turns out to be otherwise engaged.
Antic Hay was published the same year as Ernest Hemingway‘s The sun also rises, the great ‘Lost Generation’ novel, much of which is set in Paris, Gimbril’s initial destination, though the former definitely has more jokes. What started out as a comic novel develops through satire into tragi-farce; I ended up caring for some of these people, and enjoyed it. It is also a novel touching on ideas that Huxley was to carry through in his later work, and a tremendous portrait of London in its time.
When the novel first came out people were shocked by its amorality and sexual content, not that the sex is exactly spelt out; seems mere hints were enough back then – in one instance I wasn’t even sure if the deed had been done (it had). Don’t you just love those American pulp covers, though? (Never mind the Romanian. There are going to be a few disappointed readers there).
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One last thing. Antic Hay is the source of a couple of lines worthy of P.G.Wodehouse and certain inclusion dictionaries of quotations (though not in the one I’ve got downstairs):
… there was no getting out of that, good she had been. Not nice, not merely molto simpatica – how charmingly and effectively these foreign tags assist one in the great task of calling a spade by some other name! – but good.
Shame then, that there were so many foreign phrases left hanging about throughout. It is, to quote from one of my favourite sitcoms, ‘annoying’.
