"Yes, he had genius, if he chose to use it;
If he chose to—but it was too much trouble,
And he preferred reading. He lit his pipe,
Opened his book, plunged in and soon was drowned
In pleasant seas ... to rise again and find
One o'clock struck and his unshaven face
Still like a record in a musical-box,
And Auntie Loo miles off in Bloomsbury."
Mr Huxley wastes much satire on avuncular energies in war-time and makes his hero escape from his verbose relatives to walk the streets. Tired of this, he enters the inevitable café of the intellectual young novelist and moralises on the nightmare oppressiveness of profane love. He then sits out in the gardens of Leicester Square and finds comfort in regarding each hair and every pore on his hand. This palls soon enough, as one might expect, and then—
"Action, action! Quickly rise and do
The most irreparable things; beget,
In one brief consummation of the will,
Remorse, reaction, wretchedness, regret.
Action! This was no time for sitting still.
He crushed his hat down over his eyes
And walked with a stamp to symbolise
Action, action—left, right, left;
Planting his feet with flabby beat,
Taking strange Procrustean steps,
Lengthened, shortened to avoid
Touching the lines between the stones—
A thing which makes God so annoyed."
Action translates itself into spending three pounds on a book which he didn't want and pulling the bell of a chance house. He turns into a cinema house, goes to sleep, wakes at eight o'clock and so keeps "dear Jenny" waiting.
This dinner with Jenny is the most effective part of the poem, as we might expect:
"Food and drink, food and drink:
Olives as firm and sleek and green
As the breasts of a sea-god's daughter,
Swimming far down where the corpses sink
Through the dense shadowy water.
Silver and black on flank and back,
The glossy sardine mourns its head.
The red anchovy and the beetroot red,
With carrots, build a gorgeous stair—
Bronze, apoplexy and Venetian hair—
And the green pallor of the salad round
Sharpens their clarion sound....
Golden wine, pale as a Tuscan primitive,
And wine's strange taste, half loathsome, half delicious:
Come, my Lesbia, let us love and live....
'Jenny, adorable—' (what draws the line
At the mere word 'love'?) 'has anyone the right
To look so lovely as you look to-night,
To have such eyes, such a helmet of bright hair?'
But candidly, he wondered, do I care?"
The night goes on, comes the time to part—
"'Good-night,' the last kiss, 'and God bless you, my dear.'
So, she was gone, she who had been so near,
So breathing-warm—soft mouth and hands and hair—
A moment since. Had she been really there,
Close at his side and had he kissed her? It seemed
Unlikely as something somebody else had dreamed
And talked about at breakfast, being a bore."
The first thing we feel tempted to say about this poem is that we should vastly prefer to be possessed of an Olympian libido for Leda than to be burdened with John Ridley's "feebly sceptical, inefficient, profoundly unhappy" emotion for Jenny. Jove was, at any rate, healthy in his lusts: there is something terribly anæmic about our modern love-making, with our one eye on the intellect lest we should do anything without a reason. I am fully aware that this is not criticism: it is merely making a note of the feeling that is uppermost in our minds on finishing the poem. But that is one of the reasons why we should read Aldous Huxley: he is not lacking in daring: what he sees and feels he shows: he is very boyish in his desire to shock: in these days one would have thought that there was no one left to shock except the undergraduate, and those who preserve the callowness of the undergraduate through life. He exaggerates the importance of material joys and miseries: he is easily disgusted: his fastidious intellect rebels at many things that most of us accept complacently ... but it is to his credit that he makes us feel that we ought to be more fastidious, that we ought to think more, that we ought to accept less. At present he is engaged in the process of destruction, a joyous, youthful pastime: when he grows up he will give us something constructive. At present we rejoice in his vitality, energy and alertness. The rest will come. Above all, he is generously endowed with the comic spirit: that alone would make him readable in such an age of dullness.