Those Barren Leaves - Aldous Huxley

    1925; 329 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Classic Literature; High-Brow Literature; Satire; Humorous Fiction.  Overall Rating: 7½*/10.

 

    Hey, everybody, let’s head on over to Mrs. Aldwinkle’s place for dinner tonight.  She owns a lovely old villa located in picturesque Vezza, Italy.  Knowing Mrs. Aldwinkle, the food will be sumptuous.

 

    Be sure to dress for the occasion.  Formal wear is de rigueur.  All the other guests will be similarly attired.  After supper, Mrs. Aldwinkle will offer to take you on a tour of the villa.  Do not refuse her!  Think of it as the price you’re paying for the meal.

 

    And for goodness sake, put on some hoity-toity airs!  In your walk, in your talk, and above all, in your interactions with the other guests.  We’re dining with the upper crust of society.  The guest list includes Miss Thriplow, Mr. Calamy, Mr. Cardan, Mr. Falx, Lord Hovendon, and Mrs. Aldwinkle’s niece, Irene.

 

    A guy named Francis Chelifer will also be there.  He’s new to the group, and a writer.  I don’t know how he got invited to dinner.  Rumor has it Mrs. Aldwinkle fished him out of the ocean.

 

What’s To Like...

    Those Barren Leaves is an early novel by Aldous Huxley, his third to be exact.  It is set in some unspecified time between the two World Wars and is Huxley’s biting satire about the pretensions sported by the upper echelons of British society: the intellectuals, the cultured, the rich, the famous.  They will try to overwhelm you with their opinions on lofty things like art, music, religion, and politics.  In the end, however, they are revealed to be no happier than us commoners.

 

    There is no single protagonist.  We follow most of the entourage mentioned above as they experience, and occasionally contemplate, their sad lives.  Some are desperate for love, at least one is desperate for money, all are desperate for admiration be their peers.

 

    The book is written in “British English”, not American, so us Yanks are treated to strange spellings such as grammes, pretence, mediaeval, loth, and Tchekov.  Aldous Huxley also weaves some Italian, French, German, and even Latin vocabulary into the story.  In that last tongue, I learned the phrase “hinc illae lacrimae”, which translates literally into “hence those tears”, and more freely into “that’s what tears are for”.

 

    But Huxley’s mastery of the native tongue is what really shines through here – dozens upon dozens of rare, archaic, or even obsolete words that somehow fit flawlessly into the text.  A couple are listed below, here are just a few of the rest: capripede, Wordsworthian, Casanovesque, ogival, congeries, cachinnating, wamblingly, Sphingine, niffy, and one of my favorites, amphisbaena.

 

    I liked the literary nod to Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, which was published just three years earlier, as well as the discussion of the authorship of The Iliad.  Morris dancers and a popular board game called Halma were new to me, and I had no idea who Bossuet and Gene Stratton-Porter were.

 

    The book is divided into 5 parts, with a total of 42 chapters comprising 329 pages, which means the average length of a chapter is about 8 pages.  Most of it is written in the 3^rd-person point-of-view, but Part 2 and one chapter of Part 4 are in the 1^st-person, being excerpts from Francis Chelifer’s autobiography. Cussing was almost nonexistent, just two cases of “damned” in the first 50%.  Great writers don’t need cusswords.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Capripede (n.): one who has feet like that of a goat.

Others: Omphalokepsis (n.); and a zillion more.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.1/5 based on 34 ratings and 9 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.57/5 based on 710 ratings and 63 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    “Alas, it is true that I’ve never really been a successful parasite.  I could have been a pretty effective flatterer, but unfortunately I happen to live in an age when flattery doesn’t work.  I might have made a tolerably good buffoon, if I were a little stupider and a little more high-spirited.  But even if I could have been a buffoon, I should certainly have thought twice before taking up that branch of parasitism.  You may please for a time; but in the end you either bore of offend your patrons."  (loc. 463)

 

    Chelifer shook his head modestly.  “I am afraid,” he answered, I’m singularly stoical about other people’s sufferings.”

    “Why do you always speak against yourself?” asked Mrs. Aldwinkle earnestly.  “Why do you malign your own character?  You know you’re not what you pretend to be.  You pretend to be so much harder and dryer than you really are.  Why do you?”

    Chelifer smiled.  “Perhaps,” he said, “it’s to reestablish the universal average.”  (loc. 2822)

 

Kindle Details…

    Those Barren Leaves costs $2.99 at Amazon right now.  Several dozen other Aldous Huxley e-tomes are available, ranging in price from $2.99 to $13.49.  His most famous work, Brave New World, goes for $11.99, while my favorite, Ape and Essence, sells for $10.49.

 

We are all apt to value unduly those things which happen to belong to us.  (loc. 266)

    I read and reviewed Aldous Huxley’s debut novel, Crome Yellow, a couple years ago.  It was published in 1921; the review is here.  The two books are similar in content, style, and weaknesses.

 

   The writing style in both is superlative, but both suffer from PWP Syndrome, “Plot, What Plot?”  The nice way of describing that is that Those Barren Leaves is character-driven.  The blunt way is to say that nothing happens.

 

    That also means there’s very little in the way of an ending.  None of our characters finds happiness. A couple of them are contemplating marriage, but it is a near certainty that those relationships won’t last.  One has turned to meditation to attain enlightenment, but thus far has achieved nothing.  Hinc illae lacrimae.

 

    In the hands of a lesser writer, this would’ve been a complete waste of my reading time.  But thanks to Huxley’s writing skills, I still found this a witty and incisive read.  No, it’s not on the same level as Brave New World, which is where I suggest anyone new to this author should start, but fans of Aldous Huxley – and I am one of those – will still enjoy Those Barren Leaves.

 

    7½ Stars.  I try to read at least one highbrow novel each year.  That's a lofty goal, and some years I fail to reach it.  But I think Those Barren Leaves qualifies in this category, and I am going to check that goal off my 2022 bucket list.

Crome Yellow - Aldous Huxley

   1921; 183 pages.  New Author? : No, but it’s been a while.  Genre : Highbrow Lit; Social Satire; English Literature.  Overall Rating : 8*/10.

    It was two hours cut completely out of Denis Stone’s life.  And that was just the ride on the train, from London to Camlet-on-the-Water.  After that there was still a bicycle ride to Crome itself.

    He could have done a lot of other, more productive things with his time, but the social obligation beckoned and one does not lightly turn down an invitation to spend a couple weeks with the Wimbush’s at their manor in Crome.  Besides, there will be other guests there as well, and as an up-and-coming poet – with one collection of his poems already in print – Denis can't afford to miss any opportunity to hobnob with the Upper Crust.

    And admittedly he does find it gratifying to impress them with witty conversation sprinkled with his prodigious vocabulary, including a chance to give his opinions on the finer subjects of the Arts – Poetry, Music, the latest books, and what have you.

    There’s only one drawback.  While he’s expounding on all these highbrow topics, he also has to listen to everybody else give their views on these things.  And to be honest, Denis finds any opinions other his own to be just plain boring.

What’s To Like...

    Crome Yellow was first published in 1921 and is the debut novel of Aldous Huxley.  It chronicles the conversations and interactions of a group of high-class guests at Crome manor.  For the most part we follow Denis, the protagonist, but occasionally cut away to some of the others.

    The story is a scathing satire of the lives and conversations of the glitterati during the early 1920s.  The characters are said to be based on real people, and the Wikipedia article (the link is here) mentions a few, the only one of which I recognize being Bertrand Russell.  In addition to our poet Denis, the cast includes the well-to-do hosts, an artist, a writer, a handsome womanizer, and several women looking for beaus with suitable quantities of breeding and money.

    The writing is superb, which is surprising given that this was Huxley’s first novel.  The insight into the snobbery of each character is amazing, since the author was still in his 20s.  Each character strives to be the pithiest and hog the conversations, and their efforts, while pompous and attention-seeking, do contain pearls of wisdom.  Huxley explores their pretentious spiels in all sorts of areas: Art, Architecture, Eccentricity, Writing, Socializing, Privies (huh?), Books, Poetry, Music Appreciation, Love, Religion, Nature, and even Vocabulary.

    Spiritualism was popular at that time, and Huxley has some incisive things t say about that.  Ditto for the Fundamentalists, embodied in the character of Mr. Bodiham, who spouts out “Last Days” sermons.  Our characters often lapse into French (such as “le galbe evase de ses hanches”, which I had to look up and means “the curve flares from her hips”), the language of culture, in order to impress their audience, and Huxley’s examples of flowery-but-inane poetry are sheer genius.

    The vocabulary in English is a wordsmith’s delight as well, with Huxley using words like ratiocination, pullulation, vailed, argal, floaters, tractates, empyrean, and the ones listed below.  I had no idea what the Malthusian League, coconut shies were, and who Tschuplitski was.  The first two are real (and in Wikipedia), the last one is fictitious.  And if you ever wondered where the proper place for a privy is in a mansion, you’ll find your answer here.

    The grammar is an odd combination of English spelling coupled with American punctuation.  That might sound strange, but it worked perfectly for me.  The book is short – 183 pages – and divided into 30 chapters.  It’s a quick and relatively easy read, with not a lot characters to keep track of.  The reason for the “Yellow” in the book’s title is never explained, but there is a pigment called “Chrome Yellow”, so maybe Huxley was just playing around with words.  This e-book I read (with the book cover shown above) is the Public Domain version, which means it is always a free download at Amazon.

Kewlest New Word ...

Carminative (adj.) : relieving flatulence.

Others: Cantatrice (n.); Dipsomaniac (n.); Hamadryad (n.); Lich-gate (n.);  Divagate (v.); Supererogatory (adj.).  There were a bunch more.

Excerpts...

    They waited, with an uncomfortably beating heart, for the oracle to speak.  After a long and silent inspection, Mr. Scogan would suddenly look up and ask, in a hoarse whisper, some horrifying question, such as, “Have you ever been hit on the head with a hammer by a young man with red hair?”  When the answer was in the negative, which it could hardly fail to be, Mr. Scogan would nod several times, saying, “I was afraid so.  Everything is still to come, still to come, though it can’t be very far off now.”  (loc. 2071)

    “The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate.  As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.  At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in the future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet.  The proper study of mankind is books.”  (loc. 2236)

Kindle Details…

    As mentioned above, this particular e-book of Crome Yellow is always free at Amazon.  There are other versions, which range in price from $0.99 to $5.99.  But why pay for something when you can get it at no cost?

“Well, here I am.  I’ve come with incredulous speed.”  Ivor’s vocabulary was rich, but a little erratic.  (loc. 1168 )

    There are a couple nits to pick.  There seemed to be a fair amount of “scanning typos”, which is probably inevitable in a Public Domain effort.  Another round of proofreading would take care of that.  The “N-word” appears a couple times.  Yes, I recognize that was the word Huxley originally used and nobody found it offensive back in 1921.  I’m not saying it should be deleted, but it still grates my nerves every time I come across it while reading.

    More seriously, the story suffers from the PWP syndrome (“Plot? What plot?”).  People talk, Denis muses a lot, but nothing ever really happens.  I thought maybe it was just me who was bothered by this, but the Wikipedia article mentions other critics who felt the same way.  When there’s no plot, that means there’s nothing to resolve in the ending.  Denis ends his stay at Crome and goes home, a little older but not a bit wiser, and without anything having changed.

    Yet the writing skills of Aldous Huxley outweigh all this, and the book somehow kept me entertained from beginning to end.  So, nine stars for the writing, seven stars for the lack of plot; and take the average of the two.  Your rating could be a bit lower, as I’m known to be an Aldous Huxley fan.

    8 Stars.  I had my “Aldous Huxley phase” way back in my 20s.  As expected, Brave New World blew me away, then Ape and Essence, surprisingly, turned out to be even better.  After that I read Island, which was so-so at best, followed lastly by After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, which I found to be awful and ended my fascination with Huxley novels.  But all that was more than 40 years ago, and I’m thinking it may be time to reread some of those.