  We read Aldous Huxley because we see in his work another real poet in embryo, but a poet working in as different a medium from that in which Iris Tree works as it is possible to imagine. He has been called the "neurasthenic Rabelais of 1920," and in so far as this connotes a perversity of intellect it is an accurate label. For there is no getting away from the cleverness of Mr Huxley: he is almost too intellectual. His brain, which helps him so admirably in his short stories, acts as an obstruction in his pursuit of beauty. "The problem which the most authentic modern poetry is endeavouring to solve is to give beauty a fuller content by exploring unfamiliar paths of sensation and perception," but Mr Huxley most nearly approximates to beauty when he is most familiar. It is perhaps permissible to doubt whether these new, unfamiliar paths can lead anywhere but to cul-de-sac or cesspool. At any rate, in Mr Huxley's opinion, "Your centaurs are your only poets." He finds beauty "no far-fetched, dear-bought gem; no pomander to be smelt only when the crowd becomes too stinkingly insistent: it is not a birth of rare oboes or violins, not visible only from ten to six by state permission at a nominal charge, not a thing richly apart, but an ethic, a way of belief and of practice, of faith and works, medieval in its implication with the very threads of life." He desires "no Paphian cloister of pink monks. Rather a rosy Brotherhood of Common Life, eating, drinking; marrying and giving in marriage; taking and taken in adultery; reading, thinking, and when thinking fails, feeling immeasurably more subtly, sometimes perhaps creating." So much for his theory: in practice he has given us many tentative exercises which reek of the intellectual, are rich in humour, deadly in their irony, and one long poem, Leda, which has much beauty (though it has been In the latter case we shiver with disgust; in the former it is the test of the poet's genius that we are uplifted and find the original vastly improved by the fresh treatment. Mr Brett-Young does nothing to improve our impression of Thamar, Mr Huxley infuses into the old story of Leda a thousand new concepts. Let your mind dwell on this picture: "The tunic falls about her feet, and she Steps from the crocus folds of drapery, Dazzlingly naked, into the warm sun. God-like she stood; then broke into a run, Leaping and laughing in the light, as though Life through her veins coursed with so swift a flow Of generous blood and fire that to remain Too long in statued queenliness were pain To that quick soul, avid of speed and joy. She ran, easily bounding, like a boy, ... Narrow of haunch and slim and firm of breast. Lovelier she seemed in motion than at rest, If that might be, when she was never less, Moving or still, than perfect loveliness." Small wonder that Jove, scourged by his libido with itching memories of bliss, should turn his sickened sight from the monstrous shapes that met his eyes in Africa (this is the passage of surpassing ugliness) where "Among unthinkable flowers, they pause and grin Out through a trellis of suppurating lips, Of mottled tentacles barbed at the tips And bloated hands and wattles and red lobes Of pendulous gristle and enormous probes Of pink and slashed and tasselled flesh" to young Leda where she stood, poised on the river-side. Straightway his heart held but one thought: he must possess that perfect form or die. Have her he must: "Gods, men, earth, heaven, the whole Vast universe was blotted from his thought And nought remained but Leda's laughter, nought But Leda's eyes. Magnified by his lust, She was the whole world now; have her he must, he must...." He goes to Aphrodite to plan the rape " ... While she, Who was to be their victim, joyously Laughed like a child in the sudden breathless chill And splashed and swam, forgetting every ill And every fear and all, save only this: That she was young, and it was perfect bliss To be alive where suns so goldenly shine, And bees go drunk with fragrant honey-wine, And the cicadas sing from morn till night, And rivers run so cool and pure and bright ... Stretched all her length, arms under head, she lay In the deep grass, while the sun kissed away The drops that sleeked her skin. Slender and fine As those old images of the gods that shine With smooth-worn silver, polished through the years By the touching lips of countless worshippers, Her body was; and the sun's golden heat Clothed her in softest flame from head to feet And was her mantle, that she scarcely knew The conscious sense of nakedness. The blue, Far hills and the faint fingers of the sky Shimmered and pulsed in the heat uneasily, And hidden in the grass, cicadas shrill Dizzied the air with ceaseless noise, until A listener might wonder if they cried In his own head or in the world outside." Lazily she looks up into the sky and sees there the conflict between the eagle and her lovely, hapless swan. Pity (the mother of voluptuousness) is roused in Leda's heart and she opens her arms to receive the transformed god. "Crouched on the flowery ground Young Leda lay, and to her side did press The swan's proud-arching opulent loveliness ... Closer he nestled, mingling with the slim Austerity of virginal flank and limb His curved and florid beauty, till she felt That downy warmth strike through her flesh and melt The bones and marrow of her strength away.... And over her the swan shook slowly free The folded glory of his wings, and made A white-walled tent of soft and luminous shade To be her veil and keep her from the shame Of naked light and the sun's noonday flame. Hushed lay the earth and the wide, careless sky. Then one sharp sound, that might have been a cry Of utmost pleasure or of utmost pain, Broke sobbing forth, and all was still again." There is a sensuous beauty in this poem which makes it altogether lovely. Certainly in thinking of the fable of Leda in the future our minds will first fly back to Mr Huxley's poem and that is probably the highest tribute we can pay it. But the rest of his poems aim at something very different from the simple, sensuous and passionate and are on a different plane. He deals cynically with the transitory nature of human passions, he laughs at Jonah as he sits praying and singing on "the convex mound of one vast kidney" of the whale that swallowed him; in his philosophers' songs he likes to sing of man as "a poor degenerate from the ape" and of God as a fool. "If, O my Lesbia, I should commit, Not fornication, dear, but suicide, My Thames-blown body (Pliny vouches it) Would drift face upwards on the oily tide With the other garbage, till it putrefied. But you, if all your lovers' frozen hearts Conspired to send you, desperate, to drown— Your maiden modesty would float face down, 'Tis the Lord's doing. Marvellous is the plan By which this best of worlds is wisely planned. One law he made for woman, one for man: We bow the head and do not understand." This is certainly not poetry, but it is funny. The man with the wry face gets his laugh, even if we feel that to be facetious it is not necessary to be blasphemous. He is happier in his rÔle of Ninth Philosopher: he here attains a true expression of what is happening in the world of modern art. "Beauty for some provides escape, Who gain a happiness in eyeing The gorgeous buttocks of the ape Or Autumn sunsets exquisitely dying." But Frascati's shows him at his normal level of intellectual irony: "Bubble-breasted swells the dome Of this my spiritual home, From whose nave the chandelier, Schaffhausen frozen, tumbles sheer. We in the round balcony sit, Lean o'er and look into the pit Where feed the human bears beneath, Champing with their gilded teeth. What negroid holiday makes free With such priapic revelry? What songs? What gongs? What nameless rites? What gods like wooden stalagmites? What stream of blood or kidney pie? What blasts of Bantu melody? Rag-time.... But when the wearied Band Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand. And there we sit in blissful calm, Quietly sweating palm to palm." This is the vein which he expands in what Middleton Murry regards as his best poem, Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt, an attempt to "fish up a single day" from a dead "Real as his dream? He wondered. Ten to nine. Thursday. Wasn't he lunching at his aunt's? Distressing circumstance. But then he was taking Jenny out to dine, Which was some consolation. What a chin! Civilised ten thousand years, and still No better way than rasping a pale mask With imminent suicide, steel or obsidian: Repulsive task! And the more odious for being quotidian. If one should live till eighty-five ... And the dead, do they still shave? The horrible dead, are they alive?... Nine o'clock. Still in bed. Warm, but how lonely! He wept to think of all those single beds, Those desperate night-long solitudes, Those mental salons full of nudes. Shelley was great when he was twenty-four. Eight thousand nights alone—minus, perhaps, Six, or no! seven, certainly not more. Five little bits of heaven (Tum-do-rum, de-rum, de-rum), Five little bits of heaven and one that was a lapse, High-priced disgust: it stopped him suddenly In the midst of laughter and talk with a tingling down the spine (Like infants' impoliteness, a terrible infants' brightness), And he would shut his eyes so as not to see His own hot blushes calling him a swine." At last he throws the nightmare of his blankets off, gets up and goes into the bathroom— "Pitiable to be Quite so deplorably naked when one strips. There was his scar, a panel of old rose Adonis punctured by his amorous boar, Permanent souvenir of the Great War. One of God's jokes, typically good, That wound of his. How perfect that he should Have suffered it for—what?" He dresses, goes down to breakfast, letters and The Times: he reads some of his old work ... "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 |
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