Complete Works of Aldous Huxley

  The Complete Works of

  ALDOUS HUXLEY

  (1894-1963)

  Contents

  The Novels

  Crome Yellow

  Antic Hay

  Those Barren Leaves

  Point Counter Point

  Brave New World

  Eyeless in Gaza

  After Many a Summer

  Time Must Have a Stop

  Ape and Essence

  The Genius and the Goddess

  Island

  The Translation

  A Virgin Heart by Remy de Gourmont

  The Shorter Fiction

  Limbo

  Mortal Coils

  Little Mexican

  Two or Three Graces

  Brief Candles

  Miscellaneous Short Stories

  The Short Stories

  List of Short Stories in Chronological Order

  List of Short Stories in Alphabetical Order

  The Poetry Collections

  The Burning Wheel

  The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems

  Leda

  The Cicadas and Other Poems

  The Poems

  List of Poems in Chronological Order

  List of Poems in Alphabetical Order

  Selected Non-Fiction

  The Olive Tree and Other Essays

  What are You Going to Do About it?

  The Perennial Philosophy

  Science, Liberty and Peace

  The Devils of Loudun

  The Doors of Perception

  Heaven and Hell

  Brave New World Revisited

  The Memoir

  The Art of Seeing

  The Delphi Classics Catalogue

  © Delphi Classics 2018

  Version 1

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  The Complete Works of

  ALDOUS HUXLEY

  By Delphi Classics, 2018

  COPYRIGHT

  Complete Works of Aldous Huxley

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by Delphi Classics.

  © Delphi Classics, 2018.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

  ISBN: 9781786561152

  Delphi Classics

  is an imprint of

  Delphi Publishing Ltd

  Hastings, East Sussex

  United Kingdom

  Contact: [email protected]

  www.delphiclassics.com

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  The Novels

  Huxley was born in Godalming, Surrey, on 26 July 1894

  Crome Yellow

  As a young boy he was taught by his mother, but after she became ill, he attended Eton College and then graduated from Oxford University in 1916. He had attempted to join the British Army at the start of 1916, but had been rejected due to his severely impaired vision. After graduation, he took a position at the Air Ministry before acquiring a teaching position at Eton for a year. One of his students was George Orwell, who considered Huxley an incompetent teacher in many regards, but commended him for his excellent mastery of French. Towards the end of the First World War, Huxley worked for Lady Ottoline Morrell at Garsington Manor, where he encountered members of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, which included Virginia Woolf, Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and John Maynard Keynes.

  Crome Yellow was first published in Britain by Chatto and Windus in 1921. It was the author’s debut novel, although he had completed an unpublished book when he was only seventeen years old. It centres around a young poet, Denis Stone, who is searching for literary validation from more experienced writers. He visits Crome Yellow, a manor, where an array of authors and artists gather to socialise and network. The book is satirical and takes aim at those Huxley knew from his time at Garsington Manor. He creates a host of amusing and ridiculous characters that typified the self-obsession of the literary scene at that time, such as Priscilla Wimbush, who is an obvious depiction and mockery of Lady Ottoline Morrell.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CHAPTER XI.

  CHAPTER XII.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  CHAPTER XV.

  CHAPTER XVI.

  CHAPTER XVII.

  CHAPTER XVIII.

  CHAPTER XIX.

  CHAPTER XX.

  CHAPTER XXI.

  CHAPTER XXII.

  CHAPTER XXIII.

  CHAPTER XXIV.

  CHAPTER XXV.

  CHAPTER XXVI.

  CHAPTER XXVII.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  CHAPTER XXIX.

  CHAPTER XXX.

  Lady Ottoline Morrell

  Bloomsbury Group members — left to right: Lady Ottoline Morrell, Maria Nys, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell

  CHAPTER I.

  ALONG THIS PARTICULAR stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains — the few that there were — stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water. Camlet was where he always got out, leaving the train to creep indolently onward, goodness only knew whither, into the green heart of England.

  They were snorting out of West Bowlby now. It was the next station, thank Heaven. Denis took his chattels off the rack and piled them neatly in the corner opposite his own. A futile proceeding. But one must have something to do. When he had finished, he sank back into his seat and closed his eyes. It was extremely hot.

  Oh, this journey! It was two hours cut clean out of his life; two hours in which he might have done so much, so much — written the perfect poem, for example, or read the one illuminating book. Instead of which — his gorge rose at the smell of the dusty cushions against which he was leaning.

  Two hours. One hundred and twenty minutes. Anything might be done in that time. Anything. Nothing. Oh, he had had hundreds of hours, and what had he done with them? Wasted them, spilt the precious minutes as though his reservoir were inexhaustible. Denis groaned in the spirit, condemned himself utterly with all his works. What right had he to sit in the sunshine, to occupy corner seats in third-class carriages, to be alive? None, none, none.

  Misery and a nameless nostalgic distress possessed him. He was twenty-three, and oh! so agonizingly conscious of the fact.

  The train came bumpingly to a halt. Here was Camlet at last. Denis jumped up, crammed his hat over his eyes, deranged his pile of baggage, leaned out of the window and shouted for a porter, seized a bag in either hand, and had to put them down again in order to open the door. When at last he had safely bundled himself and his baggage on to the platform, he ran up the train towards the van.

  “A bicycle, a bicycle!” he said breathlessly to the guard. He felt himself a man of action. The guard paid no attention, but continued me
thodically to hand out, one by one, the packages labelled to Camlet. “A bicycle!” Denis repeated. “A green machine, cross-framed, name of Stone. S-T-O-N-E.”

  “All in good time, sir,” said the guard soothingly. He was a large, stately man with a naval beard. One pictured him at home, drinking tea, surrounded by a numerous family. It was in that tone that he must have spoken to his children when they were tiresome. “All in good time, sir.” Denis’s man of action collapsed, punctured.

  He left his luggage to be called for later, and pushed off on his bicycle. He always took his bicycle when he went into the country. It was part of the theory of exercise. One day one would get up at six o’clock and pedal away to Kenilworth, or Stratford-on-Avon — anywhere. And within a radius of twenty miles there were always Norman churches and Tudor mansions to be seen in the course of an afternoon’s excursion. Somehow they never did get seen, but all the same it was nice to feel that the bicycle was there, and that one fine morning one really might get up at six.

  Once at the top of the long hill which led up from Camlet station, he felt his spirits mounting. The world, he found, was good. The far-away blue hills, the harvests whitening on the slopes of the ridge along which his road led him, the treeless sky-lines that changed as he moved — yes, they were all good. He was overcome by the beauty of those deeply embayed combes, scooped in the flanks of the ridge beneath him. Curves, curves: he repeated the word slowly, trying as he did so to find some term in which to give expression to his appreciation. Curves — no, that was inadequate. He made a gesture with his hand, as though to scoop the achieved expression out of the air, and almost fell off his bicycle. What was the word to describe the curves of those little valleys? They were as fine as the lines of a human body, they were informed with the subtlety of art...

  Galbe. That was a good word; but it was French. Le galbe evase de ses hanches: had one ever read a French novel in which that phrase didn’t occur? Some day he would compile a dictionary for the use of novelists. Galbe, gonfle, goulu: parfum, peau, pervers, potele, pudeur: vertu, volupte.

  But he really must find that word. Curves curves...Those little valleys had the lines of a cup moulded round a woman’s breast; they seemed the dinted imprints of some huge divine body that had rested on these hills. Cumbrous locutions, these; but through them he seemed to be getting nearer to what he wanted. Dinted, dimpled, wimpled — his mind wandered down echoing corridors of assonance and alliteration ever further and further from the point. He was enamoured with the beauty of words.

  Becoming once more aware of the outer world, he found himself on the crest of a descent. The road plunged down, steep and straight, into a considerable valley. There, on the opposite slope, a little higher up the valley, stood Crome, his destination. He put on his brakes; this view of Crome was pleasant to linger over. The facade with its three projecting towers rose precipitously from among the dark trees of the garden. The house basked in full sunlight; the old brick rosily glowed. How ripe and rich it was, how superbly mellow! And at the same time, how austere! The hill was becoming steeper and steeper; he was gaining speed in spite of his brakes. He loosed his grip of the levers, and in a moment was rushing headlong down. Five minutes later he was passing through the gate of the great courtyard. The front door stood hospitably open. He left his bicycle leaning against the wall and walked in. He would take them by surprise.

  CHAPTER II.

  HE TOOK NOBODY by surprise; there was nobody to take. All was quiet; Denis wandered from room to empty room, looking with pleasure at the familiar pictures and furniture, at all the little untidy signs of life that lay scattered here and there. He was rather glad that they were all out; it was amusing to wander through the house as though one were exploring a dead, deserted Pompeii. What sort of life would the excavator reconstruct from these remains; how would he people these empty chambers? There was the long gallery, with its rows of respectable and (though, of course, one couldn’t publicly admit it) rather boring Italian primitives, its Chinese sculptures, its unobtrusive, dateless furniture. There was the panelled drawing-room, where the huge chintz-covered arm-chairs stood, oases of comfort among the austere flesh-mortifying antiques. There was the morning-room, with its pale lemon walls, its painted Venetian chairs and rococo tables, its mirrors, its modern pictures. There was the library, cool, spacious, and dark, book-lined from floor to ceiling, rich in portentous folios. There was the dining-room, solidly, portwinily English, with its great mahogany table, its eighteenth-century chairs and sideboard, its eighteenth-century pictures — family portraits, meticulous animal paintings. What could one reconstruct from such data? There was much of Henry Wimbush in the long gallery and the library, something of Anne, perhaps, in the morning-room. That was all. Among the accumulations of ten generations the living had left but few traces.

  Lying on the table in the morning-room he saw his own book of poems. What tact! He picked it up and opened it. It was what the reviewers call “a slim volume.” He read at hazard:

  “...But silence and the topless dark

  Vault in the lights of Luna Park;

  And Blackpool from the nightly gloom

  Hollows a bright tumultuous tomb.”

  He put it down again, shook his head, and sighed. “What genius I had then!” he reflected, echoing the aged Swift. It was nearly six months since the book had been published; he was glad to think he would never write anything of the same sort again. Who could have been reading it, he wondered? Anne, perhaps; he liked to think so. Perhaps, too, she had at last recognised herself in the Hamadryad of the poplar sapling; the slim Hamadryad whose movements were like the swaying of a young tree in the wind. “The Woman who was a Tree” was what he had called the poem. He had given her the book when it came out, hoping that the poem would tell her what he hadn’t dared to say. She had never referred to it.

  He shut his eyes and saw a vision of her in a red velvet cloak, swaying into the little restaurant where they sometimes dined together in London — three quarters of an hour late, and he at his table, haggard with anxiety, irritation, hunger. Oh, she was damnable!

  It occurred to him that perhaps his hostess might be in her boudoir. It was a possibility; he would go and see. Mrs. Wimbush’s boudoir was in the central tower on the garden front. A little staircase cork-screwed up to it from the hall. Denis mounted, tapped at the door. “Come in.” Ah, she was there; he had rather hoped she wouldn’t be. He opened the door.

  Priscilla Wimbush was lying on the sofa. A blotting-pad rested on her knees and she was thoughtfully sucking the end of a silver pencil.

  “Hullo,” she said, looking up. “I’d forgotten you were coming.”

  “Well, here I am, I’m afraid,” said Denis deprecatingly. “I’m awfully sorry.”

  Mrs. Wimbush laughed. Her voice, her laughter, were deep and masculine. Everything about her was manly. She had a large, square, middle-aged face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of a curiously improbable shade of orange. Looking at her, Denis always thought of Wilkie Bard as the cantatrice.

  “That’s why I’m going to

  Sing in op’ra, sing in op’ra,

  Sing in op-pop-pop-pop-pop-popera.”

  Today she was wearing a purple silk dress with a high collar and a row of pearls. The costume, so richly dowagerish, so suggestive of the Royal Family, made her look more than ever like something on the Halls.

  “What have you been doing all this time?” she asked.

  “Well,” said Denis, and he hesitated, almost voluptuously. He had a tremendously amusing account of London and its doings all ripe and ready in his mind. It would be a pleasure to give it utterance. “To begin with,” he said...

  But he was too late. Mrs. Wimbush’s question had been what the grammarians call rhetorical; it asked for no answer. It was a little conversational flourish, a gambit in the polite game.

  “You find me busy at my horoscopes,” she said, withou
t even being aware that she had interrupted him.

  A little pained, Denis decided to reserve his story for more receptive ears. He contented himself, by way of revenge, with saying “Oh?” rather icily.

  “Did I tell you how I won four hundred on the Grand National this year?”

  “Yes,” he replied, still frigid and mono-syllabic. She must have told him at least six times.

  “Wonderful, isn’t it? Everything is in the Stars. In the Old Days, before I had the Stars to help me, I used to lose thousands. Now” — she paused an instant— “well, look at that four hundred on the Grand National. That’s the Stars.”

  Denis would have liked to hear more about the Old Days. But he was too discreet and, still more, too shy to ask. There had been something of a bust up; that was all he knew. Old Priscilla — not so old then, of course, and sprightlier — had lost a great deal of money, dropped it in handfuls and hatfuls on every race-course in the country. She had gambled too. The number of thousands varied in the different legends, but all put it high. Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his Primitives — a Taddeo da Poggibonsi, an Amico di Taddeo, and four or five nameless Sienese — to the Americans. There was a crisis. For the first time in his life Henry asserted himself, and with good effect, it seemed.

  Priscilla’s gay and gadding existence had come to an abrupt end. Nowadays she spent almost all her time at Crome, cultivating a rather ill-defined malady. For consolation she dallied with New Thought and the Occult. Her passion for racing still possessed her, and Henry, who was a kind-hearted fellow at bottom, allowed her forty pounds a month betting money. Most of Priscilla’s days were spent in casting the horoscopes of horses, and she invested her money scientifically, as the stars dictated. She betted on football too, and had a large notebook in which she registered the horoscopes of all the players in all the teams of the League. The process of balancing the horoscopes of two elevens one against the other was a very delicate and difficult one. A match between the Spurs and the Villa entailed a conflict in the heavens so vast and so complicated that it was not to be wondered at if she sometimes made a mistake about the outcome.