Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley November 29th 2022

 Signed First Edition of novel published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1923

The selector of the novel, KumKum, was guided by a comment of Shashi Tharoor, the notable Indian parliamentarian, man of letters, diplomat, and former Under Secretary General of the United Nations. It seems even his wide education had not prepared him to read Antic Hay; he found it took him considerable attention and work in the library to track down the numerous allusions and references in the book to all things cultural  from books to art, and music to philosophy. He learned a lot from the furniture of Aldous Huxley’s mind and it impelled him to have as catholic an interest as Aldous Huxley in everything that belongs to the culture of humankind.

Furthermore, Priya had asked KumKum to select a ‘difficult’ book. In consequence KRG readers spent a great deal of time (those few who had the stamina) to pursue the activities of a motley cast of Londoners going about their life, loves, and obsessive activities in 1920s London. It belongs to novels of the genre that treat life in London – we have read another London novel – by Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway:
https://kochiread.blogspot.com/2021/02/virginia-woolf-mrs-dalloway-jan-29-2021.html

There is a web site www.LondonFictions.com that considers more than 80 novels celebrating London and the unique essence essence of that city of such pre-eminence in English literature. Here is the particular article dealing with Antic Hay:
https://www.londonfictions.com/aldous-huxley-antic-hay.html

It is a post-World War I London in which people have lost their moorings and the comfortable cultural pillars of orthodoxy that supported an untroubled Victorian civilisation. Here you see painters jostling with critics, sculptors trying to find space for their art in a world where the solidity of stone and marble have dissolved; social climbers making out with aspiring inventors; brilliant conversations between bespoke tailors and their exalted customers; dancehalls buzzing with the latest imported jazz bands to the music of which flighty young women in unconventional dress perform gyrations; men and women circumambulating the city aimlessly; and love, mostly of the kind where Cupid’s arrow misses the mark.

The cultural education Shashi Tharoor referred to is found in the numerous fragments of untranslated French, Italian, Latin, and German quotes. Pursuing them to their sources and meanings, and relating them to the context for the novel, affords the leisured reader some satisfaction that shee is now among the initiated. If you are a fan of opera it’s joy to come across Don Juan’s seductive thrust from the famous aria in Mozart’s Don Giovanni:

Là ci darem la mano,
Là mi dirai di sì.
Vedi, non è lontano;
Partiam, ben mio, da qui.

(There you will give me your hand,
There you will tell me 'yes’.
You see, it is not far,
Let's leave, my beloved.)

Zerlina answers she’d like to respond to the invitation, but can’t; her heart trembles. Mrs. Viveash (the Zerlina of the moment) answers to Gumbril (who fancies himself as Don Juan), with a bar from the opera:

Felice, è ver, sarei, (True, I could be happy.). 

Evocations of music abound and this one yields beauty when followed to its source, and the reader can listen from minute 2:50 onwards
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJnJjpMdT3Y

 

Don Giovanni – Come my beloved says Don Juan to Zerlina

The novel’s title and the epigraph that stands at the front of the book, are taken from the play Edward II by Christopher Marlowe:

My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns
Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay

There is a colourful scene in a jazz club showing the repetitive, frenetic movement in Chapter 15:

Scene from Ch 15: Theodore and Myra are dancing at a revue or cabaret club to a jazz band where the 'blackamoors' are playing jazz at a dancing club

Huxley paints a wonderful picture of the dance hall proceedings:

“What’s he to Hecuba?” The grinning blackamoors repeated the question, reiterated the answer on a tone of frightful unhappiness. The saxophone warbled on the verge of anguish. The couples revolved, marked time, stepped and stepped with an habitual precision, as though performing some ancient and profoundly significant rite. Some were in fancy dress, for this was a gala night at the cabaret. Young women disguised as callipygous Florentine pages, blue-breeched Gondoliers, black-breeched Toreadors circulated, moon-like, round the hall, clasped sometimes in the arms of Arabs, or white clowns, or more often of untravestied partners.

 Interesting that ‘blackamoors’ was the term in vogue at the time in London for Africans.

 One of the items from which Huxley derives much satire is the epiphany that descends on Gumbril when he thinks up inflatable rubber inserts as a way of safeguarding clients when they fall. Gumbril discusses the invention with his tailor Bojanus and decides to quit his day job, in order to develop, advertise, and sell his revolutionary pneumatic ‘Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.’ Here is a modern fashion designer’s version, although he acknowledges no debt to Gumbril or Huxley in this 1923 novel:

Inflatable trousers – designer Harikrishnan’s methodology for inflatables was adopted from ‘morphing’, the traditional method of distorting photographs by assembling fragments of the same subject taken at different perspectives

Antic Hay turns out to be a comic dance that weaves the lives of various people living lives of no great purpose or ambition (leaving aside Gumbril and his inflatable trousers). Huxley explained his true intentions in a letter,

I will only point out that it is a book written by a member of what I may call the war-generation for others of his kind; and that it is intended to reflect – fantastically, of course, but none the less faithfully – the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch.