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.

Author Bio (Kumkum)

Aldous Leonard Huxley (1894 - 1963)

Aldous Huxley was born on July 26, 1894 in Godalming, Surrey, UK. He died on November 22, 1963 in Los Angeles, United States. He came from a famous family, the Huxley family, which you can read about at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huxley_family

 Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a novelist and philosopher, an essayist and critic. His novels are known for wit and satire. Huxley was recognised for his “acute and far-ranging intelligence.” He came from a famous family of intellectuals, and renowned professionals, beginning with his grandfather, the zoologist and comparative anatomist, Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), a formidable proponent of Darwinian evolution. His brother was Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and the first director of UNESCO, and Andrew Huxley, his half-brother, was a Nobel laureate physiologist.

 Aldous Huxley’s main works include Crome Yellow (1921), Antic Hay (1923), and Brave New World (1932), which began as a parody of a book by by H. G. Wells. His other novels were Eyeless in Gaza (1936) and Island (1960). Island, his last novel, is set in a utopia, in contrast to the dystopian Brave New World. The central theme is the development of a society which fuses the best of western and eastern culture. Huxley also wrote many essays, including The Doors of Perception which he wrote while experimenting with the psychotropic drug, mescaline. Mescaline, Aldous Huxley said, “is without any question the most extraordinary and significant experience available to human beings this side of the Beatific Vision.”

He lived the latter part of his life in California and became something of an intellectual guru. The Perennial Philosophy is a comparative study of mysticism across the cultures written by him, and well worth reading for anyone seeking enlightenment.

 Joe added that Aldous Huxley lived the latter part of his life in Los Angeles and worked for Hollywood as a screenplay writer. During his lifetime he had three wives and he had a colourful life with them. Interestingly, Huxley died on the same day that President Kennedy was assassinated. 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/apr/07/biography.highereducation1
A good review of the biography of Aldous Huxley by Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual. The review itself forms a wide-ranging capsule biography of the novelist.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/13/aldous.huxley
A thumbnail biography of Aldous Huxley 

 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2010/nov/13/huxley-great-dynasties-aldous
Tall, half-blind, terrifyingly intelligent, and the author of dozens of works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and plays, his subject, according to Isaiah Berlin, was nothing less than “the condition of men in the 20th century.” According to his biographer, Nicholas Murray, in Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual (2002), Aldous was a “like an 18th-century philosophe, a modern Voltaire”, a “prophet.”

Aldous Huxley and wife Maria

Discussions

Kumkum

Kumkum chose the book Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley for the November 2022 Session. It is not an easy book to read. The words chosen by the author are not commonly used words; French and Latin  words are interspersed, and allusions to literature occur that interfere with the progress of reading. Though the book is supposed to be a funny one, often the fun remains hidden below its difficult text. KumKum was sorry to have selected the book. But, she felt that  with this book KRG covered another important prose writer of the early 20th century. Aldous Huxley is not only praised for his humorous prose, he was also known as a stylish prose writer.  

According to the encyclopedia.com, the phrase ‘Antic Hay’ refers to an absurd dance, originating in Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II (1593). The definition of dancing the antic hay is to live hedonistically.

“Antic Hay is one of the funniest and most important of Aldous Huxley’s novels. The target is fashionable London of the 1920's – and Huxley leaves it devastated." 

This is a quote from the jacket of the paperback edition of the book by Harper & Row, which is in Joe's library.

 The New York Times too praised the book thus: “Antic Hay is a cry for madder music and for stronger wine – a delirium of sense enjoyment!”

The link below gives a thumbnail introduction to the characters in the novel and chapter summaries are given from chapter 7 to chapter 22. It was a wonderful guide for those of us who were finding it difficult to plough through the book. Priya said that with this guide in hand she would like to do a second reading of the book as it gave her a lot of insight into Antic Hay and Aldous Huxley, 
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/antic-hay-aldous-huxley/

Another wonderful review of Antic Hay by Ray Greenblat,an editor on the Schuylkill Valley Journal is below:
https://northofoxford.wordpress.com/2018/04/01/a-look-back-antic-hay-by-aldous-huxley/

Another interesting review of Antic Hay:
http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2010/poller.html

KumKum chose to read from chapter 9 where a woman, Rosie Shearwater as Gumbril later realises, is described so beautifully. In fact she had quoted the words to Saras in the morning. KumKum also informed us that 'neat's leather' refers to cow's leather and that she learnt that first from Shakespeare. 

Le Sopha Crebillon 1742 -The Sofa A Moral Tale (French Le Sopha, conte moral) is a 1742 libertine novel by Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon. The book that Sophie attempts to read in French.

Joe

Joe felt that Antic Hay is a strange book. It gives the reader a sampling of several characters: a poor painter of indifferent ability, an inventor of pneumatic underclothes to cushion falls, women of various kinds from the desirable to the neurotic, a physiologist to leaven the proceedings, and locales mainly in London and around the countryside in England. It is set some time in the 1920s or 1930s. It is a satire of manners and uses the characters to good effect to exemplify the oddities of a certain class of people who circulated around London in the aspiring echelons of society at the time.

 One of the peculiarities of Huxley’s writing is that he intersperses it with a variety of cultural icons taken from sculpture, painting, opera, architecture, literature and poetry. Sometimes they pass by with no advertisement, as a subtle allusion to a play of Shakespeare or lines from a poem by Michelangelo. Sometimes it is quite explicit as when Mozart’s Quintet in G Minor (K.516)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML1hutpsz8c

 is mentioned for the second movement, the Menuetto, and Gumbril plays it. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni also gets a number of lines from the aria La Ci Darem La Mano (‘There you will give me your hand’) when Don Juan tries to seduce Zerlina. You can hear the beautiful aria at minute 2:50 at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJnJjpMdT3Y

Joe felt that it is not for the story one should read a novel of this kind but for the exposition of situations, many incongruous ones, and for the conversation that is unusually inventive in words, and sometimes ideas as well. It’s a tease also to test how much the reader knows about a variety of subjects. Joe said one of the "Tharoorisque" words in the novel was "omnifutuent" a word used by Aldous Huxley to indicate a bisexual tendency. One of his wives was omnifutuent.

The “Imaginary Prisons” by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778)

' The heavenly Mews,’ as he liked to call it (for he had a characteristic weakness for philosophical paronomasia), that Casimir Lypiatt lived and worked. You passed under an archway of bald and sooty brick—and at night, when the green gas-lamp underneath the arch threw livid lights and enormous architectural shadows, you could fancy yourself at the entrance of one of Piranesi’s prisons 

(Chapter VI pg 76)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Battista_Piranesi

Priya 

Priya

Aldous Huxley’s 1923 novel Antic Hay is by no means an easy read. When read with determination (there’s no other way to read it) it offers an insight into the aimless and decadent life of Londoners after WW1. The book has no story or plot but is about a set of characters, who are demotivated, to say the least, (because of a world that has come apart) to create any elevating inventions in science, literature, music or art. It is the dark ages once again. It is also a repeat of the times of Dorian Gray or closer still the world which Virginia Woolf portrays in A Room of One’s Own. A satire on society, the novel is both funny and depressing. Huxley is the erudite writer and the work is replete with allusions to Latin and French works of art, music and the Classics.

Vermouth Bianco 1921 Verona Italy Vintage Poster Print

"So many of Casimir’s things remind me,” she said, “of those Italian vermouth advertisements. You know—Cinzano, Bonomelli and all these. I wish they didn’t"(Chapter VII page 93)

The chosen passage is about the protagonist Theodore Gumbril’s “grand and luminous idea” of creating trousers with a pneumatic seat and retailing them commercially. Called Gumbril’s Patent Small clothes the trousers would be inflatable by means of a tube fitted with a valve; the whole constructed of stout seamless red rubber, enclosed between two layers of cloth.

After Mr Bojanus agrees to tailor the experimental trousers. Theodore meets Mr Boldero, a businessman to market the new invention, and the latter comes up with ideas for a campaign to advertise the product. Priya did not realise the references to sex that Huxley makes till Joe sent us that all important link. In fact, the book was condemned for its cynicism and for its immorality because of its open debate on sex. The novel was banned for a while in Australia and burned in Cairo.

The Last Communion of St. Jerome by Domenochino

She came to his rescue. “I bought another at the same time,” she said. “‘The Last Communion of St. Jerome,’ by—who is it? I forget.” “Ah, you mean Domenichino’s ‘St. Jerome’?” The Complete Man was afloat again. “Poussin’s favourite picture. Mine too, very nearly. I’d like to see that.” “It’s in my room, I’m afraid. But if you don’t mind.”(Chapter IX page 114)
https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/la-pinacoteca/sala-xii---secolo-xvii/domenichino--comunione-di-s--girolamo.html

Saras

Saras was very ambivalent about Antic Hay till Joe sent the link included in this blog post. Like Priya she too felt that she would benefit from another reading of the book. Never has she had to refer to Google while reading a book as much as she did while reading Antic Hay. But in the end, it was a very rewarding process.

Nancy Cunard, Socialite on whom, allegedly, the character of Mrs Viveash is based

The ennui of the characters was what struck her in the portion that she chose to read. Perhaps Aldous Huxley just wanted to hold up a mirror to the widespread disenchantment, post-WW1, that was all pervasive in the early 1920s. The “Lost Generation”, those who reached adulthood during World War I,( lost in this context referring to "disoriented, wandering, directionless" spirit of many of the war's survivors in the early postwar period – Wikipedia.) The book does capture effectively that widespread disillusionment, with London portrayed as a city devoid of any real values or meaning. “Nil, omnipresent nil, world-soul, spiritual informer of all matter.”

Steps of the London Library in the present times

'with a thrill of genuine delight, with a sense of the most profound relief, she saw a familiar figure, running down the steps of the London Library’ (Chapter 14 pg 168)

Zakia

Zakia

Zakia chose to read the portion where Gumbril Sr shows Sheerwater and Gumbril Jr his model of London as Christopher Wren envisaged it in 1600s after the Great London Fire. Wren's plan is not accepted by the authorities and Gumbril Sr says it was because the authorities preferred the squalor and the wretched human scale and did not have the imagination to think further. Zakia said she related it the disparity between vision and reality: that’s how her hometown Bangalore has become on account of unplanned development. Bangalore was such a grand  beautiful city and she feels bad to look upon it now. Zakia and KumKum also laughed over the little gesture of Gumbril senior brushing his dishevelled hair, saying it reminded them of Shashi Tharoor.  Priya said that this was one of the books on London and towards the end of the novel Gumbril Jr and Mrs Viveash take a taxi and travel all over the city visiting friends. Many locations in the city are mentioned. 

 

Sir Christopher Wren's plan of London as reproduced by J Gwynn.

The Readings

Joe Ch 8 end – The characteristics of leaders versus the herd
Mr. Bojanus bowed again. “Well, Mr. Gumbril,” he said, “the point of all these things, as I’ve already remarked, is to make the leader look different, so that ’e can be recognized at the first coop d’oil, as you might say, by the ’erd ’e ’appens to be leading. For the ’uman ’erd, Mr. Gumbril, is an ’erd which can’t do without a leader. Sheep, for example: I never noticed that they ’ad a leader; nor rooks. Bees, on the other ’and, I take it, ’ave. At least when they’re swarming. Correct me, Mr. Gumbril, if I’m wrong. Natural ’istory was never, as you might say, my forty.”
 
“Nor mine,” protested Gumbril.
 
“As for elephants and wolves, Mr. Gumbril, I can’t pretend to speak of them with first-’and knowledge. Nor llamas, nor locusts, nor squab pigeons, nor lemmings. But ’uman beings, Mr. Gumbril, those I can claim to talk of with authority, if I may say so in all modesty, and not as the scribes. I ’ave made a special study of them, Mr. Gumbril. And my profession ’as brought me into contact with very numerous specimens.”
 
Gumbril could not help wondering where precisely in Mr. Bojanus’s museum he himself had his place.
 
“The ’uman ’erd,” Mr. Bojanus went on, “must have a leader. And a leader must have something to distinguish him from the ’erd. It’s important for ’is interests that he should be recognized easily. See a baby reaching out of a bath and you immediately think of Pears’ Soap; see the white ’air waving out behind and think of Lloyd George. That’s the secret. But in my opinion, Mr. Gumbril, the old system was much more sensible, give them regular uniforms and badges, I say; make Cabinet Ministers wear feathers in their ’air. Then the people will be looking to a real fixed symbol of leadership, not to the peculiarities of the mere individuals. Beards and ’air and funny collars change; but a good uniform is always the same. Give them feathers, that’s what I say, Mr. Gumbril. Feathers will increase the dignity of the State and lessen the importance of the individual. And that,” concluded Mr. Bojanus with emphasis, “that, Mr. Gumbril, will be all to the good.”
 
“But you don’t mean to tell me,” said Gumbril, “that if I chose to show myself to the multitude in my inflated trousers, I could become a leader—do you?”
 
“Ah, no,” said Mr. Bojanus. “You’d ’ave to ’ave the talent for talking and ordering people about, to begin with. Feathers wouldn’t give the genius, but they’d magnify the effect of what there was.”
 
Gumbril got up and began to divest himself of the Small-Clothes. He unscrewed the valve and the air whistled out, dyingly. He too sighed. “Curious,” he said pensively, “that I’ve never felt the need for a leader. I’ve never met any one I felt I could whole-heartedly admire or believe in, never any one I wanted to follow. It must be pleasant, I should think, to hand oneself over to somebody else. It must give you a warm, splendid, comfortable feeling.”
 
Mr. Bojanus smiled and shook his head. “You and I, Mr. Gumbril,” he said, “we’re not the sort of people to be impressed with feathers or even by talking and ordering about. We may not be leaders ourselves. But at any rate we aren’t the ’erd.”
 
“Not the main herd, perhaps.”
 
“Not any ’erd,” Mr. Bojanus insisted proudly.
 
KumKum – Ch 9 where the Complete Man walks out towards the park and meets Rosie
At the first tobacconist’s Gumbril bought the longest cigar he could find, and trailing behind him expiring blue wreaths of Cuban smoke, he made his way slowly and with an ample swagger towards the Park. It was there, under the elms, on the shores of the ornamental waters, that he expected to find his opportunity, that he intended—how confidently behind his Gargantuan mask!—to take it.
The opportunity offered itself sooner than he expected.
He had just turned into the Queen’s Road and was sauntering past Whiteley’s with the air of one who knows that he has a right to a good place, to two or three good places even, in the sun, when he noticed just in front of him, peering intently at the New Season’s Models, a young woman whom in his mild and melancholy days he would have only hopelessly admired, but who now, to the Complete Man, seemed a destined and accessible prey. She was fairly tall, but seemed taller than she actually was, by reason of her remarkable slenderness. Not that she looked disagreeably thin, far from it. It was a rounded slenderness. The Complete Man decided to consider her as tubular—flexible and tubular, like a section of boa constrictor, should one say. She was dressed in clothes that emphasized this serpentine slimness, in a close-fitting grey jacket that buttoned up to the neck and a long, narrow grey skirt that came down to her ankles. On her head was a small, sleek black hat, that looked almost as though it were made of metal. It was trimmed on one side with a bunch of dull golden foliage.
Those golden leaves were the only touch of ornament in all the severe smoothness and unbroken tubularity of her person. As for her face, that was neither strictly beautiful nor strictly ugly, but combined elements of both beauty and ugliness into a whole that was unexpected, that was oddly and somehow unnaturally attractive.
Pretending, he too, to take an interest in the New Season’s Models, Gumbril made, squinting sideways over the burning tip of his cigar, an inventory of her features. The forehead, that was mostly hidden by her hat; it might be pensively and serenely high, it might be of that degree of  lowness which in men is villainous, but in women is only another—a rather rustic one perhaps, rather canaille even, but definitely another—attraction. There was no telling. As for her eyes, they were green, and limpid; set wide apart in her head they looked out from under heavy lids and through openings that slanted up towards the outer corners. Her nose was slightly aquiline. Her mouth was full-lipped, but straight and unexpectedly wide. Her chin was small, round and firm. She had a pale skin, a little flushed over the cheek-bones, which were prominent.
On the left cheek, close under the corner of the slanting eye, she had a brown mole. Such hair as Gumbril could see beneath her hat was pale and inconspicuously blond. When she had finished looking at the New Season’s Models she moved slowly on, halting for a moment before the travelling trunks and the fitted picnic baskets; dwelling for a full minute over the corsets, passing the hats, for some reason, rather contemptuously, but pausing, which seemed strange, for a long pensive look at the cigars and wine. As for the tennis rackets and cricket bats, the school outfits and the gentleman’s hosiery—she hadn’t so much as a look for one of them. But how lovingly she lingered before the boots and shoes! Her own feet, the Complete Man noticed with satisfaction, had an elegance of florid curves. And while other folk walked on neat’s leather she was content to be shod with nothing coarser than mottled serpent’s skin.
 
Priya – Ch 10  Where Gumbril meets Mr Boldero to decide on an advertising campaign for the pneumatic trousers.
Gumbril was wearing for the occasion the sample pair of Small-Clothes which Mr. Bojanus had made for him. For Mr. Boldero’s benefit he put them, so to speak, through their paces. He allowed himself to drop with a bump on to the floor—arriving there bruiseless and unjarred. He sat in complete comfort for minutes at a stretch on the edge of the ornamental iron fender. In the intervals he paraded up and down before Mr. Boldero like a mannequin. “A trifle bulgy,...But still...Cheap and good,” said Mr. Boldero.
 
“It sounds ideal,” said Gumbril.
 
 “And then,” said Mr. Boldero, “there’s our advertising campaign.
 
“We must set to work,” said Mr. Boldero, “sci—en—tifically.” Gumbril nodded again.
 
“We have to appeal,” Mr. Boldero went on, “to the great instincts and feelings of humanity..’
 
“That’s all very well,” said Gumbril. “But how do you propose to appeal to the most important of the instincts? I refer, as you may well imagine, to sex.”
 
 “Alas! we can’t. I don’t see any way of hanging our Small-Clothes on the sexual peg.”
 
“Then we are undone,” said Gumbril, too dramatically.
 
“No, no.” Mr. Boldero was reassuring. “You make the error of the Viennese. You exaggerate the importance of sex. After all, my dear Mr. Gumbril, there is also the instinct of self-preservation; there is also,” he leaned forward, wagging his finger, “the social instinct, the instinct of the herd.”
 
SELF PRESERVATION
Mr. Boldero cleared his throat. “We shall begin,” he said, “by making the most simple elementary appeal to their instinct of self-preservation: we shall point out that the Patent Small-Clothes are comfortable; It doesn’t take much to persuade a man that it’s pleasanter to sit on air than on wood. “We shall have to speak about the glories and the trials of sedentary labour. We must exalt its spiritual dignity and at the same time condemn its physical discomforts. ‘The seat of honour,’ don’t you know. We could talk about that. ‘The Seats of the Mighty.’ ‘The seat that rules the office rocks the world.’ All those lines might be made something of. And then we could have little historical chats about thrones;
 
MEDICAL
“After that,” said Mr. Boldero, “we get on to the medical side of the matter. “That will be a little difficult, won’t it?” questioned Gumbril.
 
“Not a bit of it!” Mr. Boldero laughed with an infectious confidence. “All we have to do is to talk about the great nerve centres of the spine: the shocks they get when you sit down too hard; the wearing exhaustion to which long-protracted sitting on unpadded seats subjects them. We’ll have to talk very scientifically about the great lumbar ganglia—if there are such things, which I really don’t pretend to know. We’ll even talk almost mystically about the ganglia. You know that sort of ganglion philosophy?” Mr. Boldero went on parenthetically. “Very interesting it is, sometimes, I think. We could put in a lot about the dark, powerful sense-life, sex-life, instinct-life which is controlled by the lumbar ganglion. How important it is that that shouldn’t be damaged. That already our modern conditions of civilization tend unduly to develop the intellect and the thoracic ganglia controlling the higher emotions. That we’re wearing out, growing feeble, losing our balance in consequence. And that the only cure—if we are to continue our present mode of civilized life—is to be found in Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes.”
 
“This sort of medical and philosophical dope,” Mr. Boldero went on, “is always very effective. It is therefore very much impressed by the unfamiliar words; particularly if they have such a good juicy sound as the word ‘ganglia.’”
 
“There was a young man of East Anglia, whose loins were a tangle of ganglia,” murmured Gumbril, improvisatore.
 
“Precisely,” said Mr. Boldero. “Precisely. You see how juicy it is?
 
Zakia – Ch 11.  Laments that Christopher Wren’s original plan for reconstructing London was not carried out
“It’s London as it might have been if they’d allowed Wren to carry out his plans of rebuilding after the Great Fire.”
 
“And why didn’t they allow him to?” Shearwater asked.
 
“Chiefly,” said Gumbril Senior, “because, as I’ve said before, they didn’t know how to think or profit by experience. Wren offered them open spaces and broad streets; he offered them sunlight and air and cleanliness; he offered them beauty, order and grandeur. He offered to build for the imagination and the ambitious spirit of man, so that even the most bestial, vaguely and remotely, as they walked those streets, might feel that they were of the same race—or very nearly—as Michelangelo; that they too might feel themselves, in spirit at least, magnificent, strong and free. He offered them all these things; he drew a plan for them, walking in peril among the still smouldering ruins. But they preferred to re-erect the old intricate squalor; they preferred the mediæval darkness and crookedness and beastly irregular quaintness; they preferred holes and crannies and winding tunnels; they preferred foul smells, sunless, stagnant air, phthisis and rickets; they preferred ugliness and pettiness and dirt; they preferred the wretched human scale, the scale of the sickly body, not of the mind. Miserable fools! But I suppose,” the old man continued, shaking his head, “we can’t blame them.” His hair had blown loose from its insecure anchorage; with a gesture of resignation he brushed it back into place. “We can’t blame them. We should have done the same in the circumstances—undoubtedly. People offer us reason and beauty; but we will have none of them, because they don’t happen to square with the notions that were grafted into our souls in youth, that have grown there and become a part of us. Experientia docet—nothing falser, so far as most of us are concerned, was ever said.
 
Saras – Ch 14. Gumbril has lunch with Mrs Viveash
They sat for a long time over their cigarettes; it was half past three before Mrs. Viveash suggested they should go.
 
“Almost time,” she said, looking at her watch, “to have tea. One damned meal after another. And never anything new to eat. And every year one gets bored with another of the old things. Lobster, for instance, how I used to adore lobster once! But to-day—well, really, it was only your conversation, Theodore, that made it tolerable.”
 
Gumbril put his hand to his heart and bowed. He felt suddenly extremely depressed.
 
“And wine: I used to think Orvieto so heavenly. But this spring, when I went to Italy, it was just a bad muddy sort of Vouvray. And those soft caramels they call Fiats; I used to eat those till I was sick. I was at the sick stage before I’d finished one of them, this time in Rome.” Mrs. Viveash shook her head. “Disillusion after disillusion.”
 
They walked down the dark passage into the street.
 
“We’ll go home,” said Mrs. Viveash. “I really haven’t the spirit to do anything else this afternoon.” To the commissionaire who opened the door of the cab she gave the address of her house in St. James’s.
 
“Will one ever recapture the old thrills?” she asked rather fatiguedly as they drove slowly through the traffic of Regent Street.
 
“Not by chasing after them,” said Gumbril, in whom the clown had quite evaporated. “If one sat still enough they might perhaps come back of their own accord....” There would be the faint sound as it were of feet approaching through the quiet.
 
“It isn’t only food,” said Mrs. Viveash, who had closed her eyes and was leaning back in her corner.
 
“So I can well believe.”
 
“It’s everything. Nothing’s the same now. I feel it never will be.”
 
“Never more,” croaked Gumbril.
 
“Never again,” Mrs. Viveash echoed. “Never again.” There were still no tears behind her eyes. “Did you ever know Tony Lamb?” she asked.
 
“No,” Gumbril answered from his corner. “What about him?”
 
Mrs. Viveash did not answer. What, indeed, about him? She thought of his very clear blue eyes and the fair, bright hair that had been lighter than his brown face. Brown face and neck, red-brown hands; and all the rest of his skin was as white as milk. “I was very fond of him,” she said at last. “That’s all. He was killed in 1917, just about this time of the year. It seems a very long time ago, don’t you think?”
 
“Does it?” Gumbril shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. The past is abolished. Vivamus, mea Lesbia. If I weren’t so horribly depressed, I’d embrace you. That would be some slight compensation for my”—he tapped his foot with the end of his walking-stick—“my accident.”
 
“You’re depressed too?”
 
“One should never drink at luncheon,” said Gumbril. “It wrecks the afternoon. One should also never think of the past and never for one moment consider the future. These are treasures of ancient wisdom. But perhaps after a little tea——” He leaned forward to look at the figures on the taximeter, for the cab had come to a standstill—“after a nip of the tannin stimulant”—he threw open the door—“we may feel rather better.” 

Mrs. Viveash smiled excruciatingly. “For me,” she said, as she stepped out on to the pavement, “even tannin has lost its virtues now.”