One would be hard pressed ever to describe Vanessa Bell as avant-garde, or as a pioneer. Instead there remains a reassuring element of calm domesticity to her work; it is unassuming yet spectacularly vibrant, much like the artist herself.

Born in 1879, the older sister of Virginia Woolf was forced by their father Sir Leslie Stephen to adopt a maternal and in some respects wifely role after the death of their mother Julia in 1895. Though she never pretended to be interested in or concerned with the female suffrage movement, unlike her sister, Vanessa realised that her artistic talent could be utilised as means of escaping the stifling atmosphere of the family home in Hyde Park Gate and embracing a less conventional way of life. She began her studies at the Royal Academy Schools in 1901 and went on to the Slade School of Art in Bloomsbury.

“Wallflowers” (c.1950) (© Christie’s Images) and “Street Corner Conversation” (c.1913) (© The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett)
“Design for Omega Workshops Fabric” (1913); “On the Steps of Santa Maria della Salute, Venice” (1948) (© The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett)

After the death of their father in 1904, the Stephen sisters moved to Bloomsbury, and in 1905 Vanessa founded the Friday Club, originally as an exhibiting society. She and her friends from the Slade would meet at her home in Gordon Square to discuss their ideas about contemporary artistic movements. It was at one of these meetings in 1906 that she was first introduced to Duncan Grant by Pippa Strachey.

Following her marriage to Clive Bell in 1907 and the birth of her sons Julian and Quentin in 1908 and 1910, Vanessa embarked upon a brief affair with her fellow Bloomsbury artist Roger Fry; the pair would continue to collaborate until Fry’s death in 1934. Their most notable joint achievement was the establishment of the Omega Workshops in 1913. Heavily influenced by Post-Impressionism, the workshops provided another outlet for Bell’s fertile imagination, and she focused upon developing her interest in textiles and interior design. After the Hogarth Press was founded in 1917, the Omega Workshops were responsible for the striking covers of Virginia Woolf’s books. Examples of these fabrics and dust jackets are an integral part of the exhibition, and allow for a more three-dimensional appreciation of Bell, as well as the Bloomsbury belief that even the most mundane objects could be endowed with aesthetic value.

“Landscape with Haystack, Asheham” (1912) (© The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett)

The Omega Workshops permitted Bell to put on her first solo exhibition in 1916, and six years later, her second was held at London’s Independent Gallery. The year was also significant for Bell as it saw her move from London to Charleston, a farmhouse in Sussex. By this time, Vanessa and her husband were leading increasingly separate lives, and along with her children, she was accompanied by Duncan Grant and David Garnett, who had both been ordered to do farmwork after refusing to be conscripted. Bell and Grant would decorate the entire house in their own inimitable style and it would become a lasting monument to the ethos of Bloomsbury, and to their unique and indefinable relationship.

“Nude with Poppies” (1916) (© The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett)

Despite Grant’s homosexuality, Vanessa Bell became deeply infatuated with her house guest. Their daughter Angelica was born in 1918, and the truth about her paternity was kept hidden from her for the next 20 years, until a peculiarly Bloomsbury twist saw the young girl marry David Garnett, her father’s former lover. The deception of her daughter must have played upon Bell’s mind, as aspects of her painting reveal. In many instances, such as her famous 1912 portrait of her sister, which is on loan at Dulwich from the National Portrait Gallery, she chooses to leave her subjects’ facial features undefined, their lack of expression encouraging the observer to determine their emotion.

In 1937, Bell was dealt a devastating blow when her son Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Overwhelmed by grief, she suffered a breakdown and the suicide of her sister in 1941 only added to her anguish. Julian had become the principal figure in her life and as Virginia Woolf remarked in her diary after his death, “Julian had some queer power over her — the lover as well as the son.”

Vanessa had struggled with his decision to go to Spain, not only because of her fears for his safety, but because of her own pacifism. Her later works were marked by her profound sense of loss and resignation; however, it is with her earlier ones that the exhibition is chiefly concerned and the delight she took in her family and friends can be seen in every brushstroke. For Bloomsbury, personal relationships were the only thing more important than art for art’s sake and she effortlessly managed to combine her love of the two.

 “The Other Room” (late 1930s) (© The Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett)

As the embodiment of the Bloomsbury devotion to aestheticism, Bell’s physical beauty and unashamed enjoyment of her earthy and youthful sensuality is also evident, and is reflected in the rosy cheeks and full lips given to her female subjects. Femininity and motherhood were so central to Bell both as an artist and as a woman that it is fitting the sixth and final room of the exhibition should be devoted to depictions of womanhood in all its forms. Unusually for a member of the Bloomsbury Group, Vanessa Bell wrote no memoirs, nor did she keep a diary. The final work on display is a self-portrait, painted in 1952, nine years before her death. In it, her own face is concealed, leaving us to wonder how she viewed herself and her career. This remarkable exhibition finally sheds some light on both.

The post Vanessa Bell appeared first on Standpoint.

Born in Kilburn, north London, in 1889, Coulson worked as a journalist for the Morning Post and as a Reuters correspondent before enlisting as a private with the London Regiment Fusiliers in September 1914, having refused a commission. He preferred to work his way up through the ranks.

Departing for Malta in December 1914, Coulson would never return to England, but memories of his homeland would haunt his poetry. After receiving minor wounds at Gallipoli, he was promoted to sergeant and went to France in April 1916, the devastation there leading him to write of his heartbreak and his fears if similar scenes were to occur in England. On October 8, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme, he was killed by a shot to the chest.

Among his possessions was a copy of what would become his best-known poem, “Who Made the Law?”, in which he questioned how any higher authority, mortal or divine, could ever condone carnage such as he had witnessed. His grave at the Grove Town Cemetery in Méaulte was inscribed with the words “Nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us in death so noble”, from Manoa’s elegy for his son in Milton’s Samson Agonistes.

Written by Coulson’s father Frederick, who also edited the book, the foreword to From an Outpost is not only elegiac but also emphasises the willing sacrifice of Coulson and other young men like him, who believed that their altruism would preserve all that they held dear. The poems themselves serve as a stark reminder that beauty and brutality are not mutually exclusive.

For Coulson, the simple splendour that he found in nature could not be destroyed by the abject hell of the trenches. Nowhere is this sentiment more apparent than in “The Rainbow”, where he expresses his gratitude that the joyful sight of a soaring lark, or corn swaying in the breeze, is undiminished by the unnatural horror wrought by mankind. Furthermore, he recognises that these things will continue to be wondrous and unchanged long after the war is over, even after his own death.

Shortly before his premonition became a reality, Coulson wrote to his father, “If I should fall, do not grieve for me. I shall be one with the wind and the sun and the flowers.” A century later, while Coulson has been outshone by the brighter poetic lights of the First World War firmament, like the night skies he marvelled at amidst the bloodshed, his poems are indeed still beautiful: “And I dry my hands, that are also trained to kill/And I look at the stars — for the stars are beautiful still.”

The post A Light Dimmed appeared first on Standpoint.

For any historian writing about the long 19th century, the shadow of Eric Hobsbawm’s trilogy inevitably looms large. It is a shadow Evans readily acknowledges and steps out from by dedicating The Pursuit of Power to the late Marxist academic. However, in his quest to produce a more truly global analysis than Hobsbawm’s “Eurocentric” work, Evans also admits to seeking inspiration from the German historian Jürgen Osterhammel, whose seminal study The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century was first published in 2009, the same year he began The Pursuit of Power. Despite Evans arguably being Britain’s most notable authority on the Third Reich, his latest volume harks back to his pre-Cambridge days, drawing upon his vast experience of teaching 19th-century history, as well as being reminiscent of his earlier works, such as Death in Hamburg (1987).

At over 800 pages, the sheer amount of material covered is staggering in its depth and diversity and in spite of its length, the book’s ability to engage the reader never wavers. Evans leaves no documentary stone unturned, examining everything from cuisine to contraception. The result is an extraordinarily animated portrayal of 19th-century daily life, crossing all boundaries of class, sex and nationality. The political events and incidents covered are illustrated so refreshingly that one could be forgiven for thinking them new ground altogether.
 
Emphasising that the desire for power was not confined to the upper echelons, each of the book’s eight chapters opens with the story of a seemingly humble observer, such as Jakob Walter, a German stonemason who had found himself conscripted into Napoleon’s Grand Army.

European elites had begun to accept that stubbornly upholding the existing orders would only encourage popular agitation. Instead, they sought to preserve their sovereignty through measured reforms in the hope that these would be enough to placate the people. In many cases, such hopes were soundly dashed.

Evans persuasively presents the revolutions of 1848, often dismissed as a series of failed uprisings, as a watershed, with a “single period of revolutionary change” enduring from 1848 to 1871. Equality, autonomy, suffrage, feminism and aristocratic privilege were all called into question as a consequence of 1848. Europe’s leaders had their noses bloodied for the first time since the French Revolution, rendering them more amenable to the devolution of their own power and the potential political emancipation of the common man, who was generally far better educated and therefore more demanding than he had been in 1789. Furthermore, the unrest of 1848 gave rise to a renewed sense of European nationalism, the echo of which reverberated for decades to come.

But if the 20th century was scarred by the two world wars, throughout the 19th relations between individual European nations were predominantly harmonious, allowing them to turn their attentions towards the capture of other continents and the expansion of their own empires. Of course, bloodshed was still perfectly acceptable when it took place in far-flung foreign lands, but this domestic security enabled Europe’s global dominance during the latter half of the century. As Evans explains, this state of affairs was by no means inevitable after the 1500s, nor was it owing to any innate European superiority, as other historians such as Niall Ferguson have suggested; it was essentially the product of “quite specific historical circumstances”.

Yet circumstances rarely, if ever, remain static. The spread of imperialism, coupled with opposing national interests and ambitions, served to create a markedly different environment as the 19th century drew to a close. When the long-awaited war finally broke out in 1914, European hegemony became one of its many casualties. Another victim was, as Evans notes, “Europe’s slow and uneven march towards democracy”. While Britain continued down this egalitarian path, elsewhere the spread of democracy came to an abrupt halt, with a return to the fervent nationalism sparked by 1848.

Comparative peace and stability had permitted Europe to flourish, but even the best efforts of statesmen like Metternich and Bismarck could not maintain it indefinitely. In an age of revolution, capital and empire, power came at a heavy price.

The post Peace In Their Time — At A Price appeared first on Standpoint.

Mount, a former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, begins by telling us that biography and autobiography have always been a singularly English tradition. Memoirs can, however, frequently leave the reader cold. As Virginia Woolf noted, the quest for detail can so often lose sight of “what the person was like”. Frequently able to condense a long and extraordinary life into a mere four pages, Mount admirably allays Woolf’s misgivings, while still leaving readers as satisfied as if they had just turned the final page of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.

To arrive at an authoritative definition of Englishness is a frustrating endeavour. History has long since blurred lines that were once decided by geography and genetics. A more English chap could scarcely be imagined than the professional footballer Walter Tull. An infantry officer descended from Barbadian slaves, Tull was praised for his “gallantry and coolness” during the First World War. We have no national dress and no national holiday on which to rejoice unashamedly in our Englishness, both derided by David Starkey as consolation prizes for more “feeble” countries. Though English music is instantly recognisable, it is hardly pervasive. In every shop or café in Vienna you will hear Strauss or Mozart. A Starbucks in London would be more likely to be piping out pop music than Elgar or Vaughan Williams.

Mount shows how we do share a political heritage, founded on personal liberty and freedom of speech, and a culture, both languorously formed and profound in its riches, that is never so exclusive as to be impenetrable to those born elsewhere. Immigrant writers such as Germaine Greer or V.S. Naipaul serve as a further reminder that above all else sits our language, which “shaped almost everything about us,” writes Mount, whose own career as a man of letters makes him pay heed to numerous literary lives from Keats to Kipling.

For the English, literature and politics so often go hand in hand that few of our most revered statesmen have not also been accomplished wordsmiths. In a nod to his own background, Mount devotes equal attention to some of our most notable and in some cases notorious political figures of the past 200 years. A few holy men are thrown in for good measure; a dishonourable mention goes to Sir Oswald Mosley. Slightly remiss perhaps, is the insufficient emphasis on military men. The English have always been a pugnacious breed. Of course, a good many of our politicians once saw active service. Yet Winston Churchill’s finest hour is adroitly sidestepped by Mount, who instead examines his disastrous involvement in the Gallipoli campaign. Published on April 26, 1915, Churchill’s obituary of Rupert Brooke for The Times, generally believed to have been written by his private secretary Edward Marsh, has passed into legend as one of the defining public expressions of loss wrought by “the hardest, the cruellest, and the least-rewarded of all the wars that men have fought”.

Brooke had died on St George’s Day as he headed for Gallipoli, and still remains the quintessential Englishman, thanks in no small part to good looks eternally preserved by his untimely demise. He represents the lost England for which we yearn, while Wilfred Owen stands for the more cynical nation that survived the Great War. Though Brooke’s verse has become unfashionable and is routinely dismissed as syrupy to the point of mawkishness, the landscapes described in poems such as “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” serve as a snapshot of an England remembered by no one alive today, where a full honey pot was the summit of appetites both quaint and winsome. In 1913, Brooke was elected a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge; the Provost was M.R. James, delightfully described by Mount as a “sexless ghost”, a term then applicable to a large percentage of Cambridge Fellows, and to a somewhat smaller percentage today. Preferring the earthy attractions available to an achingly handsome young man in the South Sea Islands, Brooke himself had mixed feelings about England, which were only fashioned into fervent ardour by the outbreak of the Great War.

“An Unusual Young Man,” Brooke’s prosaic ode to England, was published in the New Statesman on August 29, 1914, and is narrated from the perspective of a “friend” who contemplates his feelings about the declaration of war with Germany. Fondly remembering times spent in the company of German people and drinking German beer, he ponders the need to rid himself of affection for his former friends, as he surveys the vistas of his memory and the homeland which surrounds him. Stronger than any hatred he can muster for Germany, however, is the overwhelming love he feels for England. He is “immensely surprised to perceive that the actual earth of England held for him a quality which he found in A–, and in a friend’s honour, and scarcely anywhere else, a quality which, if he’d ever been sentimental enough to use the word, he’d have called ‘holiness’. His astonishment grew as the full flood of ‘England’ swept him on from thought to thought. He felt the triumphant helplessness of a lover.”

After leaving England in February 1915, Brooke would never again set foot on its hallowed soil. He succumbed to septicaemia, thought to have been caused by a mosquito bite, and was buried in his own “corner of a foreign field”, near an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros. Far less fortunate, if one can ever use such a word to describe the death of a 27-year-old, were the countless soldiers both unusual and usual cut down in muddy trenches on the continent.

On July 1, we will mark the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, whose great charnel house levelled all the classes sent to the front. Not only officers such as Brooke’s younger brother Alfred, killed in action only six weeks after the poet’s death, and Ferdinand Mount’s own grandfather, who with typical English stoicism lit a pipe before climbing Scimitar Hill, never to be seen again; but the smiling Private Perkses who had equally marched off to be entombed under the Flanders countryside, and the Johnny Browns who suddenly found themselves in khaki and irresistible to the opposite sex.

Patriotic sentiment surged to dizzying heights during the Great War, encouraged by official propaganda used as recruitment tool prior to the introduction of conscription in 1916. The last many saw of England was watching the White Cliffs of Dover turn into a speck on the horizon. Those who came home returned to a different place: similar by all accounts, but lacking its previous bombast, permanently scarred and suffering the loss of a generation of its brightest and best. Ideas about Englishness would inevitably need to evolve to accommodate a new and discomfiting reality.

To see the lasting damage inflicted by the Great War one only has to look into the doleful eyes of Harold Macmillan, whose sympathetic handling by Mount is enough to make even the stiffest of upper lips quiver. A Grenadier Guard and witness to unimaginable horrors at the front, he returned to England as an invalid in 1916. Four years later he married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, and the pair went on to have four children; Macmillan believed the youngest, Sarah, was the product of his wife’s longstanding affair with Robert Boothby. Macmillan never failed to present a veneer of unflappability and seems to fit seamlessly into the mould of the stereotypical “Englishman”, but he was already part of an unhappy and dying breed. For Mount, “Most often the dominant tone of English discourse is one of regret, of nostalgia rather than self-congratulation.”

The popularity of inter-war pacifist movements proved that England had become less sure of its place in the world. Among intellectuals, it was increasingly seen as chic to shun patriotism. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman, and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings,” George Orwell would write. “It is a strange fact,” he continued, “but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than stealing from a poor box.” Fifteen years after the Armistice, the Oxford Union passed a motion by 275 votes to 153, “that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country”. Some of those undergraduates would later be moved to go to Spain after the outbreak of the civil war there in July 1936.

They only had to wait three years until England would again be struck by the tragedy of war, with Mount himself born two months before Chamberlain’s dejected broadcast to the nation. Much of what we think of as typically “English” today derives from the Second World War. The enduring “Blitz Spirit”, Churchill’s rousing and endlessly quoted speeches, and the idea that the English are somehow always on the right side of history. Such notions predate 1939, yet fighting the Führer seemed to bring them to the forefront in an unprecedented way. The military entanglements of our own century have called such sentiments into question more than ever before.

Despite the elation that followed VE day, austerity marked the immediate post-war period, and rationing continued in Britain until 1954. The loss of the Empire dealt a further calamitous blow to national pride, but it took a while for the repercussions to be fully realised, because, as H.G. Wells wryly observed, “In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.”

By the 1960s, with the onset of the “permissive society”, Britain began to change even more rapidly. A change reflected in the political figures that towered over the decade. Mount ignores Harold Wilson, who smoked a pipe in public (cigars in private) and readopted the Huddersfield accent he had dropped at Oxford in a bid to broaden his appeal, but pays due respect to the more literary politicians Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey. The 1970s was from beginning to end a decade of even greater contrasts. Beginning with the election of Edward Heath, who opened the floodgates in the handover of a millennium of sovereignty to Europe by facilitating Britain’s entry into the EEC, the decade culminated in the 1979 election of our first and, so far, only female Prime Minister. When examining Heath’s record, Mount fulminates with righteous indignation at his 1972 Local Government Act, which redrew the boundaries of some of England’s most ancient counties, including Mount’s — and my own — home county of Berkshire, which had remained virtually unchanged since the time of Alfred the Great.

“The real tragedy of England as I see it,” D.H. Lawrence once wrote, “is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile.” Discussing Betjeman, who in 1937 famously implored “friendly bombs” to obliterate Slough, which was actually then in Buckinghamshire, and the German-born Nikolaus Pevsner, who described Berkshire as “half home county, half West Country”, one gets the impression that just as Brooke felt a spiritual pull towards the sacred earth of England, Mount retains a comparable veneration for the county. 

The natural landscape of England has been the nurturer, muse and lover of its inhabitants throughout our history. The English have a robustly physical, indeed carnal, connection to their land. Why do you think Englishwomen were once supposed “to lie back and think of England”? As Mount explains, the widespread misconception that the English are sexually repressed is primarily a construct of the late Victorian age. The Hungarian George Mikes, however, in his 1946 book How to Be an Alien still claimed: “Continental people have a sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.” Married to an Englishwoman, Mikes tells us more about the mischievous Hungarian sense of humour than the ability of our girls to satiate them.

When it comes to sex, the key to the English approach is not bashfulness but understatement. Mount tells us that even the debauched Lytton Strachey, who never missed an opportunity to sneer at the “eminent Victorians”, was curiously reticent when discussing sexual matters beyond the confines of Bloomsbury. Although it must be remembered that Strachey’s homosexuality might well have landed him in prison, Mount estimates that the number of men of his social class imprisoned for homosexual acts was so small as to be negligible.

As Mount acknowledges, working-class homosexuals were rarely afforded equal licence for their indiscretions, which brings us back to the unavoidable subject of the English and class. In Bernard Shaw’s Getting Married (1908), Hotchkiss declares that “the whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.” We are told that class does not matter any more because we are all now essentially middle class, but Shaw’s maxim rings almost as true today. No doubt some will wince at the unquestionably elitist bent of Mount’s collection, but that is surely preferable to the reverse snobbery that has permeated English society over the past half a century.

In the Irish playwright Arthur Murphy’s 1758 farce, The Upholsterer: or what news?, after contemplating the dismal state of European politics, the character Mr Pamphlet concludes that “the People of England are never so happy as when you tell ’em they are ruined.” A year after the play was first performed at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, William Pitt the Younger was born. After his meteoric climb to the top of the greasy pole at the tender age of 24, he presided over major upheaval domestically and abroad. As his health steadily declined, aided by his penchant for port, his fears for the future of England grew. His final public speech, given at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet on November 9, 1805 — a fortnight after the Battle of Trafalgar — both embodies how the English have always seen themselves, and is remarkably pertinent today. “England has saved herself by her exertions,” he said, “and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.”

At Holwood House, Pitt’s country retreat, he and William Wilberforce resolved to abolish the slave trade as they wandered the grounds. Discussing the spread of civilisation and liberty under the shady refuge of an oak tree — what could possibly be more English?  

The post Echoes Of The Elusive English appeared first on Standpoint.

Mankind’s perennial certainty that the future for which it strives will necessarily be an improvement on both the present and the past is a theme whose folly and contemporary relevance is brought to the fore in two classics by Aldous Huxley, now reissued by Vintage.

Born in 1894, and exempted from military service in the Great War due to a childhood illness that left him almost blind, Huxley was nevertheless no stranger to death. The loss of his mother to cancer when he was 14, and the suicide of his elder brother Noel in 1914, just as the demise of a generation of his contemporaries began, lent Huxley’s writing an abiding preoccupation with mortality.

Both After Many a Summer and Time Must Have a Stop hint at their author’s personal pursuit of a divine level of consciousness, reaching beyond the seemingly infer-ior confines of the physical. Originally published in 1939 and 1944 respectively, each novel confronts the reader with metaphysical truths concerning the relentless struggle between good and evil, while examining the motivations underlying social interactions and the relationship between the body and soul. Taking its title from Tennyson’s Tithonus, the Trojan prince and lover of Eos who was doomed to live and age forever, After Many a Summer tells the tale of Jo Stoyte, a discriminating philanthropist and self-made millionaire who seeks and eventually finds the secret of eternal life but at the cost of his own humanity.

Set in a wryly depicted late 1930s Los Angeles, the city Huxley called home after emigrating in 1937, and borrowing freely from the gothic literature of the 18th century, the novel has castles, cemeteries, iniquitous doctors and simpering maidens. In the dénouement, man is finally exposed in his most primal form, condemned like Tithonus but more horrifically so in the absence of the civilising self-awareness that comes with catharsis. In a further Faustian twist, we see plainly what Stoyte’s desperation has blinded him to. By binding himself solely to the earth and eschewing both moral and spiritual development, he has forfeited any hope of sublime contentment.

Despite the eloquence of Huxley’s prose, it is hard to muster any real sympathy for the book’s characters. The only exceptions are Peter Boone, a young, hopelessly idealistic medical researcher, recently returned from fighting for the Republican side in Spain, and an old school friend of Stoyte’s, the academic Mr Propter. Assessing the virtues and pitfalls of just about every conceivable “ism”, Propter chiefly appears as the emissary of Huxley’s own philosophical suppositions, on the intelligent application of free will and its power to cause both immense happiness and untold harm.

Written during the Second World War, which had left him dejected at the failure of the inter-war pacifist movements, such as the Peace Pledge Union and For Intellectual Liberty, in which he had played an active role, Time Must Have a Stop was felt by Huxley to be his best work. Ripened in the upheaval wrought by the new conflict, a timely reminder of how war or its expectation were a constant companion to preceding generations, the impressions originally explored in the earlier novel seem to have come to fruition in the later one. Retrospectively set in 1929, its ribald touches lend its narrative a comic air, and its characters seem altogether more cognisant of their fallibility and are thus capable of remorse.

An angelic-looking 17-year-old whose impulsive egocentricity inevitably leads him into having to wrestle with his own conscience, Sebastian Barnack is a budding poet who is afforded the opportunity of broadening his rather narrow horizons by an invitation to the Florentine home of his limerick-loving uncle Eustace. The robust bon vivant suffers a somewhat awkwardly-timed fatal heart attack soon after his nephew’s arrival.

Attempts to contact Eustace through a séance, convened by his eccentric mother-in-law, accompany the dead man’s bemusement at his continuing existence as a mind without matter. While uproarious, such scenes simultaneously impart the text with a sharp injection of melancholy. As Huxley was writing, millions across the globe were grieving, and his empathy for those who sought comfort through similarly unorthodox means is palpable.

The callowness of Sebastian’s youth reaches a crescendo when he thoughtlessly sells a drawing, for a paltry sum, driven by his overwhelming desire to buy a dinner- jacket. The piece is a Degas nude, gifted to him by his late uncle in exchange for a humorous verse written by the young poet, which describes the “two buttocks and a pendulous bub” depicted in the work.

Though the poem is enough to keep Eustace guffawing beyond the grave, the ensuing furore over the missing artwork lands Sebastian in hot water, until Bruno Rontini, a pious antiquarian bookseller and his second cousin once-removed, comes to the rescue. Bruno is left to atone for Sebastian’s sins, however, and his retrieval of the Degas results in his arrest by local Fascists.

The epilogue takes us to 1944, when Sebastian, now missing an arm as a result of his wartime service and left a widower following the death of his wife after a miscarriage, recalls his last meeting with Bruno. Ten years after the debacle caused by his lack of judgment, Sebastian is offered the chance of redemption, and he cares for Bruno as his cousin succumbs to throat cancer.

Irrevocably changed by his experiences, Sebastian declares that mankind’s insistence on fighting and dying for an unknown future is a form of enslavement. Liberation can only truly be found, he concludes, by living both wholly and meaningfully in the present moment. Sebastian’s realisations also allow him finally to repair the strained relationship with his father.

A staunch socialist who placed his faith in the future, and neglected the here and now during his son’s youth, the older man has become a victim of time. In a candid moment between the two, Sebastian confesses that Bruno taught him to make sense of life, by showing him that death can be seen not as an ending but as a beginning.

In the words of his widow Laura, Aldous Huxley died “the most beautiful death”, on November 22, 1963, while the world was transfixed by a more violent demise. Though it is tempting to imagine what he would make of today’s world, one hopes he is enjoying immortality too much to care. 

The post Brave Old Worlds appeared first on Standpoint.