Those barren leaves: barren indeed

Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925) is his third novel. I chose it because, having enjoyed Crome Yellow, I thought, mistakenly, that the later novel would also be a light-hearted social satire. Light-hearted it is not; the last incident with any humorous interpretation takes place at least 50 pages before the end, and the tone could be described as unremittingly sombre. I can accept Jeeves and Wooster as figures of fun because I am never invited to take them seriously. Mrs Aldwinkle, in contrast, is at the start of the novel a satirical fabulously wealthy but insensitive villa owner, but by the end of the novel her heavy-handed behaviour towards would-be lovers makes us feel distinctly uncomfortable about her.

Those Barren Leaves could be called, a novel of ideas, but while  that term is not usually intended as a negative comment, in this case, the ideas weigh down the action and left this reader yawning. Huxley’s novel is overladen with ideas. What little action there is pauses repeatedly, interminably, with lengthy meditations on such unlikely topics as the human hand (about which more below). From David Bradshaw’s introduction to the Viking edition of the novel, Huxley described his aim as a novelist was ‘to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay’. For that approach, you have to be convinced that Huxley’s ideas are interesting. In this novel, at least, the ideas give the impression of someone who (as Huxley admitted) takes pleasure in reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica: disconnected chunks of learning, seen as an end in its own right, disconnected from any kind of social vision.

In this post I will reveal details of the plot, because I really can’t imagine anyone wanting to read this novel for themselves. I hope I might be able to dissuade others from struggling through it.

This novel of ideas could be described, perhaps uncharitably, as the idle writings of an Etonian, who has studied excessively and can’t stop himself churning out great slabs of erudition, for nobody’s benefit, and with little political vision outside his own rather complacent class . All the characters have the vice of talking to themselves. Not only that, but the only characters it seems that the novelist considers truly worth are the males with the right kind of philosophical pondering. Most of the characters are from the leisured classes, and even if they are not rich (and Chellifer is not), they comply with the unstated house rules that money is not mentioned and practical action scorned.

One chapter of the book (Part Five, Chapter One)  is devoted to the human hand. The lovers Calamy and Mary Thriplow appear to be in some kind of post-coital reverie. Calamy is thinking about his hand.

‘About your hand? Said Mary incredulously. ‘That seems a queer thing to think about.’

‘But interesting if you think about it hard enough.’

That is, Calamy implies, a hand is interesting if he, Calamy thinks about it – not Mary. Now the sex is over, it is time for some real thought.

Calamy allowed his hand to be kissed, and as soon as it was decently possible gently withdrew it … He was no longer interested in kisses, at the moment …  ‘I believe that if one could stand the strain of thinking really hard about one thing – this hand, for example … one might… really get at something – some kind of truth.” … But it would be a slow laborious process; one would need time, one would need freedom. Above everything, freedom.

Implied here is freedom from the woman he is with. In this novel, women tempt, women love, they may even be novelists, but they don’t think, at least, not the way that men think. In fact they get in the way for much of the time. Calamy has no problem thinking about multiple meanings of a hand, but only when not interrupted.

Later, Mary Thriplow makes a note of this extended meditation on the human hand, clearly intending it for her next novel. No original thinking, then; the ideas in her novels are derivative. This is heavy-handed, misogynistic satire.

Not only does Huxley depict a world where women don’t think, he posits a universe where we, the readers, are fascinated by his thought. Reading this novel is a bit like attending every lecture in a University Extension course for a whole term. The novel concludes with a lengthy chapter where the three male characters – Cardan, Chelifer and Calamy discuss ideas openly.  Remarkably, they all seem to agree – the novelist’s usual trick of interrupting a lengthy digression with some disagreement is here abandoned. This is lazy writing, with characters not easily differentiated - there is no plot; the novel ends in chat. Nothing happens.

But the most horrific aspect to the novel is a subplot that is completely at odds with a satirical novel. Cardan accidentally spends the night with a brother and sister, who put him up for the night, and hatches a plan to marry the sister, who has some kind of disability, for her money. Accordingly he in effect abducts her for the remainder of the novel, where she is tolerated (but not accepted) by the main characters, until conveniently she dies horribly of food poisoning after failing to take the men’s advice on eating local fish. Is his action condemned? Nobody in the group questions what Cardan is doing. The satirical tone of the novel has been well and truly lost. How Huxley could mix up his genres in such a way is disturbing

So there we are: leaden satire, vague worries by the leisured classes about the effect of democracy on the masses, women as objects of temptation but who are not capable of systematic thinking like the men: here is a novel of the dying upper classes. When the bomb drops, this lot will still be considering the human hand and its many simultaneous meanings.

An Orientalist Painting

Antinous in the form of Osiris, c1790-c1820

At the Fitzwilliam Museum there is a small exhibition entitled The Great Belzoni, occasioned by the donation of a portrait of Belzoni to the Fitzwilliam. The authorities have marked the occasion by setting up a small exhibition of items from the permanent collection that are linked in some way to Belzoni. “In some way” is a rather broad term, since the single room devoted to the exhibition includes a miscellany of paintings, drawings and objects loosely linked to Egypt in the 19th century – a rather broad area. However much (or little) Belzoni knew about ancient Egypt, and it seems unlikely he knew very much, given his career history as a circus strongman among other activities, he certainly participated in, and was perhaps partly responsible for, a mania for all things Egyptian and Oriental during the period. One example is the ludicrous small statue of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, depicted as the god Osiris. Although this porcelain statue is from Belzoni's time, it is derived from a Roman original. Clearly, the fashion for Orientalism - dressing up the everyday in the costumes of another civilization to make it more exotic - started well before the eighteenth-century in Europe.

I’m not complaining that the exhibition was a hotch-potch, because its loose nature has enabled some things from the permanent collection to be shown that would otherwise be left gathering dust. Most wonderfully, it reveals at least one magical work, John Frederick Lewis’s The Siesta. The Fitzwilliam has Lewis's first version, in watercolour.

Lewis, The Siesta (Fitzwilliam, c1876)

Lewis (1804-1876) was an English painter who lived in Cairo for ten years (as well as spells in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Middle East). On his return to England, he used items collected from his stay abroad to suggest an Oriental theme in many of his paintings.  According to Wikipedia, he would often use his (British) wife as a model for the many ‘oriental’ works he painted for the rest of his career. His works often have exotic titles such as “The Harem”, but the figures depicted in many of them have faces more characteristic of Victorian drawing rooms.

In other words, what is “oriental” about his paintings (by "oriental" I mean exotic and sensuous for a Western viewer) above is largely anecdotal and imaginary: a state of mind rather than an accurate record. It could have been a room in Walton-on-Thames (where Lewis lived after his return to England). But in this painting, what is displayed is less about the figures and more about patterns and colours. In any case, the representations of objects and figures are less than detailed: the woman is wearing some kind of long green gown, but beyond that it would be difficult to be specific. The impression left in the viewer is of areas of varied and contrasting colours: the colours of the woman’s clothes and the fabrics on which she is reclining; the flowers on the table; the light shining through the translucent green gauze across the window; the light shining through the grille that seems to make up the outer wall of the space viewed; the patterned carpet. The rich juxtapositions of patterns, the grill that seems to make up the wall of the room, and the low kind of divan in one corner of the room, make up the exotic feel to the picture space. The woman asleep makes this a slightly voyeuristic act on the part of the viewer: we are accessing a private world. In a few words, this is exotic, reclining, relaxed, inviting, sensuous; a space we would like to inhabit. The painting is all the more successful because the human forms only a small part of the background of the painting; other works by Lewis have an exotic location but a main figure with an all-too obvious and everyday face. I prefer my fantasies more suggested than intrusive.

Lewis painted the same work again in oil (now in the Tate Britain).

Lewis, The Siesta (Oil version, Tate Britain)

However, I think the oil version is slightly more composed, and loses some of the exquisite freshness of the watercolour version. It also lacks some of the lovely pinks and blues of the watercolour.

Orientalist or not, The Siesta (in either version) is a magnificently evocative picture, and a match for (say) Tennyson in using a remote civilization as a vague suggestive backdrop to turn a mundane subject into a kind of dream: The Siesta is a wonderful example of the art of suggestion.