My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hayEdward II by Christopher Marlowe This is Brenda Salkeld dancing the antic hay. Orwell had recommended Antic Hay to her in the 1930s, but alas she wouldn't dance with him.Huxley wanted to dance with Nancy Cunard but she likened his advances to being crawled over by slugs.Nancy Cunard & slugSo he crawled away and he wrote this zany and very smart satire. The characters Myra Viveash and Theodore Gumbril Jr are based on Nancy Cunard and Huxley. Gumbril Jr is a teacher but hates it, just as Huxley did when he had been a teacher at Eton. No, this was really impossible. Definitely, it couldn’t go on, it could not go on. There were thirteen weeks in the summer term, there would be thirteen in the autumn and eleven or twelve in the spring; and then another summer of thirteen, and so it would go on for ever. For ever. It wouldn’t do. He would go away and live uncomfortably on his three hundred. Or, no, he would go away and he would make money – that was more like it – money on a large scale, easily; he would be free and he would live. For the first time, he would live.He gets an idea for making money, and quits, The real remedy, it suddenly flashed across his mind, would be trousers with pneumatic seats. For all occasions; not merely for church-going.And so Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes are invented.But don't be too concerned about the plot. 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.There's a sadness here that casts a shadow on the comedy. Poor Nancy Cunard. She could not forget her one true love who was killed in the war, and this also is the reason for Myra Viveash's ennui, She remembered suddenly one shining day like this in the summer of 1917, when she had walked along this same street, slowly, like this, on the sunny side, with Tony Lamb. All that day, that night, it had been one long goodbye. He was going back the next morning. Less than a week later he was dead. Never again, never again: there had been a time when she could make herself cry, simply by saying those two words once or twice, under her breath. Never again, never again. She repeated them softly now. But she felt no tears behind her eyes. Grief doesn’t kill, love doesn’t kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while it still lives, rots it like a medlar, kills it too at last. Never again, never again. Instead of crying, she laughed, laughed aloud.Antic Hay is blue in more than one sense. It had been banned on grounds of obscenity. Shocking indeed! Rosie ends up reading Le Sopha, 'No education can be called complete without a knowledge of that divine book.' He darted to the bookshelf and came back with a small volume bound in white vellum. 'The hero’s soul,' he explained, handing her the volume, 'passes, by the laws of metempsychosis, into a sofa. He is doomed to remain a sofa until such time as two persons consummate upon his bosom their reciprocal and equal loves. The book is the record of the poor sofa’s hopes and disappointments.'Rosie's assignations had something to do with it too, The Complete Man lifted her up, walked across the room carrying the fastidious lady in his arms and deposited her on the rosy catafalque of the bed. Lying there with her eyes shut, she did her best to pretend she was dead.Gumbril had looked at his wristwatch and found that it was six o’clock. Already? He prepared himself to take his departure. Wrapped in a pink kimono, she came out into the hall to wish him farewell.The erotica takes place between the lines but sometimes a good cover can help. Huxley wrote this book in 2 months. Never underestimate a man who takes LSD on his deathbed...
One senses that Huxley was aiming for a little mordant social satire when he wrote this book, to capture the Zeitgeist while landing a few deft jabs at British society in the aftermath of World War I. But "Antic Hay" is a clunky, sorry mess, whose primary virtue is its brevity. Heavyhanded and confused, it never gels to anything even remotely memorable.Not too hard to figure out why. There is no discernible plot - instead, various stock characters are dragged in and out of the action, essentially caroming off one another in a fairly random fashion. You've got your artist, your poet, your critic, your (pseudo)-scientist, your futurist, your lowlife, your romantic, a vamp, and a flapper or two, and the (anti)hero Gumbril, who is spectacularly devoid of personality. None of these characters is fleshed out in any credible way - they just engage in brittly clever dialog (which is to say, lethally boring dialog), mouthpieces for whatever point of view they are supposed to be representing. While the reader is left baffled as to what the hell Huxley might be trying to convey.I think the answer is that Huxley doesn't really have anything much coherent to say, in this dull and annoying book. Since there's no plot to speak of, eventually it just sort of peters out. So another writer who disappoints for reasons related to one of my pet peeves - a complete abrogation of the author's responsibility to tell the reader a story. You'll get fresher insights on this particular milieu by reading a couple of Agatha Christie's mysteries, and I dare say you'll have more fun doing so as well.
What do You think about Antic Hay (2005)?
"O supremo negativismo da época que sucedeu a Primeira Guerra Mundial é retratado neste livro, com a agudeza que caracteriza o alto espírito do seu autor."Não foi um livro que gostasse particularmente. Achei-o cansativo e por isso, não o terminei. Vou agarrar nele mais tarde.Este livro era do meu irmão. Encontrei-o perido no armário e comecei a lê-lo, pelo que percebi, também ele não o terminou (encontrei o separador na página 119. Não avancei muito mais do que isso - fiquei pelo capítulo XI.A história tem lugar em Lodres depois da Primeira Guerra.O romance passa-se neste espírito boémio, artístico, elitista e intelectual. Mas no fundo, damos conta do vazio em que todas as personagens vivem.A personagem principal - Gumbril Junior inicia a história como professor, mas depois surge-lhe a ideia de criar uma patente para umas calças almofadas, para ajudar as pessoas magras a sentirem-se confortáveis.O livro vai desenvolvendo e dá-nos a conhecer inúmeras personagens que, estranhamente, não fazem quase nada. Possuem mil e uma teorias mas não as executam.A sensação que tive do livro foi de que todas as personagens eram umas "falhadas" que estavam em busca de qualquer coisa mas nada faziam para a encontrar - talvez daí o título "Geração Perdida".Não vos posso falar do fim do livro.. não li. Penso que foi a sua aura negativista e pessimista que me assustou e não me incentivou a sua leitura. Mas é um livro que dá que pensar.Voltarei a ele, certamente que sim.
—Queirosiana
Barely just a story about Theodore Gumbril, Jr.'s pneumatic trousers (after all, the mass production and advertising scheming of Boldero the VC never came through), or quitting the academe to join London's Merry Pranksters, but about a cast of Henry Miller forebears chasing tails (their own and others) and abandoning conventionality - architectural, sexual, sexual archetypal... Huxley's characters are more fluid than his Brave New World'ers, obviously, after all they pulse serum and sputum, not diodes, and their emotions are raw and convincing - Rosie's perseverance in finding the mysterious Toto, Zoe's revenge by stabbing Coleman, Emily's sorrow from Gumbril's flippancy... Gumbril keeps foreground status throughout the novel, despite Huxley's panning from scene to scene from the eyes of the circumstantial character, with his metamorphosis from Oxon reader to character fraud, absorbing the company he keeps and masquerading as his friends to ensnare the fair sex. Rosie acknowledged this quickly, noting that both Mercaptan and Coleman were more fantastic and exquisite than Toto the pseudo-poet. Eventually Gumbril must give up the pretense, recognize the pain he's caused Emily in snubbing her for Mrs. Viveash, and close out the story with Viveash in tow, rambling from companion to companion, like voyeurs hiding in the boudoir.
—Anthony
I read this book because Lois Gordon's excellent biography of Nancy Cunard cites it. Huxley apparently had a brief liason with Cunard and then made her a character in this book. I wish I could recognize the other players, all of whom were given absurd and suggestive names in Antic Hay. (Cunard is Mrs. Viveash.) It's largely satirical, and in equal measure bilious and hilarious. The writing is sharp and vivid, but the overall tone suggests the depth of disillusion that resulted from the disaster of the first world war. In that way, this is an acute portrait of the period.
—Elizabeth
