Antic Hay

Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley (1923)

Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay opens with Theodore Gumbril Junior, a schoolmaster, sitting through chapel at the school where he teaches, brooding on the existence of God, on his dead mother's goodness, and on the tedium of his profession. During the Reverend Pelvey's reading he privately hits on an idea: trousers fitted with an inflatable pneumatic seat, which he christens Gumbril's Patent Small-Clothes. Bored beyond endurance by marking his pupils' feeble essays on the Risorgimento and Pope Pius IX, and fantasizing about a freer, richer life of travel, art, and love, Gumbril abruptly resigns his post by letter to the Headmaster and leaves for London. At his father's decaying house near Paddington, Gumbril Senior, an unsuccessful but visionary architect who loves the starlings roosting in the square's plane trees, is dining with his old friend Mr. Porteous, a scholar of Late Latin poetry. The two men muse about work, money, and the impossibility of true liberty. Gumbril Senior shows off his beautiful, impractical architectural models — grand Renaissance-style palaces he can never get commissioned — lamenting that he is reduced to designing cheap workmen's cottages. Told of his son's scheme, he offers to introduce him to Mr. Boldero, a restless, opportunistic financier of his acquaintance. Gumbril visits the tailor Mr. Bojanus to be measured for a sample pair of the pneumatic trousers. Bojanus, admiring of Lenin in theory but devoted to dressing "the Best People," delivers a long, cynical disquisition on the illusoriness of liberty under any political system, revolutionary or otherwise. Wandering idly through Bond Street on a fine spring day, Gumbril looks in at a gallery showing works by his old acquaintance Casimir Lypiatt, a bombastic, self-styled genius-painter-poet-musician who insists to the gallery owner, Mr. Albemarle, that only size, vehemence, and spiritual significance can restore art's greatness. Gumbril and Lypiatt go off together, Lypiatt borrowing five pounds before they part. That evening Gumbril dines with a circle of friends: the epicurean essayist Mr. Mercaptan, who champions civilized, rococo restraint against Lypiatt's grandiose idealism; the physiologist Shearwater, absorbed in his research on kidneys and indifferent to fashionable talk; and the mocking, nihilistic Coleman, who arrives with his mistress Zoe sporting a newly grown beaver-beard and a taste for blasphemous, provocative talk. Leaving the restaurant, the group encounters the beautiful, restless Mrs. Myra Viveash — perpetually speaking as if from a deathbed — out with the disdainful young Bruin Opps at a coffee stall. There they overhear a destitute couple's story of unemployment, illness, and a fruitless walk to Portsmouth in search of work; moved, Gumbril and the others hastily collect five pounds for them. Walking home afterward with Shearwater, Gumbril is stirred to indignation at social injustice, and confides that he was once painfully in love with Myra Viveash. Mrs. Viveash calls on Lypiatt at his shabby studio-mews to sit for a stormy, unflattering portrait he is painting of her. Lypiatt, hopelessly infatuated, delivers long tirades about genius, passion, and the "wind of life" driving his art, then breaks down weeping and even bloodies his knuckles against the floor in despair over her indifference; she comforts him without feeling anything, privately recognizing that his art, like his character, lacks real life beneath its noisy gestures. At the private view of Lypiatt's exhibition, critics such as the enthusiastic Mr. Clew and the savage Mr. Mallard argue over his pretentious catalogue verses and canvases, while Mrs. Viveash and Mercaptan tour the show, mocking its florid, advertisement-like sentimentality even as Myra defends Lypiatt personally. Gumbril, meanwhile, has his sample trousers fitted by Bojanus, who expounds a theory that political leaders need visible eccentricities — beards, collars, hairstyles — to be recognized by the human "herd," since ordinary people always require a leader. Inspired, Gumbril buys a false blond beard and adopts a swaggering persona he calls the Complete Man, shedding his usual mild, melancholy self. Wearing the beard and an oversized coat, he picks up an elegant young woman window-shopping near Whiteley's, engages her in flirtatious banter about love, and accompanies her home to a rented flat in Bloxam Gardens, where they become lovers over tea. Only after leaving does Gumbril discover from the calling card she gave him that she is "Rosie," the wife of his friend Shearwater. Descending the stairs, he narrowly avoids being recognized by Shearwater himself, who is deep in conversation with a colleague about grafting and inherited characteristics in rabbits. That night Shearwater, unaware, comes home to his wife Rosie, who lies on the sofa musing self-consciously on her afternoon's adventure and her boredom with her scientist husband's absorption in his work. Finally, Gumbril meets with Mr. Boldero, an ebullient, quick-assimilating businessman who eagerly takes up the idea of the Patent Small-Clothes, judging there is real money in it. Over lunch and later in Gumbril's rooms, Boldero lays out in exuberant detail a cynical, scientific philosophy of advertising: appealing not to sex, which the trousers cannot exploit, but to self-preservation, snobbery, health anxieties, spurious medical and "ganglion" mysticism, novelty, and economy, in order to manufacture demand for the invention among an ignorant and status-anxious public.

By Aldous Huxley · First published 1923 · Genre: Satire, Comedy, Historical Fiction · 22 chapters · 110,929 words

First lines

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

Gumbril, Theodore Gumbril Junior, B. A. Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a thousand schoolboys to the First Lesson, pondered, as he looked up at the vast window opposite, all blue and jaundiced and bloody with nineteenth-century glass, speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the existence and the nature of God.

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satire · society · modernism · philosophy · existentialism · irony · cynicism · relationships · disillusionment · intellectualism · bohemian · 1920s

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