Customer Reviews

After the Fireworks (Hesperus Modern Voices)

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In addition to his eleven novels, Huxley's fiction included five collections of shorter works in which he worked out, as he did in dozens of non-fiction books and essays, many of the ideas that found their most elaborate expression in the novels. Each story collection included a short novel--"The Farcical History of Richard Greenow," "Two or Three Graces," "Uncle Spencer," "The Gioconda Smile" (really a long story), and "After the Fireworks," one of his own favorites: it was collected in both of the Huxley readers published during his lifetime. I had long hoped that, as the short stories had been collected, the novellas might also be published in one volume. In terms of length, a few of them are actually longer than some of his proper novels, but they have the anecdotal precision and formal directness that defines this often neglected form.
Perhaps we can now expect them to appear in individual volumes, as Hesperus has handsomely done with "After the Fireworks," including a page of notes that will please all Huxleyans who are driven bonkers by his tendency to assume that we all can quote from memory Dante and other poets in the original Italian or French or German. An Annotated Aldous is long overdue! "After the Fireworks" is a delight, concerning a pompous but extremely well-educated 50-year-old novelist whose works excite romantic young women looking for a great love to begin their lives. Such is the 20-year-old tourist in Rome, Pamela, who is determined to make the writer Miles Fanning her first lover. He tries to resist, but when overpowered becomes infatuated with her fresh and eager sexuality. (If this sounds like recent Philip Roth--"The Dying Animal," "The Humbling"--the clash of young and old is hardly new, yet the similarities here are striking.) Pamela is, of course, appalled that Miles sees her as an infinitely entertaining sex toy, hardly the cosmic romantic knight she envisioned. She is especially outraged that he can't talk to her as he does to contemporaries who recall 1914 and all that followed. And when he falls ill with a humiliating intestinal complaint, she is determined to move on.
There are the usual Huxleyan sidebars about Homer, the Etruscans, Chaucer, Dante, and the dishonesty of literature, but there is also a marvelous lyricism in the passages about Monte Cavo and the natural wonders of Rome, and a passage of true linguistic virtuosity regarding the fireworks (Roman candles) that precede the sexual fireworks. There are also passages that are as funny as anything Huxley wrote, which is saying a lot, particularly those from Pamela's diary, the letter Miles doesn't get to finish, and life at a spa. This is a comedy--no one, not even Miles, dies, and there are memorable supporting characters, not least the dead mother of Pamela, recalled as having had her own needs.
"After the Fireworks" appeared in 1930, midpoint between his two masterpieces, "Point Counter Point" and "Brave New World." A section on opium and the need for people to turn on and tune out is especially prophetic of his later work.