After the Fireworks Read Free

Until that point, we follow rather blissfully the annual pilgrimage of Uncle Spencer and his nephew, whose neglectful parents are stationed in India, from Eastbourne to Dover to Ostend to Brussels to Limburg where Spencer owns a sugar factory. “Every page” of this section, an anonymous reviewer wrote in the TLS in 1924, “is delightful,” and it remains so.
    Huxley, the grandson of one of the most influential biologists of the nineteenth century and the sibling of two ofthe most prominent biologists of his own day (Julian Huxley and the Nobel laureate Andrew Huxley), all but patented the use of biological, zoological, botanical, and physiological metaphors, and here he has a field day with prawns and pigs (the latter auguring the German occupation), as well as handmade foods, from “ferial apple fritters” to chocolate bedpans. The last offends Spencer, despite “his professional belief in the virtues of sugar,” and inspires the narrator to a lexicon of euphemisms from coprophily and scatological to a thunderous excrementitious . Huxley, who mocked Swift’s “insensate hatred of bowels,” was not easily alienated from the messier precincts of the human condition. As the story deepens with an integrated marriage, we encounter tropes that will recur throughout his work: teenage priggishness, sudden death, an ugly woman who exerts sexual magnetism, the vain thought that future writers might concentrate on “man’s relation to God” instead of romance, the naïve refusal to believe war is coming (this is the twentieth century, after all), and the equally naïve assent, because “War is always popular, at the beginning.”
    Confined to the German Ministry of the Interior, Spencer finds that the prisoners are crueler to each other than are the jailors; nightmares are habitual. Yet he also finds, for the first time in his life, love in the person of a “golden-haired male impersonator,” a Cockney music hall entertainer named Emmy Wendle, one of Huxley’s most haunting creations: young, independent, morally adventitious, utterly fickle, and androgynous in the way of a Hemingway femme, touching down like a bee on the divided groups of prisoners who, “equal in their misery, still retained their social distinctions.” No good can come if it, yet Huxley ramps up thefarce as Emmy retails her nine greatest loves and her devout superstition involving a pig.
    In the realm of flighty women, however, Emmy is a patch on the redoubtable Grace Peddley of “Two or Three Graces” (1926). Although I think “After the Fireworks” is Huxley’s most masterly performance in the more-than-a-story, not-quite-a-novel idiom, I suspect that “Two or Three Graces” would have benefited most had it been offered as a novel. Huxley may also have thought so: unlike “Uncle Spencer,” which debuted in Little Mexican ( Young Archimedes in the United States) and “After the Fireworks,” which debuted in Brief Candles , “Two or Three Graces” was the title story in a volume where it counted for 195 of 272 pages. Structurally, it stands among Huxley’s most ingenious inventions.
    It opens with a bank shot. Huxley’s droll riff on the etymology and variety of bores introduces Herbert Comfrey, an old acquaintance of the narrator: a music critic named, we eventually learn, Dick Wilkes. The story is not about Comfrey, who is rather the cue ball that temporarily separates Wilkes from his far-from-boring friend Kingham, and sends him to the pocket of Comfrey’s brother-in-law, John Peddley. John is a different species of bore (“an active bore,” yet kind and intelligent), who traps unwary travelers in relentless one-sided conversations. He introduces Wilkes to his darling wife Grace—tall, lean, ugly, but “positively and actively charming.” Stimulated by their platonic friendship (like Denis in