After the Fireworks Read Free Page A

Crome Yellow , Dick hesitates), Grace undergoes a kind of psychic mitosis. In the end there aren’t two or three Graces, but four, each reflective of a man she attaches herself to—each gracefully inept in her own way. She incarnates one of Huxley’s favorite lines, from Fulke Greville:“O wearisome condition of humanity! / Born under one law, to another bound,” except that she is bound to another and another and another.
    With her husband, John, Grace is a devoted but strangely deficient bourgeois wife who fails to connect with her children (“You’re a little girl, mummy,” her four-year-old attests). With Wilkes, she is a dedicated concertgoer who doesn’t understand a thing about music. After he alienates her with a cruel joke and introduces her to the bohemian painter and faker Rodney Clegg, she takes him as her lover and out-bohemians him and his followers until he drops her, at which point, Kingham returns. A writer who lives for passion and strife, creating the latter when it does not unfold naturally, Kingham demands that Grace fall madly in love with him. She does, growing so appositely overwrought that she ponders suicide when he drops her. Wilkes, now married to a sane and cautious woman, returns in the nick of time.
    Older writers—Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy—complained that Huxley did not truly end his stories, but merely stopped them. “Two or Three Graces” has so many riches, page after page (note that his physical description of Clegg practically begets Sitwell’s of Huxley), that the ending may seem abrupt, a testament to the eternal feminine in which Grace is doomed to repeat her circuit of affections. But then as Wilkes realizes, and underscores for the reader, the story has the structure of music: from suburban andante to Clegg’s scherzando to Kingham’s molto agitato to the adagio of Beethoven’s arietta to . . . Da Capo, from the head, begin again.
    â€œTwo or Three Graces” is often seen as a test run for Point Counter Point , which is unfair to its thoroughly distinct qualities. One connection is the presumed twice-told conjuring of D. H. Lawrence. But while Lawrence is admittedly the template for the later work’s Rampion, he only looks like Kingham, with his short red beard and refusal to divulge his Christian names beyond the initials. Huxley had met Lawrence just once when he wrote “Two and Three Graces.” That encounter probably contributed to the portrait, but the sexually ravenous and distraught Kingham is not Lawrence. By 1928 they were great friends; Huxley esteemed and even loved him, which may explain why Rampion succumbs to a sage’s monotony while Kingham roars off the page. In “After the Fireworks,” published in the year of Lawrence’s death (1930), he is accessed only as a literary jape: the self-styled “fatal woman,” Clare Tarn, the mother of the story’s demigoddess and genuinely fatal woman Pamela Tarn, seeks the “dumb, dark forces of physical passion” in the arms of—a “gamekeeper? or a young farmer? I forget. But there was something about rabbit shooting in it, I know.”
    â€œAfter the Fireworks” is a major work and a turning point for Huxley, leading directly to Brave New World in its burlesque of sexual awkwardness and chagrin and the embarrassments of aging (he does here for European health spas what he would later do for Hollywood cemeteries in After Many a Summer ), Ford and his assembly line, ruminations on a world without goodness, and theisms of one versus many gods. This is a comedy, the last uncompromisingly funny novel or story Huxley wrote, unimpeded by didactic lectures and sagacious swamis. Fireworks figure in the prose as well as the plot, which is basic. A middle-aged writer at rest in Rome, Miles Fanning, whose popular novelsexcite the dreams of adolescent girls, is stalked by a twenty-year-old fan who he tries