After the Fireworks Read Free Page B

vainly to resist. He has used his finest witticisms so often that he can no longer recite them without impatient interruptions. Pamela Tarn has not heard them. Nor can she figure out why a writer would spend hours writing when he could be with her. “Death in Venice” meets “The Humbling,” heterosexually.
    Huxley is always facile with animal metaphors, and he breaks the bank here, beginning with the first lines, regarding a woodpecker. A few lines down he complains of letters getting through every barrier, like “filter-passing bacteria,” a simile more suited to the blight of email. Bears turn up on the next page, with camels on their heels, and then ostriches and whitings, jellyfish and clams, the inevitable baboon, and with the arrival of Pamela Tarn, a combination animal metaphor and adverb: hippo-ishly. Huxley lavished attention on names, and one may wish there were more of Wilber F. Schmalz and his unctuous correspondence if only to relish his moniker. Fanning notes, in Latin, that he never liked art that conceals. Neither does Huxley. He italicizes and underscores zoological traits and innermost thoughts, flitting into Pamela’s mind as well as her riotous diary as easily as he does Fanning’s mind and his unfinished letter. He drops linguistic banana peels every few pages. Fanning is one of those personages who strive to speak in epigraphs, which are wasted on fellows like the clerk at Cook’s who tells him “Gratters on your last book,” to which Miles responds, “All gratitude for gratters.” Miles loves the word impertinence , which earns a new meaning regarding Pamela: even her breasts are impertinent, “pointed, firm, almost comically insistent.” 4
    The lyrical passages remind us that Huxley was a formidable travel writer, but even they serve to remind Miles that a comedy is a series of unavoidable pratfalls. The sibilant panorama of Rome at the heart of the tale—“golden with ripening corn and powdered goldenly with a haze of dust, the Campagna stretched away from the feet of the subsiding hills, away and up towards a fading horizon, on which the blue ghosts of mountains floated on a level with her eyes”—works its magic, but as Miles breaks the “sad, sad but somehow consoling” silence, his knees crackle to let him know that he is tarnished with age and Tarn is “dangerously and perversely fresh.” If he were a younger man, he might rant, as John the Savage will in two years, “I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
    F OREWORD : J ESTING A LDOUS
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  1. Edith Sitwell in Stephen Klaidman, Sydney and Violet , Doubleday, 2013, p. 187.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  2. Richard and Clara Winston (ed.), Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955 , Knopf, 1970, pp. 213, 455, 581, 664.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  3. Anthony Burgess, 99 Novels , Summit, 1984, p. 24. The other Huxley works he includes are Ape and Essence and Island .
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  4. Pamela has run away from her censorious Aunt Edith, a relationship Huxley returns to in his final story, “Voices,” in the deadly conflict between another twenty-year-old Pamela and her Aunt Eleanor.

I
    L ATE AS USUAL. LATE.” JUDD’S VOICE WAS CENSORIOUS. The words fell sharp, like beak-blows. “As though I were a nut,” Miles Fanning thought resentfully, “and he were a woodpecker. And yet he’s devotion itself, he’d do anything for me. Which is why, I suppose, he feels entitled to crack my shell each time he sees me.” And he came to the conclusion, as he had so often come before, that he really didn’t like Colin Judd at all. “My oldest friend, whom I quite definitely don’t like. Still . . .” Still, Judd was an asset, Judd was worth it.
    â€œHere are your