Critical Essay | Critical Review by P. H. Newby

Critical Review by P. H. Newby

SOURCE: In a review of Aldous Huxley's Collected Short Stories, in London Magazine Vol. 4 1957, pp. 65-8.

In the following review of Collected Short Stories, Newby finds Huxley's short stories strained and anti-intellectual, contending that Huxley is not a true short story writer despite the brilliant analysis and observation revealed in some tales.

One thinks of Aldous Huxley as an intellectual writer. One associates him with the Twenties, short skirts and chromium plate; and one thinks of him, again, as an historian and pamphleteer, disenchanted with the twentieth century, doubtful whether the past was any better and apprehensive of the future; a pessimist, in short. The Collected Short Stories do not, however, bear this out. They provide no text for a dissertation on Mr. Huxley's ideas as they might have done had he been the intellectual, the sustained critic or satirist one, rather idly, supposed. Indeed, there is a...
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