On 16 January 1928, Mary Butts recorded in her journal that her mind was full of ‘the worst book ever written on a superb theme, [John] Buchan’s The Dancing Floor, but as if it was illustrated, in a kind of lovely light.’ By contrast, a few weeks later, on 6 February 1928, she gave qualified praise to Two or Three Graces and Other Stories by Aldous Huxley (1926): ‘Blessed man: not a master of form or language—magical language—but clear, hard, witty, observant, pitiful, aseptic—like the sound wood of a Chippendale chair . . . I finished it with the words ringing: “it’s the truth, it’s the truth, it’s the truth.”
I think quite highly of Buchan’s book, and its theme of surviving paganism on a Greek island, despite some creaky plot mechanics. It seems to me that Buchan does have the ‘magical language’ she was seeking. I was interested in her contrasting praise of the Huxley. This year marks the centenary of its first publication. It is not one of his better-known works, so I thought it worth a look, and got hold of a copy which proved to have a history. At least three previous owners had each left their mark on the book.
On the fixed rear endpaper was a subscription lending library label printed in green ink, but the library is not named. There were erratically placed date stamps in violet ink for 29 May 1926, 9 Feb 1927, 23 Feb 1927, [?] Jun 1927 and 1 Jul 1927. The label had been over-stamped in red ink capitals: PURCHASED [F]ROM THE LIBRARY”. There was also the ghost of a shield shaped label on the blue front boards.
On the front free endpaper was the pencil signature of Mansfield D. Forbes, Clare College, Cambridge, and the note: ‘Rec’d Dec ‘27’. There was copious pencil marginalia and, on the verso of the rear free endpaper, notes on page numbers and key words, eg ‘Classical’, ‘Romance’, ‘Love falsified’. Cambridge University Archives have a brief note on him: ‘Mansfield Duval Forbes (1889-1936) became a fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 1913. He belonged to a circle which included the musicologist E.J. Dent and others such as Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke’. There was a biography, Mansfield Forbes and His Cambridge by Hugh Carey (1984).
Forbes evidently enjoyed being in the know while reading Huxley’s book. In the title story there is a brief passage about a boy who climbed the Gothic pinnacle of his school and placed a chamber pot upon it: a pencil note in the margin identifies him as ‘D.R.P.’ Against the description of a character, ‘even her clumsiness was somehow graceful’, there is the note ‘Lady Caithness’, and when she is again described as having ‘graceful ineptitude’, the further note, ‘Lady C’. The modern artist in the book, Rodney Clegg, unflatteringly depicted, is annotated on page 61 as ‘C.R.W. Nev?’, presumably Christopher R.W. Nevinson.
On the fixed front endpaper there was also a rubber stamp ex libris in blue ink of a pot of flowers, signed underneath in ballpoint, E F Mawsley, Mansley or perhaps Hansley, but I have been unable to find out anything about anyone with these variant names.
These marks and marginalia I found more interesting, I am sorry to report, than the book itself, that so enthused Mary Butts. The title story has some astute and witty aphorisms, but embedded in a rather over-extended and somewhat ponderous plot, like shreds of orange zest in a suet pudding. An artist and an essayist in turn have a passion for a provocative woman, with a dull husband. She becomes drawn to bohemian circles. The essayist sees her abundant glee at this racy new world as ‘devilish’ and vampiric. Despite these epithets, there is not the slightest hint of the mysterious or supernatural. This is no femme fatale: in fact, she is merely gauche.
Moreover, Huxley often deploys the omniscient author mode to pontificate about his characters, and at times it is rather like reading a psychology case study. I can imagine that Mary Butts liked the tempestuous undercurrents, the frankness about modern love affairs, and the rather jaded worldliness of the narrator, but it all seems rather futile. Perhaps that was the intended point.
The other three stories, about minor ironies, are no more than magazine-filler fare. They include rather condescending, smirking sketches of a youth with a Lancashire accent and a stammer, and the son of a Midlands boot manufacturer, who affects a monocle. These caricatures, by the Eton and Balliol educated Huxley, are trite and snobbish, and they appear to be authorial attitudes, not merely those of his characters.
The collection followed on from Huxley’s success with Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), witty satires that had won him a reputation as a bright young author. But this volume does not match their brilliance or verve, and sees to be something of a stop-gap between better work, the author or publisher making the best of some miscellaneous products.
I can understand why the title does not stand high among Huxley’s work, and it does reveal a different side to the author later all-but-sainted for his interest in mysticism. But perhaps we might charitably credit him with at least trying, when older and wiser, to surpass his upbringing. And the book as an object, as its own miniature history, at least offered some unexpected interest.
(Mark Valentine)
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