Brief Candles

Brief Candles is an early book of short stories by Aldous Huxley. Then, in the nineteen-teens and twenties (the Anno Domini year was always six more than Huxley's own age) Huxley was savaging British society. An obscure  book, my copy came by luck in the '80s at "Ageless Book Shop" in Panama City, Florida run by Ann Humphreys who kept track of orders with small slivers of scrap paper held together by a rubber band. Brief Candles hasn't been republished for decades. It is, however, on Audible.

As a satirist, Huxley has the virtue of being motivated by humor and curiosity rather than anger. "The Claxtons" still shocks me in its insight. The story was a lampoon on the political correctness of that day. But that day is long gone and time has been hard on the book' appeal tothe reader. The overriding themes of class, rejection of conventional religion, the liberating upsurge of new values (including Freud whom Huxley disliked) all are distant ghosts mostly familiar to historians and bookworms. The action (or inaction) takes place in the elite twilight world of hyper-refined individuals in the 1920s, which probably does not register with the egalitarian minded reader of 2019.  The format of human consciousness may note have change in the last century and possibly tThe reader will experiences a shock of recognition--human foibles and pretensions laid bare. Huxley excelled at the precisely aimed dart into the balloon of pretension. This is no Strunk and White exercise. The sentences are long, elaborate, latinate, and unlike the terse "middle American prose style" that writers are encouraged to adopt today.

 The first story Chawdron is about two literarati discussing, upon hearing of his death, a magnate named Chawdrom. Its not quite Death of Ivan Illich, but similarities exist how the story starts--hearing of a death of an acquaintance, quick reversion of the conversation to self-absorbed comments, and a somewhat depressing description of the lived existance of the departed.  Chawdron was an avaricious scoundrel, though glowingly described in his obituary. As luck would have it, one of the conversants ghosted the hagiographical biography of Chawdron, while the other's father lost a lifetime of savings in a company the tycoon purposely drove into the ground, then re-bought.  "Serves him right for saving," retorts the biographer. The writer, by name Tilney, is out of Huxley central casting and is one of those dissolutive, talented, intellectual poor with which Huxley peopled his stories. The 

second story, The Rest Cure is a story I have never seen anthologized, but describes a real phenomenon. A wealthy but neglected woman becomes attracted to a proletariat Italian whilst on a vacation to regain her nerves. She attains happiness, but via misunderstanding believes all the negatives that others have said of  there impoverished Adonis. Its a more realistic Belle De Jour. The last novella, After The Fireworks, also is a favorite and more of that