Short Story by Aldous Huxley

If you like Aldous Huxley's early stories, here is one, so to speak, for the books. Perceptive and prescient of later themes in our culture,  the short story, or more accurately, the novella, "Two or Three Graces”  displays Huxley's brilliant registration of postwar England and its "modern" society. This is a highly perceptive, somewhat meandering story, full of startling insights and clever verbal constructions.

This novella has something new and something old. The "new" is a plotting style that prefigures his later work. Plots weave in and out of each other, nesting in each other, with a previous theme popping up later in the story.  The polyphonic movement of the plot, with one encounter or relationship intermingling with another, then  diverging then reuniting or,  would be later reified in the title of another book, Point-Counterpoint. Meanwhile, the  "old" aspect of "Two or Three Graces" is that Huxley exercises his wicked talent of parody.  There seems to be no posture exempt from his exorcising literary sabre.

The narrator, named Wilkes,  begins with a  meditation on the word "bore."  There are different types of bores, Wilkles explains in a pained academic tone. He intones that there are bores that bore, or "drill" through your spirit, as well as the vegetable bore, a phlegmatic type. This is the type of bore Herbert Comfrey, was  a dull character early in the story but a catalyst for later things.  Comfrey was the type of bore who attached himself to first one then another acquaintance, hanging on with just enough income not required to be anywhere at any particular time, and was, the narrator writes, a major catastrophe in his life. 

After this discussion of bores, Wilkes describes how Comfrey came into his life, at the most inopportune time.  Wilkes was talking to a friend named Kingham, a fiery writer friend. Kingham has all the energy Wilkes thinks he lacks and, to note here,  has no usable first name—he is called Kingham throughout the story, even by his intimates (in the manner of D.H. Lawrence) . Wilkes, he says,has no purpose, is hedonistic, and doesn’t think about important things, or the indignities of class.  Bemused Wilkes observes to himself that those traits Kingham attacks in him really is what Kingham dislikes in himself.  It is while the opinionated, fiery Kingham is describing his outrage at the country's povery, and unfair class distinction, in comes Comfrey, the priveleged raconteur of -prep school days. Comfrey, the bore, the old-school chum full of elite nostalgia recounts, oblivious to Kinghams growing anger,  incidents from their school days. Kingham's fury rises.  He berates Wilkes--we learn his outrages are frequent—for his complacency.  

The scene repeats a few days later. Kingham strides off, angrily. Afterward, Comfrey remains with Wilkes for weeks afterward--never leaving, becoming his loyal,, complacent sidekick. Wilkes does his best to function with Comfey. Eventually, though, it is time to return to London.

 

As they disembark in England, Wilkes and Comfrey by seeming happenstance, meet  Herbert's brother-in-law, John Peddley. This character is remarkable--by modern standards a sort of Aspergery attorney. Huxley describes hims as a talkative pedant—an “active bore.” This barrister, he knows everything, and people are known to flee his presence. To find conversation mates, he has, the narrator discovers,  taken to hanging out at the wharf, just for the chance to meet people. Comfrey and Wilkes go to Peddley’s house. We meet Pedley’s long-suffering wife, Grace. Grace is vacuous, inefficient, and diffuse yet the narrator takes kindly to her. With a disorganized mind, she lacks confidence or a sense of firm opinion or purpose. She fell in love, so that narrator says, with Pedley because she was so bad at school, so affected by met.

 

Grace is describing as having a uniquely visual mind, and here Huxley verges on describing a modern version of inarticulate. She sees numbers as pictures, and the narrator realizes that because of their difference of minds he can never really describe her fully. The deaf, he notes, are not the best describers of music. 

 

Meanwhile, Grace lives in a self-observed pantomime, ineptly copying  the role of good mother, the haughty milady, the Grande Dame, whatever visualization she makes of herself.  Grace accompanies him during his rounds as a music critic, and she mimics his mannerism of bored, hardened critic, but having little musical discernment.  He plays a mean trick by giving every indication of loving a concert and then when she gushes enthusiastically about it, criticizes it mercilessly. 

 

Eventually, Wilkes introduces Grace to the  au=courant artist Rodney Clegg. Clegg is boyish looking but fatuous—with pots of skin cream to keep his youthful look. Despite his self-advertising nature, he has become a hit .  He makes no pretense of his monetary ambitions, and his art is highly tuned to the commercial world. When Wilkes takes a vacation, Grace, fascinated and impressed, becomes romantically involved with Clegg. She copies his vocabulary and his style, and assumes the role of a modern woman of the 1920s, with libertine attitudes and flip airy morals. Her former vagueness and tendency towards non-sequiturs makes her popular. She lectures Wilkes when he returns on his deficiencies, and he hears echoes of Clegg's vocabulary in her speech. 

 

Wilkes feels a pang of jealousy at her sudden involvement with Clegg but knows he has no genuine romantic interest or claim on her affections.  Inevitably, Clegg strays to another woman to further his career, and Grace must, to save face, find someone else,  drinking and assuming an even more preposterously flirtatious and libertine manner. She ends up with, of all people, Kingham. A tragic, and painful romance ensues, then ends. Eventually, Grace recedes back into her bland bourgeois, identity-less existence, while the narrator, contemplating these events, listens to music, noting repeating motifs, and appreciating that in time Grace will once again repeat the cycle. She will--venture out into the world, leave her domesticity, assume the identity of whatever lover she happens to take, invent the same illusions about herself, and again fall prey to the evanescent nature of these illusions.