Letters

Crome Yellow  was Aldous Huxley's first novel.  When published in 1921, it was regarded as a a smart, and "modern" book.  Huxley was funny, a satirist, and an iconoclast. Along with his youthful essays of earlier years, Crome Yellow established Aldous Huxley as "modern"n, a purveyor of new ideas, and a dynamiter of Victorian morals.  What strikes me about the book, one hundred years after it was written, was its humor and even basic good nature--how infrequently good humor and hilarity are put to such good use--so few satirists are kindhearted. The protagonist is Denis Stone, a young man who is a Huxley self-portrait, one of many of these self-portraits that developed over time in many of his books. The other characters in Crome Yellow were based on urbane personalities of the day, England postwar. The physical setting is a country home, the residence of  Lady Ottoline Morrel, a culturati of the time who gathered around her a smart set.  The book...

Below, in blue, is a link to an article by the biographer and writer James Atlas. I discovered one of his works, now a favorite of mine, when I was about 20. In particular, Atlas wrote, among his other books, the authoritative biography of Delmore Schwart entitled  Delmore Schwartz, Life of An American Poet. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/delmore-schwartz-and-the-biographers-obsession But who was Delmore Schwartz? Not many people will recognize his name. For a while, there was much attention paid to the late poet, particularlyl after Saul Bellow fictionalized Schwartz in his book, which preceded Bellow's Nobel Prize, Humboldt's Gift . Delmore Schwartz peaked very early, had fame, and then dissolved into mental illness.  The link is to an article by Atlas recollection of writing the biography. Appearing in 2017 in New Yorker, Atlas recounts how he came to write the biography of Delmore Schwartz.  Great writing on a great writer, as engaging as the subj...

Miscellaneous notes, Damon LaBarbera, PhD Licensed Psychologist: Rex :

Eyeless in Gaza Damon LaBarbera Eyeless in Gaza  was written by Aldous Huxley in 1936 and describes, in achronological order, the lives of several characters over decades,   Eyeless in Gaza  is not one of Huxley's best-known books, but it is one of his finest, surpassing in-depth and literary innovation, so some opine, and I am inclined to agree, his more famous books, including  Brave New World .  Brave . Eyeless in Gaza   is a finer novel, and has that  particular style of which Huxley is so adept, allowing us to enter the inner monologue, acutely and sometimes humorously depicted, of his protagonists (assuming a book can have more than one protagonist).   The mood of this book differs from Huxley's earlier oeuvre, the latter being "smart" and "modern ."Huxley wrote  Eyeless in Gaza  at a time in his life when less interested in being iconoclastic and concerned with humanistic themes. The book is of a period that also precede...

 

The short story Cold Little Bird  by Ben Marcus appeared in  the magazine  New Yorker  in 2015. There is nothing supernatural or crimina in the story but it is nonetheless very chilling. The story is of growth from a pre-adolescent into adolescence--the parents experience of losing their son, not through death or his running away, but by his maturation. This may not sound scary but the way the author handles the developmental change and the story surrounding it is profoundly skillful.  This is sort of like the Exorcist without a devil. The change is not wrought from evil but just normal development. Jonah, the boy, is sweeet and bright but suddenly becomes caustic and detached to his parents. He no longer wants to be hugged, he is sharp and decisively cruel with his with retorts.   He scolds his pushes his parents away and blocks any attempt for them to be warm. As the clueless parents attempt to deal with the developmental sequence. Jonah becomes ever...