ABSTRACT
There can be no doubt that Aldous Huxley, one of the youngest and cleverest of England's new generation of writers, has introduced a new spirit in literature. His first volume Limbo, a collection of stories, sketches and plays, has aroused more interesting critical reactions than have been aroused by any other first volume of the last year or two. His subject-matter is new, but a writer signing himself'Affable Hawk,'1 notes in the New Statesman that the originality of the new author does not preclude one from comparing him with Jules Laforgue, because of his ironic attitude toward sentiment, and with the bitter J. K. Huysmans, because he writes 'like a man with a queasy stomach for life.' Like Huysmans, we are told, he uses his nerves too much as a writer, and 'too often he uses them as a touchstone of values, mistaking a shiver of repulsion for a deep intuition.' Further:
It is the satirical aspect of the young writer's work that most appeals to the critic of the London Nation. In 'Happy Families,' a brilliant oneact play which has been published in this country by the Little Review, we watch a young man in a conservatory proposing in a manner which
shows his ancestors taking part in the job, his arboreal as well as his knightly forbears. [Quotes stage directions, p. 211] In the dialog of this curious burlesque, Freud jostles Mendel.1 The plants snap and bite the humans. 'Happy Families,' says the London Nation, is Rabelaisian, and 'The Death of Lully,' the literary gem of the set, is worthy of Anatole France. At the back of all the stories in Limbo there is 'the homesickness of the soul born in an age that is dying in squalor for the clarity and coherence of some age of faith-at which, for very hunger, it needs must mock.'
