ABSTRACT
Little or nothing can be said against your Huxley criticism, sharp as it is, and I am glad that I too have decidedly sought distance from the spirit and sentiment of the book-and even of the man in general. This spirit is extremely western European, mellow, decadent, as you quite correctly say. In Russia he would be quickly brought to reason, and the fact that America rejects him can only be applauded. It would not be desirable for this mystical defeatism to find acceptance here. I, who have a certain weakness for the decadent and am also at home in morbidity, with a kind of knowing pride-I am irritated by the complete insensitivity of the reviews which I saw to the charms of the book as a novel, charms which you cannot deny either. The telephone scene with the former mistress who reads to him from old letters at the one end, and at the other the present girl friend in the room; the death of
the uncle; the entire intrigue with the desired evening suit, and the moralistic entanglements from which the boy can no longer free himself-all that and still more is new, daring, interesting, [full] of grating liveliness. One must be a very convinced moralist simply to reject it. And yet, I do not deny that my morality was offended with every step. Even the fact that the author exploits his hate of all fleshly life, so that through the very presentation of the pleasures of the flesh he seeks to make himself attractive as a novelist, is somewhat annoying. But his cold attitude toward everything that burns under our skin, the things we hate and love, is truly deplorable. An Italian professor who leaves his oppressed country and goes into exile must not necessarily be presented as a fool; there must be something to him. And the way in which the exhaustion and disappointment of a social fighter is narrated does not show bitter pessimism, it is no indictment of a world so difficult to improve, but is a barking ridicule of the fool who would not rather think of the salvation of his own soul.
