ABSTRACT
Who the young man was matters so little to the story that we jump at Mr. Huxley's hint that he is only trying to make us laugh all the time. But that cannot be. If he wanted to make us laugh, and that only, he would have kept out of his brutal story two things: Mrs. Viveash's not altogether despicable regret for her boy lover who was killed in the war, and the simple beauty of the woman called Emily. It takes a little courage, perhaps, to stand up to Mr. Huxley's blows and to see, through the jesting and the wallowing and the nausea, that Emily and her nuit blanche1 with Theodore Gumbril was sacred and beautiful, and that Gumbril's betrayal of them was worse than the messy niceties of Mr. Mercaptan and the lasciviousness of Rosie Shearwater and the stercorous lusts of Coleman. The Mr. Huxley who wrote Antic Hay was not in the temper to look fairly at Emily and her gift. He uses them, in effect, only to strengthen his display of the foulness of life and of those that live it.
