Editors Reads Verdict
Darker than Crome Yellow and funnier than Point Counter Point, Antic Hay is Huxley at his most energetically nihilistic — a portrait of people laughing at a world they know has been destroyed.
What We Loved
- The London milieu is the most vividly and specifically realised in Huxley's work
- The comedy is sharper and more unsettling than in Crome Yellow — the darkness is closer to the surface
- Gumbril is a more engaging protagonist than Denis Stone, partly because his self-deceptions are more spectacular
Minor Drawbacks
- The episodic structure means some sections have more energy than others
- Some of the minor characters are sketched rather than drawn
Key Takeaways
- → Post-war disillusionment produces not grief but a particular kind of manic, purposeless energy
- → The intellectual life of the 1920s was simultaneously brilliant and empty — full of ideas, devoid of direction
- → Self-invention — Gumbril's various disguises and roles — is both freedom and another form of evasion
| Author | Aldous Huxley |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Dalkey Archive |
| Pages | 303 |
| Published | January 1, 1923 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Modernist Fiction, Satirical Fiction |
Antic Hay Review
Antic Hay, Huxley’s second novel, appeared in 1923, two years after Crome Yellow and considerably darker in tone. The title is from Marlowe — “My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, / Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay” — and the image is apt: the novel’s characters are people dancing a slightly deranged dance on the grass where something enormous was killed, not yet knowing what to do about it.
The protagonist is Theodore Gumbril, Junior, a schoolmaster who begins the novel having an irreverent fantasy in chapel and ends it having accomplished very little. In between he invents and briefly markets pneumatic trousers (with an air-filled seat cushion for the comfort of sedentary workers), drifts through a sequence of women and bars and parties, adopts and abandons a persona as the Complete Man — bearded, confident, utterly convincing — and fails to do anything that matters to him when the chance arises. His inventor father, building a perfect scale model of the London that was destroyed in the Great Fire, is the novel’s moral mirror: an artist of total commitment and complete impracticality, in love with a city that no longer exists.
The London Huxley depicts is specific and observed: Soho restaurants and artists’ studios and the kind of parties where everyone is brilliant and nobody goes home satisfied. The cast is smaller than in Point Counter Point and more vividly characterised — the scientist Shearwater, conducting his bicycle experiments while his wife is seduced under his nose; the painter Lypiatt, whose grandiose ambitions are not entirely unsympathetic; the magnificently mercenary Myra Viveash, who moves through the novel like a beautiful zombie, incapable of caring about anything but unable to stop trying. Myra is perhaps Huxley’s best female character: not a satirical type but a specific, sad, compelling person.
What distinguishes Antic Hay from the earlier country house satire is its register of post-war feeling. These are not simply clever people being irresponsible; they are people who know that the war destroyed something that cannot be recovered and have chosen laughter over grief, or found that the two have become difficult to distinguish. The comedy is funnier than Crome Yellow and the darkness is darker, and this combination — the sense that the joke and the horror are both true simultaneously — gives the novel a particular flavour that is entirely Huxley’s own.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Antic Hay" about?
Theodore Gumbril, a schoolmaster who invents pneumatic trousers, drifts through London's intellectual and artistic circles in the aftermath of the First World War — Huxley's darkest comedy and his most sustained portrait of 1920s London bohemia.
What are the key takeaways from "Antic Hay"?
Post-war disillusionment produces not grief but a particular kind of manic, purposeless energy The intellectual life of the 1920s was simultaneously brilliant and empty — full of ideas, devoid of direction Self-invention — Gumbril's various disguises and roles — is both freedom and another form of evasion
Is "Antic Hay" worth reading?
Darker than Crome Yellow and funnier than Point Counter Point, Antic Hay is Huxley at his most energetically nihilistic — a portrait of people laughing at a world they know has been destroyed.
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