Collected Short Stories

Aldous Huxley Collected Short Stories (1958)
I'm still not quite sure what to think of this one. On the one hand, the man was clearly incapable of a dull sentence, and his descriptive power means it feels as though I'm reading the written equivalent of HD after trudging through the emotional, imagistic slurry of Lawrence's Plumed Serpent not so long ago; and so much of Huxley's description communicates some philosophical import or point, and communicates it well; and Collected Short Stories is of such quality as to fortify the hunch that I should probably buy every Huxley I find, providing it isn't one of those I already have.

All the same, these twenty-one short stories amount to four-hundred pages which feel like four-hundred pages, and a quick scan of the titles listed on the contents page does little to jog my memory of what I've been reading in most cases. Huxley mostly followed the maxim of writing from direct experience, or at least with reference to the same, and so almost everything here loosely inhabits a well-educated, middle-class upbringing in which one has read the classics and will accordingly get the references. This isn't a problem given how beautifully the man writes, but it contributes to a certain overall uniformity. Also, there's Chawdron which, lively reading though it certainly is, comprises nearly forty pages of conversation in a gentleman's club on the subject of the aforementioned Mr. Chawdron, recently deceased. The form is a perfectly legitimate method for telling a story while making editorial or moral comment where appropriate, but at such length it feels a bit cheeky to me.

To be clear, there's nothing bad here, and much that is very good, but I found the whole often unengaging in its consistency. That said, Young Archimedes may be one of the finest short stories I've read by any author, although its brilliance begs the additional question of why it should succeed where the others apparently don't, or don't quite. Online research reveals that this book collects the contents of five previous short story collections in a single place, albeit with each collection shorn of just one story, so this may well be my own fault for ploughing through the lot in one massively extended sitting.