Books: Spitfire

BRIEF CANDLES—Aldous Huxley—Doubleday, Doran ($2.50). Author Aldous Huxley, once considered merely cynical and brightly shocking, has gradually forced readers to take him seriously. His wit curbed, under control, his stink-bomb epigrams less offensively in evidence, the soundness of his grasp of psychology becomes more obvious with every book. Brief Candles contains at least one story, “After the Fireworks,” that is first-class. Author Huxley is not always, perhaps does not always wish to be, completely objective about characters he hates, and can still be spiteful on occasion. The first three stories in this book are pointed by his spitefulness, also a little marred by it. A millionaire is duped by a sniveling, hypocritical woman who thinks she is saving his soul. An ignorant, childish married woman takes a Neapolitan gigolo who tires of her. A family of vegetarians who imagine they are artists but know nothing about art, become more like vegetables with the passage of time. Author Huxley allows all these people to show themselves as ridiculous if not disgusting. But in the last story, a novelette which tells of the infatuation of a repressed but normal and attractive young girl for a charming middle-aged writer, he has etched a more convincing picture, and with less acid. Aldous Huxley, no zany himself, has a distinguished ancestry: he is the grandson of Thomas Huxley (1825-95), grandnephew of Matthew Arnold (1822-88). Young (35), intellectually sophisticated, he pins his human specimens with the calculationof an entomologist, the enthusiasm of an amateur bug-hunter. Most readers admit his brilliance, his penetration; many enjoy his malice; few can approve his human portraits unreservedly. Other books: Leda, and Other Poems, Limbo, Crome Yellow, Mortal Coils, On the Margin, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, Along the Road, Two or Three Graces, Jesting Pilate, Essays New and Old, Proper Studies, Point Counter Point Do What You Will.