Antic Hay

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.

The Complete Man and His Failure

Gumbril’s invention of the persona of the Complete Man — when he grows a beard and becomes unrecognisable, suddenly confident and commanding — is the novel’s most pointed comedy and its central structural argument. The Complete Man is Gumbril’s attempt to become a different, better version of himself through disguise; the disguise works, briefly and completely, transforming his social effectiveness and his success with women. But it is a disguise. When it is removed — when circumstances force Gumbril back into himself — the transformation evaporates. The Complete Man has not actually changed anything; he has demonstrated what Gumbril might be if he were a different person, which is not useful information.

The parallel with the broader post-war generation Huxley is depicting is exact. These are people who know, in some abstract way, what a good life would look like; they have read about it, theorised about it, can describe it in precise terms. The knowledge does not help. Gumbril’s father, building his perfect scale model of pre-Fire London, is the novel’s image of useless completeness: total commitment to a thing that cannot matter.

Myra Viveash: The Century’s Wound

Myra Viveash moves through Antic Hay like a figure from a more classical kind of tragedy deposited by accident into a comedy. She is beautiful, intelligent, incapable of caring about anything since the death of the man she loved in the war, and she cannot stop trying to feel something — moving from man to man, from party to party, with the methodical purposelessness of someone going through motions they no longer believe in. She is the novel’s emotional centre, more interesting than Gumbril, and Huxley treats her with a sympathy that his satire of the male characters rarely achieves.

The novel was published in 1923, just five years after the Armistice, when the full weight of what the war had done was still settling. Huxley’s title — from Marlowe’s Edward II — names the dance his characters are doing with a precision that becomes more legible with time: not celebration but antic, deranged movement on the grass where something enormous died.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — 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.

Aimless London After the War

Antic Hay (1923) follows Theodore Gumbril through a post-war London emptied of conviction, his great scheme a patent for “Gumbril’s Patent Small-Clothes” — pneumatic trousers for the sedentary. Around him drifts a set of artists and pleasure-seekers, presided over by the languid, irresistible Myra Viveash, all of them circling a void where belief used to be. The title comes from Marlowe’s Edward II — “My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns, / Shall with their goat feet dance an antic hay” — and the book captures, more sharply than any of its successors, the spiritual exhaustion of the 1920s.