Once upon a Time, I read the writing of Aldous Huxley with enthusiasm. I was a little younger then… More recently, I have tended to find his attitudes rather stuffy, and class-ridden, not embodying the fresh view of the world I once thought he held. Brave New World was not representative and, in my youth, I perhaps mis-read its intentions. A television adaptation of Eyeless In Gaza at the end of the 1960s prompted further exploration. Recently, I found The Art Of Seeing worth avoiding. So it was with mixed expectations that I started Mortal Coils, a work the author published in 1921

Its form is interesting. Aldous Huxley described its five separate sections as three short stories, a novelette and a play. In each of the pieces, there is a keen, if somewhat caricatured central character for whom some random event, some twist of fate provides an ironic punchline. For that reason, I will not review the stories in detail. What happens is crucial, and it tends to happen right at the end.

Throughout, Aldous Huxley seems to be mocking anyone who apparently takes him or herself, seriously. There is a keen eye for pretension, but, it has to be said, these tales of competition are won, more often than not, by the wily, not the showy.

The Gioconda Smile is the novelette. Miss Spence has the smile in question. She is thirtyish and a spinster. Mr. Hutton is a well-to-do friend with a hypochondriac wife, who needs to take her medicine.

Permutations Among The Nightingales is a play set in a hotel. Various society-type guests pirouette around themselves for attention. There is a lot of coming and going.

The Tillotson Banquet involves rather rich people with a decoration urge tracing a long-lost artist who has fallen on bad times. There might be a commission. In his nineties, and living in a basement among beetles, the old artist accepts the invitation to dine.

The Green Tunnels is it story about a group of visitors to Italy. They become obsessed with one another as well as with themselves. Both gestures and actions are mis-interpreted.

In Nuns At Luncheon, Huxley mocks the act of writing, itself, as a scribbler imagines how he might fictionalize a tale about a nun who falls from grace.

None of these has anything like a grand vision. These five pieces are like extended jokes with unexpected punch lines. They are stories, however, worth the telling, and certainly worth the reading.