Huxley

Aldous Huxley has been in my mind recently, with some evidence at reference 1. Mainly triggered by reading the book at reference 2. And I have been eying the foot or so of shelf space which his books occupied in the bookcase in the extension, bearing in mind the continuing accumulation of new-to-me books in the study upstairs. I had drawn back from doing anything partly because I was unsure about the two volume biography by Sybille Bedford - unsure in part because it seemed odd to keep the biography but to dump the works. But that is what I ended up doing yesterday.

I thought about carrying the works - mainly but not all fiction - to the Oxfam bookshop in town, but then, despite none of them carrying any kind of identification, I decided that burial was the proper way forward. Huxley has been with me for sixty years - starting, rather oddly for a twelve year old, with 'Brave New World' - and giving him over to be pawed, discarded or worse by the great British public did not seem appropriate. Furthermore, it seemed unlikely that many, if any, people would want them. All those goings on of the arty, clever and chattering classes of the 1920's and the 1930's; classes to which the Maufes belonged, or at least flirted with, this being the connection to my readings of reference 2. So burial in the open plan compost heap it was. That is to say the large compost heap used for prunings and such like in the summer and leaves in the winter. Maybe three or four feet high at peak now.

Rather to my surprise, I hit earth maybe a spade depth from the surface. Some crumbly grey, some crumbly brown. The odd bit of plastic which may have been all that remained of the plasticised cover of some paperback buried previous. All quite dry, despite all the recent rain. No signs of life to the naked eye at all, although I dare say a microscope would reveal some.

Just a suggestion of steam rising. So a bit warmer than the outside world, but a long way from combustion. Which we used to get in the interior of the mounds of leaves built up in the margins of the allotment field - the Stamford Green allotments where I used to operate - by the council leaf men in the autumn. Leaves which I used to trench into my upcoming potato patches, not that my potatoes were very often up to much.

Down the hole with them.

Hole backfilled and the books have vanished from site. With a robin sitting back left to make sure of fair play. Probably visible if you click to enlarge.

This is probably the third time I have unloaded my holdings of Huxley. Probably starting with the collected edition inherited from my mother, for whom Huxley was an important part of her youth in the late 1930's. I associated to the regular givings up of the smoker who cannot quite shake off the habit for good.

And I will probably take another look at the biography before too long.

PS: getting on better with 'Ulysses' than I had expected. I may even be stuck in, having started about 100 pages in - Joyce's tiresome obsession with body functions notwithstanding. Maybe it seemed clever in the 1920's to talk about things which had previously been left out of polite discourse - but to my mind left out for a good reason. Not things one wants to dwell on, particularly as one gets older and they start to go wrong.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/late-fowl.html.

Reference 2: Edward Maufe: Architect and Cathedral Builder - Juliet Dunmur - 2019.