'The Oxford Book of Depressing Verse'

“Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and despair.” I’ve never spent much time reading Aldous Huxley – Brave New World in junior-high school, Crome Yellow a little later, then, inevitably, The Doors of Perception, when it was a cult book for many of my generation. I remember almost nothing about any of them and recall his fiction as idea-driven, often a giveaway for a stillborn story. In On the Ivory Stages (Mirbeau, 2024), Theodore Dalrymple says of The Olive Tree and Other Essays (1936): “Huxley was a wonderful essayist: amusing, erudite and opinionated (who wants to read an essayist who is always fair and judicious?).” Thanks to Dalrymple, I’ve been reading Huxley’s first collection, On the Margin: Notes and Essays (1923), and may re-evaluate at least a portion of his body of work. I had never suspected Huxley of having a sense of humor. The passage above is from the essay “How…