Mortal Coils

Five sharply different pieces make up Mortal Coils, Aldous Huxley's 1921 collection of short fiction and drama. The title borrows Hamlet's image of mortal existence, and the works repeatedly turn desire into embarrassment, disillusionment, or danger. “The Gioconda Smile” combines social satire with a murder story, exposing menace beneath cultivated manners. “Permutations Among the Nightingales” is a play built around the romantic complications of hotel guests, giving its entanglements a theatrical rhythm. In “The Tillotson Banquet,” admirers rediscover an elderly artist believed to be dead and arrange an honorary dinner whose good intentions do not ensure success. “Green Tunnels” follows a bored young traveler whose romantic fantasy cannot survive contact with experience. “Nuns at Luncheon” presents a second-hand tale of a nun in love and turns its attention toward the artifice of storytelling itself. Across the collection, Huxley varies genre and tone without abandoning his interest in self-deception. Affection, vanity, artistic reputation, and social performance become occasions for comedy, but the comedy often leaves a bitter residue. Mortal Coils offers a compact view of the young Huxley as both satirist and formal experimenter.