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Robert "Bob" Briggs is a fictional screenwriter living in 1940s Hollywood. His one appearance to date is in Aldous Huxley's dystopian satire Ape and Essence .
Briggs is famous for his fascinating smile. [1]
Briggs writes for Lou Lublin Productions. (Huxley wrote screen versions of 19th century English novels for producers Hunt Stromberg, William Goetz, Kenneth Macgowan and Orson Welles, as well as a life of Mme. Curie for Sidney Franklin). He has just been denied a raise, a disappointment with repercussions for his love life. The industry is tightening its belt; Hollywood mogul Schmuel Gelbfisz has announced to the press that those under him may well see their salaries reduced by half.
He has no automobile of his own, but uses his wife Miriam's Buick convertible.
Briggs is—or was—serious about art; he deplores popular escapism as an abuse of it. He knows exactly how many tens of millions of dollars were raked in by Amanda, a vapid musical love story, three winters previously—during the Ardennes Offensive.
In early 1946 he began scripting a life of Catherine of Siena, who in 1366 had mystically married Jesus. Having to sex it up, he elaborated a character from a suitor mentioned in her letters. His script has been reworked three times by others before getting to production, but the lover-character remains; Lublin hopes to get Humphrey Bogart for the part (an unlikely prospect, as 1948 will see him starring in several films by John Huston).
Brigg's relationship with Elaine began as his involvement in the Catherine script was concluding. His long avoidance of its physical consummation—i.e. of technical adultery—mirrors his disenchantment with what in Hollywood passes for the creative process. "When you finally get what you want," he tells his friend, Huxley's narrator, "it's never what you thought it was going to be." [2]
Another symbol of spiritual death is the long drought (or drouth) upon southern California; this finally breaks when Briggs instinctively reads a script by a Mojave recluse (rejected by Lublin) after the Narrator reads him part of it.
Briggs thinks of himself as a Romantic -- "as all the Romantic poets rolled into one", according to his fellow, the unnamed narrator of the Tallis section of Huxley's novel [3] —specifically as Keats, dying in love; as Shelley, recklessly following his heart; as Byron, the darkly towering exile; as Beddoes, the mortality-obsessed suicide.
Yet of these fatal figures it is Shelley who resonates most in Brigg's life, and not for the manner of his death but for his dereliction regarding his infant son and pregnant 19-yr-old wife Harriet. (But on the bright side, cf also his poem Adonaïs with which Huxley closes the Script, the novel's second, main and final section).
It has been noted that Briggs is a reader of letters. He would in all likelihood have read Fanny Brawne's letters to Keats, published ten years before Brigg's encounter with Tallis. [4]
The buttes of the southwestern Mojave Desert remind Briggs of one of Goya's evil landscapes, though it was the foreground matter that had compelled him to buy his lover a reproduction of the work. [5]
Briggs has recently taken Elaine to Acapulco for an adulterous get-away. Though he 'd long put off moving their relation to that level, he is yet disappointed, claiming to have thought it was going to be what he wanted. [2] The precise nature of the disappointment is hinted at by Huxley's narrator, who tells us Briggs is basically impotent [6] and hence may have been avoiding the physical act of love for these nearly two years only in order to protect himself. If that is so then his voicing of moral qualms may be dishonest: his behaviour with Rosie (below) is evidence for this; the Narrator's reference to Goya's terrifying "saurian rats", however, suggests that Briggs' impotence may have honest roots.
Briggs is first made aware of Rosie when he hears her singing the popular song Now Is the Hour in the kitchen of the Cottonwood Ranch. The song would be a year-long hit for Huxley's compatriot the vocalist Gracie Fields, who during the war had come to the USA with her husband Mario Bianche lest he be interned as an enemy alien. Fields picked up Now Is the Hour in New Zealand, a place of some importance in Tallis's screenplay.
Rosie appears in a fetching black sweater and tartan skirt. The narrator notes the "technically perfect" look with which she greets Briggs, and is reminded of other upwardly-mobile kittens in history and literature: of Ninon de l'Enclos, mistress of France Antarctique founder Gaspard de Coligny; of Emy Lyon, installed at Sir Harry Fetherstonhaugh's South Downs mansion; of Anna Karenina; of Morphil.
That she is disquieteningly “simultaneously innocent and knowing” [7] foretells (by seven years) the words of another, masochistic and unreliable narrator, Humbert Humbert.
Completing the picture of pre-nubile predation, Rosie's cousin Katie is annoyed by her laziness. [8]
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and philosopher. His bibliography spans nearly 50 books, including non-fiction works, as well as essays, narratives, and poems.
John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame grew rapidly after his death. By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature, strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888 called one ode "one of the final masterpieces".
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. This novel is often compared as an inversion counterpart to George Orwell's 1984 (1949).
Madame Curie is a 1943 American biographical film made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The film was directed by Mervyn LeRoy and produced by Sidney Franklin from a screenplay by Paul Osborn, Paul H. Rameau, and Aldous Huxley (uncredited), adapted from the biography by Ève Curie. It stars Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, with supporting performances by Robert Walker, Henry Travers, and Albert Bassermann.
Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood was an Anglo-American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, autobiographer, and diarist. His best-known works include Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel which inspired the musical Cabaret (1966); A Single Man (1964), adapted into a film directed by Tom Ford in 2009; and Christopher and His Kind (1976), a memoir which "carried him into the heart of the Gay Liberation movement".
"Ulalume" is a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1847. Much like a few of Poe's other poems, "Ulalume" focuses on the narrator's loss of his beloved due to her death. Poe originally wrote the poem as an elocution piece and, as such, the poem is known for its focus on sound. Additionally, it makes many allusions, especially to mythology, and the identity of Ulalume herself, if a real person, has been a subject of debate.
Swami Prabhavananda was an Indian philosopher, monk of the Ramakrishna Order, and religious teacher. He moved to America in 1923 to take up the role of assistant minister in the San Francisco Vedanta Society. In 1928 he was the minister of a small group in Portland, OR, but in 1930 he founded the Vedanta Society of Southern California. The Swami spent the rest of his life there, writing and collaborating with some of the most distinguished authors and intellectuals of the time, including Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Gerald Heard.
Love in the Time of Cholera is a novel written in Spanish by Colombian Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez and published in 1985. Edith Grossman's English translation was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1988.
Eyeless in Gaza is a novel by Aldous Huxley, first published in 1936. It is an account of the life of a socialite named Anthony Beavis between the 1890s and 1936.
Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. is a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and best-known works. The poem, which is in 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas, was composed in the spring of 1821 immediately after 11 April, when Shelley heard of Keats's death. It is a pastoral elegy, in the English tradition of John Milton's Lycidas. Shelley had studied and translated classical elegies. The title of the poem is modelled on ancient works, such as Achilleis, an epic poem by the 1st-century AD Roman poet Statius, and refers to the untimely death of the Greek Adonis, a god of fertility. Some critics suggest that Shelley used Virgil's tenth Eclogue, in praise of Cornelius Gallus, as a model.
"Ode to Psyche" is a poem by John Keats written in spring 1819. The poem is the first of his 1819 odes, which include "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode to a Nightingale". "Ode to Psyche" is an experiment in the ode genre, and Keats's attempt at an expanded version of the sonnet format that describes a dramatic scene. The poem serves as an important departure from Keats's early poems, which frequently describe an escape into the pleasant realms of one's imagination. Keats uses the imagination to show the narrator's intent to resurrect Psyche and reincarnate himself into Eros (love). Keats attempts this by dedicating an "untrodden region" of his mind to the worship of the neglected goddess.
The Masque of Anarchy is a British political poem written in 1819 by Percy Bysshe Shelley following the Peterloo Massacre of that year. In his call for freedom, it is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance.
Literature and Science, published in September 1963, was Aldous Huxley's last book - he died two months after it was published. In it, he strives to harmonize the scientific and artistic realms. He argues that language is what divides the two realms and makes communication between them difficult. He analyzes the ways in which scientists and fiction writers use language differently to achieve their desired effects. Although he concedes that many differences in language use are inevitable, he urges both camps to seek mutual understanding and appreciation. He directs his argument primarily to fiction writers: "Whether we like it or not,” he tells them, “ours is the Age of Science."
Mathilda, or Matilda, is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August 1819 and February 1820 and first published posthumously in 1959. It deals with common Romanticism themes of incest and suicide.
Ape and Essence (1948) is a novel by Aldous Huxley, published by Chatto & Windus in the UK and Harper & Brothers in the US. It is set in a dystopia, as is Brave New World, Huxley's more famous work. It is largely a satire of the rise of large-scale warfare and warmongering in the 20th century, and presents a pessimistic view of the politics of mutually assured destruction. The book makes extensive use of surreal imagery, depicting humans as apes who, as a whole, will inevitably kill themselves.
After Many a Summer (1939) is a novel by Aldous Huxley that tells the story of a Hollywood millionaire who fears his impending death. It was published in the United States as After Many a Summer Dies the Swan. Written soon after Huxley left England and settled in California, the novel is Huxley's examination of American culture, particularly what he saw as its narcissism, superficiality, and obsession with youth. This satire also raises philosophical and social issues, some of which would later take the forefront in Huxley's final novel Island. The novel's title is taken from Tennyson's poem Tithonus, about a figure in Greek mythology to whom Aurora gave eternal life but not eternal youth. The book was awarded the 1939 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.
Lolita is a 1955 novel written by Russian-American novelist Vladimir Nabokov that addresses the controversial subject of hebephilia. The protagonist is a French literature professor who moves to New England and writes under the pseudonym Humbert Humbert. He describes his obsession with a 12-year-old "nymphet", Dolores Haze, whom he kidnaps and sexually abuses after becoming her stepfather. Privately, he calls her "Lolita", the Spanish diminutive for Dolores. The novel was originally written in English, but fear of censorship in the U.S. and Britain led to it being first published in Paris, France, in 1955 by Olympia Press.
"The Mortal Immortal" is a short story from 1833 written by Mary Shelley. It tells the story of a man named Winzy, who drinks an elixir which makes him immortal. At first, immortality appears to promise him eternal tranquility. However, it soon becomes apparent that he is cursed to endure eternal psychological torture, as everything he loves dies around him.
Epipsychidion is a major poetical work published in 1821 by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The work was subtitled: Verses addressed to the noble and unfortunate Lady Emilia V—, now imprisoned in the convent of —. The title is Greek for "concerning or about a little soul", from epi, "around", "about"; and psychidion, "little soul".
The following bibliography of Aldous Huxley provides a chronological list of the published works of English writer Aldous Huxley (1894–1963). It includes his fiction and non-fiction, both published during his lifetime and posthumously.