“The Present Fad of Self Confession” (1926): Aldous Huxley and the Paper “monster of spiritual impudicity”

I readily admit to having a thing about anniversaries, however obscure.  They are an invitation to catch up with whatever I missed first time round, especially if I was not around at the time.  The century marker in particular offers an opportunity—or a pretext, if ever I needed one—to dwell on bygone media events and the popular culture of yore, traces of which I sample in a twenty-first century context and, more narrowly, from the perspective of my own experience.

For quite some time now I have been browsing vintage US American periodicals ranging from Radio Broadcast to Vanity Fair in search of materials ripe for centenary processing.  Seriously dated though my selections inevitably are, I am more intrigued by resonance than I am concerned with variance, let alone obsolescence.

That is to say, even at the risk of presentism, I am drawn to the relatable—and am committed to relating—instead of concentrating on what makes the past so unalike from the present as to appear entirely and solely of its time.  Context need not be confinement, just as difference does not have to spell distance. 

Declaring something “past” assists in creating an air of critical detachment.  It fosters an attitude of authorial but nonetheless assumptive command over a given subject, a superciliousness that, like an eyebrow hovering prominently above the inspecting eye draws—or should draw—attention to the viewpoint of the writer whose imperiousness gainsays any claims to objectivity.

In my own catchings-up with the presumably out-of-date, I resist assuming an authoritative posture or persona.  All the while, I am aware of—and aim to foreground—my queer biases and spectatorial limitations as an absent witness or indirect observer.  

Far from clinical, the choosing of a subject matter and the manner in which we approach it reveal personality, whether the self at work is acknowledged or not.  Whenever we put our name to them, our published words proclaim “I wrote this”—unless, as is increasingly the case in a grim reality inconceivable to those living in 1926—they hush up, however vainly, that “AI wrote this.”

Despite obvious differences, both technological and social, in the ways in which we communicate and consume—how we take in and dole out prose for public consumption—the question of the “I” in journalistic writing, be it as a peek-a-boo tease between the lines or as a treatise writ large, continues to raise itself, to this day, even—or especially—as distinctions between fact and fiction, news and commentary, intelligence and artificiality have become all but erased.  Brave New World, indeed, this domain of public discourse.  

For that reason alone, Aldous Huxley’s “The Present Fad of Self Confession,” published in Vanity Fair in May 1926—coincidental with the author’s first visit to Hollywood—struck me as worth revisiting one hundred years later, at a moment in time when I question my own willingness to give so freely of myself in projects such as Retroactive Selfies, currently all but shelved on Instagram, and the visual narrative Envelope that I have proposed for display in a local gallery.

In “The Present Fad of Self Confession,” Huxley seeks to distance himself from fellow authors who, whether for a price or for the prize of notoriety, spurn or presume to smudge the line between public persona and intimate personhood, wherever such a boundary might be reasonably or realistically drawn, given the performativity of writing.

Huxley relates how he was approached by the editor of a US periodical who tried to persuade him to write on the one subject about which the author—who never penned an autobiography—claims to be reticent: himself.  

Clearly, Vanity Fair readers were given no reason to expect a psychoanalytic probing into the origins of such inhibition (not diffidence or decorum, surely) from a satirical novelist then already known for his penchant for irony.  What was and is justified, and indeed encouraged by the title of Huxley’s article, is the expectation of a scoop, perhaps the dirt, even, on the “fad,” soi-disant, by a social commentator who looks upon his chosen subject—the exposed I willingly meeting the scrutiny of the public eye—with scepticism and derision.

“I shall not divulge the magazine’s name,” Huxley declares, parading his circumspection.  “Suffice it to say that its circulation is an affair of millions and that the pages of advertising matter in every issue are to be numbered by hundreds.”

Well, I feel inclined to interject, it does not.  Suffice, I mean.  However, being that Huxley shared his experience in a similarly prominent US periodical, his restraint when referring to the competing publication less than endorsingly as a magazine in which the “patient reader may discover, interspersed with the advertisements, a little healthy and uplifting fiction, a few articles” is unsurprising; all the same, it irks me to be obliged by a lack of candor on the part of the author to speculate about what I had hoped to learn from him.

An “affair of millions” might be hyperbolic, but quite a few magazines boasted a readership approaching seven figures.  True Story Magazine specialized in “confessionals” and was gradually approaching a circulation of two million; but it relied mainly on staff writers and divulged the reputedly authentic confidences of ordinary people; meanwhile Cosmopolitan featured reminiscences by Winston Churchill. Considering its circulation, the editor in question may well have been Barton W. Currie of the Ladies’ Home Journal.  

At any rate, Huxley describes it as a “journal” that

seldom comes my way and which, even when it does come, I never read.  (Life, after all, is so short, time flows so stanchlessly and there are so many interesting things to be done and seen and learnt, that one may be excused, I think, from perusing periodicals with circulations of over a million.)

Huxley was made an offer he felt compelled to refuse, even though a substantial sum was quoted by way of remuneration.  “I should have liked the money,” Huxley admitted.  “The trouble was that I simply could not write the required article.”

In the “course of a strenuous journalistic career,” Huxley had “written articles on an extraordinary variety of subjects, from music to house decorating, from politics to painting, from plays to horticulture and metaphysics.”  He had been [d]iffident at first” of his “powers,” but gradually came to “believe” that he “could, if called upon, write an article about anything.”  

“Ignorance,” he cheekily acknowledged,

is no deterrent to the hardened journalist, who knows by experience that an hour’s reading in a well-stocked library will be enough to make him more learned about the matter in hand than ninety-nine out of every hundred of his readers.

According to Huxley, the difficulty was that the subject matter proposed by the editor was altogether too familiar to him.  “Now,” he allowed, 

there are certain aspects of myself, about which I should feel no hesitation in writing.  I should have no objection, for example, to explaining in print why I am not a Seventh Day Adventist, why I dislike playing bridge, why I prefer Chaucer as a poet to Keats.  But the emissary of the great American periodical did not want me to write about any of these aspects of myself.  He wanted me to tell his million readers one of two things, cither “Why Women Are No Mystery to Me,” or “Why Marriage Converted Me From My Belief in Free Love.”

Those, Huxley insisted, were the “actual” prompts from which the editor refused to deviate.  His “protests” that he had “never believed in Free Love”—Huxley had been married since 1919, but the relationship was apparently so widely known to have been unconventional as to convince the editor that his prompts were apropos—that “women were profoundly mysterious to [him]—no less mysterious, at any rate, than men, dogs, trees, stones, and all the other objects living or inanimate in this extraordinary world—were ignored.” 

It was unacceptable to Huxley that readers, thus tantalized, would be “interested in [him] only in so far as [he] had been initiated into the mysteries of Aphrodite, or converted from the worship of illicit Eros to that of Hymen.”

And yet, as Huxley gathered without letting readers in on the process of gathering materials to support his findings, “not everyone” shared his “love of reticence.”  Judging from the pages of the unnamed magazine, and affirmed by its editor, there was no shortage of

literary men and women who were prepared to tell the world why their marriages were failures or successes, whichever the case might be; why they did, or didn’t, practise birth control; why and on what experimental grounds they believed in polygamy or polyandry; and so on.

Apparently, circulation of the unnamed periodical had

gone up by six hundred thousand since the publication of them had started.  Readers, it seemed, found them very helpful.  He gave me to understand that by writing at length and in detail why women were no mystery to me, I should be doing a great Social Service, I should be a Benefactor of Humanity.  The account of my experiences, he said, would help the million readers to solve their own soul-problems; my example would lighten them over dark and difficult stretches of their Life’s Road.

No such arguments could induce Huxley to change his mind, even at the prospect of appearing “odiously selfish, unsociable and misanthropic.”  Indeed, he found it “difficult to understand the confessor” who, to him, seemed an “exhibitionist, a monster of spiritual impudicity.”

The word “impudicity” had me reaching for the dictionary.  Meaning “immodesty,” its pairing with “monster” and “spiritual” also had me scratching my pate.  The phrase, which is uniquely Huxley’s own, suggests the latter-day confessors to which he alludes but never mentions to be a Frankensteinian creature of modern journalism.  Those who make a virtue of their failings, Huxley seems to say, not only willingly demean themselves but the profoundly spiritual act of introspection, the very perversion of which is the cashing in on an absolution that ought to be hard earned.

But is he saying as much? A self-professed agnostic rather than a believer in the Sacrament of Penance, Huxley uses the term “confession” loosely.  Meanwhile, the phrase “monster of spiritual impudicity” is so loaded and weighty, it quite over-eggs the meringue that is “The Present Fad of Self Confession.”

Huxley has nothing specific to say about what he calls the “modishness of self-revelation.”  Instead, he digresses by making sweeping statements on art as self-expression and the “public interest in the personality of artists,” a preoccupation whose roots he dates to ancient Greece.

Notwithstanding the long line of creative individuals who have “found it very profitable to play Boswell to their own Johnson,” Huxley argues, a

decent obscurity has generally veiled at least the nuptial chamber.  It was an obscurity, I must admit, whose decency we have all had reasons to deplore.  There are facts about the private lives of the great dead which we would give a great deal to know—which, owing to the silence of the great or of their friends we shall never know.

What Huxley confesses to, albeit facetiously, is a curiosity at odds with his reluctance likewise to speak candidly about himself and his censure of those who, in his view, overshare.  As a consumer of confidences, “one wishes”—because “one,” being Huxley, is presumably loath to say “I” when expressing desire—“that the great American periodicals had existed in Shakespeare’s day.  He might have contributed some interesting articles about Ann Hathaway and the Dark Lady of the Sonnets.”  So as not to lump the bard with the present self-confessors, Huxley adds: “He might; on the other hand he might not.”

Curtailing his fancy, Huxley immediately checks himself, concluding: “much as I should have liked to know about Ann Hathaway and the Dark Lady, I rather hope [Shakespeare] would not have written those articles” but instead shared Huxley’s professed “dislike for confession and a taste for reticence.”

“The Present Fad of Self Confession” is a curious exercise in restraint by a writer whose Music at Night, a volume of essays in which the Vanity Fair article reappeared in 1931, was described by one reviewer as “predominantly mellow.”  And while the “Gothic mind” of Huxley, which begot the “flippant, bitter, restless creatures of his fiction,” had “long been peculiarly cherished by the unconventional; Music at Night may endear him equally to the traditionalists.”

Make mine Gothic, I say.  Not only is “The Present Fad of Self Confession” frustratingly vague about the vogue that is its ostensible subject, it offers no insights, beyond the lure of remuneration, into need felt by autographically inclined writers to unbosom themselves and why that might be symptomatic of a present-day malaise, something that could reasonably be said about the age of selfies and self-publishing, of Instagram and Only Fans. 

In the startling phrase “monster of spiritual impudicity,” the repressed Gothic mind briefly reveals itself.  Yet, like the words “fad,” “present” and “confession” in the title, it remains ill-defined—an apparition that is not given the ghost of a chance to come into focus.  Unwarrantably shrill, it rings as hollow as a whistle being blown by an informant who fails to inform.

Besides, the so-called “self confessions” by famous personalities of the 1920s were not necessarily tawdry.  For instance, in “The Confessions of an Actor,” serialized in Ladies’ Home Journal between October 1925 and February 1926, the celebrated actor John Barrymore reminisced disarmingly about his younger days without admitting readers into the boudoirs of his Leading Ladies, dark or otherwise:

I have written that I mean to be frank.  I don’t mind recording that I look upon myself as something of a second-story man.  As a youth I was a good deal of a grafter.  I appropriated other men’s clothes and wore them — notably those of my uncle, John Drew, whose figure is still excellent! Once in England I overturned a punt and, having rescued my host’s wife from the raging waters of the Thames and walked her ashore, I continued to live in that house all summer as a reward for my heroism, and borrowed my host’s clothes because I had ruined mine in that same foot of water of that hospitable stream.

As a boy I was, I think, a little more fruitful in untruth than my contemporaries.  Also, I went in for theft.  I stole my grandmother’s jewels and hid them.  While the detectives were in the house, I imagine I must have looked very guilty for when my grandmother, Mrs. Drew, saw me, her one desire was to get rid of the detectives and talk to me with a well-worn slipper.  Before this I had pilfered money from the other members of the family, in such small amounts that suspicion was not aroused.  I carefully hoarded it till I had enough to buy a rosary for a symmetrical lady in Philadelphia, many years my senior, with whom I fancied myself in love.  What strange inroads religion makes into the minds of the young!

The “spiritual impudicity” to which Huxley alludes is a paper “monster” beaten to a pulp.  The paper on which it was first printed was not suited or amenable to the exposé Huxley might have wanted to make—nor to a public admission that the discretion of which he made a virtue was not entirely a personal choice.

Despite his insistence of having “no objection to indulging in bad taste” when “writing about other people,” Huxley, too self-conscious to show up the competitors of Vanity Fair in said periodical, traces the cult of personality as far back as antiquity rather than comment with mordant lucidity on the present market for confessionals he glibly decries as driven by money, a share of which he pockets at the cost of self-censorship.