SOURCE: “Struggles with Style and Form: From the Early Verse to ‘Crome Yellow,’” in Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality, Indiana University Press, 1970, pp. 1-38.

In the following excerpt from his full-length study of Huxley's works, Holmes discusses the early story “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers” and notes its autobiographical elements.

In Aldous Huxley's “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers,”¹ an intelligent, stable, normal man tells the story of his odd but brilliant friend named Emberlin. Emberlin, we learn, has been studying Eupompus, the fifth century B.C. painter mentioned by Ben Jonson, who actually did base his splendid canvases on numbers. One pictured a three-eyed, three-armed, three-naveled human being accompanied by thirty-three thousand “distinctly limned” black swans; others grouped people so as to imitate exactly the various constellations. Eupompus' final painting was designed to symbolize Pure Number, in the form of a “design...