When Theodore Gumbril hits upon the notion of designing a type of pneumatic
trouser to ease the discomfort of a sedentary life, he decides the time has
come to leave his position as housemaster in a boys' public school and seek his
fortune in the metropolis.When Theodore Gumbril hits upon the notion of designing a type of pneumatic
trouser ('a comfort to all travellers, indispensable to first-nighters, the
concert-goers' friends') to ease the discomfort of the sedentary life, he
decides the time has come leave his position as a housemaster in a boys' public
school and seek his fortune in the metropolis. But post-First-World-War London
seems to be gripped by a fever of hedonism. Gumbril is soon caught up in the
delirious world of aesthetes extraordinaire Mercaptan, Casimir Lypiatt and the
thoroughly civilised Myra Viveash, and finds his burning ambitions are
beginning to lose their urgency...A contemporary commentator coined the word
'futilitarian' to describe the type of desultory, pleasure-seeking intellectual
Huxley pinned so mercilessly to the literary map in Antic Hay. Wickedly funny
and deliciously barbed, the novel epitomises the glittering neuroticism of its
decade.
