When we were young, clueless, and longing to be profound, what a thrill it was to open a novel weirdly entitled “Eyeless in Gaza.” The thrill was doubled when the author turned out to be quoting “Samson Agonistes”: “Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves.” At one point in the novel, a pair of lovers are sunbathing on the roof when a dog falls out of an airplane and explodes right beside them. A quotation from Milton and a canine kaplooey: sophisticated, or what? That, kids, was the kind of multilevel blast that Aldous Huxley used to give us when he was current. Nowadays, the titles of his books are more alive than his books, but still the legend lingers. Godlike in his height, aquiline features, and omnidirectional intelligence, Huxley was a living myth. He was the myth of the man who knew everything. Inevitably, he attracted contrary myths designed to shrivel his looming outline. Among the counter-myths was the one about his holding forth on a string of topics at the dinner table. On every topic, he knew all there was to know. But a fellow-guest noticed that all the topics began with the same letter. Suspicious, the fellow-guest retired to the library and checked up. Huxley had been quoting verbatim from the Encyclopædia Britannica.
That particular counter-myth had an element of possibility. Huxley did indeed know his way around the Encyclopædia Britannica. From one of his early essays, we find that he owned a half-sized edition on thin paper, and when travelling always had a volume of it with him. But from the same essay we learn that Huxley carried the volume only because he could not concentrate properly while on the move. From all his other writings, we must deduce that when at his desk and undistracted he read everything, and not just in the humanities but in science, history, politics, sociology, psychology, and religion. He made people who were merely quite bright feel worse than stupid: he made them feel narrow. In Britain, his land of origin, critical disparagement became common after his resettlement to America, in 1937. Hadn’t those brittle young novels—“Crome Yellow,” “Antic Hay,” “Those Barren Leaves,” “Point Counter Point”—been flashily yearning for a wider world? But any feelings among his countrymen that their star had deserted them were only an adornment to a more basic feeling, expressed in an everyday motto you can still hear in British school playgrounds: “Nobody likes a clever dick.”
When he was living in Britain, Huxley was already a presence in the slick American magazines: he was an adopted figure of fashion, showing up in Vanity Fair like Noël Coward or Gertrude Lawrence. When he was living in America, he was given space in Esquire for his views and photo spreads in Life for his beautiful face, plausibly represented as an icon of higher thought: he was up there with Einstein. Fame in America, as usual, meant fame everywhere. While he was alive, Aldous Huxley was one of the most famous people in the world. After his death, in 1963, his enormous reputation rapidly shrank, until, finally, he was known mainly for having written a single dystopian novel about compulsory promiscuity and babies in bottles, “Brave New World,” and for having been some kind of pioneer hippie who took mescaline to find out what would happen. People of a certain age might still say that So-and-So is like someone out of “Point Counter Point,” but they will probably not have read it recently or at all. Only a specialist in post-Great War literature could quote from “Crome Yellow” or “Antic Hay” the way people quote from “The Great Gatsby” or “Decline and Fall.”
But the time might have arrived for Huxley’s return to the discomfort zone, where we have to deal with what he said as a permanently disturbing intellectual position rather than dismissing it as an obsolete set of fads and quirks. How should we live? Can nothing harmonize the turbulence of our existence? How can we stop development from destroying the human race? The questions that racked his brain are still with us. They drove him to mysticism in the end. If we don’t want them to do the same to us, we had better find out how so brilliant a man should come to believe in the All, the Good, the Transcendental, and a lot of other loftily capitalized words that look like panic disguised as tranquillity.
Shining a light in his eyes is a good way to start, because his eyesight, or lack of it, ruled his life more than he was willing to let on. He could talk about a wall-size Veronese as if he could see it in a single glance. Actually, he had to look at it a few square inches at a time. Chief among the many merits of Nicholas Murray’s new biography, “Aldous Huxley” (St. Martin’s; $29.95), is that it appreciates the full weight of his early tragedies without overdoing the retroactive prediction of their effects on his future behavior. But underdoing it would have been a grievous fault. One of the tragedies was the early loss of his beloved mother, another was the loss of a beloved brother; but those were merely devastating. What happened to his eyes changed the way he saw the world. Later on, as a grown man, he had to read about the discovery of antibiotics by holding his face very close to the page. Had they arrived earlier, his disease, an inflammation of the cornea, would have been cured instantly. As things were, he was left at the age of sixteen with only one eye functioning, and that only partly. He was one of Eton’s star pupils, but from then on nothing was effortless.
Nor should we conclude from the famous names of his school and family that he had been issued a free pass by his background. His grandfather was the eminent Victorian scientist T. H. Huxley. His great-uncle was Matthew Arnold. But his parents, despite the splendor of his ancestry, belonged only to the working upper-middle class, not to the landed gentry. Most of the wealth in the house was the wealth of the mind, and he would have led no cushy life even had he been able to see properly. But his ruined eyes made the life of a writer into hard labor: for most of his career, he was hoping to score the hit in the theatre which would free him from the treadmill of piecework and the forcing house of the multi-book contract. At the start, he showed heroic tenacity in continuing to prepare himself. At Balliol College, Oxford, he went on reading at his usual rate of eight hours a day even if he had to do it with a magnifying glass. Sometimes not even the magnifying glass would do the trick. From his fluent prose style—it always loped along, even when its feet were no longer in contact with the earth—you might have guessed that he read Macaulay, but not that he read him in Braille. English was still a new subject at Oxford. Determined not to waste what was left of his eyesight on trash, Huxley read everything in English literature that mattered. He had already started to do the same in French literature while he was still at school. The result of his literary studies, formal and informal, was the solid foundation of what Murray calls his “wide and easy allusiveness.” We are bound to acknowledge the “wide” but should put a question mark over the “easy.” A macaronic tendency to drag in an untranslated quotation, whether in French, German, Italian, or Spanish, marked his prose for the rest of his life, and could have been a tacit claim that there was really not very much wrong with his eyes, if he could take in all that print. In any audience for the ballet there is someone with a bad leg who knows an awful lot about dancing.
Against the odds, Huxley managed to give himself a magnificent preliminary education. But, somehow, it had to be turned to account. The option of enlisting as an officer and joining the bulk of his generation in the graveyards of the Great War had been providentially removed by his affliction. Instead, his front line was Garsington, the country house where Lady Ottoline Morrell assembled around her the most glittering cenacle of the time. Bertrand Russell, T. S. Eliot—round up the usual suspects. If one scans the roster of those in attendance, it is hard to find an unrecognizable name. D. H. Lawrence was present to study the hypercultivated haute bourgeoisie that he would later despise in print for having presumed to tolerate his rebellious nature. Eyeless in Garsington, Huxley orated to the gathering because he was unable to read faces well enough to pursue an ordinary conversation. Erratically enthusiastic, Ottoline was often made fun of in retrospect, and especially by the writers she fed for free. Huxley was not guiltless in that regard. Though his adult life was marked by his personal kindness, he made a cruel caricature of her as Priscilla Wimbush in his first novel, “Crome Yellow” (1921).
In its form a throwback to the novels of Thomas Love Peacock, “Crome Yellow” teems with bright people making speeches. When they make speeches, they tend to quote other speeches. Even the few dullards, wheeled in for purposes of contrast, are weighed down with learning. Take the journalist Mr. Barbecue-Smith, allegedly the author of platitudinous best-sellers peddling spiritual uplift. Huxley introduces him thus:
Mr. Barbecue-Smith should have been a perfect oaf, but Huxley could not resist making him an oaf who had read Balzac. So the range of reference deployed by Mr. Scogan, the accredited philosopher, can be imagined; or, rather, it can’t. One of his speeches goes on almost uninterrupted for two and a half pages, bringing in a large part of the history of civilization since the Renaissance as he forecasts the rationally ordered future. (“In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity’s almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically exploited.”) Pursuing an idea, the characters come to a standstill and spout, like the fountains in the garden. From our viewpoint, they would do better to pursue their passions. Luckily, Priscilla pursues hers: the New Thought, the Occult—for her, these things are objects of desire, tantalizingly retreating before her down the corridors of her house and out the French windows. Weirdly got up and tireless in her extravagance, she made the book a hit. Everybody loved it except Ottoline. Murray points out that Huxley apologized when she bridled, but the sad fact is that he betrayed her all over again, when he sent Lilian Aldwinkle heavily emoting through the pages of “Those Barren Leaves” (1925). As the chatelaine of the Cybo Malaspina, a Garsington relocated to Italy, Lilian has all of Priscilla’s mad passions plus one: she is a menopausal man-eater aching to blend with just one more genius. If all the other characters had been given the free rein he gave Lilian, “Those Barren Leaves” would never have ceased to be required reading. Alas, the book’s leading man is a typical Huxley hero: effortlessly knowledgeable and seductive, he tires of all that and retreats to a hilltop to make long speeches about his quest for a higher form of being. His soliloquies leave you longing for Lilian, who has Ottoline’s lust for life along with her thirst for a fad. Though Ottoline might have been a bit much in her untiring zeal as a people-hunter, as a dinner-table hostess she was a genuine spotter of talent, and Huxley’s talent was hard to miss, anyway.
The crucial event at Garsington came in the bewitching form of his future wife, Maria. Belgian, art-struck, and delicately lovely, she had a crush on Ottoline but transferred it to Huxley. He was a lucky man. His mother reborn, Maria became the key to his existence. She typed his manuscripts, set up the houses, fended off the pests, and, according to Sybille Bedford’s 1973 biography, vetted his mistresses, generously employing her own charms to help him pull in the best-qualified candidates. Murray’s biography features, for the first time in print, the story of the ménage à trois among Huxley, Maria, and the Bloomsbury siren Mary Hutchinson. Considering that Huxley spent so much time in later years talking about the necessity to civilize the sexual impulse, it is instructive to find out that he himself civilized it by indulging it to the hilt. In “Brave New World,” it will be remembered, the Alpha males of the ruling élite get their fill of the designated babes. It turns out that Huxley wasn’t just dreaming.
The old, integrated Europe is generally thought to have been atomized by the Great War, but it had fallen apart only politically. Still the stamping ground of the artistic-minded élite, Europe had entered on yet another civilized phase. For English people with the means and tastes to get themselves to a villa and stay there, France and Italy were homes away from home. Effectively, there were no borders for the enlightened. With Maria smoothing the way at the wheel of a new Bugatti, the successful young novelist Huxley was one of the star turns and recorders of a movable feast. It is easy to see how he was confirmed in the insidious idea that the cultivated élite should cherish its separation from the mass of humanity. Though later on he softened the proclivity, he never quite lost his readiness to blame the mobile vulgus for multiplying at an indecent rate. (He even had the percentages worked out: 0.5 per cent were in the club, 99.5 per cent were outside. Hands up if you know where you fit.) The best we can say for him is that he did not fall for Fascism.
There were Fascists all around his Italian villas. Though he initially saw them as not much worse than a bad comic opera whose chorus was prone to fisticuffs, he finally concluded, long before the Nazis established their full grip on Germany, that a totalitarian solution to the anomalies of mass society was worse than the problem. Commendably, he grasped most of the horrors of the Soviet regime straightaway. He wasn’t the only one who thought that industrial society was turning out too many idiots, and he was on the side of the angels, or seemed so, in proclaiming that one of the greatest dangers the idiots posed was that they might elect dictators. Not liking dictators qualified him as a progressive in a period when George Bernard Shaw saluted Hitler as an exemplar of creative energy and H. G. Wells nose-dived to the foot of Stalin’s throne. As early as 1928, in “Point Counter Point,” the crowning novel of his early success, Huxley had created a British proto-Fascist called Everard Webley. With a strident rhetoric that was later echoed by Sir Oswald Mosley (moving in the same high social circle, Huxley had spotted Mosley on the way up), Webley makes long speeches about planning. The speeches help to wreck what might have been a classic novel. An obvious victim of Huxley’s multi-book contract, “Point Counter Point” has at least two different false starts folded into it, and, as usual, most of the characters speak essays to the air, instead of speaking dialogue to each other. Fortunately, the essayist who speaks for Huxley is not Webley. It is the brilliant (of course) writer Philip Quarles: “The problem for me is to transform a detached intellectual scepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living.” Quarles is after the All. Webley is after power, and Huxley knew there was a difference.
Nevertheless, Huxley followed prevalent fashion in assuming that industrial societies would have to be organized somehow, and that some form of élite would do the organizing. Beneath the supposed satire of “Brave New World,” which was a sensation when it appeared, in 1932, and for long afterward, there is a deep acceptance of this putative necessity. In the book, the Alpha ruling élite controls the supply of sex and drugs, the rewards by which they themselves are consoled in their task, and by which all the lower orders down to the Epsilon semi-morons are kept in line. It hasn’t turned out that way. Today, the supply does the controlling, and the Alphas are even more likely than the Epsilons to end up being treated for addiction. If Huxley was warning the world that even a free society might be tempted into totalitarianism, he was doing something useful. The society of “Brave New World” includes an outcast reservation of Savages—they can be visited in their theme park by helicopter—who suffer from love, pain, and poetry, as the human race once did before science came to its aid. Thus Huxley pays lip service to his humanist belief that creativity is too important a hostage to be given over to an ideal of improvement. But he was scarcely likely to aid his humanist cause by assuming that the alternative to planning wrong was planning right. Deep within the book is an idea that he had nursed from childhood and would never lose: one way or another, an élite would have to be in charge. “Brave New World” doesn’t attack that idea. It reinforces it, by leaving open the possibility that there might be a less flagrantly manipulative way for an intelligentsia to determine the lives of the common people.
Huxley’s fondness for the idea of “intelligent and active oligarchies” (the term popped up in a 1927 article for Harper’s called “The Outlook for American Culture”) might have sprung from his shortage of sympathy for the 99.5 per cent. No doubt he backed eugenics for the same reason. But his pacifism was something else: it indicated a shortage of political sense. As a leading light of the Peace Pledge Union in the nineteen-thirties, he went public with his private notion that war would happen less often if more people could be persuaded to dislike it. The persuasion would be done by the enlightened, who would give an example by personally embracing a life of peace. Just as he could never accept that a decent system of ethics would be more likely to arise in a school for mentally handicapped children than among any intellectual élite, no matter how attuned to the Transcendental, he could never accept that peace is not a principle, merely a desirable state of affairs.
Huxley, however, was not the only genius talking poppycock about politics, and few of the others had his cachet as a novelist. His success in Europe was complete, but his need to earn would never let him rest. Financially, he was walking a tightrope no stronger than a shoestring. His reasons for resettling in California were excellent, and there was not even any need to lower his exalted standards of smart company. With America’s share of the next war drawing ever nearer, Los Angeles became one of the intellectual centers of the modern world as European refugees flocked in. Thomas Mann had been on the Normandie with the Huxleys on the trip over (characteristically, the modern Goethe had travelled first class, but uncharacteristically he condescended to visit them in steerage), and now he was sharing the same sunlight. America didn’t isolate Huxley. But it did insulate him.
Those who think that Huxley’s fine brain turned to mush in California are apt to ascribe his declension to the mind-bending stuff he took in: the Wisdom of the East, hallucinogenic drugs, ESP. They tend to ignore the significance of what he left out. He never really grasped that the war was bound to be something much bigger than a conflict between nationalisms; that it would leave, when the smoke cleared, no alternative to accepting liberal democracy as the only guarantee of liberty; and that in liberty there could be no such thing as a universally shared “perennial philosophy.” (“The Perennial Philosophy,” his 1945 book compounding all the positive thoughts of West and East into a tutti-frutti of moral uplift, was the equivalent, in its day, of “It Takes a Village”: there was nothing in it to object to, and that, of course, was the objection.) He was fatally well placed to go on believing that mankind could and should aspire to a higher state than the one it was stuck in.
There was nothing perverse about his interest in Eastern philosophy. Nor was there necessarily anything preposterous about his conviction that mind-expanding drugs might be worth looking into. People who appear to have everything must be excused for bombing their own brains in the hope that there might be something more. Huxley’s interest in ESP, however, showed a serious anomaly. At Duke University, Professor J. B. Rhine had made extrasensory perception a laboratory study. Huxley was not just keen to believe that Rhine had discovered something substantial; he wanted to believe that statistical analysis had proved Rhine correct. Huxley’s sympathy for the sciences made him a valuable advocate for their creative connection to the humanities. But the language that connected the sciences was mathematics, and his competence in mathematics went no further than high school. About science, the best Huxley could do was talk an extraordinarily good game.
Damagingly, his fluent talk about science mesmerized even him. He tried to sound scientific about the world’s political crises, but doing so made him insufficiently critical. He went on advocating solutions to problems that he had misstated. He kept on wondering how an economy could be rationally planned, without ever wondering whether it should be. Huxley still thought that if the world’s population increased beyond a certain point all those people would run out of food. Never having placed sufficient weight on the fact that it was the advance of technology that had increased the birth rate, he placed still less weight on the capacity of technology to solve the problem.
Safely domiciled in a part of the world that suffered least from deprivation and political instability, he took his surroundings for granted as a set of conditions from which mankind could aspire to higher things, instead of as the higher thing that the rest of the world could only aspire to. Had he been less cushioned, the war and its aftermath might have made more impact on his thought. Karl Popper, exiled to New Zealand during the war, was forced by the memory of his experience in Europe to reach a minimum definition of democracy. It was the system in which the government could be replaced at the people’s whim, so that no oligarchy, intelligent or otherwise, could perpetuate itself in power. The implication was that the 99.5 per cent didn’t need to be instructed; all they needed was to have a vote. In Britain, Friedrich von Hayek reached the conclusion that a liberal democracy could have a planned economy only to the point where government regulations protected the people against arbitrary injustice. In Paris when the war was over, Albert Camus, having seen both Nazis and Communists in action from close up, defined democracy as that regime created and sustained by those who know that they do not know everything.
Huxley might have reached some of these conclusions himself had he not remained so convinced that mass ignorance was the world’s chief enemy. All the opportunities were there for Huxley in America, and he even, for a while, took one of them. The extravagance of California overwhelmed his analytical faculties for just long enough to allow his full creativity to take over. Unfairly overshadowed by Evelyn Waugh’s “The Loved One,” Huxley’s own response to California, “After Many a Summer Dies the Swan,” was and remains his best novel by far. (In Britain, it is more catchily called just “After Many a Summer”: an American editor must have thought the allusion to Tennyson needed spelling out.) Where his early novels were silted up by the Nilotic flood of his compulsive erudition, “After Many a Summer” shows, for once, a gusto for the vulgar. Every Los Angeles novel quotes the billboards, but Huxley quotes them with enjoyment—possibly because the words were big enough for him to read. Sunbathing on the heights of her magic castle, Virginia Maunciple, the pure-minded sexpot, harks forward irresistibly to Terry Southern’s Candy Christian. Virginia knows nothing. She merely exists, while the men go mad around her. Most of the other characters are, for a change, sufficiently alive to speak their own individual dialogue, instead of getting it from the library that Huxley carried in his head. Even more unusual for Huxley, the import of the book is that the observable world is all there is. The shattering final scene, when the immortal people turn out to be apes, is there to tell us that, wherever humanity might be heading, eternal life isn’t it.
That one marvellous novel pointed the way Huxley might have gone next. But finally it, too, is programmatic, and proves that Huxley was right to suppose that he was something less than an artist. Ever since Garsington, Huxley had been great friends with D. H. Lawrence, who died in Maria’s arms. In homage to Lawrence, Huxley had always been generously ready to concede that feeling might rank above thinking. But Huxley needed a humility beyond generosity: he needed to see that his longed-for higher state of being, the harmony that would make a unity out of eternal conflict, already existed, and that art was it. He loved art of every kind. His essays prove it. Few critics in modern times have written better about poetry. When he talks about Chaucer, he sends you running to the nearest copy of the Canterbury Tales. In a 1923 essay, he said of Chaucer, “He is not horrified by the behavior of his fellow-beings, and he has no desire to reform them.” Coming from Huxley, who did have a desire to reform them, the praise rings doubly true: it ran against the grain of his preconceptions but was in line with his aesthetic sense. To read all the essays in sequence is like being enrolled at the college of your dreams. They have all recently been published again as “Complete Essays” (Ivan R. Dee; $35 each), in six scholarly volumes (not scholarly enough in places: too many of those foreign phrases still go untranslated), edited by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. With due acknowledgment for their efforts, however, a less daunting way to read Huxley’s essays is in the original collections. “Music at Night,” published in 1931, would be a good place to start, because it shows how wide-ranging and undogmatic he could be when writing about the humanities. When engaged with them, he was responding to what he really knew. In other fields, he only thought he knew—a different state of consciousness altogether.
Despite the inevitable outbursts of bookishness, Huxley’s essays are easy to read and always informative, even when all they now inform us of is how much of his scientific information has gone out of date. What they lack is the inventiveness he lavished on his novels but seldom followed up because he wanted to philosophize instead. If the novels were too much invaded by the essay, his essays were insufficiently invaded by the novel, which is a soul-searching instrument, a register of the mind’s adventures, not of the memory’s contents. If he had put everything into his expository prose, he might have lifted it to a level at which it would have been possible to question his own assumptions, and thus make a drama out of a monologue. An essay written in 1956, “Hyperion to a Satyr,” hints that he might have invented the New Journalism all on his own, had he realized the potential. Here’s how it starts: “A few months before the outbreak of the Second World War I took a walk with Thomas Mann on a beach some fifteen or twenty miles southwest of Los Angeles.” And it gets better: “At our feet, and as far as the eye could reach in all directions, the sand was covered with small whitish objects, like dead caterpillars. Recognition dawned. The dead caterpillars were made of rubber.”
It turns out that the beach no longer has such visitations, thanks to the postwar construction of the gigantic Hyperion Activated Sludge Plant. Unfortunately for the reader, the intervention of the sludge plant is the point where Huxley’s tactics as an essayist return to normal. He gives us a long, global, and no doubt reliable history of sewage treatment since earliest times, but neglects the opportunity to argue with himself. For a writer who had spent his lifetime decrying the onward march of the Machine and rooting for the ideal of the small, self-sustaining community, an industrial development the size of the Hyperion sludge plant should have given him pause to reflect. He approves of it but forgets that his approval should be the start of a discussion, not the end. One side of him could have said that the plant was busy neutralizing waste products that need not have existed if industrial society had not been churning out the wrong stuff. But another side could have said that the ordinary human waste was being converted into a stream of water a lot less toxic than the Ganges. In such an internal argument, his admiration for Eastern wisdom might have had to be tempered with a more nuanced view of Western practicality. He could have faced the possibility that a world free to do so would go on creating itself with an exponential complexity that could not be fully known, and that even the brightest analyst would have to resign himself to running out of answers. But perhaps, tacitly, he had faced it, and had gone seeking refuge in the upper realms for that very reason.
If he had dramatized the conflicts that were inherent in his concepts, he might have arrived at the higher reality that was already all around him. He might have helped to defend its confusing multiplicity against the attack that would be a long time coming but is now here: the attack from the imposers of harmony, the adepts of the All. Alas, he was one of them, because of his ineradicable belief that the mass of mankind was too dense to see the inner light. But there is no mass of mankind. There are only individuals, and except in a society that is not free they will always refuse to be persuaded that their everyday lives are not worth living. You can tell from their faces, if you’ve got eyes. ♦
