Brave New Huxley
WEBSTER, HARVEY CURTIS
WRITERS & WRITING Brave New Huxley The Genius and the Goddess. By Aldous Huxley. Harper. 168 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster The case against Aldous Huxley, whom I like immensely,...
...He and Huxley will have no truck with denominational nonsense...
...Novels should be autotelic, never didactic, they say...
...What they'll say about The Genius and the Goddess will be even worse than what they said about Ape and...
...This is a Christian country and it's the Saviour's birthday...
...The excellent mind that writes essays about Goya, the whole truth, ends that must be justified by means, the perennial philosophy I regret not believing in, I admire, but, perhaps because of my own limitations, I disbelieve...
...So do Huxley's characters, though they are admittedly long talkers, perpetual analysts of what goes on in and about them, and more endowed with analytical understanding than with feelings, sympathies, etc...
...Huxley himself, through Philip Quarles, an obvious self-portrait, confesses to a lack of "that talent, which is of the heart, no less than of the head, of the feelings, the sympathies, the intuitions, no less than of the analytical understanding...
...I could and won't quote more...
...Huxley's primary virtue is that he makes dramatic in his novels what he says a little pedantically in his essays and biographies...
...Never from ours...
...Could it ever stay transfigured...
...It is his perpetual virtue that he never retires to easy satisfaction with comfortable and very simple answers...
...Maybe it's just a question of being in love with God...
...And man, in Hollywood today, dreadfully predicts Orwell's 1984...
...And...
...The novel, technically, follows Conrad's convention of the long talk not too aptly...
...And (River's again): "Why do you love the woman you're in love with...
...Indeed, it was only while rereading that I remembered that Maartens's wife...
...It is about Rivers who once idealized Maartens--Nobel Prize winner, physicist, and child--but ultimately permitted himself the pleasure-pain of sleeping with Maartens's wife...
...Huxley does make people into ideas, but how beautifully...
...My point is that the story's not the thing, though it's good enough to carry you on as the essays and books about saints and sinners only sometimes do...
...Granted that his search swerves often and brilliantly from Vedan-tism to Rhine-mind to euphoric drugs, that his knowledge is almost too encyclopedic, still his novels are always exciting if one isn't a smug and satisfied dogmatist...
...Actually, though novels certainly must have people in action in them, there are almost as many varieties of novels as there are serious novelists and there is no esthetic law that demands all people shall be four-dimensional...
...Old Rivers, sixtyish like Huxley, continues to hope and wonder...
...Those who do are labeled as pornographers...
...But the constant fact about Huxley that makes insignificant his deficiencies is his serious, not solemn, search for an answer for himself and for us and his limited, superior skill in communicating it...
...often he thinks he has the Grail but he's never certain enough to spoil his novels by the imposition of the one truth or the one God...
...I remember Rivers's remark by the way, "Those were the days when you could be a physicist without feeling guilty...
...His novels are a quest, rather like that of an intelligent Galahad...
...Do what he will, this world is not a fiction (however contradictory...
...though I have reservations...
...Ruth Maartens, the adolescent would-be sophisticate...
...But the main thing is ideas in action, morals in action, possible faiths in action...
...Sheldon whom Huxley often quotes in his essays, he is moved to write about cerebrotonics rather than about somatomes or visceratonies...
...Essence (1949), which was even worse than what they said about...
...He is a novelist primarily concerned with ideas and morals (not a Zola preoccupied with things as they are), and a novelist who perpetually searches for some way out of the obviously bad contemporary situation...
...Maybe from God's point of view.' he conceded...
...And that, after all, is God's own definition of himself...
...Like Matthew Arnold, his ancestor whom he often quotes, he seems to want to believe in something not ourselves that makes for righteousness, in a faith that is neither exclusive nor dogmatic...
...Though I didn't dislike them and liked hearing about them, I never felt against Maartens, for his wife, or for Rivers...
...they're no longer rapid or rambling...
...Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster The case against Aldous Huxley, whom I like immensely, is fairly simple to state...
...From then on, though there are a few things to smile at in Brave New World (1932), the descent has been so frightful that the deprecators have had great fun writing long reviews (or even essays) in which they point out the monotonous pattern of little action, unbelievably long and pedantic speeches posing as conversation, a group of vicious characters surrounding the spokesman for Huxley's current salve for salvation...
...Only in the novels, where in spite of himself, or at any rate in spite of his advocacy of the perennial philosophy, his fair skepticism intrudes, am I wholly, at any rate as I read, with him...
...is that it makes too much sense...
...The descent to serious thinking is lamentably marked in Point Counter Point (1928), which uses Gide's technique in The Counterfeiters ineptly and parodies the somewhat better presentation of his philosophy which Lawrence sometimes makes almost autotelic...
...As Virginia Woolf astutely said of Point Counter Point, he tends to make "people into ideas...
...Huxley's legitimate esthetic formula is ideas (embodied) in active conflict...
...In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Mickey Spillane and Maxwell and Thomas a Kempis...
...we'd be cut by all our respectable friends and might even end up in the asylum...
...Kathy, and her daughter, Ruth, were killed in an automobile accident...
...Practically everybody you see will be drunk...
...In between...
...The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance.'" On the last page, when the long and rewarding conversation that tells the tale has terminated, Rivers escorts the narrator to the door and says, "Drive carefully...
...It is always advantageous to praise a first novel so that you can show how much a novelist's work deteriorates...
...Still, what other contemporary English novelist knows as much, hopes for such good tilings, interests so consistently...
...I don't think the question too important...
...WRITERS & WRITING Brave New Huxley The Genius and the Goddess...
...They represent, however partially, what people are like and what they do or might do...
...Because she is...
...But even Virginia Woolf, as I suppose the creative artist usually must, is making the novel her own (very good) kind of novel...
...Grant Huxley's obvious limitations...
...Those who don't say so are liars...
...Facts possess neither...
...These deprecators, to whom I've undoubtedly been unfair, are stupid partly because they only pan for panning's sake, more basically because they think there is only one kind of novel, the sort James or Kafka or the friends whose backs they scratch write...
...Maybe what they settle for sometimes (peyotyl, extra-sensory perception) is more than a trifle shoddy (really I don't know...
...And Rivers again (here very clearly speaking for Huxley as I suspect he usually does): "Love is always accompanied by events in the nerve endings, the skin, the mucous membranes, the glandular and erectile tissues...
...same source: "One must never forget that the most implacable wars are never the wars about things...
...At first, say his deprecators, there were a few not very good but mildly amusing novels Chrome Yellow (1921), they say, was nearly good...
...None of his characters moves one deeply --even in sexual intercourse they seem to be thinking and analyzing: but they are a good deal more than the people spouting essays which Hemingway calls them...
...But if we said so...
...No religion answers adequately, though in moments that slip away too rapidly he believes his inner light is adequate...
...I did feel for emotionally...
...Those Barren Leaves (1925) has little that is witty, is too talky and already shows Huxley starting to find a solution for things...
...Reality never makes sense.'" "'Never?' I questioned...
...Huxley has limitations all right...
...Young Gumbril in 1922 (Antic Hay) "speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the existence and the nature of God...
...Antic Hay (1922) contains some amusing passages (almost as amusing as Wells, who of course was no great shakes) about advertising...
...they're the wars about the nonsense that eloquent idealists have talked about things...
...Actually, and this may be a remaking of an author by his critic, I believe that Huxley is a skeptic still (though, with a strong will to believe, he believes...
...Are Kafka's people "real" and could Pamela really have been...
...The proper study of mankind, like it or not, is man...
...I always look forward to each of Huxley's new books, as I did to The Genius and the Goddess, as I do to his next one (whether it's about a saint, devils, or mere cerebrotonics...
...What I remember is neither the love-making nor the violent deaths that conclude the novel...
...What I just wrote is a superficial description, of course...
...Then you stop being in love, and the universe collapses...
...To adopt the language of the Dr...
...Stoyte's search for an earthly paradise in carp-like longevity is what leads to not-Utopian nightmares...
...As always in Huxley, ideas bat one about from the first page to the last: "'The trouble with fiction, said John Rivers [page 1...
...Someone such as myself--who has lived a little belatedly through Huxley's disillusion and sought rather than found a security in faith --honors Huxley's search though he finds it difficult to believe he has found...
...Fiction has unity, fiction has style...
...I enjoyed reading The Genius and the Goddess and felt rewarded by it...
...Huxley's analytical understanding makes one think even if he doesn't feel...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 40
