Aldous Huxley A biographic introductionby Phlip Thody
Ch 6 The Perennial Philosophy [79]
One of the most surprising features of Aldous Huxley's work and ideas, especially when one remembers the goodness radiating from him in his personal relationships, is a recurrent anti-semitism which shows itself not only in incidental remarks in books and letters but also in his approach to a number of religious, philosophical and historical questions.
In this respect hehas a distinguished predecessor in Voltaire, who agreed with him in accepting the myth that the Jews possess immense financial power, and who would also have underwritten the disapproval expressed both in Do What You Will and Ends and Means for what Huxley regarded as the characteristic feature of semitic thought: a single-minded devotion to a particular concept of God and history. At the time of Huxley's professed and militant agnosticism,
the essentially Jewish idea that there is only one God ran counter to his admiration of the Greeks for their polytheism, for their ability to recognize that 'all the manifestations of life are god-like, and every element of human nature has a right - a divine right - to exist and find expression'.'
While when he became a mystic, the ritualistic and authoritarian tendencies of Old Testament thinking seemed to him totally opposed to the best traditions of the perennial philosophy, and to the tolerance for different psychological types implied by the 'eight-fold path' of Buddhism.
In Do What You Will, Huxley declares with some vehemence that humanity would have been much better off if the Jews had remained 'not forty but four thousand years in their repulsive wilderness'.
In Do What You Will, Huxley declares with some vehemence that humanity would have been much better off if the Jews had remained 'not forty but four thousand years in their repulsive wilderness'.
We should then have avoided, he argues, both the persecuting tendencies inseparable from monotheism and the admiration for worldly success which the Protestant thinkers of the sixteenth century inherited directly from the Old Testament. We should also have been spared the cruelty and intolerance which 'that old-fashioned Hebrew prophet in scientific fancy-dress, Karl Marx' made into an integral part of communism, and should not still be suffering from 'the native incapacity of the Jews to be political', and which made them so incapable of organizing their national life with the same respect for diversity of opinion that characterized the Greek city state.
In Ends and Means, Huxley elaborates on the implications of this remark, as he deplores the influence on European thought wielded by the Old Testament, that 'history of the cruelties and treacheries of a Bronze-Age people, fighting for a place in the sun under the protection of its anthropomorphic tribal deity',2 and it is strange how a book written in praise of tolerance should sometimes have so self-righteous a tone.
It is nevertheless not difficult for the student of European history to agree with Huxley that the results of the belief in a God of Battles have been uniformly disastrous, and to appreciate his reasons for seeing Jewish thought as principally responsible both for such 'criminal lunacies' as the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and for the tendency of Christianity to become the least mystical of the world religions.
It is nevertheless not difficult for the student of European history to agree with Huxley that the results of the belief in a God of Battles have been uniformly disastrous, and to appreciate his reasons for seeing Jewish thought as principally responsible both for such 'criminal lunacies' as the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and for the tendency of Christianity to become the least mystical of the world religions.
Because the Jews saw God as standing above and apart from man,
Christianity has been suspicious
of such mystical thinkers as Eckhart, with his remark that 'God is not good, I am good',
or of Ruysbroeck and his view that 'God in the depths of us receives God who comes to us; it is God contemplating God'.3
For orthodox Christians, in Huxley's opinion,
God is wholly separate and different from man, an angry father who must be placated, and a cruel tyrant who demanded the death of his son as a ransom to save mankind from hell.
The Eastern religions, which escaped the essentially semitic concepts of monotheism and of an avenging God, have a much more sensible vision of Him. For them, He is both immanent and transcendent, and
there can be no question of man fulfilling his religious duties by sacrificing himself to a jealous and angry Father.
God is manifest wherever love triumphs over hatred, or when tolerance and non-attachment overcome the self-assertive imperialism which Huxley presents as having been the ruin of European religious thought and political life.
Since 'the eye with which God sees us is the same as the eye with which we see him...' there is no danger in the pure mystical tradition of man alienating himself by his religious beliefs.
The most that can be said in defence of Huxley's more extreme remarks in Do What You Will and Ends and Means is that they are directed less against the Jews as a race than against a set of mental and spiritual attitudes which he would have found equally objectionable in any group of people.
The most that can be said in defence of Huxley's more extreme remarks in Do What You Will and Ends and Means is that they are directed less against the Jews as a race than against a set of mental and spiritual attitudes which he would have found equally objectionable in any group of people.
Some of his incidental comments in his letters, such as his remark about having to follow the wishes of 'the all-powerful Jewish gentleman in charge of distribution' whenever one had anything to do with the cinema, are less defensible;
while the description in Do What You Will of 'those mournfully sagging, sea-sicklishly undulating melodies of mother-love and nostalgia and yammering amorousness and clotted sensuality' as 'the characteristically Jewish contribution to modern popular music' is, to put it mildly, unkind.4
On a more general level, it is curious to note how, in Huxley's case, the anti-semitism associated in other writers - except, of course, Voltaire - primarily with authoritarian modes of thought such as fascism, reflects a hostility towards any kind of doctrinaire thinking.
What he cannot stand about the Old Testament is its exaltation of tradition and authority over the freedom of the [8o ] individual to choose his own values and mode of life, and in this he again resembles his paternal grandfather. There is nevertheless an important difference between the iconoclasm of Antic Hay or Do What You Will and the hostility to authoritarian modes of religious or political thought in Ends and Means or The Perennial Philosophy.
The scepticism of Huxley's later period is far more obviously directed to moral ends, and does not apply either to the taboos on sexual conduct mocked in Do What You Will or to the tenets of mystical religion dismissed as meaningless in Jesting Pilate.
'To travel', he had written in 1926, 'is to discover that everyone is wrong.'
In Ends and Means, in 1937, he declares that 'among human beings who have reached a certain level of civilization and of personal freedom from passion and social prejudice, there exists a real con-sensus gentium with regard to ethical first principles'. What is perhaps rather surprising, in view of the caustic remarks which he made about mysticism in his earlier career is that he should find this consensus gentium in the field of religious philosophy.
All mysticism and transcendentalism, he had declared in Do What You Will, in 1928, formed part of an attempt to escape from 'the welter of imme¬diate experience'; and he condemned any search for a unified and consistent world view on the grounds that 'absolute oneness is absolute nothingness; homogeneous perfection, as the Hindus per¬ceived and courageously recognised, is equivalent to non-existence, to nirvana'.
In 1937, he writes that 'the mystical experience testifies to the existence of a spiritual unity underlying the diversity of separate consciousness', and speaks of the 'web of understanding which, in the mind of the accomplished intellectual, connects the atom with the spiral nebula and both with this morning's breakfast, the music of Bach, the poetry of neolithic China, what you will'.
The contrast with the statement in Do What You Will that 'a tree, a table, a newspaper, a piece of artificial silk are all made of wood. But they are, none the less, distinct and separate objects', could hardly be greater.5
The Perennial Philosophy is undoubtedly a fascinating book.
===
Ch 7 Mysticism and the novel
It is indeed as parables exemplifying the formal conclusions of The Perennial Philosophy that Huxley's next two novels, After Many a Summer (i) and Time Must Have a Stop (1945), are, initially at least, best studied. In both of them, there is a chorus figure whose ideas and presence provide an alternative to the obvious follies which the main narrative depicts; while a well-told tale, and some vividly depicted villains, drive home the moral which is never far below the surface. However apparently scandalous their subject-matter, all the books which Huxley wrote after 1936 were very much in the Arnold tradition of using literature to convey moral truths and the later part of his career could in many ways be seen as the gradual assertion, in his personality as a writer, of the Arnold concern for moral and spiritual values over the iconoclasm and scientific approach of the Huxleys.
It is also noticeable that these two later novels have a much stronger story line than Huxley's earlier fiction. When only ideas matter, and where the characters are cut off from the real world in the country house-party atmosphere of Crome Yellow or Those Barren Leaves, the narrative does not really count; and a well-made plot would imply that both society itself and the social behaviour of human beings deserve to be taken seriously. Yet while the greater attention given to story-telling in After Many a Summer and Time Must Have a Stop reflects Huxley's greater concern for moral values, it is still - as it was in the twenties - the more scandalous events that make the novels so immediately readable. And however intellectually vulnerable Huxley's newly propounded religious views may have appeared to certain readers, they destroyed nothing of the appeal which his novels made to the adolescent with an equal interest in sex and ideas. Indeed, the very fact that his mysticism did give rise to argument only increased the appeal of his novels; while the absurd exaggerations of his later fiction, the obvious villains, the sometimes preposterous but always brilliantly expressed ideas, the easily assimilated rival philosophies, the vast historical generalizations, the continuous scorn poured on middle-aged fathers and conventional politicians, the gothic horror of the plots, the combination of Voltairean wit and Bunyanesque religious fervour, all seem in retrospect to have been deliberately calculated to make the same impact on those who were in their teens in the nineteen-forties that Antic Hay or Point Counter Point had made on similar minds fifteen years earlier. Both After Many a Summer and Time Must Have a
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Stop also deal, albeit superficially, with politics; and both reflect the conclusion, easily accepted in the nineteen-forties, that the industrialized Western democracies offered no hope at all for the future of mankind.
After Many a Summer was the first of Huxley's novels to be set mainly in the United States, and its account of at least one aspect of American life shows Huxley in what was, for him, the rather unusual role of a pioneer whose most fruitful experiments were more successfully exploited by other people. Jo Stoyte, the millionaire whose terror of death provides the mainspring of the plot, has among his many investments The Beverly Pantheon, the 'Personality Cemetery', whose Tower of Resurrection cost two hundred thousand dollars, and whose fountains, statues, perpetual Wurlitzers, Pets' Corner, Church of the Poet and 'Children's Corner with its statues of Peter Pan and the Infant Jesus' are a prefiguration of the comparable horrors which Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One did not reveal to most English readers until 1953. Huxley had been living in southern California since 193, and the impact which a civilization whose advertisement hoardings conspire to offer spiritual healing, colonic irrigation, blocklong hotdogs and 'abiding youth with thrillform brassieres', made on his still essentially Victorian personality is presented through the reactions of one of his best observed minor characters, Jeremy Pordage. Jeremy, whose 'small, fluty voice, suggestive of evensong in an English cathedral', is 'a product of Trinity College, Cambridge, ten years before the war' - just as Huxley's Balliol accent was still, as he recognized in 1949, that of 'the Oxford of Jowett and Lewis Carroll' - has been hired by Jo Stoyte to catalogue one of his latest cultural acquisitions, the Hauberk papers. It is Jeremy's discovery of the diary kept by the Fifth Earl, in the late eighteenth century, which brings the action of the novel suddenly back to England, and gives After Many a Summer the most outlandishly gruesome ending in all Huxley's fiction.
Jo Stoyte's terror of death, originally created by the text which his maternal grandmother, a Plymouth Sister, had hung over his bed -'It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living God' - has led him to engage as house physician an expert in longevity with the almost palindromic name of Obispo. At the same time, Jo Stoyte is indulging in what the Fifth Earl refers to as King David's remedy,' and it is his affair with the ironically named Virginia Maunciple which leads After Many a Summer to become as violent a novel as Point Counter Point. Virginia has been seduced by Sigmund Obispo - who perhaps owes his first name less to Huxley's anti-semitism than to his dislike of Freud - and Jo Stoyte finds the two lovers together. Uncharacteristically, however, he is not carrying his automatic pistol, and has to dash to his study to find it. By the time he comes back, Virginia is no longer with Dr Obispo but with his amiable research assistant Pete, whose idealized and wholly innocent love for Virginia has led him to comfort her by placing his hand on her shoulder. Pete is consequently shot in place of the real culprit, and Mr Stoyte is totally in Dr Obispo's power. Only Obispo can sign the death certificate camouflaging the murder into an accident, and his price for doing it is high. The crisis also leads Mr Stoyte to look more favourably at the suggestion which has come to Dr Obispo as a result of Jeremy's continued exploration of the Fifth Earl's diary, and to consider a different remedy against death and old age. The Fifth Earl, it emerges, also had an interest in longevity, and spent much time meditating on the immense age of carps swimming in his ponds. A diet of 'raw, triturated Viscera of freshly opened Carp' restores his youthful vigour to the point where he fathers three illegitimate children at the age of eighty-one, and is subsequently involved in so dramatic a scandal that he has to retire from the world. He does so by arranging a fake funeral, and seeking refuge - now at the age of almost a hundred - in the cellars of his country mansion. Intrigued by this cessation of the diary, Obispo, Stoyte, Jeremy and Virginia take ship to England. There, they find the Fifth Earl, together with the mistress he had persuaded to share in his experiments, still alive at the age of two hundred and one. Unfortunately, however, he has turned into an ape. A dog, someone remarks earlier in the novel, is a wolf that has not fully developed. So, Dr Obispo discovers, man is 'a foetal ape that has not had time to grow up'.2 Except, of course, for the Fifth Earl. As Jo Stoyte watches the simian quarrellings and copulations with which the Fifth Earl and his mistress fill their eternal life, he breaks the silence:
'How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?' he said in a slow, hesitating voice. 'I mean, it wouldn't happen at once. . . there'd be a long time while a person. . . well, you know; while he wouldn't change any. And once you get over the first shock - well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don't you think so, Obispo?' he insisted.
Dr Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again.
Scientifically, the ending of After Many a Summer is nonsense. A million years of evolution cannot be reversed in the space of a hundred years, and the grotesque horror of the ending is meaningful only on a moral plane. If men seek to fly above the human condition, they will sink infinitely below it; and the fate of the Fifth Earl bears out the Greek idea that nemesis follows hubris as the night the day. But this is not the only idea in After Many a Summer. The chorus figure, Mr Propter, waxes eloquent on what he himself refers to as
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the 'old, boring inescapable truths' of the misery of life at a human level and the possibilities of mystical experience, on the inadequacy of literature, the case for pacifism, on the advantages of Jeffersonian democracy, with its cult of economic self-reliance, over modern, centralized industry, and on the nature of God and the need for a 'calculus of eternity' to transcend the limitations of ordinary language. However, just as Pete is beginning to see that only Mr Propter can make sense of the 'absurd, insane, diabolical confusion of it all', he is shot dead by Mr Stoyte; and in the same way that Maurice Spandrel's deliberate cult of evil has a far deeper effect than the more attractive theories of Mark Rampion on the way people behave in Point Counter Point, so the Fifth Earl's diary sets out a view of life which is much more in keeping with Huxley's account of what life is like than any idea expressed by Mr Propter.
'The Christians' writes the Fifth Earl in 1833, 'talk much of Pain, but nothing of what they say is to the point. For the most remarkable Characteristics of Pain are these: the Disproportion between the enormity of physical suffering and its often trifling causes; and the manner in which, by annihilating every faculty and reducing the body to helplessness, it defeats the Object for which it was apparently devised by Nature: viz. to warn the sufferer of the approach of danger, whether from within or without. In relation to Pain, that empty word, Infinity, comes near to having a meaning.'3
The Spandrell who considered that this world might be another planet's hell could only agree, and it is perhaps significant, from a biographical as well as a literary point of view, that these considerations should be put forward in the assumed voice of an eccentric eighteenth-century aristocrat. Stylistically, the best passages in Those Barren Leaves were the extracts from Francis Chelliler's diary in which Huxley assumes the persona of a literary intellectual deliberately seeking self-stultification, and he is just as successful in reproducing the tone of eighteenth-century English in the passages from the Fifth Earl's diary in After Many a Summer. When the Fifth Earl dines with the Bishop of Winchester and finds his 'claret poor, his port execrable and his intellectual powers beneath contempt', he moves into a totally different class from the Mr Propter whose sermons lack any stylistic qualities whatsoever, and there may well be a link between the vividness of the Fifth Earl's language and the unavowed sympathy which part of Huxley's personality felt for his ideas. Huxley's official belief in the 'fundamental all-rightness of the world' would normally require him to dismiss the views of the Filth Early as nonsense. He is nevertheless unable, as an artist and stylist, to bring into After Many a Summer any character who can serve as
a convincing counterweight to him. Indeed, in so far as the presiding genius in the plot of the novel is the Marquis de Sade, a thinker for whom the Fifth Earl has considerable sympathy and admiration, everything that happens in After Many a Summer is a refutation of the metaphysical optimism lying behind Mr Propter's views.
It is curious, in this respect, that Huxley's interest in the Marquis de Sade should be associated with one of the very few errors of fact easily detectable in his books. Going through the Fifth Earl's papers, Jeremy discovers 'bound like a prayer book' a copy of 'that rarest of all works of the Divine Marquis, Les Cent- Vingt Jours de Sodome'. However much in character the possession of such a book might have been, it was not a historical possibility. The work was indeed completed as early as 1785, when de Sade succeeded in tabulating, 'on a roll of paper about thirteen yards long and not quite five inches wide', a description of all the known sexual perversions. But the manuscript was lost, and remained a legend until its discovery and publication by Eugene DhUren in 1904, by which time the Fifth Earl was safely ensconced in his cellars.4 It is nevertheless de Sade's ideas which inspire not only the conduct and philosophy of the Fifth Earl but also the sexual technique whereby Dr Obispo, as he smugly tells himself, reduces Virginia to 'a mere epileptic body, moaning and gibbering under the excruciations of a pleasure of which you, the Claude Bernard of the subject, were responsible, and of which you remained the enjoying, but always detached, always ironically amused spectator'. Man's body is vulnerable, and his desire for power infinite. Knowledge is power, and the consciousness of power nowhere more intense than in the sexual act. When Dr Obispo 'engineers' Virginia into 'an erotic epilepsy more excruciatingly intense than anything she had known before or imagined possible', he is acting as a scientist, 'wantonly committing enormities' - the phrase is from a definition of science by one of the characters in Time Must Have a Stop - in order to show his power. In the book that may have influenced Huxley when he was writing Brave New World, Bertrand Russell argued that sadism, in a world wholly dominated by science, would be 'given full range in scientific experi-ments'.5 In After Many a Summer, Russell's prediction seems to have come true earlier than he anticipated, and the Marquis de Sade to have had a clearer understanding of human nature than any of the thinkers anthologized in The Perennial Philosophy.
The fact that it is Jeremy Pordage's scholarship which, albeit unintentionally, places the copy of the Cent—Vingt Jours in Dr Obispo's hands is an ironic commentary on the only kind of marriage which Huxley the imaginative writer, as distinct from Huxley the essayist, considered possible between the arts and sciences. And in the world of After Many a Summer neither business nor politics gives any more reason for hope than science or scholarship. The Filth
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Earl makes his money out of the slave trade and the enclosure of 'three thousand of acres of common land near Nottingham'; while Jo Stoyte proves himself a worthy modem counterpart by supplementing the fortune already coming in from his oil wells and cemetery by some shrewd but dishonest purchase of land needed for public immigration schemes. The ideals which lead Pete to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war are dismissed by Mr Propter himself as nothing more than 'projections of the ego'; while the political activities of the Western democracies are represented by Jeremy Pordage's brother Tom, 'now back, more or less for good, in the Foreign Office, climbing slowly up the hierarchy, towards posts of greater responsibility and tasks of increasing turpitude'. In this respect, it is not only de Sade's sexual philosophy that Huxley is adapting to the modem world. It is his total disbelief in the possibility of any human being acting virtuously in any social, financial, private or political context.
In so far as it illustrates the supposedly more optimistic views about man's nature and destiny implied by Huxley's mysticism, After Many a Summer is consequently not a success. Just as the plot of Point Counter Point, with the consistent triumph of Maurice Spandrell, contradicted the humanism of Do What You Will, so the portrait of humanity in After Many a Summer makes it very difficult to believe in 'the existence, at the very heart of things, of a divine serenity and goodwill' of which Huxley spoke in The Perennial Philosophy.
'God needs no christening,' Pantheist mutters
'Love opens shutters On heaven's glistening, Flesh, key-hole listening, Hear what God utters' Yes, but God stutters.
wrote the more blatantly cynical Huxley in 1916, and the lines are still peculiarly apt as a description of his own version of 'the hidden God'.6 Apart from Mr Propter, none of the characters gives any sign at all of benefiting in any way from the existence of God, who for all practical purposes might just as well not exist; and however successfully Mr Propter himself may have contracted out of society by cultivating his own plot of land and even obtaining his own electricity by an ingenious device for storing solar energy, he remains a chorus figure who, like Mark Rampion, has no influence on what happens. This was undoubtedly how Huxley saw himself in 1939: a disillusioned sage, keeping alive the mystical tradition in the hope that some men, in the future, might follow his example and realize
that the only part of the world we can meaningfully improve is ourselves. It is, in a way, a counsel of despair, as well as the attempt to prove, by one of its most distinguished members, that the English intellectual upper middle class must now totally abandon any hope of influencing public behaviour.
Ii
Time Must Have a Stop is a less violently pessimistic book than After Many a Summer, and was the novel which Maria Huxley most preferred out of all her husband's works.7 It too has a mystic as chorus figure, but Bruno Rontini has an immense superiority over Mr Propter in that he eschews sermons. He also actually succeeds in doing something to help other people, for it is his intervention at a crucial moment in the plot that saves an innocent person from the wholly unintentional but nevertheless highly unpleasant consequences of someone else's selfishness. Sebastian Barnack, a young and very gifted poet, has been invited by his rich uncle Eustace to spend a fortnight with him in Florence. Eustace, who had succeeded where the Tom Cardan of Those Barren Leaves had failed and married a wealthy widow, delights in spending money on art. On the day of Sebastian's arrival, he buys from an art dealer called Gabriel Weyl - 'Where every prospect pleases', he is wont to hum as he goes into his shop, 'And only man is Weyl, Frères, Paris, Bruxelles and Florence' - a pair of magnificent Degas sketches. One of these inspires Sebastian to write a brief poem to the effect that
To make a picture others need All Ovid and the Nicene creed Degas succeeds with one tin tub Two buttocks and a pendulous bub
and the quatrain so delights Eustace that he gives his nephew one of the Degas drawings as a present. He also promises to buy Sebastian the dinner-jacket which Sebastian's self-righteous father has refused him, but dies of a heart attack before he can either put this promise into effect or make public the gift of the Degas. Sebastian, less deeply affected than he knows he ought to be by his uncle's sudden death, sells the Degas back to Weyl, only to find that Eustace's executors notice it is missing. Suspicion falls on a young Italian servant girl, and Sebastian turns to Bruno Rontini for help. Bruno persuades Weyl to give him back the picture, so that both Sebastian and the girl are saved. But as a result of this intervention, he himself is arrested by Mussolini's police force. Weyl, furious at having to give up what he had come to regard as his own property, has denounced Bruno for having contacts with anti-fascist political
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agents; and Sebastian has provided a pretext for this accusation by boasting casually, to Weyl, of his father's association with a well-known Italian liberal politician.8
This apparent defeat of virtue by a cruel and violentworld is not, however, merely a reversion to the dominant pattern in Huxley's early novels, where the spirit is invariably defeated by the flesh. The example of Bruno's unselfishness leave such a mark on Sebastian that we find him, in the epilogue to the novel, in 1944, converted to the same mystical philosophy that had inspired Bruno's life. Like Eyeless in Gaza, Time Must Have a Stop is the novel of a conversion, but Bruno Rontini is a more attractive saint than James Miller, and Sebastian Barnack a less consistently caddish hero than Anthony Beavis. The intellectual energy which threatened to burst open the seams of Eyeless in Gaza has settled down to a steady and less strident conviction that one particular way of thought is undoubtedly superior to all others, and it is perhaps for this reason that the novel ends with a serenity which explains Maria Huxley's preference. There are, however, other reasons for considering Time Must Have a Stop the most intriguing as well as the most challenging of Huxley's 'mystical' novels, and for explaining why Huxley himself preferred it to his other fiction.9
Paradoxically, the first of these reasons begins by having nothing to do with mysticism. It is the presence of Uncle Eustace, a character who has stepped straight out of the novels which Huxley wrote in the twenties, the period in which the main action of the novel is set. He is the Mr Keith of Norman Douglas's South Wind, translated only a little farther north, to Florence, and only slightly altered by his successive incarnations as the Mr Scogan of Crome Yellow or the Tom Cardan of Those Barren Leaves. It is perhaps natural, in the circumstances, that he should make so immediate an appeal to Sebastian. His rejection of the hard, puritanical idealism of Sebas-tian's father, his apology for hedonism, his sympathy for the 'idlers
and wasters' who 'demonstrably do less mischief than the other fellows', his tolerance, his wit, his knowledge of art, are all calculated
to appeal to adolescents, and the effect he has on Sebastian is in this
respect an epitome of the attraction which Huxley's early novels exercised over their readers when they were first published. Uncle
Eustace is not, however, made to be quite so sensible about food as
he is about ideas. After a night's sleep induced by a pint of stout and a plate of anchovy sandwiches, he breakfasts off porridge, two
poached eggs, toast, kippers, scones and marmalade; has lasagne
verdi, chianti and creamed breasts of turkey for lunch; champagne, two portions of creamed fish, creamed - sic - breasts of chicken and
chocolate soufflé with cream for dinner; two glasses of brandy with his cigar; and - not surprisingly - dies of a heart attack the same evening. One can accept Philip Quarles, in Point Counter Point,
drinking claret with his fish because he is, after all, Huxley himself; and Huxley once tried to live exclusively off beans.'° But although a novelist who makes a professional gourmet disgrace himself like this would normally forfeit the reader's credulity as well as his sympathy, Uncle Eustace tends at first sight rather to benefit from Huxley's obvious animus against him. Indeed, this sympathy lingers for quite a long time, and threatens to upset the whole moral balance of the book. It is only in the context of Huxley's major technical experiment in Time Must Have a Stop, the attempt to depict life after death in the light of the teachings advanced in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that the character of Eustace Barnack begins to reveal its limitations.
An ambition to illustrate certain moral concepts by providing an imaginative description of life after death inspired at least two other books published at about the same time as Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop: Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Cbs and C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. All three authors, however great their ideological differences, also reveal the same automatic dismissal of the traditional belief in an Avenging Deity actively punishing sinners in hell. Instead, each insists on the idea that we are punished in the next world solely by what we have allowed ourselves to become in this one, and just as Lewis's Napoleon shuts himself away from God by building immense replicas of Empire palaces, so Huxley's Uncle Eustace deliberately closes his eyes to the Clear Light of the Void. And just as Sartre's coward, in Huis Cbs, has the chance to walk away from his tormentors and thus prove his claim to be a brave man by trying something different, so Eustace Barnack remains free, if he so wishes, to turn away from his ordinary self and accept the salvation offered to him. If he does not do so, it is because he chooses to remain a particular kind of person, one whose gluttony is an integral part of the lack of will-power which now keeps him in this self-inflicted hell.
Unlike The Great Divorce or Huis Cbs, the section of Time Must Have a Stop which attempts to describe Eustace's experiences after death has sometimes been regarded as difficult to understand, and even so perceptive a critic as Peter Bowering writes that this part of the novel can be 'almost meaningless without a prior reading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead'.11 This is not really so, and although it is an interesting scholarly exercise to see how Huxley has in fact based his descriptions on the recommendations to the dying contained in this particular version of Buddhism, the passages are fully comprehensible without this knowledge. Eustace dies, and immediately a light begins to shine, to welcome him into an eternity of bliss if he will only agree to let go of his separate self and merge himself in it. Eustace refuses, and is encouraged to cling on to his independent existence by a spiritualist séance held in his own Florentine villa. This
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enables him to taste, through the medium, the 'mingled savours of garlic and chocolate, red wine and - yes - kidneys - haunting the tongue and palate', allthe earthly sensations he has so much enjoyed and which offer a more comfortable paradise than the 'blue, shining stillness'. This stillness, 'delicate, unutterably beautiful like the essence of all skies and flowers, like the silent principle and potentiality of all music' appeals to him in vain, and he eventually chooses to be reincarnated in the child already conceived by Gabriel Weyl and his wife. Indeed, so great is his appetite for immediate physical existence that he makes this choice in spite of the foreknowledge which he has that this child, a Jew, will suffer the agony of seeing its mother killed during the invasion of France in 1940.12 In The Perennial Philosophy Huxley quotes a passage from The Tibetan Book of the Dead describing the Bardo state, the 'intermediate state' immediately following death, as one in which 'the soul is judged - or rather judges itself by choosing, in accord with the character forged during its life on earth, what sort of after-life it shall have'. Time Must Have a Stop quite clearly shows Eustace doing this, and thus illustrates both the remark in The Perennial Philosophy that most suffering is sell-inflicted, and Huxley's more unexpected belief in the doctrine of reincarnation.
Perhaps for this very reason, the novel does not remove any of the objections which can be put forward, either on intellectual or on ethical grounds, to the views expressed in The Perennial Philosophy. In so far as it involves a belief both in some kind of life after death and in the possibility of reincarnation, it clearly goes against Huxley's rejection of metaphysics; and in so far as Eustace is seen suffering the torments of the damned because he remains attached to the pleasures of the table and the delights of occasionally unorthodox sex, it once again raises the question of whether Huxley's mystical views are in any way meaningful on a human level. If a kindly uncle, who has harmed nobody and helped whomsoever he could, is placed so firmly in a sell-inflicted hell, what torments are left for Hitler? And if it is true, as the Sebastian of Time Must Have a Stop eventually argues, that the normal human virtues of courage, reliability, and unselfishness are what lead society to catastrophic acts of sell-destruction, then how can we formulate any kind of rational ethic? All acts other than those inspired by the total detachment of the mystic are equally wrong; and there is no means of distinguishing between Stalin and Lord Attlee, between Camus and the Marquis de Sade, or between the World Health Organization and the OGPU. If we are doomed to the torments of another life and the agony of perpetual reincarnation because we enjoy food, love our children, serve our country, or grieve over the death of our friends, then we do indeed seem to be the victims of a vast and cruel practical joke.
All the higher religions do, of course, insist on the unpalatable facts that many are called but few are chosen, that only he who
would lose his life shall save it, that Christ came to bring not peace but a sword, and that God should never be judged by the purely human conceptions of right and wrong which man has evolved for his social convenience. In this respect, especially in this ecumenical age, the more pessimistic side of Huxley's mysticism can have the same salutary effect on discussions of mysticism that the teachings of the existentialists have on more orthodox faiths. Religion and humanism cannot be reconciled, and Kierkegaard is right when he insists upon the unbridgeable gull separating God from man. The implications of Uncle Eustace's 'Bardo' state are fundamentally no different from those of Matthew x, 35, and xix, 29. The task of reminding the laxer Pelagians of the true implications of their official faith was one for which Huxley was in many ways peculiarly suited - perhaps better suited, in fact, than he was to writing novels. Yet curiously enough, neither Time Must Have a Stop nor After Many a Summer is as utterly depressing, even to the unregenerate reader, as the philosophy underlying them might suggest. This is partly because Huxley's pessimism tends to backfire so that the very intensity of his gloom provides a springboard for a return to cheerfulness based on the reflection that we can't possibly all be as bad as that. More particularly, however, precisely because he is a novelist, Huxley's teaching is put forward through the medium of certain characters. And, as happens with other, greater writers, these characters themselves often seem to take charge of the book, and to acquire a life and independence which Huxley's formal views would theoretically deny them.
This is as true of Sebastian Barnack, with his poetry and sexual obsessions, as it is of Uncle Eustace and his wholly earthy, cynical wisdom. In the case of the first, one ought to feel repelled, and in a way Huxley is repelled, by the sub-plot which develops in partial counter-point to Eustace's death. For Sebastian is seduced by one of the guests at Eustace's Florentine Villa, an attractive twenty-four-year-old widow called Veronica Thwale, who uses him to be 'scientific to the point of enormity' by going to bed with him on the very night after she has agreed to marry her second husband. Casual references to the charm of birching place the affair on the same rather odd sexual plane as the preoccupations of Dr Obispo and the Fifth Earl, and Huxley's interest in the seamier side of sex seems to increase rather than diminish as his official world view becomes more and more puritanical. Yet the phrase describing Veronica's 'despairing insatiability' contains more than a hint of genuine sympathy for those who can neither be happy on human terms nor receive any help from the mystical tradition, and this may well have been another factor in the preference which Huxley's first wife
96
expressed for Time Must Have a Stop. The phrase era tanto buono, so frequently applied to Huxley himself by his Italian housekeeper, is also used by Eustace's servants to describe their master at the very moment when the 'clear light of the void' is urging him to abandon the human characteristics which once made him so attractive.
From 1937 onwards, almost everything Huxley published was directed in some way or other to explaining or exemplifying the principles of the mystical philosophy which provided him, from Eyeless in Gaza and Ends and Means onwards, with the basis both for his pacifism and for his apparent confidence that human exis¬tence was not simply a biological accident.
He did, moreover, differ from most other writers on mysticism in continuing to express his ideas with quite exceptional clarity, and even apparently recondite works such as The Perennial Philosophy or Grey Eminence are very much in the tradition established by Thomas Henry Huxley
when he took on the role of Darwin's Bulldog or gave his six lectures to working men on Our Knowledge of the Causes of the Phenomena of Organic Nature.
What the French call haute vulgarisation is an essential part of the Huxley family tradition, and the 'need to inform' which Ronald Clark finds characteristic of Julian Huxley's personality was equally evident in his brother Aldous. Yet none of the works of Huxley's mystical period is free of the same kind of ambiguities which ran through the humanism of Point Counter Point and Do What You Will, and it is both the task and the privilege of the commentator on his work to draw attention to these. In Point Counter Point, Spandrell suggests that this earth might be 'some other planet's hell', and if one is to base oneself, as Huxley insists that he is doing throughout The Perennial Philosophy, on the evi¬dence immediately available, it would be difficult to reject the suggestion as just a joke.
The account of experience in Huxley's own novels is an indication that Spandrel] might well be right, and there is an unsurmountable contradiction between this neo-Dostoievskian vision of human life as a kind of hell and Huxley's other remark about the 'fundamental all-rightness of the world16 which he insists is revealed in mystical experience.
In August 1945 Huxley remarked to John Van Druten that The Perennial Philosophy, the central and most important work of his mystical period, had been 'very interesting to compile and write', and it is an indication of the interest aroused by Huxley's work in the mid nineteen-forties that over twelve thousand copies were sold before the official publication day in September of the same year.
It is an anthology of the views expressed by the mystical writers of both East and West, all illustrating the same basic philosophy:
- that each person is, in the deepest core of his being, part of the Ultimate Reality of God;
- that this reality is transcendent throughout the universe as well as immanent in each human soul; and
- that man's final end consists of knowing himself to be part of this ultimate reality, to the point
- where his superficial, worldly personality, is totally absorbed into what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls 'the clear light of the void'.
Everything which stands in the way of enlightenment, of man's realization that, as Ruysbroeck says, 'the image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind', is to be avoided.
The lusts of the flesh and the pride of life, the negative emotions of hatred and fear, the intolerance stemming from man's tendency to give reality to his own purely verbal accounts of experi¬ence, remorse for past acts or longings for private existence must all disappear.
What will then remain is the experience of eternity that is available, here and now, to those who realize who they really are and can say 'Not I but God in me.'
It is 'the existence at the heart of things of a divine serenity and goodwill' which, writes Huxley, 'may be regarded as one of the reasons why the world's sickness, though chronic, has not proved fatal', and which consequently gives creation a purpose. Indeed, Huxley even turns to evolution itself for evidence to support this point of view.
'It looks as though', he writes, 'in the cosmic intelligence test, all living matter, except the human, has succumbed, at one time or another in its biological career, to assuming, not the ultimately best, but the immediately most profitable form.' Only man is capable of further development, and there is only one direction in which he can go: towards a greater awareness, on the part of more people, that they themselves are 'one of the infinite number of points where divine Reality is wholly and eternally present'. 'Society is good', writes Huxley in his conclusion, 'to the extent that it renders contemplation possible for its members', and he provides what his admirers might well consider as his own best epitaph when he observes, of those who have achieved the ultimate freedom of sainthood, that 'such men not only liberate themselves; they fill those they meet with a free mind'.7
The Perennial Philosophy is undoubtedly a fascinating book.
It is also, as Aldous's second wife, Laura Archera Huxley, observed, a very beautiful one.
The religion it advocates is free of dogma, and could never give rise to persecution. Its moral ideals are both noble and practical, and its social effects could only be good.
Whether the book is convincing as philosophy, however, is more open to doubt, and a reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement did indeed observe that there was, in the Western sense of the word at any rate, very little 'philosophy' in it.8
This, of course, was Huxley's own intention. His very first chapter insists on the futility of asking metaphysical questions about the origins of the universe or the underlying reasons for certain events, and he notes approvingly that 'the Buddha declined to make any statement in regard to the ultimate divine Reality'.
Mysticism, he wrote in a letter to Dr J. B. Rhine in December 1942, is 'based on direct experience, as the arguments of the physical scientists are based on direct sense impressions', and he describes the Buddha of the Pali scriptures as 'a teacher whose dislike of "footless questions" is no less intense than that of the severest experimental physicist of the twentieth century'.9
'Whatever can be said at all', wrote Wittgenstein at the end of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 'can be said clearly. And what we cannot talk about we must consign to silence', and it might perhaps seem, in this respect, that The Perennial Philosophy does offer the synthesis between religious experience and the scientific temper which seemed so inaccessible to Thomas Henry Huxley when he helped to demonstrate the incompatibility between the facts of evolution and the legends of Genesis.
When the mystic actually experiences the ultimate truth of the universe, argues the Huxley of The Perennial Philosophy, there is no need for him to indulge in 'willed assent to propositions known in advance to be unverifiable'. Indeed, since the ultimate Ground 'simply "is", there are not even any questions to be answered.10
This refusal to speculate on such questions as the nature of God, the origins of human life, the meaning of the universe or the causes of suffering would be fully acceptable if Huxley's own vocabulary did in fact avoid all mention of such concepts.
This refusal to speculate on such questions as the nature of God, the origins of human life, the meaning of the universe or the causes of suffering would be fully acceptable if Huxley's own vocabulary did in fact avoid all mention of such concepts.
But when he writes of 'man's deep-seated will to ignorance and spiritual darkness', he inevitably raises the question of how a being that is not only potentially but actually divine also came to be evil. Similarly, his use of a phrase such as 'man's final end' raises just as many metaphysical questions as the opening question in the catechism of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland which it so much resembles;11 while the second word in his statement that 'the goal of creation is the return of all sentient beings out of separateness and that infatuating urge-to-separateness which results in suffering, through unitive knowledge, into the wholeness of eternal Reality', also implies a teleological concept of the universe which can only be elaborated in terms of the metaphysical concerns which he has earlier dismissed.
It may well be, as Huxley claims in his discussion of Pauline Christianity in the chapter entitled 'Suffering', that the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement is 'the projection of a lawyer's phantasy'.12 The fact nevertheless remains that the Christian account of the Fall does offer some explanation of why men should be so wicked; and that the doctrines based on the crucifixion do provide a coherent philosophy that can be discussed in intellectually meaningful terms. The Perennial Philosophy, in contrast, reminds one at times of the scientist whose views were dismissed by one of his colleagues with the remark: 'This isn't right. It's not even wrong.'
Such objections do, of course, presuppose that the Western tradition of philosophical argument, with its insistence upon logical demonstration and on clear and distinct ideas, is intellectually valid. The praise which Huxley gives to Buddhism is a fairly clear indication that he did not think this was so, and his remark that 'the habit of analytical thought is fatal to the intuitions of integral thinking, whether on the "psychic" or the spiritual level' shows how mistrustful he was of the in-built habits of Western philosophy.
Such objections do, of course, presuppose that the Western tradition of philosophical argument, with its insistence upon logical demonstration and on clear and distinct ideas, is intellectually valid. The praise which Huxley gives to Buddhism is a fairly clear indication that he did not think this was so, and his remark that 'the habit of analytical thought is fatal to the intuitions of integral thinking, whether on the "psychic" or the spiritual level' shows how mistrustful he was of the in-built habits of Western philosophy.
It is nevertheless very difficult for a thinker to break away from the philosophical presuppositions inherent in the very language he uses, and Huxley's use of words such as 'goal', 'end' and 'will' shows how fully the basic tools of his trade compelled him to remain a Western intellectual. It is certainly impossible to explain why an infinitely good and merciful God should create human beings simply in order that they might, in due course, be totally reabsorbed in the Ground of all Being, and Huxley's refusal to indulge in metaphysics seems suspiciously like the attitude of a man who refuses to ask questions because he is afraid of the answer he might receive. Once the facts of pain, of cancer, of the pointless suffering inflicted on men and animals are taken into consideration, Spandrell's hypothesis begins to fit the available evidence more appropriately than phrases about the 'fundamental all-rightness of the world' revealed through mystical experience. After all, anyone can feel that this world is another planet's hell and find plenty of evidence to substantiate his view. A visit to the nearest hospital, a television programme on East Pakistan, a reading of the pages describing little Phil's meningitis in Point Counter Point, are enough. Mystical experiences, on the other hand, are vouchsafed only to the few, and Huxley himself is most insistent both that there is no salvation for 'nice, ordinary unregenerate people'13 and that the number of those prepared for mystical contemplation is very small. Surely, one is tempted to say, the Godhead is as wasteful of the souls that have to keep going on to what the Buddhists call the Wheel of Creation as nature itself is of the 'million, million spermatozoa' which are foredoomed either to perish without fertilizing an ovum or, if they do fulfil their purpose, nowadays merely add to the problem of over-population.
In Do What You Will Huxley had explained mystical experiences by saying that they 'happen because they happen, because that is what the human mind happens to be like'. In ThePerennialPhilosophy he is implicitly saying the same thing about physical suffering, and refusing to go any further in case it turns out to be Spandrell rather than the mystics whose vision best fits the facts. 'Your enjoyment of the world is never right', wrote Thomas Traherne in one of the phrases whose presence in The Perennial Philosophy are more than adequate compensation for its unsatisfactory metaphysics, 'until every morning you wake in Heaven.114 Huxley's conscious aim in his later works was not to explain why this could be so, but simply to bring people to the point where they were prepared to see the infinite possibilities inexplicably open to them. If he failed to do this, it was not because his views were insincerely held. It was rather that his peculiar gifts as a writer, allied with the obsession with mental and physical suffering that goes right back to the events of his adolescence and early manhood, led him to emphasize those aspects of human behaviour and experience which most contradict the underlying optimism of The Perennial Philosophy. Just as he had put all the most unpleasant features of his personality into the character of Anthony Beavis, leaving his charm, tolerance and reliability for his own personal relationships, so he was to continue, in the novels which pursued the examination of mysticism begun in Eyeless in Gaza, to make such extensive use of the blackest part of his mind that they quite contradicted the message of hope implicit in his mysticism.
In Do What You Will Huxley had explained mystical experiences by saying that they 'happen because they happen, because that is what the human mind happens to be like'. In ThePerennialPhilosophy he is implicitly saying the same thing about physical suffering, and refusing to go any further in case it turns out to be Spandrell rather than the mystics whose vision best fits the facts. 'Your enjoyment of the world is never right', wrote Thomas Traherne in one of the phrases whose presence in The Perennial Philosophy are more than adequate compensation for its unsatisfactory metaphysics, 'until every morning you wake in Heaven.114 Huxley's conscious aim in his later works was not to explain why this could be so, but simply to bring people to the point where they were prepared to see the infinite possibilities inexplicably open to them. If he failed to do this, it was not because his views were insincerely held. It was rather that his peculiar gifts as a writer, allied with the obsession with mental and physical suffering that goes right back to the events of his adolescence and early manhood, led him to emphasize those aspects of human behaviour and experience which most contradict the underlying optimism of The Perennial Philosophy. Just as he had put all the most unpleasant features of his personality into the character of Anthony Beavis, leaving his charm, tolerance and reliability for his own personal relationships, so he was to continue, in the novels which pursued the examination of mysticism begun in Eyeless in Gaza, to make such extensive use of the blackest part of his mind that they quite contradicted the message of hope implicit in his mysticism.
===
Ch 7 Mysticism and the novel
It is indeed as parables exemplifying the formal conclusions of The Perennial Philosophy that Huxley's next two novels, After Many a Summer (i) and Time Must Have a Stop (1945), are, initially at least, best studied. In both of them, there is a chorus figure whose ideas and presence provide an alternative to the obvious follies which the main narrative depicts; while a well-told tale, and some vividly depicted villains, drive home the moral which is never far below the surface. However apparently scandalous their subject-matter, all the books which Huxley wrote after 1936 were very much in the Arnold tradition of using literature to convey moral truths and the later part of his career could in many ways be seen as the gradual assertion, in his personality as a writer, of the Arnold concern for moral and spiritual values over the iconoclasm and scientific approach of the Huxleys.
It is also noticeable that these two later novels have a much stronger story line than Huxley's earlier fiction. When only ideas matter, and where the characters are cut off from the real world in the country house-party atmosphere of Crome Yellow or Those Barren Leaves, the narrative does not really count; and a well-made plot would imply that both society itself and the social behaviour of human beings deserve to be taken seriously. Yet while the greater attention given to story-telling in After Many a Summer and Time Must Have a Stop reflects Huxley's greater concern for moral values, it is still - as it was in the twenties - the more scandalous events that make the novels so immediately readable. And however intellectually vulnerable Huxley's newly propounded religious views may have appeared to certain readers, they destroyed nothing of the appeal which his novels made to the adolescent with an equal interest in sex and ideas. Indeed, the very fact that his mysticism did give rise to argument only increased the appeal of his novels; while the absurd exaggerations of his later fiction, the obvious villains, the sometimes preposterous but always brilliantly expressed ideas, the easily assimilated rival philosophies, the vast historical generalizations, the continuous scorn poured on middle-aged fathers and conventional politicians, the gothic horror of the plots, the combination of Voltairean wit and Bunyanesque religious fervour, all seem in retrospect to have been deliberately calculated to make the same impact on those who were in their teens in the nineteen-forties that Antic Hay or Point Counter Point had made on similar minds fifteen years earlier. Both After Many a Summer and Time Must Have a
86
Stop also deal, albeit superficially, with politics; and both reflect the conclusion, easily accepted in the nineteen-forties, that the industrialized Western democracies offered no hope at all for the future of mankind.
After Many a Summer was the first of Huxley's novels to be set mainly in the United States, and its account of at least one aspect of American life shows Huxley in what was, for him, the rather unusual role of a pioneer whose most fruitful experiments were more successfully exploited by other people. Jo Stoyte, the millionaire whose terror of death provides the mainspring of the plot, has among his many investments The Beverly Pantheon, the 'Personality Cemetery', whose Tower of Resurrection cost two hundred thousand dollars, and whose fountains, statues, perpetual Wurlitzers, Pets' Corner, Church of the Poet and 'Children's Corner with its statues of Peter Pan and the Infant Jesus' are a prefiguration of the comparable horrors which Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One did not reveal to most English readers until 1953. Huxley had been living in southern California since 193, and the impact which a civilization whose advertisement hoardings conspire to offer spiritual healing, colonic irrigation, blocklong hotdogs and 'abiding youth with thrillform brassieres', made on his still essentially Victorian personality is presented through the reactions of one of his best observed minor characters, Jeremy Pordage. Jeremy, whose 'small, fluty voice, suggestive of evensong in an English cathedral', is 'a product of Trinity College, Cambridge, ten years before the war' - just as Huxley's Balliol accent was still, as he recognized in 1949, that of 'the Oxford of Jowett and Lewis Carroll' - has been hired by Jo Stoyte to catalogue one of his latest cultural acquisitions, the Hauberk papers. It is Jeremy's discovery of the diary kept by the Fifth Earl, in the late eighteenth century, which brings the action of the novel suddenly back to England, and gives After Many a Summer the most outlandishly gruesome ending in all Huxley's fiction.
Jo Stoyte's terror of death, originally created by the text which his maternal grandmother, a Plymouth Sister, had hung over his bed -'It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of a living God' - has led him to engage as house physician an expert in longevity with the almost palindromic name of Obispo. At the same time, Jo Stoyte is indulging in what the Fifth Earl refers to as King David's remedy,' and it is his affair with the ironically named Virginia Maunciple which leads After Many a Summer to become as violent a novel as Point Counter Point. Virginia has been seduced by Sigmund Obispo - who perhaps owes his first name less to Huxley's anti-semitism than to his dislike of Freud - and Jo Stoyte finds the two lovers together. Uncharacteristically, however, he is not carrying his automatic pistol, and has to dash to his study to find it. By the time he comes back, Virginia is no longer with Dr Obispo but with his amiable research assistant Pete, whose idealized and wholly innocent love for Virginia has led him to comfort her by placing his hand on her shoulder. Pete is consequently shot in place of the real culprit, and Mr Stoyte is totally in Dr Obispo's power. Only Obispo can sign the death certificate camouflaging the murder into an accident, and his price for doing it is high. The crisis also leads Mr Stoyte to look more favourably at the suggestion which has come to Dr Obispo as a result of Jeremy's continued exploration of the Fifth Earl's diary, and to consider a different remedy against death and old age. The Fifth Earl, it emerges, also had an interest in longevity, and spent much time meditating on the immense age of carps swimming in his ponds. A diet of 'raw, triturated Viscera of freshly opened Carp' restores his youthful vigour to the point where he fathers three illegitimate children at the age of eighty-one, and is subsequently involved in so dramatic a scandal that he has to retire from the world. He does so by arranging a fake funeral, and seeking refuge - now at the age of almost a hundred - in the cellars of his country mansion. Intrigued by this cessation of the diary, Obispo, Stoyte, Jeremy and Virginia take ship to England. There, they find the Fifth Earl, together with the mistress he had persuaded to share in his experiments, still alive at the age of two hundred and one. Unfortunately, however, he has turned into an ape. A dog, someone remarks earlier in the novel, is a wolf that has not fully developed. So, Dr Obispo discovers, man is 'a foetal ape that has not had time to grow up'.2 Except, of course, for the Fifth Earl. As Jo Stoyte watches the simian quarrellings and copulations with which the Fifth Earl and his mistress fill their eternal life, he breaks the silence:
'How long do you figure it would take before a person went like that?' he said in a slow, hesitating voice. 'I mean, it wouldn't happen at once. . . there'd be a long time while a person. . . well, you know; while he wouldn't change any. And once you get over the first shock - well, they look like they were having a pretty good time. I mean in their own way, of course. Don't you think so, Obispo?' he insisted.
Dr Obispo went on looking at him in silence; then threw back his head and started to laugh again.
Scientifically, the ending of After Many a Summer is nonsense. A million years of evolution cannot be reversed in the space of a hundred years, and the grotesque horror of the ending is meaningful only on a moral plane. If men seek to fly above the human condition, they will sink infinitely below it; and the fate of the Fifth Earl bears out the Greek idea that nemesis follows hubris as the night the day. But this is not the only idea in After Many a Summer. The chorus figure, Mr Propter, waxes eloquent on what he himself refers to as
88 89
the 'old, boring inescapable truths' of the misery of life at a human level and the possibilities of mystical experience, on the inadequacy of literature, the case for pacifism, on the advantages of Jeffersonian democracy, with its cult of economic self-reliance, over modern, centralized industry, and on the nature of God and the need for a 'calculus of eternity' to transcend the limitations of ordinary language. However, just as Pete is beginning to see that only Mr Propter can make sense of the 'absurd, insane, diabolical confusion of it all', he is shot dead by Mr Stoyte; and in the same way that Maurice Spandrel's deliberate cult of evil has a far deeper effect than the more attractive theories of Mark Rampion on the way people behave in Point Counter Point, so the Fifth Earl's diary sets out a view of life which is much more in keeping with Huxley's account of what life is like than any idea expressed by Mr Propter.
'The Christians' writes the Fifth Earl in 1833, 'talk much of Pain, but nothing of what they say is to the point. For the most remarkable Characteristics of Pain are these: the Disproportion between the enormity of physical suffering and its often trifling causes; and the manner in which, by annihilating every faculty and reducing the body to helplessness, it defeats the Object for which it was apparently devised by Nature: viz. to warn the sufferer of the approach of danger, whether from within or without. In relation to Pain, that empty word, Infinity, comes near to having a meaning.'3
The Spandrell who considered that this world might be another planet's hell could only agree, and it is perhaps significant, from a biographical as well as a literary point of view, that these considerations should be put forward in the assumed voice of an eccentric eighteenth-century aristocrat. Stylistically, the best passages in Those Barren Leaves were the extracts from Francis Chelliler's diary in which Huxley assumes the persona of a literary intellectual deliberately seeking self-stultification, and he is just as successful in reproducing the tone of eighteenth-century English in the passages from the Fifth Earl's diary in After Many a Summer. When the Fifth Earl dines with the Bishop of Winchester and finds his 'claret poor, his port execrable and his intellectual powers beneath contempt', he moves into a totally different class from the Mr Propter whose sermons lack any stylistic qualities whatsoever, and there may well be a link between the vividness of the Fifth Earl's language and the unavowed sympathy which part of Huxley's personality felt for his ideas. Huxley's official belief in the 'fundamental all-rightness of the world' would normally require him to dismiss the views of the Filth Early as nonsense. He is nevertheless unable, as an artist and stylist, to bring into After Many a Summer any character who can serve as
a convincing counterweight to him. Indeed, in so far as the presiding genius in the plot of the novel is the Marquis de Sade, a thinker for whom the Fifth Earl has considerable sympathy and admiration, everything that happens in After Many a Summer is a refutation of the metaphysical optimism lying behind Mr Propter's views.
It is curious, in this respect, that Huxley's interest in the Marquis de Sade should be associated with one of the very few errors of fact easily detectable in his books. Going through the Fifth Earl's papers, Jeremy discovers 'bound like a prayer book' a copy of 'that rarest of all works of the Divine Marquis, Les Cent- Vingt Jours de Sodome'. However much in character the possession of such a book might have been, it was not a historical possibility. The work was indeed completed as early as 1785, when de Sade succeeded in tabulating, 'on a roll of paper about thirteen yards long and not quite five inches wide', a description of all the known sexual perversions. But the manuscript was lost, and remained a legend until its discovery and publication by Eugene DhUren in 1904, by which time the Fifth Earl was safely ensconced in his cellars.4 It is nevertheless de Sade's ideas which inspire not only the conduct and philosophy of the Fifth Earl but also the sexual technique whereby Dr Obispo, as he smugly tells himself, reduces Virginia to 'a mere epileptic body, moaning and gibbering under the excruciations of a pleasure of which you, the Claude Bernard of the subject, were responsible, and of which you remained the enjoying, but always detached, always ironically amused spectator'. Man's body is vulnerable, and his desire for power infinite. Knowledge is power, and the consciousness of power nowhere more intense than in the sexual act. When Dr Obispo 'engineers' Virginia into 'an erotic epilepsy more excruciatingly intense than anything she had known before or imagined possible', he is acting as a scientist, 'wantonly committing enormities' - the phrase is from a definition of science by one of the characters in Time Must Have a Stop - in order to show his power. In the book that may have influenced Huxley when he was writing Brave New World, Bertrand Russell argued that sadism, in a world wholly dominated by science, would be 'given full range in scientific experi-ments'.5 In After Many a Summer, Russell's prediction seems to have come true earlier than he anticipated, and the Marquis de Sade to have had a clearer understanding of human nature than any of the thinkers anthologized in The Perennial Philosophy.
The fact that it is Jeremy Pordage's scholarship which, albeit unintentionally, places the copy of the Cent—Vingt Jours in Dr Obispo's hands is an ironic commentary on the only kind of marriage which Huxley the imaginative writer, as distinct from Huxley the essayist, considered possible between the arts and sciences. And in the world of After Many a Summer neither business nor politics gives any more reason for hope than science or scholarship. The Filth
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Earl makes his money out of the slave trade and the enclosure of 'three thousand of acres of common land near Nottingham'; while Jo Stoyte proves himself a worthy modem counterpart by supplementing the fortune already coming in from his oil wells and cemetery by some shrewd but dishonest purchase of land needed for public immigration schemes. The ideals which lead Pete to fight on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war are dismissed by Mr Propter himself as nothing more than 'projections of the ego'; while the political activities of the Western democracies are represented by Jeremy Pordage's brother Tom, 'now back, more or less for good, in the Foreign Office, climbing slowly up the hierarchy, towards posts of greater responsibility and tasks of increasing turpitude'. In this respect, it is not only de Sade's sexual philosophy that Huxley is adapting to the modem world. It is his total disbelief in the possibility of any human being acting virtuously in any social, financial, private or political context.
In so far as it illustrates the supposedly more optimistic views about man's nature and destiny implied by Huxley's mysticism, After Many a Summer is consequently not a success. Just as the plot of Point Counter Point, with the consistent triumph of Maurice Spandrell, contradicted the humanism of Do What You Will, so the portrait of humanity in After Many a Summer makes it very difficult to believe in 'the existence, at the very heart of things, of a divine serenity and goodwill' of which Huxley spoke in The Perennial Philosophy.
'God needs no christening,' Pantheist mutters
'Love opens shutters On heaven's glistening, Flesh, key-hole listening, Hear what God utters' Yes, but God stutters.
wrote the more blatantly cynical Huxley in 1916, and the lines are still peculiarly apt as a description of his own version of 'the hidden God'.6 Apart from Mr Propter, none of the characters gives any sign at all of benefiting in any way from the existence of God, who for all practical purposes might just as well not exist; and however successfully Mr Propter himself may have contracted out of society by cultivating his own plot of land and even obtaining his own electricity by an ingenious device for storing solar energy, he remains a chorus figure who, like Mark Rampion, has no influence on what happens. This was undoubtedly how Huxley saw himself in 1939: a disillusioned sage, keeping alive the mystical tradition in the hope that some men, in the future, might follow his example and realize
that the only part of the world we can meaningfully improve is ourselves. It is, in a way, a counsel of despair, as well as the attempt to prove, by one of its most distinguished members, that the English intellectual upper middle class must now totally abandon any hope of influencing public behaviour.
Ii
Time Must Have a Stop is a less violently pessimistic book than After Many a Summer, and was the novel which Maria Huxley most preferred out of all her husband's works.7 It too has a mystic as chorus figure, but Bruno Rontini has an immense superiority over Mr Propter in that he eschews sermons. He also actually succeeds in doing something to help other people, for it is his intervention at a crucial moment in the plot that saves an innocent person from the wholly unintentional but nevertheless highly unpleasant consequences of someone else's selfishness. Sebastian Barnack, a young and very gifted poet, has been invited by his rich uncle Eustace to spend a fortnight with him in Florence. Eustace, who had succeeded where the Tom Cardan of Those Barren Leaves had failed and married a wealthy widow, delights in spending money on art. On the day of Sebastian's arrival, he buys from an art dealer called Gabriel Weyl - 'Where every prospect pleases', he is wont to hum as he goes into his shop, 'And only man is Weyl, Frères, Paris, Bruxelles and Florence' - a pair of magnificent Degas sketches. One of these inspires Sebastian to write a brief poem to the effect that
To make a picture others need All Ovid and the Nicene creed Degas succeeds with one tin tub Two buttocks and a pendulous bub
and the quatrain so delights Eustace that he gives his nephew one of the Degas drawings as a present. He also promises to buy Sebastian the dinner-jacket which Sebastian's self-righteous father has refused him, but dies of a heart attack before he can either put this promise into effect or make public the gift of the Degas. Sebastian, less deeply affected than he knows he ought to be by his uncle's sudden death, sells the Degas back to Weyl, only to find that Eustace's executors notice it is missing. Suspicion falls on a young Italian servant girl, and Sebastian turns to Bruno Rontini for help. Bruno persuades Weyl to give him back the picture, so that both Sebastian and the girl are saved. But as a result of this intervention, he himself is arrested by Mussolini's police force. Weyl, furious at having to give up what he had come to regard as his own property, has denounced Bruno for having contacts with anti-fascist political
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agents; and Sebastian has provided a pretext for this accusation by boasting casually, to Weyl, of his father's association with a well-known Italian liberal politician.8
This apparent defeat of virtue by a cruel and violentworld is not, however, merely a reversion to the dominant pattern in Huxley's early novels, where the spirit is invariably defeated by the flesh. The example of Bruno's unselfishness leave such a mark on Sebastian that we find him, in the epilogue to the novel, in 1944, converted to the same mystical philosophy that had inspired Bruno's life. Like Eyeless in Gaza, Time Must Have a Stop is the novel of a conversion, but Bruno Rontini is a more attractive saint than James Miller, and Sebastian Barnack a less consistently caddish hero than Anthony Beavis. The intellectual energy which threatened to burst open the seams of Eyeless in Gaza has settled down to a steady and less strident conviction that one particular way of thought is undoubtedly superior to all others, and it is perhaps for this reason that the novel ends with a serenity which explains Maria Huxley's preference. There are, however, other reasons for considering Time Must Have a Stop the most intriguing as well as the most challenging of Huxley's 'mystical' novels, and for explaining why Huxley himself preferred it to his other fiction.9
Paradoxically, the first of these reasons begins by having nothing to do with mysticism. It is the presence of Uncle Eustace, a character who has stepped straight out of the novels which Huxley wrote in the twenties, the period in which the main action of the novel is set. He is the Mr Keith of Norman Douglas's South Wind, translated only a little farther north, to Florence, and only slightly altered by his successive incarnations as the Mr Scogan of Crome Yellow or the Tom Cardan of Those Barren Leaves. It is perhaps natural, in the circumstances, that he should make so immediate an appeal to Sebastian. His rejection of the hard, puritanical idealism of Sebas-tian's father, his apology for hedonism, his sympathy for the 'idlers
and wasters' who 'demonstrably do less mischief than the other fellows', his tolerance, his wit, his knowledge of art, are all calculated
to appeal to adolescents, and the effect he has on Sebastian is in this
respect an epitome of the attraction which Huxley's early novels exercised over their readers when they were first published. Uncle
Eustace is not, however, made to be quite so sensible about food as
he is about ideas. After a night's sleep induced by a pint of stout and a plate of anchovy sandwiches, he breakfasts off porridge, two
poached eggs, toast, kippers, scones and marmalade; has lasagne
verdi, chianti and creamed breasts of turkey for lunch; champagne, two portions of creamed fish, creamed - sic - breasts of chicken and
chocolate soufflé with cream for dinner; two glasses of brandy with his cigar; and - not surprisingly - dies of a heart attack the same evening. One can accept Philip Quarles, in Point Counter Point,
drinking claret with his fish because he is, after all, Huxley himself; and Huxley once tried to live exclusively off beans.'° But although a novelist who makes a professional gourmet disgrace himself like this would normally forfeit the reader's credulity as well as his sympathy, Uncle Eustace tends at first sight rather to benefit from Huxley's obvious animus against him. Indeed, this sympathy lingers for quite a long time, and threatens to upset the whole moral balance of the book. It is only in the context of Huxley's major technical experiment in Time Must Have a Stop, the attempt to depict life after death in the light of the teachings advanced in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that the character of Eustace Barnack begins to reveal its limitations.
An ambition to illustrate certain moral concepts by providing an imaginative description of life after death inspired at least two other books published at about the same time as Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop: Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Cbs and C. S. Lewis's The Great Divorce. All three authors, however great their ideological differences, also reveal the same automatic dismissal of the traditional belief in an Avenging Deity actively punishing sinners in hell. Instead, each insists on the idea that we are punished in the next world solely by what we have allowed ourselves to become in this one, and just as Lewis's Napoleon shuts himself away from God by building immense replicas of Empire palaces, so Huxley's Uncle Eustace deliberately closes his eyes to the Clear Light of the Void. And just as Sartre's coward, in Huis Cbs, has the chance to walk away from his tormentors and thus prove his claim to be a brave man by trying something different, so Eustace Barnack remains free, if he so wishes, to turn away from his ordinary self and accept the salvation offered to him. If he does not do so, it is because he chooses to remain a particular kind of person, one whose gluttony is an integral part of the lack of will-power which now keeps him in this self-inflicted hell.
Unlike The Great Divorce or Huis Cbs, the section of Time Must Have a Stop which attempts to describe Eustace's experiences after death has sometimes been regarded as difficult to understand, and even so perceptive a critic as Peter Bowering writes that this part of the novel can be 'almost meaningless without a prior reading of The Tibetan Book of the Dead'.11 This is not really so, and although it is an interesting scholarly exercise to see how Huxley has in fact based his descriptions on the recommendations to the dying contained in this particular version of Buddhism, the passages are fully comprehensible without this knowledge. Eustace dies, and immediately a light begins to shine, to welcome him into an eternity of bliss if he will only agree to let go of his separate self and merge himself in it. Eustace refuses, and is encouraged to cling on to his independent existence by a spiritualist séance held in his own Florentine villa. This
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enables him to taste, through the medium, the 'mingled savours of garlic and chocolate, red wine and - yes - kidneys - haunting the tongue and palate', allthe earthly sensations he has so much enjoyed and which offer a more comfortable paradise than the 'blue, shining stillness'. This stillness, 'delicate, unutterably beautiful like the essence of all skies and flowers, like the silent principle and potentiality of all music' appeals to him in vain, and he eventually chooses to be reincarnated in the child already conceived by Gabriel Weyl and his wife. Indeed, so great is his appetite for immediate physical existence that he makes this choice in spite of the foreknowledge which he has that this child, a Jew, will suffer the agony of seeing its mother killed during the invasion of France in 1940.12 In The Perennial Philosophy Huxley quotes a passage from The Tibetan Book of the Dead describing the Bardo state, the 'intermediate state' immediately following death, as one in which 'the soul is judged - or rather judges itself by choosing, in accord with the character forged during its life on earth, what sort of after-life it shall have'. Time Must Have a Stop quite clearly shows Eustace doing this, and thus illustrates both the remark in The Perennial Philosophy that most suffering is sell-inflicted, and Huxley's more unexpected belief in the doctrine of reincarnation.
Perhaps for this very reason, the novel does not remove any of the objections which can be put forward, either on intellectual or on ethical grounds, to the views expressed in The Perennial Philosophy. In so far as it involves a belief both in some kind of life after death and in the possibility of reincarnation, it clearly goes against Huxley's rejection of metaphysics; and in so far as Eustace is seen suffering the torments of the damned because he remains attached to the pleasures of the table and the delights of occasionally unorthodox sex, it once again raises the question of whether Huxley's mystical views are in any way meaningful on a human level. If a kindly uncle, who has harmed nobody and helped whomsoever he could, is placed so firmly in a sell-inflicted hell, what torments are left for Hitler? And if it is true, as the Sebastian of Time Must Have a Stop eventually argues, that the normal human virtues of courage, reliability, and unselfishness are what lead society to catastrophic acts of sell-destruction, then how can we formulate any kind of rational ethic? All acts other than those inspired by the total detachment of the mystic are equally wrong; and there is no means of distinguishing between Stalin and Lord Attlee, between Camus and the Marquis de Sade, or between the World Health Organization and the OGPU. If we are doomed to the torments of another life and the agony of perpetual reincarnation because we enjoy food, love our children, serve our country, or grieve over the death of our friends, then we do indeed seem to be the victims of a vast and cruel practical joke.
All the higher religions do, of course, insist on the unpalatable facts that many are called but few are chosen, that only he who
would lose his life shall save it, that Christ came to bring not peace but a sword, and that God should never be judged by the purely human conceptions of right and wrong which man has evolved for his social convenience. In this respect, especially in this ecumenical age, the more pessimistic side of Huxley's mysticism can have the same salutary effect on discussions of mysticism that the teachings of the existentialists have on more orthodox faiths. Religion and humanism cannot be reconciled, and Kierkegaard is right when he insists upon the unbridgeable gull separating God from man. The implications of Uncle Eustace's 'Bardo' state are fundamentally no different from those of Matthew x, 35, and xix, 29. The task of reminding the laxer Pelagians of the true implications of their official faith was one for which Huxley was in many ways peculiarly suited - perhaps better suited, in fact, than he was to writing novels. Yet curiously enough, neither Time Must Have a Stop nor After Many a Summer is as utterly depressing, even to the unregenerate reader, as the philosophy underlying them might suggest. This is partly because Huxley's pessimism tends to backfire so that the very intensity of his gloom provides a springboard for a return to cheerfulness based on the reflection that we can't possibly all be as bad as that. More particularly, however, precisely because he is a novelist, Huxley's teaching is put forward through the medium of certain characters. And, as happens with other, greater writers, these characters themselves often seem to take charge of the book, and to acquire a life and independence which Huxley's formal views would theoretically deny them.
This is as true of Sebastian Barnack, with his poetry and sexual obsessions, as it is of Uncle Eustace and his wholly earthy, cynical wisdom. In the case of the first, one ought to feel repelled, and in a way Huxley is repelled, by the sub-plot which develops in partial counter-point to Eustace's death. For Sebastian is seduced by one of the guests at Eustace's Florentine Villa, an attractive twenty-four-year-old widow called Veronica Thwale, who uses him to be 'scientific to the point of enormity' by going to bed with him on the very night after she has agreed to marry her second husband. Casual references to the charm of birching place the affair on the same rather odd sexual plane as the preoccupations of Dr Obispo and the Fifth Earl, and Huxley's interest in the seamier side of sex seems to increase rather than diminish as his official world view becomes more and more puritanical. Yet the phrase describing Veronica's 'despairing insatiability' contains more than a hint of genuine sympathy for those who can neither be happy on human terms nor receive any help from the mystical tradition, and this may well have been another factor in the preference which Huxley's first wife
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expressed for Time Must Have a Stop. The phrase era tanto buono, so frequently applied to Huxley himself by his Italian housekeeper, is also used by Eustace's servants to describe their master at the very moment when the 'clear light of the void' is urging him to abandon the human characteristics which once made him so attractive.
===
Ch 8 Essays, self-portraits and history
It could be argued that TimiMust Have a Stop is Huxley's last major attempt to use fiction as a medium for expressing his ideas. Only one of the books he published after 1945, The Genius and the Goddess in 1955, sets out to tell a story in a conventionally realistic setting, and even this is more of a long short story than an orthodox novel. As Geoffrey Gorer has shown, Island (1963) is more an anthropologist's report on an imaginary paradise than a study of how human beings actually behave in society, while Ape and Essence (1946), a vision of the future even more depressing than Brave New World, is actually presented as a film-script. It is not difficult to find reasons for this move away from the novel.
It could be argued that TimiMust Have a Stop is Huxley's last major attempt to use fiction as a medium for expressing his ideas. Only one of the books he published after 1945, The Genius and the Goddess in 1955, sets out to tell a story in a conventionally realistic setting, and even this is more of a long short story than an orthodox novel. As Geoffrey Gorer has shown, Island (1963) is more an anthropologist's report on an imaginary paradise than a study of how human beings actually behave in society, while Ape and Essence (1946), a vision of the future even more depressing than Brave New World, is actually presented as a film-script. It is not difficult to find reasons for this move away from the novel.
Huxley described himself on several occasions as an essayist who happened to write novels, and the essay element is very visible in several of his books. He received, as he said in one interview, no help at all from his subconscious when elaborating his plots, and though the recurrence of certain sexual themes might lead a Freudian to take this statement with a pinch of salt, it is certainly true that his narrative is often only a pretext for the literary, philosophical and political digressions in which he is clearly most interested. As Philip Quarles comments somewhat ruefully in Point Counter Point, the chief defect of the novel of ideas is that 'you must write about people who have ideas to express - which excludes all but 0.01 per cent of the human race', and Huxley certainly knew that his novels gave an inadequate account of ordinary human experience. It may well be that he considered Time Must Have a Stop to have been his most successful novel because he had, in his description of Uncle Eustace's 'Bardo' state, actually shown an intellectuaj experiencing reality instead of just talking about it.
A move away from the novel did not, of course, involve a new departure in Huxley's work. He had always written essays, and collections such as Music at Night (1931), The Olive Tree (1932) or Adonis and the Alphabet (1956) are among his most aesthetically satisfying books. Neither are such collections irrelevant either to the successive self-portraits presented by his fiction or to the different ideas on which he tried to base his various novels. Thus his essay on Tibet, published in On the Margin in 1923, not only anticipates the general iconoclasm of Do What You Will. Its ironic comment that 'the spectacle of an ancient and elaborate civilization of which no detail is not entirely idiotic is in the highest degree comforting and
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refreshing' is yet another indication of how radically his views were to change later in his career when he used the Tibetan Book of the Dead to express a major theme in Time Must Have a Stop. The same element of intellectual autobiography is also present in Along the Road (1925), where his analysis of 'the best picture' - Piero della Francesca's Resurrection - emphasizes his liking for 'natural, spontaneous and unpretentious grandeur', and desire to worship 'what is admirable in man'. The link here is with the humanism of Do What You Will, while his remark in the same volume that he would personally 'sooner be Faraday than Shakespeare' because 'the artist must fatally pass much of his life in the emotional world of human contacts' again indicates how much of himself Huxley did put into the character of Philip Quarles in Point Counter Point.1
T. H. Huxley as a Man of Letters, on the other hand, originally given as the Huxley Memorial Lecture in May 1932, is less informative biographically than one might perhaps expect. It is primarily an analysis of his grandfather's literary style, and becomes relevant to Huxley's own work only at one point. 'Pain and sorrow knock a our doors more loudly than pleanire and hppinesan4 the prints of their footsteps are less easily effaced' is a remark which he quotes
primarily toilI fëliirãndrather predilection for the caesura
sentence; and here as elsewhere, this lecture gives most tempting encouragement to writers with a fondness for semicolons.2 But the very restraint with which T. H. Huxley expresses himself underlines by contrast the almost hysterical note which the same idea assumes in After Many a Summer, and epitomizes the difference between the two most famous members of the Huxley family. In Thomas Henry, the metaphysical pessimism underlying his work was kept in check by his six children as well as by his active involvement in the evolving science and stable society of his day; whereas in the case of his grandson, this pessimism was given freer rein as much through the isolation that was Huxley's lot as a writer as by the disintegration of his own and his grandfather's world.
Although the essay on the French philosopher Maine de Biran, published in Themes and Variations in 1950, deals primarily with mysticism and the methods of analysis elaborated in the nineteen-thirties by the American physiologist W. H. Sheldon, it has even greater interest as a partly involuntary self-portrait. For Sheldon, human beings could be analysed in terms of three basic components: endomorphy, associated with fatness, extraversion and a cheerful gregariousness; mesomorphy, with a muscular physique, large bones, aggressiveness and a 'lust for power'; and ectomorphy, with small bones, a slender build, stringy muscles, and an intense interest in the things of the mind. The three corresponding psychological types are viscerotonics - Pickwick, Uncle Eustace, Falstaff, G. K. Chesterton; somatotonics - Hotspur, Sebastian Barnack's father, Ian Paisley,
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Bulldog Drummond, the Roderick Spode of The Code of the Woosters; and cerebretonics - Hamlet, Ivan Karamazov, Voltaire, Shelley and Huxley himself. Obviously, Sheldon insists, most people
are a mixture of all three types, and probably the best example of this mixture in literature is Dmitri Karamazov, whose viscerotonic appetite for sheer physical life goes hand in hand both with the violent, somatotonic temperament which he inherits from his father, and with the speculative tendencies more highly developed in his two cerebretonic brothers. Huxley himself was an extreme example of the cerebretonic - in 1943 he described both himself and his son Matthew as 'lanky ectomorphs'; and commented in 1945 that 'the hypersensitiveness of neurotic cerebretonics can often be cured (i.e. masked) by the simple procedure of feeding them a diet rich in cream and bananas13 - and it is clear from his treatment of Maine de Biran that much of the interest which this philosopher had for him stemmed from the fact that he too fell so neatly into this Sheldonian category. So, in fact, do all the autobiographical characters in Huxley's novels - Philip Quarles, Bernard Marx, Anthony Beavis, Sebastian Barnack
and the essay on Maine de Biran is a further summary of how Huxley tended, perhaps unjustly, to see himself: inapt and inept in personal relationships, excessively retiring and unaggressive, unduly subject to the whims of his body, an extreme cerebretonic whose relative inefficiency in the ordinary affairs of life was counterbalanced by his capacity for abstract thought. One could indeed argue that it was because he himself fitted so well into this framework that Huxley adopted so relatively uncritical an attitude towards the Sheldonian hypothesis. For it is fairly obvious, even to a layman, that neither Hitler, Napoleon nor Sir Winston Churchill were markedly somatotonic types, and Soijenitsin noted in The First Circle that Stalin was not a large man.4
Another of Huxley's hobby horses, vegetarianism, also shows itself in the Maine de Biran essay, when he comments on the Christian habit of referring to priests and rulers as shepherds. This analogy, he claims, 'was first used by the herd-owning, land-destroying, meat-eating and war-waging peoples who replaced the horticulturalists of the first civilization and put an end to the Golden Age of Peace, which not long since was regarded as a mere myth, but is now revealed by the light of archaeology as a proto- and pre-historical reality'; and it is clear from this Rousseau-istic comment that Huxley's essays frequently reflect both the didactic tones and the liking for unconventional ideas which first made itself heard in Eyeless in Gaza and Ends and Means.
What is perhaps most noticeable about Huxley's later career as an essayist is the gradual disappearance of purely literary topics. Although Huxley still regarded himself, as late as 1958, as sufficiently a man of letters to remark, when a Brazilian newspaper gave a daily
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outline of his views under the heading 0 Sabio, 'It is the only place in the world where anyone wants to read a literary gent's opinions about things in general day after day',5 his own interests had turned several years previously to historical, social and- political matters. Huxley's best essays on literature all come before the major turning point of 1936, and two of them, Tragedy and the Whole Truth and Vulgarity in Literature, date from 1931 and 1930 respectively. The first, with its thesis that tragedy is 'chemically pure' art, life with all the irrelevancies taken out, is a fascinating gloss both on the Shakespeare whom Huxley liked and the Racine whom he didn't, while at the same time a deliberate comment on the kind of books he personally was trying to write. Thus when Mark Staithes, in Eyeless in Gaza, 'complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature' and 'began to catalogue its omissions', he is certainly echoing Huxley's own views. What he deplores is the 'almost total neglect of those small, physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or an unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation.' From this point of view, Huxley is infinitely more truthful a writer than the Flaubert whose Emma Bovary spends seven hours with her lover in a cab, and even the most unpleasant incidents in Eyeless in Gaza - Helen's abortion, the amputation of Mark Staithes's leg - can be seen as part of a consistent attempt to tell the truth about human existence. Yet while this aspect of his work still makes him very up to date in 1972, it is also linked with another feature of his novels on which he himself, less consciously this time, has also commented in one of his best known literary essays, Vulgarity in Literature.
Thus Huxley is a writer who consistently emphasizes the extremes in human life - of intellectuality, of pointlessness, of physiological irrelevance (little Phil needing to go to the lavatory when waiting for his parents to come back from abroad; Sebastian Barnack masturbating in a hot bath while his uncle dies of a heart attack), of spiritual ecstacy and physical disgust - and there is a curious relationship in this respect between Vulgarity in Literature and some of his own books. It is not that he is vulgar in the true sense of the word, which he rightly diagnoses as being pretentious. He is not like the Edgar Allan Poe whose over-poetical rhymes and rhythms he compares to a parvenu 'wearing a diamond ring on every finger', and whose 'finer shades of vulgarity' remained hidden to foreign observers such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valery. It is rather that he never developed the aristocratic skill of being ordinary enough to disarm admiration, the gentlemanly habit of limiting his knowledge, as his brother Julian once suggested to him he should, to 'what the company needed', the art of discreetly fusing narrative with ideas to the point where the reader is rather flat teredby his own intelligence
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than overwhelmed by the brilliance of ijbQ1. It is not unusual,
when discussing Huxley with WEA students, to hear him dismissed as 'a know-all'. Just as ridicule kills in France, such an accusation can spell death in England.6
Nowhere, however, was Huxley's breadth of knowledge used to better effect than in his essays on the visual arts, and it is extraordinary that a man who was virtually blind in one eye and had
only imperfect vision in the other should have known so much about painting, sculpture and architecture. Yet Huxley not only knew where every picture was in the many galleries he visited, when it was painted and in what historical circumstances. He was also, as Kenneth Clark has observed, 'one of the most discerning lookers of our time', whose ability to give a 'description of the subject of a picture in an artist's own terms' is a most rare gift in literary men. And just as Huxley's knowledge of science or philosophy invariably found its way into his novels, so his appreciation of the visual arts was frequently incorporated - often more successfully - into the patterns of his fiction. In Antic Hay, it is the model of Wren's plans for London that serves as a reference point for beauty and sanity in a chaotic world, while in After Many a Summer it is a Vermeer portrait of a lady, 'sitting at the very heart of an equation, in a world where beauty and logic, painting and analytical geometry, had become one', which provides both the aptest comment on the fury of Jo Stoyte as he looks ferociously for his gun, and the most attractive alternative to the criminal follies which he represents. It is indeed through his interest in art that Huxley is most successful in amalgamating the two sides of his literary activity, his work as an essayist and the contribution which he makes to the literature of ideas; and Grey Eminence, the study he published in 1942 of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's assistant and principal adviser in home and domestic policy, is a particularly good example of how his two major interests, the aesthetic and the ethical, can be woven together.
11
A lack of enthusiasm for the artistic style known as the baroque appears early in Huxley's career when he describes the seventeenth century, in Along the Road (1925), as the 'age of baroque, of kingly and clerical display' and comments on how grotesque the 'too expressive, theatrical gestures of the baroque architects and decorators' becomes because they are 'trying to express something tragic in terms of a style essentially comic'. Here, however, his distaste is primarily aesthetic, and it is not until Ends and Means, in 1937, that he sees the 'hysterical, almost epileptic' violence of what he then calls the emotionality of baroque art in a fuller context. It was, he argues, part of a deliberate attempt, in Catholicism, to replace the
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more impersonal 'way of knowledge' fully accepted in Eastern religions as a possible means of attaining God by that 'devotion to a personal deity' which, in Huxley's view, had always been one of the worst aspects in the Christian tradition. Neither was the substitution, in baroque art, of intense yearning for quiet contemplation the only reason for Huxley's dislike. 'The throne', he wrote in Beyond the Mexique Bay, 'is the natural ally of the altar, and both, for the same ceremonial reasons, have steps.' The Catholic Counter Reformation, which sought to make itself the dominant intellectual influence during the seventeenth century, found a natural ally in the spiritual bullying implicit in the spurious dignity which baroque grandeur gave to kings and priests, and the Huxley who had always felt 'a passion for personal freedom' had political as well as aesthetic reasons for disliking this particular artistic style.7
He also had other motives whose apparent irrelevance to the art and politics of the Counter Reformation only underlines the consistency of the philosophy be had elaborated for himself as a result of his conversion to mysticism. Thus in 1956, in The Education of an Amphibian, be remarks that the adage 'If you waAt,,tp see, stop trying', has a wider application than the immediate role which it plays in the Bates system of eye training. Indeed, he continues, this aphorism was invented for the express purpose of allowing the 'deep wisdom of the body' to overcome the bad habits which people had acquired through their conscious efforts, and he remarks in this context that 'left to itself, the physiological intelligence is almost incapable of making a mistake'.8 This view is fundamental not only to his early agnosticism - the Bull at Benares, in Jesting Pilate, behaves sensibly because it follows its instincts, whereas the worshippers on the banks of the Ganges act stupidly as a result of the religious ideas created by their conscious mind - but also to the synthesis which be strove to establish, from the nineteen-thirties onwards, between the study of human physiology and the findings of the mystics. Indeed, in so far as his thesis in The Doors of Perception, in 1953, is the Bergsonian one that, by using our conscious, analytical intellect to gain control of the world around us, we have effectively prevented ourselves from seeing what really exists, the mistrust which Huxley shows for the practices of baroque devotion can be linked to his much better known writings on the effects of mescalin. Father Joseph, writes Huxley in Grey Eminence, 'never succeeded in overcoming his all too natural desire to take the kingdom
of heaven by violence', and the intense intellectuality of seventeenth-century Catholicism tended to hide the Ultimate Reality from him
just as effectively as the language which modern man uses to think about the world leads him to mistake his various philosophies for a correct account of existence. Like his contemporaries whose yearnings are reflected in the intense, emotional lines of the ecstatic figures
in baroque sculpture, Father Joseph tried too hard to attain that unification with the underlying goodness of the world which, for Huxley, reveals itself in two basic ways: to the natural mystic as a result of a patient 'waiting on God' in the state of physical and psychological relaxation known as meditation; and those who, by a correct use of drugs such as mescalin, so cleanse their doors of perception that everything, in Blake's words, 'appears to them as it is, that is infinite'. Mescalin, in other words, can induce a state of
relaxation, of openness to experience, which is precisely the opposite of the tension and conscious striving reflected in baroque art; and
in this respect there is a very clear link between Huxley's unfavourable analysis of seventeenth-century Catholicism in Grey Eminence, his reading of F. Matthias Alexander, his adoption of the Bates system for eye training, and his defence, in The Doors of Perception and Island, of the controlled use of certain drugs.
This analysis of Father Joseph's 'frenzy of zeal' is, of course, only one aspect of Grey Eminence. In the emphasis which it places upon
the relationship between what Father Joseph did and what subse-
quently happened in Europe, this 'study in religion and politics' is very much the work of a committed historian, closely related to the
time at which it was written and specifically aimed at proving certain
theses. These are that Father Joseph, who was Cardinal Richelieu's chief political assistant between 1614 and 1638, is indirectly respon-
sible for two of the greatest evils of the present day: nationalist wars
and totalitarian government. By advising Richelieu on how best to prolong the Thirty Year War, Father Joseph not only helped to
kill one-third of the population of Central Europe. He also created
exactly the right conditions for the later domination of Germany by Prussia, and the consequent establishment of the military machine
which, in the year when Grey Eminence was published, had con-
quered the mainland of Europe. Moreover, by helping Richelieu to destroy all opposition to the Crown, Father Joseph enabled
Louis xiv's 'characteristically totalitarian'9 ambitions to create, in seventeenth-century France, a state which was prevented only by its own inefficiency from attaining the same degree of spiritual uniformity as Hitler's Germany.
It is rather curious, when one remembers the hostility towards Catholicism which shows itself throughout Huxley's work - especially on the question of birth control - to discover that something very like his thesis on Cardinal Richelieu was put forward in 1931 by the militantly Catholic historian and man of letters, Hilaire Belloc. The parallel is even more surprising when one remembers Huxley's private little dig at Belloc's Cautionary Tales in After Many a Summer - 'Curious how many English Catholics take to comic versifying', he remarks of Jeremy Pordage's brother Tom, who becomes a convert and 'publishes a volume of comic verse two days
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after the sack of Nanking' - and there can be no question of a direct influence. Both writers nevertheless maintain that the Cardinal's readiness to ally himself with the German protestants - and even with the infidel Turks - if this could serve the interests of Catholic France constitutes an important turning point in modern history, and both quote the remark which Pope Urban viii is said to have made after Richelieu's death: 'If there is a God, then Cardinal Richelieu has much to answer for; but if there is not, he has done very well.' There, however, the parallel finishes. Huxley had no sympathy for the spiritual totalitarianism implied by Belloc's vision of a Europe united under the Catholic Church and he was, in any case, essentially concerned less with Richelieu himself than with his assistant. Indeed, in the first pages of Grey Eminence, Father Joseph almost becomes another of the semi-autobiographical characters on to whom Huxley projects not only his immediate intellectual preoccupations but also his own private experience of the world. Like Huxley, Father Joseph was an intellectually precocious child, with a marked tendency to 'shrink from what he felt to be the indecency of expressed emotional intimacy with other human beings'. When he was ten, his father died; and when the first paroxysm of grief was past, writes Huxley, 'there remained with him, latent at ordinary times, but always ready to come to the surface, a haunting sense of the vanity, the transience, the hopeless precariousness of all merely human happiness'. The parallel with Huxley's reaction to the death of his mother when he was fourteen is almost uncanny, and the personal similarity between the two men becomes even more marked later in the volume. In 1604, at the age of twenty-seven, 'an aggravation of that progressive defect of vision which advanced throughout his life until, at the end, he was nearly blind' prevents Father Joseph from following his intended career as a theologian and man of learning. Instead, he turns to the world of men, and the biographical similarity with Huxley's inability, because of his own poor eyesight, to follow the medical career which he had originally planned, takes on a more intellectual aspect. Like Huxley, Father Joseph reads widely in the mystical tradition. In addition to the more orthodox Christian thinkers, he knew, as Huxley remarks in his casually well informed manner, 'Dionysius the Areopagite's Mystical Theology and Divine Names, the mystical writings of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and St. Bernard', as well as 'Ruysbroeck and two lesser contemplatives of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, Henry de Herp and the Benedictine Abbot, Blosius'.'° But, unlike Huxley, he goes into politics, and it is with the incompatibility between politics and mysticism that Grey Eminence is essentially concerned.
Father Joseph, according to Huxley, 'believed he could live and work, even at power politics, in a state of "holy indifference" very similar to the state recommended in the Bhagavad Gita to the hero Arjuna as he prepares to go into battle'. But experience proved him to be wrong, and his whole life suffered from the infection given off by his political acts. Yet although God and power politics do not mix, Father Joseph was encouraged to think they might by the very doctrines which, as Huxley argues, are common to both Eastern and Western mysticism. Huxley himself prefaced the new translation of the Bhagavad Gita which Christopher Isherwood made in 1948, and certainly knew at the time of writing Grey Eminence of the injunction to Arjuna to fight vigorously but 'with detachment'. What he does not seem quite to hiëilië bföEThgiñriihg his account of Father Joseph's career, is that this injunction is not so much morally neutral as ethically nihilistic. If one is detached, one doesn't care, and it was precisely Father Joseph's mysticism which enabled him to contribute so effectively to the blindness and insanity of seventeenth-century Europe. 'Few political idealists', writes Huxley, 'have spent half a life-time brooding upon the torture and death of a man-god, by comparison with whose sufferings those of ordinary human beings are so infinitesimal as to be practically negligibile';11 and it requires only the slightest shift of emphasis to show how this indifference towards the fate of people in the world could be fitted into the Eastern view of physical reality as Maya, illusion. Since human beings do not really exist, Father Joseph had every licence to use treachery, fraud and violence in the furtherance of the greater glory of France. Nihilism and tyranny, as Camus argued in L'Homme révolté, go automatically hand in hand because both refuse to believe in people as individuals.
Huxley naturally tried to answer, in the text itself, the overwhelming case against mysticism unwittingly advanced by the account of Father Joseph's activities in Grey Eminence. 'As a matter of historical fact', he observes, 'many of the great theocentrics have been men and women of enormous and beneficent activity', and he links this remark to his own dislike of industrialism and centralization by adding that the work which theocentrics do is 'always marginal' and always directed to units small enough 'to be capable of shared spiritual experience and of moral and rational conduct'. 12 The sympathy which Huxley felt for the Society of Friends is closely linked to this view, and he never ceased to insist that no salvation was attainable to anyone who accepted the norms of our own highly complex technological society. In this context, his final judgment on Father Joseph, like the possibly unconscious emphasis which he gives to the similarities between himself and the subject of his book, also takes on an autobiographical tone. According to the Indian view, he writes, it is 'a fatal thing for the members of one caste to usurp the functions that properly belong to another', and proceeds to comment that Father Joseph is 'an eminent example' of what
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happens when brahmins forsake the meditation which is their natural calling and go in for politics.13 The place for cerebretonics, Huxley is implying, is essentially in the library. If they are going to come down into the world of men, they must do so only in order to join small groups of like-minded individualists, and must not involve themselves in any of the large-scale activities of the modern world.
As in the social implications of Brave New World, this rejection of the traditions of the class into which he was born again marks Huxley out as an exception even within his own family. Neither his brother Julian, who accepted in 1946 the post as first Director General of Unesco, nor his cousin Gervas, who spent the second world war, in the words of Who's Who, as 'adviser to the Ministry of Information on publicity to and about the Empire and on relations with the American forces in the United Kingdom', found it necessary to adopt so extreme an attitude, and it is again a curious example of the difference between Huxley the writer and Aldous the man that his private relationships were in no way affected by the views he put forward in his books. According to Grey Eminence, anybody who touched pitch would inevitably be deified; and for a pacifist and advocate of non-attachment, there could surely be nothing blacker than propaganda for the Empire. But in 1948, when Gervas dined with him in New York, Aldous displayed 'a fascinated and wholly objective interest in the art and techniques of advertising, public relations and market research'. It was an attitude which one would have thought, from his books, quite impossible for the man who had such harsh words to say about the not wholly dissimilar work that Jeremy Pordage's brother Tom did in the Foreign Office - 'working away at the precise spot where he could do the maximum amount of harm to the greatest possible number of people'.14
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Ten years after the publication of Grey Eminence, Huxley returned to the century and subject which seem to have had an almost obsessive attraction for him, and wrote the book by which, in 1972, he is probably known to more people than ever read either his essays or his novels. The Devils of Loudun, first published in October 1952, is the only one of his novels to have achieved fame by being adapted to the mass media, and there is some irony in the fact that Ken Russell's film The Devils will have made more money in a year than Huxley received from his books during his whole lifetime. For all its extravagance, the film is not a wholly inaccurate adaptation. Admittedly, by concentrating on the political aspects of Urbain Grandier's trial for witchcraft in 1634, it reveals how all-pervasive the fashionable anti-authoritarianism of the early nineteen-seventies
can be. But Grandier was just as much a victim of the totalitarian ambitions of Cardinal Richelieu as he was the object of vengeance for the private enemies whom his pride had led him to make, and the book has the same implicit defence of the open society as Grey Eminence. The physical horror of the scene in which Grandier is burnt at the stake is again no betrayal of the book. 'After all', writes Huxley, quoting Montaigne, 'it is rating one's conjectures at a very high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them'; and the agnosticism underlying all his work is inseparable from his obsession with the physical suffering which men inflict on other men.
In 1952, however, the main subject-matter of the book was more obviously relevant to the immediate political atmosphere of the time, and Huxley was expressing a widespread attitude when he argued that only a relatively narrow gap separated the witch-hunts of the seventeenth century from the excesses of the Cold War. In the very same year that Arthur Miller used the Salem witch trials of 1692 as an allegory to comment on America during the McCarthy era, Huxley was writing in The Devils of Loudun that 'the destinies of the world are in the hands of self-made demoniacs, of men who are possessed by, and who manifest, the evil they have chosen to see in others'; while the essence of Jean-Paul Sartre's attack on French anti-communism in the nineteen-forties can be summed up in Huxley's very characteristic remark that 'like the mercurial and antimonial poisonings of earlier years, like the sulpha poisoning and serum-fevers of the present, the Loudun epidemic was an "iatro-genic disease", produced and fostered by the very physicians who were supposed to be restoring the patients to health'.15 Yet there was, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, nothing imaginary about the Communists occupying Eastern Europe or threatening West Berlin, and The Devils of Loudun shows the same refusal to distinguish between the half loaf of Western democracy and the 'no bread' of totalitarianism which had characterized Huxley's political thinking in the nineteen-thirties.
It is not, however, only a political book, and has other themes which link it more firmly to Huxley's more general philosophy. Thus it is a sustained if sometimes paradoxical defence of his belief in the fundamental goodness of nature - a belief reflected in the nineteen-fifties by his praise for vegetarianism in Variations on a Philosopher, but going right back to the nineteen-twenties and his comments on the sacred bull at Benares in Jesting Pilate - and the events described in The Devils of Loudun come about precisely because men have tried to repress the natural sexual urge by shutting women up in convents and insisting that priests should remain celibate. If Soeur Jeanne des Anges, an 'average sensual woman', had been able to marry and have children, she would never have developed the frustrated passion for Urbain Grandier which led her to accuse him of
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seeking to possess her soul and body by witchcraft; and had Christian theologians not chosen to regard nature as evil, they would never have developed the elaborate theories which justified burning people at the stake for supposed commerce with the Devil. When, at the very moment that Grandier is burnt alive, a flock of pigeons suddenly swoops down from the sky, the parson's enemies greet them as 'a troop of devils come to fetch away his soul'. More probably, comments Huxley, they are merely 'obeying the laws of their own, their blessedly other-than-human nature' -just as the bull at Benares was when it ignored the ceremonies surrounding the eclipse of the sun, and calmly licked up the rice. Unlike men, animals do not drive themselves insane by the notions which they themselves invent; and down below the 'verminous realm of Original Sin' there is an underlying natural virtue which man can reach only by letting go his conscious mind and allowing the universe to think in his place.'6 9 Drugs, devils and biography
It is perhaps inevitable that this incipient pantheism, like the metaphysical optimism which it implies, should be neglected in the cinema, just as it was neglected in the very successful play which John Whiting wrote as an adaptation of The Devils of Loudun in 1961. What predominates on both stage and screen - and Huxley, it should be noted, greatly appreciated John Whiting's adaptation, which he saw on one of his rare visits to London17 - is the physical horror of the events. What one remembers are the tortures, the hangings, the whippings, the hysteria, the giving of real enemas and the receiving of probably false stigmata, the heady mixture of sex and religion which continued to predominate after Huxley moved away from the novel and chose a genre which allowed a more natural blend between essays and narration. By concentrating on those aspects of seventeenth-century France which most anticipated the horrors of the twentieth century, he was also following the same bent of his own imagination which had led him to base the plot of Point Counter Point on a brutal murder and the death of a child, and which had struck D. H. Lawrence as so out of keeping with his professed humanism. In The Devils of Loudun, even the mystic, Father Surin, goes mad; and Huxley seems to have experienced, in the late forties and early fifties, so intense an onset of pessimism that his mystical beliefs became almost irrelevant to the world in which he and his contemporaries were forced to live.
It is in the context of this increased pessimism that Huxley's famous first experiment with mescalin, on a 'bright November morning in 1953' is most immediately relevant to his career as a writer. He remarks almost casually in the opening pages of The Doors of Perception (1954) that he had never himself had a mystical experience, and his initial acceptance of 'the perennial philosophy' may well have been based much more on what he thought than on what he felt. It was, he wrote to a correspondent in 1945, through 'the aesthetic" that be had come to the spiritual, and if he was only intellectually convinced of the views defended in the books he published after 1936, he would naturally have had difficulty translating them into the 'felt' medium of the novel. By the time he took mescalin Huxley was fifty-nine, and rather too set in his ways as a writer for the overwhelming experience which he describes in The Doors of Perception to have much effect upon the world vision expressed in his more imaginative works. Indeed, the similarities between The Genius and the Goddess, published only one year after The Doors of Perception, and novels such as Point Counter Point or Time Must Have a Stop, are so great that one wonders at times just how deeply Huxley the writer was affected by the drugs which he did so much to popularize.
Thus the narrator in The Genius and the Goddess, John Rivers, has the same kind of possessive, idealistic mother from whom Mark Rampion had succeeded in escaping in Point Counter Point, but who had rendered Brian Foxe so unfit for normal sexual emotions in Eyeless in Gaza. The Genius and the Goddess - like the early short story Chawdron 1936) - is told in flashback, and at the time when the events he describes take place, Rivers is working as research assistant to Henry Maartens, whose brilliance as a scientist and philosopher, contrasted with his inability to be anything but 'an idiot where human relations are concerned, a prize ass in all the practical affairs of life' again strikes a very familiar note. The central incident in The Genius and the Goddess again recalls some of Huxley's earlier insistence that what puritans call sexual immorality can well have much better results than rigid adherence to fixed rules. Henry Maartens is so parasitic upon his wile Katy that when she temporarily lacks the vigour to cure him by the sheer radiance of her presence, there seems to be no hope of saving him - until, that is, she comes to John Rivers's bedroom late one night. By going to bed with him, she renews contact with that 'animal grace' which
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refreshing' is yet another indication of how radically his views were to change later in his career when he used the Tibetan Book of the Dead to express a major theme in Time Must Have a Stop. The same element of intellectual autobiography is also present in Along the Road (1925), where his analysis of 'the best picture' - Piero della Francesca's Resurrection - emphasizes his liking for 'natural, spontaneous and unpretentious grandeur', and desire to worship 'what is admirable in man'. The link here is with the humanism of Do What You Will, while his remark in the same volume that he would personally 'sooner be Faraday than Shakespeare' because 'the artist must fatally pass much of his life in the emotional world of human contacts' again indicates how much of himself Huxley did put into the character of Philip Quarles in Point Counter Point.1
T. H. Huxley as a Man of Letters, on the other hand, originally given as the Huxley Memorial Lecture in May 1932, is less informative biographically than one might perhaps expect. It is primarily an analysis of his grandfather's literary style, and becomes relevant to Huxley's own work only at one point. 'Pain and sorrow knock a our doors more loudly than pleanire and hppinesan4 the prints of their footsteps are less easily effaced' is a remark which he quotes
primarily toilI fëliirãndrather predilection for the caesura
sentence; and here as elsewhere, this lecture gives most tempting encouragement to writers with a fondness for semicolons.2 But the very restraint with which T. H. Huxley expresses himself underlines by contrast the almost hysterical note which the same idea assumes in After Many a Summer, and epitomizes the difference between the two most famous members of the Huxley family. In Thomas Henry, the metaphysical pessimism underlying his work was kept in check by his six children as well as by his active involvement in the evolving science and stable society of his day; whereas in the case of his grandson, this pessimism was given freer rein as much through the isolation that was Huxley's lot as a writer as by the disintegration of his own and his grandfather's world.
Although the essay on the French philosopher Maine de Biran, published in Themes and Variations in 1950, deals primarily with mysticism and the methods of analysis elaborated in the nineteen-thirties by the American physiologist W. H. Sheldon, it has even greater interest as a partly involuntary self-portrait. For Sheldon, human beings could be analysed in terms of three basic components: endomorphy, associated with fatness, extraversion and a cheerful gregariousness; mesomorphy, with a muscular physique, large bones, aggressiveness and a 'lust for power'; and ectomorphy, with small bones, a slender build, stringy muscles, and an intense interest in the things of the mind. The three corresponding psychological types are viscerotonics - Pickwick, Uncle Eustace, Falstaff, G. K. Chesterton; somatotonics - Hotspur, Sebastian Barnack's father, Ian Paisley,
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Bulldog Drummond, the Roderick Spode of The Code of the Woosters; and cerebretonics - Hamlet, Ivan Karamazov, Voltaire, Shelley and Huxley himself. Obviously, Sheldon insists, most people
are a mixture of all three types, and probably the best example of this mixture in literature is Dmitri Karamazov, whose viscerotonic appetite for sheer physical life goes hand in hand both with the violent, somatotonic temperament which he inherits from his father, and with the speculative tendencies more highly developed in his two cerebretonic brothers. Huxley himself was an extreme example of the cerebretonic - in 1943 he described both himself and his son Matthew as 'lanky ectomorphs'; and commented in 1945 that 'the hypersensitiveness of neurotic cerebretonics can often be cured (i.e. masked) by the simple procedure of feeding them a diet rich in cream and bananas13 - and it is clear from his treatment of Maine de Biran that much of the interest which this philosopher had for him stemmed from the fact that he too fell so neatly into this Sheldonian category. So, in fact, do all the autobiographical characters in Huxley's novels - Philip Quarles, Bernard Marx, Anthony Beavis, Sebastian Barnack
and the essay on Maine de Biran is a further summary of how Huxley tended, perhaps unjustly, to see himself: inapt and inept in personal relationships, excessively retiring and unaggressive, unduly subject to the whims of his body, an extreme cerebretonic whose relative inefficiency in the ordinary affairs of life was counterbalanced by his capacity for abstract thought. One could indeed argue that it was because he himself fitted so well into this framework that Huxley adopted so relatively uncritical an attitude towards the Sheldonian hypothesis. For it is fairly obvious, even to a layman, that neither Hitler, Napoleon nor Sir Winston Churchill were markedly somatotonic types, and Soijenitsin noted in The First Circle that Stalin was not a large man.4
Another of Huxley's hobby horses, vegetarianism, also shows itself in the Maine de Biran essay, when he comments on the Christian habit of referring to priests and rulers as shepherds. This analogy, he claims, 'was first used by the herd-owning, land-destroying, meat-eating and war-waging peoples who replaced the horticulturalists of the first civilization and put an end to the Golden Age of Peace, which not long since was regarded as a mere myth, but is now revealed by the light of archaeology as a proto- and pre-historical reality'; and it is clear from this Rousseau-istic comment that Huxley's essays frequently reflect both the didactic tones and the liking for unconventional ideas which first made itself heard in Eyeless in Gaza and Ends and Means.
What is perhaps most noticeable about Huxley's later career as an essayist is the gradual disappearance of purely literary topics. Although Huxley still regarded himself, as late as 1958, as sufficiently a man of letters to remark, when a Brazilian newspaper gave a daily
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outline of his views under the heading 0 Sabio, 'It is the only place in the world where anyone wants to read a literary gent's opinions about things in general day after day',5 his own interests had turned several years previously to historical, social and- political matters. Huxley's best essays on literature all come before the major turning point of 1936, and two of them, Tragedy and the Whole Truth and Vulgarity in Literature, date from 1931 and 1930 respectively. The first, with its thesis that tragedy is 'chemically pure' art, life with all the irrelevancies taken out, is a fascinating gloss both on the Shakespeare whom Huxley liked and the Racine whom he didn't, while at the same time a deliberate comment on the kind of books he personally was trying to write. Thus when Mark Staithes, in Eyeless in Gaza, 'complained of the profound untruthfulness of even the best imaginative literature' and 'began to catalogue its omissions', he is certainly echoing Huxley's own views. What he deplores is the 'almost total neglect of those small, physiological events that decide whether day-to-day living shall have a pleasant or an unpleasant tone. Excretion, for example, with its power to make or mar the day. Digestion. And, for the heroines of novel and drama, menstruation.' From this point of view, Huxley is infinitely more truthful a writer than the Flaubert whose Emma Bovary spends seven hours with her lover in a cab, and even the most unpleasant incidents in Eyeless in Gaza - Helen's abortion, the amputation of Mark Staithes's leg - can be seen as part of a consistent attempt to tell the truth about human existence. Yet while this aspect of his work still makes him very up to date in 1972, it is also linked with another feature of his novels on which he himself, less consciously this time, has also commented in one of his best known literary essays, Vulgarity in Literature.
Thus Huxley is a writer who consistently emphasizes the extremes in human life - of intellectuality, of pointlessness, of physiological irrelevance (little Phil needing to go to the lavatory when waiting for his parents to come back from abroad; Sebastian Barnack masturbating in a hot bath while his uncle dies of a heart attack), of spiritual ecstacy and physical disgust - and there is a curious relationship in this respect between Vulgarity in Literature and some of his own books. It is not that he is vulgar in the true sense of the word, which he rightly diagnoses as being pretentious. He is not like the Edgar Allan Poe whose over-poetical rhymes and rhythms he compares to a parvenu 'wearing a diamond ring on every finger', and whose 'finer shades of vulgarity' remained hidden to foreign observers such as Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Valery. It is rather that he never developed the aristocratic skill of being ordinary enough to disarm admiration, the gentlemanly habit of limiting his knowledge, as his brother Julian once suggested to him he should, to 'what the company needed', the art of discreetly fusing narrative with ideas to the point where the reader is rather flat teredby his own intelligence
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than overwhelmed by the brilliance of ijbQ1. It is not unusual,
when discussing Huxley with WEA students, to hear him dismissed as 'a know-all'. Just as ridicule kills in France, such an accusation can spell death in England.6
Nowhere, however, was Huxley's breadth of knowledge used to better effect than in his essays on the visual arts, and it is extraordinary that a man who was virtually blind in one eye and had
only imperfect vision in the other should have known so much about painting, sculpture and architecture. Yet Huxley not only knew where every picture was in the many galleries he visited, when it was painted and in what historical circumstances. He was also, as Kenneth Clark has observed, 'one of the most discerning lookers of our time', whose ability to give a 'description of the subject of a picture in an artist's own terms' is a most rare gift in literary men. And just as Huxley's knowledge of science or philosophy invariably found its way into his novels, so his appreciation of the visual arts was frequently incorporated - often more successfully - into the patterns of his fiction. In Antic Hay, it is the model of Wren's plans for London that serves as a reference point for beauty and sanity in a chaotic world, while in After Many a Summer it is a Vermeer portrait of a lady, 'sitting at the very heart of an equation, in a world where beauty and logic, painting and analytical geometry, had become one', which provides both the aptest comment on the fury of Jo Stoyte as he looks ferociously for his gun, and the most attractive alternative to the criminal follies which he represents. It is indeed through his interest in art that Huxley is most successful in amalgamating the two sides of his literary activity, his work as an essayist and the contribution which he makes to the literature of ideas; and Grey Eminence, the study he published in 1942 of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu's assistant and principal adviser in home and domestic policy, is a particularly good example of how his two major interests, the aesthetic and the ethical, can be woven together.
11
A lack of enthusiasm for the artistic style known as the baroque appears early in Huxley's career when he describes the seventeenth century, in Along the Road (1925), as the 'age of baroque, of kingly and clerical display' and comments on how grotesque the 'too expressive, theatrical gestures of the baroque architects and decorators' becomes because they are 'trying to express something tragic in terms of a style essentially comic'. Here, however, his distaste is primarily aesthetic, and it is not until Ends and Means, in 1937, that he sees the 'hysterical, almost epileptic' violence of what he then calls the emotionality of baroque art in a fuller context. It was, he argues, part of a deliberate attempt, in Catholicism, to replace the
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more impersonal 'way of knowledge' fully accepted in Eastern religions as a possible means of attaining God by that 'devotion to a personal deity' which, in Huxley's view, had always been one of the worst aspects in the Christian tradition. Neither was the substitution, in baroque art, of intense yearning for quiet contemplation the only reason for Huxley's dislike. 'The throne', he wrote in Beyond the Mexique Bay, 'is the natural ally of the altar, and both, for the same ceremonial reasons, have steps.' The Catholic Counter Reformation, which sought to make itself the dominant intellectual influence during the seventeenth century, found a natural ally in the spiritual bullying implicit in the spurious dignity which baroque grandeur gave to kings and priests, and the Huxley who had always felt 'a passion for personal freedom' had political as well as aesthetic reasons for disliking this particular artistic style.7
He also had other motives whose apparent irrelevance to the art and politics of the Counter Reformation only underlines the consistency of the philosophy be had elaborated for himself as a result of his conversion to mysticism. Thus in 1956, in The Education of an Amphibian, be remarks that the adage 'If you waAt,,tp see, stop trying', has a wider application than the immediate role which it plays in the Bates system of eye training. Indeed, he continues, this aphorism was invented for the express purpose of allowing the 'deep wisdom of the body' to overcome the bad habits which people had acquired through their conscious efforts, and he remarks in this context that 'left to itself, the physiological intelligence is almost incapable of making a mistake'.8 This view is fundamental not only to his early agnosticism - the Bull at Benares, in Jesting Pilate, behaves sensibly because it follows its instincts, whereas the worshippers on the banks of the Ganges act stupidly as a result of the religious ideas created by their conscious mind - but also to the synthesis which be strove to establish, from the nineteen-thirties onwards, between the study of human physiology and the findings of the mystics. Indeed, in so far as his thesis in The Doors of Perception, in 1953, is the Bergsonian one that, by using our conscious, analytical intellect to gain control of the world around us, we have effectively prevented ourselves from seeing what really exists, the mistrust which Huxley shows for the practices of baroque devotion can be linked to his much better known writings on the effects of mescalin. Father Joseph, writes Huxley in Grey Eminence, 'never succeeded in overcoming his all too natural desire to take the kingdom
of heaven by violence', and the intense intellectuality of seventeenth-century Catholicism tended to hide the Ultimate Reality from him
just as effectively as the language which modern man uses to think about the world leads him to mistake his various philosophies for a correct account of existence. Like his contemporaries whose yearnings are reflected in the intense, emotional lines of the ecstatic figures
in baroque sculpture, Father Joseph tried too hard to attain that unification with the underlying goodness of the world which, for Huxley, reveals itself in two basic ways: to the natural mystic as a result of a patient 'waiting on God' in the state of physical and psychological relaxation known as meditation; and those who, by a correct use of drugs such as mescalin, so cleanse their doors of perception that everything, in Blake's words, 'appears to them as it is, that is infinite'. Mescalin, in other words, can induce a state of
relaxation, of openness to experience, which is precisely the opposite of the tension and conscious striving reflected in baroque art; and
in this respect there is a very clear link between Huxley's unfavourable analysis of seventeenth-century Catholicism in Grey Eminence, his reading of F. Matthias Alexander, his adoption of the Bates system for eye training, and his defence, in The Doors of Perception and Island, of the controlled use of certain drugs.
This analysis of Father Joseph's 'frenzy of zeal' is, of course, only one aspect of Grey Eminence. In the emphasis which it places upon
the relationship between what Father Joseph did and what subse-
quently happened in Europe, this 'study in religion and politics' is very much the work of a committed historian, closely related to the
time at which it was written and specifically aimed at proving certain
theses. These are that Father Joseph, who was Cardinal Richelieu's chief political assistant between 1614 and 1638, is indirectly respon-
sible for two of the greatest evils of the present day: nationalist wars
and totalitarian government. By advising Richelieu on how best to prolong the Thirty Year War, Father Joseph not only helped to
kill one-third of the population of Central Europe. He also created
exactly the right conditions for the later domination of Germany by Prussia, and the consequent establishment of the military machine
which, in the year when Grey Eminence was published, had con-
quered the mainland of Europe. Moreover, by helping Richelieu to destroy all opposition to the Crown, Father Joseph enabled
Louis xiv's 'characteristically totalitarian'9 ambitions to create, in seventeenth-century France, a state which was prevented only by its own inefficiency from attaining the same degree of spiritual uniformity as Hitler's Germany.
It is rather curious, when one remembers the hostility towards Catholicism which shows itself throughout Huxley's work - especially on the question of birth control - to discover that something very like his thesis on Cardinal Richelieu was put forward in 1931 by the militantly Catholic historian and man of letters, Hilaire Belloc. The parallel is even more surprising when one remembers Huxley's private little dig at Belloc's Cautionary Tales in After Many a Summer - 'Curious how many English Catholics take to comic versifying', he remarks of Jeremy Pordage's brother Tom, who becomes a convert and 'publishes a volume of comic verse two days
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after the sack of Nanking' - and there can be no question of a direct influence. Both writers nevertheless maintain that the Cardinal's readiness to ally himself with the German protestants - and even with the infidel Turks - if this could serve the interests of Catholic France constitutes an important turning point in modern history, and both quote the remark which Pope Urban viii is said to have made after Richelieu's death: 'If there is a God, then Cardinal Richelieu has much to answer for; but if there is not, he has done very well.' There, however, the parallel finishes. Huxley had no sympathy for the spiritual totalitarianism implied by Belloc's vision of a Europe united under the Catholic Church and he was, in any case, essentially concerned less with Richelieu himself than with his assistant. Indeed, in the first pages of Grey Eminence, Father Joseph almost becomes another of the semi-autobiographical characters on to whom Huxley projects not only his immediate intellectual preoccupations but also his own private experience of the world. Like Huxley, Father Joseph was an intellectually precocious child, with a marked tendency to 'shrink from what he felt to be the indecency of expressed emotional intimacy with other human beings'. When he was ten, his father died; and when the first paroxysm of grief was past, writes Huxley, 'there remained with him, latent at ordinary times, but always ready to come to the surface, a haunting sense of the vanity, the transience, the hopeless precariousness of all merely human happiness'. The parallel with Huxley's reaction to the death of his mother when he was fourteen is almost uncanny, and the personal similarity between the two men becomes even more marked later in the volume. In 1604, at the age of twenty-seven, 'an aggravation of that progressive defect of vision which advanced throughout his life until, at the end, he was nearly blind' prevents Father Joseph from following his intended career as a theologian and man of learning. Instead, he turns to the world of men, and the biographical similarity with Huxley's inability, because of his own poor eyesight, to follow the medical career which he had originally planned, takes on a more intellectual aspect. Like Huxley, Father Joseph reads widely in the mystical tradition. In addition to the more orthodox Christian thinkers, he knew, as Huxley remarks in his casually well informed manner, 'Dionysius the Areopagite's Mystical Theology and Divine Names, the mystical writings of Hugh and Richard of St. Victor and St. Bernard', as well as 'Ruysbroeck and two lesser contemplatives of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries respectively, Henry de Herp and the Benedictine Abbot, Blosius'.'° But, unlike Huxley, he goes into politics, and it is with the incompatibility between politics and mysticism that Grey Eminence is essentially concerned.
Father Joseph, according to Huxley, 'believed he could live and work, even at power politics, in a state of "holy indifference" very similar to the state recommended in the Bhagavad Gita to the hero Arjuna as he prepares to go into battle'. But experience proved him to be wrong, and his whole life suffered from the infection given off by his political acts. Yet although God and power politics do not mix, Father Joseph was encouraged to think they might by the very doctrines which, as Huxley argues, are common to both Eastern and Western mysticism. Huxley himself prefaced the new translation of the Bhagavad Gita which Christopher Isherwood made in 1948, and certainly knew at the time of writing Grey Eminence of the injunction to Arjuna to fight vigorously but 'with detachment'. What he does not seem quite to hiëilië bföEThgiñriihg his account of Father Joseph's career, is that this injunction is not so much morally neutral as ethically nihilistic. If one is detached, one doesn't care, and it was precisely Father Joseph's mysticism which enabled him to contribute so effectively to the blindness and insanity of seventeenth-century Europe. 'Few political idealists', writes Huxley, 'have spent half a life-time brooding upon the torture and death of a man-god, by comparison with whose sufferings those of ordinary human beings are so infinitesimal as to be practically negligibile';11 and it requires only the slightest shift of emphasis to show how this indifference towards the fate of people in the world could be fitted into the Eastern view of physical reality as Maya, illusion. Since human beings do not really exist, Father Joseph had every licence to use treachery, fraud and violence in the furtherance of the greater glory of France. Nihilism and tyranny, as Camus argued in L'Homme révolté, go automatically hand in hand because both refuse to believe in people as individuals.
Huxley naturally tried to answer, in the text itself, the overwhelming case against mysticism unwittingly advanced by the account of Father Joseph's activities in Grey Eminence. 'As a matter of historical fact', he observes, 'many of the great theocentrics have been men and women of enormous and beneficent activity', and he links this remark to his own dislike of industrialism and centralization by adding that the work which theocentrics do is 'always marginal' and always directed to units small enough 'to be capable of shared spiritual experience and of moral and rational conduct'. 12 The sympathy which Huxley felt for the Society of Friends is closely linked to this view, and he never ceased to insist that no salvation was attainable to anyone who accepted the norms of our own highly complex technological society. In this context, his final judgment on Father Joseph, like the possibly unconscious emphasis which he gives to the similarities between himself and the subject of his book, also takes on an autobiographical tone. According to the Indian view, he writes, it is 'a fatal thing for the members of one caste to usurp the functions that properly belong to another', and proceeds to comment that Father Joseph is 'an eminent example' of what
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happens when brahmins forsake the meditation which is their natural calling and go in for politics.13 The place for cerebretonics, Huxley is implying, is essentially in the library. If they are going to come down into the world of men, they must do so only in order to join small groups of like-minded individualists, and must not involve themselves in any of the large-scale activities of the modern world.
As in the social implications of Brave New World, this rejection of the traditions of the class into which he was born again marks Huxley out as an exception even within his own family. Neither his brother Julian, who accepted in 1946 the post as first Director General of Unesco, nor his cousin Gervas, who spent the second world war, in the words of Who's Who, as 'adviser to the Ministry of Information on publicity to and about the Empire and on relations with the American forces in the United Kingdom', found it necessary to adopt so extreme an attitude, and it is again a curious example of the difference between Huxley the writer and Aldous the man that his private relationships were in no way affected by the views he put forward in his books. According to Grey Eminence, anybody who touched pitch would inevitably be deified; and for a pacifist and advocate of non-attachment, there could surely be nothing blacker than propaganda for the Empire. But in 1948, when Gervas dined with him in New York, Aldous displayed 'a fascinated and wholly objective interest in the art and techniques of advertising, public relations and market research'. It was an attitude which one would have thought, from his books, quite impossible for the man who had such harsh words to say about the not wholly dissimilar work that Jeremy Pordage's brother Tom did in the Foreign Office - 'working away at the precise spot where he could do the maximum amount of harm to the greatest possible number of people'.14
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Ten years after the publication of Grey Eminence, Huxley returned to the century and subject which seem to have had an almost obsessive attraction for him, and wrote the book by which, in 1972, he is probably known to more people than ever read either his essays or his novels. The Devils of Loudun, first published in October 1952, is the only one of his novels to have achieved fame by being adapted to the mass media, and there is some irony in the fact that Ken Russell's film The Devils will have made more money in a year than Huxley received from his books during his whole lifetime. For all its extravagance, the film is not a wholly inaccurate adaptation. Admittedly, by concentrating on the political aspects of Urbain Grandier's trial for witchcraft in 1634, it reveals how all-pervasive the fashionable anti-authoritarianism of the early nineteen-seventies
can be. But Grandier was just as much a victim of the totalitarian ambitions of Cardinal Richelieu as he was the object of vengeance for the private enemies whom his pride had led him to make, and the book has the same implicit defence of the open society as Grey Eminence. The physical horror of the scene in which Grandier is burnt at the stake is again no betrayal of the book. 'After all', writes Huxley, quoting Montaigne, 'it is rating one's conjectures at a very high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them'; and the agnosticism underlying all his work is inseparable from his obsession with the physical suffering which men inflict on other men.
In 1952, however, the main subject-matter of the book was more obviously relevant to the immediate political atmosphere of the time, and Huxley was expressing a widespread attitude when he argued that only a relatively narrow gap separated the witch-hunts of the seventeenth century from the excesses of the Cold War. In the very same year that Arthur Miller used the Salem witch trials of 1692 as an allegory to comment on America during the McCarthy era, Huxley was writing in The Devils of Loudun that 'the destinies of the world are in the hands of self-made demoniacs, of men who are possessed by, and who manifest, the evil they have chosen to see in others'; while the essence of Jean-Paul Sartre's attack on French anti-communism in the nineteen-forties can be summed up in Huxley's very characteristic remark that 'like the mercurial and antimonial poisonings of earlier years, like the sulpha poisoning and serum-fevers of the present, the Loudun epidemic was an "iatro-genic disease", produced and fostered by the very physicians who were supposed to be restoring the patients to health'.15 Yet there was, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, nothing imaginary about the Communists occupying Eastern Europe or threatening West Berlin, and The Devils of Loudun shows the same refusal to distinguish between the half loaf of Western democracy and the 'no bread' of totalitarianism which had characterized Huxley's political thinking in the nineteen-thirties.
It is not, however, only a political book, and has other themes which link it more firmly to Huxley's more general philosophy. Thus it is a sustained if sometimes paradoxical defence of his belief in the fundamental goodness of nature - a belief reflected in the nineteen-fifties by his praise for vegetarianism in Variations on a Philosopher, but going right back to the nineteen-twenties and his comments on the sacred bull at Benares in Jesting Pilate - and the events described in The Devils of Loudun come about precisely because men have tried to repress the natural sexual urge by shutting women up in convents and insisting that priests should remain celibate. If Soeur Jeanne des Anges, an 'average sensual woman', had been able to marry and have children, she would never have developed the frustrated passion for Urbain Grandier which led her to accuse him of
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seeking to possess her soul and body by witchcraft; and had Christian theologians not chosen to regard nature as evil, they would never have developed the elaborate theories which justified burning people at the stake for supposed commerce with the Devil. When, at the very moment that Grandier is burnt alive, a flock of pigeons suddenly swoops down from the sky, the parson's enemies greet them as 'a troop of devils come to fetch away his soul'. More probably, comments Huxley, they are merely 'obeying the laws of their own, their blessedly other-than-human nature' -just as the bull at Benares was when it ignored the ceremonies surrounding the eclipse of the sun, and calmly licked up the rice. Unlike men, animals do not drive themselves insane by the notions which they themselves invent; and down below the 'verminous realm of Original Sin' there is an underlying natural virtue which man can reach only by letting go his conscious mind and allowing the universe to think in his place.'6 9 Drugs, devils and biography
It is perhaps inevitable that this incipient pantheism, like the metaphysical optimism which it implies, should be neglected in the cinema, just as it was neglected in the very successful play which John Whiting wrote as an adaptation of The Devils of Loudun in 1961. What predominates on both stage and screen - and Huxley, it should be noted, greatly appreciated John Whiting's adaptation, which he saw on one of his rare visits to London17 - is the physical horror of the events. What one remembers are the tortures, the hangings, the whippings, the hysteria, the giving of real enemas and the receiving of probably false stigmata, the heady mixture of sex and religion which continued to predominate after Huxley moved away from the novel and chose a genre which allowed a more natural blend between essays and narration. By concentrating on those aspects of seventeenth-century France which most anticipated the horrors of the twentieth century, he was also following the same bent of his own imagination which had led him to base the plot of Point Counter Point on a brutal murder and the death of a child, and which had struck D. H. Lawrence as so out of keeping with his professed humanism. In The Devils of Loudun, even the mystic, Father Surin, goes mad; and Huxley seems to have experienced, in the late forties and early fifties, so intense an onset of pessimism that his mystical beliefs became almost irrelevant to the world in which he and his contemporaries were forced to live.
It is in the context of this increased pessimism that Huxley's famous first experiment with mescalin, on a 'bright November morning in 1953' is most immediately relevant to his career as a writer. He remarks almost casually in the opening pages of The Doors of Perception (1954) that he had never himself had a mystical experience, and his initial acceptance of 'the perennial philosophy' may well have been based much more on what he thought than on what he felt. It was, he wrote to a correspondent in 1945, through 'the aesthetic" that be had come to the spiritual, and if he was only intellectually convinced of the views defended in the books he published after 1936, he would naturally have had difficulty translating them into the 'felt' medium of the novel. By the time he took mescalin Huxley was fifty-nine, and rather too set in his ways as a writer for the overwhelming experience which he describes in The Doors of Perception to have much effect upon the world vision expressed in his more imaginative works. Indeed, the similarities between The Genius and the Goddess, published only one year after The Doors of Perception, and novels such as Point Counter Point or Time Must Have a Stop, are so great that one wonders at times just how deeply Huxley the writer was affected by the drugs which he did so much to popularize.
Thus the narrator in The Genius and the Goddess, John Rivers, has the same kind of possessive, idealistic mother from whom Mark Rampion had succeeded in escaping in Point Counter Point, but who had rendered Brian Foxe so unfit for normal sexual emotions in Eyeless in Gaza. The Genius and the Goddess - like the early short story Chawdron 1936) - is told in flashback, and at the time when the events he describes take place, Rivers is working as research assistant to Henry Maartens, whose brilliance as a scientist and philosopher, contrasted with his inability to be anything but 'an idiot where human relations are concerned, a prize ass in all the practical affairs of life' again strikes a very familiar note. The central incident in The Genius and the Goddess again recalls some of Huxley's earlier insistence that what puritans call sexual immorality can well have much better results than rigid adherence to fixed rules. Henry Maartens is so parasitic upon his wile Katy that when she temporarily lacks the vigour to cure him by the sheer radiance of her presence, there seems to be no hope of saving him - until, that is, she comes to John Rivers's bedroom late one night. By going to bed with him, she renews contact with that 'animal grace' which
