Aldous Huxley
by CHARLES J. ROLO
1
ALDOT-HUXLEY surveys a nightmare world with “multiplicity of eyes”: scientific, economic, artistic, philosophic; the amused eyes of a man of sense and the religious eyes of a modern mystic, “Literature,” he says, “is also philosophy, is also science. In terms of beauty it enunciates truths.”Whether or not we agree with Huxley’s conclusions, we cannot fail to find, in his sardonic scrutiny of the condition humaine, a profusion of particular truths.
In the brilliant talk of Huxley’s characters, in those little essays which are so gracefully woven into the fabric of his fiction, all the values of our lunatic civilization are submitted to a seathing and informed assessment. One by one Huxley punctures -the “highly inflated balloons” of human stupidity the out-of-date beliefs and up-to-date substitutes for belief, the shams, prejudices, and pretensions of homo soi-disant sapiens. Turning a page in Huxley, you say, “There but for the grace of God. . . .” — and suddenly you wonder whether Divine Grace has intervened in time. “He writes,” a critic punned, “not that he who runs may read, but that he who reads may run.”Where to? The condemned playground or the contemplative’s oasis? You reads Huxley and you takes your choice.
Aldous Leonard Huxley was born on July 26, 1894, the third son (Julian, the scientist, being the eldest) of Dr. Leonard Huxley-teacher, editor, and man of letters — and of Julia Arnold, niece of the poet Matthew Arnold, and sister of the novelist Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Failing eyesight cut short
Huxley’s education at Eton and prevented him from becoming a doctor. Three years of almost total blindness, which spared him the conventional activities of English gentlemen, left him with a lasting bent for the reflective life. “My ambition and pleasure,” he once wrote, “are to understand, not to act.” Philip Quarles — the author-hero of Point Counter Point — reflects that his talent is not of the heart, the feelings, the sympathies, Huxley probably had in mind his own limitations. But this emotional aloofness is the source of other strengths — the sad clearness of vision, the colossal intellectual vitality, the corrosive spirit of analysis — which give to his work its special character.
As soon as Huxley could read through a magnifying glass, he went to Oxford, where he took First Class Honors. During the last two years of World War I, he worked in a government office. He was married to Maria Nys, a Belgian, in 1919, and there followed years of “all-devouring journalism”: music, art, and drama criticism, book reviews, articles on house decoration and architecture.
Two volumes of short stories and two novels established Huxley’s reputation before he was thirty. Preferring “sunlight to literary company,”he then settled in Italy for a number of years, and there formed a close friendship with D. H. Lawrence during the last part of Lawrence’s life. Since the middle thirties, the Huxleys have lived in the United States. Huxley’s output to date totals more than thirty volumes, plus prefaces, pamphlets, translations, and innumerable contributions to periodicals. “I never take a complete holiday,”he says, “as I find that my health breaks down as soon as I stop working. Holidays are healthful only to those who dislike their work. I find mine tolerably agreeable. My recreations are reading, painting, and traveling.”“You are not your grandfather’s Enkel for nothing,” D. H. Lawrence once wrote to Aldous with reference to grandfather T. H. Huxley, ally of Darwin and scourge of theologians, who rained explosives on the “buttresses of superstition.” T. H. Huxley bequeathed to his grandson’s generation a disquieting scientific materialism and to Aldous what Lawrence called his “desperate courage of repulsion and repudiation,” which fiercely repudiated “superstitions,” old and new, but was also repelled by the fruits of science and presently repudiated materialism. Grandfather abandoned an experiment in vegetarianism because it diminished his mental firepower; his Enkel, agreeing that butcher’s meat has martial properties, prescribes for that reason the Buddhist’s diet of vegetables. In place of “superstition,” T. H. Huxley offered Victorian England the scientist’s consolation prize: inevitable progress. Aldous affirms that technological advance is spiritual regression to the death-withouttears of Brave New World. Against a community made safe for gadgets, he proposes a community made safe for God.
Lawrence’s reference to Huxley’s heredity today recalls his great-grandfather, Dr. Thomas Arnold, a formidable moralist, who sought to inject religious principle into literature and English schoolboys; whose friends marveled, says Lytton Strachey, at his “absolute wrestling with evil.” Dr. Arnold’s great-grandson has injected religious principle into the modern novel and he too has wrestled with the problem of evil. It would seem that both ancestors have lived on and waged a fierce vendetta of ideas in the mort al coils of Aldous Huxley — skeptic, moralist, and artist.
2
PASSION and reason, self-division’s cause” is a persistent Huxleian theme and a key to his own work. His sympathies, he disclosed in an essay on Pascal, leaned even then (1927) towards the moralist and mystic. His reason, which found the positivist role “only too easy to play, was on Grandfather Huxley’s side of the fence. It spoke for that “second me,” of which Alphonse Daudet once said: “The second me, I have never been able to intoxicate, to make shed tears, to lull to sleep. And how it delves into things, and how it mocks!”
When Huxley came of age, human behavior, it seemed to the modernist, was entirely explicable in terms of Libido, Instinct, glandular function, or conditioned reflex. Science and psychology had substituted for the Absolute the atom, for the soul the complex, for virtue and vice the inscrutable hormone. It was by a “conjuring trick,” Huxley concluded (in the essay on Pascal), that man, out of his longing for certainty and justification, had deduced “all the Gods and Goods, all the Truths and Beauties ... of a bewildered humanity.” But to the Pascalian, the materialist’s picture of man and the cosmos was squalid and incomplete. While repudiating the Gods and Goods, Huxley implicitly continued to search for them, applying to the task an integrity that bit like acid through illusion, sentimentality, and convention. All his work is a quest for values in the face of skepticism battening at the vitals of belief; for meaning amid the pointlessness; for freedom amid the “fact of slavery” — bondage to institutions, to time and the ego, to the limitations of a body “at the mercy of skin and mucus. At the mercy of those thin threads of nerve.”
The rebellious skeptic is a wrecker of false idols. The Pascalian, surveying the barren altars, is a rebel against “Omnipresent Nil.” This mocking, halfdetached desolation is a corrosive solvent to satire. Huxley’s is pitched in a variety of keys. There is a terrible farce. There is despairing buffoonery like that of the “mild and melancholy” Gumbril (Antic Hay), who puts on cloak and beaver to play the “Complete Man,” who stifles his frustration in learned chatter about the “marriage ceremonies of octopuses.” But as with Hume when he despaired of philosophy, “cheerfulness keeps breaking in.” Then Huxley’s wit sparkles and stings; his fancy cuts elegant capers.
Contrast being the mainspring of satire, the ideal construction for the satirist is one that holds the reader, not so much by the sequence of events in time (the story), as by the startling effects that result from viewing related events simultaneously. Music achieves these effects by its abrupt transitions. The Diabelli variations, for example, contain the “whole range of thought and feeling, yet in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune.” Huxley’s most important innovation as a craftsman has been the partial replacement of story with music.
All the novelist needs for the abrupt transitions is a “sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots.” In Antic Hay, while Shearwater the physiologist is playing guinea pig in an absurd experiment, bis neglected wife plays Madame Bovary on Mercaptan’s Crébillon-haunted sofa and in the terrifying embrace of Coleman, the bearded Diabolist. While his father, an architect, translates his dreams into models of grandiose cities, Gumbril dreams up ads for his pneumatic trousers.
Another musical form Huxley has used as effectively as counterpoint is modulation, achieved in prose by showing “several people falling in love, or dying or praying in different ways — dissimilars solving the same problem. Or vice versa.” Those Barren Leaves modulates between the parallel amours of a middle-aged romanticist, an elderly cynic and a moron, two ingenuous twenty-yearolds and three self-conscious intellectuals. Another way is to “consider the events of the story in their various aspects — emotional, scientific, religious, metaphysical, etc.” Juxtapose, for example, acoustics and the music of Bach as in the simultaneously aesthetic and scientific account of a concert in Point Counter Point; juxtapose spiritual pretensions and economic facts-as when Burlap (in the same novel) interrupts his apostrophes to “Lady Poverty” to advise, expertly, on gramophone shares; juxtapose sex and philosophy — as when Calamy, the hero of Those Barren Leaves, in an entr’acte between love-making, discourses on the different modes in which his hand exists. Thus seen, reality looks exceedingly queer. Hence the pervading quality of irony in Huxley’s work.
From the neat antithesis to the odd and laughterprovoking word or phrase, the suggestive name, the satiric portrait — Huxley commands every device of the comic artist. You can almost guess from the sound of their names the bombast of Casimir Lypiatt, the would-be Titan; the stoatishness of Mr. Stoyte; the Wildean propensities of Beppo Bowles; the foibles of Lady Giblet and Baron Badgery. And Pasteur Mercaptan, the mannered aesthete with the rococo boudoir and the perfumed style — how appropriate that he should bear the name of a group of colorless fluids having (says Webster) “a strong, repulsive garlic odor.
Perhaps the most accomplished caricaturist in English prose of our time, Huxley puts human flummery and pretentiousness on parade in a crowded gallery of portraits, drawn with atrocious raillery or polite malice. Often the portrait is achieved in a single epigrammatic phrase, the absurdity of a personage is compressed into a mannerism or physical peculiarity. Molly d’Exergillod — “a professional athlete of the tongue”; Grace Peddley — “ She was almost too hospitable — she kept open bed, you know”; Spandrerell — “When he smiles, it’s like an appendicitis operation with ironical corners.”
“Everyone’s a walking tragedy and a walking farce at the same time. The man who slips on a banana skin and fractures his skull describes against the sky, as he falls, the most richly comic arabesque.” Huxley has an extraordinary capacity to distil vials of wrathful humor out of things which he also regards as horrible. Modern man, modern civilization, fracturing their skulls on the banana skins of stupidity, success-worship, and lust for power, describe, against Huxley’s skyline, a richly comic arabesque.
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THE chief defeat of the novel of ideas,”says Philip Quarles, “is that you must write about people who have ideas to express —which excludes all but about 01 percent of the human race.” Huxley’s characters, though individualized by satiric detail, are essentially embodiments of an attit ude, mouthpieces for a set of ideas. The central figure is almost invariably a writer, a Hamlet-like intellectual, who articulates Huxley’s opinions and dilemmas. His foil is the sentimentalist in reverse (Spandrell, Chelifer, Mark Staithes), at once hypnotized and sickened by everyday reality, who, like today’s Existentialist hero, makes a cult of his “nausea.”Other recurring types are: the disenchanted siren, forever confronted with “steppes of ennui” and the certainty that “tomorrow will be as awful as today" (Myra Viveash, Lucy Tantamount, etc.); the Victorian materialist (Mr. Scogan, Gumbril Sr., Mr. Cardan), a genial figure for whom Huxley seems to have once had a nostalgic sympathy; the elderly pedant (Quarles Sr., Beavis Sr., Jeremy Pordage), whom his creator detests; the (surprisingly) ethereal mother-figure, who evokes the scent of lavender and the rustle of long skirts; and Huxley’s bête noire, the type whose personality is simply an inflation of a single idea - life for passion’s sake or for wit’s sake or for art’s sake. One more must be added: the man of wisdom (Mark Rampion, Dr. Miller, Mr. Propter, Bruno Rontini), who carries Huxley’s positive message. Huxley himself has said that “people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real. They’re slightly monstrous. The admirable man in Huxley’s novels tends to remain vox et practerea nihil — sound without sense.
Each of the previous types represents a set of ideas which are debunked and are used to debunk others. Huxley’s idol-smashing begins at home: the values of the intellectual and the artist are those he most systematically disparages. The so-called higher life” of scholarship is simply “ idea-mongering... a more complete escape from the responsibilities of living than alcohol or morphia. . . . Books are opium.” When Denis, the young poet of Crome Yellow, holds forth on the beauty of words, Mr. Scogan suggests “a mental carminative.” Art is
“the last and silliest of the idols . . . the sweetest of the inebriants.”If you would worship at the shrine of Reason, Huxley will marshal precedents to show that “the madman not the philosopher appeals to what is fundamental, the passion and the instincts,” As for the notion that Marxist or technological revolution brings liberty— it is, says Mr. Bojanus, the greatest “swindle hatched in the ‘ole of ‘istorv!” Idealism, says Huxley, is usually the “noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. Fame-seeking? “Compared with it pure sensuality is all but harmless.” And Christianity? In America it seems to have been transformed “from a religion . . . into a system for the justification of wealth and the preachment of industrious respectability; from a system that condemned the Pharisee . . . into one that exalts the Pharisee above every other human type.”
There is some justice in one critic’s quip that. Huxley makes the worst of both worlds. He uses science and psychology to debunk values rooted in the stubborn stupidity of custom and simultaneously mocks at the conceits of the new gospels.
“Filippo Lippi,”he writes, “once had a bump of art. He is now an incestuous homosexualist with a bent toward anal-eroticism. . . . Fifty years from now . . . the current explanation [will be] something more fundamental even than faeces and infantile incestuousness.”“Dream,” says Gumbril to a meretricious poet. “The word is inadmissible. It’s altogether too late in the day. Dreams. they belonged to the Rostand epoch. Le rêre ah! Now the word merely connotes Freud.” It’s also a bit late in the day for love. “If you aren’t in love,” says Calamy, “it’s a mere experiment in applied physiology. . . . But if you are, it means that you become enslaved . . . in a way that’s positively disgraceful.” Love as Liebe-Triehe. Cuore-Dolore to the modernist is pretty disgraceful. And love as applied physiology — at best, “twin cannibals in bedlam": more often, merely a relief for “itch and ennui.” or, as Helen Ledwidge says, “just bygiene.”
Science which equates love and applied physiology. masterpieces and faeces, which informs the poet, that his “mind sublime [is] issued from the monkey’s womb” — science itself dances a pretty pointless jig in Huxley’s books. The laboratory in Antic Hay portrays the futility of the scientist’s cosmos: “The cock into which Shearwater had engrafted an ovary came out, not knowing whether to crow or cluck. The beetles, who had had their heads cut off and replaced by the heads of other beetles, darted uncertainly about, some obeying their heads, some their genital organs.”Shearwater himself, imprisoned in a Hot Box, is nightmarishly pedaling away on a stationary bicycle—to discover the effects of prolonged sweating. The data of such experiments are-the only truths the modernist can accept, yet what do they tell him in terms of the Gods, the Goods, the Beauties they have displaced? What’s he to Hecuba?” chant the minstnds in a nightclub where Gumbril and Myra Viveash are dancing. And dolefully they answer, “Nothing at all.”
Unable to pay homage to the traditional values, unable to see in the laws of science more than “stammering provisional theories” about one part of reality, Huxley has for twenty-five years grappled with the problem of the moral vacuum. It is a problem that is focal to our time, as evidenced by the popularity of such books as Liebman’s Peace of Mind, du Xoüy’s Human Destiny. Wylie’s Essay on Morals—best-sellers all; and by the palsy of the modern hero, a man “things are done to,” as Wyndham Lewis wrote of Hemingway’s heroes. The father-figure who laid down the law has been largely replaced either by the Kafkaesque son in search of a father, in search of the law; or by the escapist seeking, to quote Cyril Connolly’s inspired pun, “a womb with a view.” Wombland to the right. Anarchy to the left. Connolly goes on to enshrine the modernist’s dilemma in the despairing aphorism: “Everything is a dangerous drug except reality, which is unendurable.” How, then, should one live? Where to turn for principle?
4
THROUGHOUT Huxley’s books one theme, which recurs crescendo, hints at the nature of the final solution. From the start, Huxley mobilized his prodigious intellectual virtuosity to puncture the “pathetic belief” in rationalism, in the values of the intellect as opposed to the animal senses and the spirit. Reason, weaker than passion, is a sorry guide to conduct-Five words sum up every’ biography:
Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.” Man often sees the good but needs must love the lowest. Still less can reason furnish an answer to the fundamental mysteries or explain away soul in terms of body, mind in terms of matter. “When you reflect that it’s the human mind,” says Calamy, “that has invented space, time and matter, picking them out of reality in a quite arbitrary fashion — can you attempt to explain a thing in terms of something it has invented itself?” God as 2 + 2 = 4, Gumbril reflects in chapel. It just won’t do. It was therefore to “Divine unreason” that Huxley looked for the “ lost purpose and the vanished good.” But deciding to inhabit the mystic’s oasis, he cultivated a variety of gardens.
Crome Yellow (1921), Huxley’s first novel, introduces one of his main themes: the inadequacy as a human being of the self-conscious intellectual. Antic Hay (1923) dramatizes in terms of life the implications of scientific materialism. Disoriented by science, like the beetles on which Shearwater has engrafted new heads, Huxley’s men and women pointlessly “dance the antic hay, trying to give Nil the slip in infantile pleasures and pursuits. But even in the early twenties, there existed in Huxley a core of mystical feeling. Gumbril becomes conscious in the night of a “crystal quiet . . . inexpressibly lovely,” an interior universe in which the demon Nil is exorcised. It is this universe that Calamy (Those Barren Leaves) decides to explore in solitude, hoping that he may “burrow [his] way right through the mystery [to] some kind of truth, some explanation.”
In Point Counter Point (1928) Huxley repudiated mysticism, to which he returned eight years later, and championed a doctrine of “life-worship inspired by the Greeks, by Blake, and the “noble savagery” of D. H. Lawrence, after whom the character of Mark Rampion is modeled. Point Counter Point is a richer orchestration of the themes in Huxley’s earlier work. Lord Edward Tantamount epitomizes the futility of science; hatching “asymmetrical tadpoles” in a glass tank is as irrelevant to the problems of living as Shearwater’s pointless pedaling. His assistant, Illidge, a militant Communist, is one of several variations on the theme of self-division : his Communism is rooted in Marxian determinism, which, as a scientist, he knows to be fifty years out of date. Walter Bidlake is another victim of “passion and reason. He is obsessively in love with Lucy, who reintroduces ihe bitch motif. She is a sadistic reincarnation of Myra Viveash (Antic Hay), hell-bent on giving Nil the slip in progressively intenser pleasures.
The trouble with Lucy and Walter and the rest — Spandrell, the “little Stavrogin,” Burlap, the fake Franciscan, Webley, the strutting führer-is, says their creator, that they are not in any real sense adults. Walter is a mother’s boy who sobs on the shoulder of one mistress and worships at the feel of another. Spandrell’s sadism is a childish revenge on his mother for her second marriage. Webley is still playing soldiers. Lucy is still pulling legs off flies — her victims happen to be lovesick young men. Burlap enjoys nothing better than a romp in the bathtub with the frightened virgin he has seduced. They are representatives of an age that “invented Peter Pan and raised that monstrosity of arrested development to the rank of an ideal” — the ideal that caused Scott Fitzgerald to write bitterly: “There are no second acts in American lives.” Arrested development (or prolonged infantilism), which Hollywood has made epidemic, now engages the attention even of the mass magazines, which have subventioned psychiatrists to analyze the bull market in divorce and neurosis. Prolonged infantilism is becoming recognized as the mat du siècle, a less class-conscious palsy than the romantic spleen of an era that had not yet unearthed and contaminated the “little man.”
Self-division, infantilism is the harsh “point” to which the “wholeness” of Mark Rampion provides the answering counterpoint. The Good Life he preaches is a synthesis of reason, feeling, and instinct, which harmonizes and includes the claims of body and heart as well as of intellect and spirit.
This remains the official doctrine of Huxley until Eyeless in Gaza. Huxley himself expressed doubts as to whether taste and instinct did not make him “congenitally incapable” of giving the Lawrencian emphasis to heart and blood. Although he wrote at this time a caustic essay about Swift’s hatred of the body — “the harmless necessary tripes” — Huxley’s books suggest that he himself is easily repelled by physical phenomena. There is a strong element of shame and Schaudern in most of his sex scenes. Illness in its mildest forms fills him with nausea. And when he quotes Odo of Cluny’s reference to the body as a “bag of muck,” one suspects that he does not entirely disagree with the fastidious Bishop.
Brave Sew World (1932) is not so much a book of prophecy as a fable which satirically dramatizes the choice between a return to primitivism (advocated by Lawrence) and forward march toward the scientific and industrialized Utopia. The Savage is clearly speaking for Huxley when he fiercely repudiates the Brave New World. But the conclusion shows it’s too late in the day for noble savagery.
5
HUXLEY’S first statement of a personal religion, arrived at by direct experience and therefore immune to skeptical erosion, appears in Eyeless in Gaza (1936). The title refers to Samson, blind and a slave, who with God’s strength tore down the house of the Philistines. In brief, Huxley preaches “non-attachment” as the means to union with the spiritual reality underlying the phenomenal world — “a form of fife more intense . . . richer and of finer quality than ordinary life.” “Good,” Anthony Beavis reflects, “is what makes for unity. . . . Evil is the accentuation of division. Pride, hatred, anger—the essentially evil sentiments . . . because they are all intensifications of separateness.” Huxley’s credo is therefore also pacifist. Since separateness is the condition of individual life, evil is inherent in reality on the human level. But there is a way— that of the contemplatives —of transcending separateness, which is rooted in selfhood. Huxley warns, however, that “the contemplative life can be made a kind of high-brow substitute for Marlene Dietrich; a subject for erotic musings in the twilight. Meditation — valuable only as a means for effecting desirable changes in the mode of existence.”
Paradoxically, the discovery of a faith leads Huxley to cultivate what André Gide called the “art of being disagreeable.” The satire is hereafter more bitter; each of the characters, with few exceptions, achieves a detestable perfection in his particular brand of rottenness. The harsh point of Eyeless in Gaza is the gruesome description of Helen’s abortion, the tragic suicide of Brian Foxe, the hideous amputation performed on Mark Staithes, the symbolism of a dog that falls from a passing plane, drenching in its blood two naked lovers on a rooftop. Such events belong, says Huxley elsewhere, “to the very essence of the world in which we elect to live.” By intensifying the harshness of the point, he points up the nemesis that waits on wrongdoing.
“Mysticism?” Huxley quotes a certain Eminence as saying. “What you mean is misty schism.” The prelate was doubtless concerned with dogma, but the pun has its point in reference to literature. For mistiness is inescapable when what the writer wishes to express is inexpressible. “The only vocabulary at our disposal,” says Mr. Propter in Huxley’s next novel, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, “is a vocabulary primarily intended for thinking strictly human thoughts about strictly human concerns. What we want to talk about are non-human realities.” The writer seeking to convey mystical experience to the non-mystic is in the position of someone trying to describe music to a man born deaf. And that is only one half of Huxley’s dilemma. The other half is the problem of integrating message and story, of devising a dramatic interplay between the mystic, whose characteristics are serenity and non-attachment, and unregenerate men and women, whose characteristics are excitement and craving — which, as Huxley pointed out. in Brave New World, constitute the raw material of nine tenths of all art. From the writer’s point of view, mystic and non-mystic are almost as fire and water. They may meet but they cannot easily be made to mix, and it seems unlikely that they would be inclined to mate. Huxley has stated the problem with candor; he has not, for all his prodigious command of ways and means, solved it. The contemplative sage in the last two novels plays a marginal role. The novel, as a work of art, suffers from marginalia.
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HUXLEY’S mystical-pacifist credo and its social implications are first set forth in detail in Ends and Means (1937). The social context most congenial to the ideal of non-attachment is, Huxley argues, decentralization and self-government in politics and industry — genuine democracy as opposed to state socialism or capitalism, which concentrate power in the hands of political and economic bosses.
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1940) is a lively story about man’s age-old wish to live forever, with digressions on time and the ego as a moral reading on the text. Good, Mr. Propter explains, exists below the human level, as proper functioning of the animal organism (roughly Lawrence’s credo); and above it, on the level of spirit, as the experience of eternity, the knowledge of God — “a being [Huxley quotes Tauler’s definition] withdrawn from creatures, a free power, a pure working.” Good lies outside of time, which is the very “raw material of evil”; outside of personality. Ideals are “merely the projection, on an enormously enlarged scale of some aspect of personality” — the sacrifice of one set of personal passions for another set — and therefore the work of the devil. “It’s a matter of experience and observation,” says Mr. Propter, “that most idealism loads to war, persecution and mass insanity.” This theme Huxley exemplifies in Grey Eminence (1940), the life of Father Joseph, Cardinal Richelieu’s alter ego, and in his last novel, Time Must Have a Stop (1944).
It is not uncommon to hear Aldous Huxley spoken of, even by aficionados, as a sophisticated debunker who, having plumbed the depths of nihilism, made a jet-propelled take-off into the mystical stratosphere. This opinion is, I think, partly due to the fact that fashion, which so rapturously press-agented Huxley’s early novels, has in the long run done him an injustice. The shadow of the Pascalian was not reflected in the portrait of the enfant terrible which fashion, in the twenties, painted in its own image. The “unshakeable sophistication” which delighted Mencken and Scott Fitzgerald still gives glitter to Huxley’s thought. But “unshakeable sophistication,” coupled with “amateur in garbage,” “cynic in ragtime,” “fastidious sensualist” (I quote from early reviews), conjures up a Michael Arlen, a Carl Van Vechten an elegant trifler engaged, like Paul Morand, in compiling a Baedeker of the boudoir and cosmopolitan vice.
A review of Huxley’s adventures in negation and belief shows that he was never satisfied with garbage collecting and the smashing of idols; that early in his career he “chased the absolute in remote strange regions” and seemed on the point of embracing mysticism at the conclusion of Those Barren Leaves. The skeptical aesthete of the twenties had faced God and detected a “conjuring trick”; but he failed to outface man’s need for a God. Skeptic, aesthete, satirist, stylistic virtuoso, encyclopedia of scientific fact, columnist of the “family gossip known as Culture,” amateur of the fantastic, and expert in human folly —Huxley has been all of these things. But his energizing impulse has always been, as it is now, preoccupation with the spirit of man.
The two Huxley brothers stand—as did their eminent ancestors — at two extreme destinations which the intellectual can reach in an age allergic to belief and uneasy in doubt. For Julian, “Freud in combination with Darwin suffices.” For Aldous, without divine Reality, life is a “tale told by an idiot.” The tale his books tell is a twentieth-century Pilgrim’s Progress, in which Darwin, Freud, and their colleagues patrol the frontier between the realm of ape-men and the free state of God-men. He describes, in richly comic arabesques, the antics of a generation which thinks itself to be the apes offspring, a monkey on a string agitated by animal instinct. He echoes our frustrations, articulates our dilemmas, chronicles our struggle with the Janusheaded monster that has Time on one face and Ego on the other. He has come close to writing a biography of the ideas of modern man.