Why should we still read the works of Dead White Males?
Well, for one thing, being a great writer has nothing to do with your skin colour or when you lived. I decided to read all the Aldous Huxley books on my shelves, partly because he was one of the most influential and important writers of the twentieth century, and partly because I’m at that stage of life where I’m trying to downsize, bookwise, so as not to lumber my executors with a huge disposal job after my demise. But I find it very hard to simply chuck books out, especially if they’re Important Works by Important Authors which I should have read.
So they must be read before I can even think about it.
I had already read the famous one – Brave New World, which remains, I think, the most influential and relevant to present-day readers. Of that more later. But what about the rest of the Huxley oeuvre?
I started with Huxley’s very first novel, Crome Yellow, written in 1921 in a seaside resort in Tuscany. (Huxley came from a wealthy family prominent in science and letters.)
Crome Yellow is, like so many first novels, autobiographical in that it’s based on Huxley’s experiences as a young man, when he was part of the Bloomsbury circle that revolved around Lady Ottoline Morrell, a Bloomsbury figure and the chatelaine of her elegant country house, Garsington.
The story is set over a weekend in just such a house – Crome – presided over by a flamboyant and eccentric grande dame not unlike Ottoline Morrell, and her husband, Henry Wimbush. It’s told from the point of view of Denis Stone, a young man fresh out of university. He’s been invited along with a half dozen other arty aristocratic types – writers, artists, earnest young women striving for sexual independence and intellectual achievement. The cast of characters is said to include versions of the artist Dora Carrington, the writer and philosopher Betrand Russell and the statesman Herbert Asquith, who became Prime Minister and the great grandfather of Helena Bonham-Carter.
The setting is familiar to us from any number of book and screen versions of English upper-class life of the time. Think Gosford Park, or Downton Abbey. The guests talk about art, literature and politics over breakfast, then again over lunch – sorry, luncheon, and again over tea – always at four – then in lubricated earnest over drinks and dinner. The day is spent strolling the grounds, or painting, or writing, and after dinner there might be readings, or parlour games or dancing – to the new-fangled gramophone, which leads to flirting and a good deal of unrequited love on the part of the young protagonist, who is secretly in love with his hosts’ beautiful but moody niece Anne. Sadly for him she, like the other girls, prefers the older men who’ve made a name for themselves. It’s a bit hard to work out whether any actual sex takes place: there are no casual hook-ups in these pre-contraceptive pill days, and sex was not written about with the kind of graphic and gay abandon we are used to today. And speaking of gay abandon, it’s clear that there’s a certain amount of sexual ambiguity on both sides of the gender divide. Huxley’s characters use the word ‘epicene’ to refer euphemistically to homosexuality.
Huxley has said of himself at the time that he was a ‘virgin prig’, and he includes a scene where an older, published writer makes a pointed remark about the tiresomeness of sensitive young poets. I imagine this was a real incident that stuck in Huxley’s memory and marked an early milestone on the path to self-awareness.
So it’s a coming of age novel as well as being a social satire, one that was highly praised at the time for its wit and perceptiveness. Nowadays it would make a good country house comedy of manners if lushly produced a la Merchant Ivory.
Antic Hay was a similar social satire written a couple of years later but set in London. But I haven’t read that.
I did read Eyeless in Gaza, written by Huxley in his early forties and published in 1936. It’s said to be his most personal novel. Again, it’s loosely autobiographical. It follows the life of Anthony Beavis from childhood through school, college and various romantic affairs, but not in chronological order. It has a complex narrative that folds back in on itself as Anthony and his contemporaries search for meaning and purpose at a time – the aftermath of World War One – when all the old moral, social and political certainties were crumbling. Politics is a major preoccupation. There is much talk about The Crisis in Democracy – now there’s a theme with a contemporary ring to it – and communism is debated as a serious alternative. 0ne of the heroines is an admirer of Stalin and is not regarded as a fool or a dupe.
Anthony is tormented by the meaninglessness of upper-class life and is emotionally shattered by the suicide of an old school friend. He turns first to pacifism, then to Marxism. A charismatic friend persuades him to take up arms with Mexican revolutionaries, but this adventure proves ineffectual and nearly gets them killed. Anthony’s disillusionment leads him to dally next with mysticism, mirroring Huxley’s own intellectual journey.
Some critics have said Eyeless in Gaza is Huxley’s greatest novel, written at the height of his powers, an enduring literary achievement and not just a period piece. But I found the intense preoccupation with the social and political concerns of the interwar years meant the whole doesn’t quite transcend its setting, the crisis in democracy notwithstanding.
And it’s a difficult read. Huxley was highly educated – intellectually hyperactive almost, and he doesn’t wear his erudition lightly.
Take that intriguing title. Eyeless in Gaza. Gaza, eh? What the heck does it mean here? Google to the rescue: It’s a reference to the Jewish biblical hero Samson, who promised to deliver Israel from the Philistines but instead was captured by them and had his eyes burnt out. “Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.” I expect it’s meant to encapsulate how nihilistic and persecuted Huxley was feeling when he wrote the book.
Huxley had a vital interest in science and technology. His ancestry was full of notable teachers and scientists, including the biologist Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog. This aspect of his thinking informed his two most famous books – Brave New World and The Doors of Perception.
Brave New World, the most memorable and influential of Huxley’s books, takes its title from Shakespeare. It was written in 1932.
Huxley imagines a modern worldwide utopia, set several hundred years in the future. The problems that beset the human race – war, disease, famine – have been solved by the creation of a rigidly hierarchical society in which the causes of these miseries have been systematically addressed by the scientific technocracy that governs this brave new world.
Natural birth has been abolished. People are no longer ‘born’ of a human mother. Such a thing has become a disgusting indecency. Family structure has been abolished as being psychologically damaging. Only animals or savages would behave like that.
Human beings are created in factory-like clinics by means of test-tube fertilization technology that, such is Huxley’s scientific literacy, doesn’t actually sound ludicrous or implausible. During gestation they are given chemical treatments to control their physical and mental development, and are then ‘decanted’ as one of five classifications of human types – alpha, beta, gamma, delta and epsilon – according to current social needs. (One non-conforming alpha who plays a lead role is widely reported to have had alcohol added to his chemical feed while in vitro – an eerie presaging of foetal alcohol syndrome).
Within the five groups there are sub-groups of plus or minus, such that at the very bottom are what’s called ‘epsilon semi-morons’, who do the most menial work – uncomplainingly, because as well as being chemically programmed to have only the simplest needs, they, like everyone – are conditioned during infancy and childhood to accept the values, rules and mores of the society into which they will soon be emerging.
Crucial to the harmonious functioning of this brave new world is the use of Soma, a happy drug that everyone takes every day. There’s no need for alcohol or tobacco or other dangerous recreational drugs. No one ever needs to put up with boredom or irritation or melancholy, even for a minute.
Material consumption is encouraged. The population pays homage to an entity called Our Ford – note the pointed rhyming with Our Lord – based on the real-life Henry Ford, a materialist visionary with an unflagging faith in the future and a refusal to dwell on the past. Remember his famous dictum ‘History is bunk’. Remember Huxley was writing in the early thirties. Ford was the Elon Musk of his day.
Parts of the world are still Badlands, where the technology of the world government has not yet extended its reach. People can go there as tourists, in fast, instant flying transport, but not many go and not often because they find the dirt, disease and squalor revolting.
An alpha functionary invites a beta girl to visit the Badlands with him. There they witness ragged people, sick animals, baffling rituals of pain and endurance. The Beta girl can’t wait to get back home to her Soma.
And they want to take one of the Savages back with them. He’s a young man born of a normal woman who was accidentally stranded there years before. When they realise who he is they invite him back to the normal world. His mother, now old and feeble, has raised him on stories of her early life in that world, and he, believing it to be a paradise of order and health and plenty, eagerly accepts their offer.
But is it a paradise? The interesting thing about Brave New World is that Huxley started writing it as a genuine utopia, a thought experiment exploring the notion that the loss of normal human relationships – family, tribal, national, sexual, institutional – with all their frustrations and futile strivings, was a price worth paying for a life free of pain and suffering and psychological turmoil. As for the rigid social determinism and the all-effacing happy drug that underpins it, what’s the point of freedom of choice if your choices lead only to misery?
Huxley was intellectually honest enough to challenge his own prejudices. And he uses the Savage to illustrate the dystopian aspects of the brave new world.
One aspect of it is that sexual fidelity is considered bad form, and promiscuity is encouraged. John the Savage falls in love with the young Beta woman, and she fancies him. He’s full of romantic longing and feels he must do something to win her. But first chance she gets, she strips naked and offers herself to him. He recoils and calls her a whore. She’s genuinely bewildered and hurt…what’s wrong with him? Not only does he reject the offer of free sex with a gorgeous young woman, he refuses to take the happy drug!
Her angst doesn’t last long. She writes him off as a weirdo and – spoiler alert – he retreats to the life of a hermit, but when he becomes an object of vulgar tourist curiosity, he kills himself.
Perhaps if he’d taken the happy drug he wouldn’t have. Whatever, Huxley certainly didn’t abandon his belief in the usefulness of drugs to improve the human condition.
In 1953 he took a controlled dose of mescaline, and wrote about the experience in The Doors of Perception. Everyone knows that’s where Jim Morrison got the title for his band, The Doors. But in the annals of drug experimentation literature it goes back to the early 19th century and the mystical poet William Blake, who said ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is: infinite.’
That’s more or less Huxley’s thesis.
It’s a bit hard to follow his account of the early, intense part of the trip, where he fixates first on flowers in a vase, then on the folds of his trousers, then on nearby artworks and ….well, I couldn’t quite work out what he meant by the concept of ‘suchness’, but he sure doesn’t settle for ‘wow, man, that blew my mind’. His has got to be the most exquisitely detailed, most cerebrally analytical account of a good trip you’ll ever come across.
Huxley emerged from it a true believer in the benefits of psychedelic drugs. In the last part of Doors, when he’d come down sufficiently to reflect on his experience, Huxley outlines his reasoning.
He theorises that if everyone did a trip say once a week they wouldn’t need toxic drugs like alcohol or tobacco. He points to native American cultures that use psychedelics regularly without addiction. No craving, therefore no crime to get hold of it. Furthermore, because people will have such a profound understanding of the meaning of life there will be no need for religion, that notable source of social disharmony.
Is he right? Well, John Lennon would have agreed with him.