Читать книгу The Detached Retina - Brian Aldiss - Страница 9

The ambition of the literary artist is to speak about the ineffable, to communicate in words what words were never intended to convey … In spite of ‘all the pens that ever poets held’—yes, and in spite of all the scientists’ electron microscopes, cyclotrons, and computers—the rest is silence, the rest is always silence.

Thus claimed Aldous Huxley, in a small book entitled Literature and Science, published in the year he died, 1963. The silence needed many millions of words in explanation. Even on his death-bed, Huxley was busy explaining Shakespeare, ‘a human being who could do practically anything’. In Literature and Science, he is busy making connections, and in this case entering the debate between Snow and Leavis on ‘The Two Cultures’. As ever, Huxley builds bridges. ‘The precondition’, he tells us, ‘of any fruitful relationship between literature and science is knowledge.’

Which is all very well, but few of us set out in life with such cultural advantages as Huxley. He was the grandson on his father’s side of the great Thomas Henry Huxley, while his mother was the grand-daughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby, niece of Matthew Arnold, and sister to Mrs Humphrey Ward, the novelist. Aldous grew up in a house full of books and the intelligent conversations which spring from (and into) books: where knowledge is as routine as good meals.

This privileged English existence, with its Eton and Balliol background, was to end on the coast of California, fading out in gurudom, on an LSD injection. The pop group ‘The Doors’ named themselves after Huxley’s short work, The Doors of Perception, advocating use of mescalin.

Here lie mysterious connections between the world of experience and the world of conjecture and speculation. Huxley took his title—he was always brilliant at fishing for titles—from William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed,

everything will appear to man as it is, infinite.

Yet in the text, he makes reference to a different kind of writer, when speaking of our longing to transcend ourselves: ‘Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.’ The reference is to one of Wells’s most poignant short stories. So, via the pop group, the expression passed into popular life, and into the drug culture of the sixties.

Alas, behind the doors of Haight-Ashbury, the broken dreams and dead babies piled up. Even the Flower Children were only human. Transcendence is hard work, as Huxley himself was aware. He says, ‘To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.’

Behind this modest but complex statement, compassionate yet uncompromising, lies an extraordinary trajectory of a twentieth-century life, the long trek from Eton to the Mojave, prompted in part by that fearless curiosity which Christopher Isherwood called ‘one of Aldous’s noblest characteristics’.

Curiosity spells diversity. The diversity of Huxley’s life is echoed in his writings. These engage readers of many kinds, since even the novels, for which he was most renowned, touch upon religion, science, politics, literature, art, music, psychology, utopianism, and—to use the title of one of his most remarkable books—the human situation. Through them all flow Huxley’s wit and his adroit use of language. Huxley’s early distaste for bodily functions, in his Bright Young Thing phase, develops into a passion for mysticism. Henry Wimbush’s comic discourse on sixteenth-century privies in Crome Yellow (‘the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe’) later becomes a preoccupation with enlightenment, and with the hazardous position between privy and universe which we occupy.

Thousands of individuals have had their spirit of enquiry sharpened by Huxley’s cultured tour of ‘the ineffable’.

His preoccupation took many forms. Advice on how to see, for instance, in Huxley’s little valuable book, The Art of Seeing, in which one notes a typical observation concerning the eye: ‘its peculiarly intimate relationship with the psyche’ … For Huxley, all things connected.

Concern with quality of life, and with any new thing which might conceivably alleviate the human condition, pointed a way to the future, from hydroponics to Scientology. Like a true Californian, Huxley embraced many crank cults in his time. (In her biography of Huxley, Sybille Bedford relates how L. Ron Hubbard and his wife, ‘stiff and polite’, went to dinner with the Huxleys. They presented the Huxleys with two pounds of chocolates.) So—discounting the marvellous cruel joke of After Many a Summer, with its speculations on evolutionary longevity—Huxley’s three utopian novels appear.

None was received with great understanding by a literary world partial to country houses, stories of the wealthy, large doses of characterization, and even larger doses of nostalgia. Such is the fate of novels of ideas, at least in England.

The utopian trilogy consists of Ape and Essence, reviled on its appearance in 1946, perhaps because Huxley does not treat the human species with the respect it believes it deserves; Island, his last novel (1963); and Brave New World (1932), Huxley’s most famous work. Huxley was a connoisseur, some might say victim, of unconventional ideas. Brave New World shows us what happens when mass production is applied to biology. Promiscuous sex helps preserve immaturity; immaturity reinforces superficiality. ‘When the individual feels, the community reels.’ Drugs keep everyone happy. The workers get four half-gramme tablets of soma every day after work. It can readily be seen why thousands have longed to live in such a utopia, from which Huxley himself would have recoiled, at least in part. The privy may not be abolished, but at least the universe is obscured.

In Ape and Essence, the theme of sexual promiscuity is reintroduced. Nuclear bombs have fallen on LA. What remains of mankind has reverted to savagery. Womankind has reverted, apelike, to oestrus. For religion, a kind of perverted bogomilism is practised. The Narrator (the novel takes the form of a film script) says, ‘Thanks to the supreme Triumph of Modern Science, sex has become seasonal, romance has been swallowed up by the oestrus, and the female’s chemical compulsion to mate has abolished courtship, chivalry, tenderness, love itself’.

In this respect, Ape and Essence is an extension of the evolutionary idea, so splendidly defended by T. H., Aldous Huxley’s grandfather, parodied in After Many a Summer. There, down in the cellarage of his castle, the Fifth Earl enjoys near immortality, coupling perpetually with his housekeeper. But the foetal ape has had time to mature. The universe has disappeared; only the privy remains …

The two creatures coupling in the ancestral dark are literary cousins to the orgiastes presided over by the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, and Bishop of Hollywood, who presides over the post-war dystopia.

The codified society of Brave New World was the work of Mr Mond. In Ape, the ruined post-war world is the work of Belial. It’s an emetic work, perhaps, but I persist in seeing both books as slyly sardonic, like Gulliver’s Travels. If they are science fiction, they are Huxley’s brand, not H. G. Wells’s.

Huxley plays Jung to Wells’s Freud. Huxley saw an escape from the human situation through mysticism, not politics; politics was Wells’s thing, when, later in life, his closed mind produced the Open Conspiracy. So the least (but lengthiest) of Huxley’s three utopias, Island reverses many of the assumptions of Brave New World. It shows a threatened utopia where soma and sexual freedom bring about genuine happiness. Alas, as Milton’s Paradise Regained is less readable than its noble predecessor, Paradise Lost, so Island is less readable than its two mischievous predecessors. The devil—and Huxley knew it well—has all the best tunes. Mysticism and soil conservation challenge any novelist’s repertoire.

If Island is a failure, it is nevertheless worth reading for the instruction it gives—which not all can follow—and for its courage. Huxley must have known when he was writing Island that he had to lay aside one of his best weapons, the blade of satire, to write about what he conceived of as the most desirable place. Philip Toynbee perceived as much when he reviewed the book in The Observer on Sunday, 1 April 1962. While admiring Island as ‘an act of genuine virtue and love’, Toynbee points out that the islanders address each other in preposterous language, and that much of the book belongs to what he calls ‘the helpless language of inarticulate mysticism’.

To this charge, Huxley had earlier given answer. In Grey Eminence, he speaks of a book, widely available in England even a generation ago, which was written by a fourteenth-century mystic, and entitled. The Cloud of Unknowing. Commenting on The Cloud, Huxley says:

Ultimate reality is incommensurable with our own illusoriness and imperfection; therefore it cannot be understood by means of intellectual operations; for intellectual operations depend upon language, and our vocabulary and syntax were evolved for the purpose of dealing precisely with that imperfection and illusoriness, with which God is incommensurable. Ultimate reality cannot be understood except intuitively, through an act of the will and the affections.

And that is what Island is: Huxley’s act of the will and the affections, to reach out beyond the privy to embrace the universe.

Unlike most utopias, Island is not about governance, but about Being. Whereas Wells came to believe that a group of good men and true could reorganize the whole world, Huxley mistrusted governments. ‘Society’, he said, ‘can never be greatly improved, until such time as most of its members choose to become theocentric saints.’

This remark comes in Grey Eminence (1941), one of his most absorbing books, where his gifts are deployed in a study of Father Joseph, a Capuchin monk who became adviser to Cardinal Richelieu. Between them, Father Joseph and Richelieu prolonged the Thirty Years War, causing millions of deaths by torture, famine, disease and the usual appurtenances of war, including cannibalism. The Capuchin Father Joseph eschews the simian diversions beloved by the Fifth Earl, but falls into a different trap. Politics betrays the nationalistic religion, and vice versa.

The best of Huxley is scattered everywhere, perhaps most thickly in collections of essays; of the essay form he is one of this century’s masters. Adonis and the Alphabet (1956) is a perfect example. The erudition, never obtrusive, carries us from psycho-industrial power, dirt and spirituality, and population pressures, to Martian language and literature … and much else besides.

The Human Situation (1978) gathers together a series of lectures delivered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1959. They provide learned and unpompous summaries of Huxley’s thinking on many subjects, answering such questions as, ‘How should we be related to the planet on which we live? How are we to develop our individual potentialities?’ No better handbook to our ongoing civilization could be devised.

In one of those essays, the one on ‘Man and Religion’, Huxley states that, because mysticism does not commit one to any cut-and-dried statement about the structure of the universe, there is no conflict between a mystical approach to religion and science. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that such gurus as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky commit themselves to wacko versions of the world. Ouspensky seemed to believe that the periodic table was somehow related to notes in music. Low man in the guru totem pole, Hubbard believed in vast intergalactic battles. Yet the universe as revealed by current science is wacko enough for most mortals.

However, Huxley also says that there is a sense in which it is no great matter whether myths are true or not: they are simply expressive of our reactions to the mystery of the world in which we live.

Huxley’s personal myth was of this mystical union of something that existed beyond words. It produced his difficult, dedicated work. The Perennial Philosophy (1946). The possible connection of this myth with the death of his much-loved mother when he was fourteen is a matter for speculation, though it is scarcely to be imagined that such a traumatic event left no shockwave.

Huxley faded away on Friday 22 November 1963, with LSD in his veins. Within twenty-four hours, another wise man, another writer of SF who had lost his mother in childhood, C. S. Lewis, would also be dead. But it was Huxley who died on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Huxley’s continuing influence was summed up by Isaiah Berlin, who said, ‘He was the herald of what will surely be one of the great advances in this and following centuries—the creation of new psycho-physical sciences, of discoveries in the realm of what at present, for want of a better term, we call the relations between body and mind.’

Almost everything Aldous Huxley wrote was adversely criticized at one time or another. Everyone spoke well of the man himself, of his nobility and charm. His gentleness, sweetness and humour were remarked on by all those fortunate enough to know him.

Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was a personal friend. She has the last word. ‘I shall always think of Aldous as smiling.’