EROS AND ALDOUS HUXLEY by Gwen Matheson A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate ...

256 Pages·2012·22.48 MB·English

EROS AND ALDOUS HUXLEY
by
Gwen Matheson
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of
Graduate Studies and Research in partial
fulfilment of the requirements for the
degree of Master of Arts.
Department of English,
McGill University,
Montreal. August 1961
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. INTRODUCTION • • . • . • • • • . • . • . • • • • 1
PART 1: PSYCHOLOGY
2. A Early Poetry and Limbo (1916-1920) ••.•..•.••• 21
3. B Crome Yellow----Two or Three Graces (1921-
- 1926) •• 45
PART II: ETHICS
4. A Proper Studies (1927), Point Counter Point
(1928), Do What You Will (1929)............ 88
5. B Vulgarity in Literature----The Olive Tree
- ( 1930-1936).. • • . • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 115
PART III: METAPHYSICS
6. ! Eyeless in Gaza (1936), Ends and Means (1937} 140
7. After Many a Summer----The Genius and the
~
Goddess (1939-1955) ••••••••••••.••••••••••• 160
8. CONCLUSION • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 211
REFERENCES • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 235
BIBLIOGRAPHY • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 249
GHAPTER 1
Introduction
A youthful nun is robbed of ber new set of gold
and ivory false teeth; a muscular physiologist peddles
furiously on a stationary bicycle, ostensibly to make an
experiment on the process of perspiration; a dissipated
murderer listens with absorption to Beethoven's A-Minor
Quartet before he brings about his own death; a dog, hurled
from an airplane, "explodes" on a rooftop and causes a
violent quarrel; an elderly earl goes on a diet of carp's
gut and converts himself into something resembling an ape;
a deceased uncle refuses to dissolve into the "Light," and
consequently becomes a candidate for re-incarnation; a
handsome young priest is burned alive on a charge of
consorting with Satan to bewitch a convent; an adolescent
girl's interest in Swinburne contributes to a fatal car
accident.
The above selection of bizarre situations could
be taken from the works of almost no other contemporary
novelist except Mr. Aldous Huxley. Yet, underlying the
apparent incongruity of this random selection there is a
definite pattern which is nothing less than a modern
intellectual's search for meaning; this pattern conditions
everything that Huxley bas ever written, from his early
conventional verse to his most recent social and spiritual
2
commentary. It is an essential part of Huxley's persistent
irony that no idea, situation or character in his fifty or
so books is completely unrelated to any other idea,
situation or character, for all are part of an organic
whole.
At the same time, the unity of this twentieth
century writer's work is counterbalanced by his multiple
point of view. In Those Barren Leaves (1925), Calamy is
a projection of his creator when he interrupts his love
making with an attractive female novelist, to examine his
band and to analyse it in terms of electricity, chemistry,
1
biology, and morality.
"Had we but world enough and time!11 as Huxley
himself frequently commenta, there are an almost unlimited
number of aspects of this writer's thought that could be
examined--many topics, levels, and divisions, in the
products of his wide erudition and restless, searching
mind. For the present purpose, however, it will be
feasible to concentrate only on one aspect of the human
scene as treated by Huxley--i.e., eroticism. The
adjective erotic could be subject to much analysis, but
it will be used here simply to indicate the biological
urge which seeks its most habitual expression i n the many
types of relationship between the two sexes. The subject,
therefore, can be summed up under one word--a bare,
clinical, and at present much profaned and vulgarized
3
little word, a term which, if used to denote a human
activity, is of fairly recent usage, not appearing in the
Bible or Shakespeare--i.e.,
~·
Those familiar with Huxley's writings will
realize the artificiality of isolating any one of his
various topics. However, although this theme is only one
of many which provide pattern and structure in his stories,
most of Huxley's readers will realize at once that almost
all of the other topics in his work are inseparably related
to this one. Any character or situation may be selected
from his fiction--the peddling physiologist, the music-
loving murderer, the priest burning at the stake--and it
can be eventually related to sex in sorne of its aspects.
Such an assertion may appear to arise from the genetic
fallacy, or those intellectual sins of over-simplification
and adherence to a "nothing but" philosophy which Huxley
himself so deplores: "How wearily familiar we have become
with that 'nothing but space, time, matter, motion,' that
2
'nothing but sex,'· that 'nothing but economics ••• !" This
study, however, will deal with Huxley's erotic themes only
as parts of a whole and reflections of deeper levels of
meaning.
Huxley has, of course, given a prominent place
to this "'lion of the tribe of human passions'.") When
the name Aldous Huxley is mentioned, in fact, certain
ideas usually come to the mind of the more or less
4
cultivated reader. To begin, there is the familiar
passage on the back of most Penguin editions of his books
concerning Hux.ley's name "which became known in the
twenties," and, "rapidly developed into a password for
his generation. At cocktail parties, which were becoming
fashionable in the same period, it was bandied about as if
the mere mention of it were enough to show that one was
brilliant, witty, and cynically up to date." Since Huxley
made a considerable reputation while playing the role of
the smart young cynic of the thirties, this impression
unfortunately still dominates the minds of many people.
But those who have kept up-to-date on their Huxley realize
that he is no longer merely an "amused Pyrrhonic aesthete,"4
as he calls his earlier self in a recent preface to
Brave New World (1932). A few new roles have been added,
and we now have Huxley as the serious thinker, weighed
down with the problems of man. Ideas associated with this
author at present, then, might run somewhat as follows:
intellectualism, sex, pacifism, mescalin, and mysticism.
There is a connection between these associations, and they
may all be significantly related to the topic of eroticism.
References to Huxley's characters usually bring
to mind leisured members of the upper-middle and upper
classes in the social world he knew, holidaying at country
5
bouses, attending parties, cultivating the arts, and
always and incessantly indulging in what one of Huxley's
critics has called "sexuality and cerebration."5
It must not be forgotten, however, that is
~
closely related in Huxley's thought to a developing
conception of two other kinds of love: love for mankind
and love for God. The whole progress of this author's
development can be described as a progression from eros
to agape to union with the Divine. Huxley has always been
conscious of this interrelation, as shown by his special
linguistic and semantic interest in the many definitions
of the ambiguous word, love. In After Many a Summer
(1939), the saintly but constantly sermonizing Propter
expounds his ideas on this subject to Pete, a potential
though culturally unsophisticated disciple:
Let's take the commonest word in all religious literature:
"love". Love on the human level means what? Practically
everything from Mother to the Marquis de Sade ••• we don't
even make the simple Greek distinction between erao and
philo, eros and agape. With us everything is just love,
whether-rtTs self-sacrificing or possessive, whether it's
friendship or lust or homicidal lunacy. It's all just
love,' he repeated. 'Idiotie word! Even on the human
level it's hopelessly ambiguous. And when you begin using
it in relation to experiences on the level of eternity -
well, it's simply disastrous. "The love of God." "God's
love for us." "The saint's love for his fellows." What
does the word stand for in such phrases? And in what way
is this related to what it stands for when it's applied
to a young mother suckling her baby? or to Romeo climbing
into Juliet's orto Othello as he strangles
bedroom~
Desdemona? or to the research worker who loves his
science? or to the patriot who's ready to die for his
country - to die and, in the meantime, to kill, steal,
lie, swindle and torture for it? Is there really anything
6
in common between what the ward stands for in these
contexts and what it stands for when one talks, let us
say, of the Buddha's love for all sentient beings?
6
Obviously, the answer is: No, there isn't.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A personal introduction to the controversial
Aldous will be valuable at this point. That school of
criticism that goes to the personal life of the author
for insight into his work could claim Huxley as an
adherent; for example, in his study of Swift in Do What
You Will (1929), he ultimately traces this kindred
7
spirit's saevo indignatio to a theoretical impotence.
And it might be argued that in the study of a writer's
attitudes towards sorne knowledge of his personal
~'
love life would be especially useful. Nevertheless,
Huxley bas kept this part of his life private, and if we
expect any revelations from him, we will be disappointed.
In an essay entitled "Those Personal Touches" in
I•'Iusic at Night (1931), he describes his interview with a
representative of none of the most fabulously prosperous
of American journals" who offered him a "handsome cheque"
if he would write an article either on "Why Women are No
Mystery to Me" or "Why Marriage Converted Me from my Belief
in Free Love." Huxley turned down this request, partly
because he could not agree to the titles but mainly through
a commendable and apparently unusual reticence. He writes
at the conclusion of the essay: "Persuaded by the dumb
eloquence of handsome cheques, literary men and women have
7
begun to tell the world their most intimate and amorous
secrets. We know why X divorced his wife, how Y enjoyed
her experiments in Harlem, what made young Z decide to
8
become a monk, and so on."
Although we are quite justifiably debarred from
the intimate details Huxley's life, the desire to have
~
sorne personal knowledge of the author before examining
sorne forty of his books is natural and legitimate. But
just how does one grasp the essence of a personality with
which one bas never bad direct contact? Many have the
intuitive notion that physical appearance is a key in this
respect. And we will be following the method of many
novelists (Huxley himself, in fact) if we now approach
our "character" from this point of view.
First, there is Huxley's "Quiz Kid self
identification", given at the age of fifty-eight, in
which he reveals his love of classification by emphasizing
that he is "an extreme Ectomorph, in Dr. W.H. Sheldon's
terminology (to be precise a 1-2-7), with all the extreme
Ectomorph's tendencies to restraint in posture and move
ment, physiological over-response, emotional restraint,
love of privacy, resistance to alcohol, poor routinizing,
introversion and need for solitude when troubled or
perplexed."9
Then the following description of Huxley at the
age of forty-three, perhaps best conveys the general
impression of his appearance and manner:
Mr. Huxley himself made a more vivid impression on me
than anything he said. He is a kind, gentle, soft
spoken, thoughtful man - entirely free from a sort of
intellectual arrogance I expected to find. With his
thick, heavy glasses on, Mr. Huxley looks exactly like
an intellectual as caricatured in one of rvlr. Hearst's
papers - tall, thin, and dressed in ill-assorted, loose,
shapeless clothes. The impression is deepened when he
reads for he holds the book almost touching his nose.
But when he takes his glasses off, as he does in
conversation, there is a transformation; the intellectual
becomes a Byronic poet, --- a smooth brow, a delicately
sculptured nose, and a large well-shaped mouth; altogether
a finely featured, open, sensitive face. Because of the
weakness of his eyes, he seldom looks directly at the
person he is addressing. When he turned towards me, he
shielded his eye by resting his long-fingered, finely
shaped hand on his eyebrow---. His voice which is quiet
and not extravagantly English, seldom varies in inflexion
or volume.lO
The contrast which this account brings to mind
is obvious--the gentle although somewhat impersonal
scholar of the actual interview as opposed to the enfant
terrible of the novels, the cynic with acid in his ink.
Such a contrast is reminiscent of one of Huxley's heroes
and partial self-portraits--Walter Bidlake, the young
reviewer, whose heartless poetry criticisms wounded to
the quick many an earnest spinster, but whose ideal of
love was based on Shelley1s "Epipsychidion". Here we see
in operation the psychological principle of repressed
opposites or the law of induction; it is a possible clue
to Huxley's whole temperament and philosophy, the basis
of the Huxleyan irony, and also one of Huxley's own pet
theories.