OF ALDOUS HUXLEY by Pamela Heller A Thesis presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ...

246 Pages·2014·9.92 MB·English

THE SPIRITUAL QUEST IN THE WRITINGS
OF
ALDOUS HUXLEY
by
Pamela Heller
A Thesis presented for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Faculty of Arts at the
University of the WJ.twatersrand
April, 1969.
declare that the dissertation which is
1
herewith submitted for the degree of Doctor
01
Philosophy in the University of the Witwatersrand
is entirely my own work and that it has not
previously been submitted for a degree in any other
university.
Acknowledgments.
My sincere thanks to Professor A.G. Woodward
of the University of the Witwatersrand for his
advice and guidance.
CONTENTS PAGE
IMPRESSIONS OF ALDOUS HUXLEf
1
ACCIDIE
1
MULTIPLICITY 33
UNITY IN DIVERSITY 82
THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY 132
EPILOGUE 190
BIBLIOGRAPHY 226
IMPRESSIONS OF ALDOUS HUXLEY
In piecing together the fragments and mosaics of opinions
of those who remembered Huxley and paid tribute to him in A Memorial
Volume,^ we are left with an overall impression of size, both physi­
cal and mental, of a "gigantic grasshopper a giant among Lillipu­
" , 9
tians with an encyclopaedic appetite. We can study him through his
cousin, Juliette Huxley's eyes and picture him at Garsington in that
summer of 1915 - t a l l , slender, slightly stooped, with generous
mouth, sculptured nose, thick brown hair over a broad foreheada nd
blue eyes which "had an inward look until one realized that hew as
almost totally blind in one eye, and not fully seeing with the
other."g Sight less yet observant, he was the Homeric seer launching
on mental odysseys, a b rilliant conversationalist whose talk ranged
from the marriage ceremonies of octopuses to the backside of the
moon, the rents in Regent Street, the heroin addict, Rubens and
grasshoppers!^ Edith Sitwell comments on his deliberately absurd
and erudite monologues in her autobiography, Taken Care Of:-
The animal and vegetable world became endowed,
under the spell of his talk, with human charac­
teristics, usually of a rather scandalous nature.
I remember one monologue of this description on
the subject of the morals of the octupus tribe -
the tribe in question being, according to Aldous,
conversant with Ovid's theory of love. He expati­
ated on the advantages possessed by the octopus in
every amorous adventure.... so many arms with which
to enfold the beloved! His enthusiasm grew as he
proceeded. We were, at the moment, on a platform
in Sloane Square underground station. It was
Sunday morning, the platforms were crowded, and
the passengers waiting for trains listened, spell­
bound, to the monologue.^
Yet, like Denis Stone at Crome Manor, Huxley was usually
silent and withdrawn in the Garsington household, lonely and brood­
ing over his drawing and poetry or else reminiscing wi*:h Juliette
about his mother's death, his blindness, his brother's suicide which
he transposed into the novel, Eyeless in Gaza. To Juliette he was
1. AldousH uxley 1P94-1963: A Memorial Volume, ed. Julian Huxley,
(London": thafcio A Windus^ iW b)
2 . Ibid., p. 34
3. Ibid. , p. 40
4. Antic Hay( London: Chatto &W indus, 1930), p. 292-294
TTn future references only the title Antic.Hay will be Riven.
Ref. Bibliography p.226-2/7 for editions OfTPkts used throughout
5. Editil Sitwell.: Taken Care Of (London; Hutchinson, 1966),
p. 89-90
VWi
”a kind of amphibious creature, rejecting emotional contacts with
skilful evasions, using his intellectual equipment as a shield.
And Leonard Woolf who encountered him in the same period, was
struck by his personality and ideas as a "remarkable combination
of velvet and stee l We see him again in his old age as described
. "7
by the psychiatrist, Humphry Osmond, who administered Huxley's first
dose of mescalin:-
He seemed to be suspended a fraction of an
inch above the ground like one of Blake's
allegorical figures. He was very ta ll. His
head was massive, finely shaped, with a splen­
did brow. His gaze, from his better eye, was
keen and piercing, but seemed to be focussed a
little above and beyond me. His handshake was
sketchy and uncertain, as if he did not enjoy
the custom, and this was indeed so, for the
thin-skinned, lightly built, slender people
whom Sheldon calls cerebrcconic do not relish
physical contact overmuch.^
Huxley's friend, Robert Craft, fills in the fc.aps of Osmond's ideal­
ized picture. He looks back on Huxley dining with the Stravinskys,
absurdly out of place in their minute house, handicapped by his
semi-blindness, indulging in his usual, eclectic conversations.
Craft comments th at:-
... he is the gentlest human being I have ever
seen, and the most delightfully giggly................
As he listens to us his fingers plait and un­
p lait, or tickle the fenders of his chair, but
when he talks his arms move continuously and
rapidly in large illustrative gestures so that
he seems, like Vishnu, to have several pairs of
them.g
It is exactly here that the reader is at a disadvantage:
he cannot see this three dimensional figure, witness theg estures,
the nuances of tone, the side-tracking. All he can do is to bear
the image of the conversationalist in mind as he reads Huxley's
works which, at their worst, become records of talks, often infuri­
ating in their digression and repetition. Critics might then level
. Aldous Huxley 1894-1963: A Memorial Volume, p. 42-43
6
7. Ibid., p. 34
. Ibid., p. 115 Osmond refers to the American psychologist,
8
Sheldon, who proposed a theory of three constitutional types,
the morphology of each corresponding with temperament: hence
the definition of Huxley as ectomorph or thin man, by tempera­
ment a cerebrotonic, sensitive, restreined, inhibited.
9. Robert Craft, "With Aldous Huxley," Encounter, Vol. xxv, No. 5,
November 196 , p. 11
j
ill
the accusation that this is not art, merely a writ in* down of the
spoken word with the minimum of a rtistic planning, except in the
nOVels' foint Counter Point and Eyeless in Gaza. But this is not
strictly true for Huxley as intellectual and rational idealist was
very much concerned with the structural; with planned art, society
planned along the lines of Jeffersonian democracy, and even religion
planned in terms of the 'Perennial Philosophy.' At the same time,
he recognized the limitations of the artistic form, as neatly sunned
up in the words of John Rivers
„ "Ti1® trouble with fictio n ,” said John Rivers,
is that it makes too much sense. Reality
never makes sense.”
|Never?” I questioned.
Maybe from God's point of view," he conceded.
Never from ours. Fiction has unity, fiction
has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw,
existence is always one damned thing after
another, and each of the damned things is simul-
taneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously
Mickey Spillane and Thomas k Kempis. The criter-
ion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance."
And when I asked, "To what?" he waved a square
brown hand in the direction of the bookshelves.
To the Best that has been Thought and Said,"
c Mock portentousness. And then,
Oddly enough, the closest to reality are always
the fictions that are supposed to be the least
true. He leaned over and touched the back of a
battered copy of The Brothers Karamazov. "It
makes so little sense that "it's almost real.
V/hich is more than can be said for any of the
academic kinds of fiction. Physics and chemistry
fiction. History fiction. Philosophy fic tio n ...."
His accusing finger moved from Dirac to Toynbee,
from Sorokin to Carnap. ^
Treading the undefined line between fiction and reality,
Huxley 1 ived his a r t : ..is art revolved around him as personality
and it is this personality which dominates all his writings and
forms their nucleus. He did not refine himself out of his works
and create a separate aesthetic world in the style of Henry Tames or
James Joyce. He wrote as personality, using personae or masks as mouth­
pieces for his different points of view. These enabled him, like
W.B. Yeats, to assume his opposite: the poet-dreamer assuming the
mask of the man of action, the inhibited masked as the hedonist,
!0. The Genius and the Goddess (London: Chatto & Hindus, 1955),
P- /
iv
the sceptic masked as the naively credulous. Craft points to these
extremes; "There are only Mozarts and imbeciles in his world, only
extreme aspects of humanity, and these aspects continually shock
him."u
The dialectic of opposites is the crux of Huxley's person­
ality and personae. The drama of the novels is staged with scientist
against" poet, realist against idealist, the innocent against the
experienced, the young agains; the old, with the focus on the figure
jf the a rtis t, sensitive, inhibited, tormented. Like his creator,
the artist or hero is "preconditioned by his inteilectualism ,"^
the detached, disinterested intellect which analyses and dissects
humanity from a distance (as is the case with the "zoological novel-
isc ,^j Philip Quarles), and which forms the basis for mystical non-
attachment as practised by Miller and Anthony Beavis in Eyeless in
Gaza, Rontini and Sebastian Barnack in Time Must Have a Stop. The
hero's is a quest towards understanding, a search for significance
in the light of "man’s predicament, his relationships with reality,
with the awful circumstance which bound aspiring spirit to wretched
f l e s h . Y e t there is little active questing in the early works ••
novels, short stories and essays - concerned as they are with the
lethargic disease of accidie. The fictional heroes, Denis Stone and
Gumbril Junior, are either hampered by ratiocination or content to
dance the antic hay to destruction to the accompaniment of boredom,,
emptiness and fu tility , themes extended 4n the On the Margin essays
and early short stories. In Point Counter Point, the accidie re.*ins
as a tra it of the hero, Philip Quarles, but is submerged among multi­
ple themes, attitudes and points of view, in which huiaan voices are
counterpointed according tc the principles of a Bach fugue-. Once
again, the essays of the period extend, diversify and clarify the
hero's quest.
The quest for m ultiplicity in Point Counter Point forms the
basis of the search for unity in diversity, as pursued by Anthony
Beavis. Mis is the struggle of the rational idealist within the
11. Robert Craft, "With Aldous Huxley," Encounter, Vol. xxv, No. 5,
November 1965, p. 13
12. R.C. Zaehner: Mysticism Sacred .id Profane (London; Oxford
University Press, J'*bl), p. T5
13. Point Counter Point (Penguin, 1963), p. 334
14. Ronald W. Clark; The Huxleys (London: Heinemarn, 1968), p. 218
political context of pacifism towards the ultimate goal of mysti­
cism. And from this point onwards, Huxley's heroes - from Propter
in A^t*r Many a Summer to Rontini and Sebastian Barnack in Time
Must Have a Stop - combine the uneasy roles of rationalist and
mystical adherent to the 'Perennial Philosophy.' Drawing chiefly
on The—Pere_nnial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception and Heaven
— - Hel l ’ critics tend to isolate Huxley as mystic: in the words
of John Mortimer: "The unfortunate Beatles, like many of us it
seem*, are in grave danger of coming into contact with the Spirit
of Universal Truth, an unhelpful tipple which has in the past turned
the great mind of Aldous Huxley to mystical blotting paper "
But the attackers fail to take into account the complexity of his
work, the variety of topics which preoccupied him throughout his
literary career. Side by side with the mystical is a firm grasp of
the p J itic a l, the industrial, the scientific. ..sides, he himself
veered between belief and unbelief until gradually he journeyed
through a period of cynicism and accidie towards a renewal of faith
which culminated in his final novel, Island.
Huxley's vision was not confined to the spiritval problems
of contemporary life: the frantic 1920's reflected in Antic Hay,
the pre-and post-war problems pondered in Time Must Have a Stop.
TK utopian novels form en important part of his own spiritual quest
in probing not only the complexities of the future, but in isolating
and crystallizing the spirit of the realistic works: the scepticism
of the early works, Crome Yellow and Antic Hay, together with the
religious affirmation of The Perennial Philosophy. From the despair
and hideousness of Brave New World and Ape and Essence. Huxley soars
to the harmony, tranquillity and mystical intensity of Island,
theoretically, the hero, Will Farnaby' s spiritual quest has comet o
an end - in Fa la he finds the ideal society - but before he can
fully savour utopian life, the island is invaded by the forces of
industrialism and imperialism, and the utopian bubble bursts.
15. John Mortimer, "No Gurus is Good Gurus," New Statesman.
September 29 1967, p. 397 ----------------------
■
HIT
Crotr.f t? How.
The setting is Garsington, home of the Morrells, an
Elizabethan manor house combining the traditional Gothic win­
dows and Tudor panelling with the exotic flavour of the East -
ornate black and gold Chinese lacquer cabinets, oriental rugs,
rich brocaded curtains; d l this the inimitable stamp of
Lady Ottoline:-
A vagui scent of incense and pot-pourri
enhanced one’s serse of privilege, of
living in a 'habitable work of a r t. ' ^
And within this habitable work of art'" were gathered the
" 1
w riters, thinkers, politicians and pacifists of the First World
War years: the Garsington home served as refuge, haven and plat­
form for the ideas of, among others, Bertrand Russell, Middleton
Murry and Siegfried Sassoon. Period, setting and people were
caught and transmuted into the fiction of Huxley's Croroe Yellow,
published in 1921.
The characters of this early novel are clearly defined
types: Scogan, the ratio n a list, reminiscent of Bertrand Russell;
Wimbush, English gentleman-historian; Gombauld, French artist and
rake; Mary, birth control protagonist; Anne, languid seductress;
Priscilla Wimbush, pass£e seductress, an echo of Lady Ottoline;
Barbecue-Smith, the smug hack journalist, a caricature of Middleton
Murry. Each is drawn, not only from a contemporary figure, but also
from among the aristocracy, the only class which can really afford
to indulge in eccentricities - as Scogan ironically points cut:-
'Eccentricity I t's the justification
of all aristocracies. It justifies leisured
classes and inherited wealth and privilege
and endowments and all the other injustices
of that so rt. If you're to do anything reason­
able in this world, you must have a class of
people who are secure, safe from public opinion,
safe from poverty, leisured, not compelled to
waste their time in the imbecile routines that
go by the name of Honest Work
. '2
1. Aldous Huxley 1894-1963: A Memorial Volume,
ed. Julian Huxley, p. 39
2. Croroe Yellow, p. 58
w w