Uplift and Suspicion

As a schoolboy in Cambridge in the early ‘60s, I was educated among the shades, or at any rate in the shadows, of the Darwins, the Keyneses, the Cornfords and the Huxleys. All of these families, some of them intermarried, were flowerings of the late-Victorian and Edwardian scientific revolution, in which reason was to be triumphant and in which guarded optimism was a persistent theme. One knew, of course, of some unintended consequences (the Cavendish laboratory down the road was the place where the atom was first split; at Kings College and elsewhere, a whole generation of bright young men had once decided that the culmination of the Enlightenment was Stalin’s Russia). Still, the spirit of inquiry and skepticism was predominant: I had some junior Keyneses and Huxleys as my contemporaries and perhaps for this reason noticed, on Nov. 22, 1963, that Aldous Huxley’s death was reported on the same day as that of President Kennedy’s. (The other person deprived of his due obituary the next morning was C.S. Lewis, chronicler of Narnia.) By that time, I had read several of Huxley’s novels and had found them, as I think many people once did, a useful bridge between boyish and adult fiction. I realized, too, that he did not seem to believe in utilitarian values or in human perfectibility. And, of course, he became an Oxford man and a member of Lady Ottoline Morrell’s gifted salon in Garsington.

His mother was the niece of Matthew Arnold, author of “Culture and Anarchy.” His grandfather was T.H. Huxley, the celebrated naturalist who took up Charles Darwin’s cause and famously vanquished the creationist Bishop Wilberforce in public debate. So I was impatient to read his essay on Lytton Strachey, the author of “Eminent Victorians.” And here’s what I found in Volume I of the “Complete Essays”:

“A superlatively civilised Red Indian living apart from the vulgar world in an elegant and park-like reservation, Mr. Strachey rarely looks over his walls at the surrounding country. It seethes, he knows, with crowds of horribly colonial persons. Like the hosts of Midian, the innumerable ‘poor whites’ prowl and prowl around, but the noble savage pays no attention to them. . . . One cannot imagine Mr. Strachey coping with Dostoevsky or with any of the other great explorers of the soul. One cannot imagine him writing a life of Beethoven. These huge beings are disquieting for a Voltaire who has learned enough sympathy to be able to recognise their greatness, but whose temperament still remains unalterably alien.”

This passage is quite strikingly representative of the Huxley style. He writes with an easy assurance and a command of classical and modern cross-references. The tone is slightly lofty, the prose well-turned if not very sparkling and the manner dry. But dry in the sense of desiccation rather than irony; I was reminded repeatedly of a slightly supercilious and unflappable schoolmaster with a Latin tag for all occasions. Moreover, when Huxley spoke of Strachey’s fastidious distance from the vulgar and the dirty--neatly inverting the picture so that it is the native who despises the poor white--he was describing the obverse of his own style. Here he is in India in Volume II:

“The Kashmiris are proverbial throughout India for the filthiness of their habits. Wherever a choice is offered them between cleanliness and dirt, they will infallibly choose the latter. They have a genius for filthiness.”

His entire diary for his visit to the subcontinent in the mid-1920s is a record of revulsion from spittle and excrement and pullulating humanity: Not until V.S. Naipaul was the register of disgust to be so intense (though not even Naipaul represented the Kashmiris as faced with a “choice” between squalor and hygiene). Yet, when seated on his study chair in more salubrious quarters, Huxley could write with cheerful astonishment about Jonathan Swift’s horror of the bowels, breezily reminding him that these functions were all a part of nature’s wholesome plan, and compare him unfavorably to Rabelais.

Does this make him inconsistent? Only to the extent that he actively sought to be. He took as his model the ancient Hellenic thinker Pyrrho, who insisted that judgment be suspended on any question that directly concerned the truth. In a 1928 essay for Vanity Fair entitled “Ravens and Writing Desks,” reprinted in Volume II, Huxley asserted that all philosophical and moral precepts were “equally right and equally wrong”:

“God is, but at the same time God also is not. The Universe is governed by blind chance and at the same time by a providence with ethical preoccupations. Suffering is gratuitous and pointless, but also valuable and necessary. The universe is an imbecile sadist, but also, simultaneously, the most benevolent of parents. Everything is rigidly predetermined, but the will is perfectly free. This list of contradictions could be lengthened so as to include all problems that have ever vexed the philosopher and the theologian.”

And so it could, which would make Huxley a master of tautology rather than of contradiction. His pedantry seems to have protected him somewhat from this challenge to learned complacency. However, his fondness for bold contrasts seems to have predisposed him to Los Angeles as soon as he set eyes on it in 1926 (without apparently having read F. Scott Fitzgerald):

“Jazz it up, jazz it up. Keep moving. Step on the gas. Say it with dancing. The Charleston, the Baptists. Radios and Revivals. Uplift and Gilda Gray. The pipe organ, the nigger with the saxophone, the Giant Marimba phone. Hymns and the movies and Irving Berlin. Petting Parties and the First Free United Episcopal Methodist Church.”

Indeed it can be fun, as one pages along, to detect the early shoots of “Brave New World.” In a 1929 essay, “Silence Is Golden,” he writes with almost insufferable condescension about his first visit to a “talking picture” or “talkie.” Without giving away the title, he makes it fairly plain that he went to a minstrel-type show, since he reprobates the “dark and polished young Hebrews, whose souls were in those mournfully sagging, sea-sickishly undulating melodies of mother-love and nostalgia and yammering amorousness and clotted sensuality which have been the characteristically Jewish contributions to modern popular music.” (He also makes a rare allusion to the fact that he was almost blind after a childhood infection, a misfortune which perhaps helps explain why so many of his essays are about musical appreciation.) At the close he denounces the talkies--and we can see the idea of “The Feelies” in “Brave New World” being shaped--as “the psychical putrefaction of those who have denied the God of life and have abandoned their souls, already weakened by the hereditary malady of Christian spirituality and scientific intellectualism, to the life-hating devil of the machine.”

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I pause to note that his languid Pyrrhonist mood appeared to have deserted him here, because he was impressed, in 1927, by the now-exploded IQ theories of Cyril Burt, one of the ancestors of those for whom the bell curves. “The more elaborate tests of Terman in America and Burt in England have shown that intelligence (or at least the correlated capacity to succeed in the tests) is distributed in a very symmetrical way round a numerically determined normal.” The figures of “Brave New World’s” Alphas and Epsilons are lurking there. In “A Note on Eugenics,” written in the same year, he reviews a book by a certain Maj. Leonard Darwin and suggests that scientists will soon enough “learn to breed babies in bottles.” Relishing the profusion of nubile young flappers in California, he says that, “Plumply ravishing, they give, as T.S. Eliot has phrased it, ‘a promise of pneumatic bliss.’ ”

Suspicious alike of the materialists and the spiritualists and protected by a carapace of classical learning and admiration for high culture, Huxley could be penetrating even when it seemed he was being merely snobbish. One wants to object when he writes of James Joyce in 1925:

“In spite of its very numerous qualities--it is, among other things, a kind of technical handbook, in which the young novelist can study all the possible and many of the quite impossible ways of telling a story--’Ulysses’ is one of the dullest books ever written, and one of the least significant. This is due to the total absence from the book of any sort of conflict.”

While this is not entirely true--there are some in those “dull” pages who think Leopold Bloom has no real right to be in Dublin--it is true enough to set one reflecting. Certainly, there are no Dostoevskyan dilemmas and agonies in “Ulysses,” and it’s a point in Huxley’s favor that he admired those who faced tragedy and contradiction, even if he did sometimes try to avoid it himself. In a brilliant essay on Spinoza, which takes the form of an attack on all religious efforts to deny (while also seeking to mold) human nature, he has this to say:

“ ‘Homer was wrong,’ wrote Heracleitus of Ephesus, ‘Homer was wrong in saying: ‘Would that strife might perish from among gods and men!’ He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for if his prayer were heard, all things would pass away. These are words which the superhumanists [Huxley’s word for the moralists] should meditate. Aspiring towards a consistent perfection, they are aspiring towards annihilation. The Hindus had the wit to see and the courage to proclaim the fact; Nirvana, the goal of their striving, is nothingness. Wherever life exists, there also is inconsistency, division, strife.” The choice of the word “meditate” may be unfortunate above or it may be deliberate.

Huxley was undoubtedly what we would now lazily term an “elitist.” His favorite word of disapproval was “vulgar” and he would often insert it where it did not really belong. A clever essay on why the French persist in liking Edgar Allan Poe (he asserts that for them, in effect, he gains in translation) is marred by a lengthy and drawling digression on the “painfully low and popular quality” of Poe’s work; unarguable in my opinion but heavy-handed in its context. There is, in Huxley, very, very little of the epigrammatic or the aphoristic; a point is not a point until it has been hammered home. But beneath his occasionally arid and donnish style, and among the automatic prejudices, one is afforded a glimpse of a proper and steely Stoicism, prepared to pass up the latest temptation and even to appear old-fashioned rather than sacrifice the virtues of detachment and skepticism. In this respect, however far his later diversions and experiments took him, he was loyal to that inherited Victorian integrity of mind.