ALDOUS HUXLEY

Evening Star, Issue 22455, 28 September 1936, Page 12

ALDOUS HUXLEY

THE MAN AND HIS WORK A CHARACTER SKETCH Aldous Huxley has just published bis sixth novel Not too many for a writer who has ink in his blood and has been in print for almost 20 years. The last of the series, ‘ Eyeless in Gaza,’ is establishing its author in the headship of .English intellectuals; a place which D. H. Lawrence occupied two or three years ago. but which Aldous Huxley more or less annexed with his ‘ Brave New World ’ in 1932. ‘ Eyeless in Gaza ’ will not break any publishing record (writes the London correspondent of the Melbourne ‘Argus’). It will not sweep the Anglo-Saxon reading world as did ‘ Anthony Adverse,’ or as Margaret Mitchell’s many-paged story of the Civil War, ‘ Gone With the Wind,’ is doing in America. But the men and women who do the thinking, talking, and writing for Young England are revelling in it. One may dislike the book, but it calls for reading. It is significant that one cannot write of Aldous Huxley without continually recalling his odd- Christian, name. Julian Huxley, the biologist; and secretary of the London Zoological Gardens, is his elder brother, but hie father. Doctor Leonard Huxley, and his grandfather, Thomas Huxley, were also men of letters. And this is only one-half of Aldous Huxley’s literary pedigree. His , mother, Julia Huxley, was a daughter of Matthew Arnold, the poet and essayist. Born in 1894, Aldous Huxley was destined from birth for Eton, Balliol College, and a literary career, though his paternal and maternal grandfathers alike would have been a bit puzzled by .the later fruits of the family talent. As a boy, Aldous Huxley was a weakling. For three years he was virtually blind, and learnt to read Braille and to write by “ touch typing.” Yet the itch to express himself enabled Aldous, as a lad of 17, to write a novel of SO.OOO words (it was not published), and when, he went to Oxford two years later ho took a first in English literature. By this time Huxley had recovered his sight, though at Balliol he could only read with the aid of a powerful glass. AN IDEAS MONGER. A triumph of mind over body this, and it may be that in the long battle with bodily disabilities lies the due to the man who wrote * Brave New World ’ and ‘ Eyeless in Gaza.’ Aldous Huxley has Always aamitted that be was not “ a congenital novelist.” Mere storytelling does not amuse h.m. He has none of the social reform desires of a Tolstoi, a Wells, or a Shaw, or even that interest in his fellows which characterised the novels of Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett. Aldous Huxley is a student of ideas, who chews all the knowledge which travel, the newspapers, the radio, the cinema, and the gramophone put at the disposal of a man of learning to-day. From the rich chaos Huxley distils the nourishment which he thrusts upon his readers, now through essays, now through. poems or plays, but primarily through novels of ideas, for it is m ‘Antic Hay’ (1923), ‘Point Counter Point ’ (1928), ‘ Brave New World ’ (1932), and • Eyeless in Gaza (1936) that the younger intellectuals rejoice. What adverse criticism describes as the ugly cruelty of Aldous Huxley his admirers describe as facing facts with courage. ~ _ , From Balliol, Oxford, Aldous Huxley passed to a sub-editorship on the ' Athenaeum 1 and dramatic criticism on the old ‘ Westminster Gazette. Then he wrote ‘ Antic Hay,’ that quaint post-war fantasy, which professedly dealt with the young schoolmaster Gumbril and his invention of the pneumatic pants, but was really concerned with the scars left by the World War and the mood of pessimistic scepticism which oppressed English youth in 1923. ‘ Antic Hay ■ seems to have fixed an abiding problem in the imagination of Huxley—-what is the true and right relation of mind and body, flesh and spirit? ‘Eyeless m Gaza’ is as much concerned with tins puzzle of intellectuals through the ages as was ‘ Brave New World.’ FRIENDSHIP WITH LAWRENCE. In 1919, at the age of 25 years, Aldous Huxley was happily married to Miss Maria Nys. They, have a son, named after Matthew Arnold. Tn« boy seems to have inherited his father’s talent for painting, for Aldous Huxley is more than a competent painter. Much of his year is spent at La Gourgette, in the Var province of France, but Huxley also makes time for travel. In particular, Mexico has long attracted him, and he and his wife lived there for a time in 1900. Another episode which left' a definite mark upon the writer was his friendship with D. H. Lawrence, who with Huxley had a talent for painting as well as writing. They were together in Florence in 1928, and at Bandol, Var, in 1929, and Aldous Huxley has published the letters he exchanged with his brother novelist. Both of the men were troubled by the conflict between body and mind and the flesh ana the spirit, but Aldous Huxley s treatment of the riddle was utterly .unlike that of Lawrence. He could never have written, .as Lawrence wrote:—" “ My great religion is a belief in tbe blood, the flesh, as being wiser ban the intellect. We go .wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says is always true. . ...» What do I care about knowledge? The body and its satisfactions mean very little to Aldous Huxley, whereas the ideas which ferment m the mind are all-important. Lawrence one* spoke of Huxley’s “ funny diymindedness.” The phrase indicate! the gulf between the two outlooks, as it explains Aldous Huxley’s lack of sympathy with the . crowd consciousness, which sways so much popular opinion in 1936. If Aldous Huxley speaks through his own characters, it is through Philip Quarles, the novelist of ‘ Point Counter Point’ and Anthony Beavis, the philosopher essayist,of ‘Eyeless in Gaza’ _ Beavis echoes not a few of the pacifist sentiments which have increasingly occupied tbs writer’s imagination in recent years, and, have, indeed, persuaded him to da some public lecturin'*. Aldous Huxley hr:, 'one of the emotional enthusiasm and simplifying powers which make for success in the more crowded haunts of men. Id essence, he seeks to be a moralist, putting problems of right and wrong before individuals among his fellows. There are many, many doubts id Aldous Huxley, moralist, and probably no really bright .flame of belief illuminates Ins creed. But it*iuay b® that ho expressed the faith that is deepest in his nature when in ‘Point Counter Point ’ he made Mrs Quarles aver; “We ought uot to ask why w« aren’t happy, but bow can we please God, and why we aren’t better?” If reader wants the quintessence of Aldous Huxley, not as story-teller or .character creator, but as thinker. Jet him or her try ‘ Texts and Pretexts,’ the best of all modern anthologies, and alive with comments upon men, things, and books which show the ripo scholarship of the men.