Cargoes for Crusoes

i

In that closing chapter, classical in its quality, which rounds off his Antic Hay, Aldous Huxley writes:

“Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare.... From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on.... The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a water proof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle....

“Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast, unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were tropics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were changing continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by virtue of some unimaginable enchantment....

“In his hot box Shearwater sweated and pedalled. He was across the channel now; he felt himself safe. Still he trod on; he would be at Amiens by midnight if he went on at this rate. He was escaping, he had escaped. He was building up his strong light dome of life. Proportion, cried the old man, proportion! And it hung there proportioned and beautiful in the dark confused horror of his desires, solid and strong and durable among his broken thoughts. Time floated darkly past.”

This is not the Aldous Huxley, you will say, of Limbo, or of Crome Yellow, nor even of the collection of tales called Mortal Coils. No, it isn’t. The intelligent child, the studious Oxford youth, the young man in maiden meditation fancy free, have gone somewhere. (We need not mind where.) The person that emerges in their place has a mind vaulted and full of pointed arches. His thoughts are lighted through stained glass, glass that singularly resembles the colored microscopic slides with which Grandfather Huxley was intently preoccupied. It is a Gothic mind with a special twentieth century illumination through the windows of applied science; the lighting is not very satisfactory nor is the source entirely congruous; but this mind-place is one of many and singular pleasures. A sense of airy spaciousness exists, and there is a comfortable feeling that one is not too closely observed, except by God. The delight of sanctuary would be perfect if one were not forced to go outside, now and then. However, there is the sense of escaping, of having escaped—from Grandfather, with his courage and his science and his controversies; from Aunt Humphry Ward with her formula for writing novels; from Laforgue and the French school; from Oxford and the English school; from Applied Religion; and this goes some way to compensate for the necessity of living in London and struggling to build up a strong light dome of life with stories, critiques, poems, books, essays, feuilletons.

ii

To understand Aldous Huxley’s work it is only necessary to have been born too late. This includes practically everybody. But to appreciate his writing requires more of a background than is possessed by those who would make a cult of him. He has nothing to do with cults, though perhaps something with literary cultures. His roots are very far back, the smallest at least as far back as the Elizabethans. Not many can identify the passage in Marlowe from which are taken the two lines on the titlepage of Antic Hay. There is more than a suspicion that the grandson of T. H. Huxley is acquainted with Greek and Latin literature and with the spectacles of the Renaissance. But the alcoves of the Bodleian Library are well-lined and not too much frequented. The truth is that Huxley is the child of the nineteenth century far more than of the twentieth, or the seventeenth, or even the first. And the nineteenth century is so much in the foreground as to be most unfamiliar ground for many readers of today. Their backgrounds are too far back, and their foreground is too far forward; the scene is lost in the middle. One of the most significant facts about Aldous Huxley is his almost indiscriminate fondness for the works of Charles Dickens, just as another in his nephewship to Mrs. Humphry Ward. Consider his two grandfathers. The renowned scientist, T. H., whose name is still anathema to the simple fundamentalist, was yet a human, an all too human creature, who, as he told Henry Holt, tried vegetarianism but had to abandon it because he found he could no longer think. The father of Julia Arnold (who became Mrs. Leonard Huxley, Aldous’s mother) was the subject of considerable conversion and re-conversion by the Church of England and the Church of Rome. Julia Arnold was a niece of Matthew Arnold, whose doctrine of sweetness and light wasn’t wasted on a desert air—was, indeed, caught up and echoed with diminishing but sympathetic outcries. As for Mary Arnold, who became Mrs. Humphry Ward, the author of Robert Elsmere was by taste and temperament a scholar whose true monument is possibly her encyclopædia articles on theologians in Spain.

What, then, is the character of a man barely thirty whose horoscope belongs to 1894? His sisters and his cousins and his aunts are not to be left out of the reckoning any more than those of W. S. Gilbert’s admiral. Brought up to admire Wordsworth, Mr. Huxley has lived to enjoy him;[34] a child of eminent Victorians, he has a perspicacious eye for the limitations of Lytton Strachey as a biographer.[35] The inner truth, of course, is something more important than these details of taste, which might be accidental. The inner truth is itself an accident—quite possibly an accident in design. And it is due to the shape of Huxley’s head, not the outer shape but the shape inside—as we have said, all curious vaultings, pointed arches, mediæval, constructed for all the rites of a ceremonious mysticism but constrained by the circumstances of his era and the exigencies of daily living to be used rather as a laboratory than a cathedral. One must eat. When Grandfather Huxley gave over eating meat, he was unable to think, and his grandson, obliged to use a beautiful brain in journalism and letters, can hardly dedicate it to worship.

“Worship.” The word may seem strange to be used in speaking of the author of Antic Hay, in which there is much genial blasphemy; but what the careless reader may not see is the bitter cry beneath the surface of a stony contempt. The cry is there, nor is it always embittered. “God as a sense of warmth about the heart, God as exultation, God as tears in the eyes, God as a rush of power or thought—that was all right,” reflected Theodore Gumbril Junior. “But God as truth, God as 2 plus 2 = 4—that wasn’t so clearly all right.”[36] And a few moments later the young man is recalling, with passion and pain, the death of his mother. Those familiar with the story of the two dwarfs, Sir Hercules and Filomena, in Crome Yellow[37] know what pathos and tenderness Huxley can command in a narrative of entire simplicity undisturbed by the self-conscious tendency of much of his work. For it is true, as Michael Sadleir said some time ago, that there are (have been?) several Huxleys.[38] But although the artificer in words who is “almost omnipresent” will never vanish, the “amateur in garbage, pierrot lunaire, the cynic in ragtime, the fastidious sensualist” are numbered of days. The young man in his twenties who provoked “consternation and respect” knows as well as Mr. Sadleir that he has no time to waste. His position is clear, being that of a man whose time is being wasted, not by himself but by others; and a man whose impatience is becoming very great. The portrait of Coleman in Antic Hay is perhaps the most concentrated expression of that ... impatience. Of the several attitudes assumed in the world today by gifted writers whose core of feeling is mystical, Huxley’s, I think, has the most courage to commend it. Mr. Sinclair Lewis clicks the shutter of a mental camera; Mr. James Branch Cabell tries to glue our eyes to a series of romantically-colored stereoscopic slides; Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer paints in oils; Mr. James Joyce uses chalk on the sidewalks or even on the walls of less advertised, but not less public, places. Huxley, however, has learned from Dickens the art of caricature. As he draws, his really vast erudition comes crowding through the aisles of his strange and beautiful mind. Like little imps, like twisted gargoyles come to life, figures of the past fling themselves on the haft of his pen, to move it this way and that. A heavier stroke here, to show the semblance of a satyr; this curve a little thinned by pity; a blot here for the spirit made flesh.... So you have gradually assembled his company, grotesque, exaggerated, wretched, bizarre, inhuman-human, like drawings by Cruikshank or Phiz, like illustrations to a new Nicholas Nickleby, or Pickwick, repulsively true, their meaninglessness carrying their deepest meaning. That meaning is so significant that only a mystic can be expected to grasp it. It goes back to the struggle between paganism and Christianity which led into what we call the Dark Ages. Mr. Huxley has looked at his world and seen with disgust—but also with anguish and pity—how the wheel has come full circle, how for the mystical mind a Dark Age is again come upon us. Must, then, the old and crucial warfare be waged all over again? If we are to worship at Greek shrines, he will remind us that Priapus was the god of gardens. And he quotes the Latin of Odo of Cluny[39] to show how excess breeds counter-excess. The whole point with Huxley is his perfect grasp of the historical analogy to the present mood and tense—or tension. He is savage in his picture of London, the modern city, in Antic Hay; unsparing in his representation of the manifestations of the spirit we affect—jazz, prevailing dances, rages in new art, stupidities in experimental science. Possibly his comprehension of the last is his most relentlessly hostile view; he is the grandson of a scientist, a very great thinker, pathetically dependent upon a flesh diet for intellectual accomplishment. Grandfather’s thinking, though possibly not futile, seems to have got no farther than the God of 2 plus 2 = 4. For such a God, the grandson has little use; for such an age as impends over us, he has even less.

This young man has been everywhere and seen everything. He writes, not that he who runs may read, but that he who reads may run. He subtly, but more and more urgently, invites us to flee—the wrath to come? No, the madness already here. Does his generation fancy itself as pagans and revel in its paganism? He will show them their precedents and quote for them their texts—which they may ponder before passing out to the vomitorium. One might divide Aldous Huxley’s work to date into two classes: and if one class is juvenilia, most certainly the other division, led by Antic Hay, is Juvenalia. The Goth laid waste, even as this young Goth from Oxford is laying waste; and then the Goth built churches. They are the incomparable, those edifices. The son of the Arnolds and the Huxleys, the Oxford scholar, the pupil of London, is preparing for us his twentieth century Gothic.

iii

“Huxley, Aldous Leonard, writer,” recites Who’s Who, “born 26 July 1894; third son of Leonard Huxley, whom see, and Julia Arnold; married, 1919, Maria Nys; one son. Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. Worked on the editorial staff of the Athenæum, 1919-1920; dramatic critic of the Westminster Gazette, 1920-1921. Publications: The Burning Wheel, 1916; The Defeat of Youth, 1918; Limbo, 1920; Leda, 1920; Crome Yellow, 1921; Mortal Coils, 1922. Recreation: reading. Club: Athenæum.”

A short private letter dated 13. vii. 22 adds one or two details. “I was educated very conventionally at Eton & at Oxford (the only break in the process being two or three years of partial blindness, from 17 to 19½, when I learned to read Braille embossed writing). I took English Literature at Oxford, under the professorship of the late Sir Walter Raleigh. I have worked on a good many papers—doing literary journalism, art criticism, music criticism & dramatic criticism. I am a close student of French literature & have many acquaintances in Paris. I travel as much as I can—which is not nearly so much as I should like. My ideal at the moment is to be completely idle for three years—but, alas, I see no prospect of its being fulfilled!” The letter also says, in answer to a specific inquiry about Mortal Coils: “Mortal Coils, like Crome Yellow, was chiefly written in Italy last summer (tho’ there are two stories in it of considerably earlier date)—in extreme heat by the Mediterranean.”

Here is a reminiscence of Huxley written in June, 1922:

“Aldous Huxley had tea with me at the Savoy in February, 1922, when London was being raided by a series of particularly nasty fogs. All the salt exhaled by the neighboring sea is sucked in by these fogs, which apply it patiently to the eyes of London, causing the people sore eyes and a weary outlook. Out of one of these fogs Huxley stepped into the writing room of the hotel, where I instantly recognized him. He is very tall and thin, walks with a visible stoop, and looks about him with the uncertainty of those who are new to the extreme of near-sightedness. One of his eyes is almost all white.

“He is very much interested in America and professes to envy us our exuberance and Henry L. Mencken, which seems to me sheer affectation. He also entertains the view that the invasion of Europe by American soldiery during the late war has caused a revolution in European social intercourse, which is a little more reasonable. I have made a complete record of this conversation in a manuscript book of mine entitled ‘In Georgian England,’ which is unlikely ever to find a publisher.

“About him personally I know only what one can gather from a purely impersonal discussion. He has a slight income, and that was why he was leaving for Italy with his wife, and that was why he was very anxious about an American market, and that was why he was writing some plays which, judging by some play work of his I saw, must be pretty bad. But it should interest you to know that at a luncheon of young Oxford poets to which I was invited he was referred to several times as the most learned man in England.”[40]

Huxley’s personal appearance and agreeable manner have been frequently described[41] and his conversational gift is not aptly epitomized by that very famous English novelist who recently said of him: “He looks clever. He says nothing—he has no need to say anything. It suffices for him to sit silent, looking clever.” The same novelist, a very penetrating analyst of literary powers, added: “But this young man is almost the only ‘white hope’ in English literature at present.” Huxley is at his best, conversationally, in a small company. One of his close friends is Frank Swinnerton whose judgment of Huxley’s gifts as a writer strongly confirms the novelist’s estimate just quoted.

iv

The Burning Wheel (1916) and The Defeat of Youth (1918) were volumes of poems, as was Leda (1920). Only Leda has been published in America. Although it is not ten years since the appearance of Mr. Huxley’s first book, the first (London) editions of all of them are held at a premium by dealers and collectors. One may pay, for a particular item, anywhere from ten to fifteen pounds in some instances—or certainly not less than $60 or $75 in New York. A first edition of a new Huxley is something to put aside carefully. The distinction is unusual among living writers and, in the case of a man under thirty, possibly unique.

The title poem of Leda is an affair of nearly 600 lines, iambic pentameter with an occasional variant, written in rhymed couplets as a continuous narrative with the occasional “paragraphing” usual in narrative blank verse. The subject is the classical myth of Jupiter’s disguise as a swan:

The poems which follow, including the “First Philosopher’s Song,” are among the earliest and most perfect expressions of Huxley’s perception of the futility of science:

The deliberate attempt, with a delicate savagery, to hold the mirror up to his generation was begun in “Frascati’s”:

A number of poems written in prose form—though without the special effects of Amy Lowell’s “polyphonic prose” in Can Grande’s Castle—follow. Of these “Soles Occidere et Redire Possunt” is the only one arranged as verse. Preceded by a short foreword it offers us the record of a day in the life of John Ridley. “Ridley was an adolescent, and suffered from that instability of mind ‘produced by the mental conflict forced upon man by his sensitiveness to herd suggestion on the one hand and to experience on the other’ (I quote from Mr. Trotter’s memorable work on Herd Instinct).” It is a study in “the anguish of thinking ill of oneself”:

But of these prose poems the most significant is “Gothic,” fashioned around the nursery couplet:

From the opening sentence: “Sharp spires pierce upwards, and the clouds are full of tumbling bells” to the evocative closing image—“he had it in turn as an alms from the grave knight who lies with crossed legs down there, through the clouds and the dizzy mist of bell-ringing, where the great church is a hollow ship, full of bright candles, and stable in the midst of dark tempestuous seas”—the piece is a true glimpse into that mind which no more resembles the other minds of its day than St. Paul’s resembles a shop on Bond Street.

v

Much unwisdom has been uttered concerning Huxley’s prose. The applausive enthusiasm of the ordinary Huxley devotee may be dismissed without comment; superficiality (not to say shallowness) may call for pity but certainly not for censure. A misapprehension of what the author was doing in Antic Hay, though common enough and a more serious matter, will rectify with time. A comparison of such poetry as “Leda” to Keats is better ignored than made the subject of delicate differentiation; but what shall we say of these? “The wittiest man, after Beerbohm, now writing in English.”[42] “His humor is hot as well as shining.”[43] “He is finished and fastidious, sophisticated and diverting.”[44] “There’s no doubt about it. Huxley is brilliant.”[45] Mr. Clement K. Shorter, in the London Sphere, pronouncing Mortal Coils the best book Huxley had yet written, said: “There’s a great deal of brilliancy in it, although one or two of the stories are too chaotic for my taste, and one, ‘Nuns at Luncheon,’ is too morbid. The best are ‘The Gioconda Smile’ and ‘The Tillotson Banquet.’... One thing is clear, that Mr. Aldous Huxley has a career in front of him and some of his gifts are hereditary.... Mrs. T. H. Huxley had distinct gifts as a poet, and I have a volume of her verse I highly value. The son, Mr. Leonard Huxley, is a man of varied talent and the editor of the Cornhill Magazine. Mr. Aldous Huxley’s talents have taken a widely different turn, but they should carry him far.” If they are to carry him much farther, one grieves for Mr. Shorter, already lagging a little. It was commonly remarked that Crome Yellow derived from Peacock—a modernized Headlong Hall with the slap-stick eliminated and the addition of overtones on the (then) current sex motif.

Let us glance at the prose and test some of these characterizations.

Limbo opens with a novelette, “Farcical History of Richard Greenow,” the account of a young man whose mental hermaphroditism explained the fact that in certain states he was Pearl Bellairs, a highly sentimental novelist. The lady takes increasing possession of his faculties; he dies, a conscientious objector to war service, engaged in writing perfervid patriotic appeals to the girls and women of England. “Happily Ever After” deals with an inveterate feminine propensity toward the disguise of love by allurements. “Eupompus Gave Splendour to Art by Numbers” is a historical precedent offered to Cubists and other innovators in art. “Happy Families,” “Cynthia,” and “The Death of Lully” are all studies in the immature, adolescent attitude toward sex and love; and “The Bookshop” is a study in pity.

In Mortal Coils, “The Gioconda Smile” deals with Miss Spence, who poisons her rival quite vainly. “Permutations Among the Nightingales,” in form a play, is a study in promiscuity. “The Tillotson Banquet,” though longer, is of the same genre as “The Bookshop” in Limbo. “Green Tunnels” is the episode of a young girl’s heartbreaking disappointment. “Nuns at Luncheon” is the effective portrait of a writer of fiction whose god of realism identifies himself to the worshipper only in his aspect of brute. The original, like most Huxley originals, is a composite. For Mr. Huxley is not so much engaged in hitting heads as in hitting what is in the heads.

The novels, Crome Yellow and Antic Hay exhibit the same characteristics and underlying intention as the shorter pieces; they have the added value of unity of form (in Crome Yellow, of time and place as well). Crome Yellow is more varied in its emotional presentation as well as lenient; Antic Hay is sterner, more peremptory—the rapier driven home. But where is the likeness in all this or in any of this, to Max Beerbohm? Mr. Huxley is witty—incidentally. His humor, described as “hot as well as shining,” is no more humor than the work of Mark Twain in The Mysterious Stranger. No doubt his prose is a “finished” prose; but “fastidious, sophisticated and diverting”! The picture conjured up by such adjectives is one of an elegant trifler. Yet hardly a man writing can use such uncompromising, Old-Testamentary speech; and if the bulk of Huxleyana is diversion, then Savonarola should be considered with reference to his possibilities as a vaudeville entertainer. And “brilliant.” It is a word from the outermost darkness, spreading darkness around.

vi

Perhaps as a result of these singular misapprehensions, the remark was general, when Huxley’s book of essays, On the Margin, appeared, that here was a volume which might be the work of any gifted young man. Not quite. The display of learning was rather too great for gifted young men to manage, as it were, without parade. Yet the very ones who made the comment—and this writer must number himself among them—could have learned more concerning what a conventional biographer would love calling “the real Aldous Huxley” from a re-perusal of On the Margin than from any other of his books. Said one reviewer: “Mr. Huxley can be fantastic enough, though his is never the fantasy of the cloudy dreamer, but the fantasy of a thinker whose mind is enchanted by the logical development of a happy thought; but his clarity was never better shown than in this collection.... Even in his lesser marginalia, he has a winning and graceful conversational manner, whether he be commenting on a quaint book, on pantomime songs, on the contrast between amorous poetry (of the second class) in French and in English, or upon boredom as a literary inspiration through the ages.... The one thing which Mr. Huxley cannot stand is mistiness and insincerity; and what he means by clarity and sincerity he amply shows in his essays on Edward Thomas, Sir Christopher Wren, Ben Jonson, Chaucer, and the centenary of Shelley’s death.”[46] Here is a greater degree of percipience than has been shown since Mr. Sadleir offered his criticism (now perhaps obsolescent, but penetrating at the time). In fact, the essay on “Sir Christopher Wren” in On the Margin is the single most self-illuminatory bit of writing Mr. Huxley has offered us. Like the great architect of London, Aldous Huxley is a designer who prizes in his work a quality peculiar and individualizing; and as with Wren, the quality is not æsthetic but moral.

It is explicit, for all its unobtrusiveness, in the title story of his new collection, Young Archimedes and Other Sketches. Comedy and irony in various proportions are the material of five of the six tales, but the principal story, in length a novelette, is a charming narrative of a child in Italy, a child with a beautiful forehead and eyes that could flash ripples like the sunshine on clear pale lakes. The young Guido showed an extraordinary penchant for music; but when he was a little older, like Archimedes, his mind turned to the theorems of mathematics; it was evident that his genius was larger. The tragedy of his life in the hands of a grasping woman is told with an affectionate sadness. Undoubtedly this piece of his fiction, austere and tender, will give to thousands of readers a new conception of Aldous Huxley. They will perhaps see that the mind of the child, Guido, is a miniature of the mind of the one who writes about him; and that there is even a profound likeness between both those minds and the one of which Emerson wrote:

BOOKS BY ALDOUS HUXLEY

SOURCES ON ALDOUS HUXLEY

In addition to the sources referred to in the text of the chapter or in footnotes, the reader should consult the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature for the years since 1920.