ALDOUS HUXLEY: A PHILOSOPHER-ARTIST

Miss ADARSH BALA

Unlike the great Shakespeare and majestic Milton whose fathers were chief alderman and scrivener respectively, Aldous Huxley's father Leonard Huxley was a giant in journalistic literature, who edited a world-renowned literary magazine, viz., “Cornhill Magazine.” The halo of the family does not stop here alone; it emerges from no less a renowned scientist than Thomas Huxley of Darwin School, the grandfather of the author. Again, his ancestral glory adds one more feather to his cap when this fact comes into limelight that he was the grandson of Dr. Thomas Arnold, the well-renowned Headmaster of Rugby School from his mother’s side. Like a worthy son of a worthy father he inherited the traits of his grandfather and father by studying very closely religion and science and brought them to a confluence, a craze of the 20th century writer and the reader of his age. He was an author of repute and his works present satirically the disillusionment in life. He was learned, perhaps overlearned, in letters, science, music, painting and architecture. He was acutely sensitive to the beauty of art and music as well as to indifference of Nature and the inhumanity of man.

When Huxley was a boy, people believed in the steady progress of human life as a gift of science. They hoped that science would transform the old world of disease, poverty and suffering into a new world where everyone would enjoy the basic amenities of life. His early manhood was spent in a society which was trying to forget the horrors of war. He began with poetry and intellectual satirical novels. His poetry did not say anything, but his prose was witty. As Sisirkumar Ghose pointed out in his critical book on Aldous Huxley “A Cynical Salvationiat” that “It is not by his early poems, his malicious but admirable short stories, the excellent little middles and travelogues, nor even by his increasingly serious tracts for the times, that Aldous Huxley is generally remembered. For the majority of readers he remains and will probably remain primarily a novelist. Though not a best-seller, “he is best known as a novelist.”

In the nineteen twenties, Huxley appeared like a modern Jonathan Swift savagely satirizing his contemporaries in energetic prose; and some of his novels such as “Mortal Coils” and “Antic Hay” delighted even those against whom his barbed arrows of wit and venom were aimed until smiles grew rarer as Huxley’s wit dwindled and his disgust increased.

Huxley was twenty when the first world war began in 1914. If he had not been almost blind, he would have enlisted, and seen the horrors of war with his own eyes. But he had enough intelligence and imagination to know all what it was. His first book of stories “Limbo” was published in 1920 and his last novel “Island” in 1962. These were years of change and transformation of values. Influence of Freud was there. The sanctity of the Victorian home had been shattered by the brutalities of war. Sons smoked before their fathers, and girls began to go out with their boy-friends. Authority, of whatever type–parental, official, commercial–came to be flouted and disregarded. Strong will was also suspected, because it seemed to be allied to Victorian moral order and parental authority. This writer accepted the challenge of the new age and contrary to the temper of the age, he emphasised the spiritual and encouraged people to reject materialism.

An inability to reconcile his youthful idealism with the ugly materialism of the world, outside the academic calm of Oxford, is the most interesting aspect of the earliest part of Huxley’s work, his poetry. Equally too, he expresses his sad awareness of his own insufficiency and lack of contact with reality. This then has remained in some form or the other in all his later works more especially in his fiction. In all his novels from “Crome Yellow” to “Ape and Essence” it is his brilliant satire of modern life that has commanded most attention.

The world of “Antic Hay” (1923) has much in common with the world of T. S. Eliot’s “Waste Land”: “it is a world of ‘broken images’ where the ‘dead trees give no shelter, the cricket no relief’.” Unlike Mr. Wells he does not look to science for salvation. His “Brave New World” (1932) depicts a scientific Utopia of the future more hideous than the present world. It is a “novel of future.” It is Mr. Huxley’s nearest approach to a “popular” novel and probably served to introduce him to a far wider public.

In his next novel “Eyeless in Gaza” (1935) he reverts to an earlier and more characteristic manner. This novel preaches active “pacifism” as the only hope for mankind. In construction of “Eyeless in Gaza” Mr. Huxley tried by interpolation of chronological order to secure something of contrapuntal effect of music. There is not only an increasing interest in politics but in this novel he is also interested in the doctrines of mystical philosophy. In the book “Aldous Huxley” Jocelyn Brooke also interprets that – “It is interesting, by the way, to note that further Mr. Huxley progresses towards his ultimate goal of ‘non-attachment,’ the more preoccupied he seems to become with the more unpleasant aspects of the human body.” Besides an English writer we find the doctrine of “Nonattachment” of Gita in this novel.

In 1921 appeared Mr. Huxley’s first novel “Crome Yellow” and by the publication of this novel Mr. Huxley established his reputation. It is something of a youthful firework display.” It is concerned with the Willbush family, and its young hero Dennis is another Hamlet in whom reflection mars his capacity for action. It is light-hearted in its raillery, It possesses much charm. It is Mr. Huxley’s gayest and happiest book. It is a thoroughly light-hearted affair, enormously readable and in parts, extremely amusing.

“Those Barren Leaves” (1926) studies the acquisitive nature of women through the character of Mrs. Aldwinckle. In it “we hear a Utopia of conditioned and classified Babbitts who are going to inherit the earth.” This novel is marked with diffuseness and is sprawling in character. It contains a hint of change in his attitude. Most of the easy-going characters believe in Hindu philosophy that all the universe is meaningless, Therefore, the young lover, Calamy retires to a mountain-top, where he spends his time in philosophical meditation.

“And what? (asks the sceptical Mr. Cardan), and what will happen at the end of three months’ chaste meditation when some lovely young temptation comes toddling down this road...? What will happen to your explorations of the inward universe then, may I ask…? Perhaps you think you can explore simultaneously both the temptation and interior universe?”

Calamy shook his head. “Alas, I’m afraid that’s not practicable...”.

In “Point Counter Point” (1928) a picture of upper class and intellectual life and thought follows. “The views are short but close and extraordinarily varied. What is more interesting is the variety of ‘points’, the planned view of characters and incidents, which illuminate each other and to none of which undue emphasis is given.” It is a serious novel (reflecting) representing the conflict between Passion and Reason. This novel adopts a special technique described as the “Musicalization of fiction.” It is rich in witty and satirical epigrams. The total effect of “Point Counter Point” is one of the bitter disillusionment with society, though it contains some of Huxley’s most brilliant writing and coruscating epigrams. It is one of Mr. Huxley’s longest and most ambitious novels, though it lacks some of the force and vitality of “Crome Yellow” and “Antic Hay.”

The book that contains Huxley’s wisdom is a book of essays, “ Ends and Means.” In it we find essays on a number of political, educational and religious subjects. Huxley argues forcefully in this book for right living, which meant to him a courageous search for ideals. Sisirkumar Ghose has beautifully described the opening chapter of this novel. He says, Huxley opens the chapter on “Beliefs” in “Ends and Means” with three interrogations: “First, what do we want to become? Second, what are we now? Third, how do we propose to pass from the present position to the condition we desire to reach?” In his novels it is the second issue which takes precedence over the other two. The first query, what do we want to become is, at the beginning, not much heard of. But it gradually gains in volume till it drowns all the rest. “I do not know what I desire” says Dennis. But he soon does or has to. The third query about the technique of transformation follows as soon as we have decided what we want to become, that is our faith or ideal. The outlines of the technique have been suggested in his two latest novels and worked out in some detail in “Ends and Means.”

“After Many a Summer” (1939) is a comedy of longevity set in Hollywood. There is a scientist who wishes a prolonged human life by artificial means. Thus, Huxley mocks at the corrupting influence of wealth in the new world. Much of the novel is in Mr. Huxley’s best comic vein, but the philosophical divagations are inserted, one feels, somewhat arbitrarily, and tend to destroy the balance of the book. The same might be said of “Time Must Have A Stop.” It is, perhaps, the least successful novel of Mr. Huxley. In it the mental process of a man which is already dead is described. But the experiment done by Huxley is not much successful.

The “Perennial Philosophy” (1946) is a philosophical work inspired by the message of “Bhagawadgita.” It shows how eagerly is Huxley’s intent on “developing his own social and spiritual usefulness to society.” This book is an answer to “all the turbulance of a world which has been broken up and destroy itself. It is the answer to the problem of Mass Men, from whom it has become so difficult to escape, whom it is so difficult to help. Huxley goes back to the wisdom of East to bring balance in the life of the human race.”

Failure to persuade humanity to follow him along the path of non-attachment and unity provoked Huxley to write “Ape and Essence” (1949) a bitter novel in which he predicts the bestial degradation of the human species after a third world war.

In the end we can conclude that Mr. Huxley is a versatile writer. Novels, poetry, drama, travel books, short stories, biography, essays–there is all-most no literary form which he has not, at one time or another, attempted. But he is best known as a novelist in the world of history. As a novelist he has employed his brilliant novels for the purpose of discussion and propagation of his views. It is not the story or the plot that is important in Huxley’s novels. He has “great difficulty in inventing plots” and has no story to tell. “His plots are generally artificial, and have neither the allegories sweep of a Bunyan, the narrative flair of a Swift, nor the clumsy vitality of Dickens.” But what is significant in his works is “the treatment of subject in a brilliant manner.” He is an extraordinarily intelligent man. He has the most comprehensive intelligence of his day; his intellectual equipment and his artistic sensibility are both of high order. He will go down as a thought-provoking and stirring novelist of our time.

Huxley was a man of the widest culture with an insatiable thirst for knowledge. He made great contribution to the development of novel as an art form. He did for fiction what Shaw did for drama, namely, made intellectual discussion as exciting as emotional experience. Huxley created in fiction an image of the dynamic world of ideas that are to be found in the changing modern society. According to Henderson, “Huxley is primarily a light philosophical essayist using the novel form to present the more superficial modes of contemporary thought and feeling.” He was the spokesman of the “modernist.” His writings will be turned as a guide by the social historians of the future.

Back