The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  Mr Barbecue-Smith should have been a perfect oaf, but Huxley could not resist making him an oaf who had read Balzac. So the range of reference deployed by Mr Scogan, the accredited philosopher, can be imagined. Or rather it can’t. One of his speeches goes on almost uninterrupted for two and a half pages, bringing in a large part of the history of civilization since the Renaissance as he forecasts the rationally ordered future. (‘In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity’s almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically exploited . . .’) Pursuing an idea, the characters come to a standstill and spout, like the fountains in the garden. From our viewpoint they would do better to pursue their passions. Luckily Priscilla pursues hers: the New Thought, the Occult – for her these things are objects of desire, tantalizingly retreating before her down the corridors of her own house, out of the French windows and into the ha-ha. Weirdly got up and tireless in her extravagance, she made the book a hit. Everybody loved it except Ottoline. Murray points out that Huxley apologized when she bridled, but goes light on the sad fact that he betrayed her all over again when he sent Lilian Aldwinkle heavily emoting through the pages of Those Barren Leaves. As the chatelaine of the Cybo Malaspina, a Garsington transferred to Italy, Lilian has all of Priscilla’s mad passions plus one: she is a menopausal maneater aching to blend with just one more genius. Ottoline’s loopy but boundless enthusiasm for the arts was too much fun to go unspoofed. Huxley couldn’t leave it alone. In politeness, he should have. Luckily inspiration won the day. If all the other characters had been given the free rein he gave Lilian, Those Barren Leaves would never have ceased to be required reading. Alas, the book’s leading man is a typical Huxley hero: effortlessly knowledgeable and seductive, he tires of all that and retreats to a hill-top to make long speeches about his quest for a higher form of Being. The speeches leave you longing for Lilian, who has Ottoline’s lust for life along with her batso thirst for a fad. Ottoline might have been a bit much when bedtime loomed, but as a dinner-table hostess she was a genuine spotter of talent, and Huxley’s talent was hard to miss anyway. The only question was about the form in which it would express itself. Those orations to the mesmerized company were the spoken rehearsals for his written act. Professionally, he began as an essayist, and it could be said that forty years later he ended the same way. It was his natural form, and Garsington was an important stage in its first flowering. He talked himself into it.

  But the crucial event at Garsington came in the bewitching form of his future wife, Maria. Belgian, art-struck and delicately lovely, she had a crush on Ottoline but transferred it to Huxley. He was a lucky man. His mother reborn, Maria became the key to his existence. Maria took care of everything. She typed his manuscripts, set up the houses, fended off the pests and vetted his mistresses, generously employing her own charms to help him pull in the best qualified candidates. This biography features, for the first time in print, the story of the ménage à trois between Huxley, Maria and the Bloomsbury siren who went to bed with both of them, Mary Hutchinson. (Make way for the movie that will do for Huxley’s back catalogue what The Hours has done for Virginia Woolf’s.) Considering that Huxley spent so much time in later years talking about the necessity to civilize the sexual impulse, it is instructive to find out that he himself civilized it by indulging it up to the hilt. In Brave New World, it will be remembered, the Alpha males of the ruling elite get their fill of the designated babes. It turns out that Huxley wasn’t just dreaming.

  The old, integrated European culture is generally thought to have been atomized by the Great War. But it had fallen apart only politically. Still the stamping ground of the artistically minded elite, Europe had entered on yet another civilized phase. For English people with the means and tastes to get themselves to a villa and stay there, France and Italy were homes from home. Effectively there were no borders for the enlightened. With Maria smoothing the way at the wheel of the new Bugatti, the successful young novelist Huxley was one of the star turns and recorders of a movable feast: Garsington on wheels. It is easy to see how he was confirmed in the insidious idea that the cultivated elite should cherish its separation from the mass of humanity. Though later on he softened the proclivity, he never quite lost his readiness to blame the mobile vulgus for multiplying at an indecent rate and thus threatening to queer the pitch for the patrician order. (He even had the percentages worked out: 0.05 per cent were in the club, 99.5 per cent were outside the rope. Hands up if you know where you fit.) The best we can say for him is that he did not fall for Fascism.

  There were Fascists all around his Italian villas. Though he initially saw them as not much worse than a bad comic opera whose chorus was prone to fisticuffs, he finally concluded, and long before the Nazis established their full grip on Germany, that a totalitarian solution to the anomalies of mass society was worse than the problem. Commendably, he spotted most of the horrors of the Soviet regime straight away, even if he had no idea as yet that its own experiments in population-reduction would raise legitimate doubts about the supposedly ameliorative effects of that end. On the subject of ends and means – Ends and Means, among his best collections of essays, was another of his resonant titles – he was always capable of questioning the means. His weak point, however, was his failure to see that some of his favoured ends would inevitably bring questionable means into existence, and that the ends were themselves questionable for that reason.

  But the weak point was yet to become obvious. For the time, he looked good. He wasn’t the only one who thought that industrial society was turning out too many idiots (most of us still think it when we are caught in a traffic jam) and he was on the side of the angels, or seemed so, in proclaiming that one of the greatest dangers the idiots posed was that they might elect dictators. Not liking dictators qualified him as a progressive in a period when George Bernard Shaw saluted Hitler as an exemplar of creative energy and H. G. Wells nose-dived to the foot of Stalin’s throne. As soon as 1928, in Point Counter Point, the crowning novel of his early success, Huxley had created a British proto-Fascist called Edward Webley. With a strident rhetoric that would later be echoed by Sir Oswald Mosley (moving in the same high social circle, Huxley had spotted Mosley on the way up), Webley makes long speeches about planning. The long speeches help to wreck what might have been a classic novel. An obvious victim of Huxley’s multi-book contract, Point Counter Point has at least two different false starts folded into it (why leave them out when you can bodge them in to make up the bulk?) and many a promising conversation is padded out with the unlikely erudition that the author could shovel in so much more speedily than he could invent plausible action and follow where it led. Most of the characters do more orating than real talking. In other words, they speak essays. But the essayist who speaks for Huxley is not Webley. It is the brilliant (of course) writer Philip Quarles. ‘The problem for me is to transform detached intellectual scepticism into a way of harmonious all-round living.’ Quarles is after the All. Webley is after power, and Huxley knew there was a difference.

  Nevertheless Huxley followed prevalent fashion in assuming that the mass industrial societies would have to be organized somehow, and some form of elite would do the organizing. Beneath the supposed satire of Brave New World there is a deep acceptance of this putative necessity. Brave New World was a sensation in 1932 and for long afterwards. When I first read it in Sydney in the late 1950s, all the male students of my generation were running around calling themselves Alpha plus and deciding which of our female contemporaries was the most ‘pneumatic’, the book’s word for bedworthy. The book remains famous today, although it is probably now more referred to than read. When referred to, it is often supposed to be the book that did a better job of forecasting the future – i.e. our present – than Orwell did when he published Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948. When read, Brave New World rules that supposition out. Orwell wasn’t trying to forecast the future: he was trying, for the benefit of the West’s gullible progressive intellectuals, to demonstrate what the Soviet Union was
actually like to live in. Orwell’s vision never came true for the West: a turn of events, or non-events, for which we partly have him to thank. After Orwell’s book came out, Huxley was fond of saying – he said it to Orwell himself – that he, Huxley, had come nearer to projecting the probable future. But Brave New World hasn’t happened either, and there are good reasons for thinking that it never can.

  *

  In the book, the Alpha ruling elite controls the supply of sex and drugs, the reward by which they themselves are consoled in their task, and all the lower orders down to the Epsilon semi-morons are kept in line. It hasn’t turned out that way. Bill Clinton, nominally the top man of the ruling elite, never controlled the supply of sex: indeed the supply of sex came very near to controlling him. Drugs remain the enemy of the state, and not its friend. It might very well be true that a liberal democratic state would do better to make drugs legal, thus to pacify the inevitable dissatisfactions in a society where glamour and success are free to exalt themselves. But the same society which allows the freedom for such anomalies would be unlikely to apply the restrictions that would confine reproduction to approved genetic programming. Only a totalitarian society could line up the bottles. If Huxley was warning the world that even a free society might be tempted into totalitarianism, he was doing something useful. The society of Brave New World includes an outcast reservation of Savages – they can be visited in their theme park by helicopter – who suffer from love, pain and poetry as the human race once did before science came to its aid. Thus Huxley pays lip service to his humanist belief that creativity is too important a hostage to be given over to an ideal of improvement. But he was scarcely likely to aid his humanist cause by assuming that the alternative to planning wrong was to plan right. Deep under the book is the idea he had nursed from childhood and would never lose: one way or another an elite would have to be in charge. Brave New World doesn’t attack that idea. It reinforces it, by leaving open the possibility that there might be a less flagrantly manipulative way for an authoritarian intelligentsia to determine the lives of the common people.

  Huxley’s fondness for the idea of ‘intelligent and active oligarchies’ (the term popped up in an article for Harper’s Magazine called ‘The Outlook for American Culture’) might have sprung from his shortage of sympathy for the 99.5 per cent. No doubt he backed Eugenics for the same reason. But his pacifism was something else: it indicated a shortage of political nous. As a leading light of the Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s, he went public with his private notion that war would happen less often if more people could be persuaded to dislike it. The persuasion would be done by the enlightened. Somewhere in the glowing bowl of this pipe-dream bubbled the notion that human mentality, or at any rate the elite’s share of it, would need to be transformed by some kind of collective access to a higher form of existence. Just as he could never accept that a decent system of ethics would be more likely to arise in a school for mentally handicapped children than amongst any intellectual elite no matter how attuned to the Transcendental, he could never accept that peace is not a principle, merely a desirable state of affairs.

  Huxley, however, was not the only genius talking poppycock about politics, and few of the others had his cachet as a novelist. His success in Europe was complete but his need to earn would never let him rest. Financially, he was walking a tightrope no stronger than a shoe-string. His reasons for resettling in California were excellent, and there was not even any need to lower his exalted standards of smart company. Garbo and Chaplin greeted the Huxleys as fellow lions. The stars bowed to the sage. With America’s share of the next war drawing ever nearer, Los Angeles became one of the intellectual centres of the modern world as the European refugees flocked in. Thomas Mann had been on the Normandie with the Huxleys on the trip over (characteristically the modern Goethe had travelled first class but uncharacteristically he condescended to visit them in steerage) and now he was sharing the same sunlight. With Thomas Mann at the other end of the dinner table, Huxley had no need to think that he was casting his pearls before swine. And even Mann was only primus inter pares. The intellectual level was stratospheric. Above all, it was European, and in the best sense. Huxley heard all the news from the old world. America didn’t isolate him. But it did insulate him.

  Those who think that Huxley’s fine brain turned to mush in California are apt to ascribe his declension to the mind-bending stuff he took in: the Wisdom of the East, hallucinogenic drugs, ESP. They tend to ignore the significance of what he left out. He never really grasped that the war was bound to be something much bigger than a conflict between nationalisms; that it would leave, when the smoke cleared, no alternative to accepting liberal democracy as the only guarantee of liberty; and that in liberty there could be no such thing as a universally shared Perennial Philosophy. (The Perennial Philosophy, his book compounding all the positive thoughts of West and East into a tutti-frutti of moral uplift, was the equivalent for its day of It Takes a Village: there was nothing in it to object to, which was, of course, the objection.) As even Solzhenitsyn would fail to realize, the one thing a free society can never be is spiritually united. It was a conclusion Huxley might have been forced to if he had been in the middle of the action. But he was fatally well placed to go on believing that mankind could and should aspire to a higher state than the one it was stuck in.

  There was nothing perverse about his interest in Eastern philosophy. Millions of people, after all, had always believed that there was something to it, and he can be forgiven for assuming that swamis who could tie their legs in knots or inhale mercury through the penis might have commerce with the Transcendental. Nor was there necessarily anything preposterous about his conviction that mind-expanding drugs might be worth looking into. If we ourselves are contemptuous of materialism, people who appear to have everything must be excused for bombing their own brains in the hope that there might be something more. Huxley’s interest in ESP, however, showed a serious anomaly. At Duke University, Professor J. B. Rhine had made extra-sensory perception a laboratory study. Huxley was not just keen to believe that Rhine had discovered something substantial, he was keen to believe that statistical analysis had proved Rhine correct. If Rhine had been correct, research into telekinesis would now be funded by General Motors. Huxley knew next to nothing about statistical analysis, or any other form of mathematics beyond arithmetic and school-level algebra. He was right to be interested in all forms of science. His sympathy for the sciences made him a permanently valuable advocate for their creative connection to the humanities. (In 1962, the second last year of his life, when the Two Cultures controversy between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis shook the intellectual world, Huxley’s intervention was a welcome note of sense.) But he was debarred from the language that connected the sciences themselves. His admired and admiring friend, the great astronomer Edwin Hubble, could understand everything Huxley meant when he talked about music. But Huxley had to take the mathematics for granted when Hubble talked about the expanding universe. About science, the best Huxley could do was talk an extraordinarily good game.

  Damagingly, his fluent talk about science mesmerized even him: the biggest trap lying in wait for eloquence, no matter how self-deprecating. He tried to sound scientific about the world’s political crises, and trying to sound scientific made him insufficiently critical. He went on advocating solutions to problems he had misstated. He kept on wondering how an economy could be rationally planned, without ever wondering whether it should be. As if Malthus had been right instead of wrong, Huxley still thought that if the world’s population increased beyond a certain point all those people would run out of food. Never having placed sufficient weight on the fact that it was the advance of technology that had increased the birthrate, he placed still less weight on the capacity of technology to solve the problem. He also failed to notice that all the famines took place in countries that were not democracies. With ideological extermination reducing the world’s population almost as fast it might otherwise hav
e increased, he still thought that the world’s bugbear was nationalism, as if, for totalitarianism, nationalism were not merely a tool, and as if totalitarian states would not go on killing people whether at war or not.

  Safely domiciled in the part of the world that suffered least from deprivation and political instability, he took his surroundings for granted as a set of conditions from which Mankind could aspire to higher things, instead of as the higher thing that the rest of the world could only aspire to, and with increasing desperation. Had he been less cushioned, the war and its aftermath might have made more impact on his thought. Exiled to New Zealand, Karl Popper was forced by the memory of his experience in Europe to reach a minimum definition of democracy. It was the system in which the government could be replaced at the people’s whim, so that no oligarchy, intelligent or otherwise, could perpetuate itself in power. The implication was that the 99.5 per cent didn’t need to be instructed. All they needed was to have a vote. Exiled to Britain, Friedrich von Hayek reached the conclusion that a liberal democracy could have a planned economy only to the point where government regulations protected the people against arbitrary injustice: but to restrict the free market beyond that point would always result in totalitarianism. In Paris when the war was over, Albert Camus, having seen both Nazis and Communists in action from close to, defined democracy as that regime created and sustained by those who know that they do not know everything.

  Challenged only by orthodoxies that derive their notion of harmony from a supposed access to exalted knowledge, these were the conclusions that would dominate the world we have lived in ever since. Huxley missed out on every one of them. All the opportunities were there for Huxley in America, and he even, for a while, took one of them: the biggest one. Unfairly overshadowed by Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, Huxley’s own response to California, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, was and remains his best novel by miles. (In Britain it is more catchily called just After Many a Summer: an American editor must have thought the allusion to Tennyson needed spelling out.) Though his earlier novels show far more inventiveness than is nowadays credited to them, they were indeed all silted up by the Nilotic flood of his compulsive erudition. Rather than pursue to a conclusion the promising situations he had set up for them, his characters quoted literature to each other at length, and he often neglected to tip off the reader about what literature they were quoting. But even without the learned bric-a-brac, every novel would still be weighed down by long speeches (essays, in fact) from guru figures preaching about the necessity of a higher state of Being than the one enjoyed around the dinner table.