The Detached Retina

Which is all very well, but few of us set out in life with such cultural advantages as Huxley. He was the grandson on his father’s side of the great Thomas Henry Huxley, while his mother was the grand-daughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby, niece of Matthew Arnold, and sister to Mrs Humphrey Ward, the novelist. Aldous grew up in a house full of books and the intelligent conversations which spring from (and into) books: where knowledge is as routine as good meals.

This privileged English existence, with its Eton and Balliol background, was to end on the coast of California, fading out in gurudom, on an LSD injection. The pop group ‘The Doors’ named themselves after Huxley’s short work, The Doors of Perception, advocating use of mescalin.

Here lie mysterious connections between the world of experience and the world of conjecture and speculation. Huxley took his title—he was always brilliant at fishing for titles—from William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed,

everything will appear to man as it is, infinite.

Yet in the text, he makes reference to a different kind of writer, when speaking of our longing to transcend ourselves: ‘Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.’ The reference is to one of Wells’s most poignant short stories. So, via the pop group, the expression passed into popular life, and into the drug culture of the sixties.

Alas, behind the doors of Haight-Ashbury, the broken dreams and dead babies piled up. Even the Flower Children were only human. Transcendence is hard work, as Huxley himself was aware. He says, ‘To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.’

Behind this modest but complex statement, compassionate yet uncompromising, lies an extraordinary trajectory of a twentieth-century life, the long trek from Eton to the Mojave, prompted in part by that fearless curiosity which Christopher Isherwood called ‘one of Aldous’s noblest characteristics’.

Curiosity spells diversity. The diversity of Huxley’s life is echoed in his writings. These engage readers of many kinds, since even the novels, for which he was most renowned, touch upon religion, science, politics, literature, art, music, psychology, utopianism, and—to use the title of one of his most remarkable books—the human situation. Through them all flow Huxley’s wit and his adroit use of language. Huxley’s early distaste for bodily functions, in his Bright Young Thing phase, develops into a passion for mysticism. Henry Wimbush’s comic discourse on sixteenth-century privies in Crome Yellow (‘the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe’) later becomes a preoccupation with enlightenment, and with the hazardous position between privy and universe which we occupy.

Thousands of individuals have had their spirit of enquiry sharpened by Huxley’s cultured tour of ‘the ineffable’.

His preoccupation took many forms. Advice on how to see, for instance, in Huxley’s little valuable book, The Art of Seeing, in which one notes a typical observation concerning the eye: ‘its peculiarly intimate relationship with the psyche’ … For Huxley, all things connected.

Concern with quality of life, and with any new thing which might conceivably alleviate the human condition, pointed a way to the future, from hydroponics to Scientology. Like a true Californian, Huxley embraced many crank cults in his time. (In her biography of Huxley, Sybille Bedford relates how L. Ron Hubbard and his wife, ‘stiff and polite’, went to dinner with the Huxleys. They presented the Huxleys with two pounds of chocolates.) So—discounting the marvellous cruel joke of After Many a Summer, with its speculations on evolutionary longevity—Huxley’s three utopian novels appear.

None was received with great understanding by a literary world partial to country houses, stories of the wealthy, large doses of characterization, and even larger doses of nostalgia. Such is the fate of novels of ideas, at least in England.

The utopian trilogy consists of Ape and Essence, reviled on its appearance in 1946, perhaps because Huxley does not treat the human species with the respect it believes it deserves; Island, his last novel (1963); and Brave New World (1932), Huxley’s most famous work. Huxley was a connoisseur, some might say victim, of unconventional ideas. Brave New World shows us what happens when mass production is applied to biology. Promiscuous sex helps preserve immaturity; immaturity reinforces superficiality. ‘When the individual feels, the community reels.’ Drugs keep everyone happy. The workers get four half-gramme tablets of soma every day after work. It can readily be seen why thousands have longed to live in such a utopia, from which Huxley himself would have recoiled, at least in part. The privy may not be abolished, but at least the universe is obscured.

In Ape and Essence, the theme of sexual promiscuity is reintroduced. Nuclear bombs have fallen on LA. What remains of mankind has reverted to savagery. Womankind has reverted, apelike, to oestrus. For religion, a kind of perverted bogomilism is practised. The Narrator (the novel takes the form of a film script) says, ‘Thanks to the supreme Triumph of Modern Science, sex has become seasonal, romance has been swallowed up by the oestrus, and the female’s chemical compulsion to mate has abolished courtship, chivalry, tenderness, love itself’.

In this respect, Ape and Essence is an extension of the evolutionary idea, so splendidly defended by T. H., Aldous Huxley’s grandfather, parodied in After Many a Summer. There, down in the cellarage of his castle, the Fifth Earl enjoys near immortality, coupling perpetually with his housekeeper. But the foetal ape has had time to mature. The universe has disappeared; only the privy remains …

The two creatures coupling in the ancestral dark are literary cousins to the orgiastes presided over by the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, and Bishop of Hollywood, who presides over the post-war dystopia.

The codified society of Brave New World was the work of Mr Mond. In Ape, the ruined post-war world is the work of Belial. It’s an emetic work, perhaps, but I persist in seeing both books as slyly sardonic, like Gulliver’s Travels. If they are science fiction, they are Huxley’s brand, not H. G. Wells’s.

Huxley plays Jung to Wells’s Freud. Huxley saw an escape from the human situation through mysticism, not politics; politics was Wells’s thing, when, later in life, his closed mind produced the Open Conspiracy. So the least (but lengthiest) of Huxley’s three utopias, Island reverses many of the assumptions of Brave New World. It shows a threatened utopia where soma and sexual freedom bring about genuine happiness. Alas, as Milton’s Paradise Regained is less readable than its noble predecessor, Paradise Lost, so Island is less readable than its two mischievous predecessors. The devil—and Huxley knew it well—has all the best tunes. Mysticism and soil conservation challenge any novelist’s repertoire.

If Island is a failure, it is nevertheless worth reading for the instruction it gives—which not all can follow—and for its courage. Huxley must have known when he was writing Island that he had to lay aside one of his best weapons, the blade of satire, to write about what he conceived of as the most desirable place. Philip Toynbee perceived as much when he reviewed the book in The Observer on Sunday, 1 April 1962. While admiring Island as ‘an act of genuine virtue and love’, Toynbee points out that the islanders address each other in preposterous language, and that much of the book belongs to what he calls ‘the helpless language of inarticulate mysticism’.

To this charge, Huxley had earlier given answer. In Grey Eminence, he speaks of a book, widely available in England even a generation ago, which was written by a fourteenth-century mystic, and entitled. The Cloud of Unknowing. Commenting on The Cloud, Huxley says:

Ultimate reality is incommensurable with our own illusoriness and imperfection; therefore it cannot be understood by means of intellectual operations; for intellectual operations depend upon language, and our vocabulary and syntax were evolved for the purpose of dealing precisely with that imperfection and illusoriness, with which God is incommensurable. Ultimate reality cannot be understood except intuitively, through an act of the will and the affections.

And that is what Island is: Huxley’s act of the will and the affections, to reach out beyond the privy to embrace the universe.

Unlike most utopias, Island is not about governance, but about Being. Whereas Wells came to believe that a group of good men and true could reorganize the whole world, Huxley mistrusted governments. ‘Society’, he said, ‘can never be greatly improved, until such time as most of its members choose to become theocentric saints.’

This remark comes in Grey Eminence (1941), one of his most absorbing books, where his gifts are deployed in a study of Father Joseph, a Capuchin monk who became adviser to Cardinal Richelieu. Between them, Father Joseph and Richelieu prolonged the Thirty Years War, causing millions of deaths by torture, famine, disease and the usual appurtenances of war, including cannibalism. The Capuchin Father Joseph eschews the simian diversions beloved by the Fifth Earl, but falls into a different trap. Politics betrays the nationalistic religion, and vice versa.

The best of Huxley is scattered everywhere, perhaps most thickly in collections of essays; of the essay form he is one of this century’s masters. Adonis and the Alphabet (1956) is a perfect example. The erudition, never obtrusive, carries us from psycho-industrial power, dirt and spirituality, and population pressures, to Martian language and literature … and much else besides.

The Human Situation (1978) gathers together a series of lectures delivered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1959. They provide learned and unpompous summaries of Huxley’s thinking on many subjects, answering such questions as, ‘How should we be related to the planet on which we live? How are we to develop our individual potentialities?’ No better handbook to our ongoing civilization could be devised.

In one of those essays, the one on ‘Man and Religion’, Huxley states that, because mysticism does not commit one to any cut-and-dried statement about the structure of the universe, there is no conflict between a mystical approach to religion and science. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that such gurus as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky commit themselves to wacko versions of the world. Ouspensky seemed to believe that the periodic table was somehow related to notes in music. Low man in the guru totem pole, Hubbard believed in vast intergalactic battles. Yet the universe as revealed by current science is wacko enough for most mortals.

However, Huxley also says that there is a sense in which it is no great matter whether myths are true or not: they are simply expressive of our reactions to the mystery of the world in which we live.

Huxley’s personal myth was of this mystical union of something that existed beyond words. It produced his difficult, dedicated work. The Perennial Philosophy (1946). The possible connection of this myth with the death of his much-loved mother when he was fourteen is a matter for speculation, though it is scarcely to be imagined that such a traumatic event left no shockwave.

Huxley faded away on Friday 22 November 1963, with LSD in his veins. Within twenty-four hours, another wise man, another writer of SF who had lost his mother in childhood, C. S. Lewis, would also be dead. But it was Huxley who died on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Huxley’s continuing influence was summed up by Isaiah Berlin, who said, ‘He was the herald of what will surely be one of the great advances in this and following centuries—the creation of new psycho-physical sciences, of discoveries in the realm of what at present, for want of a better term, we call the relations between body and mind.’

Almost everything Aldous Huxley wrote was adversely criticized at one time or another. Everyone spoke well of the man himself, of his nobility and charm. His gentleness, sweetness and humour were remarked on by all those fortunate enough to know him.

Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was a personal friend. She has the last word. ‘I shall always think of Aldous as smiling.’

THE IMMANENT WILL RETURNS—2

‘What of the Immanent Will and its designs?’, asks Thomas Hardy. The question forms the opening line of Hardy’s vast drama, The Dynasts, and is answered by that phantom intelligence, the Spirit of the Years:

It works unconsciously, as heretofore,

Eternal artistries in Circumstance,

Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,

Seem in themselves its single listless aim,

And not their consequence.

To which the Spirit of the Pities joins, saying,

Still thus? Still thus?

Ever unconscious!

It is clear that the Immanent Will is a prototype of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, that Vast Active Live Intelligence System. Thinking the matter over after the carnage of the First World War, Hardy decided that he had erred on the optimistic side—thereby leaving the door open for Olaf Stapledon.

Stapledon sweeps away the human characters in whom Hardy delighted, to present us with a threadbare stage upon which humanity is all but lost. On that stage are unfolded the evolutionary histories of the Last Men and the soliloquies of the Star Maker.

Those two great dramas of Stapledon’s, Last and First Men and Star Maker, were written over fifty years ago, in 1930 and 1937. They loom above the later oceans of science fiction like the immense rocks in Bocklin’s painting, ‘The Isle of the Dead’, appearing and disappearing in the mist. That Stapledon, an Englishman, has not himself taken permanent sojourn on Bocklin’s grim island is entirely due to the work of American scholars. The Oxford Companion to English Literature allows him no entry to himself.

In fact, Stapledon is a writer of a notably English kind, his attempts to establish an individual mythology somewhat reminiscent of William Blake (the sub-title of his novel, Odd John echoes a poem of Blake’s, ‘A Story Between Jest and Earnest’—though there’s precious little enjoying of the lady in the book). His grandiosities recall Charles M. Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, Dawn in Britain, with its quixotic attempt to restore Chaucer to modern English. Two other voices echo conflictingly through Stapledon’s fiction, the voice of John Milton in Paradise Lost and the voice of that Victorian storm-trooper, Winwood Reade, author of The Martyrdom of Man.

In many respects, Stapledon is of his time. Born in 1886, he was torn by religious doubt, like many men of his day. Essentially a Victorian, he had trouble fitting into the post-war world. Together with many others, he flirted with pacifism, communism and promiscuity. And being outside the swim of London literary society, he knew few other authors and soon became critically disregarded.

The central premise of his work, that mankind is irrelevant to the purposes of the universe, proves unpalatable to many. His admirers honour him precisely for that unpalatability, so variously, so swoopingly expressed. We encounter in his work faith versus atheism, and the seeking for individual fulfilment versus communality, whether terrestrial or stellar. These remain painfully contemporary concerns. In his two great glacial novels, spanning the thirties, we encounter spiritual suffering and the surreal mutations which mankind must undergo at a Creator’s command.

My first encounter with Last and First Men came at a time of suffering and mutation. I was part of the British Second Division, fighting back the Japanese Army which had invaded Burma and Assam and was planning to storm the gates of India. I was nineteen, brown as a berry, on half rations. We were about to advance on enemy-held Mandalay while shooting DDT down our pants and under our arms. Specifically, I was standing in a commandeered bungalow in the jungle outside Kohima, awaiting a typhus injection.

The medical officer had established his temporary HQ in the home of a tea planter who had fled—to India or England. In the room where I awaited my jab were book-lined shelves. Among the books were two blue Pelican books, together comprising a paperback edition of Last and First Men. The title caught my eye. I took them down and began to read.

I could not leave them behind when I was summoned to the surgery. I kept them. For the first and last time, I stole a book. Well, it was wartime …

While the great salvation and destruction of the sunlit world went forward, Stapledon’s steady voice proved to be what was needed. In particular, his daring time-schemes appeased an urgent desire for perspective.

What sustained me then, as we advanced across the Burmese plains, was the bleak vision of humankind locked within the imperatives of creation. If Stapledon’s name is to be preserved, it will be by science fiction readers. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest in his writing, there is also the wider question: why is not SF, or work which closely resembles SF, accepted into the general corpus of the century’s literature? The writing is excellent; the subject under discussion is a central one; the author was not exactly a backwoodsman; nor did he write in obscure tongue; so how is it that he suffers a general neglect? Why is he not considered as is, say, Jorge Luis Borges or Mikhail Bulgakov or even William Burroughs?

These are perforce rhetorical questions. I cannot answer them. Nor, as far as I can see, can anyone else. De gustibus non est disputan-dum. And yet … we must continue to dispute …

I was instrumental in having Penguin Books reprint Last and First Men in 1963. The edition contains my Foreword, and was reprinted more than once. Harvey Satty, the active chairman of the Olaf Stapledon Society, published Nebula Maker in 1976, an interesting early attempt of Stapledon’s to write Star Maker. Later, Satty, in collaboration with Curtis C. Smith, produced a comprehensive bibliography (1984). The volume contains an essay by Stapledon never before published. In 1982 came Patrick A. McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon from Twayne Publishers. This slender volume presents excellent summaries of Stapledon’s novels. McCarthy collaborated with Charles Elkins and Martin Harry Greenberg to produce The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon in 1989.

In 1987, the Los Angeles publisher, James Tarcher, published an edition of Star Maker with my introduction and, in the following year, Last and First Men, with a Foreword by Gregory Benford and an Afterword by Doris Lessing. This is claimed to be the first complete edition of the novel to be published in the USA. In fact, Dover Books had published the complete text in 1968.

A curious player in the Stapledon game is the celebrated critic, Leslie A. Fiedler. Fiedler’s Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided was published in 1983.[1] Fiedler had shown interest in Stapledon some years previously. When Harry Harrison and I were editing a series of hardcover and paperback reprints of classic SF in the 1970s (SF Master Series), Harry persuaded Professor Fiedler to write an introduction to Odd John.[2] An excellent introduction it is too. The longer critical work is of more dubious value.

The authority on Stapledon is undoubtedly Dr Robert Crossley. Again an American weighs in to great effect. Crossley has a better grasp of British weirdness than Fiedler; he is familiar, for instance, with the deadly English habit of litotes; as witness his exemplary editing of Talking Across the World: The Love Letters of Olaf Stapledon and Agnes Miller, 1913–1919.[3] These gentle, humorous letters of courtship during a terrible war are touching and beautiful. They carry us closer than anything else to the private man, and far beyond the world of science fiction, though they are not without speculative content.

Crossley follows up with his massive biography, Speaking for the Future: The Life of Olaf Stapledon.[4] This will always remain the standard life.

The new biography brings out well Stapledon’s sense of division within himself, manifest in his fiction. Even the august Star Maker—the very emblem of Stapledon’s cogitations—is given, like the god Shiva, a dual nature, both mild and terrible. The opening sentence of Last and First Men makes the division clear: This book has two authors’.

Other examples of this division are not far to seek. The title of Stapledon’s last book, clearly autobiographical in nature, and published only months before his death in 1950, is A Man Divided. In ‘The Peak and the Town’, the posthumously published essay included in the 1989 book mentioned above, one of the characters speaks of ‘the double life’ as ‘a marvellous duplicity’. This submerged quality—Mary Shelley speaks poignantly of it too—manifests itself in the first of the letters Crossley preserves in Talking Across the World. In a letter declaring his love to the distant Agnes in Australia, Stapledon says, ‘I fear lest you might in answering say there is no hope at all, and if you were to say that I should only outwardly accept it, and inwardly go on hoping and acting as if there was a chance …’

Stapledon served as an ambulance driver in the First World War. For his courage he was awarded the Croix de Guerre. In that serving capacity, he observed the divided nature of his fellows, remorseless in enmity, at other times compassionate to friend and foe alike.

Mathew Arnold has a splendid poem, ‘The Buried Life’, in which he says how

There rises an unspeakable desire

After the knowledge of our buried life

This element in Stapledon drove him to extend the boundaries of conventional human sensibility.

Stapledon was in his fifties when Star Maker was published. So let’s finally talk about this masterwork.

It is the most wonderful book I have ever read, while its central premise is the most difficult to accept. Star Maker is grander in theme than Last and First Men, more felicitous in style, and subtler in approach. And more overwhelming in its imaginative power.

It’s not an abstract book. Rather, it’s chock-a-block with great common agonies and private lonelinesses—often the lonelinesses of entire solar communities. Madness, that kith and kin of loneliness, is often present in Stapledon’s mind. The intellect is threatened by the prospect of endless galaxies formed—for what?

As we searched up and down time and space, discovering more and more of the rare grains called planets, we watched race after race struggle to a certain degree of lucid consciousness, only to succumb to some external accident or, more often, to some flaw in its own nature, we were increasingly oppressed by a sense of the futility, of the planlessness of the cosmos.

The sombre mood owes much to the pessimism of Schopenhauer. The conviction that God was dead is characteristic of the thinkers of the late nineteenth century. But we cannot call it unearned: this was a man who had been through the carnage of the Somme.

Pessimism unrelieved is not much to anyone’s taste. The pessimism of artists is a different matter. We drink down the pessimism of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels because of his and our delight in artifice. Stapledon is short on dialogue, but he keeps us reading by the prodigality of his imaginings, expressed in delicate imagery.