1925 his next conversational «hold-all» novel, Those Barren Leaves, appeared. If the setting is different-in place of the Wimbushes at Crome we now have Mrs. Aldwinkle in Vezza-the structure is roughly the same: an assortment of idiosyncratic types congregate to discuss ideas, revealing in the process features of their own peculiarity that Huxley found symptomatic of the age.
Although it strains the definition somewhat because of its violence and the fact that its grotesque climax occurs elsewhere, the California estate of Mr. Stoyte in After Many a Summer (1939) is nevertheless recognizably a third instance of Huxley's adaptation of the Peacock model. Of all three it must be said that while the form is thoroughly useful, given Huxley's artistic intentions, it is neither resonant nor particularly interesting in its own right. It provides Huxley the vehicle he needs for his thought, nothing more.
Point Counter Point (1928) constitutes Huxley's most ambitious formal effort. Meditating, as the title suggests, on what he calls the 'musicalization of fiction,' Quarles wonders whether it is possible to devise a fictional form that can approximate the modulations of key and mood available to musical compositions: 'All you need is a sufficiency of char-749- acters and parallel plots… You alternate the themes… A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways-dissimilars solving the same problem.' If the musical analogy does not quite work, it does point to the considerable formal differences between Point Counter Point and the Peacock novels. In place of static conversation we have a vast number of people generating patterns of meaning as they jostle against each other throughout London. Talk still abounds, but the range of characters and the interaction between them distinguishes the novel in important ways from the others.
As seriously as he took the attempt to find proper forms to embody his novels of ideas (and this discussion shouldn't be left without mentioning the disaster of Eyeless in Gaza, whose self-consciously mixed-up chronology adds little but confusion), what finally matters are the ideas themselves. Testimony from those who fell under his sway emphasizes the enormous appeal of his sophisticated intelligence and immense learning. Widely considered to know everything, he was at home in art, history, music, philosophy, and psychology, as well as English, European, and Classical literature. What H. G. Wells could do in digesting and popularizing science, Huxley could do for it all- including science, as the prescient and credible Brave New World demonstrates.
For a generation that saw all of its certainties and securities blown away by the war, a scintillating, critical intellect was itself a stable point, a guarantee that the individual could still fashion its own order from the surrounding chaos. What Huxley's intellect went on to offer was not so much solutions as a diagnosis that confirmed his readers' understanding of the age's moral pathology. All his novels of the twenties and thirties, from Crome Yellow to After Many a Summer, exhibit the overwhelming sense of futility and meaninglessness that was the war's legacy. Although the tone is sometimes gentler (as in Crome Yellow and Those Barren Leaves) than at other times (Antic Hay and Point Counter Point), the satiric focus on the human consequences of the hollowness of the old pieties and the absence of any sustaining belief remains constant. The only reassurance Huxley provided the age was his honesty in confronting its failures.
Foremost among those failures is the impossibility of nourishing human contact. Huxley is the connoisseur of the failed relationship. Of all the myriad love relationships portrayed in Huxley's fiction of the twenties and thirties, with the single exception of that of the exemplary -750- if slightly implausible Rampions in Point Counter Point, there is not a single one that is not marked by betrayal, dislike, indifference, or even cruelty. Whether it is Denis's inability to win Anne's love in Crome Yellow or Shearwater's disregard of Rosie in Antic Hay, or Mrs. Aldwinkle's pathetic efforts to attract Chelifer in Those Barren Leaves or the multitude of Point Counter Point's infidelities, or the savage's violent rejection of Lenina's advances in Brave New World, people are brought together in Huxley's fiction only to illustrate how removed they are from each other. Denis's observation that 'Parallel straight lines… meet only at eternity… Did one ever establish contact with anyone? We are all parallel straight lines' defines the emotional climate not just of Huxley's first novel but of his entire fictional world.
'Passion is sanity,' writes mild-mannered E. M. Forster, but in Huxley's world sexual passion is treated almost exclusively as a source of perverse satisfaction and an opportunity for exploitation. Coleman more or less rapes Rosie in Antic Hay; the vicious Spandrell in Point Counter Point gets his real pleasure not simply from seducing women but from convincing them afterward to hate themselves for finding any enjoyment in the act; Virginia Maunciple gives herself coldly to the repulsive Mr. Stoyte ('Uncle Jo'; he calls her 'baby') in order to continue to enjoy the benefits of his California mansion. Sexuality and degradation invariably go together in Huxley, adding a curious dimension to the notion of the emancipated intellectual who helped liberate an age from stuffiness and cant of all kinds. Not very far beneath the surface of Huxley lurks a genuine distaste for the human body and its appetites that comes out in various ways in his work.
The values of friendship don't fare much better in Huxley's novels than do those of romantic love. Friends traduce each other with the same frequency as do lovers. Anthony Beavis, in Eyeless in Gaza, causes the suicide of his best friend, Brian Foxe, by capriciously allowing the woman Brian loves to fall in love with him. It is not just Philip Quarles who is 'a tourist in the realm of feeling,' but all of the isolated souls who stumble through Huxley's landscape.
Huxley's success as a novelist ultimately rests in the wit and skill with which he presents to his audience an image of their own cultural and moral disorientation. As he wrote to his father, who intensely disliked the grimness of Antic Hay, it 'is a book written by a member of what I may call the war-generation for others of his kind; and… is intended to reflect-fantastically, of course, but none the less faithfully-the life -751- and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch.'
But there is another strain in Huxley beyond that of the satiric chronicler of an age, and this is the writer interested in exploring solutions to the dilemma of those trapped within it. From Those Barren Leaves on, each of Huxley's novels posits some set of values or model of behavior that is designed, however tentatively, to hold out the possibility for personal and social regeneration. In the first of these Calamy, the inveterate seducer of women, decides that real freedom is to be found not in the endless round of sensual indulgences but in the effort to apprehend the reality that underlies the surface of things. It requires the renunciation of the world of appearances so that he can encounter the «universe» within him, which can only be approached 'by way of introspection and patient, uninterrupted thought.' Retreating to a simple cottage in the mountains, as the novel ends, Calamy prepares for his solitary journey.
In the midst of all the disastrous relationships of Point Counter Point stand the healthy, glowing Rampions, embodying the very doctrine of proportion that Mark Rampion, a version of D. H. Lawrence, expounds at length. Rampion calls for people to live with 'their whole being.' Barbarism, the opposite of civilization, involves being lopsided, and one can be a barbarian of the intellect as well as the body: 'To be a perfect animal and a perfect human-that was the ideal.' If no one else in the novel can approach that ideal, it nevertheless serves to define the condition of the failed, incomplete people Rampion sees around him.
As Brave New World is not so much a reflection of the present age as it is a projection into the future of trends already observable, the pattern we are discussing here is not altogether relevant. But we should recognize that the savage does represent an alternative set of values to the biologically manipulated hierarchy of the future. The savage's ideals of personal freedom are certainly preferable to what he finds, but he nevertheless is tainted by the lunacy of his own past. As Huxley later stated, offering the savage two choices, 'an insane life in Utopia, or the life of a primitive in an Indian village,' was a serious defect in the book.
Eyeless in Gaza is interesting in that its therapeutic gospel is delivered both through a preacher and a disciple. An admirer of F. M. Alexander, whose ideas on diet, movement, and body posture interested Huxley immensely, the enigmatic Dr. Miller stresses that a negative body can only breed negative thinking. Once the body has rid itself of -752- the poisons of too much protein and milk, only then can the individual begin to appreciate the unity of all life and the degree to which each person is part of the larger order. Following Miller's instructions, Anthony Beavis, the novel's protagonist, changes his diet and in the process understands the need to go beyond the division and separation characterizing this world to a perception of unity that transcends individual identity.
For Beavis, this effort requires meditation, exercise, cultivating 'the difficult art of loving people,' and most particularly, working hard for a pacifist organization. Arguing that violent means cannot achieve a peaceful end, Huxley became an ardent pacifist in the thirties as he sought ways to contain fascism without relying on armed force. He was an active member of the Peace Pledge Union, writing a controversial pamphlet supporting its position, 'What Are You Going to Do About It?' which was heavily criticized. Beavis's involvement with pacifism is thus not a trivial affiliation but an important index of his moral growth, permitting him the mystical vision of oneness that
