The Columbia History of the British Novel

concludes the novel.

The most radical prophet of all is Mr. Propter, whose doctrine of salvation constitutes the moral and philosophic center of After Many a Summer. For Propter, 'actual good is outside time.' Anything having to do with time and self must be rejected. The goal is liberation-'from personality, liberation from time and craving, liberation into union with God.' All human endeavor, beyond the disinterested quest for truth, is futile. Pete Boone, for example, who prides himself on having fought against fascism in the Spanish civil war, is frustrated by Propter's unwillingness to endorse the nobility of his cause. Propter, of course, sees all the solemn, time-bound ideals like self-sacrifice and social justice as fetters to keep people tied to the world of personality. As such, fascism and opposition to fascism come to the same thing.

Each successive attempt of Huxley's to locate some positive alternative to things as they are negates the previous one. Calamy's lopsided impulse for isolated contemplation is undercut as an ideal by the Rampions' commitment to the wholesome, integrated life, which is in turn repudiated by Miller's insistence that true freedom and fulfillment can be achieved only by struggling through division to understand the unity of all things, a vision that endorses Beavis's pacifist efforts. And Propter goes several steps further, rejecting all human endeavor entirely except as it is engaged in the disinterested quest for truth. -753-

In every instance the elaboration of these ideals involves ponderous disquisitions which, important as they are to Huxley's aspirations for the novels, are aesthetically disastrous. D. H. Lawrence, for example, found Point Counter Point's Mark Rampion, the character based on him (and unquestionably the most plausible of all the prophets in Huxley's fiction), 'the most boring character in the book-a gas bag.' Huxley is at his best in documenting absurdity and excoriating folly. His forays into the positive are decidedly less successful. Not only are they tedious, straining the already slightly suspect form of his novel of ideas, they are not particularly compelling as solutions. Certainly the useful social applications of Propter's philosophy seem elusive at best, and while the Rampions are firmly rooted in time, it is not clear how they managed to achieve their exemplary wholeness in a society that does not encourage it, or how others might go about it either.

It is also worth noticing that however inadequate they might be, those who presume to have the answers and embody the ideals are exclusively male. (Mrs. Rampion is not really an exception as she is more a dimension of her husband's wholeness than an advocate in her own right of Rampion's philosophy.) Women do not fare well in Huxley's work. Weak, addled, coldly indifferent, or victimized by men, they are never permitted to ascend to the higher wisdom Huxley accords his male prophets.

Happily, Huxley's flirtation with the higher wisdom, whose mystical forms he explored in much nonfictional work in the forties and fifties, never quite managed to subdue the exuberance of his portrayal of an age's sickness. Long after we have forgotten some of the lamentable philosophic posturings, memorable images of desperation and pathos remain: Shearwater in Antic Hay, dreaming of freedom as he frantically drives his stationary bicycle to nowhere in a heat-controlled room, his sweat rolling into a receptacle for analysis; Burlap and Beatrice, concluding Point Counter Point by pretending to be two children as they gaily splash each other in the bathtub; the foul, gibbering Fifth Earl of Goniston, 201 years old, reduced to the level of fetal ape as he demonstrates the glories of eternal life at the end of After Many a Summer. Although Somerset Maugham charged him with 'deficient sympathy with human beings,' and D. H. Lawrence hated his negativity, Huxley was read precisely because he succeeded in revealing, as Lawrence also confirmed, 'the truth, perhaps the last truth, about you and your generation, with really fine courage.' Unpleasant as that truth was, it was still necessary that it be shown. -754-

Christopher Isherwood also sought to reveal truths about his generation, though the truths he pursued were always more complexly involved with efforts to understand himself than were Huxley's. Huxley the satirist, observing the spectacle of human futility, gives way to Isherwood the ironist, reflecting on the elusiveness and vagaries of the self even as it attempts to impose order on the world around it. Isherwood's fascination with the problem of how a writer deals with his own identity remains a central concern throughout his career, so that neat distinctions between fiction and autobiography lose their edge in his work. Even the biographical study of his family which he builds around the publication of letters and excerpts from his mother's diary in Kathleen and Frank is finally shaped into an occasion for Isherwood to examine how he came to be what he is.

Although Isherwood knew early on that he wanted to be a writer, he had to make himself one through a deliberate act of rebellion. The immediate objects of the rebellion were his mother and all the suffocating aspirations for respectability he felt she harbored for him. Failing his Cambridge tripos, as I said earlier, dealt effectively with the specific professional option his mother was advocating, that of becoming a university don. But in rejecting his mother's plans for him he was doing more than simply refusing a particular vocation; he was opting out of an entire structure of conventional expectations and proper role playing that he had come to associate with her. Isherwood could conceive of his freedom only in opposition to the majority culture sanctified by Kathleen.

Discussing, in Christopher and His Kind (1976), the homosexuality that was such a critical part of his life, Isherwood wonders, not altogether facetiously, to what degree his sexual preference represents an act of willful resistance to the pressures of social conformity: 'Girls are what the state and the church and the law and the press and the medical profession endorse, and command me to desire. My mother endorses them, too. She is silently brutishly willing me to get married and breed grandchildren for her. Her will is the will of Nearly Everybody, and in their will is my death.' Even if his nature were the same as those of the heterosexual majority, he concludes, it would still be necessary to fight them: 'If boys didn't exist, I should have to invent them.'

Much of this early, formative anger is channeled into his first novel, All the Conspirators (1928), which he began when he was twenty-one. In a new foreword to the book, written in 1958 (the decade of the Angry Young Men in British fiction), Isherwood defines the concerns of the -755- Angry Young Man of my generation [who] was angry with the Family and its official representatives; he called them hypocrites, he challenged the truth of what they taught. He declared that a Freudian revolution had taken place of which they were trying to remain unaware. He accused them of reactionary dullness, snobbery, complacency, apathy. While they mouthed their platitudes, he exclaimed, we were all drifting toward mental disease, sex crime, alcoholism, suicide.

Such is the emotional climate of the novel in which Philip Lindsay struggles to break free from the clutches of his mother and the deadly office job she has decreed for him. While Isherwood's sympathies in this intergenerational conflict are unambiguous-the author, Isherwood writes in the preface, 'makes not the smallest pretence of impartiality. His battle-cry is 'My Generation-right or wrong''-at the same time he achieves enough ironic distance from Philip to understand his moral failures. The book, in a sense, is a portrait of the neurasthenic as a young man. Infantilized by his mother, he flees real resolution by taking refuge in sickness. The rheumatic fever that he manages to incur-a fittingly childish disease-guarantees that he will have to be looked after for a long time. While Mrs. Lindsay's need to keep him dependent on her is clear, Isherwood avoids any temptation toward self- indulgence on behalf of the innocent hero. Isherwood's resentment at the selfish manipulations of the older generation notwithstanding, he understands the extent to which Philip shares culpability in permitting himself to be reduced to a passive invalid.

All the Conspirators is very much a first novel of a young writer, filled with self-consciously modernist techniques and solemn literary echoes. Quick narrative shifts, bits of stream of consciousness, dialogue between speakers whose identity is at first uncertain-all testify to Isherwood's having read his Joyce and Woolf. He even challenges the reader, in his preface, to try to understand who is speaking in the first few pages of the book's last chapter. More important than these primarily technical devices he adapted for his own purposes is the overall influence on his tone and point of view of E. M. Forster, a writer he admired and a man he went on to love deeply as a friend.

In Lions and Shadows, his fictionalized autobiography covering the period up to his departure for Berlin in 1929, Isherwood describes the revelation about the art of novel writing experienced by his friend Chalmers (actually the writer Edward Upward): -756-

Forster's the only one who understands what the modern novel ought to be… Our frightful mistake was that we believed in tragedy: the point is, tragedy's quite impossible nowadays… We ought to aim at being essentially comic writers… The whole of Forster's technique is based on the tea-table: instead of trying to screw all his scenes up to the highest possible pitch, he tones them down until they sound like mothers'-meeting gossip… It's the completely new kind of accentuation-like a person talking a different language.