Mr. Huxley among the Philistines
Eyeless in Gaza. By Aldous Huxley. (Chatto and Windus. 10s. 6d.) Two things are remarkable in Mr. Iluxley's new book : the method and the moral. The method is what first strikes the reader with surprise ; the time-scheme is confused in
a bewildering fashion ; for ten pages we are in 1933, then for half a dozen in 1902, thence we jump to 1926, after twenty
pages we find ourselves in 1912, and a little later we are
_back where we started. The cinema," say Mr. Huxley's publishers, " has accustomed people to the use of similar methods." The cinema, it is true, telescopes, it omits, it speeds time up and slows it down, and gives a bird's-eye view, as it were, of simultaneous happenings—but it does not turn topsy-turvy the series of events in time, as does Mr. Huxley in this book. The only machine that does that is the human mind, in its efforts to remember and in its sub-conscious re-creation of the past. Mr. Huxley has not used a psychological method of presentment, he writes as an impersonal narrator, recording from outside the hap- pening of events. The result is a book which is at a first reading considerably more puzzling than The Waves, and irritating as The Waves is not, because the feature which causes the difficulty has no obvious artistic justification. So skilfully, however, has Mr. Huxley used his method that, as one reads on, one instinctively recognises and co-ordinates these different strata, and on a second reading everything falls more or less naturally into its place. In this respect, the book is a tour de force : the thing is done so well that really it is almost as satisfactory as if it had not been done at all.
• The method, none the less, has its advantages. -Indeed, something of the sort is necessitated by the absence of a con- tinuous plot and by the nature of the task which Mr. Huxley has set himself. For his aim is not to tell a story ; it is to preach a sermon. And his collection of snapshots of the pre-War and the post-War world is presented to us simply in order to make that sermon more effective. We do not feel that interest which attaches to events which play their part in the development or the interplay of character. Mr. Huxley simply takes a piece of the life lived by his chief figures at their private school in 1902, cuts it into slices, and scatters it through the book, interlarded with slices from their lives in 1912-14, in 1926, in 1933. Each of these slices indicates the squalor of the tread-mill to which the hero, Anthony Beavis, and his contemporaries are condemned. Mr. Huxley is an adept at this kind of picture, and we do not wonder at the impulse which finally drives Anthony away from the London world made familiar to us in Point Counter Point and Antic Hay, to Mexico. It is in Mexico that he meets Dr. Miller ; and Dr. Miller is in some ways the most important figure in the book. It is Dr. Miller who introduces the moral ; and the moral is the other remarkable thing about Eyeless in Gaza.
Not that it is remarkable that a novel of Mr. Huxley's should contain a moral ; it would be a much stranger thing if it did not. For Mr. Huxley is at heart a Puritan, and in almost every book that he has written it has become more evident that his fundamental purpose as an artist is satiric. But his satire hitherto has been conveyed mainly by means of the reflections of . some. detached, some balanced, intel- lectual, who does not commit himself doctrinally any further than is involved by putting a record on the gramophone .
and declaring, amid ,the hopeless and aimless debauchery of his contemporaries, his faith in the Seventh Symphony.
Now Mr. Huxley has discovered that the serene temples of the intellect, from which he used to look down smiling, not without pity, upon the blind and desperate struggles of humanity, are open themselves to a most insidioUs assault. For there has broken out, as is well known, among the intellectuals of today, as there did among their mid-nineteenth century predecessors, a serious epidemic of religious doubt. History is beginning to repeat itself, with the difference that our intellectuals are discovering that they have found, not lost, their faith. In Eyeless in Gaza Mr. Httxley for the first time frankly abandons a detached and intellectual stand- point : Dr. Miller preaches the Way and the Life ; Anthony Beavis is his evangelist. Their Gospel does not fit exactly into the dogmas of any recognised religion : it is compounded of a little Christianity, a good deal of Bu,ddism, no butcher's meat, a Miniinum of eggs, and Love. Love gains, but force- subdues. " That sallow skin," says Dr. Miller, " and the irony, the scep- ticism, the what's the good of it all attitude ! Negative really. Everything you think is negative. . . . How can you expect to think in anything but a negative way, when you've got chronic intestinal poisoning ? " As for prayer, Dr. Miller has never really liked it : " I've observed it clinically," he says, " and it seems to have much the same effect upon people as butcher's meat. Prayer makes you more yourself, more separate. Just as a rumpsteak does.1 Self is the enemy, for it leads to hatred, to division, and to war.
So Anthony becomes an Active Pacifist, and we leave him at the end of. the book (at the end, according- to the time-series ; according to the page-series, throughout it) going up and down the country addressing Dr. Miller's meetings, preaching against Fascism and Communism, against hatred and butcher's meat ; in favour of love, and compassion, and a proper diet, and, above all, unity : " Unity beyond the turmoil of separations and divisions. Goodness beyond the possibility of .evil." In these passages from Mr. Huxley's book there is no trace of irony ; no touch of the " distaste, the intellectual scorn " which his hero reprehends, and it appears that the writer himself is speaking. .
It is in the moral, therefore, that the explanation of the
method is to be sought. The topsy-turvy jumble of pictures •
reflects the shapelessness, the aimlessness of a life which Dr. Miller has not sanctified with purpose, while the pictures themselves are made horrible in order to..show the true nature of the hell from which Dr. Miller offers us deliverance.
Indeed, the horror of Mr. Huxley's descriptive passages deserves to be recorded as the third remarkable feature of the book. There is a serious danger, that Eyeless in Gaza may fail in its evangelistic aim because those of its readers who have not the very strongest stomachs will put it aside in disgust before they realise the seriousness of its purpose. " Writing is dirty work," as a, distinguished contemporary writer has assured us ; and Mr. Huxley himself in this book reminds us of the adage that a dirty mind is a perpetual feast. There are those who after reading a very little of this book may be inclined to exclaim that Mr. Huxley knows his job, and that enough is to them as good as that par- ticular kind of feast ; for the glimpses which, Mr. Huxley affords, with that suggestiveness of imagery and significance of detail of which he is a master, into the private school, the public lavatory, the concentration camp, and into many a bedroom, are an advance (if that is the right word) on anything that he has done before. But they are all in a good cause, for they serve to point the more vividly Dr. Miller's moral.
At the moment, then, it seems that Dr. Miller (true to his doctrine of unity and the avoidance of all hatred) has per- suaded Mr. Huxley that the best way to vanquish the Philistines is to join them, and he and Mr. Huxley are safe together in 'a region where they cannot be touched by the intellectual scorn of Mr. Huxley's own earlier books. One is left regretting that Dr. Miller and Mr. Cardan can never meet—and wondering where Dr. Miller will next lead the
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