The Meaning of Recognition (41 page)

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 have 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.

In
After Many a Summer
there is less of that. For once there is a gusto for the vulgar. Every Los Angeles novel before or since quotes the billboards, but Huxley quotes them with
enjoyment: possibly because the words were big enough for him to read. Sunbathing on the heights of her magic castle, Virginia Manciple the pure-minded sex-pot harks forward irresistibly to Candy
Christian. Virginia knows nothing. She merely exists, while the men go mad around her. She had one antecedent: the raunchy, truth-telling servant girl Gladys in
Point Counter Point
. But
Gladys got only a few paragraphs, whereas Virginia is there from first to last. The William Randolph Hearst figure, Mr Stoyt, was bound to be aced out by
Citizen Kane
(Huxley got there
first, but Welles got there the most), because Stoyt doesn’t even have any dignity to lose: but all the other characters are so alive that they speak their own individual dialogue, instead of
getting it from the library that Huxley carried in his head. Even more unusual for Huxley, the import of the book is that the observable world is inexhaustible: i.e. is all there is. The shattering
final scene when the immortal people turn out to be apes is there to tell us that wherever humanity might be heading, eternal life isn’t it. But there is still one guru, and he is an
indication that Huxley’s quest for a more significant life is not dead yet. Huxley had always liked the idea of small, locally governed communities that would stave off the nefarious pressure
of highly industrialized world states, thus to leave the minds of the elite free for the seeking of the All. This time the guru’s name is Propter, and his little workshop is designed to
supply his simple needs. But the workshop is equipped with machine tools. Now where did
they
come from?

Nevertheless that one marvellous novel pointed the way Huxley might have gone next. But finally it, too, is programmatic, and proves that Huxley was right to suppose that he was something less
than an artist. Ever since Garsington, the Huxleys had been great friends with D. H. Lawrence, who died in Maria’s arms. In homage to Lawrence, Huxley had always been generously ready to
concede that feeling might rank above thinking. (F. R. Leavis, self-appointed guardian of Lawrence’s posthumous reputation, loftily ‘dismissed’ Huxley in favour of Lawrence, while
declining to notice that Huxley’s written appreciations of Lawrence left his own in the cold.) But Huxley needed a humility beyond generosity: he needed a realization that there was indeed a
harmony that would make a unity out of eternal conflict, and that art was it. He loved art: art of every kind. His essays prove it. Nobody in modern times has ever written better about poetry. When
he talks about Chaucer, he beats even Chesterton, and sends you running to the nearest copy of
The Canterbury Tales
. From the arts angle, to read all the essays in sequence is like being
enrolled at the college of your dreams. They have all recently been published again as
Complete Essays
in six scholarly volumes (not scholarly enough in places: too many of those foreign
phrases still go untranslated) edited by Robert S. Baker and James Sexton. With due acknowledgment for their efforts, however, a less daunting way to read Huxley’s essays is in the original
collections.
Music at Night
, his collection of 1931, would be a good place to start, because it shows how wide-ranging and undogmatic he could be when writing about his proper field, the
humanities. In saying goodbye to the avant-garde, Huxley wasn’t embracing philistinism – he was just saying that popular art was more likely to stay in touch with ordinary human truths.
It remains an important point, and made by so learned a man it carries extra force.

Despite the inevitable outbursts of bookishness, Huxley’s essays are easy to read and always informative, even when all they now inform us of is how much of his scientific information has
gone out of date. What they lack is the inventiveness he lavished on his novels but seldom followed up because he wanted to philosophize instead. If the novels were too much invaded by the essay,
his essays were insufficiently invaded by the novel, which is a soul-searching instrument, a register of the mind’s adventures, not of the memory’s contents. If he had put everything
into his expository prose, he might have lifted it to the extra level at which it would have been possible to question his own assumptions, and thus make a drama out of a monologue. An essay
written in 1956, ‘Hyperion to a Satyr’, hints that he might have invented the New Journalism all on his own, had he realized the potential. Beat this for an opening sentence. ‘A
few months before the outbreak of the Second World War I took a walk with Thomas Mann on a beach some fifteen or twenty miles south-west of Los Angeles.’ And it gets better. ‘At our
feet, and as far as the eye could reach in all directions, the sand was covered with small whitish objects, like dead caterpillars. Recognition dawned. The dead caterpillars were made of rubber . .
.’

It turns out that the beach no longer has such visitations, thanks to the post-war construction of the gigantic Hyperion Activated Sludge Plant. Unfortunately for the reader, the intervention of
the sludge plant is the point where Huxley’s tactics as an essayist return to normal. He gives us a long, global and no doubt reliable history of sewage treatment since earliest times, but
neglects the opportunity to argue with himself. For a writer who had spent his lifetime decrying the onward march of the Machine and rooting for the ideal of the small, self-sustaining community,
an industrial development the size of the Hyperion Sludge Plant should have given him pause to reflect. No small community could make a thing like that. But his knowledge was doing all the talking,
as it so often did. If he had dramatized the conflicts that were inherent in his concepts, he might have arrived at the higher reality that was already all around him: liberal democracy. He might
have helped to defend its inexorably confusing multiplicity against the attack that would be a long time coming but is now here: the attack from the imposers of harmony, the adepts of the All.
Alas, he was one of them, and all because of his ineradicable belief – his one and only stupidity – that the mass of mankind was too dense to see the inner light. But there is no mass
of mankind. There are only individuals, and except in a society that is not free they will always refuse to be persuaded that their everyday lives are not worth living. You can tell from their
faces, if you’ve got eyes.