While this book was not an easy read (maybe I didn't get all the satire he was doing 90+ years removed), this book expresses a few emotions better than nearly any other I have read. Within just the first few pages the way the author describes being mad at someone else for something you did felt extremely true. None of these are particularly positive or particularly negative emotions, they are the mundane, day to day, sometime irrational emotions that get overlooked by many authors on their way to tell an epic (or even just moving at a reasonable speed) story.

I reread Point Counter Point after discovering that Dorothy L. Sayers wittely, intellectually and mostly gently pokes fun at the book and its author in n  The Documents in the Casen, in the person of John Munting, alias Philip Quarles, alias Aldous Huxley himself (talk of Russian puppets inside puppets!). Of course Aldous Huxley was a pacifist, Sayers quite the contrary; Sayers was a Catholic, be it more of the mind than of the heart, where Huxley tends to some unspecified universal mysticism. Both are "n  passionate mindsn".

Point Counter Point offers great satirical portraits of D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Lady Ottoline Morell, and Huxley himself. In this first "novel of ideas" Huxley experiments with an essayistic form of narrative, trying to cramp as many ideas & theories into the book as possible. "Ape and Essence", as it were. When the reader gets rather bored with the non-moving non-plot & the avalanche of philosophical talk, Philip-Quarles-alias-Huxley explains why the book is getting so sadly tedious. Then follow a Murder, and the Death of a Child.
All the Great Questions are raised in both books – "What is Life", of course, Religion & Politics, and the respective beastlinesses of Communism and Fascism. And Sex, the big teaser of the Thirties. Both are brilliantly funny. As a crime-novel, Documents is rather a disaster - as a novel, Point is rather a bore. But essayistically spoken, both are gorgeously brilliant.

Aldous Huxley's lifelong concern with the dichotomy between passion and reason finds its fullest expression both thematically and formally in his masterpiece Point Counter Point. By presenting a vision of life in which diverse aspects of experience are observed simultaneously, Huxley characterizes the symptoms of "the disease of the modern man" in the manner of a composer--themes and characters are repeated, altered slightly, and played off one another in a tone that is at once critical and sympathetic.

First published in 1928, Huxley's satiric view of intellectual life in the '20s is populated with characters based on such celebrities as D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Sir Oswald Mosley, Nancy Cunard, and John Middleton Murray, as well as Huxley himself. A major work of the 20th century and a monument of literary modernism.

Along with Brave New World (written a few years later), Point Counter Point is Huxley's most concentrated attack on the scientific attitude and its effect on modern culture.

What a mess!

I was kinda up for the meandering conversational style and I love the idea of a 200-page packed party as an opener, but the prose should be tight as hell to hold attention at this same place. And it doesn’t mean the plot needn’t advance.

Wherever this did not go after 200 pages it still will not have gone 600 pages in, so I’m putting this one in the local phone box

Prin ”Point counter point” am descoperit o parte neașteptată a lui Aldous Huxley, una cu totul diferită de ”Brave New World”. Datorită faptului că nu știam că a fost filosof, supriza a fost cu atât mai mare și mai plăcută când am descoperit în romanul său nenumărate și valoroase idei filosofice.

Romanul a fost unul interesant, ilustrând prin personajele sale, cu destul de multă acuratețe, aspecte ale vieții interioare pe care le simțim cu toții în situații precum: atunci când suntem înșelați, precum Marjorie, sau când înșelăm și alternăm între a ne simți torturați de vină și euforici de plăcere, precum soțul său Walter, când am crescut într-o situație financiară precară și privim orice lux sau răsfăț ca fiind revoltător, precum Ilidge, când suntem creduli și orbi atunci când suntem îndrăgostiți, precum Beatrice și Everard, când o boală neașteptată ne tulbură pe noi sau pe cei dragi nouă, torturându-ne existențial, precum Bidlake sau Eleonor etc. Cu toate că aș putea continua negreșit și cu toate că poate lista nu este una convingătoare, ceea ce vreau să subliniez este că ”romanul său de idei” (ca să îi fur una din propriile sale expresii) arată că Huxley este un bun observator al naturii umane.

Filosofia mea preferată de viață din roman este cea a lui Rampion, care face apologia umanului și a naturalului în detrimentul a tot ce este abstract, intelectual și împotriva instinctului natural, animalic, precum religia, care reneagă corpul, intelectualismul exagerat, care reneagă sentimentele, snobismul muzical, care nu reflectă o trăire autentică a muzicii, ci doar încearcă să aducă admirația celorlalți. A trăi uman, în echilibru cu partea intelectuală și animalică, a nu renega nici corpul și ale sale instincte și necesități, nici intelectul, partea spirituală, acesta este idealul pe care îl predică Rampion. Iar entuziasmul și elocvența personajului mă fac să mă întreb dacă nu cumva prin ele se reflectă și viziunea lui Huxley.

Finalul romanului a fost puțin dezamăgitor pentru mine, căci toate personajele au avut de suferit ceva traumatic, exceptându-l pe Burlap, care mie mi s-a părut cel mai parșiv dintre toți. Dar poate aceasta chiar a fost intenția lui Huxley: să transmită un mesaj ironic și să sublinieze că viața nu are nicio noimă, nicio direcție și niciun favoritism pentru dreptate. În ciuda acestui lucru, am citit cu mare plăcere cartea și chiar mă gândesc să îmi adaug pe listă și alte romane de ale sale.

Roman în care foarte mult timp nu se întîmplă nimic deosebit (infidelități clasice, party-uri, lungi discuții, la restaurant, la club...) Deh, sîntem la Londra, prin anii ’20 ai secolului trecut; personaje aristocratice și artistice îsi confruntă opiniile despre viață, muncă, război, societate etc., se judecă unele pe altele, dansează valsul conveniențelor specifice epocii. De-abia în ultimele 6 capitole (din cele 37), și chiar pe ultima pagină, se desfășoară dramele, care fac cartea clasabilă și printre romanele “obișnuite”.

De unde vin satisfacțiile cititorului?
Discursul personajelor, cultivate și cu opinii puternice, este înțesat de foarte multe referinte artistice englezești, dar și universale – muzicale, plastice, literare, economice, religioase, politice, geografice, urbanistice – pe care tu, ca cititor, dacă nu te grăbești, le poți adînci după plac. De exemplu, am cîștigat cunostințe de arhitectură londoneză, comparativ cu cea romană, într-unul din astfel de răgazuri luate în timpul lecturii cărții, determinate de o frază “Capătul răsăritean al străzii Pall Mall e bîntuit pe furiș de trei fantome italiene...”(p.21). Și i-am amușinat pe D.H.Lawrence (Rampion în roman), pe pictorii Augustus John (John Bildlake în roman) și pe sora sa, Gwendolyn John (nu apare în roman, dar se pare că ar fi fost o artistă mai bună decît fratele ei, abia acum crescîndu-i cota), pe pictorul franco-olandez Ary Scheffer, pe Giovanni Antonio Bazzi zis Il Sodoma, cel contemporan cu Rafael, la apelau iubitorii și doritorii de pictură dacă nu și-l puteau permite pe Rafael etc. Chiar și Baudelaire, deși nu contemporan cu scriitorul, l-a fascinat pîna la a croi personajul Maurice Spandrell pe trăsăturile poetului. Ca să nu mai vorbim de personalitatea lui Aldous Huxley însuși, revelată parțial prin personajul lui Philip Quarles.

Însuși faptul că în spatele multora dintre personaje se află personalități reale, cu care Huxley a interacționat, în majoritatea cazurilor, si să ai ocazia sa le asculți vocea, chiar și mediată, nu-i tocmai puțin lucru. Scriitorul e un maestru al portretelor, fizice, psihologice și al descrierii relațiilor dintre personaje, relații tarate de educația victoriană, excesiv de pudibondă, bigotă si ipocrită – astfel, în roman este o constantă și ascuțită discrepanță între ce gîndesc și cum se comportă personajele în relație cu ceilalți, sub presiunea prejudecăților și conveniențelor. Oamenii nu-și pot vorbi deschis, sincer, cauzîndu-și suferințe imense unii altora. În schimb, își exprimă cu multă plăcere părerile despre lumea înconjurătoare, despre autoritățile în diverse domenii. Ai ocazia să-ți pui la încercare eventualele convingeri cu pozițiile unor personaje cu greutatea alter-ego-urilor scriitorului (Philip Quarles) și al lui D.H.Lawrence (Mark Rampion) vehement și profund anti-intelectualiste:

„Compania lui Rampion mă cam indispune, căci mă face să înţeleg marea prăpastie care desparte conştiinţa lucrurilor evidente de trăirea lor efectivă. Şi vai, câte greutăţi ai de întâmpinat când vrei să treci acea prăpastie! Înţeleg acum de ce marele farmec al vieţii intelectuale – viaţa devotată erudiţiei, cercetărilor ştiinţifice, filosofiei, esteticii, criticii – constă în uşurinţa ei. E o substituire de simple scheme intelectuale în locul complexităţilor realităţii... E incomparabil mai uşor să ştii multe, să spunem, în domeniul istoriei artei şi să ai cele mai adânci idei asupra metafizicii şi sociologiei, decât să cunoşti personal şi intuitiv amănunte despre cei din jurul tău, să ai legături mulţumitoare cu iubitele şi prietenii tăi, cu nevasta şi copiii tăi. Viaţa e mult mai grea decât limba sanscrită, chimia sau ştiinţele economice. Viaţa intelectualului e un joc de copii; iată de ce intelectualii tind să devină puerili, apoi imbecili şi, în sfârşit, aşa cum demonstrează limpede istoria politicii şi industriei din ultimele secole, ţicniţi, cu idei criminale sau fiare. ... e mult mai uşor să fii un intelectual pueril, un ţicnit sau o fiară decât să fii un om matur, echilibrat, iată de ce (printre alte motive) se simte şi o atât de mare nevoie de educaţie superioară. Goana după cărţi şi universităţi e ca o goană după băutură. Oamenii vor să înece în alcool înţelegerea greutăţilor de a trăi decent în această lume contemporană grotescă, şi vor să uite propria lor incapacitate deplorabilă de a reuşi ca artişti în viaţă. Unii îşi îneacă grijile în alcool, alţii, mai numeroşi, citind cărţi şi practicând diletantismul artistic.”(Quarles)

și anti-crestine:

„... practic, încercarea de a deveni mai mult decât uman înseamnă a deveni mai puţin uman. ... Gândiţi-vă la câteva exemple. Bătrânul Tolstoi – un om de valoare, care a devenit fatal un idiot, încercând să fie mai mult decât un om de valoare. Sau oribilul ... Sfânt Francisc. Un alt idiot, dar pe punctul de a deveni un diavol. Masochismul, distrugerea a tot ce este decent, frumos şi viu. Iată programul lor. Au încercat să-l asculte pe Iisus şi să fie mai mult decât oameni; n-au reuşit decât să devină încarnaţia unei distrugeri diabolice pure. Ar fi putut rămâne fiinţe umane absolute decente dacă ar fi încercat să se poarte firesc, conform instinctelor. Dar nu, ei voiau să fie mai mult decât umani... De o religiozitate neumană, de o moralitate neumană, intelectual şi ştiinţific neumani, neumani în specializare ca şi în eficacitate, neumani ca oameni de afaceri, neumani în zgârcenia lor şi în pofta lor de a poseda, de o lascivitate neumană, ca a lui Don Juan... . Sunt pervertiţi cu toţii. Pervertiţi ai bunătăţii sau ai răutăţii, ai spiritului sau ai trupului; departe de tipul uman normal, departe de umanitate. Lumea este un azil de pervertiţi.” (Rampion)

Față de ipocrizia monumentală afișată de personajele sale, Huxley este neiertător:

“Nu există pe lume atîtea bon mots pentru a asigura unui orator plin de rîvnă un stoc proaspăt (de spirite și aforisme n.m.) la fiecare ieșire în societate. Deși bogat, repertoriul lui Molly era limitat, ca al tuturor celorlalți maeștri mai cunoscuți ai cuvîntului. Fiind o gospodină pricepută, știa să toace resturile de conversație rămase de la masa de seara trecută, pentru a le oferi a doua zi la prînz. Felurile calde de la înmormîntarea de luni erau utile și la nunta de a doua zi.”

“... Simmons apăru deodată în bibliotecă, ducînd o tavă. De o vîrstă mijlocie, avea o atitudine demnă, de om de stat, obligat să-și controleze vorbele și nervii, să nu declare niciodată ce gîndește sincer, și să respecte aparențele, atitudine cum se putea întîlni la diplomați, la membrii familiilor regale, la înalții funcționari guvernamentali și la majordomi.”

Apoi se impune structura romanului, pentru a cărei înțelegere primim o legătură de chei în capitolul XIV, dar mai ales în capitolul XXII, dedicat în întregime descifrării intențiilor scriitorului relativ la construcția sa contrapunctică, constînd în prezentarea unei diversități de aspecte, fiecare printr-o diversitate de optici. De exemplu, în acest registru, scriitorul își pune diverse personaje să interpreteze aceeași “partitură” (despre muncă – Spandrell, Rampion, despre formarea personalității – Spandrell, Elinor, despre existența lui Dumnezeu – marchizul Gattenden, Spandrell etc.). Iată-i în “aria muncii” pe Spandrell:

“... munca nu-i cu nimic mai respectabilă decît alcoolul și slujește același scop: îți distrage atenția, te face să-ți uiți grijile. Munca nu-i decît un stupefiant! E umilitor că oamenii nu pot trăi treji, fără stupefiante. E umilitor că n-au curajul să vadă lumea și să se vadă pe ei înșiși cum sînt în realitate. Trebuie să se drogheze muncind. E idiot. Evanghelia muncii e evanghelia prostiei și a fricii. ... Munca înseamnă să te ascunzi de tine însuți. ... Dacă n-ar mai munci majoritatea ar avea revelația că, de fapt, nici nu există. “(Spandrell)

si pe Rampion:

“’Civilizația noastră, fiind ceea ce este,’ e momentul să le spuneți,’trebuie să vă petreceți opt ore din cele douăzeci și patru ale zilei, devenind un fel de corcitură între un idiot și o masină de cusut.’ Știu e foarte neplăcut. E umilitor și dezgustător. Dar asta-i situația. ‘Trebuie să faceți cum vă spun, altfel întregul eșafodaj al lumii noastre se duce de rîpă și o să murim de foame. Așa că, faceți-vă meseria, idiot și mecanic, și petreceți-vă orele libere ca oameni adevărați și întregi, bărbați sau femei, de la caz la caz.’” (Rampion)

Tot de compozitiile muzicale sînt legate si trecerile bruste între maiestuos (sau tensionat) si comic, cum numai la Virginia Woolf am mai întîlnit si apreciat.

”Lordul Edward și fratele său luau aer în parcul Gattenden. Lordul Edward lua aer plimbîndu-se. Al cincilea marchiz lua aer într-un fotoliu pe rotile, tras de un măgar mare, cenușiu. Marchizul era infirm. ’Asta nu împiedică, din fericire, să-mi umble mintea’, îi plăcea lui să spună. Mintea îi umblase haotic, de colo-colo, toată viața. Măgarul cenușiu mergea încet, foarte încet."

“Burlap se culcase de vreo zece minute cînd Beatrice veni ca să-și țină promisiunea. Îmbrăcase un capot verde și își împletise părul blond într-o coadă lungă și groasă, care se clătina puțin la fiecare pas; parcă ar fi fost coada grea și împletită a unui cal de tracțiune expus la o expoziție agricolă."

Tot muzicală mi se pare si maniera de a introduce unele personaje (marchizul Gattenden, lady Janet Bidlake) la început ca pe niste “teme” abia schitate, apărînd într-o conversatie telefonică ciudată (marchizul), sau numai trecînd prin cadru cu lalele (lady Janet), ca ulterior sa li se dedice secvente ample de caracterizare sau sa păsească în actiune, cîtă e, acolo...

În concluzie, lectură complexă, ca audierea unei simfonii, cu pasaje sfichiuitoare, dar si cu unele cu care rezonezi intim.
*
Nu pot să nu adaug că de mult n-am mai văzut o carte redactată si editată atît de neglijent (greseli de tipar si de punctuatie cu ghiotura, omisiuni de conjunctii si prepozitii, deformînd uneori sensul sau lăsîndu-te în ceată, enervant, sau numai hilarant, fără să ai chef de rîs, însă). Unele sensuri mi le-am putut clarifica numai după lectura citatelor (din Goodreads) în engleză. Poate de aceea n-am mai auzit de editura “Z”.

Point Counter Point inhabits a world that's readily familiar today. The aftermath of the first world war left a world denuded of confidence in concepts of progress, religion or science and which was consequently highly vulnerable to competing extremisms, whether from communism or fascism. One particular passage in Point Counter Point could serve equally well as a description of contemporary social media, when describing a rally of the fascist British Freemen: "At the entrance to the Park they had met an Anti-Vivisection procession and there had been some slight confusion – a mingling of ranks, a musical discord, as the bands collided, of ‘The British Grenadiers’ and ‘My Faith looks up to Thee, Thou Lamb of Calvary’, an entangling of banners, ‘Protect our Doggies’ with ‘Britons never shall be slaves’, ‘Socialism is Tyranny’ with ‘Doctors or Devils?’

Overall, Point Counter Point is an attempt to describe these sort of competing ideas realistically, presenting them through the perspectives of different characters using the sort of techniques Mikhal Bakhtin would have described as polyphonic: "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. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects – emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other – as from the aesthetic to the physico-chemical aspect of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial." Thus the novel contrasts an series of perspectives, such as Spandrell's nihilism, Burlap's christian moralism, Webley's fascism, Illidge's communism and Lord Edward's belief in scientific progress. All of them are found wanting in various ways, for example with Rampion critiquing them: "You can’t be a true communist without being a mechanist... Bolsheviks and Fascists, Radicals and Conservatives, Communists and British Freeman – what the devil are they all fighting about? I’ll tell you. They’re fighting to decide whether we shall go to hell by communist express train or capitalist racing motor car, by individualist ’bus or collectivist tram running on the rails of state control. The destination’s the same in every case... They all believe in industrialism in one form or another, they all believe in Americanization. Think of the Bolshevist ideal. America but much more so."

The murder of Webley by Illidge and Spandrell's suicide void their ideas, while the novel treats Burlap and Edward with satirical contempt. This leaves the ideas of Mark Rampion, a fairly transparent depiction of DH Lawrence. Rampion repeatedly makes criticisms of Philip Quarles, who serves as a proxy for Huxley in the novel: " A man who has always taken pains to encourage his own intellectualist tendencies at the expense of all the others. He avoids personal relationships as much as he can, he observes without participating, doesn’t like to give himself away, is always a spectator rather than an actor... as he gradually discovers, he has only narrowed and desiccated his life; and what’s more, has cramped his intellect by the very process he thought would emancipate it. His reason’s free, but only to deal with a small fraction of experience." Nonetheless, there are good reasons to distrust Rampion as a prophet in the novel.

One of the challenges of writing a novel of ideas is that the novel is concrete rather than abstract: as Huxley puts it, "The great defect of the novel of ideas is that it’s a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run." Huxley employed various ways to address this, from framing his narratives as science fiction to the satirical mode employed in Point Counter Point. One aspect of this is that the satire sits oddly with a lot of the ideological architecture of the novel: of the ideas propounded in the novel, Rampion's Lawrentian primitivism proves the closest to the author's views, but it's still the case that Rampion is protrayed as a rather ludicrous crank who is laughed at while ranting about his children's unreasonable liking for toy machinery: "motor cars, trains, aeroplanes, radios. ‘It’s an infection, like smallpox. The love of death’s in the air. They breathe it and get infected. I try to persuade them to like something else. But they won’t have it. Machinery’s the only thing for them. They’re infected with the love of death." Rampion is hardly treated with much more generosity than Burlap or Edward.

Even beyond the satirical treatment, the novel's handling of Rampion's ideas is less than generous when they are put into practice: Lily's masochistic promiscuity is far from the notions of love in Lawrence's novels. As the novel puts it of one character: "And then what was this love he talked about so thrillingly? Just an occasional brief violence in the intervals of business. He despised women, resented them because they wasted a man’s time and energy. She had often heard him say that he had no time for love-making. His advances were almost an insult – the propositions one makes to a woman of the streets." Equally, towards the end Spandrell talks about animalism with Rampion and wonders whether "I were to tell them that I’d just jumped out on a man from behind a screen and hit him on the side of the head with an Indian club... I’m not so sure of what you say. Behaving like an animal is behaving like a creature that’s below good and evil. You must know what good is before you can start behaving like the devil." The end result is that the novel defeats any attempt for one of the ideologies within it to triumph over the overs: "Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting – at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats"

I am still shaking my head in disbelief that Huxley penned this drivel just four years prior to the publication of Brave New World. Perhaps I’ve missed his point (sorry, just couldn’t help myself), but this one was a snooze fest for me. There was, as expected, some great dialog and a multitude of interesting characters, however, I cared for none of them nor did I care for this lengthy tale.

There is, of course, class distinction, however, most of the affluent characters were rather self indulgent bores while the lower echelon were envious, ignorant and foul mouthed. While I get the cracks and sarcasm, it either didn’t go far enough or went too far. Many of the characters are said to be based on actual people including the likes of D. H. Lawrence, Augustus John, and Nancy Cunard. Some autobiographical comparisons are also insinuated, supposedly as Philip Quarles, but possibly as Walter Bidlake.

There’s Marjorie Carling who is seduced and impregnated by Walter Bidlake. She pines away for her man who, she is quite aware, is out pining for another. This is a pitiful woman whom we never get to truly know so she never garners any deserved sympathies.

Walter Bidlake is the man who doesn’t want what he has and wants what he doesn’t have. He is well aware of his wrongdoings, but oh, he just feels so sorry for himself and his current predicament. Well, I didn’t feel sorry for him and most certainly, did not like him.

Lucy Tantamount is free spirited and sexually promiscuous as well as self indulgent and intellectually lacking. Described as somewhat unattractive, one can only guess (cough, cough) why men are attracted to her like flies. Another unlikable character.

Huxley covers the literary gamut including the have’s and the have not’s, infidelity, alcoholism, cancer, and premature death, but we either don’t know enough about any given character to care or know too much and still don’t care. There is an unexplained murder that really just doesn’t fit in with all of the hedonism that abounds. I get that this was truly satire, but it just didn’t work for me. I couldn’t wait to finish this one…

I’m sure I’d enjoy Mr. Huxley’s company, but I would steer clear of discussing this novel and perhaps ask about his teaching of the young George Orwell.

My rating for Point Counter Point is a 5 out of 10.

Point Counter Point is a tragicomedy about a group of London intellectuals and/or members of the leisured class in the 1920s. Despite cynical and fun-making elements, Huxley allows his characters to formulate a series of profound and serious ideas, amongst them being:

(a) Why do people bother with worrying about liberty, democracy and politics, when they should just get on with living their lives
(b) It is easier to live the life of the intellectual, to live in a world purely of ideas, than it is to succeed in the art of life – to be on good terms with your colleagues, friends, spouse and children.
(c) Art is so much purer and more discriminating than life. In the sense that lurid accounts of orgies never discuss fatigue, boredom or hiccoughs
(d) You cannot properly separate the mind from the rest of the body. Any attempt to live a super-pure existence by living entirely in the mental will result in one becoming simply less than human

And so on.

Huxley is so sharp, so clever and so observant that it is a pleasure to be in his company. Yet he is so cutting about the intellectual pursuits that one can’t but feel guilty that one has the leisure and self-indulgence to be reading such a clever book. One should be undertaking some arduous proletariat task, or at least interacting with one’s fellow man. Or possibly indulging in one of those orgies (although, says Huxley, wickedness becomes as routine and uninteresting as anything else after a while).

So many little ideas, compared with Brave New World, which has one huge, overarching notion that there must be more to life than the simple pursuit of pleasure, or even happiness. But Point Counter Point seems much more natural, less clunky, than Brave New World’s 1932 attempt to be 24th century seems in 2008.

In summary, Point Counter Point is really good

As a teenager in the 1990s I would often take advice regarding authors and books to read from the stories, poems, and novels of Charles Bukowski. Bukowski, naturally, a kind of Skid Row Zarathustra, has had a monumental influence on a great many readers over the years while also being an object of opprobrium and misgivings, understandably so, but I believe that I certainly gained as a youngster from his having introduced me to Louis-Ferdinand Céline, John Fante, and Knut Hamsun’s HUNGER etc. I also recall, all these many years later, his praise of Aldous Huxley’s POINT COUNTER POINT, a book I have only just gotten to now, which I believe he extolled for its instructional properties, explaining that it taught him much about men and women; he claimed, if memory serves, that the novel offered him applicable precepts serving relations with the fairer sex. In his introduction to the Dalkey Archive edition, the very great Nicholas Mosley, a man only three years younger than Bukowski, discusses how he and his friends found Huxley’s novel, which they had caught up to in the aftermath of the Second World War, eye-opening in its depiction of a species of generalized libertinage which seemed to have disappeared from the English scene in subsequent years, the recent European conflagration doubtlessly having had something to do with that. POINT COUNTER POINT seems to have been a novel that fed the imaginations and sensibilities of a generation of young men. A generation and beyond. You see, it remains an absolutely striking masterpiece. Its frankness about sex relations can no longer be considered terribly risky or outré, except when conceived of in terms of its historical context, but its insights into what we might call, in consonance with the novel itself, human zoology, sexual matters of course being central to the corresponding field of inquiry, remain profoundly relevant. There can be no denying that the casual frankness about sex, which hardly seems calculated to shock, is especially rare in an English novel of the time. Of course, it happened now and then. It is certainly telling (and for reasons I will soon elaborate) that Lawrence's LADY CHATTERLY’S LOVER would appear the same year as POINT COUNTER POINT. Well, both appeared only shortly before Patrick Hamilton’s very fine trilogy 20,000 STREETS UNDER THE SKY, which I hold to be especially British in that one of its three main characters is a prostitute and nothing whatsoever about the trilogy indicates that a prostitute is a person who engages in sexual intercourse for money—if you didn’t already know you would never know. All this considered, please refrain from imagining that POINT COUNTER POINT is merely a novel about sexual mores in somewhat liberal times. It is far more than that. It is tragicomic, its is gripping, it is a societal salmagundi, positively kaleidoscopic, and it is above all a prodigious novel of ideas. It is a compendium of human hangups, hypocrisies, and pathologies, as such evoking for me the many novels comprising Blazac’s comédie humaine, were they to find themselves on the other side of the English Channel and aggressively compressed into something tart and intense. I am not at all comfortable calling POINT COUNTER POINT satire, as many understandably have, because the novel is too rich to be ghettoized in those terms, but I will happily concede that one of the many things it occasionally does is satirize. It is a rare literary work that triumphs at both earnestness and irony. It can be frolicsome and amusing just as it can be brutally cutting. It can also be solemn, heartbreaking, virtuosic, digressive, expansive, or regal. It is the novel of a highly observant student of his surroundings. There can be no denying that basic fact. Is it a roman à clef? Not strictly. Nicholas Mosely, from his Introduction: “Much has been made over the years of the suggestion that the characters of POINT COUNTER POINT were taken from life—Rampion from D. H. Lawrence, Burlap from John Middleton Murry, Lucy Tantamount from Nancy Cunard, both Walter Bidlake and Philip Quarles from Huxley himself. But Huxley denied that he portrayed anyone straight: he proposed the novelist’s usual explanation that he took one trait from one person here, another from another there, and from these he fabricated a character.” The Rampion-Lawrence connection is an excellent case in point, as obviously Rampion both very much is and is not D. H. Lawrence; any reader with a cursory knowledge of Lawrence and his backstory will not fail to see how Rampion’s diverges. Rampion is not Lawrence the man, more like a kind of Lawrence gestalt. Rampion is one of the more laudable characters in the novel, though not without his faults. And it seems clear that Huxley very much sees it that way. In keeping with the tone of the book, Rampion can extemporize at length or be quick and merciless. Sometimes he can be both at once: his ranting disparagement of Percy Shelley and "To a Skylark,” for example, is a jocose ill-tempered delectation. Rampion believes in congruence in a world where hardly anybody is halfway congruent. Rampion backs up his talk in a way few other characters can. He is also aware of his shortcomings, and, almost singularly here, seems able to profitably amend his conduct by way of self-knowledge, a skill most everybody else seems to be lacking. His major flaw, to my mind, remains his nostalgia for history he wasn’t around to experience in the first place. He is a displaced romantic, longing for uncomplicated bygone immersions in life lived intuitively, and it has a tendency to make him cross. The detached and intellectual Philip Quarles at one points poses the following supposition: “What’s the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn’t the rationalization of your feelings? If you’ve never had a religious experience, it’s folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can’t eat them without being sick.” It is Rampion whose philosophy corresponds to his behaviour. Certainly not Philip Quarles or Walter Bidlake, the two characters Mosley tells us are based on Huxley himself. If Huxley is engaging himself through these characters it is pretty obvious that his preoccupation is with his own character defects. His clarity in that regard would seem truly remarkable. The women for the most part seem less deluded and pathetic. The character of Lucy Tantamount, devil-may-care hedonist, would be scorned or held up as a warning by most writers of Huxley’s generation. Here she comes off as a character of rare congruence. When told that she is tormenting Walter Birdlake, the young man who pursues her to his own bedevilment though already nominally living with the still-theoretically-married mistress he has impregnated, she isn’t having any of it: “I assure you, I don’t torment him. He torments himself.” There can be no denying that this is the absolute truth of the matter. Walter is one of many characters in this novel, the more privileged men from the older generation being especially dire, whose ideals will never hold up to scrutiny of their actions. They are callow and kidding themselves. It is a tragicomic state of affairs, its implications universal and all too sound. Walter reflects: “I was making love to a woman when I was interrupted, first by the screaming of a cockatoo, then by the arrival of a visitor.” He realizes that this is essentially “a smoking-room joke,” and despite its being such, “he could not be suffering more if he had lost his mother.” That in a nutshell is the tragicomedy of human pride. I was recently blown away by the philosopher Vilém Flusser's THE HISTORY OF THE DEVIL, in which all of metaphysics, ontology, and ethics are filtered ironically through the seven deadly sins. POINT COUNTER POINT is perhaps above all else about envy, greed, and most especially pride. Civilization itself, as Flusser has it, is the apotheosis of envy and greed, and the political spectrum of POINT COUNTER POINT speaks to this. The proud greed of fascism at one extreme, the envy and wounded pride of the proletarian revolutionary at the other. But man’s true folly, everywhere in Huxley's novel, is a byproduct of his pride. Pride can pervert in all kinds of ways, leading to high comedy or miserable tragedy, wether it is the bitter communist scientist Illidge, raised in poverty and abjection, or various puffed-up high society imbeciles precipitating all manner of wreckage. There is the malign Spandrell, a bit like Iago or Mephistopheles and compared by Rampion to Stavrogin in Dostoevsky’s DEMONS, who muses bitterly of “the pride of an able man who is not quite able enough,” and whose shallow woundedness leads first to indolence and then to tragic, suicidal misadventure. It can certainly be funny, and the inflated ideas men possess can be a source of great humour, we have established this. Note Rampion asserting of the fatuous man of letters Burlap (who Mosley tells us is based on John Middleton Murry), that his “books were so heartfelt that they looked as though they had come from the stomach, after an emetic.” POINT COUNTER POINT is full of juicy one-liners such as that one. It is, in fact, full of many dazzling passages of disparate flavour. Perhaps nothing quite surpasses Elinor’s profound consideration of her and Philip’s son, named for his father: “He was aunts and cousins she hardly ever saw; grandfathers and great-uncles she had only known as a child and utterly forgotten; ancestors who had died long ago, back to the beginning of things. A whole population of strangers inhabited and shaped that little body, lived in that mind and controlled its wishes, dictated its thoughts and would go on dictating and controlling. Phil, little Phil—the name was an abstraction, a title arbitrarily given, like ‘France’ or ‘England,’ to a collection, never long the same, of many individuals who were born, lived, and died within him, as the inhabitants of a country appear and disappear, but keep alive in their passage the identity of the nation to which they belong.” This is a way of framing the individual that looks forward to thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, modern and exquisitely articulated. Rampion seems to speak for Huxley’s entire approach to life and especially to literature when he evokes a God that is “a quality of actions and relations—a felt, experienced quality.” This is the God of “living corporeal beings,” not of fanciful speculation, not of transcendence and nonsense. The values that matter are ultimately the values immanent to an expression of lived life. Ideals are so much hot air. The pure thing does not exist, the thing muddied by life must be approached on those terms. Walter Bidlake fails in a way I can most demonstrably relate to. Perhaps I was quite like him when I was younger and didn't know any better. He fails in relation to Lucy Tantamount, but especially in relation to Marjorie, the mistress he has impregnated and more or less abandoned, she at least finding consolation in a workable sort of spirituality. “Marjorie unadulterated might have been worse than Marjorie tempered by irrelevancies.” Walter Bidlake is rendered pitiful by his own thinking and the absence of discipline born of it. He cannot inhabit the plane of ideals, he fumbles at cross-purposes on the plane of life. Life on life’s terms renders him a spiritual cripple. POINT COUNTER POINT is not only a novel of ideas but one at a frontier. It is not just modern, it has a quality of prophecy. Certainly we have Rampion appearing to predict the Second World War, which is no small thing, but we also have the future author of THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION appearing at times to grasp the flimsiness of reality, analogous as reality perhaps is to his own fictive constructions. There is the background sense that maya, illusory phenomenal reality, may be a supernatural project unconsciously engineered by the men and women taken in by its shared perception. “Nothing ever happens to a man except what’s like him.” This is a novel that appears to be telling us some secrets under its breath. And finally: I cannot help but close by mentioning that Huxley isn’t necessarily easy on me either, just as D. H. Lawrence certainly would not be. I am a guy who dedicates 98% or his waking life to books, cinema, and music. No current sex partners nor straightforwardly paying job nor desire for either. What of it? “Pigs are human—all too much so, perhaps, but still human. Whereas hermit crabs are doing their best to be molluscs.” Well, fair enough. Tee hee. Fair enough.

A truly fantastic book. Read this in the buildup to university exams in between college books and other things I had to read for UNI. While my mind was focused on that, in the evenings and before bed, Huxley exercised the more important parts of my brain. I can't do the book justice on the grounds that I lack the intelligence to truly convey what Huxley presents in Point Counter Point. All I can say is that this book is among the best I've ever read, on a whole range of issues. It tackles the meaning of life, tragedy, joy and nihilism in a complex matrix of characters one strains to keep track of at times. Delivered with funny and at times absurdist wit, the book never fails to provoke the mind whether in rejection or agreement.

Bad people doing bad things, but in a very witty way. That is a brief, if incomplete, summary of Aldous Huxley's novel, Point Counter Point.
It is more broadly a "novel of ideas" with a novelist of ideas, Philip Quarles, at its center. Quarles is a withdrawn, cerebral man, ill at ease with the everyday world and its emotions. He is surrounded by friends and family whose lives are like those of the monsters that Philip writes about in his journal. Just as Philip decides to structure his novel on the contrapuntal techniques of music (think Bach and Beethoven) the novel Huxley has written is structured in the same way. We are presented with an opening overture of more than one-hundred-fifty pages at a dinner party that serves as an introduction to most of the characters. The remainder of the novel intersperses scenes from their lives, letters from lovers and most interesting, the writings of Philip Quarles, who with his wife spends most of the first half of the novel returning from India and who is the closest to a protagonist that we get. While there is a bit of a literary explosion near the end, this is more a novel of the daily lives of London sophisticates in the 1920s. It catalogues their alternately sordid and ludicrous (sometimes both) erotic adventures, which generally end unhappily.
I particularly enjoyed the wealth of references to literature and philosophy, Huxley's polymathic mind shows through on every page. Among the literary references was the use of Dickens in a way that captures one of his essential character traits, "the appearance of Dickensian young-girlishness" (p. 19). Overall, I found the play of wit and ideas compelling, enough to bear with the bad people and their antics.