...
Show More
I first read this as a teenager, aware that my absent father was a Huxley fan. Later I would I discover from him that it was my unknown grandfather that was the real fan, and his interest in Huxley was tied up with his religious upbringing. I've read all the novels now, and started to read them again a few years ago; Brave New World because it was the world's favourite Huxley novel; Eyeless in Gaza because it was my favourite Huxley novel - a book which actually made a change to my own thinking. The significance of Huxley for me is its possible to follow his intellectual development through his novels. A more straightforward way to enjoy this journey might be to read his essays. After rereading After Many A Summer I suspect I should have.
Halfway through 2019 I felt a real compulsion to reread this book. I seemed to remember that it actually had a story - something that usually takes a subordinate role in Huxley's novels; events are there to get the protagonist's musings from point A to point B. His only successful plot driven novel is The Genius and the Goddess which doesn't read like a Huxley novel at all. And yes, there are events here - at least, one of the main characters is murdered by another. Though it doesn't seem that events are driving character development or vice versa, what we have instead is Cluedo plus applied philosophy.
As Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard representative of social stereotypes, the characters gathered in Jo Stoyte's Gothic mansion are representative of certain appraoches to Life. I was reminded of Erich Fromm's theory of character orientation - the ways in which "people relate to the world by acquiring and using things (assimilation) and by relating to self and others (socialization)". I don't think Huxley is consciously using Fromm's orientations, but by describing the dominant forms of orientation Huxley found in the first half of the twentieth century, he creates a degree of overlap. The main characters and their orientations are:-
Jo Stoyte - the businessman, to live is to have
Jeremy Pordage - the scholar, to live is to know
Dr Obispo - the scientist, to live is to control
Virgina - the actress, to live is to receive
Pete - the revolutionary, to live is to aspire
Mr Propter - the saint, to live is to trandscend
The setup gives the opportunity for the characters to develop and express these orientations. This dominates the novel, and is occasionally boring. Events move unevenly from nothing happening to everything happening too suddenly. Having read this and Huxley's other novels, my presupposition is that Mr Propter's orientation is the one that is going to be shown as the productive one for humans to adopt, and all the others non-productive. Having re-read this, I'm not so sure.
What surprised me were the repeated attacks on Roman Catholicism: Jeremy Pordage's brother obscures his war guilt by converting to Roman Catholicism and cynically seeking forgiveness for his sins; Virginia secretly prayers to the Madonna in the hope of redemption; and most surprisingly of all, Mr Propter sees his charitable work as a means of sending its beneficieries in the right direction to the next world rather than improving their lives in this. The conclusion suggests we have to accept and make the best of our allotted span in the this world, not aim for eternity in the next.
This is not what I expected, Huxley is still to write The Perennial Philosophy which I thought advocates for Mr Propter's (and Thomas Aquinas's) orientation. Reading Mr Propter's views again, I'm not sure that Huxley is giving them unequivocal support. Or if I see holes in Propter's arguments it is not because Huxley sees those holes, but because I've read God is Not Great and Hitchens does see those holes. All this confusion has come about from trying to infer the author's views from reading his novels, rather than getting them straightforwardly from reading his essays.
One of the last books of Huxley's I read for the first time was Grey Eminence and this was I thought the departure point for me on Huxley's intellectual journey. In trying to write a Goodreads review for that biography of a Roman Catholic monk, mystic and war-criminal, I realised how profoundly confused I was about Huxley's position. I thought that his inability to reconcile the moral failings with the trandscendent successes of du Trembley, lead Huxley away from transcendental mysticism to hallucigenic drugs. But The Perennial Philosophy was published four years after Grey Eminence, and the problems with the transcendental orientation are already present in After Many A Summer.
Halfway through 2019 I felt a real compulsion to reread this book. I seemed to remember that it actually had a story - something that usually takes a subordinate role in Huxley's novels; events are there to get the protagonist's musings from point A to point B. His only successful plot driven novel is The Genius and the Goddess which doesn't read like a Huxley novel at all. And yes, there are events here - at least, one of the main characters is murdered by another. Though it doesn't seem that events are driving character development or vice versa, what we have instead is Cluedo plus applied philosophy.
As Professor Plum and Colonel Mustard representative of social stereotypes, the characters gathered in Jo Stoyte's Gothic mansion are representative of certain appraoches to Life. I was reminded of Erich Fromm's theory of character orientation - the ways in which "people relate to the world by acquiring and using things (assimilation) and by relating to self and others (socialization)". I don't think Huxley is consciously using Fromm's orientations, but by describing the dominant forms of orientation Huxley found in the first half of the twentieth century, he creates a degree of overlap. The main characters and their orientations are:-
Jo Stoyte - the businessman, to live is to have
Jeremy Pordage - the scholar, to live is to know
Dr Obispo - the scientist, to live is to control
Virgina - the actress, to live is to receive
Pete - the revolutionary, to live is to aspire
Mr Propter - the saint, to live is to trandscend
The setup gives the opportunity for the characters to develop and express these orientations. This dominates the novel, and is occasionally boring. Events move unevenly from nothing happening to everything happening too suddenly. Having read this and Huxley's other novels, my presupposition is that Mr Propter's orientation is the one that is going to be shown as the productive one for humans to adopt, and all the others non-productive. Having re-read this, I'm not so sure.
What surprised me were the repeated attacks on Roman Catholicism: Jeremy Pordage's brother obscures his war guilt by converting to Roman Catholicism and cynically seeking forgiveness for his sins; Virginia secretly prayers to the Madonna in the hope of redemption; and most surprisingly of all, Mr Propter sees his charitable work as a means of sending its beneficieries in the right direction to the next world rather than improving their lives in this. The conclusion suggests we have to accept and make the best of our allotted span in the this world, not aim for eternity in the next.
This is not what I expected, Huxley is still to write The Perennial Philosophy which I thought advocates for Mr Propter's (and Thomas Aquinas's) orientation. Reading Mr Propter's views again, I'm not sure that Huxley is giving them unequivocal support. Or if I see holes in Propter's arguments it is not because Huxley sees those holes, but because I've read God is Not Great and Hitchens does see those holes. All this confusion has come about from trying to infer the author's views from reading his novels, rather than getting them straightforwardly from reading his essays.
One of the last books of Huxley's I read for the first time was Grey Eminence and this was I thought the departure point for me on Huxley's intellectual journey. In trying to write a Goodreads review for that biography of a Roman Catholic monk, mystic and war-criminal, I realised how profoundly confused I was about Huxley's position. I thought that his inability to reconcile the moral failings with the trandscendent successes of du Trembley, lead Huxley away from transcendental mysticism to hallucigenic drugs. But The Perennial Philosophy was published four years after Grey Eminence, and the problems with the transcendental orientation are already present in After Many A Summer.
