But his attachment to what Leibniz had called the philosophia perennis did indeed rest on the conviction that there was One Answer – however rich and eclectic the material he assembled turned out to be. In Huxley’s exaggerated predictions of what would happen after the war, and in his Cassandra-like ejaculations about the state of the world throughout the 1940s and 1950s, there is the sense of a man who has conceived of the contemporary problem and its solutions in intellectual terms perfectly satisfactory to him and who is disappointed at the world’s inability to follow his lucid directions for saving itself. The intellectual, Joad seems to be saying, runs the risk of simplifying the world into a set of watertight theorems, ignoring its complexity which is founded often in contradiction and the resistance of the human material to logical straightening out. Too readily, sometimes, Huxley would happen on the work of a thinker with a Big Idea – such as William Sheldon and his theory of human types – and immediately see in it a comprehensive and sufficient explanation. Such a disposition is the pure intellectual’s occupational hazard. But the new philosophy that Huxley was presenting in the book – in fact a very old philosophy as he was at pains to point out – was a great deal more complex than anything he had embraced to date. What exactly was it?
‘The Perennial Philosophy is primarily concerned with the one, divine Reality substantial to the manifold world of things and lives and minds. But the nature of this one Reality is such that it cannot be directly and immediately apprehended except by those who have chosen to fulfil certain conditions, making themselves loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit.’ In direct contrast to the knowledge that is in books or encyclopaedias, the perennial philosophy needs a prepared human instrument on which to play its melodies. ‘Knowledge is a function of being. When there is a change in the being of the knower, there is a corresponding change in the nature and amount of knowing … What we know depends also on what, as moral beings, we choose to make ourselves.’ Two paradoxes play throughout this argument: Huxley’s stress on the limitations of words, of the need to tune in to the ineffable, comes from a dazzlingly proficient wordsmith; and his pre-occupation with ‘seeing’ and the invisibleness of God, comes from a man who wrestled all his life with the difficulty of seeing in the plain physical sense. Later, he would seek to explore consciousness in a drug-induced manner, to ‘see’ with chemical assistance. His whole life was, as I suggested in the opening pages of this book, a search for light, for means of knowing and seeing that did not depend on the shortcomings of the human machinery. More than most, he would value the words of Dionysus the Areopagite: ‘For this darkness, though of deepest obscurity, is yet radiantly clear.’ But he insisted in The Perennial Philosophy that all this was not escapism. A key theme of the book is that the insights of mysticism are data. They are real elements in life and not abstractions.
The book is written, it hardly needs saying, with absolute clarity and avoids the sort of luminous waffle that such subjects can invite. It is true that concessions are made to the portentous initial capital (Reality etc) but the book – essentially a series of extracts from the great mystical works of the world ‘chosen mainly for their significance … but also for their beauty and memorableness’ – introduces and explains each extract, linking it to others. Anyone new to this tradition would find it hard not to be seduced by the way the material is presented and it remains a valuable primer for this body of thought. The extracts combine the wisdom of East and West, from Christian mystics like William Law, St John of the Cross, Thomas Traherne, Meister Eckhart, to Chinese Tao and Indian scripture, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Dionysus the Areopagite. Huxley’s education, since arriving in America in 1937, at the hands of Gerald Heard, the Swami Prabhavananda, and Krishnamurti, bore fruit in the essentially Eastern bias of his presentation. Central to his exposition is the Sanskrit phrase tat tvam asi (‘That art thou’), the perception that the Atman, or immanent eternal Self discoverable in each of us, is one with Brahman, ‘the Absolute Principle of all existence’. The purpose of life, for the mystic, is to connect with the divine ‘ground’ of all existence. ‘It is from the more or less obscure intuition of the oneness that is the ground and principle of all multiplicity that philosophy takes its source. And not alone philosophy, but natural science as well. All science, in Meyerson’s phrase, is the reduction of multiplicities to identities.’ Huxley was not about to turn his back on science, however much he knew its current limitations.
Although this is a book which explores the ineffable and the unseen, it is far from insulated from the real world. Again and again, Huxley tilts at his old targets, such as the need to love the earth and respect nature instead of following the example of those ‘who chopped down vast forests to provide the newsprint demanded by that universal literacy which was to make the world safe for intelligence and democracy, and got wholesale erosion, pulp magazines, and the organs of Fascist, Communist, capitalist and nationalist propaganda’. He attacked ‘technological imperialism’ and the mechanisation which was ‘increasing the power of a minority to exercise a co-ercive control over the lives of their fellows’ and ‘the popular philosophy of life … now moulded by advertising copy whose one idea is to persuade everybody to be as extraverted and uninhibitedly greedy as possible, since of course it is only the possessive, the restless, the distracted, who spend money on the things that advertisers want to sell’ – the argument of Brave New World recapitulated. He talked of non-attachment, ‘standing out of one’s own light’, and turning one’s back on the ‘universal craving’ that consumer capitalism has fostered (in an exponential way since 1945, we might add, and with much less opposition, at the turn of the twentieth century, from the intellectual class). But this was not to articulate a programme of flight from the world. As noted earlier, the book was written specifically as a contribution to the work of post-war reconstruction: ‘The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.’
But for many of Huxley’s admirers the spectacle of their former iconoclastic hero talking about God – in however vague and non-institutional a way – was profoundly unwelcome.
1 L.500
2 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 17 January 1944
3 L.502
4 L.502
5 Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, Jacob’s Hands (1998) edited with introductions by David Bradshaw and Laura Huxley
6 Isherwood Diaries, Vol 1, p336, 11 March 1944
7 Reading, Letter to Leon Lion, 28 March 1944
8 Reading, Letter to Harold Raymond, 4 April 1944
9 HL, Isherwood papers. Letter to Christopher Isherwood, 13 June 1944
10 Isherwood Diaries, Vol 1, p334, 7 February 1944
11 L.505
12 L.510
13 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 23 July 1944. Author’s translation
14 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 22 August 1944. Author’s translation
15 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 19 November 1944. Author’s translation
16 HRC, Copy of customs declaration. 25 November 1944
17 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Sybille Bedford, 15 January 1945. In English
18 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux. Undated but probably Easter, 1945. Author’s translation
19 L.516
20 L.525
21 L.529
22 L.531
23 SB2.59 Citing letter from Maria Huxley to Rosalind Rajagopal. Undated
24 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 4 July 1945. Author’s translation
25 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 17 July 1945. Author’s translation
26 HL, Letter to Krishnamurti, 19 July 1945
27 RL, Letter from Maria Huxley to Jeanne Neveux, 12 October 1945. Author’s translation
28 C.E.M. Joad, New Statesman and Nation, 5 October 1946. Watt
pp363–65
XXX
Gioconda
Shortly before returning to the film studios in the autumn of 1945, Huxley had become, briefly, a political canvasser for President Roosevelt. The Welsh writer George Ewart Evans was told by his son, Paul, who was a friend of Matthew – the latter currently on strike at Warner Brothers’ studio and a Roosevelt campaigner – that Matthew had been struck down by ’flu and had prevailed upon his father to do some doorstep leafleting. As Paul Evans put it: ‘I daresay that many of the people of Beverly Hills would be surprised to learn that the cadaverous, courtly, half-blind gentleman who knocked at their door and left a political tract was Aldous Huxley.’1
The new film project was far from a political tract as Huxley explained to Anita Loos: ‘I am about to sign up with Disney’ – a delicious leap from Meister Eckhart to the creator of Mickey Mouse – ‘for the script of Alice in Wonderland, which is to be a cartoon version of Tenniel’s drawings and Carroll’s story, embedded in a flesh-and-blood episode of the life of the Rev. Charles Dodgson. I think something rather nice might be made out of this – the unutterably odd, repressed and ridiculous Oxford lecturer on logic and mathematics, seeking refuge in the company of little girls and in his own phantasy. There is plenty of comic material in Dodgson’s life, and I think it will be legitimate to invent some such absurd climax as a visit of Queen Victoria to Oxford and her insistence on having the author of Alice presented to her, in preference to all the big wigs …’2 Dorris Halsey, the current agent for the Huxley estate, whose husband Reece Halsey dealt with Huxley over this contract, told an interviewer that her husband described a story conference with Disney ‘who had no idea who and what Aldous Huxley was’. The meeting was ‘on two different planes: the two personalities were so dissimilar, and while Aldous was forever courteous – the tone was one of noblesse oblige – here was this man who had made a success out of a mouse … It was sort of weird.’3
While waiting for a non-existent film version of Brave New World to materialise, using the talents of Loos, Burgess Meredith and Paulette Goddard (and worrying whether the Hays Office which censored films would tolerate babies in bottles on screen), Huxley threw himself with enthusiasm into the Lewis Carroll project, according to Maria, who noted that he was being paid $5000.4 His own mother, Julia Arnold, had been one of the little girls photographed by Charles Dodgson and he probably had more of an instinct for the milieu of Victorian Oxford than anyone else in Hollywood at that time. It took him some time to realise that this was probably the last thing wanted by Walt Disney. Rather more quickly he found that ‘as usual, it turns out to be impossible to make any of the documentary points which it would be so amusing (at any rate for me) to elaborate … it would be nice to reconstruct the university of the period … But alas, there is no time in an hour of film – and even if there were time, how few of the millions who see the film would take the smallest interest in the reconstruction of this odd fragment of the forgotten past!’5 By now, too, the film of Brave New World had bitten the dust, in spite of Huxley’s being convinced that it had ‘a fearful topicality’.6 RKO, who had been sold the film rights by the crooked agent, Pinker, were now demanding so much that it was unviable. It was later made as an NBC mini-series and the musical rights were later sold – though the musical remains unmade. It is a pity that no one at the BBC thought of approaching Huxley to do Alice. The film was eventually made by Disney in 1951 with Huxley’s earlier involvement nowhere acknowledged.
Huxley was able to do much of the work at Llano with occasional visits to Wrightwood, which was being steadily improved. The stable block was converted into a writing studio for Aldous, and Maria seemed happy. She told Harold Raymond at Chatto about the house and about Llano, with which she was obviously still in love. She confirmed that Aldous was seeing much better and could read large print with the eye that was once blind: ‘If you notice on the photographs, the eyes are never re-touched now.’7 She aired with him their thoughts about going to Europe, which they had not seen since before the war. ‘Sometimes I long to. To go to Florence again. To see the roofs on the French houses. The mists over the dark trunks of the London parks.’ But she wondered whether it was ‘fair to go and eat your food’ (rather injudiciously following this remark with the information that she was feeding her eleven cats with Californian sardines).
Meanwhile, Aldous was looking on the wider world with his usual dismay, telling Middleton Murry that he was forced to wonder whether ‘there may not, after all, be some truth in the notion of diabolic possession’8 to explain the world’s madness. It is conventional to describe Huxley as ‘pessimistic’ in these later years yet it was not the pessimism of hopeless resignation. He kept on hoping that reason and good sense would prevail and did what he could to prepare for that eventuality, notwithstanding his Cassandra-like exclamations of woe at the world scene. In March 1946 he published a little book called Science, Liberty and Peace. This short treatise is highly significant for in it Huxley, the inheritor of a great proselytising scientific tradition, makes his most powerful statement of a belief that science has negative as well as positive consequences (though with the stress on the positive). He said the book’s aim was to show ‘how and by what means applied science has contributed hitherto toward the centralization of power in the hands of a small ruling minority, and also how and by what means such tendencies may be resisted and ultimately, perhaps, reversed’. He was exploring the paradox that science had enabled man in one sense to ‘conquer nature’ but ‘as Tolstoy foresaw, man and his liberties have sustained a succession of defeats’. Faced with the post-war arms race, pre-war pacifists must express their opposition through civil disobedience. He believed that the mass media and ‘the spread of free compulsory education’ have created not Mill’s enlightened democracy but propaganda for the powerful.
Even if one accepts Huxley’s contention that ‘never have so many been so much at the mercy of so few’, and even if one endorses his indictment of the abuses of literacy, there is something disquieting about his repeated attacks on universal free education (a theme played repeatedly since the 1920s). A privately-educated upper-middle class Eton and Balliol man from a distinguished intellectual family cuts a poor figure denouncing the very means by which those less intellectually privileged – but equally intellectually gifted – than himself might achieve their fulfilment. Even his great uncle, Matthew Arnold, in his writings on culture, understood (though popularly thought to have argued the exact opposite) that the goal of social equality demanded access to education by all. One wonders at Huxley’s progressive friends, particularly in America, not having pointed these things out to him. In the book he argues once again for decentralisation and small-scale applications of science for self-sufficiency and supplying local markets, revealing himself yet again as a proto-Green. One rather relishes his reference to ‘the note of bumptious self-congratulation’ that began to be sounded with the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and notes his first public reference – albeit fleeting – to the Holocaust. He argues that the rise of nationalism and centralisation means inevitably that science will serve the ends of militarism. ‘The collective mentality of nations … is that of a delinquent boy of fourteen, at once cunning and childish, malevolent and silly, maniacally egotistical, touchy and acquisitive, and at the same time ludicrously boastful and vain.’ He wants scientists to oppose the arms race and concentrate their skills on tackling instead problems of food production and of fostering regional self-sufficiency in food production. He concludes by advocating a Hippocratic oath for scientists.
During the summer of 1946, Huxley began work on yet another film project: to turn his short story from Mortal Coils in 1922, ‘The Gioconda Smile’ into a movie. The story had been bought a year previously, ‘badly handled by an inexperienced writer, and then brought to me for a revision which has turned into complete re-writing’.9 He had just turned down an approach from another producer to acquire the rights to Point Counter Point –
‘a costume piece, I suppose, about the idyllic nineteen-twenties’10 – but was chary of making the same mistake as with Brave New World and letting the rights go for a song. He had also managed to commit himself ‘to compile an anthology of essays and criticism for the Encyclopaedia Britannica people. I wish I hadn’t, but there it is.’ The director of the new film, which would eventually be called A Woman’s Vengeance, was Zoltan Korda and the salary was a comfortable $1500 dollars a week. Probably one of the strongest plots in film-maker’s terms from the self-professed uncongenital novelist, ‘The Gioconda Smile’ was also worked on towards the end of the year by Huxley as a stage script, its third generic version – though he would admit cheerfully to Jeanne that summer: ‘I know nothing about the contemporary theatre, not having been to a play for years’.11 Huxley spent the summer at Wrightwood in his stable-studio working on it for Korda, ‘a very nice fellow who has good ideas and who doesn’t interfere’.12 As soon as it was finished he talked of reworking it into a stage version and then announced his plans to write an historical novel about St Catherine of Siena (abandoning a slightly more ambitious plan to mix it with contemporary material). This idea in the end came to nothing.
Aldous Huxley Page 42