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Particularly poignant is the last essay in The Engines of the Night, a piece called ‘Corridors’.
Ruthven is an SF writer, accorded the honour of being made Guest of Honour at an SF Convention. He delivers the GoH speech. For the first thirty-two minutes of his thirty-five minute address, he sticks to the script. His anecdotes of such editors as H. L. Gold and Campbell are appreciated. There is applause when he speaks of the Apollo landings on the Moon. ‘We did that’, he says. ‘We did that at three cents a word.’
Then Ruthven loses control and deserts his text.
‘We tried [Ruthven says]. I want you to know that, that even the worst of us, the most debased hack, the one-shot writer, the fifty-book series, all the hundreds and thousands of us who ever wrote a line of this stuff for publication: we tried. We tried desperately to say something because we were the only ones who could, however halting our language, tuneless the song, it was ours.’
He rants bravely on. And then—‘in hopeless and helpless fury, Ruthven pushes aside the microphone and cries’.
But I have become carried away from my main theme. One admires the music of protest, at least when played on such a fine instrument as Barry Malzberg.
I have produced about thirty anthologies of other people’s stories, many of them with Harry Harrison. The most successful is the Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, which began life in 1961 and has rarely been out of print since. Something of a record, I would imagine. I have written well over three hundred stories, and published several novels, maybe thirty, among them—as mentioned earlier—Barefoot in the Head, so kindly referred to by Lester del Rey. I would be less ‘neglected’ if I always wrote the same book; but that choice was made long ago.
In the seventies, Harrison and I produced a series of three anthologies, dividing up SF by decades. The third and last was Decade: The Sixties. It dealt with the SF of that anarchic, sublimish decade when we discovered the Present, and therefore it featured the New Wave. If there was ever a blind spot among American SF readers, and many British ones, it concerned the New Wave, even though American writers such as Norman Spinrad, John Sladek, Pamela Zoline, and Thomas Disch came to England at the time and were involved with it and with its flagship, the magazine New Worlds. The New Wave aroused as much hatred as if it had been a Commie plot; in reality it was only a revolution. There was even a move afoot to boycott any New York publisher who dared publish New Wave authors; the names of Sam Moskowitz and Isaac Asimov somehow became involved in this shamingly practical zoilism, which happily got nowhere. If ever there was a time to weep in the Malzberg way, it was then.
Perhaps those various people were right to be suspicious of us. It was all a bit of a snow job. We danced on the fire of old stories. Icefloes in society were breaking up. One thing uniting the loosely coherent group centring round New Worlds and its flamboyant editor, Michael Moorcock, was an aversion to that vast impersonal mega-machine of which Havel speaks. Nor were they alone. That aversion, and the embrace of personal fulfilment, were hallmarks of a memorable decade, the sixties.
I was writing such stories as ‘Poor Little Warrior’ and ‘The Failed Men’, and novels like Report on Probability A, some while before the New Wave was a ripple, yet somehow I became entangled in its coils, and was on a sinister blacklist.
However that might be, only two of Harrison’s and my decades anthologies were published in the States. The third one, the sixties anthology, was turned down. Looking through my Introduction to that volume, it still seems a fair summing up in two thousand words of how we viewed the whole matter then. By far the best book on the subject is Colin Greenland’s scholarly The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British ‘New Wave’ in science fiction (1983). It is a key document in the history of that brief epoch.
I attempted to bring that Introduction (which follows) up-to-date, but finally considered it must stand as it was when first published in 1977.
The eighteen stories in the anthology, to which the Introduction makes reference, are:
J. G. Ballard: The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy considered as a Downhill Motor Race
Harvey Jacobs: Gravity
Kurt Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron
Gordon R. Dickson: Computers Don’t Argue
Will Worthington: The Food Goes in the Top
Mack Reynolds: Subversive
Thomas Disch: Descending
Brian Aldiss: The Village Swindler
Keith Roberts: Manscarer
Keith Laumer: Hybrid
Pamela Zoline: The Heat Death of the Universe
Roger Zelazny: Devil Car
Michael Moorcock: The Nature of the Catastrophe
Robert Silverberg: Hawksbill Station
Frederik Pohl: Day Million
Philip K. Dick: The Electric Ant
Norman Spinrad: The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde
Kingsley Amis: Hemingway in Space
Of all these stories, it is only the Zelazny I would discard today. The Ballard, Zoline, and Pohl stories remain brilliant, and are among the best to emerge from those few brief years before the Oil Crisis of 1973—another manifestation of the world machine—when the world took another of its not infrequent turns for the worse. (More litotes!)
All the stories would get a clean bill of health under the Havel edict. None pays a subscription to the glamour of power. They are fine SF for all that.
1. Here is an opportunity to recommend H. Bruce Franklin’s 1988 War Stars, the sub-title of which is The Superweapon and the American Imagination.
A NOTE (#ulink_373ed2de-9d6e-5a9a-b943-06793b868c04)
Suppose you want to boil yourself a perfect egg, the kind in which the white is hard and the golden centre still fluid like a medium-consistency honey. You are alone in the kitchen, there is no clock, you have lost the egg-timer, and your watch has stopped. How can you time the egg exactly?
One answer is that you could put a record of Mozart’s overture to The Marriage of Figaro on the record-player. The overture lasts four minutes. At its conclusion, remove your egg from the pan and it will be done to perfection.
We recognize that this useful culinary tip has nothing to do with music. It is a misapplication. It is using Mozart as a utility; we are amused by the inappropriateness of the idea, or perhaps we think it is vaguely immoral.
Literature is a bit different from music, and maybe science fiction is a bit different from literature. For science fiction authors, among them some of the best known, like to claim practical applications for their fiction. Not that their fiction boils eggs—although of course there is a fortune awaiting a man who writes the story which will boil the first four-minute egg—but, less modestly, that it changes opinions, that it turns them into scientists, or even that it helps Man on his Way to the Stars.
Other authors would claim the opposite, that their fiction can have no justification unless it succeeds as fiction. This would seem to them glory enough. In imaginative literature and in poetry, the human spirit has risen to some of its greatest heights. To turn fiction into propaganda is to demean it.
The two opposed views can best be exemplified by a juxtaposition Mark Adlard made (in an article entitled ‘The Other Tradition of Science Fiction’) of statements by Isaac Asimov and C. S. Lewis. In a film he made about the history of magazine SF, Asimov says in essence that the SF of the 1940s (when Asimov’s SF was in full spate) became the fact of the 1960s. He went on to imply that when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon it justified the work done by Campbell’s stable of writers in Astounding (see Decade 1940s).
In Of Other Worlds (1966), Lewis by contrast has this to say: ‘If some fatal process of applied science enables us in fact to reach the moon, that real journey will not at all satisfy the impulse which we now seek to gratify by writing such stories’.
The argument about the role of SF is highly germane to the sixties. It was a period of tremendous popular intellectual ferment, when everything was called into question. The great issues of the day found SF writers divided, whether on Vietnam, on the Space Race, on Marxism, on drugs, or on race. The question of one’s life-style became crucially important; beards were political.
It was a highly political decade, starting promisingly with a glamorous president in the White House and the dandyish Macmillan in 10 Downing Street, and continuing with ominous vibrati from all over the world. The two great communist countries, China and the Soviet Union (with its luckless satellites), turned their arts from aesthetic purposes to expressions of political intention, and many people in the West were prepared to do the same thing. But there is a gulf of difference between personal belief and state-imposed belief; certainly SF authors, whose very material has of necessity economic and political implications, often forsook aesthetic goals for the causes in which they believed. The Third World lay uneasy on their consciences. In the United States, despite its racial upheavals, some people found time to wonder at the justice which permitted a small number of people to consume something like ninety per cent of the world’s resources. There was reason to think of SF as ammunition in a global battle.
As change was inevitable in the world at large, so it was inevitable in the realm of SF. Each decade shows a changing pattern, although the basic arts of story-telling are perennial and less susceptible to alteration than readers may imagine. The forties was Campbell’s and Astounding’s decade. The fifties saw the great change in taste which brought in Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, with emphasis on sociology and human values. The sixties re-emphasized this swing; in addition, it was the decade in which space travel and the future became less of an overriding concern.
The point needs some examination. Before the first Sputnik sailed up into the skies of the fifties, magazine SF seemed at times to have turned itself into a propaganda machine for space travel. Wernher von Braun was one of the heroes of this machine, as he laid before Congress and the general public grandiose plans for a fleet of ships to annex Mars. Yet, according to the mythology, sales of SF magazines declined with the launching of the first satellites. If this is what really happened, it justifies C. S. Lewis’s dictum and provides an argument for SF as an imaginative literature, SF as reverie rather than prophecy; its proper subject is the things that may be, not the things that will be.
Many of the older SF writers held as an article of faith the belief that space travel was possible. When the possibility became actuality, a sense of déjà vu set in. And more than that. In the context of the times, aspirations foundered. The multi-million-dollar and -rouble programmes aimed at getting men into space contrasted gratingly with the mess they left behind on Earth. Arguments were sometimes short-sighted on either side. The ‘space race’ eased an emergence from the Cold War which had dominated the fifties, as well as proving a tremendous and undeniable success in its own right, a technological miracle on a scale we may not witness again for many years.
And yet … Had the natural aggressiveness of mankind merely stumbled on a new arena for its working-out? Commenting on man’s arrival on Luna, J. G. Ballard said, ‘If I were a Martian, I’d start running now’.
The tremendous process of which journeys to the Moon are part has by no means unfolded fully. And yet … Propaganda apart, the brilliance of the success served to emphasize to one half of the world how grandiosely the other half lived.
Disenchantment or curiosity made many writers look away from space and the future to the world about them. There was plenty to explore, from computers to over-population, from injustice to the Pill, from heart-transplants to emergent nations. The sixties was the decade in which SF discovered the Present. It is no coincidence that it was also the decade in which the general reading public discovered SF.
A few milestones are in order.
In 1961, Kingsley Amis’s survey of SF, New Maps of Hell, was published in England. It had been condemned in some quarters; Amis wrote lightly and amusingly about a subject on which he felt deeply, and some people understand only the ponderous. But New Maps remains a shrewd, reliable guide to what it’s all about, and certainly paved the way to more general acceptance of the genre. Amis emphasizes the satiric aspects of SF at the expense of the fantastic side; there he was merely being prophetic. As this anthology shows, the decade following his book relied heavily on forms of satire—including satires on prose styles.
Within forty-eight hours of the death of President Kennedy in 1963, two writers died whose names, for all their other achievements, are still closely associated with the upper pastures of the science fiction field: Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) has long ranked as SF; so does the neglected but equally penetrating Ape and Essence (1948); while his last novel, Island (1962), is a remarkable utopian novel which repays careful attention. Lewis, a connoisseur of romances and science fiction, wrote the beautiful trilogy which begins with Out of the Silent Planet (1938).
In 1965, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien’s great trilogy The Lord of the Rings was published in paperback; it went on to become the cult book of the sixties. While not in itself SF,
its enormous success has directed attention towards the enchantments of alternate worlds to ours. During a period when SF was expanding and becoming increasingly departmentalized, the Tolkien syndrome encouraged alternate-worldery, so that alternate worlds have increasingly become a part of SF. Other cult books included Frank Herbert’s Dune, which began life as a serial in Analog and won the first Nebula Award for the best novel of 1965, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (Hugo award-winner 1962), a campus favourite for some years. Other award-winners of the decade included Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon (Nebula, 1966), Samuel Delany’s The Einstein Intersection (Nebula, 1967), Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (Nebula, 1969), Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (Hugo, 1961), Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (Hugo, 1963), Fritz Leiber’s The Wanderer (Hugo, 1965), Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (Hugo, 1968) and John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (Hugo, 1969).
One interesting thing about this list is that few of the award-winners can be classified as adventure or action novels. Their equivalents only a decade earlier would have been so classifiable. After all, magazine SF largely grew out of men’s adventure fiction. In the sixties, a more meditative mood set in.
Another milestone of the decade was the Stanley Kubrick-Arthur C. Clarke film, 2001: a Space Odyssey, which had its European première in May 1968. Significantly, it is cast as an adventure, but it concludes with a psychedelic trip followed by meditation.
Another comparatively new feature of SF was that it began to stand outside itself and look at itself. ‘Heat Death of the Universe’ is not so much traditional SF as a story which takes SF for granted and uses its vocabulary. Among the great successes of the decade are two novels by my collaborator on this series, Harry Harrison. Both his Bill, the Galactic Hero and The Technicolor Time Machine make ingenious fun of all the clichés of the genre—the former with particular reference to the novels of Heinlein and Asimov.
It was hardly to be expected that changes which infiltrated every facet of life should not have their effect on the way the writers wrote as well as what they wrote about. The mood became dispassionate, hard-hearted at least on the surface. To be ‘cool’ was the height of fashion.
In the mid-sixties, London was the height of fashion. For a few years—which now seems as remote as the Ming Dynasty—London was the place where culture lived and thrived as it had done in Paris in the twenties. An electricity was generated. We all felt it. The time and the place acquired a label which was instantly mocked: Swinging London. But the phenomenon needed a label, however absurd.
Behind the ballyhoo, the hippies, the Flower Power, and the youth cult, many dark things lurked. Writers have always been abnormally aware of dark things. They did not forget them as they made hay with the rest while the sun shone.
This go-where-you-please, do-your-own-thing, turn-on-freak-out mood found particular embodiment in the pages of a British SF magazine, New Worlds.
New Worlds was the oldest-established British magazine. Under its editor E. J. Carnell it had achieved regular publication and modest success but, as the sixties dawned, its sales were dwindling and illness afflicted the dedicated Ted Carnell. Also, it must be said, its formula was growing somewhat threadbare. Although most of its fiction was by British writers, many of them copied American models of some vintage and assumed a Transatlantic tone of voice. Not infrequently, the stories were rejects from the more profitable American market.
It seemed as if only a miracle could save New Worlds and its companion Science Fantasy, also edited by Carnell. He handed over editorships to Michael Moorcock and Kyril Bonfiglioli respectively. Moorcock had already made a name for himself as a writer of fantasy and his hero Elric was well established, although not taken too seriously (least of all by the genial Moorcock himself). Kyril Bonfiglioli was a hitherto semi-respectable antiquarian-book-and art-dealer and bon viveur residing in Oxford.
Bonfiglioli was an important influence in the life of several new authors, among them Johnny Byrne, who went on to write Groupie with Jenny Fabian (a real sixties-flavour book) and to work on the TV series Space 1999; Thom Keyes, who went on to write One Night Stand, which was filmed; and Keith Roberts, who became editor of Science Fantasy when Bonfiglioli changed the name to SF Impulse, and did much of the excellent artwork as well as contributing stories. The best known of these stories were those which formed the novel Pavanne; in that book and others since, Roberts has shown himself master of the alternate-world story, pitching his tone deliberately in a minor key. He is represented by ‘Manscarer’, a story of artists in an over-populated world, which was first published in New Writings in Science Fiction, the paperback magazine started by Carnell when he left New Worlds; NW in SF still continues, with even greater success, edited by Kenneth Bulmer who, like Carnell before him, has shown himself generous, reliable and discerning.
SF Impulse faded out, but New Worlds went from strength to strength. Aided by a dedicated editorial team, including such lively men as Charles Platt, Mike Moorcock kicked out the old gang and installed the new. Galactic wars went out; drugs came in; there were fewer encounters with aliens, more in the bedroom. Experimentation in prose styles became one of the orders of the day, and the baleful influence of William Burroughs often threatened to gain the upper hand.
The revolution was inevitable. The bathwater had become so stale that it was scarcely to be avoided if the baby sometimes went out with it. When an Arts Council grant was secured for New Worlds and it became glossy and filled with illustrations, it was the only SF magazine in the mid-sixties which looked as if it belonged to the mid-sixties. All the others seemed like fossils. Life was where New Worlds was.
Of course, individual issues were often disappointing. But the ritual of a magazine, its layout, its expectations, its continuity, its hazardous pact with readers and authors, elevates it to a sort of protolanguage which speaks as strongly as its actual fiction content. The ritual suggested that the future had arrived with a flutter of colour supplements and mini-skirts and was securely nailed to New Worlds’ editorial desk. The rather twitchy hedonism of New Worlds had no need to look ahead, and the galaxy began in Ladbroke Grove.
In the decidedly more sombre mood of the seventies, all this may sound silly. Naturally, it was easy to hate New Worlds, which often opted for trendiness rather than depth—though trendiness in those days was almost a philosophy in itself. But the feeling that the future has happened is not as perverse as it seems. Our Western culture has in many ways fulfilled the targets established in the early Renaissance: to take control of our world through observation and understanding and application. Enormous benefits have accrued to us. The life of the average man in the West, as regards both his physical and his mental horizons, has been much enhanced by the impetus of that aspiration. Now the bills for our astonishing performance, centuries long, are coming in. We see that progress and pollution, medical discoveries and over-population, technical development and nuclear escalation, improved communications and terrorism, social care and public apathy are sides of the same coin. Further advances are increasingly hard-won; moreover, the Oil Crisis in the early seventies rang like a tocsin through the West, reminding its citizens that the hour grew late and Toynbee’s Civilization Number Twenty-Two was losing autonomy. Our alternatives grow fewer. New Worlds was the first SF magazine in the world to abandon the idea that technological progress could be extrapolated for ever; as such, it may be honoured for having been truly prodromic.
Hardly surprising, then, that it often radiated a hard shiny surface of scepticism, the cool of slight desperation. Boiling eggs to Mozart—the whole comedy of misapplication—was New Worlds’ thing. The dominant figure here was J. G. Ballard, with his postlapsarian guilts and a genuine power to embody the landscapes of subtopia in skeletal fiction. It is possible that New Worlds ultimately damaged Ballard’s development by overlauding the sadistic side of his work; but he is and remains a genuine original and an acute observer. Ballard threw away the old pack of cards. His new ones may not be to everyone’s taste, but they are his own. He has the courage of his convictions, and his best stories remain the best. If he often seems to use other authors as models—Jarry, as in the piece we anthologize here, Kafka, Greene, Conrad, Burroughs—the benefit of a post-Renaissance period is that we are heirs to all styles, and Ballard moulds each to his own purpose.
Moorcock rightly seized upon Ballard, but also forged his own fictional hero, Jerry Cornelius. Cornelius is in fact neither hero nor anti-hero, but a sort of myth of the times. He can be male or female, white or black. Moorcock encouraged this ambiguous aspect by persuading other writers to chronicle the adventures of Cornelius; is Norman Spinrad’s Jerry, in the typically cool and comic account of the ‘The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde’.
Spinrad was one of a number of American writers who found the English cultural climate more congenial than the American one. His chief contribution to New Worlds was Bug Jack Barron, serialized at inordinate length; its use of four-letter words, together with a modicum of sexual intercourse, oral sex and other pleasures, led to a banning of New Worlds by W. H. Smith and the denunciation of Spinrad in Parliament as a degenerate—the sort of accolade most writers long for. Barron is a powerful novel about the role of television and government, powerfully over-written.
Among other expatriates who drifted through was Thomas M. Disch, a distinguished writer whose stories move easily between being flesh, fowl, and good red herring. Disch’s greatest contribution to New Worlds was the novel Camp Concentration. A friend of his, John Sladek, settled in London, and has become one of SF’s leading comedians and parodists. Pamela Zoline, primarily an artist, also came over and settled here.
Among the English authors encouraged by Moorcock were Langdon Jones, Hilary Bailey, David Masson, Robert Holdstock and Ian Watson. Moorcock has gone on to greater things and is a legend in his own time. With the maverick New Worlds, he brought British SF kicking and screaming into the twentieth century.
News of the English revolution percolated back to the United States, where it had imitators who seem mainly to have thought the issue rested on writing as wildly and fuzzily as possible. But the times they were a-changing rapidly in the States as elsewhere, and many authors emerged with genuine fresh approaches to experience. One of them was Harvey Jacobs. Comic writers are always welcome in a field which frequently inclines to the ponderous; but Jacobs found he was most welcome by Mike Moorcock. Among the other new names were Will Worthington, who showed, like Disch, some kinship with the Theatre of the Absurd; he came and went all too fast, but shall be remembered by his excellent story, first published by Ted Carnell, ‘The Food Goes in the Top’.
Roger Zelazny came and stayed. A genuine baroque talent, often too much in love with the esoteric, but shining forth clearly with ‘Devil Car’. His story is a persuasive embodiment of the sixties’ passion for the automobile.
Keith Laumer rose to great popularity in the sixties, when his name was associated with Retief, his hero whose military adventures had a satiric edge.
The other authors include Kurt Vonnegut, Jr, Gordon R. Dickson, Philip K. Dick, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg and Mack Reynolds—distinguished names all, and old hands at SF. All manifest the spirit of the sixties in one form or another—Reynolds in his enquiry into capitalist economics, Vonnegut in his satire on equality, Pohl in his sparky creation of Day Million, Dickson in his preoccupation with the blindness of computers. Silverberg re-creates the past, the far past. Dick does his own thing on the Dickian subject of reality. Reality trembled in the sixties. As many of us discovered, when things settled back into place again and the music died, life ceased to be quite so much fun.
B.W.A.
1. Although the jacket of the first hardcover edition in 1954 quoted the perceptive Naomi Mitchison as saying. ‘It’s really super science fiction’.
BETWEEN PRIVY AND UNIVERSE (#ulink_70d556d4-1bd1-53e7-b7fb-89ccd048a85d)
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) (#ulink_ac92e993-5b43-5dc5-9abe-7386e8cc33af)
The ambition of the literary artist is to speak about the ineffable, to communicate in words what words were never intended to convey … In spite of ‘all the pens that ever poets held’—yes, and in spite of all the scientists’ electron microscopes, cyclotrons, and computers—the rest is silence, the rest is always silence.
Thus claimed Aldous Huxley, in a small book entitled Literature and Science, published in the year he died, 1963. The silence needed many millions of words in explanation. Even on his death-bed, Huxley was busy explaining Shakespeare, ‘a human being who could do practically anything’. In Literature and Science, he is busy making connections, and in this case entering the debate between Snow and Leavis on ‘The Two Cultures’. As ever, Huxley builds bridges. ‘The precondition’, he tells us, ‘of any fruitful relationship between literature and science is knowledge.’
Which is all very well, but few of us set out in life with such cultural advantages as Huxley. He was the grandson on his father’s side of the great Thomas Henry Huxley, while his mother was the grand-daughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby, niece of Matthew Arnold, and sister to Mrs Humphrey Ward, the novelist. Aldous grew up in a house full of books and the intelligent conversations which spring from (and into) books: where knowledge is as routine as good meals.
This privileged English existence, with its Eton and Balliol background, was to end on the coast of California, fading out in gurudom, on an LSD injection. The pop group ‘The Doors’ named themselves after Huxley’s short work, The Doors of Perception, advocating use of mescalin.
Here lie mysterious connections between the world of experience and the world of conjecture and speculation. Huxley took his title—he was always brilliant at fishing for titles—from William Blake:
If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything will appear to man as it is, infinite.
Yet in the text, he makes reference to a different kind of writer, when speaking of our longing to transcend ourselves: ‘Art and religion, carnivals and saturnalia, dancing and listening to oratory—all these have served, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, as Doors in the Wall.’ The reference is to one of Wells’s most poignant short stories. So, via the pop group, the expression passed into popular life, and into the drug culture of the sixties.
Alas, behind the doors of Haight-Ashbury, the broken dreams and dead babies piled up. Even the Flower Children were only human. Transcendence is hard work, as Huxley himself was aware. He says, ‘To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness—to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning.’
Behind this modest but complex statement, compassionate yet uncompromising, lies an extraordinary trajectory of a twentieth-century life, the long trek from Eton to the Mojave, prompted in part by that fearless curiosity which Christopher Isherwood called ‘one of Aldous’s noblest characteristics’.
Curiosity spells diversity. The diversity of Huxley’s life is echoed in his writings. These engage readers of many kinds, since even the novels, for which he was most renowned, touch upon religion, science, politics, literature, art, music, psychology, utopianism, and—to use the title of one of his most remarkable books—the human situation. Through them all flow Huxley’s wit and his adroit use of language. Huxley’s early distaste for bodily functions, in his Bright Young Thing phase, develops into a passion for mysticism. Henry Wimbush’s comic discourse on sixteenth-century privies in Crome Yellow (‘the necessities of nature are so base and brutish that in obeying them we are apt to forget that we are the noblest creatures of the universe’) later becomes a preoccupation with enlightenment, and with the hazardous position between privy and universe which we occupy.
Thousands of individuals have had their spirit of enquiry sharpened by Huxley’s cultured tour of ‘the ineffable’.
His preoccupation took many forms. Advice on how to see, for instance, in Huxley’s little valuable book, The Art of Seeing, in which one notes a typical observation concerning the eye: ‘its peculiarly intimate relationship with the psyche’ … For Huxley, all things connected.
Concern with quality of life, and with any new thing which might conceivably alleviate the human condition, pointed a way to the future, from hydroponics to Scientology. Like a true Californian, Huxley embraced many crank cults in his time. (In her biography of Huxley, Sybille Bedford relates how L. Ron Hubbard and his wife, ‘stiff and polite’, went to dinner with the Huxleys. They presented the Huxleys with two pounds of chocolates.) So—discounting the marvellous cruel joke of After Many a Summer, with its speculations on evolutionary longevity—Huxley’s three utopian novels appear.
None was received with great understanding by a literary world partial to country houses, stories of the wealthy, large doses of characterization, and even larger doses of nostalgia. Such is the fate of novels of ideas, at least in England.
The utopian trilogy consists of Ape and Essence, reviled on its appearance in 1946, perhaps because Huxley does not treat the human species with the respect it believes it deserves; Island, his last novel (1963); and Brave New World (1932), Huxley’s most famous work. Huxley was a connoisseur, some might say victim, of unconventional ideas. Brave New World shows us what happens when mass production is applied to biology. Promiscuous sex helps preserve immaturity; immaturity reinforces superficiality. ‘When the individual feels, the community reels.’ Drugs keep everyone happy. The workers get four half-gramme tablets of soma every day after work. It can readily be seen why thousands have longed to live in such a utopia, from which Huxley himself would have recoiled, at least in part. The privy may not be abolished, but at least the universe is obscured.
In Ape and Essence, the theme of sexual promiscuity is reintroduced. Nuclear bombs have fallen on LA. What remains of mankind has reverted to savagery. Womankind has reverted, apelike, to oestrus. For religion, a kind of perverted bogomilism is practised. The Narrator (the novel takes the form of a film script) says, ‘Thanks to the supreme Triumph of Modern Science, sex has become seasonal, romance has been swallowed up by the oestrus, and the female’s chemical compulsion to mate has abolished courtship, chivalry, tenderness, love itself’.
In this respect, Ape and Essence is an extension of the evolutionary idea, so splendidly defended by T. H., Aldous Huxley’s grandfather, parodied in After Many a Summer. There, down in the cellarage of his castle, the Fifth Earl enjoys near immortality, coupling perpetually with his housekeeper. But the foetal ape has had time to mature. The universe has disappeared; only the privy remains …
