The Meaning of Recognition (40 page)

Against the odds posed by his comparative indigence and absolute injury, Huxley had managed to give himself a magnificent preliminary education. But somehow it had to be turned to account, or he
would have lived out his life as a schoolteacher whose pupils could guy him behind his back to his face. The option of enlisting as an officer and joining the bulk of his generation in the
graveyards of the Great War had been providentially removed by his affliction. Instead, his front line was Garsington, the country house where Lady Ottoline Morrell assembled around her the most
glittering cenacle of the time: Bertrand Russell met T. S. Eliot’s wife there, with the usual results, and D. H. Lawrence was present to study the hyper-cultivated
haute bourgeoisie
that he would later despise in print for having presumed to tolerate his rebellious nature. Eyeless in Garsington, Huxley orated to the gathering because he was unable to read faces well enough to
pursue an ordinary conversation. Erratically enthusiastic even in her first youth, Ottoline was often made fun of in retrospect, and especially by the writers she fed for free. Huxley was not
guiltless in that regard. Though his adult life was marked by his personal kindness, he made a cruel caricature of her as Priscilla Wimbush in
Crome Yellow
.

In its form a throwback to the novels of Thomas Love Peacock,
Crome Yellow
teems with bright people making speeches, which often clog the action. When they make speeches, they tend to
quote other speeches. Even the few dullards, wheeled in for purposes of contrast, are weighed down with learning. Take the journalist Mr Barbecue-Smith, allegedly the author of platitudinous
bestsellers peddling spiritual uplift. Huxley introduces him thus:

Mr Barbecue-Smith should have been a perfect oaf, but Huxley could not resist making him an oaf who had read Balzac. So the range of reference deployed by Mr Scogan, the accredited philosopher,
can be imagined. Or rather it can’t. One of his speeches goes on almost uninterrupted for two and a half pages, bringing in a large part of the history of civilization since the Renaissance
as he forecasts the rationally ordered future. (‘In the upbringing of the Herd, humanity’s almost boundless suggestibility will be scientifically exploited . . .’) Pursuing an
idea, the characters come to a standstill and spout, like the fountains in the garden. From our viewpoint they would do better to pursue their passions. Luckily Priscilla pursues hers: the New
Thought, the Occult – for her these things are objects of desire, tantalizingly retreating before her down the corridors of her own house, out of the French windows and into the ha-ha.
Weirdly got up and tireless in her extravagance, she made the book a hit. Everybody loved it except Ottoline. Murray points out that Huxley apologized when she bridled, but goes light on the sad
fact that he betrayed her all over again when he sent Lilian Aldwinkle heavily emoting through the pages of
Those Barren Leaves
. As the chatelaine of the Cybo Malaspina, a Garsington
transferred to Italy, Lilian has all of Priscilla’s mad passions plus one: she is a menopausal maneater aching to blend with just one more genius. Ottoline’s loopy but boundless
enthusiasm for the arts was too much fun to go unspoofed. Huxley couldn’t leave it alone. In politeness, he should have. Luckily inspiration won the day. If all the other characters had been
given the free rein he gave Lilian,
Those Barren Leaves
would never have ceased to be required reading. Alas, the book’s leading man is a typical Huxley hero: effortlessly
knowledgeable and seductive, he tires of all that and retreats to a hill-top to make long speeches about his quest for a higher form of Being. The speeches leave you longing for Lilian, who has
Ottoline’s lust for life along with her batso thirst for a fad. Ottoline might have been a bit much when bedtime loomed, but as a dinner-table hostess she was a genuine spotter of talent, and
Huxley’s talent was hard to miss anyway. The only question was about the form in which it would express itself. Those orations to the mesmerized company were the spoken rehearsals for his
written act. Professionally, he began as an essayist, and it could be said that forty years later he ended the same way. It was his natural form, and Garsington was an important stage in its first
flowering. He talked himself into it.

But the crucial event at Garsington came in the bewitching form of his future wife, Maria. Belgian, art-struck and delicately lovely, she had a crush on Ottoline but transferred it to Huxley. He
was a lucky man. His mother reborn, Maria became the key to his existence. Maria took care of everything. She typed his manuscripts, set up the houses, fended off the pests and vetted his
mistresses, generously employing her own charms to help him pull in the best qualified candidates. This biography features, for the first time in print, the story of the
ménage à
trois
between Huxley, Maria and the Bloomsbury siren who went to bed with both of them, Mary Hutchinson. (Make way for the movie that will do for Huxley’s back catalogue what
The
Hours
has done for Virginia Woolf’s.) Considering that Huxley spent so much time in later years talking about the necessity to civilize the sexual impulse, it is instructive to find out
that he himself civilized it by indulging it up to the hilt. In
Brave New World
, it will be remembered, the Alpha males of the ruling elite get their fill of the designated babes. It turns
out that Huxley wasn’t just dreaming.

The old, integrated European culture is generally thought to have been atomized by the Great War. But it had fallen apart only politically. Still the stamping ground of the artistically minded
elite, Europe had entered on yet another civilized phase. For English people with the means and tastes to get themselves to a villa and stay there, France and Italy were homes from home.
Effectively there were no borders for the enlightened. With Maria smoothing the way at the wheel of the new Bugatti, the successful young novelist Huxley was one of the star turns and recorders of
a movable feast: Garsington on wheels. It is easy to see how he was confirmed in the insidious idea that the cultivated elite should cherish its separation from the mass of humanity. Though later
on he softened the proclivity, he never quite lost his readiness to blame the
mobile vulgus
for multiplying at an indecent rate and thus threatening to queer the pitch for the patrician
order. (He even had the percentages worked out: 0.05 per cent were in the club, 99.5 per cent were outside the rope. Hands up if you know where you fit.) The best we can say for him is that he did
not fall for Fascism.

There were Fascists all around his Italian villas. Though he initially saw them as not much worse than a bad comic opera whose chorus was prone to fisticuffs, he finally concluded, and long
before the Nazis established their full grip on Germany, that a totalitarian solution to the anomalies of mass society was worse than the problem. Commendably, he spotted most of the horrors of the
Soviet regime straight away, even if he had no idea as yet that its own experiments in population-reduction would raise legitimate doubts about the supposedly ameliorative effects of that end. On
the subject of ends and means –
Ends and Means
, among his best collections of essays, was another of his resonant titles – he was always capable of questioning the means. His
weak point, however, was his failure to see that some of his favoured ends would inevitably bring questionable means into existence, and that the ends were themselves questionable for that
reason.

But the weak point was yet to become obvious. For the time, he looked good. He wasn’t the only one who thought that industrial society was turning out too many idiots (most of us still
think it when we are caught in a traffic jam) and he was on the side of the angels, or seemed so, in proclaiming that one of the greatest dangers the idiots posed was that they might elect
dictators. Not liking dictators qualified him as a progressive in a period when George Bernard Shaw saluted Hitler as an exemplar of creative energy and H. G. Wells nose-dived to the foot of
Stalin’s throne. As soon as 1928, in
Point Counter Point
, the crowning novel of his early success, Huxley had created a British proto-Fascist called Edward Webley. With a strident
rhetoric that would later be echoed by Sir Oswald Mosley (moving in the same high social circle, Huxley had spotted Mosley on the way up), Webley makes long speeches about planning. The long
speeches help to wreck what might have been a classic novel. An obvious victim of Huxley’s multi-book contract,
Point Counter Point
has at least two different false starts folded
into it (why leave them out when you can bodge them in to make up the bulk?) and many a promising conversation is padded out with the unlikely erudition that the author could shovel in so much more
speedily than he could invent plausible action and follow where it led. Most of the characters do more orating than real talking. In other words, they speak essays. But the essayist who speaks for
Huxley is not Webley. It is the brilliant (of course) writer Philip Quarles. ‘The problem for me is to transform detached intellectual scepticism into a way of harmonious all-round
living.’ Quarles is after the All. Webley is after power, and Huxley knew there was a difference.

Nevertheless Huxley followed prevalent fashion in assuming that the mass industrial societies would have to be organized somehow, and some form of elite would do the organizing. Beneath the
supposed satire of
Brave New World
there is a deep acceptance of this putative necessity.
Brave New World
was a sensation in 1932 and for long afterwards. When I first read it in
Sydney in the late 1950s, all the male students of my generation were running around calling themselves Alpha plus and deciding which of our female contemporaries was the most
‘pneumatic’, the book’s word for bedworthy. The book remains famous today, although it is probably now more referred to than read. When referred to, it is often supposed to be the
book that did a better job of forecasting the future – i.e. our present – than Orwell did when he published
Nineteen Eighty-Four
in 1948. When read,
Brave New World
rules that supposition out. Orwell wasn’t trying to forecast the future: he was trying, for the benefit of the West’s gullible progressive intellectuals, to demonstrate what the Soviet
Union was actually like to live in. Orwell’s vision never came true for the West: a turn of events, or non-events, for which we partly have him to thank. After Orwell’s book came out,
Huxley was fond of saying – he said it to Orwell himself – that he, Huxley, had come nearer to projecting the probable future. But
Brave New World
hasn’t happened either,
and there are good reasons for thinking that it never can.

*

In the book, the Alpha ruling elite controls the supply of sex and drugs, the reward by which they themselves are consoled in their task, and all the lower orders down to the
Epsilon semi-morons are kept in line. It hasn’t turned out that way. Bill Clinton, nominally the top man of the ruling elite, never controlled the supply of sex: indeed the supply of sex came
very near to controlling him. Drugs remain the enemy of the state, and not its friend. It might very well be true that a liberal democratic state would do better to make drugs legal, thus to pacify
the inevitable dissatisfactions in a society where glamour and success are free to exalt themselves. But the same society which allows the freedom for such anomalies would be unlikely to apply the
restrictions that would confine reproduction to approved genetic programming. Only a totalitarian society could line up the bottles. If Huxley was warning the world that even a free society might
be tempted into totalitarianism, he was doing something useful. The society of
Brave New World
includes an outcast reservation of Savages – they can be visited in their theme park by
helicopter – who suffer from love, pain and poetry as the human race once did before science came to its aid. Thus Huxley pays lip service to his humanist belief that creativity is too
important a hostage to be given over to an ideal of improvement. But he was scarcely likely to aid his humanist cause by assuming that the alternative to planning wrong was to plan right. Deep
under the book is the idea he had nursed from childhood and would never lose: one way or another an elite would have to be in charge.
Brave New World
doesn’t attack that idea. It
reinforces it, by leaving open the possibility that there might be a less flagrantly manipulative way for an authoritarian intelligentsia to determine the lives of the common people.

Huxley’s fondness for the idea of ‘intelligent and active oligarchies’ (the term popped up in an article for
Harper’s Magazine
called ‘The Outlook for
American Culture’) might have sprung from his shortage of sympathy for the 99.5 per cent. No doubt he backed Eugenics for the same reason. But his pacifism was something else: it indicated a
shortage of political nous. As a leading light of the Peace Pledge Union in the 1930s, he went public with his private notion that war would happen less often if more people could be persuaded to
dislike it. The persuasion would be done by the enlightened. Somewhere in the glowing bowl of this pipe-dream bubbled the notion that human mentality, or at any rate the elite’s share of it,
would need to be transformed by some kind of collective access to a higher form of existence. Just as he could never accept that a decent system of ethics would be more likely to arise in a school
for mentally handicapped children than amongst any intellectual elite no matter how attuned to the Transcendental, he could never accept that peace is not a principle, merely a desirable state of
affairs.