Vintage Reading (15 page)

A small glass vase, for instance, contained three flowers which, under the influence of the drug, fairly popped out at him with primeval life. “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.” It was Plato, who had confused original Being with the abstraction of Idea, laments Huxley. He “could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light.”

These intense perceptual experiences lead Huxley to embrace the notion advanced by the French philosopher Bergson, among others—and by no means at odds with scientific thinking today—that the brain functions as a filter,
sieving out excessive and confusing sensory stimuli that would otherwise overwhelm the organism. Under mescaline, he suggests, this nervous system filter is lacking—letting the world rush in with unchecked force.

Just as it rushes, uncontrollably, into the consciousness of the schizophrenic: At one point, Huxley observed strong shadows cast across a garden chair. “That chair—shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but flowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire ... It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. And suddenly I had an inkling of what it must feel like to be mad.”

“So you think you know where madness lies?” Asks the scientific investigator at whose suggestion Huxley had tried the drug. He replies, unhesitatingly, “Yes.”

Compared to the onrush of sensory color he encounters with mescaline, everyday reality seems grey indeed. Even as glimpsed by artists. Huxley opens a volume of Van Gogh reproductions of “The Chair.” (Would a Van Gogh original, one wonders, have been different?) Under the influence of the drug, it seems to him a flop. “Though incomparably more real than the chairs of ordinary perception, the chair in his picture remained no more than an unusually expressive symbol of the fact.” The artist had failed to communicate the sheer reality of the chair.

Which leads Huxley to ruminations on Cezanne, Botticelli, Vermeer, the significance of drapery in painting, the ties between Zen and Chinese landscape art ...

Aldous Huxley experimented with mescaline ten years before the world had ever heard of LSD or Timothy Leary. He was, at the time, sixty years old, a distinguished man of letters. Indeed, his slim book became a minor classic which, during the subsequent decade, many chose to read as apologia for the drug revolution then raging.

But one need not accept the values of that revolution to read with unflagging interest what this immensely perceptive man, and first class writer, had to say about one afternoon’s experience.

____________

By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
First published in 1809

A middle-aged married man falls in love with a young girl. His wife is irresistibly drawn to her husband’s boyhood chum. Fireworks ensue.

The scene is a lush estate in the German countryside during the time of Napoleon. The man is Eduard, pampered and self-indulgent. His friend is known simply as The Captain. Eduard’s wife, Charlotte, is a woman of refined intelligence and uncommon good sense. The object of his infatuation is Ottilie, a quiet, ascetic child who attends the same boarding school as Charlotte’s daughter from a previous marriage. Ottilie is all silent mystery, giving what could be a soap opera of a story its haunting power.

As a title,
Elective Affinities
risks reinforcing the stereotype of Germanic abstraction and pedantry. Goethe himself admitted it was strange. The reference, made clear in an early chapter, is to how each chemical substance exhibits its own affinity for other substances, showing up as a greater or lesser tendency to combine or react with them. Thus, as one character explains, the two great classes of compounds known as the acids and alkalis, though ‘mutually antithetical, and perhaps precisely because they are so, most decidedly seek and embrace one another, modify one another, and together form a new substance.’

Lest it be lost that all this may refer to more than chemistry, Charlotte observes, in a foreshadowing of the rest of the story, that the combining substances “possess not so much an affinity of blood as an affinity of mind and soul. It is in just this way that truly meaningful friendships can arise among human beings: for antithetical qualities make possible a closer and
more intimate union.”

This novel, almost two centuries old, smacks not at all of musty age; its freedom of content and form makes it seems thoroughly modern. Sometimes, in mid-paragraph, the past tense abruptly gives way to the present: “Eduard returns and learns what has happened, he rushes into the room, he throws himself down beside her, clasps her hand and bathes it with silent tears ...” The sense is that of stage directions, of critical intellect suspended, leaving only bare action. At other times, an otherwise straightforward account yields to diary entries, letters, even to a brief story-within-a-story reminiscent of those of Doris Lessing in
The Golden Notebook
.

Goethe’s world of the German gentry is vastly freer in matters of sex and marriage than anything we associate with the equivalent time in America, which corresponded to Thomas Jefferson’s presidency. Divorce was common, unsanctified liaisons not unknown; for 18 years, Goethe himself “lived together,” as we say today, with a younger woman and had five children by her, before marrying her at the age of 57. Then, two years later, he fell in love with an 18-year-old. The ensuing turmoil provided the material for
Elective Affinities.

In it, the principal characters freely discuss serial marriage. Sexual tension runs at high fever throughout. And a partner-swapping scheme involving divorce and remarriage is the aim of most of the principal players.

In one respect, though, the novel reveals anything but modern sensibilities. Goethe confines his attention to the mansion on the hill and its aristocratic denizens, consigning the hundreds huddled in the town below to obscurity. Inn owners occasionally appear, and servants, and nameless physicians. And for comic relief so does the unforgettable Mittler, who serves as professional mediator, family therapist, and general busybody, quick to intrude at the first sign of domestic trouble. But all these function as so many worker ants, there to satisfy the everyday needs and passing fancies of the gentry. Meanwhile, Charlotte, Eduard and the others celebrate birthdays, indulge their passions, comment intelligently on matters of the heart and the mind, or debate the landscaping merits of one path up the mountain versus another.

Goethe, author of
Faust
and German literature’s surest claimant to the mantle of genius, is no spinner of light romances.
Elective Affinities
is a story of both lust and love, of passions silly and grand, of suffering self-indulgent and noble. But for all its echoes of
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
, it is not apt to be picked up, consumed greedily, and forgotten.

____________

By George Orwell
First published in 1938

In December 1936, more than 10 years before he was to write
Nineteen Eighty-Four
, George Orwell went to Spain to report on the civil war between Republican loyalists and insurgent Fascist generals led by Francisco Franco.

This was no ordinary civil war. Spain’s popularly elected leftist government drew arms and support from Soviet Russia, while Mussolini and Hitler supplied the Fascists. The war gripped the attention of the world. It excited grand passions. It was impossible to be neutral about it.

Orwell—his real name was Eric Blair—came under Spain’s spell. Stirred by the heady egalitarian spirit of revolutionary Barcelona, the principal city of the region known as Catalonia, he enlisted in a militia unit linked to a Trotskyist political party. For three months he fought in the trenches of the Aragon front. Then he returned to Barcelona, where he witnessed an outbreak of internecine street violence between contending leftist groups. Back at the front, he was shot in the neck by a sniper, the bullet hitting a vocal cord; his doctors assured him he’d never speak again.

Soon after, when the Communists suppressed the Trotskyists on the pretext that they were consorting with the Fascists—a ridiculous charge— Orwell, fearing arrest, fled across the French border and thence to England. In London, he wrote, were “the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”

On his return, with the outcome of the war still in doubt, Orwell wrote about what he’d seen in a plain, forthright style almost wholly free of
sentimentalism and cant:
Homage to Catalonia
, one critic has written, is “perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War.” Wrote another, Lionel Trilling, “This book is one of the important documents of our time.”

Though permeated by the mud, lice, boredom, and fatigue of front line combat,
Homage to Catalonia
is no antiwar tract. As horrifying as the war was, Orwell did not regard it as meaningless. He had signed up to help save Spain from Franco. He knew there was plenty of killing to be done. He was not a pacifist. At one point, he writes of a “trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do.” The sight revived in him, he wrote, “that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.”

Orwell’s chronicle is redolent of his fondness for the Spanish people, “with their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist tinge” (even as he missed good, sturdy English justice); just a hint of travelogue here, overlays the gritty combat narrative.

But what almost compels a reading of Orwell’s book today is his incisive account of the infighting that racked the loyalist Left even as it waged war on the Right. Here, Orwell and his time resonate with us and ours. For in dissecting the Communist subjugation of the other loyalist parties, he exposes a recurrent and troubling axiom of modern political life: The more tender and progressive the ideals professed, the more they’re apt to cover up cruelty, ruthlessness and lies. It’s a theme he further developed in
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. It can scarcely bear too much repeating today.

Yet Orwell was himself an idealist. He had “breathed the air of equality,” he wrote. “The Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society ... where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking ... It deeply attracted me.”

But above all, Orwell was honest: He showed it was possible to hold passionate convictions—and even be ready to kill or be killed for them—without ever letting them cloud his clear vision or inhibit his telling of what was true.

____________

By Sigmund Freud
First published in 1930

Freud has taken his lumps of late. Sleep lab data may supply a better way to understand dreams, many now suspect, than do his notions of wishfulfillment and repression. Discoveries in brain chemistry give his theories of neurosis, once revolutionary, a musty, shopworn air.

Still, there were good reasons Freud enjoyed intellectual popularity for so long, and they owe as much to the sheer force of his personality, and the eloquence with which he expressed it in print, as to the validity of his theories. We see an example of this in
Civilization and Its Discontents
, one of Freud’s last works, published in 1930.

Men and women stand in continual tension with society, Freud wrote. We may wish to act on our instinctual sex drive unhindered, yet family, society and personal conscience restrain us. We may wish to string up our enemies from the nearest tree, but the force of law and the opinion of our fellows stops us. Civilization cramps our style, and so stirs in us a malaise. We each deal with this conflict differently, adopting one or another strategy for reconciling personal needs with the dictates of society. Invariably, there’s a price to pay, often in the form of neurosis.

Therein lies the essence of this slim book. But its rewards lie less in its ideas than in the opportunity it furnishes to brush up against the author’s formidable personality. Freud is all force, his words brimming with confidence and authority. There are few appeals to case histories or scientific studies here, no mind-numbing recitation of bibliographic sources.

“What we call happiness,” he declares, “comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been damned up to a high degree,
and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”

We are so made
... as if he were privy to the blueprints!

The whole book is written that way. When Freud does deign to hedge his bets, you notice it—as when he suggests a link between family structure and the weak role of smell, among humans, in sexual excitement: “This,” he admits, “is only a theoretical speculation.” (Of course, he adds immediately, it’s “important enough to deserve careful checking.”)

But this hint of humility startles by its rarity. More often, we feel in the presence of an all-wise father, uttering truths culled from infinite human experience, and from the orbit of whose intellect wrest oneself: “An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one’s life,” Freud declares, “but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.”

Sometimes, his counsel sounds like that of an Eastern guru: “All suffering is nothing else than sensation it only exists in so far as we feel it.”