Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Philip put down the book and feeling in his breast pocket pulled out his pocket diary and his fountain-pen. ‘Female Angler-fishes,’ he wrote, ‘carry dwarf parasitic males attached to their bodies. Draw the obvious comparison, when my Walter rushes after his Lucy. What about a scene at an aquarium? They go in with a scientific friend who shows them the female Anglers and their husbands. The twilight, the fishes – perfect background.’ He was just putting his diary away, when another thought occurred to him. He re-opened it. ‘Make it the aquarium at Monaco and describe Monte Carlo and the whole Riviera in terms of deep-sea monstrosity.’ He lit a cigarette and went on with his book.
There was a rap at the door. He got up and opened; it was Elinor.
‘What an afternoon!’ She dropped into a chair.
‘Well, what news of Marjorie?’ he asked.
‘No news,’ she sighed, as she took off her hat. ‘The poor creature’s as dreary as ever. But I’m very sorry for her.’
‘What did you advise her to do?’
‘Nothing. What else could she do? And Walter?’ she asked in her turn. ‘Did you get a chance to be the heavy father?’
‘The middle-weight father, shall we say. I persuaded him to come down to Chamford with Marjorie.’
‘Did you? That was a real triumph.’
‘Not quite such a triumph as you think. I had no enemy to fight with. Lucy’s going to Paris next Saturday.’
‘Let’s hope she’ll stay there. Poor Walter!’
‘Yes, poor Walter. But I must tell you about Angler-fishes.’ He told her. ‘One of these days,’ he concluded, ‘I shall really have to write a modern Bestiary. Such moral lessons! But tell me, how was Everard? I quite forgot you’d seen him.’
‘You would have forgotten,’ she answered scornfully.
‘Would I? I don’t know why.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘I’m crushed,’ said Philip with a mock humility. There was a silence.
‘Everard’s in love with me,’ said Elinor at last without looking at her husband and in the flattest, most matter-of-fact of voices.
‘Is that news?’ asked Philip. ‘I thought he was an old admirer.’
‘But it’s serious,’ Elinor went on. ‘Very serious.’ She waited anxiously for his comment. It came, after a little pause.
‘That must be less amusing.’
Less amusing! Couldn’t he understand? After all, he wasn’t a fool. Or perhaps he did understand and was only pretending not to; perhaps he was secretly glad about Everard. Or was it just indifference that made him blind? Nobody understands what he does not feel. Philip couldn’t understand her because he didn’t feel as she felt. He was confident in the belief that other people were as reasonably lukewarm as he was himself. ‘But I like him,’ she said aloud in a last desperate attempt to provoke him into at least a semblance of caring. If only he’d show himself jealous, or sad, or angry, how happy she’d be, how grateful! ‘Very much,’ she went on. ‘There’s something very attractive about him. That passionateness of his, that violence …’
Philip laughed. ‘Quite the irresistible cave-man, in fact.’
Elinor rose with a little sigh, picked up her hat and bag, and bending over her husband’s chair, kissed him on the forehead, as though she were saying good-bye; then turned away and still without a word went upstairs to her bedroom.
Philip picked up his abandoned book. ‘Bonellia viridis,’ he read, ’is a green worm, not uncommon in the Mediterranean. The female has a body about the size of a prune, bearing a string-like, terminally bifid, very contractile proboscis, which may be two feet long. But the male is microscopic and lives in what may be called the reproductive duct (modified nephridium) of the female. It has no mouth and depends on what it absorbs parasitically through its ciliated surfaces …’
Philip once more put down the book. He was wondering whether he oughtn’t to go upstairs and say something to Elinor. He was sure she’d never really care for Everard. But perhaps he oughtn’t to take it so much for granted. She had seemed rather upset. Perhaps she had expected him to say something – how much he cared for her, how wretched he’d be, how angry, if she were to stop caring for him. But these precisely were the almost unsayable things. In the end he decided not to go upstairs. He’d wait and see, he’d put it off to another time. He went on reading about Bonellia viridis.
CHAPTER XXII
FROM PHILIP QUARLES’S Notebook
TO-DAY, AT LUCY Tantamount’s, I was the victim of a very odd association of ideas. Lucy, as usual, was the French tricolor; blue round the eyes, a scarlet mouth and the rest dead white against a background of shiny metal-black hair. I made some sort of a joke. She laughed, opening her mouth – and her tongue and gums were so much paler than the paint on her lips that they seemed (it gave me a queer creepy shock of astonished horror) quite bloodless and white by contrast. And then, without transition, I was standing in front of those sacred crocodiles in the palace gardens at Jaipur, and the Indian guide was throwing them bits of meat, and the inside of the animals’ mouths was almost white, as though the mouths were lined with a slightly glacé cream-coloured kid. And that’s how one’s mind naturally works. And one has intellectual pretensions! Well, well. But what a windfall for my novel! I shall begin the book with it. My Walterish hero makes his Lucyish siren laugh and immediately (to his horror; but he goes on longing for her, with an added touch of perversity, all the same and perhaps all the more) sees those disgusting crocodiles he had been looking at in India a month before. In this way I strike the note of strangeness and fantasticality at once. Everything’s incredible, if you can skin off the crust of obviousness our habits put on it. Every object and event contains within itself an infinity of depths within depths. Nothing’s in the least like what it seems – or rather it’s like several million other things at the same time. All India rushes like a cinema film through his head while she’s laughing and showing – she the beloved, longed-for, lusted-after, beautiful one – those gruesomely bloodless crocodile’s gums and palate.
The musicalization of fiction. Not in the symbolist way, by subordinating sense to sound. (Pleuvent les bleus baisers des astres taciturnes. Mere glossolalia.) But on a large scale, in the construction. Meditate on Beethoven. The changes of moods, the abrupt transitions. (Majesty alternating with a joke, for example, in the first movement of the B flat major quartet. Comedy suddenly hinting at prodigious and tragic solemnities in the scherzo of the C sharp minor quartet.) More interesting still the modulations, not merely from one key to another, but from mood to mood. A theme is stated, then developed, pushed out of shape, imperceptibly deformed, until, though still recognizably the same, it has become quite different. In sets of variations the process is carried a step further. Those incredible Diabelli variations, for example. The whole range of thought and feeling, yet all in organic relation to a ridiculous little waltz tune. Get this into a novel. How? The abrupt transitions are easy enough. All you need is a sufficiency of characters and parallel, contrapuntal plots. While Jones is murdering a wife, Smith is wheeling the perambulator in the park. You alternate the themes. More interesting, the modulations and variations are also more difficult. A novelist modulates by reduplicating situations and characters. He shows several people falling in love, or dying, or praying in different ways – dissimilars solving the same problem. Or, vice versa, similar people confronted with dissimilar problems. In this way you can modulate through all the aspects of your theme, you can write variations in any number of different moods. Another way: The novelist can assume the god-like creative privilege and simply elect to consider the events of the story in their various aspects – emotional, scientific, economic, religious, metaphysical, etc. He will modulate from one to the other – as from the aesthetic to the physico-chemical aspect of things, from the religious to the physiological or financial. But perhaps this is a too tyrannical imposition of the author’s will. Some people would think so. But need the author be so retiring? I thi
nk we’re a bit too squeamish about these personal appearances nowadays.
Put a novelist into the novel. He justifies aesthetic generalizations, which may be interesting – at least to me. He also justifies experiment. Specimens of his work may illustrate other possible or impossible ways of telling a story. And if you have him telling parts of the same story as you are, you can make a variation on the theme. But why draw the line at one novelist inside your novel? Why not a second inside his? And a third inside the novel of the second? And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there’s a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc. At about the tenth remove you might have a novelist telling your story in algebraic symbols or in terms of variations in blood-pressure, pulse, secretion of ductless glands and reaction times.
Novel of ideas. The character of each personage must be implied, as far as possible, in the ideas of which he is the mouthpiece. In so far as theories are rationalizations of sentiments, instincts, dispositions of soul, this is feasible. The chief defect of the novel of ideas is that you must write about people who have ideas to express – which excludes all but about .01 per cent of the human race. Hence the real, the congenital novelists don’t write such books. But then I never pretended to be a congenital novelist.
The great defect of the novel of ideas is that it’s a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run.
The instinct of acquisitiveness has more perverts, I believe, than the instinct of sex. At any rate, people seem to me odder about money than about even their amours. Such amazing meannesses as one’s always coming across, particularly among the rich! Such fantastic extravagances too. Both qualities; often, in the same person. And then the hoarders, the grubbers, the people who are entirely and almost unceasingly preoccupied with money. Nobody’s unceasingly preoccupied with sex in the same way – I suppose because there’s a physiological satisfaction possible in sexual matters, while there’s none where money’s concerned. When the body’s satiated, the mind stops thinking about food or women. But the hunger for money and possessions is an almost purely mental thing. There’s no physical satisfaction possible. That would account for the excesses and perversities of acquisitiveness. Our bodies almost compel the sexual instinct to behave in a normal fashion. Perversions must be violent before they overrule the normal physiological tendencies. But where acquisitiveness is concerned, there’s no regulating body, no lump of too too solid flesh to be pushed out of the grooves of physiological habit. The slightest tendency to perversion is at once made manifest. But perhaps the word ‘perversion’ is meaningless in this context. For perversion implies the existence of a norm from which it departs. What is the norm of acquisitiveness? One guesses vaguely at some golden mean; but is it in fact the true statistical norm? I should imagine myself rather ‘underacquisitivized’; less interested in money and possessions in general than the average. Illidge would say it’s entirely due to having been brought up in an atmosphere of easy money. It may be partly true. But not entirely, I think. Consider the many people born rich who are preoccupied with nothing but money making. No, my under-acquisitiveness is hereditary as well as acquired. In any case I find myself uninterested in possessions and rather unsympathetic with, and without understanding of, those who are. No predominantly acquisitive character has appeared in any of my stories. It is a defect; for acquisitives are obviously very common in real life. But I doubt if I could make such a character interesting – not being interested myself in the acquisitive passion. Balzac could; circumstances and heredity had made him passionately interested in money. But when one finds a thing boring, one’s apt to be boring about it.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE WRITING TABLE was under the window. Dimmed by the smoky air of Sheffield, a shaft of yellow, viscous-looking sunlight lit up a corner of the table and a patch of red and flowered carpet. Everard Webley was writing a letter. His pen rushed over the paper. Whatever he did was done with rapidity and decision.
‘Dearest Elinor,’ he wrote. ‘De profundis clamavi, from the depths of this repulsive hotel bedroom and the even lower depths of this political tour of the North, I call to you.’ (He wrote his I’s as though they were pillars – a strong straight shaft and two little transverse strokes at top and bottom for capital and base. The crosses on his t’s were firm and uncompromising.) ‘But I don’t suppose you listen. I’ve always felt such sympathy for the savages who give their gods a good beating when they don’t answer prayers or respond to sacrifices. England expects that every god this day will do his duty. And if he doesn’t – well, so much the worse for him; he’ll get a taste of the cat-o’-nine-tails. The modern worship of a remote Ineffable, whose acts one doesn’t criticize, seems to me very unsatisfactory. What’s the good of making a contract with somebody who can break it at will and against whom one has no redress? Women have gone the same way as the gods. They mayn’t be questioned. You’re not allowed to compel them to do their duty by their worshippers or fulfil their part in the natural contract between the sexes. I write, I implore. But, like the new-fangled god of modern philosophies and broad theologies, you don’t listen. And one’s not allowed to take reprisals; it’s bad form to beat the defaulting god. It isn’t done. All the same, I warn you: one of these days I’ll try the good old methods. I’ll do a slight Rape of the Sabines and then where will your ineffable remote superiority be? How I hate you really for compelling me to love you so much! It’s such a damnable injustice – getting so much passion and longing out of me and giving nothing in return. And you not here to receive the punishment you deserve! I have to take a vicarious revenge on the ruffians who disturb my meetings. I had a terrific battle last night. Howls, booing, organized singing of the International. But I fought them down. Literally at one moment. I had to give one of the ringleaders a black eye. Poor devil! He was only paying for your misdeeds. He was your scapegoat. For it was really you I was fighting. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have been half so savage. I probably wouldn’t have won. So indirectly I owe you my victory. For which I’m duly grateful. But another time there won’t be any Communists to vent my rage on. The next fight will be against the real enemy – against you. So be careful, my dear. I’ll try to stop short of black eyes; but in the heat of the moment one never knows. But seriously, Elinor, seriously. Why are you so cold and aloof and dead? Why do you shut yourself off from me? I think of you so incessantly, so insistently. The thought of you is always there. It lies hidden, a latency, in the most unlikely things and places, ready at the command of some chance association to jump out at me from its ambush. Haunting, like a guilty conscience. If I …’
There was a knock at the door. It was Hugo Brockle who came in. Everard looked at his watch, then at Hugo. The expression on his face was menacing. ‘Why are you so late?’ he asked in a terrifyingly quiet voice.
Hugo blushed. ‘I hadn’t realized the time.’ It was only too true. He had been lunching with the Upwiches, twenty miles away across the moors. Polly Logan was staying with them. After lunch old Upwich and the others had gone to play a round of golf on the private links in the park. Polly, providentially, didn’t play. He had taken her for a walk through the woods along the river. How should he have realized the time? ‘I’m sorry,’ he added.
‘I should hope you were,’ said Everard and the latent violence broke out from under his quietness. ‘I tell you to be back at five and it’s now a quarter past six. When you’re with me on British Freeman business you’re under military discipline. My orders are to be obeyed, do you understand? Do you understand?’ he insisted.
Sheepishly Hugo nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And now go away and see that all the arrangements for this evening’s meeting have been properly made. And mind, this sort of thing mustn’t happen again. You won’t get off so lig
htly next time.’
Hugo shut the door after him. All the anger instantly vanished from Everard’s face. He believed in frightening his subordinates from time to time. Anger, he always found, was an excellent weapon, so long as you didn’t let yourself be mastered by it. He never did. Poor Hugo! he smiled to himself and went on with his letter. Ten minutes later Hugo came in to say that dinner was ready. The meeting was at eight; they had to eat very early.
‘But it’s so silly, all this political squabbling,’ said Rampion his voice shrill with exasperation, ‘so utterly silly. Bolsheviks and Fascists, Radicals and Conservatives, Communists and British Freeman – what the devil are they all fighting about? I’ll tell you. They’re fighting to decide whether we shall go to hell by communist express train or capitalist racing motor car, by individualist ‘bus or collectivist tram running on the rails of state control. The destination’s the same in every case. They’re all of them bound for hell, all headed for the same psychological impasse and the social collapse that results from psychological collapse. The only point of difference between them is: How shall we get there? It’s simply impossible for a man of sense to be interested in such disputes. For the man of sense the important thing is hell, not the means of transport to be employed in getting there. The question for the man of sense is: Do we or do we not want to go to hell? And his answer is: No, we don’t. And if that’s his answer, then he won’t have anything to do with any of the politicians. Because they all want to land us in hell. All, without exception. Lenin and Mussolini, MacDonald and Baldwin. All equally anxious to take us to hell and only squabbling about the means of taking us.’
‘Some of them may take us a little more slowly than others,’ suggested Philip.
Rampion shrugged his shoulders. ‘But so very little more slowly that it wouldn’t make any appreciable difference. They all believe in industrialism in one form or another, they all believe in Americanization. Think of the Bolshevist ideal. America but much more so. America with government departments taking the place of trusts and state officials instead of rich men. And then the ideal of the rest of Europe. The same thing, only with the rich men preserved. Machinery and government officials there. Machinery and Alfred Mond or Henry Ford here. The machinery to take us to hell; the rich or the officials to drive it. You think one set may drive more cautiously than the other? Perhaps you’re right. But I can’t see that there’s anything to choose between them. They’re all equally in a hurry. In the name of science, progress and human happiness! Amen and step on the gas.’