Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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‘Well, here we are,’ said Rampion, when Spandrell opened his door to them the next afternoon. ‘Where’s Beethoven? Where’s the famous proof of God’s existence and the superiority of Jesus’s morality?’
‘In here.’ Spandrell led the way into his sitting-room. The gramophone stood on the table. Four or five records lay scattered near it. ‘Here’s the beginning of the slow movement,’ Spandrell went on, picking up one of them. ‘I won’t bother you with the rest of the quartet. It’s lovely. But the heilige Danksgesang is the crucial part.’ He wound up the clockwork; the disc revolved; he lowered the needle of the sound-box on to its grooved surface. A single violin gave out a long note, then another a sixth above, dropped to the fifth (while the second violin began where the first had started), then leapt to the octave, and hung there suspended through two long beats. More than a hundred years before, Beethoven, stone deaf, had heard the imaginary music of stringed instruments expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings. He had made signs with ink on ruled paper. A century later, four Hungarians had reproduced from the printed reproduction of Beethoven’s scribbles that music which Beethoven had never heard except in his imagination. Spiral grooves on a surface of shellac remembered their playing. The artificial memory revolved, a needle travelled in its grooves and through a faint scratching and roaring that mimicked the noises of Beethoven’s own deafness, the audible symbols of Beethoven’s convictions and emotions quivered out into the air. Slowly, slowly, the melody unfolded itself. The archaic Lydian harmonies hung on the air. It was an unimpassioned music, transparent, pure and crystalline, like a tropical sea, an Alpine lake. Water on water, calm sliding over calm; the according of level horizons and waveless expanses, a counterpoint of serenities. And everything clear and bright; no mists, no vague twilights. It was the calm of still and rapturous contemplation, not of drowsiness or sleep. It was the serenity of the convalescent who wakes from fever and finds himself born again into a realm of beauty. But the fever was ‘the fever called living’ and the rebirth was not into this world; the beauty was unearthly, the convalescent serenity was the peace of God. The interweaving of Lydian melodies was heaven.
Thirty slow bars had built up heaven, when the character of the music suddenly changed. From being remotely archaic, it became modern. The Lydian harmonies were replaced by those of the corresponding major key. The time quickened. A new melody leapt and bounded, but over earthly mountains, not among those of paradise.
‘Neue Kraft fuehlend,’ Spandrell quoted in a whisper from the score. ‘He’s feeling stronger; but it’s not so heavenly.’
The new melody bounded on for another fifty bars and expired in scratchings. Spandrell lifted the needle and stopped the revolving of the disc.
‘The Lydian part begins again on the other side,’ he explained, as he wound up the machine. ‘Then there’s more of this lively stuff in A major. Then it’s Lydian to the end, getting better and better all the time. Don’t you think it’s marvellous?’ He turned to Rampion. ‘Isn’t it a proof?’
The other nodded. ‘Marvellous. But the only thing it proves, so far as I can hear, is that sick men are apt to be very weak. It’s the art of a man who’s lost his body.’
‘But discovered his soul.’
‘Oh, I grant you,’ said Rampion, ‘sick men are very spiritual. But that’s because they’re not quite men. Eunuchs are very spiritual lovers for the same reason.’
‘But Beethoven wasn’t a eunuch.’
‘I know. But why did he try to be one? Why did he make castration and bodilessness his ideal? What’s this music? Just a hymn in praise of eunuchism. Very beautiful, I admit. But couldn’t he have chosen something more human than castration to sing about?’
Spandrell sighed. ‘To me it’s the beatific vision, it’s heaven.’
Not earth. That’s just what I’ve been complaining of.’
‘But mayn’t a man imagine heaven if he wants to?’ asked Mary.
‘Certainly, so long as he doesn’t pretend that his imagination is the last word in truth, beauty, wisdom, virtue and all the rest. Spandrell wants us to accept this disembodied eunuchism as the last word. I won’t. I simply won’t.’
‘Listen to the whole movement, before you judge.’ Spandrell reversed the disc and lowered the needle. The bright heaven of Lydian music vibrated on the air.
‘Lovely, lovely,’ said Rampion, when the record was finished. ‘You’re quite right. It is heaven, it is the life of the soul. It’s the most perfect spiritual abstraction from reality I’ve ever known. But why should he have wanted to make that abstraction? Why couldn’t he be content to be a man and not an abstract soul? Why, why?’ He began walking up and down the room. ‘This damned soul,’ he went on, ‘this damned abstract soul – it’s like a kind of cancer, eating up the real, human, natural reality, spreading and spreading at its expense. Why can’t he be content with reality, your stupid old Beethoven? Why should he find it necessary to replace the real, warm, natural thing by this abstract cancer of a soul? The cancer may have a beautiful shape; but, damn it all, the body’s more beautiful. I don’t want your spiritual cancer.’
‘I won’t argue with you,’ said Spandrell. He felt all at once extraordinarily tired and depressed. It had been a failure. Rampion had refused to be convinced. Was the proof, after all, no proof? Did the music refer to nothing outside itself and the idiosyncrasies of its inventor? He looked at his watch; it was almost five. ‘Hear the end of the movement at any rate,’ he said. ‘It’s the best part.’ He wound up the gramophone. Even if it’s meaningless, he thought, it’s beautiful, so long as it lasts. And perhaps it isn’t meaningless. After all, Rampion isn’t infallible. ‘Listen.’
The music began again. But something new and marvellous had happened in its Lydian heaven. The speed of the slow melody was doubled; its outlines became clearer and more definite; an inner part began to harp insistently on a throbbing phrase. It was as though heaven had suddenly and impossibly become more heavenly, had passed from achieved perfection into perfection yet more deeper and more absolute. The ineffable peace persisted; but it was no longer the peace of convalescence and passivity. It quivered, it was alive, it seemed to grow and intensify itself, it became an active calm, an almost passionate serenity. The miraculous paradox of eternal life and eternal repose was musically realized.
They listened, almost holding their breaths. Spandrell looked exultantly at his guest. His own doubts had vanished. How could one fail to believe in something which was there, which manifestly existed? Mark Rampion nodded. ‘Almost thou persuadest me,’ he whispered. ‘But it’s too good.’
‘How can anything be too good?’
‘Not human. If it lasted, you’d cease to be a man. You’d die.’
They were silent again. The music played on, leading from heaven to heaven, from bliss to deeper bliss. Spandrell sighed and shut his eyes. His face was grave and serene, as though it had been smoothed by sleep or death. Yes, dead, thought Rampion as he looked at him. ‘He refuses to be a man. Not a man – either a demon or a dead angel. Now he’s dead.’ A touch of discord in the Lydian harmonies gave an almost unbearable poignancy to the beatitude. Spandrell sighed again. There was a knocking at the door. He looked up. The lines of mockery came back into his face, the corners of the mouth became once more ironic.
‘There, he’s the demon again,’ thought Rampion. ‘He’s come to life and he’s the demon.’
‘There they are,’ Spandrell was saying and without answering Mary’s question, ‘Who?’ he walked out of the room.
Rampion and Mary remained by the gramophone, listening to the revelation of heaven. A deafening explosion, a shout, another explosion and another, suddenly shattered the paradise of sound.
They jumped up and ran to the door. In the passage three men in the green uniform of British Freemen were looking down at Spandrell’s body. They held pistols in their hands. Another revolver lay on the floor beside the dying man. There was a hole in the side of his head an
d a patch of blood on his shirt. His hands opened and shut, opened again and shut, scratching the boards.
‘What has …?’ began Rampion.
‘He fired first,’ one of the men interrupted.
There was a little silence. Through the open door came the sound of music. The passion had begun to fade from the celestial melody. Heaven, in those long-drawn notes, became once more the place of absolute rest, of still and blissful convalescence. Long notes, a chord repeated, protracted, bright and pure, hanging, floating, effortlessly soaring on and on. And then suddenly there was no more music; only the scratching of the needle on the revolving disc.
The afternoon was fine. Burlap walked home. He was feeling pleased with himself and the world at large. ‘I accept the Universe,’ was how, only an hour before, he had concluded his next week’s leader. ‘I accept the Universe.’ He had every reason for accepting it. Mrs Betterton had given him an excellent lunch and much flattery. The Broad Christian’s Monthly of Chicago had offered him three thousand dollars for the serial rights of his St Francis and the Modern Psyche. He had cabled back demanding three thousand five hundred. The Broad Christian’s answer had arrived that afternoon, his terms were accepted. Then there were the Affiliated Ethical Societies of the North of England. They had invited him to deliver four lectures each in Manchester, Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield. The fee would be fifteen guineas per lecture. Which for England, wasn’t at all bad. And there’d be very little work to do. It would just be a matter of re-hashing a few of his leaders in the World. Two hundred and forty guineas plus three thousand five hundred dollars. The best part of a thousand pounds. He would go and have a talk with his broker about the position and prospects of rubber. Or what about one of these Investment Trusts? They gave you a very safe six or seven per cent. Burlap whistled softly as he walked. The tune was Mendelssohn’s ‘On Wings of Song’. The Broad Christian and the Affiliated Ethicals had made him spiritually musical. He whistled with no less satisfaction when he thought of the day’s other triumph. He had definitely got rid of Ethel Cobbett. The moment had been auspicious. Miss Cobbett had gone away for her holiday. These things are easier to do by post than face to face. Mr Chivers, the business manager, had written a business-like letter. For financial reasons a reduction of the staff of the Literary World was urgently necessary. He regretted, but … One month’s notice would have been legally sufficient. But as a token of the directors’ appreciation of her services he was enclosing a cheque for three months’ salary. Any references she might require would always be forthcoming and he was hers faithfully. Burlap had tempered Mr Chivers’s business-likeness with a letter of his own, full of regrets, and friendship, and jeremiads against a public that wouldn’t buy the Literary World, and lamentations over the defeat of God, incarnated in literature and himself, by Mammon in the person of Mr Chivers and all business men. He had spoken of her to his friend Judd of the Wednesday Review, as well as to several other people in the journalistic world and would, of course, do everything in his power to etcetera.
Thank goodness, he reflected, as he walked along whistling ‘On Wings of Song’ with rich expression, that was the end of Ethel Cobbett so far as he was concerned. It was the end of her also as far as everybody was concerned. For some few days later, having written him a twelve-page letter, which he put in the fire after reading the first scarifying sentence, she lay down with her head in an oven and turned on the gas. But that was something which Burlap could not foresee. His mood as he walked whistling homewards was one of unmixed contentment. That night he and Beatrice pretended to be two little children and had their bath together. Two little children sitting at opposite ends of the big old-fashioned bath. And what a romp they had! The bathroom was drenched with their splashings. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.
Brave New World
Brave New World was first published by Chatto & Windus in 1932. Huxley wrote the novel in Sanary-sur-Mer over the course of three months in the summer of 1931. A small town in the South East of France, close to Marseille, Sanary-sur-Mer became a haven for German writers in the mid 1930’s during Hitler’s rise to power. Thomas Mann, Wilhelm Herzog and Bertolt Brecht all spent significant time there before the onset of the Second World War. Huxley claimed that his dystopian novel was in part conceived as a parody and attack on H .G Wells’ Utopian works. In a letter he wrote to a friend in the spring of 1931, he stated that he was ‘writing a novel about the future, on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it’. However, during the composition of the book, Henry Ford began to emerge as the primary figure of influence for the author and a harbinger of a dystopian future.
Brave New World is set in 2540 AD, primarily in the ‘World State’ city of London, where a centralised, united and totalitarian government presides over most of the world. It is a scientifically controlled society, without war, poverty or human emotions; moods are controlled by drugs and babies are artificially engineered in wombs and cloned. Each person is designated a ‘caste’, which determines their work and social status. Art, the teaching of history and most books are banned, while consumerism is a key facet of the state’s ideology. The order is disrupted when John, a young man raised outside the ‘World State’ arrives in London and begins to criticise the regime.
Huxley wrote the novel shortly after the 1929 Wall Street Crash, when Britain was experiencing severe economic depression and instability and authoritarianism was a rising tendency across Europe. He not only expresses his concerns about how science and technology are deployed, but how the Fordist model of mass production, which was considered a sign of progress, was dehumanising and alienating. It fostered a society where the individual was subsumed by the production process and any notions of personal potential or development were deemed irrelevant.
The first edition cover of the novel
Huxley in 1934
CONTENTS
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
§ 1
§ 2
Chapter V
§ 1
§ 2
Chapter VI
§ 1
§ 2
§ 3
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Henry Ford in 1919
Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus
réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et
nous nous trouvons actuellement devant
une question bien autrement angoissante:
Comment éviter leur réalisation définitive?
. . . Les utopies sont réalisables. La vie
marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un
siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où
les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront
aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner
à une societé non utopique, moins ‘parfaite’
et plus libre.
NICOLAS BERDIAEFF.
Chapter I
A SQUAT GREY building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, and, in a shield, the World State’s motto, Community, Identity, Stability.
The enormous room on the ground-floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels
of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work-tables.
‘And this,’ said the Director opening the door, ’is the Fertilizing Room.’
Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director’s heels. Each of them carried a note-book, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse’s mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D.H.C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments.
‘Just to give you a general idea,’ he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently — though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers, but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society.