Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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Old, tired, bitter. But that wasn’t all, Sebastian said to himself, as he watched the deeply furrowed, leathery face and listened to the now incongruously loud and commanding voice. That wasn’t all. In some subtle and hardly explicable way his father gave an impression of deformity — as though he had suddenly turned into a kind of dwarf or hunchback. ‘He that is not getting better is getting worse.’ But that was too sweeping and summary. ‘He that isn’t growing up is growing down.’ That was more like it. Such a man might end his life, not as a ripened human being, but as an aged foetus. Adult in worldly wisdom and professional skill; embryonic in spirit and even (in spite of all the stoical and civic virtues he might have acquired) in character. At sixty-five his father was still trying to be what he had been at fifty-five, forty-five, thirty-five. But this attempt to be the same made him essentially different. For then he had been what a busy young or middle-aged politician ought to be. Now he was what an old man ought not to be; and so, by straining to remain unmodified, had transformed himself into a gruesome anomaly. And, of course, in an age that had invented Peter Pan and raised the monstrosity of arrested development to the rank of an ideal, he wasn’t in any way exceptional. The world was full of septuagenarians playing at being in their thirties or even in their teens, when they ought to have been preparing for death, ought to have been trying to unearth the spiritual reality which they had spent a lifetime burying under a mountain of garbage. In his father’s case, of course, the garbage had been of the very highest quality — personal austerity, public service, general knowledge, political idealism. But the spiritual reality was no less effectually buried than it would have been under a passion for gambling, for example, or an obsession with sexual pleasure. Perhaps, indeed, it was buried even more effectually. For the card-player and the whoremonger didn’t imagine that their activities were creditable, and therefore stood a chance of being shamed into giving them up; whereas the well-informed good citizen was so certain of being morally and intellectually right that he seldom so much as envisaged the possibility of changing his way of life. It had been the publicans who came to salvation, not the Pharisees.
Meanwhile, the talk had veered away from nepotism, to settle, inevitably, on what might be expected to happen after the war…. Up till quite recently, Sebastian was thinking as he listened, this staunch idolater of future time had been rewarded by his god with the grace of an inexhaustible energy in the service of his favourite social reforms. Now, instead of the beneficiary, he was the victim of what he worshipped. The future and its problems had come to haunt him like a guilty conscience or a consuming passion.
There was first the immediate future. On the continent a chaos so frightful that, to millions of people, the war years would seem in retrospect a time positively of prosperity. And even in England, along with the enormous relief, there would be a certain nostalgia for the simplicities of war economy and war organization. And meanwhile, in Asia, what political confusion, what hunger and disease, what abysses of inter-racial hatred, what preparations, conscious and unconscious, for the coming war of colour! John Barnack raised his hands and let them fall again in a gesture of utter hopelessness. But of course, that wasn’t all. As though spurred on by avenging Furies, he proceeded to explore the further distances of time. And here there loomed for him, like the menace of an inescapable fate, the quasi-certainties of future population trends. An England, a Western Europe, an America, hardly more populous thirty years hence than at the present time, and with a fifth of their inhabitants drawing old-age pensions. And contemporary with this decrepitude, a Russia of more than two hundred millions, preponderantly youthful, and as bumptious, confident and imperialistically minded as England had been at a corresponding point in her own long-past phase of economic and demographic expansion. And east of Russia would be a China of perhaps five hundred millions, in the first flush of nationalism and industrialization. And, south of the Himalayas, four or five hundred millions of starving Indians, desperately trying to exchange the products of their sweated factory labour for the wherewithal to survive just long enough to add an additional fifty millions to the population and subtract yet another year or two from the average expectation of life.
The main result of the war, he went on gloomily, would be the acceleration of processes which otherwise would have taken place more gradually and therefore less catastrophically. The process of Russia’s advance towards the domination of Europe and the Near East; of China’s advance towards the domination of the rest of Asia; and of all Asia’s advance towards industrialism. Torrents of cheap manufactures flooding the white men’s markets. And the white men’s reaction to those torrents would be the casus belli of the impending war of colour.
‘And what that war will be like …’
John Barnack left the sentence unfinished and began to talk instead about the present miseries of India — the Bengal famine, the pandemic of malaria, the prisons crowded with the men and women at whose side, a few years before, he himself had fought for swaraj. A note of despairing bitterness came into his voice. It was not only that he had had to sacrifice his political sympathies. No, the roots of his despair struck deeper — down into the conviction that political principles, however excellent, were almost irrelevant to the real problem, which was merely arithmetical, a matter of the relationship between acreage and population. Too many people, too little arable land. Thanks to technology and the Pax Britannica, Malthus’s nightmare had become, for a sixth of the human race, their everyday reality.
Sebastian went out to the kitchen to brew some tea. Through the open door he heard a momentary blast of trumpets and saxophones, then the distressing noise of actresses being emotional, then the quieter intonations of a masculine voice that talked and talked. His father was evidently listening to the news.
When he came back into the living-room, it was over. His eyes shut, John Barnack was lying back in his chair, half asleep. Taken off guard, the face and the limp body betrayed an unutterable fatigue. A cup clinked as Sebastian set down the tray. His father started and sat up. The worn face took on its familiar look of rather formidable determination, the body was taut again and alert.
‘Did you hear that about the Russians and the Czechs?’ he asked.
Sebastian shook his head. His father enlightened him. More details about the twenty-year pact were coming out.
‘You see,’ he concluded almost triumphantly, ‘it’s beginning already — the Russian hegemony of Europe.’
Cautiously, Sebastian handed him an overflowing cup of tea. Not so long ago, he was thinking, it wouldn’t have been ‘Russian hegemony,’ but ‘Soviet influence.’ But that was before his father had begun to take an interest in population problems. And now, of course, Stalin had reversed the old revolutionary policy towards religion. The Greek Orthodox Church was being used again as an instrument of nationalism. There were seminaries now, and a patriarch like Father Christmas, and millions of people crossing themselves in front of ikons.
‘A year ago,’ John Barnack went on, ‘we would never have allowed the Czechs to do this. Never! Now we have no choice.’
‘In that case,’ Sebastian suggested after a brief silence, ‘it might be as well to think occasionally about matters where we do have a choice.’
‘What do you mean?’ his father asked, looking up at him suspiciously.
‘Russians or no Russians, one’s always at liberty to pay attention to the Nature of Things.’
John Barnack assumed an expression of pitying contempt, then burst into a peal of laughter that sounded like a carload of scrap iron being tipped on to a dump.
‘Four hundred divisions,’ he said, when the paroxysm was over, ‘against some high-class thoughts about the Gaseous Vertebrates!’
It was a remark in the good old style — but with this difference, that the good old style was now the new style of a self-stunted dwarf who had succeeded in consummating his own spiritual abortion.
‘And yet,’ said Sebastian, ‘if one thought abou
t it to the point of…’ he hesitated, ‘well, to the point of actually becoming one of its thoughts, one would obviously be very different from what one is now.’
‘Not a doubt of it!’ said John Barnack sarcastically.
‘And that sort of difference is infectious,’ Sebastian went on. ‘And in time the infection might spread so far that the people with the big battalions would actually not wish to use them.’
Another load of scrap iron was tipped down the chute. This time Sebastian joined in the laughter.
‘Yes,’ he admitted, ‘it is pretty funny. But, after all, a chance of one in a million is better than no chance at all, which is what you look forward to.’
‘No, I didn’t say that,’ his father protested. ‘There’ll be a truce, of course — quite a long one.’
‘But not peace?’
The other shook his head.
‘No, I’m afraid not. No real peace.’
‘Because peace doesn’t come to those who merely work for peace — only as the by-product of something else.’
‘Of an interest in Gaseous Vertebrates, eh?’
‘Exactly,’ said Sebastian. ‘Peace can’t exist except where there’s a metaphysic which all accept and a few actually succeed in realizing.’ And when his father looked at him questioningly, ‘By direct intuition,’ he went on; ‘the way you realize the beauty of a poem — or a woman, for that matter.’
There was a long silence.
‘I suppose you don’t remember your mother very well, do you?’ John Barnack suddenly asked.
Sebastian shook his head.
‘You were very like her when you were a boy,’ the other went on. ‘It was strange … almost frightening.’ He shook his head, then added, after a little pause: ‘I never imagined you’d do this.’
‘Do what?’
‘You know — what we’ve been talking about. Of course, I think it’s all nonsense,’ he added quickly. ‘But I must say …’ A look of unwonted embarrassment appeared on his face. Then, shying away from the too emphatic expression of affection, ‘It certainly hasn’t done you any harm,’ he concluded judicially.
‘Thank you,’ said Sebastian.
‘I remember him as a young man,’ his father went on over the top of his teacup.
‘Remember whom?’
‘Old Rontini’s son. Bruno — wasn’t that his name?’
‘That was it,’ said Sebastian.
‘He didn’t make much impression on me then.’
Sebastian wondered whether anybody had ever made much impression on him. His father had always been too busy, too completely identified with his work and his ideas, to be very much aware of other people. He knew them as the embodiments of legal problems, as particular examples of political or economic types, not as individual men and women.
‘And yet I suppose he must have been remarkable in some way,’ John Barnack went on. ‘After all, you thought so.’
Sebastian was touched. It was the first time that his father had paid him the compliment of admitting that perhaps he wasn’t an absolute fool.
‘I knew him so much better than you did,’ he said.
With what was obviously a rather painful effort, John Barnack hoisted himself out of the depths of the armchair. ‘Time to go to bed,’ he said, as though he were enunciating a general truth, not expressing his own fatigue. He turned back to Sebastian. ‘What was it you found in him?’ he asked.
‘What was it?’ Sebastian repeated slowly. He hesitated, uncertain what to answer. There were so many things one could mention. That candour, for example, that extraordinary truthfulness. Or his simplicity, the absence in him of all pretensions. Or that tenderness of his, so intense and yet so completely unsentimental and even impersonal — but impersonal, in some sort, above the level of personality, not below it, as his own sensuality had been impersonal. Or else there was the fact that, at the end, Bruno had been no more than a kind of thin transparent shell, enclosing something incommensurably other than himself — an unearthly beauty of peace and power and knowledge. But that, Sebastian said to himself, was something his father wouldn’t even wish to understand. He looked up at last. ‘One of the things that struck me most,’ he said, ‘was that Bruno could somehow convince you that it all made sense. Not by talking, of course; by just being.’
Instead of laughing again, as Sebastian had expected him to do, John Barnack stood there, silently rubbing his chin.
‘If one’s wise,’ he said at last, ‘one doesn’t ask whether it makes any sense. One does one’s work and leaves the problem of evil to one’s metabolism. That makes sense all right.’
‘Because it’s not oneself,’ said Sebastian. ‘Not human, but a part of the cosmic order. That’s why animals have no metaphysical worries. Being identical with their physiology, they know there’s a cosmic order. Whereas human beings identify themselves with money-making, say, or drink, or politics, or literature. None of which has anything to do with the cosmic order. So naturally they find that nothing makes sense.’
‘And what’s to be done about it?’
Sebastian smiled and, standing up, ran a finger-nail across the grille of the loud-speaker.
‘One can either go on listening to the news — and of course the news is always bad, even when it sounds good. Or alternatively one can make up one’s mind to listen to something else.’
Affectionately, he took his father’s arm. ‘What about going to see if everything’s all right in the spare room?’
Ape and Essence
Ape and Essence was first published in the UK and USA in 1948 by Chatto & Windus and Harper & Brothers respectively. Written shortly after the end of World War II, the horrors and atrocities committed during the conflict serve to shatter the idea of the inevitability of a better and more progressive future. Huxley had famously expressed his fears about a society ruled by technology and science in his famous dystopian novel, A Brave New World. It was a time of great uncertainty, when it was possible to produce nuclear weapons with the power to kill many millions, possibly billions of people, while also decimating entire ecosystems. In Ape and Essence, Huxley once again focuses on the dehumanising aspects of unchecked technological advancement, while also exploring the effects of State oppression.
The satirical novel opens on 30 January 1948, the day of Gandhi’s assassination, with Bob Briggs complaining to an uninterested narrator about his personal woes. They discover a discarded film script called ‘Ape and Essence’ by William Tallis and decide to try and find him. The rest of the novel is the screenplay of ‘Ape and Essence’, which is set one hundred years after human civilisation has been devastated by World War III and the use of nuclear weapons. A team of scientists from New Zealand, having survived the destruction, arrive on the West Coast of the USA to explore the region. They discover a small society of survivors living a horrible existence that involves eugenics, stealing from graves, burning books and worshipping the devil, Belial. Huxley underlines that this future dystopia, where all empathy and humanity has been decimated, already has its seeds in the present.
The first US edition, 1948
CONTENTS
I. TALLIS
II. THE SCRIPT
I. TALLIS
IT WAS THE day of Gandhi’s assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the centre of the universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead; but across the desk in his office, across the lunch table in the Studio Commissary, Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself.
‘You’ve always been such a help,’ Bob assured me, as he made ready, not without relish, to tell the latest instalment of his history.
But at bottom, as I knew very well and as Bob himself knew even better than I, he didn’t really want to be helped. He liked being in a mess and, still more, he li
ked talking about his predicament. The mess and its verbal dramatization made it possible for him to see himself as all the Romantic Poets rolled into one — Beddoes committing suicide, Byron committing fornication, Keats dying of Fanny Brawne, Harriet dying of Shelley. And seeing himself as all the Romantic Poets, he could forget for a little the two prime sources of his misery — the fact that he had none of their talents and very little of their sexual potency.
‘We got to the point,’ he said (so tragically that it occurred to me that he would have done better as an actor than as a writer of screen plays), ‘we got to the point, Elaine and I, where we felt like ... like Martin Luther.’
‘Martin Luther?’ I repeated in some astonishment.
‘You know — ich kann nicht anders. We just couldn’t — but couldn’t — do anything but go off together to Acapulco.’
And Gandhi, I reflected, just couldn’t do anything but resist oppression non-violently and go to prison and finally get shot.
‘So there it was,’ he went on. ‘We got on a plane and flew to Acapulco.’
‘Finally!’
‘What do you mean, “finally”?’
‘Well, you’d been thinking about it for a long time, hadn’t you?’
Bob looked annoyed. But I remembered all the previous occasions when he had talked to me about the problem. Should he or should he not make Elaine his mistress? (That was his wonderfully old-world way of putting it.) Should he or should he not ask Miriam for a divorce?