Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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He tries to approach, but she holds him at arm’s length.
‘It can’t be right,’ she says.
‘But it is right.’
She shakes her head.
‘It’s too good to be right, I should be too happy if it were. He doesn’t want us to be happy.’ There is a pause. ‘Why do you say He can’t hurt us?’
‘Because there’s something stronger than He is.’
‘Something stronger?’ She shakes her head. ‘That was what He was always fighting against — and He won.’
‘Only because people helped Him to win. But they don’t have to help Him. And, remember, He can never win for good.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because He can never resist the temptation of carrying evil to the limit. And whenever evil is carried to the limit, it always destroys itself. After which the Order of Things comes to the surface again.’
‘But that’s far away in the future.’
‘For the whole world, yes. But not for single individuals, not for you or me, for example. Whatever Belial may have done with the rest of the world, you and I can always work with the Order of Things, not against it.’
There is another silence.
‘I don’t think I understand what you mean,’ she says at last, ‘and I don’t care.’ She moves back towards him and leans her head against his shoulder. ‘I don’t care about anything,’ she goes on. ‘He can kill me if He wants to. It doesn’t matter. Not now.’
She raises her face towards his and, as he bends down to kiss her, the image on the screen fades into the darkness of a moonless night.
NARRATOR
L’ombre était nuptiale, auguste et solennelle. But this time it is a nuptial darkness whose solemnity is marred by no caterwaulings, no Liebestods, no saxophones pleading for detumescence. The music with which this night is charged is clear, but undescriptive; precise and definite, but about realities that have no name; all-embracingly liquid, but never viscous, without the slightest tendency to stick possessively (like blood or sperm, like treacle or excrement) to what it touches and comprehends. A music with the spirit of Mozart’s, delicately gay among the constant implications of tragedy; a music akin to Weber’s, aristocratic and refined, and yet capable of the most reckless joy and the completest realization of the world’s agony. And is there perhaps a hint of that which, in the Ave Verum Corpus, in the G-minor Quintet, lies beyond the world of Don Giovanni? Is there a hint already of what (in Bach, sometimes, and in Beethoven, in that final wholeness of art which is analogous to holiness) transcends the Romantic integration of the tragic and the joyful, the human and the daemonic? And when, in the darkness, the lover’s voice whispers again of
a mortal shape indued
With love and life and light and deity,
is there already the beginning of an understanding that beyond Epipsychidion there is Adonais, and beyond Adonais the wordless doctrine of the Pure in Heart?
Dissolve to Dr. Poole’s laboratory. Sunlight pours through the tall windows, and is dazzlingly reflected from the stainless steel barrel of the microscope on the work-table. The room is empty.
Suddenly the silence is broken by the sound of approaching footsteps; the door is opened and, still a butler in moccasins, the Director of Food Production looks in.
‘Poole,’ he begins, ‘His Eminence has come to ...’
He breaks off and an expression of astonishment appears on his face.
‘He isn’t here,’ he says to the Arch-Vicar, who now follows him into the room.
The great man turns to the two Familiars in attendance on him.
‘Go and see if Dr. Poole is in the experimental garden,’ he orders.
The Familiars bow, squeak, ‘Yes, Your Eminence,’ in unison, and go out.
The Arch-Vicar sits down and graciously motions to the Director to follow his example.
‘I don’t think I told you,’ he says; ‘I’m trying to persuade our friend here to enter religion.’
‘I hope Your Eminence doesn’t mean to deprive us of his invaluable help in the field of food production,’ says the Director anxiously.
The Arch-Vicar reassures him.
‘I’ll see that he always has time to give you the advice you need. But meanwhile I want to make sure that the Church shall benefit by his talents and ...’
The Familiars re-enter the room and bow.
‘Well?’
‘He isn’t in the garden, Your Eminence.’
The Arch-Vicar frowns angrily at the Director, who quails under his look.
‘I thought you said this was the day he worked in the laboratory?’
‘It is, Your Eminence.’
‘Then why is he out?’
‘I can’t imagine, Your Eminence. I’ve never known him to change his schedule without telling me.’
There is a silence.
‘I don’t like it,’ the Arch-Vicar says at last. ‘I don’t like it at all.’ He turns to his Familiars. ‘Run back to Headquarters and have half-a-dozen men ride out on horseback to find him.’
The Familiars bow, squeak simultaneously, and vanish.
‘And as for you,’ says the Arch-Vicar, turning on the pale and abject figure of the Director, ‘if anything should have happened, you’ll have to answer for it.’
He rises in majestic wrath and stalks towards the door.
Dissolve to a series of montage shots.
Loola with her leather knapsack and Dr. Poole with a pre-Thing army pack on his back are climbing over a landslide that blocks one of those superbly engineered highways whose remains still scar the flanks of the San Gabriel mountains.
We cut to a wind-swept crest. The two fugitives are looking down over the enormous expanse of the Mojave desert.
Next we find ourselves in a pine forest on the northern slope of the range. It is night. In a patch of moonlight between the trees, Dr. Poole and Loola lie sleeping under the same homespun blanket.
Cut to a rocky canyon, at the bottom of which flows a stream. The lovers have halted to drink and fill their water-bottles.
And now we are in the foothills above the floor of the desert. Between the clumps of sage-brush, the yuccas and the juniper bushes the walking is easy. Dr. Poole and Loola enter the shot, and the Camera trucks with them as they come striding down the slope.
‘Feet sore?’ he asks solicitously.
‘Not too bad.’
She gives him a brave smile, and shakes her head.
‘I think we’d better stop pretty soon and eat something.’
‘Just as you think best, Alfie.’
He pulls an antique map out of his pocket and studies it as he walks along.
‘We’re still a good thirty miles from Lancaster,’ he says. ‘Eight hours of walking. We’ve got to keep up our strength.’
‘And how far shall we get tomorrow?’ Loola asks.
‘A little beyond Mojave. And after that I reckon it’ll take us at least two days to cross the Tehachapis and get to Bakersfield.’ He returns the map to his pocket. ‘I managed to get quite a lot of information out of the Director,’ he goes on. ‘He says those people up north are very friendly to runaways from Southern California. Won’t give them back even when the government officially asks for them.’
‘Thank Bel ... I mean, thank God,’ says Loola.
There is another silence. Suddenly Loola comes to a halt.
‘Look! What’s that?’
She points, and from their viewpoint we see at the foot of a very tall Joshua-tree a slab of weathered concrete, standing crookedly at the head of an ancient grave, overgrown with bunch-grass and buckwheat.
‘Somebody must have been buried here,’ says Dr. Poole.
They approach, and in a close shot of the slab we see, while Dr. Poole’s voice reads aloud, the following inscription:
‘WILLIAM TALLIS
1882-1948
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
They hopes are gone before: from all thing
s here
They have departed, thou shouldst now depart!’
Cut back to the two lovers.
‘He must have been a very sad man,’ says Loola.
‘Perhaps not quite so sad as you imagine,’ says Dr. Poole, as he slips off his heavy pack and sits down beside the grave.
And while Loola opens her knapsack and takes out bread and fruit and eggs and strips of dried meat, he turns over the pages of his duodecimo Shelley.
‘Here we are,’ he says at last. ‘It’s the very next stanza after the one that’s quoted here:
‘That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction, which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love,
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst, now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.’
There is a silence. Then Loola hands him a hard-boiled egg. He cracks it on the headstone and, as he peels it, scatters the white fragments of the shell over the grave.
The Genius and the Goddess
The first edition
The Genius and the Goddess
“THE TROUBLE WITH fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.”
“Never?” I questioned.
“Maybe from God’s point of view,” he conceded. “Never from ours. Fiction has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Michelangelo, simultaneously Mickey Spillane and Thomas à Kempis. The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance.” And when I asked, “To what?” he waved a square brown hand in the direction of the bookshelves. “To the Best that has been Thought and Said,” he declaimed with mock portentousness. And then, “Oddly enough, the closest to reality are always the fictions that are supposed to be the least true.” He leaned over and touched the back of a battered copy of The Brothers Karamazov. “It makes so little sense that it’s almost real. Which is more than can be said for any of the academic kinds of fiction. Physics and chemistry fiction. History fiction. Philosophy fiction….” His accusing finger moved from Dirac to Toynbee, from Sorokin to Carnap. “More than can be said even for Biography fiction. Here’s the latest specimen of the genre.”
From the table beside him he picked up a volume in a glossy blue dust-jacket and held it up for my inspection.
“The Life of Henry Maartens,” I read out with no more interest than one accords to a household word. Then I remembered that, to John Rivers, the name had been something more and other than a household word. “You were his pupil, weren’t you?”
Rivers nodded without speaking.
“And this is the official biography?”
“The official fiction,” he amended. “An unforgettable picture of the Soap Opera scientist — you know the type — the moronic baby with the giant intellect; the sick genius battling indomitably against enormous odds; the lonely thinker who was yet the most affectionate of family men; the absent-minded Professor with his head in the clouds but his heart in the right place. The facts, unfortunately, weren’t quite so simple.”
“You mean, the book’s inaccurate?”
“No, it’s all true — so far as it goes. After that, it’s all rubbish — or rather it’s non-existent. And maybe,” he added, “maybe it has to be non-existent. Maybe the total reality is always too undignified to be recorded, too senseless or too horrible to be left unfictionalized. All the same it’s exasperating, if one happens to know the facts, it’s even rather insulting, to be fobbed off with Soap Opera.”
“So you’re going to set the record straight?” I presumed.
“For the public? Heaven forbid!”
“For me, then. In private.”
“In private,” he repeated. “After all, why not?” He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “A little orgy of reminiscence to celebrate one of your rare visits.”
“Anyone would think you were talking about a dangerous drug.”
“But it is a dangerous drug,” he answered. “One escapes into reminiscence as one escapes into gin or sodium amytal.”
“You forget,” I said, “I’m a writer, and the Muses are the daughters of Memory.”
“And God,” he added quickly, “is not their brother. God isn’t the son of Memory; He’s the son of Immediate Experience. You can’t worship a spirit in spirit, unless you do it now. Wallowing in the past may be good literature. As wisdom, it’s hopeless. Time Regained is Paradise Lost, and Time Lost is Paradise Regained. Let the dead bury their dead. If you want to live at every moment as it presents itself, you’ve got to die to every other moment. That’s the most important thing I learned from Helen.”
The name evoked for me a pale young face framed in the square opening of a bell of dark, almost Egyptian hair — evoked, too, the great golden columns of Baalbek, with the blue sky and the snows of the Lebanon behind them. I was an archaeologist in those days, and Helen’s father was my boss. It was at Baalbek that I had proposed to her and been rejected.
“If she’d married me,” I said, “would I have learned it?”
“Helen practised what she always refrained from preaching,” Rivers answered. “It was difficult not to learn from her.”
“And what about my writing, what about those daughters of Memory?”
“There would have been a way to make the best of both worlds.”
“A compromise?”
“A synthesis, a third position subtending the other two. Actually, of course, you can never make the best of one world, unless in the process you’ve learned to make the best of the other. Helen even managed to make the best of life while she was dying.”
In my mind’s eye Baalbek gave place to the campus of Berkeley, and instead of the noiselessly swinging bell of dark hair there was a coil of grey, instead of a girl’s face I saw the thin drawn features of an ageing woman. She must have been ill, I reflected, even then.
“I was in Athens when she died,” I said aloud.
“I remember.” And then, “I wish you’d been here,” he added. “For her sake — she was very fond of you. And, of course, for your sake too. Dying’s an art, and at our age we ought to be learning it. It helps to have seen someone who really knew how. Helen knew how to die because she knew how to live — to live now and here and for the greater glory of God. And that necessarily entails dying too there and then and tomorrow and one’s own miserable little self. In the process of living as one ought to live, Helen had been dying by daily instalments. When the final reckoning came, there was practically nothing to pay. Incidentally,” Rivers went on after a little silence, “I was pretty close to the final reckoning last spring. In fact, if it weren’t for penicillin, I wouldn’t be here. Pneumonia, the old man’s friend. Now they resuscitate you, so that you can live to enjoy your arteriosclerosis or your cancer of the prostate. So, you see, it’s all entirely posthumous. Everybody’s dead except me, and I’m living on borrowed time. If I set the record straight, it’ll be as a ghost talking about ghosts. And anyhow this is Christmas Eve; so a ghost story is quite in order. Besides, you’re a very old friend and even if you do put it all in a novel, does it really matter?”
His large lined face lit up with an expression of affectionate irony.
“If it does matter,” I assured him, “I won’t.”
This time he laughed outright.
“The strongest oaths are straw to the fire i’ the blood,” he quoted. “I’d rather entrust my daughters to Casanova than my secrets to a novelist. Literary fires are hotter even than sexual ones. And literary oaths are even strawier than the matrimonial or monastic varieties.”
I tried to protest; but he refused to l
isten.
“If I still wanted to keep it secret,” he said, “I wouldn’t tell you. But when you do publish, please remember the usual footnote. You know — any resemblance to any character living or dead is purely coincidental. But purely! And now let’s get back to those Maartenses. I’ve got a picture somewhere.” He hoisted himself out of his chair, walked over to the desk and opened a drawer. “All of us together — Henry and Katy and the children and me. And by a miracle,” he added, after a moment of rustling among the papers in the drawer, “it’s where it ought to be.”
He handed me the faded enlargement of a snapshot. It showed three adults standing in front of a wooden summer house — a small, thin man with white hair and a beaked nose, a young giant in shirt sleeves and, between them, fair-haired, laughing, broad-shouldered and deep-bosomed, a splendid Valkyrie incongruously dressed in a hobble skirt. At their feet sat two children, a boy of nine or ten, and a pig-tailed elder sister in her early teens.
“How old he looks!” was my first comment. “Old enough to be his children’s grandfather.”
“And infantile enough, at fifty-six, to be Katy’s baby boy.”
“Rather a complicated incest.”
“But it worked,” Rivers insisted, “it worked so well that it had come to be a regular symbiosis. He lived on her. And she was there to be lived on — incarnate maternity.”
I looked again at the photograph.
“What a fascinating mixture of styles! Maartens is pure Gothic. His wife’s a Wagnerian heroine. The children are straight out of Mrs. Molesworth. And you, you …” I looked up at the square, leathery face that confronted me from the other side of the fireplace, then back at the snapshot. “I’d forgotten what a beauty you used to be. A Roman copy of Praxiteles.”
“Couldn’t you make me an original?” he pleaded.
I shook my head.
“Look at the nose,” I said. “Look at the modelling of the jaw. That isn’t Athens; that’s Herculaneum. But luckily girls aren’t interested in art history. For all practical amorous purposes you were the real thing, the genuine Greek god.”