Author: Aldous Huxley
Category: Literature
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“Well, I didn’t. Nor from the Queen Mother.”
“Did the Rani come too?”
“At the command of her Little Voice. And, sure enough, the Little Voice sent her to the right address. My boss, Joe Aldehyde is one of her dearest friends.”
“Did she tell you that she’s trying to bring your boss here, to exploit our oil?”
“She did indeed.”
“We turned down his latest offer less than a month ago. Did you know that?”
Will was relieved to be able to answer quite truthfully that he didn’t. Neither Joe Aldehyde nor the Rani had told him of this most recent rebuff. “My job,” he went on, a little less truthfully, “is in the wood-pulp department, not in petroleum.” There was a silence. “What’s my status here?” he asked at last. “Undesirable alien?”
“Well, fortunately you’re not an armament salesman.”
“Nor a missionary,” said Susila.
“Nor an oil-man — though on that count you might be guilty by association.”
“Nor even, so far as we know, a uranium prospector.”
“Those,” Dr Robert concluded, “are the Alpha Plus undesirables. As a journalist you rank as a Beta. Not the kind of person we should ever dream of inviting to Pala. But also not the kind who, having managed to get here, requires to be summarily deported.”
“I’d like to stay here for as long as it’s legally possible,” said Will.
“May I ask why?”
Will hesitated. As Joe Aldehyde’s secret agent and a reporter with a hopeless passion for literature, he had to stay long enough to negotiate with Bahu and earn his year of freedom. But there were other, more avowable reasons. “If you don’t object to personal remarks,” he said, “I’ll tell you.”
“Fire away,” said Dr Robert.
“The fact is that, the more I see of you people, the better I like you. I want to find out more about you. And in the process,” he added, glancing at Susila, “I might find out some interesting things about myself. How long shall I be allowed to stay?”
“Normally we’d turn you out as soon as you’re fit to travel. But if you’re seriously interested in Pala, above all if you’re seriously interested in yourself — well, we might stretch a point. Or shouldn’t we stretch that point? What do you say, Susila? After all, he does work for Lord Aldehyde.”
Will was on the point of protesting again that his job was in the wood-pulp department; but the words stuck in his throat and he said nothing. The seconds passed. Dr Robert repeated his question.
“Yes,” Susila said at last, “we’d be taking a certain risk. But personally … personally I’d be ready to take it. Am I right?” she turned to Will.
“Well, I think you can trust me. At least I hope you can.” He laughed, trying to make a joke of it; but to his annoyance and embarrassment, he felt himself blushing. Blushing for what, he demanded resentfully of his conscience? If anybody was being double-crossed, it was Standard of California. And once Dipa had moved in, what difference would it make who got the concession? Which would you rather be eaten by — a wolf or a tiger? So far as the lamb is concerned, it hardly seems to matter. Joe would be no worse than his competitors. All the same, he wished he hadn’t been in such a hurry to send off that letter. And why, why couldn’t that dreadful woman have left him in peace?
Through the sheet he felt a hand on his undamaged knee. Dr Robert was smiling down at him.
“You can have a month here,” he said. “I’ll take full responsibility for you. And we’ll do our best to show you everything.”
“I’m very grateful to you.”
“When in doubt,” said Dr Robert, “always act on the assumption that people are more honourable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are. That was the advice the Old Raja gave me when I was a young man.” Turning to Susila, “Let’s see,” he said, “how old were you when the Old Raja died?”
“Just eight.”
“So you remember him pretty well.”
Susila laughed. “Could anyone ever forget the way he used to talk about himself. ‘Quote “I” (unquote) like sugar in my tea.’ What a darling man.”
“And what a great one!”
Dr MacPhail got up and crossing to the bookcase that stood between the door and the wardrobe, pulled out of its lowest shelf a thick red album, much the worse for tropical weather and fish insects. “There’s a picture of him somewhere,” he said as he turned over the pages. “Here we are.”
Will found himself looking at the faded snapshot of a little old Hindu in spectacles and a loin cloth, engaged in emptying the contents of an extremely ornate silver sauceboat over a small squat pillar.
“What is he doing?” he asked.
“Anointing a phallic symbol with melted butter,” the doctor answered. “It was a habit my poor father could never break him of.”
“Did your father disapprove of phalluses?”
“No, no,” said Dr MacPhail. “My father was all for them. It was the symbol that he disapproved of.”
“Why the symbol?”
“Because he thought that people ought to take their religion warm from the cow, if you see what I mean. Not skimmed or pasteurized or homogenized. Above all not canned in any kind of theological or liturgical container.”
“And the Raja had a weakness for containers?”
“Not for containers in general. Just this one particular tin can. He’d always felt a special attachment to the family lingam. It was made of black basalt, and was at least eight hundred years old.”
“I see,” said Will Farnaby.
“Buttering the family lingam — it was an act of piety, it expressed a beautiful sentiment about a sublime idea. But even the sublimest of ideas is totally different from the cosmic mystery it’s supposed to stand for. And the beautiful sentiments connected with the sublime idea — what do they have in common with the direct experience of the mystery? Nothing whatsoever. Needless to say, the Old Raja knew all this perfectly well. Better than my father. He’d drunk the milk as it came from the cow, he’d actually been the milk. But the buttering of lingams was a devotional practice he just couldn’t bear to give up. And, I don’t have to tell you, he should never have been asked to give it up. But where symbols were concerned, my father was a puritan. He’d amended Goethe — Alles vergängliche ist NICHT ein Gleinchnis. His ideal was pure experimental science at one end of the spectrum, and pure experimental mysticism at the other. Direct experience on every level and then clear, rational statements about those experiences. Lingams and crosses, butter and holy water, sutras, gospels, images, chanting — he’d have liked to abolish them all.”
“Where would the arts have come in?” Will questioned.
“They wouldn’t have come in at all,” Dr MacPhail answered. “And that was my father’s blindest spot — poetry. He said he liked it; but in fact he didn’t. Poetry for its own sake, poetry as an autonomous universe, out there, in the space between direct experience and the symbols of science — that was something he simply couldn’t understand. Let’s find his picture.”
Dr MacPhail turned back the pages of the album and pointed to a craggy profile with enormous eyebrows.
“What a Scotsman!” Will commented.
“And yet his mother and his grandmother were Palanese.”
“One doesn’t see a trace of them.”
“Whereas his grandfather who hailed from Perth, might almost have passed for a Rajput.”
Will peered into the ancient photograph of a young man with an oval face and black side whiskers, leaning his elbow on a marble pedestal on which, bottom upwards, stood his inordinately tall top-hat.
“Your great-grandfather?”
“The first MacPhail of Pala. Dr Andrew. Born 1822, in the Royal Burgh, where his father, James MacPhail, owned a rope mill. Which was properly symbolical; for James was a devout Calvinist, and being convinced that he himself was one of the elect, derived a deep and glowing satisfaction from the thought of all
those millions of his fellow men going through life with the noose of predestination about their necks, and Old Nobodaddy Aloft counting the minutes to spring the trap.”
Will laughed.
“Yes,” Dr Robert agreed, “it does seem pretty comic. But it didn’t then. Then it was serious — much more serious than the H-bomb is today. It was known for certain that ninety-nine point nine per cent of the human race were condemned to everlasting brimstone. Why? Either because they’d never heard of Jesus; or, if they had, because they couldn’t believe sufficiently strongly that Jesus had delivered them from the brimstone. And the proof that they didn’t believe sufficiently strongly was the empirical, observable fact that their souls were not at peace. Perfect faith is defined as something that produces perfect peace of mind. But perfect peace of mind is something that practically nobody possesses. Therefore practically nobody possesses perfect faith. Therefore practically everybody is predestined to eternal punishment. Quod erat demonstrandum.”
“One wonders,” said Susila, “why they didn’t all go mad.”
“Fortunately most of them believed only with the tops of their heads. Up here.” Dr MacPhail tapped his bald spot. “With the tops of their heads they were convinced it was the Truth with the largest possible T. But their glands and their guts knew better — knew that it was all sheer bosh. For most of them, Truth was true only on Sundays, and then only in a strictly Pickwickian sense. James MacPhail knew all this and was determined that his children should not be mere Sabbath-day believers. They were to believe every word of the sacred nonsense even on Mondays, even on half-holiday afternoons; and they were to believe with their whole being, not merely up there, in the attic. Perfect faith and the perfect peace that goes with it were to be forced into them. How? By giving them hell now and threatening them with hell hereafter. And if, in their devilish perversity, they refused to have perfect faith, and be at peace, give them more hell and threaten hotter fires. And meanwhile tell them that good works are as filthy rags in the sight of God; but punish them ferociously for every misdemeanour. Tell them that by nature they’re totally depraved, then beat them for being what they inescapably are.”
Will Farnaby turned back to the album.
“Do you have a picture of this delightful ancestor of yours?”
“We had an oil painting,” said Dr MacPhail. “But the dampness was too much for the canvas, and then the fish insects got into it. He was a splendid specimen. Like a High Renaissance picture of Jeremiah. You know — majestic, with an inspired eye and the kind of prophetic beard that covers such a multitude of physiognomic sins. The only relic of him that remains is a pencil drawing of his house.”
He turned back another page and there it was.
“Solid granite,” he went on, “with bars on all the windows. And, inside that cosy little family Bastille, what systematic inhumanity! Systematic inhumanity in the name, needless to say, of Christ and for righteousness’ sake. Dr Andrew left an unfinished autobiography, so we know all about it.”
“Didn’t the children get any help from their mother?”
Dr MacPhail shook his head.
“Janet MacPhail was a Cameron and as good a Calvinist as James himself. Maybe an even better Calvinist than he was. Being a woman, she had further to go, she had more instinctive decencies to overcome. But she did overcome them — heroically. Far from restraining her husband, she urged him on, she backed him up. There were homilies before breakfast and at the mid-day dinner; there was the catechism on Sundays and learning the epistles by heart; and every evening, when the day’s delinquencies had been added up and assessed, methodical whipping, with a whalebone riding switch on the bare buttocks, for all six children, girls as well as boys, in order of seniority.”
“It always makes me feel slightly sick,” said Susila. “Pure sadism.”
“No, not pure,” said Dr MacPhail. “Applied sadism. Sadism with an ulterior motive, sadism in the service of an ideal, as the expression of a religious conviction. And that’s a subject,” he added, turning to Will, “that somebody ought to make a historical study of — the relations between theology and corporal punishment in childhood. I have a theory that, wherever little boys and girls are systematically flagellated, the victims grow up to think of God as ‘Wholly Other’ — isn’t that the fashionable argot in your part of the world? Wherever, on the contrary, children are brought up without being subjected to physical violence, God is immanent. A people’s theology reflects the state of its children’s bottoms. Look at the Hebrews — enthusiastic child-beaters. And so were all good Christians in the Ages of Faith. Hence Jehovah, hence Original Sin and the infinitely offended Father of Roman and Protestant orthodoxy. Whereas among Buddhists and Hindus education has always been non-violent. No laceration of little buttocks — therefore Tat tvam asi, thou art That, mind from Mind is not divided. And look at the Quakers. They were heretical enough to believe in the Inner Light, and what happened? They gave up beating their children and were the first Christian denomination to protest against the institution of slavery.”
“But child-beating,” Will objected, “has quite gone out of fashion nowadays. And yet it’s precisely at this moment that it has become modish to hold forth about the Wholly Other.”
Dr MacPhail waved the objection away. “It’s just a case of reaction following action. By the second half of the nineteenth century free-thinking humanitarianism had become so strong that even good Christians were influenced by it and stopped beating their children. There were no weals on the younger generation’s posterior; consequently it ceased to think of God as the Wholly Other and proceeded to invent New Thought, Unity, Christian Science — all the semi-Oriental heresies in which God is the Wholly Identical. The movement was well under way in William James’ day, and it’s been gathering momentum ever since. But thesis always invites antithesis and in due course the heresies begat Neo-Orthodoxy. Down with the Wholly Identical and back to the Wholly Other! Back to Augustine, back to Martin Luther — back, in a word, to the two most relentlessly flagellated bottoms in the whole history of Christian thought. Read the Confessions, read the Table Talk. Augustine was beaten by his schoolmaster and laughed at by his parents when he complained. Luther was systematically flogged not only by his teachers and his father, but even by his loving mother. The world has been paying for the scars on his buttocks ever since. Prussianism and the Third Reich — without Luther and his flagellation-theology these monstrosities could never have come into existence. Or take the flagellation-theology of Augustine, as carried to its logical conclusions by Calvin and swallowed whole by pious folk like James MacPhail and Janet Cameron. Major premise: God is Wholly Other. Minor premise: man is totally depraved. Conclusion: Do to your children’s bottoms what was done to yours, what your Heavenly Father has been doing to the collective bottom of humanity ever since the Fall: whip, whip, whip!”
There was a silence. Will Farnaby looked again at the drawing of the granite person in the rope-walk, and thought of all the grotesque and ugly phantasies promoted to the rank of supernatural facts, all the obscene cruelties inspired by those phantasies, all the pain inflicted and the miseries endured because of them. And when it wasn’t Augustine with his ‘benignant asperity’, it was Robespierre, it was Stalin; when it wasn’t Luther exhorting the princes to kill the peasants, it was a genial Mao reducing them to slavery.
“Don’t you sometimes despair?” he asked.
Dr MacPhail shook his head. “We don’t despair,” he said, “because we know that things don’t necessarily have to be as bad as in fact they’ve always been.”
“We know that they can be a great deal better,” Susila added. “Know it because they already are a great deal better, here and now, on this absurd little island.”
“But whether we shall be able to persuade you people to follow our example, or whether we shall even be able to preserve our tiny oasis of humanity in the midst of your world-wide wilderness of monkeys — that, alas,” said Dr MacPhail, “is anoth
er question. One’s justified in feeling extremely pessimistic about the current situation. But despair, radical despair — no, I can’t see any justification for that.”
“Not even when you read history?”
“Not even when I read history.”
“I envy you. How do you manage to do it?”
“By remembering what history is — the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma. He turned again to the album. “Let’s get back to that house in the Royal Burgh, back to James and Janet, and the six children whom Calvin’s God, in his inscrutable malevolence, had condemned to their tender mercies. ‘The rod and reproof bring wisdom; but a child left to himself bringeth his mother to shame.’ Indoctrination reinforced by psychological stress and physical torture — the perfect Pavlovian set-up. But, unfortunately for organized religion and political dictatorship, human beings are much less reliable as laboratory animals than dogs. On Tom, Mary and Jean the conditioning worked as it was meant to work. Tom became a minister, and Mary married a minister and duly died in childbirth. Jean stayed at home, nursed her mother through a long grim cancer and for the next twenty years was slowly sacrificed to the ageing and finally senile and drivelling patriarch. So far, so good. But with Annie, the fourth child, the pattern changed. Annie was pretty. At eighteen she was proposed to by a captain of dragoons. But the captain was an Anglican and his views on total depravity and God’s good pleasure were criminally incorrect. The marriage was forbidden. It looked as though Annie were predestined to share the fate of Jean. She stuck it out for ten years; then, at twenty-eight, she got herself seduced by the second mate of an East Indiaman. There were seven weeks of almost frantic happiness — the first she had ever known. Her face was transfigured by a kind of supernatural beauty, her body glowed with life. Then the Indiaman sailed for a two-year voyage for Madras and Macao. Four months later, pregnant, friendless and despairing, Annie threw herself into the Tay. Meanwhile Alexander, the next in line, had run away from school and joined a company of actors. In the house by the rope-walk nobody, thenceforward, was ever allowed to refer to his existence. And finally there was Andrew, the youngest, the Benjamin. What a model child! He was obedient, he loved his lessons, he learned the Epistles by heart faster and more accurately than any of the other children had done. Then, just in time to restore her faith in human wickedness, his mother caught him one evening playing with his genitals. He was whipped till the blood came; was caught again a few weeks later and again whipped, sentenced to solitary confinement on bread and water, told that he had almost certainly committed the sin against the Holy Ghost and that it was undoubtedly on account of that sin that his mother had been afflicted with cancer. For the rest of his childhood Andrew was haunted by recurrent nightmares of hell. Haunted, too, by recurrent temptations and, when he succumbed to them — which of course he did, but always in the privacy of the latrine at the bottom of the garden — by yet more terrifying visions of the punishments in store for him.”