Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

If Island is a failure, it is nevertheless worth reading for the instruction it gives—which not all can follow—and for its courage. Huxley must have known when he was writing Island that he had to lay aside one of his best weapons, the blade of satire, to write about what he conceived of as the most desirable place. Philip Toynbee perceived as much when he reviewed the book in The Observer on Sunday, 1 April 1962. While admiring Island as ‘an act of genuine virtue and love’, Toynbee points out that the islanders address each other in preposterous language, and that much of the book belongs to what he calls ‘the helpless language of inarticulate mysticism’.

To this charge, Huxley had earlier given answer. In Grey Eminence, he speaks of a book, widely available in England even a generation ago, which was written by a fourteenth-century mystic, and entitled. The Cloud of Unknowing. Commenting on The Cloud, Huxley says:

Ultimate reality is incommensurable with our own illusoriness and imperfection; therefore it cannot be understood by means of intellectual operations; for intellectual operations depend upon language, and our vocabulary and syntax were evolved for the purpose of dealing precisely with that imperfection and illusoriness, with which God is incommensurable. Ultimate reality cannot be understood except intuitively, through an act of the will and the affections.

And that is what Island is: Huxley’s act of the will and the affections, to reach out beyond the privy to embrace the universe.

Unlike most utopias, Island is not about governance, but about Being. Whereas Wells came to believe that a group of good men and true could reorganize the whole world, Huxley mistrusted governments. ‘Society’, he said, ‘can never be greatly improved, until such time as most of its members choose to become theocentric saints.’

This remark comes in Grey Eminence (1941), one of his most absorbing books, where his gifts are deployed in a study of Father Joseph, a Capuchin monk who became adviser to Cardinal Richelieu. Between them, Father Joseph and Richelieu prolonged the Thirty Years War, causing millions of deaths by torture, famine, disease and the usual appurtenances of war, including cannibalism. The Capuchin Father Joseph eschews the simian diversions beloved by the Fifth Earl, but falls into a different trap. Politics betrays the nationalistic religion, and vice versa.

The best of Huxley is scattered everywhere, perhaps most thickly in collections of essays; of the essay form he is one of this century’s masters. Adonis and the Alphabet (1956) is a perfect example. The erudition, never obtrusive, carries us from psycho-industrial power, dirt and spirituality, and population pressures, to Martian language and literature … and much else besides.

The Human Situation (1978) gathers together a series of lectures delivered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1959. They provide learned and unpompous summaries of Huxley’s thinking on many subjects, answering such questions as, ‘How should we be related to the planet on which we live? How are we to develop our individual potentialities?’ No better handbook to our ongoing civilization could be devised.

In one of those essays, the one on ‘Man and Religion’, Huxley states that, because mysticism does not commit one to any cut-and-dried statement about the structure of the universe, there is no conflict between a mystical approach to religion and science. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that such gurus as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky commit themselves to wacko versions of the world. Ouspensky seemed to believe that the periodic table was somehow related to notes in music. Low man in the guru totem pole, Hubbard believed in vast intergalactic battles. Yet the universe as revealed by current science is wacko enough for most mortals.

However, Huxley also says that there is a sense in which it is no great matter whether myths are true or not: they are simply expressive of our reactions to the mystery of the world in which we live.

Huxley’s personal myth was of this mystical union of something that existed beyond words. It produced his difficult, dedicated work. The Perennial Philosophy (1946). The possible connection of this myth with the death of his much-loved mother when he was fourteen is a matter for speculation, though it is scarcely to be imagined that such a traumatic event left no shockwave.

Huxley faded away on Friday 22 November 1963, with LSD in his veins. Within twenty-four hours, another wise man, another writer of SF who had lost his mother in childhood, C. S. Lewis, would also be dead. But it was Huxley who died on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Huxley’s continuing influence was summed up by Isaiah Berlin, who said, ‘He was the herald of what will surely be one of the great advances in this and following centuries—the creation of new psycho-physical sciences, of discoveries in the realm of what at present, for want of a better term, we call the relations between body and mind.’

Almost everything Aldous Huxley wrote was adversely criticized at one time or another. Everyone spoke well of the man himself, of his nobility and charm. His gentleness, sweetness and humour were remarked on by all those fortunate enough to know him.

Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was a personal friend. She has the last word. ‘I shall always think of Aldous as smiling.’

‘What of the Immanent Will and its designs?’, asks Thomas Hardy. The question forms the opening line of Hardy’s vast drama, The Dynasts, and is answered by that phantom intelligence, the Spirit of the Years:

It works unconsciously, as heretofore,

Eternal artistries in Circumstance,

Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,

Seem in themselves its single listless aim,

And not their consequence.

To which the Spirit of the Pities joins, saying,

Still thus? Still thus?

Ever unconscious!

It is clear that the Immanent Will is a prototype of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, that Vast Active Live Intelligence System. Thinking the matter over after the carnage of the First World War, Hardy decided that he had erred on the optimistic side—thereby leaving the door open for Olaf Stapledon.

Stapledon sweeps away the human characters in whom Hardy delighted, to present us with a threadbare stage upon which humanity is all but lost. On that stage are unfolded the evolutionary histories of the Last Men and the soliloquies of the Star Maker.

Those two great dramas of Stapledon’s, Last and First Men and Star Maker, were written over fifty years ago, in 1930 and 1937. They loom above the later oceans of science fiction like the immense rocks in Bocklin’s painting, ‘The Isle of the Dead’, appearing and disappearing in the mist. That Stapledon, an Englishman, has not himself taken permanent sojourn on Bocklin’s grim island is entirely due to the work of American scholars. The Oxford Companion to English Literature allows him no entry to himself.