Brian Aldiss - The Detached Retina

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.

In fact, Stapledon is a writer of a notably English kind, his attempts to establish an individual mythology somewhat reminiscent of William Blake (the sub-title of his novel, Odd John echoes a poem of Blake’s, ‘A Story Between Jest and Earnest’—though there’s precious little enjoying of the lady in the book). His grandiosities recall Charles M. Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, Dawn in Britain , with its quixotic attempt to restore Chaucer to modern English. Two other voices echo conflictingly through Stapledon’s fiction, the voice of John Milton in Paradise Lost and the voice of that Victorian storm-trooper, Winwood Reade, author of The Martyrdom of Man.

In many respects, Stapledon is of his time. Born in 1886, he was torn by religious doubt, like many men of his day. Essentially a Victorian, he had trouble fitting into the post-war world. Together with many others, he flirted with pacifism, communism and promiscuity. And being outside the swim of London literary society, he knew few other authors and soon became critically disregarded.

The central premise of his work, that mankind is irrelevant to the purposes of the universe, proves unpalatable to many. His admirers honour him precisely for that unpalatability, so variously, so swoopingly expressed. We encounter in his work faith versus atheism, and the seeking for individual fulfilment versus communality, whether terrestrial or stellar. These remain painfully contemporary concerns. In his two great glacial novels, spanning the thirties, we encounter spiritual suffering and the surreal mutations which mankind must undergo at a Creator’s command.

My first encounter with Last and First Men came at a time of suffering and mutation. I was part of the British Second Division, fighting back the Japanese Army which had invaded Burma and Assam and was planning to storm the gates of India. I was nineteen, brown as a berry, on half rations. We were about to advance on enemy-held Mandalay while shooting DDT down our pants and under our arms. Specifically, I was standing in a commandeered bungalow in the jungle outside Kohima, awaiting a typhus injection.