ALDOUS HUXLEY

This distinguished grandson of T.H. Huxley began his literary career as a cynical young bourgeois decadent mocking the foibles of his time, and ended it on the cautiously optimistic note of one who had faith in better things to come. Not that he became a proletarian author in any strict sense of the word; for he was always too conscious of his bourgeois origins to be capable of an exclusively transcendental approach to writing. Beginning as a bourgeois author in Europe, he later became a bourgeois/proletarian one in the United States, dedicating himself to the (posthumous) Beyond rather than simply to the collapse of bourgeois civilization. Whether or not he attained to the Clear Light of the Void at death ... must remain a somewhat debatable point. But he was certainly at a far remove from the social cynicism of Antic Hay and Point Counter Point by then!

Many of the best literary minds agree that Huxley's most important work was done in the United States, and so I believe it was. For on the West Coast of America his spiritual life blossomed as never before, and he came into his own as a bourgeois/proletarian author, dedicated to things of the spirit. Even then, however, there were serious limitations to Huxley's spirituality, strange shortcomings in his concept of the Beyond. He was quite convinced of a posthumous salvation or, rather, the reality of posthumous salvation, and even wrote a novel in which one of his own character projections, Eustace Barnack, is confronted, at death, by the Clear Light and finds himself unable to abide it, in consequence of which he is obliged, under the law of reincarnation, to return to the world in order to improve his karma. This novel, Time Must Have a Stop, showed Huxley to be greatly interested in and considerably influenced by works like The Tibetan Book of the Dead and Eastern mysticism generally. It wasn't just a gimmick of his, as some critics have fatuously contended, but a serious interest which he persisted in right up until his death, when, convinced that posthumous salvation lay to-hand, he availed himself of two separate shots of LSD in order to assist his passage into the Other World. He died the day that President Kennedy was assassinated, and died, we are informed, in the most peaceful fashion, sustained by his faith in the Clear Light and encouraged towards a peaceful merging with this transcendent manifestation of spiritual beatitude by his second wife, Laura, who behaved towards him similarly to the way that he had behaved towards his first wife, when she had been in the throes of dying and apparently had need of mystical encouragement. There can be no doubt that Huxley was in deadly earnest concerning the possibility of a posthumous salvation; for it was not like him to indulge in gimmicks or to be sceptical about a belief in which he had become so interested and which formed a pivot, so to speak, for his creative inspirations. From our point of view, his earnestness may seem a trifle bizarre, even crazy, but there can be no question that he took his mysticism very seriously. At times a shade too seriously, if what his second wife revealed in her journals about his fear of the consequences of being unprepared for union with the Divine Ground is to be believed! It was as though he not only believed in a posthumous salvation, but in a posthumous damnation as well - quite in the paranoid spirit of a medieval Christian!

But if Huxley effectively became something of a Buddhist crank, he nonetheless remained fundamentally a bourgeois. For the substitution of one traditional world religion for another doesn't alter one's class integrity but, rather, confirms the decadence of things falling apart from the (Christian) centre, to paraphrase Yeats. His belief in posthumous salvation was quite respectable from a bourgeois standpoint, even if founded on oriental rather than occidental symbolism. He did not cross that fateful borderline which divides bourgeois thinking from proletarian thinking and proceed to a level of thought in which all possibility of a posthumous salvation, of whichever kind, is dismissed as a delusion. It never occurred to him that salvation, when and if it did materialize, would only come at the culmination of evolution, following the transformation of men into supermen, and the supermen of the lower millennium into superbeings, and the superbeings of the higher millennium into spiritual globes, and the spiritual globes of the heavenly Beyond into the omega absolute, or something to that effect. No, such a level of thought, such a way of thinking, would not have been intelligible or accessible to a bourgeois, even if he had the appearance of being progressive. Huxley remained deluded throughout his life, and he died deluded, too! He was the supreme example of bourgeois decadence, by which I mean that he attained to a relatively high level of spiritual thought without, however, crossing that fateful borderline which distinguishes the end of one civilization from the beginning of another. Regarded in this positive sense, decadence implies the culmination of the literary or aesthetic achievements of a given class in terms which anticipate or seem to reflect the influence of the next evolutionary class without, however, completely breaking free of traditional belief.

It is interesting to note, in a number of Huxley's works, not least of all his late essays, how the bourgeois in him is at times compromised by the extent of his decadence into taking sides with, or almost taking sides with, that which is known to be the enemy of bourgeois civilization. Thus in Brave New World Revisited one encounters many passages which refer to either Stalin or Hitler or Soviet technology or socialist dictatorships in general, and although Huxley never openly comes out on the side of these anti-bourgeois phenomena (he has no desire to commit literary suicide), nevertheless his persistent interest in them betrays the extent of his decadence, confirming the fact that, while still fundamentally bourgeois at heart, his decadent integrity requires a negative interest in socialist phenomena - much the same as with Malcolm Muggeridge, another staunch bourgeois decadent. Huxley, however, never quite forgets himself, or his Eton-Balliol upbringing, even though at times he seems on the point of doing so, and consequently his work remains relatively respectable from a bourgeois point-of-view.

My own opinion as to the most important side of his work leads me to single out what may be called his Moksha writings for special commendation. If Huxley deserves to be remembered for anything, in the decades ahead, it must surely be for his pioneering experiments with LSD and mescaline, as also for the writings associated with them. The future will doubtless find an important role for vision-inducing synthetic drugs, and Huxley's contribution to their role in society should not be forgotten. He was much wiser than Arthur Koestler or Carl Jung on this subject, and deservedly earned the respect and friendship of Dr Timothy Leary for his experiments in artificially-induced visionary experience. To Jung, such experiments would have suggested an audacious attempt, on the part of man, to gatecrash Heaven, which, in his view, could only be reached through long and arduous naturalistic spiritual endeavour. Huxley, however, was of the opinion that science should be brought to bear on the development of man's spiritual life, and although he had only a limited notion as to what the contribution of science should entail, we needn't doubt that he was fundamentally right. Meditation by itself will not suffice for getting spirit to the heavenly Beyond - a contention, I feel sure, that even Koestler would have been prepared to endorse, irrespective of his personal scepticism concerning the validity of synthetics.

As a novelist, Huxley had the anti-literary merit of preferring to philosophize and moralize than simply tell a story. He remarked somewhere that he lacked the congenital talent for story-telling, in the mould of conventional narrative fiction, but we need not suppose it greatly bothered him. Probably it was a modest way of revealing his contempt for and indifference towards mere story-telling. As a philosophical novelist, Huxley's contribution to literary progress from the fictional to the truthful was of considerable significance for its time, and we need be in no doubt that his literary work ranks with the most important of his generation, certainly as regards his later novels, which date from Eyeless in Gaza. Prior to that turning-point in his career, his most significant novel was Point Counter Point, a work which may well have been influenced, in its juxtaposition in one chapter of simultaneous character settings, by James Joyce. Certainly much has been made of D.H. Lawrence's influence on the 'all-round', dualistic philosophical position of Rampion, one of the novel's leading characters. But although Lawrence did apparently exert some influence on Huxley at around this time, there would seem to be little evidence for ascribing the Rampion philosophy directly to Lawrence's influence or, indeed, for seeing in Rampion, as in one or two earlier Huxley characters, a fictional reproduction of D.H. Lawrence. That Huxley more or less concurred with Lawrence at this time, in upholding a typically bourgeois philosophy, would appear to be the most likely explanation. It is, par excellence, the type of philosophy to appeal to a young man anyway, and the author of Do What You Will was by no means aping Lawrence when he insisted on the applicability of an all-round, dualistic attitude to life, as befitting the 'life-worshipper's' creed.

Such an attitude, however, was to play little or no part in the novels which date from Eyeless in Gaza, and confirm Huxley in a new bourgeois/proletarian creative integrity. It was from this date, too, that his novels became increasingly philosophical, leading through Time Must Have a Stop and After Many a Summer ... to the most philosophical of them all - his final novel, Island. In one sense at least, this novel marked the climax to his career and set the tone for future philosophical novelists to follow. But in another sense it was a comparative failure, in that its setting on a jungle island in the South Pacific entailed a kind of 'back-to-nature' approach to correct living which conflicts with its transcendental content. Paradoxes and contradictions were not foreign to Huxley's fiction, as indeed to bourgeois literature generally, but this final paradox was perhaps the greatest of them all! Despite his genuine interest in transcendental criteria, Huxley could never forsake his naturalistic bourgeois roots, since the man who studied the spiritual masters for clues to the Beyond was no less disposed to studying Wordsworth or Arnold or Whitman through his love of nature. He was certainly no Mondrian, rigorously spurning the natural-world-order in the interests of the transcendent, a pioneer of a new artificial-world-order. He may have experimented with synthetic drugs from time to time, but, despite his decadent status, the man who criticized Father Surin in the Devils of Loudun for his anti-natural ambitions remained, to the end, a bourgeois, living if not always writing the Rampion philosophy of dualistic allegiance to the spirit and to the flesh.