BOOKS OF THE DAY
Man without Honour
Ape and Essence. By Aldous Huxley. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. 6d.) MR. HUXLEY is out of love with human beings in his new novel Ape and Essence. But then in no novel that he has ever written can he be said to have found much in their favour. Probably it is himself he hates, and, indeed, observing the self which is revealed in his writing—and in his novels how clearly it is revealed—one can hardly blame him. Those who imagine that the times we live in are the high watermark of the intolerable (a fairly common delusion) might take this picture of life in the twenty-second century for com- fort. Another personal point before passing to the book. Why is Mr. Huxley so fascinated by evil? He seems to dote upon it. Perhaps emotionally (heaven knows, he is clever enough in the head), perhaps in the heart, as it were, he is a bit retarded, a bit like a precocious and rather unpleasant Child peering at adult behaviour, especially if that behaviour is going on where privacy is usual, noting the details with a mixture of glee and disgust, in fact a Peter Pan of the keyhole.
We open in Hollywood. A script-writer, Bob by name, is asking his producer, Mr. Lubin, for a rise in salary. " Bob," says Mr. Lubin, " in this studio, at this time, not even Jesus Christ himself could get a raise.P This firm retort gives Bob's companion (a typical self- portrait character, with a negative attitude to life and a familiarity with the world's masterpieces) an opportunity to go on for some time about this imaginary picture of Christ before Lubin as it might be painted by Rembrandt, Breughel and Piero, and to add a few words about Plato, Karl Marx, Athena (" the patroness of the arts . . . the goddess of scientific warfare, the heavenly Chief of every General Staff ") Brahman and Atman, Order, Beauty, Gandhi and the political situation round about 1946. When later on it emerges that poor Bob, who is not nearly so well educated as his friend, is unable to keep away from women or to satisfy them (his predicament is less briefly noted), readers will know that they are well over the border and into Huxley country.
A truck tears out of the studio grounds, narrowly missing the two 'riends. It carries rejected scripts which are to be burnt at the dump ; some of them fall to the ground as the truck takes the corner on two wheels and one of these scripts is picked up by Bob's clever friend. Say goodbye to the friends ; you will never see either of them again. The rest of Ape and Essence is the salvaged script.
It is about life as Mr. Huxley thinks it will be lived two centuries from now, after the third world war, and the killing, maiming and infecting of the world's population by atomic and bacteriological warfare. Oddly enough New Zealand appears to have escaped what is henceforth alluded to as " the Thing " (that is the third world war and its consequences), and from New Zealand comes a party of explorers to the coast of California. Settling down to life as it is lived in the twenty-second century, we find not one vestige of virtue. But then of course there never was a vestige of virtue in any of Mr. Huxley's novels ; good people are so difficult to make anything
,of, aie they not ? And vice and cruelty are so exciting. All the *acne, it is odd if this book is going to be held up as a warning to the human race of what will happen if they do not stop dropping bombs on each other, because we have never had a hint from this writer that there is anything in civilisation that is worth preserving. It would be instructive—following his lead about the pictures of Christ before Lubin—to imagine what Churchill and his colleague? would have made of the 1940 situation if they had been drawn from Mr. Huxley's novels and not from life. One supposes they would have sat round weeping crocodile tears for the horrors of war, dragging in tags from literature and philosophy to excuse their pusillanimity, and cabling a surrender, post-dated to allow time for the priority evacuation to California of themselves and their friends.
The god of Mr. Huxley's new age is Belial, and his laws and customs are described with gusto. But is not Belial rather an historic devil, a schoolman's bogey, for our new age? His priests are eunuchs, and the slave population are wholly in their power. We extract a few particulars to show that gusto is no vain charge, our author has indeed been enjoying himself. It appears that men and women are not allowed to have anything to do with each other except on Belial's Day. If they break this law they are subject to fearful penalties (detail) unless they can make good their escape to desert territory. On Belial's Day all the mothers who have deformed babies (and owing to " the Thing " there are a great many deformed babies) have their heads shaved and are brought as felons before the altar with their babies. The babies are snatched from them by the priests and impaled on knives and killed. The mothers are then beaten by the priests, and the onlookers, stimulated by this spectacle, take off their clothes and proceed to celebrate a saturnalia. The women's clothes, by the way, have the word " No " printed on them back and front, and a good deal is made of the significant placing of these prohibitives. The eroticism of these passages, and the warmth of the tone, should alone be sufficient to refute the publisher's claim that this book is a work of satire.
What work do the people do? They dig up the embalmed dead of the pre-Thing past, and the bosses take the clothes of the dead people to dress themselves in (detail of soiled nylons for the boss's girl). The customs of these worshippers of Belial are observed with surprise by a young professor from the New Zealand party who is captured by the natives. But he soon adjusts himself to the situa- tion (Mr. Huxley's intellectuals were never brave), and, with fearful memories of his widowed mother back in New Zealand and of that stock Huxley figure, a middle-aged girl on marriage bent who thinks he'll do, he falls in love with a young native girl called Loola, and escapes with her. And that is the end of the book.
A word should be said about the Narrator's part in this scripted novel. The Narrator speaks in verse, and whenever he says anything serious he at once turns it off by a facetious twist. He quotes Pascal: " We make an idol of truth ; for truth without charity is not God, but his image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship," and goes on in his own voice, " You lived for the worship of an idol. But in the last analysis every idol is Moloch. So here you are my friends, here you are." Flight into humour by weak don— how well we know it !
In the script there is also quite a lot of devil-worship liturgy. This sort of thing, split up into Chorus and Sernichorus: "It is a terrible thing Terrible, terrible To fall into the hands The huge hands and the hairy Into the hands of the living Evil."
and again, governed by "into the hands " I suppose (" the huge hands and the hairy ") though mercifully separated from it by half a page of particularisation,
" Of the naked Worm that never dies And, never dying, is the source of eternal life
Of the Prince of the Powers of the Air Spitfire and Stuka, Beelzebub and Azazel, Hallelujah."
This " Spitfire and Stuka " is interesting. And as for the tide, the magnificent outburst of the exasperated Isabella was not Shakespeare's whole idea of Man.
When Mr. Huxley is writing about other people's writing, how wise he can be, how loving and compassionate, though sharp. His Texts and Pretexts is one of the best of personal anthologies. It is only when faced by life that he grows spiteful ; spits, falters and diminishes. And what after all is the argument of Ape and Essence, if allowed, but one from fear, and therefore useless?
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