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RODNEY ACKLAND
The Letters of Aldous Huxley edited by Grover Smith (Chatto and Windus 100s) The thematic construction of Aldous Hux- ley's philosophical novels from Eyeless in Gaza of 1936 to Island, published a few months before his death twenty-seven years later, made it necessary for him to invent for each of them, as the still centre of the vortex created by his unenlightened characters—all in varying degrees of self-identification with their own particular addictions, distractions and attachments, of determined or un- conscious or regretful impermeability to Truth—a character who lives according to it, a truly sane human being to represent Reality: perhaps a saint, in any case a 'good' man. But however unavoidable, however absolutely intrinsic to a work a 'good' character may be, the task of making such a one convincing to the reader, or even feasi- ble, has always proved so very nearly im- possible that, in the whole history of western literature, the number of times it has been brought off may be counted, more or less, on the fingers of one hand.
No one knew this better than Huxley. `There are no completely healthy or com- pletely grown-up good characters in imaginative literature,' he wrote to Mrs Rosalind Huxley after the publication of Eyeless in Gaza, . . [they] have to be, as it were, diluted with weakness or eccentricity; for only on such conditions are they com- prehensible by readers and expressible by writers.' And as examples of 'diluted' good characters, he quoted Dostoievsky's idiot, Dickens's good characters en masse and Gorky's 'extravagantly eccentric' hermit. Did Huxley himself, then, succeed in any of his attempts at creating a convincing portrait of a truly good man? Critical opinion has not, I think, granted it to him—except, perhaps, with the character of Bruno Rontini in Time Must Have a Stop though Bruno, in point of fact, was not intended to be a good man merely: he was a saint.
However, it seems to me that now at last, without effort or intention, posthumously, Huxley has brought it off, and that out of the nine hundred and ninety-two pages of The Letters of Aldous Huxley there emerges the portrait of a character who is first and foremost, and without any sort of qualifica- tion or question, recognisable as a good man: compassionate, loving and supremely humanhearted, the antithesis of the cold intellectualism sometimes so ignorantly at- tributed to him. The eccentricity without which the goodness of the character called Aldous Huxley would not be 'com- prehensible to the reader', lacking as it does the alternative 'dilution of weakness', is his many-sided genius.
Nothing is easier than to label Huxley as a latterday Man of the Renaissance but what in fact makes him unique, sets him so spatially apart from any other writer of our times, is not his protean qualities as novelist, poet, philosopher, wit, dramatist, scriptwriter, anthropologist, historian and mystic, nor is it the prodigious and eser widening range of the knowledge with which his mind was furnished, but its permanent. entire and undeviating openness; and the intense, unappeasable, penetrating, patient and .searching curiosity into every aspect of existence, non-existence and supra-exig- ence—a curiosity as unflaggingly evident in the penultimate letter of this collection (the last, dictated to his second wife, Laura Archera shortly before his death in 1963. is to his London agents and concerned with the possibility of a -ry production of The Tillotson Banquet) as it is in those of his undergraduate days, just prior to and during the course of the 1914-18 war.
Nine hundred and ninety-two pages of the letters of one man to his friends and ac- quaintances over a period of sixty-three years may seem a daunting proposition. But should the publishers, with due acknow- ledgement to Leslie Frewin, have de- ci4ed to call it The Wit and Wisdom of Aldous Huxley or, as I should prefer it, The Sanity of Huxley, they would have been justified entirely. Indeed if .any reader, with the help of its twenty-six page index, cares to use this collection of letters as a vade mecum or Enquire Within for Sanity on Every Subject, he will find that there are few if any subjects of intense contemporary interest which are not touched on somewhere in these letters, none of which carry the smallest suggestion of having been written for posterity. Huxley's concern for the worries, difficulties, marital troubles. illnesses and bereavements of his friends is constant; and to those for whom the Huxley image is based on only a superficial knowledge of his work, the diversity of these friends will undoubtedly cause some surprise, not to say some raising of eyebrows. 'Dear Eileen', for instance, to whom many of his longest and most absorb- ing letters are addressed, is Mrs Eileen Gar- rail, the spiritualist medium; 'Dearest Anita', with whom he corresponds frequently from the middle 'thirties onwards, turns out to be Anita Loos.
Huxley wrote somewhere—I think it ∎sac in The Perennial Philosophy—that there could be no such thing as 'righteous' anger; and if ever a man practised what he (for want of a better word) preached, Huxley was that man. Overcoming what, in a letter to his son, Matthew, he called `the Huxley failing of not suffering fools gladly', he had to suf- fer them interminably while writing scripts in Hollywood and particularly in his almost invariably disastrous contacts with the theatre; but always he remains courteous and forebearing; only once, when his treat- ment by a Broadway director passes all bounds—even for a Broadway director—in arrogant, carnival-headed, narcissistic, trendy crassness and effrontery does a hint of righteous anger show. And even then what he writes is no more than polite and ice-cold sense.
Semi-blind from the age of six, Huxley. after his discovery of the Bates system, tried to teach us, in the book of that name, The Art of Seeing; in all his work, from Ends and Means until he was too ill to work any longer, he tried to teach us the art of living: and finally, in Island, the art of dying as well. The letters reveal that the incident in this, his lastolovel, of the death of Susila—leaving this life in accordance with the instructions of the Bardo Thol, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, in full awareness and with the help and encouragement of her husband—Is
based on the death and the manner of dying of Maria Huxley, Aldous's first wife, his partner in thirty-six years of happy marriage. The account of this in the collected letters, better than his fictionalisation of it, is perhaps the most profoundly moving thing he ever wrote.
To be truly good is to be truly sane, and for thirty-three years it has seemed to me that Huxley's voice has been the only sound of sanity to be heard in the hideous uproar of a mad mad mad mad and increasingly demented world. In The Letters of Aldous Huxley it may be heard again in its most warm and human accents.
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