What is the best novel Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) wrote? I think I can get close to an answer by trying to extract some features that make his fiction work. But just to start with a spoiler, I don’t consider Brave New World (1932) one of his better books. Why? Well, let’s take a look. In this dystopian society, happiness is the goal, fostered by a mind-numbing drug called Soma and years of conditioning. Babies are cultured in bottles and conditioned there by chemical techniques and after birth by sleep suggestion and other training, the result being a class system from Alpha plus to Epsilon minus, graded by height and intelligence. Promiscuity is encouraged if not actually mandated, since procreation only occurs in bottles. Into this society Bernard Marx does not fit; he is small for an Alpha plus, doesn’t like promiscuity, and wants to be an adult in a world which infantilizes everyone. Bernard brings back from a “savage reservation” in New Mexico a young man named John, also unable to fit into his society since he isn’t Indian and he has been taught to read by his mother, who was left there, pregnant with John, while she was on holiday from London like the one Bernard is on now. He realizes that it his own boss, an unpleasant fellow who is about to fire Bernard (which means being exiled to an island) who is John’s father. The boy is equally out of place in London, where he applies a Shakespearean sensibility to all that happens to him, having absorbed Shakespeare as practically the only reading material available. His quotations from the plays, applied to what goes on around him, contrast humorously with the clichés about the desirability of pleasure and the dangers of solitude repeated from their sleep conditioning by the people around him. John ends up killing himself after having succumbed for a night to the orgiastic, Soma-fed passions he detests. Bernard, meanwhile, will be sent to an island for his inability and unwillingness to fit in. The good news there is that he will be in company with other misfits like himself.
When you write about science and the state of what is known at a given moment, you risk giving your fiction a dated quality, and Brave New World is full of that. But it’s also jejune and full of adolescent whining, which may be why adolescent readers like it. Too much whining, not enough humor, and also not enough of the real world as it is, which Huxley excels at humorously dissecting. Huxley is not at his best when he’s describing either a dystopia or a utopia headed for inevitable ruin, as he does in his last novel, Island (1962).
What is he good at describing? When I look at his first novels, I see that he is best at combining satire of his contemporaries, of the sort that Evelyn Waugh perfected, with the novel of ideas—a kind of novel that Thomas Love Peacock made delightful use of—perhaps invented—a hundred years before Huxley was writing. Get a bunch of people together at a dinner table, in a drawing room, or in a hunting party out in the woods and include people who have obsessive beliefs or practices—hobby-horses, as Laurence Sterne called them—and let them talk at each other. Add a young writer, poet, or artist, a naïf to be amazed at it all, perhaps to be influenced to adopt one of the obsessions, but also to fall in love with one of the women present, preferably one older who can treat him as a child, maybe indulge herself sexually with him, but ultimately break his heart.
The pattern is set in Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow (1923). Denis Stone, a hapless and gormless young author of one “slim volume” of poetry, visits Crome, where he is in love with Anne, the daughter of the house and four years older than he, who thinks of him as a child. Priscilla and Henry Wimbush are the hosts of Crome, which is based on Huxley’s visits to Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor. Henry is engaged in writing and printing a history of Crome, from which he reads to the assembled guests on two evenings. Among those guests are Ivor (who visits briefly and seduces Mary, another guest and a modern young woman who wants sexual experience so she won’t be “repressed”), Gombauld, a painter who tries to seduce Anne, Mr. Barbecue-Smith, the writer of self-help books, and Mr. Scogan, who punctures Denis’s always perilous aplomb by guessing the entire plot of Denis’s novel-in-progress. Notable moments include Denis’s riff on his fascination with the word carminative and his disillusionment when he finally looks it up, and Scogan’s riff on the imaginary library depicted on a secret door in Crome’s real library.
Huxley uses refinements on this formula for three more successful novels written in the twenties: Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925), and Point Counter Point (1928).
There are two comic engines in Antic Hay. Theodore Gumbril, at chapel in the school where he teaches, dreams up the idea of trousers with a sewn-in inflatable rubber cushion in the seat to protect the tender bottom from hard seats like chapel pews. He quits his job and tries to market them. Aside from Gumbril’s Patent Small Clothes, the other comic engine is the false beard—a “beaver”—that Gumbril, naturally self-effacing, affects and which makes him more forceful and compelling, resulting in the conquest of the bored wife of his acquaintance Shearwater. He also romances a lovely and virginal—though married—girl whom he then neglects and loses because of his infatuation with the seductress Myra Viveash (who also has ensnared Shearwater), herself incapable of love since her one true passion died in the war—though Huxley is confused about when this happened, indicating three different possible dates before and after the armistice. The complex love-relations among the characters are a hallmark of this sort of comedy of manners and reach their utmost complexity, as we shall see, in Point Counter Point.
Huxley takes the show on the road with Those Barren Leaves, set in Italy. “An Evening at Mrs. Aldwinkle’s” introduces the art-worshipping, aging Lillian Aldwinkle, whose household at the Palazzo Cybo Malaspina in Vezzia includes her adoring niece Irene. The houseguests are the socialist Mr. Falx, young Lord Hovenden, who is a kind of acolyte of Falx and also in love with Irene, the novelist Mary Thriplow, who feigns simplicity (Diderot apparently said of the actors in the Commedia del Arte that the less they felt the better they represented feeling) to attract Mr. Calamy, and the cynical Mr. Cardan.
The second section, “Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer,” sends the entire guest list at the palazzo on a road trip through Italy. This section contains the first-person description of Chelifer’s longtime infatuation and short love affair with Barbara Walters, a nymphomaniac (“’a woman with a temperament,’ as the euphemists qualify the lascivious thing”) and a stupid, unimaginative, and mendacious but beautiful woman. After a near-drowning, Chelifer is taken up by Lillian Aldwinkle, who attempts to seduce him, but he resists. He is a writer who often compares his own writing to the checkerlike board game, halma: “Arts for art’s sake—halma for halma’s sake.” His rather mundane view of art thus opposes that of Mrs. Aldwinkle, for whom art is all, but who is hardly able to appreciate it.
Cardan stumbles into a gothic household where a grasping brother hopes his moron sister, Grace Elver, will catch malaria and die, leaving him her money. Cardan takes Grace back to the palazzo, thinking that he can marry Grace, treat her well enough, and enjoy the interest on her fortune.
The house party moves to Rome, except for Calamy and Thriplow. Lord Hovenden and Irene become engaged, but as they move back toward Vezzia, Grace Elver insists on eating questionable fish, sickens, and dies. At the end Calamy leaves his affair with Mary Thriplow to go up into the hills to think.
Huxley’s next novel, Point Counter Point, is more ambitious in scope than his first three. He interweaves the stories of a group of Londoners prominent in politics, art, and society. Walter Bidlake, who has tired of Marjorie Carling (she left her husband for Walter and now is pregnant by him), is pursuing the beautiful and cruel Lucy Tantamount, who tortures him, briefly accepts him as her lover, and then goes to Paris to seek other men. Walter’s father, the aging painter John Bidlake, is the lover of Lucy’s mother Lady Edward Tantamount. Her husband ignores her and dabbles in science, assisted by the would-be Marxist revolutionary Illidge.
The leader of the Blackshirt-like British Freemen, Everard Mobley (Oswald Mosley was the name of the historical Blackshirts' leader), pursues Elinor Quarles, John Bidlake’s daughter and the wife of Philip Quarles the novelist, a bloodless intellectual. Elinor is tempted to take Mobley as her lover because of her husband’s neglect. At the story’s climax, Elinor is about to succumb when she is called away to her child, who is dying of meningitis. Charles Spandrell, a malcontent who enjoys seducing innocent girls and planning mischief, takes the opportunity to enlist Illidge in the murder of Mobley, whom they waylay at the Quarles’s apartment. Then Spandrell arranges to be killed by Mobley’s British Freemen. He has invited as witness Mark Rampion, a writer and painter whose loving relationship with his wife Mary is the only healthy one in the book. Whew!
Rampion enunciates throughout the book a philosophy of the natural man—acting according to our strange makeup that is simultaneously animal and intellectual, neither allowing the animal to have free rein (like the goatish Sidney Quarles, Philip’s fraud of a father, or like John Bidlake, whose art is only an extension of his nearly totally lubricious view of the world), nor the intellectual to take over as in Philip Quarles, nor the spiritual to be unfettered with the inevitable resulting hypocrisy, as in Denis Burlap, the editor of the literary quarterly where Walter works. Burlap, while piously affecting devotion to St. Francis, whose biography he is writing, really pursues all the women working in his magazine’s office. The title, in other words, only partly alludes to musical counterpoint; this is a novel of ideas and contains much conversation and exchange of viewpoints, as well as the dramatization of those viewpoints in the actions of the characters.
An additional level of interest for some results from the barely-disguised reference to real people among Huxley’s acquaintances: he was apparently burned by Nancy Cunard as Walter is by Lucy Tantamount; Rampion and his wife Mary are at least partly based on D. H. Lawrence and Frieda; John Bidlake is inspired by Augustus John, Philip Quarles is a self-deprecating self-portrait, and Burlap is based on John Middleton Murry.
Huxley is also writing short stories and novellas during the twenties, and one of the best, After the Fireworks, is published in a collection titled Brief Candles at the end of the decade in 1930. The short story and the novella forms enable him to concentrate on one aspect of his comedy of manners; in this novella, it’s the love of an infatuated young person with a worldly older one. But in After the Fireworks, we first get a clear-headed view of why the romance is doomed. But it happens anyway. Miles Fanning, a fiftyish, successful novelist whose books advocate shedding inhibitions and living the life of true sentiment, is approached by an admirer, twenty-one-year old Pamela Tarn, who, despite his efforts to hold her at arm’s length, becomes his lover. The letter he writes to her before this happens, intending to leave Rome and her the next morning, details the inevitable course their romance would have taken. But before he can finish it, she storms his apartment, and they do become lovers. Then the romance takes the inevitable course he had outlined in the letter he never sent.
She realizes she does not love Fanning so much as she is in love with an idea. He becomes demanding and a little crazy, but his experience overpowers her attempt at resistance. He becomes ill from the excess, and as they move from Rome to a spa away from the city, his thoughts turn from the real Pamela to the idealized love of Dante for Beatrice, while Pamela begins to think about the boy in Rome who took her dancing, and her thoughts turn from idealized love to the thought of a real young man.
Something unfortunate happens to Huxley in the 1930s, at least unfortunate for his fiction. He becomes a believer. He embraces a particular philosophy and becomes quite as obsessive about it as one of the hobby-horse riders in his early novels. He becomes a pacifist and also a believer in a universal core of truth in all the world’s major religions, a core best approached, in his newfound conviction, through mysticism. He writes about these beliefs later in The Perennial Philosophy (1945). He began to write novels containing a character who can’t be satirized for his hobby-horse because Huxley believes in the hobby-horse. Moreover the usual coming of age and developing worldliness of the young, naïve protagonist turns into a conversion experience. You can bring this off if you are Tolstoy, but it wasn’t good for Huxley. Fortunately, the worst effects only show up in one novel, Eyeless in Gaza (1936).
The novel follows its protagonist, Anthony Beavis, occasionally in first-person journal entries or notes for the sociology text he is writing, mostly in third-person omniscient narration, from the time of his mother’s death and burial in 1902 until early in 1935. We see him at school and later at university, at a party given by his lover in the twenties, Mary Amberley, and with his subsequent lover, Mary’s daughter Helen, in the thirties, most notable in a scene where their rooftop naked sunbathing and lovemaking is interrupted when a dog, thrown from a helicopter, falls to its death beside them, spattering them with blood. Another scene is that of Anthony’s best friend Brian Foxe’s suicide in 1914, an event precipitated by Beavis’s kissing of Brian’s innocent fiancée, which has the effect of convincing her he loves her, since he is willing to show his affection physically while Brian has shrunk from intimacy. Later events include Beavis’s travel to South America with his school friend Mark Staithes in a futile attempt to join a revolutionary insurrection.
Beavis’s character is consistent throughout the book until he meets—just as his friend Mark is dying of sepsis from an injured leg—a remarkable doctor who saves Mark and converts Beavis to his philosophy of pacifism and universal love tinged with mysticism. That character of Anthony Beavis, ambivalent and abulic, unable to act on his few convictions, distances him from Helen Amberley when she would have been ready to commit to love, and is also responsible for his friend Brian’s suicide.
The narrative is fragmented, with each episode returned to several times but surrounded by chronologically nonsequent episodes. The jumbling enables, for example, the conversion episode with the doctor who saves Staithes’s life to be closely juxtaposed with Brian Foxe’s suicide twenty years earlier, thus increasing the dramatic effect. Despite that effect and the suspense that’s built up from our incomplete knowledge of so many episodes, I do not think the narrative really gains from this fragmentation. It’s hardly experimental, though we might call it that if Huxley had left us to find our way rather than heading each chapter with a precise date.
Also less than completely successful in preserving us from boredom are Anthony’s frequent essays on sociology, morals, and philosophy, either in diary entries or in notes toward his book. Making him a sociologist is a good move—a groundless man following an ephemeral non-discipline—but his lack of solidity is apparent in the life he leads, regardless of his attempt to separate himself in his own mind from his many equally purposeless friends. And the humor that was present in earlier books about the bright young things in London society is painfully absent here. Too much of the book is taken up with Beavis’s painful childhood and young adult aimlessness. Then he is suddenly converted to pacifism and mysticism by the example of the doctor who saves his friend Mark’s life.
But Huxley recovers some kind of creative equilibrium in the next two novels, After Many a Summer (1939) and Time Must Have a Stop (1944). It’s as if the war’s seriousness has the paradoxical effect of bringing him back from his own unwonted seriousness to his true comic nature.
In After Many a Summer, the millionaire Jo Stoyte, his castle in the hills, and his young mistress Virginia Maunciple may be roughly modeled on William Randolph Hearst, Hearst Castle, and Marion Davies, but Huxley is not just satirizing Hollywood’s narcissism, culture vacuum, and cult of youth. He wants to look at the fear of death and the people who parasitize on it, here Dr. Sigmund Obispo, who keeps Stoyte upright with testosterone shots and holds out the hope that he will actually solve the “problem” of aging. What other real problems that solution would create Huxley hints at with the allusion to Tithonus in the title but keeps as a surprise for the end of the book.
The book’s conversational center is William Propter, an erstwhile historian of the Counter Reformation, an old friend of Stoyte who lives nearby. Propter is practical in his actions, providing decent shelter, furniture, and food for some of the workers on Stoyte’s farms (“the transients,” says the black chauffeur, “have come to pick our navels.”) whom the millionaire exploits and bleeds for rent. But Propter has a philosophy that he explains at length to anyone who will listen. He thinks “good manifests itself only at the animal level” and in a timeless eternity; “time is evil,” so that the task is “to make the human world safe for animals and spirits.” He also think there is truth in all great religions, according to the “Perennialist Philosophy” that Huxley espoused.
Somehow Propter converts to this nebulous philosophy Obispo’s idealist assistant, Pete. He does not convert the Englishman Jeremy Pordage, hired by Stoyte to catalogue the Hauberk papers. Pordage, writes Huxley, is a man of “humorous Puritanism” who would rather read than do anything else, and he enjoys, in his way, the eclectic mixture of art works his millionaire employer has assembled. The Castle is “stuffed with the best that has been thought and said” as well as painted or sculpted, with “every item…perfectly irrelevant to every other item.”
Obispo is the cynic in this group, seducing Virginia without much resistance, laughing at Pete’s idealism, and ready to go wherever science leads him. When he discovers in the Hauberk papers, with Jeremy’s help, that the fifth Earl of Gonister seems to have discovered the secret of indefinite longevity, he pursues this information literally to its source.
After Many a Summer has more action than the typical Huxley talkfest, and what goes on is both sensational and darkly comic. Aside from Propter’s prolix monologues, the novel moves right along. Huxley and Evelyn Waugh both found Hollywood too easy a target of satire—E. B. White famously said an Englishman is never happy until he has explained America to you—but the book is funny, and Huxley is at his best when he is being funny, whatever else he is doing. There is less here also of the painful soul-searching of the naïfs, here Virginia and Pete, than we get in other books like Eyeless in Gaza.
In his next novel, Time Must Have a Stop, Huxley returns to prewar Italy for the setting of most of the action. Sebastian Barnack is seventeen and writes poetry with apparent ease, but he worries about his nonexistent love life and getting evening clothes for a party. His father John, an English barrister, an anti-fascist and a socialist, won’t approve such frills. On a visit to Florence, Sebastian comes under several competing influences. His hedonistic but kind Uncle Eustace Barnack (a “cynical realist” according to his brother John) promises the evening clothes and gives Sebastian a taste of his own mode of living (a Roederer champagne, Sebastian thinks, tastes like “an apple peeled with a steel knife”), praises his poetry, but dies the night of Sebastian’s arrival. Bruno Rontini, a saintly bookseller friend of Eustace, teaches Sebastian by example, by “being good before trying to do good,” by trying to calculate the consequences of his actions, or “the genealogy of an offence” as he puts it. Bruno, too, is an anti-fascist, and one of the consequences of a lie Sebastian tells is Bruno’s arrest by the Fascisti. Another notable influence is Veronica Thwale, who boasts to Sebastian, “Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love” after a frenzied night of lovemaking in which she takes his virginity in a fashion quite unlike the tender scene he’d imagined. And a final, negative influence is the man whom Veronica marries, Paul De Vries, who styles himself self-disparagingly pontifex, not maximus but minimus, a maker of bridges “with which he loved to link the island universes of discourse.” De Vries is a proto-Structuralist.
Huxley follows Eustace after his death, as he floats disembodied in a memory field, disliking the pervasive light, and occasionally, becoming embodied in a medium at a séance who comically misinterprets the things Eustace tries to say to those present. Eustace’s post-death existence seems at times like the circle where Paolo and Francesca float in the Inferno.
Huxley thought Time Must Have a Stop the book in which he succeeded best at “fusing idea with story.” The action stays comic, we don’t dwell painfully on the self-flagellations of Sebastian as we do with young narratively-centered main characters elsewhere in his work, and the attitudes of his characters, their hobby-horses, are not given prolix speeches but are largely conveyed through their actions. All in all, it’s like a mature version of Crome Yellow or the other early books.
I am not fond of the post-war novels that Huxley wrote—Ape and Essence (1948), The Genius and the Goddess (1955), and Island (1962). Huxley’s thoughts had turned from fiction to the mystical universalism of The Perennial Philosophy (1945), the exploration of drug-induced revelations in The Doors of Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956), and his visions for society, detailed in several nonfiction books and many essays.
So which novel is the best? Well, first: if we exclude, as I would, Eyeless in Gaza and Brave New World, Huxley produced over twenty years a string of six novels, all entertaining, from which to choose. Point Counter Point is the one that often makes it onto lists of best novels. Time Must Have a Stop was Huxley’s candidate for his most successful fusing of idea with story. My personal favorite is Crome Yellow, which lacks the polish of later books but has freshness and charm. I read it in a fifth-floor garret room at the Hotel San Andre des Arts, just off the Place Saint-Michel, during the month I turned twenty-one, so it has a sentimental appeal. If you asked me which Huxley to read if you were going to read only one, I’d say one of these three. But don’t stop at one.
