Aldous Huxley - Ape and Essence

Review

"'Painfully and majestically vivid; it is a great piece of work' Guardian"

Product Description

In February 2108, the New Zealand Rediscovery Expedition reaches California at last. Although it is over a century since the world was devastated by nuclear war, the blight of radiation still gnaws away at the survivors. The expedition expects to find physical destruction, but they are quite unprepared for the moral degradation that confronts them.

Ape and Essence

by Aldous Huxley

Copyright, 1948, by Aldous Huxley

I

TALLIS

IT WAS the day of Gandhi's assassination; but on Calvary the sightseers were more interested in the contents of their picnic baskets than in the possible significance of the, after all, rather commonplace event they had turned out to witness. In spite of all the astronomers can say, Ptolemy was perfectly right: the centre of the universe is here, not there. Gandhi might be dead; but across the desk in his office, across the lunch table in the Studio Commissary, Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself.

"You've always been such a help," Bob assured me, as he made ready, not without relish, to tell the latest instalment of his history.

But at bottom, as I knew very well and as Bob himself knew even better than I, he didn't really want to be helped. He liked being in a mess and, still more, he liked talking about his predicament. The mess and its verbal dramatisation made it possible for him to see himself as all the Romantic Poets rolled into one -- Beddoes committing suicide, Byron committing fornication, Keats dying of Fanny Brawne, Harriet dying of Shelley. And seeing himself as all the Romantic Poets, he could forget for a little the two prime sources of his misery -- the fact that he hadnone of their talents and very little of their sexual potency.

"We got to the point," he said (so tragically that it occurred to me that he would have done better as an actor than as a writer of screen plays), "we got to the point, Elaine and I, where we felt like... like Martin Luther."

"Martin Luther?" I repeated in some astonishment.

"You know -- ich kann nicht anders. We just couldn't -- but couldn't -- do anything but go off together to Acapulco."

And Gandhi, I reflected, just couldn't do anything but resist oppression nonviolently and go to prison and finally get shot.

"So there it was," he went on. "We got on a plane and flew to Acapulco."

"Finally!"

"What do you mean, 'finally'?"

"Well, you'd been thinking about it for a long time, hadn't you?"

Bob looked annoyed. But I remembered all the previous occasions when he had talked to me about the problem. Should he or should he not make Elaine his mistress? (That was his wonderfully old-world way of putting it.) Should he or should he not ask Miriam for a divorce?

A divorce from the woman who in a very real sense was still what she had always been -- his only love; but in another very real sense Elaine was also his only love -- and would be still more so if he finally decided (and that was why he couldn't decide) to "make her his mistress." To be or not to be -- the soliloquy had gone on for the best part of two years, and if Bob could have had his way it would have gone on for ten years longer. He liked his messes to be chronic and mainly verbal, never so acutely carnal as to put his uncertain virility to yet another humiliating test. But under the influence of his eloquence, of that baroque facade of a profile and prematurely snowy hair, Elaine had evidently grown tired of a merely chronic and platonic mess. Bob was presented with an ultimatum: it was to be either Acapulco or a clean breach.

So there he was, bound and committed to adultery no less irrevocably than Gandhi had been bound and committed to nonviolence and prison and assassination, but, one may suspect, with more and deeper misgivings. Misgivings which the event had wholly justified. For, though poor Bob didn't actually tell me what had happened at Acapulco, the fact that Elaine was now, as he put it, "acting strangely" and had been seen several times in the company of that unspeakable Moldavian baron, whose name I have fortunately forgotten, seemed to tell the whole ludicrous and pathetic story. And meanwhile Miriam had not only refused to give him a divorce: she had taken the opportunity of Bob's absence and her possession of his power of attorney to have the title to the ranch, the two cars, the four apartment houses, the corner lots at Palm Springs and all the securities transferred from his name to hers. And meanwhile he owed thirty-three thousand dollars to the Government for arrears of income tax. But when he asked his producer for that extra two hundred and fifty dollars a week which had been as good as promised him, there was only a long and pregnant silence.

"What about it, Lou?"

Measuring his words with a solemn emphasis, Lou Lublin gave his answer.

"Bob," he said, "in this Studio, at this time, not even Jesus Christ himself could get a raise."

The tone was friendly; but when Bob tried to insist, Lou had banged his desk and told him that he was being un-American. That finished it.

Bob talked on. But what a subject, I was thinking, for a great religious painting! Christ before Lublin, begging for a raise of only two hundred and fifty bucks a week and being turned down flat. It would be one of Rembrandt's favourite themes, drawn, etched, painted a score of times. Jesus turning sadly away into the darkness of unpaid income tax, while in the golden spotlight, glittering with gems and metallic highlights, Lou in an enormous turban still chuckled triumphantly over what he had done to the Man of Sorrows.

And then there would be Breughel's version of the subject. A great synoptic view of the entire Studio; a three-million-dollar musical in full production, with every technical detail faithfully reproduced; two or three thousand figures, all perfectly characterised; and in the bottom right-hand corner long search would finally reveal a Lublin, no bigger than a grasshopper, heaping contumely upon an even tinier Jesus.

"But I've had an absolutely stunning idea for an original," Bob was saying with that optimistic enthusiasm which is the desperate man's alternative to suicide. "My agent's absolutely crazy about it -- thinks I ought to be able to sell it for fifty or sixty thousand."

He started to tell the story.

Still thinking of Christ before Lublin, I visualised the scene as Piero would have painted it -- the composition, luminously explicit, an equation in balanced voids and solids, in harmonising and contrasting hues; the figures in adamantine repose. Lou and his assistant producers would all be wearing those Pharaonic headdresses, those huge inverted cones of white or coloured felt, which in Piero's world serve the double purpose of emphasising the solid-geometrical nature of the human body and the outlandishness of Orientals. For all their silken softness, the folds of every garment would have the inevitability and definitiveness of syllogisms carved in porphyry and throughout the whole we should feel the all-pervading presence of Plato's God, forever mathematizing chaos into the order and beauty of art.

But from the Parthenon and the Timaeus a specious logic leads to the tyranny which, in the Republic, is held up as the ideal form of government. In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet -- the scientific poet -- of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard as inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favourite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million school-teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.