RSSWhen we were young, clueless and longing to be profound, what a thrill it was to open a novel weirdly entitled Eyeless in Gaza. The thrill was doubled when the author turned out to be quoting Samson Agonistes. "Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves." At one point in the text a pair of lovers are lying on the patio when a dog falls out of an airplane and explodes right beside them. A quotation from Milton and a canine kaplooey: sophisticated, or what? That, kids, was the kind of multilevel blast that Aldous Huxley used to give us when he was current. Nowadays, the titles of his books are more alive than his books, but still he won’t lie down. The legend lingers. God-like in his height, aquiline features and omnidirectional intelligence, Huxley was a living myth. He was the myth of the man who knew everything. Inevitably he attracted contrary myths designed to shrivel his looming outline. To borrow the haunting rhythm of another celebrated Huxleyan title, Point Counter Point, it was a case of Myth Counter Myth. Among the counter-myths was the one about his holding forth on a string of topics at the dinner table. On every topic, he knew all there was to know. But a fellow guest noticed that all the topics began with the same letter. Suspicious, the fellow guest retired to the library and checked up. Huxley had been quoting verbatim from the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
That particular counter-myth had an element of possibility. Huxley did indeed know his way around the Encyclopaedia Britannica, from A ("This letter has stood at the heart of the alphabet during the whole period that can be traced historically") to Zygote ("the biological term for the fertilised egg ovum"). From one of his early essays we find that he owned a half-sized edition on thin paper and when travelling always had a volume of it with him. But from the same essay we learn that Huxley carried the volume only because he could not concentrate properly while on the move. From all his other writings we must deduce that when at his desk and undistracted he read everything, and not just in the humanities but in science, history, politics, sociology, psychology and religion. You name it and he’d read it. Especially he’d read it when you couldn’t name it. He made people who were merely quite bright feel worse than stupid: he made them feel narrow. In Britain, his land of origin, critical disparagement became common after his relocation to America in 1937. Even when set in Europe, hadn’t those brittle young novels — Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, Those Barren Leaves, Point Counter Point — been flashily yearning for a wider world? So let him have it. But any British feelings that their star had deserted them were only an adornment to a more basic British feeling, expressed in an everyday motto you can still hear in the school playground, even from a teacher: "Nobody likes a clever-dick." Good riddance to scintillating rubbish.
When living in Britain, Huxley was already a presence in the American slick magazines: he was an adopted figure of fashion, showing up in Vanity Fair like Noel Coward or Cecil Beaton. When living in America, he was given space in Esquire for his views and photo-spreads in Life for his beautiful face, plausibly represented as the icon of higher thought: he was up there with Einstein. Fame in America, as usual, meant fame everywhere. While he was alive, Aldous Huxley was one of the most famous people in the world. After his death, his enormous reputation rapidly shrank, until finally he was known mainly for having written a single dystopian novel about compulsory promiscuity and babies in bottles, Brave New World. For that, and for having been some kind of pioneer hippie who took mescalin to find out what would happen. Where did he go? A glib answer could be drawn from the title of his first book of madly clever short stories: Limbo. A better answer might be that he vanished into the comfort zone where names are referred to with some confidence but not for the detail of what they did. People of a certain age might still say that say-and-so is like someone out of Point Counter Point but they will probably not have read it recently or at all. Only a specialist in post Great War literature could quote from Crome Yellow or Antic Hay the way we can all quote from The Great Gatsby or Decline and Fall. In the comfort zone, a reputation is fragmented into the sort of quiz questions finely calculated to ensure that beyond a certain stage you will not go on doubling your money. Which of these books was written by Aldous Huxley? Was it (a) In Our Time, (b) Time and the River, (c) Time Regained, or (d) Time Must Have A Stop? Would you like to phone a friend?
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)