Harold Bloom Aldous Huxley (2002)

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.Some of the student poems written at Oxford, published in1934, mock the rationalist s faith that order rules our experience, and theseseem to evidence that turning point.Years later he wrote a humorousautobiographical sketch, The Ladder and the Tree (1965), recalling theconflict that had troubled him as he prepared to enter the university.Thevoice of his father joined with Einstein and Sir James Jeans (and no doubt theauthors of all those scientific classics found in the household), while the voiceof Edgar Allan Poe, advocate for darkness and mystery, urged him to choosethe alternative path.When I interviewed Golding in 1982 I was determined to questionhim about this early confrontation with the two cultures.Had there been a classic revolt, I asked, against his father s scientific point of view? Aftersome defense of the father s complexity of mind, the conclusion was clear: But I do think that during the formative years I did feel myself to be in asort of rationalist atmosphere against which I kicked (130).I also asked123Golding and Huxley: The Fables of Demonic Possessionwhether he felt he belonged to the long line of English writers who,especially since Darwin, had taken scientists and the scientific account ofthings into their own work a line running from Tennyson and includingamong others Hardy, Wells, Huxley, Snow, Durrell, and Fowles.AndGolding? His reply was oblique, equivocal, and we hurried on to othermatters.In 1988 I tried to sum up what had been achieved and what neededto be done:We need more work on the role of science in Golding s fiction(perhaps beginning with the impact of Poe on the formation ofhis attitudes) and we need to reassess his accomplishment in thelarger context made up of his contemporaries.( William Golding 11)No scholar has responded.Since Golding s death in 1993 his work has goneinto partial eclipse, as he himself predicted.While we wait for recovery, if itever comes, we should adjust our accounts.We shall find that much of thefiction was oriented and directly influenced by his knowledge of science andthat there is an evolution from the extreme negativism of Lord of the Fliestoward greater respect for the scientist and scientific inquiry.The muchdiscussed sources for the dark fable lie in Golding s experience of the war, inhis connection with Lord Cherwell s research into explosives, in the use ofthe atomic bombs on Japan, in the postwar revelations of the Holocaust andthe horrors of Stalinist Russia quite enough to bring on the sense of tragicdenouement and, as he said in A Moving Target (163), grief, sheer griefas inspiration, if that is the proper word.Was there a contemporary literary source or precedent on which hecould build his own account of the failure of humanity and the likelihood ofatomic apocalypse? There have been a few unfruitful forays into thisquestion.Craig Raine, for example, finds occasional stylistic parallels inGolding with Huxley (Antic Hay, Eyeless in Gaza) as well as Dostoyevsky,Henry James, and Kipling but concludes that these or others that might behunted down are not real sources (108) worthy of serious attention.We getmore specific guidance from Golding himself.In an address titled Utopiasand Antiutopias he comes, inevitably, to Aldous Huxley:As the war clouds darkened over Europe he and some of our mostnotable poets removed themselves to the new world.& ThereHuxley continued to create what we may call antiutopias andutopias with the same gusto, apparently, for both kinds.One124JAMES R.BAKERantiutopia is certainly a disgusting job and best forgotten.& Yet Iowe his writings much myself, I ve had much enjoyment fromthem in particular release from a certain starry-eyed optimismwhich stemmed from the optimistic rationalism of the nineteenthcentury.The last utopia he attempted which was technically andstrictly a utopia and ideal state, Island (1962), is one for which Ihave a considerable liking and respect.(181)Huxley arrived in America in 1937, toured part of the country, then wrotemost of Ends and Means (1937) at the Frieda Lawrence ranch in New Mexico,and settled in Los Angeles that fall.He wrote only two books in the genreGolding discusses before his death in 1963, Island and an earlier antiutopiaundoubtedly the disgusting job & best forgotten Ape and Essence (1948).Golding s harsh judgment on this book (shared by several reviewers andcritics) may reflect disappointment in a literary idol.Again there is talk ofHuxley in one of the last interviews, William Golding Talks to John Carey,when the interviewer asks about the four novels the apprentice Golding triedto write.He abandoned all of them (they have never come to light) becausethey were merely imitations, examples of other people s work :JC.Huxley was one of the influences on the earlier attempts,wasn t he?WG.I took him very neat, you know.I was fascinated by him.And he was, I think superb but clever; it was cleverness raised toa very high power indeed.Never what Lawrence can sometimesproduce never that mantic, inspired & I don t think Huxley waseven inspired; almost too clear-sighted to be inspired.(189)Huxley was the near-contemporary (17 years separated them) so muchadmired in the early stage of Golding s efforts, and he was quite likeGolding knowledgeable about science and scientists, yet dedicated toliterature, intent upon spiritual experience and a search for an acceptablereligious faith.Huxley s skeptical views were an update on H.G.Wells andhis rather quaint scientific humanism, a faith fading in Huxley s mind andlost to Golding and many of his generation.The California years were often difficult for Huxley.After the warbegan he was privileged to find himself in the company of one of the mostextraordinary gatherings of intellectuals ever assembled in the UnitedStates including exiles Mann, Brecht, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Isherwood,125Golding and Huxley: The Fables of Demonic Possessionand Heard, and Americans Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Agee, and West some ofthem writing for money at the studios as Huxley was to do.On the negativeside, he was attacked by his countrymen for his pacificism, his eyesight failedfurther, he was often short of money, and the anxious quest for spiritualsustenance drove him constantly.These personal problems were intensifiedby the events of the war, the ugly alliance of the scientific and militarycommunities, the bombing of Japan, the emergence of the cold war.Inevitably, he was subject to bouts of depression and despair over thebehavior of men and nations.David King Dunaway sums up the effect ofthese burdens: In the fall of 1946, Aldous Huxley turned a dark corner andfound himself in a hallway of desperation; Ape was at the end of that longdark corridor (214) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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