Re: MAPS: Book Review: The Famous Novelist Was Also a Journalist

[zachary <soulove508@xxxxxxxxx>]

Not that anyone on this list knows me or cares about my opinion, but
I strongly urge all of you to be highly skeptical of a book review as
obviously biased as this one. Furthermore, it states the lead singer
of the Doors as being a guitarist, leaving me wondering where they
got their information from.

zph



--- Peter Webster <vignes@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Pubdate: Tue, 18 Dec 2001
> Source: Wall Street Journal (US)
> Copyright: 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
> Contact: letter.editor@xxxxxxx
> Website: http://www.wsj.com/
> Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/487
> Author: Stefan Kanfer
> Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Aldous+Huxley
>
> THE FAMOUS NOVELIST WAS ALSO A JOURNALIST, PERIODICALLY
>
> Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) was marked by good fortune and marred by
> misjudgment. Among the assets were impeccable bloodlines: His
> paternal
> grandfather was the scientist Thomas Huxley, Britain's most
> eloquent
> defender of Charles Darwin. On the maternal side was his
> great-uncle
> Matthew Arnold, the Victorian poet and critic. The family expected
> Aldous
> and his older brother, Julian, to be equally brilliant, and the
> siblings
> did not disappoint.
>
> Julian became an eminent biologist and eventually received a
> knighthood.
> For his part, Aldous rose to world fame, largely because of his 11
> novels.
> The most celebrated, "Brave New World," imagined a dystopia built
> by
> behavioral conditioning and genetic engineering. That book remains
> as
> disturbing today as it was upon publication nearly 70 years ago,
> before the
> nightmares of totalitarian eugenics, B.F. Skinner and cloning.
>
> On the debit side was devastating ill health. Julian experienced a
> number
> of nervous breakdowns, and in adolescence Aldous was not only
> neurasthenic
> but was beset by an eye disease that left him blind for months.
> (Undaunted,
> he learned Braille and excelled in his studies at Eton. But nothing
> was
> quite the same after he recovered his sight.) The young writer
> mistakenly
> assumed that journalism, rather than fiction, would establish his
> name. A
> contributor to periodicals, he announced, "is promoted from mere
> humanity
> and has attained the apotheosis of print. Concealing his merely
> human
> physique and personality, he presents himself to the world
> disguised in the
> magic and pontifical robes of pure verbiage."
>
> Clad in those raiments he offered essays as provocative as his
> fiction.
> Unlike the novels, however, these fugitive pieces came and went,
> uncollected, trapped in stacks of faded magazines and crumbling
> newspapers,
> where they were available only to scholars. Happily, two
> professors, Robert
> S. Baker and James Sexton, have recently ransacked libraries and
> organized
> the Huxleiana in chronological order from the 1920s to the 1960s.
> Fully
> annotated, "The Complete Essays" (Ivan R. Dee, 445 pages, $35) show
> a
> striking mastery of English prose as well as a profusion of ideas
> and
> insights. They also reveal the flaws that were to make Aldous a
> victim of
> what lyricist Lorenz Hart called "the self-deception that believes
> the lie."
>
> Because of early visual problems, Huxley depended more on his ears
> than his
> eyes, and his remarks on classical music retain their sparkle. Here
> he is
> praising and damning Beethoven: It was the German composer "who
> first
> devised really effective musical methods for the direct expression
> of
> emotion." In doing so, however, "he made possible the weakest
> sentimentalities of Schumann, the baroque grandiosities of Wagner,
> the
> hysterics of Scriabin; he made possible the waltzes of all the
> Strausses. .
> . . And he made possible, at a still further remove, such
> masterpieces of
> popular art as 'You Made Me Love You.' "
>
> Yet the visual arts did not escape Huxley's notice; the
> Surrealists, he
> observed critically, "have presented us not with the finished
> product of
> creative thought, but with the dream-like incoherencies which
> creative
> thought uses as its raw material. It is the statue that lives, not
> the
> stone." Huxley's tone was not always so lofty. He considered Felix
> the Cat
> his favorite dramatic hero and praised the "hilarious and subtle"
> pranks of
> Charlie Chaplin as well as the adventure films of Douglas
> Fairbanks.
> Indeed, Aldous was so besotted with cinema that when he and his
> wife
> emigrated to America in the 1930s they headed straight for
> Hollywood. There
> he wrote the scenarios for "Pride and Prejudice," starring the
> young
> Laurence Olivier, and "Jane Eyre," featuring Orson Welles.
>
> And there he succumbed to the California state of mind, a state
> that
> included a naive belief in psychic phenomena and the transformative
> powers
> of psychedelic drugs. At Duke University, he writes, Prof. J.
> Rhine's
> research "leaves no doubt as to the existence of telepathy and
> clairvoyance
> and very little doubt as to the existence of pre-vision" -- this
> despite
> contemporary exposes of the professor's shoddy research. To this
> day, of
> course, no repeatable laboratory experiment has affirmed the
> existence of
> extra-sensory perception or pre-vision. So much for "no doubt."
>
> Huxley never stopped seeking transcendence -- the ability to rise
> above
> "the phenomena of the external world." When religious experience
> failed to
> take hold he turned to chemicals. Had these hallucinogenic
> experiments been
> a private affair they would have remained a harmless family secret.
> But he
> decided to proselytize, in short pieces and in his book "Doors of
> Perception." Like Timothy Leary's screeds, they seem to have
> exerted the
> greatest influence on the credulous young. The Beatles saluted
> Huxley by
> including his image on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper; Jim Morrison
> named
> his rock group The Doors in the author's honor. The guitarist later
> paid
> for his enchantment with narcotics by dying at the age of 27.
>
> Still, assaying Aldous Huxley by these defects is like judging a
> garden by
> its weeds. His onetime collaborator W.H. Auden appraised the poet
> William
> Butler Yeats by writing, "You were silly like us; your gift
> survived it
> all." So it is with Aldous Huxley. His foolishness is largely
> forgotten;
> his lucid apercus still illuminate the page. Samples: "Facts do not
> cease
> to exist because they are ignored"; "An unexciting truth may be
> eclipsed by
> a thrilling lie"; "Folly is often more cruel in the consequences
> than
> malice can be in the intent."
>
> Huxley died on Nov. 22, 1963, and his obituary was lost in reams of
> prose
> about the assassinated president, John F. Kennedy. "The Complete
> Essays of
> Aldous Huxley" redresses the imbalance 38 years later.
>
__________________________________________________________________________
> Distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior
> interest in
> receiving the included information for research and educational
> purposes.
> ---
> MAP posted-by: Richard Lake
>
>
>
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List archives: www.cerebral.org/~law/Maps.html
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MAPS Forum is supported by a generous grant from the Promind Foundation.