Eyeless In Gaza
Authors: Aldous Huxley
Contents
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAW
Anthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the cynical and manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Anthony attempts to find a new way to live.
Eyeless in Gaza
is considered by many to be Huxley's definitive work of fiction.
Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel,
Crome Yellow
(1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by
Antic Hay
(1923),
Those Barren Leaves
(1925) and
Point Counter Point
(1928) â bright, brilliant satires of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy but in the 1930s he moved to Sanary, near Toulon.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, Huxley's work took on a more sombre tone in response to the confusion of society which he felt to be spinning dangerously out of control. His great novels of ideas, including his most famous work
Brave New World
(published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material âprogress') and the pacifist novel
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as
Music at Night
(1931) and
Ends and Means
(1937).
In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (
Time Must Have a Stop
, 1944 and
Island
, 1962) and non-fiction (
The Perennial Philosophy
, 1945,
Grey Eminence
, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience,
The Doors of Perception
, 1954.)
Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.
Novels
Crome Yellow
Antic Hay
Those Barren Leaves
Point Counter Point
Brave New World
After Many a Summer
Time Must Have a Stop
Ape and Essence
The Genius and the Goddess
Island
Limbo
Mortal Coils
Little Mexican
Two or Three Graces
Brief Candles
The Gioconda Smile
(Collected Short Stories)
Grey Eminence
The Devils of Loudun
Along the Road
Jesting Pilate
Beyond the Mexique Bay
The Burning Wheel
Jonah
The Defeat of Youth
Leda
Verses and a Comedy
The Gioconda Smile
On the Margin
Proper Studies
Do What You Will
Music at Night
Texts and Pretexts
The Olive Tree
Ends and Means
The Art of Seeing
The Perennial Philosophy
Science, Liberty and Peace
Themes and Variations
The Doors of Perception
Adonis and the Alphabet
Heaven and Hell
Brave New World Revisited
Literature and Science
The Human Situation
Moksha
The Crows of Pearblossom
Aldous Huxley
David Bradshaw
LDOUS
H
UXLEY (1894â1963)
On 26 July 1894, near Godalming in Surrey, Aldous Leonard Huxley was born into a family which had only recently become synonymous with the intellectual aristocracy. Huxley's grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, had earned notoriety as âDarwin's bulldog' and fame as a populariser of science, just as his own probing and controversial works were destined to outrage and exhilarate readers and non-readers alike in the following century. Aldous Huxley's mother was a niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, and he was a nephew of the redoubtable Mrs Humphry Ward, doyenne of late-Victorian novelists. This inheritance, combining the scientific and the literary in a blend which was to become characteristic of his vision as a writer, was both a source of great pride and a burden to Huxley in his formative years. Much was expected of him.
Three traumatic events left their mark on the young Huxley. In 1908 his mother died of cancer, and this led to the effective break-up of the family home. Two years later, while a schoolboy at Eton, Huxley contracted an eye infection which made him almost completely blind for a time and severely impaired his vision for the rest of his life. The suicide of his brother Trevenen in August 1914 robbed Huxley of the person to whom he felt closest. Over twenty years later, in
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936), Huxley's treatment of the death of the main character's mother and his embodiment of âTrev' in the novel as the vulnerable Brian Foxe give some indication of the indelible pain which these tragic occurrences left in their wake. To a considerable degree, they account for the darkness, pungency and cynicism which feature so prominently in Huxley's work throughout the inter-war period.
Within months of achieving a First in English Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford in 1916, Huxley published
The Burning Wheel
. Huxley's first collection of verse, and the three which followed it,
Jonah
(1917),
The Defeat of Youth
(1918) and
Leda
(1920), reveal his indebtedness to French symbolism and
fin de siècle
aestheticism. Also discernible, however, beneath the poetry's triste and ironic patina, is a concern with the inward world of the spirit which anticipates Huxley's later absorption in mysticism. These volumes of poetry were the first of over fifty separate works of fiction, drama, verse, criticism, biography, travel and speculative writing which Huxley was to produce during the course of his life.
Unfit for military service, Huxley worked as a farm labourer at Lady Ottoline Morrell's Garsington Manor after he left Oxford. Here he met not only D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Mark Gertler and other Bloomsbury figures, but also a Belgian refugee, Maria Nys, whom he married in 1919. By then Huxley was working for the
Athenaeum
magazine under the adroit editorship of Middleton Murry. Soon after he became the first British editor of
House and Garden,
worked for
Vogue
and contributed musical criticism to the
Weekly Westminster Gazette
in the early 1920s.
Limbo
(1920), a collection of short stories, preceded the appearance of
Crome Yellow
in 1921, the novel with which Huxley first made his name as a writer. Inspired by, among others, Thomas Love Peacock, Norman Douglas and Anatole France, Huxley's first novel incorporated many incidents from his sojourn at Garsington as well as mischievous portraits of its chatelaine and his fellow guests. More blatantly still,
Crome Yellow
is an iconoclastic tilt at the Victorian and Edwardian mores which had resulted in the First World War and its terrible aftermath. For all its comic bravura, which won acclaim from writers such as Scott Fitzgerald and Max Beerbohm,
Crome Yellow
may be read, along with Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians
(1918) and Huxley's second novel
Antic Hay
(1923), as an expression of the pervasive mood of disenchantment in the early 1920s. Huxley told his father that
Antic Hay
was âwritten by a member of what I may call the war-generation for others of his kind'. He went on to say that it was intended to reflect âthe life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch'.
Even as a schoolboy Huxley had been an avid browser among the volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and it did not take long for him to acquire a reputation for arcane eclecticism. Moreover, as his prestige as a debunker and an emancipator grew, so Huxley was condemned more roundly by critics of the old guard, such as James Douglas of the
Daily Express,
who denounced the explicit discussion of sex and free thought in his fiction.
Antic Hay
was burned in Cairo, and in the ensuing years many of Huxley's books were censured, censored or banned at one time or another. Conversely, it was the openness, wit, effortless learning and apparent insouciance of Huxley's early work which proved such an appetising concoction for novelists as diverse as Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner, Anthony Powell and Barbara Pym. Angus Wilson called Huxley âthe god of my adolescence'.
From 1923 onwards Huxley lived abroad more or less permanently, first near Florence and then, between 1930 and 1937, at Sanary on the Côte d'Azur. In
Along the Road
(1925), subtitled âNotes and Essays of a Tourist', Huxley offered a lively and engaging account of the places and works of art he had taken in since his arrival in Italy, and both the title story of his third collection of tales,
Little Mexican
(1924), and his third novel,
Those Barren Leaves
(1925), are set in that country. According to Huxley, the theme of
Those Barren Leaves
is âthe undercutting of everything by a sort of despairing scepticism and then the undercutting of that by mysticism'. For W.B. Yeats,
Those Barren Leaves
heralded the return of philosophy to the English novel, but it was with his fourth novel,
Point Counter Point
(1928), that Huxley cemented his reputation with the reading public as a thought-provoking writer of fiction.
Point Counter Point
is Huxley's first true ânovel of ideas', the type of fiction with which he has become most closely identified. He once explained that his aim as a novelist was âto arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay', arguing that the novel should be like a holdall, bursting with opinion and arresting ideas. This privileging of content over form was one of the many things he had in common with H.G. Wells; it was anathema to the likes of Virginia Woolf. Huxley was fascinated by the fact that âthe same person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover etc', and one of his key aims in
Point Counter Point
was to offer this multi-faceted view of his principal characters.