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Le Guin Tom Stoppard Dante Sinclair Lewis Jonathan Swift Daniel Defoe Bernard Malamud Amy Tan Bloom’s Modern Critical Views Alfred, Lord Tennyson Alice Walker Thomas Wolfe Henry David Thoreau Robert Penn Warren Tom Wolfe J. R. R. Tolkien Eudora Welty Virginia Woolf Leo Tolstoy Edith Wharton William Wordsworth Mark Twain Walt Whitman Richard Wright John Updike Oscar Wilde William Butler Yeats Kurt Vonnegut Tennessee Williams Bloom’s Modern Critical Views ALDOUS HUXLEY Edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University Bloom’s Modern Critical Views:Aldous Huxley Copyright © 2003 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2003 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 ISBN-10: 0-7910-7040-9 ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-7040-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bloom’s modern critical views: Aldous Huxley / edited with an introduction by Harold Bloom. p. cm.—(Bloom’s modern critical views) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7910-7040-9 1. Huxley, Aldous, 1894–1963--Criticism and interpretation. I. Bloom, Harold. II. Series. PR6015.U9 Z564 2002 823'.912—dc21 2002009631 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Gabriel Welsch Cover designed by Terry Mallon Cover: Associated Press Printed in the United States of America IBT EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom Marking and Remembering: Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) 3 Milton Birnbaum Brave New World and the Flight from God 9 John Attarian Color and Light: Huxley’s Pathway to Spiritual Reality 25 Sally A. Paulsell Aldous Huxley’s Modern Myth: “Leda” and the Poetry of Ideas 53 Jerome Meckier Aldous Huxley, Satiric Sonneteer: The Defeat of Youth 85 Jerome Meckier Aldous Huxley in Russia 109 Nina Diakonova Golding and Huxley: The Fables of Demonic Possession 119 James R. Baker vi CONTENTS Aldous Huxley and the Nuclear Age: Ape and Essencein Context 137 Sanford E. Marovitz Westward, Utopia: Robert V. Hine, Aldous Huxley, and the Future of California History 153 Kerwin Lee Klein The Best of Companions: J. W. N. Sullivan, Aldous Huxley, and the New Physics 165 David Bradshaw Aldous Huxley’s Philosophy 189 Ronald Hope Huxley’s ‘Deep Jam’ and the Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland 195 David Leon Higdon and Phill Lehrman Chronology 217 Contributors 221 Bibliography 223 Acknowledgments 227 Index 229 Editor’s Note My Introduction is an attempt to come to terms with Aldous Huxley’s version of the mystical tradition, which he termed the “perennial philosophy.” In an overview of Huxley’s career as a person-of-letters, Milton Birnbaum praises the novelist-essayist for stoicism, intellectual vibrancy, acuteness of language, and prophetic insight. Brave New Worldis the focus of John Attarian, who sees the dystopia as an evasion of transcendence. Huxley’s quest for the spirit, from agnosticism to gnosticism, is traced by Salley A. Paulsell, after which Jerome Meckier gives us two essays on Huxley’s verse, the first analyzing “Leda,” and the second turning to the sonnet, “The Decameron,” and later experiments at converting the sonnet form to satiric purposes. Huxley’s influences upon Russian writers and readers is considered by Nina Diakonova, while James R. Baker contrasts William Golding’s Lord of the Flieswith Huxley’s Ape and Essence. Ape and Essenceis placed in the context of the Age of the atom bomb by Sanford E. Marovitz, after which Kerwin Lee Klein compares Huxley’s California dystopias with Robert V. Hine’s much sunnier California’s Utopian Colonies(1953). The influences of the scientific journalist J. W. N. Sullivan upon Huxley is expounded by David Bradshaw, while Ronald Hope centers upon Huxley’s anthology The Perennial Philosophy. Finally, Huxley’s synopsis for turning Alice in Wonderland into a film script is investigated by David Leon Higdon and Phill Lehrman. vii Introduction Aldous Huxley cannot be judged to have achieved lasting eminence either as a novelist or as a spiritual guide. The best of his novels were Antic Hay and Point Counter Point, which I enjoyed in my youth, but now regard as very literate Period Pieces. His most famous fiction, Brave New World, scarcely sustains rereading: its basic metaphor, in which Henry Ford replaces Jesus Christ, now seems strained and even silly. Huxley’s one great book is his Collected Essays, which includes such superb performances as “Wordsworth in the Tropics,” “Tragedy and the Whole Truth,” and “Music at Night.” In this Introduction, I turn mostly aside from Huxley-as-essayist in order to center upon his anthology-with-comments, The Perennial Philosophy, and two curious little books, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, both concerned with his visionary experiences induced by taking drugs. Huxley defines the Perennial Philosophy as: “the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being.” The figures and texts testifying to this metaphysic, psychology, and ethic are very various: St. Augustine, St. Bernard, the Bhaghvad-Gita, the Buddha, St. Catherine of Siena, Chuang Tzu, The Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart, Fénelon, St. Francis de Sales, St. John of the Cross, Lao Tzu, Jalal-uddin Rumi, Theologica Germanica, Thomas Traherne. It will be noted that my list of these fifteen spiritual authorities is alphabetical, they being so diverse that no other ordering seems possible. But, to Aldous Huxley, they are all One Big Thing: The Perennial Philosophy. This Californian eclecticism helped to make Huxley one of the gurus of the New Age, but it renders me uneasy, 1