The story jumps around a lot chronologically so it is quite hard to establish the characters definitively, especially the peripheral ones. However, it’s also quite powerful in highlighting how huge swathes of our lives pass without much of note remaining in our memories, while other passages are remembered in pellucid, excruciating detail. In this respect it is effective. The chronological gaps between the two can be huge or very short and what is remembered ranges from the obviously significant to the seemingly irrelevant, which all lends yet more mystery to the chimerical and ethereal character of memory! The negative, for me, was that I felt that most of the peripheral characters are a bit redundant as I didn’t really have a clear idea of their histories or characteristics. They’re sort of shadowy, half characters who occasionally come into focus but remain largely blurry. In some ways I feel the story might be more powerful if told in a more traditionally chronological way; however, given I found the end very moving this may be an unfair, and inaccurate, criticism to make. A bit like having a good plate of pasta in a restaurant and then thinking it might have been better to have had pizza! I suppose one could read the chapters in chronological order rather than in the order they’re presented in order to compare. Another, far more minor, criticism is the lack of translation of Latin, French, Italian and perhaps another couple of languages in the Vintage Classics edition I read; just how erudite does this publisher expect their readership to be!? It’s not like they’re in a footnote and I was just too lazy to look them up; they’re not included at all! Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book more and more the further into it I got as I felt there was more depth to the characters and more narrative context in which to locate them. The individual chronological pieces combine and crescendo together to create a very powerful ending, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
The prep school scenes are extremely well documented and realistic, presumably drawing on Huxley’s own experiences at Hillside School, Malvern. The scenes depicting sex and sexual desire are also very vivid but encompass a range of appetites and dispositions. From ravenous, insouciant man and woman eaters, to ever-ambivalent Anthony to the, scarcely believable, chastity of Brian Foxe who reveres his lover so much he doesn’t want to defile her by the act of copulation! For me this range of characters and emotions says a lot about Huxley’s ability to observe and portray very different characters believably.
Anthony is an intriguing character with a development that includes the despicable and delightful. Initially, I felt so sorry for the poor boy left with only his peculiar, unemotional father after the death of his mother. However, his behaviour towards his old friend Brian, wooing the woman he loves for a bet and then shirking his duty to admit this, made my stomach turn. I found myself enraged at him and Mary Amberly, his lover with whom he makes the bet, for treating the emotions of others with such disregard. Especially Anthony, who perpetrates the crime against his oldest friend and must have some premonition of the hurtful consequences. Brian’s suicide note is heart wrenching to read:
“It’s as if a broken statue somehow contrived to hold itself together….A statue at one moment, and the next a heap of dust and shapeless fragments.”.
We cannot even claim love or infatuation in his defence; he does it to show the worldly-wise Mary how he too can be flip about sex and relationships. Later, I despise his cowardice for not confessing his crime. However, at the same time, I feel I can understand how terrible actions emanate from confused feelings that are nowhere near as awful as the acts themselves.
I really like the dichotomy Huxley draws between Anthony, a boy who hasn’t been loved enough, and Brain, a boy who has been loved too much. Both end up emotionally retarded in very different ways but with the ultimate consequences that they are broadly unsuited to meaningful relationships. Brian because he is too idealistic and places his lover on an impossible pedestal and Anthony because he seems scared of commitment, probably on account of the loss he has suffered earlier in his life and never properly come to terms with. I feel like what happens between the two is sickening and disgusting but in some way it is also understandable and almost familiar. In the end, my anger and hatred of Anthony subsided into a feeling of hopelessness and loss at the tragedy of Brian’s suicide and the dreadful feelings of guilt that must haunt Anthony in the aftermath.
As I mentioned, the end of the book is by far the most powerful section to me as Huxley, and the characters, try to make some sense of their lives and the experiences that have lead them to this point. Dr. Miller is an intriguing, semi-prophetic character who speaks didactically in almost parabolic language; short sentences, lots of repetition, sweeping, unqualified observations that challenge conventional wisdom or seem unrelated to the topic at hand. He is a figure from the society Anthony knows, appearing in a strange land at a time when he desperately needs help and he provides it to him while simultaneously reflecting on the metaphysical nature of the universe! There is more than a little of the saviour about him and what he says and does. It strikes me there’s also a lot of wisdom in what he says and that this is his purpose in the book for Huxley, to be a demagogue for Anthony and help him to develop and reach greater understanding. I hear what I imagine to be Huxley’s opinions in a mixture of what he says and what the mature Anthony says at the end to Helen, which I’ll include later. I have a feeling he makes a very brief appearance earlier in the book but cannot be sure of it. His other worldly quality reminds me of the dog that falls out of the sky while Anthony is lying on the roof with Helen. As far as I’m aware this remains totally unexplained but seems to be the totemic image of the horror and pain of the world for both Anthony and Helen; recurring in both of their narratives over long periods of time.
One piece of the novel I loved was Hugh Ledwidge’s letter to Helen about the passage of time. Apart from this missive and some very vivid depiction of him as socially and sexually awkward I would put him in the category of ‘shadowy, half characters’ that I mentioned in the first paragraph. I never feel I’ve got to know very well owing to their scanty appearances and a personal narrative that is, at best, loosely sketched. The letter is wonderful though and can probably justify his whole inclusion as it’s not something Brian, Anthony or Helen could really say:
“‘Midsummer Day, Helen. But you’re too young, I expect, to think much about the significance of special days. You’ve only been in the world for about seven thousand days altogether; and one has got to have lived through at least ten thousand before one begins to realize there aren’t an indefinite number of them and you can’t do exactly what you want with them. I've been here more than thirteen thousand days, and the end’s visible, the boundless possibilities have narrowed down. One must cut according to one’s cloth; and one’s cloth is not only exiguous; it’s also of one special kind - and generally of poor quality at that. When one’s young, one thinks one can tailor one’s time into all sorts of splendid and fantastic garments - shakoes and chasubles and Ph.D gowns; Nijinsky’s tights and Rimbaud’s slate-blue trousers and Garibaldi’s red shirt. But by the time you’ve lived ten thousand days, you begin to realize that you’ll be lucky if you succeed in cutting one decent workaday suit out of the time at your disposal. It’s a depressing realization; and Midsummer is one of the days that brings it home. The longest day. One of the the sixty or seventy longest days of one’s five and twenty thousand. And what have I done with this longest day - longest of so few, of so uniform, of so shoddy? The catalogue of my occupations would be humiliatingly absurd and pointless. The only creditable and, in any profound sense of the word, reasonable thing I’ve done is to think a little about you, Helen, and write this letter…’”
I feel the conclusion of the novel, consisting of Brian’s death, Anthony’s trip to South America and encounter with Dr Miller and his final monologue with Helen is very powerful. For some reason, Helen’s experience with the Communists where she loses her lover didn’t have such a profound effect on me except as an exemplification of the kind of hate politics that Anthony later criticises in his exposition on how to live life. This portion is, for me, presaged by Anthony’s conversation with Mark in Chapter 13 (1934) when he says:
“But, after all, if you had enough love and goodness you could be sure of evoking some measure of answering love and goodness from almost everyone you came into contact with - whoever he or she might be. And in that case almost everyone would really be ‘dear’. At present, most people seem more or less imbecile or odious; the fault is at least as much in oneself as in them.”
But reaches its fullest expression in Chapter 54 (1935). It’s also perhaps because I was better placed by this point to appreciate his philosophy knowing more about his experience and narrative:
‘It begins,’ he answered, ‘with trying to cultivate the difficult art of loving people.’
‘But most people are detestable.’
‘They’re detestable, because we detest them. If we liked them, they’d be likeable’
‘Do you think that’s true?’
‘I’m sure it’s true.’
‘And what do you do after that?’
‘There’s no “after,”’ he replied. ‘Because, of course, it’s a lifetime’s job. Any process of change is a lifetime’s job. Every time you get to the top of a peak, you see another peak in front of you - a peak that you couldn’t see from lower down. Take the mind-body mechanism, for example. You begin to learn how to use it better; you make an advance; from the position you’ve advanced to, you discover how you can use it better still. And so on, indefinitely. The ideal ends recede as you approach them; they’re seen to be other and more remarkable than they seemed before the advance was begun. It’s the same when one tries to change one’s relations with other people. Every step forward reveals the necessity of making new steps forward - unanticipated steps, towards a destination one hadn’t seen when one set out. Yes, it lasts a lifetime,’ he repeated. ‘There can’t be any “after”. There can only be an attempt, as one goes along, to project what one has discovered on the personal level on to the level of politics and economics. One of the first discoveries,’ he added, ‘one of the very first one makes, is that organized hatred and violence aren’t the best means for securing justice and peace. All men are capable of love for all other men. But we’ve artificially restricted our love. By means of conventions of hatred and violence. Restricted it within families and clans, within classes and nations.”
I really like the idea of life’s purpose being a constant, never ending process of improvement and it resonates with what I have experienced in life so far. I also like the idea, probably more present in the first quote than the second, that what we think of the world is at least as much a reflection of our own internal lives than it is any objective reality.
The final passages of the book, where Anthony expounds a meditative philosophy of peace, contain some very beautiful passages:
“Frenzy of evil and separation. In peace there is unity. Unity with other lives. Unity with all being. For beneath all being, beneath the countless identical but separate patterns, beneath the attractions and repulsions, lies peace. the same peace as underlies the frenzy of the mind. Dark peace, immeasurably deep. Peace from pride and hatred and anger, peace from cravings and aversions, peace from all the separating frenzies. Peace through liberation, for peace is achieved freedom. Freedom and at the same time truth. The truth of unity actually experienced. Peace in the depths, under the storm, far down below the leaping of the waves, the frantically flying spray” - my highlights
At the beginning, I didn’t think I’d enjoy this book nearly as much as I did at the end, which is much better than the inverse!
