REVIEW ESSAYS Prepping for Brave New World: Aldous Huxley’s Essays of the 1920s JEROME MECKIER Robert S. Baker and James Sexton, eds. Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays. Volume I: 1920-1925. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. xx + 487 pp. $35.00. . Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays. Volume II: 1926-1929. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. xviii + 587 pp. $35.00. TWO HEFTY INSTALLMENTS of Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays bode well for a major undertaking expected to fill six volumes. Thanks to the sleuthing of Robert S. Baker and James Sexton, “all of Huxley’s published essays as well as a generous selection of shorter reviews and brief occasional pieces” (I: xiii) will soon be handsomely packaged in one good place. Now only an expanded edition of the polymath’s letters, a scholarly biography, and criti- cal editions of the poems, stories, and novels stand between Huxleyans and a perfect world. Each of the first two volumes covers roughly half of the 1920s, the dec- ade during which Huxley wrote four of his twelve novels while schooling himself to compose Brave New World (1932). Although the dystopist who foresaw a totalitarian World State by A.F. 632 seldom speaks at length in Volume I: 1920-1925, intermittent utterances resonate like bulletins to con- vey a strong sense of foreboding. Huxley compares the “expansion of Henry Ford’s factories” throughout the civilized world to the spread of cancer (“Wander Birds” I: 430), ponders birth control as the solution to “European philoprogenitiveness” (“The Country” I: 446), and labels ninety per cent of Freudian psychology “balderdash” (“On Not Being Up-to-Date” I: 373). Mustapha Mond, his fellow World Controllers, and the involuntary hedo- nists of the brave new world are implicit in Huxley’s frequent jabs at “the bright H.G. Wellsian future” “Variations” I: 294), especially in his con- tempt for Men Like Gods, wherein “a race of athletic chemists and mathe- matical physicists ... go about naked and . . . make free love in a rational manner between the experiments” (“Work and Leisure” I: 234). When Huxley began publishing, the “radio-telephone” or “wireless telephone” was no less a novelty than moving pictures (“Music and Machin- ery” I: 243). But he sensed that culture’s fate had been sealed by 1925. For individuals with more free time to dispose of, Huxley predicted, “more cin- mas, more newspapers, more bad fiction, more radios, and more cheapAldous Huxley’s Essays 235 automobiles” were inevitable; given distractions such as jazz recordings and the gramophone, many people would “go through life with the intellectual development of boys or girls of fifteen” (“Work and Leisure” I: 413, 415). In A.F. 632, supplying “diversions” is not just “a profitable industry” (“The Spread of Bad Art” I: 167); it has become a government monopoly. Mond and his ilk ensure stability by providing a plethora of infantile amuse- ments. Even an Alpha such as Bernard Marx is supposed to behave child- ishly out of office hours.! For Aldous Huxley the twenties teemed with “substitutes for thought” (I: 168). Once the populace of an “increasingly lowbrowed leisure society” resorted to golf to fill “the vacuum of their exis- tences” (“The Horrors of Society” I: 389), refinements such as obstacle golf and the electro-magnetic variety could not be far off, Huxley decided. The early essays suggest that the future has at least as much to fear from pop culture (i.e., bad art) as it does from bad science. Diatribes against “the horrors of modern ‘pleasure,’” that most “deadly” of post-war “poisons” (“Pleasures” I: 355), sound like a kill-joy’s complaints, but Huxley was never puritanical. He condemns “effortless” or “ready-made” distractions that are “the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world” (I: 356). These kinds of pleasure—the popular press instead of literature, for example—rob individuals of their questioning intelligence. Conformity, regimentation, indeed, servitude, Huxley repeatedly warns, are apt to arrive sugar-coated. “Opulent” is his adjective for Wells’s descrip- tions of “the organization of research and record” in the future world state (“Accumulations” I: 77). Throughout Huxley’s early essays, suggestions for the brave new world rub shoulders with hints not taken. Does a reference to the “Dramatic Serv- ice of Community Singing,” the subtitle of a book Huxley lampoons (“Demo- cratic Art” I: 362), portend the bi-weekly Solidarity Service? “Makers of Utopia” who “look forward to an age when everyone will work” (“The Dan- gers of Work” I: 370) get their wish: employment is universal in Huxley’s dystopia. But what about utopists who foresee “synthetic foods” (“Work and Leisure” I: 414)? One never learns what brave new worlders eat.? Occasionally, essays in Volume I help one to spot a failure of imagina- tion. There are still newspapers in the brave new world, but despite Hux- ley’s animadversions against inferior novels and inexpensive cars, both apparently have become outmoded. On the other hand, Alexander Graham Bell’s invention survives into the seventh century after Ford virtually unim- proved upon. When Bernard Marx telephones Helmholtz Watson from New Mexico, it still takes “nearly three minutes to get through” (BNW 120). The “ringing of the telephone” summons first John Savage and then Watson to the Park Lane Hospital (BNW 231, 250). When the Savage starts a riot there, the Deputy Sub-Bursar phones for help after “looking up a number in the telephone book” (BNW 250). Brave new worlders travel by rocket and every Alpha owns a helicopter, yet they still consult telephone directories. Arguably, the “amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete,” as Huxley later styled his early self in his 1946 “Foreword” to Brave New World, is ubiquitous in Vol-236 UTOPIAN STUDIES ume I as a sincere but cynical cultural arbiter preoccupied with the deterio- rating quality of modern life. In “The Modern Spirit and a Family Party,” one of Huxley's most important essays from the twenties, he complains of a world “socially and morally wrecked” (I: 33). Although it is “time to pick up the pieces,” he can only wonder what “the new synthesis” will be like. Untiringly, he demands that artists step forward to repair the wreckage. In “The Cry for a Messiah in the Arts,” only a new Shakespeare—and, point- edly, not H.G. Wells—can rescue a “steadily decaying civilization” (I: 28). In “Subject-Matter of Poetry,” another crucial early essay, the twentieth century is shown desperately awaiting “its Lucretius, . .. its philosophical Dante, its new Goethe” (I: 70). Huxley is not sure a formative intelligence will appear; nor is he willing as yet to prescribe for the modern age himself. Throughout the early twenties, Huxley separates artists conducive to a better future from those who are not. D.H. Lawrence is hailed as a “great renewer of love” (“Art and Life” I: 165); Charles Dickens will “outlast” Leo Tolstoy (“The Importance of Comic Genius” I: 148); but Igor Stravinsky, who later befriended Huxley in America, composes “barbaric music” (“What, Exactly, Is Modern?” I: 171). Huxley damns Ulysses as “one of the dullest books ever written, and one of the least significant” (“The Pleasant and the Unpleasant” I: 179). He regrets having wasted seventy-two hours on James Joyce's “portentous and boring book” (“Fashions in Love” I: 374). At last a major modern who claims actually to have finished Joyce’s epic, although reading it in three days sounds implausible. Huxley’s constant theme, one must reiterate, is the importance of “real artists” to society and its culture (“The Interpreter and the Creator” I: 232). Unfortunately, genuine artists were in short supply, as Huxley’s novels of the 1920s also reveal. Moreover, searching for messianic figures takes its toll. Even a reader as omnivorous as Huxley could be daunted. Marcel Proust, he ironically admits, has a future: the essayist is stockpiling Proust’s novels to peruse in retirement; perhaps he will “have time to read them” in “a calm and leisured old age” (Proust: The Eighteenth-Century Method” I: 8). Despite the need for “a new Balzac” to write a social history of life since “the catastrophe of 1914,” the Comédie Humaine reduces Huxley to “a very small mouse in presence of an enormous moon-like cheese” (“Balzac and Social History” I: 18). Jesting Pilate (1926), Proper Studies (1927) and Do What You Will (1929), the three collections Huxley published at the rate of nearly one a year during the second half of the 1920s, provide most of the material for Volume II: 1926-1929. Essays from On the Margin (1923) and Along the Road (1925) were not as central to Volume I. From the first two members of this late-twenties trio, one can extrapolate a list of indispensable back- ground readings for the study of Brave New World. In Jesting Pilate, one must turn to the sub-section “At Sea” under the larger heading “Malaya” (II: 525-26). Huxley is on the last leg of his round- the-world journey. Fresh from disappointment with India’s “spirituality,” which allegedly encourages the country to wallow in poverty, he discoversAldous Huxley’s Essays 237 Henry Ford’s autobiography, My Life and Work, in the ship’s library. “Fas- cinated,” he sounds almost serious when he dubs the American automaker “a greater man than Buddha” (II: 526). Perhaps “the way of Gautama” is a dead-end, he muses, whereas “drains, machinery, and the minimum wage” are the true path to salvation. After crossing America from California to New York, however, the contrapuntist decided to pit one set of impressions against the other; in other words, he concluded on second thought that America and India—Ford and Buddha—were both equally wrong. Brave New World may be read as a comprehensive parody of the precepts and programs set out in Ford’s auto- biography. India’s combination of “dirt and religion” is transferred to the Indian reservation at Malpais so that Huxley could also ridicule Lawrence's fascination with primitives of the American southwest. In effect, jesting pilate washed his hand of both claimants; he juxtaposed Eastern spirituality and Western materialism in order to expose each as half of yet another appar- ently irresolvable dichotomy. The five movements of which “Los Angeles. A Rhapsody” is com- prised (II: 549-59) are also required reading for students of Huxley’s dystopia. “Joy City” repeatedly manifests itself as the prototype for the Americanized London of Brave New World. Life in Los Angeles epitomizes “the superla- tively Good Time,” Huxley announces—a Sybaritic experience “untem- pered by any mental sauce.” The brave new world is equally indebted to Ford’s genius for organization and to southern California's incessant crav- ing after excitement. Compared to Los Angeles, Huxley alleges, Babylon was “dull and dim” (II: 552). Huxley’s dystopia resembles a smoothly run factory and a gigantic pleasure palace; its mass-produced citizens inhabit a hygenic brothel that doubles as a world-wide amusement park. Unlike Jesting Pilate and Proper Studies, Do What You Will looks back to Point Counter Point, Mark Rampion, Huxley’s Lawrentian spokesperson in the 1928 novel, could have written these essays the following year. “One and Many,” for example, seconds Lawrence’s call for “a new religion of life,” which should be “Panic as well as Apollonian . . . Phallic as well as Minervan” (II: 319). One must learn to emulate the ancient Greeks, whom Rampion also commends.’ They accepted their natures “as they found them,” Huxley declares, and dared to live fully in all directions at once— that is, “multifariously, inconsistently, and contradictorily” (“Spinoza’s Worm” II; 328-29). Thus they confounded life’s “diverse laws,”* such as the contrapuntal demands of passion against reason, by obeying all of them simultaneously. Lawrence having died in 1930, Huxley demoted the so-called “blood philosophy” to an anachronism in Brave New World. By A.F. 632, only a much diminished version of it survives in America’s southwest corner, Hux- ley began the novel intent on using a Savage from New Mexico to set the brave new world on its ear. But the persistent Pyrthonist overruled the life- worshipper along with the rationalizer: when Lawrentian outlook and Welles- ian forecast collide, each makes the other appear absurdly incomplete.238 UTOPIAN STUDIES Huxley’s anti-pantheon, Do What You Will contains scathing indict- ments of Baruch Spinoza, William Wordsworth, Charles Baudelaire, St. Francis of Assisi, and Blaise Pascal, all of whom sinned against the life- embracing Greek ideal. Each of these lopsided creatures cultivated some form of incompleteness instead of striving to become whole. Huxley anato- mizes one unhealthy imbalance per essay. Similarly, Rampion-Lawrence arraigns Burlap (a “pure little Jesus pervert” who admires St. Francis), Spandrell (a “morality-philosophy pervert” who reminds one of Baudelaire), and Philip Quarles, an “intellectual-aesthetic pervert” who resembles Hux- ley (PCP 564). Between 1929 and 1932, Huxley’s reservations about the viability of Lawrence's ideas grew. One need only read the twelve essays from Do What You Will in conjunction with the merciless dismissal of the Savage in Brave New World: the messianic proponent of a new Greco- pagan religion became a doomed advocate of the oversimplified life. More so than the essays from other early collections combined, Proper Studies serves as a veritable casebook for Brave New World. In Huxley’s opinion, Western Civilization was ready for something new. “The notion of human equality” no longer compels assent, Huxley argues; democracy has proven a sham (“The Idea of Equality” II: 151). Consequently, Huxley and the World State both favor a “ruling aristocracy”—government by intelli- gent men (“Political Democracy” II: 225). Yet Mustapha Mond and his fel- low World Controllers are a parody of the Samurai who run things in Wells’s A Modern Utopia. Mere technocrats—members of the scientific oli- garchy—cannot be genuine aristocrats; eventually, Huxley settles on scien- tifically trained philosophers such as Miller in Eyeless in Gaza and Dr. MacPhail in Island. Intelligent government must provide more than efficiency and comfort, Huxley informs Wells. That a supervisory intelligence implies its posses- sor’s enlightenment, not just abundant know-how, would become increas- ingly clearer to Huxley from Brave New World on. One of Mond’s biologists puts forth the theory that “the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well being [that is, good health, good things] but some intensification and refining of consciousness” (BNW 209). This heretical paper is a bit too late to make a difference by A.F. 632; ironically, 1932 is a bit too early for Hux- ley to do more than flirt with its thesis. Mond censors “A New Theory of Biology”; its author will probably be sent to the Marine Biological Station at St. Helena. The ideal education of the future, Huxley contends, “trains up every human being to fit into the place he or she is to occupy in the social hierar- chy, but without, in the process, destroying his or her individuality” (“Edu- cation” II: 216). The brave new world ignores the challenge in Huxley’s contrapuntal proviso: can one be made to fit in without ceasing to stand out? Exactly how Mond was put in charge or took control is never spelled out. In “Political Democracy,” Huxley proposes an ingenious selection process: the “ideal examination of the future” (II: 229). Subtle enough to gauge all aspects of the character, this test will be used to “assign” everyone, would-Aldous Huxley’s Essays 239 be guardians included, his or her perfect job. Too bad Huxley was not more forthcoming about this utopian exam; sample questions would have been nice. ‘As Huxley addresses every utopist’s major concerns—government, education, science, religion—Proper Studies provides clues to the mess that the brave new world makes of them. Thus sex and business are mentioned prominently among twentieth-century surrogate religions (“The Substitutes for Religion” II: 254-55). The brave new world conflates them into a state sponsored orgy of spending: its religion may be called sexually promiscu- ous consumerism. In “A Note on Eugenics,” Huxley’s fear that “superior whites” are being outbred by rival races puts the “liberal rationalist” (Baker’s epithet; II: xii) in an unfavorable light.S Otherwise, this piece is as crucial for Brave New World as anything Huxley wrote prior to 1932. Huxley accepts without panic J.B.S. Haldane’s prediction that society “will learn to breed babies in bottles”; but cloning, the prospect that “every genius” soon will be able to reproduce himself, leaves the essayist less sanguine (II: 283). Although the non-existence of a “precisely formulated standard of eugenic fitness” troubles Huxley, he declines to formulate one. Instead, he utters a pious hope that “the creation of human excellence” will be everyone’s “eugenic goal” (II: 283). Eugenic standards abound in the brave new world; there is a fitness formula for each caste. For the lower orders, production quotas replace fitness stan- dards, the goal being “to manufacture as many batches of identical twins as possible” from a single ovary (BNW 7). How will “the eugenic state” handle its surplus of superior individuals? Posing this question, Huxley recognizes that eugenics may prove self-defeating, the very name a misnomer. The brave new world validates Huxley’s suspicion that eugenic reform and the advancement of “human excellence” are contra- dictory ideals: as with freedom and happiness, one cannot have unrestricted amounts of both. In other words, not everyone can have a white collar job. Huxley scoffs at “the inhabitants of one of Mr. Wells’s numerous Utopias” for “doing high-brow and low-brow work, in turns. While Jones plays the piano, Smith spreads the manure. At the end of the shift, they change places” (II: 284). Instead, the brave new world breeds five distinct classes; the lower one’s caste, the less cerebral one’s task. Huxley fears that it may be easier, and more conducive to everyone’s happiness, to teach the brave new worlder to embrace his or her lot than it is io rotate Smith and Jones. Eugenics sounds like a euphemism when eugenists create Deltas and Epsilons, semi-morons whom behaviorists teach to relish doing society’s unpopular chores. Caste-creating eugenics reinforced through conditioning is the likeliest scenario, the dystopist predicts. The brave new world has long since real- ized the futility of universal eugenic improvement: “a state with a popula- tion consisting of nothing but . . . superior people,” the essayist decreed, “could not hope to last for a year” (Il: 285). Actually, the Cyprus Experi- ment, Huxley’s parody of Wells’s program for Smith and Jones, lasts nearly six years but kills nineteen thousand Alphas.240 UTOPIAN STUDIES As Mond tells the Savage, Cyprus was re-colonized in A.F. 473 “with a specially prepared batch of twenty-two thousand Alphas.” The results were predictable but deplorable: “The land wasn’t properly worked; there were strikes in all the factories; the laws were set at naught, orders disobeyed; all the people detailed for a spell of low-grade work were perpetually intrigu- ing for high-grade jobs, and all the people with high-grade jobs were counter-intriguing at all costs to stay where they were” (BNW 263-64). After civil war, the three thousand survivors begged to be governed by World Controllers. “And that,” Mond concludes, “was the end of the only society of Alphas that the world has ever seen.” Presented as a flashback, the Cyprus Experiment corroborates “A Note on Eugenics” in that, says Huxley, society cannot simply upgrade everyone. Without the “Note,” there might be no Cyprus Experiment; were it not for this experiment, eugenics in the brave new world would be a different mat- ter. Mond cites the Cyprus fiasco to justify modeling the eugenic society on “the iceberg”: its population must live “eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above” (BNW 264). In both the “Note on Eugenics” and Brave New World, Huxley relishes putting readers in a contrapuntal bind. Either the unintelligent will inherit the earth, the essayist predicts, or “chronic civil war” will disrupt the “per- fectly eugenized state” as it does on Cyprus because no one “capable of playing the superior part” will “do the dirty work and obey” (II: 284). Neither prospect is attractive. Similarly, the Savage must choose between “insanity” in Utopia and “lunacy” in an Indian village, which is how Huxley phrases John’s dilemma (and the reader’s) in the 1946 “Foreword.” Essays in Volume II that are not drawn from Proper Studies, Jesting Pilate, ot Do What You Will ought not to be overlooked. In “Dorian Gray,” for instance, Huxley calls Oscar Wilde’s novel “a pamphlet in favor of the new hedonism” (II: 10). The lifestyle of brave new worlders resembles that of Wilde’s profligate, but without the remorse: despite soma (drugs), unlim- ited sex, and a full schedule of mandatory pleasures, most remain vigor- ously healthy, exempt from illness and aging, until about sixty; then their warranties expire. In “The Battle of the Sexes,” Huxley assesses “the modern sexual situa- tion,” one of his recurring concerns. Is it truly liberation, he asks, or an over-reaction to the previous generation’s “excessive restraints”? (II: 113— 14) When Huxley ranks the break-up of the family “among the greatest of our Anglo-Saxon blessings” (The Decline of the Family” II: 116), he sounds disconcertingly like Mustapha Mond. The brave new world, one under- stands, is satirized for its bad decisions, not for the problems it tries to resolve. It has come up with the wrong way to supercede the family. Huxley considers Jean Racine “one of the greatest French bores” (“The Importance of Being Foreign” II: 126). One wonders how many additional examples he might have volunteered. Claiming to have a “non-mystical mind” (“No Disputing About Reasons” II: 141), did Huxley speak too soon? Sadly, his 1927 prediction of air raids wiping out entire cities proved uncan-Aldous Huxley’s Essays 241 nily accurate (“Archaeology in A.D. 5000” II: 96). Timely for the twenties, Huxley’s pronouncements on the proliferation of sports and the pillaging of the environment now seem prescient. “The traditional Anglo-Saxon interest in organized sport,” he complained in the same year he foresaw air raids, “has spread, and is still spreading, like an infection, through every country of the world” (“Recreations” Il: 86). “We are rich”, the farsighted environ- mentalist warned in 1928, “because we are living on our capital. The coal, the oil, the niter, the phosphates which we are so recklessly using can never be replaced . . . Our Prosperity has been achieved at the expense of our chil- dren” (“Progress” II: 293). Four essays from Vanity Fair deserve special attention as preludes to Brave New World. In “How Should Men Be Educated?” in the “scientifi- cally ordered state” (II: 75), Huxley considers catering to different psycho- logical types. In “Whither Are We Civilizing?” he acknowledges the difficulty of “measuring” individual happiness in any given society (II: 105). Besides ridiculing “utopia-mongers,” “compensatory” utopias, “imaginary noble savages,” and the absurdly “retrospective Utopias of William Morris,” “The Future of the Past” concludes that “external conditions change; but human nature remains . . . the same,” a constant impediment for the perfectibilitarian (II: 88-92). This does not prohibit the essayist from raising the possibility of “a new caste system” based on ability (II: 93). “Progress,” Huxley stipu- lates in an essay by that title, “is a modern invention,” nothing more than a word for the “re-valuation of values and a re-distribution of temptations” (II: 296)—not a bad definition of the brave new world. Huxley’s insistence that “evolutionary progress of the species has not been perceptible within historical times’ (II: 297) reminds one that he had yet to meet Gerald Heard. Baker has written concise introductions to both volumes. Essays in Vol- ume I, he argues, are best read as warming-up exercises: “‘they lucidly rehearse various issues that were continually evoked in [Huxley’s] novels” (1: xvi). Combing the essays from 1920 through 1929 for clues to Brave New World is one way of sustaining Baker’s contention, In the early twen- ties, one of Huxley’s “most creative periods’” he “set down fundamental views and judgements he would never abandon” (I: xv, xvii). Huxley’s was too much of a sweat-shop apprenticeship for such rigid consistency: over 200 articles and reviews in eight months as second assistant editor to Middle- ton Murry on the Athenaeum, for example. Nevertheless, a flurried Huxley, still in his mid-twenties, managed to lay the groundwork for an illustrious career. He decided that art is founded on empirical truth (that is, actual experience), and that it conveys moral and spiritual precepts. Early on, how- ever, these often take the form of depressing observations, smart, irreverent, negative. In short, Huxley expresses the intellectual “turmoil” of the post- war period (I: xx), a sense that essays must be written by an amused (and amusing) Pyrrhonist or a Jesting Pilate—that is, without the social and ethi- cal framework originators of the genre enjoyed. Essays in Volume IT, Baker continues, attest to their author’s continuous intellectual maturation despite the pressures of what Huxley called his242 UTOPIAN STUDIES “strenuous journalistic career” (“The Present Fad of Self-Confession” II: 66). In the later twenties, Huxley begins to make a concerted effort to become the modern era’s spokesperson, its formative or directing intelligence on every- thing from metaphysics to movies. Skepticism abides as does a life-long willingness to write with tongue-in-cheek, but a sage-like gravity, coupled with a greater sense of urgency, increasingly asserts itself as if Matthew Amold were teamed with Voltaire. Stylistically, Huxley prides himself on clarity and cleverness. His style evolves mainly in the sense one has of its developing into a better and broader illustration of its original strengths. Baker quotes Huxley's definition of the modern milieu: “freedom from customary bonds and ancient prejudices, from traditional and vested inter- est; the freedom in a word, from history” (II: xxi). This foreshadows Mustapha Mond echoing Henry Ford to proclaim that “History is bunk” (BNW 38), irrelevant nonsense in light of changed circumstances. Admit- tedly, Huxley’s “Pyrrhonist tendencies” compelled him to depict a “frag- mented” or “discontinuous” world of “contingency and indeterminacy” (II: xiii), But the would-be mind of his age was always intrigued by what Baker calls “the idea of a unitary oneness” (II: xiii). At first Huxley could only present it parodically in the perverse “Community, Identity, Stability” of the World State (BNW 1). Editorial decisions on how to arrange Huxley’s essays may cause some confusion. Baker groups the 146 essays in Volume J under four heads. He marshals 56 pieces under “I. Architecture, Painting, Literature”: two from the Athenaeum, seven that appeared in Murry’s journal as “Marginalia,” and seven from Vanity Fair. Then come twenty-two of the twenty-seven essays collected in On the Margin (1923), ten more from Vanity Fair, and eight from Huxley's 1925 collection Along the Road. The integrity of Huxley’s individual volumes of essays, collections he supervised and presumably assembled, yields to the editors’ classifications. Organization by topic works wonderfully for “II. Music,” wherein sixty-two reviews Huxley contributed to The Weekly Westminister Gazette form a book-within-a-book—an anthology of the author’s concert-going in 1922-23 and a comprehensive guide to the young Londoner's tastes in musical composition and performance. Some of these reviews seem rather ephemeral. Does anyone still need to know what Huxley thought of Harold Bauer’s piano recital on 10 June 1922? Yet Huxley was never simply a man for the moment. Even here he pauses to consider “the relations of music to the non-musical facts of existence” (“Literary Music” I: 255). Thanks to the Baker-Sexton retrievals, one is also treated to Huxley's views on “Brahms,” “Beethoven’s Quartets,” “Bach and Handel,” not to mention Mozart, Verdi, Palestrina, and many others. But in excluding five essays that appeared in On the Margin from “I. Architecture, Painting, Literature” while printing the rest of this collection there, Baker and Sexton in effect declare that one should study the develop- ment of Huxley’s mind by concentrating on topics prescribed by the editors. This approach, they imply, is preferable to reading Huxley’s self-containedAldous Huxley's Essays 243 texts to compare ideas that cohered as On the Margin with those that became Along the Road two years later. Granted, the Baker-Sexton sugges- tions deserve assent—their headings reflect Huxley’s overriding concerns. Still, it seems arbitrary to come upon “Popular Music,” the next-to-last essay in Along the Road, as the last essay under “II. Music” and the only piece in this section not from The Westminister Gazette. Huxley divided the twenty-two essays in Along the Road into four parts; “Popular Music” is the third of four essays in Part IV, which may be where Huxley intended read- ers to encounter it. The final category, “IV. Travel,” poses a similar prob- lem: it contains ten essays from Along the Road but opens with “Tibet,” the fifteenth of twenty-seven essays in On the Margin. Some of the Baker-Sexton decisions must have been difficult. Should “Books for the Journey” go into “I.” or “IV.”—that is, was Huxley talking about “Literature,” the category to which the editors assign this piece, or “Travel”? Why is “Rimini and Alberti” aesthetic rather than locomotive, not “Travel” but “Architecture”? Huxley seems equally interested in Rimini, perched on the Adriatic, and Alberti, a Florentine who built a temple there. “A Night at Pietramala” winds up under “III. History, Politics, Social Criti- cism.” As a tourist eating lunch at Pietramala, Huxley speculates about the visit Sir Humphry Davy and Michael Farraday paid to this village in 1814. “TIL.” is a hybrid section for the early twenties: of its fifteen essays, four come from On the Margin, nine from Vanity Fair, three from Along the Road. The Baker-Sexton categories help to chart the rise and fall of Huxley’s interests. They reveal his promotion from cultural commentator on books and concerts to modernism’s premiere intellectual, a composite of Pyrrhon- ist, prophet, and philosopher. For Volume II the editors expand their first category to include “Music,” formerly “II.” But this enlarged classification, now “Architecture, Painting, Music, and Literature,” garners only eight entries. “Travel” (still “IV.”) shrinks to four essays, but this is misleading in that the four pieces correspond to the four parts of Jesting Pilate. “II. His- tory, Politics, Social Criticism,” a grab bag in Volume I, comes into its own with nineteen essays, just short of the newest and largest category, “III. Sci- ence, Philosophy, Religion,” which holds twenty-two essays and points emphatically to Huxley’s future concerns. Despite only fifty-three essays compared to Volume I’s 146, Huxley had clearly graduated to longer, graver efforts; Volume IT outstrips its predecessor by 100 pages. Perhaps it would have been more useful to run all of the twenty-three essays Huxley wrote for Vanity Fair between 1926 and 1929 in sequence, instead of putting four under the first category, sixteen in the second, and three in the third. Reading these fine articles one after another, one realizes how frequently Huxley addressed an American audience before his 1937 hegira. The editors also do violence to Do What You Will. This collection enunciates Huxley’s final Lawrentian moment, but three of its twelve essays appear in the first category, two in the second, and seven in the third. Nor is the original order preserved: “Silence is Golden,” the first to appear in Baker-Sexton, comes second in Huxley’s volume, while “One and Many”244 UTOPIAN STUDIES which originally set the tone, if not the stage, in the 1929 collection, is reprinted as the sixteenth essay under “III.” Fortunately, all twelve sections of Proper Studies, arguably Huxley’s most important collection prior to Brave New World and second or third overall to Ends and Means (1937) and The Perennial Philosophy (1946), occur in proper order, just as Huxley chose to present them. Nevertheless, one first reads five essays from Huxley’s 1929 collection, then the twelve from 1927. Huxley’s round-the-world journey preceded both Proper Studies and Do What You Will, greatly influencing both. Impressions of India and America conclude Volume I when, actually, they were in print before the essays printed above them. ‘Appendices provide tables of contents for Along the Road and On the Margin in Volume I and for Proper Studies and Do What You Will in Vol- ume II. Readers wanting to re-experience the original collections can resort to these listings. They will discover that every Huxley collection—not only Proper Studies but even the more loosely organized Along the Road—has its overriding themes, its carefully controlled modulations. The solution may be to read Huxley’s essays pvice: once to follow the unfolding of each collection as Huxley published it, and a second time in the valid but non- chronological Baker-Sexton constellations. One can savor developments in Huxley's thinking within a given volume and from one collection to the next, as well as on subjects supplied by the editors. In a “Note on This Edition,” which appears in both volumes, the editors state their preference for “an austere policy regarding footnotes”: “only minor figures are identified on their first appearance in the text” (II: ix). Austerity borders on deprivation. References to far-away places and lesser- known works of art go unexplicated. Volume II scatters a mere seventy-four notes, usually of one line, over 587 pages. “Minor figures” certainly include Carlo Dolci, the Italian painter who is mentioned on I: 156, then footnoted on 191, Surely not minor, H.L. Mencken is footnoted on I: 80 despite hav- ing been quoted extensively on 22-23. Even Huxley scholars might have appreciated a reminder that Huxley borrowed Ekai Kawaguchi’s surname (I: 419-20) twice in Brave New World. “An hour’s reading in a well-stocked library will be enough to make [the essayist] more learned about the matter in hand than ninety-nine out of every hundred of his readers,” Huxley confessed in the aptly titled “The Present Fad of Self-Confession” (II: 66). Still, no one put in more hours than Huxley. Volumes I and II of Complete Essays show him developing into an idea-man three times over: this judge of other thinkers, this synthe- sizer of ideas, also issued warnings and proposals of his own. In Brave New World, Huxley does all three simultaneously. Had Huxley devised a step-by-step preparation for writing a novel about the future, his essays from the 1920s reveal that he could hardly have acted more wisely. Begin with short pieces assessing the state of the arts, they seem to say, immerse oneself in the current culture. Then take a trip round the wold to observe other ways of doing things. Finally, review West-Aldous Huxley’s Essays 245 ern philosophy since the Enlightenment against recent perceptions of the modern, post-war world. “In his prose essays, Huxley was . . . composing Brave New World for years before starting the novel itself.” He “was indulging in distopian prose, from which the anti-utopian or distopian novel and eventually the positive utopia spring almost inevitably” (Meckier 177). ‘Were Huxley to envision a brave new world, the ultra-modern World State, it was clear from his essays between 1920 and 1929 that it would be anti- Wellesian, anti-American, a eugenic nightmare, a lowbrow’s paradise. Minor reservations about ordering and footnoting aside, Complete Essays is a bonanza for Huxley scholars, utopists, admirers of the essay, and students of modernism generally. One is awed by Huxley’s output in the twenties—so many essays mostly of high quality. Instead of the moon-like cheese Huxley confronted in Balzac, one dines on haute cuisine: aperitif from the Athenaeum, caviar from Vanity Fair, beefsteak in Proper Studies. Even after 1,074 pages, one looks forward, like a good utopist, to the piv- otal third volume and beyond. NOTES 1, As the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning prepares to banish Bernard Marx, he cites the latter's “refusal to obey the teachings of Our Ford and behave out of office hours ‘like a babe in bottle"” (Huxley, Brave New World, 175. Hereafter BNW). 2. John disdains “cotton-waste flour-substitute,” “pan-glandular biscuits,” “vitaminized beef- surrogate,” but Delta twins consume chocolate éclairs (BNW, 290, 245). 3. Rampion lauds “the sane and harmonious Greek man” who “ties to strike a balance” between body and mind, flesh and spirit (Huxley, Point Counter Point, 164. Hereafter PCP). 4. Quoted from Huxley's epigraph to Point Counter Point. These lines from Fulke-Greville (Lord Brooke) attribute the “wearisome condition of humanity” to “diverse laws” governing existence, such as “Passion and reason” which cause self-division. Between 1920 and 1929, Huxley's essays quote this passage half a dozen times. 5. Fear of eugenic deterioration, widespread in the post-war world that had just witnessed the annihilation of an entire generation of Europeans, is not inconsistent with Huxley’s sense of overall cultural decline. Nor is it as paranoid as Wells’s plan to eliminate the non-white “swarms”; see Anticipations, 178. REFERENCES Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Chatto & Windus, 1932. Point Counter Point. London: Chatto & Windus, 1928. Meckier, Jerome. Aldous Huxley: Satire & Structure. London: Chatto & Windus, 1969, Wells, H.G. Anticipations (1901). Mineola: Dover, 1999.