Word: huxley
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...ESSENCE (205 pp.)-Aldous Huxley-Harper...
...rather be myself . . . Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly." So declaims the unadjustable hero of Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's satiric fable about a totally efficient, totally soulless Utopia. This defense of the unreconstructed individual, who refuses to run with the mob, is a central theme in much of Huxley's writing, and it spills all over his latest novel. But where Brave New World was a neat stiletto jab into the tender hide of the reforming perfectionists, Ape and Essence, a poorer novel, is a rather crude bludgeon indiscriminately aimed...
...hero of Ape and Essence, as pallid as most of Huxley's heroes, is Dr. Alfred Poole, a mother-dominated scientist with a vast intellect and a recessive sex drive. On an expedition from New Zealand (one of the few spots, in the 22nd Century, that has escaped the atomic destruction of the Third World War), Dr. Poole discovers the remnants of a decayed civilization on the west coast of North America. In once proud and loud California there vegetates a sallow, stupefied tribe of helots whose technology is not much superior to that of the pre-Columbian Indians...
Desperate Jeremiad. In the past, the report of the contemporary traveler on a future society or imaginary land (Edward Bellamy, Sir Thomas More) has often been used as a vehicle to show what a wonderful Utopia awaits man. In Huxley's hand this form becomes a desperate, overworked and sometimes incoherent jeremiad directed against a destruction-bent, unheeding world. As a satirist, Huxley has neither Swift's passion nor Celine's gusto; he simply can't stand the world any more, not even enough to pillory...
...stating explicitly what his story conveys, or should convey, by itself. Written as a movie scenario, Ape and Essence is burdened with a "narrator" who points the lesson line by line. Yet the book has a certain awesome impressiveness; its sheer, intractable bitterness cannot but affect the reader as Huxley chants his litanies over modern civilization...