Euphorion, 1992 (Anul 3, nr. 22-30)

1992 / nr. 22-24

NWSNYYSSYYYYYYYYYYNYYYYYYSYYYYY^YYYYY^YYYVYSYNYYYYYNNSNYY^YYYYYY*YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY,<\YYNY‘.Y.YY->YY‘<YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYvYY>Y-<YY.Y\YYV.S.Y''YYV>YY\YYYYYNYY' >YYYYYYYYYYYYYVYYYYYYYY\YY'-NYYYYY.YYY'.YYYYY-YV.NS,>YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY.\YYNYYYV.YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY,*SYNYvYYYYYYYY"Yv R N Dumitru Pop - Ciocoi "Death of Ivan llyitch is/one of the artistically most per­fect... books ever written.../be­cause/ Tolstoy is never emphatic, indulges in no rhetori­cal flourishes, speaks simply of the most different matters and flatly..." (Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations) What Aldous Huxley stated about Tolstoy's Death of Ivan llyitch apparently holds good for his own novella, The Genius and the Goddess published in 1955. That this book meant much to Huxley is evinced by the rare in­tensity (rare in his published correspondence, at least) of his retort when Joseph Anthony, di­recting the dramatic version of The Genius and the Goddess wanted to make some al­terations meant to "in­crease" the dramatic effect but which, if carried out, would have spoiled its whole message. Sybille Bedford, a writer and critic closely acquainted with Al­dous Huxley’s writings, was among the first to realize the im­portance of the Genius and the Goddess, which in its manu­script form had been a favourite of Maria Huxley. And in a letter addressed to Allan Crane, dated January 27,1963, we read : "Since The Doors of Percep­tion I have written a short novel, The Genius and the Goddess (Edwin Muir thought it the best thing I ever did...)..." (1) The very choosing of an appro­priate title for this novella which Huxley wrote and rewrote for many months seems to have been particularly difficult. The title finally adopted, was sug­gested in early December 1954 a member of the Harper editorial staff. It appealed to the author through its straightforwardness and the fact that it had "good precedents", such as D.H.Law­rence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy. (2) In fact a notable part of the book, especially Henry and Katy Maartens' matrimonial life, was modelled on D.H.Lawrence and his wife, Frieda (3). The novella as such consists mainly of a piece of oral narattion by John Rivers, a man who played a leading role in the events he is describing. According to Keith May This device should be seen first of all as yet another answer to a problem which Huxley had by now been faced with for some twenty years, the problem of how to pass on certainties without fracturing the work. He evidently felt the need to incorporate into his later fictions his own com­­mentaires upontheactions.(4) For the first time Huxley seems to have achieved a perfect union of both fictional and essay ele­ments, and indeed, John Rivers emerges as a ’real’ character who does not indulge in analysis only, but also acts, and sees events from within. He does not explain or comment upon things, he experiences them and The message he delivers is perfectly , Huxley's own even though his voice, appearance, past and present behaviour are all distinc- _ tive’\(5) Unfortunately this remarkable achievement is eclipsed by an evident flaw in the dramatic quality of the book ; a fact which explains why, despite the interest it stirred up immediately after the publication (6), The Genius and the Goddess has never enjoyed the popularity of Point Counter Point, Brave New World or Eye­less in Gaza. What makes this writing unique in Huxley’s work, is that in many respects it is the epitome of his ideas on fiction with its tasks of conveying or clarifying reality. Writing about the special signifi­­ance of The Genius and the God­dess, Keith May asserted: It is probable that in the years 1954 and 1944 Huxley’s thinking strayed from its normal path. Pessimistic to some degree he may always have been, but pes­simism was, as we have seen usually accompanied either by sheer pleasure in the process of living, intellectual high spirits, boundless curiosity, or alterna­tively, by a fairly hopeful search for better things. Normally he held both the old-fashioned be­lief that knowledge liberates and the quasi-existentialist assump­tion that man determines, within limits, his character and fate. Most unacceptably all this is thrown overboard in The Genius and the Goddess, a novel con­trived to demolish hope. In the absence of a full biography it is tempting to conjecture that this temporary mood was caused by the long illness and the death, in 1955, of Maria Huxley.(7) The years 1954 and 1955 did represent a period apart in Hux­ley’s life. The witnessed, in our opinion, the total scepticism prompted to the author by his utter disillusion with the world. This was mainly due to the fam­ily and personal misfortunes he went through during that time (8). But it is equally associated with an increasing dissatisfaction with whatever faith (literary, mys­tic, or social) he had nourished before - in other words, these were the years when Huxley’s non-commitent became total as well. No reader will fail to notice the author’s utterlydispassionate standpoint expressed in this work. What Huxley does, in fact, is to sum up, instinctively, his knowledge of life and literature, feeling (like John Rivers) that he is "pretty close to the final reckoning”. The whole book reads like a self-analysis prompted by death, a self-ana­lysis of rude sincerity, pathetic in its lack of pathos. Deutsch Not only the content but also some elements of form indicate that this work is a summary chapter of Huxley's literary work. Many of the quotes scattered through the novella, in them­selves philosophic principles in a nut-shell, had been used in ear­lier writings. Nevertheless they should not be interpreted as te­dious repetitions but rather as proofs of Huxley’s ceaseless en­deavour to clarify some aspects of life. Thus, for example, The strongest oaths are straw to the fire i’ the blood" was used in Brave New World (9) ; Goethe’s famous line in Faust, "Alles Ver­­ganglische ist nur ein Gleich­­niss", can be found in Eyeless in Gaza (10) ; "vox et praetera nihil" was mentioned in Time Must Have a StuH (11). Love being The desire of the i noth for the star" is requoted from The Devils of Lou­­dun (12), and the same holds true with his considerations on the Manichean dualism (13); his views on the inaccuracies of history have already been ex­pressed in Brave New World (14) and the philosophical cum phil­ological approach to "love" is re­taken from After Many a Summer (15). Even such a momentary re­flection as The billion-to- one chance" we might have To be Shakespeare" can be traced back in his poem "Fifth Philos­opher’s Song" (16). The series of examples meant to illustrate the summarizing character of The Genius and the Goddess, in so far as elements of form are concernd, does not end here. Undoubtedly Henry Maartens, the moronic scientist, reminds us of Lord Edward (Point Counter Point), Ruth Maartens is an ’incipient’ Helen Ledwidge (Eyeless in Gaza) or Veronica Thwale (Time Must Have a Stop) ; old John Rivers has much of the wisdom and cultivated spirit of Dr.Miller (Eye­less in Gaza), Propter {After Many a Summer) or Bruno Ron­­tini (Time Must Have a Stop). Man viewed as a succesion of states, a fact that makes Rivers wonder how anyone can "seri­ously believe in his own identity" (17) goes back to Eyeless in Gaza (18). There is a great number of ref­erences to : literature (Theo­critus, Marlowe, Shakespeare, William Cowper, Goethe, E.A.Poe, Swinburne, O.Wilde.H enryJames,D.H.Lawrence,H.G .Wells, James Thurber etc.), philos­ophy (William James, P.A.Dirac, J.A. Toynbee, P.Sorokin, Ru­dolph Carnap, John Dewey), psychology (Piaget, Montessori, Freud, Jung, Havelock Ellis), physics and mathematics (Schroedinger, Planck, Ruther­ford, Thompson, Hilbert and Poincare), religion (Thomas a Kempis, the Bible), Greek myth­ology etc as well as all kinds of references of general character. They are all evidences of Hux­ley's inquisitive mind and thirst for knowledge - one of the fun­damental features of his best writings. Still, from the point of view of from, what differentiates The Genius and the Goddes from Huxley’s previous works is the simplicity and straightforward­ness, if not the downright flat­ness, of style - precisely because the writer has one single goal : the telling of the whole truth about life - through literature. Thus the book is not a mere enumeration of commentaries onlife theories but the Swan Song of Huxley's lifelong study of the interrelationship between reality and literature, and of its derivatives: reason-imagination, physical existence - spiritual life, appearance-reality etc. The sexagenarian John Rivers, whose large frame and lined face still suggest how handsome he was in his youth, once an assis­tant of the great physicist, Henry Maartens, sets himself the task of clarifying his former professor's life which had been distorted and misinterpreted by an "official" biography.The whole con­fession (because that is how the whole book reads) is occa­sioned by one of the rare visits that a writerfriend of his pays him. Thus the aim emerges clearly from the very beginning : the presentation of true facts without any fictional load. The motivation for this approach to expressing reality is the very opening para­graph of the book: "The trouble with fiction" said John Rivers, "is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense." "Never ?■ I questioned. Maybe from God’s point of view, "he conceded. Never from ours. Fic­tion has unity, fiction has style. Facts possess neither. In the raw, existence is always one damned thing after another, and each of the damned things is simultaneously Thurber and Mi­chelangelo, simultaneously Mic­key Spillane and Thomas a Kempis. The criterion of reality is its intrinsic irrelevance". (19) This means that the closest to reality are the fictions whose truthful­ness we doubt most. The Brothers Karamazov makes so little sense that it is almost real. Vv No variety of academic fiction (physics and chemistry fiction, history fiction, philosophy fiction etc.) can ever live up to this. (20) Reality is intricate and senseless. Fiction has unity and style. The chasm between the two seems to be unbridgeable. What is the use of interpretative’ fiction then if does not accurately interpret reality ? It lies in the fact that "...the total reality is always too undignified to be recorded, too senseless or too horrible to be left unfictionalized". (21) These are then the premises to Rivers' attempt to present the personal life of Henry Maartens (The Genius) the way it was. In doing so he will also express his Franşais personal view of Katy Maartens (The Goddess) on whom Henry Maartens was dependent, in a symbiotic partnership, as well as of Ruth and Timmy, the two Maartens' children. The Genius is materialistic, fully convinced of the unique su­periority of science which alone can unravel the meaning of human existence through laws, theories and ratiocinations. His imagination is deeply rooted in the objective facts of the sur­rounding realities. Katy Maartens, his wife, has all the qualities which, supposedly, a goddess must have. She is beautiful like a Valkyrie or a Greek Goddess and her spiritual world is more liké' a dream which can be materialized only by its instinctive approach to the genius. The coexistence of the two is not only possible but almost necessary. The genius, although rationally gigantic, proves to be infantile and downright foolish where human relations are con­cerned. (22). He needs the per­manent concern and care of the goddess whose entire emotional make-up consists of affection, love and grace. This symbiosis seems to be longlasting. A har­mony between the real and the imaginary does not appear in­congruent although some par­ticular aspects of the Maartens household are anything but natural or common. If Timmy’s young age gives his presence no other importance than to lend color to the story and to enable the reader to get some information concerning its de­nouement, Ruth Maartens, an adolescent, has a far more im­portant role. Though Rivers tries to support his direct portrait of Ruth by general commentaries (the same holds true for his port­rait of Katy) there is hardly any agreement between the two. Just like Katy, who, in spite of being compared to a Valkyrie, Hera, "Hebe and the three Graces and all the nymphs of Diana rolled into one" (23) is in the novel less solid, than Rivers" for instance, Ruth is not sharply individ­ualized. She is rather constituted of stated of mind normal for a girl of her age, more particularly defined as an American adoles­cent in the early 1920’s with knowledgeable parents. At four­teen she is fascinated by E.A.Poe and writes poems in which typical rhyming words are "gloom" and "tomb" ; about a year later she moves on to Wilde's and Swinburne's erotic poetry. Her appearance, despite some occasional descriptions, is nebulous. Still this adolescent girl whose mind is a "saturated solution of feeling" (24), whose floating emotions emulate those of literary models, will definitely contribute to the tragedy that will ravage the Maartens family. The Maartens's household routine is broken by the arrival of John Rivers, a young man of twenty-eight, innocent, relig­iously dogmatic, emotionally underdeveloped but with a physical beauty resembling a ’genuine Greek God' (25). As soon as Katy is compelled to leave her family in order to look after her dying mother, Henry Maartens falls into a des­pondency that verges on death. Overwhelmed by the sufferings caused by her mother’s death and her husband's potential death, Katy, broken- hearted and thrown off her spiritual balance, A1A tfvn cs UTai 1 ■ ; JTLU.X jy fiction

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