Point Counter Point

With Point Counter Point (1928) I've now completed the most complicated and ambitious of Aldous Huxley's early novels. It's clear that Huxley wanted to write a different kind of novel -- novels of ideas, works that confront big issues. And the complaint that his novels are too talky is certainly borne out by both Those Barren Leaves and Point Counter Point. His characters tend to be writers and artists and journalists who spend a good deal of time eating out together and arguing about the meaning of life and art and science.

In some respects Huxley is the embodiment of C.P. Snow's two cultures: a man well educated in the arts who is also current in his knowledge and understanding of the latest scientific advances. But this doesn't seem to result in a particularly harmonious existence either for Huxley himself or for the characters who populate his novels. There is constant tension between the quest for artistic truth and the desire to harness scientific knowledge, and in addition an undercurrent of spiritual alienation in the presence of the modern, twentieth-century milieu his characters inhabit. The period between the two world wars was not a happy time for Huxley or for George Orwell or for most of the other British intellectuals I've been reading and re-reading.

While I recognize what Huxley was attempting to do with Point Counter Point, and while I was interested in the story and the characters, as well as the themes and ideas and narrative structure, I can't quite bring myself to say I found the book entertaining. Huxley is honest enough, or foolish enough, to include a character who is attempting (and failing) to write just such a book, and perhaps the lesson both for Huxley and for his readers is that such experiments are likely doomed to fail, and yet may fail in interesting ways. Huxley's fascination with music and musical structure governs his narrative, from an opening evening concert to a climactic phonograph recording of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15, the third movement of which offers one seriously deranged character proof of God's existence. But Huxley's attempt to translate musical patterns to narrative does little to stitch together the various strands of his wandering plot.

Once again in Point Counter Point the cast of characters is a somewhat heterogeneous collection of well to do eccentrics and lower class strivers who are attempting (and generally failing) to relate to one another either romantically or as family or friends. One of the most striking characters in this novel is Everard Webley, the leader of a nasty and growing gang of fascists who call themselves the Brotherhood of British Freemen. Some readers have seen a reference to Oswald Moseley, but 1928 is too early even for Huxley to have seen where Moseley was tending or would end up. What is so striking about this element of the plot, however, is that it reveals Huxley's prophetic ability. Both he and Orwell saw where the trends of the early twentieth century were leading British culture. One of Huxley's characters in Point Counter Point exclaims that he gives current European civilization about ten more years. Given what was coming in 1939, that turns out to be just about right.

Point Counter Point, like Crome Yellow,  Antic Hay, and Those Barren Leaves, tries out themes that will re-emerge a few years later in Brave New World (1932).  All of these novels offer a critique of the aimless existence of contemporary English society, and in various ways predict a coming collapse, owing to some extent to a misplaced faith in what they thought was scientific progress, and also to the exhaustion of human spirituality brought on by what Huxley diagnoses as a misguided trust in religion, especially Christianity. Each novel has at least one character who longs for a more natural human existence, perhaps a foreshadowing of John the Savage. Other themes that will re-emerge in Brave New World include Huxley's fascination with human sexuality, his suspicion of the motives of the educated classes, especially the scientists and politicians who are fashioning the modern world, and his faith in the sustaining and redemptive power of art and literature.

Up next is Brave New World, which I'm going to read again now in its proper place in the development of Huxley's fiction. The first time I encountered it, I was in high school in the 1960s. Then I taught it when I was not much older and a teaching assistant at the University of Texas. But on those occasions I read Huxley's novel out of context, relating it more to my own world than to his, and comparing it to Orwell's 1984, which was written nearly two decades later and reflected a very different perspective on English culture. This time around I want to attempt to put Huxley's book back with its predecessors and in the context of an England struggling to come to terms with life after the disaster of the First World War, and in that early period of anxiety brought on by the growing realization that another world war was almost certainly inevitable.