The opening chapters of Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point take place at a splendid party. It is Huxley's curtain-up, where he can display on one stage almost his full cast of characters.
Unfortunately for them, however, one pair of characters (including Philip Quarles, arguably the novel's central character and almost certainly Huxley's alter ego) are not at the party, nor even in England when we first meet them, but somewhere in India, being entertained by a politician whose food sounds quite foul:
"Four or five untidy servants came out of the house and changed the plates. A dish of dubious rissoles made its appearance...They drank sweet champagne that was nearly as warm as tea. The rissoles were succeeded by sweetmeats - large, pale balls (much fingered, one felt sure, long and lovingly rolled between the palms) of some equivocal substance, at once slimy and gritty and tasting hauntingly through their sweetness of mutton fat."
I re-read Point Counterpoint during lockdown and was rather dismissive of it on this blog at the time. Picking it up again now, as well as rediscovering that disgusting meal, I see that it is full of brilliant insight and much prescience.
I realise I like the character of Rampion, based on DH Lawrence, as he is made to say all sorts of amusing and not unintelligent things:
On Cubism, Rampion says:
"Nothing like modern art for sterilising the life out of things. Carbolic acid isn't it."
On scientists, Rampion says:
"What the scientists are trying to get at is non-human truth"
On the world, Rampion says:
"The world's an asylum of perverts."
Unfairly but not unamusingly, I'm ashamed to admit, on St Francis, Rampion says:
"Your little stink-pot of a St Francis...a silly, vain little man trying to blow himself up into a Jesus and only succeeding in killing whatever sense or decency there was in him, only succeeding in turning himself into the nasty smelly fragments of a real human being. Going about getting thrills of excitement out of licking lepers. Ugh! ... Not curing the lepers, mind you. Just licking them For his own amusement. Not theirs. It's revolting!"
On his belief that the majority of humanity never really live fully, Rampion says:
"Make the effort to be human!" (That's the short version)
Augustus John is also brought to life quite vividly, including his superstitious beliefs, outlined here while he is waiting for a doctor's diagnosis:
"One should never formulate one's knowledge of coming evil; for then fate would have, so to speak a model on which to shape events. There was always a kind of impossible chance that, if one didn't put one's foreboding of evil into words, the evil wouldn't happen."
The scenes between the Augustus John character and his grandchild are truly touching.
Middleton Murry, another celebrity of the time, now largely forgotten other than for being Katherine Mansfield's lover, appears in the novel as Burlap and one has the impression that Huxley disliked Middleton Murry very very much. Here he is being vicious about him and his self-centredness:
"For every Jesuit novice Loyola prescribed a course of solitary meditation on the passion of Christ; a few days of this exercise, accompanied by fasting, were generally enough to produce in the novice's mind a vivid, mystical and personal realisation of the Saviour's real existence and sufferings. Burlap employed the same process; but, instead of thinking about Jesus, or even about Susan, he thought of himself, his own agonies, his own loneliness, his own remorses. And duly, at the end of some days of incessant spiritual masturbation, he had been rewarded by a mystical realisation of his own unique and incomparable piteousness."
Here he encourages the reader to feel extremely queasy about Burlap's feelings for his girlfriend which, Huxley explains are :
"those of a child for its mother (a rather incestuous child, it is true, but how tactfully and delicately the little Oedipus!); his love was at once babysish and maternal; his passion was a kind of passive snuggling."
Ugh.
Most damning of all is Huxley's remark about the writing efforts of Middleton Murry's alter ego:
"Burlaps books were so heartfelt that they looked as though they had come from the stomach, after an emetic."
Huxley I realise now tries to mitigate the slight lifelessness that a novel of ideas can have - or apologise for it - by having his alter ego, Philip Quarles write in a notebook, which we then read as part of the novel:
"The great defect of the novel of ideas", Quarles tells his notebook - and thus, us - "is that it's a made-up affair. Necessarily; for people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren't quite real; they're slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run."
Quarles also interestingly observes that:
"It's incomparably easier to know a lot, say, about the history of art and to have profound ideas about metaphysics and sociology than to know personally and intuitively a lot about one's fellows and to have satisfactory relations with one's friends and lovers, one's wife and children. Living's much more difficult than Sanskrit or chemistry or economics...It's much easier to be an intellectual child or lunatic or beast than a harmonious adult man. That's why (among other reasons) there's such a demand for higher education. The rush to books and universities is like the rush to the public house. People want to drown their realisation of the difficulties of living properly in this grotesque contemporary world."
and reflects with great clarity on the attraction of pageant, after seeing a Fascist march:
"How does one explain the fascination of the military spectacle?... A squad is merely ten men and emotionally neutral The heart only begins to beat at the sight of a company. The evolutions of a battalion are intoxicating. And a brigade is already an army with banners - which is the equivalent, as we know from the Song of Songs, of being in love. The thrill is proportional to the numbers. Given the fact that one is only two yards high, two feet wide, and solitary, a cathedral is necessarily more impressive than a cottage and a mile of marching men is grander than a dozen loafers at a street corner. But that's not all. A regiment's more impressive than a crowd. The army with banners is equivalent to love only when it's perfectly drilled. Stones in the form of a building are finer than stones in a heap. Drill and uniforms impose an architecture on the crowd. An army's beautiful. But that's not all; it panders to lower instincts than the aesthetic. The spectacle of human beings reduced to automatism satisfies the lust for power. Looking at mechanised slaves, one fancies oneself a master...The trumpets were prodigious - like the overture to the Last Judgement. (why should upper partials be so soul-shaking?) And when the trumpet overture was done, the thousand voices burst out with that almost supernatural sound which choral singing always has."
One character's thoughts about his first experience of sex with an actual female, seem alarmingly contemporary, given the almost universal availability of very graphic pornography via the internet and its reported warping of youthful expectation:
"Such an apocalypse, the first real woman - and at the same time, such a revolting disappointment! So flat, in a way, after the super-heated fancy and the pornographic book."
There are also some bits that are just quite funny, such as this bit of a letter from a really frightful character called Lucy, describing what is either an early piece of conceptual art or a very odd fetish:
"Suffering from a cold and intense boredom, only momentarily relieved by your letter. Paris is really terribly dreary. I have a good mind to fly away somewhere else, only I don't know where. Eileen came to see me today. She wants to leave Tim, because he will insist on her lying naked in bed whie he sets fire to newspapers over her and lets the hot ashes fall on her body. Poor Tim! It seems unkind to deprive him of his simple pleasures. But Eileen's so nervous of being grilled."
The same Lucy expounds on modernity, saying:
"Living modernly's living quickly. You can't cart a wagon-load of ideals and romanticisms about with you these days. When you travel by airplane, you must leave your heavy baggage behind. The good old-fashioned soul was all right when people lived slowly. But it's too ponderous nowadays. There's no room for it in the aeroplane...The thing is to know what you want and to be ready to pay for it."
That seems very close to how contemporary citizens are encouraged to view the world, even though it was composed back in the early part of the twentieth century.
Meanwhile the extremely weird character called Spandrell's declaration about trees makes me laugh:
"What I hate about trees in the summer is their beastly fat complacency. Bulging - that's what they are; like bloated great profiteers. Bulging with insolence, passive insolence."
Spandrell also makes the following intriguing and increasingly chilling statements:
"The great public has a chronic and cannibalistic appetite for personalities."
"From someone who does not appeal to one even devotion, even the flattery of admiration, are unbearable."
"There is in debauchery something so intrinsically dull, something so absolutely and hopelessly dismal...Actions which at first seem thrilling in their intrinsic wickedness become after a certain number of repetitions morally neutral. A little disgusting, perhaps, for the practice of most vices is followed by depressing physiological reactions; but no longer wicked, because so ordinary. It is difficult for a routine to seem wicked."
Philip Quarles's father doing the crossword also amused me, slightly prefiguring the central character in One Foot in the Grave in an episode when at home, at a loose end, he starts roaming through the medical dictionary:
"A crossword problem had brought Mr Quarles to the seventeenth volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Idle curiosity detained him. The Lord Chamberlain, he learned, carries a white staff and wears a golden or jewelled key. The word lottery has no very definite signification; but Nero gave such prizes as a house or a slave, while Heliogabalus inroduced an element of absurdity - one ticket for a golden vase, another for six flies. Pickney B S Pinchback was the acting Republican governor of Louisiana in 1873. To define the lyre, it is necessary clearly to separate it from the allied harp and guitar. In one of the northern ravines of Madeira some masses of a coarsely crystalline Essexite are exposed to view...." etc
There is also a speech by Philip Quarles's mother that I think is supposed to make us despise her, but unfortunately I think is pretty spot on:
"The enormous stupidity of the young people of this generation is thye never think of life except in terms of happiness. 'How shall I have a good time?' That's the question they ask. Or they complain: 'Why am I not having a better time?' But this is a world where good times, in their sense of the word, perhaps in any sense, simply cannot be had continuously, and by everybody. And even when they get their good times, it's inevitably a dispapointment - for imagination is always brighter than reality. And after it's been had for a little, it becomes a bore. Everybody strains after happiness and the result is that nobody's happy. It's because they're on the wrong road. The question they ought to be asking themselves isn't: Why aren't we happy, and how shall we have a good time? It's: How can we please God, and why aren't we better."
John Updike in his preface to More Matter, a collection of his essays and criticism, wrote that "just as the impossibly ideal map would be the same size as the territory mapped, the ideal review would quote the book in its entirety, without comment." I take this as a cue to add a few random quotations from Point Counterpoint that I admired for their clarity, perception or some other quality that made them worth passing on.
1. A description of a butler:
"Butler Simmons: was middle-aged and had that statesman-like dignity of demeanour which the necessity of holding the tongue and keeping the temper, of never speaking one's real mind and preserving appearances tends always to produce in diplomats, royal personages, high government officials, and butlers."
2. A mind opening gloss of things that Sir Isaac Newton and Aristotle said, which I find useful since I know in my heart of hearts that I am never going to read either:
"The moving instant which, according to Sir Isaac Newton, separates the infinite past from the infinite future advance inexorably through the dimension of time. Or, if Aristotle was right, a little more of the possible was every instant made real; the present stood still and drew into itself the future, as a man might suck forever at an unending piece of macaroni."
The analogy in the final sentence of that paragraph is also wonderfully irreverent.
3. This observation from one of the book's characters:
"Nights are like human beings - never interesting until they're grown up. Round about midnight they reach puberty. At a little after one they come of age. Their prime is from two to half past. An hour later they're growing rather desperate, like those man-eating women and waning middle-aged men who hop around twice as violently as they ever did in the hope of persuading theselves that they're not old. After four they're in full decay. And their death is horrible. Really horrible at sunrise, when the bottles are empty and people look like corpses and desire's exhausted itself into disgust."
4. This realisation when a character sees his lover bent to a match flame to light her cigarette and notices that the expression on her face is identical to that when she is leaning toward him for his kisses:
"There are many thoughts and feelings, but only a few gestures; and the mask has only half a dozen grimaces to express a thousand meanings."
5. Another character's realisation:
"There are some people who no sooner enjoy but they despise what they have enjoyed
6. A sad truth:
"A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one."
7. A passage describing a book Philip Quarles is reading about the human brain throws up the startling possibility that Huxley may have inspired Finnegan's Wake - although on reflection perhaps, having already read the very first instalments of Joyce's book, Huxley is actually here poking fun:
Quarles comes "upon the case of the Irish gentleman who had suffered from paraphasia...The physician had asked the patient to read aloud a paragraph from the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin. "It shall be in the power of the College to examine or not examine every Licentiate, previous to his admission to a fellowship, as they shall think fit." What the patient actually read was: "An the bee-what in the tee-mother of the trothodoodoo, to majoram or that emidrate, eni eni krastrei, mestreit to ketra totombreidei, to ra from treido as that kekritest."...
"The final word about life", Philip Quarles writes in his notebook, determining to use the phrase beginning "An the bee'what" on the title page of his next book.
Finally, the book is not merely an icy set of ideas. There is tragedy in it, including the tragedy of Quarles's wife who loves a man who is almost certainly not capable of giving love in return:
"Still being in love with him, she persisted in her efforts to lure him into direct contact and, though the process was rather discouraging - like singing to deaf-mutes or declaiming poetry to an empty hall - she went on giving him her intimacies of thought and feeling."
I won't go further on the twists and turns of the plot and tragedy, except to say there are elements that are almost unbearably sad.
