Sunday 29 September 2024

Literary Meals - a Continuing Series: Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley

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.


Friday 27 September 2024

Spending Time with a Toddler

As I am very bad at imagining what anything is ever going to be like - or possibly very pessimistic - I am often positively surprised. Never has this been truer than in my experience of becoming a grandmother. 

To be honest, I hadn't envisaged myself as a grandmother at all and so I had no clear expectation, just as before learning I was to become a mother I had no expectation of that experience either (although with some reason in that case as when I was 20 a doctor told me that I probably never would have a child - but that's another story). 

The only time the idea of being a grandmother had even occurred to me was when reading the ecstatic comments of one of my favourite writers, Helen Garner, on the subject. 

Mind you, much as I love being a grandmother, I still don't entirely understand a passage of hers where she describes how, when on a Melbourne tram with one of her grandchildren, someone takes her for her grandchild's mother and it seems absolutely vital to her that they know she is the child's grandmother - not because she feels guilty of misleading the other person but because being a grandmother is something she is so especially proud of. 

But I do now understand what she sometimes tries to explain - that the love you feel for a grandchild is quite unlike anything else, including the love you feel for your own children, enormous though that is.

It might be something to do with regaining a sense of how marvellous the world is or possibly a matter of discovering a new perspective on time.

For my grand daughter, most objects I barely notice or take for granted are interesting and even exciting. For her, almost everything is fresh and vivid. Because of this, she lingers, even in apparently dreary spots. Time stretches. A five-minute walk takes half an hour, as snails are studied, leaves collected, puddles jumped in, cats and dogs and birds and aeroplanes all greeted.

The other day while out walking together we came across some dandelions. Some were still flowering, others had gone to seed. When I spotted an unusually perfect dandelion seed head. I picked it:

I showed her how to blow on the seed head and count each time she did so, until all the seeds were scattered, as if each breath was the chime of a clock:
She blew until every seed had gone but, as she is small and her blowing is not expert, we had arrived at 29 o'clock by the time she'd finished:

Well no one ever claimed that dandelion clocks work with Swiss precision. In fact maybe they aren't about telling the time at all, but simply reminders that time passes very quickly. It feels as if my grand daughter was only born a month or two ago but in reality she is already almost two and a half years old. 




 

Saturday 21 September 2024

Bonnard in Aix en Provence


Ages ago I went to an exhibition of paintings by Pierre Bonnard at the Tate Modern in London. It was, I thought, exhaustive. Therefore a day or two ago in Aix en Provence when I saw that a museum I was visiting was displaying a small exhibition concentrating on the influence of Japanese prints on Bonnard's work I imagined there would be nothing new to see.

I was wrong. There were in fact plenty of paintings I'd never seen before but most of them weren't as good as the Japanese prints they were displayed with - and from which allegedly Bonnard's inspiration for his works there came.

There was one exception though, this really lovely picture:

It is called Fish in a Pool at Agénor and was painted, (oil on canvas), in 1943.

I put a few other snaps of my trip to Aix en Provence on Instagram. Plus here are a couple of nice doorways and two or three random street shots:







Aix is lovely but many other people have heard that it is, which means inevitably that there are so many places to eat that are of the kind that tout for passing business and know they will never see you again that it is difficult in two days to discover restaurants that care about making food and serving it so beautifully that you cannot wait to return. Tant pis. We still ate well - and drank far too much delicious wine.

Wednesday 28 August 2024

The Irritants of Modernity - an Occasional Series

Supposedly someone in the 19th century left a suicide note that read as follows:

I weary of all this buttoning & unbuttoning.

It may have been an Englishman or a Frenchman. It may be apocryphal. In any case, I think the modern version would read thus:

I weary of all this two-step verification.

I know it's for my own good and I should appreciate the exercise involved in regularly having to run up two flights of stairs to get my telephone and find the code that I must never share with anyone. All the same, I liked it better when I didn't have to.

Monday 26 August 2024

A Trip to England

We're in England for a bit and there is a new government. The last one seemed to lack any idea of what it was doing or why.The new one has, as Allister Heath put it in the Telegraph recently:

"delivered a masterclass in how to seize the levers of power."

 I didn't care for the last government but, observing the new one get into its stride, it has dawned on me that few things are as bad as being governed by people who are convinced that they know what is good for you.


Saturday 17 August 2024

A Far Cry from K2

I already told the story of how some time ago I went to a rural supply shop in New South Wales to buy some salt for my mum's cattle. The man there showed me where to find what mum was after - in a corner of the shop's big warehouse was a heap of bags labelled "Himalayan rock salt", sold in 25 kilogram lumps.

After checking that the bags contained decent-sized single lumps and not a whole lot of 5 kilogram pebbles, the bloke heaved several of the best onto a trolley, which he pushed out to my car. As he hefted a couple of the sacks into the boot, I noticed that there was an address printed on the side of them. It proved that they really were from the Himalayas and not, as I had imagined called 'Himalayan' purely from whimsy or to create a romantic impression, (and, indeed, now I come to think of it, I realise trying to endow cow salt with romance would be an unlikely marketing ploy).

Anyway, I was so surprised that I made a comment. 

'They really are Himalayan', I said. 

The bloke from the shop dumped the second bag into the back of the car and straightened up before turning for the next one. 

'Yeah', he said, pushing back his hat and wiping his forehead. 

'I suppose there's some poor little bugger up there on the top of Mount Everest, chip, chip, chipping away.' 

He bent over and grabbed hold of the corners of the next bag. 

'It'd be a long hard way down with 25 kilo', he grunted, as he hurled it after the others.

The memory came back to me walking through a field in south Wales this afternoon. There it was - a chunk of Himalayan salt, another bit of that poor little bugger's bounty, so I guess he's still up there, chip, chip, chipping away.







Thursday 8 August 2024

Skimping

I spend a lot of time in an apartment on the third floor of a building. To reach it, you have to climb 96 stairs. When I am not there, I take opportunities where I can to stay in practice with climbing stairs. Thus, today, staying in a modern chain hotel, I climbed to our fifth floor room. To get there I walked up 70 stairs. So to reach the fifth floor, I climbed almost 30 fewer stairs than I would to reach my usual third floor flat. 

At some point somewhere someone in an office decided to save money by lowering ceiling heights in new-builds. When I walk into the rooms in that 96-steps-up third floor apartment, they are so generous in their proportions that I feel my spirit has been set free. When I walk into a low-ceilinged modern hotel room, I feel I am entering a box, a space that provides not a centimetre more space than is absolutely necessary. It may save money for builders but I wonder what the mental effect is on those who live in apartment buildings constructed on similar lines.