Books: The Devil & the Deep Blue Huxley

APE AND ESSENCE (205 pp.)—Aldous Huxley—Harper ($2.50).

“I’d 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 at all men’s thick skulls.

The 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 and whose morality is rather worse.

The Sign of the Horns. Captured by the post-atom Californians, Poole is condemned by the Chief of the Californians to be buried “alive or dead … as you like,” but when he promises to teach the barbarians something about science, he is grudgingly let off—on condition that he swear by “Almighty Belial” and make “the sign of the horns.” For in lower California during the 22nd Century, Belial, the devil himself, rules; his victory over “the Other One” was consolidated in Atomic War, though his battle for power began centuries before.

Brought back to the ruins of Los Angeles, Poole sees two women drawing water in a goatskin from a shallow well in front of the Philharmonic Auditorium. Near by stand the communal ovens. They are stoked with books brought by small boys from the remains of the Public Library. “In goes The Phenomenology of Spirit, out comes the corn bread.”

A little way off in “what was once the Bilbmore Coffee Shop” a group of women are busily weaving on primitive looms. The Chief explains to Poole that “none of these vessels [as the Californians call the women] had a baby this season [in the communal mating] . . . When they’re not producing monsters, they’re sterile. What we’re going to do for manpower, Belial only knows . . .”

The Source of Deformity. Farther along on his tour, Poole hears the “Satanic Science Practitioner” piping a Belialic catechism to a group of students.

“What [is] your duty towards your neighbor?” The answer: “To do my best to prevent him from doing unto me what I should like to do unto him . . .” And “What is the Nature of Woman?” “Woman is the vessel of the Unholy Spirit, the source of all deformity . . . the enemy of the race.”

That night in the Los Angeles Coliseum, Poole witnesses the rites of “purification” of Belial Eve and the beginning of the mating season at California’s biggest celebration: Belial Day. “His Eminence, the Arch-Vicar of Belial, Lord of the Earth, Primate of California, Servant of the Proletariat, Bishop of Hollywood,” explains to Poole that the triumph of his lord was assured by the rise of two doctrines during the pre-atom era: “Progress and Nationalism . . . the theory that Utopia lies just ahead and that, since ideal ends justify the most abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder . . . [and] the theory that the state you happen to be subject to is the only true god . . . and that every conflict over prestige, power or money is a crusade for the Good, the True and the Beautiful . . . The longer you study modern history,” concludes the Arch-Vicar, “the more evidence you find of Belial’s Guiding Hand.”

For two weeks the Chief and the Arch-Vicar encourage the most indiscriminate promiscuity so that the state may gain manpower; afterwards, when the helots are put to work, all sexual contact is strictly forbidden. Poole is urged to join the California priesthood, which can be done by submitting to an operation that will forever remove potency. But in the meantime Poole has discovered a luscious vessel named Loola, who has taught him a few things. Preferring Loola to eunuch lordship, Poole escapes from Los Angeles towards a lonely northern outpost where, it is rumored, men are still Lee.

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 it.

As a result, he moralizes too much, 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:

“As for the Hope—Bless your little heart, there is no hope. Only the almost infinite probability Of consummating suddenly, Or else by agonizing inches, The ultimate and irremediable Detumescence.”