Wandering into Brave New World [1 ed.] 9789401209724, 9789042037168

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Wandering into Brave New World

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 200 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, László Sándor Chardonnens and Theo D’haen

Wandering into Brave New World

David Leon Higdon

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2013

Cover image flapper woman: Where there’s smoke there’s fire by Russell Patterson. Derived from Wikicommons Cover image Indian woman: www.dreamstime.com Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 978-90-420-3716-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0972-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2013 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Chapter One Around the World in 264 Days

vii 1

Chapter Two Traversing the Raj

27

Chapter Three The Dangers of Ford and Freud

69

Chapter Four Three Days in Joy City

113

Chapter Five Encountering the Hopi and the Zuni

143

Chapter Six Naming but Not Libeling

195

Bibliography

233

Index

249

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Wandering into Brave New World began with a simple question: how did Aldous Huxley acquire such full and accurate knowledge about the Hopi Snake Dance? The more I asked myself the question, the conventional answers given in much earlier Huxley criticism placing Huxley under the shadow of D.H. Lawrence seemed inadequate and probably incorrect. Two letters mentioning Huxley’s visit to Arizona’s Grand Canyon in May 1926 led to research on train schedules, tourist attractions, Santa Fe Railway brochures for passengers, and ethnographic reports as I traced Huxley’s journey from Los Angles to Chicago in 1926. The results showed conclusively that Huxley had had personal experience of Arizona and New Mexico in 1926. Jesting Pilate soon opened up possibilities that other material in Brave New World might have originated in Huxley’s passage through India, Indonesia, Malaya, the Pacific crossing, and brief stays in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City. At the end of my own journey, I believe I have clarified part of Huxley’s creative process and identified new backgrounds to characters and events in his novel. No book about another book could possibly be written without considerable assistance from other books. As Margaret Drabble’s character says in The Realms of Gold, “We all live in quotation marks”. I want to express my gratitude for the careful biographical scholarship of Sybille Bedford, David King Dunaway, and Nicholas Murray; for Grover Smith’s and James Sexton’s meticulous editing of Huxley’s letters; and for the keenly perceptive and challenging criticism of Jerome Meckier, Robert S. Baker, and Peter Firchow which has been invaluable in helping me form and test my readings. At times, a Huxley scholar in 2012 must feel that he is simply writing footnotes to the works of these scholars. Thanks to specific individuals is expressed in appropriate footnotes, but I want to thank generally the staff at various Santa Fe Railway museums and archives, Harvey House Museums, Special Collections and General Collections at Zimmerman Library, University of New Mexico, the London Library, and to any number of students in my British novels classes in the 1990s. Special thanks to the Aldous Huxley Estate for permission to quote the several Huxley novels, essays, letters, and travel books.

Thanks to Christopher Lorey, Editor of The International Fiction Review, for giving me permission to reprint “The Provocations of Lenina in Huxley’s Brave New World”, 29 (2002): 78-83, much of which appears in a different form in Chapter 2. Also thanks to the participants in the 2008 Pasadena meeting of the Aldous Huxley Society who responded with enthusiastic interest and suggestions to material from Chapter Five. Two individuals deserve special thanks. William L. Moore III, my partner, has been a constant, enthusiastic source of encouragement, and Cedric Barfoot, with his keen eye and sharp pencil, helped me clarify, shape, and correct my chapters.

CHAPTER ONE AROUND THE WORLD IN 264 DAYS As late as 1929, Aldous Huxley had no interest in and even no sympathy for utopian or futuristic fiction. In “Spinoza’s Worm”, an essay whose images and examples he would repeat a number of times, he dismissed it, commenting: My own feeling, whenever I see a book about the Future, is one of boredom and exasperation. What on earth is the point of troubling one’s head with speculation about what men may, but almost certainly will not, be like in A. D. 20,000?1

Earlier in Those Barren Leaves (1925), his character Chelifer dismisses Utopia as a state of total boredom: … in the Utopian state where everybody is well-off, educated and leisured, everybody will be bored; unless for some obscure reason the same causes fail to produce the same effects. Only two or three hundred people out of every million could survive a lifetime in a really efficient Utopian state. The rest would simply die of spleen.2

These words cut ironically across his career, because in 1929 he was but two years away from writing Brave New World, thus creating the best known, most studied, most censored, and most discussed utopian world of the twentieth century. Since the book’s publication in 1932, its British and American publishers have printed over ten million paperback copies. Although Huxley did not recognize it in 1929, he had already gathered most of the materials that would go into the making of Brave New World. From the time he and Maria sailed aboard the S.S. Genova from Naples on September 15, 1925 until they disembarked at Southampton the following year on June 5, 1926, a nine-months’ trip around the world, Huxley experienced four distinctly different worlds, each of which would contribute directly to his utopian novel and each of which would challenge his views on culture in very different ways: 1 2

Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will, London, 1929, 71. Aldous Huxley, Those Barren Leaves, London, 1950, 317.

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first, the subcontinent of greater India across its northern reaches; second, the tropical world we now call Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines; third, the Native American world of the Southwestern United States; and finally, the roaring Twenties urban centers of movietown Los Angeles (where Huxley would eventually come to live from 1937 until his death in 1963), speakeasy gangster land Chicago, and sophisticated New York City. The immediate result of the trip was Jesting Pilate (1926),3 diffident and informal travel book, which Nicholas Murray describes as “full of characteristic and stimulating lucubrations [but] not always very profound in its sounding of other cultures”,4 and which Peter Firchow has even more accurately called “a fascinating travelogue of a man in search of the truth but too pressed to stay for a definite answer”.5 In all, the Huxleys visited forty-seven cities and sites, half of them in India, a handful of them on no tourist maps of the time. Why did Huxley decide to travel around the world in 1925? True, he was always noticeably restless, and during his lifetime visited at least sixty countries on five continents. After settling in the United States in 1937, his letters record a constant crossing and recrossing of the continent by car and plane as well as numerous trips abroad after World War II. It is not clear that Huxley himself fully understood what propelled him on his adventures in 1925. He may have been searching for material for a new novel, because Those Barren Leaves had little of the spark and dazzle of Crome Yellow (1921) and Antic Hay (1923), suggesting that the creative vision he brought to the British social and intellectual scene had somewhat faded. He had written both Crome Yellow and Antic Hay in two months each, but Those Barren Leaves had taken four months, and he was not satisfied with it. He wrote to Naomi Mitchison that he considered his three works “jejune and shallow and off the point. All I’ve written so far has been off the point.”6 There were, though, other pressures on his life. He could have been escaping from the pressures of his two-volumes a year contract, or fleeing the chaos Mussolini’s Blackshirts brought into his life by 3

Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: Travels through India, Burma, Malaya, Japan, China and America, New York, 1991. 4 Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, New York, 2002,173. 5 Peter Firchow, Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist, Minneapolis, MN, 1972, 124. 6 Sybille Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, New York, 1974, 152.

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raiding his house in Italy, or simply caught up in the wanderlust that had infected his generation.7 C.S. Ferns weighed the possibility that Huxley wished to become more acquainted with Indian mysticism,8 but after considering Huxley’s strictures on Indian religion, he concluded, rightly, that this interest developed much later. On August 24, 1921, three months before Crome Yellow was published, Huxley wrote to his brother, Julian, that “What I should like now more than anything is a year or two of quiet devoted simply to seeing places and things and people: to living, in fact”,9 and four years later, he told Julian he had nominated himself for the Kahn Travelling Fellowship, though he had little hopes of securing it. His interview was apparently unsuccessful, because he could not adequately articulate what he would do during his travels, though he did “have some faint, faint hopes that they may give me a thousand pounds to permit me to visit the Jesuit missions in Mexico and Goa”.10 It was not until July 24, 1925 that he told his father, “Vague plans for remoter travelling this autumn have become concrete in the last few days and I have settled definitely to go to India this autumn, to take a look round”.11 While he was sailing between Naples and Port Said, he was much more definite, telling his father, “I look forward to seeing much that is curious and interesting, particularly as we shall be looking at things mostly from the Indian side of the fence. It will be curious seeing the political business.”12 After India, though, the journey took on an ad hoc feel. Writing to Julian from Singapore March 4, 1926, he said: We go to Java tomorrow, scamper through the islands, come back here and take a ship that goes up along the coast of Borneo to a place called Zamboanga in the southern Philippines, whence (with luck) we shall get another ship to take us to Manila in time to catch the liner leaving for Frisco on April 7th. It ought to be very pleasant, I think.13 7

In Mussolini, New York, 1997, Jasper Ridley documents the intimidation tools used by the Blackshirts: beatings, emetics, arson, and murder (see 103-11, 123-37 and 14648). 8 C.S. Ferns, Aldous Huxley: Novelist, London, 1980, 29-31. 9 Aldous Huxley, Letters, ed. Grover Smith, New York, 1969, 202. 10 Ibid., 241. 11 Ibid., 251. 12 Ibid., 253. 13 Ibid., 268 (emphases added).

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Not until the end of his journey was he fully willing to draw some conclusions about what he had seen and experienced. The trip had made him dismiss numerous convictions he had when he set out. In the last pages of Jesting Pilate, he commented: “So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions, many perished certainties.”14 When he set out, he tells us, he thought he knew … how men should live, how be governed, how educated, what they should believe I knew which was the best form of social organisation and to what end societies had been created. I had my views on every activity of human life. Now, on my return, I find myself without any of these pleasing certainties.15

Between his first trip abroad in 1912 to Germany and his plans for 1925, except for the disordered war years, Huxley had been an enthusiastic European traveler through Belgium, France, and Italy. He and Maria had chuffed their ten horsepower Citroen up and down numerous French and Italian passes, jounced along through six hour bus rides to visit out of the way villages, and even risked a drive from Florence to Bologna one March through a snowstorm. On the Margin, his 1923 collection of essays, contains only one travel essay, actually a review of Ekai Kawaguchi’s Three Years in Tibet. Huxley observes that such books are useful in forcing contrasts between cultures: The spectacle of an ancient and elaborate civilization of which almost no detail is not entirely idiotic is in the highest degree comforting and refreshing. It fills us with hopes of the ultimate success of our own civilization; it restores our wavering self-satisfaction in being citizens of industrialized Europe.16

He found such customs as never washing, letting nurses keep their patients constantly awake, using taxes to keep monastery lamps supplied with clarified butter, and having “twenty different standards

14

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 322. Ibid., 323. 16 Aldous Huxley, On the Margin, New York, 1923, 106. 15

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of weight and thirty-six different standards of measure”, “fantastically unreasonable” yet strangely comforting to an Englishman.17 Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist (1925), published just before the Huxleys sailed, is fully a travel book, except for its last two short pieces. It contains advice on how to travel, suggestions on why to travel, and demands for independence of travel. Occasionally the advice comes tongue-in-cheek as when he tells the traveler what reading matter to pack. He personally takes a volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica on occasion and advises not taking Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of Pure Reason, F.H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, or Dante’s Inferno, all very lengthy or multi-volume works, because this reading agenda will molder in the suitcase. He recommends an anthology of poems or aphorisms and praises Henry Frowde who “reinvented” the sturdy tissue-paper thin paper which enables one to “get a million words of reading material into a rucksack and hardly feel the difference”.18 Huxley had few good words to say about travel guidebooks unless they were “copiously illustrated”.19 Otherwise they are too prescriptive and burdensomely restrictive: “The personal guide-book must be the fruit of bitter personal experience.” In “Why Not Stay at Home?” Huxley mourns the attitude of tourists, commenting, “tourists are, in the main, a very gloomy-looking tribe. I have seen much brighter faces at a funeral than in the Piazza of St. Mark’s.”20 He feels that too few tourists know why they are tourists – one thinks of Henry James’ American tourists – however, he does sketch an ideal tourist: Your genuine traveller, on the other hand, is so much interested in real things that he does not find it necessary to believe in fables. He is insatiably curious, he loves what is unfamiliar for the sake of unfamiliarity, and he takes pleasure in every manifestation of beauty.21

The trip around the world would severely test this ideal, but Huxley knows that he must accept boredom; he accepts the possibility of 17

Ibid., 110, 106. Aldous Huxley, Along the Road, New York, 1925, 76. 19 Ibid., 45. 20 Ibid., 9. 21 Ibid., 16. 18

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discomfort; he knows that something, somehow will go wrong. Also, though, he knows that the ideal traveler values his “excessive freedom” from his native country.22 All these issues are given concrete form in his essays detailing visits to Montesenario, Portoferraio, Sienna, Holland’s landscapes and cityscapes, Mantua, and his adventures at Borgo San Supoclero and Pietramala, trapped by a snowstorm and an unethical landlord, an incident which has all the makings of a short story by Thomas Hardy or Joseph Conrad. It remained for him to test his ideal against on the much broader scale that would take him around the world. A few days after leaving Naples, the S.S. Genova arrived in Port Said. Up to this point, Huxley’s travels had been virtually confined to Europe within the familiar bounds of Western Civilization, where the countries, dress, diet, and languages were relatively familiar. His luggage would have shown labels (had he been given to this practice) of only Germany, France, Belgium, Holland, Italy, with a very brief vacation in Tunisia. Therefore Port Said was the door to the Other, the genuinely foreign. Beyond it lay the lands “East of Suez”, unknown languages, exotic clothing, bizarre food, and only guidebooks and a handful of introductory letters to help him along. There were unambiguous warnings about this door to adventure. The Thomas Cook guidebook cautioned, “There is nothing to interest visitors at Port Said, except the shops, where Oriental goods of every description can be bought”,23 and Huxley wrote to Mary Hutchinson that a Doctor aboard the ship “knows all the addresses in Aden and Bombay where one can see ladies emulating Europa and Pasiphae – but with donkeys and St. Bernard dogs. Not my taste, really.”24 D.E. Lorenz’s warning in The ’Round the World Traveller was even more pointed: “while Port Said has a reputation for spectacular wickedness of the basest sort, there is nothing of distinctively tourist interest.”25 Huxley agreed. After watching goods being unloaded, fascinated with the coordination of the operation, he disembarked to find “a sink”26 in which the main goods for sale seemed to be 22

Ibid., 17. Thomas Cook and Son, India, Burma, and Ceylon: Information for Travellers and Residents, London, 1908, 49. 24 Aldous Huxley, Selected Letters, ed. James Sexton, Chicago, 2007, 141. 25 D.E. Lorenz, The ‘Round the World Traveller, New York, 1924, 440. 26 Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 12. 23

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“indecent photographs”, a scene he would work into Point Counter Point, his first fictional use of his travels. Thus Port Said was the ordeal of the threshold crossing Joseph Campbell so well describes as the crucial adventure of the hero,27 beyond which lay four very different worlds for Huxley to observe, experience, and later to transform in his writings. Campbell writes that the call of adventures “signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown”.28 Alain de Botton’s comment that “journeys are the midwives of thought”29 certainly came to apply to Huxley’s ventures. Here and there in Jesting Pilate, Huxley mentions the guidebook he was using without actually naming it, though we can assume that it was a Thomas Cook since he had all his mail forwarded to various Thomas Cook offices. In 1925, he had his pick of three main guides for globetrotters: D.E. Lorenz’s The ’Round the World Traveller, Thomas Cook and Sons’ India, Burma, and Ceylon: Information for Travellers, and the ever-present Baedekers. These guides had early established their generic features encompassing the recommended sites, the suggested hotels, the warnings/disclaimers. The guides differ from more modern ones in several obvious ways: modern guides enthusiastically recommend national parks and environmental sites, an awareness that had not percolated into the traveller’s world in the 1920s; some early guides contain justifications of colonialism and highlight the Christian presence in the East, down to churches to attend; and, finally, the early guides are embarrassingly outspoken about perceived lacks in the cultures. Lorenz, for example, dismisses Hinduism: Taken as a whole, Hinduism means polytheism and the grossest superstitions, the paralyzing caste system, the degradation of women, the social ostracism of widows, child marriage, the worship of animals,religious mendicancy, and hopeless prejudice and mental paralysis .… Hinduism as administered by the present-day Brahmin priests has scarcely one redeeming point, and is merely an unspeakable abomination of caste, filth, blood and degradation.30 27

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd edn, Princeton, NJ, 1968, 49-58 and 245-51. 28 Ibid., 58. 29 Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel, New York, 2002, 54. 30 Lorenz, The ’Round the World Traveller, 335-36.

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And he highly commended the “success” of “white man’s burden” in Hawaii: There can be no question about the immense value of American missions in the social, moral and intellectual transformation in these Islands. Even though the native Hawaiians do not measure up to the highest Christian ideals, one need only compare them with any other non-Christian Malay race in the Pacific to realize what a noble result has been achieved.31

Such racism figures in most of the guidebooks of the period. And Lorenz lets no opportunity pass for working in a warning about the “Japanese menace” which threatens Hawaii, the Philippines, Korea, and China. Virtually all the guides contain numerous racist comments as well as a smug sense of cultural superiority. Between mid-September and early March, Huxley visited at least twenty-three cities and three sites in India and Burma. Surprisingly, his travels through northwestern and north-central India differ little from the itinerary offered by most travel firms of our own day. Like most modern tourists, he simply ignored southern India to concentrate on what had once been the great Mughal Empire with its palaces, forts, pleasure gardens, and tombs. He and Maria had been advised to travel south to Madura but began to find distances a problem. He wrote to Sydney Schiff that “we shan’t see Madura and the other fine places in those parts. The distances are really portentous here.”32 Agra, Jaipur, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Fatehpur, and several important British sites (Amritsar, Cawnpore, Lucknow, and Calcutta) drew most of his attention. The trip combined sightseeing, observing a native Indian government coming into existence, and experiencing a world of constant diversity and exoticism. In his masterful, short guide to and history of India, Stanley Wolpert warns his readers: “Much of the paradox found everywhere in India is a product of her inextricable antiquity and youth. Stability and dynamism, wisdom and folly, abstention and greed, patience and passion compete without end within the universe that is India.”33 31

Ibid., 69. Huxley, Selected Letters, 148. 33 Stanley Wolpert, India, Berkeley, CA, 1991, 1. 32

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Looking at the sacred cows in Srinagar, Huxley intuited the same conclusion. He saw how the cattle had free range of the town and apparently understood and exploited their status, but he also saw how they were starved, abused, and often worked to death. Huxley saw much beauty in Kashmir’s topography, but in its people, he found “Minings and counter-minings, prodigious treacheries, monstrous panderings and prostitutions”.34 “But then”, he adds, “the majority of human actions are not meant to be looked at with the eye of reason”.35 India became more and more a contradiction as he moved across the plains. India, for example, was graduating some twelve thousand university students a year into a severely limited job market, creating a “class of educated unemployed – the class most dangerous to an established government”.36 Pushkar Lake, one of the holiest bodies of water in the country, he discovered, was losing a dozen or so worshipers each year to its crocodiles. The waters are “so holy that no life may be taken within its waters or on its banks, not even the maneater’s”.37 Huxley ironically observes that “it is considered lucky to be eaten by a crocodile at Pushkar”. He found similar contradictions in India’s architecture and saw much in Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu aesthetics he did not like. Indeed, no iconic site impressed him, neither the pleasure gardens of Kashmir, nor the Golden Temple in Amritsar, nor the Taj Mahal in Agra, not the Shwe Dagon pagoda in Rangoon. What did impress him were the ruins at Taxilia, Akbar’s city at Fatehpur Sikri, the pink city of Jaipur, and the fort at Chitor. The Shwe Dagon pagoda struck him as “a sacred Fun Fair, a Luna Park dedicated to the greater glory of Gautama – but more fantastic, more wildly amusing than any Bank Holiday invention”.38 The Sikhs’ Golden Temple “architecturally … is less than nothing”, but its holiness and costliness somewhat make up “for any lack of architectural merit”.39 Walking barefoot as required, Huxley and Maria were appalled by “the bird droppings and expectorated betel that strewed the causeway”.

34

Huxley, Selected Letters, 142. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 48. 36 Ibid., 42. 37 Ibid., 103. 38 Ibid., 184. 39 Ibid., 66. 35

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His reaction to architecture’s equivalent to painting’s Mona Lisa, the Taj Mahal, has made ten pages of Jesting Pilate infamous. How could he not like it? After all, guidebooks told him that he was in the presence of one of the finest, most beautiful buildings in the world. Lorenz, for example, cannot find enough superlatives to praise it, writing: The Taj is unquestionably the most perfect creation that ever was conceived in the mind of man and actually realised in visual form. To visit it is one of the supreme objects of travel, and it certainly should be classed as one of the seven modern wonders of the world. It never disappoints, and usually surpasses all expectation .… Its size is lost in its exquisite proportion, its restful purity of outline, its transcendent grace and symmetry, which quite baffle analysis and description.40

The Cunard Line and Thomas Cook and Son, preparing a brochure for the Franconia’s 1929 luxury cruise around the world, opened the text with a photograph of the Taj highlighting its symmetries and balances, and oddly called it “the most lovable monument ever erected”.41 As we will see in the next chapter, a number of writers responded coolly to the Taj on first sight. The Taj Mahal was distinctly off-putting to a number of Western visitors. Huxley simply rebelled at being told he must look and admire. He found the Taj Mahal’s architecture disappointing and felt that guidebook insistence on its costly materials substituted economics for aesthetics. Huxley excuses himself through analogy, explaining that however much the world admires Edmund Spenser’s poetry, he cannot, because: I am unduly prejudiced in favour of sense; but it has always seemed to me that poets should have something to say. Spenser’s is the art of saying nothing, at length, in rhyme and rumbling metre.42

He considered the four minarets of the Taj “among the ugliest structures ever erected by human hands”,43 because of their offenses 40

Lorenz, The ’Round the World Traveller, 376. Cunard Line and Thomas Cook, The Supreme Travel Adventure Around the World in the “Franconia” 1929, New York, [1928], 36. 42 Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 71. 43 Ibid., 74. 41

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against dimensions, mass, and proportion. The Taj itself “is marred by none of the faults which characterise the minarets. But its elegance is at the best of a very dry and negative kind … an actual deficiency of fancy, a poverty of imagination.”44 Like Huxley, many Western visitors find the Taj’s strangely empty monumentality less an expression of love and more a manifestation of ego and worldly extravagance. Diana and Michael Preston in their discussion of the Moghul Empire found the four minarets “not essential” and “untraditional”.45 We see Huxley evolving an aesthetic in his contrasting the elegance of the Taj Mahal with the rich conceptual variety of St Paul’s in London and the Rotonda of Palladio in Vicenzia, an aesthetic that would fully express itself in the structure of Point Counter Point. One can understand why he was more drawn to the excited decorations of Hindu architecture than to the more austere Mughal. E.M. Forster’s reaction to the Taj Mahal in 1921 suggests that some Englishmen needed a second or even a third exposure to it. Forster comments that: After nine years, I revisited the Taj. The first time, he (or she) looked hideous and hard, but we drove down again one evening and I have never seen the vision lovelier. I went up the left hand further minaret, and saw all the magnificent buildings glowing beneath me and all the country steaming beneath a dim red and grey sky.46

After pronouncing Calcutta’s Jain temple “a high-class bordello”, Claude Lévi-Strauss came away from the Taj with some of Forster’s and Huxley’s reservations: “There is nothing that cannot be said about the Taj Mahal and its easy, coloured-picture-postcard charm”, he wrote, but then added, “Yet I defy any visitor who still retains some freshness of approach not to be overcome with emotion as he enters the precincts of the Taj”, still, he was not fully impressed with the architecture, finding it “a marble imitation of a draped scaffolding”.47

44

Ibid., 75. Diana and Michael Preston, Taj Mahal: Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Mogul Empire, New York, 2007, 175. 46 E.M. Forster, The Hill of Devi, London, 1953, 126-27. 47 Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique, trans. John and Doreen Weightman, New York, 1984, 398. Lévi-Strauss’ essay, “Taxila”, is not a particularly well known 45

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Many came to look at the Taj Mahal, but they did not necessarily leave impressed by the experience. Writing in the 1630s, Muhammad Qazwini Padshadnama established what was for centuries the accepted response: “It will be a masterpiece for ages to come, increasing the amazement of all humanity.”48 Huxley’s eye for the interesting vignette was never overwhelmed by the architectural wonders, the foreignness, and the otherness of India. India gave him a number of vignettes worthy of anthologizing, not least of which is Huxley’s retelling of his ride on an elephant from Jaipur to the ruined city of Amber. Huxley includes a photograph of the elephant and its mahout. As it did with George Orwell, Huxley’s encounter with an elephant led to meditation about the meaning of existence, colonial and otherwise. Huxley concludes that we are set apart from the other animals because we have found uses for dung. After a hilarious account of him mounting the elephant, and like every tourist finding the ride precarious, Huxley begins “mournfully reflecting about the cosmos” because the elephant “halted and, with its usual deliberation, relieved nature, portentously”.49 An old woman rushes from her hovel to claim this treasure, shouting “‘Salaam, Maharaj’” after them. Similarly, the “holy man” in their railroad car, the bull slurping food from the sleeping beggar’s bowl, the princess “purifying” herself with bilge water, and the “murder” of plants in Sir J.C. Bose’s laboratory all find their way into his book. Indian society in general, he felt, needed its own Marcel Proust to convey an accurate image of the variety, the contradictions, the color, and the foreignness. He felt that the “minings and counter-minings, prodigious treacheries, monstrous panderings and prostitutions” needed their own Proust to capture the complexities at length.50 One senses that Huxley’s book could have become much more political had he understood Hindi and/or Tamil. He spent at least three days attending the All India Congress at Cawnpore, but like many of the other attendees, he could not understand most of the speeches. Huxley had no doubts that the British must find some way to exit response to India. It is brief but trenchant in its criticism of Islamic architecture and culture. Like Huxley, he seemed to prefer the Hindu side of the subcontinent. 48 Paramhansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), quoted in Michael Wood, India, New York, 2007, 204. 49 Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 83. 50 Huxley, Selected Letters, 142.

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India. He sensed that the British system was not working effectively and that opportunities for colonials in India often attracted the wrong kind of person. Thus, he was quite interested in seeing the Indian side of things, even though he gradually came to conclude that the Indians would probably not be able to do a better job than the British. National unity could hardly be wrung from nearly seven hundred states, sixteen hundred languages, five major religions, and the oppressive caste system. He had been fortunate in meeting Sarojini Naidu, the recently elected President of the All-Indian Congress while in Bombay, and later Pandit Motilal Nehru, leader of the Swarajist Party, and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, but he came away from the Congress disappointed by the hours of speeches, the behavior of the delegates, and the allpresent allegiance to spirituality. He refused to draw conclusions about the Indian future: “Whether the Indians are in a position to start governing themselves at once, whether they would do the job as well as the English, or worse, or better, I am not able to say.”51 But he felt that immediate independence would bring “communal discord, religious and political wars, the oppression of the lower by the higher castes, inefficiency and corruption, in a word, general anarchy”.52 His attention wandered from the political speeches to the “medical advertisements” in the Cawnpore Congress Guide that promised unflagging virility, increased vigor, and freedom from virtually every known disease. Among the political figures, only Gandhi held his attention. Gandhi struck him as more a charismatic leader than an effective politician. After arid India and its nominal layer of British rule, Southeastern Asia took Huxley into a very different and threatening world – the rain forests of the Malay Peninsula, Java, Borneo, and the southern islands of the Philippines. Two years after the experience, he recalled the threat he sensed in Borneo: The jungle is marvelous, fantastic, beautiful; but it is also terrifying, it is also profoundly sinister. There is something in what, for lack of a better word, we must call the character of great forests – even in those of temperate land – which is foreign, appalling, fundamentally and

51 52

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 131. Ibid., 133.

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Wandering into Brave New World utterly inimical to intruding man. The life of those vast masses of swarming vegetation is alien to the human spirit and hostile to it.53

An incident with an armed sailor run amok in Labuan on the northern coast of Borneo brought a personal epiphany: “I realised suddenly and forcibly the precarious artificiality of all that seems most solid and fundamental in our civilisation, of all that we take for granted.”54 His encounter with the jungle outside Batavia, on the island of Java, earlier convinced him that the jungle shaped the inhabitants’ thoughts about the supernatural: Pure monotheism is probably the last religion that would suggest itself to the minds of men living near the equator. In a tropical jungle, only a blind deaf-mute could be a monotheist. The woods are horrible; they teem with countless small and separate mysteries – unaccountable sights in the half darkness, inexplicable sounds across the silence. Nobody with ears and eyes could fail, in a jungle, to be a believer in spirits, ghosts and devils.55

Again and again, he returns fascinated to the threat the jungle seems to pose to the European, using imagery familiar to readers of Joseph Conrad’s Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. Sandakan in northeastern Borneo led him to an allegorical statement of the relationship between civilization and the primeval as he thinks about the small town’s club, golf course, and eleven-mile paved road: At the eleventh milestone, the road collides with what seems an impenetrable wall of forest and comes abruptly to an end. You get out of your car and, examining the wall of verdure, find it flawed by a narrow crevice; it is a path. You edge your way in and are at once swallowed up by the forest. The inside of Jonah’s whale could scarcely have been hotter, darker or damper. True, the jungle monster sometimes opens its mouth to yawn; there is a space between the trees, you have a glimpse of the sky, a shaft of thick yellow sunlight comes down into the depths. But the yawns are only brief and occasional. For the greater part of our stroll in the belly of the vegetable monster, we walked in a hot twilight. It was silent too. Very occasionally a bird would utter a few notes – or it might have been a 53

Huxley, Do What You Will, 114. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 249. 55 Ibid., 206-207. 54

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devil of the woods, meditatively whistling to himself, as he prepared some fiendishly subtle and ingenious booby trap to terrify the human trespassers on his domain.56

Although Huxley adopts the stance of “a mere spectator of the world, not an actor in it”,57 he has trouble keeping his eyes on the spectacle and all it implies. A number of times, he retreats in his thoughts from tropical Asia. For example, description of the Rice Table, a Javanese menu item which features some twenty-six or more dishes for lunch, spawns a brief contrasting with European lunch tables and an eight-page digression on Gluttony, ending in a paragraph on mysticism; a visit to Weltevreden’s Gambrier Park leads to a mediation on the perverse way motion pictures present the Western World: “a world of silliness and criminality … [to] the subject peoples.”58 These feints seem a defense against the tropics, as well they might be. Eric Leed has argued that comparisons are … the way in which the traveler calls up a base of familiarity before the spectacle of the new and the strange, which is perceived as such only in relationship to the known. In so going, one may diffuse the anxiety normally associated with the strange and unusual …. In this sense, the comparison … may be regarded as a defense against the strange and unusual.59

Huxley’s attempts to see the landscapes as being similar to those he knows from England, Scotland, and France collapse, but he still had an eye for capturing the picturesque – the noisy Malayan cicadas which “could shout down a steel works”,60 the sterile monotony of a rubber plantation, the bizarre foliage on the trees, the “mournful and sinister, abysmally unreal”61 horizon of Borneo, the hilarious unloading of pigs tranquillized with opium and wrapped in individual rattan baskets, etc.

56

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 258-59. Ibid., 266. 58 Ibid., 225. 59 Eric S. Leed, The Mind of the Traveler from Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, New York, 1991, 68. 60 Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 201. 61 Ibid., 243. 57

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The trip in this part of Southeast Asia was rushed. They arrived in Singapore early in March 1926. At first, Huxley found the tropics a welcome change; he told his brother that “The whole place breathes a prosperity: everyone seems to have enough to eat and not too much to do – a great relief after the deserts of upper India and their starved and hopeless inhabitants”,62 an opinion which quickly changed. They planned to leave for Java on March 5 and return to Singapore later to take a ship to Borneo, to the Philippines, and on to Japan. Their travels took them from Singapore to Batavia, with side trips to Garoet and the world-famous gardens at Buitenzorg. The outbound ship to Manila stopped several times on the Sarawak and Borneo coasts, leaving Huxley disappointed in not seeing a headhunter, before moving from Sandakan to Jolo and then Zamboanga, areas exotic and dangerous for the European tourist in 1926 and still very dangerous today because of Islamic separatists. From Zamboanga, they traveled to Manila, to Shangahi, through Japan’s Inland Sea to Kobe, and then by train to Yokohama. Huxley sensed permanence in Shanghai, but only a shoddiness in Kobe, Kyoto, and Yokohama. He had “an impression of dense, rank, richly clotted life”63 in Shanghai, which bespoke centuries of tradition and habit which promised centuries more. In contrast, “London and Paris offer no such certainty. And even India seems by comparison provisional and precarious.”64 Japan, however, was gray, cold, wet, and deeply muddy. Kyoto was like the mining camps of Wild West movies, and Yokohama “looks like a mining camp that has not yet been finished”.65 In fairness, both cities were recovering from a major 8.3 earthquake in 1923, which killed an estimated 143,000 people and had virtually destroyed Yokohama. Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders give an indication of the devastation: “All in all, about eighteen thousand buildings in Yokohama collapsed during the earthquake, and more than fifty-five thousand were consumed by fire.”66 Huxley was more impressed by the stylized, formalized dancing of the geishas, “drilled to a pitch of almost Prussian efficiency”,67 and the same formalized 62

Huxley, Letters, 268. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 271. 64 Ibid., 273. 65 Ibid., 286. 66 Jelle Zeilinga De Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders, Earthquakes in Human History, Princeton, NJ, 2005, 185. 67 Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 276. 63

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performance of the music. He even found degrees of admirable formalization in Mount Fuji: “We saw it first at noon, a tiny cloud melting into the clouds; and at sunset we were looking back on it, an enormous mass rising clear of all vapours, naked and perfect, into the coloured sky.”68 Huxley said virtually nothing about his very brief travels through America’s Southwest as he journeyed on the Santa Fe Limited between Los Angeles and Chicago – one day on the ground and three days in the train. Jesting Pilate is utterly silent and only two extant letters provide evidence of what the Huxleys did on the four day trip. Huxley, however, took with him from the area his impressions of Arizona’s Grand Canyon, the El Tovar Hotel, the landscapes of Arizona and New Mexico, and, most significant, two books about the Hopi and Zuni Pueblos. These two books would spur the beginnings of Brave New World and become the source of virtually all major details in the novel’s Savage Reservation scenes. The two letters show that the Huxleys booked the Harvey Company’s Indian Detour and spent an entire day at the Grand Canyon, taking a bus tour along the Canyon’s South Rim, and visiting the Canyon’s Hopi House. Huxley’s visit is an untold event in the biographies, but an event of crucial importance in the evolution of his novel and in the definition of the novel’s positive values. This stopover is discussed at length in Chapter Five. He could not resist discussing America’s major cities. In Brave New World, Lenina and Henry Foster visit the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, featuring this particular night “CALVIN STOPES AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS” and offering “LONDON’S FINEST SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN”. They join the other four hundred couples “fivestepping” and dance to the popular tune “Bottle of mine” until “they might have been twin embryos gently rocking together on the waves of a bottled ocean of blood-surrogate”.69 This scene is immediately followed by one of Bernard at the Solidarity Service where he and eleven others stand “ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being”70 as they share the communion cup of strawberry ice-cream soma, sing all twelve verses of the solidarity hymns, and collapse in a round of 68

Ibid., 280. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, New York, 1946, 89, 90, 91. 70 Ibid., 95. 69

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“orgy-porgy”. This scene seems to have come directly from Huxley’s brief passage through Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, the modern, urban Cities of Dreadful Joy section of his trip. He told John St Loe Strachy that … I wish you had seen California. It is pure Rabelais, a chronic kermesse. Materially, the nearest approach to Utopia yet seen on our planet. After twenty-four hours of it, you begin to pine for the slums of Dostoievsky’s St Petersburg!71

The Huxleys had no time to form an opinion of San Francisco. It was simply a crush of reporters wanting to know what Huxley thought about the General Strike in Britain and a rush to the train station for a twelve hour journey south. (Rail travel was the only option for the Huxleys. Passenger travel by air did not begin in the United States until July 8, 1929.) Los Angeles was a different story: with its film studios, night clubs, special effects, and religious sects, it became the “City of Dreadful Joy” to Huxley.72 Robert Nichols saw to it that the Huxleys experienced what had made Hollywood the new Babylon. Its beaches offered “frisking temptations”, but Huxley demurs because we “three St. Anthonies – Charlie Chaplin and Robert Nichols and I – three grave theologians of art, too deeply absorbed in discussing the way of cinematographic salvation to be able to bestow more than the most casual attention on the Sirens, however plumply deserving”.73 He captures the disjunction between cocktail time and Prohibition and the ways in which joy has been defined as group activity. He pronounces the “Good Times” of Babylon, Rome, Alexandria, and Byzantium “dull and dim and miserably restricted in comparison with the superlative Good Time of modern California”.74 Indeed, his prose style changes completely to capture the disjunctions, speed, and chaos of his experiences. Huxley virtually penned a preliminary draft for the entertainment scene of the cabaret, the “feelies”, and the clubs in his novel. A few days later – Chicago, where looking through the Yellow Pages (one can imagine no other novelist doing this), Huxley became 71

Aldous Huxley, The Hidden Huxley, ed. David Bradshaw, London, 1994, 23. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 300. 73 Ibid., 299. 74 Ibid., 301. 72

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fascinated by an advertisement for the Kalbsfleisch mortician services, a full-page ad which he calls “a symptom and a revealing symbol”,75 of the revaluation of morés in America. Meditating on the ad, he decides that much of American democracy is crass materialism wrapped in humbug: For Jesus and St. Francis, Service connoted self-sacrifice, abnegation, humility. For the morticians and other American Business Men, Service means something else; it means doing profitable business efficiently and with just sufficient honesty to keep out of jail. American Business Men talk like St Francis; but their activities are indistinguishable from those of the money-changers and sellers of doves whom Jesus expelled from the Temple with a whip of small cords.76

Glancing at news of the Scopes Trial which still remains iconically in the news, he concludes that in America: Intelligence independence and disinterested activity – once admired – are in process of becoming evil things which ought to be destroyed. In Tennessee and other remote provinces the crusade against them has already begun. It remains to be seen whether this further perversion of values will affect the rest of the continent.77

New York City brought him to framing mottos for nations, a clear anticipation of the “Community, Identity, Stability” motto of the World State. For France, he proposes “Intelligence, Sterility, Insolvency” to replace “Liberty, Fraternity, Equality”, and for America, he offers “Vitality, Prosperity, Modernity”.78 He well captures the optimistic spirit of 1926 America, soon to be dealt a severe blow by the Depression. Each of the three terms he turns into a sincere complimentary observation, but America remains a paradox, as troubling in its way as the paradox of India: “In modern America the Rome of Cato and the Rome of Heliogabalus co-exist and flourish with an unprecedented vitality.”79 75

Ibid., 306. Ibid., 311-12. 77 Ibid., 314. 78 Ibid., 315. 79 Ibid., 322. 76

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Chicago and New York gave Huxley expansive ideas about modern architecture. In his childhood, London’s skyline was still largely dominated by church spires, Big Ben, and the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. During the nineteenth century, London had spread outwards and downwards, through the railroads and subways. Not until the 1930s did London begin to reach upwards, and still today its skyline does not compare with those of Chicago, New York City, Singapore, or Hong Kong in terms of skyscrapers. Huxley’s World State London, though, is a city of skyscrapers, a point anticipated by C.W. Ferns.80 The opening sentence of the novel, almost totally eclipsed by what follows in the chapter, immediately sets the tone for the strangeness of the new world: “A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.”81 At thirty-four stories, the Central London Hatchery in Bloomsbury would have towered over virtually all London buildings in 1932, and that the narrator describes it as “squat” immediately establishes that there are far taller buildings serving the World State’s citizens. Henry Foster’s apartment building, for example, is forty stories tall, and the Fordian Community Singery soars three hundred twenty meters “of white Carrara-surrogate”,82 some seventy stories or 975 feet into the skyline. The Park Lane Hospital for the Dying is sixty stories tall. Huxley’s London is unrelentingly urban and modern. It has kept some historic buildings, such as Westminster Abbey (now a cabaret) and Lambeth Palace, but it has moved into the metropolitan nightmare of much futuristic fiction and films such as Blade Runner, Brazil, and the vast cities of Star Wars. Londoners may have broken the movement upwards in their resistance to the Hilton Hotel in the 1950s, but the skyscrapers he had seen in Chicago and New York were a vital part of Huxley’s futuristic vision. Although Los Angeles had no skyscrapers to impress Huxley, Chicago and New York were the world’s center for ambitious architects who were driven to conquer heights with technology. Huxley appears to have stayed in Chicago for parts of two days, and since he arrived at the Dearborn Station in the center of town, he would easily have seen a large number of skyscrapers – Montauk (130 feet), Tacoma (125 feet), the Auditorium (270 feet), Rand McNally, 80

Ferns, Aldous Huxley, 128. Huxley, Brave New World, 1. 82 Ibid., 93. 81

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Monaduock (215 feet), and Reliance (200 feet) – continuing on in our day to the Brunswick, John Hancock, and Sears Tower. The buildings embody capitalism, wealth, technological revolution, and even nationalistic ego, quite like the Great Pyramid of Khufu, which at 481 feet was the tallest building in the world until the building of Lincoln Cathedral in the early 1300s and then the Eiffel Tower at 1000 feet in 1879. Chicago still numbers six of the fifty tallest buildings in the world. We cannot dismiss the elevator’s role in helping make these buildings possible. Unfortunately, Huxley was five years too early to have seen the Chrysler Building (1930, 1046 feet) and the Empire State Building (1931, 1250 feet) in Manhattan. However, in 1926 New York City was fired by the same ambitions and drive as Chicago. There were the Woolworth Building (792 feet), the tallest building in the town, and the famous Flatiron Building (286 feet) with its odd triangular shape. Such buildings demanded a technological revolution and, to a considerable extent, a cultural revolution as well. From the Great Pyramid, the numerous Gothic cathedrals, the Washington Monument, and the Eiffel Tower, all tall buildings were monuments or ceremonial sites. The skyscraper was meant to be inhabited and used personally and commercially. It carried no religious or sacred meaning; it was built for commerce. Even the most famous unbuilt building of the Modernist period was intended for daily use. Vladimir Tatin’s proposed monument to the Third Communist International, which achieved existence only as a model in 1920, was meant to state more than vertical ambitions and nationalistic hubris. The monument he proposed was a 1300 foot high slanting tower, leaning at even bolder angles than the Tower of Pisa. Its interior consisted of three revolving sections, the lowest and largest revolving over a year, the next once in a month, the highest once a day. The building would truly have graced Huxley’s World State. America’s architects, Russia’s constructivists, and Germany’s Bauhaus were creating a Modernist world, and the new verticality fascinated Huxley so much that he would annex their iron and glass and height and pair these with unheard of speed for the world After Ford. Throughout his journey, Huxley was in that unconscious, unaware state called the “gathering phase” of the creative process during which a multitude of sights, sounds, experiences – the rich fodder impinging on one daily – percolates down into one’s memory. Most of these will

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be dismissed if not utterly forgotten, but others will gradually coalesce into a creative urge, that mysterious moment when Zeus’ power once again joins with Mnemosyne’s memory. When Huxley arrived in London, his gathering phase had accumulated clusters of information. From India and Burma, he carried back observations of the caste system and awareness of the options available and unavailable in the making of a new society. From the American Southwest, he brought back hurried glimpses of a terribly foreign, arid landscape and some knowledge of Hopi and Zuni rituals and folklore that would eventually become the Savage Reservation episode. From the cities, he carried his experience of the energetic Jazz Age. Only the experiences in Southeastern Asia would expire unused – probably because of Huxley’s lack of broad knowledge of its native peoples and because its jungles might have formed a positive backdrop to the contrast Huxley intended between his two worlds. Between June 1926 and April 1931, these memories waited to find a form, a voice, a need as his decision to reply to the number of utopian novels and plans of the late 1920s and early 1930s began to demand his answer. Richard Gerber has catalogued 149 utopian works published between 1900 and 1931, several of which seem to cover some of the same ground Huxley would visit, the most interesting of which, Charlotte Haldane’s Man’s World, Gerber summarizes as a Brave New World … purged of all retrograde persons by a devastating chemical war. The direction of affairs is in the hand of scientists and geneticists…. A lonely artist who tries to rediscover religious values finally commits suicide.83

The next five years found Huxley writing once again in his initial vein of social satire. He began Point Counter Point in October 1926 but did not complete it until May 1928. Jesting Pilate was published in October 1926, followed by Essays Old and New in December. He then immediately began Proper Studies and quickly finished it by July 1927. Arabia Felix and Do What You Will followed by May 1929. They were written in the context of Huxley’s usual restless movement back and forth across England, Italy, Spain, and France, and his increasing involvement with D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda. 83 Richard Gerber, Utopian Fantasy: A Study of English Utopian Fiction since the End of the Nineteenth Century, New York, 1973, 149.

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Baring discovery of letters or journals that somehow escaped the 1961 fire which destroyed Huxley’s library and most of his manuscripts, we will probably never know what changed Huxley’s attitude toward utopian fiction or identify the moment the change occurred. Two letters, though, indicate that the beginnings of Brave New World were troublesome. On May 18, 1931, he told Mrs Kethevan Roberts that he was … writing a novel about the future – on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and a revolt against it. Very difficult. I have hardly enough imagination to deal with such a subject. But it is none the less interesting work.84

But nine days later, he told his brother, “since writing last I have been overwhelmed by a literary catastrophe – the discovery that all I’ve been writing during the last month won’t do and that I must re-write in quite another way. This throws me right back in my work.”85 Taking Huxley’s words at their most literal, it would appear that he began writing the novel in late April or early May 1931 with a clear agenda of revolting against “the horror of the Wellsian Utopia”. We can only speculate the nature of the “literary catastrophe” took, but the terms are far more extreme than his comments regarding problems with earlier novels and suggest a major rethinking of the form, theme, and probably characters and actions. We can assume that Henry Ford began to eclipse H.G. Wells as a target, that earlier material in Crome Yellow was newly appropriated for development, and that the urban worlds of Los Angeles and New York displaced Wells’ less centered, rural settings. Huxley largely confirmed these conclusions when, in 1962, he wrote to Christopher Collins that Wells “annoyed me to the point of planning a parody, but when I started writing I found the idea of a negative Utopia so interesting that I forgot about Wells and launched into Brave New World”.86 When, on August 24, 1931, Huxley excused his tardiness in thanking his father for a birthday letter, he describes the completed

84

Huxley, Letters, 348. Ibid., 348-49 (emphases added). 86 Huxley, quoted in Robert S. Baker, Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia, Boston, 1990, 25. 85

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Brave New World in very different terms than one would expect from the Roberts letter: My only excuse is that I have been harried with work – which I have at last, thank heaven, got rid of – a comic, or at least satirical, novel about the Future, showing the appallingness (at any rate by our feeling of such quite possible biological inventions as the production of children in bottles (with consequent abolition of the family and all the Freudian ‘complexes’…) ,the prolongation of youth, the devising of some harmless but effective substitute for alcohol, cocaine, opium etc. – and also the effects of such sociological reforms as Pavlovian conditioning of all children from birth and before birth, universal peace, security and stability. It has been a job writing the book and I’m glad it’s done.87

Two weeks later, he told G. Wilson Knight that his novel was “Swiftian”, “a comic book – but seriously comic”.88 The distance between Wells’ Men Like Gods and Swift’s “Voyage to Laputa” in Gulliver’s Travels is considerable and suggests a move into deeper levels of irony than Huxley had yet attempted. Early in his career, Huxley, like many young, defensive authors, felt that searches for origins were a dead end and of questionable value. While he was reading Benjamin Kidd’s Principles of Western Civilization in February 1925, he wrote to Naomi Mitchison that … the discovery of the origins of a thing constitutes no explanation of the thing. You can discover the biological function of ethics, you can establish a connection …. But your discoveries will not in the least affect the value of the ethical and religious experiences of the individual.89

His comments are rather a critique of Kidd’s argument than a statement of general principles. No author, however, can escape our recognition that his or her creative process passes through distinct stages, sometimes simultaneously. The stages involve gathering, creating, and revising. The following chapters concentrate on the gathering stage in which Huxley experienced, observed, or read raw 87

Huxley, Letters, 351. Ibid., 353. 89 Ibid., 242. 88

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materials that would be transformed in various ways and for various purposes in Brave New World. It cannot be emphasized enough that Huxley was not engaged in guessing what shapes human society might take in five or six hundred years after he was writing. He was depicting a world that already largely existed in the 1920s and 1930s, only exaggerated and distorted by the satiric lens he brought to bear on it the future had already arrived. In the following chapters, we will see that Jesting Pilate and the trip it records became the inspiration, sourcebook, and key to Brave New World in ways that have not been fully recognized or appreciated. Huxley’s biographers have summarized his trip without actually exploring its implications and results. Sybille Bedford provides an excellent summary of Huxley’s stops in India and Los Angeles but mentions neither in her chapters on Brave New World. Making effective use of several Mary Hutchison letters and Huxley essays unavailable to Bedford, Nicholas Murray has penned a livelier version of the trip and adds considerable new insight and new facts, but he too makes only very tenuous connections between the travel book and the novel. No Huxley scholar or critic has ever claimed that Jesting Pilate is a significant work in itself. It is, in truth, a rather unfocused, wandering travel book which pales in quality when compared to such works as Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1978) or Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar (1975), and for a travel book about India, one would do better reading the Eric Newby trilogy A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958), Slowly Down the Ganges (1966), and The Big Red Train Ride (1978). However, for understanding how Brave New World gradually evolved from inchoate materials gathered somewhat haphazardly, one can find no better source. Brave New World is a novel rooted firmly in the 1920s and early 1930s, a fact often obscured by the futuristic trappings.

CHAPTER TWO TRAVERSING THE RAJ

British citizens, whether soldier, trader, missionary, administrator, educator, or tourist, arriving in India any time between 1700 and 1925 surely experienced a profound culture shock. Before them lay evidence of an ancient, sophisticated civilization. They would have been staggered by the spatial and temporal dimensions of the subcontinent – just as were the Spanish, French, and English explorers of the American continents. In The Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott’s Edwina Crane contemplates “the flat, wide, immense Punjabi plain” and feels “dwarfed, famished in the spirit, pressed down by a tremendous weight of land, and of air and incomprehensible space that even the flapping, wheeling crows had difficulty keeping up in”.1 E.M. Forster, too, found the space troubling, and noted that “India ... baffles description because there is nothing to describe – the cultivated earth extending for ever”.2 After all, India was twenty times larger than Great Britain, several thousand years older as a culture, and even after the railway system was in place, it still took days to cross the subcontinent. Furthermore, the visitors would have been confronted by a plethora of major religions, often hostile to one another: Hindu, Jain, Buddhist, Islam, Sikh, and the animistic beliefs of the hill tribes. They would have seen representations of gods with multiple heads, arms, and legs, gods with heads of elephants (Ganesha), boars (Varaha), monkeys (Hanuman), snakes (Naga); they would have seen devotion to cows, rats, tigers, even cobras, and worship of the linga and yoni. They would also have discovered, with any curiosity, that Hinduism was 1

Paul Scott, The Jewel in the Crown, New York, 1979, 10. E.M. Forster, quoted in Nicola Beauman, Morgan: A Biography of E.M. Forster, London, 1994, 259.

2

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polytheistic to an extreme, having a staggering thirty million gods. The human population, with its extremes, would have overwhelmed them, both in the city streets and in the country lanes. Today India is projected to become the world’s most populous nation with well over a billion people; at Independence in 1947 it had a population of three hundred million; in the 1920s when Huxley visited, there were at least one hundred fifty million. This crush of people frightened Miss Crane even more than the landscape. She visits a Hindu temple, … which had frightened her, as the native town had frightened her with its narrow dirty streets, its disgusting poverty, its raucous dissonant music, its verminous dogs, its starving, mutilated beggars, its fat white sacred Brahmini bulls and its ragged population of men and women who looked so resentful in comparison with the servants and other officiating natives of the cantonment.3

Faced by distance, the often hostile climate with its extremes of drought and monsoon, the utter foreignness of the people, and the fatalism of the belief systems, the British colonialists must have had many trepidations about the country the moment they set foot in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras, or any other port city. One wishes for a time machine which would let one observe the early twentieth-century tourists, such as Huxley, as they responded to an Indian temple such as the Minakshi temple in Madurai, south of Madras in the state of Tamil Nadu.4 The temple, rebuilt in the seventeenth century on the site of an earlier fourteenth-century temple, is dedicated to Shiva, the creator and destroyer god, in extraordinarily exuberant fashion. Its walled compound is punctuated by four ninestoried gopurams or gateways, with five lesser gopurams within the walls. The tourists would have been fairly comfortable with the massive open spaces and geometrical lines of the Islamic mosques and tombs because they could relate them to the spatial volumes and linear forces of English cathedrals, and the serene meditative atmosphere of the Buddhist temples, shrines, and painted caves would have spoken with some familiarity, but Minakshi would have temporarily 3

Scott, The Jewel in the Crown, 9. See Brian Leigh Molyneaux and Piers Vitebsky, Sacred Earth, Sacred Stones, San Diego, 2000, 158-59, for excellent photographs of the temple. There are, of course, numerous such temples throughout India, but this one is perhaps the most spectacular. 4

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paralyzed a European mind. Its gopurams feature more than thirty million painted carvings. Where does one look? What does one think? Where does one focus? And, once through the entrance, where does one actually go in the virtual maze of columned corridors and separated shrines? Is there a central focus? The temple, one of the many Chola Empire temples originally built between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, is indeed a temple a god would deign to inhabit, and its Hindu architecture is completely foreign to the European mind. Although he had planned to, Huxley did not get to travel through the southern reaches of the subcontinent. His experiences were more with the Moghul, Islamic mosques and tombs of northern India, which he did not much admire. English writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s were a restless, nomadic generation. At any one time we could find Eric Blair (George Orwell) in Burma, Evelyn Waugh in Ethiopia, W.H. Auden in China, D.H. Lawrence in Australia, Graham Greene in Sierra Leone, and Aldous Huxley in India. The world was being remade once again – especially the world of colonies and mandates – and these men wanted to see the process. They also wanted to see lands that were least likely to participate in the remaking and to experience the results of the changes. The Communist Revolution of 1917, the redrawing of European boundaries during the peace talks at the end of World War I, the distribution of the mandates, the rise of Mussolini in Italy in 1922, and nascent nationalistic movements in the various colonial territories demanded attention. As Nicolas Berdyaev noted a few years later, “the youth of the whole world is seeking a new order, a world-revolution is in progress”,5 and Walter Benjamin, experiencing Moscow in 1927 for the first time, sensed that “each thought, each day, each life lies here as on a laboratory table … it must endure experimentation to the point of exhaustion”.6 Looking back over 1931, Arnold Toynbee concluded that “men and women all over the world were seriously contemplating and frankly discussing the possibility that the Western system of Society might break down and cease to work”.7 5 Nicholas Berdyaev, The Fate of Man in the Modern World, trans. Donald A. Lowrie, Ann Arbor, MI, 1961, 23. 6 Walter Benjamin, Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz, New York, 1986, 106. 7 Arnold Toynbee, quoted in Alfred F. Havighurst, Britain in Transition: The Twentieth Century, 4th edn, Chicago, 1985, 229.

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Yet it is difficult to discover clear motivation in some of the travelers. Huxley was generally silent about his agenda in traveling around the world – if he had a planned agenda – but his visit to India in 1925-26 came at a most crucial moment in the country’s history. The Amritsar Incident of 1919 was still fresh in the Indian mind; Gandhi’s non-violent resistance program seemed to have sputtered in 1922, and the All-Indian Congress was acquiring genuine political power. Here was a country slowly slouching toward unity and nationhood, unfortunately never to be achieved. Huxley was about to experience a country speaking over 1,600 languages8 and divided into 563 states in addition to the British territories,9 some of whose rajahs or maharajahs or nizams appropriated up to one-third to one-half of the state’s yearly revenues for their own personal expenses. “India” in 1925 was more a concept than a reality. April 13, 1919 saw one of the low points in the British occupation of India. In Amritsar in the Punjab, several thousand Indians crowded into a walled garden square, Jallianwalla Bagh, to demonstrate and to protest against events of the previous weeks even though such public gatherings had been prohibited by Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer. Dyer had banned gatherings, because political and racial tensions were rising sharply. On April 8 Gandhi had called for a hartal or suspension of work, and on April 10 five Englishmen had been killed. Many in the crowd had simply gathered on the thirteenth for the Baisakhi Spring Festival Day celebrated by Sikh and Hindu alike and not to hear the political poem designed to be read and to incite action. Armed Gurkha and Baluchi troops began to fire at pointblank range into the crowd, and within less than ten minutes 379 people lay dead and approximately 1500 had been wounded. Historian James Morris describes the outcome thus: The Bagh was littered with corpses and wounded men, blood trickled through the dust, and when dusk fell upon the carnage, and the last survivors had left the square terrified and aghast, women and children crept around the garden searching for their menfolk – … turning bodies over, inspecting shattered faces, or simply squatting helplessly among the horror.10 8

Andrew Dalby, Language in Danger, New York, 2003, 119. R. Palme Dutt, India To-Day, London, 1940, 391. 10 James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat, New York, 1978, 275. 9

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Amritsar became to Indian nationalists what the Alamo did to the Texans. Brigadier-General Dyer was recalled, only partially disgraced in the eyes of the British public.11 Hindu revenge came in part during the Chauri Chaura incident, February 4, 1922, in the district of Gorakhupta in Uttar Pradesh when a nationalist demonstration burst out of control and the mob burned to death twenty-three local police officers in their station. Near the Pakistani border in the northwest Punjab, Amritsar is no ordinary Indian city, nor was the Jallianwala Bagh the last massacre it would experience. Amritsar is the holy city of the Sikhs, whose founder, Guru Nanak, created a highly egalitarian, tolerant, open religion which synthesized a number of the best ideas from Hindu and Muslim faiths. Guru Ram Sas (guru from 1574 to 1581) founded Amritsar (“Nectar of Immortality”) around a natural spring named Amrit (“Immortal Nectar”).12 The spring created a tank or small lake, and in its center the Sikhs built a temple, the Harmandir Sahib, better known as the Golden Temple. The temple is the holiest shrine in the Sikh faith. It is a squarish building with towers on each corner and entries on each side, because Sikhism welcomes all. It has been described as the Vatican, the Hagia Sophia, and the Dome of the Rock to the Sikhs. Befitting its significance, in 1830 Angit Singh donated 220 pounds of gold to gild the entire temple. The temple and its many reflections in the pool shimmer; to many visitors the temple appears to float on the water. During the Baisakli festival, Sikhs celebrate Guru Govind Singh’s 1699 rebirth of the faith. When Huxley visited Amritsar, not only were Hindus and Moslems celebrating the land’s fertility; they were also asserting their demands for dominion status. Some were going further, demanding complete independence. The Sikhs were beginning to think about a separate nation for themselves, though from maps today we can see that this dream was not to be realized. Considering the social, religious, and political importance of Amritsar, Huxley’s response to the Jallianwala Bagh site, the Golden Temple, and the town of Amritsar is disappointingly superficial. After 11

Ibid., 275. Morris records that Dyer’s “superior officers condoned his actions; the guardians of the Golden Temple enrolled him into the Brotherhood of Sikhs; the House of Lords passed a motion in his support; the readers of the Morning Post subscribed a £25,000 testimonial” (276). 12 Stanley Wolpert, India, Berkeley, CA, 1991, 106.

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visiting the Golden Temple of the Sikhs, the main tourist attraction in Amritsar, Huxley found himself in the Jallianwalla Bagh. He laconically noted, “A bad place for a crowd to be caught and fired on with machine-guns”.13 He then moved on to speculate on the efficacy of such ruthless actions and concluded that modern “men have become reluctant to use their power to the full, to carry authority to its logical conclusion in brute force”14 – one of Huxley’s signal failures to read his own age’s temper accurately, a failure he certainly had corrected by the time of the writing of Brave New World. Huxley’s letter home was a bit less guarded, but equally brief: “We went to Amritsar the other day, saw the golden Temple of the Sikhs – incredibly hideous, but full of queer pilgrims – the park where General Dyer shot down the unarmed crowd and a number of male prostitutes painted and dressed up as women.”15 A few months later after visiting Amritsar, Huxley had the opportunity to observe the meetings of the All India Congress for three days in Cawnpore, a gathering, he estimated, of some seven to eight thousand delegates making mutually incomprehensible speeches in English, Hindi, and Tamil for hours each day. Although he bluntly admitted he would rather have been in a library gathering information than in the meeting hearing oratory, he was impressed by both the quantity and quality of the gathering and accurately interpreted the difference in the power wielded by Sarojini Naidu and Pandit Nehru and the much different aura of power surrounding Gandhi, even though he was much puzzled by audience reactions to these three leaders. The All-Indian Congress or National Indian Congress (now simply the Congress Party) had been founded in 1885 and was well into its third generation at the time of the 1925 meeting attended by Huxley. For its first twenty years, it was largely concerned with achieving Dominion status, but just before World War I, it became aggressively nationalistic, provoking the British into promulgating a number of repressive laws. In the 1920s, the Congress passed into the control of Gandhi and his program of satyagraha (nationalist civil disobedience). Huxley immediately recognized that Gandhi was an ascetic, an Indian saint, and “the most influential popular leader of modern 13

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 67. Ibid., 68. 15 Huxley, Selected Letters, 253. 14

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times”,16 but not a true politician. He was shocked, though, that the audience did not give Gandhi total attention but rather talked and walked around while he was speaking. Huxley had met Naidu during his first days in Bombay and accurately assessed her power in the party. She first became noticed by the public with her poetry which was admired and well-received. Active in politics beginning in 1903, she worked to advance women’s rights from 1906 on and in 1925 became the first woman to be elected President of the party. In photographs of the period, she appears next to Gandhi during the Salt March in 1930, at his meeting with the Aga Khan in 1931, and with him during the 1931 London conference.17 In 1925, Gandhi had such confidence in Naidu that he turned the Presidency of the Congress over to her, a sure sign of his trust in her. Her leadership, though, accomplished little, and her Cawnpore speech “caused widespread disappointment” because its “eloquent and moving appeal for unity … contained no constructive proposals for the achievement of the unity desired”.18 She impressed Huxley as “the only real He-Man”19 among the politicians, and he hailed her as “one of the most important political leaders in the country”. Had Huxley looked closer, he would have seen in 1925-26 that the British government of India was addressing myriad problems, ranging from upgrading cattle breeding programs to improving telephone systems to suppressing dacoit gangs. Social problems had particular attention, but Huxley seemed only superficially aware of them. Constantly in the minds of British and Indians alike were the hostilities dividing Hindus and Moslems, a problem which would drench the Subcontinent in blood during the 1947 Partition and later wars. Also, every British adult was aware that he or she was swamped in numbers: for every British adult, there were approximately four thousand Indians. The government was struggling with practical problems of health, education, rural debts, and agricultural and industrial production, and it was seeing some progress in the very areas that disappointed Huxley. For instance, 919,649 pupils were enrolled in schools in the Punjab, and genuine advances were occurring in public health in the treatment of malaria, kala-azar, 16

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 119. See Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi’s Passion, Oxford, 2001, for numerous photographs. 18 J. Coatman, India in 1925-26, Calcutta, 1926, 72. 19 Huxley, Letters, 253. 17

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cholera, and hookworm, even in “unremitting campaigns … waged against rats” in the “Central Provinces”.20 The British were also having considerable success in overcoming plague. In 1905, plague deaths numbered 1,125,652, but various hygienic measures had reduced these to 181,388 in 1913. Most Indians refused inoculation, however, and nothing could have prepared India and the British for the 6,000,000 deaths from the pandemic influenza in 1918. Huxley had no mixed feelings about leaving India: “I am glad to be leaving India”, he wrote in Jesting Pilate: For India is depressing as no other country I have ever known. One breathes in it, not air, but dust and hopelessness. The present is unsatisfactory, the future dubious and menacing.21

He was particularly disillusioned that two centuries of British rule had had so little recognizable humanistic effect. The years had brought no prosperity to the people; “ancient superstition” continued extremely powerful; illiteracy remained shockingly high; and a serious disjunction between private and public ambitions seemed continually to mire possible advances. Keen observers recognized that the mélange of states and territories was ripe for revolution. Huxley’s contemporary, Edward Thompson, noted that “the discontent with our rule is growing universal, and there must be first, widespread popular memories to account for that discontent being able to spread; and, second, blazing hatred at its heart, to have caused it to gather such rapid momentum”.22 Huxley largely agreed with Thompson’s assessment, though he had serious doubts that the Indians could govern themselves any better than the British had done. A month after leaving India, he wrote to Robert Nichols: … this is a queer country – a nightmare, out of which I am really rather glad to escape. The whole situation is so hopeless. Nothing can possibly get the English out – short of a miracle.23

20

Coatman, India, 164, 187. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 182. 22 Edward Thompson, quoted in Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, New York, 1993, 206. 23 Huxley, Letters, 266. 21

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Forster, too, agreed, writing to Hugh Meredith that … there is no solution of the problem of governing India. Our presence is a curse both to them and to us. Our going will be worse.24

Huxley was not alone in finding India a depressing country and culture with a bleak future and a frustrating present. Among Huxley’s contemporaries visiting and writing about India were E.M. Forster, J.R. Ackerley, Kathleen Mayo, Constant Sitwell, Robert Byron, and a number of others. These writers were highly critical of the English who were transformed by India and at the same time felt threatened by their own experience of the country. They agreed with Forster that India was a “muddle”. In An Essay on India (1931), Byron voiced both the collective disappointment and the intellectual challenge: My sojourn in India was a period of acute intellectual strain. The strain began as I stepped from an aeroplane at Karachi … and it by no means ended when I boarded a P & O at Bombay … I had never felt, nor wished to feel any interest in India. Now, having returned from India, I am burdened with thoughts that give me no peace and have destroyed the harmony of my former way of life.25

The nature of this disappointment is perhaps no more specifically seen than in the long, highly negative opening paragraph of Forster’s A Passage to India (1924): Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off – the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and the bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest …. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excrescence back into the soil. Houses 24

Forster, quoted in Beauman, Morgan, 270 (emphasis added). Robert Byron, quoted in Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars, Oxford, 1980, 88-89. 25

36

Wandering into Brave New World do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outlines of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life.26

Forster presents the town as a lack, an absence. Similar rhetoric is seen in Byron’s description of Baghdad: he writes that it is a … land of mud deprived of mud’s only possible advantage, vegetable fertility. It is a mud plain …. From this plain rise villages of mud and cities of mud. The rivers flow with liquid mud. The air is composed of mud refined into a gas. The people are mud-colored; they wear mudcolored clothes, and their national hat is nothing more than a formalized mud-pie.27

This passage recalls the opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and clearly conveys an Englishman’s contempt for the site. In January 1925, Huxley encouraged Carlo Linati to read Forster’s “masterly book”, styling it “the best study of the relation of the English to the Indians that I know: all the hopelessness of the situation, the impossibility – with the best will in the world – of achieving anything is exquisitely and undidactically set forth”.28 Dewas, too, struck Forster during his first visit as an absence: Nothing detained the tourist there, and the surrounding domain was equally unspectacular. No antiquities, no picturesque scenery, no large rivers or mountains or forests, no large wild animals … no factories, no railway station.29

In his memorial for Syed Ross Masood, Forster allows just how much his ideas of India came from Masood: Until I met him, India was a vague jumble of rajahs, sabhis, babus, and elephants, and I was not interested in such a jumble …. He made everything real and exciting as soon as he began to talk.30

26

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, New York, 1952, 7 (emphases added). Robert Byron, quoted in Fussell, Abroad, 99. 28 Huxley, Selected Letters, 126. 29 Ibid., 51. 30 E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, New York, 1951, 292. 27

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Ironically, J.R. Ackerley succeeded to the same position of private secretary as Forster in 1924. Because his Hindoo Holiday is a lightly fictionalized account of his stay from December 28, 1924 to May 8, 1925, Ackerley did not have to exercise Forster’s tact nor tone down the comic confusions of the court. His narration is far more biting in its depiction of Anglo-Indian racism, xenophobia, and snobbery. For example, he lets the reader glimpse the problems in a number of brief exchanges, as when Mrs Montgomery tells guests of her recent adventure: … the krait was lying right in the middle of the path! Then the servant did a thing absolutely without precedent in India – he touched me! – he put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me back. My shoe came off and I stopped. Of course, if he hadn’t done that I should undoubtedly have been killed; but I didn’t like it all the same, and got rid of him soon after.31

Unlike Forster, Ackerley offers a much more detailed description of Indian customs. The Maharajah, state officials, and palace servants acquaint Ackerley with the private world of India by fully describing marriage customs, food preparation and distribution, Hindu dress, political entanglements, and the Puranic origins of caste. Ackerley sees at first-hand, often as a participant, the tensions between Hindu and Muslim, the Maharajah’s excesses in his plans to build a Grecian temple and his unwise pursuit of Napoleon the III, a young actor/dancer. Perhaps most revealing is the comic scene when closing his book with the reader’s attention focused on the rear end of a sacred cow which is blocking the entry to the palace. Kathleen Mayo turned her descriptions of Indian culture and customs into an indictment of its practices, especially the marriage practices, which she and many of the British agents saw as abusive and uncivilized. Ackerley had understood that readers attracted to his book would wish to know what customs and practices he witnessed. As a result, his report on marriage provided exactly the type of raw material that so excited and angered Mayo. For example, Ackerley remarks that Narayan, the Guest House Clerk,

31

J.R. Ackerley, Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal, New York, 1932, 25.

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Wandering into Brave New World … had intercourse with his wife once every two or three nights. She is fourteen years old, and he twenty; and they have been married and together for three years. During the first two years he went with her too much, frequently they had intercourse two or three times a day, and he found this bad for his health. She was then nearing twelve, and he was seventeen. He had had many affairs with other girls before her, during his sixteenth year, and has had many since. She is not beautiful, and he does not love her much.32

Ackerley reports that if the bride is from the upper class, she then “disappears … into purdah, and save by her husband, her near relations, and female friends, is never seen again”.33 Mayo’s Mother India (1927) detailed the abuses of child brides she had seen while traveling widely across the subcontinent, and her book shocked and angered many. Lord Irwin, the Viceroy, told colleagues in London, Miss Mayo has dropped a brick with her book Mother India. It will make Hindus of course see red … I think the general effect may be useful if it gives a shock to the unsatisfactory conditions of Hindu thought on many of these subjects.34

Forster, Ackerley, Mayo, and Huxley each exited India with a very different book in mind, ranging from Mayo’s social exposé to Ackerley’s detailed report of everyday life in a maharajah’s court to Huxley’s informed though often rushed observations. Huxley emerged, though, with three experiences and observations which would later be transformed into major features of Brave New World. While in Calcutta, Huxley spent one afternoon with Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, who showed Huxley through the Bose Institute laboratories for three hours. Bose was one of India’s leading scientists and had been knighted in 1917 for his numerous achievements in demonstrating the effects of stress and fatigue on metals and for his investigations into radio and microwave optics. He had experimented with remote wireless and the use of semiconductor junctions. He was particularly interested in the mid-1920s in investigating the boundaries between living and nonliving forms. His experiments with plants 32

Ibid., 279. Ibid., 124. 34 Viceroy Irwin, quoted in Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, New York, 1997, I, 722. 33

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impressed Huxley more than he expected. On the way to Malaya, he wrote to his brother: … we saw all the experiments in full blast – the heart beats of plants, a graph, and so forth. Really astonishing. I had been skeptical – such is the force of ancient prejudice – I thought there must be something fishy about the results. But when you see the plants making records of their own sensations – well, you’ve got to believe. And I suppose one’s also got to believe Bose’s earlier results on the fatigue of metals and the effects of drugs on them.35

At the time of Huxley’s visit, Bose was completing a major work, to be published in August 1927 as Plant Autographs and Their Revelations. Huxley’s hours in the laboratory seem to have been recalled in 1931 and to have provided the structural underpinning of the opening chapters of Brave New World. Bose’s twenty-seven chapter report on his experiments is a mix of scientific experiments, debunking of superstitions, and undisguised love of India’s flora. The chapters, “The Praying Palm of Faridpore” and “The Weeping Mango-tree”, concern trees to which villagers in the area had attributed supernatural responses to the gods. Each day when the priests rang bells for evening prayers, the palm tree seemed to bow low, and “it was alleged that offerings made to the tree had been the means of affecting marvelous cures”.36 The mango-tree was claimed to “weep” at one o’clock each day. Bose demonstrated that both incidents were caused by temperature, sap, and pressure. Guided through the experiments, Huxley definitely saw plants respond to drugs, electric shock, and aggressive physical assault as Bose demonstrated the effects of camphor, chloroform, cobra venom, ether, morphine, mercuric chloride, and various other chemicals and gases applied to the leaves and stems of several kinds of plants. The reactions were immediately recorded by the crescograph, the galvanometer, the sphymograph, the phytograph, or other sensitive devices, several of which Bose had invented. Huxley saw Bose subject plants to pricks, to stabs, and to severe wounds, with the plants sometimes dying. 35

Huxley, Letters, 267. Jagadis Chunder Bose, Plant Autographs and Their Revelations, New York, 1927, 48. 36

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Bose had devised a “Death-Recorder” and created an experiment with mimosas: Then a sudden spasm – the death-spasm – occurs, the recording lever being jerked up with a convulsive violence …. The entire record, then, is the curve of life and death.

Such data led Bose into analysis and verification: “The results obtained led to the conclusion that the sap in the plant is propelled by a mechanism which is essentially similar to that which maintains the circulation of blood in the animal.”37 The recording equipment let Bose listen in on “the silent life of plants”38 and enabled him to conclude that humans should be humble creatures because “Man’s pretensions as a highly sensitive being receive a rude shock when certain plants are found to be a great deal more sensitive than the lord of creation”.39 To Huxley, it was “a visit to the slaughterhouse … converted to vegetarianism”.40 This day with Bose gave Huxley a needful strategy for introducing his readers to some of the more exotic, and possibly shocking, features of the World State. While it might be easy for a reader in 2012 to pass over Huxley’s visit to the Bose Institute as an encounter with an eccentric scientist, Bose was nothing of the sort. Bose was a major scientist. When Huxley left India at the end of December 1925, he took with him the experience of Bose’s botanical laboratory. The latter reappears as the framework of the novel’s first chapter in which the Director shows the new employees through the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, explaining the activities of the Fertilizing Room in which ova and sperm are introduced to one another and the resulting embryo often is subjected to the Bokanovsky Process, then the Bottling Room with its Liners and Matriculators, and finally the Social Predestination Room. Huxley underwent such a tour, introduction, and indoctrination as Bose ushered him through his numerous experimental sites. When Huxley visited his laboratory in 1925, Bose’s major interest, the unity of all living things was spawning chapter titles such as The Plant-Script, Behavior of Plants, 37

Ibid., 71. Ibid., ix. 39 Ibid., 21. 40 Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 177. 38

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Drugged Plants, Electrical Response, Sleep of Plants, Response of Inorganic Matter, Wounded Plants, Sense of Direction in Plants, Nerve of Plants, etc. Paramhansa Yogananda, like Huxley, saw many of the same plant experiments and recorded his amazement thus: My gaze was fixed eagerly on the screen which reflected the magnified fern-shadow. Minute life-movements were not clearly perceptible; the plant was growing very slowly before my fascinated eyes. The scientist touched the top of the fern with a small metal bar resuming eloquent rhythms as soon as the rod was withdrawn.41

Huxley’s second piece of Indian baggage was soma, the nectar of the gods, the liquid necessary for certain Vedic rituals, and the psychedelic, hallucinogenic, entheogenic pressings from the poisonous fly agaric mushroom that brought ecstasy to Brahmins. In Brave New World Revisited, Huxley acknowledges that he intended the Vedic and not the Greek soma: “I took the name of this hypothetical drug [from] an unknown plant … used by the ancient Aryan invaders of India in one of the most solemn of their religious rites.”42 During the last century and a half, over one hundred plants have been proposed as soma; however, in 1969, R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president at the investment firm of J.P. Morgan and one of the world’s premier mycologists, identified it as the Amarnita muscaria or fly agaric, a mushroom which grows in the Himalayas, usually at heights from 4,000 to 8,000 feet. Summarizing materials from the RigVeda, Houston Smith describes the processing of the mushrooms as follows: … dried plants were steeped in water and their juice pounded out with stones and wooden boards covered with bull hides. The juice was then forced through wooden [woolen?] filters and blended with milk, curds, barley water, ghee, and occasionally honey.43

The pressed juice is then sacrificed to the gods and drunk by the priests. First, it brings somnolence, then hallucinations, and finally ecstasy, but, as Wasson reminds us: 41

Paranihansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, Los Angeles, CA, 1981, 6. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, New York, 2000, 68. 43 Huston Smith, Cleansing the Doors of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals, New York, 2000, 49. 42

42

Wandering into Brave New World … ecstasy is not fun. In our everyday existence we divide experiences into good and bad, ‘fun’ and pain. There is a third category, ecstasy, that for most of us hovers off stage .… The divine mushroom introduces ecstasy to us. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles, until you fear that you will never recover your equilibrium. After all, who will choose to feel undiluted awe, or to float through that door yonder into the Divine Presence?44

Numerous hymns to and references to soma in the Rig-Veda treat the effects of soma on the individual, presented in quite metaphysical imagery describing the pressing, processing, and consumption. The following is typical: I have tasted the sweet drink of life, knowing that it inspires good thoughts and joyous expansiveness to the extreme, that all the gods and mortals seek it together, calling it honey. / When you penetrate inside, you will know no limits, and you will avert the wrath of the gods. Enjoying Indra’s friendship, O drop of Soma, bring riches as a docile cow brings the yoke. / We have drunk the Soma; we have become immortal; we have gone to the light; we have found the gods. What can hatred and the malice of a mortal do to us now, O immortal one?45

Mycologists consider the Amanita muscaria to be one of the most beautiful of the mushrooms. Its scarlet cap dotted with white speckles would attract any hunter or hiker, though they might turn away because of its kinship with the Destroying Angel and the Death Cap. However, it is not deadly. In the past it has been used throughout Eurasia simply to stupefy flies and other insects. If a human eats it raw, he can experience “delirium, raving, and profuse sweating”. Siberian shamans used “to drink the urine of reindeer who had been fed the mushrooms”.46 Soma is very frequently mentioned and praised in the Rig-Veda where it is “worshiped … as a deity second only to Indra in power”.47 Soma is omnipresent throughout the Rig-Veda, 44

R. Gordon Wasson, “The Divine Mushroom of Immortality”, in Peter T. Furst, Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens, New York, 1972, 199. 45 The Rig Veda: An Anthology, trans Wendy Doniger, London, 1981, 134-35, Section, 8:48. 46 Christal Whelan, “Amanita muscaria: The Gorgeous Mushroom”, Asian Folklore Studies, LIII (1994), 165. 47 Wolpert, India, 29.

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where priests, with some considerable risk to their own lives, partake of it in ceremonies and where even the gods are wary of its power. Huxley was fully aware of all this, and in looking back on soma, he commented: In the Vedic hymns we are told that the drinkers of soma were blessed in many ways. Their bodies were strengthened, their hearts were filled with courage, joy and enthusiasm, their minds were enlightened and in an immediate experience of eternal life they received the assurance of their immortality. But the sacred juice had its drawbacks. Soma was a dangerous drug.48

During the 1920s and 1930s, Huxley could have chosen alcohol, marijuana, opium, cocaine, or heroin to provide chemical escapes for his characters, but all these have side effects ranging from mild hangover to addiction to death. He wished, as he spelled out in the essay, “Wanted, A New Pleasure”, a drug which had only positive, pleasurable effects: If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution – then, it seems to me, all our problems … would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.49

In The Doors of Perception, Huxley spells out the universality of this search: That humanity at large will ever be able to dispense with Artificial Paradises seems very unlikely. Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.50

48

Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 68. Huxley, Music at Night, Garden City, NY, 1931, 233. 50 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, New York, 2004, 62. 49

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The synthetic soma in Brave New World, first commercially produced in A.F.184 after six years of experimentation by “two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists”,51 is not restricted to one caste or even one professional group within a caste, but certainly provides the same range of somnolence and hallucinations to any and all citizens of the Fordian world. Some carry their own private supply while others receive theirs in controlled distribution. Everyone knows that “there is always soma, delicious soma, half a gramme for a halfholiday, a gramme for a week-end, two grammes for a trip to the gorgeous East, three for a dark eternity on the moon; returning whence they find themselves on the other side of the crevice, safe on the solid ground of daily labour and distraction”.52 Soma provides the stability necessary to their society. At various points in the novel, Lenina and Henry end their dinner with soma and soothe themselves on the flight to Santa Fe with soma, Linda takes twenty grammes a day while in the hospital; the Deltas receive soma distribution after their workday; and soma authorizes the orgy-porgy at John’s tower in the closing pages of the novel. Soma is also the solemn drink at the Solidarity Services which transforms the Alpha group – and Morgana’s eyebrow – into ecstatic Pentecostal worshipers.53 Small doses of soma erase stress, calm anxiety, and bring a feeling of contentment for the citizen. Larger doses bring happiness and occasional hallucinations, taking the individual away from the everyday world. Although some characters reach the bliss of nothingness, no one actually seems to achieve ecstasy, a condition which would be extremely dangerous to the state itself. Huxley understood fully how the similar “peyote cult [acts] as a short cut to the visionary world, but also as an instrument for creating a loving solidarity within the participating group”.54 One “ancient superstition” which remained with Huxley through the writing of Brave New World was that of caste. This concept is more complex than the soma and tortured plants and perhaps is never fully understood by one born outside its constrictive boundaries. Theoretically, caste determines one’s place in society: whom one can or cannot marry, whom one can or cannot share food with, who is 51

Huxley, Brave New World, 64. Ibid., 67. 53 Ibid., 98-99. 54 Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 156. 52

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“pure” or “impure” in his or her life, what professions are open or closed to one, what one can or cannot wear, whether or not one can become literate, and what one’s exact place is in the hierarchy of society. One of the most astute analysts of caste, Louis Dumont, characterizes caste as a system which … divides the whole society into a large number of hereditary groups, distinguished from one another and connected together by three characteristics: separation in matters of marriage and contact, whether direct or indirect (food); division of labour, each group having, in theory or by tradition, a profession from which their members can depart only within certain limits; and finally hierarchy, which ranks the groups as relatively superior or inferior to one another.55

From this general description, we can see the outlines of the caste system in Brave New World taking shape. Indeed, in a comment in “Science and Civilisation”, Huxley’s choice of terms indicates how close the Indian system was to him during 1931-32: “The rulers and their advisory experts will be a kind of Brahmins controlling, in virtue of a special and mysterious knowledge, vast hordes of the intellectual equivalents of Sudras and Untouchables”.56 The locus classicus of the caste system – a system peculiar to India – consistently cited as the founding document appears in the RigVeda, in the creation myth telling of the sacrifice and dismemberment of the primeval man, Purusa. The passage reads: When they divided the Man, into how many parts did they disperse him? What became of his mouth, what of his arms, what were his two thighs and his two feet called? His mouth was the Brahmin, his arms were made into the nobles [Ksatriyas], his two thighs were the populace [Vaisyas], and from his feet the servants [Sudras] were born. The moon was born from his mind; the sun was born from his eye. From his mouth came Indra and Agni, and from his vital breath the wind was born. From his navel the atmosphere was born; from his

55

Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implication, rev. edn, trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati, Chicago, 1980, 21. 56 Huxley, The Hidden Huxley, 113.

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This passage, the Purusasukta hymn, lays bare the five caste levels, with the Untouchables being the unmentionable Other or fifth caste. We have the four levels or varnas of Brahmins, Ksatriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras. It is helpful to think of these categories as both vocational and moral responsibilities: the Brahmins are responsible for higher learning and sacrifices; the Ksatriyas are warriors; the Vaisyas function as merchants; and the Sudras become farmers, agricultural workers, and subjugated peoples. The exact origins, implications, and even the realities of these five castes are perhaps the most argued, most contentious, and most mystifying aspects of Hindu society. Sachchidanand Sinha has strongly argued that the concept of varna and the practice of caste have been much more fluid when looked at historically than the Puranic myth suggests. Discussing the relationship between castes, he comments that: … when we try to look a little minutely into the history of the castes, we are struck by the fact that much of the theorizing about the caste system is based either on an extrapolation of a certain relation of recent origin over the entire past history, or on taking the facts – the ordinances derived from the Puranic legends and the commandments of the Dharmashastras, whose exact standing in relation to the political system, existing when they were compiled, we do not know.58

M.N. Srinivas has suggested that the arrival of the British may have made the varna model more popular because of their dependence on Brahmana law.59 At the other extreme, Brian K. Smith has exhaustively combed the Sanskrit literature and concluded that varna is a totalizing system which underlies the Hindu classification of the universe, society, gods, space, time, flora, and fauna. “Varna”, he writes “was a classificatory system which attempted to encompass 57

The Rig-Veda, trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, in Hindu Myths: A Sourcebook Translated from the Sanskrit, London, 1975, 28. The passage is 10.90.1-16 in the RigVeda. 58 Sachchidanand Sinha, Caste System: Myths, Reality, Challenge, New Delhi, 1982, 63. 59 M.N. Srinivas, “Social Changes in Modern India: Chapter I, Sanskritization”, in Modern India: An Interpretative Anthology, ed. Peter Medawar, London, 1972, 8.

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within it all of the major sectors of the visible and invisible universe”.60 Huxley adopted the idea that caste is inflexible, capturing the individual within a system where one’s fate is determined by birth. When adapted to Brave New World, caste became the deconstructive power undermining Huxley’s attack, because Huxley does not apply the caste system and rebellion against it with evenhandedness. Caste has been explained as the outcome of military conquest, as a feature of economic differences, as the consequence of karma governing moral perception, as a political system, and as an amalgamation of all these. Oliver Cromwell Cox concluded after extensive study that “belief in the fourfold device of caste in India has persisted from the Vedic period to this day, yet it appears never to have existed in fact”,61 a stance like that of Sinha. However, William and Charlotte Wiser, in their classic study, Behind Mud Walls, contemporary with Huxley’s visit, clearly confronted a caste system when they set out in the late 1920s to study Karimpur, a village near Agra. When William Wiser launched his study of the village’s water supply, he found “the shepherds’ well, the wells used by farmer castes, the Muslims’ well, the wells reserved for the various craftsmen, and those for the serving castes, the leather workers’ well, and the wells of other untouchable groups”,62 and within a year the Wisers had delineated eleven castes within the sudra grouping alone. Indeed, the temptation to explain economic, social, and professional differences in terms of the five varna divisions alone tempts the Westerner into superficial conclusions at times. One quickly discerns, as Cox noted, that “one caste may include more than a thousand subcastes, or it may be without any subcaste whatever”,63 and that the subcastes have names which differ drastically across the subcontinent. As he struggled to distinguish between caste, class, tribe, and clan, F.G. Bailey concluded that “one caste has direct control over economic resources and it alone has a corporate political existence: the other castes derive their living by a dependent relationship upon the dominant caste, and in themselves they have no corporate political 60

Brian K. Smith, Classifying the Universe, New York, 1994, xxx. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics, New York, 1959, 105. 62 William H. and Charlotte Vaill Wiser, Behind Mud Walls 1930-1960, with a sequel: The Village in 1970, Berkeley, CA, 1971, 4. 63 Cox, Caste Caste, and Race, 26. 61

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existence”,64 but immediately warned that these were abstractions “of a high order” which dim when “put against reality”. It has been generally believed that the caste system in Brave New World was a direct response to H.G. Wells’ delineation of the class system in A Modern Utopia, and there are many similarities between the two. Wells’ system, however, is a fictional abstraction, whereas Huxley observed and experienced the reality of the caste system while he was in India. It is not unreasonable to suppose that both Wells’ and Huxley’s classifications owe as much to their general knowledge of the caste system and that we have a tangled ancestry demonstrating convergent evolution from both Indian and Japanese parentage. It should be expected that all utopian fictions will share many aspects, because they all begin with the same question: “What characteristics of a society are essential to convince citizens that it is ‘utopian’?” As a result, most of the utopian fictions give more or less attention to eradicating disease, to insuring long life, to pacifying the environment in various ways, to lessening if not finally removing tensions over property and family allegiances, avoiding population overexpansion, and to insuring that individuals enjoy considerable kinds of pleasure in their daily existence. The fictions begin to diverge sharply in presenting those features which turn utopia into dystopia, usually some totalitarian aspect of the government and clear restrictions on the freedoms of the individuals. From the very first in The Time Machine in 1895, Wells showed a clear interest which would continue until A Modern Utopia in modifying the environment, increasing human pleasure, and controlling population. In Men Like Gods, Barnstaple realizes that the world around him is remarkably free of annoying insects, various weeds, and rodent species: “most infectious and contagious fevers”, he realizes, “had gone very easily; some had only been driven out of human life by proclaiming a war and subjecting the whole population to discipline”;65 moreover, the animal world has been transformed with “the larger carnivore, combed and cleaned, reduced to a milk dietary, emasculated in spirit and altogether be-catted”.66 In A Modern Utopia, the same victories have been claimed over Nature where “a 64 F.G. Bailey, Tribe, Caste, and Nation: A Study of Political Activity and Political Change in Highland Orissa, Manchester, 1960, 258. 65 H.G. Wells, Men Like Gods, Atlantic edn, New York, 1927, 92. 66 Ibid., 94.

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strident suppression of the free movement of familiar animals “has eradicated certain diseases as “plague, influenza, catarrhs and the like”.67 He also emphasized the necessity of not letting reason become a tyrant as it had in Plato’s visions. Huxley, too, was quite engaged with these issues; however, he inverted them and made them the emanations of a dictatorial power which hedged individual action at every turn. It is immediately evident that Wells and Huxley share the same worries about overpopulation, the necessity of the suppression of organized religion as they knew it, the uses of genetic manipulation to increase the human lifespan, without running into the Swiftian problem of the Struldbruggs, and the always desirable diminutions of excessive materialism. The two men could have marched under the same banner proclaiming the need for more birth control and less property. In “The Samurai”, the ninth chapter of A Modern Utopia, the narrator’s “Utopian double” outlines and briefly describes the caste system of the four classes – the Poietic, Kinetic, Dull, and Base – and sketches their responsibilities and roles in the utopian state. The significant difference between Wells’ classes and those in other utopias, including Huxley’s, is stridently voiced in the opening paragraph of the novel: “the Modern Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage leading to a long assent of stages.”68 This key principle certainly informs the Poietic class, named so after the Greek poiesis for the power and ability of forming, producing, discovering, and creating. Wells’ creative class is charged with creating, inventing, and discovering in fields artistic, philosophical, technological, or scientific. Imaginative power defines the class: “imaginations that range beyond the known and accepted, and that involve the desire to bring the discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge and recognition.”69 Characterized by “a more restricted range of imagination”,70 the Kinetic class is more conservative, less inventive, and more committed to what is known and accepted. They may be clever, committed, and energetic citizens of Utopia, but they do not search for new technology or art because they range from the “mainly 67

Ibid., 205. H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia, Atlantic edn, New York, 1927, 7. 69 Ibid., 236. 70 Ibid., 237. 68

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emotional, unoriginal man” to the “mainly intellectual, unoriginal type, which, with energy of personality, makes an admirable judge or administrator”. Wells characterizes them as the pillars of society on earth – not a compliment in 1905. Wells had read widely and deeply in utopian literature and quite frequently refers to specific works in the pages of his novel, thus he was keenly aware of the analogies various authors and cultures had established between, say, the brain and heart of an individual and the intelligentsia and administrators of a social unit. But no society can exist simply with brain and heart (though Wells’ own Martians come extraordinarily close to doing so and hence become all the more monstrous in War of the Worlds): stomach and limbs must also accompany them whether in the form of Plato’s feared “appetite” or Daniel’s “feet of clay”. These classes take the form of Utopia’s Dull and Base classes who clearly handle all the physical chores of the community. The narrator characterizes them as “the stupid people, the incompetent people, the formal, imitative people, the people who, in any properly organised State, should, as a class, gravitate towards and below the minimum wage that qualifies for marriage”. On the other hand, the Base are self-defined, self-willed outcasts. They may come from any of the three other classes; however their “narrower and more persistent egoistic reference” has placed them outside “the common run of humanity”.71 They form a constant source of antagonism for the State. All four classes live in a dynamic world in which movement from one class to another is entirely possible. Huxley’s citizens live in a world where choice is confined to selecting a sexual partner for the day or night or opting to play Centrifugal Bumble-puppy or Obstacle Golf. In Wells’ “modern Utopia”, classes are not hereditary; no one is arbitrarily assigned to a class; rather “they are classes to which people drift of their own accord … each man (and woman) must establish his position with regard to the lines of this abstract classification by his own quality, choice, and development”.72 We go to the core of Wells’ optimism in this trust of the individual, the educational system of the future, and the benevolently tolerant administrative powers of the State. Where Wells hopefully envisioned a dynamic, responsive, open society, Huxley (and virtually all other purveyors of twentieth-century 71 72

Ibid., 238-39. Ibid., 236.

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dystopian visions) glimpsed a static, threatened (even paranoid), closed world which could only thrive if it exercised massive control of the individuals. Wells’ “Utopian double” puts it thus: “the State is for Individualities. The State is for Individuals, the law is for freedoms, the world is for experiment, experience, and change: these are the fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia must go.”73 In contrast, Huxley’s Mustapha Mond tells John that he has read … what people in the time of Our Ford used to write about scientific progress. They seemed to have imagined that it could be allowed to go on indefinitely, regardless of everything else. Knowledge was the highest good, truth the supreme value.74

But he has earlier rejected such a vision, telling John: We don’t want to change. Every change is a menace to stability. That’s another reason why we’re so chary of applying new inventions. Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive75

Huxley offered no extended comments or analysis of the Indian caste system in either Jesting Pilate or his later essays; however, scattered comments in Jesting Pilate make it clear that he regarded the caste system to be one of the major impediments to modernity in India. He clearly understood how caste generated an orderly, peaceful, contented society, but he also clearly discerned that it made for a fatalistic, deterministic, static world with no impetus for change, exploration, or discovery. Most disturbing, Huxley found no room in the system for individual freedom; it was as restrictive as the mediaeval serfdom from which Europe had emerged. Contrasting European materialism with Oriental spirituality, Huxley opted for more of the former: To my mind ‘spirituality’ … is the primal curse of India and the cause of all her misfortunes. It is this preoccupation with ‘spiritual’ realities, different from the actual historical realities of common life, that has kept millions upon millions of men and women content, through centuries, with a lot unworthy of human beings. A little less 73

Ibid., 82. Huxley, Brave New World, 273. 75 Ibid., 269. 74

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Wandering into Brave New World spirituality, and the Indians would now be free – free from foreign dominion and from the tyranny of their own prejudices and traditions. There would be less dirt and more food.76

In his letters, Huxley was even blunter about the matter, writing: People who are so much preoccupied with Higher Things as these poor imbeciles are, won’t get much of the Lower. India is enough to convert the most convinced believer in religion and spirituality into an ardent materialist, epicurean and atheist. What these people need is a good supply of Nietzschean missions.77

Leading up to this rejection are a number of asides made as Huxley traveled through northern India. When he objected to men doing labor beasts should do, he is told by his host in Kashmir: … they feel them less, because they’re used to this sort of life. They don’t mind, because they know no better. They’re really quite happy.78

He witnessed the vast disjunction between social class, caste, and educational level, in Kashmir, and in Agra, he concluded that “the life of a cow, it is true, is respected, but not the life of a man. Humanitarian feelings with regard to men have been introduced artificially, from outside.”79 There can be no doubt that Huxley had the Indian caste system in mind when he created the divisions in the Fordian world, because every time he mentions the divisions, he refers to caste. When Mustapha Mond and John have their major confrontation in Chapter Sixteen interview scene so typical of the ideologically driven novels of the 1920s and 1930s, Mond tells John: “We should suffer acutely if we were confined in a narrower space. You cannot pour upper-caste champagne-surrogate into lower-caste bottles.”80

76

Huxely, Jesting Pilate, 128. Huxley, Selected Letters, 161. 78 Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 32. 79 Ibid., 70. 80 Huxley, Brave New World, 267. 77

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And there are the frequent references to “higher” and “lower” castes by the various characters beginning with Henry Foster explaining to the trainees that “the lower the caste . . . the shorter the oxygen”81 given the embryo, to Mond telling the students how caste replaced democracy, liberalism, and freedom early in the establishment of the Fordian world. We discover that Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are further divided by pluses and minuses. At various points, characters are identified as being Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron, Epsilon-Plus, Gamma-Plus, Beta-Minus, Alpha Plus (the absence of the hyphen is one of the many physical and thematic inconsistencies in the novel), Alpha-Minus, Delta-Minus, and Alpha Double Plus.82 The thrust of the caste system is underlined further with statements such as “solved by standard Gammas, unvarying Deltas, uniform Epsilons”, a reminder that “characters remain constant throughout a whole lifetime”,83 and clear distinctions made in such matters as housing: the lower castes have “barracks” divided from the upper caste “houses” by a wall. For any society adopting a rigid caste or class system, the overarching problems for social stability are how to make one’s caste immediately recognizable so that each citizen will respond to the others accordingly. Huxley decided that a color scheme would emphatically accomplish this. Each caste is restricted to one color, though this coding is persistently violated by Lenina, perhaps the most successful rebel against Fordian conformity. The conditioning tape repeats and repeats: Delta Children wear khaki. Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They’re too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour …. Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they’re so frightfully clever. I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green ….84

81

Ibid., 15. Ibid., 70, 118, 78, 14, 19, 8, and 192. 83 Ibid., 6 and 66 (emphases added in both passages). 84 Ibid., 30-31. 82

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The mystery of the Betas’ color is soon clarified: “Mulberrycoloured Beta-Minuses came and went.”85 Huxley’s first venture into using his perceptions of color codes in the caste system came in Point Counter Point, where he presents the British Freemen, the fascists following Everard Webley, as “uniformed in green”: Theirs is the livery of Robin Hood and Little John, the livery of outlaws. For outlaws they are in this stupid democratic world.86

Any specific color symbolism may be discounted, but two points are evident: first, the colors are as muted, even as dull, as the Fordian society; second, entire ranges of the spectrum are disallowed. Grey, black, and khaki would have reminded European readers of colors already experienced in the business and military worlds, even in the clerical and academic worlds. That each of the castes is associated with a color, the original meaning of varna, may have been known to Huxley. Brahmin was associated with white, Kshatriyas with red, Vaishyas with brown, and Sudras with black. These associations have led some scholars to theorize a racial basis to caste; however, history, genetics, and ethnic distribution have not borne out such conclusions, and race issues are quite irrelevant in the Fordian world, as they are in Wells.87 Huxley may even have been aware of the color system adopted for workers in the Soviet Union to ensure that factories and plants were operating each day of the week. In 1929, the Council of People’s Commissaries abolished Saturday and Sunday from the calendar, established a five-day workweek, and assigned a color to each day so the workers would recognize their day off. The colors were yellow, orange, red, purple, and green.88 A color was assigned each worker according to the day of the week he was to begin work or to have a day off. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1986) perhaps 85

Ibid., 75 (emphases added). Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point, New York, 1965, 340. 87 The understanding of race in Brave New World totally puzzles some readers. In two 1946 editions I used, someone at sometime had written “racist” next to every use of the word “Negro” and also objected to the presentation of the Pueblo in Chapters Seven and Eight. To the contrary, ethnic and racial differences have been erased in the novel. 88 E.G. Richards, Mapping Time: The Calendar and Its History, Oxford, 1998, 27778. 86

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shows a direct influence of Huxley’s color scheme in the way its authoritarian regime dresses its women: white for adolescent virgins, dull green for “Marthas”, red for handmaidens, multi-colored stripes for Econowives, and powder blue for Wives – colors which instantly signal the role and status of the women. Among the men, Guardians wear green and Commanders black, the Aunts are recognized by their leather belts and cattle prods.89 Greek, Roman, mediaeval, and Renaissance societies, even modern revolutionary states have attempted to control their citizens’ expenditure on luxury items, to limit styles of clothing worn by the various classes, and even to restrict colors available to individuals. During Rome’s Punic Wars in 213 BC, sumptuary laws restricted women from possessing more than a half ounce of gold, from riding in a carriage within towns, and from wearing dresses having more than one color.90 During the reign of Tiberius, men were forbidden to wear silk garments, and from the reign of England’s Edward III (1327-77) to that of Mary I (1553-58), the kind, quality, and often the color of clothing were regulated for men, women, and children in England; all of these laws were finally repealed during James I’s rule.91 At times individuals not part of the royal family were subject to heavy fines if they wore purple or gold. At other times, the rules were simply bizarre. In fourteenth-century Paris, Barbara Tuchman notes: … streets were bright with colored clothes. Crimson, green, and particolored, being the most expensive, were reserved for nobles, prelates, and magnates. The clergy could wear color as long as their gowns were long and buttoned.92

And in 1349, “because many persons were pretending to higher position than belonged to them by birth or occupation”,93 the city of Siena renewed its sumptuary regulations. Even fabrics were restricted. “By law”, the contemporary fashion scholar, Ruth Rubenstein, notes, 89

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, New York, 1998. George Long, “Sumtuariae Leges”, in A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, ed. William Smith, London 1875, 1077-78. 91 Francis Elizabeth Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England, Baltimore, 1926, 34, 115. 92 Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, New York, 1978, 117. 93 Ibid., 117. 90

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“damasks, velvet, and satin could be used only by nobles; broadcloth was reserved for burghers; and the poor wore whatever they could come by”.94 Both conservative and radical thinkers of the early nineteenth century argued for caste colors. Louis de Bonald argued that people should dress according to their functions, and Charles Fourier advocated that status should be signaled by clothing: needful work, for instance, would allow the individual to wear variegated clothing. Sumptuary laws enforced the difference between classes and genders, made the social standing of an individual immediately evident, and allowed the state to regulate the lives of its citizens toward social order. Fixing identity through clothing color and style has appealed to cultures at various times, taking the form not only of sumptuary laws, but also of uniforms, and fashions. At the time Huxley was writing his novel, the terms “brown shirt” and “black shirt” were becoming sinister terms fraught with political, racial, and ideological content. Black shirts were worn by the Italian fascist military formed in 1923 and largely made up of demobilized elite shock troops of the Italian Army. They were known for their terror offensives and were barely controlled by Mussolini. Brown shirts or Braunhemd were the uniform of the Nazi SA. Usually, laws attempted to coordinate clothing and social status, with color itself often being a key indicator of power, authority, and standing. The 2005 televised mourning and funeral ceremonies for Pope John Paul II conveyed this clearly to the viewing audience: bishops in purple with all its royal associations, cardinal princes resplendent in scarlet, priests in black, and the pope in pure white with decorative over-copes. Indeed, if we could transport ourselves back a few hundred years, we would quickly see a color caste system in aprons. Summarizing Occupational Costume in England from the Eleventh 4th Century to 1914 (by Phillis E. Cunningham, Catherine Lucas, and Alan Mansfield, London, 1967), Ruth Rubinstein reports that: “for many centuries, aprons of different colors and patterns were worn in England by different occupational groups: blue for gardeners; black for cobblers; checks for barbers. Those who wanted to be recognized as skilled rather than menial laborers wore white aprons, which they starched and pressed.”95 94

Ruth P. Rubinstein, Dress Codes: Meanings and Messages in American Culture, Boulder, CO, 1991, 33. 95 Ibid., 237, n.11.

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In discussing Indian social change, M.N. Srinivas offers a most revealing example of clothing codes among castes of exactly the kind Huxley would have seen. In southern India in 1930, the Kallar or upper caste had come into conflict with the Harijan or Untouchables: … the Kallar in Ramnad propounded eight prohibitions the disregard of which led to the use of violence by the Kallar against the exterior Harijan castes, whose huts were fired, whose granaries and property were destroyed, and whose livestock was looted. The eight prohibitions were as follows: (1) that the Adi-Dravidas shall not wear ornaments of gold and silver; (2) that the males should not be allowed to wear their clothes above the hips; (3) that their males should not wear coats or shirts or baniyans; (4) [that] no Adi-Dravida shall be allowed to have his hair cropped; (5) that the Adi-Dravidas should not use other than earthenware vessels in their houses; (6) [that] their women shall not be allowed to cover the upper portion of their bodies by clothes or ravukais [blouses] or thavanis [upper cloths worn like togas]; (7) [that] their women shall not be allowed to use flowers or saffron paste; [and] (8) [that] the men shall not use umbrellas for protection against sun and rain, nor shall they wear sandals.96

In the Fordian world such regulations begin much before the nascent citizens even need clothes, when the Predestinators decide what caste an embryo would join. Should they send it to a bottle all its own, flooded with blood-surrogate, or should they Bokanovskify it into ninety-six identical beings? The Fordian world, like the Indian caste system is a pyramid with many Deltas and Epsilons at the base and only a small population of Betas and Alphas at the apex – with the aim of all citizens being happy in their rigid collectivity. Compared to Indians in the caste system, Fordians have it relatively easy, because the Fordian world has achieved many of the modern world’s goals, more effectively than Huxley’s world had achieved them except in imagination. The Fordian world has triumphed over disease, aging, illness, poverty, crime, maladjustment, guilt over promiscuity, economic and material insecurity, unstable environment, and threat of war. Everyone is “happy”, enjoying the fruits of the state motto: “COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.”97 96

M.N. Srinivas, “Social Change in Modern India”, in Thomas R. Metcalf, Modern India: An Interpretative Anthology, London, 1971, 119-20. 97 Huxley, Brave New World, 1.

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However, the cost has been high. The state has abolished or totally transformed individuality, intellectuality, art, science, awareness of the past and future, and family unity; as John puts it, the World State has even abolished the right to be unhappy. To maintain stability, the generally benevolent totalitarian world has used two major tools: thorough conditioning and tranquillizing drugs, accompanied by amusement parks, feelies, and promiscuity. As Mustapha Mond tells John, “they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.”98 Everyone has a sense of being useful and having a purpose. Hopelessness is theoretically impossible – exactly the opposite of the conclusion Huxley reached about the caste system while he was in India. Huxley’s Fordian world has no need of change or hope. Two years after the publication of Brave New World, Mulk Raj Anand gave the British public a bracing look at the problems of caste in such an utterly hopeless world. Bakha, the protagonist of Anand’s Untouchable has glimmers of hope but realizes that he is confined and restricted as rigidly as are the Fordian citizens but lacking any of their benefits: Heredity had furrowed no deep grooves in his soul where flowers could grow or grass abound. The cumulative influence of careful selection had imprisoned his free will in the shackles of slavery to the dreary routine of one occupational environment. He could not reach out from the narrow and limited personality he had inherited to his larger yearning.99

The Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons are denied even such rudimentary recognitions. In later essays on politics and religion, Huxley returned to the caste system in the midst of a discussion of Father Joseph (the Grey Eminence) to make a point about the confusion of vocations: It is a fatal thing, say the Indians, for the members of one caste to usurp the functions that properly belong to another. Thus when the merchants trespass upon the ground of the kshatriyas and undertake the business of ruling, society is afflicted by all the evils of capitalism; and when the kshatriyas do what only the theocentric Brahmin has a 98 99

Ibid., 264. Mulk Raj Anand, Untouchable, London 1940, 94.

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right to do, when they presume to lay down the law on spiritual matters, there is totalitarianism, with its idolatrous religions, its deifications of the nation, the party, the local political boss.100

The Fordians, though, have no opportunity to disturb the responsibilities of any other caste. Disruption is beyond their comprehension. In the first four chapters of the novel, Huxley brilliantly develops awareness of the thoroughness and success of the conditioning process to which every Fordian citizen has been subjected, by carrying the new field of behaviorism to logical extremes of behavior modification in the name of cultural stability. In the names of Community, Identity, and Stability, the state has decided that it must determine each citizen’s physique, brain power, vocational options, caste identification and loyalty, and purpose. As the Director shepherds the newly arrived students through the Central Hatchery, the reader overhears his lecture in the Social Predestination Room: “that is the secret of happiness and virtue – liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”101 He provides a concrete demonstration in Chapter Two of Delta children being conditioned to be repulsed by books and flowers. At this point, the narrator bursts in with a metaphor to convey the suffocating effect of the process: “Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.”102 The coding of colors and conditioning are reinforced by several other identifiers of caste. In the course of the novel, several characters mention Bernard Marx’s height, or his lack thereof. A number of studies in America and Europe have assessed the importance of height as related to power and authority in business and politics. The conclusions have always been that height does matter and that it frequently trumps ability. A recent study conducted in The Netherlands says “height is one of the first features that others notice

100

Aldous Huxley, Collected Essays, New York, 1958, 282. Huxley, Brave New World, 17. 102 Ibid., 32. 101

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and is associated with status”;103 the professors also say there is evidence that height also indicates good genes, cognitive abilities, and possibly even reproductive success. Height obviously signals caste status in the Fordian world. The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning is “tall and rather thin”, Mustapha Mond has only “middle height”, but Bernard, an Alpha-Plus, is “small”, a full “eight centimeters short of the standard Alpha height”.104 His stature creates problems for him in terms of social authority and sexual desirability. As Fanny tells Lenina, we learn that … each time he found himself looking on the level, instead of downward, into a Delta’s face, he felt humiliated. Would the creature treat him with the respect due to his caste? The question haunted him. Not without reason. For Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons had been to some extent conditioned to associate corporeal mass with social superiority. Indeed, a faint hypnopaedic prejudice in favour of size was universal.105

Rumors freely circulate that “somebody made a mistake when he was still in the bottle – thought he was a Gamma and put alcohol into his blood-surrogate. That’s why he’s so stunted.”106 As the passage also makes clear, physique counts almost as much as height, as the description of Helmholz Watson shows: he is “every centimeter an Alpha-Plus … a powerfully built man, deep-chested, broad-shouldered, massive, and yet quick in his movements, springy and agile”.107 Near physical perfection for the Alpha Pluses and gradual diminution in size for the lesser castes can be expected in a world which has perfected the biological and chemical means of manipulating both the human body and the human mind. Huxley’s characters can be known instantly through reading their physical appearance: the color of their clothing, their height, their facial features, and their occupation. They can even be read in terms of their leisure activities, the extent of their conditioning, the quality of their 103

Abraham P. Buunkah, Justin H. Parka, Rosario Zurriagac, Liga Klavinaa, and Karlijn Zurragac, “Height predicts jealous differently for men and women”. http://www.ethology.ru/english/?id=196. 104 Huxley, Brave New World, 3, 37, 54, and 76. 105 Ibid., 76-77. 106 Ibid., 54. 107 Ibid., 79.

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birth (were they single or part of a group), and the degree of individuality they manifest – a very dangerous quality in their world and a quality beyond the reach of most. Brave New World is usually approached through its four male rebels drawn from the Alpha and Alpha Plus class: Bernard Marx, Helmholtz Watson, John the Savage, and Mustapha Mond – each of whom has been driven in one way or another to question and to rebel against the not-to-be-questioned values of the Fordian/Freudian world of A.F. 632. Each of these men has wandered dangerously far into unorthodoxies that threaten the community, identity, and stability of the World State. At one point, the Director reminds Henry Foster that “no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of behaviour …. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself.”108 Only one of them, Mustapha Mond, has the status and power with which to protect himself in his own private unorthodoxy. Huxley thus depicts one male failure after another. Helmholtz Watson’s excursion into modernist poetry brings exile to the Falkland Islands; Bernard Marx’s drive for affirmation of his Alpha status brings exile, possibly to Iceland; and John’s attempt to restore a sense of worth to the individual brings death at the end of a rope, turning a deserted air-lighthouse into a grim compass signaling the absolute directionlessness Huxley sensed in his world. Huxley offers a remarkably sexist vision which suggests – if it does not outright say – that only Alpha men are capable of being unhappy, of being unorthodox, of being rebels. Only once, in a remark by Mustapha Mond, does the work suggest that women can become as troublesome to the State as men and suffer exile for their unorthodoxy, when he tells Helmholtz that he will be with “the most interesting set of men and women to be found anywhere in the world” while he is in exile.109 The Cyprus experiment, which consisted solely of Alphas, also suggests that women could be of Alpha caste. Discontent with these readings which so privilege the male world and the patriarchal state begins with a simple question: why does Lenina Crowne frequently wear green? The rigid caste system of Brave New World, as we have seen, emphatically signals status, intelligence, and worth through the colors prescribed for males and females of the five castes individually is extinguished through these 108 109

Ibid., 176. Ibid., 272.

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colors. Within these five castes there are plus and minus categories, but nothing indicates that colors differ or even shade into various tones. While Henry Foster and Lenina “copter” to play Obstacle Golf, Lenina voices her dislike for the “hideous colour khaki”, and, a few moments later, tells Henry, “my word … I’m glad I’m not a Gamma” as they watch “the leaf-green Gamma girls” changing shifts at the Television Corporation’s factory. Interestingly, Lenina is wearing a “bottle green jacket” at the time.110 Even earlier, the narrative voice had remarked Lenina’s jacket “made of bottle green acetate cloth with green viscose fur at the cuffs and collar”, her “green corduroy shorts”, her “green-and-white jockey cap”, her “bright green” shoes, all topped off by “a silver-mounted green morocco-surrogate cartridge belt, bulging … with the regulation supply of contraceptives”.111 Green is an obvious violation of her caste. Two things are basically wrong with these details if orthodoxy and consistency are to be features of the World State and of Huxley’s chosen satire. First, green clearly places Lenina outside the color codes of the caste system, the only character, other than the foreigner John, who is allowed this violation. Second, and more revealing, Lenina is not construed by Huxley as a rebel for wearing green even though her green wardrobe clearly marks her as being unorthodox. Lenina is, after all, either an Alpha (most likely) or a Beta and should be wearing gray or maroon. Deanna Madden asserts, without evidence, that Lenina is a Beta and implies that women cannot be Alphas: The caste of virtually every named female in the text remains highly indeterminate. There is a faint hint that the Solidarity Service [Chapter v, Part 2] involves only members of the same caste, but again the crucial evidence is absent from the pages, but one can infer, given the World State’s emphasis on sexual gratification, that the disastrous Cyprus experiment, described by Mustapha Mond to John, involving some twenty-two thousand Alphas had both male and female Alphas.112

110

Ibid., 75, 75, 71. Ibid., 59-60. 112 Deana Madden, “Woman in Dystopia: Misogyny in Brave New World, 1984, and A Clockwork Orange”, in Misogyny in Literature: An Essay Collection, ed. Katherine Anne Ackley, New York, 1991, 291. 111

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Lenina’s wardrobe of green, white (other than her at-work uniform), and pink directly interrogates the text in which it appears. Huxley’s text backs its reader into an uncomfortable corner in a number of ways. Either Lenina is as self-consciously a rebel against her benevolently totalitarian world as are the men but left undeveloped because Huxley could not conceive of a woman rebel, or Huxley allowed gross inconsistencies onto his pages which threaten the integrity of his closed system and the themes of his work. One may assume that Huxley was so involved in the 1930s search for a “good place” that his text escaped his control, possibly because he wrote it so quickly in the four months between April and August 1931. There some signs those readings of Lenina are changing. Approaching her from a very informed psychological angle, Peter Firchow has convincingly argued that Lenina “changes in the course of the novel into something quite different [and complex]. She changes because she falls in love.”113 He concludes that “as Lenina’s development in the novel indicates, it is possible, as it were, to scratch the plasticized ‘doll-like’ surface of a citizen – at least of an Alpha or Beta citizen – of the new world state and draw actual blood”.114 I certainly agree, but carry the argument further to say that she is the only genuine rebel of the World State. Lenina is also at odds with her world in other crucial areas, equally significant but not as equally noticeable to all those around her. She is warned, though, by friends that she is straying into dangerous unorthodoxies in her sexual habits. Lenina suffers from the desire to experience love for another and to be sexually monogamous with this being for some time – two tendencies that strike at the heart of prescribed sexual behavior in a society mandating promiscuity as a civic duty. After confiding to her friend Fanny that she “‘hadn’t been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately’”, Lenina is cautioned by Fanny that “‘You’re hopeless’”, and told “with dismal emphasis, ‘One of these days … you’ll get into trouble’”.115 Lenina has, after all, been dating Henry Foster for four months and blushes in defiance when telling Fanny, “‘No, there hasn’t been any one else .… And I jolly well don’t see why there should have been’.”116 113

Peter Firchow, Aldous Huxley: Satirist and Novelist, Minneapolis, MN, 1972, 147. Ibid., 148. 115 Huxley, Brave New World, 50, 56. 116 Ibid., 46. 114

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Lenina knows and knows well that she has consciously broken the regulation that “‘every one belongs to every one else’”.117 Lenina’s sexual rebellion poses as large a challenge to the text’s motifs as does her wardrobe; it is just a bit less visible to those around her. Just as she questions the codes of colors, she questions the codes of sexuality, and, in both instances, she escapes punishment or even official notice. She even ventures into heresies striking at the very basis of the caste system when she observes to Henry Foster, as they pass over the crematoria smokestacks, “‘queer that Alphas and Betas won’t make any more plants grow than those nasty little Gammas and Deltas and Epsilons down there’”.118 Indeed, she either escapes the notice of her superiors or eludes censure because she is so desirably and “wonderfully pneumatic”.119 Rather than confronting, developing, and enabling her rebellion – so less shrill and programmatic than those of Bernard and John and also so much more successful at times – Huxley’s text takes revenge on her and virtually humiliates her back into the confines of its systems. It is a mean-spirited revenge, one which callously violates her characterization in the early chapters. Suddenly in Chapter Six, Part I, Lenina becomes nothing more than a mouthpiece to play the most conventional platitudes off against Bernard’s adolescent attempts to shock her. Indeed, Theodor Adorno asserts that “each of her gestures … is socially preformed, part of a conventional ritual” (Adorno mistakes many other things about Lenina, writing, for instance that she is “a well-groomed and polished American career woman”120). After John the Savage enters the text, Lenina becomes but one more Huxleyian sexual predator. Like Myra Viveash and Lucy Tantamount, Lenina becomes obsessed with achieving sexual victory. At Malpais, Lenina so brazenly apprises John’s “really beautiful body” that he blushes and “dropped his eyes”, and when her “zippicamiknicks” drop to the floor in a later scene, John “retreat[s] in terror, flapping his hands at her as though he were trying to scare away some intruding and dangerous animal”.121 Near the end of the 117

Ibid., 50. Ibid., 87. 119 Ibid., 51. 120 Theodor W. Adorno, “Aldous Huxley and Utopia”, in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber, Cambridge, MA, 1981, 105. 121 Huxley, Brave New World, 137, 230, and 231. 118

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novel, the revenge becomes complete. A young woman – without question Lenina – “in green velveteen shorts, white shirt, and jockey cap” disembarks from a helicopter and approaches the abandoned lighthouse John has made his home.122 John begins to whip her, and we are to assume, I believe, that in the ensuing frenzy of the orgy, he either whips her to death and/or embraces her sexually or then kills her in disgust over his own actions. Lenina deserves better than this from Henry Forster, from Bernard Marx, from John, and especially from Aldous Huxley. As befits a Juvenalian satirist, indignantly, bitterly, misanthropically chastising his culture, Aldous Huxley’s characters often expresses outright disgust with the entire human species. In Antic Hay (1923), his second novel, an anonymous old man tells Theodore Gumbril, the protagonist, as they look at London’s suburban houses: “What disgusts me is the people inside the architecture. The numbers of them, sir. And the way they breed. Like maggots, sir, like maggots. Millions of them, creeping about the face of the country, spreading blight and dirt wherever they go; ruining everything.”123

He then forecasts that the world will soon become “‘a pretty sort of bear garden … a monkey house … a warthoggery’”.124 Five years later, this vision had deepened into the “modern Bestiary”, of parasitical animals in Point Counter Point (1928), who are “damned destroyed, irrevocably corrupted”.125 Here Spandrell complains to Mark Rampion that the beings around them are “ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other”,126 excellent metaphors for a satirist become fabulist. It is equally obvious, however, that Huxley reserved especial satiric bite for the female of the species, whose presence provokes even more heated rhetoric. In Antic Hay, for example, Mercaptan tells Myra Viveash, “‘ces femmes! They’re all Pasiphaes and Ledas. They all in their hearts prefer beasts to men, savages to civilised beings’”, 122

Ibid., 308. Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay, New York, 1990, 262. 124 Ibid., 264. 125 Huxley, Point Counter Point, 298, 57. 126 Ibid., 490. 123

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and the anonymous gentleman, looking after Myra as she walks down London’s King Street, acidly thinks: “Vicious young women. Lesbians, drug-fiends, nymphomaniacs, dipsos – thoroughly vicious, nowadays, thoroughly vicious.”127 Indeed, he is correct so far as the women in the world of Antic Hay go, because they are depicted as dangerous predators, ranging from the serpent-like Rosie Shearwater to the “sullen and ferocious” Zoe to the Sphinx-like, “bored” Myra who announces that “‘to-morrow … will be as awful as to-day’”.128 These women pale, though, when compared to Lucy Tantamount of Point Counter Point. Lucy, “the consummate flower of this charming civilization”, bluntly warns that she needs victims and more men than Philip Quarles describe her as a “man-eater” who wants “to be herself … ruthlessly having her fun”.129 These characterizations, misogynist as they are, certainly do not get in the way of Huxley’s Juvenalian vision, but they do hint a potential imbalance in this vision. This misogyny has not gone unremarked. In one of the more inclusive discussions, Milton Birnbaum notes that women in Huxley’s world “are seen chiefly in relationship to the males” and only “occupy a satellite position”.130 In her enlightening general discussion of misogyny in dystopian books, Deanna Madden concludes that Huxley’s “men [in Brave New World] have a spiritual dimension that the women lack … mired in the physical, the women interfere with or prevent the men from achieving spiritually” and that “Huxley’s misogyny has its obvious roots in a more general inability to accept the body”.131 As we can see, at least once in his career, misogyny disastrously impeded characterization, theme, and intention and virtually deconstructed his novel before the eyes of his readers. The inconsistencies of the caste discourse surrounding Lenina threaten to destabilize the text and to provide generic signals contrary to Huxley’s condemnation of the World State. The reader is emphatically encouraged to read against the grain of the book. At least twice in his lifetime, Huxley had occasion to reconsider Brave New World and to contemplate what he called “the artistic sins committed and 127

Huxley, Antic Hay, 121, 217. Ibid., 72, 350. 129 Huxley, Point Counter Point, 57, 136, 196, and 206. 130 Milton Birnbaum, Aldous Huxley’s Quest for Values, Knoxville, TN, 1971, 61. 131 Madden, “Woman in Dystopia”, 292, 296. 128

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bequeathed by that different person who was oneself in youth”,132 but neither time brought forth any observations about Lenina or women. He maintained silence on women and their roles in Brave New World and in the contemporary society which so troubled him, other than pointing out by quoting the Harvard Business Review, that the “ideal wife” for the “ideal man” must be “highly gregarious, infinitely adaptable and not merely resigned to the fact that her husband’s first loyalty is to the Corporation, but actively loyal on her own account”.133 Huxley steeps this sentence in considerable irony, because he goes on to observe that the ideal wife is much worse off than was Eve, but the rest of his discussion maintains a studied silence. To some extent, as Madden pointed out, Lenina is also a generic problem, one posed as such from the moment H.G. Wells introduced Weena into The Time Machine (1895), and the problem surfaces continually in futuristic fiction down to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) when Julia is largely dropped from the last sixty pages of the novel. Orwell, though, at least recognized that sexual expression and activity could be acts of rebellion. After having sex with Julia in the “Golden Country”, Winston Smith is elated, thinking … their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.134

Not so with Huxley. I believe he was so blinded by his misogyny that, as he wrote Brave New World, he created a character at odds with the text who resisted fitting comfortably into the caste fable of the text and being shaped by the ideas of the text, so much so that an attentive reader realizes that the urgencies of satire ask us to brush by the paradoxes through which Lenina so threatens the text. Lenina’s bottlegreen jacket may not shake the World State, but it certainly does threaten Huxley’s caste system. It provides an escape Huxley did not see possible in the Indian caste system.

132

Huxley, Brave New World, vii. Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 25. 134 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four, New York, 1981, 105. 133

CHAPTER THREE THE DANGERS OF FORD AND FREUD

The most ironic moment during Huxley’s travels came when he was almost exactly opposite the British Isles on the globe and when he was deepest in what his contemporaries would have called the least civilized part of the world. Huxley was sailing along the northwest coast of Sarawak and Borneo (now Kalimantan), reading Henry Ford’s autobiography and hoping to encounter a headhunter. The synonyms for industrial technology and material success and the primeval shedder of human blood with Stone Age weapons confronted one another in Huxley’s mind. Without doubt, he would have regarded Ford as the more dangerous man. In 1926, virtually any British or American citizen could have attended a circus or a sideshow carnival and have seen a “Wild Man of Borneo” exhibited as an example of the utter primitiveness of parts of the world, and in any of the world exhibitions or World’s Fairs held between 1875 and 1925, promoters made certain to include native peoples from North America, South America, Africa, and Asia to illustrate the gaps between cultures. At the same time, people arriving at the circus, carnival, or exhibition were probably transported in part by vehicles reflecting Ford’s conception of progress and riding on highways made possible by the automobile’s impact on society. The exotic, dangerous, primitive world jarred against the technological, scientific, modern world in ways that they would again in the juxtaposition of the Savage Reservation and the World State. A Dayak village and a Detroit factory looked at one another briefly in Huxley’s mind. In mid-December 1925 while still in northwest India, Huxley shared with Lewis Gielgud his reading of colonials settled in Southeast Asia, telling him that:

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Huxley was echoing the colonial paradox so many travelers had observed: that the colonial experience might enrich one financially but it would also challenge and test one’s physical being, intellectual being, and moral being. The colonial was endangered from many angles. As tourists, the Huxleys were never in any particular danger in India, because they were usually in the company of Indian hosts, Indian politicians, or Indian guides, but a tally of the number of English officials murdered in the 1920s indicates that being English, and being as physically conspicuous as Huxley was, did not protect one. Leaving India, though, brought Huxley into the most dangerous leg of his journey, because the headhunter was no exaggeration at the time. In 1926, the Dutch East Indies apart from Java simply were not particularly safe for European tourists. Yet today, guidebooks to the areas now known as Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia still carry numerous warnings about diseases, iffy transportation, political unrest, religious customs, and terrorist activities. The respected Lonely Planet guide to Indonesia, for example, contains a lengthy description of the medical kit one should carry, a frank description of diseases and their treatments, warnings about political strife, local scams, and drugs, and other problems.2 It is scarcely reassuring to find notes that “snake bites do not cause instantaneous death and antivenins are usually available”, a warning not to swim anywhere in Kalimantan’s national parks, because though “it may be tempting to take a dip to cool off … there are plenty of crocodiles lurking in the murky waters”, and a friendly reminder that “most volcanoes in Indonesia are safe for trekking [but] there are several that have been erupting almost continuously for the past several years”.3 In other words, inherent dangers lurk in the flora, fauna, sea creatures, topographical features, and even in some of the peoples. 1

Huxley, Letters, 261. Patrick Witton, Mark Elliott, Paul Greenway, Virginia Jealous, Etian O’Carroll, Nick Ray, Alan Tarbell, and Matt Warren, Indonesia, 7th edn, Melbourne, 1986, 21, 81-91, 94-95. 3 Ibid., 694, 170 (emphases added). 2

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Today one may spend the night in a Dayak long-house, sample Dayak cooking, admire the richly complex Dayak tattoos, and be ferried up and down the rivers in a Dayak prau while in Kalimantan. In 1926, however, the Dayak were believed by the Dutch still to be headhunters. Huxley himself had a frightening encounter with East Indies violence while in Borneo when a crewmember on the ship ran amok, threatening the safety of crew and passengers alike. Indeed, the areas of the Malacca Straits, South China Sea, and Java Sea are surprisingly even more dangerous for seafarers today than they were when Huxley sailed from Singapore to the Philippines, because piracy has increased alarmingly. Piracy on oil tankers and passenger ships has made the Malacca Straits “some of the most pirated waters in the World”.4 John Burnett, whose sailboat was hijacked, reminds his readers that the Malacca Straits, “the world’s most conjested channel, cuts through the heart of political and religious unrest”, probably more volatile than in Conrad’s day.5 Sailing from Singapore, Huxley entered the world Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham had defined and depicted for the English – a world of corrupted men. In Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Lord Jim (1900), Victory (1915), and numerous short stories, Conrad gave his readers a series of men, examples of colonial corruption like the men Huxley met in India, who failed the challenges thrown their way by the East Indies land and its peoples. Kaspar Almayer, Willems, Jim, and Axel Heyst in various ways fell victim to the demands of the frontier. Drawing on his four visits to Borneo and his acquaintance with an actual Charles Olmeijer, Conrad gave his readers a man born in Java to a Dutch couple and launched on his way in business and trade in Macassar. However, he is a deeply flawed man, believing that he is racially superior, culturally superior, and even intellectually superior to the native population of the islands and, worse, that fortune will simply fall into his hands because he is white. Full of self-delusions, he marries a native girl adopted by a famous seaman thinking marriage will enable him to inherit wealth and property. During the wedding, he is not contemplating sex or love, but is “concocting plans for getting rid of the pretty Malay girl in a

4

John S. Burnett, Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas, New York, 2002, 11. 5 Ibid., 286.

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more or less distant future”.6 After all, he thinks, “she may mercifully die. He was always lucky! and money is powerful!”7 Trapped in a competitive trade war involving religious, economic, and racial tensions, Almayer is simply no match for his native wife who burns their house’s furniture, conducts an affair with a Rajah, and plots an alternative future for her daughter. Nor is he a match for Borneo’s natural features of the river and the jungle which are presented in pure deterministic and Darwinian terms: … the intense work of tropical nature went on, plants shooting upward, entwined, interlaced in inextricable confusion, climbing madly and brutally over each other in the terrible silence of a desperate struggle towards the life-giving sunshine above – as if struck with sudden horror at the seething mass of corruption below, at the death and decay from which they sprang.8

This land and its peoples have consumed him. W. Somerset Maugham picked up these exact strains of thought and character in numerous short stories and novels such as The Painted Veil (1925) and The Narrow Corner (1932). Maugham’s “Footprint in the Jungle” is a virtual transcript from observation. Maugham said he “can hardly claim the authorship of, for it was told me word for word one evening in a club in one of the towns of the Federated Malay States”.9 In the story, a successful plantation owner is murdered by a shotgun blast to the head while bicycling through the jungle with the payroll for his workers. Some years later, his watch and a decaying bag of money are found. The police agent, Mr Gaze, knows that Theo Cartwright, the plantation owner’s friend and now husband of the widow, has committed the murder because he and the wife were having an affair and she was pregnant by him. Tanah Merah, the small town in which the action occurs, may be charming and agreeable, but its English are so isolated and in such a minority, they feel crimes can be committed with absolute impunity. When the

6 Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly, eds David Leon Higdon and Floyd Eugene Eddleman, Cambridge, 1994, 19. 7 Ibid., 10. 8 Ibid., 55. 9 W. Somerset Maugham, quoted in Ted Morgan, Maugham: A Biography, New York, 1980, 252.

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narrator objects that the Cartwrights cannot be “very nice people”, Gaze responds: “That’s where you’re wrong. They are very nice people; they’re about the pleasantest people here .… If you’d been a policeman as long as I have, you’d know it’s not what people do that really matters, it’s what they are.”10

The Conrad and Maugham characters were morally flawed, placed on the frontier thousands of miles from England and “civilization”, and further isolated contextually by language, religion, economics, and politics: they felt there was no one to see or to know about their slips. After all, the English and Dutch communities in which they found themselves were so small that censure, much less punishment, was unlikely. These are fictional constructs, but Huxley had quite accurately assessed the colonial situation and saw that it was worse in the Indies than in India. Consider two actual events which convey the real mystery of the Indies. James Harrison Wilson Thompson arrived in Thailand as an OSS officer in 1945. Discharged, he returned to the United States in 1946, but fate had struck. He had become enchanted by Thailand, and when he returned to the country he had specific plans for transforming its silk industry, which had fallen on hard times. On Easter Sunday, March 27, 1967, while vacationing with friends in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, Thompson disappeared. That afternoon he apparently decided to take a walk while his hosts and the other guest napped. In doing so, he was ignoring virtually all the guidelines the Highlands Tourist Association gave to its visitors: “Never walk alone.” The area was quite dangerous, as he knew: the jungle was extremely dense, ravines were precipitous and unexpected, tigers had been sighted, and the hill tribesmen had been known to hunt nearby with poisoned darts. He was never seen again: no body or even signs of a body were ever located; no later sightings were ever confirmed. No one had seen him leave the cottage; no one had sighted him on his walk. He stepped into legend which soon spun out tales that he had been kidnapped by Malaysian insurgents or Cambodian rebels; that he had fled to China,

10

W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories, London, 1952, II, 395.

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Switzerland, Tahiti, or Singapore. His disappearance has still not been solved. A few years earlier, Michael Rockefeller disappeared into a similar mystery on the eastern edges of the Indies. An adventurous, ambitious young man, anxious to establish himself as an anthropologist, Rockefeller joined an expedition sponsored by the Peabody Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology to study Papua’s Dani tribe in the Baliem Valley of Irian Jaya. He would take over 3,500 photographs, act as a sound recordist for a documentary, and become infected with “the desire to do something adventurous”. In 1961, he returned to Irian Jaya with René Wassing to study and collect art from the Asmat tribes. Their dugout canoe was swamped some three miles from shore, and Rockefeller and Wassing stayed with the canoe while their local guides swam for help. Rockefeller decided “I think I can make it” to shore and began swimming. He was never seen again.11 As with Thompson, explanations are numerous. It has been suggested that he drowned, was killed by shark or crocodile attack, or – more exotically – made it to shore where the Asmat killed and possibly ate him. These two examples from the 1960s suggest strongly just how the Indies could have swallowed up Huxley as he made his way through the waters and islands of the area, especially during his visits to Borneo and Mindanao. Four years before Huxley’s visit to Borneo, Maugham visited the island where he stayed for several weeks and did visit a Dayak settlement. He found the same mix of incredible beauty and unexpected violence. So he describes the Sarawak River: The mouth is very broad. On each side are mangrove and nipah washed by the water and behind the dense green of the jungle, and in the distance, darkly silhouetted against the blue sky, the rugged outline of a mountain. You have no sense of gloom, or of being shut in, but of space and freedom. The green glitters in the sunshine and the sky is blithe and cheerful. One seems to enter upon a friendly, fertile land.12

However, he also senses what this beauty hides: 11

The Rockefeller mystery has generated short stories, films, and one general biography: see Milt Machlin, The Search for Michael Rockefeller, New York, 1972. 12 W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook, London, 1984, 183.

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On either bank the jungle spread densely, and under the full moon it was blacker than the night, silent with a silence in which was something ominous. You shuddered as you thought of the dark, violent things which its thick foliage shrouded. It seemed to wait expectantly.13

It was against such a backdrop in the East Indies that Huxley began to read and think about Henry Ford and to formulate the mysteries and dangers he posed for the world. Soon Huxley would realize that Henry Ford was far more dangerous to society than a headhunter. Huxley surely knew Ford by reputation before he took his 19251926 trip. Given his interest in automobiles, Huxley would have been aware that Ford’s Model T had sold millions – ten million by June 4, 1924. True, it was not Huxley’s Citroen or his Bugatti, but the Model T probably accounted for half the cars in the world in 1926. Huxley had the opportunity to come to know Ford in his own words as he sailed in 1926 between Singapore and the Philippines. In the ship’s library Huxley came across Ford’s My Life and Work (1922). This was a crucial moment in the eventual evolution of Brave New World because Ford would later crowd H.G. Wells out of Huxley’s novel. Huxley describes the encounter: Among the genuine books which I discovered imbedded in a ship’s library was Henry Ford’s My Life and Work. I had never read it; I began, and was fascinated. It is easy enough in a book to apply destructive common sense to the existing fabric of social organisation and then, with the aid of constructive common sense, to build up the scattered pieces into a more seemly whole. Unsystematically and in a small way I have done the thing myself. I know how easy it is. But when Ford started to apply common sense to the existing methods of industry and business he did it, not in a book, but in real life. It was only when he had smashed and rebuilt in practice that he decided to expound in a book the theory of his enormous success.14

The book was a jarring contrast to the spirituality he had found in India, but Huxley felt that Ford’s ideas would prove hopelessly and equally imperfect. While waiting for Mustapha Mond to appear in his

13 14

Ibid., 192. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 241.

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office, John, like Huxley, notices a book plainly and obviously exhibited: … a massive volume bound in limp black leather-surrogate, and stamped with large golden T’s. He picked it up and opened it. MY LIFE AND WORK, BY OUR FORD. The book had been published at Detroit by the Society for the Propagation of Fordian Knowledge.15

Huxley thus works Ford’s autobiography into the narration of his novel to individualize his attack on the consequences of Ford’s ideas. The book’s binding and its publisher’s name mirror the Bible and the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge. Huxley’s decision to make Ford, rather than Sigmund Freud or some easily recognized political leader, such a central figure in his dystopian novel may puzzle some readers. In the 1920s, though, Henry Ford was one of the world’s most successful, most recognized, and richest businessmen. He enjoyed a reputation as a forward thinking reformer, a humanitarian entrepreneur, a racially blind employer, and a virtual embodiment of the Protestant ethic as defined by Max Weber. He was a folk hero to many Americans and a living example of the American dream. An early champion of what we now call “globalism”, he had established plants throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia, beginning with Great Britain and Canada in 1911, Germany, Australia, India, France and even the Soviet Union in the 1920s. In Detroit, he raised wages to twice the going rate, established a forty-hour work week, created a model plant in which raw materials were turned into an automobile, and founded English Schools to “Americanize” his immigrant workers. He fully understood the forces necessary to drive a consumer society and with his Model T and later the Model A transformed many social practices. He also championed a peaceful society, which he felt could be created by trade and technology. Even Reinhold Niebuhr, who was to become a dominant voice in Christian theology, wrote that “Henry Ford is America … the hero of the average American … the symbol of an America which has risen almost in a generation from an agrarian to an industrial economic order”.16 With all these accomplishments, why would 15

Huxley, Brave New World, 261. Reinhold Niebuhr, quoted in Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century, New York, 2005, 253-54. 16

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Huxley have selected Ford as one of the two founding fathers of the World State? The answer comes quickly: there was another and a darker Henry Ford. Born in 1863 to a Michigan farm couple, Ford left the farm in 1879 for Detroit to work as an apprentice and then moved on to Westinghouse and the Edison Illuminating Company, before founding the first of several automobile companies. He offered the consumer the Model T in the fall of 1908 and his product met amazing, immediate success. When he died, he was worth billions. In addition to the Model T and the private fortune, though, Ford brought to fruition a new consumer society with its concentration on materialism, the standardization of production through use of the assembly line, the disturbing drive for equal standardization of the worker, the complete dismissal of the past which can surely be seen as one more manifestation of the modernist gap or break, a gospel of technology, and an arrogant dismissal of power structures outside his own. Most of his decisions did benefit his workers, but most of all they benefited Henry Ford. Huxley saw in Ford the champion of trends he felt would constrain, if not destroy, the individual and create a world utterly hostile to diversity. Ironically, despite his bitter critique of Ford in Brave New World, Huxley’s first major purchase when he arrived in New York in 1937 was a Ford car, which Maria then drove cross-country to Taos, New Mexico, and seven months later on to California.17 This was not, however, a sign that Huxley had changed his opinion of Henry Ford’s ideas and practices he so skillfully satirizes in Brave New World. During the last several decades, the issue of the relationship between Ford and Huxley has been considered from several angles. In 1979, Jerome Meckier called attention to the complex responses of Huxley to Ford’s My Life and Work, a clear necessity for seeing precisely how Huxley’s critique was grounded. In 1986, James Sexton innovatively explored what he called “the rationalization of industry that set Berdyaev, Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor”, and Huxley against developments in industries in the 1920s and 1930s.18 More recently, 17

See Huxley, Letters, 425. See Jerome Meckier, “Debunking Our Ford: My Life and Work and Brave New World”, South Atlantic Quarterly, LXXXVIII (1979), 448-55; and James Sexton, “Brave New World and the Rationalization of Industry”, English Studies in Canada, XII (1986), 424-36.

18

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Robert Baker offered a succinct discussion with numerous examples of Ford’s faulty handling of employees but somewhat limited his discussion to the first two chapters of Huxley’s novel. A valuable contribution in his discussion is his reminder that numerous other writers were also taking negative measures of Ford and his Company, men such as Garet Garrett, R.M. Fox, and S.D. Schmalhausen, who called Ford “a ‘remarkable defective’ best regarded as ‘the Mussolini of American Business’”.19 Anti-Ford comments are sprinkled throughout Huxley’s writings long before Brave New World. In 1925 in Along the Road, Huxley comments on “mechanical progress”: It is in the civilized countries, where human beings eat most and take least exercise, that cancer is most prevalent. The disease spreads with every fresh expansion of Henry Ford’s factories.20

Four years later in 1929 in Do What You Will, he had already begun to shape a defined age to be burdened with the name of Ford: But in any case it is not loneliness that oppresses the equatorial traveller: it is too much company; it is the uneasy feeling that he is an alien in the midst of an innumerable throng of hostile beings. To us who live beneath a temperate sky and in the age of Henry Ford, the worship of Nature comes almost naturally.21

“History is bunk.” This is the sentence, whether actually uttered by Henry Ford or spawned by a reporter, by which Western civilization remembers Henry Ford.22 To Mustapha Mond, it is “that beautiful and

19

Quoted in Robert S. Baker, Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia, Boston, 1990, 86. 20 Huxley, Along the Road, 30. 21 Huxley, Do What You Will, 115. 22 Exactly how Ford phrased his comment is the subject of debate. It is generally agreed that a reporter asked him what he thought about Bismarck, and Ford replied: “Bismarck, Bismarck? I guess that is a matter of history. I don’t know much about that. I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is work a tinker’s damn is the history we make today” (quoted in Jonathan Norton Leonard, The Tragedy of Henry Ford, New York, 1932, 140).

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inspired saying of Our Ford’s”.23 In the essay, “On the Charms of History and the Future of the Past” in Music at Night, Huxley confronts the “bunk” comment directly: … if Mr. Ford is right, we are all interested in bunk. Is he right? Up to a point, I think, he is. For most of what passes for history is really perfectly insignificant and trivial.24

The rest of his essay is devoted to defining what history is and what role it plays in relationship to the future, items Ford did not consider. Huxley sketches a number of Ford’s positions, commenting: The Saint of the new dispensation has no choice but to hate history. And not history only. If he is logical he must hate literature, philosophy, pure science, the arts – all the mental activities that distract mankind from an inquisitive interest in objects. 25

Henry Ford struck Aldous Huxley and many of Huxley’s contemporaries as a living contradiction on virtually all counts. Later biographers of Ford have fully agreed. Duncan MacLeod writes: An enigmatic character, Ford coupled ruthlessness in business with a gentle and loving marriage; anti-Semitism with liberal employment practices with respect to black people; a commitment to high wages with hostility towards unions and their practices; a hostility to tradition … with the founding of a major museum of Americana.26

And Peter Collier and David Horowitz divided their biography into a contrast between “Crazy Henry” and idealistic Henry. They commented, “Perhaps Henry Ford was two people: one generous and optimistic, the other paranoid and intolerant; one a caring and successful industrialist and the other an ignorant and powerful dreamer”.27 Such contradictions inform his entire life.

23

Huxley, Brave New World, 38. Huxley, Music at Night, 119. 25 Ibid., 123. 26 Duncan MacLeod, “Henry Ford”, in Makers of Modern Culture, ed. Justin Wintle New York, 1981, 171. 27 Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Fords: An American Epic, New York, 1987, 96. 24

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He may have said “history is bunk”, but late in life he founded the Henry Ford Museum, reconstructed a rural town as a theme park, and acquired a very large collection of American antiques and artifacts to furnish it. He may have become a billionaire, but he distrusted, even detested banks, bankers, stockbrokers, and all institutions of wealth and credit. He became the only American favorably mentioned in Hitler’s Mein Kampf and investigated by the government for possible Nazi sympathies. He may have paid his workers more than twice the minimum wage, but he was reviled and hated by many of them, and his plants were once plagued by excessive worker turnover. He made possible increasing urbanization and mobility for the modernist age, yet he wished constantly to restore rural values and stability. He was widely recognized as a technological genius, yet he was responsible for no key invention and held only 161 patents, a small number compared to those held by Thomas Alva Edison, his close friend. He was a serious pre-election candidate for Senator in 1918 and President in 1924, yet he was dangerously ignorant on matters of history, diplomacy, and economics, even of the nation’s founding documents. He acquired the Detroit Independent and told Edwin Pipp, who was to be the paper’s first editor, “to try to make the world more kindly, to spread the gospel of tolerance”,28 but then turned the newspaper into a strident voice for anti-Semitism and reprinted as authentic the well-known forgery Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Ford may have championed the values of thrift and rural virtues, but his entire industry helped create the new society of consumerism. As Watts has pointed out: “as the ability to consume became the essence of Americanism, ownership of an automobile became the quintessence of consumption. In the hands of Ford and his associates, the Model T appeared as the most common symbol of a new age of material comfort.”29 Reacting against advice Benjamin Franklin had given Americans about money, Ford voiced a “gospel of spending”, because, as he said:

28

Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, New York, 2004, 71. Steven Watts, The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century, New York, 2005, 112.

29

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No successful boy ever saved any money. They spent it as fast as they could for things to improve themselves.30

If Huxley had wished to broaden his knowledge of Ford beyond Ford’s own writings, he could have read any of three biographies, each quite different in focus and tone. Charles Merz’s And Then Came Ford, an adulatory volume published in 1929 and Jonathan Norton Leonard’s The Tragedy of Henry Ford were available to the reading audience of the early 1930s, and they would have confirmed the paradoxical, contradictory nature of Ford. Two brief passages capture the tone and approach of Merz: “Jove himself, in all his legendary exploits, never performed a feat much more remarkable than producing a Ford coupé by hurling a bolt of thunder at a piece of tin”,31 and this led to even more worshipful flourishes in his closing paragraph: If this is a new America of towering wealth, here is a man who started with empty hands and amassed the greatest of all fortunes. If this is a new America which has achieved unity and like-mindedness, here is a man who has given it wheels on which to travel and so helped rid it of its last frontier. If this is a new America of vast energy and an indomitable will to go somewhere, here is a man who has broadened the orbit of its interests, defied its precedents, challenged its history, collected its antiques, enriched its folklore and remade its legends.32

A stirring bit of rhetoric and true in many ways. But Leonard, much more closely aligned with Huxley’s perspective, opens his biography with an equally rhetorical disclaimer: Before he goes any further the author of this book has a confession to make. He started to write it in a fine fury of indignation. He had seen the Ford factory, the workmen with their dull eyes, their rapid dull hands, obeying their mechanical drill masters as slavishly as if they were valve-stems yielding to the superior force of the cam-shaft. He had heard about the horrors of life under the ten-acre roofs of River Rouge. He had heard about Ford’s cruelty, his insensitivity, his intolerance, his hatred of everything related to beauty, freedom, and human dignity. He had observed his maniacal attacks on the Jews, his 30

Ibid., 118. Charles Merz, And Then Came Ford, Garden City, NY, 1929, 320-21. 32 Ibid., 76. 31

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Wandering into Brave New World destructive contempt for all those regions of human life which lay outside his own narrow experience …. ‘Surely,’ he thought, ‘here is the evil genius of twentieth century America … all the symptoms of that haloed greed which is the motive power of America’s religion of business.’33

Researching and writing the biography led him to qualify these opinions, but not to change them significantly. At one point he places Ford in the tradition of Torquemada, John Calvin, and Oliver Cromwell.34 It is unlikely that Huxley could have found a copy of the third biography, Samuel S. Marquis’ Henry Ford: An Interpretation, because this highly critical 1923 biography disappeared from American bookshelves rather quickly. It is known that Clara Ford, Henry’s wife, inquired at one time as to the possibility of buying the entire print run.35 If Huxley had actually made Ford a living character in his novel, he would probably have placed him midway between the two extremes. However, by keeping him the far-distant founding father of the World State, many of the excesses can be attributed to his followers. In either case, what his followers have made of “Our Ford” is much more attractive than the actual Ford whose factories refused to employ married women whose husbands also worked, provided stimulant pills next to the water fountains to keep up energy levels, pried into the workers’ private lives to make certain that their wages were being spent “wholesomely”, and seemed unwilling or unable to understand why he was considered a major enemy of the American Jewish community. Virtually any reader will find Ford’s “autobiography” so peculiar as to be considered eccentric. It more resembles a self-help book than a genuine autobiography. It simply does not belong on the shelves with such important works as John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (1873), George Moore’s Confession of a Young Man (1888), much less the T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) or Robert 33

Leonard, The Tragedy of Henry Ford, 11. The fullest and fairest discussion of Ford’s anti-Semitism and its consequences is Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews, which lays bare Ford’s naiveté, ignorance, and insensitivity to history in being willing to accept Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic document. 35 Douglas Brinkley, Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, New York, 2003, 279. 34

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Graves’ Good-Bye to All That (1927). The work, co-written with Samuel Crowther, is surely one of the strangest American autobiographies, because it shows virtually no interest in its individual subject. Ford and Crowther assume that Ford himself should remain private, secret, utterly unglimpsed. Huxley would have found out very little about Ford himself, because he does not provide the names or backgrounds of his parents; he nowhere mentions his seven siblings, a crucial point in ambition theory; he basically skips over his formative years of childhood and adolescence. Ford never allows the reader to glimpse an emotion other than muted glee at outwitting” lawyers and bankers. Ford never mentions his wife’s name, and he seems to have no friends or acquaintances. He never mentions another man unless he has something to do with the Ford Company. Ford knows success only in terms of time and money. Ford remains virtually silent on his senatorial and political ambitions. Other than its frontispiece photograph of Ford, the book’s photographs are of the engine assembly line, the Model Ts rolling off the end of the assembly line, and aerial shots of the River Rouge and Highland Park plants – items far more significant to the authors than any individual human being. If one looks to literature to find the predecessor of Henry Ford, one need look no further than Charles Dickens’ Thomas Gradgrind, that committed man of facts taught a severe lesson in Hard Times. Huxley would certainly have seen the connection. Consider Ford’s comment near the end of his book and notice the Gradgrindism behind it: Thinking of service, we shall not bother about good feeling in industry or life; we shall not bother about masses and classes, or closed and open shops, and such matters as have nothing at all to do with the real business of living. We can get down to facts. We stand in need of facts.36

One can sense the opening paragraph of Hard Times behind every word of Ford: “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out 36

Henry Ford, with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work, New York, 1922, 113.

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Wandering into Brave New World everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”37

The chapter titles show that the real focus of the book is advice on running a business, and its somewhat Emersonian essays on selfsufficiency eventually become mere sloganeering. “What I Learned about Business”, “Starting the Real Business”, “The Secret of Manufacturing and Serving”, and “Getting into Production” suggest that his book is something of a self-help volume, while “Why Not Always Have Good Business?”, “Money – Master or Servant?”, and “Why Be Poor?” address more general, more philosophical issues. Throughout run Ford’s distrust and dislike of bankers, stockbrokers, and lawyers, his naïve misunderstandings of the money industry, his ingrained feeling that anything not of immediate use is merely waste, his anti-urban bias, and his conclusion that government simply impedes business by not understanding business. Only once does the reader glimpse a human Ford – when he talks briefly about birdwatching. Ford and his Company appeared to be more humanitarian and certainly further advanced than the robber barons and exploiters of an earlier generation. His idealism had been fully recognized though his involvement in the Peace Ship incident of 1915 brought puzzled admiration but also considerable ridicule. Ford offered his workers an attractive package: wages twice as high as the going rate, opportunities for physically disabled employees, a consistent work year with no seasonal fluctuations or layoffs, a democratic shop floor with lack of titles, pride in a product that was reaching a large audience rather than only the very wealthy few, easy communication with superiors, “a clean, well-lighted and well-ventilated factory”,38 a safe working environment, a generous profit-sharing program, a trade school for teenagers, and a hospital. “I am for the kind of democracy”, Ford affirmed, “that gives to each an equal chance according to his ability”.39 Each benefit, however, had its dark side. The men could not unionize; they had to be “American” in both spirit and fact;40 there 37 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, eds George Ford and Sylvère Monod, 2nd edn, New York, 1990, 253. 38 Ford, My Life and Work, 113. 39 Ibid., 253. 40 Leonard records that the Company dismissed some eight-hundred eastern European workers because they took off for an Orthodox holiday, but I was unable to verify this

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was little chance for advancement; the assembly line standardized the men; the constant emphasis on speed and time reduced the men to cogs in an enormous asocial machine; and, always in the background, stood Ford’s ruthless business practices and irrational prejudices. His employees understood that Ford was against many practices of the common man. He was a staunch prohibitionist and published a pamphlet, “The Case Against the Little White Slaver”, to try to convince men to stop smoking. The pamphlet spoke in blunt economic terms: “the boy who is not addicted to the use of cigarettes will return larger dividends on the investment both to himself and his employer.”41 Huxley would have been particularly interested in the practical aspects and theoretical implications of the assembly line – which he duplicates in Brave New World – Ford’s pursuit of standardization, and his attitude towards his workers. Ford tells his readers that he got the idea for the assembly line from thinking about the processing of cattle carcasses in Chicago’s meat packing industry.42 No single crew of men was responsible for turning the animal into packages of meat for consumers, a hide to be processed into leather, bones and hooves to be turned into glue. Rather, the animal moved by means of overhead trolleys from the killing station through various other stations where individual butchers processed specific parts of the carcass. But there was one highly significant difference: the butchers started with a whole and gradually reduced it to parts; Ford needed to reverse the process and move from parts added to create to a whole. The reversal may have been the brightest contribution he made to his in Brinkley, Wheels for the World, or Collier and Horowitz, The Fords. The conflict apparently involved the differences between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars. 41 Watts, The People’s Tycoon, 309. 42 Brinkley, Wheels for the World, 152, points out that the contractors building the Great Pyramid of Cheops had the basic idea of the assembly line and that the Arsenal shipyard in Venice in the fifteenth century was “using a fully developed assembly line, [and] could outfit the empty shell of a warship in a matter of minutes, largely with materiel made on the premises”. These instances would not have been known by Ford. Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, 63, note that “as far back as 1908 Sorensen and some co-workers at the Piquette plant had gotten the idea of pulling a chassis by a rope past laborers at their work stations …. And although Ford himself later claimed authorship of the assembly line that was installed there at [the Highland Park plant], saying the concept first occurred to him when he went to a watch plant and saw a staged assembly process, it was actually the hard-driving Sorensen – archetype of the auto industry plant superintendent – who implemented this innovation.”

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industry. In employing his idea, Ford was constantly reaching for ways to get the most productivity from the fewest necessary workers and in the least amount of time, all of which would lead directly to Charlie Chaplin’s satire in Modern Times (1936). The following are typical expressions of Ford’s self-celebration of victories of the clock over the workers: The former record for twenty-eight men was one hundred seventy-five assemblies a day. Now seven men turn out twenty-six hundred assemblies in eight hours.43

Ford fully outlines the principles of his assembly line for his readers thus: Place the tools and the men in the sequence of the operation so that each component part shall travel the least possible distance while in the process of finishing. (2) Use work slides or some other form of carrier so that when a workman completes his operation, he drops always the part always in the same place – which place must always be the most convenient place to his hand – and if possible have gravity carry the part to the next workman for his operation. (3) Use sliding assembling lines by which the parts to be assembled are delivered at convenient distances.44

The result of all this can be perceived at the human level as alienation and specialization. Ford himself admits that: Some men do only one or two small operations, others do more. The man who places a part does not fasten it – the part may not be fully in place until after several operations later. The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut; the man who puts on the nut does not tighten it.45

And that: Probably the most monotonous task in the whole factory is one in which a man picks up a gear with a steel hook, shakes it in a vat of oil, then turns it into a basket. The motion never varies. The gears come to 43

Ford, My Life and Work, 89. Ibid., 89. 45 Ibid., 83. 44

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him always in exactly the same place, he gives each one the same number of shakes, and he drops it into a basket which is always in the same place. No muscular energy is required, no intelligence is required.46

Leonard comments with some sarcasm that Ford “had standardized his cars until number 384,536 could be swapped for number 483,974 in the dead of night and the owner would never know the difference. Now he proposed to standardize his men.”47 Baker notes that Ford was known as “the Speed-up King”.48 Huxley’s hostilities may have been further aroused by knowledge that Ford had purchased a large tract of land in Dagenham in east London in 1930 with plans for building a plant there in 1931. Reading a description of the assembly line in Ford’s Highland Park factory reminds one of the efficiency and specialization that went into the creation of a Model and satirized by Huxley. Steven Watts gives a very succinct description of the very complex process: In the subassembly of various components, for instance, such as the engine or the rear axle, workers labored at stations where they were provided easily accessible bins filled with appropriate parts for the task at hand. Then, in the general assembly of the Model T, a lineproduction system held sway: a skeletal chassis was placed upon a stand, or ‘horse’, as teams of workers, each specializing in a specific task, added sections of the car. Supplied with the necessary components, these teams followed one another sequentially, moving from horse to horse, until the automobiles began to emerge. When the wheels had gone on the car, it would be rolled along from station to station until its completion. The smooth operation of this system demanded the timely delivery of parts and the careful orchestration of assembly teams.49

“‘System, system, system!’” was the accurate conclusion of a reporter for the Detroit Journal.50 Only if an assembly man forgot a step, as does Lenina when she fails to vaccinate an Alpha embryo for sleeping sickness, would the car be compromised in any way. 46

Ibid., 106. Leonard, The Tragedy of Henry Ford, 115. 48 Baker, Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia, 84. 49 Watts, The People’s Tycoon, 139. 50 Ibid., 139. 47

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Huxley’s “assembly line” follows Ford’s principles with an exactness which would have made him proud: On a very slowly moving band a rack-full of test-tubes was entering a large metal box, another rack-full was emerging. Machinery faintly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through.51

As well as in his description of the workers’ operations: Flaps of fresh sow’s peritoneum ready cut to the proper size came shooting up in little lifts from the Organ Store in the sub-basement. Whizz and then, click! the lift-hatches flew open; the bottle-liner had only to reach out a hand, take the flap, insert, smooth-down, and before the lined bottle had had time to travel out of reach along the endless band, whiz, click! another flap of peritoneum had shot up from the depths, ready to be slipped into yet another bottle, the next of that slow interminable procession on the band.52

And even more tellingly, Each bottle could be placed on one of fifteen racks, each rack, though you couldn’t see it, was a conveyor traveling at the rate of thirty-three and a third centimeters an hour. Two hundred and sixty-seven days at eight metres a day. Two thousand one hundred and thirty-six metres in all. One circuit of the cellar at ground level, one on the first gallery, half on the second, and on the two hundred and sixty-seventh morning, daylight in the Decanting Room. Independent existence – so called.53

As Henry Foster shepherds the trainees along, he calls attention to various key points such as Meter 112 (artificial maternal circulation), Meter 200 (test for sex), Meter 320 (the blood-surrogate pump). Although the contexts differ significantly, Huxley had sketched out the assembly-line production of human beings eleven years earlier in Crome Yellow when Mr Scogan tells the guests that: … our descendants will experiment and succeed. An impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system. In vast state 51

Huxley, Brave New World, 5. Ibid., 9. 53 Ibid., 11-12. 52

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incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear ... and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.54

One can see just how Ford’s specialization, as well as Josef Stalin’s collectivization, and John Broadus Watson’s behaviorism were fusing to create what Huxley would depict as the least desirable aspects of his dystopia. (Stalin and Watson are discussed in Chapter Six.) The assembly line can only work if specialization in small tasks is introduced. On this both Ford and Huxley agree, and specialization becomes a key focal point for critics of the system. The points critics frequently raised are the alienation and dehumanization resulting from asking a worker to engage in these repetitive simple tasks for eight hours a day. Ford’s system broke the craftsman tradition and thoroughly standardized and mechanized the manufacturing process; the modernization of industry led directly to an increased sense of alienation among the work force. Specialization became intense as Ford deconstructed each task. As he said some of his workers, “do only one or two small operations, others do more. The man who places a part does not fasten it – the part may not be fully in place until after several operations later”,55 and he further explains, objecting to criticism with his habitual anti-intellectual hostility: I have been told by parlour experts that repetitive labour is soul – as well as body-destroying, but that has not been the result of our investigations. There was one case of a man who all day long did little but step on a treadle release .... It would seem reasonable to imagine that going through the same set of motions daily for eight hours would produce an abnormal body, but we have never had a case of it.56

This passage also lets one see that Ford was intensely anti-intellectual. He was also resistant to change and refused to retire the Model T until his son and the Board of Directors virtually forced him to in 1927, at which time General Motors was edging ahead of Ford in sales. Huxley describes similar specialization in the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. At Meter 150, Lenina seems to do 54

Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow, New York, 1939, 22. Ford, My Life and Work, 83. 56 Ibid., 103. 55

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nothing but inoculate embryos against tropical diseases,57 and Epsilons seem to exist only to handle repetitive tasks – think of the elevator operator who manages to glimpse forbidden sunshine for a moment. Ford fully understood the attractions of the Epsilon personality, because a number of times he emphasizes that many Ford workers do not need active minds: “the remaining 95 per cent. are unskilled, or to put it more accurately, must be skilled in exactly one operation which the most stupid man can learn within two days”,58 and he elsewhere notes that: … to some types of mind thought is absolutely appalling. To them the ideal job is one where the creative instinct need not be expressed .… The average worker, I am sorry to say, wants a job in which he does not have to put forth much physical exertion – above all, he wants a job in which he does not have to think.59

In one of his most pointed attacks on standardization, Huxley tellingly damns this type of worker and his employer in one nightmarish scene of the workers in the Electrical Equipment Corporation, that is shown to John by the Human Element Manager. In the plant “eighty-three almost noseless black brachycephalic Deltas were cold-pressing”, fifty-six “aquiline and ginger Gammas” are manipulating “fifty-six four-spindle chucking and turning machines”, one-hundred-seven “heat-conditioned Epsilon Senegalese” are working the foundry, thirty-three Delta “females, long-headed, sandy, with narrow pelvises” are cutting screws, and two sets of Gamma-Plus dwarfs are assembling the parts. A conveyor belt runs between tables where “the completed mechanisms were inspected by eighteen identical curly auburn girls in Gamma green, packed in crates by thirty-four short-legged, left-handed male Delta-Minuses, and loaded into the waiting trucks and lorries by sixty-three blue-eyed, flaxen and freckled Epsilon Semi-Morons”.60 Huxley did not need to fantasize

57

Huxley, Brave New World, 18, 223. Ford, My Life and Work, 87. 59 Ibid., 103. 60 Huxley, Brave New World, 190. There is absolutely no reason why Huxley should have been consistent in his numbers, but the uneven numbers raise questions about what happened to create these uneven numbers of the various castes at work here. The Bokanovsky process should have generated only even numbers. 58

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the scene, because in 1931 he witnessed just such working conditions in the Joseph Lucas Plant in Birmingham: Each girl had her special function – to insert a rod, to tighten so many screws, to make fast certain wires. When the last girl had done her job, yet another magneto was ready to be fitted to yet another car.61

And the manager justifies the conditions in Fordian terms of time, expense, and minimal brain power: Girls … are much more efficient on this sort of job than men. Greatly to their credit, as I conceive, men get very bored with such fiddling repetitive work, and so do it badly. Girls cost less and do the job better.62

Here is Ford’s standardization of the workmen become surrealistic nightmare. And Ford did wish extensive standardization of his workers; he wished them to be as standardized as the machines with which they worked. He brags in the Introduction to his book that he has conquered Nature: “No two things in nature are alike. We build our cars absolutely interchangeable”, and earlier regrets that “most certainly all men are not equals, and any democratic group which strives to make men equal is only an effort to block progress”.63 In 1914, Julian Street toured Ford’s Highland Park plant and later recounted his impressions in Abroad at Home. Viewing the factory as a kind of Hell portrayed by Gustave Doré, he describes what he saw thus: … the whole room, with its interminable aisles, its whirling shafts and wheels, its forest of roof-supporting posts and flapping, flying, leather belting, its endless rows of writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell of oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population – to my mind it expressed one thing and that was delirium.64

61

Huxley, The Hidden Huxley, 74. Ibid., 74. 63 Ford, My Life and Work, 11, 10. 64 Julian Street, quoted in Brinkley, Wheels for the World, 155. 62

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From the first, Ford’s company had difficulty retaining its employees in these contexts. Collier and Horowitz estimate that the company hired 963 workers for each 200 retained in 1913, “thus losing $3 million a year solely because of worker defections”.65 Brinkley reports that during 1912-1913, “absenteeism at Highland Park reached 10 percent a day and the annual turnover rate hit 380 percent”.66 Ford himself reports the problems faced in 1914: “when the first plan went into effect [the $5 a day wage] we had 14,000 employees and it had been necessary to hire at the rate of about 53,000 a year in order to keep a constant force of 14,000. In 1915 we had to hire only 6,508 men and the majority of these new men were taken on because of the growth of the business.”67 Throughout his autobiography, Ford maintains he is and others would be driven by the idea of service. This eventually becomes his utopian vision. His sense of service, though, is fueled by the material fact of money: “All that the Ford industries have done – all that I have done – is to endeavour to evidence by works that service comes before profit and that the sort of business which makes the world better for its presence is a noble profession.” This becomes a statement that we can labor and produce enough for all, “that regardless of the frailties of human nature, our economic system can be so adjusted that selfishness, although perhaps not abolished, can be robbed of power to work serious economic injustice”.68 The Social Welfare Department of Ford Motor Company was “exercising the necessary vigilance to prevent, as far as possible, human frailty from falling into habits or practices detrimental to substantial progress” by leading campaigns against the men smoking, drinking, gambling, or wasting their money – a clear indication of Big Brotherism. Socialists in Detroit denounced Ford in 1914, claiming that “by a raise in pay of a few dollars a week Ford has purchased the brains, life and soul of his men”.69 The Social Welfare Department was an aggressively Protestant, religious arm of the company. When Ford brought the Very Reverend Samuel S. Marquis into the Company to head the department in 1916, Ford charged him, “I want you, Mark, to 65

Collier and Horowitz, The Fords, 65. Brinkley, Wheels for the World, 159. 67 Ford, My Life and Work, 129. 68 Ibid., 271, 270. 69 Quoted in Charles Merz, And Then Came Ford, 122. 66

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put Jesus Christ in my factory”,70 and the Department’s “Rules of Living” and general questionnaire smack of the American puritanical, evangelical bent. The guidelines given the members of the Department read: In our investigations here we use the following questions: Are you married? If married, how many dependent upon you? If single, how many dependent upon you and to what extent? Relationship of dependents? Residence of dependents? Married men: do you live with your wives [sic]? Have you ever had domestic troubles? Are your habits good or bad? Have you a bank account? What is the name of the bank and number of the book? Last employment? Reason for leaving? Would your home conditions be bettered were your income increased? Would you be willing to follow some systematic plan of saving suggested by the company?71

A worker, William Pioch, commented, “It was kind of a funny idea in a free state”.72 Even Ford recognized the intrusive paternalism of such questioning of cleanliness, citizenship, and “wholesomeness”, and remarked: … the home life of the men was investigated and an effort was made to find out what they did with their wages. Perhaps at the time it was necessary; it gave us valuable information. But it would not do at all as a permanent affair and it has been abandoned.73

Before the system was abandoned, however, workers were forbidden to speak “even during the lunch break”, and one man was fired for smiling and laughing which “Ford supervisors claimed slowed the production line by ‘maybe half a minute’”.74 As it evolved, the World State of Brave New World destroyed as much of the past as it could – the “bunk” of books, museums, families, intellectuals, ideas – the list goes on considerably. In particular, the World State has abolished God and religion. The Director reminds the trainees that “Ford’s in his flivver .… All’s well with the world”, in 70

Brinkley, Wheels for the World, 276. Ibid., 273. 72 Ibid., 173. 73 Ford, My Life and Work, 263. 74 Baker, Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia, 84-85. 71

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part because it has dispensed with “something called Christianity” and “a thing called God”.75 However, the World State remains a quite religious society in its cult of personality and in its language, offices, and rituals. Ford has indeed become the center of a cult of personality. Every place where a reader in 1932 would have said “God” in some form, Huxley has substituted “Ford”, and with every act of crossing oneself, Huxley has his characters make the sign of the “T” in memory of the Model T. Thus Henry Ford and his best-known product have become the focus of the highly secularized Solidarity Service in the utopian society. Indeed, the Solidarity Service has become a mockery of Communion or the Last Supper, and the twelve Disciples of Christ. Jerome Meckier has meticulously catalogued the references to Ford and his Model T in Brave New World and found 110 of them, with references present in all chapters except Chapter Fourteen, an average of almost six in each chapter.76 Many of these ape specific religious or scriptural sayings: “the time of Our Ford”, “Ford’s in his flivver”, “cleanliness is next to fordliness”, “the teachings of Our Ford”, “Ford be praised”, and “Society for the Propagation of Fordian Knowledge”. Other phrases play with the Lord/Ford rhyme: “Our Ford”, “our Ford’s Day”, “his fordship”, “thank Ford”, “Ford help him”, “Ford be praised”, “Ford forbid”, and one’s making the sign of the Cross, now the “sign of the T” made not using one’s head, heart, and shoulders, but rather one’s stomach emphasizing the cultural shift from the spirit or soul to the appetite. The Solidarity Service combines a number of very diverse activities: grammar school games alternating boy/girl, boy/girl, a grotesque rendering of Indian ceremonial dances, and the Anglican Communion service. The president of the group signs the T, passes the communion chalice of soma-laced strawberry ice cream, and leads the others in the twelve-stanza Solidarity Hymns. As the third soma portion and the rhythms of the third hymn take over their consciousnesses, the ceremonial becomes emotionally Pentecostal, and they begin “to jig and stamp and shuffle”77 in a circular parody of 75

Huxley, Brave New World, 51, 53-54, 62. Jerome Meckier, “Aldous Huxley’s Americanization of the Brave New World Typescript”, Twentieth-Century Literature, XLVIII (2002), 427-60. For further investigation of Ford’s role, see Meckier’s “Debunking Our Ford”, and “Our Ford, Our Freud and the Behaviourist Conspiracy”, Thalia (1977-78), 35-39. 77 Huxley, Brave New World, 99. 76

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the war dance, building up to an orgiastic coupling. That each twohour Solidarity group consists of twelve members, with Ford the thirteenth, suggests the Disciples at the Last Supper. Huxley even provides a Judas, Bernard, who emerges from the ceremony unatoned and still alienated. “Worship” of Ford combines everything Huxley wants his readers to reject in the Fordian state: renunciation of the self in favor of a standardized whole, dependence on drugs and recreational sex to bring an ecstatic state of being, the cult of personality, and more. Huxley had already witnessed the emptying of Christian rituals and beliefs during his lifetime. He had to look no further than the apotheosis of Lenin brought about by the decisions of Josef Stalin. And by his death in 1963, Huxley could have added a number of other examples in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and others. When Lenin died in 1924, Stalin transformed his body into “a sacred relic to be worshiped by the faithful”.78 His body was embalmed in such a way as to be incorruptibly exhibited, a sure sign of sanctity in both the Roman Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, enshrined in a mausoleum of marble, porphyry, labradorite, and granite, and ever present for “worshippers” to “adore” and turn to for thanks and requests. Stalin would himself undergo a similar sanctification for the Russian people for eight years before his body was removed in secret one night and buried under double layers of concrete. It is rumored that Kim Il Sung's mausoleum consumed $8 billion. The apotheosis of Ford may strike readers in the twenty-first century as eccentric, but it was not so in the twentieth-century. The New-York Tribune reported in 1922 that: … in every barber shop, every pool room, every store window one can see a gilt-framed picture of Henry Ford. The cab drivers, chambermaids, hotel porters and barbers talk about him. There is the most implicit belief that his offer will be accepted and that he will as if by waving a magic wand transform the Tennessee Valley [through the Muscles Shoals project] into a second River Rhine, teeming with traffic and lined with factories. They look upon his coming almost as that of the Messiah.79

78 79

Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, trans. H.T. Willetts, New York, 1997, 212. Merz, And Then Came Ford, 207-208.

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Notice that all these establishments are commercial. Huxley had observed the trends, and in a 1935 essay, “Emperor-Worship Up to Date”, would warn his public against dictator-worship, singling out Hitler and Mussolini and hinting at Stalin. He concluded, “we see the stupid and dangerous idolatries of nationalism supplemented here and there by the crazy blasphemies of dictator-worship. It is an ugly and disquieting spectacle.”80 Ford’s paternalism and his customers’ “worship” were troubling enough; dictator-worship threatened one’s very existence. As with Hindu gods, Ford has other incarnations in Brave New World, specifically Sigmund Freud, although there seems to be only one specific reference to him. Mustafa Mond introduces Freud and his accomplishments to the boys being shown through the Central Hatchery. Freud, he tells them, had freed the world from families: Our Ford – or Our Freud, as, for some inscrutable reason he chose to call himself whenever he spoke of psychological matters – Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers – was therefore full of misery; full of mothers – therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts – full of madness and suicide.81

Freud’s specific advance in dealing with the family, Mond confides, involved doing away with emotions: “Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along and offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”82 Huxley, though, gives us one candidate ripe for the analyst’s couch – John the Savage, who is caught up in puzzling emotions and fenced in by self-imposed and obvious oedipal taboos. Brave New World does not foreground its hostility to Freud as it does to Ford; however, in his letters, Huxley makes no positive comments about Freud and Freudian analysis whatever. Indeed, his tone runs more to ridicule, parody, dismissal, and even condescension.

80

Huxley, The Hidden Huxley, 195. Huxley, Brave New World, 44. 82 Ibid., 45. 81

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Writing to Juliette Huxley March 20, 1960 from the Menniger Foundation in a very snowy Kansas, Huxley tells her: Here I am, for 6 weeks, in the Holy of Holies of Psycho-Analysis, finding much of interest, much to admire and also not a little to shake my head over in incomprehension. E.g. they treat hospital patients in a rational way, attacking their problems on all fronts from the nutritional and gymnastic to the psychological: but their private patients they treat in the grand old Freudian way, as tho’ they had no bodies – only mouths and anuses – and as tho’ a multiple amphibian could be cured of his troubles by psychology alone.83

This comment is longer but no less pointed than his September 1927 remark to his brother as they discussed possible sites for vacation: … there are some very lovely places [west of Marseilles near the Spanish border]. They would have the merit of being less remote than Ischia and not being islands – against which I have certain prejudice (which ought to mean, according to Freud, that I have secret homosexual tastes; for islands, it is well known, are symbols of the female genitals …)84

One sees in these comments dislike of the systematic monism of Freudian analysis, contempt for his rigid interpretation of symbols, and his general dismissal of reason as opposed to emotion. To Huxley, psychoanalysis as practiced by Freudians was a pseudo-science with too much emphasis on past traumas however slight or serious. When Anita Loos approached Huxley about rewriting Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy She Stoops to Conquer (1773), he advised her on how they could exploit the play’s incipient oedipal complexes to keep it a comedy of character rather than a comedy of situation to which Goldsmith‘s version turns. He proposed that they write an introductory frame or introductory scene in which the actors would be discussing the play and then move into the play itself. Huxley read both protagonists as oedipal, telling Loos: Marlow is one of those classical cases, so dear to psychoanalysts, with a fixation on his mother, about which he feels sub-consciously guilty, 83 84

Huxley, Letters, 888. Ibid., 290.

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so that he can’t associate sex with respectability, but has to take it all out on tarts or housemaids. A parallel Freudian relationship exists between Mrs Hardcastle and Tony Lumpkin – the old lady having a kind of incestuous passion for her son, who responds with aversion – perhaps because he is a homosexual? (His big Bess Bouncer might become little Ben Bouncer).85

Near the end of his life, he advised Carolyn Hawley who had picked up on a comment he had made about a psychoanalytic ballet: At back of the stage or to one side, the patient on a couch with the analyst behind him or her .… The ballet is the projection into danceforms of what happens as fragments of buried memories come to the surface. Memories of ecstatic adolescent happiness and of adolescent despair. Memories of traumatic events in childhood – punishments, humiliations, an attempted rape, Archetypal visions – solemn, beautiful, prophetic .… Anyhow there are endless possibilities to play with.86

Nothing came of either of these projects, though the ballet idea has been co-opted by Broadway in Lady in the Dark (1941) and the brilliant Agnes de Mille ballet in Oklahoma (1943). Both musicals exploit the dreams of the characters to create surrealistic sequences, emphasizing the woman’s relationship to the men in her life. In Brave New World Huxley had already adapted Freud’s oedipal complex, just as he had adapted Ford’s assembly line: in a scene saturated with both overt and covert references to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, John enacts the murder scene Hamlet contemplates. He finds his mother and Popé asleep in her bed and stabs Popé twice in the back. Popé surprises John. Rather than beating him, Popé holds his chin, forces him to look into his eyes, and then, understandingly, breaks out laughing, saying, “‘Go, my brave Ahaiyeta’”. He clearly understands John’s desire to protect his mother, to have her all to himself, and to allow no other male within the sexual circle he has drawn around her: he obviously understands the sexual tensions as a mature adult, a state not yet reached by John. The scene particularizes Freud’s remark that “we were all destined to direct our first sexual impulses toward our mothers, and our first impulses of hatred and 85 86

Ibid., 567. Ibid., 934-35.

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violence toward our fathers”.87 Although the Hamlet references dominate the scene, the deep structure behind both scenes is the oedipal myth as interpreted by Freud, with the young Oedipus/John killing his father figure in order to possess his mother solely. Turning through his volume of Shakespeare, John comes across the passage from Hamlet (III, iv, 92-94): “Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, ‘Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty.”88 John finds the relevant passage almost by accident, a genuine sortes directing him to action, and discovers that the passage is “better than Mitsima’s magic, because it meant more, because it talked to him; talked wonderfully and only halfunderstandably, a terrible beautiful magic, about Linda”.89 John is on the cusp of puberty at this time, just turned twelve, and Shakespeare’s words channel John’s hatred of Popé and the other men of the tribe who have had sex with Linda into a newly focused direction. John’s oedipal tensions become both more subtle and more complex with his surrogate parents, Bernard and Lenina, who have “rescued” him from Malpais and his actual father, the Director of the Central Hatchery. At this point, John is between nineteen and twentyfour: his father cannot remember exactly how many years ago he visited New Mexico with Linda. John’s actual parents desert him: Linda disappears for the most part into a soma holiday and then dies in the Park Lane Hospital, muttering “Popé” and a fragment of a Fordian slogan. Thomas, his biological father, so humiliated by the laughter enveloping him when it becomes known that he is an actual father, resigns in utter disgrace and is never seen or mentioned again. Lenina, though, recapitulates Linda’s past. She is sexually available to any number of men but she is also idealized by John, especially in terms of Shakespearean heroines such as Juliet. She attracts sexually, but she is also taboo unless John, through some task, somehow becomes worthy of her through some task As a child, John’s rivals were those men of the tribe on the Malpais Reservation; now they are thoroughly conditioned, promiscuous Alphas in a sexual world John cannot fully understand. John’s brutal rejection of Lenina in Chapter Thirteen becomes ever more painful to read because the two cultures 87

Sigmund Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams”, in The Basic Writings, ed. and trans. A.A. Brill, New York, 1938, 308. 88 Huxley, Brave New World, 156. 89 Ibid., 156.

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have formed two beautiful beings who completely misunderstand one another, John being far more at fault because he has bound himself with the myths of romantic love and his own neurotic distancing of himself from the human body. It is not by accident that Huxley closes the chapter with John learning that Linda is dying. Reason has triumphed over emotion, and Lenina unzips while John recoils. Analyzing the contents and origins of dreams, Freud turned to the oedipal materials in male dreams and concluded that “Falling in love with one parent and hating the other forms part of the permanent stock of the psychic impulses which arise in early childhood, and are of such importance as the material of the subsequent neurosis”.90 Indeed, we see the “subsequent neurosis” in John when he is twelve, again when he is excluded from the pueblo initiations, and yet again when he meets Bernard and Lenina. His anger spurred by his mother’s relationship with Popé and other men and the attacks on women he finds voiced by Hamlet, Othello, and Lear, John reaches adulthood as a textbook case of the neurotic, caught, as he is, between his idealization of Lenina and his repulsion by human sexuality. He occasionally draws on romantically lyrical passages in Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest, but the savage invectives directed toward Claudius in Hamlet, his own reaction to the revolting redaction of Othello, and Lear’s mad rage against “the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, stench, consumption”91 found in women form the words John uses to fight back against the voluptuous temptations offered by Lenina. His offended rejection of sex he has not earned through trial and ordeal bespeaks the illusions and naiveté which hurry him into suicide. Freud would have found John a most challenging case study, especially if he had known of his comments “‘Oh, forgive me! Oh, make me pure! Oh, help me to be good’”,92 his brutal flagellations, and his revulsion from his night of “long-drawn frenzy of sensuality”.93 Having been raised in the ambiguous rejection/love of his mother, having had to stage one’s own initiation ceremonies, and having as reading material only The Chemical and Bacteriological Conditioning of the Embryo and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 90

Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams”, 306. Ibid., 233. 92 Ibid., 293. 93 Ibid., 330. 91

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one’s best hope is to be only neurotic. John’s oedipal tensions have pushed him into the range of the psychotic. The Violent Passion Surrogate Mustafa Mond suggests he undergo would not have helped balance him or rescued him from the terrible split between body and soul which traps a number of Huxley protagonists. In 1952, Huxley commented: “Freud’s greatest error, it seems to me, was not to have paid sufficient attention to this more than personal not-self with which we are all so blessedly associated, and to have concentrated the therapist’s and the patient’s attention on the self and its rats and black beetles in the personal sub-conscious.”94 He found Freud and his theories too rationalized, too negative, too hostile to the makeup of the family, too dismissive, and simply too facile in probing the self. In a MIT lecture and Literature and Science, Huxley contrasted F.W.H. Myers and Freud, returning once again to the “rats and black beetles” and arguing that: Freud, so to speak, is talking all the time about the basement downstairs with the rats and black beetles, whereas Myers is largely concerned with the floors above the ground floor where the ego lives, and he would agree, I would think, with the mystical point of view that the topmost floor of these upper levels has no roof to it and is open to the sky.95

From these passages and the other references in letters and essays, it is very difficult to determine just what works of Freud Huxley knew, either through reading or conversation with acquaintances and his brother. Grover Smith identifies no specific titles in his annotations to the letters; nor do Sybille Bedford and Nicholas Murray in their biographies. Given the repetitive nature of many of Freud’s books, one’s guesses are likely to mislead. Ironically, though, many ideas in Brave New World often seem to be replies to Freud’s 1930 work, Civilization and Its Discontents, his pessimistic psychoanalysis of the relationship between the community and the individual and the tension between the two in which aggression and repression war with one another. In its fifth chapter, Freud speculates that “if we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we 94 95

Huxley, Letters, 647. Huxley, quoted in Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 643.

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cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take”.96 Huxley, though, could speculate. Brave New World has followed out Freud’s speculations to their logical conclusion by giving us a world, peaceful and docile, with complete heterosexual freedoms, parenthood dissolved, families abolished, and the pleasure principle triumphant. Indeed, family relationships are turned pornographic and shameful. But while granting these freedoms to its citizens, the World State remains powerfully repressive: one must not have an exclusive relationship; one must not be celibate; one must not experience strong emotions; one must not act out individuality or strive for progress, unless it is to find ever more complicated and ever more expensive sports activities for the citizens. During the Central Hatchery Director’s lecture about Bernard’s “crime”, he could be quoting Freud: The greater a man’s talents, the greater his power to lead astray. It is better that one should suffer than that many should be corrupted .… you will see that no offence is so heinous as unorthodoxy of Thanks very much for behaviour. Murder kills only the individual – and, after all, what is an individual?97

The World State has its defenses against individuality: imprisonment, exile, and execution.98 Helmholtz Watson is exiled to the Falkland Islands; Bernard’s begging does not keep him from probably being sent to Iceland; Lenina is probably beaten to death; John self-selects suicide. Dystopian novels nearly always end with the rebels defeated. It is the reader’s responsibility to see and frame ways to marshal against the power of the World State. Huxley did credit Freud with insights into the importance of the early years of childhood. Considering how state leaders might gain controls through various methods, Huxley commented in “Science and 96

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. and trans. James Strachey, New York, 1961, 71-72. 97 Huxley, Brave New World, 176. 98 The World State has apparently abolished execution in its present status, but there seems to have been considerable death in the founding of the State through chemical warfare, guns, and massive planned starvation. The State, however, rejected these for “infinitely surer methods of ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia” (ibid., 60).

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Civilisation”: “Freud and his followers have shown how profoundly important to us are the events of the first few months and years of our existence; have proved that our adult mentality, our whole way of thinking and feeling, our entire philosophy of life may be shaped and moulded by what we experience in earliest childhood.”99 These general comments take particular shape in his novel. He fully belongs in the line of critics which would grow increasingly vocal in their arguments against Freud during the rest of the century, with Sir Peter Medawar in 1972 dismissing psychoanalysis as “one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought”.100 Separating the 1926 encounter with Ford’s autobiography, Freud’s ideas, and the 1931 writing of Huxley’s novel, however, stands the Great Depression or the Slump as the British called it. Readers should never forget that Brave New World was written during the Great Slump and, in oblique ways, reacts to this historic collapse of the world economy. Indeed, a number of the slogans of the World State reflect advice given during the Slump by leaders such as Ford. For instance, the reference to “the ethics and philosophy of underconsumption” goes to the heart of an argument about the necessity of citizens spending to encourage more production of goods, as does the slogan “Ending is better than mending”.101 Even the games of the World State are designed to increase consumption of goods. Recall that “country sports” are revised so that they would “entail the use of elaborate apparatus. So that they consume manufactured articles as well as transport.”102 The severity of the Great Slump is nowadays attributed to a combination of multiple causes: overproduction made possible by technological advances, ill-advised protective tariffs, demands for balanced national budgets, increased income tax, deflation of virtually all currencies, a high number of bank failures, debates over the gold standard, soaring unemployment, and difficulties with German war repatriations.103 While Huxley settled into a fairly routine life at 99

Huxley, The Hidden Huxley, 109. Peter Medawar, The Hope of Progress, London, 1972, 68. 101 Huxley, Brave New World, 62, 58. 102 Ibid., 25. 103 Charles P. Kindleberger, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, New York, 2002, provides a good overview of economic crashes; John A. Garraty’s The Great Depression, San Diego, CA, 1986, contains a useful chapter on the Depression in Great Britain. 100

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Sanary, Great Britain was struggling with unemployment doubling in late 1929 to 2.5 million, with a week in which 240 securities lost £15.98 billion in value, and with exports falling from £839 million in 1929 to £461 million in 1931.104 Twenty-three percent of the work force was unemployed by 1931, nearly thirty-four percent in Wales and a staggering seventy-five percent in the Jarrow area.105 While Huxley was working with the early draft of his novel, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald struggled to deal with the global depression while seeing the pound, the standard of the world’s monetary system, fall from $4.86 to $3.23. With an income from his British sales of approximately £2,000 a year, Huxley was insulated from the worse features of the Slump, though he and Maria began practicing a number of small economies, made some major changes in their house to make it less expensive to operate, postponed a trip to New York, and worried about the unfavorable exchange rate. For instance, Huxley told his brother: I hope that the net result of all the changes [in the house] will be that we can run the house more cheaply. At the present rate of exchange it costs a lot; but I hope that the French will find themselves forced off their perch of gold.106

In many ways, Brave New World stands with J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement (1930), Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole (1933), George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Cloud Howe (1933), Graham Greene’s It’s a Battlefield (1934), and Patrick Hamilton’s Twenty Thousand Streets under the Sky (1935) as a literary response to the Slump. Any book which catalogued the economic ills and especially any novel whose utopian world seemed to hold out hope for reforms that might restore balance, prosperity, and happiness would have received far more than a second look from readers in the 1930s. As Philip Henderson commented in 1936, “the novel today … could scarcely have a nobler

104

Charles Loch Mowatt, Britain between the Wars 1918-1940, Chicago, 1955, 357-

58. 105 106

Havighurst, Britain in Transition, 238. Huxley, quoted in Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 275.

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function than that of awakening man to a consciousness of his destiny as a social being”.107 In 1930, Henry Ford and his ghost writer, Samuel Crowther, published Moving Forward, their third collaboration, and surely many people turned immediately to it for the advice its title seemed to promise on how to deal with the economic challenges suddenly thrust upon them. But they also probably came away disappointed, because the book is a defensive, self-promoting, self-justifying account of what the Ford Corporation had done well in the past. It is very much a glorification of the machine, even though Ford constantly insists that machines are “labor-serving” rather than “labor-saving”, becoming quite defensive at times on this point. Nearing the end of Moving Forward, Ford offers his take on “some of the more current delusions”: he particularly attacks those who claim that “Machinery is labour saving, and hence it displaces men and robs them of their right to work” and that “Machinery has taken away liberty as well as leisure and will in time change the human being into some kind of machine”, and especially those Luddites who claim “Machinery is a curse, and we really ought to get rid of it or at least confine its use within reasonable bounds”.108 Any book with such a title, though, seemed at the time to promise ways out. If Huxley read it, he would have found it a smug repetition of the material in the autobiography. Ford offers a litany of high wages, cheap and available goods, sound management, and Prohibition as solutions to the economic difficulties. “We now know”, he wrote with self-confident surety, “that anything which is economically right is also morally right. There can be no conflict between good economics and good morals.”109 Poverty is simply an outcome of bad management, and Prohibition, he was convinced, would relieve much of the individual’s bad management of himself. Throughout the book, though, Ford’s love for the machine is clearly evident – the very point that antagonized Huxley in 1926. Ford’s cultural hero is the engineer. His praise of engineers near the end of his book could, without difficulty, be given to Mustapha Mond or the Hatchery Director: 107

Quoted in Philip Henderson, The Novel Today: A Study of Contemporary Attitudes, London, 1939, 52. 108 Henry Ford, with Samuel Crowther, Moving Forward, Garden City, NY, 1930, 292-93. 109 Ibid., 280.

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Wandering into Brave New World Engineering spells freedom. Men were held to a single spot before the engineer came. By steam and motor car and airplane he has liberated man. He has lengthened man’s day with light, increased the limits of man’s life through food and sanitation, emancipated man’s mind, and given him a sense of possible mastery over elements and environment – in short the engineer found society immobile and left it mobile. Yet he is now charged by bookish people with wanting to fix the world in a rigid casting!110

Pages earlier, his praise focused on the product: “The machine is the greatest and most versatile of all broadening powers”,111 and in a paragraph which can be read as an abstracting symbol of the entire discussion, Ford waxes almost poetic over the workings of a welding machine in particular: In our new machine … the operator’s duties consist in placing the stock in the machine, slipping on a clamp, and turning the air valve, which clamps all parts at once. The machine then goes through the welding cycle automatically to completion. The air valve is opened, and the machine returns to its starting position, where the housing is removed and the operation repeated. This machine requires only one operator and does from fifty to sixty an hour. And the welding is more uniform …. It is impossible for the operator to go wrong..112

The machine doubled the stock produced and halved the time required, but it left the operator bereft of the “two husky fellows” who were employed with him on the original production and diminished the operator’s responsibilities to turning a few valves. He could have had but little investment in the product and certainly would have wondered where the other two men were now employed, if they were employed at all. Huxley emphatically rejected Ford’s viewpoint. In “The Victory of Art over Humanity”, he quotes Ford saying “‘If the work goes through the tools, it must be right’” and immediately responds: The implications of the phrase are terrifying. For what does it imply? It implies that one of the best, the most satisfying things in human life

110

Ibid., 250-51. Ibid., 137. 112 Ibid., 197-98 (emphases added). 111

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– creation – is too much trouble, is a burden of which, if possible, men and women should be relieved.113

Huxley’s conclusions some years earlier in Music at Night were even more pointed: There is no place in the factory, or in that larger factory which is the modern industrialized world, for animals on the one hand, or for artists, mystics, or even, finally individuals on the other. Of all the ascetic religions Fordism is that which demands the cruelest mutilations of the human psyche – demands the cruelest mutilations and offers the smallest spiritual return.114

We have no certain evidence that Huxley read or even knew of four other books of this period, Alfred Moritz Mond’s Industry and Politics (1927) and Imperial Economic Unity (1930), or Henry Mond’s Why the Crisis? (1931) and Modern Money (1932), but his curiosity might have piqued interest since Brave New World overlays Monds’ chemical factory onto Ford’s assembly line. When in the British Midlands and North Country in 1930 and 1931, Huxley visited a number of plants, including one of the Imperial Chemical Industries sites. He was particularly struck by the transformation of compressed gases into ammonia and gives the impression in his description that the entire process operated independent of human involvement. He found the process to be “wonderfully impressive” and “a particularly choice specimen of industrial poetry”.115 In the Mond plant in Billingham, Huxley saw a different world than the automobile factory, but one which had already adopted Ford’s practices. One cannot expect a chemical plant to work like an automobile assembly plant. There are issues of heightened safety for workers, need for protective clothing, protocols for handling potentially dangerous chemicals, and concern for workers’ health. In the opening chapters of Brave New World, Huxley has merged Ford’s assembly line practices and Mond’s chemical plant techniques. The room through which the Director shepherds his new charges is fully described as a laboratory with its artificial infrared lightning, test tubes, incubators, microscopes, and prescribed technical processes, all 113

Huxley, The Hidden Huxley, 77. Huxley, Music at Night, 159-60. 115 Huxley, The Hidden Huxley, 69. 114

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working in synchronization with the slowly moving assembly line. The workers wear uniforms, and in the famous modernist exercise of Chapter Three Lenina and Fanny decontaminate in the plant’s Changing Room showers, use its vibro-vacuum machines, and gossip while dressing for their free time and dates. The chapter also frequently immerses the reader in the vocabulary of chemicals: “Phosgene, chloropicrin, ethyl iodoacetate, di-phenylcyanarsine, trichlormethyl, cloroformate, dichlorethyl sulphide. no mention hydrocyanic acid”, drones a decontextualized voice, possibly the same voice mentioning a chemical formula for bombs on the next page, and Mustapha Mond reminds the workers that “two thousand pharmacologists and bio-chemists” were subsidized in the early years of the World State to create a “perfect drug”, something they accomplished in six years.116 Nicholas Murray remarks that Mustapha Mond shares the name “incidentally of a prominent industrialist, Sir Alfred Mond” of Imperial Chemical Industries.117 As we will see in a later chapter, there is nothing “incidental” about Huxley’s choice of names. Huxley seems not to have been aware of the Mond family and its industry during the mid-1920s; however, in 1930 and 1931 his trips to industrial England quickly led him to see that Fordism had firmly established itself on English soil, and that the Mond plants had mechanized its workers. In a number of essays unknown or unavailable to many early critics until the publication of The Hidden Huxley, edited by David Bradshaw, Huxley explored English industrialization and the Slump. “Abroad in England”, “Sight-Seeing in Alien Englands”, “The Victory of Art over Humanity”, and “Science and Civilisation” grew out of visits to a County Durham mining village, a tour of two of London’s main docks, a visit to an East End abattoir, and six days in Chesterfield, Sheffield, Middlesbrough, Billingham, and Birmingham. In March 1928, shortly after Maria had finished typing Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which so clearly predicted many of the industrial tensions of the Great Slump, the Huxleys visited the Midlands; Huxley returned again in October 1930, and a third time in March 1936, this time in the company of Victor Rothschild. Not until 1936, though, did he write a series of short essays focused on specific 116 117

Huxley, Brave New World, 56, 64. Murray, Aldous Huxley, 259.

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problems of the Slump: “A Horrible Dilemma”, “If We Survive”, “People’s Front”, “How to Improve the World”, and “The Man Without a Job”. At this point in his visits, he found the Nottingham Boots factory to be “a model factory”,118 though he questioned the necessity of its products, but he was appalled at what he found in Nottingham’s Raleigh bicycle factory – a factory which appears prominently in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) – because of the makeup of its labor force which seemed to realize the worse aspects of the Fordian dream: Out of its 4,000 workers, nearly 3,000 were boys and girls between the ages of 14 and 20. The machines were so perfect that they could be worked by children fresh from school. No training was needed, and no special skill had to be shown. All the young people had to do was to repeat an identical process once every five or six seconds throughout the day.119

In 1931, as he began to work on the manuscript of his novel, Huxley saw a number of fields converging, and he projected that their convergence would enslave individuals by fragmenting and specializing human wholeness. He had begun his career as an author with a Jekyll and Hyde tale, which extended the nineteenth-century battle against fragmentation, a battle which took place in the works of such different authors as Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Hardy, and H.G. Wells, and continued well into the twentieth-century fiction of E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence. Huxley saw John Broadus Watson’s behaviorist psychology leading directly to large scale conditioning which would so separate parent from child that the family unit itself would become endangered. He had already voiced his fears in “Babies – State Property”, writing that … the State will obviously try to get hold of its victims as soon as possible. The process of standardization will begin at the very moment of birth …. Which means that both the individual and the family are in for a very bad quarter of an hour.120

118

Huxley, The Hidden Huxley, 222. Ibid., 233. 120 Ibid., 49. 119

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The second converging force was Henry Ford’s technological advances which standardized the product and in so doing alienated the worker from the object, which Huxley labeled “industrial predestination”.121 The third force, he deemed was Alfred Mond’s industrialization which, despite his admiration for many of its features, led Huxley to comment: “The great ICI factory is one of those ordered universes that exist as anomalous oases of pure logic in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence.”122 It divorced the workers from their emotions. In each instance, the forces showed humankind outrunning the consequences of the human mind. And Huxley was addressing one of the great themes of Western literature, the dangers of constructing a society around “pure logic”, an issue from Euripides’ Bacchae to the general run of dystopian fiction.123 Indeed, in “The Victory of Art over Humanity” and “Science and Civilisation” published in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine (July 1931) and broadcast on BBC’s National Programme (January 13, 1932), Huxley adopted a Frankenstein trope to develop his argument. He turned frequently to the trope of the hostilities between the creator and his or her creation, just like the hostilities between Victor Frankenstein and his Monster. Weigh the resonances and echoes in the following sentences: “triumphant man now finds himself faced with new and unfamiliar foes – the products of his own inventive spirit”124 and “Man has used his mind to create a thousand separate arts, which are compelled by the very laws of their being to grow and proliferate like living things, independently of their creators … their often monstrous and disproportionate growth must be curbed and regulated”,125 or “The application of science to human life has already produced a large crop of unintended effects, some of which are highly undesirable”.126 Some readers have found it quite easy to claim that Huxley is antiscience, even a modern Luddite; however, he is much more accurately aligned with the views of Mary Shelley. Like her, Huxley places blame on the scientist, the technologist, the industrialist who failed the product or the creation by not considering its consequences. Because 121

Ibid., 77. Ibid., 67-68. 123 For a general overview of Huxley’s views on science and technology, see Birnbaum, Aldous Huxley’s Quest for Values, 139-51. 124 Huxley, The Hidden Huxley,79. 125 Ibid, 81. 126 Ibid., 114. 122

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Victor Frankenstein failed to acknowledge the Monster, his creation recoiled on him. Ford is a Frankenstein to Huxley, but there are others. Huxley saw the same failure in the Fascism of Mussolini, the communism of Stalin, and the capitalism of Ford, Mond, and others. In Brave New World, he projects the consequences as well as offering a solution to be inferred from his satire. In “Science and Civilisation”, he quite directly spells it out: … the ideal society is one whose constituent members are all physically, intellectually and morally of the best quality; a society so organized that no individual shall be unjustly treated or compelled to waste or bury his talents; a society which gives its members the greatest possible amount of individual liberty, but at the same time provides them with the most satisfying incentives to altruistic effort; a society not static but deliberately progressive, consciously tending towards the realization of the highest human aspirations.127

Ford, with his usual contempt for writers and intellectuals, dismissed such individuals as Huxley as mere “bookish people”. It was a label Huxley gladly accepted and which he used for his counter response.

127

Ibid., 107.

CHAPTER FOUR

THREE DAYS IN JOY CITY

On July 30, 1939, Aldous Huxley celebrated his forty-fifth birthday in Hollywood. He and Maria had been living what they called a simple and quiet life since they arrived in California late in 1937, not yet fully aware that they would not be returning to England or Italy for a decade. Nothing about the party, though, was simple or quiet, because the Huxleys had become acquainted with some of the most important names in Hollywood – Charlie Chaplin, Paulette Goddard, Gretta Garbo, Harpo Marx, Helen Hayes, Lillian Gish, and Orson Welles, to name but a few. Paulette Goddard arrived with an eight-pound cake, followed immediately by Charlie Chaplin with a dozen bottles of champagne.1 The party stretched from lunchtime to early evening. In two brief years, Huxley’s acquaintances had also extended into the Los Angeles worlds of science (Edwin Hubbel), music (Igor Stravinsky), literature (Thomas Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Upton Sinclair), although these last four people were not at the party. The “City of Dreadful Joy” had supplied Huxley with any number of stimulating friendships, mainly coming through the auspices of Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, whom he had met in New York in 1926. Hollywood may have been the New Babylon to numerous Americans, but in 1939 it was quickly becoming home to Huxley. Huxley’s first sight of Hollywood early in May 1926 had evoked much less favorable reactions. He commented in Jesting Pilate: How strenuously, how whole-heartedly the people of Joy City devote themselves to having a Good Time! The Good Times of Roman and Babylon, of Byzantium and Alexandria were dull and dim and 1

Murray, Aldous Huxley, 321.

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Wandering into Brave New World miserably restricted in comparison with the superlatively Good Time of modern California.2

Huxley had squarely entered a world as paradoxical and contradictory as any he had encountered on his journey. In 1926 he had landed emphatically in the midst of Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Lost Generation, an age in which changing fashions in clothing, availability of automobiles, exploitation of new and exciting art forms, flaunting of bobbed hair on women, newly authorized female suffrage, and exploding prosperity seemed to be transforming American society. But, at the same time, these changes were being hedged on all sides. During the 1920s, Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover had each promised a return to “normalcy”. The legislature in Nebraska had forbidden the teaching of foreign languages in primary and grammar schools; the legislature in Florida had commanded the reading of the Bible daily in state schools; the legislature in Oregon had attempted to require all children to attend state schools (a move designed to crush parochial education), and the nationwide conflicts between Fundamentalists and Modernists were erupting in battles over Darwin and the teaching of evolution. Huxley was especially appalled by the contradictions he saw everywhere. During his three days in Hollywood and Los Angeles, Huxley was struck by three things so discordant in their chaotic juxtaposition in American life: the artificialities of film production, the commercialization of American evangelical religion, and the ubiquity of excess in everything from architecture to restaurant portions. “Good Times” was celebrating “Mrs. Wealth”.3 A few days after his visit, he generalized that “the thing which is happening in America is a revaluation of values, a radical alternation (for the worse) of established standards”.4 After eight months of travel, Huxley had found little he particularly liked, not the Taj Mahal, not the jungles of the Dutch East Indies, and now not the vibrant culture of California. Huxley saw what he would have considered the prospering of the dregs of the Protestant Reformation. Reading the Los Angeles Daily Times Saturday newspaper of May 8, 1926, he came across the

2

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 301. Ibid., 302. 4 Ibid., 306. 3

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following ads, some of which would find their way later into his novel: Dr. Leon Tucker with the Musical Messengers in a Great Bible Conference. 3 Meetings To-morrow. Chimes, Giant Marimbaphone, Vibraphone, Violin, Piano, Accordeon [sic], Banjo, Guitar and other Instruments. Wiltshire Baptist Church.5

The First Methodist Church was offering the exclusive services of Dr James H. Maclaren, Dramatic Orator, who was going to give his wellknown stunt, “Impersonations of Lincoln and Roosevelt … unique, original, eloquent, instructive and inspiring .… Uplifting and Inspiring. It will do your soul good”, and in the “Church of Divine Power (Advanced Thought)”, Miss Leila Castberg was preaching on Divine Motherhood. Huxley does not mention the obvious: the intense secularization and the theatricalization of all three services. In the interests of attracting audiences, these three “Christian” churches had largely dispensed with Christianity. Huxley was probably more comfortable with India’s Hinduism and Burma’s Buddhism than he was with California’s theater churches and especially with their battles that pitted Fundamentalist against Modernist. Huxley accurately quoted the advertisements exactly from the May 8, 1926 Los Angeles Daily Times which, every Saturday, featured one or two pages of church advertisements. Huxley did not exaggerate the oddities. He might have been struck by the number of services concerned with Great Britain’s General Strike. Wilshire All Soul’s Church offered an evening’s discussion “When Calamity Hits Britannia – and the Significance of England on the Brink of Civil War”; Wilshire Boulevard Congregational Church featured Dr Frank Dyer weighing whether England was “on the verge of ruin”; and the Westlake Presbyterian Church had Dr G.A. Griegleb sermonizing on “The British Lion’s Restless Brood, or Chickens Come Home to Roost”. Since May 9 was also Mother’s Day, any number of sermons in praise of motherhood were offered, such as “Psychology of Motherhood”, “The Greatest Optimist in the World – Your Mother”, “The World’s First Human Mother and Our ‘Mothers’”, “Women who Have made history”, “True Motherhood”, “Tied to Mother’s Apron Strings”, “My Madonna”, “What Is Meant to be the Mother of God”, 5

Los Angeles Daily Times, May 8, 1926, Part II, 3-4; see Brave New World, 296-97.

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and so on. The Christadelphian Ecclesia, Church of the New Jerusalem, Church of the Open Door, Rosicrucian Fellowship, United Lodge of Theosophists, Church of All Nations, and Church of Psychic Truth were names that surely tantalized Huxley’s interest, and had he not been so attracted to Dr Leon Tucker’s extravaganza or Miss Leila Castberg’s talk, he might have favored the “Fiery Welshman”, George Phillips, talking on “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle: The NewFangled Cradle: Motor-Driven-Self-Rocking”. The advertisements gave Huxley a rich field to pick over for a harvest of irony. If Robert Nichols, Huxley’s host, had driven Huxley through Los Angeles’ Echo Park area, he would have seen a monument to America’s unique and often eccentric religious power: Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple, the home base of the Church of the Foursquare Gospel, so named after one of McPherson’s visions. More spectacular than contemporary movie palaces, more crowded than most sports arenas, more welcoming to racial and social diversity than most other institutions of its period, Angelus Temple was a hub of Christian and evangelical activity. In addition, it was also a tourist attraction. David Epstein well describes its architectural excesses: Fifty miles away the pilgrims could see a lighted cross rotating on top of the dome. In daylight the great dome sparkled from the crushed seashells mixed into the cement. Inside, the interior curve [of the dome] had been painted pale blue with wisps of clouds to resemble a bright sky. Five thousand three hundred seats in the auditorium and two balconies faced the stage, where the baptismal pool’s backdrop represented the banks of the Jordan river .… At the top of the walls art-nouveau angels had been painted standing wing-to-wing, representing a vision [McPherson] had had in 1917. The balcony facades bore a frieze of tilting bells.6

Like some mediaeval monastery or convent, Angelus Temple also contained a prayer tower where squads of members prayed twentyfour hours a day and, in addition, took prayer requests from telephone callers. Besides being an architectural landmark, it was a center of charitable activities, helping individuals find jobs, sheltering unmarried pregnant girls, and during the Great Depression providing “food, clothing, and rent money for the needy, regardless of race or 6

Daniel Mark Epstein, Sister Aimee: The Life of Aimee Semple McPherson, New York, 1993, 247-48.

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religion”.7 In 1924, the Angelus Temple began broadcasting as the first full-time religious station in the United States. Only two weeks after Huxley’s visit to Los Angeles, Angelus Temple also provided one of the major scandals of the 1920s when its founder and powerful evangelist disappeared on May 18. It has never been determined if her disappearance was an actual kidnapping, a publicity stunt, or a secret lovers’ tryst. The intellectual Huxley would have been puzzled by the concoction which made up American Protestantism and the power and authority it vested in charismatic leaders. McPherson, for example, once entered on a motorcycle and staged “sermon plays” similar to mediaeval mystery plays only given a true Hollywood touch. Animals were not uncommon on the Angelus Temple stage. No ordinary preacher would have dared use some of her gimmicks. Protestants were heady with victory in the early 1920s because they had pushed through the Prohibition Amendment to the United States Constitution, promising, among other things, that Prohibition would virtually erase crime from society. The Amendment, however, was also directed as much against German and Italian immigrants who were primarily Catholic and brought a tradition of brewing and fermenting alcohol in their cultures. The three major branches of Protestantism – evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and Pentecostalism – had solidified their battle against the Jazz Age, though Prohibition would be swept away in 1933 with the repeal of the Sixteenth Amendment. Huxley commented acidly on the gap between the laws promulgated and the actual practice of the citizens. Drinks in clubs led him to write: Cocktail time. (We’ve dealt with the same bootlegger for upwards of two years now. A most reliable man.) Ice rattles in the shaker – a dance of miniature skeletons – and the genuinely reliable liquor is poured out …. This is dry America.8

Fundamentalism, too, was savoring its triumph in the Tennessee Scopes trial – a triumph which was Pyrrhic and which continues to haunt American culture like regular outbreaks of the flu – claimed to vindicate its literal reading of the Bible and to substitute the opening 7 8

Ibid., 249. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 299.

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chapters of Genesis for modern science. Huxley sarcastically dismissed the affair as “Monkeyville, Bryan, the Ku Klux Klan”,9 and marked it as the anti-intellectualism rampant in American life. Mulling over the trial later in Chicago, Huxley saw a dangerous trend in American culture: Intelligence, independence and disinterested activity – once admired – are in the process of becoming evil things which ought to be destroyed. In Tennessee and other remote provinces the crusade against them has already begun. It remains to be seen whether this further perversion of values will affect the rest of the continent.10

In the years since the Scopes trial, the American educational systems have been almost constantly battling creationism and intelligent design, both fighting to banish Darwin and evolution from the classroom. The Pentecostals offered far more spectacle than the antiintellectualism of the Fundamentalists and the intense personalism of worldwide evangelism and seemed a ripe target for satire. Pentecostals moved individuals into the extremes of emotionalism that Huxley would explore later in Ape and Essence and acutely analyze in Devils of Loudun. Authorized, they felt, by statements in the Book of Acts, Pentecostals foregrounded the “gifts of the spirit” – a mix of speaking in tongues, prophecy, and faith healing. Daniel Epstein offers an informative description from a contemporary newspaper that captures much of the spirit in Amiee Semple McPherson’s revivals: Conviction hung like a cloud over record audiences, and hundreds rushed to the altars in ever-recurrent waves crying, ‘God be merciful’ …. No less than three altar calls marked some of the services especially the divine healing services …. Deaf mutes commenced to speak and hear the Word of God, and lines of beds were carried out empty as joyous patients rose and walked. Moreover, hundreds of people at a time were sometimes slain [surely lain] under the power of God.11

9

Ibid., 303. Ibid., 314. 11 Epstein, Sister Aimee, 405. 10

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Pentecostals were satirized by other Americans as “holy rollers” because of the intense emotionalism of their services and devotions: History also records many sporadic outbreaks of involuntary and uncontrollable jigging, swaying and head-wagging. These epidemics of that in one region is called Tarantism, in another St.Vitus’s dance have generally occurred in times of trouble following wars, pestilences and famines … to escape from insulated selfhood into a state in which there are no responsibilities, no guilt-laden past or haunting future, but only the present, blissful consciousness of being someone else.12

What Huxley considered to be excesses in California Christianity, he would satirize in the religion of the World State. Perhaps no better example can be cited than the fate of Westminster Abbey, which has been reduced to cabaret status resembling the highly secularized churches advertised in the Los Angeles Daily Times. (He might have been aware of the fate of churches in the Soviet Union that underwent even more drastic transformations.) Like the ads in the newspaper, its gaudy neon signs invite Lenina and Henry to enjoy “CALVIN STOPES [named undoubtedly after Marie Stopes, the famous advocate of birth control] AND HIS SIXTEEN SEXOPHONISTS” and “LONDON’S FINEST 13 SCENT AND COLOUR ORGAN. ALL THE LATEST SYNTHETIC MUSIC”. Not unlike the California churches, the World State’s religion knows of “something called Christianity” in the distant past and also “a thing called God”.14 And although details are somewhat obscured in the Solidarity Service of the Alphas, it has many features of “holy roller” emotionalism, fueled here by drugs, sex, and hypnotic music. Huxley understood that “drugs, elementary sexuality and herd-intoxication … are the three most popular avenues of downward self-transcendence” and pointed out that “primitive religions prolonged rhythmic movement … for the purpose of inducing a state of infra-personal and sub-human ecstasy”.15 As the participants dance in a circle, slapping on one another’s buttocks, they work themselves into a trance culminating in belief that the “Greater Being” or the apotheosis of Henry Ford has manifested himself to them and that sexual coupling 12

Aldous Huxley, The Devils of Loudun, 2nd edn, New York, 1996, 321. Huxley, Brave New World, 89, 90. 14 Ibid., 62. 15 Huxley, The Devils of Loudun, 321. 13

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has brought annihilation of their personal “oneness”.16 The scene contains some of Huxley’s most pointed, most topical, and most polished satire. Huxley had considerable understanding of the crowd mentality. In On the Margin, he notes “the way in which the random mob emotion may be systematically organized into a kind of religion”,17 and, interestingly, draws his example from the … wild outburst of mob excitement over the arrival in this country of Mary Pickford .… The newspapers set the excitement going; they built the fire, applied the match, and cherished the infant flame. The crowds, only too happy to be kindled, did the rest; they burned.18

By the time Huxley visited Hollywood in 1926, film, its major product had already become a worldwide force in both entertainment and propaganda, and Hollywood was one of the most important centers of the industry. Film studios and directors in Hollywood and elsewhere had already produced a number of films which still figure as important works, sometimes masterpieces, in the history of film: Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), F.W. Munae’s Nosferatu (1922), Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919), Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925), and others. And in 1926 the industry was on the threshold of utter transformation with its transition from black-and-white to color and from silence and placards to sound and heard dialogue.19 Reputations and fortunes were being made almost overnight. Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin had signed contracts for a million dollars a year, and Pickford has been credited with saying, “I cannot afford to work for only 10,000 dollars a week”.20 16 Huxley’s depiction of the dance may have been influenced by the description of the Navajo Fire-dance in Erna Fergusson’s Dancing Gods, Albuquerque, 1931, 230-33. 17 Huxley, On the Margin, 68-69. 18 Ibid., 67. 19 A.R. Fulton, in Motion Pictures: The Development of an Art from Silent Films to an Age of Television, Norman, OK, 1960, 156, succinctly conveys the revolutionary nature of the change sound brought: “Whereas in July of 1928 only 220 theatres in the United States were showing sound pictures, by the end of the year, 1,000 theatres had sound equipment and, by the end of 1929, 4,000 .… Attendance at the motion pictures nearly doubled.” 20 Icons of Film: The 20th Century, ed. Peter W. Engelmeier, New York, 2000, 13.

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Huxley had arrived prepared not to like Hollywood, its films, or its population. Visiting Gambier Park, outside Weltevreden, in Java a month earlier, he was drawn to an “open-air picture show” and joined the silent crowd watching an adventure/rescue film in which a young man hurried from car to train to airplane in order to save a “distant female” in danger of being raped. The film sounds very much like either a Harold Lloyd work or a film imitating his work, structured as it was by desperate pursuit, becoming more desperate as the hero moved from ever increasingly speedy forms of transportation. When the Harold Lloyd character in Girl Shy, for instance, discovered that his girlfriend is about to marry a bigamist, he rushes to her rescue by just such devices; as Robert Klepper points out, “as far as chase sequences go, this is definitely one of the best in comedy history”.21 Even before the Lloyd comedies, D.W. Griffith had established the endangered woman/rescuing man as a key narrative motif for serious films. In The Lonely Villa (1909), a wife, assailed by two villains, manages to call her husband who then quickly drives home to rescue her. Two years later, in The Lonedale Operator (1911), Griffith repeated the pattern by having a railroad engineer rush to his girlfriend. Mast points out that cutting between scenes generated considerable tension: “Griffith cuts with increasing rapidity from outside to inside to train, outside, inside, train, until the beau arrives just in time to find his sweetheart holding the culprits at bay with a wrench she has disguised as a pistol.”22 The motif was used again and again, in Birth of a Nation and countless other films. Bored by such stereotyped actions, though, Huxley wandered on, away from “the violent imbecilities of the story”,23 but he continued thinking about the film, its content, and its effect on the Javanese audience. His conclusions were distinctly negative. Huxley’s response to the film was peculiar in that it involved questioning the responsibilities of the colonial power to its colony: just what, he wondered, did the colonial powers such as Great Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, France, or any other Western state that still had a colonial empire wish the colonials to think. Essentially, Huxley wondered if the state should not exploit film’s propaganda value to 21 Robert K. Klepper, Silent Films: 1877-1991: A Critical Guide to 646 Movies, Jefferson, NC, 1999, 283. 22 Gerald Mast, A Short History of the Movies, 4th edn, New York, 1986, 57. 23 Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 224.

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convince the colony that a highly desirable level of civilization was being offered it. Speculating on the relationship between producer and market, Huxley commented: Over the entire globe the producers of Hollywood are the missionaries and propagandists of white civilization. It is from the films alone that the untaught and untravelled member of a subject race can learn about the superior civilisation which had conquered and is ruling him. And what does he learn from the films? What is this famous civilisation of the white men which Hollywood reveals? These are questions which one is almost ashamed to answer.24

Others than Huxley were wondering much the same. In 1926, the Colonial Office weighed how “films could be a powerful method of spreading knowledge of the ‘conditions and resources’ of empire”25 The Films Committee considered the educational value of films, the need to censor films which presented an undesirable image of imperial life (especially in American films), and experiments with films in Africa. Julian Huxley conducted experiments testing responses of schoolchildren in 1929. The Huxley brothers had responded to film in very opposed ways. Julian immediately understood and exploited the possible uses of film in science. His Private Life of the Gannets received the Academy Award for best short subject in 1937. He followed this film with several other documentaries such as Monkey into Man, Heredity in Man, Heredity in Animals, and From Generation to Generation. But Aldous took a reactionary attitude towards film in the 1920s – just as many in his generation disclaimed the artistic possibilities in photography and film – which breathed distrust, even a fear, of technologically dependent forms that Walter Benjamin labeled “an

24

For full and insightful discussion of Huxley in Hollywood after 1937, see Virginia M. Clark, Aldous Huxley and Film, Metuchen, NJ, 1987, and David King Dunaway, Huxley in Hollywood, New York, 1989. Clark discusses the film scripts on which Huxley worked and his use of Hollywood in his later novels. Dunaway offers an extraordinarily full and fascinating treatment of Huxley’s life and work in Hollywood after he arrived there in late 1937. 25 Rob Skinner, “‘Natives Are not Critical of Photographic Quality’: Censorship, Education and Films in African Colonies between the Wars”, University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 2(2001),1: www.sussex.ac.uk 2Skinner_natives_ are_not_critical_of_photographic_qualitv.pddf.http. (accessed November 18, 2009).

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abortion of technology”.26 Just as mid-nineteenth century painters feared the photograph, especially when the box camera suddenly placed photography in the hands of millions, many writers feared that film would annex the narrative and descriptive spines of stories and novels, especially since film tempted writers with astounding salaries. In the 1920s – Huxley resisted, complained, and damned film, as can be seen in his characters’ comments. In Antic Hay, Bojanus condemns virtually all popular forms: “People don’t know ’ow to entertain themselves now; they leave it to other people to do it for them. They swallow what’s given them. They ’ave to swallow it, whether they like it or not. Cinemas, newspapers, magazines, gramophones, football matches, wireless telephones – take them or leave them, if you want to amuse yourself.”27

This was quickly followed by Frank Chelifer’s mock catechism in Those Barren Leaves: Q. What is the function of newspapers, cinemas, radios, motorbikes, jazz bands, etc.? A. The function of these things is the prevention of thought and the killing of time. They are the most powerful instruments of human happiness.28

How close Huxley’s own opinions are to those of his characters may be seen in the essay, “Wanted, A New Pleasure”: The great joint-stock companies which control the modern pleasure industries can offer us nothing in any essential way different from the diversions which consuls offered to the Roman plebs .… And this is true in spite of the movies, the talkies, the gramophone, the radio, and all similar modern apparatus for the entertainment of humanity.29

His plaint becomes a rage against mechanization. In “Revolutions”, he holds that “now that ready-made creation-saving amusements are spreading an ever intenser boredom through ever wider spheres – 26

Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Pieter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York, 1986, 241. 27 Huxley, Antic Hay, 46-47. 28 Huxley, Those Barren Leaves, 89. 29 Huxley, Music at Night, 223.

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existence has become pointless and intolerable”,30 and his essay on Baudelaire leads to the conclusion that people … create in themselves the illusion of being alive, they make a noise they rush about, they hasten from distraction to distraction. Much to the profit of the shareholders in the great amusement industries. In a word, they have a Good Time.31

Huxley was not alone in his opinions about high and low art forms. George Jean Nathan fulminated against sound in film, saying: Aside from its commercial value in certain short-reel subjects, such as an opera-singer doing her bit, or a politician exuding the usual platitudes, or a musician making pretty sounds, it will bring to the motion-picture exactly the thing that the motion-picture should have no use for, to wit, the human voice, and that, further, once it brings it, the motion-picture will have a tough time holding its own even among the boobs who now make it the profitable institution it is.32

Huxley created his own example of the worst kind of film in Brave New World with Three Weeks in a Helicopter, a grotesque redaction of Shakespeare’s Othello, although as John notices at the time, the connection is strained: “Othello, he remembered, was like the hero of Three Weeks in a Helicopter – a black man.”33 There are actually two other films in Brave New World, both used for propaganda purposes to support the World State. John observes a Beta-Minus geography class of “Young Etonians” watching a film about the Penitentes of Acoma, one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America, and the Penitentes’ ardent flagellation provokes shouts of laughter from the class until “the laughter drowned even the amplified record of their groans”.34 The school’s provost himself finds the film “so 30

Ibid., 179. Huxley, Do What You Will, 160. 32 George Jean Nathan, quoted in David Crafton, The Talkies: American Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1926-1931, New York, 1997, 448. 33 Huxley, Brave New World, 204. 34 Ibid., 193. Because of Huxley’s phrasing, “The Penitentes of Acoma”, readers may be tempted to see the Penitentes as yet another Indian group. In fact, Penitentes are Hispanic, Catholic, Male, and very private and secretive groups in north-central New Mexico and south-central Colorado, whose practices may originate in the Third Order of St Francis, established in 1221, and were certainly established by Spanish colonists 31

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extraordinarily funny”. Obviously, to the provost, the World State offers as a superior alternative to that of Acoma. “Civilized” is trumping “savagery” by showing what the students – and their teacher – regard as barbaric, savage, and archaic. The second film, shown to a much larger audience, is virtually identical in intent since it shows John in purgative and penitential exercises, attempting to exorcise sexual thoughts of Lenina by whipping himself until he bleeds. Darwin Bonaparte who is watching all this from his artificial oak tree blind knows that his film of John will be even more successful than his “famous all-howling stereoscopic feely of the gorillas’ wedding”35 or even the “Sperm Whales’ Love-Life” filmed earlier. Huxley may possibly have been parodying titles of his brother’s works such as The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe and Bird-watching and Bird Behaviour. Both films in Brave New World involve self-inflicted suffering, something virtually impossible for the citizens of the World State to comprehend. As Mustapha Mond tells John, “‘there isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant’”.36 Three Weeks in a Helicopter, on the other hand, indulges in, almost wallows in, the free sexuality available to the members of the audience who would regard its actions as a measure of civilized life. In 1932, the title would have provoked numerous connotations and associations. To the reader in 2012, helicopters are a fact of life; to the reader in 1932, the helicopter was still a dream of the future. The first for worship and mutual aid to their communities. As sensationalized as were the Hopi Snake Dances discussed in Chapter Five, their rituals during Holy Week attracted considerable attention in the nineteenth century and were denounced a number of times by the Catholic hierarchy. During Holy Thursday and Good Friday, the members gathered in their morada and then performed public acts of penance, namely flagellation with yucca and rope whips in which flint pieces and bits of glass were embedded. On Good Friday, they performed crucifixion of one of the members, who did not did not always survive. A sensationalized film, The Lash of the Penitentes, brought them to national attention in 1936. Advertising materials prepared to publicize the film included the statements: “The processions, crucifixions, and flagellations were photographed at the risk of the cameramen’s lives through long range lenses hidden in the mountains of the Penitente country. For years, the practices of the cult had been carried-on unknown to the civilized world.” Also see Marta Weigle, The Penitentes of the Southwest, Santa Fe, NM, 1970 and Alberto Lơpez Pulido, The Sacred World of the Penitentes, Washington, 2000. 35 Huxley, Brave New World, 303. There were no Penitentes at Acoma. 36 Ibid., 284.

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successful helicopter flight, undertaken by Hanna Reitsch in Bremen, Germany, would not occur until July 4, 1937. And the phrase “three weeks” would have immediately evoked ties with Elinor Glyn’s scandalous novel. There can be little doubt that Huxley had Glynn’s novel in mind. In 1907, English audiences may have been reading Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent or John Galsworthy’s Man of Property, but they were talking about and titillated by Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks and J.B. Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. The later has become a classic in dramatic literature; the former has all but faded from memory, except for its tiger skin rug scene. In its emphasis on love, honor, titles, great wealth, and romance, Glyn’s novel is a late example of the Silver-Fork School of fiction, a world Glyn was uniquely qualified to write about since she moved in the circles of great society hostesses such as the Countess of Warwick, mistress to the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), had been presented at Court, and eventually became the mistress of Lord Curzon. With royalty money from her first book, The Visits of Elizabeth (1900), she purchased herself a tiger skin rug. Three Weeks, the fifth of Glyn’s twenty-one novels, is simple in outline but complex in implications. Paul Verdayne, “young and fresh and foolish”,37 a handsome young Englishman, is sent on a Continental tour in hope he will forget a potentially infelicitous love affair with a curate’s daughter. In Switzerland he meets and falls hopelessly in love with an older woman of great wealth, royal bearing, and mysterious mien. Glyn surrounds her with seductive feline and serpentine imagery: Then a madness of tender caressing seized her. She purred as a tiger might have done, while she undulated like a snake. She touched him with her fingertips, she kissed his throat, his wrists, the palms of his hands, his eyelids, his hair. Strange, subtle kisses, unlike the kisses of women.38

Such scenes lead to impassioned love making on a tiger skin rug Paul bought as a gift for her. The love making becomes as sensuous and voluptuous as the reader’s imagination can frame it because Glyn’s 37 38

Elinor Glyn, Three Weeks, Introduction by Cecil Beaton, London, 1974, 5. Ibid., 134.

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narrative voice usually exits discretely in a string of asterisks. The mysterious lady becomes pregnant – her secret agenda to secure a meaningful succession to her unnamed Balkan kingdom – and disappears back into mystery. Little more than a year later, she is murdered by her tyrannical husband who is then killed by her servants, and Paul’s infant son succeeds to the throne. In his Introduction to the novel, Cecil Beaton suggests that the murder of Queen Draga of Serbia in 1903 inspired Glyn’s “Ruritanian romance”.39 As she says in her note to her American readers, Glyn intended the Lady to be “a deep study, the analysis of a strange Slav nature, who from circumstance and education and her general view of life was beyond the ordinary laws of morality … the study of a tiger”.40 In a preface to the new edition of 1916, fully aware of the continuing scandal, she told her readers that she “personally meant it very simply when I wrote it. I wanted to show the tremendous force of a great love for elevation of character, and the inevitable result of the breaking of any law, whether of God or of Man.”41 If the now largely unread novel is remembered at all, it is for the tiger skin and the immorality of the couple’s affair. Readers in 2012 will find the novel turgidly rhetorical, filled with coy evasions, and disingenuous in its themes, and be unaware that the “Missus Glyn” mentioned in the Richard Rodgers and Moss Hart song, “My Heart Stood Still”, is Elinor Glyn, a reference still depending on the reputation of Three Weeks. In 1926, had he been lucky or unfortunate as the case may be, Huxley could have met Glyn in Hollywood. She had become an advisor on etiquette and taste to Hollywood producers, first at Paramount from 1919 to 1923 and then at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1923-29, and eventually would herself become a producer. She had adapted Three Weeks for a 1924 movie. She originated backlighting to provide “glamorous soft-focus” to make actresses appear “most ethereal”42 and would make the pronoun “IT” synonymous with sex appeal. Once she famously said that the only ones in Hollywood to have “IT” other than Clara Bow were Antonio Moreno, the doorman at the Ambassador Hotel, and Rex the Wonder 39

Ibid., ix. Ibid., xxv. 41 Ibid., xviii-xviv. 42 Ibid., 16. 40

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Horse.43 She had obviously not yet encountered Lenina Crowne. She returned to London in the 1930s and when she died in her Mayfair house in 1943, she still had tiger skins on the floors of several rooms. Huxley certainly knew of Glyn’s novel. In an early letter he contrasts its publication with the suppression of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow. It is obvious why Huxley would satirize works by Glyn. Crome Yellow, Antic Hay, and Those Barren Leaves ridicule the class of people foregrounded in numerous Glyn novels, and characters such as Myra Viveash and Lucy Tantamount are literal glosses on the imagery used in the presentation of Glyn’s mysterious Queen. John and Lenina do indeed go to a 1920s movie palace to see Three Weeks in a Helicopter – and movie theaters of the 1920 were indeed palaces. The San Francisco Fox offered a sea of gilding on its columns and ceiling, ornate chandeliers, a sweeping grand staircase and Loew’s Paradise in Los Angeles held almost four thousand viewers surrounded by faux Renaissance statuary in gilded niches, a magnificent curtain, and a ceiling looking as though it had been taken from an Italian villa.44 John and Lenina’s theater measures up to these, because it holds an audience of six thousand, offers an organ overture (in 1920s provincial theaters this was usually a piano, in cosmopolitan centers sometimes an orchestra), but this is a “scent organ … playing a delightfully refreshing Herbal Cappriccio”, shortly succeeded by “a trio for hyper-violin, supra-cello and oboe-surrogate” accompanied by voice.45 When the featured film comes on screen, it is obvious that Huxley is parodying any number of contemporary film advertisements, because the screen reads, “THREE WEEKS IN A HELICOPTER. AN ALL-SUPER-SINGING, SYNTHETIC-TALKING, COLOURED, STEREOSCOPIC FEELY. WITH SYNCHRONIZED SCENT46 ORGAN ACCOMPANIMENT”. It is equally obvious that the star of the film is an inanimate object, the bear rug, featured in both the opening and closing scenes. The film itself is basically a comedy which can also certainly be called a musical: the lovers sing a duet in the opening scenes, and the 43 Quoted in Richard Koszarski, An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture 1915-1928, New York, 1990, 309. 44 See This Fabulous Century 1920-1930, ed. Ezra Bowen, New York, 1969, III, 3, 107-109 for color photographs of these two theaters. 45 Huxley, Brave New World, 198, 199. 46 Ibid., 199-200.

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“golden-haired young brachycephalic Beta-Plus female” along with the “three handsome young Alphas” break into a “synthetic quartet, with full super-orchestral accompaniment and gardenias on the scent organ” at the closing.47 Unlike the other two films, this one offers positive confirmation and powerful conditioning support to the audience which can see the dangers of isolating oneself from the group, of possessing simply for oneself, and of the benevolence offered by the State in not exterminating the protagonist but rather sending him to a reconditioning center so that he may re-enter society at some point in the future, completely healed. Importantly, the film does not endanger society by presenting him as a revolutionary like Helmholtz Watson. That would indeed have been dangerous because it would imply that conditioning had significantly failed somewhere in his background education or, worse, that revolutionary tendencies were inherent in the individual. Aromas, action, and attractive human bodies were given the audience to reinforce their years of conditioning. Judging from the generous thank-you of Huxley’s letter, Robert Nichols provided guidance around the Hollywood studios. He toured Huxley through a studio where he saw scenes being staged for a silent film and where he also saw special effects being generated. Special effects had come into being almost simultaneously with the birth of film. The first generally recognized special effects date to 1895 and involve the beheading of Mary, Queen of Scots. Quickly an entire repertoire of special effects came into being. By the time of Huxley’s visit, The Lost World (1925), an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, had given audiences stampeding dinosaurs, an erupting volcano, and a brontosaurus reeling through London. Critics called it “the first great creature movie”,48 and it certainly does stand as the ancestor of King Kong (1933), Jaws (1975), and Jurassic Park (1993). Within the special effects rooms, Huxley saw technicians “concocting miracles and natural cataclysms – typhoons in bathtubs and miniature earthquakes, the Deluge, the Dividing of the Red Sea, the Great War in terms of toy tanks and Chinese fire crackers, ghosts and the Next World”, surely a thorough introduction to special effects. He also saw the initial stages for Hollywood’s visions of the future where men were “modelling prehistoric animals and the architecture 47 48

Ibid., 200, 201. Richard Rickitt, Special Effects: The History and Technique, New York, 2000, 303.

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of the remote future”.49 The “Dividing of the Red Sea” suggests that Huxley saw the effects devices used in The Ten Commandments (1923), in which the parting of the Red Sea was accomplished by emptying two bowls of water and “then playing the shorts backwards and magnified”.50 If Huxley were to tour a special effects studio today, he would see many of the same activities and techniques but greatly sophisticated by technology and computers. The “bathtubs” remain in use for sea scenes,51 and the modeled animals and futuristic sets have found their full expression in such things as the hydraulically operated, computer controlled Tyrannosaurus rex of Jurassic Park and the fantastic cities of the Star War films. Indeed, Huxley’s Brave New World is a virtual exercise in special effects. The architecture of its London, its fantastically speedy transportation devices, its interiors, and its games, whether on page or on film demand imaginative, exaggerated, futuristic constructs. Its opening chapter, set in the Hatchery and Conditioning Factory, demands special effects in its lighting, its complicated assembly line, and its set designs. Even costume designers would be pressed to find appropriate expressions of the color-keyed uniforms. It may well be that the futurism in the novel owes more to film than to earlier utopian writing. Before touring the special effects room, however, Huxley first saw the filming of an actual movie. He watched actors in a silent movie – sound was but months away – as they enacted scenes similar to those he saw in Java. Miss X, an unidentified actress, sat reading a book on Theosophy until called to the set. There she disappeared behind a curtain so she could register “Terror” when she sees a murder being committed. After several takes, with the director demanding “some pep”, she was dismissed and returned to her book. Lacking knowledge of the specific studio and the specific motion picture, one can only speculate as to what Huxley was seeing filmed. If he had been in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, it might have been something like Man, Woman, and Sin (filmed 1926, released 1927), starring Jean Eagles, John Gilbert, Gladys Brockwell, and others, a film whose resolution depends on a woman truthfully telling exactly what happened in the killing she witnessed. Its complicated plot, boxed into 49

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 295. David Shipman, The Story of Cinema, New York, 1962, 148. 51 See Richitt, Special Effects, 108-13. 50

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sixty-five minutes, tells of a newspaper publisher’s mistress who begins an affair with a reporter. Publisher and reporter fight, and the publisher is accidentally killed; nevertheless, the reporter is charged with murder. Only once before writing Brave New World did Huxley give his views on movies full expression beyond the few scattered comments in the essays. The occasion was his response to The Jazz Singer, in which he ridiculed the “rancid hog-wash” of the jazz band and the film itself which “allowed all its instincts and emotions to degenerate and putrefy”.52 While in Paris in 1929 (probably in October), Huxley attended a showing of The Jazz Singer at a “fetid hall”53 on the Boulevard des Italiens. He was offended by everything – but then the Juvenalian satirist usually is. The theater offered no travel film, no “fascinating” newsreel, but rather featured a short of a comic, another short of “somebody’s celebrated jazz-band”.54 With many in his generation, Huxley had difficulty with the close-ups which enormously magnified the actors’ faces, the loud volume of the music, and the length of the pre-feature shorts. The entire experience left him with a “firm resolve never … to be re-introduced to … the latest and most frightful creation-saving devise for the production of standardized amusement”.55 His only enjoyment came from the closing short, an aria from Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, sung by the Metropolitan Opera’s Giovanni Martinelli whose rendition of “Vesti la Guibba” closed many such showings. Obviously, he left the theater in no mood to be sympathetic with film or its future. The experience had offended his eyes and ears and intellect and cued his embarrassing anti-Semitic and racial prejudices – but it had given him material to exploit and material with which to center his 1926 Hollywood experience. Huxley’s objections to the film seem designed specifically to provoke, to annoy, to offend, and even to anger. Murray aptly characterizes the Huxley who penned the review as a “young fogey of thirty-five pretending to be unfashionable” and describes the essay’s tone as “a bit thick and … deliberately overstated”.56 The entire essay, considering that its author 52

Huxley, Do What You Will, 44, 47. Ibid., 42. 54 Ibid., 43. 55 Ibid., 42. 56 Murray, Aldous Huxley, 229. 53

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was in the midst of writing Point Counter Point, which makes use of many cinematic techniques, is probably the most subjectively indulgent and aesthetically shallow review he ever wrote, reeling as it does from the Modern Age about to suffer a serious blow that month from the Depression or the Great Slump as the British call it. In his summary of the film, Huxley snidely reduces the characters to mere abstractions: Jazz Singer, Mammy of Mine, My Baby, and Poppa. He points out that the story depends on a conflict between honor and duty, but unlike the plays of the Restoration that built on such conflicts, The Jazz Singer settles for “the stern pursuit of newspaper notoriety and dollars”.57 The conflict grows out of the hostilities between a very traditionally minded cantor and his son who wishes to make a career singing jazz and ragtime. The cantor falls ill just before Yom Kippur, and his son faces the dilemma of singing the Nol Kidre at the synagogue or making his debut with his girl friend. Actually he manages to do both. Huxley had reason to be disappointed. The Jazz Singer is an historically significant but not a great film. It did, however, contain three songs with lasting power: “Toot, Toot, Tootsie”, “Blue Skies”, and “Mammy”. As numerous studies of film point out, it is not even the first sound movie, as so often credited. It just accelerated the movement to sound that would doom silent film and forever transform the movie theater. Huxley objected that film was a captive of too many technicians and devoid of tradition. On the latter count, he was certainly mistaken, because film was combining the narrative traditions of fiction and the dialogue tradition of the stage into a new form. Huxley, though, was quite correct on the first point: he would find out just how accurate he was when he began to work as a member of script teams after he arrived in Hollywood in 1937. Surprising similarities exist between Huxley’s scattered remarks on film and the general argument of Walter Benjamin’s classic essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, published in 1936. Both object that film (and other modern arts) lacks the uniqueness that tradition gives a work. Benjamin proposes that “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition”,58 and contrasting the songs in The Jazz Singer and Pagliacci, Huxley concludes that: 57 58

Huxley, Do What You Will, 46. Benjamin, Illuminations, 221.

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… in comparison with the jazz-band’s Hebrew melodies and the singer’s jovialities and mammy yearnings, Leoncavallo’s throaty vulgarity seemed not only refined and sincere, but even beautiful, positively novel … for, after all, the composer, whatever his native second-rateness, had stood in some sort of organic relationship, through a tradition of taste and of feeling. 59 Both also object to the triumph of technology: in Benjamin’s case lithography and photography; in Huxley’s “Taylorized work and mechanized amusement” – over the individual artists’ creative urges that invest “authenticity” in a work. Both vigorously object to the ways in which film excludes the individual, whether creator or spectator. Benjamin writes that: … the shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle unimaginable anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc.60

Indeed to support his point, Benjamin quotes Huxley’s conclusions in Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) to expand his observation. Huxley had written, “Advances in technology have led … to vulgarity .… Process reproduction and the rotary press have made possible the indefinite multiplication of writing and pictures”.61 Huxley would add more bitterly to his point in Ape and Essence, striking out against submission of individual talents to group work generating scripts for film, where Bob Briggs thinks ruefully of the script he wrote for “Catherine of Siena”: I worked on the script two years ago. Then they gave it to Streicher. And after that it was rewritten by the O’Toole-MenendezBoguslavsky team. It’s lousy.62

59

Huxley, Do What You Will, 47. Benjamin, Illuminations, 232-33. 61 Ibid., 247. 62 Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence, New York, 1948, 9. 60

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By 1948, though, Huxley had written four produced scripts; by 1936, he had written two plays and surely understood the co-operative nature of a staged production; in 1926 and 1929, he was more or less criticizing film at the level of ideological abstractions. Like Benjamin, Huxley expressed considerable elitism in his views, but elitism more tempered than some in his generation. Both men saw that films would be a disruptive force in the arts of the twentieth century, and both glimpsed the scope of this disruption. In the essay, “Revolutions”, Huxley wrote that: … now that not only work, but also leisure has been completely mechanized; now that, with every fresh elaboration of the social organization, the individual finds himself yet further degraded from manhood towards the mere embodiment of a social function; now that ready-made creation-saving amusements are spreading an every intenser boredom through ever wider spheres – existence has become pointless and intolerable.63

We can see Centripetal Bumble-Puppy, Obstacle Golf, and the “feelies” displacing what Huxley would consider to be true art. His vision for Brave New World had been given brave new impetus by his experiences with film and by his observations in Hollywood. After his few days in Hollywood, Huxley found both the word and the metonymy to express his impressions of American society. The word was “excess”, and the metonymy was the meal he was served at a club. He turned to the Rabelaisian tradition to describe it: The restaurant is immense. The waiters spring about, carrying huge dishes of the richest food. What Gargantuan profusion! Great ten pound chops, square feet of steak, fillets of whale, whole turkeys stewed in cream, mountains of butter. 64

It was too much and too many, whether it was food or flappers of which there were “thousands and thousands”, or frenetic dancing or the theatrical stagings or the speed of everyday life. The excesses of Los Angeles may have become memories by the time Huxley reached Chicago, but along the way he read one of the best contemporary introductions to the new American he was seeing, 63 64

Huxley, Do What You Will, 179. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 392.

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Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Once in Chicago, he enthusiastically wrote to Loos, who was living in New York City at the time, asking if they could meet while he was in New York. He wrote: I have no excuse for writing to you – no excuse, except that I was enraptured by the book, have just hugely enjoyed the play, and am to be in America so short a time that I have no leisure to do things in the polite and tortuous way .… It would be a very great pleasure – for us at any rate – if we could arrange a meeting with you during that time.65

His letter began a friendship which would flower when he returned to Los Angeles in 1937. In 1938, Loos introduced Huxley to some of the best Hollywood offered. But in 1926, though, the short time in Hollywood, the reading of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and seeing the stage production (quite likely an out-of-town tryout since the Broadway production did not open until September 1926) provided materials which would eventually influence his Lenina Crowne, Huxley’s unique version of the Flapper. The Flapper who did much to define the women of the 1920s was depicted and satirized by numerous cartoonists and novelists on both sides of the Atlantic. For both America and England, photographs well define the emphatic shift from the “modest maiden” of the 1910s to the “flappers” of the 1920s. Time-Life Books’ This Fabulous Century 1910-1920 opens with a photograph of four young women in a Midwestern park in 1911.66 Three of the women are perched on a cannon barrel, waiting for the fourth to snap their photograph. Each of the women is wearing a dress buttoned tightly at the throat, cinched with a wide ribbon belt, with the skirt falling past her shoes. The women also wear broad-brimmed hats, crowned by a garden of flowers or a tail of feathers. Beneath the hats is long hair stacked into submission. Even suffragettes of the period wore this costume. Because the outing was informal, they wear no gloves. Photograph after photograph in the 1910-1920 volume repeats the image of “America’s Sweetheart”, Mary Pickford, who may have raised her 65

Bedford notes that “They met. Anita Loos was in her twenties” (Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 175). Actually, she was thirty-eight. Her dates are 1888-1981. 66 This Fabulous Century 1910-1920, II, 8-9.

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skirt to her ankles, but the hat, the long curls, the modest dress remain like a uniform. The dress styles became part of the culture war that spilled into so many areas during the 1920s. When hemlines began to raise in the earlier decade, a minister denounced the fashion: “Never in history were the modes so abhorrently indecent as they are today.”67 Victory in World War I, with the ever-growing impact of the automobile on social practices, the advent of motion pictures, the granting of women’s vote, the burgeoning urbanization, and increasing prosperity, brought sudden and drastic changes. The first thing Anita Loos did when she visited New York City in 1916 was to borrow scissors and cut her long hair, and Ralph Barton, the illustrator of both Gentleman Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, shows unbobbed hair only on older women. Again, photographs record the striking shift in women’s fashions, the fashions Huxley would have seen in Hollywood, Chicago, New York City, and in London, Paris, and elsewhere. He knew them even before his trip. In 1922, he fell for Nancy Cunard, daughter of the shipping magnet. In a famous Cecil Beaton photograph, taken in 1930, Nancy Cunard, looking frighteningly like Alex in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, poses in bobbed hair, cloche hat, arms covered with African bracelets, most of them ivory.68 She looks exactly as the reader probably imagines Lucy Tantamount, Myra Viveash, and other predatory women of Huxley’s 1920s novels. The flapper received much attention in songs of the day: “Baby Face”, “Betty Co-ed”, “Yes Sir! That’s My Baby”, “Ukulele Lady”, “Don’t Bring Lulu”, “Sweet Georgia Brown”, “If You Knew Susie”, “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue”, “Where’d You Get Those Eyes”, “There’s Yes Yes in Your Eyes”, and the iconic “Runnin’ Wild”. Each of these songs emphasizes the physicality, sensuality, sexuality, and desirability of the young woman. A photograph in This Fabulous Century 1920-1930 of a tea dance at Miami’s fashionable Nautilus Hotel in 1925 tells a story of this cultural transformation. Virtually every woman wears a cloche hat – no feathers, no blossoms – and their hemlines have galloped to their knees. The dresses fit natural lines, and occasionally one can glimpse rolled stockings. Also, the women are being held closely by their partners. Other photographs in the volume show women doing what 67 68

Ibid., 237. See Bedford, Aldous Huxley: A Biography, 232, plate viii.

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was unthinkable twenty years earlier: smoking, drinking in public, etc. John Held, the most trenchant social cartoonist of the age, offers a wonderfully insightful caricature of the flapper for the June 3, 1926 cover of Life. The girl graduate, having discarded her academic gown, leans back in a chair, lighting her cigarette with her diploma; her stockings are rolled to the knees; her blonde hair is closely bobbed; her arms are bare almost to the shoulder.69 Here is no idealized, demure, modest, submissive girl of the 1910s; here is the aggressive, sexual, materialistic flapper – a virtual sister of Lenina. A Held cartoon of twelve young women bending over a rail to watch the boat races makes his opinion of the new fashions quite clear. As each woman leans against the rail her legs show to the thigh, her rolled stockings and underwear are visible, and the skirts barely cover their buttocks; all but one is wearing a cloche hat over bobbed hair.70 Anita Loos sold her first screen play in 1911 and helped during the next twenty years to launch the careers of Douglas Fairbanks and Jean Harlow, and the notes she began writing while taking the train from New York City to Los Angeles became Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It was a surprise best-seller when issued in 1925 and by the 1960s had gone through eighty-five printings. It outsold other novels on Liveright’s 1925 publication list, such as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay. In selecting “the dumbest blonde of all”71 as her pattern for Lorelei, Loos created one of American fiction’s most remarkable unreliable narrators. Lorelei has as much knowledge of spelling as she does of physics; phrases wander lost in her sentences; and naïve comments acquire levels of meaning never quite intended. Loos said that she “wanted Lorelei to be a symbol of the lowest possible mentality of our nation”.72 Lorelei may not understand the English language, but she certainly does understand men and material possessions. One exchange in the stage adaptation well captures the materialistic urges of Lorelei. She is asked, “Have you got the nerve to tell me you don’t want to marry my son for his money?”. She 69

This Fabulous Century 1920-1930, III, 53. Ibid., 55. 71 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes, introduction by Regina Barreca, New York, 1998, xxxviii. Her two autobiographical works, A Girl Like I, New York, 1966, and Kiss Hollywood Good-By, New York, 1974, provide enlightening and entertaining discussions of her own flapper years. 72 Ibid., xxxix. 70

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responds, “It’s true”, and she lays her motivation bare: “I want to marry him for YOUR [sic] money.” Lorelei and Dorothy, the novel’s protagonists, are gold-digging flappers, sexually aggressive, manipulative, utterly materialistic, and completely subversive of the older values of society. Lorelei’s diary is an uncensored look at the world – uncensored enough to interest writers as diverse as William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, and George Santayana, who called the novel the best book of American philosophy.73 Like her namesake luring men to their death in the Rhine, Lorelei lures men, both American and European, into her net and deftly divests them of money, trips, jewels, promises, and commitment. Her philosophy is clear: “I mean it seems to me a gentleman who has a friendly interest in educating a girl … would want her to have the biggest square cut diamond in New York”,74 or “So I really think that American gentlemen are the best after all, because kissing your hand may make you feel very very good but a diamond and safire bracelet lasts forever”.75 Surely the last sentence inspired the song, “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”, in Jule Styne’s 1949 musical Gentleman Prefer Blondes. From Mrs Wimbush in Crome Yellow to Lucy Tantamount in Point Counter Point, Huxley repeatedly contrasted the Edwardian matron who is Lorelei’s persistent enemy with the Georgian flapper. Mrs Wimbush’s hair alone marks her as being in the superseded generation: Everything about her was manly. She had a large, square, middle-aged face, with a massive projecting nose and little greenish eyes, the whole surmounted by a lofty and elaborate coiffure of curiously improbable shade of orange.76

Contrast her appearance with that of Lucy Tantamount: She was of middle height and slim, like her mother, with short dark hair oiled to complete blackness and brushed back from her forehead. Naturally pale, she wore no rouge. Only her thin lips were painted and there was a little blue round the eyes.77 73

Ibid., xli. Ibid., 7. 75 Ibid., 55. 76 Huxley, Crome Yellow, 5. 77 Huxley, Point Counter Point, 45. 74

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The contrast marks what could be called a paradigm shift in culture. To Huxley’s men, Myra Vivash, Lucy Tantamount, and ultimately Lenina Crowne are dangerous predators – Loreleis become much smarter, more acquisitive, and more provocative. The list of Lucy’s victims is impressive in number, but Lorelei would regard her as a failure since she did not get “presents” from them: “I like the way she floats through life instead of trudging. I like the way she flits from flower to flower and which is perhaps a rather too botanical and poetical description of Bentley and Jim Conklin and poor Reggie Tantamount and Maurice Spandrell and Tom Trivet and Poniatovsky and that young Frenchman who writes plays … and the various others one has forgotten or never heard about.”78

Lenina is not the “man-eater” Lucy is, but only because her world has approved and prescribed the behavior of the Anglo-American flapper, even to the extent of recognizing some of their boredom and especially their “living quickly”.79 The nineteen-year-old, brunette, “wonderfully pneumatic” and bobbed Lenina is a typical flapper, freed by the reforms of her world. Promiscuity is no longer frowned upon by either society or government; women have been granted equality and independence (at least theoretically though certain actions in the novel suggest that theory has not been completely translated into action), and the materialism so joyously exploited by Lorelei and Dorothy seems to have been reined in, but not absolutely since there still seems to be a sexual quid pro quo as when the Arch-Songster gives Lenina a rather expensive gold T memento to reward her sexual availability. And she is the one who commits herself to the trip with Bernard Marx, when in the past men have asked her. She knows that her body both attracts men and grants her certain power over them, especially over John. Her physicality is emphasized by her viscose clothing, her short shorts, and her revealing zippicamiknicks. Her undressing becomes a virtual striptease for John: Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the

78 79

Ibid., 92. Ibid., 196, 209.

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From her introduction in Chapter One as an “uncommonly pretty” woman, Lenina lacks the flapper’s cloche hat, but she most definitely possesses the sexual independence, the cultural freedom, and the subversive force of the flapper. Modesty about one’s naked body does not bother the girls of Brave New World. Such modesty had apparently disappeared from the Fordian world centuries earlier, and throughout Chapter Three, Lenina zips garments loose far more frequently than she zips them tight as she enjoys her after-work bath, the drying tubes, the chyper, the vibrovacuum machine, and other features of the Girls Dressing Room. A thoroughly modern girl, she is probably most Fordian when the filth, disease, and aging process of the Pueblo repel her, and conditioning makes it impossible for her to fathom John’s sexual inhibitions. Had she been awake to see John smelling her perfume, playing with her clothing’s zippers, and fondling her zippicamiknicks, she would have been appalled by his actions, and quite rightly so. When Lenina presses the appropriateness of their sexual union, John retreats into angry misogyny, and he attempts to disarm her “as though he were trying to scare away some intruding and dangerous animal”.81 Any flapper of the 1920s would have scared John. The clash between the cultures of Lenina and John is even more pointed than the conversation between Mustapha Mond and John and perhaps more effective since it is less abstract and far less defensive. The revolution in sexuality is a more fundamental attack on the world of the 1920s than is a philosophical discussion such as Mond’s and similar scenes in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, both definitely a feature of most twentieth-century dystopias. Huxley missed many of the absurdities taking place when he traveled across America. Had he stayed several months, he might have become acquainted with the flagpole sitting, the goldfish swallowing, the marathon dancing, the aerial stunts, and perhaps even the beauty pageants. But even during a short visit, he could not have missed the flappers, their fashions, their attitudes, and their possibilities for his novel. He recorded that he had seen “thousands and thousands” of the 80 81

Huxley, Brave New World, 197. Ibid., 197.

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flappers in Los Angeles, and he certainly made excellent use of what he observed.

CHAPTER FIVE ENCOUNTERING THE HOPI AND THE ZUNI An author’s memory sometimes fails him, and, as a result, scholars are misled into faulty assumptions. In a 1961 interview with George Wilkes and Ray Frazer, Aldous Huxley commented: I had to do an enormous amount of reading up on New Mexico [for Brave New World], because I’d never been there. I read all sorts of Smithsonian reports on the place and then did the best I could to imagine it. I didn’t actually go there until six years later in 1937, when we visited Frieda Lawrence.1

Actually, Huxley traveled across California, Arizona, and New Mexico in May 1926, making brief stops at the Grand Canyon and in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his preparatory reading extended far beyond Smithsonian reports on the Southwest. On May 13, 1926, as the Santa Fe California Limited train approached Chicago, Huxley wrote an oblique thank-you letter to Robert Nichols who had hosted the Huxleys while they were in Los Angeles, or the “City of Dreadful Joy” as Huxley liked to call it.2 He casually noted, “The Grand Canyon was quite up to specifications and only man was vile”.3 A day or so earlier, he had written to Mary Hutchinson that “we have been in America 5 days and have already seen its two most remarkable natural 1

Aldous Huxley, “Interview with George Wickes and Ray Frazer”, in Writers at Work, 2nd series, ed. George Plimpton, New York, 1963, 198. 2 Robert Nichols (1893-1944) was a minor English poet, author of Invocation (1915) and Ardours and Endurances (1917). He and Huxley apparently met at a poetry reading at Sybil Colefax’s “charity affair before a large and expensive audience” on December 12, 1917 (Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 91). The readers included Nichols, Huxley, Viola Tree, T.S. Eliot, and Osbert and Edith Sitwell. Huxley’s initial comment about Nichols did not forecast a long friendship: “Eliot and I were the only people who had any dignity: Bob Nichols raved and screamed and hooted and moaned his filthy war poems like a Lyceum villain” (ibid., 91). In his 1926 letter, Huxley comments encouragingly about Nichols proposed epic poem on Don Juan, a work which Nichols never completed. 3 Huxley, Letters, 268.

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phenomena – the Grand Canyon and Charlie Chaplin. Both very splendid .…”4 These two brief comments are the only ones to break Huxley’s silence about incidents and experiences between Los Angeles and Chicago during his around-the-world trip, and Jesting Pilate, his published record of the trip, elides his Southwestern experiences in total silence. This is unfortunate, because the silence occludes a crucial chapter in the genesis of and events in Brave New World, involving Huxley’s exposure to and experience of Native American geography and culture in Arizona and New Mexico, specifically of the Hopi and Zuni Pueblos and their ceremonies. Behind the Malpais and Reservation scenes in Brave New World stands a fortunate conjunction of the Santa Fe Railway, the Harvey Indian Detours, a booklet on a Hopi dance which had actively excited white imaginations for decades, a collection of Zuni folktales, and the scholarly Smithsonian Reports from the Bureau of American Ethnology. On May 5, 1926, Aldous and Maria Huxley arrived in San Francisco via an American liner, the S.S. President Cleveland, from Yokohama, Japan. They were in the last stages of their nine-month around-the-world trip they had begun, sailing from Genoa, Italy, September 15, 1925. By May 1926, they had extensively toured India, before moving on to Burma, Malaya, Java, the Philippines, with brief stops in China and Japan. Huxley wrote about all these stops in Jesting Pilate, but he said very little about his several weeks in America, except for his distinctly Fordian experiences in Los Angeles. Indeed, the chapters in Jesting Pilate become increasingly rushed and hectic as though he felt he had already written enough material about India for a volume, because his section on India accounts for sixty percent of the book and includes eleven of the twelve illustrations. Singapore, an example of the rush, gets only one paragraph. In his letter to Nichols, he was equally sketchily about his visit to the Grand Canyon, commenting only: One trundles in motor buses along the brink of the chasm. Or if one has more time or, being a woman, likes the shape of one’s haunches in

4

Quoted in Murray, Aldous Huxley, 182. Murray tentatively dates the letter May 10, 1926.

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breeches, one mounts a mule and goes off with a movie cowboy down into the gulf.5

How did the Huxleys spend their thirteen days between San Francisco and Chicago? They arrived the morning of May 5, a Wednesday, and immediately took the Santa Fe Daylight Limited to Los Angeles, a journey of approximately twelve hours, putting them in Los Angeles early that evening. Huxley’s “Rhapsody” in five movements on Los Angeles in Jesting Pilate makes it clear that Nichols showed them through a movie studio where they saw “Miss X” emote “terror” for the screen and watched special effects being created. Huxley mentions buying a Saturday newspaper, enjoying cocktail time, and being served a Saturday night’s dinner of “Gargantuan profusion”.6 They spent approximately four days in Los Angeles and left for Chicago on Sunday, May 9. Unlike contemporary trains, the California Limited was a luxury and social experience. Santa Fe’s 1906 brochure commented: … luxurious train is certainly inviting – so warm, so full of light and color! It is to be a home on wheels for many travelers during the next three days en route to the land where every month is June. Congenial persons – educated, refined and well dressed – are the kind one meets here .… The journey is sure to be pleasant socially.7

Valets, maids, and barbers met passenger needs, and meals were provided by the more than satisfactory Fred Harvey Services. Club, parlor, dining, and observation cars entertained the passengers. The brochure did not exaggerate. In 1931, Anita Loos, who would become one of Huxley’s best friends in Hollywood, traveled from New York back to Los Angeles on the Santa Fe Super Chief from Chicago. She described it thus: But what a de luxe five days! Compartments glittered with polished mahogany, shiny brass, and red brocade; the seats flaunted antimacassars of heavy lace. Gazing out on drab railroad tracks on

5

Huxley, Letters, 269. Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 302. 7 Quoted in Robert Strien, John Vaughan, and C. Fenton Richards, Jr., Santa Fe the Chief Way, Santa Fe, NM, 2001, 36. 6

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In 1926, it took approximately sixty-three hours for the California Limited to travel from Los Angeles’ Union Station to Chicago’s Dearborn Station. This left one day for the Huxleys to visit the Grand Canyon and other sites. (The Huxleys could have taken Santa Fe’s Navajo or Scout, but these trains would have put them in Chicago only an hour or so earlier.) Santa Fe Railway provided one of the few ways to cross the continental United States rather quickly in 1926 and further offered the Huxleys several options involving both the Railway and the Harvey House Tours. The Huxleys left Los Angeles on the California Limited at 12:01 p.m. Sunday May 9, and arrived at the Grand Canyon 574 miles later at 8:20 am Monday, May 10.9 Having had comfortable Pullman service all the way, they would have arrived rested and fresh for sightseeing. Upon awakening that morning, Huxley was in the scenic Kaibab National Forest on the threshold of the Grand Canyon, which had been declared a National Park only in 1919 and was quickly becoming the most significant tourist attraction in the Southwest. They would have been greeted by Hopi welcoming dances 8

Loos, A Girl Like I, 23. I particularly wish to thank Maurine McMillen and staff of the Harvey House Museum (Belen, NM), Ellen Halteman and Kathryn Santos of the California State Railroad Museum Library, and Craig Ordner of the Railroad and Heritage Museum (Temple, TX) for their assistance in locating Santa Fe timetables for 1926 and descriptions of the Santa Fe passenger trains. New Mexico had been opened to Spanish and American colonial trade and settlement through the sixteenth-century Camino Real de Tierra Adentro which connected Mexico City and Santa Fe and the early nineteenth century Santa Fe Trail which connected Independence, Missouri with Santa Fe. When the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway crossed into New Mexico December 7, 1878, it rushed building its tracks along both these trails, south to El Paso and west from Albuquerque to the Arizona border. Although built at first to carry raw materials such as coal and merchandise goods, railway officials quickly realized there was a third important source of income – tourists. See David F. Myrick, New Mexico’s Railroads: A Historical Survey, rev. edn, Albuquerque, NM, 1990; Robert Strein, et al., Santa Fe the Chief Way; and Marci L. Riskin, The Train Stops Here: New Mexico’s Railway Legacy, Albuquerque, NM, 2005. Riskin provides excellent introductions to the role and importance of the railways. Strein provides numerous photographs, mostly from the 1940s to the 1960s; Myrick gives the history of the various rail lines and spurs; Riskin concentrates on the more technical aspects of rolling stock and staffing.

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before spending a pleasant day taking the bus tour of the South Rim. Directly across from the El Tovar Hotel were the Hopi House and usually a resident band of Hopis. The Hopi House would have been of particular interest to Huxley. It was three stories high, built on a sixty by ninety base, after an original building at Oraibi on the Hopi mesas. It was largely staffed by Hopi from Hano-Tewa Pueblo, who could be seen potting, spinning, and weaving. Its shop offered a wide range of Indian handiwork, including even some Eskimo art at times. Fred Harvey’s tourist booklet pronounced it “almost as good as a trip to the province of Tusayan [largely the Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo lands in northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico], minus the desert”.10 In addition to selling their crafts, the Hopi men welcomed each train and staged non-religious dances; as Clemmer notes, “more and more people came to expect Hopis as part of the ‘Grand Canyon scene’”.11 The Huxleys took the bus tour along West Rim Drive, also known as Hermit Road, which had been laid out by Santa Fe. This eight-mile trail veers close to the rim and offers spectacular views of the Canyon from Trailview Overlook, Maricopa Point, Powell Point, Hopi Point, Mohave Point, and especially The Abyss with its three thousand foot drop-off. Each of these stops gives a panoramic view of the Bright Angel Trail, many of the unusual buttes, glimpses of the river, and some rapids. From several of these overlooks, Huxley could have seen the riders and mules snaking their way down to the bottom of the Canyon. They could have eaten a memorable lunch at El Tovar Hotel, and then taken in the Hopi House and the other tourist offerings, before boarding the train back to Williams at 7:35 p.m., arriving there at 10:00 p.m. This would have given them one full day to get a sense of the Arizona landscape and to sample exotic Indian culture. Leaving Williams at 5:40 Tuesday morning, Huxley had over twelve hours of spring daylight to see the Arizona and New Mexico landscape and to become acquainted with several Pueblo sites before exiting New Mexico through the Raton tunnels into southeastern Colorado as darkness fell that evening. The Santa Fe routing is particularly interesting. Between Williams and Laguna, Huxley would have been surrounded by buttes, mesas, 10

Fred Harvey, El Tovar: A New Hotel at Grand Canyon of Arizona, Chicago, 1906, 23. 11 Richard O. Clemmer, Roads in the Sky: The Hopi Indians in a Century of Change, Boulder, CO, 1995, 137.

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the lava wastes of Malpais which border the tracks on both sides just east and west of Grants, the volcanic eleven thousand foot high Mount Taylor, and miles and miles of arid countryside, paradoxically blooming with colorful late spring flowers. He would have seen a variety of Pueblos alongside the Rio San José and the Rio Grande and, if the day were clear, even the distant, massive mesas of Acoma. The remaining route enabled Huxley to see several pueblos quite closely; he would have passed directly through the Laguna Reservation – the train tracks give a close up view of the pueblo – and the Navajo Canoncito Reservation, then the Pueblos of Isleta, Sandia, San Felipe, and Santo Domingo as the train traveled toward Albuquerque the morning of May 11 and then north up the Rio Grande valley. He would have had further opportunity to interact with Indian culture in Albuquerque, because Indians from various pueblos sold their wares to passengers during the wait in Albuquerque where the California Limited stopped for forty minutes. Alongside the Santa Fe station and the Alvarado Hotel, there was even an especially designed “Indian House” displaying historic crafts and enabling tourists to see weavers, silversmiths, potters, and basketmakers creating their wares. The railway platform was an exciting venue in the 1920s. Photographs from the era show Cecil B. DeMille, Jack Dempsey, Rudolph Valentino and his Irish wolfhound, Dorothy Gish, Mary Pickford, Norma Shearer, Samuel Goldwyn, and others taking advantage of the forty minute stop.12 The California Limited was indeed the preferred way of travel between Los Angeles and Chicago, and the Santa Fe line surrounded its passengers with Indian symbols, art, apparel, and eventually guides. The brochures, menus, and timetables featured Southwestern landscape and culture. Hopi katsinas, sand paintings; even Mimbres designs on the china reminded passengers that they were traveling through a land which had been a state only since 1912.13 Brochures promised passengers that they would be “nearer to 12

Between March 8 and June 7, 2009, the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History mounted a major exhibition, well documented in Deborah C. Slaney’s Jewel of the Railroad Era: Albuquerque’s Alvarado Hotel. The exhibition catalogue features excellent photographs and drawings of the Alvarado and its Indian Department (Albuquerque, NM, 2009, 8-29, 66-81). The hotel was razed in early 1990, but the city later built a transportation center featuring many of the hotel’s architectural features on the site. 13 Located in far southwestern New Mexico and extending into Mexico, the Mimbres were a prehistoric branch of the Mogollon culture. The Mimbres are famous for their

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the primitive than anywhere else on the continent”, and emphasized they would be “crossing a land in which foreign people, with foreign speech and foreign ways, offer them spectacles which can be equaled in very few Oriental lands”.14 Unlike the “Oriental lands” of India, Java, and Japan, New Mexico would have struck Huxley as strangely empty. Although New Mexico is the fifth largest state of the United States (121,589 square miles), in 1926, its population was approximately only 395,000, or three persons per square mile.15 As the Huxleys sped across America, we can be positive that Huxley became acquainted with two books and a travel brochure that would have a major influence on Brave New World. Bernard Marx’s visit to the Savage Reservation exactly follows Santa Fe’s westbound luxury Indian Detours itinerary and shows both Huxley’s familiarity with the excursions and his interest in them. After spending the first evening in an “excellent” Santa Fe hotel (obviously a fictionalized La Fonda),16 Bernard and Lenina are piloted in a helicopter the following day by a Gamma octoroon deep into the reservation, a flight taking geometric black-and-white pottery which used extensive animal designs. Their pottery was often used as mortuary items and “bowls were almost universally punctured or ‘killed’ and are commonly found at the side of the skeleton” (Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Mimbres: Art and Archaeology, Albuquerque, NM, 1989, 4). “Kachina” is the familiar spelling, but Hopi has no “ch” sound. The more accurate and now more common spelling is “katsina” or “kat’sina”. Katsina means “respected spirit”, of which there are over three hundred. Bertha P. Dutton, American Indians of the Southwest, rev. edn, Albuquerque, NM, 1983, 40, explains that “when the katsina cult functions fully, every man, woman, and child of a pueblo is supposed to be initiated into it, and every man takes an active, lifelong part in its ceremonies .... Primarily, the katsinas are recognized as benevolent beings that dwell in the mountains, springs, and lakes, and who are the bringers of blessings, particularly rain, crops, and wellbeing.” Fewkes did pioneering work in studying the katsinas in his 1893-94 Smithsonian report, “Tusayan Katchinas”, 15:251-313 and his later “Hopi Kachinas, Drawn by Native Artists”, Twenty-first Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, DC., 1903, 3-126. 14 D.H. Thomas, The Southwestern Indian Detours, Phoenix, AZ, 1978, 196. 15 Nelson P. Valdes, “The New Mexico Population”: http://unm.edu/~mbs;frd326NM Pop06.Htm (assessed January 22, 2008). 16 La Fonda, with its striking Pueblo architecture, remains yet today a landmark and a premier hotel in Santa Fe. Built in the early 1920s, Santa Fe Railways acquired it in 1926. Lesley Poling-Kempes, The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West, New York, 1991 , reprints three period photographs (177-78). El Tovar, Bright Angel Lodge, and La Fonda are the only three Harvey House hotels still serving the public. Most westward bound tours started from La Fonda which the Harvey House Company had turned into a luxury hotel.

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them from the easternmost to the westernmost pueblos, over ten of the nineteen New Mexico pueblos: “[Bernard] sleeping was carried over Taos and Tesuque; over Nambe and Picuris and Pojoaque, over Sia and Cochiti, over Laguna and Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, over Zuñi and Cibola and Ojo Caliente, and woke at last to find the machine standing on the ground” in Malpais.17 This itinerary clearly places Malpais in Arizona, alongside of or overlapping Hopi lands. The flight may originate in New Mexico, but it ends in Arizona.18 Their “blond and brachycephalic Alpha-Minus” Warden from Santa Fe may even be a parody of an Indian Detour courier, because he is garrulous to a fault, “a mine of irrelevant information and unasked-for good advice. Once started, he went on and on – boomingly”,19 delighting in describing the electrified fence and its victims. He leaves Lenina wishing for soma and Bernard “pale and trembling with impatience”.20 It never occurs to either of them that the young man is probably desperate for civilized Alpha company and that he has possibly been banished to his position. Travel in the American Southwest had been transformed for thousands of tourists like the Huxleys on January 1, 1878 when Frederick Henry Harvey, an English emigrant gifted with considerable ambitions and abilities, signed a five-year contract with Santa Fe Railway. Santa Fe agreed to stop its numerous passenger trains for two meals a day at its Florence, Kansas station, and Harvey agreed to provide quality meals, a service distinctly absent from American rail travel at the time. The relationship was completely and successfully symbiotic. The Harvey Houses, with their first-class meals, their well trained Harvey staff, and their luxury hotel accommodations followed 17

Huxley, Brave New World, 124. Enchanted Mesa, Cibola, and Ojo Caliente are not actually pueblos. Enchanted Mesa, which figures significantly in Acoma founding myth, is an uninhabited topographical and sacred site at Acoma Pueblo; Ojo Caliente is a small lake and village about twenty miles southwest of the main Zuni pueblo; Cibola is the Spanish name for the Zuni area, and “Sia” dropped from usage early in the twentieth century, becoming “Zia”, the name of the symbol on New Mexico’s state flag. Several pueblos go unmentioned, but they would not have been on the rather direct flight pattern: these include Jemez, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, San Juan, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, and Isleta. These pueblos are in the Jemez and Rio Grande valleys. See Daniel Gibson, Pueblos of the Rio Grande, Tucson, AZ, 2001 for a good overview of the nineteen pueblos. 19 Huxley, Brave New World, 118. 20 Ibid., 120. 18

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the Santa Fe Railway west. Santa Fe brochures soon featured the following advertisement: Along the line of the A. T. & S. F. [Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe], between terminal points, are under the charge of Mr. Fred. Harvey, a caterer of long experience, and all the delicacies served at first-class hotels, are found at the dining stations …. Neatness, cleanliness, and carefully-prepared dishes await the traveler who dines at the Santa Fe Eating Houses. Mr. Harvey knows what the traveling public wants, and he provides it.21

THE EATING HOUSES

Soon there were Harvey House establishments approximately every one hundred miles on the Santa Fe system, and such hotels as El Tovar (Grand Canyon), El Navajo (Gallup), the Alvarado (Albuquerque), La Fonda (Santa Fe), and the Castenada (Las Vegas) – all but the first in New Mexico – became famous stops for tourists, businessmen, and movie stars on their way to and from San Francisco and Los Angeles to Chicago, and then on to New York City by the 20th Century Limited. By the 1920s, the Harvey House Corporation had begun to branch anew into other forms of tourist business, offering the Harvey’s Indian Detours to develop its already quite successful tours to the Grand Canyon. Harvey House’s El Tovar had opened at the Grand Canyon in 1905 and was entertaining 44,000 guests a year by 1919, 200,000 in 1929, and over 300,000 in the mid1930s.22 In the words of its owner, “El Tovar is more than a hotel; it is a village devoted to the entertainment of travelers”.23 By then Harvey House facilities had reached virtually iconic status for dependable luxury service in the tourist world. Planning for the Indian Detours began in earnest in August 1925, and was enthusiastically welcomed by the newspapers, Chambers of Commerce, and delighted public officials, even though the first tour would not take place until March 17, 1926. The Albuquerque Morning Journal enthused that the tours “will enable rail tourists from Chicago to California to see points of historic and scenic interest in this state”.24 The Harvey brochure promised even more, telling its potential customers that: 21

Poling-Kempes, Harvey Girls, 36. Ibid., 169. 23 Harvey, El Tovar, 9. 24 Thomas, Indian Detours, 45. 22

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The Indian Detours made it possible for tourists to leave the train at any number of stops between Williams, Arizona and Las Vegas, New Mexico for a carefully arranged, expertly guided one- to five-day tour. Tour planning had been both extensive and intensive. Harvey House had hired Erna Fergusson who had run her own Koshare Tours between 1921 and 1925 and who would write a book detailing her tours to train and direct the young women couriers, and potential drivers of the luxuriously appointed Packards were rigorously vetted.26 They would, after all, be driving many times where there were no designated roads. The roads through the Hopi lands, for instance, were not paved until 1959 and 1960.27 Several drivers reached a million miles accident free, and during the years the Detours operated only one fatality (that of a driver) occurred. Most of the tours featured Pueblos, especially the ones near Santa Fe and the Hopi villages in Arizona, and all the tour literature emphasized the “foreignness” of the travelers’ experiences “nearer to the primitive than anywhere else on the continent”.28 The Hopi’s Snake Dance, which truly strikes Bernard and Lenina as foreign, and which is ever so briefly but quite accurately depicted by Huxley, is indeed spectacular, so spectacular that the crowds of curious people led the Hopi first to prohibit cameras during the ceremony by 1911, then to restrict visits to the pueblos, and finally to end access to this and other religious dances entirely. The Hopi resented the anthropologists, photographers, and tourists – indeed all pahaanas (whites) – and took progressive steps to restrict access to their ceremonies. After the intrusions of Edward S. Curtis, Adam Clark Vroman, Frederick Monsen, George Wharton James, and 25

Ibid., 65. Erna Fergusson would later turn her visits to the pueblos and her experience of the dances into a book for general readers, Dancing Gods: Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona, Albuquerque, NM, 1951. 27 Clemmer, Roads in the Sky, 275. 28 Thomas, Indian Detours, 196. 26

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countless amateur photographers, the Hopi banned all photography in 1915, a move supported by the government agents who “believed that photographing ceremonies provided unwanted encouragement for the Indians to retain native customs and discouraged the assimilation of white ways”.29 Forrest notes that Edward S. Curtis filmed the activities in the kiva during the 1906 dance at Oraibi and “the next winter toured eastern states showing them in theatres”.30 Each year in August a Hopi priest announces the advent of the nine-day ritual, usually in conjunction with a full moon and the coming of the monsoon rains which arrive in New Mexico and Arizona at this time. On four consecutive days the Snake Priests, hunting successively in the four cardinal directions, gather fifty to sixty snakes – bull snakes, whip snakes, racers, and rattlesnakes. There is a particular snake for each of the six directions, but only those of North, West, and Below directions are used – called Masichu’a, Káto’ya, and Tuwáchu’a, respectively – “the only [snakes] whose power man can control”.31 These snakes are taken to the kiva where, before the climax of the dance, they are sung to, soothed with eagle feather “snake whips”, ceremonially washed in a specially prepared solution, dried in sand, and prepared for their role in the ceremonies. The ninth day, they are taken from the kiva and placed in the kisi, a kind of teepee or brush arbor of cottonwood branches. At this time, ceremony becomes spectacle. Following the morning’s Snake Race, in which the athletic young men race for some distance, the Antelope Kiva priests enter the

29

Victor Masayesva and Erin Younger, Hopi Photography/Hopi Images, Tucson, AZ. 1983, 24. One could scarcely find a more succinct statement of Federal policy relating to Indian affairs. The Pueblo tribes as well as the Hopi and Navajo are extremely sensitive about photography. Some pueblos allow general photography for a fee; no photography of religious dances is allowed. 30 Edward Sheriff Curtis, whose photographic record of Native Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remains one of the major accomplishments of American ethnography, did lecture, using numerous colored slides and musical accompaniment, on the East Coast, and filmed the Hopi and Navajo, though there is disagreement about the date of the filming. He also produced one feature film, “The Land of the Head Hunters”, but this was a film from 1914, using Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia. 31 There are actually seven directions in Hopi and Zuni thought: north, south, east, west, up, down, and center. These directions are associated with colors, colors of corn, seasons, and spirits.

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plaza.32 The Snake Priests follow, and in pairs approach the kisi. The “carrier” selects a snake, places its neck in his mouth, and dances four times around the plaza. He is accompanied by the “holder” or “hugger”, another Snake Priest who puts his right arm on the “carrier’s” shoulders and with his left hand strokes the snake with eagle feathers.33 Meanwhile, a “gatherer” collects the snakes which, after having been carried around the dancing area several times, have been spit, sometimes carefully placed, or simply dropped on the ground. Eventually, when all the snakes have been “danced”, the “gatherers” place them inside a circle drawn with sacred cornmeal. Women sprinkle more sacred cornmeal on them, then, at a signal, the dancers grab several snakes in their hands, run from the plaza to the base of the mesa some three hundred to six hundred feet below, and release the snakes. The snakes are charged to carry the prayers for rain to the Snake Mother Goddess. The dancers return to the mesa, drink an emetic prepared for the occasion and vomit until they are purged and purified – a purification act duplicated by Huxley’s John in Chapter Eighteen of Brave New World. Non-Indian viewers were always astounded that no one was bitten and were repelled by but 32 These races, a combination of athletic competition and ceremonial act, are an important part of feast days and folklore. See the following stories in Harold Courlander, The Fourth World of the Hopis: The Epic Story of the Hopi Indians as Preserved in Their Legends and Traditions, Albuquerque, NM, 1971: “The Destruction of Palatkwapi”, in which the kikmongwi’s nephew trains to run faster than deer; “The Dispersal from Sikyatki”, in which competitive races between two villages become a revenge story; “The Antelope Boy of Shongopovi”, in which a deserted baby is adopted by the antelope people, and “The Races between Payupki and Tikuvi”, in which Spider Woman helps a brother and sister during a race involving shape-shifting. The races most impressed D.H. Lawrence. He wrote, “Never shall I forget the Indian races, when the young men, even the boys, run naked, smeared with white earth and stuck with bits of eagle fluff for the swiftness of the heavens, and the old men brush them with eagle feathers, to give them power. And they run in the strange hurling fashion of the primitive world, hurled forward, not making speed deliberately” (“New Mexico”, in Phoenix, ed. Edward McDonald, New York, 1936, 146). 33 There is some belief among the Navajo that the water in which the snakes are washed and in which the feather wands are dipped contains a drug that pacifies the snakes, hence stroking the snake with the feathers during the dance would keep it tranquil. Supposedly the drug leeches from the Broom Snakeweed (Gutierrezia sarothrae). Several Indian tribes have used it to treat a variety of medical problems such as respiratory problems, swellings, stomach upsets, fevers, etc. Whether this explanation is valid is still open to question.

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simultaneously mesmerized by seeing someone, in a sacred context, so handle poisonous rattlesnakes.34 Consider the glimpses of this ceremony that Huxley gives his readers in Brave New World. Lenina Crowne and Bernard Marx seem to arrive just after the Snake Dance has begun. As they look on, One of them [the dancers] was holding a feather brush; the other carried, in either hand, what looked at a distance like three or four pieces of thick rope. One of the ropes writhed uneasily, and suddenly Lenina saw that they were snakes.35

Elsewhere in the scene, the narrator tells us: … then suddenly the leader of the dancers broke out of the line, ran to a big wooden chest which was standing at one end of the square, raised the lid and pulled out a pair of black snakes. A great yell went up from the crowd, and all the other dancers ran towards him with outstretched hands. He tossed the snakes to the first-comers, then dipped back into the chest for more. More and more, black snakes and brown and mottled – he flung them out. And then the dance began again on a different rhythm.36

They also view the last act: The dancers rushed forward, picked up the snakes and ran out of the square. Men, women, children, all the crowd ran after them.37

Unlike D.H. Lawrence’s description of the ritual and the costumes, Huxley’s description of the Snake Dancers is very specific and surprisingly accurate.38 Lenina and Bernard see the Snake Priests: 34

How priests avoided being bitten by the rattlesnakes, if indeed they did, remains a contentious topic. Walter Hough, The Hopi Indians, Cedar Rapids, IA, 1915, 17, notes that “The Mokis have an antidote for snake bite made from the root of a plant called by botanists Gaura parviflora”; Lawrence speculated that in preparing the snakes during the several days before the dance the priests “emptied” the snakes of their poison by getting them to strike repeatedly (Morning in Mexico, London, 1927, 17576). Navajos believe that the lustration uses a tranquillizing herb. 35 Huxley, Brave New World, 127. 36 Ibid., 133. 37 Ibid., 135. 38 See the illustrations by John Gregory Bourke, The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, Chicago, 1962; Walter Hough, The Moki Snake Dance, Albuquerque, NM,

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In Masked Gods, Frank Waters captures the solemnity and confusion of this final act: Suddenly it is over. Two Hopi girls dressed in ceremonial mantles sprinkle the writhing mass with baskets of meal. Then Snake priests grab up the snakes in armfuls, like loose disjointed sticks of kindling, and run out of the plaza. Down the trails into the stark Arizona desert to four shrines where the snakes are freed. Released at last, after giving up their dark potency, to carry the meal prayers sprinkled upon them, the feather breaths of life, the ceremonial commands laid upon them, back to the deep spinal core of the dark source.40

After considering these and other dances, the architecture of the pueblos, and the orientation of buildings in relationship to the natural environment, Vincent Scully has pronounced these dances “to be the most profound works of art yet produced on the American continent”,41 akin to practices in ancient Greece, or even earlier if one considers the Cretan Snake Goddess figurine holding snakes in each hand. Huxley added one feature to the Snake Dance ceremony: the whipping. Lenina truly wishes for her soma during the whipping scene. As the young Palowhtiwa walks slowly around the “writhing heap of snakes”,42 a coyote-masked katsina strikes him with a whip as 1992 (this edition is an exact reprint of the original 1898 Santa Fe edition); Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian: The Complete Portfolios, ed. Hans Christian Adam, Cologne, 2003, and Neil David, Frederick Dockstader, J. Brent Richs, and Alexander E. Anthony, Kachinas: Spirit Beings of the Hopi, Albuquerque, NM, 1993. Also see Adrea Portago and Barton Wright’s Classic Hopi and Zuni Kachina Figures, Santa Fe, NM, 2006 for handsome color photographs of Hopi kachinas (plates 24-26). Unfortunately the photographs contain neither plate numbers nor page numbers; these are relegated to the back of the volume. 39 Huxley, Brave New World, 127. 40 Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi, New York, 1963, 314. 41 Vincent Scully, Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance, 2nd edn, Chicago, 1989, xiii. 42 Huxley, Brave New World, 134.

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he completes each round.43 On the seventh round, the boy collapses and his blood is sprinkled with a feather over the snakes. The scene is largely Huxley’s creation, because no such act is recorded by any of the historic witnesses of the Snake Dance, nor is it part of the mythic institution of the dance. However, I think no reader would deny the ceremonial effectiveness of Huxley’s addition. Ceremonial whippings of the young do occur in Hopi initiations, but these are very private affairs. Hough records that during February’s Powamu ceremonies held in the kivas “ferocious Kachina”44 severely flog initiates with yucca whips, and Waters colorfully describes the terrors Angwushahai’i and her two Hu’ whippers must have inspired in the young initiates:45 The two Hu’ whippers … were terrifying. Their bodies were naked save for red horsehair kilts, and painted black with white dots except for forearms and lower legs painted white. From their black masks stuck out horns, buldging eyes, huge mouths with bared teeth, and long black-and-white striped horsehair beards. In both hands they carried long yucca whips.46 43

There is no recorded Hopi coyote katsina. A number of furred mammals do figure as katsinas – badger, squirrel, bear, wolf, dog, and chipmunk, for instance – but no coyote. The coyote does, however, play a role in Zuni mythology. See Frank Hamilton Cushing, “Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths”, Thirteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, DC., 1896, 387-91 and Jesse Green’s comment in Zuni: Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing, Lincoln, NB, 1979, 337, that “Coyote is a kind of double character, a container of oppositions, at once one of the most hallowed of the animal spirits and the most foolish, the meddling trickster who is forever being tricked” (337). Hamilton A. Tyler’s Pueblo Animals and Myths, Norman, OK, 1974, contains an interesting discussion of Coyote myths among the Tewa, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi in which one learns of Coyote’s disruption of the cosmos in helping place the Sun, Moon, and stars, his associations with death, his shape-shifting, and his creation of seasons. For entertaining glimpses of Coyote’s antics, see the collection by Mourning Dove, Coyote Stories, ed. Heister Dean Guie, Lincoln, NB, 1990. She also uses her Indian name, “Humishuma”. 44 Hough, The Hopi Indians, 139. 45 This should be Angwusnasomtaqat, the Crow Mother. Angwushahai’i is the Crow Bride and not associated with the Hu whippers. 46 This is an exact description of the Hu Katsina Twungwup: see Oscar T. Branson, Hopi Indian Kachina Dolls, Tucson, AZ, 1992, C14; and Waters, Book of the Hopi, 178. Neil David’s paintings depict the “whipper” katsinas, all of whom carry yucca fronds: see his illustrations for Owangozozo (number 1), Sohu He (number 10), Tuwateuah (number 15, who wears a generous turkey feather crown), Salako (number 19), Hototo (#53), and Silafafgoingtaka (number 68). David’s paintings are invaluable

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Susanne and Jake Page describe a more recent and more benign ceremony in which the Crow Mother recites the initiates’ “youthful sins” while the godparents “whip the initiates, giving each one four blows with fresh yucca shoots, raising welts, even breaking the skin”,47 and in the late nineteenth century, Jesse Fewkes recorded mythic initiations in which a young man appears with “his back … cut and bleeding, and covered with splinters of yucca and willow after he has been flagellated by Calako [also spelled Salako] preparing him for a religious vision”.48 At Hano, the easternmost of the Hopi villages, every ten years a ceremony was performed involving the showing of four “dignitary” masks. At this time, the sacred clowns, the goyemsi and the koshare (respectively the mudheads and the horizontally striped beings topped with cornshuck hair decorations) are whipped with willow or yucca, “part of the ceremony of purifying the whole community, that’s the meaning of the whipping”.49 Such initiatory, penitential, and purifying whippings remain features in both contemporary Christian and Islamic rituals, and Huxley obviously heard tales of New Mexico’s Penitentes, whose bloody selfflagellations, especially during Easter Holy Week, have entered the area’s folklore. Fray Angélico Chávez recalls in My Penitente Land that as: … young monecillos in their surplices heralded a procession by starting out of the church bearing high the black-painted cross of the Via Cruscis … rows of bare-chested Brothers of Blood with black hoods over their heads joined in, whips ready in hand. Others of them

for understanding the regalia and the traditionalism of the katsinas. He also provides a useful bibliography. Susanne and Jake Page, Hopi, New York, 1987, 166-67 gives excellent sepia photographs of the katsina ogres. Also see Harold S. Colton, Hopi Kachina Dolls, Albuquerque, NM, 1959. 47 Page and Page, Hopi, 68. 48 Jesse Fewkes, quoted in Hough, The Hopi Indians, 198. In “The Zuni Indians”, Twenty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, DC, 1904, 103, Matilda Coxe Stevenson provides a full, early description of initiation ceremonies and emphasizes that the katsinas strike the blanket-covered children “four times with all [their] strength across the back with the yucca”. She continues: “A blanket of ordinary thickness and a deerskin are used for voluntary initiation. The novices pass but once before the Sa’yahlia, receiving from each of these four gods four strokes with giant yucca delivered with all their strength, and though every effort is made by the novices to keep silent, their smothered groans are pitiable to hear.” 49 Courlander, The Fourth World, 221.

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began shouldering heavy crosses as nazarenos, to drag them between their flagellant counterparts as these began lashing their backs to the rhythm of the piper’s tune.50

His own father and some of his neighbors were members of the group. Recall that Huxley has a film on the Penitentes being shown to the amusement of a Beta-Minus geography class. We are told that the “young Etonians fairly shouted with laughter” at the sight of the “Penitentes of Acoma prostrating themselves before Our Lady” and that as the film continued “the laughter drowned even the amplified record of their groans”.51 It is entirely likely that the self-imposed ordeal John undergoes was inspired by a few lines in Frank Cushing’s “Remarks on Shamanism”, which was published in 1897 in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Writing about various Zuni puberty rites for young men, Cushing comments: From this, the spiritual relation, so to say, or the source or totemic origin of the child is divined .… Now when the age of puberty is attained, and the boy is to be solemnly invested with the garment or clout and the responsibilities of manhood, he is … required to pass through various ordeals, such as a period of vigorous fasting and purification (this both by means of emetics and purgatives); and to retire to some lonely spot and there keep, day and night, lengthy vigils, whereby it is sought to diminish for a time his earthly grossness, interests and affections, to ‘still his heart’ and quicken his spiritual perception and hearing of the meaning of the ‘Silent Surpassing Ones’.52

“When the other boys were sent out to spend the night on the mountains – you know, when you have to dream which your sacred animal is”, John tells Bernard, “they wouldn’t let me go with the others; they wouldn’t tell me any of the secrets. I did it myself.”53 How did Huxley achieve such accuracy in describing the topography, the apparel of the dancers, the basic occasion of the 50

Fray Angelico Chavez, My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM, 1995, 219-20. 51 Huxley, Brave New World, 193. 52 Cushing, Zuni: Selected Writings, 209. 53 Huxley, Brave New World, 210.

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dance, and the architecture of the pueblo? Specifically, how did he get the colors correct? Many explanations have turned to D.H. Lawrence who had witnessed several pueblo dances in New Mexico and Arizona and have also looked to possible sources in his several essays on the dances and his novel, The Plumed Serpent. At one point in discussing the manuscript of Brave New World, Jerome Meckier comments that “for chapter 7 in the typescript, he relied on The Plumed Serpent and Lawrence’s essays in Mornings in Mexico”.54 Huxley had read these works; however, we will see that Huxley’s descriptions of the Snake Dance and the Malpais Pueblo are so keenly detailed and so accurate that he could not have depended solely on Lawrence, if at all. Huxley did not have a high opinion of The Plumed Serpent. He once called it “a mass of contradictions”55 and confessed that at times “one doesn’t know what he’s getting at”. The eleven or so passages in The Plumed Serpent referring to “the wild Indians of the North” are typically too abstract to be sources. For instance, Lawrence writes in Chapter 17: For the old dances of the Aztecs and the Zapotecs, of all the submerged Indian races, are based upon the old sinking bird-step of the Red Indians of the north. It is in the blood of the people, they cannot quite forget it. It comes back to them, with a sense of fear, and joy, and relief.56 54

Jerome Meckier, “Aldous Huxley’s Americanization of the Brave New World Typescript”, Twentieth-Century Literature, XLVIII (2002), 439. 55 Huxley, “Interview”, 209. 56 D.H. Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, New York, 1959, 285. The key references to Indian dances occur in Chapters 7, 9, 13, 17, 21, and 22. The closest Lawrence comes to actual description of the dances occurs on pages 128-129 and 399-400. The relationship of Lawrence’s works and personality on Huxley’s fiction remains one of the most contentious issues in studies of the ties between the two men. Some scholars find that Huxley made considerable use of Lawrence’s stories and novels; others emphasize Huxley’s use of Lawrence’s life. Katherine Toy Miller’s “Deconstructing the Savage Reservation in Brave New World”, in Huxley’s Brave New World Essays, eds David Garrett Izzo and Kim Kirkpatrick, Jefferson, NC, 2008, provides a fair sample of the strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches. Carefully mining Huxley’s Preface to the Lawrence letters and his own letters, Miller adds to the generally accepted argument that D.H. and Frieda Lawrence figure in the characters of John and Linda, but one has to regard as highly problematic her comments that “One possible cause of Trev’s suicide was that he had gotten a girl of a lower class pregnant ... which may have fueled Huxley's concern with birth control in Brave New World” (156), because this was one of Huxley’s concerns from early in his career. After mentioning half a dozen Lawrence works, ranging from The Plumed Serpent to

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In addition, several sites have been proposed for the Malpais Pueblo, specifically Zuni Pueblo and its Thunder Mountain and Acoma Pueblo and its Enchanted Mesa. Considering Huxley’s accuracy in details, none of these explanations is fully satisfactory, and several are simply invalid. As he said, Huxley depended largely on Smithsonian reports, but he also depended on three other sources gathered during his 1926 trip which enabled him to fuse Zuni and Hopi cultures almost seamlessly to any reader who is not aware of the differences between these two cultures. Brave New World provides an overlay of Zuni language, names, and bits of mythology on a much more substantial base of Hopi materials. The several pueblos that have been suggested as the inspiration for the pueblo described in Brave New World do not actually resemble the one visited by Bernard and Lenina. Most recently, Margaret Sloan has proposed that the Malpais Reservation “closely resembles either the Acoma Pueblo … or the Pueblo of Zuni”.57 In fact, it little resembles either. The keys to identification are the height of the mesa, the ship imagery used by Huxley, and the “stepped and amputated” pueblo architecture. Because of its location, just off Interstate 40, its aggressive tourist promotions, its busy casino, and its educational guided tours, Acoma is probably the best known of the pueblos at present, even better known than Taos. It sits 376 feet high on a sandstone mesa, virtually unreachable except by a single trail until the early twentieth century, and impregnable to its foes until betrayed by a miscreant of the tribe. But it is far too large in area ever to be described as a ship, and its architecture is not quite what Huxley describes. Also, Acoma’s Enchanted Mesa’s sheer sides challenge all but the most dedicated members of the tribe in search of a spirit quest; indeed, climbing to its top is forbidden at present.58 And neither Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine, Miller asserts that “Huxley used parts of these almost directly” (149), an assertion that seems quite unearned. Behind much of the discussion of the relationship between the two men one finds the assumption that Lawrence is a superior type of artist, Huxley an inferior one and almost a parasite on Lawrence. 57 Margaret F. Sloan, “Frank Hamilton Cushing: A Source for Huxley’s Brave Old World”, Aldous Huxley Annual, III (2003), 131. 58 Enchanted Mesa is a sacred site, figuring importantly in the origin and establishment myths of the Acoma. Supposedly, there is no path to its top. Once, the myth tells, two women (usually a grandmother and granddaughter) were trapped atop the Mesa when lightning struck and destroyed the path. Rather than starve, they

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Acoma nor Zuni stages a Snake Dance any longer. Zuni Pueblo is even less likely because it is spread out in a river valley below Dowe Yallane (Thunder Mountain) that rises almost nine-hundred feet above the pueblo. The site Huxley describes is virtually identical to Walpi, a Hopi pueblo in Arizona almost ninety miles northwest of Zuni. Huxley had no opportunity of visiting any of these three sites, but Walter Hough’s The Moki Snake Dance, a booklet published by the Passenger Department of the Santa Fe Railway and readily available at its stations and on its trains, contains five photographs of Walpi, as well as photographs of the Hopi pueblos of Mishonginovi, Shipaulovi, and Oraibi, all four of which are situated atop narrow, easily defended mesas, approximately three- to four-hundred feet above the valleys, all of which have stepped buildings, some in ill repair, and all of them, as the photographs show, are reached by steep rock paths. One photograph in particular shows just how narrow the mesa access to Walpi is and how relatively narrow are the several mesas.59 The Walpi mesa does indeed resemble a large ship such as a Cunard liner or a modern aircraft carrier rising out of the desert.60 Numerous scholars have turned to the ship image: for example, Hough was also thinking of Cunard liners when he commented: “Perched upon high, warmtinted sandstone mesas, narrow like the decks of great Atlantic liners, are their clustered dwellings.”61 The pueblos oddly awaken memories of Athens’ Acropolis.

jumped to their deaths. I have known several Acoma, male and female, who have climbed the Mesa as part of a spiritual quest. Usually they have held or later held high positions in the tribe’s government. H.L. James’ Acoma: People of the White Rock, Atglen, PA, 1988 provides an excellent visual guide to the Pueblo, its crafts, and dances. Unfortunately, the photographers are not identified in the book. Also useful is Ward Alan Minge, Acoma: Pueblo in the Sky, Albuquerque, NM, 2002. 59 Walter Hough, The Moki Snake Dance, Santa Fe, NM, 1898, 28, 29, 35, 37. This pamphlet has been reprinted numerous times. Avanyu Publishing of Albuquerque reprinted it in a handsome edition in 1992. Jesse Walter Fewkes, Hopi Snake Ceremonies, Albuquerque, NM, 1986, which gathers three of his accounts, was also published by Avanyu. 60 To appreciate the appropriateness of the ship imagery, see Page and Page, 12-16, which offers a striking double-page photograph of Walpi and other Hopi pueblos; also see the iconic photograph by Curtis, North American Indian, 84, and Hough, The Moki Snake Dance, 28. 61 Hough, The Moki Snake Dance, 19.

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When Lawrence sketches Walpi in “The Hopi Snake Dance”, he gives it but two sentences: The nearest village, Walpi, stands in half-ruin high, high on a narrow, pallid rock. On the top of the mesas perch the ragged, broken, grayish pueblos, identical with the mesas on which they stand.62

His destination at the time was Hotevilla on the Third or westernmost mesa, and he was even less impressed with its “tiny village of grey little houses, raggedly built with undressed stone and mud around a little oblong plaza, and partly in ruins”.63 At various times, Lawrence witnessed at least four Indian dances while he was in New Mexico: the Corn Dance at Santo Domingo Pueblo, the Snake Dance at Hotevilla Pueblo, an Apache dance near the village of Dulce in north-central New Mexico on the Jicarilla Apache Reservation,64 and the Deer Dance at Taos Pueblo. His reactions to the dances vary enormously and are of uneven quality. The Apache dance, perhaps since it marked Lawrence’s first contact with New Mexico’s Indians, is described in detailed, puzzled, and somewhat unfocused terms as though he did not know where to concentrate his attention.65 His responses cannot quite grasp the 62

Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 141. Ibid., 144. 64 The Apache are nomadic Indians, not Pueblo Indians, and the last to be brought under American control. In addition to the nineteen Pueblo Indian lands, New Mexico has two Apache reservations for the Jicarilla and Mescalero. Some Chiricahua do live in New Mexico, but their reservation is in Arizona. There is also a small Ute reservation and large expanses of Navajo lands. Cochise and Geronimo, two Apache chiefs, are famous for their resistance to United States dominance. Lawrence was appalled by the smell of the Apache and noted, “the Apaches have a cult of waterhatred; they never wash flesh or rag. So never in my life have I smelt such an unbearable sulphur-human smell as comes from them when they cluster: a smell that takes the breath from the nostrils” (“Indians and an Englishman”, in Phoenix, 95). In contrast, Curtis was impressed with their careful hygiene: “The Apache, old and young alike, are particularly fond of bathing, and make the most of every opportunity to have a swim. They call it ‘a swim’ regardless of how shallow the water may be, just so long as they can wash their bodies” (Curtis, The North American Indian, 73). This is but one of many examples where ethnographical record diverges sharply from Lawrence’s comments. 65 Such confusion is common when outsider – pahaanas – view Native American dances. The drumming, the repetitive chanting (often in an archaic language), the exotic regalia, and the impenetrable symbolism leave one totally outside the ritual, wondering what is and what is not significant. Dances held by pueblos at Christmas, 63

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occasion, and he describes the dancers as “Strange dark faces with wide, shouting mouths and rows of small close-set teeth, and strange lines on the faces, part ecstasy, part mockery, part humorous, part devilish, and the strange, calling, summoning sound in a wild songshout, to the thud-thud of the drum”.66 After a while, the dance becomes an unforgettable experience in which “something in [his] soul broke down, letting in a bitterer dark, a pungent awakening to the lost past, old darkness, new terror, new root-griefs, old root-richnesses”. “The Dance of the Sprouting Corn”, telling of his visit to Santa Domingo, is a more impressive response to a much more closed society which at the time only occasionally allowed visitors to witness its formalized dance of “this green resurrection”.67 He now understands the purpose of the koshare (clowns), the source of the various rhythmic sounds, and the import of the “flat wooden tiaras [the tabletas] shaped like a castle gateway” on the women’s heads. However, the forty-two male dancers draw most of his attention to their physiques, their apparel, and their rhythmic “queer, beautiful two-step”,68 as the two clans of the Pueblo respond to one another for almost six hours. His essay is highly descriptive and specific and only veers into abstract musings in its final paragraph. (The 2009 Corn Dance would have astonished Lawrence. There were an estimated one thousand dancers in the two clans who danced for approximately eight hours in extreme heat.) The two women who follow each male dancer have always been dressed in black, with turquoise tableta headdresses; the men, stripped to the waist, cover their bodies in reddish clay, wear a decorated kilt, decorative belts, bells and turtle shells on their legs, and carry rattles. Both sexes carry or wear fir branches. Lawrence does not mention the koshare who in their turquoise or pumpkin colored body paint, stalk through the dancers, chanting at times, and wearing corn shuck decorations atop their heads. Santo Domingo Pueblo, which is only a few miles off a busy Interstate highway, now attracts many tourists to its dances. Epiphany, and founding saints’ days are usually open to the public as are many of the animal and food dances (corn, crow [very rare], deer, buffalo, arrow/bow, turtle, etc.). Most of the specifically religious dances are closed to outsiders in general and sometimes to ethnic groups in particular. The show dances one might see at powwows are competitive dances by individuals, stripped of their religious content. 66 Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 95. 67 Ibid., 127. 68 Ibid., 133.

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Lawrence’s discussion of the Hopi Snake Dance is not so fortunate, because, so agenda-driven in observation and error-prone in details, it becomes clotted with the labored rhetoric common to The Plumed Serpent. In August 1924, D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, along with Mabel Dodge and Tony Luhan motored from Taos to view the Hotevilla Snake Dance. The trip to the Hopi mesas was “utterly bumpy and horrible”, and the black cars conveying the estimated three-thousand tourists to the dance reminded him of “a funeral cortège”.69 His initial disgust with the tourists and their greedy curiosity spilled over into his opinion of the dance itself, which he pronounced … almost boring, not much more than a circus turn, or the games that children play in the street …. The last is grotesque rather than beautiful, and rather uncouth in its touch of horror. Hence the thrill, and the crowd.70

But he quickly became impressed with both the Antelope and the Snake Priests, especially with the chants leading up to the end of the first day’s ceremonies which echoed “that famous darkness and silence of Egypt, the touch of the other mystery”.71 He then adds: “the deep concentration of the ‘priests’ conquers, for a few seconds, our white-faced flippancy, and we hear only the deep Häh-ha! Häh-ha! Speaking to snakes and the earth’s inner core.”72 The second day spoke even more deeply to him. He witnessed a “queer ecstasy” in the twelve snake dancers, and this excitement infuses his entire description of the dance, both in tone and figuration, especially in his description of the release of the snakes: “amid all its crudity, and the sensationalism which comes chiefly out of the crowd’s desire for thrills, one cannot help pausing in reverence before 69

Ibid., 136. Ibid., 146. 71 Lawrence’s several references to Egyptian culture and mystery religions are surely inspired by the discovery of Pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb by Howard Carter and his team November 4, 1922 (the stairs to the tomb) and November 26, 1922 (the tomb itself), which inspired a dramatic new interest in things Egyptian throughout the Western world. The revelation of the spectacular golden mummy mask did not take place until October 28, 1925. See Nicholas Reeves, The Complete Tutankhamun: The King, The Tomb, The Royal Treasure, London, 1990, for chronology, discussion, and photographs. 72 Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 155. 70

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the delicate, anointed bravery of the snake-priests (so-called), with the snakes.”73 He was particularly impressed with the snakes that “seemed strangely gentle, naïve, wondering, and almost willing, almost in harmony with the men. Which of course was the sacred aim.”74 Some of Lawrence’s experience is embedded here and there in the labored rhetoric of The Plumed Serpent, and at times refers specifically to “the wild Indians from the north” who “still have the secret of animistic dancing. They dance to gain power; power over the living forces or potencies of the earth.”75 Although Huxley met Lawrence in 1915, they did not actually become friends until 1927, and their friendship was always on uneasy terms. Huxley told John Chandos that Lawrence was “extremely fascinating, and he was always stimulating. A little alarming to be with.”76 Lawrence in turn confided to William Gerhardi that “I refuse to be Rampioned. Aldous’ admiration for me is only skin-deep.”77 They were together twice in 1927 in Florence, for ten days in 1928 at 73

Ibid., 155, 165. Ibid., 159. 75 Lawrence, The Plumed Serpent, 399. After considering all references to the “red Indians of the North” and the descriptions of the dances taking place near Guadalajara in The Plumed Serpent, I have concluded that Huxley owes very little if any debt at all to Lawrence’s novel. E.M. Forster may have considered it Lawrence’s greatest novel, and many early critics have labeled it “major”, but I find myself more in agreement with Clive James, “D.H. Lawrence in Transit”, in D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, Poet, Prophet, ed. Stephen Spender, New York, 1973, who while admiring the “most brilliant descriptive passages”, finds “the rhetoric ... short of totally suffocating, but still fearsomely turgid” (168) and Daniel R. Schwarz who “troubled by Lawrence’s misanthropy, anti-Semitism, and penchant for violent political solution”, agrees with Ross Parmenter’s conclusion that the novel “veers into a sociopathic fascist vision where self-proclaimed Ũbermenschem are allowed to let their atavistic psyches roam free” (Daniel Schwartz, The Transformation of the English Novel 1890-1930, 2nd edn, New York, 1995, 207). I have found that students laugh now at passages such as “He would never woo; she saw this. When the power of his blood rose in him, the dark aura streamed from him like a cloud pregnant with power, like thunder, and rose like a whirlwind that rises suddenly in the twilight and raises a great pliant column, swaying and leaning with power, clear between heaven and earth” (Plumed Serpent, 342). Given such rhetoric and Lawrence’s omissions and errors in describing the dances, I find little that might have appealed to or benefitted Huxley in his creation of the Reservation chapters. 76 Bedford, Aldous Huxley, 210. 77 Harry T. Moore, The Priest of Love: A Life of D.H. Lawrence, rev. edn, New York, 1974, 458. Being “Rampioned” refers to the character, Rampion, in Huxley’s Point Counter Point. 74

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Bandol, twice again in 1929, and once in early 1930 at the time of Lawrence’s death. In 1928, Huxley was apparently ready to return to New Mexico with Lawrence because he wrote to him “Let’s go to New Mexico in autumn. Let’s be amused.”78 There is no way of knowing what topics the two authors discussed – surely matters such as Lawrence’s health, Lady Chatterley’s Lover which Maria Huxley had helped type, Italian Fascism which encroached on both their lives, Huxley’s new automobile, and other things. However, since Lawrence thought “New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had. It certainly changed me for ever”,79 it would be foolish to assume that the two men did not talk about the area. Robert Nichols has given us a good description of what it was like to talk to Huxley: .

Here are some of the things we touched on – unemployment (effect on character of workmen) – Crébillion – steam-cars – the nature of music (pattern as opposed to content) – drug-taking in Siberia (consumption of a fungus and its effects) – the book of Job … the new process for procuring petrol from coal by electrolysis … Siamese cats.80

His list continues for ten more lines. But as we will see, there are significance differences between the descriptions of the dance offered by Lawrence and Huxley. Lawrence is, at most, a minor influence on and an unlikely source for Huxley’s Savage Reservation. The Walter Hough pamphlet, the Jesse Walter Fewkes’ reports, and the Santa Fe Indian Detours brochure loom much more significantly. At times, Lawrence intuits insightful interpretations; at others, he errs like any curious bur uninformed tourist. He read the dance as a battle between the Cosmic Dragon and the Sun, whereas the dance is an invocation of rain, a worship of the ancestors, and an affirmation of complex mythology.

78

Ibid., 193. In the years after the publication of Brave New World, Huxley visited Frieda Lawrence and the Lawrence Ranch in New Mexico several times: between May and September 1937, February 1938, and October 1950. He was also in the general region once more in May 1962 for a lecture at Los Alamos, just six months before his death. 79 Ibid., 142. 80 Ibid., 249.

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The certain scenario is that after visiting the Grand Canyon and seeing Hopi House, Huxley read about the Snake Dance in Walter Hough’s The Moki Snake Dance, a sixty-page booklet written expressly for the Santa Fe route and distributed by its Passenger Department.81 This booklet contains sixty-six half-tone illustrations covering various aspects of Hopi life, including two iconic Edward Sheriff Curtis photographs. The Snake Dance itself is richly illustrated. Hough’s booklet covers various aspects of Hopi life and obviously speaks directly to the tourist. It outlines four routes to the Hopi lands, gives several maps and timetables, and underlines the trip’s benefits as only a tourist salesman can: Aside from the powerful charm exerted by this region upon all visitors, [he writes,] there is an invigorating tonic quality in the pure air of Arizona that is better than medicine for the overworked in the exhausting activities of city business life. Many a professional man (and woman), wearied in brain and enfeebled in body, having been solicited to make this or a similar outdoor excursion in Arizona, has complied with misgiving and returned almost miraculously restored to health and vigor.82

His subtitle, “A popular account of that unparalleled dramatic pagan ceremony of the Pueblo Indians of Tusayan, Arizona, with incidental mention of their life and customs”, promises, his prose delivers, and his photographs depict what travelers in the Twenties would have found most exotic – photographs of sentimentalized naked children, unmarried Hopi girls with their squash blossom hairdos, pueblo sites, priests in their ceremonial regalia, pensive donkeys, and many shots of and full exposition of the Snake Dance. Popularized ethnography, tourist literature, and visual appropriation fuse in ways that could not but have interested the Santa Fe passengers who picked up the brochure. Hough knew his subject and his audience equally well. He had studied the people in depth and published a scholarly book on the Hopi in 1915. His booklet may be patronizing at times, 81 The Spanish called the Hopi “Moqui”, and this name was used for a number of years. The Navajo, one of the traditional Hopi enemies, used it because the word means “dies” or “is dying” in their language (Page and Page, Hopi, 152). An outbreak of smallpox among the Hopi Pueblos which disfigured and killed many Hopi may account for the use of the term. 82 Hough, The Moki Snake Dance, 54.

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but it remains generally free of the condescension and racism of many discussions of the Native Americans at that time. He knows, though, how to draw in his audience with mention of “swarthy priests”, “mysterious rites”, “rhythmic movement and tragic gestures of the dancers with here and there the sinuous undulation of a venomous rattlesnake”, and ceremonies which “make the blood curdle”.83 He fully describes the Snake Dance from the entry of the priests into the plaza to the “frenzied pitch” of the climactic “dancing” of the snakes: The Antelope Priests, who open the ceremony are smeared all with grey and black, and are naked save for little kilts embroidered like the sacred dance-kilts in other pueblos, red and green and black on a white fibre-cloth. The fox-skins hang behind. The feet of the dancers are pure ash-grey.84

Hough, an authority on the Hopi, who had seen numerous Snake Dances, pictures them as does Lawrence, as “semi-nude bodies streaked with white paint; a band of white on the chin from mouth to ear, rattles of tortoise shell tied to the knee, embroidered kilts of white cotton fastened around the loins, necklaces of shell and turquoise, and fox skins hanging behind from the belt”, but also emphasizes the zigzag lightning bolts painted on their chests.85 The zigzags evoke both lightning strikes and the movement of a snake, both crucially important to the invocations of rain. In “Tusayan Snake Ceremonies”, one of the several Smithsonian reports Huxley certainly read in his quest for authentic background material, Jesse Walter Fewkes describes them as follows: Each Antelope wore a ceremonial kilt of white cotton with embroidered ends, ornamented with raincloud symbols in red and dark green. Their faces had a line of white from the corners of the mouth to the ears, and the chin was painted black. They had zigzag lines of white on the breast, arms, and legs; fox-skins depended from

83

Ibid., 3, 3, 4, 15. Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 155-56. 85 Hough, Moki Snake Dance, 6. 84

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So far, Lawrence and the authorities generally agree. Huxley does not mention the Antelope Priests but concentrates only on the Snake Priests. Lawrence gets the larger details of the various stages of the dance fairly correct. However, his description of the Snake Priests is both inaccurate and all too brief: Their faces were black, showing the whites of the eyes. And they wore small black loin-aprons. They were the hot living men of the darkness, lords of the earth’s inner rays, the black sun of the earth’s vital core, from which dart the speckled snakes, like beams.87

Writing at least a year, possibly two, after his experience, Lawrence seems to have been more caught up in his interpretative rhetoric of this last sentence than in accurate description. Because the Snake Dance is one of the oldest, most traditional, and most ritualized of Hopi ceremonies, the colors, makeup, costumes, and choreography vary but little among the nine Hopi pueblos: Fewkes notes that he “sought especially to notice any innovations or variations from the presentations in 1891, 1893, and 1895 .… [but] The kiva exhibitions were found to remain practically unchanged.”88 Hough depicts the Snake Priests almost in the very words Huxley uses: The costume of the priests of the sister society of Antelopes is gay in comparison with that of the Snake priests. Their bodies rubbed with red paint, their chins blackened and outlined with a white stripe, their dark red kilts and moccasins, their barbaric ornaments, give the Snake priests a most somber and diabolical appearance.89

Throughout Hough’s pamphlet are photographs showing Snake Priests with turkey-and-eagle feather headdresses from which Huxley could have gleaned this additional detail. Fewkes’ comparative study 86

Jesse Walter Fewkes, “Tusayan Snake Ceremonies”, in Sixteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, DC, 1897, 282. 87 Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 163. 88 Jesse Walter Fewkes, “Notes on Tusayan, Snake, and Flute Ceremonies”, in Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, Washington, DC, 1900, XIX, 976-77. 89 Hough, The Moki Snake Dance, 7.

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of the dance on three pueblos is even more highly descriptive and illustrated with nineteen photographs (unfortunately all in black-andwhite): Each Snake priest wore a bunch of feathers in his hair, and curious feathered objects on the back of the head. Their faces were blackened, but there was no white paint on the chin. All wore shell and turquoise necklaces, armlets, and wristlets, and daubs of white on their foreheads, breasts and back .… Their kilts were colored red, with zigzag figures of the plumed snake, bearing tripod-shape and alternate parallel bars as ornaments. Less than half their number had a fringe of antelope hoofs on the lower edge of the kilt; all wore foxskins pendent from their loins, turtle-shell rattles on the leg, moccasins stained red with sesquioxide of iron, and red wristlets.90

Fewkes notes later that the kilts “are always stained red”.91 Huxley’s description follows those of Hough and Fewkes almost exactly: … their faces inhuman with daubings of scarlet, black and ochre … Their black hair was braided with fox fur and red flannel. Cloaks of turkey feathers fluttered from their shoulders; huge feather diadems exploded gaudily round their heads. With every step they took came the clink and rattle of their silver bracelets, their heavy necklaces of bone and turquoise beads.92

In his essay, Lawrence only sketchily describes the entry of the Snake Priests into the Hotevilla plaza. The first day: They are naked, and smeared with red ‘medicine’, with big black lozenges of smeared paint on their backs. Their wild heavy hair hangs loose.93

The second day, he barely notes any physical details. Indeed, his description of the Snake Priests reverses the actual distribution of colors: their chests and backs were painted black with red “lozenges” on their chests. Huxley’s priests look exactly like the Snake Dancer featured on the cover of Hough’s pamphlet, a virtual mirror image. 90

Fewkes, “Tusayan Snake Ceremonies”, 294. Ibid., 297. 92 Huxley, Brave New World, 127. 93 Lawrence, Mornings in Mexico, 157. 91

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Huxley’s description corresponds even more closely to the color illustration in Fewkes’ 1897-98 report, “Notes on Tusayan, Snake, and Flute Ceremonies”. Here one sees the pendant foxskin, the red kilt with the black-and-white zigzags, the white armlets, the heavy necklaces, and the prominent turkey-feather headdresses. (The sixteenth century Spaniards noted that both the Hopi and the Zuni kept “herds”, not “flocks” of turkeys.) Seeing this colored picture may have been the most significant moment in the genesis of the Savage Reservation scenes because “Snake Dance at Mishongnovi” gave Huxley all the pertinent information he needed about regalia, colors, and chorography. M. Wright Gill’s illustration makes all the blackand-white drawings and photographs in Brouke and Hough suddenly come to life.94 In the authoritative Kachinas: Spirit Beings of the Hopi, with its seventy-nine paintings, giving both front and rear views of katsinas and dancers, Neil David, a native Hopi/Tewa, also depicts the traditional Snake Priest (Tsuoh or Chusonai) wearing that red kilt with its black-and-white decoration, blackened torso and arms blackened to the elbow, two vertical broad red strips on the chest, a considerable amount of silver and turquoise jewelry, blackened face, whitened chin and lips, and an abundant headdress of dyed turkey feathers. He shows a rattlesnake or “elder brother” too.95 Lawrence’s entire essay is filled with errors of detail and interpretation. For example, he thinks the snakes are kept in the sipapu, the “lid” on which the dancers stamp each of the four times they make the circuit. Actually, the sipapu is the opening to the underworld, and the dancers stamp on it to alert the underworld gods and ancestors that the Hopi are honoring traditions. There were always four circuits of the plaza, not three as Lawrence counts, and Lawrence’s reading of the emetic the priests swallow at the end of the ceremony as liquid protecting the dancers from snake venom is mere outsider gossip and fails to recognize the purification emetic as the closing act of the ceremony. Actually, three agendas collide awkwardly here. Hough was intent on introducing the exotic and the 94

This particular Smithsonian volume contains a number of quality colored illustrations, especially the lithographs of Mayan paintings in Thomas Genn’s “Mounds in Northern Honduras” (655-92). M. Wright Gill also prepared colored illustrations of the Antelope altars showing the variety of colors in representing rain clouds, bolts of lightning, and zigzags of stylized snakes. 95 David, Spirit Beings, see number 45, and Oscar T. Branson, Hopi Indian Kachina Dolls, Tucson, AZ, 1992, C14.

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picturesque to the tourist; Lawrence was intrigued with the aboriginal and archetypal connections negotiated through the ceremonies between the human and the natural forces; Huxley was interested in drawing sharp contrasts between the savage and the civilized worlds, hence he introduces the images of squalor, old age, sexual and biological impropriety (to Lenina and Bernard), and disease – surely stemming from his observations while he was in India and about which he was most discrete in his descriptions of that country. The Hopi’s snake dance mythology Hough’s Santa Fe brochure obviously interested Huxley in the Hopi people, as did his later encounter with Fewkes and possibly John Gregory Bourke, Erna Fergusson, and Edward Sheriff Curtis. The Hopi (Hopituh-Shinumu, or peaceful people) are far less well known to the English-speaking world than are many American tribes.96 They do not figure importantly in colonial American history as do the Mohawks and Iroquois. They generated no mythology of guerilla warfare and lightning raids as did the Comanche and Apache. They did not triumph in any memorable battles as did the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Battle of Little Big Horn; nor were they memorialized in paintings by artists such as George Catlin, Charles H. Russell, and Charles Bird Key. Rather they lived in satisfied obscurity and near isolation in northeastern Arizona until approximately 1850. After a brief unpleasant encounter with seventeen of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado’s men in 1540, they had almost no further contact with colonizing forces until 1629, when Spanish missionaries arrived. Joining in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Hopi killed the four priests and soldiers in their lands and were then largely ignored by the Spanish during the 1692 Reconquest. In 1700, they slaughtered all Christian men in the Hopi village of Awatowi, distributed the women and children to the remaining villages, razed Awatowi, and remained largely to themselves until the 1850s when one of their ritual 96

The Hopis have been fortunate in the authors who have presented them to the reading public. Frank Waters’ discussion of myths, legends of the migrations, the dances, and the history is still probably the best starting point. Frank Clemmer’s discussion concentrates more on the contemporary Hopi and their problems and successes. Susanne and Jake Page have given us a beautifully illustrated look at the Hopis and their life. Their photographs are uniformly excellent and offer a rare glimpse at the contemporary Hopi. Most other photographs date before 1915. Curtis’ photographs remain the best known and most comprehensive.

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ceremonies began to attract such attention that a joke would circulate before the end of the century: “Describe a typical [Hopi] family – a mother, father, three children, and an anthropologist.”97 At the present time, the ten thousand Hopi live on a two-and-a-half million acre reservation in northeastern Arizona completely surrounded by the much larger Navajo Reservation, a source of numerous difficult conflicts over land, sacred sites, and water. Intensely conservative, highly ritualistic, and very protective of their customs and beliefs, the Hopi have laid claim that their Orabai pueblo is “indisputably the oldest continuous occupied settlement in the United States” – a claim of up to a thousand years has been advanced.98 The Hopi live on three mesas which jut like slender fingers from the much larger Black Mesa, so called because of its extensive coal deposits. Hopi culture is responsible for three historic ruins: Betatakin, Keet Seel, and Canyon de Chelly, sites featuring cliff houses tucked into large sandstone arches. In the 1920s, there were nine loosely confederated villages – Walpi, Sichomovi, and HanoTewa on the First or easternmost mesa; Mishonynovi, Shipaulovi, and Shongopovi on the Second or middle mesa; Oraibi, Hotevilla on the Third or westernmost mesa, and Moenkopi, near Tuba City, Arizona, about thirty miles west of the Third Mesa. Each village still functions under a matrilineal clan system with numerous priests and secret societies. In “Tusayan Migration Traditions”, Fewkes outlines a complex pattern of historical and geographical relationships among the clans, noting that the Snake and Bear clans have priority. He charts a scenario of migrations from southern Utah, southern Arizona, and the Rio Grande Valley, resulting in some two hundred clans, ranging from animal, insect, bird, plant, weather, trees, and weapons.99 (Since this essay is in the same volume as Fewkes’ discussion of the Snake Dance, Huxley may have glanced through it and gleaned some ideas for the castes in his novel.) The Hopi follow a richly ceremonial religious calendar (mainly lunar) that features dances most months in a cycle completed approximately every four years. From December to 97

Kathleen Bryant, The Four Corners: Timeless Lands of the Southwest, Flagstaff, AZ, 2003, 19. 98 See Waters, The Book of the Hopi, ix. Both the Acoma and the Hopi claim to have the oldest continuously inhabited pueblo. 99 See Fewkes, “Tusayan Migration Traditions”, 267-313, for the full discussion.

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July, the pueblo witnesses masked dances (The Hopi prefer the term “faces” rather than “masks”) in which katsinas, or impersonated life spirits, appear. The katsinas leave the pueblos in July, and for the rest of the year unmasked dances are staged. Mischa Titiev and Richard Clemmer have explained the relationship between the masked and unmasked dances: The distinction between ‘this world’ and the ‘Underworld’ was replicated in the changes marked by sunrise and sunset – day is the ‘Upper World’ of the living, and night is the ‘Lower World’ of the Dead – as well as by division of the ceremonial year into the world of the ancestors – the katsinas (December-July) – and the world of earthly life (July-December). 100

It was one of these several unmasked dances whose reputation quickly spread among tourists that led visitors to enthuse: This was more like a scene one would expect in the jungles of darkest Africa, or some far corner of India. It was one of those wild, weird pageants once common in the old West that has vanished. But I was not in Africa or India. I was in Arizona – when it was the last frontier.101

After his visit in 1913 and his exposure to rituals rarely witnessed by outsiders, President Theodore Roosevelt found the dance to be “not only interesting as relics of an almost inconceivably remote and savage past analogous to the past wherein our own ancestors once dwell – but also represent a mystic symbolism which has in it elements that are ennobling and not debasing”.102 Later officials in the United States government were less sympathetic to the dance than Roosevelt and in 1923 tried to ban the dance. The paganism of the dance troubled some Americans, needlessly, it seems. Snakes figure prominently in the mythology and folklore of the Americas, just as they do throughout the other continents in both space and time, and it is tempting to speculate that the Great Serpent 100

Clemmer, Roads in the Sky, 75. Clemmer is quoting Mischa Titiev, Old Oraibi: A Study of the Hopi Indians of the Third Mesa, Cambridge, MA, 1944, 107, 178. 101 Earle R. Forrest, The Snake Dance of the Hopi Indians, Los Angeles, CA, 1961, 75. 102 Theodore Roosevelt, A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open, New York, 1916, 77.

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Mount of the Hopewell culture near Cincinnati, Ohio and the Hopi Snake Dance are naïve, unsophisticated, or even fragmentary offshoots of Quetzalcoatl in the Aztec pantheon, a god well known to Huxley through his reading of The Plumed Serpent. Indeed, the snake figures large in the petroglyphs of the New Mexico Indians. Dennis Slifer’s Signs of Life: Rock Art of the Upper Rio Grande gives numerous illustrations ranging from El Paso, Texas in the south to the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado where the Rio Grande rises.103 This prehistoric art, the product of a number of tribes, records many crested, plumed, and horned serpents. Scholars, though, have warned us that assumptions of unity are mistaken. In his far-ranging study of gods and myths among the Pueblo Indians, Hamilton Tyler concludes: The Plumed Serpent of Mexico, Quetzalcoátl, is so well known that the possible relationship between the two snake gods must be settled, lest the reader carry a false image in his mind. At most the two gods were distantly related by belonging to the general family of snake gods. The Plumed Serpent, at least in his final form, was a god of civilization, or wisdom, or culture, while the Pueblo Horned Water Serpent is not even a culture-hero, which is a likely first step toward becoming the symbol of a whole culture.104

Fewkes early cautioned that “the worship of a Great Snake plays no part”.105 Fewkes even more pointedly states that it “has been shown that in the Snake ceremony there is no worship of the Great Serpent, and the Snake priests scout [sic, possibly scotch] the idea that this great deity belonged to their clan worship. The psychic element of religion in the Snake dance is totemic ancestor worship.”106 It might be added, that the Hopi and Zuni do not even have a snake katsina, which surely is puzzling to a scholar.

103

See Dennis Slifer, Signs of Life: Rock Art of the Upper Rio Grande, Santa Fe, NM, 1998, 17, 80, 108, and 138-39 in particular. The New Mexico sites are numerous, but two of the most accessible are the Three Rivers site near Carrizozo with some 21,000 petroglyphs in Jornado Style and the 15,000 petroglyphs in Albuquerque’s Petroglyph National Monument done in Rio Grande Style. 104 Tyler, Pueblo God and Myths, 244. 105 Fewkes, “Tusayan Snake Ceremonies”, 304. 106 Fewkes, “Notes on Tusayan, Snake, and Flute Ceremonies”, 1009.

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Fewkes recorded that the “number of white spectators of the Walpi Snake dance in 1897 was more than double that during any previous dance, and probably two hundred would not be far from the actual enumeration”. Lawrence estimated there were 3,000 interested people attending in 1924; in 1925, some 2,500 people witnessed the Snake Dance,107 which so fascinated anthropologists, tourists, and other curious beings, staged in the pueblos every other year in alternation with the Flute Dance. (Actually the Snake Dance is performed each year in one or more of the pueblos, because the pueblos have a staggered schedule. Once, Oraibi, Shipaulovi, and Shongopovi performed the dance in even years; Walpi and Mishongnovi in odd years.) The Snake Dance is deeply embedded in Hopi mythology, Arizona history, and tribal identity. Hopi mythology tells the adventures of Tiyo, the Snake Youth, who traversed the length of the Colorado River to its mouth in a hollowed log (or boat). Recognizing that he could not ascend the river to his home pueblo, he was befriended by Spider Woman (often called Spider Grandmother), one of the most powerful supernatural figures in Hopi mythology, who gave him advice, spells, and tribal medicine to use in adventures experienced on the way back to his tribe. His journey, an episodic account of threats met and conquered, brings him into contact with the Snake People who give him a bride. They also give him secret knowledge: They taught him their ceremonies. They taught him prayers. They taught him songs to bring rain. They taught him how to talk to snakes, how to handle them, and how to dress for the snake rituals. They told him all the things that must be done to bring a good life.108

On return to his pueblo (Tokonave), his bride gives birth to young rattlesnakes which bite the pueblo’s children as they attempt to play with them, so the parents drive the Snake Children and their mother from the pueblo. A major drought then suddenly falls on the land The history of the American Southwest, especially in New Mexico and Arizona, is writ large in terms of such droughts. In cataloging the Hopi katsinas, Barton Wright commented that:

107 108

Fewkes, Ibid., 978; Clemmer, Roads in the Sky, 137. Courlander, The Fourth World, 89.

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Water is always scarce; sources are scant, especially for sedentary agriculturalists such as the Hopi whose lands receive only an average of eight to ten inches of precipitation each year, most of it in the winter months, and an unusually severe drought between 1100 and 1350 caused the Hopi to abandon thirty-six of their forty-seven villages.110 Understanding that expulsion of the Snake Children offended the gods of the weather, the Hopi evolved the Snake Dance to propitiate the gods, to send requests for rain, and to convey their prayers for rain through messengers sympathetic to the gods. When the Snake Clan priests begin to sing Tiyo’s songs to prove their special abilities to Masauwu, the Spirit of Death who oversees the Upper World: Snakes began to appear from all directions …. Soon there were hundreds of them. They crawled without fear around the feet of the dancers. The men picked the snakes up and carried them in their hands, sometimes in their mouths, talking to them, brushing them with feathers to soothe them. As the singing and dancing continued, clouds formed in the sky and covered the sun. Rain began to fall.111 109

Barton Wright, quoted in David, Kachinas, 6. Page and Page, Hopi, 58, 150. 111 Courlander, The Fourth World, 94. Snake handling in acts of worship seems a universal practice. Now illegal in the United States (except West Virginia), snake handling was practiced by evangelical congregations in the Southern United States. Some two to five thousand people belong to congregations loosely called the Church of God with Signs Following. They legitimate their practice by reference to the Gospel of Mark: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them” (Mark 16:17-18). Anyone fortunate enough to be in Coculla, Italy in May has seen snakes wreathing themselves about the statue of San Domenico Abate as it is carried through the streets, and many of his devotees also put the snakes about their arms, necks, and shoulders (see Erls Zwingle, “Italy before the Romans”, National Geographic, January 2005, 52-77). Valmik Thapar, Land of the Tiger: A Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent, Berkeley, CA, 1997, provides a striking example of snake ceremonies among the Hindus: “Snake worship reaches its peak at the time of Nagapanchami, the festival of snakes ... the little village of Battis Shirala, not far from Bombay, has become famous 110

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As Vincent Scully puts it: The major point is rain. Here the nature of the sympathetic magic seems obvious. We know from pueblo paintings and petroglyphs of all periods that snakes are associated with lightning and with the descending rain itself.112

Huxley had no opportunity to visit or even to glimpse actual Hopi lands during his cross-country tour, or for that matter, either the Zuni or the Acoma. The Santa Fe track comes within fifteen miles of Acoma but no nearer than sixty miles of the Hopi and Zuni pueblos. For years, Fred W. Voltz had taken visitors from his trading post at Canyon Diablo to Oraibi and Walpi Pueblos. More famous, though, were the Indian Detours run by the Harvey House Corporation and the Santa Fe Railway. An eastbound tourist could take comfortable touring cars (Packards) with experienced drivers and trained couriers (tour guides) from a number of stops along the Santa Fe lines, including Flagstaff, Winslow, or Holbrook in Arizona and Gallup, Albuquerque, or Santa Fe in New Mexico. Tour No. 27 (to the Hopi pueblos) was described in the following terms: The route is northwest from Gallup through the Navajo Country to Keam’s Canyon, where the night is passed. Several of the famous Hopi towns, the fabled ‘Seven Cities of Cibola’ of early Spanish explorers, are visited. These are the most isolated and primitive of all Southwestern pueblos and are built on the tops of sheer-sided mesas commanding immense desert panoramas.113

for having the largest collection of venomous snakes in the world. A week before the festival, young men venture into the forests to ‘persuade’ the snakes to come out; they are then captured and kept in readiness. On the day of the feast people paint figures of serpents and birds on their walls. They then take a wisp of grass, tie it in the form of a snake and dip it into a prepared mixture of wheat and pulses. This, together with sweets and money, is offered to the live snakes. A cobra is paraded through the village, where the people worship it amid much merry-making. Women drop coloured incense on to the cobras’ hoods. At sunset a procession of decorated bullock carts carries the snakes to the temple of Siva, where the ceremonies continue. Then the following day the men take the snakes back to the forest and release them where they found them” (23). 112 Scully, Pueblo Mountains, 342. 113 Thomas, Southwestern Indian Detours, 226.

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The four days of the more leisurely, luxury tour ($404.50 for two persons in 1926) trekked from one well-appointed Harvey hotel to another (usually moving from La Fonda in Santa Fe to El Tovar at the Grand Canyon). Its second day offered visits in New Mexico to Isleta, Laguna, and Acoma Pueblos; its fourth day visited the Hopi villages.114 There had been one or two day trips since 1892, increasing in number after the spur line to the Grand Canyon was opened in 1901.115 By the time Huxley traveled across New Mexico, the Snake Dance had generated considerable ethnographic and popular literatures, which Huxley found available in the London Library, where he often worked. In addition two likely books Huxley might have seen, books whose findings and descriptions would make their way into Hough’s pamphlet and Fewkes’ reports in the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, were John Gregory Bourke’s The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona (1884) and Erna Fergusson’s Dancing Gods: Indian Ceremonials of New Mexico and Arizona (1931). The London Library had acquired the Bourke volume in its English edition sometime before 1931 and the Bureau reports in 1898.116 Fewkes and Hough were anthropologists, ethnographers, and Smithsonian scholars; Bourke was an archetypal soldier-adventurer with some considerable literary talent and, a keen eye for detail. He was also a rather imperious intruder into the Indian world and at least once was bodily thrown out of a kiva he had invaded. He was also keenly interested in reporting his adventures among Indians: since he also wrote An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre (1886), The Medicine Men of the Apaches (1892), and On the Border with Crook (1892). Bourke’s Scatalogical Rites of All Nations (1891) had a Preface by Sigmund Freud. Bourke’s record of his 1881 visit to the Hopi villages still has a charm missing from much of the ethnographic literature, largely became of his vibrant, lively personality. His intense curiosity – so typical of those later tourists who would cause the closing of the pueblos to outsiders – led him to violate numerous Pueblo taboos while seeking information about the people and the ceremonies. He 114

Ibid., 218. Ibid., 15. 116 I wish to thank Amanda Robertson of the London Library for assisting me in locating these volumes and establishing their accession dates. 115

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seemed to miss no pertinent detail, and he has all the eagerness of a discoverer viewing a totally foreign world for the first time. A Captain in the Third Cavalry, Bourke had earlier witnessed the Sun Dance of the Dakotas and was eager to travel from his station in Santa Fe to the Hopi villages in August 1881.117 The dances must have been quite successful that year, because his narrative is punctuated by numerous rainstorms, the most violent striking the evening after the Snake Dance. Burke ventured to speculate that the Snake dance involved ancestor worship and eagerly supplied chapters on the worldwide practice of snake worship or ophiolatry reminiscent of the accumulation of examples later in James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Most interesting are his frequent references to masks, rattles, and doors made in the shape of a T, a detail which might have reinforced Huxley’s “sign of the T”, though given Henry Ford’s Model T, this is unlikely.118 Bourke’s description of the Snake Priests is identical in detail to that of Hough and Fewkes, except for his adjectives: The spectacle was an astonishing one, and one felt at once bewildered and horrified at this long column of weird figures, naked in all excepting the snake-painted cotton kilts and red buckskin moccasins; a dark greenish-brown, relieved only by the broad white armlets and the bright yellowish-gray of the fox skins dangling behind them; long elfin locks brushed straight back from the head, tufted with scarlet parrot or woodpecker feathers; faces painted black, as with a mask of charcoal, from brow to upper lip, where the ghastly white of kaolin began, and continued down over chin and neck; the crowning point being the deadly reptiles borne in mouth and hand, which imparted to the drama the lurid tinge of a nightmare.119 117

The Sun Dance, practiced by the Northern Plains tribes, especially the various Sioux bands, probably originated in the late 1700s. The United States government began prohibiting it in the 1880s but allowed it to be reinstated in the 1920s. It involves vision quests, piercing of the pectoral muscles, and attaching the piercing to a “sacred tree” erected at the center of a circle. With the rope passed beneath his pectoral muscles, the man is then pulled up to swing around the tree. Like the Hopi Snake Dance, it is highly ritualized and intensely sacred. For the introduction to the Sun Dance, see Thomas E. Mails, Sundancing: The Great Sioux Piercing Ritual, 2nd edn, Tulsa, OK, 1998. 118 Bourke, The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, 131, 158, 159, and 246. 119 Ibid., 162-63.

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Elsewhere, he notices as much dirt and filth as does Huxley’s narrator. Bourke’s book initiated interest in the Hopi, and Fewkes’ expeditions followed as an indirect result. Trained as a marine biologist and anthropologist at Harvard and Leipzig, Fewkes had established his reputation in the fields by 1888 with articles on the formation of coral islands and lower invertebrates when, on a trip to California, he became intrigued by Pueblo Indians he saw at a railway station. He completely changed the direction of his career. In 1889, he was in Zuni, meeting Frank Hamilton Cushing; in 1890, he was in Maine recording Passamaquoddy songs. Later that year he and his associates were with the Hopi beginning a long association which would eventually initiate him into the Antelope and Flute priesthoods. By 1895, he had been appointed ethnologist with the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology and began his career in the American Southwest with reports on the cultures in the Four Corners area (the area where the boundaries of Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet). His theoretical contributions were many, suggesting relationships between ruins of small settlements and the great pueblo ruins, identifying trade networks, defining Mimbres pottery, and promoting protection of archeological sites. However, his major contributions to Huxley’s novel were his reports on the Hopi. Fewkes’ ethnographic reports from field trips in 1891, 1893, 1896, and 1897 detail his studying the Snake Dances in five Hopi villages and his analysis of the variants among the dances. (Huxley would have had no difficulty locating these reports, because the Smithsonian volume for 1931 was a comprehensive index of reports up until 1930.) Photographs and drawings, especially of the altars, supplement his descriptions which confirm and extend Bourke’s observations. As would be expected from an ethnographic report, Fewkes pays close attention to the differences, noting, for instance, how the position of the “hugger” differs in the various villages, how the snakes are held differently, and how the snakes are simply thrown down by one village’s dancers but almost reverently laid down in another. Fewkes agrees with Bourke that ancestor worship is at the core of the ceremony. Hough’s reports, pamphlets, and books followed directly from Fewkes’ work. Hough (1859-1935) joined the Smithsonian’s Division of Ethnology in 1885 and eventually became Head Curator of the Institution in 1923. He joined Fewkes in 1896 to work on Hopi

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materials, work which resulted in his two books for the general public – the Santa Fe pamphlet and his 1915 book on Hopi culture. His interests, though, ranged further afield than those of Fewkes, showing interest in cultural aspects of fire, arrows, blowguns, drills, and even beverages. His honed analytical skills enabled him to reach a number of insightful conclusions regarding Hopi life and customs. Lacking evidence of any kind at present, we will probably never know if Huxley was familiar with Edward Sheriff Curtis’ monumental, twenty-volume The North American Indian, Being a Series of Volumes Picturing and Describing the Indians of the United States and Alaska, particularly with Volumes XII (1922) and XVII (1926) devoted to the Hopi and Zuni/Tiwa/Keres respectively. We do know, however, that some photographs appearing in Volume XII were printed earlier in the Hough pamphlet and elsewhere, particularly his famous photographs of Walpi and the Snake Dance. Again, one of the problems is that these photographs are in black-and-white (actually sepia) and give no hint of the colors Huxley so accurately describes. During his career, Curtis took some forty-thousand photographs of eighty tribes and made over ten-thousand wax-cylinder recordings of tribal chants and songs. His major project was the North American Indian, financed in large part by J. Pierpont Morgan and the Morgan Estate, but this project was a failure during its time: only 272 sets of the planned 500 were sold, making it a very rare library holding for anyone to consult. Fortunately, the German firm, Taschen, has reprinted the 721 photogravures and added a number of Curtis’ other photographs, for the contemporary viewer.120 The Hopi were apparently Curtis’ favorite tribe. He visited the pueblos a number of times; he devoted one entire volume of the project to the people and their world; and he was eventually initiated into Snake priesthood and allowed to participate in a dance. He took part in the secret kiva ceremonies, hunted snakes with the other priests, and danced in full regalia. So he described his dancing: “Dressed in a G-string and Snake Dance costume and with the regulation snake in my mouth, I went through [the ceremony numerous times] while spectators witnessed the dance and did not know that a white man was one of the wild dancers.”121 Curtis’ 120

Curtis, The North American Indian, 203. Florence Curtis Graybill and Victor Boesen, Edward Sheriff Curtis: Visions of a Vanishing Race, Albuquerque, NM, 1976, 79. 121

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interpretation of the Snake Dance was extremely insightful and in full agreement with those of later ethnologists. He commented that “to understand the meanings of the ritual: I returned over a period of many years”, and concluded that “it is not a dance, but a beautiful dramatized prayer for rain”: Rain and food are synonymous terms to the Hopi in that dry desert country of Arizona. Corn is the staff of life, and crop failure means hunger. If the gods are angry and withhold the rain, famine and subsequent death stalk the land …. To them the snakes are messengers of the divine ones.122

Zuni presences Before attributing all Lenina and Bernard’s adventures in Malpais to Hopi sources, though, one must come to terms with the numerous Zuni references scattered throughout Brave New World. By a scholarly coincidence Margaret Sloan and I almost simultaneously discovered that all Indian names, all Indian gods, and all references to Indian folktales in Brave New World were Zuni. That there was a specific source was not surprising, because Huxley’s narrator tells the reader that it “was only in Zuni that the Savage could adequately express”123 his disgust toward the Arch-Community-Songster and others at Bernard’s party: “‘Ai yaa takwá’ … ‘Sons éso tse-ná.’ And he spat on the ground ….” In Huxley’s novel, all of these italicized passages are associated with John. What is very new is our discovery that all the Zuni materials came directly from one book, Frank Hamilton Cushing’s Zuni Folk Tales, first published in 1901 and reprinted with an Introduction by Mary Austin in 1931, just as Huxley was writing Brave New World.124 For example, John’s “rival” in the rain ritual, Palowhtiwa, takes his name from Paliwahtiwa, governor of the Zuni in the 1800s; the allusion to the Girl of Mátsaki,125 tells a story set in a village some two miles east of the main Zuni pueblo, a story which Huxley summarizes, and Kiakimé, the girl John longs after, is the name of the Zuni village where the Spaniard Estavan was 122

Anne Makepeace, Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light, Washington, DC, 2001, 45. Huxley, Brave New World, 206. 124 Frank Hamilton Cushing, Zuni Folk Tales, New York, 1931. Several of the tales are reprinted in Cushing’s Zuni Selected Writings. 125 In the 1946 text of Brave New World, this is misspelled “Mátaski” but then spelled correctly on page 301. 123

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killed in 1539. Most other names ultimately prove to be Zuni: Awonawilona, Ahaiyuta, Marsailema, Etsanatlehi, and Pookong. The old man of the pueblo tells John: The seed of men and all creatures, the seed of the sun and the seed of earth and the seed of the sky – Awonawilona made them all out of the Fog of Increase. Now the world has four wombs; and he laid the seeds in the lowest of the four wombs. And gradually the seeds began to grow.126

This deftly summarizes the key Zuni creation myth. Awonawilona is the Zuni’s universal god, “the supreme life-giving bisexual power, who is referred to as He-She, the symbol and initiator of life, and life itself, pervading all space”.127 With the Sun Father and the Moon Mother, Awonawilona existed in a world where … all was shi’plolol (fog) rising like steam. With the breath from his heart Awonawilona created clouds and the great waters of the world. He-She is the blue vault of the firmament.128

He delegates power to Shi’wanni and Shi’wano’kia who parent the A’shiwi or Zuni, and the Sun Father’s two sons, Kow’wituma and Wats’usi, born of foam and sun rays, descend into the First World to lead the A’shiwi to the Fourth World. At each level, they cut a particular kind of tree to let the people ascend to the next level. Thus, they pass from A’chianapi’akoa to A’wishote’hula to Pa’nanula tehula, finally to the outer world of Te’hohaiakwi u’kai’ilia, where they are still quite unfinished creatures. As Stevenson summarizes the mythic materials: The A’shiwi were queer beings when they came to this world. They had short depilous tails, long ears (at night they lay on one ear and covered themselves with the other), and webbed feet and hands, and their bodies and heads were covered with a’wisho (moss), a lengthy tuft being on the fore part of the head, projecting like a horn .… After the A’shiwi moved to a spring not far distance from their place of 126

Huxley, Brave New World, 155. Stevenson, “The Zuni Indian”, 22 (a more general introduction to the Zuni may be found in Bertha P. Dutton’s Friendly People: The Zuni Indians, Santa Fe, NM, 1963). 128 Ibid., 23. 127

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Ahaiyuta and Marsailema are War Gods, born from the sunrays and the “laughing water”, when Kow’wituma and Wats’usi tire of fighting. Their names are more usually spelled Uyuyewi and Masailema.130 They figure prominently in the initiation ceremonies that induct men into the Bow Priesthood. Estsanatlehi is “Changing Woman”, a powerful shape-shifter and goddess who can rejuvenate herself and who figures as the wife of the Sun God, and Pookong obviously comes from Pookong-hoya, the elder warrior god. Agreeing with Sloan’s research and findings on a number of key points, I find myself admiring, complimenting, and benefiting from her work, but also correcting, censoring, and refuting many of her conclusions. Because she drew some unusually restrictive boundaries around her discussion, Sloan worked under the influence of several faulty assertions. Consider her comments in her second paragraph which set up the framework of the essay: Huxley peppers this episode with actual tribal names and myths of the Zuni and faithfully transcribes the geography of the New Mexico pueblos. Huxley did not visit New Mexico when he traveled across America in 1926 or when he traveled in Mexico in 1934. He did not have first-hand experience of New Mexico until 1937; instead, he relied on sources such as D.H. Lawrence, current events, and Smithsonian reports ….131

As I have shown, Huxley “faithfully describes the geography” of Arizona pueblos, not the New Mexico ones. He did travel in New Mexico in 1926, had “first-hand experience of New Mexico” before 1937, and Lawrence’s influence has been widely assumed rather than well documented. Huxley does not “identify the reservation most strongly as Zuni”, nor does the pueblo visited by Lenina and Bernard resemble either that of Acoma or Zuni. Her discussion most seriously omits any consideration of the Snake Dance, a near fatal oversight in her argument. I have other reservations, but these generally involve 129

Ibid., 28. Ibid., 35. 131 Sloan, “Frank Hamilton Cushing”, 129. 130

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interpretative conclusions. Overall, her errors do not eclipse her finding that Huxley made extensive use of Cushing’s writings and translations or that he might have consulted Cushing’s seminal study, “Outlines of Zuni Creation Myth” in the 1896 Smithsonian Reports. I fully agree with her conclusions that Cushing was an “irrefutable” source for Huxley, but question the extent to which Huxley made use of this source. Zuni, the most populous of the nineteen pueblos at present, is situated approximately fifty miles south of Gallup, New Mexico, bordering Arizona. Unlike the Hopi lands, Zuni has a river, a fairly fertile valley, and high enough mountains to the north and east to supply melt water in the spring from the Continental Divide. The Zuni are famous for their silversmithing skills, their small carved fetishes and art objects, and their winter dance, featuring the Shalako, almost as famous as the Snake Dance. It features the Shalaki, spirits of the ancestors, dressed in ten-foot tall costumes with bird-like masks, and ceremonies which last an entire November or December night. Like the Hopi, the Zuni are rather isolated. Still today, only two paved roads pass through Zuni lands, and their language is a puzzling linguistic isolate. Some of its pithouse ruins date from the 700s, and historically it was the first pueblo encountered by the Spaniards in their 1539 trek. To the east of the present pueblo rises Dowa Yallane (Corn Mountain, sometimes called Thunder Mountain) to which the Zuni have retreated in times of crisis, but it is far higher and larger than the mesa Huxley describes. The tribe’s pueblo is actually in a river valley. On his trip or during his visits to the London Library, Huxley acquired a copy of Zuni Folk Tales, collected and translated by Frank Hamilton Cushing, a work still highly respected. Cushing, an unexpected hero to the Zunis, came to Zuni in the late summer of 1879 on a three-month assignment from the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology. He stayed for four and a half years, became completely fluent in Zuni, and was initiated into the Priesthood of the Bow, the highest warrior group; he even earned a Zuni name, Tenatsali, or Medicine Flower.132 The volume contains thirty-three tales, a number 132

Cushing (1857-1900) was “regarded as a man of genius (if somewhat erratic genius) by such contemporaries or near contemporaries as [John Wesley] Powell, Adolph Bandelier, Franz Boas, and Alfred Kroeber” and earned the admiration of such anthropologists as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Emile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and

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of which are tales of Coyote, the clown of Zuni mythology. As pointed out earlier, every Zuni word and every Zuni name Huxley uses in his novel come from Cushing’s pages, even “Waihiuswa”, the name of the Hopi man who helped Cushing collect the tales. Specifically, he took quotations from “The Trial of Lovers”, “The Serpent of the Seas”, “The Foster-Child of the Deer”, “The Young Swift-Runner”, “Atahsasa, the Cannibal Demon”, “The Hermit Mitsina”, and “How the Twins of War and Chance, Ahalyuta and Másailéma Fared with the Unborn-Made Men of the Underworld”. Also, there are five tales of male outcasts which might have influenced Huxley’s development of John the Savage. Guinevera Nance’s conclusion that John’s “white skin and blue eyes accentuate his differences, and he is excluded from the life of the reservation” reflects the general feeling among Huxley critics that race primarily excludes John from tribal rituals.133 This is a questionable conclusion, given that the elders label him “the son of the she-dog”,134 his mother’s promiscuity seems to explain the exclusion of her son. Historically, white skin, blond or white hair, and even blue eyes would not have excluded a boy from the full activities of the tribe. Ethnographers remarked from the first the number of albinos among both the Hopi and the Zuni. In 1848, John Hughes noted “some thirty albinos” resident in Zuni, and Cushing tells of a “nephew” who was an “over-grown, heavy-faced, thick-lipped, yellow-haired, blue-eyed blonde – a specimen of the tribal albinism”.135 Forrest recalls that the chief of the Hopi Antelope Society was an albino and that he saw several albinos at the 1908 Flute Ceremony at Mishongnovi, and Bourke noticed a number of albinos.136 Obviously, there is a persistent genetic mutation in the tribes. Huxley was obviously more interested in the effects the Zuni words might have and the meanings his audiences might ascribe to them than in using the words accurately and appropriately. He wanted Claude Lévi-Strauss (Green, Zuni: Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton Cushing, 4). For Cushing’s essays about his stay, see his My Adventures in Zuni, Palmer Lake, CO, 1998. 133 Guinevera Nance, Aldous Huxley, New York, 1988, 76-77. 134 Huxley, Brave New World, 162. 135 Quoted in C. Gregory Crampton, The Zunis of Cibola, Salt Lake City, UT, 1977, 68 n.20; and Cushing, Selected Writings, 66. 136 Forrest, The Snake Dance, 58, and Bourke, The Snake Dance of the Moquis, 54, 64, 286, 293, and 305.

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their exotic, rhetorically menacing resonance. For example, near the end of Brave New World, when John is being troubled by the invasive Fordian Science Monitor reporter who keeps telling him to take a “couple of grammes” of soma, John shouts, “Kohakwa iyathtokyai” in a “menacingly derisive” tone.137 The phrase comes from “The Hermit Mitsina” in which Mitsina tricks gullible young men out of their belongings. It is a self-directed compliment Mitsina uses to entice the young men into his home. They hear the throw and rattle of dice, followed by Mitsina’s triumphant cry of “Kohakwa iyathtokyai” which Cushing translates as “The white-corn symbol fell uppermost!”,138 scarcely the curse the reader might ascribe to it. Elsewhere, John uses “Háni” as a dismissive curse word, though it only means “younger sister”.139 When John uses it in conjunction with “’Sons éso tse-ná!”,140 the phrasing indeed does adequately convey John’s unwillingness to be exhibited to the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury. Sloan has found complex ironies in Huxley’s use of these Zuni words: “At first”, she writes, “the Zuni phrases seem inconsequential; however, examining their context in both Brave New World and Cushing’s Folk Tales reveals Huxley’s care in using them”.141 “Once the context is understood”, she concludes, “this scene [Bernard’s party and other scenes], turns into a grand joke at the ArchCommunity Songster’s expense, because it compares him to a “wheezing, vain and deceitful spider”.142 This would be a very private joke on Huxley’s part, because none of his readers would have understood the Zuni or its context. Juvenalian satirists such as Huxley. Huxley’s most interesting borrowing from the folktales is his use of a song from “The Trial of Lovers: or The Maiden of Mátsaki and the Red Feathers”. The song goes: “Kiäthlä tsilu, / Silokwe, silokwe, silokwe; / Ki’ai silu silu, / Tsithl! Tsithl!” This is “squirrel talk” which Cushing translates as “Hemlock of the / Tall kind, tall kind, tall kind, / Sprout up hemlock, hemlock, / Chit! Chit!”.143 John remembers these 137

Huxley, Brave New World, 301. Cushing, Zuni Folk Tales, 387. 139 Huxley, Brave New World, 365. 140 Cushing, Zuni Folk Tales, 365; and Huxley, Brave New World, 206, 209, and 300. 141 Sloan, “Frank Hamilton Cushing”, 147. 142 Ibid., 148. 143 The Zuni and its translation are taken from Cushing, Zuni Folk Tales, 27. Margaret F. Sloan comments that the “sprout up hemlock, hemlock, chit” may be “a foreshadowing for John’s suicide. To a lesser degree, this reference may also 138

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lines in connection with “old Mitsima saying magic [words] over his feathers and his carved sticks and his bits of bone and stone”144 utters to bring them power. At the moment he recalls the lines, John has been reading Hamlet’s condemnation of his mother and finds the Zuni words magically evocative. The song is indeed a magic chant, which plays a crucial role in “The Trial of Lovers”, itself one of the dozens of Orpheus and Eurydice or Cupid and Psyche tales in which a mortal falls in love with an immortal and through a series of tests wins the right to marry her. The handsome young man of Hálonawan is tricked into slaying his bride by her evil double, but she returns as a spirit to tell him to dye a feather red, place it in her headband, and follow it each day as she travels as an invisible spirit back to the spirit world. For three days he struggles consecutively through a dense forest, across a jagged lava field, and then through a cactus field. The fourth day she descends into an astonishingly deep canyon. As the husband hangs on the edge, his rescuer appears. A “jolly little striped Squirrel” calls out” You crazy fool of a being .… If you drop you will be broken to pieces and the moles will eat up the fragments! Wait! Hold hard, and I will help you, for, though I am but a squirrel, I know how to think!145

He plants a hemlock seed, and every time he runs around it chanting his song the tree grows and grows until the man can climb down it into the canyon. Aid from Squirrel and later Owl, however, cannot prevent the separation brought when he kisses his bride before the permitted moment. “Charming, charming”,146 the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning might have judged this story, but he would have seen no particular intertextual connections between the folktale and the novel at this point of intersection, though when Popé dismisses the young John, who has just stabbed him in the back, as

foreshadow John’s failed love relationship with Lenina” (“Frank Hamilton Cushing”, 149). Since the American hemlock tree is not in the least poisonous as is the European hemlock shrub, this reading is most unpersuasive. 144 Huxley, Brave New World, 156 (note that Huxley uses “Mitsima” rather than Cushing’s “Mitsina” throughout). 145 Cushing, Zuni Folktales, 27. 146 Huxley, Brave New World, 34.

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“my brave Ahaiyuta”,147 the allusion to the young, trickster War God seems most appropriate. The Hopi and Zuni “expulsion tales” do suggest John’s plight. The Hopi tale, “The Antelope Boy of Shingopovi”, in particular tells of a young Hopi girl, pregnant by “a certain young man of the village”,148 who gives birth and abandons her baby secretly during a rabbit hunt. An old female Coyote finds the baby boy hidden in a badger hole while hunting for wounded rabbits and takes him to the Antelope People. The Antelope People are shape-shifters – antelopes when outside grazing but humans of sorts when they return to their kiva and doff their antelope skins. The boy is raised with the young antelopes, becoming as lithe and swift as them, but always retaining his human form. Seen with the antelopes by a Hopi hunter, the boy is soon ceremonially dressed by his Antelope “uncle” and returned to the pueblo so that he may choose his world. Claimed by his mother and recognized by his father, the boy finds no place of belonging in the pueblo and returns to the Antelope People, even though his parents do love him. In rough outline, the Antelope Boy resembles John, moving from one world to another and finally returning to the former, finding a primitive society preferable to the more sophisticated one. A number of the Zuni folk tales in Cushing treat the motif of the boy outcast, raised by animals, a motif common in world mythology. When Huxley returned to London, he closed Jesting Pilate with the comment: “So the journey is over and I am back again where I started, richer by much experience and poorer by many exploded convictions,

147

Ibid., 159. Popé is the name of the heroic warrior from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (San Juan Pueblo) who unified the Pueblo peoples to rebel against the Spanish in 1680 and to expel them from New Mexico. The rebellion was successful, but Popé died in 1688, and the Spanish returned in 1692. Popé (now corrected to Po’pay) was selected to be the subject of New Mexico’s contribution to the National Statuary Hall Collection, to which each state may contribute two statues. At the unveiling of the statue, Governor Bill Richardson firmly established Po’pay’s significance: “The Pueblo Revolt prevented the cultural and racial genocide that occurred in the eastern United States. The language, culture and people of the Nations, Tribes and pueblos survived as sovereign nations. By standing up for his people at a time when conquest and religious conversion were the order of the day, Po’pay forever changed the history of the West”, Po’pay: Leader of the First American Revolution, eds Joe S. Sando and Herman Agoyo, Santa Fe, NM, 2005, 171. There is no connection between Huxley’s Popé and the historical Po’pay. 148 Courlander, The Fourth World, 139.

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many perished certainties.”149 Between his return in June 1926 and the moment he began writing Brave New World in April 1931, Huxley’s life was extremely busy and creative. During these five years, he averaged two volumes a year, eleven in all, ranging from short stories, poems, and essays, to a play and a novel. Point Counter Point (1928) stands as his major work during this period, and his edition of the D.H. Lawrence letters is also a significant accomplishment. Arizona and New Mexico seem to have retreated permanently in his memory as he and Maria shuttled restlessly between Italy, Switzerland, France, and England. Twice in later years Huxley returned to Brave New World to consider what he had created. His 1946 Preface contemplated how he would rewrite his “faulty work” of 1932: If I were now to rewrite the book, I would offer the Savage a third alternative. Between the utopias and the primitive horns of the dilemma would lie the possibility of sanity.150

Twelve years later in his 1958 Brave New World Revisited, he took a much more critical look at the future world he had forecast. This work began as articles commissioned by Newsday but quickly expanded beyond the scope of magazine format. The nature of the assignment and Huxley’s own interest precluded any discussion of the Malpais scenes since Huxley wished to concentrate on the technological aspects of Brave New World. He wished to discuss overpopulation and developments in mind control through propaganda, brainwashing, hypnopaedia, and selected drugs. His conclusion about the future is not optimistic: Perhaps the forces that now menace freedom are too strong to be resisted for very long. It is still our duty to do whatever we can to resist them.151

Of particular interest is that at neither point did Huxley discuss the Malpais world. He remained silent about Hopi and Zuni sources, the conditions of Indian life on the Reservation lands, and the aspects of 149

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 322. Huxley, Brave New World, ix. 151 Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 123. 150

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Indian life so sharply contrasted with features of the Fordian world. This silence came from at least three sources: his lack of interest in the past of the Malpais world, his lack of thorough knowledge of the Hope and Zuni worlds, and, more important, the derivative nature of the Malpais chapters in Brave New World. Huxley had depended so heavily on the works of Fewkes, Hough, Cushing, and possibly Bourke, Curtis, and Fergusson, that he personally had nothing more to say about the rituals and folktales, even though it appears that his novel began with the Indian materials. After closely studying the typescript of Brave New World, Jerome Meckier has concluded that Chapter Eight contains “the oldest surviving pages of the typescript” and that “the earliest draft of Brave New World may have started with the reservation scenes”.152 So, May 10 really is the day Huxley’s novel began. In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Pip muses about crucial days in one’s life and challenges his readers to: Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, or thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.153

If we were to strike May 10-11, 1926 from Aldous Huxley’s life, we might say that Brave New World would never have been or might have been a very different novel. Huxley’s brief visit to the Grand Canyon, his experience of Hopi House, and his acquisition of The Moki Snake Dance and Zuni Folk Tales certainly planted the seeds from which scenes in Brave New World later blossomed. One can easily visualize Huxley in April 1931 looking over the cover of The Moki Snake Dance to see how he should describe the Snake Priests and consulting Zuni Folk Tales when he needed Zuni vocabulary for John. How ironic that his months in India spurred no major fiction (other than two chapters in Point Counter Point), while his single day at the Grand Canyon helped spawn the most read, most taught, and most discussed dystopia of the twentieth century. Even with his 152

Meckier, “Aldous Huxley’s Americanization of the Brave New World Typescript”, 435. 153 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, New Milford, CT, 2003, 84.

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uncanny prescience, Huxley could not have seen this future as he stood on the terrace of the El Tovar Hotel and looked over the vastness of the Grand Canyon.

CHAPTER SIX NAMING BUT NOT LIBELING

In Oliver Twist, a novel very much concerned with how its protagonist acquires a proper and legal surname, Charles Dickens lets the reader overhear how Oliver Twist, a foundling, comes to have a name in the first place: “… we have never been able to discover who is his father, or what was his mother’s settlement, name, or con – dition.” Mrs. Mann raised her hands in astonishment; but added, after a moment’s reflection, “How comes he to have any name at all, then?” The beadle drew himself up with great pride, and said, “I inwented it.” “You, Mr. Bumble!” “I, Mrs. Mann. We name our fondlins in alphabetical order. The last was a S, – Swubble, I named him. This was a T, – Twist, I named him. The next one as comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins. I have got names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it again, when we come to Z.” “Why, you’re quite a literary character, sir!” said Mrs. Mann.1

Unlike Mr Bumble, British novelists of the Twenties and Thirties were shadowed by censorship in their use of names, because they enjoyed no immunity under British libel law. They were vulnerable to laws that uniformly favored the plaintiff, even if the offense was a mere chance agreement of names. E.M. Forster felt that the libel laws had led to serious self-censorship and had actually stopped books from being written. During the PEN Club meeting of July 27, 1939, he got Kilburn Roberts to admit that “the libel law had murdered, or killed, a great many books” and Ernest Raymond to agree that the law “tended if not to dry up springs of creation, at least to dilute them”.2 Twenty1 2

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, ed. Fred Kaplan, New York, 1993, 23. P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster: A Life, New York, 1978, II, 232.

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five years earlier, after having lost a thousand dollar judgment to a minor actor who shared his name with a character in a serialized novel, John Prothero penned a new novel after securing permission from a number of authors to use their names. G.K. Chesterton, for example, wrote to Prothero: You can rely on me to bring no libel action. You may depict me as a burglar, or as a man who steals pennies from the blind, or a beggar, or even a politician.3

Like Prothero, a number of Huxley’s contemporaries, including D.H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and George Orwell, became entangled by the libel law. The question is: why did Huxley not? Satirists were particularly vulnerable, and since Huxley used the actual names of a number of living, litigious, cantankerous men in Brave New World, by what chance did he escape the law and the courtroom? George Orwell’s essays and novels offer a case in point. Gollancz, his publisher, had reason to be cautious with his booklist, having lost expensive and awkward cases in 1931 involving Rosalind Wade’s Children Be Happy, a novel set in a girls’ school which provoked a number of lawsuits. Gollancz withdrew the novel and paid damages to several women. As a result, Norman Collins, the deputy chair of the firm, thereafter vetted manuscripts for possible libel. The conversation between Collins and Orwell over Burmese Days, as recorded by Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, must have given Collins considerable pause, as Orwell confirmed his use of actual names and events: “Now then, about the characters. Would you say they are drawn from life?” “Yes ...” “Well, one or two, or how many?” “All of them.” “All?” “All”... “But surely you’ve changed their names for the novel?” “Oh no.” “You mean that you’ve used their actual names?” “Oh yes.” 3

“Novel Travesties”, New York Times, October 1, 1911.

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“How many?” “All of them.”4

Surprisingly, Collins asked for only a few revisions here, but later he insisted that Orwell “spoil an entire chapter in Keep the Aspidistra Flying where some “potentially actionable points ... would have to be altered” to keep an advertising firm from bringing suit for parodies of advertising slogans and names of well-known individuals.5 Orwell ran a considerable risk in using so many contemporary, instantly recognizable names and personalities, as several of his other contemporaries in the 1930s discovered. Many times, the problem involved more than just a name. In 1932, J.B. Priestley threatened a libel action against Graham Greene and W.H. Heinemann over the name “Savory” in Stamboul Train. He had read a review copy and decided that M. Savory, a popular novelist, was based on him. Priestley’s objections were quite specific about details he perceived as reflecting on himself. Charles Evans of Heinemann told Greene that: Priestley wanted references to Dickens, to a pipe, to blunt fingers, to come out. Priestley also objected to the comment, ‘sold a hundred thousand copies. Two hundred characters.’ An undistinguished piece of dialogue, ‘You believe in Dickens, Chaucer, Charles Reade, that sort of thing’, had to be altered with ‘Shakespeare’ inserted instead of ‘Dickens’.6

The affair ended with Greene making the changes, Heinemann reprinting twenty some pages, and Greene bearing the cost. Another suit threatened in 1936 when Dr P.D. Oakley of the Sierra Leone Medical Service objected to the drunken character Pa Oakley in Greene’s Journey Without Maps. The 1930s ended with Greene judged guilty of libeling Shirley Temple in a review he had written of the film Wee Willie Winkie.7

4

Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Orwell: The Transformation, New York, 1979, 57-58. 5 Ibid., 149-50; also see Michael Shelden, Orwell, New York, 1991, 181-82, 224. 6 Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume 1:1904-1939, New York, 1989, 433. 7 See Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Man Within, London, 1994, 227-28, and Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume 1:1904-1939, 619-21 and 656-58.

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The problems persist to the present time. In a column of May 10, 2008, The Economist pointed out the problem of “libel tourism” whereby foreigners were using British libel law as, in Chris Walker’s opinion, “manna from heaven to deeply illiberal and fantastically wealthy ex-Soviet oligarchs and Middle-Eastern oil tycoons. Everyone knows the potency of the English laws and everyone takes it into account, at an incalculable cost to free speech.”8 Just as J.B. Priestley threatened to crush Greene’s novel, W. Somerset Maugham, many of whose works were taken directly from the lives around him, found himself both being accused of and accusing others of libel. Hugh Walpole felt that Maugham’s Cakes and Ale libeled him in the character of Alroy Kear, which Maugham at first denied. Walpole returned the insults in John Cornelius (1937), but Maugham seemed most wounded by Gin and Bitters, a 1931 novel by A. Riposte (the pen name of Elinor Mordaunt, also known as Evelyn May Clowes Wiehe). Her target was obvious as can be seen in one telling description: Only after Mr. Leverson Hurle, his secretary and valet, were back in England, and a volume of short stories dealing with life in the Malay States, and a play fabricated from one of these same stories, became public property did his many hosts and hostesses – those people who had turned out of their own rooms, on the cool side of their houses, spent both themselves and their money to do him honor – come to the conclusion that never – never – again, whatever his credentials might be, would they entertain any traveling author.9

Although Maugham tried to brush off the affair in public, he consulted legal counsel, and sued to suppress the book. Huxley’s career, though, was generally free of lawsuits, despite the roman à clef features in his early novels. His publishers did worry at times about scenes which could possibly be perceived as pornographic by the 1920s audience, but despite very recognizable portraits of various contemporaries such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, Nancy Cunard, and a number of other figures, he seems only to have changed the name “Dowlas” to “Maunciple” in After Many a Summer to avoid any association with Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst.10 He 8

Chris Walker, “Hacks v beaks, The Economist, May 10, 2008, 70. Ted Morgan, Maugham: A Biography, New York, 1980, 338. 10 Nicholas Murray, Aldous Huxley, New York, 2002, 325. 9

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deftly sidestepped difficulties primarily by using non-British names and by not actually libeling any British person, except possibly the dead D.H. Lawrence. Naomi Mitchison recalled: … one thing Aldous did was to put people into his books. Sometimes it was quite fun ... But goodness, one does that; I mean, I’ve done it myself. You watch people, and inevitably one puts in things which hurt, if one’s writing a modern novel.11

Huxley’s early works of the 1920s demonstrate a keen interest in Dickensian naming, especially naming that could be turned to satiric purposes. In “The Farcical History of Richard Greenow”, his transsexual take on Jekyll and Hyde materials, we find such names as Skewbauld, Capthorne-Slazenger, and Cravitas, and a protagonist who first attends Aesop School and then Canteloup College. Two years later in 1922, Crome Yellow, Huxley’s take on the Peacockian country-home novel, gave readers such memorable names as Barbecue-Smith, Gumbauld, and Tschuplitski. He followed this up in the “warthoggery” of Antic Hay in 1923 with surnames such as Porteous, Bojanus, Lypiatt, Mercaptan, Boldero, Sclopis, and Viveash. Even the exhausted, sated world of Those Barren Leaves gives us Aldwinkle, Calamy, Falx, and Chelifer, trapped in their wealth. It can be seen from these names that Huxley is closely working within the naming practices of Charles Dickens and others. Perhaps no English novelist has created and named more characters than Charles Dickens, with whom Huxley’s novels share a number of characteristics. Here was a man obviously fascinated, even enthralled, by the variety and oddity of human life, and from 1833 until 1869, his imagination gave hundreds of characters existence on his pages with such highly individualized speech patterns, gaits, hair styles, physiques, and hobby-horse ideas, as to imprint them permanently on a reader’s mind. Dickens’ “Book of Memoranda” contains some two hundred names, “some … genuine neologisms; others, names Dickens had spotted on signposts or death notices”.12 Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays surmise that Dickens “couldn’t get 11 David King Dunaway, Aldous Huxley Recollected: An Oral History, New York, 1995, 19-20. 12 Justin Kaplan and Anne Bernays, The Language of Names: What We Call Ourselves and Why It Matters, New York, 1977, 182.

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down to the work of writing a novel until he had baptized his principal characters; he didn’t know who they were or where they were going until they were safely inside the skin of their rightful names”. Name after name captures the essence of the characters, often even of their professions.13 Think, for instance, of M’Choakumchild in Hard Times. In a few syllables, Dickens conveys his dislike of the individual and his condemnation of the man’s pedagogical methods. The cluster of hard consonants – m, ch, k, mch, ld – conveys the disapproval, and the image of murdering a child by forcing information into his or her brain/throat presents him as a true danger to youth. His name stands as an editorial judgment, driven home firmly by Dickens’ allusion to the Arabian Nights: “He went to work, in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him.”14 Morgiana, of course, kills the forty thieves by pouring boiling oil into the containers where they are hiding from Ali Baba. Dickens is also especially skillful in naming business firms: Blaze and Sparkle (jewelers), Sheen and Gloss (mercers), Snitchey and Craggs (lawyers), Peffer and Snagsby (stationers), Spendlow and Jorkins (lawyers), and others. Emile Zola made a perceptive point about such names, commenting: I always judge a young author by the names which he bestows upon his characters. If the names seem to be weak or to be unsuitable to the people who bear them, I put the author down as a man of little talent, and am no further interested in the book.15

Clearly Dickens would have retained Zola’s interest. Dickens also deftly conveys the inadequacies of minor characters, which rarely have two names, Blather, Bumble, Chuffey, Dorker, Fang, Gabblewig, Knag, Muzzle, Pruffle, Smangle, and Toodle. A reader can easily intuit that Chuffey, Pruffle, and Toodle are far less threatening to the protagonist than Fang, Muzzle, and Smangle. He reserves his particular contempt for academics, medical doctors, and 13

A thorough study of names in Dickens’ works can be done using Michael and Mollie Hardwick’s Charles Dickens Encyclopedia, New York, 1973. Their compilation goes far beyond the usual structure of an encyclopedia and contains 133 pages listing characters. 14 Dickens, Hard Times, 12. 15 Quoted in Stanley Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: Names, Fashions, and Cultural Change, New Haven, CT, 2000, 224.

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preachers. Who would want to trust his or her body to the care of doctors called Clatter, Payne, Sawyer, Slammer, Slasher, or Soemup? And would one’s spiritual welfare be safe with the passionate histrionics of Boanerges Boiler, Horace Crewlett, Septimus Crisparkle, Luke Honeythunder, or the pomposities of Melchisedech Howler? Preaching is one thing, but to have the act compared, however obliquely, to rumbles in a water boiler, a dissonant thunderstorm, a cock’s hoarse crowing, or some creature’s howl is quite another. Academics are also simply dismissed with more pejorative adjectival names suggesting supreme duncedom: Blunderum, Doze, Dull, Flummery, Kwakley, Ledbrain, Pumpkinskull, Slug, and Snore. All these names share three qualities: they capture the essence of the individual’s personality, they exploit the ironic disjunction between the individual and his or her work/profession, and they often signal a quasi-allegorical function. Huxley’s novels up to 1930 exploited just such names. Whether in books or in life, naming is never an innocent nor an unplanned activity. It is an authoritative act shaped consciously or unconsciously by many forces: tradition, culture, socio-economics, education, religion, and sometimes even law. In the worlds of purebred animals such as cattle, horses, and dogs, naming can result in baroquely arcane forms; in the world of humans, it often is trapped between honoring tradition and achieving originality; in the world of dystopian fiction, it nearly always serves an ideological purpose. Futuristic fiction, such as Brave New World, has always faced several problems in naming characters. If it assumed that the future would bring a totalitarian state of some kind, it seemed necessary to the authors to abolish the traditional Western forms of naming, yet some semblance of individuality was usually retained.16 Naming has always been a particular problem in dystopias. Hence, authors such as Yevgeny Zamyatin turned to numbers, and other authors turned to invented but still recognizable names. The problem is exacerbated when authors introduce other species, other planets, and other galaxies 16

In pointing out the differences separating human names from animal names Ernst Pulgram makes a very interesting observation: “The only difference is that in many cases imagination is given free rein with animals which one feels obliged to employ when naming humans, for the sake of local custom, good taste, or tradition, may be discarded. A racing form provides a study in exuberance unmatched in other realms of onomastics” (Theory of Names, Berkeley, CA, 1954, 19).

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which are truly foreign and exotic. Such mixes of the two solutions are easily seen in films such as Fahrenheit 451 and Star Wars and with television series such as Star Trek and Battlestar Gallactica. To make the point that the State can become so totalitarian as to strip virtually all identity from its citizens, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, written in 1920-21, simply codes its characters: O-90, I-330, D-503, S-4711, R-13, and so on.17 We learn that vowels are reserved for women, consonants for men, and an attentive reader will notice an occasional attempt by the characters to create intimacy by using only the letter or the numbers, almost as a nickname, like “little 6655321” in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.18 At other times, the ideological purpose is more subjectively personal, as when Burgess has a cannibalistic mob in The Wanting Seed (1962) eat victims named after several contemporary authors: “Then the metropolis flashed its own sudden canines: a man called Amis suffered savage amputation of an arm off Kingsway; S. R. Coke, journalist, was boiled in an old copper near Shepherd’s Bush; Miss Joan Waine, a teacher, was fried in segments.”19 One recognizes the victims as Kingsley Amis and John Wain. Add to these Mr Livedog, Dogsake, and a Catholic priest named Father Shackel, and the novel’s ideological bent becomes clear. In Brave New World, no character’s name stands innocent or free of thematic purpose. It will also become clear that Huxley made a radical

17 Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, trans. Charence Brown, London, 1993. The relationship between We and Brave New World is still somewhat cloudy and uncertain. Robert S. Baker has surveyed the issue and concluded that “Huxley’s statements as to when or even whether he had read We do appear contradictory, suggesting that indeed he may be guilty of an unacknowledged debt to Zamiatin, but the accusations of systematic plagiarism directed against both writers [Huxley and Orwell] are false” (Baker, Brave New World: History, Science, and Dystopia, 38-39). He decided that the “recurrent patterns of opposition do not point to indebtedness or plagiarism, but rather to the formal conventions of the genre” (ibid., 40). 18 In A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess establishes judgment against several of his contemporaries through naming the streets of his World State after leaders and theorists of the Party: Marghanita Boulevard (Laski, novelist), Boothby Avenue (Conservative politician), (Kingsley) Amis Avenue (novelist), (Clement) Attlee Avenue (Labour Prime Minster), (J.B.) Priestley Place (novelist and playwright), Kingsley Avenue, (A.J.P.) Taylor Place (historian), and he also ties in Soviet figures whose triumph is more emphatically stated through the Slavic roots of “Nadsat,” the teenage slang: Jonny Zhivago, Ed and Id Molotov, Gargarin Street, etc. See A Clockwork Orange, New York, 1986. 19 Anthony Burgess, The Wanting Seed, New York, 1962, 194.

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departure in the use of names which could have endangered him legally by turning to names of living personalities. Huxley raises the process of naming as a particular issue in Brave New World because its World State exercises especially tight control over surnames. We are told that “Fanny worked in the Bottling Room, and her surname [like Lenina’s] was also Crowne. But as the two thousand million inhabitants of the planet had only ten thousand names between them, the coincidence was not particularly surprising.”20 At some point in its history, the World State has obviously abolished virtually all surnames as part of its campaign to extinguish individuality, family, and history, and in the interest of enforced orthodoxy decided to use only the surnames of its founders and “saints”. As Bateson has pointed out, this is a totemic system arranged “so that every individual bears names of totemic ancestors”.21 This is one reason why the World State has reduced names to two units, one of which must be a founding name. We can see just how serious the World State has been in its restrictions to ten thousand elements, because there are at present over a million and a half surnames in the United States and surely more than a million in the United Kingdom.22 We should, however, remind ourselves that the official Chinese post office handbook lists only 5,730 current family names for a population of over one billion and even this is an expansion of the “Hundred Surnames” list (which actually contains 438 names) established by the legendary emperor Fuxi.23 Huxley’s Western audience would have been and continues to be more aware of a vast stock of multiple surnames – a clear difference between West and East. These surnames come from a father’s name (patronymics), an occupation or office, a description or action (usually nicknames), or a place.24 The World State’s agenda has 20 In the reset 1989 American paperback editions, “planet” reads “plant” (41), which many readers will construe as being accurate, but which does not reflect Huxley’s insistence that the planet, not the plant, is populated by two billion people. 21 Quoted in Claude Levi-Straus, The Savage Mind, trans. John and Doreen Weightman, Chicago, 1966, 124. 22 Elsdon C. Smith, American Surnames, Philadelphia, 1969, 299-300. 23 Dorothy Perkins, Encyclopedia of China, New York, 1999, 337. 24 Elsdon Smith’s analysis of surnames in the United States found that patronymics accounted for 32.23%, occupational names for 15.16%, nicknames 9.48%, and place names 43.13%; he cites C.N. Matthews’ English Surnames as showing that the names of members of the House of Commons divided into the same categories in 33%

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suppressed all four of these categories; indeed, it has erased any chance of signs of parentage. Huxley does not indicate what branch of the World State is responsible for naming nor if naming is extended below the Alpha and Beta castes, but apparently some bureaucratic branch has this office. Two last names, though, are apparently too “sacred” for common use – those of Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud. When one carefully weighs the names Huxley’s World State allows its citizens to bear, one should notice immediately that the novel is dominated by names taken from the public sphere in the early twentieth century. Huxley does not wish the onomistic comedy of Dickens or the numerics of Zamyatin and deliberately turns his back on his earlier practice. Charles Holmes has labeled the names “comically ironic”,25 and David Sisk has weighed the ways in which the names pun, lampoon, and condemn, though in no way is his conclusion that George Bernard Shaw’s name is “reserve[d] for his harshest treatment” supported by the text,26 but the irony cuts far deeper and more sharply. He wishes to indict the World State by using names that should resonate in his reading public’s mind as powers which could make such a world possible. In particular, Huxley uses a stock of Russian names prominent in the foundation of the Soviet state: Bakunin, Engels, Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky.27 To these he adds names from the worlds of industry and finance: Edsel Ford, Henry Ford, Mond, Mellon, and Rothschild. A cluster of other political and philosophical names join them: Benito, Bonaparte, Hoover, Shaw, Malthus, Bradley, Bradlaugh, Habibullah (an Afghan leader), and Sarojini (the first name of the President of the Indian Congress Party whom Huxley met in 1925 and a woman he described as “the only real He-Man among the Indian politicians”).28 There are also several scientists: Diesel, Watson, Helmholz, etc. Such name play sets Brave New World apart from Huxley’s original targets – the novels of H.G. patronymics, 17.5% occupational, 13% nicknames, and 36.5 place names (Smith, American Surnames, 9-10). 25 Charles M. Holmes, Aldous Huxley and the Way to Reality, Westport, CT, 1970, 87. 26 David W. Sisk, “Using Language in a World that Debases”, in Readings on Brave New World, ed. Katie de Koster, San Diego, CA. 1999, 126. 27 Huxley’s use of clusters of names has been remarked from the first. There are four very good discussions of the name at present: see David W. Sisk, Robert S. Baker, Jerome Meckier, and Krishan Kumar, I correct some of their assignments of sources, develop others, and place the names more within thematic contexts of the novel. 28 The name “Sarojini” would stay with Huxley; he uses it again in Island.

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Wells. In The Time Machine (1895), for example, Wells uses virtually no names; rather he identifies the characters by occupation: Psychologist, Doctor, Journalist, Editor, and, naturally, the TimeTraveller. War of the Worlds (1898) gives us the Narrator, Curate, Artilleryman, and Younger Brother, along with a few specific names. A Modern Utopia has the Botanist, the Narrator, a Talkative Blond Person, and a Utopian Double who talk their way through issues but do not create a narrative. However, in Men Like Gods, Wells turned to specific names.29 Naming in life and naming in books are two quite distinct activities, each with its own agenda. We can assume that parents selecting a name for their child want the child and want the child to be pleased with and even proud of his or her name. In the past, tradition and religion played major roles in the selection even when it resulted in some of the most bizarre names the English world has even seen – names such as the oft cited Praise-God Barebones or Safe-on-High Hutchinson or the truly astonishing Through-Much-Tribulation-WeEnter-Into-the-Kingdom-of-Heaven Crabb, who fortunately was simply called Tribby by her relatives.30 Farhang Zabeeh and others have argued that proper names “are not connotative signs; that is, they convey no information about the bearers of those signs and hence are names without significations or simply ‘unmeaning marks’”.31 Virtually every parent and novelist would disagree strongly with this assertion. Marcel Proust, for instance, comments: How much more individual still was the character that they [small towns] assumed from being designated by names, names that were only for themselves, proper names such as people have. Words present to us little pictures of things, lucid and normal .... But names present to us … a confused picture, which draws from the names, from the brightness or darkness of their sound, the colour in which it is uniformly painted. 29

Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells: A Biography, New York, 1973, 336. The Mackenzies see names such as Barnstaple, Burleigh, Catskill, Lady Stella, Lord Borralonga, Uthred, Lychnis, and others in Men Like Gods as allegorical labels for politicians contemporary with Wells. 30 Stephen Wilson, The Means of Naming: A Social and Cultural History of Personal Naming in Western Europe, London, 1998, 198. 31 Farhang Zabech, What Is in a Name: An Inquiry into the Semantics and Pragmatics of Proper Names, The Hague, 1968, 10.

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He then adds: “I thought of names not as an inaccessible ideal but as a real and enveloping substance into which I was about to plunge, the life not yet lived, the life intact and pure which I enclosed in them.”32 Unlike a parent, however, a novelist may wish to use names to create authorial rhetoric directly reflecting the negative and positive values of his or her vision of the world and manipulating the entire population of the novel. I agree with Kaplan and Bernays’ comment that “names of characters … convey what their creators may already know and feel about them and how they want their readers to respond”.33 The work may be pushed toward the abstract or to the particular by the names, in exactly the same way that a novelist will provide specific temporal references in the opening pages and that a romancer, by contrast, will show little concern for temporality. Huxley employs names in Brave New World to pass a severe judgment on the World State and especially on his contemporary world as well and to manipulate his audiences’ reactions. Naturally, authors exercise even more power than parents when it comes to naming their characters. With the downfall of numerous royal families during and after World War I, especially the Romanovs, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns, and Wittelsbachs, the power vacuum created was often filled with ambitious dictators throughout Europe: Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany, Pilsudski in Poland, Primo de Rivera in Spain, King Alexander in Yugoslavia, Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, Bela Kun in Hungary, Antonio Carmona in Portugal, and numerous would-be dictators such as Oswald Moseley in England. The Europe Huxley knew before the 1930s experienced many coups, assassinations, purges, and murders affecting lives on three continents. Almost without exception, the new crop of dictators warred against the past in political, social, artistic, and family registers and offered Huxley ever more fresh targets. Since 1845 Huxley’s world had been flooded with new and unusual names, especially on the political scene. Like all citizens who lived during the first half of the twentieth century, Huxley had the opportunity of witnessing the rise of dictators from the political left and right, some promising utopian states, others offering stability within controlled conservatism. At the time Huxley was writing Brave 32

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, New York, 1934, I, 296, 298. 33 Kaplan and Bernays, Language of Names, 172.

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New World, though, three figures stood out in world affairs: Benito Mussolini (in power from 1922 to 1945), Josef Stalin (in power from 1924 to 1953), and Mustafa Kemal (in power from 1923 until 1938). Quite obviously, Huxley had the Fascism of the former, the Communism of the second, and the reformism of the latter in mind as he conceived his characters and developed his ideas. The cluster of political names – some twelve in all – draws heavily on the development of Soviet Russia and its theorists and some Englishmen who praised the supposed utopian state unfolding in Eastern Europe. Specifically, he took the names of Lenin, Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Bakunin, Rabinovitch, and Bokanovsky, though the latter two are possibly fictional. The characters of Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne particularly foreground the Soviet names. He also draws in Sarojini Naidu, Herbert Hoover, Benito Mussolini, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Only three are names of dead persons, thus avoiding the possibility of libel, but virtually all of them would have been instantly recognizable in the early 1930s as names carrying much political weight. I know of no other English novel in the twentieth century that makes such bold and reckless use of the names of actual personages and thus runs the possibility of being crushed by libel suits. Within the political cluster, Huxley creates comedy through the tension, discord, and contradictions as he yokes given names and surnames together in almost metaphysical ways. The names in Brave New World represent an entirely new direction for Huxley in their recognizability, contemporaniety, and referentiality. One can savor the earlier satiric resonances of Sclopis and Barbecue-Smith without relating them to the contemporary world in particular whereas names such as Ford, Freud, Mellon, and Watson virtually demand a more targeted satirical aim. Huxley seems particularly interested in oxymoronic combinations. “Lenina Crowne”, for instance, pulls together the founding leader of the Soviet state with the regal term “crown”, the symbol of power which Lenin exterminated in 1918 through the murder of the Czar and his family. We see the same play with “Sarojini Engels”, which combines the leader of the quest for Indian independence, with Frederick Engels, Victorian social critic and co-theorist with Karl Marx. Virginia M. Clark perceived this practice while discussing After Many a Summer, but she did not follow it up beyond one name. She comments, “Virginia Maunciple

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(whose name ironically juxtaposes the suggestion of ‘virgin’ with that of ‘manciple,’ which has the root meaning as ‘possession or slave’)”.34 A number of the names fuse layers of meaning in the way they combine echoes, names such as Darwin Bonaparte, Benito Hoover, Primo Mellon, and Morgana Rothschild. Morgana, whose single eyebrow repels Bernard, combines the worlds of Arthurian romance and world high finance. Morgana refers to Morgan le Fay, half-sister of King Arthur, who figures importantly in Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geraldus Cambrensis, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, at times as a defender, at times as an enemy of Arthur. Gradually in the myths her supernatural shape-shifting and flying powers turn sinister, and she schemes to destroy Arthur and others. Bernard senses something of the sinister temptress when he finds himself next to Morgana at the Solidarity Service: When Morgana Rothschild turned and beamed at him, he did his best to beam back. But the eyebrow, that black two-in-one – alas, it was still there; he couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t, however hard he tried.35

Her surname hints at the role banking, finance, and complex wealth played in the early founding years of the World State. Krishan Kumar perceptively observed that “as in the old allegorical fables, Huxley gives many of his characters names which symbolize his particular bêtes noires. Together they add up to a fairly comprehensive indictment of western thought and achievement since the Enlightenment.”36 Benito Hoover sardonically combines the names of the Italian Fascist dictator and the Republican American President, both contemporary with the novel and quite alive at the time. The combination reverberates with political and philosophical tensions. Coming to the presidency with a very successful record in private business and public works, much was expected of Hoover, but by 1930 he was perceived as failing miserably because he depended too much on “voluntarism”, “rugged individualism”, and his “New Day” agenda just as the nation sank into a serious economic Depression. Mussolini was clearly everything that Hoover was not – arrogant, 34

Clark, Aldous Huxley and Film, 84. Huxley, Brave New World, 96. 36 Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times, Oxford, 1987, 243. 35

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public, virile, forceful, and comfortable in his power, especially in the centralizing of power in one personality. The gap in meaning separating the given name and the surname is also powerfully present in the name Primo Mellon which yokes together Primo de Rivera, the Spanish dictator who seized power in a military coup in 1923 and the financial and artistic acumen of Andrew Mellon, the very successful American financier. Huxley could have found patterns for failed utopian states in both Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Russia since both dictators had promised perfected worlds but had been unable to deliver them. Mussolini’s views on government can be summarized in the threeword slogan he sold to the people: “Credere, Obbedire, Combattere [Believe, Obey, Fight].” In her biography of Mussolini, Laura Fermi argues that “to those who believed and obeyed blindly, ‘to fight’ became dogma, an essential part of the Fascist credo. This dogma was to enslave the nation and its duce and lead them to their ultimate catastrophe”,37 and ultimately to George Orwell’s nightmarish, constantly warring World State. The slogan does not quite match the slogan of Huxley’s World State: “Community, Identity, Stability.” Given his life-long interest in population control, Huxley would have keenly noticed Mussolini’s concern for the Italian birthrate. In 1927, Mussolini announced a program to increase the Italian population by fifty percent in three years – an impossible goal – raising the population from forty to sixty million. The World State moves in just the opposite direction. Henry Foster and Mustapha Mond celebrate the steps the World State has taken to secure population control. Foster tells his charges that “fertility is merely a nuisance”,38 and Mond tells them about a moment in history when “there were two thousand millions. Stop all the wheels. In a hundred and fifty weeks there are once more only a thousand millions; a thousand thousand thousand men and women have starved to death.”39 Such are and were the consequences of the cultural revolution which had taken place approximately five-hundred years before the novel’s present time. In the East, Stalin founded programs intended to reduce population in order to purify the citizenry. The ruthlessness with which he 37

Laura Fermi, Mussolini, Chicago, 1974, 297. Huxley, Brave New World, 13. 39 Ibid., 49. 38

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exploited the Ukrainian famine to destroy the Kulak class of peasants to bring about the collectivization of farms and his show trials of 1928 and 1930 centralized power and mark the return of the Red Terror, as did his actions to destroy the Church in Russia, successfully closing at least eighty percent of the village churches, and to control individual movement by bringing back the hated internal passport. All of this, Nikolai Bukharin declared, “has accomplished the greatest miracle of all time .... It has succeeded in changing the very nature of Russian man.”40 During this time, the CPU (secret police) arranged a tour for George Bernard Shaw who pronounced the Soviet Union the country of the future and called the “rumours” of famine “pure invention”.41 H.G. Wells passed more severe judgments during both his 1920 and 1934 visits. Because of their perceived sympathy for the Soviet state, both Shaw and Wells entered the pool of names of Huxley’s World State. Both Mussolini and Stalin offered Huxley negative patterns for the generally benevolent World-Controller Huxley wished to develop, and neither Adolf Hitler nor Francisco Franco had yet risen to power as Huxley was writing. One European leader, though, had come to power and was affecting major reforms in his country, creating a sharp break between the Old World and the New World. While the Mellons and Rothschilds provide surnames for two minor characters, the Monds supply the name of a key figure, Mustapha Mond, one of the ten World-Controllers whose dialogue with John in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen of Brave New World goes to the heart of the conflicts between the contrasted worlds. It has been suggested that the name Mustapha was taken from one of the several Ottoman leaders in the rather distant past, but given the topicality of Huxley’s novel, it is far more likely that the name would have been recognized among the 1930s audience as referring to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the revolutionary leader who modernized Turkey in the decade following the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of World War I, “a social revolution … as remarkable as any of the postwar revolutions.”42 When first introduced to the reader, Mustapha appears to be Middle-Eastern – “a man of middle height, black-haired, with a 40

Quoted in Edvard Radzinsky, Stalin, trans. H.T. Willetts, New York, 1997, 240. Ibid., 258. 42 Martin Gilbert, A History of the Twentieth Century, Vol. 1, 1900-1933, New York, 1997, 676. 41

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hooked nose, full red lips, eyes very piercing and dark”.43 The range of Kemal’s vision was evident when he addressed a public meeting in Bursa, because he told the crowd: “A nation which does not make pictures, a nation which does not make statues, a nation which does not practice science, such a nation, one must admit, has no place on the highroad of civilization.”44 Mustapha Kemal in Turkey, the last and largest remnant of the collapsed Ottoman Empire, assumed power in October 1924, fully committed to affecting a thorough-going cultural revolution which would transform Turkey into a Westernized, secularized, modernized nation capable of taking its place among the other European powers. His reforms remain in effect in 2012, although they are now increasingly under fire. His transformation of his country was accomplished with little bloodshed – none of the exiles and executions of Hitler and Stalin. He first abolished the sultanate and caliphate, ending almost four-hundred-years rule by the Ottomans. This was followed by separation of the Islamic institutions from the State, closure of the religious schools, disbanding of the Muslim brotherhoods, and closing of numerous shrines. Next came an overhaul of the education system: the religious, Arabic-speaking schools were replaced with secular, Turkish-speaking ones. Kemal was equally eager to change the way Turks dressed. He restricted use of the turban, banned the fez, discouraged women’s veils and head scarves, all in the interest of “civilized dress”. Matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance were taken away from the religious courts, giving women a number of legal and social rights – even the right to vote. In a sweeping importation of Western institutions, he introduced the international Gregorian calendar, thus changing January 1, 1342 to January 1, 1926, introduced Western numbers, the census, and the Roman alphabet. These were shortly followed by international weights and measures and eventually the adoption of surnames. Early in the twentieth century, there had been talk of Turkey breaking its ties with Arabic script, and there were good reasons for this. As Andrew Mango summarizes the situation:

43

Huxley, Brave New World, 32. Andrew Mango, Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey, New York, 2000, 371. 44

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Wandering into Brave New World The Arabic script had disadvantages: letters could have four shapes (initial, medial, final or free-standing) and short vowels were omitted. The Arabic script reflected the phonetic structure of classical Arabic; it did not suit Turkish, which has fewer consonants and more vowels than Arabic.45

Since the Turkish population at this time was largely illiterate, such a change would have had little effect on the citizens. After all, if they became educated, the Latin alphabet and script would be the first one they learned. But this change did have a major effect on the educated classes, one that has become more serious over time, because it immediately cut them off from the past, exactly as has happened in Huxley’s novel. Books written in Turkish but in the Arabic script gradually became unintelligible to all but the specialist, just like the books locked in the World Controller’s office. Kemal’s actions well describe the war against the past depicted in Chapter Three of Brave New World. Huxley’s readers in 1932 would have immediately related the gas warfare of A.F. 141 with the gas warfare of World War I, the Great Economic Collapse with the Slump or Depression, and would have had no difficulties seeing Hitler’s, Stalin’s, or Kemal’s programs in such comments by Mond as “Accompanied by a campaign against the Past; by the closing of museums, the blowing up on historical monuments (luckily most of them had already been destroyed during the Nine Years’ War); by the suppression of all books published before A.F. 140”.46 Melding Morgana’s Arthurian name with the names of two families who had been major players in international banking and finance since the early nineteenth century adds other sinister dimensions to the financial cluster of names. Given the economic turmoil brought about by World War I, the boom of the early 1920s in many countries, and the Depression, few citizens of the Western world would have been unaware of the wealth, power, and influence of the Morgans, Rothschilds, and Mellons. The question is, what role did these men and their families play in the transformation of the political world that made the World State possible and that placed their surnames on the permitted list? After financing General Electric,

45 46

Ibid., 464. Huxley, Brave New World, 41.

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Morgan and his grandson consolidated U.S. Steel. Morgan’s power was such that Gilbert calls it “endless”: He controlled Armour’s of Chicago, through whom he held power of life and death over the cattle of the Argentine. His shipping Combine contained most of the Atlantic liners.47

When he died he left an estate of $68.3 million, provoking Andrew Carnegie to remark snidely, “and to think, he was not a rich man”.48 His son, John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., Huxley’s contemporary and an eager Anglophile, who lived in London from 1898 until 1906, was not the flamboyant figure his father was, but he did help New York displace London as the center of world finance and shifted Morgan interests to international loans. As a purchasing agent for Britain and France, he secured $3 billion in war goods for the countries during World War I. His actions on the international scene were controversial enough for provoke three assassination attempts at his home, his church, and his office. A joke that circulated in 1901 illustrates the force of the Morgan name. It took the form of a cartoon in Life, a comic weekly: “Who made the world, Charles?” “God made the world in 4004 B.C., but it was reorganized in 1901 by James J. Hill, J. Pierpont Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller.”49 Mellon’s wealth began with the opening of a private banking house. By the end of his life in 1908, he and his son ran the Mellon National Bank, Alcoa, Gulf Oil, Carborundum, Koppers (a chemical firm), had interests in several railways and construction concerns, and sat on numerous Boards. Soon the bank had become an enormous holding company “specializing in bonds, data processing, and managing personal trusts”.50 In the next several decades its major projects would include the Panama Canal locks, the George Washington Bridge, the RCA Building, and more. The names of these financiers and bankers were prominent in the average man’s talk during the Depression, and many people blamed rich speculators for 47

Gilbert, History of the Twentieth Century, 32. Stephen Salsbury, “Morgan, John Pierpont”, in American National Biography, eds John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, New York, 1999, XV, 839. 49 Quoted in John K. Winkler, Morgan the Magnificent: The Life of J. Pierpont Morgan, New York, 1930, 197. 50 Robert L. Gale, “Mellon, Andrew William”, in American National Biography, XV, 270. 48

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the Slump. For many Europeans, though, the names of Mellon and Morgan paled beside mention of the Rothschilds. Banking, wealth, and power were practically synonymous with the name; the family’s banking houses in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Vienna, and Naples were symbols of international power. Lionel Rothschild, the father, had guaranteed the four-million pounds that enabled Britain to become principal stockholder in the Suez Canal Company.51 To this company of investment moguls, Huxley added the British Mond family, prominent in England from 1867 to the present – again a founding father, sons, and grandsons – whose activities he came to know in 1930. The Mond family were chemical manufacturers and industrialists. The first generation focused on manufacturing soda, recovering sulphur from certain chemical processes, and exploiting nickel ores. Huxley clearly satirizes this reclamation process in the scene where Lenina and Bernard remark how citizens continue to be “socially useful even after” death through the reclamation of phosphorous in the cremation process: “more than a kilo and a half per adult corpse. Which makes the best part of four hundred tons of phosphorous every year from England alone.”52 The second Mond generation continued the work with nickel, scientific patents, financing, and manufacturing. Robert Mond originated a number of patents, and his brother developed ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries), one of the world’s largest industrial corporations and a firm Huxley had visited. Father and sons alike enthusiastically supported and helped fund scientific work through the Society of Chemical Industry, the Societé des Amis de la Maison de la Chimé, the National Council for Chemistry, the Hill Observatory Corporation, and other organizations. The family’s philanthropy and industries continue in the present fifth generation. Huxley’s agenda in using the names Mellon, Morgan, Mond, Rothschild, Lenin, Marx, and Mustafa is clear. He wanted to summon awareness of the three major revolutions – Russian, Italian, and Turkish, which were active during the time he was writing his novel and which seemed to be succeeding within limits, to emphasize the 51

For a brief, lively discussion of the English branch of the Rothschild family, see Frederic Morton, The Rothschilds: A Family Portrait, New York, 1962, 142-247. Morton fully demonstrates the power of a name, especially when it has fabulous wealth behind it. 52 Huxley, Brave New World, 87.

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drastic transformations that could occur within a period of a few years – a suddenness that the later century would grow accustomed to in Germany, China, Cuba, Iran, and Cambodia – and to suggest the power and wealth essential for the creation of the truly industrial society. A billion people have died in the creation of his World State, whereas only millions would perish in the name of revolution throughout the twentieth century. He wished, also, to underline the contemporary dimensions of his futuristic world. During their lengthy conversation in Chapters Sixteen and Seventeen, Mustapha Mond tells John that “Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive; even science must sometimes be treated as a possible enemy”, he then explains that pure science can threaten a society’s stability: “Science is dangerous; we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.”53 Just before the topic shifts to religion and philosophy, Mond returns yet again to his warning that “science is a public danger. As dangerous as it’s been beneficent ... But we can’t allow science to undo its own good work.”54 Science, frozen as technology, has indeed been good to the World State’s citizens, giving them immediate access to happiness through soma, granting them life free of diseases, allowing them untrammeled sexuality free of social and moral censure, and surrounding them with assured employment, amusements, advanced transportation, and clothing and through its bombs and gasses a political stability made possible by technology. Brave New World, however, is no anti-science screed in the tradition of a number of nineteenth-century novels and twentieth-century dystopias. The second largest name cluster in the novel draws together a number of scientists from various disciplines, ranging from chemist to sociologist, from biologist to linguist, from wildlife photographer to petroleum expert. At least sixteen references to scientists are used, but they are not used with the same ironic edge and critical perspective evident with the political and financial names, with the sole exception of Darwin Bonaparte, the photographer famous for the “gorilla’s wedding” and the “sperm Whale’s Love-life”. In fact, most of the names appear only once and are used for minor characters which have virtually no narrative importance. They exist as names only and do not enter the story line. For example, Fifi Bradlaugh, Joanne Diesel, Clara 53 54

Ibid., 269, 270. Ibid., 272-73.

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Deterling, and Tom Kawaguichi are participants only in the Solidarity Service at which Bernard Marx and Morgana Rothschild are the main characters. The unnamed scientists behind Podsnap’s Technique, Pilkington in Mombassa, and Pfitzner are referred to only once, and mention of Dickens’ Podsnap is a puzzling anomaly. Only Bokanovsky, Helmholtz, and Thomas Malthus have significant thematic roles adding allusive depth and scope to the novel, as Huxley explores the social issues of the World State, especially those concerning population control and family makeup. Throughout his life, Huxley was troubled by the problems posed by overpopulation. His World State had two billion citizens, and one of its major heroes, honored by the State’s birth control program, is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who is mentioned several times. Lenina, for instance, wears “a perfectly sweet Malthusian belt”.55 Other heroes of the World State, specifically Bakunin, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky also worried about population as it affected tensions between classes. The Russian scientist Bokanovsky has gone beyond worrying into various types of control of population groups.56 Each of these men believed that population, however numerous, should be controlled by a strongly centralized cadre. In Malthus and Marx, an alignment suggested in Brave New World, Huxley finds an almost fatal progression from overpopulation and limited resources to an over-organized and managerial state. Huxley had already addressed the problems of the state controlling population from conception to birth in Crome Yellow where Scogan suggests that in the near future “an impersonal generation will take the place of Nature’s hideous system”.57 The conjunction haunts both the opening and the closing pages of Brave New World Revisited. Huxley reverts to Malthus’ 55

Ibid., 60 (Huxley’s emphasis). James Sexton has argued that the name Bokanovsky comes from Maurice Bokanowski (1879-1928), a French politician who held posts in Third Republic cabinets. Sexton comments: “Bokanowski was a high-profile advocate of the rationalization of industry as a response to the economic crisis after the Great War” (“Aldous Huxley’s Bokanovsky”, Science-Fiction Studies, XVI [1989], 85). Because Bokanowski had little connection with science or technology, I find Sexton’s argument somewhat problematic. Very likely, though, Huxley had information about Bokanowski unavailable to us. Independently, Sexton and I glanced at Ivan Vasilevich Bokhanovsky (1848-1917), a minor Russian revolutionary involved in the Chigirin conspiracy of 1877, but found no evident connections to this name. 57 Huxley, Crome Yellow, 22. 56

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thesis in Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) that population increases in a geometrical ratio while resources increase at an arithmetical ratio: … the yearly increases [in population rates] are themselves increasing. They increase regularly, according to the rules of compound interest; and they also increase irregularly with every application, by a technological backward society of the principles of Public Health …. At the present rate it [population] will double in less than half a century. And this fantastically rapid doubling of our numbers will be taking place on a planet whose most desirable and productive areas are already densely populated, whose soils are being eroded by the frantic efforts of bad farmers to raise more food, and whose easily available mineral capital is being squandered with the reckless extravagance of a drunken sailor getting rid of his accumulated pay.58

Huxley believed that many world leaders find that: Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of the central government. And permanent crisis is what we have to expect in a world in which over-population is producing a state of things, in which dictatorship under Communist auspices becomes almost inevitable.59

Surrounded by Cold War pessimism in 1948, Huxley moves to an even darker conclusion: “Over-population and over-organization have produced the modern metropolis, in which a fully human life of multiple personal relationships has become almost impossible.”60 To Huxley, Malthus had pinpointed the modern crisis, which the World State had partially solved by organizing the citizens totally and by separating sex from reproduction, marriage from social status. One does not sense a depth of knowledge or a full range of familiarity with Marxist/Leninist thought in Huxley, but he clearly understands its potential to centralize so fully that citizens would be unable to avoid being sucked into its black hole. History has strongly come down on Huxley’s side, even in his prediction:

58

Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 6. Ibid., 12. 60 Ibid., 118. 59

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Wandering into Brave New World In Russia the speaker will, of course, be associated with glimpses of Lenin, with the words ‘people’s democracy’, with the prophetic beard of Father Marx. Because all this is still safely in the future, we can afford to smile. Ten or twenty years from now, it will probably seem a good deal less amusing. For what is now merely science fiction will have become everyday political fact.61

Huxley intuits where Lenin and Marx are taking the people. He also knows where the programs of Benito Mussolini, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Herbert Hoover failed, and where sympathizers with Leninism such as George Bernard Shaw had failed to perceive the consequences. His pairing of the name elements in Benito Hoover, Lenina’s “really too hairy”62 sex partner, is unusually oxymoronic in its ironies in joining the names of the Italian dictator and the American president who could not prevent or cope with the Depression.63 Capitalist names and Communist names underline Huxley’s dual attack on the systems. Indeed, to him, both were enemies of individuality and liberty. In his essay, “The New Romanticism”, Huxley writes: The aim of the Communist Revolution in Russia was to deprive the individual of every right, every vestige of personal liberty (including the liberty of thought and the right to possess a soul), and to transform him into a component cell of the great ‘Collective Man’ – that single mechanical monster who, in the Bolshevik millennium, is to take the place of the unregimented hordes of ‘soul-encumbered’ individual who now inhabit the earth.64

He then moved immediately to an amalgamation of his two enemies: To the Bolshevik idealist, Utopia is indistinguishable from one of Mr. Henry Ford’s factories. It is not enough, in their eyes, that men should 61

Ibid., 86. Huxley, Brave New World, 68 (Huxley’s emphasis). 63 Some surnames have little or no political or scientific connection: Pilkington, Pfitzner, Kawaguichi (a Japanese lake famous for its inverted reflections of Mount Fuji and, more likely, the name of the author of a book on Tibet Huxley discussed in On the Margins), and Detering. Most of the first names such as Polly, George, Joanna, Tom, Jim, and especially Fifi show that the State exercises little control over them and still grants the citizens this last vestige of individuality. 64 Huxley, Music at Night, 190. 62

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spend only eight hours a day under the workshop discipline. Life outside the factory must be exactly like life inside. Leisure must be as highly organized as toil.65

Huxley knows that virtually all proposed utopias from Plato, to early Christianity, to mediaeval monastic Christianity, to Thomas More, to Communism have maintained that if society were to abolish private property and the basic family unit a utopian world could be achieved. Huxley also knows, though, that while humans may be willing, even eager, to redistribute or to reallocate property, they are not willing to abolish property entirely; nor are they eager to abolish the family unit, however defined. They wish more contact than just genital contact. Abolition of individuality, property, and family are the three main features of the World State and the three main targets of Huxley’s critique, in particular of the industrialization and collectivization of the modern world which were advocating and implementing them. One may validly ask why Huxley did not schedule a visit to the Soviet Union during his 1925-26 trip. Actually, he had planned such a trip in early 1931. Perhaps he felt enough Englishmen had visited it – including George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Harold Laski, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and even his own brother, Julian, who was in the Soviet Union while Huxley was writing Brave New World, a trip he would report in his A Scientist Among the Soviets (1932). On May 27, 1931, he wrote to Julian that he had decided not to accompany him on his trip to Russia because he had to “re-write [Brave New World] in quite another way” and that this left “no alternative but to renounce the Russian scheme altogether”.66 Since the 1917 Revolution, the Soviet Union had attracted numerous visitors and reporters eager to experience and assess the “new civilization”. Kingsley Martin claimed in 1932 that “the entire British Intelligensia has been to Russia this summer”.67 The very year Brave New World was published readers were also offered G.D.H. Cole’s The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos, John Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power, and John Middleton Murry’s The Necessity of Communism, all of which focused attention on the economic, cultural, and political systems in 65

Ibid., 191 (and see Chapter Three above). Huxley, Letters, 349. 67 Quoted in Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties, Oxford, 1988, 396. 66

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the Soviet Union. David Caute has researched the flow of British “tourists” to Russia, and damns virtually all the visitors in hindsight for their naivety and ideological blindness. Even Julian’s rather innocent trip is subjected to withering irony in his discussion.68 Huxley’s World State rules not through Stalinist terror, however, but through benevolent control. Yet its benevolent paternalism could not exist without the collusion between government and science. Specifically, it could not exist without politicizing the behaviorist thought of John Broadus Watson, whose experiments involving stimuli and responses foregrounded the concept of conditioning to much of the public in the 1910s and 1920s.69 Huxley could count on his readers immediately reacting to the names Lenin, Ford, and Freud; however, the name Watson might not have been as familiar. Watson was the American founder of behaviorism that enjoyed considerable respect until the 1960s. After taking two degrees at Furman University, he left South Carolina to study at the University of Chicago with James Angell and Henry Davidson in psychology and physiology. His dissertation, “‘Animal Education’: An Experimental Study on the Psychical Development of the White Rat, Correlated with the Growth of its Nervous System”, became streamlined as “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” where he concentrated on defining and theorizing behaviorism. Watson argued for observable, measurable, objective study of the human being. But there were problems. His granddaughter, Mariette Hartley, recalls listening to an Ashley Montagu radio discussion on: 68 David Caute, The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, rev. edn, New Haven, CT, 1988. Caute’s discussion subjects each visit to sardonic comment, questioning why the tourists and fellow-travelers did not see what later came to light. For example, of Anna Louise Strong, he sarcastically wrote: “Why, the constitution even put printing shops, paper supplies and buildings at the disposal of the working people! Of where else could that be said? Sidney Webb was absolutely right, said Anna Louise, to call all this ‘truly a unique and unprecedented conception of public freedom’. But there was one further point, widely misunderstood in the West, which she was determined to clear up once and for all. Articles 127 and 128 guaranteed that: ‘No person may be arrested except by decision of court or the sanction of a state attorney.’ And that guarantee was as good as gold. (It is not clear whether her own interrogation in the Lubianka [Prison] in 1949 came under article 127 or article 128” (Caute, The Fellow Travellers, 90-91). 69 For full discussion of Watson’s life and work, see the biographies by David Cohen and Kerry W. Buckley: curiously, neither biographer mentions Aldous Huxley or Brave New World.

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child-raising theories popular in the twenties – antiseptic theories that greatly influenced psychology, theories that claimed that any show of love or close physical contact made the child too dependent. Children were viewed as mechanical objects at the mercy of their environment, and parents cold make them into anything they wished.70

She then realized that Montagu was talking about her grandfather and that these ideas had driven her uncle and aunt to suicide attempts and her mother into rigid withdrawal. With his 1913 paper, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”, and his books Behavior (1914), Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist (1919), Ways of Behaviorism (1928), and Psychological Care of the Infant and Child (1928), Watson established objective, scientific methods for investigating and shaping conditioned responses. The last book summarizes the thesis of his entire career, this time directed at parents and prospective parents: Now we are forced to believe from the study of facts that all of these forms of behavior are built in by the parent and by the environment which the parent allows the child to grow up in. There are no instincts. We build in at an early age everything that is later to appear. 71

Helmholtz Watson, Bernard’s closest friend and far more an intellectual malcontent in the World State than Bernard, gets his surname from Watson, and his given name partly comes from the bold-faced phrase in Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, “Objections to the Helmholtz Theory”.72 Huxley had apparently been familiar with Helmholtz’s optical work for some time.73 His theory relates to vibrations of membranes in the auditory system to form an “acoustic image”. Elsewhere, Watson refers to it as the “resonance theory of auditory stimulation”, and bragged, like the Jesuits, that “give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select …. 70

Mariette Hartley, Breaking the Silence, New York, 1990. John Broadus Watson, Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, New York, 1928, 38 (second emphasis added). 72 Watson, Behaviorism, New York, 1925, 93. 73 Huxley, Letters, 441-42, 815. 71

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regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.”74 Watson conducted a number of conditioning experiments with animals and infants, one of which conditioned fear responses from an eleven-month-old baby when confronted with rabbits, white rats and other furry objects. Watson features this experiment again and again in his writings, most graphically in Psychological Care of Infant and Child. Here Watson prints seven photographs with explanatory captions and clear explanations of the negative conditioning of the child’s fear of the rabbit and the rat.75 Psychology supplies “Albert B.’s” name and description and chronicles the gradual creation of fear displacing his original interest.76 Of this experiment, Watson comments, “This was as convincing a case of a completely conditioned fear response as could have been theoretically pictured”.77 He permanently fixed the image of the rat maneuvering its way through the maze in the public’s perception of psychological experiments. Watson was building on the experiments of Vladimir Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov. Positive conditioning was essential for the citizens of the World State to accept life without property, without family, and without committed sexuality and love. John Broadus Watson is to Huxley what B.F. Skinner, a follower of Watson, became to Anthony Burgess, who pronounced Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity “one of the most dangerous books ever written ... [it] seems to miss the whole point of human life”.78 Several examples of Watsonian conditioning, indeed parodies of Watson’s experiments, appear in Huxley’s novel. The new students being shown through the Conditioning Center witness eight-month old Delta babies being conditioned to associate books and flowers with unpleasant noises and electric shocks in one of the two hundred repetitions they will experience before entering the world. The Director explains:

74

Watson, Behaviorism, 89, 82. Watson, Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, 23-25, 28-31, 52-54 respectively. 76 John Broadus Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, 3rd edn, Philadelphia, 1929, 241-43; also see Behaviorism, 126-31. 77 Ibid., 243. 78 Charles T. Bunting, “An Interview in New York with Anthony Burgess”, Studies in the Novel, V (1973), 521. 75

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Books and loud noises, flowers and electric shocks – already in the infant mind these couples were compromisingly linked; and after two hundred repetitions of the same or a similar lesson would be wedded indissolubly. What man has joined, nature is powerless to put asunder.79

In each of his books, Watson emphasizes that loud noises are one of the most powerful negative conditioning forces.80 And, since he believed that “the child’s whole emotional life plan has been laid down, his emotional disposition set” by the age of three, he pays particular attention to the ways in which parents, especially mothers, can damage this conditioning. In terms very similar to those fears voiced about the parents in Brave New World, Watson, who recommends that parents should not kiss or hug their infants, reminds his readers: … won’t you then remember when you are tempted to pet your child that mother love is a dangerous instrument? An instrument which may inflict a never healing wound, a wound which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness.81

Near the end of the novel, John encounters "an interminable stream of identical eight-year-old male twins" undergoing death conditioning. John’s distraught response to Linda’s death totally disrupts the exercise and the hospice routine: “Undoing all their wholesome deathconditioning with this disgusting outcry – as though death were something terrible, as though any one mattered as much as all that!”82 The World State has accepted Watson’s principle that the human is “an assembled organic machine ready to run”.83 Even the scenes of childhood sex play in the World State seem inspired by Watson’s advice that “we should develop sex knowledge in our children as rapidly as they can take it in”.84 Although Watson lived until 1958, 79

Huxley, Brave New World, 23. Watson, Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, 26 and Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, 79. 81 Watson, Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, 45. 82 Huxley, Brave New World, 247. 83 Watson, Behaviorism, 216. 84 Watson, Psychological Care of the Infant and Child, 172-73. 80

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there is no record that he responded to Brave New World in general nor to Huxley’s parodies of his experiments in particular, because late in life, Watson burned all his personal papers. In fact, no evidence has been found to indicate that Watson was aware of Huxley’s novel. Thus no awareness; no libel. Watson’s views would have appealed to Huxley for a number of reasons other than behaviorism. After being dismissed from Johns Hopkins University (for sexual misconduct) and from the New School for Social Research (again for sexual misconduct), Watson established a lucrative career for himself in advertising, in popularizing behaviorism, and in advising parents on rearing their young. His works were extremely popular, and he reached a wide audience through American magazines such as Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, Saturday Review of Literature, McCall’s, and Liberty. What would have caught Huxley’s attention especially were his views on women, family, and marriage. He felt that mothers should have little control over their children, that a “baby farm” should be established where infants could be “prepared” apart from their parents, and that wives should be mere adjuncts to their husbands. In addition, he proposed in 1928 that marriage should probably be abolished. Cohen comments: He never tired of attacking fundamental social institutions. Marriage, the family, religion, and the law persisted because of ‘inertia and ignorance’ .… They were outmoded, old-fashioned, and fit for the ‘Victorian era’. These institutions were already disintegrating [and] he predicted that marriage would not survive the next fifty years.85

He was every bit as hostile to the past as were Ford and Kemal. In his very last book, he championed … a universe unshackled by legendary folk lore of happenings thousands of years ago; unhampered by disgraceful political history; free of foolish customs and conventions which have no significance in themselves, yet which hem the individual in like taut steel bands .… For the universe will change if you bring up your children, not in the

85

Kerry W. Buckley, Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginning of Behaviorism, New York, 1989, 161.

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freedom of the libertine, but in behaviouristic freedom – a freedom we cannot even picture in words, so little do we know of it.86

In 1929, he wrote a Preface to What’s Wrong with Modern Marriage by G.V. Hamilton and Kenneth MacGowan and two magazine articles, “Why 50 years from now Men Won’t Marry” and “After the Family – What?” In his “Behaviorist’s Utopia”, he even argued that “large women and the occasional ill-favored women [should not be] allowed to breed”.87 Huxley had every good reason to make Watson a founding father of the World State. Quite controversial for many readers of Brave New World is the World State’s abolition of the family. Brave New World consistently ranks in the top seventy-five most frequently challenged books, according to the American Library Association, with its sexuality and drugs fueling the leading objections. Especially contentious is the abolition of the family. Family is one of the casualties brought about, again, by the nexus of Watson, Ford, Freud, Marx and Lenin. Recall the passage in Chapter Three of Brave New World which credits Freud with the theoretical basis for dissolving the family: Our Freud had been the first to reveal the appalling dangers of family life. The world was full of fathers – was therefore full of misery; full of mothers – therefore of every kind of perversion from sadism to chastity; full of brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts – full of madness and suicide.88

And the general four-letter word vocabulary of offensive terms has been replaced in the World State with terms relating to family relationships, birth, and the nurture of children, words which cause even the mature students being shown through the plant to blush and stammer. It is very tempting to speculate that the idea of presenting a society which had abolished marriage and the traditional concept of family may have come to Huxley while he was in Burma. While there, he traveled by steamer up the Irrawaddy River into the far northeast of the country, to Bhamo, very near the Chinese province of Yunnan. He 86

Quoted in David Cohen, J.B. Watson: The Founder of Behaviourism, London, 1979, 217. 87 Buckley, Mechanical Man, 164. 88 Huxley, Brave New World, 44.

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found Bhamo “more than half a Chinese town”,89 and was intrigued by the joss houses, the town’s chinoiserie architecture, and the high quality of the shops’ chinaware. In Jesting Pilate, Huxley then veers suddenly – and maddeningly – into a description of The Glass Palace Chronicles of the Kings of Burma and says no more about Bhamo or the area. He includes, though, a photograph of a Chinese woman, possibly in Na tribal dress, which leads to speculation about what he might have heard about marriage customs in the general area of Yunnan and Sichuan. Ethnic groups in this area may have contributed directly to Huxley’s thoughts about marriage in the World State. The Na, for example, is the one ethnic group in the world which does not practice any form of marriage. Women become pregnant by any man they wish (outside their family), and their brothers assist in raising the child. In the same area, the Musuos practice “walking marriage”. Again, there is no formal marriage. The man continues to live with his family, but visits the woman in her family’s house whenever he wishes to spend the evening with her. Huxley was aware, from some source, that there were “societies which have never heard of fatherhood” – or motherhood for that matter. The Na have been brought again to the contemporary world’s attention by Stephanie Coontz. Her Marriage, a History calls them “a startling exception to what otherwise seems to be the historical universality of marriage”.90 Huxley himself, as with most of his literary generation, did not model marital fidelity on his own conduct. His generation understood that monogamy can be an overrated virtue and adultery an overrated sin, but even in the midst of a literary debate on marriage stretching from George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) and Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) to D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1920), and Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust (1934) only rarely did an English novelist call for the abolition of marriage and the deconstruction of the family. Reform is one thing; revolution is another. The World State, however, has completely severed ties between parent and child by abolishing the very concepts themselves. Huxley approached the family issues from two directions. First, he lets Mustapha Mond fully develop the problems both the nuclear and the extended families had come to present in society and the numerous dangers these posed to the individual. The result surely shocked 89 90

Huxley, Jesting Pilate, 190. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History, New York, 2005, 24.

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readers. Then, John enters the novel with his thoroughgoing critique of the World State. Thus the novel juxtaposes Mond’s judgment on the past with John’s enactment of the values of the past as he sits by the dying Linda’s bed with “hot tears welling up behind his eyelids as he recalled the words and Linda’s voice as she repeated them [when reading to him as a child]”.91 One line of thought judges the other. Mond’s brief historical summation finds its kin in the Communist Manifesto when Engels and Marx also argue that: On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.92

Once again, Huxley indicts communist and capitalist societies on similar grounds: both work against the individual, property, and family. Huxley could have been familiar with the dissolution of marriage from reading Positivist thinkers such as Charles Fourier who, like Plato, believed that the institution of the family corrupted human emotions and that “human altruism was more worthy than individual salvation in an afterlife”.93 Key voices in the modernist project, especially during the nineteenth century, had argued for and against private property. In his Paris manuscripts of 1844, Marx expressed the abolition principle thus: “the entire revolutionary movement necessarily finds its empirical and its theoretical basis in the movement of private property – more precisely, in that of the economy.”94 Two pages later in the discussion, he argues, “the proletariat … is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite private property .… [Thus] private property drives itself in

91

Huxley, Brave New World, 240. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones, trans. Samuel Moore, London, 1967, 239. 93 Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War, New York, 2005, 235. 94 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 133. 92

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its economic movement towards its own dissolution.”95 The issue had been foregrounded for political and legal theorists by time of the French Revolution. The French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” had listed property as one of the “natural and imprescriptible rights of Man”.96 In 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s What Is Property? condemned property for “the iron yoke it fastens on the will, the moral torture it inflicts on the consciousness, the pious and stupid uniformity it enforces”.97 Proudhon’s aphorism “property is theft” became as famous as his statement that “God is evil”. Marx and Engels were not voices in the wilderness in the mid-1800s when they enunciated one of the key principles of Communism: You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property the necessary condition for whose existence is the nonexistence of any property for the immense majority of society.98

Citizens in the Fordian society pay bills and rent apartments, but they seem to have no personal property themselves, except possibly their clothing. No discussion of naming in Brave New World would be complete unless it considered the cluster of names Huxley took from Frank Cushing’s Zuni Folk Tales which stand in sharp cultural and philosophical contrast to the names of political, financial, and scientific characters. Huxley tells us that many people in the World State share surnames picked from a closed repository of ten thousand names. In Indian tribes, especially among the Zuni and Hopi tribes, a different focus on individuality and relationship to the past obtains. Jacob Z. Lauterback has shown how in a much closed society, a Jewish child may not be given the name of a dead relative.99 Among the Hopi and Zuni this would not be an option either. Names for them 95

Ibid., 135. Ibid., 149. 97 Ibid., 163. 98 Ibid., 237. 99 See Jacob Z. Lauterbach, “The Naming of Children in Jewish Folklore, Ritual and Practice”, in Studies in Jewish Law, Custom and Folklore, New York, 1970, 30-74. 96

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are single, highly individualized, tailored to fit the personality, and constantly new. John shares with the reader two sets of such names which are genuinely exotic, foreign, and crafted: names of the Zuni gods and names of individuals in John’s tribe. The named gods include Awonawilona, Ahaiputa, Marsailema, Pookong, and Etsanathahi; the names of people, Palowhtiwa, Popé, Mitsima, Kothlu, and Kiakime. Any audience, especially an audience in 1932, would be asking: how do I pronounce these names? Do these names have particular meanings? What world has created these names? The names would have had no meaning, no connotations, and no wider context for Huxley’s audience. The deities would have been utterly foreign, without attributes; and the people unknown. Almost a century ago, A.A. Goldenweiser pointed out that Indian names are quite different from Western names: “the individual name … is only to a very limited extent comparable to our personal name. It must rather be conceived of as a sort of ceremonial designation, and also as a more intimate expression of one’s membership in a clan.”100 When Huxley gives one of his characters a name, it functions much as does a “see also” or a tag on a computer file listing. It is a transparency which asks the reader to look at another and a larger world within the twentieth century. Huxley exercised at least three strategies to evade lawsuits from his look at the contemporary world. First, some of the names he used were names of dead people. Second, many names were used only once and these in a totally neutral context from which no defamation could be inferred. Third, when he used the name of a living person, he appropriated names of politically or financially prominent persons whose considerable egos would have kept them from a lawsuit with a novelist at the moment when their attentions were most needed elsewhere. Perhaps the only individuals who potentially posed a problem were John Broadus Watson and Henry Ford, but a libel suit would probably have damaged Watson’s reputation further by revealing the possible negative consequences of his psychological conditioning principles, and Henry Ford was such a public and controversial figure that probably he would not have minded the worship his name is given in Huxley’s novel. Since Ford once sued a

100

Quoted in Claude Levi-Straus, Savage Mind, 188.

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newspaper for libel and came away looking like a fool, he was not likely to desire to repeat the performance. Huxley grounds his case largely in the names employed in developing the ideas. He sees the system, the intervention, the action of the named man as disrupting all necessary ties between individuals. The contrast between the highly evocative names of leaders in the Western world and the mysterious Zuni names strikingly defined the two sets of beliefs at war with one another in Brave New World. In 1940, Huxley closed his brief essay, “Words and Their Meanings”, with the comment, “words and the meanings of words are not matters merely for the academic amusement of linguists and logisticians, or for the aesthetic delight of poets; they are matters of the profoundest ethical significance to every human being”.101 If we substitute “names” for “words”, we can see the underlying agenda of naming in his World State. As with other aspects of his novel, Huxley has achieved a brilliant opposition by playing the exotic, utterly foreign Zuni names against the very familiar names of the politically and technologically active world of the first quarter of the twentieth century. As pointed out earlier in this chapter, authors work on entirely different principles than parents when naming their characters. It would be the odd parent who gave his or her child a name the society would look upon with disdain and that the child would detest. Yet it would be the odd author who did not manipulate names so that the reader would form negative or positive opinions often even before getting to know the character. Charles Dickens wanted most of the names he used for his characters to carry a moral and ethical weight related to the characters’ professions, the characters’ dealings with other characters, and the characters’ placement on the moral yardstick of the novel. The characters were not, in any way, confined by their names to one particular time period. Aldous Huxley’s characters are confined by their names to points in time by their relationship to public actions, public ideologies, and public figures, yet, like the characters in Dickens’ novels, they escape this chronological prison by being placed in a distant future. If we look at the collection of names taken from Dickens and Huxley, we see that regardless of the narrative kind, regardless of the 101

Aldous Huxley, “Words and Their Meanings”, in The Importance of Language, ed. Max Black, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 12.

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social and cultural themes, the authors made names serve an ideological purpose – grotesquely in the case of Dickens and topically in the case of Huxley. Brave New World, though, is an extreme case in many ways when it comes to its distribution of names. There are few futuristic novels that seek so tight a connection between present actions, present decisions, and a future where consequences are followed to such frighteningly logical conclusions and whose narrative line exploits so many contemporary names. Brave New World is a text of the worldwide Depression years much more so than a text of a projected utopian dream. Dickens wished to create comedy, fantasy, and the grotesque; Huxley wanted widely known personalities closely associated with clusters of ideas about human behavior. At a time when so many essays, books, and manifestoes were telling people how the world of the future should be made, Huxley was telling them how it should not be made. Humans should not be manufactured on assembly lines; education should be much more than Watsonian conditioning; words and ideas should not be confined by ideological censorship; the past should be valued and conserved; and individuality should not be drowned in collectivity. In brief, Lenin, Ford, Watson, Mond, and the others, should not be allowed to design the new world. The temptation, however, is great. As the Berdyaev epigraph to the novel warns the reader: “Les utopias apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY WORKS BY ALDOUS HUXLEY Huxley, Aldous, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist, New York: George H. Doran, 1925. —, Antic Hay (1923), New York: Carroll and Graf, 1990. —, Ape and Essence, New York: Harper, 1948. —, Brave New World (1932), New York: Harper Brothers, 1946. —, Brave New World Revisited (1958), New York: Perennial Classics, 2000. —, Collected Essays, New York: Harper and Row, 1958. —, Crome Yellow, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1939. —, The Devils of Loudun, 2nd edn, New York: Carroll and Graf, 1996. —, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (1954), New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. —, Do What You Will, London: Chatto and Windus, 1929. —, The Hidden Huxley: Contempt and Compassion for the Masses, ed. David Bradshaw, London: Faber and Faber, 1994. —, Jesting Pilate: Travels through India, Burma, Malaya, Japan, China, and America (1926), New York: Paragon House, 1991. —, Letters, ed. Grover Smith, New York: Harper and Row, 1969. —, Music at Night, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran, 1931. —, On the Margin: Notes and Essays, New York: George H. Doran, 1923. —, Point Counter Point (1928), New York: Harper and Row, 1965. —, Selected Letters, ed. James Sexton, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2007. —, Those Barren Leaves, Collected Edition, London: Chatto and Windus, 1950. —, “Interview with George Wickes and Ray Frazer”, in Writers at Work, Second Series, ed. George Plimpton, New York: Viking, 1963. 193-214. —, “Words and Their Meanings”, in The Importance of Language, ed. Max Black, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1952, 1-12.

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Rychlak, Ronald J., Hitler, the War, and the Pope, Columbus, MS: Genesis Press, 2000. Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Schwarz, Daniel R., The Transformation of the English Novel, 2nd edn, New York: St Martin’s 1995. Slaney, Deborah C., Jewel of the Railroad Era: Albuquerque’s Alvarado Hotel, Albuquerque, NM: Albuquerque Museum, 2009. Slifer, Dennis, Signs of Life: Rock Art of the Upper Rio Grande, Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press, 1998. Smith, Elsdon C., American Surnames, Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1969. Søndergaard, G., “Naming of Children”, in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. R.E. Asher, Oxford: Pergamon, 1995, V, 267779. Strien, Robert, John Vaughan, and C. Fenton Richards, Jr., Santa Fe the Chief Way, Santa Fe, NM: New Mexico Magazine, 2001. Thapar, Valmik, Land of the Tiger: A National History of the Indian Subcontinent, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1997. Trimble, Stephen, The People: Indians of the American Southwest, Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1993. Valdes, Nelson P., “The New Mexico Population”: http://unm.edu/ ~nvaldes/326/NMPop06.htm. Walker, Chris, “Hacks v beaks”, The Economist, May 10, 2008, 70. Withycombe, E.G., ed, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 3rd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Wood, Michael, India, New York: Basic Books, 2007. Yenne, Bill and Susan Garratt, North American Indians, Baltimore, MD: Ottenheimer Publishers, 1994. Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We (1921), trans. Clarence Brown, London: Penguin, 1993. Zwingle, Erls, “Italy before the Romans”, National Geographic, January 2005, 52-77.

INDEX Abraham, William (see Stransky, Peter) Ackerley, J.R., 36-37, 39 Ackley, Katherine Anne, 62 Acoma pueblo, 161-62 Adam, Hans Christian, 156 Adorno, Theodor W., 64 Agoyo, Herman (see Santo, Joe S.) Albuquerque, 148 All-India Congress, 13, 30-31, 32-33 Anand, Mulk Raj, 58 Anthony, Jr., Alexander E. (see David, Neal) Apache, 163 Arizona (see Grand Canyon) Amritsar, 30-31, 31-32 assembly line, 85-90, 106 Atatürk, Mustafa Kermal, 207, 210-12, 214, 224 Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, 145-46, 14748, 149 Atwood, Margaret, 51 Bailey, F.G., 47, 49 Baker, Robert S., 24, 78, 87, 93, 203, 204 Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth, 55 Baldwin, Neil, 80, 82 Barrcca, Regina, 137 Beauman, Nicola, 27 Bedford, Sybille, 2, 101, 104, 135, 143, 166

behaviorism, 89, 90-91, 22025 Benjamin, Walter, 29, 122, 132, 133, 136 Bernays, Anne (see Kaplan, Justin) Berdyaev, Nicholas, 2, 29. 231 Birnbaum, Milton, 66, 110 Boesen, Victor (see Graybill, Florence Curtis) Borneo, 13-14, 69, 71-72, 7475 Bose, Jagadis Chunder, 39-41 Bourke, John Gregory, 155, 180-82 Bowen, Ezra, 128, 135, 137 Branson, Oscar, 157, 172 Brill, A.A., 98 Brinkley, Douglas, 82, 84, 85, 92 British reforms in India, 33-34 Bryant, Kathleen, 174 Buckley, Kerry W., 220, 222, 224, 225 Bukharin, Nikolai, 210, 216 Bunting, Charles T., 222 Burgess, Anthony, 202, 222 Burleigh, Michael, 227 Burnett, John S., 71 Burma, 225-26 Buunkab, Abraham P., 60 Byron, Robert, 35-36 Campbell, Joseph, 7 Carnes, Mark C. (see Garrety,

250

Wandering into Brave New World

John A.) caste, 44-48, 49-50, 51-54, 5859 Caute, David, 220 Chaplin, Charlie, 113, 120 Chávez, Fray Angelico, 159 Chesterton, G.K., 196 Chicago, 19, 20-21 Christian ritual, 94-96, 115-16, 119-20 Clark, Virginia M., 122, 208 Clemmer, Richard O., 147, 152, 173, 175, 177 Coatman, J., 33, 34 Cohen, David, 220, 225 Collier, Peter, 79, 84, 85, 92 Colton, Harold S., 158 Conrad, Joseph, 71-72 Cook, Thomas and Son, 6, 10 Coontz, Stephanie, 226 Courlander, Harold, 154, 158, 177, 178, 191 Cox, Oliver Cromwell, 47 Crafton, David, 124 Crampton, C. Gregory, 188 Crowther, Samuel, 82, 83, 104, 105 Cunard Line, 10 Cunningham, Valentine, 219 Curtis, Edward S., 153, 156, 162, 163, 173, 183, 184, Cushing, Frank Hamilton, 157, 159, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 228 Dalby, Andrew, 30 Davies, Marion, 198 David, Neil, 156, 157-58, 172 De Boer, Jelle Zeilinga, 16

De Botton, Alain, 7 Depression, The, 103-104 Dickens, Charles, 83, 193, 195, 199-206, 230 Dockstader, Frederick (see David, Neal) Dumont, Louis, 45 Dunaway, David King, 122, 199 Dutt, R. Palme, 30 Dutton, Bertha P., 149 Eddleman, Floyd, 72 Elliott, Mark (see Witton, Patrick) Engelmeier, Peter W., 135 Engels, Friedrich (see Marx, Karl) Epstein, Daniel Mark, 116, 118 Fergusson, Erna, 119, 152, Fermi, Laura, 209 Ferns, C.S., 3, 20 Fewkes, Jesse Walter, 149, 158, 162, 169, 170, 174, 17677 Firchow, Peter, 2, 63 flappers, in America, 135-37 Ford, Henry, 75-90, 104-106, 224, 225, 229 Forrest, Earle R., 175, 188 Forster, E.M., 11, 27, 34-36, 166, 195 Frazer, Roy, 143 Freud, Sigmund, 98, 100-102 Freudian analysis, 96-101, 102- 103 Fulton, A.R., 120

Index Fundamentalism, 117-18 Furbank, P.N., 195 Furst, Peter T., 42 Fussell, Paul, 35 Gale, Robert, 213 Garratt, Susan (see Yenne, Bill) Garraty, John A., 103, 213 Genn, Thomas, 172 Gerber, Richard, 22 Gibson, Daniel, 150 Gilbert, Martin, 38, 210, 213 Gill, M. Wright, 172 Gissing, George, 226 Glyn, Elinor, 126-28 Goldsmith, Oliver, 97-98 Goldenweiser, A.A., 229 Grand Canyon, 17, 143-44, 146-47, 151 Graybill, Florence Curtis, 183 Great Slump (The Depression), 103-104, 213-14 Greene, Graham, 197 Greene, Jesse, 157, 188 Greenway, Paul (see Witton, Patrick) Griffith, D.W., 121 Guie, Heister, 157 Gulati, Basia (see Sainsbury, Mark) Hamlet (character), 99, 100 Hardwick, Michael and Mollie, 200 Hardy, Thomas, 226 Hartley, Mariette, 221 Harvey Houses, 140-41 Harvey, Fred, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141

251 Harvey houses, 150-51 Havighurst, Alfred F., 29, 104 Hawley, Carolyn, 98 Held, John, 137 Henderson, Philip, 140 Higdon, David Leon, 72 Hinduism, 7-9, 27 Hollywood, 18-19, 113 Holmes, Charles M., 204 Hoover, Herbert, 196, 204, 207, 208, 218 Hopi pueblo, 167, 168, 17379, 183 Horowitz, David (see Collier, Peter) Hough, Walter, 155, 157, 162, 168, 169, 170-71, 182-83 Hurst, William Randolph, 198 Huxley, Aldous, Works: Along the Road, 5, 6, 78; Antic Hay, 66, 123; Ape and Essence, 133; Brave New World, 17, 20, 44, 51, 52-54, 57, 58, 59, 60-62, 63-64, 65, 67, 76, 78, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 96, 99, 101, 103, 108, 115, 119, 124-25, 128, 140, 150, 155, 156, 159, 171, 184, 185, 189, 190, 192, 203, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214- 16, 218, 223, 225, 227; Brave New World Revisited, 41, 43, 67, 192, 217-18; Collected Essays, 59; Crome Yellow, 89, 138, 216; The Devils of Loudon, 119; The Doors of Perception, 43, 44; Do What You Will, 1, 14, 78, 131, 132, 133, 134; The Hidden Huxley, 18. 45, 91, 96,

252

Wandering into Brave New World

106, 107, 109- 11; Jesting Pilate, 2, 4,7, 9, 10-11, 12, 13, 14-15, 16, 17,18-20, 32, 34, 40, 52, 75, 113-14, 117-18, 121, 134, 135, 145, 192, 226; Letters, 3, 4, 16, 23, 24, 33, 34, 39, 69-70, 77, 97-98, 101, 145, 219, 221; Music at Night, 43, 79, 107, 123, 218-19; On the Margin, 4-5, 120; Point Counter Point, 54, 65, 66, 139; Selected Letters, 6, 8, 9, 12, 32, 36, 52; Those Barren Leaves, 1, 123; “Interview with George Wickes and Ray Frazer”, 143, 160; “Words and Their Meanings”, 230 Huxley, Julian, 122, 125, 219 India, 8-12, 13, 27-29, 35-38 Indian politics, 12-13, 30 Indonesia, 15-16, 70 Irwin, Viceroy, 38 Izzo, David Garrett, 160 James, Clive, 166 James, H.L., 162 Japan, 16-17 Java, 15, 120 The Jazz Singer, 131-32 Jealous, Virginia (see Witton, Patrick) Kaplan, Justin, 199, 206 Kat’sina (Katchina) 149, 157, 158 Kemal, Mustafa (see Atatürk) Kindleberger, Charles P., 103 Kirkpatrick, Kim, 160

Klavinaa, Liga (see Buunkab, Abraham P.) Klepper, Robert K., 121 Koszarski, Richard, 127 Kumar, Krishan, 204, 208 Lauterbach, Jacob Z., 228 Lawrence, D. H., 154, 155, 161, 163-67, 169, 170, 171, 177, 226 Leed, Eric S., 15 Lenin, Vladimir Ilich, 207, 214 Leonard, Jonathan Norton, 78, 81, 83, 84, 87 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 11, 203, 229 libel laws, 195-99 Lieberson, Stanley, 200 Lloyd, Harold, 121 Long, George, 55 Loos, Anita, 137-38, 145-46 Lorenz, D.E., 6, 7-8, 10 Los Angeles, 18 Los Angeles Daily Times, 11516 McDonald, Edward, 154, 163 Machlin, Milt, 74 Mackenzie, Norman 205 MacLeod, Duncan, 79 McMillen, Maurine, 146 McPherson, Aimee Semple, 116- 17 Madden, Deanna, 62, 66 Mails, Thomas E., 181 Makepeace, Anne, 184 Malaya, 72-73 Malthus, Thomas, 216-17 Mango, Andrew, 211

Index Marquis, Samuel S., 82, 92 Martin, Kingsley, 219 Marx, Karl, 207, 216, 218, 225, 227-28 Masayesva, Victor, 153 Massara, Karlign (see Buunkab, Abraham P.) Mast, Gerald, 121 Matthews, C.N., 203 Maugham, W. Somerset, 7273, 74-75, 198 Mayo, Kathleen, 37, 38 Meckier, Jerome, 77, 94, 160, 204 Medawar, Peter, 103 Mellon, Andrew William, 213 Merz, Charles, 80-81, 92, 95 Metcalf, Thomas R., 57 Miller, Katherine Toy, 160-61 Minakshi temple, 28-29 Minge, Ward Alan, 162 misogyny, 64-66 Mitchison, Naomi, 2, 199 Molyneaux, Brian Leigh, 28 Mond, Alfred, 107, 195, 201202, 214 Moore, Harry T., 166 Morgan, John Pierpont, 212-13 Morgan, Ted, 72, 198 Morris, James, 30-31 Morton, Frederick, 214 Mourning Dove, 157 movie palaces, 128 Mowat, Charles Loch, 104 Murray, Nicholas, 2, 108, 113, 131, 144, 198 Musuos tribe, 226 Mussolini, Benito, 29, 96, 206,

253 207, 208, 209, 210, 218 Myrick, David F., 146 Na tribe, 226 Naidu, Sarojini, 35, 204, 207 Nance, Guinevera A., 188 names and naming, 199-202, 203-204, 205-206 Nathan, George Jean, 124 New York City, 19 Nichols, Robert, 143, 144 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 76 O’Carroll, Etian (see Witton, Patrick) O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger, 42-43, 46 Ordner, Craig, 146 Orwell, George, 67, 196-97 Page, Susanne and Jack, 158, 162, 168, 178 Parka, Justin H. (see Buunkab, Abraham P.) Penitentes, 158-59 Pentecostals, 118-19 Perkins, Dorothy, 203 Poling-Kempes, Lesley, 149, 151 Po’pay (Popé), 99, 178, 191 Port Said, 6 Portago, Andrea, 156 Priestley, J.B., 197 Preston, Diana and Michael, 11 Prohibition, 117 Prothero, John, 196 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 228 Proust, Marcel, 205-206

254

Wandering into Brave New World

Pulgram, Ernst, 201 Pulido, Alberto López, 125 Radzinsky, Edvard, 95, 210 Ray, Nick (see Witton, Patrick) Reeves, Nicholas, 165 Richards, E.G., 54 Richards, C. Fenton (see Strien, Robert) Richardson, Bill, 191 Richitt, Richard, 129, 130 Ricks, J. Brent (see David, Neil) Ridley, Jasper, 3 The Rig-Veda, 42-43, 46 Riposte, A., 198 Riskin, Marci L., 146 Rockefeller, Michael, 74 Roosevelt, Theodore, 175 Rothschild family, 214 Rubinstein, Ruth P., 55-56 Said, Edward W., 34 Sainsbury, Mark, 45 Salsbury, Stephen, 213 Sanders, Donald Theodore (see DeBoer, Jelle Zeilinga) Sando, Joe, S., 191 Santa Fe Railway (see Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad) Santos, Kathryn, 146 Schwarz, Daniel R., 166 Scott, Paul, 27, 28 Scully, Vincent, 156, 179 Sexton, James, 74, 216 Shakespeare, William, 99, 100, 127

Shaw, George Bernard, 204, 218, 219 Shelden, Michael, 197 Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 109, 110 Sherry, Norman, 197 Shipman, David, 130 Sikh’s Golden Temple, 9, 3132 Sinha, Sachchidanand, 46 Sisk, David W., 204 Skinner, B.F., 222 Skinner, Rob, 122 skyscrapers, 20-21 Slaney, Deborah C., 148 Slifer, Denis, 176 Sloan, Margaret F., 161, 186, 189-90 Smith, Brian K., 47 Smith, Elsdon C., 203 Smith, Huston, 41 snake dance, 152-56, 163, 16466, 167, 169-72, 176-77, 178, 180-81 Soma, 41-43 Srinivas, M. N., 46, 57 Stalin, Joseph, 95, 206, 207, 20910, 210, 211, 212, 220 Stansky, Peter, 196-97 Stevenson, Matilda Coxe, 158, 185-86 Street, Julian, 91 Strien, Robert, 145, 146 Styne, Jule, 138 sumptuary laws, 54-56, 57, 62, 63 Taj Mahal, 10-12

Index Thapar, Valmik, 178-79 Thomas, D. H., 149, 151, 152, 179 Thompson, Edward, 34 Titiev, Mischa, 175 Toynbee, Arnold, 29 Tuchman, Barbara, 55 Tyler, Hamilton A., 157, 176 Valdes, Nelson P., 149 Vaughan, John (see Strien, Robert) Vitebsky, Piers (see Molyneaux, Brian Leigh) Walker, Chris, 198 Walpi pueblo, 162-63 Warren, Matt (see Witton, Patrick) Wasson, R. Gordon, 41-42 Waters, Frank, 156, 173, 174 Watson, John B., 221-25 Watts, Steven, 76, 80, 85, 87 Waugh, Evelyn, 226 Weigle, Marta, 125

255 Wells, H.G., 48-50, 204-205, 219 Whelan, Christal, 42 Wickes, George, 143 Wilson, Stephen, 205 Winkler, John K., 213 Wiser, William S. and Claire Viall, 47 Witton, Patrick, 70 Wolpert, Stanley, 9, 31, 33, 42 Wright, Barton, 156, 178 Yogananda, Paramhansa, 12, 41 Younger, Erin, 153 Zabech, Farhang, 205 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 201-202 Zola, Emile, 200 Zuni pueblo, 161-62, 184-90, 228-29, 230 Zurriagac, Rosario (see Buunkab, Abraham) Zwingle, Erls, 178