ALDOUS HUXLEY AND D. H. LAWRENCE

DR. K. BHASKARA RAMAMURTY, M. A., Ph. D.

Senior Lecturer in English, M. R. College, Vizianagaram

Lawrence and Huxley are two of the most brilliant men of this age, the one a genius, the other a dazzling intellectual. To some, the former passed for a madman, the latter for a scoffer. By essential nature they are both neo-puritans, but one is mislabelled a libertine and the other a cynic. Both highly individualistic by temperament, they offer an interesting study in contrast. Lawrence is a pronounced introvert, Huxley, by his own admission, a moderate extrovert. Lawrence grasps things through intuitive perception, Huxley through intellectual analysis. The one speaks with all the fervour of the blood, the other with the urbanity and poise of a university wit. If Lawrence is the Rousseau of his age, Huxley is its Voltaire. If Lawrence is, as Dr. Leavis calls him, like the wild untutored phoenix, Huxley is like a well-broken hawk. ‘Be yourself’, cries Lawrence. ‘Know thyself’, pleads Huxley.

They were both good friends, contemporaries, though Lawrence, nine years older, died thirty-three years earlier. They had genuine affection for each other. Huxley jotted down in his diary under the date of 27 December 1927:

“He is one of the few people I feel real respect and admiration for. Of most other eminent people I have met I feel that at any rate I belong to the same species as they do. But this man has something different and superior in kind, not degree”. ¹

And here is what Lawrence has to say about Huxley:

“But, as I say, there’s more than one self to everybody, and the Aldous that writes those novels is only one little Aldous amongst others–probably much nicer–that don’t write novels–I mean it’s only one of his little selves that writes the book and makes the child die, it’s not all himself. No, I don’t like his books: even if I admire a sort of desperate courage of repulsion and repudiation in them. But again, I feel only half a man writes the books–a sort of precocious adolescent. There is surely much more of a man in the actual Aldous.”²

Lawrence’s father was a Nottingham miner, a handsome and impetuous person. His mother, a little puritanical, came from a family bordering on the middle-classes. Lawrence inherited the impetuosity of his father and the puritan spirit of his mother. He is a passionate being, taking a phoenix-eye-view of things, rejecting with pungent scorn all empirical knowledge, and trying to squeeze in the whole universe into an intuitively conceived pattern of his own. The one clue to the universe, he says, is “the individual soul within the individual being;” all that science has to say about the origin of the universe and man is worse than the tale that tells us “the cart conceived and gave birth to the horse.” His theory is:

“When the living individual dies, then is the realm of death established. Then you get matter and elements and atoms and forces and sun and moon and earth and stars and to forth. In short, the outer universe, the Cosmos. The Cosmos is nothing but the aggregate of the dead bodies and dead energies of bygone individuals. The dead bodies decompose as we know into earth, air, and water, heat and radiant energy and free electricity and innumerable other scientific facts. The dead souls likewise decompose–or else they don’t decompose. But if they decompose, then it is not into any elements of matter and physical energy. They decompose into some psychic reality, and into some potential will.” ³

So, man, according to him, is the centre of the universe. The primal consciousness in man is pre-mental, the mind is only “the last flower, the cul de sac.” He propounds a new doctrine, and speaks of four nerve centres which, distributed along the spinal cord, determine the nature of our consciousness. The most important is the solar plexus, a sympathetic centre, at which the individual realises “I am I, the clue to the whole.” The second is the lumbar ganglion, a volitional centre, at which is realised the duality of things: “I know that I am I, in distinction from the whole universe which is not as I am.” Then in the upper region, above the diaphragm, is again a sympathetic centre, the cardiac plexus, at which the child goes forth seeking to understand the mystery of things, to get a revelation of the unknown. Then finally is the volitional centre, the thoracic ganglion, the centre of mental activity, of curiosity, of the desire to discover, to invent, to know. And education, Lawrence says, should aim at a full and harmonious development of these four primary modes of consciousness, because we want effectual human beings, not just conscious ones. “The final aim is not to know, but to be.” ⁴

This doctrine of plexuses and planes, vividly presented in two of his books, ‘Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious’ and ‘Fantasia of the Unconscious’, is a superb rationalisation of, what he calls, his data of living experience and sure intuition. It is a deduction drawn through emotional perception not from any empirical stud. A bigoted anti-intellectual, he rejects as puerile the objective science of rational knowledge. In a letter to Earnest Collings, he writes:

“My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle. What do I care about knowledge. All I want to answer to my blood, direct, without fribbling intervention of mind, or moral, or what not. I conceive a map’s body as a kind of flame, like a candle flame for ever upright and yet flowing; and the intellect is just the light that is shed on to the things around. And I am not so much concerned with the things around–which is really mind–but with the mystery of the flame for ever flowing, coming God knows how from out of practically nowhere, and being itself, whatever there is around it, that it lights up. We have got so ridiculously mindful, that we never know that we ourselves are anything–we think there are only the objects we shine upon. And there the poor flame goes on burning ignored, to produce this light. And instead of chasing the mystery in the fugitive half-lighted things outside us, we ought to look at ourselves and say “My God, I am myself” ⁵

Huxley defines this religion of Lawrence as Life-worship contrasting it with that of ascetics like Pascal whom he calls death worshippers. The Life-worshipper’s creed is presented by Huxely in his ‘Do What You Will’ (1929). The Life-worshipper’s aim is to live intensely, on all the facets of his being, balancing “excess of self-consciousness and intelligence by an excess of intuition, of instinctive and visceral living.” Huxley himself has turned, at one stage, to Lawrence for inspiration. Life-worship has had great fascination for him, and he presents Lawrence as Kingham in his book ‘Two or Three Graces’ and as Rampion in ‘Point Counter Point’. The Life-worshipper gives an important place to sexual life, whereas the death-worshipper rejects it as obscene and bestial. Huxley and Lawrence have both been fascinated and tormented by sex. Both have worried themselves over the paradox of man who is an animal as well as an angel. But, whereas Lawrence, with his doctrine of intense living and intuitive perception, has sanctified sexual life, Huxley, during the 1920’s, viewed sex with intellectual disgust. Then, his Calamy in ‘Those Barren Leaves’ considers indulgence in sexual pleasures a hindrance to spiritual life. But later on Huxley has come to realise that, in spite of all its vulgar earthiness, sex has got to be provided for in a harmonious life. He is drawn to Lawrence and his wife Frieda, exceptional beings who are able to live the life they have been preaching. Phillp Quarles (Huxley’s self-portrait) in “Point Counter Point” says that Rampion and Mary live in a more satisfactory way than anyone he has known. Lawrence says:

“And God the Father, the Inscrutable, the Unknowable, we know in the Flesh, in woman. She is the door for our in-going and our out-coming. In her we go back to the Father:

but like the witnesses of the Transfiguration, blind and unconscious”. ⁶

And he speaks of “mystic suave loins of darkness” and “mindless communion of the blood.” His theory is that, alone woman is nothing and man is ‘manque’, but together they are “the wings of the Morning.” Exulting in a strange romantic emotionalism Lawrence says:

“Man is a column of blood; Woman is a valley of blood. It was the primeval oneness of mankind, the opposite of the oneness of the spirit”.” ⁷

He advocates a new conception of life, of the fusion of the primeval “blood-and-vertebrate consciousness with the white man’s mental-spiritual consciousness, the sinking of both beings into a new being”. ⁸

Like mescalin in the case of Huxley, Lawrence’s philosophy of sex exposed him to ridicule and vituperative attacks. He has been called a prurient sensualist, his doctrine a gospel of animalism, or, as Bertrand Russel says, a cult of insanity. The censors have dubbed some of his writings pornographic and banned their circulation. The vehemence of his passion is attributed to coarse sensuality, the audacity of his utterance to crude uncultured egoism. Some of Lawrence’s own friends, like Prof. Middleton Murry, have condemned his views, and at best pitied him. Perhaps, had Lawrence possessed a little of the university-educated middle-class sophistry and euphemistic subtlety, he would have been acclaimed with popular gusto. As it is, Huxley’s classic introduction to Lawrence’s letters, and Dr. Leavis’ brilliant critical appraisals have helped much towards a correct understanding of Lawrence as a man and as an artist. Dr. Leavis says “he is still the great writer of our phase of civilisation.”

Lawrence, as an individual, belongs to a class by himself. He is different in kind. By essential nature he is a puritan, sensing the very nature of things through sure intuitive perception and, from his visionary heights, expounding life in broad swift strokes of genius. Those who can neither rise to his heights nor align themselves to his channels of thought, find it hard to accept him. Lawrence writes to Lady Ottoline Morrel:

“God forbid I shall be taken as urging loose sex activity. There is a brief time of sex, and a long time where sex is out of place”. ⁹

One year before the publication of ‘Sons and Lovers’, as early as in 1912, Lawrence wrote to Mrs. Hopkins:

“Let every man find, keep on trying till he finds, the woman who can take him and whose love he can take, then who will grumble about men or about women. But the thing must be two-sided. At any rate, and whatever happens, I do love and I am loved. I have given and I have taken–and that is eternal. Oh, if only people could marry properly; I believe in marriage”. ¹⁰

Those who call Lawrence a crude sensualist, “rotten and rotting others”, have not either studied him properly or understood him. Huxley writes that Lawrence’s “special and characteristic gift was an extraordinary sensitiveness to what Wordsworth called ‘unknown modes of being.’ In ‘Point Counter Point’, Huxley, depicts Lawrence-Rampion as an extremely sensitive being who could smell people’s souls. Even Prof. Middleton Murry admits that “Lawrence had a mysterious gift of ‘sensing’ the hidden and unconscious reality of his fellow-beings”. ¹¹ Lawrence’s methods of approach and his interpretation of life may seem unacceptable, but his conclusions, sympathetically considered, do not seem to be far removed from those of religion or psychology or, in some cases, even science. For instance, what Lawrence calls the solar plexus, lumbar ganglion, etc., have a physiological basis and find their counterparts in the autonomic nervous system in the human body. Secondly, his theories relating to the different levels or layers of consciousness based on the plexuses and planes, broadly correspond to what is said in the Hindu Tantrik system of Yoga. One can be sure that Lawrence has not borrowed these ideas either from Hinduism or Buddhism. He firmly believes that “Buddha worship is decadent and foul,” and “it is ridiculous to turn to the East for inspiration.” Moreover, if he had borrowed, he would surely have acknowledged his indebtedness to them because the one dominant quality in him which even his most outspoken critics admit is his “terrifying honesty.” Lawrence’s solar plexus, cardiac plexus and thoracic ganglion, as centres of awakening consciousness, are similar to the ‘Manipura’, ‘Anahata’ and ‘Visuddha cakra’ in the Hindu Yogic system. Whereas Lawrence stops with the thoracic ganglion, with a sanctification of the corporeal life, the Hindu Yoga moves higher up through two more centres of transcendental consciousness, centres which facilitate the “contemplative attitude of luminous intuition.” But this transcendental sphere, Lawrence deliberately rejects as non-human. But for this rejection, Lawrence sounds almost like a Tantrist himself. The Tantrist believes that the whole macrocosm abides bodily within himself, the microcosm, and he names it ‘God’. Lawrence says that each individual is his own Holy Ghost. Huxley, significantly, makes his Rampion say “God’s not apart, not above, not outside.” But whereas the Tantrist seeks to awaken his spiritual consciousness, Lawrence rests contented with a mystical materialism which rejects both religion and science. He says:

“If we want to talk about God, well, we can please ourselves. God has been talked about quite a lot, and He doesn’t seem to mind. Why we should take it so personalty is a problem. Likewise if we wish to have a tea-party with the atom, let us; or with the wriggling little unit of energy, or the other or the Libido, or the Elan Vital, or any other cause, Only don’t let us have sex for tea”. ¹²

When Lawrence says that man and woman are like the bow and the arrow, the bow without the arrow is as nothing, and the arrow without the bow only a short-range dart, ineffectual, and that together, in absolute union, not as mere instruments of passion one to the other, they transcend the barrier between themselves and the great unknown around them, he is mystical in utterance and comes quite close to the Tantrik beliefs which Huxley himself has finally accepted, Thus, we find that Lawrence, through intuitive vision, arrives at conclusions similar to those arrived at by mystics through meditation and by Huxley through reason. Perhaps Cardan (Huxley’s ‘Those Barren Leaves’) is right when he says that there are eighty-four thousand paths to salvation.

Just as ‘ Island’ sums up Huxley’s views, Lawrence’s last story ‘The Man Who Died’ (1930) gives us his ultimate conception of love, love that leads to a true union of souls, and to a union with that other world, outside self. Prof, A. C. Ward calls it Lawrence’s “ultimate masterpiece”.

“But that lovely last-named fable is a perfect thing, a final reconciliation of the elements that had warred within him, a discovery of atonement on the threshold of death, a vision of apocalyptic harmony between Osiris and Christ”. ¹³

After all, Huxley also seeks this reconciliation of Osiris and Christ, But, unlike Huxley, Lawrence wishes to be guided by the wisdom of the blood alone, and he rejects all empirical knowledge and reason; and his rejection is often ill-tempered, Huxley writes that when Lawrence refuses to accept what science says, it is not because he cannot understand things scientific, but he does not want to understand them. He is a man with exceptional insight, but, at times refuses, almost perversely, to see things, Frieda, in a moment of annoyance, writes:

“Lawrence always wants to treat women like the chicken we had the other day, take its guts out and pluck its feathers sitting over a pail–I am just wildly arguing with Lawrence, and he is so stupid, I think, in seeing things that cannot be seen with eyes, or touched or smelt or heard”. ¹⁴

Huxley, with all this admiration for Lawrence, has neither completely accepted him nor rejected him at any time. He writes that Lawrence’s doctrine is apt to be misunderstood, distorted and exploited for personal convenience by a variety of individuals. It will also be misconstrued as a cult of animalism. Lawrence speaks with emotional fervour from his phoenixian heights in a strangely virile language whose tone and tenor are apt to be misunderstood by ordinary people. “He seems to hack his meaning out of the words, as his forebears had hacked coal from the pits,” ¹⁵ says Prof. Ifor Evans.

Lawrence and Huxley move on parallel tracks in their conclusions on life as well as art. Whereas Lawrence says that the wisdom of the blood is a sure guide to happiness, Huxley says that, for harmonious living–wisdom of the blood alone is not enough–a comprehensive mind-body conditioning is necessary, and one has to take the help of every available branch of human knowledge including the science and art of death. “Nothing short of everything will really do”. Whereas Lawrence believes that a millenium can never dawn on this earth, Huxley hopes it can.

They are both brilliantly clear-headed, endowed with supreme intelligence and insight. Both are dissatisfied with the world around them, a world that has gone pervert clinging to all kinds of substitute ideologies mistaking them for the ‘genuine article’. Both of them, idealists in their own way, live in their particular ivory towers looking at the world around, more as sensitive spectators than as positive participants. Both are afraid of personal contacts being shy and individualistic by nature. Juliette Huxley says that Aldous is a kind of “amphibious creature, rejecting emotional contacts with skilful evasion using his intellectual equipment as a shield.” “It’s as though he only felt safe among ideas”.¹⁶ Lawrence himself confesses: “for my part people don’t mean much to me, especially casuals: them I’d rather be without”.¹⁷ Both of them used their art as a means of self-education. Lawrence says: But one sheds one’s sickness in books–repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them”. ¹⁸ Huxley says that the composition of his books has been a “form of self-exploration and self-education”.¹⁹ If Lawrence’s motto is “Art for my sake,” Huxley’s is at least not “Art for Art’s sake.” Both are novelists of ideas, who have extended the bounds of fiction. Huxley believes in “musicalization of fiction,” in presenting a comprehensive view of life in all its diversity and multiplicity. And Lawrence, in his characteristic way, says:

“Only in the novel are all things given full play, or at least, they may be given full play, when we realise that life itself, and not inert safety, is the reason for living. For out of the full play of all things emerges the only thing that is anything, the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man alive and live woman”. ²⁰

True to their nature, whereas Huxley adopts, what Prof. Isaacs calls, the stream of thought technique, Lawrence is carried away on a stream of passion, Huxley is seeped in “intellectualism and conscious emotionalism”, Lawrence relies on spontaneity of feeling and utterance. He writes:

“The novels and poems come unwatched out of one’s pen. And then the absolute need which one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one’s experience as a writer and as a man. The novels and poems are pure passionate experience. These “polyanalytics” are, inferences made afterwards, from the experience”.²¹

Both are world-betterers at heart, and both have been dubbed as failed Messaiahs. Perhaps, the words of Prof. Scott-James on Lawrence equally apply to both:

“He was a romanticist whom circumstances compelled to behave like a realist. He was a Christian, driven into the camp of anti-Christians; a moralist doomed to have his books condemned for immorality; an ordinary man who got trapped in a corner as a rebel and was forced to sustain the character”. ²²

They are both products of a certain phase of European civilisation, and both have tried to re-vitalise that civilisation using their art as the instrument, and both have influenced a generation of writers to pursue new modes of thought and technique.

¹ Huxley’s introduction to ‘Letters of D. H. Lawrence’. p. xxx.

² Lawrence’s letter to Lady Ottoline Morrel dated 5 Feb., 1929.

³ D. H. Lawrence: ‘Fantasia of the Unconscious’, p 120.

⁴ Ibid, P 45.

⁵ ‘Letters of D. H, Lawrence’, p. 94.

⁶ D. H. Lawrence: Foreword to ‘Sons and Lovers’ and also ‘Letters of D. H. Lawrence’. p. 100

⁷ D. H. Lawrence: ‘The Plumed Serpent’. p. 446

⁸ D. H. Lawrence: ‘The Plumed Serpent’ p 444.

⁹ ‘Letters of D. H. Lawrence’. p. 773.

¹⁰ ‘Letters of D. H, Lawrence’. p. 49.

¹¹ Middleton Murry: ‘Reminiscences of D. H. Lawrence’. p 280.

¹² D. H. Lawrence: ‘Fantasia of the Unconscious’. p 3.

¹³ A. C. Ward: ‘Twentieth Century Literature’, p. 60

¹⁴ ‘Letters of D. H. Lawrence’. p. 86

¹⁵ B. Ifor Evans: ‘A Short History of English Literature’ p. 187.

¹⁶ Aldous Huxley –A Memorial Volume’. Pp. 42-43

¹⁷ Letters of D. H. Lawrence’. P. 677

¹⁸ Ibid. p. 150

¹⁹ Huxley’s Foreword to his ‘Stories, Essays and Poems’, Everyman’s. p. vii.

²⁰ D. H. Lawrence: ‘Phoenix ‘. p. 538.

²¹ D. H. Lawrence: ‘Fantasia of the Unconscious’, p. 5.

²² R. A. Scott-James: ‘Fifty Years of English Literature’. p. 126.

21st December, 1973

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