The Detached Retina. Brian Aldiss
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and Religion’, Huxley states that, because mysticism does not commit one to any cut-and-dried statement about the structure of the universe, there is no conflict between a mystical approach to religion and science. Nevertheless, it is noticeable that such gurus as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky commit themselves to wacko versions of the world. Ouspensky seemed to believe that the periodic table was somehow related to notes in music. Low man in the guru totem pole, Hubbard believed in vast intergalactic battles. Yet the universe as revealed by current science is wacko enough for most mortals.
However, Huxley also says that there is a sense in which it is no great matter whether myths are true or not: they are simply expressive of our reactions to the mystery of the world in which we live.
Huxley’s personal myth was of this mystical union of something that existed beyond words. It produced his difficult, dedicated work. The Perennial Philosophy (1946). The possible connection of this myth with the death of his much-loved mother when he was fourteen is a matter for speculation, though it is scarcely to be imagined that such a traumatic event left no shockwave.
Huxley faded away on Friday 22 November 1963, with LSD in his veins. Within twenty-four hours, another wise man, another writer of SF who had lost his mother in childhood, C. S. Lewis, would also be dead. But it was Huxley who died on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
Huxley’s continuing influence was summed up by Isaiah Berlin, who said, ‘He was the herald of what will surely be one of the great advances in this and following centuries—the creation of new psycho-physical sciences, of discoveries in the realm of what at present, for want of a better term, we call the relations between body and mind.’
Almost everything Aldous Huxley wrote was adversely criticized at one time or another. Everyone spoke well of the man himself, of his nobility and charm. His gentleness, sweetness and humour were remarked on by all those fortunate enough to know him.
Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was a personal friend. She has the last word. ‘I shall always think of Aldous as smiling.’
‘What of the Immanent Will and its designs?’, asks Thomas Hardy. The question forms the opening line of Hardy’s vast drama, The Dynasts, and is answered by that phantom intelligence, the Spirit of the Years:
It works unconsciously, as heretofore,
Eternal artistries in Circumstance,
Whose patterns, wrought by rapt aesthetic rote,
Seem in themselves its single listless aim,
And not their consequence.
To which the Spirit of the Pities joins, saying,
Still thus? Still thus?
Ever unconscious!
It is clear that the Immanent Will is a prototype of Philip K. Dick’s VALIS, that Vast Active Live Intelligence System. Thinking the matter over after the carnage of the First World War, Hardy decided that he had erred on the optimistic side—thereby leaving the door open for Olaf Stapledon.
Stapledon sweeps away the human characters in whom Hardy delighted, to present us with a threadbare stage upon which humanity is all but lost. On that stage are unfolded the evolutionary histories of the Last Men and the soliloquies of the Star Maker.
Those two great dramas of Stapledon’s, Last and First Men and Star Maker, were written over fifty years ago, in 1930 and 1937. They loom above the later oceans of science fiction like the immense rocks in Bocklin’s painting, ‘The Isle of the Dead’, appearing and disappearing in the mist. That Stapledon, an Englishman, has not himself taken permanent sojourn on Bocklin’s grim island is entirely due to the work of American scholars. The Oxford Companion to English Literature allows him no entry to himself.
In fact, Stapledon is a writer of a notably English kind, his attempts to establish an individual mythology somewhat reminiscent of William Blake (the sub-title of his novel, Odd John echoes a poem of Blake’s, ‘A Story Between Jest and Earnest’—though there’s precious little enjoying of the lady in the book). His grandiosities recall Charles M. Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, Dawn in Britain, with its quixotic attempt to restore Chaucer to modern English. Two other voices echo conflictingly through Stapledon’s fiction, the voice of John Milton in Paradise Lost and the voice of that Victorian storm-trooper, Winwood Reade, author of The Martyrdom of Man.
In many respects, Stapledon is of his time. Born in 1886, he was torn by religious doubt, like many men of his day. Essentially a Victorian, he had trouble fitting into the post-war world. Together with many others, he flirted with pacifism, communism and promiscuity. And being outside the swim of London literary society, he knew few other authors and soon became critically disregarded.
The central premise of his work, that mankind is irrelevant to the purposes of the universe, proves unpalatable to many. His admirers honour him precisely for that unpalatability, so variously, so swoopingly expressed. We encounter in his work faith versus atheism, and the seeking for individual fulfilment versus communality, whether terrestrial or stellar. These remain painfully contemporary concerns. In his two great glacial novels, spanning the thirties, we encounter spiritual suffering and the surreal mutations which mankind must undergo at a Creator’s command.
My first encounter with Last and First Men came at a time of suffering and mutation. I was part of the British Second Division, fighting back the Japanese Army which had invaded Burma and Assam and was planning to storm the gates of India. I was nineteen, brown as a berry, on half rations. We were about to advance on enemy-held Mandalay while shooting DDT down our pants and under our arms. Specifically, I was standing in a commandeered bungalow in the jungle outside Kohima, awaiting a typhus injection.
The medical officer had established his temporary HQ in the home of a tea planter who had fled—to India or England. In the room where I awaited my jab were book-lined shelves. Among the books were two blue Pelican books, together comprising a paperback edition of Last and First Men. The title caught my eye. I took them down and began to read.
I could not leave them behind when I was summoned to the surgery. I kept them. For the first and last time, I stole a book. Well, it was wartime …
While the great salvation and destruction of the sunlit world went forward, Stapledon’s steady voice proved to be what was needed. In particular, his daring time-schemes appeased an urgent desire for perspective.
What sustained me then, as we advanced across the Burmese plains, was the bleak vision of humankind locked within the imperatives of creation. If Stapledon’s name is to be preserved, it will be by science fiction readers. Quite apart from the intrinsic interest in his writing, there is also the wider question: why is not SF, or work which closely resembles SF, accepted into the general corpus of the century’s literature? The writing is excellent; the subject under discussion is a central one; the author was not exactly a backwoodsman; nor did he write in obscure tongue; so how is it that he suffers a general neglect? Why is he not considered as is, say, Jorge Luis Borges or Mikhail Bulgakov or even William Burroughs?
These are perforce rhetorical questions. I cannot answer them. Nor, as far as I can see, can anyone else. De gustibus non est disputan-dum. And yet … we must continue to dispute …
I was instrumental in having Penguin Books reprint Last and First Men in 1963. The edition contains my Foreword, and was reprinted more than once. Harvey Satty, the active chairman of the Olaf Stapledon Society, published Nebula Maker in 1976, an interesting early attempt of Stapledon’s to write Star Maker. Later, Satty, in collaboration with Curtis C. Smith, produced a comprehensive bibliography (1984). The volume contains an essay by Stapledon never before published. In 1982 came Patrick A. McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon from Twayne Publishers. This slender volume presents excellent summaries of Stapledon’s novels. McCarthy collaborated with Charles Elkins and Martin Harry Greenberg to produce The Legacy of Olaf Stapledon