Read Eyeless In Gaza Online

Authors: Aldous Huxley

Eyeless In Gaza

Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Aldous Huxley

Title Page

Introduction

Epigraph

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Chapter XL

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLIII

Chapter XLIV

Chapter XLV

Chapter XLVI

Chapter XLVII

Chapter XLVIII

Chapter XLIX

Chapter L

Chapter LI

Chapter LII

Chapter LIII

Chapter LIV

Copyright

The History of Vintage

About the Book

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID BRADSHAW

Anthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the cynical and manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Anthony attempts to find a new way to live.
Eyeless in Gaza
is considered by many to be Huxley's definitive work of fiction.

About the Author

Aldous Huxley was born on 26 July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel,
Crome Yellow
(1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by
Antic Hay
(1923),
Those Barren Leaves
(1925) and
Point Counter Point
(1928) – bright, brilliant satires of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy but in the 1930s he moved to Sanary, near Toulon.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, Huxley's work took on a more sombre tone in response to the confusion of society which he felt to be spinning dangerously out of control. His great novels of ideas, including his most famous work
Brave New World
(published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material ‘progress') and the pacifist novel
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as
Music at Night
(1931) and
Ends and Means
(1937).

In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (
Time Must Have a Stop
, 1944 and
Island
, 1962) and non-fiction (
The Perennial Philosophy
, 1945,
Grey Eminence
, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience,
The Doors of Perception
, 1954.)

Huxley died in California on 22 November 1963.

ALSO BY ALDOUS HUXLEY
Novels

Crome Yellow

Antic Hay

Those Barren Leaves

Point Counter Point

Brave New World

After Many a Summer

Time Must Have a Stop

Ape and Essence

The Genius and the Goddess

Island

 
Short Stories

Limbo

Mortal Coils

Little Mexican

Two or Three Graces

Brief Candles

The Gioconda Smile

(Collected Short Stories)

 
Biography

Grey Eminence

The Devils of Loudun

 
Travel

Along the Road

Jesting Pilate

Beyond the Mexique Bay

 
Plays

The Burning Wheel

Jonah

The Defeat of Youth

Leda

Verses and a Comedy

The Gioconda Smile

 
Essays and Belles Lettres

On the Margin

Proper Studies

Do What You Will

Music at Night

Texts and Pretexts

The Olive Tree

Ends and Means

The Art of Seeing

The Perennial Philosophy

Science, Liberty and Peace

Themes and Variations

The Doors of Perception

Adonis and the Alphabet

Heaven and Hell

Brave New World Revisited

Literature and Science

The Human Situation

Moksha

 
For Children

The Crows of Pearblossom

Eyeless in Gaza
Aldous Huxley
 
With an Introduction by
David Bradshaw

A
LDOUS
H
UXLEY (1894–1963)

On 26 July 1894, near Godalming in Surrey, Aldous Leonard Huxley was born into a family which had only recently become synonymous with the intellectual aristocracy. Huxley's grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, had earned notoriety as ‘Darwin's bulldog' and fame as a populariser of science, just as his own probing and controversial works were destined to outrage and exhilarate readers and non-readers alike in the following century. Aldous Huxley's mother was a niece of the poet and essayist Matthew Arnold, and he was a nephew of the redoubtable Mrs Humphry Ward, doyenne of late-Victorian novelists. This inheritance, combining the scientific and the literary in a blend which was to become characteristic of his vision as a writer, was both a source of great pride and a burden to Huxley in his formative years. Much was expected of him.

Three traumatic events left their mark on the young Huxley. In 1908 his mother died of cancer, and this led to the effective break-up of the family home. Two years later, while a schoolboy at Eton, Huxley contracted an eye infection which made him almost completely blind for a time and severely impaired his vision for the rest of his life. The suicide of his brother Trevenen in August 1914 robbed Huxley of the person to whom he felt closest. Over twenty years later, in
Eyeless in Gaza
(1936), Huxley's treatment of the death of the main character's mother and his embodiment of ‘Trev' in the novel as the vulnerable Brian Foxe give some indication of the indelible pain which these tragic occurrences left in their wake. To a considerable degree, they account for the darkness, pungency and cynicism which feature so prominently in Huxley's work throughout the inter-war period.

Within months of achieving a First in English Language and Literature at Balliol College, Oxford in 1916, Huxley published
The Burning Wheel
. Huxley's first collection of verse, and the three which followed it,
Jonah
(1917),
The Defeat of Youth
(1918) and
Leda
(1920), reveal his indebtedness to French symbolism and
fin de siècle
aestheticism. Also discernible, however, beneath the poetry's triste and ironic patina, is a concern with the inward world of the spirit which anticipates Huxley's later absorption in mysticism. These volumes of poetry were the first of over fifty separate works of fiction, drama, verse, criticism, biography, travel and speculative writing which Huxley was to produce during the course of his life.

Unfit for military service, Huxley worked as a farm labourer at Lady Ottoline Morrell's Garsington Manor after he left Oxford. Here he met not only D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Mark Gertler and other Bloomsbury figures, but also a Belgian refugee, Maria Nys, whom he married in 1919. By then Huxley was working for the
Athenaeum
magazine under the adroit editorship of Middleton Murry. Soon after he became the first British editor of
House and Garden,
worked for
Vogue
and contributed musical criticism to the
Weekly Westminster Gazette
in the early 1920s.

Limbo
(1920), a collection of short stories, preceded the appearance of
Crome Yellow
in 1921, the novel with which Huxley first made his name as a writer. Inspired by, among others, Thomas Love Peacock, Norman Douglas and Anatole France, Huxley's first novel incorporated many incidents from his sojourn at Garsington as well as mischievous portraits of its chatelaine and his fellow guests. More blatantly still,
Crome Yellow
is an iconoclastic tilt at the Victorian and Edwardian mores which had resulted in the First World War and its terrible aftermath. For all its comic bravura, which won acclaim from writers such as Scott Fitzgerald and Max Beerbohm,
Crome Yellow
may be read, along with Lytton Strachey's
Eminent Victorians
(1918) and Huxley's second novel
Antic Hay
(1923), as an expression of the pervasive mood of disenchantment in the early 1920s. Huxley told his father that
Antic Hay
was ‘written by a member of what I may call the war-generation for others of his kind'. He went on to say that it was intended to reflect ‘the life and opinions of an age which has seen the violent disruption of almost all the standards, conventions and values current in the previous epoch'.

Even as a schoolboy Huxley had been an avid browser among the volumes of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and it did not take long for him to acquire a reputation for arcane eclecticism. Moreover, as his prestige as a debunker and an emancipator grew, so Huxley was condemned more roundly by critics of the old guard, such as James Douglas of the
Daily Express,
who denounced the explicit discussion of sex and free thought in his fiction.
Antic Hay
was burned in Cairo, and in the ensuing years many of Huxley's books were censured, censored or banned at one time or another. Conversely, it was the openness, wit, effortless learning and apparent insouciance of Huxley's early work which proved such an appetising concoction for novelists as diverse as Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner, Anthony Powell and Barbara Pym. Angus Wilson called Huxley ‘the god of my adolescence'.

From 1923 onwards Huxley lived abroad more or less permanently, first near Florence and then, between 1930 and 1937, at Sanary on the Côte d'Azur. In
Along the Road
(1925), subtitled ‘Notes and Essays of a Tourist', Huxley offered a lively and engaging account of the places and works of art he had taken in since his arrival in Italy, and both the title story of his third collection of tales,
Little Mexican
(1924), and his third novel,
Those Barren Leaves
(1925), are set in that country. According to Huxley, the theme of
Those Barren Leaves
is ‘the undercutting of everything by a sort of despairing scepticism and then the undercutting of that by mysticism'. For W.B. Yeats,
Those Barren Leaves
heralded the return of philosophy to the English novel, but it was with his fourth novel,
Point Counter Point
(1928), that Huxley cemented his reputation with the reading public as a thought-provoking writer of fiction.
Point Counter Point
is Huxley's first true ‘novel of ideas', the type of fiction with which he has become most closely identified. He once explained that his aim as a novelist was ‘to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay', arguing that the novel should be like a holdall, bursting with opinion and arresting ideas. This privileging of content over form was one of the many things he had in common with H.G. Wells; it was anathema to the likes of Virginia Woolf. Huxley was fascinated by the fact that ‘the same person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover etc', and one of his key aims in
Point Counter Point
was to offer this multi-faceted view of his principal characters.

Other books

By the Sword by Flower, Sara
Eye of the Moon by Dianne Hofmeyr
The Mak Collection by Tara Moss
Tantrika by Asra Nomani
The Beautiful American by Jeanne Mackin
Luna of Mine by Quinn Loftis
Something to Talk About by Dakota Cassidy