PARTISAN REVIEW
It may also be owing to the beneficent effects of having a subject
he is anxious to get on with that he has happily scanted certain of the
figures one has come to associate with the Huxleyan
oeuvre.
The man
who began to talk in
Crome Y ellow
and who has continued to talk with
ever increasing range, vocabulary and inconsequence is killed off early
in the book and the reader has only to deal with his departed spirit as
it hangs, sometimes with quite impressive effect, between the material
~eductions
of the earth and the great light of the Godhead. Other Hux–
leyan spectres are partially exorcised, though still present are the bitch,
the vile wealthy old woman, good dull people, interior decoration, art
_ rchitecture, contumely of
Pro~t,
spiritualism and politics all decked
out with a frur number of truths and a large number of amusing half–
truths.
The story deals with the conversion of the handsome youth, Sebas–
tian, from: a life of sensuality and art! to acceptance of the necessity for
the destruction of the ego and union with God. An Italian anti-Fascist
shows him the way. And as in any half way ' successful cautionary tale,
nine-tenths of the book deals with the diverting and damning wicked–
ness of the world and the last tenth is devoted to the h ero's approach to
the mystical life. This last tenth is presented under the cloak of epilogue
to excuse the inexcusable time lapse of fifteen years, a frank admission
of the extreme difficulty of showing the process of slow conversion. For,
\
though Huxley has got himself a directive theme, he has got the one
theme of all that is destructive of a fictive pattern. Fiction is above all
personal and pictorial: mysticism is non-personal, non-pictorial. Simpler
writers avail themselves of asses, whales and boils to get over the
impasse.
If
he disdain these, or more delicately symbolic aids, it would seem that
the true artist as well as the true mystic would not attempt to meld
fiction and mysticism. But though he has talked inordinately about
objects of art, Huxley has never shown much concern with the practice
of art. He must always leave room for the dir!Y aws of the wolf moral-
-
ist to show beneath the lambskin, this time, of the contem lative.
One notes this with a good deal of regret, for he has patently tried
very hard to leash and sweeten his Calvinism. And it is because he has
occasionally succeeded that one hopes well for the man after reading
the book.
Here, in the anti-Fascist Rontini-more Quixote than partisan-he
has drawn though conventionally still with a good deal of candor a
man who has achieved "a condition of complete simplicity (Costing not
less than everything)." This man tells Sebastian, "Find out how to become
your inner not-self in God while remaining your outer self in the world."
Sufficiently high advice, sufficiently\ needed.
In the afore-mentioned epilogue, Sebastian ponders; these and other
of Rontini's words and tries to draw
~
by-laws for he Kingdom of
od on earth. He would, one gathers, allow great art-Shakespeare, any-
