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the hopeless precariousness of all merely human happiness."
If
mature life
implies a willingness to face up to emotional conflicts even if one knows
them
to
be unresolvable, then Huxley shrank from maturity; his nerve for
such struggles had been broken at the first encounter.
Two years later came the chance infection that condemned him to go
through life a visual cripple .
"Keratitis punctata
shaped and shapes me, "
he wrote later. But his feeble sight did not hamper him in quite the way one
would expect. All his life he read and wrote at prodigious length-including
some excellent art criticism, though he could only take in paintings by scan–
ning them with a magnifyng glass, inch by inch. The real handicap lay in
the stunting of his other capacities, since all his resources had to be com–
mitted to the labor of acquiring and expressing
his
enormous knowledge:
he was like a man determined to fill a swimming pool with a
t~aspoon.
In
one year (1919) , for example, he produced thirty-seven articles, nearly two
hundred reviews, and other writings. He P4blished altogether fifty-seven
books. One can imagine the effort this required of someone who had to
bring his watch within two inches of his better eye to tell the time. Huxley
himself was quite conscious of the choice he had made: "When one hasn't
much vitality or physical energy, it is almost impossible to live and work at
the same time ." The question remains, however, as to why his idea of a
year's work vastly exceeded what most writers would undertake.
A third blow came when Aldous was twenty: the nervous breakdown
and suicide of Trevenen, one of his two older brothers. Trev was more emo–
tionally accessible than the rest of the cerebral Huxley clan , and more lov–
able ; in
Eyeless in Gaza
Aldous re-created Trev as Brian Foxe, a lay saint who
is tormented by a stutter and by excessive scrupulosity in his personal rela–
tions. Aldous worked out his own predicament in the same novel under the
character of Anthony Beavis, who relates how he defended against the shock
of Brian 's suicide by becoming a " nonentity," an inhuman thinking ma–
chine: " I've ... a queer feeling that I'm really not there , that I haven' t
been,there for years past."
Politely turning aside all offers of sympathy, Huxley came to terms in
solitude with his triple impairment, then shaped his literary career accord–
ingly. He was determined to make an adequate living from writing, and had
no strong identification with the concerns of the avant-garde; hence the
hybrid quality of his deliberately Peacockian novels of the twenties. They
combined conventionality of form with witty destructiveness; they stung,
but without drawing blood from any but the most diehard defenders of the
old proprieties; they were " advanced," but also accessible and entertaining.
The political balance in Europe was still relatively stable, allowing Huxley to
remain as much a humorist as a satirist; and his marriage to Maria Nys in
